The Constitution of Literature: Literacy, Democracy, and Early English Literary Criticism 9781503626911

Citation preview

The Constitution of Literature

The Constitution of Literature Literacy) Democracy) and Early English Literary Criticism

Lee Morrissey

~

•

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2oo8 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morrissey, Lee. The constitution of literature : literacy, democracy, and early English literary criticism I Lee Morrissey. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-o-8047-5786-7 (alk. paper) r. Criticism--Political aspects--Great Britain--History--17th century. 2. Criticism--Political aspects--Great Britain--History--r8th century. 3· Books and reading--Political aspects--Great Britain--History--17th century. 4· Books and reading--Political aspects--Great Britain--History--r8th century. 5· English literature--Philosophy. 6. English literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc. I. Title.

8or '·9 50903 2--dc22 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in ro/12 Saban

The rights of nations, and of kings, sink into questions of grammar, if grammarians discuss them. -Samuel Johnson

Contents

Preface: Rethinking the History of Criticism, ix Introduction: Habermas and the Resistance to Reading in Early English Literary Criticism, I r. Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy in the 164os, 2S

"God forgive you Common-wealths-men": Dryden and the Project of Restoration, 6I

2.

3· "Avoid Disputes": The Spectator, the Market, and Criticism, 87 4· Early Eighteenth-Century Rules for Reading: An Act of Settlement, I I 2 5· Hume, the Politics of Passion, and Reading, I33

6. Samuel Johnson, the Constitution, and the Exuberance of Signification, ISS Conclusion: The Enlightenment and the Unfinished Project of Deconstruction,

Notes, 20I Bibliography, 2I7 Index, 23S

I8I

Preface Rethinking the History of Criticism

On one level this book is a gloss on Jacques Derrida's claim, "No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy," 1 using early English literary criticism as the example. Inspired though this book is by Derrida's slogan, his formulation requires qualification, modification, and, most important, historical consideration. Literary criticism, literature, and democracy may be related, but texts that are considered "literary" exist long before democracies. Thus, Derrida's point has more to do with the institution of literature in modern democracies; as he points out, "what defines literature as such is profoundly connected with a revolution in law and politics." 2 That "revolution" might happen at different times in different places, but in England it begins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On another level, then, this book takes up the question of why modern English literary criticism emerges during and after the Restoration rather than at some earlier time. Provisionally it can be said that the emergence of literary criticism as a related modern institution is seen here as a response to the upheaval associated with the English Civil Wars of the r64os. The argument is that what we now know as literary criticism attempts to organize what was then seen as one particularly troubling aspect of print culture: democratized reading. Therefore, this book reviews how reading is redefined and debated from the r64os to the late eighteenth century, mostly with reference to canonical early literary critics such as Dryden, Addison and Steele, Pope, Hume, and Johnson and often with reference to other sources where reading is also being defined, such as dictionaries and grammars. Focusing on the early critics' debates over what they think reading is and over how it operates on and through us as readers, I consider early English literary criticism as an extended debate over theories of

X

Preface

reading, including theories of resistance to reading. Such a historical consideration of the theories of reading that constitute the central debate (and activity) of literary criticism represents, I believe, the unfinished project of deconstruction. Leaving it unfinished puts literary studies in a particularly complicated position: literary studies claims a pioneering relationship to democracy (albeit by invoking it more than exploring it), while new forms of literacy (electronic literacies) claim to be more democratic, and literary criticism might unknowingly replicate some of the same preferences for interpretive stability (rather than the instability of democratic plurality) seen among its earliest modern practitioners. For as the early critics cast these debates over theories of reading as also being debates over political philosophy, literacy turns out to have been a politically ambivalent image of democracy for early English literary critics. In these debates each of the major seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literary critics mentions different anxieties over the Civil Wars of the r64os and the role of reading in fomenting them, indicating that the eighteenth-century development of literary criticism has an antithetical relationship with what could be seen as the democratic political upheaval of the seventeenth century. The political history of eighteenth-century literary criticism is often understood through Jiirgen Habermas's idea of the public sphere. But focusing on theories of reading reveals an extended debate over a range of different models of democracy, some apparently rejecting the public sphere through which early criticism is usually seen. Rather than the steady, albeit slow, rise of an autonomous public sphere devoted to free expression, with which literary criticism and democracy have been associated, in the debate over the definition of reading between the r64os and the eighteenth century various models of political philosophy and literacy are proposed and recombined. If, as Robert DeMaria points out, "reading, like literature itself, is socially constructed," 3 then literary criticism is the social construction of reading (and literature itself) writ large. More than socially constructed, however, literary criticism is also constituted in the eighteenth century through a cumulative and evolutionary process of acquiring practices, precedents, and terms, as well as a canon and a way of reading that canon. I attempt to suggest how we might reimagine the political history of modern English literary criticism by focusing on theories of reading during its formative decades. When considered in relation to its theorists' anxiety about the Civil Wars, the extensive reading sometimes attributed to the eighteenth century seems born out of a resistance to an earlier kind of reading-the intensive reading of the mid-seventeenth century. As I discuss in more detail in my introduction, my formulation combines more recent devel-

Preface

Xl

opments in the history of the book with Paul de Man's claim that "the resistance to theory is in fact a resistance to reading."4 For de Man this resistance to reading is "a resistance to the rhetorical or tropological dimension of language." 5 As we will see, Hobbes, Sprat, Dryden, and others are explicit on this count, convinced that the tropological dimension of language is dangerous because misleading. Of course, they are not the first to be concerned with the effect of images. But they associate attention to the tropological with arguments published in the 164os. Thus, implicitly under consideration in this book is whether what de Man considers criticism's resistance to reading results from the arguments over the definition of reading in the work of these early literary critics. At the same time, although the terms may be de Man's, the approach is not, for it is my assumption that the resistance to reading has a history. In a way the tropological, rhetorical readings described by de Man and associated with poststructuralism and deconstruction are well attuned to the modes of reading that predate literary criticism's modern constitution. For some that is the problem with poststructuralism; it lacks the necessarily rational attributes that are said to have come to criticism in its eighteenth-century, Enlightenment formation. Indeed, it may be that the controversy that followed poststructuralist literary theory stems from its reconnecting reading to modes that are older than the eighteenth-century constitution of literature. Conversely, though, it may also be that the kinds of reading described by the early English literary critics are not well equipped to address texts written in an earlier time, when reading may have needed to be tropological because there was not necessarily a protection accorded speech or writing. It seems to me that deconstruction still makes at least two major contributions to literary studies and to our sense of its democratization: the first highlights the degree to which literature is a type of reading (more than a form of writing or of publication), and the second articulates and defends the plurality of meanings, the multivalence and the ambiguity, of verbal representations. Both points remain relevant to how we see literature's relationship to pedagogy, to book history, and to digital literacy because the empowered reader posited by deconstruction can be placed at the center of the classroom, is at issue in the history of reading, and is implied throughout the literature on hypermedia. Perhaps most important, though, the poststructural celebration of unresolved plurality expands meaningful possibilities: the multiplicity that makes possible what deconstruction calls "play" constitutes the deep, generative connection between reading and democracy. 6 The plurality of meanings is not merely an analogy for pluralism in general, however. In print culture it is its defining image.

xu

Preface

Depending on how we understand the reading process, different readings can represent different choices or even difference itself. At a time when arguments about modes of literacy implied by the development and spread of the World Wide Web are casting the printed book as linear, hierarchical, fixed, and stable-and digital hypertext as preferably fluid, open, and changeable-it is all the more important to reassert the intrinsically flexible capacity of texts, and not just "literary" ones. What begins in these arguments about interactive media as a difference in the production of the text or in the reading experience associated with it often becomes a putative difference in the political possibilities of the two media, with hypertext cast as democratic, the book as aristocratic. The importance and potential of the World Wide Web for democratizing access to publication should not be overlooked, even if this supposed democratization requires extraordinary and unevenly distributed levels of investment in knowledge and technology. But it is striking that defenses of digital literacy share a vision of the book as unchanging, both in its physical form and over its various readings. The reality is that the book has never achieved the stability or exclusiveness attributed to it. Despite the efforts of the early literary critics and many, many others, printed text remains as dynamic and destabilizing as the World Wide Web is said to be. Still, the historical association between the book and stability must be conceded, while at the same time we must insist that it is "merely" an association-one to which the eighteenth-century development of criticism contributes. The early literary critics, like today's users of digital media, have their reasons for wanting to make reading safer, as we will see. I worry, though, that their solution, if unexamined, would leave us with a diminished sense of literacy and of democracy. At a time when some claim that the World Wide Web has displaced print with a more democratic literacy and pedagogy, it is particularly important to turn to a history of reading so as to rearticulate literary criticism's defining relationship with democracy or, more accurately, to its relationship with a fuller range of democracies.

Acknowledgments An overview of the narrative of The Constitution of Literature was published as "Re-reading Reading in Early English Literary Criticism" in a special issue of College Literature focused on new approaches to the eighteenth century (3r, no. 3 [summer 2004]: rs7-78). Selections were published in Paul Poplawski, ed., English Literature in Context

Preface

Xlll

(Cambridge University Press, 2007). I gratefully thank both publishers for their permission to reprint those works here. The research for and the drafting of this book have been supported by Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; from the Newberry Library, Chicago; and from the College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities at Clemson University. This book could not have been written without the students in my ENGL 4I4/ 6I4 and ENGL 4I5 I 6I5 courses and their related Graduate Reading Hours. I thank them for their curiosity, their informed participation, and their patience. Finally, my thanks, again, go to Sanna for her constitutive contributions to our ongoing discussions of literacy, democracy, literature, and pedagogy.

INTRODUCTION

Habermas and the Resistance to Reading in Early English Literary Criticism Literacy in its varied versions can be taken up as both the politics of representation and the representation of politics. -Henry A. Giroux, "Literacy, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Difference"

.

~

Modern English literary criticism emerges during the Restoration and eighteenth century. Along with the novel it has been called "the most significant 'new' mode of writing to enrich English literature between the Restoration of Charles II and the death of George 111." 1 Although there were literary-critical defenses of poetry before the Restoration and although there would be more extensive networks of academic and published criticism after the eighteenth century, figures such as John Dryden, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, and Samuel Johnson represent important changes in the status of criticism. Between the second half of the seventeenth century and the latter third of the eighteenth, literary criticism becomes professional, periodical criticism begins to come into its own, and across the period an English literary canon is developed, refined, and debated. It is not surprising that Peter Gay should refer to the Enlightenment as "The Age of Criticism." 2 Although there is agreement that modern English literary criticism begins to come together during the Restoration and eighteenth century, however, there is less consensus on why it happened at that time. What was it about this period that prompted the emergence of modern literary criticism? Generally, there have been two, sometimes related, approaches to explaining the eighteenth-century emergence of literary criticism: the explosion of print

2

Introduction

and the public sphere. In July 1641 the Star Chamber was abolished and with it the licensing system that had kept print in check. 3 The following year would see more titles-two thousand-than would be published in one year again until 1695. 4 More titles were published between 1640 and 166o than had been in the preceding century and a half. 5 Those numbers, high as they might have seemed in 166o, would be similarly dwarfed by the last decade of the eighteenth century, when it is estimated that fifty-six thousand titles were published. 6 According to this explanation, democratization is related to what we might call massification: the sheer quantity of new titles called for-produced, one could say-critics, professional readers who could help others find their way through the thicket of these new books. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Jiirgen Habermas offered a second answer to the question of criticism's emergence, an answer still related to the explosion of print. Arguing that critics help create the modern "public sphere" central to modern democracy, and citing Addison, Steele, The Guardian, and The Spectator by name, Habermas placed eighteenth-century English critics at center stage, giving literary criticism an emancipatory role in public culture? Through a mechanism that Habermas calls "representative publicness," 8 critics become figures of opposition to a governing aristocracy, "to engage them in debate over the general rules governing relations." 9 It is a heroic story: criticism wrests power from an aristocracy, using only the "critical reasoning of private persons on political issues." 10 Related to this shift, and perhaps more important, though, criticism also negotiates a transition from a premodern decision-making process based on the will of a sovereign to what Habermas sees as the modern, rational choice of the people debating the issues openly, from "sovereignty based on voluntas" to "legislation based on ratio." 11 Habermas's public sphere now operates as something like the "standard model" for the early history of English literary criticism. In the four decades since the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, a presumption of a mutually reinforcing relationship between literary criticism and democracy, perhaps especially during the eighteenth century, has become practically axiomatic in literary studies. Variations on the "public sphere" model can be seen in Peter Uwe Hohendahl's The Institution of Criticism, 12 Terry Eagleton's The Function of Criticism: From "The Spectator" to PostStructuralism,U and James Engell's Forming the Critical Mind: Dryden to Coleridge. 14 A series of important associations have thus developed around eighteenth-century literary criticism, including the origins of English literary study, the dispersion of a critical vocabulary to a mass audience, the development of the modern public sphere, the articulation

Habermas and the Resistance to Reading

3

of the right of unimpeded public expression, and the centrality of print media in modern democracy. 15 The public-sphere vision of the eighteenth century that Habermas describes has been subject to important critiques over the past few decades, although without yet a corresponding change in the history of literary criticism. Some, for example, argue that a modern public sphere as Habermas understands it might have emerged much earlier than Habermas indicates. Historians such as Nigel Smith have reconsidered Civil War-era pamphlets, moving the emergence of a contestatory public sphere back to the mid-seventeenth century, to the period immediately following the end of the Star Chamber. 16 Similarly, in Origins of Democratic Culture David Zaret builds on the work of Smith and argues (perhaps more directly than Smith might) that "a political public sphere first appeared in the English Revolution." 17 Prominent work on eighteenth-century history indicates that England does not see the openness that Habermas associates with the public sphere. 18 J. C. D. Clark, for example, describes a persistent ancien regime, a confessional state in which religious affiliation and genealogical rank were more important than open participation in policy debates. 19 In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy argues that the "history of the African diaspora ... may require a more complete revision of the terms in which the modernity debates have been constructed" by Habermas and others. 2°From political philosophy there is a range of objections to Habermas's model of democracy. Historians of philosophy argue that what Habermas associates with the modern democracy of the eighteenth century might have preceded it, at least by the seventeenth century. Quentin Skinner, for example, reveals a "liberty before liberalism," which he contends proposes an "unconstrained enjoyment of a number of specific rights" in the seventeenth century. 21 Among political philosophers, advocates of "radical democracy" would contend that Habermas's insistence on rationality and a preference for proceduralism structure a public sphere that, if democratic, would be amorphous. Finally, the recent "aesthetic turn" reminds us that the literary experience engages more than reason. Although it is quite widely accepted currently, Habermas's model for democracy and for literary criticism entails at least two significant limitations for the history of English literary criticism. Its story of increasing openness and participation does not quite fit the English experience with criticism in the eighteenth century (even as Habermas cites English critics in his history), and its emphasis on an eighteenth-century rise of reason is at odds with what literary critics believed, by the middle of the eighteenth century, makes literature literary. The discussion of print during this period reveals profound tensions over democratization, across nearly

4

Introduction

a century after the Civil Wars. Perhaps especially after the revisions of the chronology for Habermas's public sphere, the story of early English literary criticism ought to start earlier in the seventeenth century, with the public sphere of the r64os, rather than with the eighteenth-century and Romantic authors on which it is generally focused today. In English at least, though, criticism develops in a Restoration attempt to give print the stability that early literary critics believed the mid-seventeenthcentury experience with democratized print had lacked. There is a profound resistance to reading-or, more accurately, resistances to different ideas of reading-built into the intellectual and cultural history of this period. What is needed is a history of criticism that would indicate the important and often destabilizing democratic potential that cannot be separated from print and the influential debate over attempts to achieve such a separation so as to increase stability during the Restoration and eighteenth century. Given political historians' recent contributions to our knowledge of the complexity of early modern political philosophy, the history of literary criticism needs to be more attuned to the variety of models that characterize Restoration and eighteenth-century English political theory, at least in addition to and maybe rather than the rise of rationality that Habermas sketches. The fact that this history does unfold as a debate is part of Habermas's public sphere, but the fact that the status of rationality itself is at issue within this debate is at odds with how Habermas describes the public sphere in the eighteenth century. Finally, and following from this, what is needed is a history of criticism as a debate that recognizes and attempts to account for the difference between the aesthetic experience as described by literary critics-especially in the eighteenth century-and the rationality that Habermas prefers (and sees in eighteenth-century criticism). Contrary to both the "explosion of print" and the public-sphere explanations for the emergence of criticism, the democratized access to print at issue in both explanations is cause for deep concern about the place of print in the public sphere among those we now see as formative seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critics. Reading, it turns out, is an ambiguous figure for democratization in the period. It was not lost on contemporaries that the initial increase in titles published during the mid-seventeenth-century public sphere happened to coincide with the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. Especially after Hobbes's Leviathan, the violence of the English Civil Wars becomes associated with the newly popular press and, more important, with the kinds of reading advocated through it during the r64os. Therefore, with The Constitution of Literature, I argue that English literary criticism initially emerges as part of a reaction against the role print was thought to have played in the

Habermas and the Resistance to Reading

5

English Civil Wars of the r64os. That is, literary criticism is understood here as part of a Restoration response to the English Civil Wars and also as part of a larger project of "restoration" after the English Civil Wars, a project that persists long after the end of the Restoration as a historical period. After all, the Restoration was not fully restorative, with an Exclusion Crisis in the mid-r68os, the Glorious Revolution in r688, and Jacobite rebellions until as late as I745· Early English critics' dual attention to the increase in print and democratic access come together in debates over theories of reading-processes for acquiring meaning from the page, psychological and social effects, and diffusion across the population, for example. A focus on the critics' debate over theories of reading offers a historiography of English literary criticism that is more complicated than either the explosion of print or the models informed by Habermas would predict. By tracing a debate over the definition of reading between the r64os and the 177os, or what I call "the constitution of literature," I propose a reconsideration of what we might call the political history of early English literary criticism. Today historians are somewhat less likely than they once were to consider the Civil Wars as "a catastrophe which had imposed on the subjects the appalling obligation to reconstitute authority," to use J. G. A. Pocock's and Gordon Schochet's helpful phrase. 22 Revisionist historians such as J. C. D. Clark have been making the case that the Civil Wars of the r64os can no longer be considered a defining episode. As we will see, however, the Civil Wars are mentioned by each of the major seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literary critics-Dryden, Addison and Steele, Pope, Hume, and Johnson. In the wake of the Civil Wars of the r64os many proposed a wide range of ways to reconstitute authority; their hope may have been for precisely the continuities that Clark sees in the eighteenth century, but it is not clear these hopes were achieved to the degree revisionist historians have argued. For the literary critics the focus was on the seemingly and potentially unstable relationships between literacy and politics. In other words the critics focused their political attention on reading. Rather than Clark's sense of eighteenth-century "continuities which established society's basic public formulations," 23 The Constitution of Literature traces different Restoration and eighteenth-century assertions of continuity as a response to a central-one might even say continuous-discontinuity: the execution of Charles I. 24 By the middle of the nineteenth century, Dickens was able to treat his country's obsessive, protracted process of remembering the king's death as a kind of bad joke. In David Copperfield Mr. Dick wonders how it could have already been two centuries since the execution of Charles: "if it was so long ago, how could the people about him have

6

Introduction

made that mistake of putting some of the trouble out of his head, after it was taken off, into mine?" 25 Instead of the forgetting to which "The Act of Oblivion" officially committed the Restoration, a paradoxical process of keeping alive the memory of the king's death is an important part of the Restoration project, and it extends through the eighteenth century. Habermas is right to remind us that the development of literary criticism participates in a formative debate in political philosophy over the shape of modern democracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And it may also be, as Habermas claims, that criticism played a formative role in the development of modern democracy. What is not so clear is whether that development also results in the modern democratic public sphere. The terms of the Restoration and eighteenth-century debate over the definition of reading also entail a debate over political philosophy. The very fact of the debate over reading indicates a wider range of political philosophy than is indicated in Habermas's narrative. We do not see a single, particular type of political arrangement coalescing over the period. Rather, we see a contest over what form political arrangements should take. Across the debate it is not clear that Habermas's democratic openness is what the critics were aiming for. If anything is open, it is a deep concern over openness and accessibility. That this debate over openness itself took place in public is not, though, the same as what Habermas means by an eighteenth-century development of a public sphere. In his story such openness is developed so that other areas could be discussed. In seeing literary criticism as a form of reading with an institutional history, the approach here is informed by the history of the book, offering part of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century version of what Cavallo and Chartier call "the history of reading." 26 Scholarship in the history of the book has two main strands, sometimes described "as material objects and as systems.'m The latter, systemic or more immediately sociological approach tends to recount the situation for printing, either at a particular time or over time, looking at various aspects of the production and circulation of texts, usually in quantitative terms, to the extent that such data can be known. The former approach begins at a somewhat more micro level, usually starting with a book as a physical object and reading it for evidence of its participation in-or its running counter to-the larger sociological or systemic patterns. Perhaps the most important recent development in the history of the book as a field combines these two approaches to show that books are not in themselves stable objects. In an earlier model of systemic book history it was believed that "the press gives the book a permanent and unchanging text," that texts

Habermas and the Resistance to. Reading

7

became more standardized in the transition from handwritten copies to the printing press. 28 Comparisons of individual books as material objects, however, revealed important variations between different copies of the same "text," even within the same edition. For centuries print was composed of movable type, and type was often moved during print runs, resulting in different texts even within the same printing. The idea that print stabilizes text seems to assume retroactively a permanence of print made possible by nineteenth-century developments in print technology, when printing advanced beyond movable type. Against this presumption of print's stability, and in an argument typical of the recent approach to book history, Adrian Johns argues in The Nature of the Book that it is not the printing of books per se that creates a new sense of their stability. Instead, Johns contends that "the roots of textual stability may be sought as much in ... practices as in the press itsel£." 29 Usually, and understandably, explanations of the extramechanical practices associated with the development of textual stability focus on the development cif copyright laws and legal definitions of authorship. 30 In The Constitution of Literature, by contrast, I consider the debates over theories of reading in early literary criticism as one of those practices designed for textual stability. In The Order of Books Chartier asks, "How did people in Western Europe between the end of the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century attempt to master the enormously increased number of texts?" 31 Chartier's own answer has to do with organizing institutional structures-"inventorying titles, categorizing works, and attributing texts." 32 In this book I consider Chartier's question from a more qualitative angle. By attempting to organize responses to books rather than the books themselves, early literary critics try to do for reading what cataloguing does for bound volumes. Where Chartier refers to an "order of books" emerging between the end of the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century, The Constitution of Literature describes something like an "order of literature" within the order of the book, focused on the question of what it means to read, developing during the Restoration and eighteenth century. In a well-known book-history distinction, Rolf Engelsing distinguishes between an "intensive" reading, practiced until about 1750, and an "extensive" reading since then. 33 According to this model reading is said to shift from repeated readings of, say, the Bible before 1750 to a faster pace and greater number of titles after, when readers "ran through a great deal of printed matter," in Robert Darnton's memorable phrase. 34 Perhaps as a consequence of the "explosion of print" reading of the Restoration and eighteenth century, there is a tendency to explain the possible shift from intensive to extensive reading as a response to

8

Introduction

the sheer quantity of printed materials, as if people found a new way to read solely to deal with the extraordinary volume of new publications.35 By tracing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debates over the definition of reading, though, we can see that the central figures in early English literary criticism associate what Engelsing calls reading intensively with the political violence of the English Civil Wars of the r64os. Thus, what is usually characterized in book history as an inevitable shift from intensive to extensive reading made necessary by the sheer volume of new publications (and the pace at which they appear) emerges instead as something much more strategic. What Engelsing calls reading extensively turns out to be cast as a response to what was seen as the regrettable condition of print culture associated with the r64os. It could be that extensive reading is encouraged in the public sphere, although that hypothesis then raises questions about democracy in the period, given the flowering of democratic political philosophy that coincides with and is sometimes represented by mid-seventeenth-century intensive reading and the Civil Wars. When considered in relation to its theorists' concern over the Civil Wars, it seems that extensive reading is born out of a resistance to an earlier kind of reading-the intensive reading of the mid-seventeenth century. Consider, for example, a passage from Samuel Johnson's "Life of Addison," in which Johnson sketches a history of literary criticism from Sprat to Addison and Steele: The Royal Society was instituted soon after the Restoration to divert the attention of the people from public discontent. The Tatler and The Spectator had the same tendency; they were published at a time when two parties, loud, restless, and violent, each with plausible declarations, and each without any distinct termination of its view, were agitating the nation; to minds heated with political contest they supplied cooler and more inoffensive reflections. 36

As recipients of a public-sphere history of literary criticism, we might not recognizethe origins of literary criticism in the history Johnson sketches, despite the fact that it features the major figures still associated with the history of early English literary criticism: Addison, Steele, and Johnson himself, of course. In the Habermasian history of criticism, and of the eighteenth century, these figures are seen as struggling heroically to create a public sphere that protects democratic free expression. Johnson, by contrast, sees them as quelling dissent. At the very moment that the development of a democratic public sphere is supposed to be making possible the public discussion of policy and political events, Johnson connects literature to a politics of depoliticizing, placing Addison and Steele in a lineage that is said to direct attention away from political concerns.

Habermas and the Resistance to Reading

9

By not seeing literary criticism replaying the Restoration, as Johnson does, the current public-sphere model of literary criticism overlooks how what is called literary criticism emerges as a reconceptualization-rather than the creation-of the public sphere. According to a familiar criticism of the Enlightenment and of the scholarship of the eighteenth century, we are too willing to see the period in the same glowing terms its most famous figures used to describe it. 37 It is not clear, however, that the most enthusiastic current defenses of an Enlightenment public sphere are actually seeing the eighteenth century the way major authors of the day did. It turns out that those whom we now consider to have been formative early English literary critics were deeply concerned about the possible consequences of a free press. The emergence of a deregulated press, the ultimate political violence of the English Civil Wars, and, most important, the radical theories of reading that at least coincide with and maybe even help to precipitate these wars may explain why the protocols of reading that are subsequently debated for literary criticism emerge in the eighteenth century rather than some other period. 38 In other words, The Constitution of Literature reveals a resistance to reading, or, more specifically, a history of resistances to democratized reading, in the early development of English literary criticism. My phrasing refers, of course, to Paul de Man's well-known analysis of the "resistance to theory," although I am interested here in combining this resistance with the history of the book for reconsidering the history of literary criticism. For de Man, language combines a logical side, which it is possible to decode, and a "tropological" or metaphorical side, which stays as a "residue of indetermination" after a decoding of the grammar has occurred. 39 When de Man describes "a resistance to the rhetorical or tropological dimension of language," 40 it is this figurative, metaphorical, or "tropological" dimension that readers resist. Because for de Man language is always made of these two parts, each avoidance of this tropological dimension is also an avoidance of reading the text in itself. Thus there is a paradox at the heart of the experience of reading: the avoidance of one side of the meaning is unavoidable. "Resistance to the rhetorical or tropological dimension of language" is built into reading, de Man believes. Combining Engelsing's terms with de Man's, we could say that what de Man is describing is a resistance to intensive reading (or, conversely, a tendency toward extensive reading).41 Unfortunately, de Man contends that "if the conflict," between what he calls the tropological and the grammatical, or what Engelsing might call the intensive and the extensive, "is merely historical, in the literal sense, it is of limited theoretical interest." 42 By thus summarily dismissing the possibility that the resistance to theory might have a

IO

Introduction

history, de Man's vision of literary theory turns away from one of the most important issues it could address: what reading means across the institutional history of literary criticism. Of course, de Man's possible motives for offering an "ahistorical turn" now haunt the institutional history of poststructuralliterary theory and of literary studies. It is precisely on account of the justified concern about de Man's own history, though, that we ought to reject his sense that the history of this resistance to reading is not important. The Constitution of Literature reads theories of reading, 43 after theory,44 for historicist objectives. This might seem an old-fashioned thing to do. After all, since the revelation in December 1987 of de Man's wartime writings for a Belgian German-controlled newspaper, it has been noted that we are working in the wake of theory and of deconstruction.45 A consensus has emerged that we are now "post theory" or "after theory."46 There is a way in which the recent interest in the history of the book and the history of reading might be attempting to repair the separation between history and hermeneutics implied by de Man's model. 47 But it is also possible to see book historians' insistence on the materials of reading as a way of avoiding association with theory understood in a deconstructive way. The difference, however, between poststructuralism and, say, cultural materialism matters little when compared to the current sense that print itself no longer matters in an age of electronic communication. Considering how persuasive such claims can be, considering as well how predisposed many are to believe them, literary studies would be in a better position if it could agree that deconstruction can be a form of historicism and that cultural matqialism sometimes reveals what is most important about reading: the immaterial. Understood in this way, it seems to me that rereading theories of reading historically is the unfinished project of deconstruction. Of course, such a focus on critics defining the word reading and related cognates does not indicate how people actually do read. There may very well be, and probably is, quite a wide gulf between how the critics understand reading, or the kind of reading they propose, and the kind of reading that is actually taking place. Literary critics are not necessarily the best guides for the reading practices of their day. Indeed, this gap can be seen even in the authors' own claims about how to read; it is not clear that they are all reading as they prescribe. Also, to consider how reading is defined does not necessarily entail a consideration of what people are reading. Critics' concerns about some genres, or preferences for others, can distort our sense of the popularity of certain texts. Nor can we assume that the critics' prescriptions change the behavior of actual readers. The Spectator, for example, had a print run of only three thousand

Habermas and the Resistance to Reading

II

to four thousand copies per issue, Defoe's Review only four hundred. 48 Even if each issue had many readers, we are still looking at a very small percentage of the population. Indeed, it is believed that only 30 percent of the adult males in England were literate in the I68os. 49 Nonetheless, focusing on how a particular small group of readers such as the early literary critics defines reading does indicate how they at least wish people would read, even if those concerned are "merely" voicing concern about how they think people do read. Moreover, the select group under consideration in this book remains particularly influential, as they are often credited with articulating the earliest claims of a modern, professional literary criticism. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a widespread discussion of the positive relationship between an accessible press and democratic possibilities, that is, precisely the kind of public-sphere discussion Habermas would lead us to expect. There were authors who posited a causal connection between the diffusion of print and the form of government in England. In The Candid Reader (I744), for example, John Skelton begins with the premise that "as in a well-regulated Commonwealth ... so in one of Books." 50 Writing in I746, John Upton articulates as more than an analogy the assumption behind such arguments, "trac[ing] ... the reciprocal dependence and mutual connexion between civil liberty and polite literature." 51 For Upton it is a relationship in which civil liberty causes English polite literature. Some might wonder, of course, about how the "polite" might limit the literature. However, when Skelton goes on to exclaim, "as we freely live, let us freely read," 52 this same text indicates a profound tension between political liberty and literacy: why the declaration? Who is limiting free reading? Some, perhaps especially in contemporary Continental philosophy, are said to have uncovered an alternative, archaeological-almost subconscious-counter-Enlightenment way of understanding the eighteenth century not directly available to us through the claims of the period's major authors. To this way of thinking, these previously unacknowledged sources might reveal counter-Enlightenment pressures on free reading. I focus here on discussions of literacy and democracy specifically in the major, canonical critics of the Restoration and eighteenth century; through their work it can be seen that both sides in today's debate over the Enlightenment underestimate the degree to which tensions concerning the public sphere characterized the Enlightenment-and maybe especially characterize criticism's role during the period. That is, I propose seeing the presentday debate over the Enlightenment as already having been part of the Enlightenment.

12

Introduction

The risk, it is said, in moving beyond Habermas's model is the abandonment of what is thought to be the eighteenth century's commitment to reason. One important question, however, both for Habermas's model of the eighteenth century and for literary studies, is whether Habermas's vision of a rational eighteenth century fits either the period or the criticism in the period. Before "theory," England was known for its commitment to empiricism rather than rationality, France for its commitment to reason rather than theories. Simply put, the classic distinction was between Baconian induction and Cartesian deduction; English empiricism was thought to be opposed to French rationalism. As can be seen in the old titles about Locke, Berkeley, and Hume as English empiricists, this model used to be widespread. During the past forty years, however, the meanings and the cultural-geographical associations about empiricism and reason have been flipped. Where reason and empiricism might have been opposed in the eighteenth century, as observation had limits, they have been fused by the theory debate. The question, of course, is whether the current pairings-Anglophone philosophy as rational and analytic, and Continental philosophy as poetic, descriptive, and irrational-apply retroactively to the Restoration and eighteenth century. And Habermas is particularly important in this, as he cast French philosophers such as Derrida as irrational new conservatives who threaten to return us "to the historical locale where mysticism once turned into enlightenment," or, to the seventeenth century. 53 It may be time to reconsider the older sense of the English philosophical tradition and the differences between it and the rationalist approach. A haphazard quality as the experiential basis for the antirationalist approach used to be associated with English early modern philosophy. But such haphazardness represents the principal advantage of an antirationalist approach. It already represents the freedom that the rationalist approach tries to anticipate and shape in advance, and it offers us the opportunity to learn from history. To its defenders, such an empiricist a posteriori approach is preferable to a rationalist a priori one, insofar as it will be too late to change a rationalist system if it turns out not to work as planned in advance. Contrary to Habermas's stress on reason, eighteenth-century critics see themselves as having this advantage of historical developments. By the 1740s, Hume and Johnson had access not only to the classical criticism with which they would have been familiar through their education but also with a century of arguments in Britain over literature, poetry, drama, the arts, and how to read. In other words, Hume and Johnson, if only because they come later than Dryden, Addison, or Pope, can see a process of a posteriori cumulative growth, the institution or even self-constitution of English literary criticism in

Habermas and the Resistance to Reading

13

this case. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Hume cites precedence as one of the reasons for literary value or that Johnson should cite a century as the usual measure of literary value. In both cases they are taking the process of cumulative (albeit haphazard and not necessarily rational) development to be part of the process of critical evaluation. At the same time, their acceptance of precedence itself as a measure of worth also points to the central paradox not only of a posteriori development but also of literature as understood by critics in the second half of the eighteenth century: the rational requires the antirational. It is not possible to prove the rational basis for the survival of any particular text. Indeed, the irrational experience of reading a text is often the most important factor in finding a work of art valuable. Thus this admission of the limits of reason leaves open the possibility of an irrational, emotional response to an aesthetic dimension. What reason means to Habermas differs from what it meant to the eighteenth-century critics. For Habermas reason is tied to debate, to the exercise of public critique; it is part of what he calls "communicative action." 54 But in the faculty model of psychology through which the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century intelligentsia understood the mind, reason is but one "cognitive capacity," one of several that engaged in the act of reading. 55 After Hobbes's Leviathan the debate over theories of reading that is at the center of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitution of literature returns again and again to the definition and operation of memory, imagination, understanding, sensation, and many other psychological and physiological terms, each given a different valence by different critics. Reading is seen as a psychological-or, as we might today say, "cognitive"-process. Literacy cannot be understood without reference to the psychological capacities it engages. There would, for example, be no construing meaning from letters and words without a memory of what those characters might mean. By the same token, there would be no interpreting without some use of the imagination, recombining the words. It is not only that words trigger the imagination but also that the imagination can do things to the words as well. And imagination is itself affected by reading, of course. As we will see, each participant in the constitution of literature has a different sense of the relationship between memory and imagination. Addressing each of these psychological capacities figures prominently as part of the overarching Restoration project. Consequently, the discussion of literacy and theories of reading among the early English critics can become an almost technical exercise in establishing relationships among various aspects of late faculty psychology. As far as Habermas is concerned, the alternative to Enlightenment reason is mysticism-religion, in other words. In this way Habermas's

I4

Introduction

concern about what we might call enthusiasm and superstition aligns his argument with that of David Hume, one of the great figures of the Scottish, and English-language, Enlightenment. But this similarity also makes for an illustrative contrast. Like Hume, Habermas would tie the recent rise of religion to destabilizing, irrational violence. For Habermas, the Enlightenment offers the alternative to such irrationality. Despite a defining Enlightenment concern about enthusiasm and superstition, Hume, by contrast, incorporates an extraordinary defense of the irrational into his work. In an oft-cited passage from his A Treatise of Human Nature Hume claims, "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions" (2.3.462). As we will see in Chapter 5, Hume thus commits reason to the passions, as an extension of the passions. Classically, this would have made reason unreasonable, as the passions are passionate, not reasoning. According to Hume, however, it is unreasonable to think that passions should not be passionate. Hume's idea of reason has important consequences for freedom or autonomy. For once one accepts that reason is passionate, one must be ready to accept an absence of autonomy. From reason's state of "slavery" to the passions, it follows that "liberty and chance are synonimous [sic]" (ibid., 2.3.460). For Hume the question is how to accept the irrational while avoiding political violence, without falling back on Hobbes's "One Person." The answer, for Hume, has to do with how the arts, as they spread from one person to another, can calm the passions and create a government that is free insofar as it lessens the prospect of unpredictability. Thus, Hume's vision of freedom is simultaneously irrational (i.e., passionate), social ("passed from breast to breast"}, 56 and more predictable (i.e., reducing chances). Implicitly, Hume believes that through the arts the irrational can decrease chance. Somewhere between Habermas's insistence on reason in the public sphere and Hume's sense that governmental structures can productively use irrationality to limit freedom, eighteenth-century literary critics point, first, to the experience of reading (aesthetic in the older, "senseperception" sense of the word) and, second, to the experience of reading literature in particular (aesthetic, in the modern sense of the word). Habermas's complaint about those whom he considers postmodern and therefore post-Enlightenment is a contemporary version of an old, Platonic debate between philosophy and literature, according to which poets deal in images, and images are inaccurate; therefore, poets, and by extension literature, are inaccurate. It is important, though, to remember that this debate had its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century form as well, which is to say that this debate had its Enlightenment version. Literature after theory may have come to be associated with an irrational critique of the Enlightenment for a variety of different reasons, includ-

Habermas and the Resistance to Reading

15

ing a presumed antifoundationalism, the de Man and Sokol affairs, and notorious "bad-writing" contests. But literature's connection to fiction will always leave it with a contested relation to truth, as was the case in the eighteenth century, or during the Enlightenment. As Edward Gibbon put it, "the end of philosophy is Truth; the end of Poetry is Pleasure." 57 If the so-called postmodern critique of the Enlightenment commits itself to an antirealist position in philosophy, it does so in part for a commitment to the literary. In literary studies the name of that risky antirealist position is metaphor, because metaphors posit an identity between different things. For Habermas that is exactly the mystical, antimodern problem with literature, perhaps especially after theory's focus on the tropological: it foregrounds the metaphorical over the logical, resulting in a commitment to the nonrational. The very elements that make a work enjoyable are not necessarily rational, however; they work emotionally, even if our responses to them can be described verbally. The question, then, is whether literature, understood as rhetoric, distorts through the seductive power of images (e.g., as what the Phaedrus calls "a third kind of madness, which is a possession of the Muses") 58 or whether it can be used to get to the Truth. The fact of the matter is that Newtonian physics and the Burkean sublime are both part of the Enlightenment. We might have difficulty seeing them as part of the same period because to a large extent both sides in the recent debate presume the rationality of the Enlightenment. Even at the height of the early eighteenth-century interest in a rational aesthetics, though, Alexander Pope defends the importance of "a Grace beyond the Reach of Art." 59 Metaphor's connection to the emotions-something beyond the reach of the rules or the rational-makes it what Habermas would consider irrational, but that is also a way of describing its connection to the aesthetic in the modern sense of the term. To recognize this, though, only adds to what literature can offer to democracy, albeit in a way different than Habermas might hope. Elaine Scarry, for example, has made just this argument for the important relationship between good aesthetics and good political philosophy. For Scarry awareness of injustice requires "precisely the level of perceptual acuity that will forever be opening one to the arrival of beautiful sights and sounds." 60 I am quite sympathetic to Scarry's position here; after theory, literature not only requires but can also offer a new relationship to the aesthetic (as both sense perception and the awareness of beauty) with new possibilities for democratic political philosophy. This belief that attention to the irrational component of the literary-including what Susan Stewart describes in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses as the "kinesthetic" -represents a model for political responsibility has a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history,

r6

Introduction

extending from Milton's more or less Baroque attention to textual detail to the mid-eighteenth-century sentimentalism or the late eighteenth-century Romantic response to the sublime in the physical world. 61 Although with a valence quite different from what Scarry is proposing, a similar presumption can be seen in Burne's sense that the irrational affects of the arts have politically pacifying effects. What Scarry calls "perceptual acuity" is also a cognitive capacity, one of many psychological capacities at issue in the Restoration and eighteenth-century debate over theories of reading. Throughout that debate runs an important and powerfully democratic sense that these capacities are inborn and are thus widely distributed. These capacities are not equally well developed, however. For some, these developmental differences are also innate and ratify the privileged position of the critic; for others, these are what we might call inequalities of development and can be overcome through the critic's participation in public life, that is, with a democratic pedagogy. By arguing that "it is as though beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception,"62 Scarry takes a relatively Romantic position on that spectrum. If we were all innately attuned in the way that Scarry suggests, the world around us would be precisely as animated as Wordsworth and Coleridge said it is. We would all place a jar on a hillside in Tennessee. Unfortunately, though, by itself the placement of beautiful things here and there has not been able to prevent the most horrifying acts from occurring ·nearly everywhere. Apparently, something other than an awareness that beautiful things have been placed here and there is needed. It could be that Scarry's model puts too much emphasis on the things or on their placement rather than on the observer, who may or may not notice the things and may or may not consider the placement of such things to be beautiful. Noticing beauty depends on the observer, so it is on the observer's ability that we must focus. In other words, it is a pedagogical issue. And across the Restoration and eighteenth-century debate over theories of reading, literary critics emphasized the role of the critic as a teacher. How they understood that role differed dramatically, usually with correlated consequences for their models of literacy and political philosophy. But they did understand that there was an affective capacity that could be shaped for social ends, ends about which, again, they often disagreed. The question for us, as we consider the debates over reading in eighteenthcentury literary criticism, is whether anything is lost in the critics' choosing stability and ease of access, to some extent over imagination, in the activity of reading. Book historian Roger Chartier has shown that "reading is, in fact, in its own way, inventive and creative." 63 And Jerome

Habermas and the Resistance to Reading

I7

McGann catalogues several kinds of inventive reading, including, for example, "radial" and "deformative."6 4 As we will see, the theories of reading offered by the radical democrats of the r64os are probably the most imaginative, inventive, and deformative models proposed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They also coincide with a civil war and the execution of a monarch. Therefore, as the eighteenth-century debate over theories of reading begins to focus on the differences between, say, "perusing" and "surveying," earlier active, imaginative ways of understanding the process are somewhat diminished and replaced by, for example, an initial quick read and a subsequent overview. On the one hand, it seems that the assumption in the constitution of literature is that a less imaginative form of reading will also be safer. On the other hand, there is a tension in early English literary criticism between democratization and massification. While the seventeenth- and especially eighteenth-century increase in readership is a kind of democratization, minimizing the imaginative aspect of the reading process while discussing it with this new, larger audience is not necessarily democratic. That is, access to the more imaginative models of reading has become no more likely. Thus Trevor Ross argues that the eighteenth-century development of a literary canon "recognized a rather reduced sense of the possibilities for reading literature." 65 In Persecution and the Art of Writing Leo Strauss attempts to describe the condition of writing prior to constitutional protections of speech. Strauss contends that persecution and censorship give rise to "a peculiar technique of writing" that he calls an "exoteric book." This form of writing contains both a foregrounded "popular teaching" and "a philosophic teaching" that is "indicated only between the lines." 66 Strauss's theory has the dual advantage of recognizing a level of reading, the philosophic teaching, that will require imagination and of tying that mode to a time when not all can be said (which, some might argue, is every time). Strauss believes, however, that only a select few, qualitatively different, people can grasp the true significance of the metaphorical implication: "only thoughtful men are careful readers" (25), and for Strauss the most careful readers are always male, specifically "the young men who might become philosophers" (36). Strauss may offer those students access to what he considers the best reading and the best texts, but he is thoroughly antidemocratic and offers at best an "elitist theory of higher education," as Annabel Patterson puts it. 67 The problem for the eighteenth-century democratic constitution of literature is the possibility that its oft-noted preference for ease of access (which is related to Habermas's idea of the rational in debate) means that only what Strauss calls the "popular teaching" of earlier texts can be conveyed to the new,

r8

Introduction

larger audience. In other words, the popular reading is what Engelsing calls the extensive and could also stem from an active resistance to the tropological dimension. Or, conversely, the question after the development of the constitution of literature is whether the philosophic teaching, the intensive reading, or the tropological dimension can be made available democratically. One need not be as conservative as Strauss to think that there are better, more imaginative, ways of reading than the extensive or what Strauss calls the popular teaching. Indeed, the people who proposed and defended some of the most intensive modes of reading during the r64os were also pushing for democratic reforms so radical that many have not been implemented in England to this day. In the abstract the best readings would be attuned to the multiplicity that is part of the tropological dimension of language; in a way, the best readings would therefore involve multiplicity itself, both multiplicity of meaning and the democratic political multiplicity that the linguistic multiplicity represents and makes possible. Such multiplicity, the variability that follows from the strange logic of the metaphor, is also irrational. Noticing such multiplicity requires intensive reading. Of course, only reading intensively would also refuse multiplicity and would narrow possibilities; it would itself be a resistance to reading, resisting extensive reading in this case. The most democratic pedagogy would increase the chance that the most readers would be able to get access to the most possible meanings. It is certainly not the best argument for a progressive modern, democratic model of literacy that it allowed more people access only to what is considered the lesser kind of reading. In this case the undemocratic inequities may "only" involve reading, but access to the best kinds of reading (which is only partly related to access to the best kinds of texts) already involves other, more recognizably larger, differences of opportunity and preparation. In this context it is important to remember that affordable access to university education actually declines during the eighteenth century. Where the increase in literacy and publication would in the Habermas model predict an increase in access, research into literacy in the period instead reveals an exclusion. 68 By the latter half of the eighteenth century, as we will see in Chapter 6, critics such as Samuel Johnson were trying to convey the intensity of good reading for an audience more familiar with and interested in extensive reading, a paradoxical formulation and probably a limiting sense of literacy but one that is a consistent outgrowth of the reading debate's concern over the political and psychological instability that follows from intensive reading. We tend to forget that becoming an intensive reader, developing that capacity, being able to note what may be "between the lines," can be an empowering experience. It is in that way particularly important to

Habermas and the Resistance to Reading democracies; expanding and developing this innate capacity can help create a participatory, articulate citizenry. This development requires what Derrida and Aristotle call play, and there must also be what Hume calls practice; indeed, we practice so that we can play, and we play so that we can find out what is possible between the lines. The possibilities for the practiced play of such intensive reading are manifold: unlike the Romantic sublimity of a given landscape with beautiful things here and there, the explicit constructedness of text highlights the processes of construction, aesthetic-political construction, in which we nearly always find ourselves, even in the landscape. In a way it is in attending to the constituting of the text that we can find our own constitution through literature. But it is also through the extreme compression and ineffable paradoxes, the aporias, that we find new possibilities for constitution. The redescribing of the sometimes seemingly indescribable that constitutes the act of reading intensively also models the act of articulating verbally what may be only tentatively felt, what seems irrational. The subject, then, is constituted through the experience of becoming a better (which will also seem to the learning subject more intensive) reader. This process does not happen in isolation; not only is there a text in this class, but there will also be other readers, each pointing out other possibilities from between the lines. In this way I use the word constitution differently than Gerard Genette does in Fiction and Diction. Genette distinguishes between two ways of understanding a literary object: constitutive and conditional. The constitutive approach takes "the literariness of certain texts for granted." 69 This approach to the text is associated with what we might call the canonical reading of the canon, the canon as finished and solidified. It is, as Genette says, "essentialist" and "closed," as opposed to the "open" poetics of the conditional approach, which asks "under what conditions, or under what circumstances, can a text ... become a work of art?" (4-5). My sense of the experience of developing into an intensive, tropological, between-the-lines reader is that it can be constitutive for the subject; however, it is a process of becoming and thus not closed. It is also a kind of literacy and thus not a kind of text. It could, for example, be a noncanonical reading of the canon, depending on how one understands the canon and the canonical. In the eighteenth century, though, the constitutive and conditional approaches are still overlapping. In fact, they have a mutually supporting process of sorting out. Eighteenth-century critics debate the conditional questions of how and when a text becomes a work of art. They are, after all, attempting to deal with the consequences of a newly accessible press that is forcing these questions to the fore. But they address the issues in a way that, to

20

Introduction

today's readers, will sound like the constitutive, essentialist approach because after Dryden, and culminating with Johnson's The Lives of the English Poets, they are beginning to put together an English canon. That is, the conditional approach itself is being constituted in the history of early English literary criticism. That process of constitution may have taken on an essentialist quality, but attention to the profound concern across the history of early criticism reveals instead the provisional, conditional quality of these early attempts to make print safer through different ideas of reading. Instead of Habermas's public sphere, I would propose imagining the political history of early English literary criticism through Slavoj Zizek's idea of "the political and its disavowals," 70 which sees democratic political philosophy as a response to-a reaction against-a moment of democratic politics proper. In an article first published in Critical Inquiry and then, in a fuller version, in The Ticklish Subject, Zizek argues that "the entire history of European political thought is ultimately nothing but a series of disavowals of the political moment, of the proper logic of political antagonism." 71 Whereas Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere sees a gradual, progressive rise of democracy from the Middle Ages through its diminution in the twentieth century, Zizek, by contrast, sees a cyclical pattern: democracy is the problem that political philosophy sets out to solve, repeatedly. Habermas and Zizek agree that democracy is the model for all political action, the goal being each person's participation. The difference is that Zizek believes that a democratic politics is also a struggle for admission into the debate, including the debate about the structure of the debate. The moment in which everyone gets the chance to say how he or she wants to be understood will strike many as irrational. Such a moment of maximum political participation will also generally coincide with the moment of the least social and psychological stability. For Zizek such instability and conflict are parts of disagreement and difference and are therefore constitutive of true democracy. As he puts it, "the political proper" is "the reassertion of the dimension of antagonism." 72 But such instability prompts political philosophers to long for a return to things as "normal," which is to say, a time in which fewer were participating and the situation was therefore more stable. Thus, democratic political philosophy attempts to manage this inherently unstable quality of democracy or, as Zizek puts it, "to gentrify the properly traumatic dimension of the political." 73 According to Zizek the moment of true democratic politics and antagonisms is followed by four basic forms of disavowals-"arche-politics," "parapolitics," "metapolitics," and "ultrapolitics"-that he describes in a kind of table or Greimasian square.74 If the pamphleteering r64os (see

Habermas and the Resistance to Reading

21

Chapter 1) represent something like what Zizek would call "the properly traumatic dimension of the political," or "the proper logic of political antagonism," then political philosophy as a "defense mechanism" kicks in with Hobbes's Leviathan. For Hobbes our relative equality gives us each equal hope of achieving our ends and, thus, puts us each in a natural state of perpetual war with one another. Therefore, Hobbes contends, "men have no pleasure (but on the contrary a great deal of griefe) in keeping company where there is no power to over awe them all." 75 That is, for Hobbes equality is the problem that government was created to solve. And Hobbes solves that problem by creating a sovereign who can enforce a beneficial inequality. Nothing better represents a defense formation against a democratic moment than Hobbes trying to solve the problem of equality by creating a form of government that will overawe the people. Hobbes's particular form of government also represents the first of Zizek's four modes of disavowal: "arche-politics," which Zizek defines as "the 'communitarian' attempt to define a traditional, close, organically structured, homogeneous social space that allows for no void in which the political moment or event can emerge." 76 So, for example, Hobbes's argument that "a multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one person, represented" (114) typifies the homogeneous space of Zizek's arche-political disavowal. Moreover, although Hobbes claims on the one hand to be describing a government that is written by the people, like an artificial person is written by an author, he also argues that once the government is thus created by its people, "there can happen no breach of Covenant on the part of the Sovereigne; and consequently, none of his Subjects, by any pretense of forfeiture, can be freed from his Subjection" (122). Thus, we have in Hobbes's model no void in which a political event or moment could emerge. In Locke's Second Treatise, by contrast, it is inequality that prompts the creation of governments-not that Locke's model of government undoes inequality, but it protects the property that, without protections in the state of nature, can be so easily encroached upon. In this, Locke's insistence on "freedom from absolute, arbitrary power" (§23) is particularly important. The highly polysemous phrase can apply to slavery, to absolute monarchs, and to any kind of property taking. In part, the rejection of the absolute means that Locke's model would justify more change or flexibility than is possible for Hobbes. There is an element of choice in Locke's government. And, at the same time, insofar as it is freedom from arbitrary power, Locke is proposing a focus on rules for settling political disputes. Thus, we have with Locke the second type of Zizek's disavowals of politics, "parapolitics"-"the attempt to depoliticize politics."77 While conceding that there are variations within parapolitics,

22

Introduction

Zizek mentions the "social contract" and "the attempt to deantagonize politics by way of formulating clear rules." 78 Dryden's sense in Religio Laici that readers ought not to worry about passages that they find obscure matches this contemporary depoliticization of politics; it takes at least some of the reading out of the act of reading (see Chapter 2). Provisionally with Addison's Spectator no. 69 essay (at the Royal Exchange), and later and more fully with Smith's Wealth of Nations, we encounter the next of Zizek's types: metapolitics. Zizek associates this type with utopian socialism, and Marxism, both of which would be anachronistic for the eighteenth century. But it is in this kind of disavowal that a discussion of "political economy" emerges, and for this, Spectator no. 69 and The Wealth of Nations are both crucial. In this type, according to Zizek, "political conflict is fully asserted, but as a shadow theater in which events whose proper place is in another scene (that of economic processes) are played out." 79 Thus, in Spectator no. 69 Addison tells us, "I look upon the High-Change to be a great Council, in which all considerable Nations have their Representatives." 80 That is, by the early eighteenth century, markets are already being understood as a kind of government. Or, as Addison puts it, "factors in the trading world are what Ambassadors are in the Politick World" (ibid., 212). Although the analogy between politics and economies is clear, this market model still displaces politics in that it converts the differences that (as we have seen in Hobbes's and Locke's states of nature) lead to conflict. Combining Harvey's discoveries about the heart with Newton's sense of balanced opposites, Addison's exchange takes surpluses from one place and sends them to places that have a lack, returning to the source of the surplus something that they lack as well. Resource scarcity, then, becomes a positive good and requisite for the healthy functioning of the market, which dissipates the political events entailed by struggles over scarcity. Thus, Addison contends, "Trade, without enlarging the British Territories, has given us a kind of additional Empire" (ibid., 296). Politics has been achieved by economics, and criticism will talk about literary value in a new way, in market terms. The issue is not simply in seeing whether Zizek can be brought to the eighteenth century but rather the awkward fit between the long eighteenth century and criticism's self-congratulatory public-sphere model. Zizek's four disavowals of politics suit the tensions that we see in Restoration and eighteenth-century England better than Habermas's public sphere, no matter how desirable an open, accessible public sphere might be. Hobbes's "arche-political" Leviathan fits an arche-political Lord Protector and to some extent an arche-political Restoration. Locke's "parapolitical" Second Treatise fits a parapolitical Glorious Revolution,

Habermas and the Resistance to Reading

23

glorious precisely because it was depoliticized politics, in that James II simply left, a new contract was forged with William and Mary, and, certainly by the 1701 Act of Settlement, rules had been established. Of course, this early eighteenth-century interest in developing political rules is matched by an interest in artistic rules in the century's first two decades (e.g., Pope's An Essay on Criticism). Addison's "metapolitical" economy fits with the rise of Walpole in the wake of the South Sea Bubble (and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a defense of a South Seas trade, no matter how small). ZiZek's "ultrapolitical" mode fits less with the early English literary criticism, but a consideration of the experience in the colonies would likely point to the fourth disavowal of politics: the direct militarization of politics (e.g., North America, India, China), and international colonial encounters (e.g., with the French in Canada or the Spanish elsewhere). 81 The four modes of disavowing politics might overlap, perhaps especially today, but during the Restoration and eighteenth century, as the terms of modern constitutional democracy begin to be articulated, they seem to unfold over time, with each new disavowal claiming an advantage over the disavowal that preceded it. In other words, in Restoration and eighteenth-century England the disavowals of politics unfold in that haphazard way associated with empiricism, the irrational, and the conditional. Considering early English literary criticism in terms of the debate over reading resituates what Habermas calls the public sphere as one of several options discussed during the Restoration and eighteenth century. In "Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment" J. G. A. Pocock claims, "There was an Enlightenment, and England and the English had much to do with it, and yet the phrase 'the' (or 'an') 'English Enlightenment' does not ring quite true." 82 A similar point could be made about literary criticism and democracy: there is modern democracy, and literature and English literary criticism had much to do with it, yet the idea of "the" or "a" modern democracy emerging in the eighteenth century does not quite ring true. Where Habermas sees literature as the model for openness needed for democracy to see itself, literary critics are instead debating the possibilities for and consequences of openness. Where Habermas sees the eighteenth century as contributing to the rise of the modern, rational public sphere, there is instead a contest over democracies, plural. Consequently, we can trace a constitution of literature, in several senses. First, the modern study of literature is constituted, in the eighteenth century, in the sense of being created or instituted; it is acquiring its procedures, principles, and precedents. Moreover, rather than the steady, albeit slow, rise of an autonomous public sphere devoted to free expression with which literature and democracy

Introduction

have been associated recently, the debate over the definition of reading between the 164os and the late eighteenth century reveals instead an extended discussion of political philosophy and literacy in which various models are proposed and recombined. Between the English Civil Wars and the mid-eighteenth century, English literary critics participate in this complicated shift. Schematically, the debate over literacy and democracy moves from a "participatory" model in the 164os, to a "republican" idea in the 165os, to a "representative" democracy articulated by Addison and Steele, to a "procedural" approach hinted at by Hume, to the constitutional approach described by Johnson.

CHAPTER ONE

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy in the 1640s

.

~

Given that modern English literary criticism does not begin until after the Restoration, it may be surprising that a book on the development of English criticism should begin two decades earlier-not only before modern literary criticism can be said to have begun but also when the Civil Wars were distracting writers. On the face of it the publications of the 164os have little to do with literary criticism. Indeed, notoriously, there is little written in the 164os that fits most familiar descriptions of the literary, the ban on theater being the most important symbol of a lack of literary life from 1642 to I66o. English literary history has long agreed with Dryden's Lisideius that during the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth "we have been so long together bad Englishmen, that we had not leisure to be good Poets." 1 Consequently, the period between Shakespeare and Donne on the one hand and, say, Milton or Dryden on the other is traditionally overlooked in literary history, precisely because the Civil Wars took people away from literary writing. As Lois Potter points out in Secret Rites and Secret Writing, "until recently, it was the habit of literary historians to leap rapidly from 1642 to I66o, on the grounds that the intervening period belonged to the history of politics and religion, not literature." 2 As Samuel Johnson intimated in his Life of Addison, however, criticism develops as a reaction to what happens in print and in politics during the 164os, a decade that has been described both as "an information revolution" 3 and "the central trauma of English history." 4 There are two overarching, related reasons why publications-even the seemingly nonliterary pamphlets-from the 164os are particularly important to the history of English literary criticism: the early literary critics, from Dryden through Johnson, cite the experience of the Civil Wars with profound concern; moreover, they often associate this decade with

Chapter One the pamphlet wars and the extraordinary ideas about reading conveyed in those pamphlets. In other words, literary criticism is a response to the sense that unregulated printing led to political violence in the r64os. Having begun with the comparative democratizing of English political life made possible by the topical press, the r64os end with the violence of Charles's execution; especially after Hobbes, that violence becomes associated with the popular press and the kinds of empowered reading advocated in the r64os. Between the loosening of press restrictions after the abolishing of the Star Chamber in r64r and the pamphleteering subsequent to the execution of Charles (e.g., Charles I's Eikon Basilike and Milton's Eikonoklastes in 1649), printing was unregulated to an unprecedented degree, and the Civil Wars are shaped by what John Morrill calls "a war of words." 5 With petitions, debates, and other forms of participation, it was a period of extraordinary democratic access to the printing press and, through it, to contemporary political life. In r642 Roger Cocks wrote, "Pamphlets, like wild geese, fly up and down in flocks about the country. Never was more writing." 6 Thanks to George Thomason, a seventeenth-century London bookseller who collected more than twenty-two thousand items published between r64r and r66o, we know that Cocks is probably right.? If there was not more writing per se, it does seem that there never was more printing in England: more titles are published during r642-two thousand-than were published in any year until r69 5. 8 In a coincidence that would not go unnoticed, the r64os also happened to be the same decade as the English Civil Wars. With violence reaching the highest level of the English government, it was a period of extreme political instability and turmoil, with two civil wars and the execution of Charles I. For those looking back on it, the troubling question of print's role runs through it all. It was not only the quantity of the publications in the r64os that occasioned the concern about print, however. The number of titles simply pointed to larger questions about who should have access to the press and how its products should be read. Discussion of the role of democratized print in the political violence of the r64os and the Civil Wars recurs across the history of early English literary criticism. During the last two decades a substantial body of scholarship, all loosely associated with the history of the book, has developed around these questions of press access, literacy, reading practices, and print organization. A significant amount of this book-history work has been undertaken on the English experience of the r64os. 9 This scholarship, however, has not yet been brought to bear on the history of English literary criticism. On the one hand, this is quite understandable. For about as long as the r64os have been considered through a book-history

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

lens, the larger span of early English literary criticism has been understood in terms of the development of the modern public sphere of debate on political and social issues. Indeed, some see the eighteenth century as offering what might be the ideal manifestation of a modern public sphere. Recently, though, others have shown the public sphere emerging in the publications of the r64os. In Origins of Democratic Culture, for example, David Zaret contends that "a political public sphere first appeared in the English Revolution." 10 Similarly, Sharon Achinstein contends that "the press helped to create a public space in which political arguments over such topics could be carried on." 11 And Alexandra Halasz has documented a "Marketplace of Print" in the "Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England." 12 Such arguments suggest that interest in the public-sphere history of English criticism ought to extend to considering whether it has seventeenth-century origins. For if by "public sphere" we mean something like what Habermas calls "critical public debate," 13 then the r64os do indeed see England's first modern public sphere. But if by modern public sphere we refer to a legal right to make public such analyses, then there are significant limits to understanding the r64os through Habermas's idea of the public sphere. Some of the most prominent titles published in the r64os were ordered burned by Parliament; several of the authors were physically mutilated, by order of Parliament during the r64os. Moreover, according to Habermas's model, the greater openness of the public sphere increases the rationality of debate. But at least in the r64os the opposite seems to occur. During that decade the relatively democratic access to print results not in the propositional openness predicted by the publicsphere model but in religiously inspired, often seemingly inscrutable, texts and sophisticated theories of reading to accompany them. 14 The unorthodox models of reading-and the forms of argumentation that accompany them-offer a particularly important reason the publications of the r64os ought to matter to literary history. And recent work in book history makes it possible for us to see some of the publications of the r64os in a new light. Of course, there are petitions, participating in a tradition going back to the Middle Ages, updated for new print technologies and access. Some of those petitions and pamphlets will also claim that the people are the original source of governmental, political power and thus point toward the contractual theories of government that will prove so influential through Locke to the eighteenth century. Broadsides and newspapers also deliver information about recent developments to readers. These elements-relaying news, debating policy-are part of what makes up the eighteenth-century public sphere as Habermas describes it. In addition to these "rational" components of the public

Chapter One

sphere in the 164os and 16sos, however, we find extremely heterodoxical writings by participants in the then-current political and religious debates. At least in the case of some participants in the public sphere of the 164os, the stance was oppositional, obscurantist, and determinedly individualistic, making broad consensus impossible on either a political or a hermeneutical level. In Habermas's vision of the public sphere, such writing does not rise to the level of the rational required for suitable participation in the public sphere. For Habermas an increase in access to the press, to the means of communication, results in an increase in critical and rational thinking, critique being part of the process of establishing an all-important political consensus. But the question is whether democracy necessarily unfolds that way. Pamphlets from the late 164os and early 165os by Jacob Bauthumley, Laurence Clarkson, or Abiezer Coppe do not fit traditional models of either literature or democracy. As far as the former is concerned, these authors are writing largely exegetically about the Bible; they do not see themselves as commenting on fiction, myth, or poetry, nor are they narrating stories in poetry or prose. Politically, they are so committed to tolerance that they propose something more like separatism than any governmental structure. On the face of it they would seem to be putting forward a Christian anarchist utopian vision in some variations on expository prose. The extent of their exclusively religious affiliations would seem to distance them from anything like what would today, after the constitution of literature, be called literary production; their commitment to independence would similarly seem to undermine their participation in anything like what would, after the modern representative constitution, be called democratic government. Still, they can nonetheless offer something positive to our understanding of both literature and democracy: the radically empowered reader. Paying attention to reading, as recent book history has reminded us to do, reveals dramatically subjective versions of reading posited by these authors-sometimes in what is required to read their works, sometimes in the vision of reading they directly propose, and sometimes in both. Where earlier generations and traditions saw the meaning as guaranteed by God's presence in the book, these writers shift the meaning to the believing reader. They are discussing the kinds of issues recently associated with "reader-response" theory, asking where the meaning of the text {the Bible, in their case) originates. Theory and history come together in these ideas about reading. We have in these pamphlets actual readers discussing ideal readers claiming to represent a community of believers at a particular point in time, a community of believers so committed to tolerance that they defend distinctly different moves on the text by different readers in the act of reading.

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

Kevin Sharpe's point that "to Milton, reading was politics" 15 certainly applies here, although not only to Milton and not only to the r64os. It is the argument of the present study that reading is politics (and not necessarily what we might call party politics) to some extent across the early history of English literary criticism, in part precisely because of the kinds of claims for reading and democracy made in the r64os (represented here by Bauthumley, Coppe, and Milton). Although they differ from Habermas's idea of the communicative action permeating the public sphere, these positions in the r64os and early r6sos are democratic, nonetheless. The hermeneutical subjectivity and the political differentiation that they offer or propose may not meet familiar standards of rationality, and they make consensus difficult at best. But insofar as democracy involves precisely this possibility of hearing a range of voices, these pamphlets represent a profoundly democratic moment in the r64os. In a way, Christopher Hill's vision of a tumultuous and participatory r64os undergirds this chapter. 16 So, too, does Nigel Smith's notion that print contributes "a massive destabilization of meaning" to the shocks described by HillY By conveying the urgency of the r64os debates over reading and tying it to a sense of the world being turned upside down, Sharon Achinstein's phrase "revolutionary reader" makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role of print in the period. Achinstein admits, however, that she is not interested in the question of reading "at the level of language or mediation per se." 18 It is precisely at this level, though, that the ideas of reading per se put forward in the r64os become most interesting. Usually, the debate over democracy in the r64os is understood through the term republicanism. But this word has always been a rough fit for the arguments of the r64os. Indeed, as Blair Worden has argued, "there was precious little evidence of republicanism even during the civil wars." 19 In part, the continued use of a term that can fit only awkwardly can be explained by the fact that republicanism is always conceded to be a loose designation for a complicated concept. For some, republicanism entails an opposition to monarchy. And there was certainly opposition to the monarchy in the r64os. At the same time, though, some argued and fought against Charles I, against that monarch, without seeing themselves as fighting monarchy itself. Moreover, republicanism is said to be more communitarian and less concerned with individual rights than is liberalism. 20 But there are arguments made in the r64os that insist to a surprising degree on quite specifically individual rights. For some in the r64os, republicanism involved a mixed constitution, combining a democratic, an aristocratic, and a monarchical element; for others, the republican emphasis on independence and virtue meant an aversion to

Chapter One wealth and a related dislike of the mixed constitution's class structure. Faced with the confusion caused by these complexities, J. G. A. Pocock points toward one possible resolution when he argues that before the r6sos republicanism "was a language, not a programme." 21 Pocock's description of seventeenth-century republicanism as a language opens up an area in which history, political philosophy, and literary studies meet, an overlap that can be seen in the politics of reading in the r64os. But Pocock's "language of republicanism" does not capture the revolutionary quality of the more radical conceptions of democratic literacy as attention to language in print during the r64os (nor was it necessarily intended to do so). Since Pocock first described a language of republicanism, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have developed a theory of "radical democracy" that seems particularly well suited to capture the mood and tone of the r64os revolutionaries, although it is meant as an intervention in today's praxis. At least since Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe have been describing what Mouffe calls an "agonistic model of democracy," with a correlated "legitimation of conflict and division." 22 Starting from the antagonistic vision of relationships in democracy, Laclau and Mouffe describe something they call "the democratic imaginary." 23 Insofar as it is an "imaginary"-and specifically a "discursive" formation-Laclau's and Mouffe's proposal is similar to Pocock's language of republicanism. 24 Working from the assumption that modern democracy represents what she, in more recent work, calls "the end of a substantive idea of the good life," 25 Mouffe offers radical democracy as an alternative to republicanism and liberalism. For Mouffe, democracy, radical democracy, is inherently antagonistic. She believes that both republican and liberal forms of democracy share a preference for stability that runs counter to what should be the openness of democracies. It is not at all clear that Laclau's and Mouffe's theory of radical or antagonistic democracy offers anything like a pragmatic contribution to democratic constitutions, 26 but this is another reason why their model is suitable for the r64os. The participants in the debate of the r64os were basically theorizing the conditions for a radical right to radical difference and radical autonomy (which some would later see as the political theory of the Civil Wars). Part of the trouble later generations have with the radicals of the r64os is their refusal of anything like a constitutional approach, even as so many petitions to Parliament invoked an idea of Parliamentary responsiveness implicit in an idea of an ancient constitution. This anarchic impulse, though, is central to how Laclau and perhaps more especially Mouffe lately understand democracy. In subsequent work, such as The Democratic Paradox, Mouffe has

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

31

elaborated on this idea of a radical democracy. For Mouffe, when democracy is working well, it is characterized by what she calls "agonistic confrontation." 27 In a democracy everything is potentially debatable, except, Mouffe believes, popular sovereignty. In response to those who might see the instability and maybe even the potential for violence implicit in perpetual conflict as undermining democracy, Mouffe argues, by contrast, "to aim at a universal rational consensus-that is the real threat to democracy." 28 For Mouffe such desire for consensus necessarily means the effacement of someone's particular, real, and political concerns or interests. In classical republicanism the emphasis on virtue could too easily mutate into a defense of the existing class structure. The class structure would be undemocratic and for Mouffe would likely require a consensus that accords with the interests of those already benefiting from the structure. In liberal democracy the emphasis on rational choice and on representation by others limits the terms of participation in advance, undemocratically to Mouffe. In a democracy everything is to be contested, including the rules and definitions of the rational. "Conflicts and confrontations," Mouffe argues, "far from being a sign of imperfection, indicate that democracy is alive and inhabited by pluralism." 29 In this case the r64os show democracy at its most alive. Therefore, there is also another way in which-at the level of language-the ideas about reading discussed in the r64os are better described as radical than as revolutionary. The term radical can imply both the political extremism and the hermeneutical rootedness of the arguments being made. When considered in terms of ideas of reading thrown up by the democratic possibilities for literacy in the r64os, Milton, for example, can emerge as a less revolutionary reader than some of his contemporaries. But like them he would still be a "radical" in one sense of the word or the other, either rooted or revolutionary. In 1647, two years before Charles I was executed, Thomas May claimed that "the very foundations of Government were shaken" by the events of the r64os. 30 The foundations would be shaken even more over the next two years. Revisionists today might argue an older order came through the r64os unchanged, but those going through the experience did not have the same feeling as events unfolded. After two civil wars and the public execution of the king outside the Banqueting House in London, people had the sense that something had happened. We might debate whether that something rises to the level of a revolution, but many in the r6sos thought that the events had certainly been radical in the revolutionary sense of the term. Something had happened, even if what had happened did not rise to the level of a revolution and even if it had occurred within a religious-and thus "premodern" -framework. At the

Chapter One very least, what Pocock and Schochet call the "dissolution" of the government during the r64os is important for how it invites reconceiving of the English polity. 31 The r64os are not known, however, for attempts to envision systematically a new way of organizing the government. Opposition to Charles, and claims for radical democracy, while they might imply other arrangements, do not provide an overarching framework for how to handle their own success. Martin Dzelzainis's claim regarding Milton's The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (r649)-that it "made a bonfire of constitutionalism" 32 -applies to others in the r64os as well, such as Bauthumley and Coppe. Contrary to what the current discussion of a public sphere in the r64os might lead us to expect, their religiously inspired visions of democracy and hermeneutics made a bonfire of anything like Habermas's rational consensus, too. Against the rational public sphere through which early literary criticism and, more recently, the pamphlets of the r64os have been understood, the works of the radical democrats accept the irrational, the multiple, and the radical autonomy of the participants. Their ideas about democracy may be extraordinarily unstable, but they are no less "democratic" than Habermas's approach. Indeed, there are ways in which the radical democrats are more democratic, just as it is also true that Habermas's rationality would be more stable than the models offered by the radical democrats. Politically, the radical democrats of the r64os and r6sos seem to sense and represent something like that moment of democratic politics proper from which Zizek claims political philosophy so often recoils. There is a way in which the radical democratic position, contra Habermas, could also be called the unfinished project of modernity. The question for the Restoration and eighteenth century is how to balance the democratic demands and risks against a deep desire for political stability. The same tension between the irrational and the rational, between the risks and stability applies to reading as well as to political philosophy. In describing what they call the democratic imaginary, Laclau and Mouffe contend that "the logic of necessity is the logic of the literal." 33 That is, radically democratic politics always insist that there is another way to see situations; but such a claim revolves around reading, around treating the situation as a metaphor, believing that its events stand for something else and can be read another way. The problems with such an approach are obvious: not everyone will see the same meaning in the events, and, consequently, nearly perpetual debate over the meaning will ensue. But if a process is to be democratic, it must be open to the possibility that others might read things differently. Therefore, democratic processes must anticipate and facilitate the prospect of a seemingly endless stream of contestatory readings. For Habermas

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

33

the rational public sphere is the place arranged in advance for such a contest of readings. The problem, though, is the preexisting requirement that the contest be rational. To be democratic, even the definition and limits of the rational must be open to contestation as well. In the 164os, the mysticism of the radical democrats signified their debate with the requirements of the rational. The important lessons about the destabilizing impact of print in the 1640s must be brought to bear on a reconsideration of the early history of modern English literary criticism. This "radically democratic" understanding of reading, more than the increasing productivity of the press, is later rejected by many English authors, the early literary critics prominent among them. On the one hand, this means that what is rejected is not a type of text but a type of reading (although, granted, a type of reading that is associated during the 164os and 165os with the type of text produced by, for example, religiously inspired authors such as the Ranters). To understand why modern literary criticism emerges after 166o, one must look at the mid-seventeenth century, at what the literary critics of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are concerned about. The political sympathies of the radically democratic authors of the mid-seventeenth century were objectionable to the early English literary critics, as we will see in subsequent chapters. Especially after 166o there was a profound concern that readers so empowered would act in politically radical ways as well. Literary critics were not the only ones who experienced such concerns after the Restoration of course; there was a widespread wish to avoid the violence of that decade. Actually, there was no category of public intellectuals called literary critics ready to intervene on the side of stability. Rather, those whom we now see as major figures in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history of English literary criticism assume that position precisely because they aim to offer safer and more moderate theories of reading. In the twentieth century T. S. Eliot argued that "the civil war of the seventeenth century ... has never been concluded." 34 The unresolved persistence of the Civil Wars was all the more palpable during the Restoration and the eighteenth century. The early English literary critics are among those who attempt to address what are seen at the time to have been among the causes of the Civil Wars: the effects of radically democratized reading. The material reviewed in this chapter provides a basis for comparison between these radically democratic models of reading at midcentury and the subsequent Restoration and eighteenth-century debate over theories of reading among early English literary critics. Concerned as he is with "what is to be thought in general of reading" (as he puts it in Areopagitica), Milton makes the most famous contribution

34

Chapter One

to radically democratic reading in the 164os and 165osY But he is not alone in having a sense of how democratized reading should operate, on the level of textual analysis. Bauthumley and Coppe are among those who also address the topic. Moreover, the debate over reading in the 164os and 165os does not consist solely of defenses of democratized reading. The subsequent unprecedented events of the 164os are matched by the unprecedented flourishing of political philosophy in the 165os, beginning most significantly with Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). Indeed, the two are related, as the events of the 164os, both political and hermeneutic, demand a response. As we will see toward the end of this chapter, the work of reimagining reading also begins with Leviathan. Although this chapter reviews how reading is defined in selected prose texts from the 164os and 165os, it initially sketches some basic differences in the hermeneutics proposed by Luther in "The Pagan Servitude of the Church" (1520) and by Calvin in "Three Forms of Exposition" (1540). Rather than the complete picture of reading in the Reformation or of print culture during the Civil Wars of the 164os, the object in this chapter is to explore some of the more radical theories of reading developed at the level of language or mediation, representative perhaps only in their extremity. It is from the extremes of this debate that the early literary critics later recoil, especially after the Restoration. That is, this chapter offers a brief introduction to a range of possibilities for reading that will be sometimes ridiculed, sometimes reworked, and sometimes avoided during the debates over reading in the subsequent early history of English literary criticism. Central to this debate in the 164os is the work of John Milton. In an essay on Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Kenneth R. Kirby wonders "whether Milton was really conscious of the liberties he was taking with the currently accepted principles of interpretation." 36 If Kirby's concern is with generally accepted principles, then part of the point of this chapter is to establish that in the 164os and 165os there were apparently fewer accepted principles of interpretation than we might expect. Kirby tells us that "in the mid [seventeenth] century, the professed theory was still basically that of Luther and the early reformers," 37 but the debate over reading in the 164os shows that there is more variety to Protestant reading than is usually recognized. It is not clear that "the 'single literal sense'-the 'tongue sense'-of Scripture was virtually a mantra of Protestant and Puritan hermeneutics," as is so often claimed. 38 In reality there is more to Protestant reading than the single sense, and there are important differences between Luther and Calvin, more than the scriptura sola story usually conveys. The difficulty, though, comes

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

35

in trying to describe this interpretive variety. Many have relied on the well-known distinction between the literal and the figurative, or the literal and the allegorical, but notions of "literal," "metaphorical," and "allegorical" cannot get at the remarkable hybrids that make the theories of reading in the 164os radical. As a consequence, some have resorted to combining the literal and the metaphorical; Boyd Berry, for example, discusses a "figurative literalism," whereby Puritans "fused a literal with a wildly figurative reading." 39 While it is important to complicate the sola scriptura story often told about Protestant reading, such combinations simply reveal the limits of the "literal vs. metaphorical" distinction in describing acts of reading. 40 This model may have the advantage of making the differences between the literal, the metaphorical, and the allegorical contingent on an act of reading, but it has the disadvantage of constructing each different reading as one level higher than the one preceding it, creating a hierarchy from the literal to the allegorical. Many important participants in the debate over Protestant hermeneutics tried to move beyond this multilevel model of interpretation (articulated most famously by Dante). William Perkins, for example, argues that "the Church of Rome maketh four senses of the scriptures, the literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical, ... but this her device of the fourfold meaning of the scripture must be exploded and rejected." 41 According to the vocabulary usually used for Protestant reading, Luther and Calvin are both reading literally. And it is true that neither of them overlooks the words. How they describe the act of reading differs markedly, though. Luther combines a demand for making the text available to all readers with a claim that the text will nonetheless have one meaning for them all. With Calvin, by contrast, the same demand for a wider reading results in a greater range of possible meanings. This is not, as convention would have it, a difference between literal and metaphorical. Rather, the difference has to do with where Luther and Calvin think the meaning is located and how, therefore, readers might get access to meaning. Between Luther and Calvin, the meaning is relocated from the text to the reader of the text. In "The Pagan Servitude of the Church" (1520) and in "Three Forms of Exposition" (1540) Luther and Calvin, respectively, focus on the same passage from Luke, in which Jesus says "'This is my body which is given for you. Do this in memory of me'" (22:19). As is well known, in the Catholic Church this passage is taken to imply a transubstantiation achieved by the priest during the performance of the Mass; the bread becomes the body after a change effected by Jesus during the Last Supper and by the priest during the Mass. Both Luther and Calvin reject transubstantiation, but they do so for different reasons, involving-and representing-interpretation. That is, in discussing this

Chapter One

passage, Luther and Calvin articulate different ways of reading. In the process, both treat "the bread" not only as the issue at the heart of the service but also as an image for reading. In rpo, Martin Luther published "The Pagan Servitude of the Christian Church," also known as "The Babylonian Captivity of the Christian Church." It had been only three years since he had distributed the "95 Theses" that legend says he nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, three particularly prolific and important years for Luther. In "The Pagan Servitude" Luther breaks with his own former positions, contending that he had been "entangled in the gross superstitions of a masterful Rome." 42 An inquisition initially begun against him after the "95 Theses" was resumed after the publication of "The Pagan Servitude" and other works from 1520 to 1521; excommunication, outlaw status, and exile were to follow shortly thereafter. Although there are as a consequence many issues to address in considering Luther's "The Pagan Servitude," the document is particularly important here for its offering a new model of interpretation. In the essay Luther applies his interpretive approach to Jesus's sentence, "This is my body." Luther's treatment of the issue means not only a break from the church; it will also help set the terms for a relatively popularized debate over how to read. As is well known, Luther is committed to "the plain, literal sense," as he puts it in "The Pagan Servitude" (266). On the face of it, however, it is not clear what the plain, literal sense of Jesus's claim might be, how we are to understand literally Jesus's being both body and bread at the same time. The church had steered around this problem by claiming that Jesus performs a change in the bread, so that it turns into his body during his speaking of the words, a change then replicated by the priesthood during the Mass. In this way, the church's reading focuses on the acute "presentness" of the verb is: although the bread was not body before, it now is. As Luther sees it, though, the church thereby treats the word is as if it were the word becomes. For Luther, the is does not imply any change; it is a state of being present. This leaves Luther with the question, then, of how Jesus could be the bread without the bread's undergoing a change. His answer is that Jesus is everywhere, permeating everything. The bread is Jesus's body because there is already divinity in the bread, as there is, for Luther, in everything. In this way, the bread can be the body of Christ, for Luther, without there being any change. Luther reminds readers, "It is not necessary for human nature to be transubstantiated before it can be the corporeal habitation of the divine" (270). In the same way, Luther argues, that the human form did not need to be changed before God could be incorporated into it, bread does not need to be changed in order for it to be the body of Christ.

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

37

Luther offers the process of making iron as an analogy for how Christ can permeate bread: "iron and fire are two substances which mingle together in red-hot iron in such a way that every part contains both iron and fire. Why cannot the glorified body of Christ be similarly found in every part of the substance of the bread?" (267). For Luther, the presence of the divinity in the bread means that it already is the body of Christ. Moreover, as iron cannot be made without the fire, Luther implies that divinity is diffused through all things in the very act of their creation. The "fire" is not reserved for bread over which the words "this is my body" have been spoken or for bread over other kinds of things. Although in this case the body of Christ in the bread (or the fire in the iron) is at issue, the same point could apply to the Spirit in the Bible: the spirit could be in the words, just like fire in iron, or Christ in the bread. In this way, Luther's approach is what Derrida has called "logocentric"-the presence of the divinity guarantees the meaning. 43 It is important to keep this in mind when thinking about Luther's well-known "scriptura sola." When Luther writes that "these words alone, and apart from everything else, contain the power, the nature, and the whole substance of the mass" (271-72), we must remember that Luther means that there is something actually in the words. There is a sense, then, in which the words are never completely alone for Luther, who associates the literal and the plain sense with words because he believes they contain a power. Like the bread, words are not symbols of divinity, but contain divinity itself. In this way, Luther's insistence on making the Bible available to readers does not entail the prospect of profound differences in readings of the Bible, as the church presumably feared it would. Although Luther, in his push to make the Bible more accessible, is leaving the meaning up to each individual reader, he does not believe that there will necessarily be a range of analyses. Following from his conviction that the presence is in the Bible (like Jesus is in the bread or the fire in the iron), Luther's logocentric version of interpretation means the spread of the Bible would lead to a great number of similar-maybe even identical-readings. With the presence persisting in the text, like fire in hot iron, making the text available to every reader would mean that every reader would gain access to the one presence. Rather than opening the text up to a variety of interpretations, Luther's sense seems to be that openness would result in each person's coming to similar conclusions. After all, if neither the human nor the bread requires transubstantiation before becoming a vehicle for God, then neither does the Bible. John Calvin's "Three Forms of Exposition," published in 1540, is often seen as a companion piece to Luther's "The Pagan Servitude of the

Chapter One

Christian Church." Like Luther, Calvin focuses on the sentence, "This is my body." This focus on the words-and Calvin's extensive commentaries on them elsewhere-suggests that Calvin, too, advocates a literal mode of reading. But his approach to words in "Three Forms of Exposition" is quite different from Luther's. According to Calvin, "Luther was willing to leave the generally received opinion untouched; for while condemning transubstantiation, he said that the bread was the body of Christ, inasmuch as it was united with him." 44 By "generally received opinion," Calvin intends Catholicism and the presence. From Calvin's analysis, Luther emerges almost insufficiently Protestant, still too Catholic. To Calvin, Luther's argument that Jesus resides in the bread either confines divinity to a piece of bread or spreads it too far. In either case, Calvin contends, "to maintain that, it must be confessed either that the body of Christ is without limit, or that it may be in different places" ("Three Forms of Exposition," 530). Luther's argument may have gotten around the problem of a transformation of the bread, but it is not clear, Calvin responds, how the body referred to in the sentence could still be anything like a body, if conceivably found everywhere. As far as Calvin is concerned, Luther's approach does not address the central question of the presence, which remains, in Luther's argument, in the bread, albeit without any change to the bread. In Luther's reading, the verb to be simply indicates an identity between the bread and the body (and presumably between the divinity and everything else). For Calvin, the sentence in Luke implies neither (Catholic) transubstantiation nor (Luther's) cosubstantiation. Rather, it is a question of reference: "grace ... resides not in the sacrament, but refers us to the cross" ("Three Forms of Exposition," 527). With Calvin, the bread becomes a symbol. The is that Luther claims Catholics treat as becomes, and that Calvin claims Luther treats as a form of "being," means "represents" for Calvin. Thus Calvin argues, "the bread and the wine are visible signs, which represent to us the body and blood" (514). For Calvin, the words refer to the meaning, just as the bread represents Jesus and the Last Supper. In Calvin's model, the presence is not in the symbol. Because for Calvin words refer to a meaning, words are not themselves the meaning, or the meaning is not in the words. Instead, the meaning is in the reader, who is referred by the sign to a referent. "When we see the visible sign," Calvin argues, "we must consider what it represents" (srs). As Calvin moves beyond Luther's logocentrism, the sign, rather than directly communicating (as it would in Luther's model) a meaning to the reader, triggers some knowledge the reader already has. The referent of the word is already known to those who understand the sign. Calvin claims that "if we have the reality, we are by

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

39

stronger reason capable of receiving the sign" (523). We might describe Calvin's position through the classical distinction between the res and the verba: those who have the "things" will understand the "words." Calvin is known for proposing a theology of predestination, according to which some are saved in advance. This ostensibly theological point applies to Calvin's hermeneutics as well. In Calvin's model, not everyone will be able to understand a text. Rather, because readers must know some meaning of the symbols before they can read any particular combination of them, there is a sense in which readers arrive at symbols "predestined" to find them meaningful. Readers must know how a text can mean before they know what it does mean. In "Three Forms of Exposition," Calvin provides what he calls an "analogous case" through which to understand this model of interpretation: the story from John of St. John the Baptist seeing "the Spirit of God descending" in the form of a dove. To the others who were with John the Baptist, there was only a dove. Or, as Calvin points out, "if we look more closely, we shall find that he saw nothing but the dove, in respect that the Holy Spirit is in his essence invisible" (515). Thus, the "meaning" of the dove-in this case that it represented the Spirit-was visible only to one of those who saw the dove. Only John even considered the dove a sign. Thus, for Calvin, the meaning is in the believer I reader. In Calvinist theology those few predisposed to see the meaningful come to be known as the predestined or Elect. At the same time, though, such seeing in the sign what is otherwise invisible is precisely what all readers do, at least in Calvin's idea of reading. To see beyond the visible sign as Calvin recommends is also to move away from the model of reading that Luther describes. The presence that Catholics believe arrives in the bread during the Mystery of the Eucharist, and that Luther believes resides in the bread (and elsewhere), shifts in Calvin's argument to the reader or believer. If Luther's approach could be called logocentric for having the presence in the word, we might call Calvin's approach subjective for valorizing the ability of the believing reader (i.e., his or her "subjectivity") to find the invisible in the visible. Of course, such a move away from the logocentric and toward a subjective model of reading entails the possibility of profound misreadings (and even, as we will see, nonreadings). Calvin, however, aware of this possibility, invokes and alters Luther's analogy between the church and the bread in such a way to address the understandable objection to the prospect of multiple misreadings. Anticipating differences of interpretation, Calvin argues that the church is made up of differences, blended into one. The various subjectivities of the believers make up the church, just as their different readings might be combined into one. "As the bread which is there sanctified for the common use of all is composed

Chapter One of several grains so mixed together that they cannot be distinguished from each other," Calvin writes, "so ought we to be united together in indissoluble friendship" (520). For Luther, the bread is the one meaning of Jesus; for Calvin, the bread is made up of many different elements, the group of believers. For Luther, many readers will arrive at one meaning (overcoming difference). For Calvin, the many different readers make up one church made of differences, like the grains in the bread. For the debates during the 164os over what Protestant reading means, Calvin's proposal is a particularly important development. There are Calvinists in the late 164os who claim that the meaning is to be found solely in the reader, so much so that some readers argued that it was not necessary to actually read. Indeed, it is not clear that read is the right word, as reading is apparently not necessary to some of these authors. In recent scholarship there are some who include Milton among those who advocate a form of nonreading. Stanley Fish, for example, argues that Milton's reading "renders books beside the point." 45 When we consider Milton's discussion of reading in the context of other models articulated in the 164os, however, it turns out that Milton is working to make sure the book matters to radically democratic, and maybe Calvinist, ideas of reading. Indeed, what makes Milton's prose essays of the 164os interesting for the history of reading is how Milton's claims about reading balance the seemingly competing demands of logocentric and subjective modes of reading. Like Luther, Milton believes in the importance of the book, arguing that there is a presence in it; like Calvin, he also believes in the importance of subjective reading(s). For Luther, having access to the book would mean arriving at similar readings; for Calvin, similar access could produce different readings. In Areopagitica, as he sets out to describe "what is to be thought in general of reading books," Milton accepts both the logocentric and the subjective yet reverses the terms of the debate (507). Milton argues that precisely because (as a logocentric approach would have it) there is something to a book, it can have a variety of meanings when engaged by different readers (as the subjective approach would have it). In the early 164os, with Areopagitica, Milton makes a logocentric defense of the subjective reading of books. Like the bread as described by Luther, books "contain a potencie of life in them" (492). Milton's logocentrism differs from Luther's, however: Milton's book contains the presence of its author. As Milton puts it, books "preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them" (492). While there is a way in which the author is also contained in the Bible understood logocentrically, in that case the author is thought to be God, whereas in Milton's case the author reflects a more modern,

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

subjective vision of authorship-that of an individual. At the same time, there are significant physiological implications to that vial. In his essay on Areopagitica Stanley Fish parenthetically suggests that this preserved sample is preserved "in amber, as it were." 46 But Fish's illustrative aside overlooks the fact that Milton's analogy has already explained that the potency is preserved in a vial-not, that is, in amber. To see the preservation as if it were amber would be to miss the central point that whatever is preserved in Milton's idea of the book can be brought fully to life. Quite unlike what is preserved in amber, "the pretious life-blood of a master spirit" (493) is not absolutely dead. Thus, as a living thing Milton's book is not an idol, an inanimate object worshipped in reading. More to the point, the book can create life. The phallic metaphor implicit in Milton's discussion of the "violl" invokes the classical assumption that semen contains miniature human replicas, stored up, in Milton's terms "on purpose to a life beyond life" (493). It could be argued that Areopagitica imagines reproduction in terms of the "one-sex model" that Thomas Laqueur claims was popular until the end of the seventeenth century, but in the analogy to a vial, Milton treats the book as physiologically male. 47 This is an important, and controversial, point, as it would seem to confirm the long-standing sense that Milton excludes women from authorship. However, if for Milton reading is a creative process, modeled on human sexuality, then reading is not, as it is sometimes imagined, only an activity of consuming. Rather, it is also a productive act. Thus, if the book is male, and the reading is productive, each reader would thereby be cast as female. Moreover, Milton describes the reader and the book as being involved in a relationship with each other. Because a book is like the means to produce a child, this relationship between the reader and the book produces a new, third thing, the meaning, different from either the reader or the text. The meaning is the result of a combination of the reader and the book, of the subjective and the logocentric. Via the sexual implication of the book's ability to preserve an "efficacie" and to perpetuate life thereby, it can be seen how the book would be required to produce a meaning in the reader. With Milton's physiological model, we have Renaissance self-fashioning of a most dramatic kind: in reading. It is not so much a self that is fashioned in this process, but rather the fashioning, the reading, of each book will vary depending on the self of each reader. Reading becomes a pleasurable and procreative act, producing the reader's reading of the book, which at least that reader calls the meaning. Because of the unique combination between each reader and text, no book will interact with each reader in exactly the same way; indeed, interaction with different readers can result in a wide range of different productions. In other words, the

Chapter One wide range of interpretations that accompany all texts can in this way be explained as the result of the creative interaction involved in reading. Rather than being, as they might for a Calvinist, the result of inscrutable conscience that arrives ready to be reminded of what it already knew, different readings are here the result of the combination of the text and its different readers. Milton's idea of an "extract" embedded in the printed text recalls the terms of Plato's Phaedrus, in which Phaedrus and Socrates rely on gendered seed imagery to understand writing. "Using his pen to sow words," Phaedrus calls it; Socrates talks about watching "tender plants grow up." 48 Although Phaedrus and Areopagitica share such imagery and, as a result, are often compared, Milton's argument differs from Plato's. 49 Socrates objects to writing on several related grounds: texts are inanimate; they cannot respond and consequently are merely aids to memory, not a way of learning or acquiring new knowledge. Texts, like paintings, Socrates claims, "stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence" (Phaedrus, 521). Milton argues the opposite: books stand before us as if they were dead. Rather than creating the illusion that they are alive, books create the illusion that they are not alive. Behind that illusion, according to Milton, is the reality that books might live. For Plato, the fact that books do not respond makes books less valuable than speaking to other people. Thus Socrates describes "living speech" as having "unquestioned legitimacy" (Phaedrus, 521). Books' inability to respond is not, for Milton, a weakness of books; it is instead a misunderstanding of them. To read a book is to revive it, to bring it back from its not absolutely dead state. Thus, what we read is its response. The relationship is a productive one, literally producing new beings, thoughts at the very least. That is, what we gain from the book is not necessarily the same as what the book is saying. Therefore, the meaning is, in a sense, our response to its response. In this, Milton counters perhaps one of Socrates' central objections to writing, that "written words do [no]thing more than remind one who knows that which the writing is concerned with" (521). In Calvin's model, Socrates' problem actually makes the text more important, precisely by serving to refer readers to what they already know and believe. In Milton's model, by contrast, the act of reading the book combines what we already know with what the book contains, and the encounter produces something new, something that we as readers at least did not know before. Milton's argument also invokes the well-known image of the author as parent and the book as child, which receives a classic treatment in Montaigne's "On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children." In Areopagitica, however,

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

43

the book is not the child; after all, children contain more than a potency of life. If there is a child in the relationship Milton describes, it is not the book but rather the meaning for the reader. Milton may have reconciled Luther's logocentric position with Calvin's subjective one, but the new, third possibility, produced by the combination of the book and the reader, will come to be seen as one of the problems with democratized print, both in general and illustrated during the r64os in particular. The problem is that the reading of the text can differ from the text itself. In Areopagitica, Milton addresses this concern, taking the impossibility of getting to the Truth as a "sad" given: Truth indeed came into the world with her divine master and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on; but when he ascended, and his apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, lords and commons, nor ever shall do, till her master's second coming. ( 549)

On the one hand, this story concedes that there will be in reading exactly the great variety that Milton's opponents dread; there is no Truth on which to ground an argument. On the other hand, however, Milton contends that there once was Truth; truth came to earth with Jesus. Interestingly, Truth is different from Christ, having come into the world with him but remaining after he leaves. In this story, rather than the Fall, it is instead the Ascension that left us banished from access to the truth. Moreover, Truth, like the reader in the book analogy earlier, is figured as female, a woman undergoing the torture suffered by the Egyptian god Osiris. Thus, not only does the passage argue that there is no complete Truth, but by combining Truth, Jesus, the Ascension, the Apostles, and Egyptian myth, Milton enacts the creative piecing-together of Truth's partial elements that he claims constitutes reading. Whether such reading is accurate or not seems to matter much less than whether it indicates a reader's engaging with a text. There is a tradition that sees Areopagitica as making a formative contribution to and defense of freedom of speech, a freedom that would later be formalized in the U.S. Constitution as the First Amendment. That is, some would argue that Areopagitica represents an early element of what might be an aspect of the constitution of literature. There are, however, distinct limits to Milton's defense of free speech. Milton claims that tolerance is "prudent" but adds, "I mean not tolerated Popery," in the very

44

Chapter One

next sentence (565). Milton sees Catholics as intolerant and, paradoxically, cannot tolerate the intolerant. In the r64os, as it turns out, there are endorsements of toleration more emphatic than Milton's in Areopagitica. William Walwyn, for example, is willing to tolerate Catholics: "let them alone ... and live quietly together." 50 Areopagitica concludes with a defense of printers and authors being "register'd" (569), but Walwyn by contrast sees such control of the press as part of a larger issue, religious freedom and its corollary, toleration. Walwyn thinks licensing is a conspiracy of the clergy "to make themselves the only publick speakers." 51 Control of the press means access to the public and means a distinction within that public-a distinction between those who can communicate and those who cannot. 52 Walwyn encapsulates the issue in a requirement to "heare all voyces." 53 Anticipating the objection that his proposal would lead to what he calls "confusion," Walwyn argues that "the establishing of onely one, and suppressing all others, will breede in all a generall discontent." 54 Also in the r64os Gerrard Winstanley, the most famous of the Diggers, makes another, different argument for toleration. Winstanley adopts the "subjective" assumption that the meaning of Scripture is different from the words, and he uses this gap to argue for tolerance. Winstanley claims that "there is an experimental perswasion," a persuasion based on experience, that will guide each reader in his or her understanding of the Spirit. Indeed, precisely because reading is so related to the Spirit, toleration is required for other readings: "to pass construction [upon] the meaning, by way of office, teaching others; this you cannot do." 55 We might understand Winstanley's concept of passing construction through our own use of "construal" to describe a process of establishing meaning. For Winstanley, it is not that a reader cannot "pass construction" upon the words, cannot, that is, read subjectively; in fact, readers must, in accordance with the Spirit. Others, however, should be left unaffected, able to pass their own constructions. Winstanley's reading-internal, personal, solitary-prioritizes the subjective and leaves readers to their own reading. It requires, in other words, an extraordinary level of toleration. Areopagitica does not offer such defenses of toleration. But then it is not clear that Areopagitica is ultimately concerned with a tolerance for books or printing. Milton supports some kinds of regulations and is opposed to tolerating Catholics, both of which would seem to contradict Areopagitica's advocacy of access to information. Rather, through the model of reading that Milton describes, Areopagitica defends freedom of interpretation more than freedom of the press. Because the range of meanings that readers get from texts depends, according to Milton, on a combination of the different readers and the text, differences between

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

45

interpretations would not be constrained even if readers were all reading the same text and even if no other books were printed. If printing were to be restricted, interpretation would continue to proliferate; if the object in licensing is to control reading, stopping the books could not do it. Milton accepts this possibility, making it part of his claim: different readers can read the same book and produce different readings as a consequence. Milton's Areopagitica is a defense of radically democratic literacy more than a defense of unrestricted publishing. Areopagitica has been treated as a pamphlet concerned with writing because of subsequent assumptions that writing is the productive activity, not reading, a consequence, it seems to me, of the debate over reading in the constitution of literature. To recap: schematically, we could say that Luther moves from the subjective to the logocentric, from the many to the one, presuming that making the Bible available to many new readers will nonetheless result in a relatively uniform number of readings. Calvin, by contrast, opens up the possibility of leaving the logocentric behind in favor of the subjective, as the meaning is transferred from the text to the reader. Milton builds on both. Like Calvin, Milton retains the differences of the many, and, like Luther, Milton bases the differences on the interaction of the text and the reader. Unlike either Luther or Calvin, though, Milton goes from the one to the many-one text can lead to many interpretations. 56 For Milton the many are already implicit in the one, or at least in the readers' varied interactions with it. Some of the radical democrats of the later r64os and early r6sos, such as Bauthumley and Coppe, are like Milton in insisting on the importance of subjective reading. Some of them differ significantly from Milton, however, in arguing that subjective "reading" can occur without the text. They both build on Calvin's idea of subjectivity, but where Milton's subjective reading emerges from a relationship with the text, some of the later radical democratic readers dispense with the text altogether in favor of the subjectivity. At least one of them, Abiezer Coppe, goes out of his way to specify protocols of not reading. With such arguments, reading subjectively-or reading as subjectivity-reaches its endgame: reading is so much a question of the reader that there is no need to read. In the late r64os and early r6sos, as models of reading developed by Ranters Abiezer Coppe and Jacob Bauthumley more or less dispense with the book, radically democratic literacy reaches new levels of selfconscious subjectivity. In "Some Sweet Sips, of some Spirituall Wine," Coppe, for example, distinguishes between two general types: "brave" and "better." 57 Coppe describes the difference between these two types of reading in terms of how well the Spirit speaks to the reader. Because

Chapter One

they "can heare the eternall God silently and secretly whispering secrets," the first type, the "brave schaller," "can reade their Lesson in this primer; that can reade him within Book" (6r). In this the brave scholar is like Winstanley's reader reading by the light of the Spirit. Coppe takes what could have been an acknowledgment that the Bible is a difficult text-"that which is here (mostly) spoken, is inside, and mysterie" (49)and turns it into an argument that this book will be understood only to the extent that a reader has God's Spirit. Echoing the subjective idea of reading we have seen with Calvin, Coppe believes "so farre as any one hath the mysterie of God opened to him, In Him, can plainly reade every word of the same here" (49). For Coppe, it is not, as Winstanley would have it, that believing readers will have an understanding that suits their convictions and that, as a consequence, ought to be tolerated. Rather, only the believing reader can even begin to understand the text. In a characteristically complicated sentence, Coppe explains how the spirit shapes the difference between readers: "the rest is sealed up from the rest, and it may be the most,-from some" (49). That is, while part of the text is available to some readers (including at least the brave scholars), some aspect of the meaning of the text ("the rest") is not available to other readers ("the rest"). When Coppe continues, "it may be the most,-from some," the ambiguity of the pronoun reference indicates that most of the text might be missed by most readers, even if noticed by the brave scholars. Although Coppe's "brave schaller" has a better understanding of the book than those who do not hear God, there is yet a second category of reader, superior to his brave scholar. Coppe calls this second type of reader "better schollers" and contends they can "have their lessons without book" (6r). To be clear: Coppe's better readers (and they are the best type of reader he describes) have no need for the book. "Without" could refer to the outside of the book and to forgoing the book entirely. In either case Coppe's best readers do not need to read. For Coppe, reading is subjectivity itself, having nothing to do with either the text or with readings made by others. At the same time, though, what is striking about Coppe's discussion of the "better schollers" is the extraordinary lengths to which Coppe goes to describe how what is supposed not to be a reading can take place. Coppe's better scholars can reade God (not by roate) but plainly and perfectly, on the backside, and outside of the book, as well as in the inside: that can take this primer in their hands; and hold it heeles upward, and then reade him there: that can spell every word backwards, and then tell what it is: that can reade him from the left hand to the right, as if they were reading English, or from the right to the left, as if they were reading Hebrew: that can read, God as plainly in the Octavo of a late converted

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

47

JEW, as in a Church Bible in Folio: that can reade him within book, and without book, and as well without book, as within book: that can reade him downwards and upwards, upwards and downwards, from left to right, from right to left. (6r)

Thus, Coppe describes all the ways in which the better scholar can perform the best reading without reading, or "without book" (6r). Although the better scholar is meant to have no need for the book, Coppe specifies in surprising detail a wide range of physical acts of reading, through which the better scholar's nonreading should proceed: better scholars get the meaning from the outside, with the book upside down, and backwards. In this way, the better scholars get the meaning (from the) "without" of the book, as opposed to the within. In "The Light and Dark Sides of God" (r6so), Jacob Bauthumley describes a different way of addressing the logocentric and the subjective visions of reading, one that sees something "within book" yet decides that the spirit-filled believer does not need to read. Taking a position similar to Luther's, Bauthumley argues that God, "being the life and substance of all Creatures," animates everything. 58 However, because God is always everywhere, including in the believer, Bauthumley argues that his own beliefs can fully stand in for any reading of Scripture: "having mind of God within, I am able to see it witnessed, and made out in the Letter" (258). Coppe follows Calvin in contending that only certain readers are able to fully understand the text; although some readers might get some meaning, the better scholars will get more, ideally without book. Bauthumley, by contrast, makes a similar defense of not reading, but with a more Lutheran sense that God is already everywhere (and is not reserved for the few). Recognizing, though, that such a defense of not reading could prompt the objection that "I may be deceived," as Bauthumley puts it, "and take for a discovery of God which is but a fancie of my own Brain," Bauthumley claims that his not reading constitutes its own best defense (261). For Bauthumley, precisely because a reader might misinterpret the text, it is better not to read: because "I may mis-interpret the outward scripture," Bauthumley claims, "the safest and surest rule to walk by, is that law of the spirit" (26r). When seen in terms of the r64os debate over models of reading, Milton's claim that the meaning of a book results from the combination of the reader reading and the text being read is more complicated than it first might seem. Milton negotiates a complicated position between Walwyn, Winstanley, Bauthumley, and Coppe-less tolerant than the Levellers, less "subjective" than the Ranters. If we were to describe ideas of reading in terms of some of the revolutionary groups of the r64os, Ranters such as Coppe become textual Levellers, treating the texts as if they are each the same (and as if it is the readers who are different).

Chapter One Milton, though, is more of a Digger, textually anyway. For Milton there is something in the text itself, even if that same text winds up meaning different things to different people. Although Bauthumley also believes that the text has something important in it, that importance contributes to his sense that he should not read it. In Milton's model, by contrast, the text is a potentiality, awaiting a kind of revival by the reader, who digs out some manifestation of the text's potential. (What Werner Hamacher says regarding Hegel's reading applies to Milton's idea of the book: "this reading is still not yet of what it already is.") 59 In "Milton's Verse," F. R. Leavis complains that Milton "'exhibits a feeling for words rather than a capacity for feeling through words."' 60 In the r64os and r6sos, however, such a feeling for words is part of what distinguishes Milton's approach from those of his radical contemporaries, even as it engages him in a debate with them. In this sense of the text's having a potential that readers dig out in the act of reading, Milton's analogy to the Cadmus myth in Areopagitica is particularly important. Books, according to Milton's image, "are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men" (492). In this analogy, as in the analogy to the vial, there is the implication that books are like seeds, comparison reminiscent, again, of Plato's Phaedrus, in which Socrates invokes a "a sensible farmer who had some seeds" to describe writing (52r). In this, Milton's Areopagitica differs from the theory in Coppe's "Some Sweet Sips." Of course, six years separated the publication of Milton's Areopagitica and the publication of Coppe's "Some Sweet Sips," not just any six years but some of the most tumultuous years in British political history, where many participants and observers were radicalized. It may be that Coppe's relatively dismissive attitude toward the book indicates frustrations and radicalization over those intervening six years. Or conversely, it might be that Milton's sense that there is something to a book reflects an older, somewhat prerevolutionary sense of reading, a Humanist sense of the importance of the text. As Milton's "Dragons teeth" produce armed men, however, the description of the book in Areopagitica is not entirely unrelated to the subsequent upheaval of the wars. Eikonoklastes (r649), Milton's response to what was thought to be Charles I's Eikon Basilike, demonstrates Milton's continued conviction at the end of the decade that there is something about books themselves that must be encountered and sometimes countered. Charles's Eikon Basilike, described as "the most spectacular propaganda coup of the age," 61 would go through twenty editions "within a month and a half of the execution (there would be thirty-five editions by the end of r649 ),

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

49

and it had been translated into Latin and several European languages." 62 The King's Book, 63 as it is sometimes called, testifies to the new importance of the press in political matters, at the end of a decade that had seen the popular press play more of a political role than it had ever done before. With Eikonoklastes Milton responds to the king's book with another book. Seemingly unable or unwilling to let Charles rest with what were thought to be his last words, Eikonoklastes argues with the king within weeks of the king's death. 64 This bookishness, the wordiness of the radically democratic reader, has been seen as a shortcoming of that side in the English Civil Wars. Kevin Sharpe, for example, notes the "failure to forge a republican culture that erased or repressed the images of kingship." 65 Sharpe complains that the revolutionary readers respond to books with more words, when the most intriguing aspect of Eikon Basi/ike is its visual imagery, which the republicans do not match. This may be true, but it is also important to note that Milton's Eikonoklastes is consistent with Milton's theory of the book from the earlier Areopagitica; the fact that his reading of, or response to, Eikon Basi/ike would be another book illustrates Milton's earlier idea that reading is productive. With Eikonoklastes Milton is responding to a book, exactly what he said in Areopagitica readers should do and reading should be. Books have a potential from which armed men can spring up-on both sides of the war, as it turns out. With that response democratic politics and print reach their most violent combination during the r64os, from which many, including the early English modern literary critics, would later recoil. For in this process of participatory reading and politics, subjective reading becomes associated with violence of the most public kind. As a reading of what is taken as the final document of a king recently executed, Eikonoklastes is concerned with politics throughout. In Eikonoklastes Milton remains centrally concerned with reading at the same time. But what Milton says about reading in Eikonoklastes makes the link with radical democratic politics explicit. As he addresses Charles's text, Milton claims, "in those words which admitt of various sense, the libertie is ours to choose." 66 This liberty to choose from among various senses represents another iteration of Milton's version of the r64os idea of revolutionary reading. Leaving the assignation of the meaning of the text to each individual reader, such reading dovetails with the focus on toleration associated with Leveller William Walwyn and Digger Gerrard Winstanley. It is also, though, consistent with Milton's sense that there is something in the words themselves. For Milton the words do have meanings; readers simply choose from among those meanings. Ultimately, by arguing with a dead king over the meaning of what were thought to be the monarch's

so

Chapter One

last words, Milton provides an extraordinary example of a radically democratic model of literacy. Contending that "all other human things are disputed, and will be variously thought of to the Worlds end," 67 Milton-at least in the r64os-is committed to perpetual dispute; it is, after all, part of what he claims makes one human. With Eikonoklastes, notoriously, Milton committed himself to perpetual antagonism, even, in this case, arguing with what were taken to be the words of an executed king. In response to the objection that such disputing may produce the factions that result in political upheaval, Eikonoklastes claims that England has always been schismatic: "I never knew that time in England, when men of truest religion were not counted Sectaries." 68 Disputing is central to what it means to be not only human but English in particular it would seem. Disputing, and even sectarian violence, is not only good, human, and English, however; it is also Protestant. For Milton, disputing, or what Laclau and Mouffe call antagonism, is required if England is to show its commitment to a truly "protesting" Reformation. With Leviathan Hobbes, earlier and more systematically than anyone at the time, connects equality, reading, and the singular act of political violence with which the decade concluded. Hobbes contends that "as to Rebellion in particular against Monarchy; one of the most frequent causes of it, is the Reading of books of Policy" (225). In other words, Hobbes's political philosophy cannot be separated from his analysis of the effects of words and books, as Leviathan ties the instability of the r64os to democratic literacy. Or, as Hobbes writes, "I cannot imagine, how any thing can be more prejudicial to a Monarchy, than the allowing of such books to be publikely read" (226). In On the Poetics of Knowledge Jacques Ranciere argues that "the modern revolution, whose birth Hobbes is witnessing, could be defined as follows: the revolution of the children of the book." 69 England experiences what Ranciere considers the modern revolution of the children of the book most acutely in the r64os. More than merely witnessing it, however, Hobbes provides the very terms through which that revolution is subsequently debated. Indeed, Hobbes is probably the first to argue so comprehensively that the decade of the r64os represents a revolution of the book. Believing that "the Actions of Men proceed from their Opinions," Hobbes argues that "in the well governing of Opinions, consisteth the well governing of mens Actions" (124). In short, for Hobbes the Civil Wars showed that controlling meaning is necessary for social stability.7° Leviathan provides thereby an analysis of the Civil Wars that lays the groundwork for what is later known as criticism. It is not that Hobbes is an early literary critic; rather, criticism addresses concerns about reading and democracy articulated for

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy England by Hobbes in the Leviathan. After what happens to the monarchy in the r64os-not only the execution of Charles I but also the earlier relaxation of the Star Chamber's control of printing-it is not clear that the monarch can again control meaning to the extent that Hobbes proposes. There are many who nonetheless share Hobbes's wish for meaning to be controlled, if not by the monarch then by some other stabilizing mechanism. After the Restoration, Hobbes's early analysis becomes widespread, and the early literary critics are among those who are concerned. Through their debates over the definition, operation, and consequences of reading, these literary critics aim to make a contribution to textual and political stability. In Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes Quentin Skinner argues that "the Leviathan constitutes a belated but magnificent contribution to the Renaissance art of eloquence." 71 The Leviathan is also, of course, a study of the consequences of eloquence. Across his political writings, Hobbes equates eloquence with power. Before the Civil Wars, Hobbes was already concerned that words can leverage the position of the good speaker. In The Elements of Law, published ten years before the Leviathan, Hobbes complains that "a democracy, in effect, is no more than an aristocracy of orators." 72 After the Civil Wars, with the Leviathan, Hobbes goes into great detail exploring how words acquire such power. As we will see, Hobbes first describes human psychology as continually pressed upon by external stimuli. The result is an extraordinarily susceptible subject, always being played by sensation and at pains to distinguish memory from imagination (and thus not necessarily rational). Second, setting aside the susceptible instability of human psychology, words themselves distort, as they have but a tenuous connection to the world they are purported to describe. Faced with language that is as potentially unstable as the humans who use it, Hobbes tries to draw distinctions between appropriate uses of words, and he argues that the sovereign can settle interpretive differences. Moreover, in describing how the sovereign can be created through a process of writing, Hobbes uses writing to show how agreements about writing can govern meaning. That is, the way in which Hobbes makes English philosophy modern also sets the stage for the emergence of literary criticism as an institution and for the constitution of literature. For Hobbes, the democratized reading and the political violence of the r64os are different manifestations of the same issue: equality. Because of a natural relative equality, everyone, according to Hobbes, believes him- or herself capable of what the other is doing or has. Or, as Hobbes puts it, "from this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our Ends" (87). To Hobbes this equality is dangerous because

Chapter One in the absence of a government it provides each person an opportunity to achieve his or her desires, often at the expense of those around them. Understandably, this equality is usually understood as physical power, stemming from physiological similarity. The same problem of equality applies to questions of interpretation as well. What the radical democrats of the 164os offer as a political and interpretive proposal Hobbes sees as the central problem: a privileging of the subjective on a presumed basis of interpretive equality. In the Leviathan's chapter on "those things that Weaken, or tend to the dissolution of a Common-wealth," Hobbes writes: "I observe the Diseases of a Common-wealth, that proceed from the poyson of seditious doctrines; whereof one is, That every private man is Judge of Good and Evil! actions" (223). That is, the problem, as Hobbes sees it, is the individuation and empowerment of judgment. The perception of the equality of opinion, or of opinion-forming ability, Hobbes believes, means that disputes could never be resolved. The constitution Hobbes proposes will set up a strategic inequality that is supposed to prevent the physical disputes and to settle the interpretive ones. For Hobbes, as we will see, the solution is to have the monarch settle interpretive disputes, to create what Sharon Achinstein calls a "lexarch." 73 Ironically, despite beginning with an argument that presumes a distrust of words, Hobbes puts forward an idea of a constitution that relies on representation. The Leviathan is intended to short-circuit the conflict that, for Hobbes, springs from relative equality in a state of nature. From the perspective of the radical democrats the events of the 164os reveal a previously overlooked pluralism. To Hobbes, by contrast, the radical democracy of the 164os looks a lot like anarchy, his state of nature. Hobbes sees the radical democracy of the 164os not only as precipitating the Civil Wars; it also represents what Claude Lefort calls "the dissolution of markers of certainty," 74 the antifoundational state of nature that takes place when "the locus of power becomes an empty space." 75 It looks, that is, like an existing social order has come apart, without a sense of what will replace it. In the 164os this dissolving of what used to signify certainty can be seen most clearly in the wide range of readings of the Bible and in the execution of Charles I. To say this is not only to insist that the events of the 164os represent an extraordinary development; it is also to posit that the groundwork for the breakaway from the radical democracy of the Civil Wars is laid as soon as the early 165os, that what is often treated as a political and literary settlement achieved in or by the Restoration is here seen as unfolding almost a decade earlier. Although, for example, Kevin Sharpe contends that "the initial impulse of those who made the Restoration settlement was to re-establish control-not just of the press but of writing and of inter-

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

53

pretation itsel£," 76 the initial impulse can be seen as early as Hobbes's influential analysis in Leviathan. 77 The full extent of the change does not unfold in the 16sos but takes generations, with the political philosophy described in the 165os merely setting some of the terms. There is a tendency to see in Hobbes an early version of the Restoration, to treat Leviathan as if it were a model for the return of Charles II nine years after the Leviathan was published. However, Hobbes's political philosophy justifies the Protectorate that would emerge before the Restoration and even closer to the publication of Leviathan. Through the contractual theory of government, Hobbes enlisted the radical democratic language of participatory politics, although he converted it into a centralized, unitary model of government and thus appealed to the Royalists too. For the radical democrats participation would have been the ideal representation; for Hobbes, by contrast, the sovereign is a representative of the people due to an originary covenant founding the government. Although the constitutional implications of Hobbes's Leviathan on the government of the Interregnum are beyond the scope of this study, the important point here is that Hobbes's analysis in Leviathan of the political problems of the 164os cannot be separated from his ideas of literacy, nor can his proposed solution. Hobbes's state is a text written by the represented, representative both in the very process of its creation and in its institutions. It is not only as the creation of a writing process, though, that the sovereign relies on and participates in a debate over literacy. While combining participation and representation, Hobbes aims for a mechanism that can govern interpretation, a means of affecting and limiting the debates over meaning and reading that characterized the print culture of the 164os. That is, Hobbes contends that the people who draft the representative government are also drafting a means of controlling representation. The same covenant through which people agree to achieve political stability can also be the means through which they agree to settle interpretive disputes. Because Leviathan is so famous for its terse description of a painful state of nature and for its ideas on how to ameliorate that natural state, it is easy to overlook the fact that Hobbes begins with chapters on "sense" and "imagination," rather than, say, on government or politics. Before he gets to the state of nature considered socially, however, Hobbes describes the state of nature understood psychologically. The extraordinary uncertainty of Hobbes's state of nature is grounded, at least at the beginning, in an equally extraordinary uncertainty regarding our ability to process even quotidian sense impressions with anything approaching accuracy. For Hobbes our thoughts are representations of sense impressions. We gather these sense impressions involuntarily, as

54

Chapter One

external objects "presseth the organ proper to each sense" (r3). But these impressions, Hobbes intimates, cannot be trusted: he calls them "fancy" to indicate that they are but a "seeming" of the objects that left the impression (14). The lights, colors, sounds, and tastes that, Hobbes writes, "men call Sense" are in fact something like a first act of imagination (14). They are instantaneously inaccurate. And we do not experience the world as it is because we cannot, physiologically. Moreover, and perhaps more important, we also cannot remember with any degree of accuracy, either. Hobbes contends that "after the object is removed, or the eye shut, we still retain an image of the thing seen" (15). First there is the experience that creates the sense impression. But with the cessation of that sensory impression our senses continue to register an image of the external object. This image, though, is already at a great remove from the original object that made the first sense impression. If the sense, as what Hobbes calls fancy, is already an image of the original object (and thus at one remove), the image after some time becomes an even further altered version, an image of the image. Thus what was already but a representation of an original becomes almost a representation of a representation. Memory is the name Hobbes gives to this image at a second remove from the original impressing object. Consequently, he describes memory, the image of the image of the impression, as a "decaying sense" (r5). His definition means that memory is inaccurate categorically. As memory is an altered image of the real, Hobbes's definition also means that memory is a form of imagination. As Hobbes puts it, "Imagination and Memory, are but one thing" (r6). Thus, Hobbes's model of psychology raises the question of whether we imagine our memories. Hobbes implies, then, that in the state of nature, truth cannot be established, and must always be contested, because experience will be imagined-which also means remembered-differently by everyone. In the absence of the sovereign the same problem of epistemic instability that Hobbes sees in human psychology is only reinforced by words. Hobbes argues that "no Discourse whatsoever, can end in absolute knowledge of Fact" (47). It would seem that Hobbes is sweeping aside words, although given the psychology he describes, there is the question of whether absolute knowledge of fact is possible generally, and, if so, how it can be attained, with or without discourse. In a way, Hobbes's claim echoes the arguments of Bauthumley, Coppe, and others who reject the logocentric sense that the meaning is in the words themselves. Rather than adapting the subjective understandings of words, however, Hobbes sees the debates of the r64os as revealing the impossibility of establishing the truth verbally: "men are disposed to debate with them-

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

55

selves, and dispute the commands of the Commonwealth; and afterwards to obey, or disobey them, as in their private judgments they shall think fit" (223). In other words, the potential problem with words can be seen in the radical democratic, subjective models of reading proposed by Bauthumley, Coppe, Milton, and others. It is as if for Hobbes the radical democratic literacy of the r64os shows how words operate in the state of nature. According to Hobbes, "names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination. No more can Metaphors, and Tropes of speech" (31). As far as Hobbes is concerned, words can only be internally consistent; they cannot reach out to a reality outside of themselves for verification. For Hobbes, words might cohere, but they cannot correspond. Hobbes's definition of words raises questions about his sense of language's ability to convey the truth. Hobbes contends, "True and False are attributes of Speech, not of things" (27). This is another formulation of Hobbes's coherence version of truth, according to which propositions can be logically consistent without a relation to the object described. For some Hobbes's argument is a familiar problem haunting Platonism: there is truth, but it cannot be reached through words. In part, Hobbes shares the Platonist sense that language distorts what it is thought to represent. What is different, though, is that Hobbes thinks that truth and falsity can somehow nonetheless unfold within language. On one level Hobbes distinguishes himself from the subjective positions of the radical democrats: there is something to the words. Hobbes's position, though, is not logocentric, because it does not contend that there is something in the words. The meaning of words is established by convention, or covenants, and the enforcement of those covenants ensures that there is something to words. On another level, though, to argue that truth and falsehood occur only in language raises the claim of what truth might mean to Hobbes, as he separates language, or speech, from things. Language has its own internal logic that matters little to things. Things just are, no matter what is said about them. Speech can say what it wants, apparently without any relation to things. The gap between speech and things, on the one hand, and the susceptible, impressionable psychology, on the other, leaves Hobbes profoundly concerned about how words can be used. There are some speakers who "work ... on mens minds, with words and distinctions, that of themselves signifie nothing, but bewray (by their obscurity) that there walketh (as some think invisibly) another Kingdome" (226). In Hobbes's model words do something to the mind-more, apparently, than the mind can do to the words. Words have this power because of their tenuous connection to the world, their objects, or their referents, and because of how they prey on the weak, irrational dimension of human psychology.

Chapter One

Rather than choosing from between various possible meanings, as Milton would have it, Hobbes's democratized reader is pushed around by words. Thus, words' destabilizing, irrational effect on human psychology gives power to those who can use them effectively. Moreover, insofar as they do not necessarily point to a world outside of language, there is a sense in which all words signify nothing to Hobbes. It would seem that Hobbes believes that there is some kind of emotional valence to the experience of hearing or reading the words, a psychological charge that leads people to impute to words a meaning that is not there. They are attributing meaning to or finding meaning in the apparently meaningless. The central tension is between obscurity and invisibility, between what is seen only with difficulty and what cannot be seen at all. Ultimately, Hobbes's truth is on the side of the "things." The trick, then, is to find a way of getting at the "things" living their existence separate from speech. Here, what has looked like Hobbes's engagement with the radical democratic, subjective, and maybe Calvinist, sense that the words are not important becomes something more like a Baconian critique of language. When he defines "a Signe," Hobbes turns to early modern science's developing vocabulary of causal relations: "a Signe is the event antecedent, of the consequent; and contrarily, the Consequent of the Antecedent, when the like Consequences have been observed, before" (22). Rather than standing in for the "thing," the sign is an event in itself. In this way the sign, like the external object, presses on the senses; in both cases the impressing is the event. Although it is mistaken for a representation, the sign understood this way has an effect; as an event, there is something to the sign. Describing the sign as an "event antecedent" implies both that the sign, even as an event, precedes some other event and also that the sign refers to something. In the latter case. the sign is understood grammatically, in terms of reference (the antecedent); in the former case the sign is something like what we might now call a signal, portending what is about to happen. In this predictive capacity Hobbes's sign entails cause and effect: signs, and by extension words, indicate consequences. In this way Hobbes absorbs the sign into science, which he calls "the knowledge of Consequences" (35). In those cases where we have seen similar causal connections before, the sign that precedes some other event can also, in different circumstances, be what follows the signal. There is an obvious circularity to this understanding of the sign, but for Hobbes it has the advantage of tying the sign to a central attribute of the scientific method: repeatability. The event called a sign can predict another event; having experienced the latter event, we can logically anticipate its recurrence whenever we see the prior sign. Still, even this narrowing of words into scientific, causal terms will

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

57

not suffice to create the clarity of presentation or consensus of meaning Hobbes seeks. Words, being too liable to what Hobbes calls "abuse," require a strong, centralized mechanism to enforce their meaning (25). Therefore, arguing that "covenants without the Sword, are but Words, without the strength to secure a man at all," Hobbes proposes that the sovereign settle interpretative differences (u7). Equality among humans and the inequality between humans and words require instituting an inequality between humans matching that between humans and words. As Hobbes puts it, "the Validity of Covenants begins not but with the Constitution of a Civill Power, sufficient to compel men to keep them" (101). Not only can interpretative differences be settled that way; a deciding interpretation can also be enforced. Thus Hobbes gives what Sharon Achinstein calls the "lexarch" several functions related to words. First, Hobbes argues that it should be "annexed to the Soveraignty, to be Judge of what Opinions and Doctrines are averse, and what conducing to Peace" (124). This role, akin to that of the Star Chamber, would not only control the concepts that might be described but would also determine who in particular would be allowed to speak. Given the fact that Hobbes proposes vetting opinions, settings, and speakers, it is perhaps not surprising that he also argues that the lexarch "shall examine the Doctrines of all bookes before they be published" (124). To create such a lexarch, Hobbes appropriates the vocabulary of the radical democrats about whom he is so concerned. He takes the radical democratic terms of choice and covenant and creates a monarchical figure able to settle the interpretive disputes that follow from the subjective, radical democratic models of reading. In a claim that would seem to be calculated as much for its rhetorical effects as for its constitutional implications, Hobbes argues that "Law is the publique conscience" (223). On one level such a claim accepts the Calvinist privileging of conscience: the government refocused around the sovereign that he is proposing is not so different from the radical democrats' insistence on the autonomy of the believer. The sovereign is merely the public version of the same moral capacity that the radical democrats would exercise privately. Law does for the group what Calvinists say grace does for the individual. At the same time, though, Hobbes also reworks what was an opposition argument-that the power resides in the people-by employing their implied contract theory as the basis for a unifying sovereign. For Hobbes, the people can reorganize the monarchy, creating a different kind of monarchy, the monarchy they want. Thus, on another level, describing the law as public conscience is not merely a rhetorical strategy. If a government can be created in the way Hobbes proposes, Hobbes contends it can reflect the beliefs and convictions-the conscience-of the people who have created it.

Chapter One Combining the contract theory implied by the petitioners in the Civil Wars with his own sense that the sign is an event in itself, Hobbes contends that the sovereign can be written into existence. Thus, Hobbes distinguishes between "Naturall" and "Artificiall" persons (rrr). In both cases a capacity for representation makes the person: persons natural speak their own words; persons artificial, by contrast, "have their words and actions owned by those whom they represent" (r12). From theater Hobbes takes his model for the artificial person, the "Actor" (r12), who does not own his or her own words. This artificial person will become the model for Hobbes's sovereign, which, as an "Actor," is written into existence by the people, acting as "Author" (113). That is, in a complicated doubling, Hobbes is turning to the figure of the author to address the problem of words, the use of which, it turns out, makes us persons. The argument is that the state is the creation-the text-written by the represented: "A Common-wealth is said to be Instituted, when a multitude of men do Agree, and Covenant, every one, with every one, that to whatsoever Man, or Assembly of Men, shall be given by the major part, the Right to Present the Person of them all, (that is to say, to be their Representative)" (121). Thus Hobbes imagines a process whereby a government is supposed to be representative both in its institutions and in the very process of its creation. We might call it a self-constituting artifact. For Hobbes, all the represented become authors, writing the text of their representative and thus ensuring the consent of a majority of the governed or represented. By describing the process of covenanting that creates the artificial person of the sovereign, it would seem that Hobbes returns to a model of representation that he has rejected. Despite his earlier concern over the vagaries of words, and their potential for abuse, Hobbes now seems to assume that the representative always accurately represents the represented, that there is no possibility for misunderstanding the representation. For Hobbes, though, the difference between a distorting sign and any abuse by the political representative is anticipated in the process of creating the Leviathan. Consistent with his understanding of the sign as an event, writing a sovereign is effective if only because the writing, as an event, will make an impression. The existence of the Leviathan means that there is an enforcement mechanism for disputes over interpretations. The Leviathan is a representative that can monitor representation itself. The state can represent representation, or govern meaning, because it is itself the creation of the represented. The represented are already agreeing to the meanings, through the covenants that constitute the state. The idea is that the state is not simply enforcing its own reading but rather is itself a manifestation of the agreed-upon meanings of those who organized it. Therefore, the

Radical Literacy and Radical Democracy

59

covenants are being enforced by the other people, through the Leviathan, and not simply by the Leviathan itself. In a way, Hobbes's state combines the hermeneutics we have seen in Luther and Calvin. Like Luther's bread, Hobbes's state has something in it: the people. And, as illustrated by the famous image on the title page, the people remain distinct bodies, somewhat like the different grains in Calvin's bread. In both cases, as Hobbes tries to piece the body politic back together after the Civil Wars, unity is perhaps his highest political value, "great authority being indivisible" (128). By binding the represented and the representative, the circularity of the relationship between the two results in great stability. In the Leviathan, people "conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, to one will" (120). This unity minimizes the conflict between individuals, in part because the Leviathan can now enforce covenants among citizens. It also creates stability by minimizing the differences that might lead to conflict. Actually, there is no room for autonomy in Hobbes's idea of the common power-so much so that once the sovereign has been instituted, according to Hobbes, "he that dissented must now consent with the rest ... or else justly be destroyed by the rest" (123). To those who might wonder where protection from an imposing monarch-or from a majority-would derive, Hobbes contends there would be no need for either dissent or protection, as it is impossible for the representative to hurt the represented. After all, the subjects are also the authors of the government: "because every Subject is by this Institution Author ... it can be no injury to any of his Subjects" (124). According to Hobbes, there would be no need for dissent, because it is impossible for the representative to break the law. 78 Through this identification between the representative and the represented, any attempt to overthrow the representative would simply mean the people are attacking themselves. Thus, as Pocock and Schochet write, Hobbes transforms "the opposition ideology of rights and liberty into the basis of absolute authority." 79 The "One Person" into which Hobbes proposes organizing the people could be understood as a royalist proposal for a strong monarchy or as a royalist concession that a strong protectorate might be just as good as the lost monarch (12o). But it is also part of Hobbes's reaction to the competing spirit-led, radical democratic interpretations of the r64os, which, to Hobbes, exacerbated a problem in the very structure of English government: division between common, lords, and monarch. To Hobbes, a political system that involves more than one governmental branch is more likely to be unstable or divided. Therefore, a political system that

6o

Chapter One

has more than one part is already on its way to war. For Hobbes, "a monarch cannot disagree with himself ... but an assembly may; and that to such a height, as may produce a civil warre" (120). Hobbes's proposal certainly could create stability, but the question is whether the loss of plurality in its various manifestations would justify the gain in stability. This question means that rather than drafting the modern democratic constitution (as he is often thought to have done), Hobbes instead initiates a debate over the appropriate attributes of such a constitution. Hobbes's analysis of the Civil Wars is profoundly influential for early English literary critics, despite the persistent controversy over his bleak vision of the state of nature. Hobbes's concern about reading, his discussion of words' distorting effects on human psychology, and his interest in and description of how to formulate a governmental covenant for controlling meaning each had an impact on English literary criticism. The possibility of a correlation between radically democratic ideas of reading and the political violence of the r64os haunted the next century or so. As the leading figures in literary criticism, including Dryden, Addison and Steele, Pope, Hume, and Johnson, debate and reimagine models of reading, they will invoke the unfortunate example of the Civil Wars, for politics and for literacy, often reworking Hobbes's terms in the process. Considering Hobbes's influence over English philosophy, Quentin Skinner has argued that "in teaching philosophy to speak English, Hobbes at the same time taught it a particular tone of voice .... The tone is very much that of the sane and moderate savant beset on all sides by fanaticism and stupidity." 80 Hobbes gives that particular tone of voice to English literary criticism as well, a tone concerned about the vagaries of verbal representation. The significant political and interpretive differences between figures such as Milton, Coppe, and Bauthumley will largely disappear from later literary critical history behind their shared radical democratic stance. Subsequent generations will propose models of reading meant to avoid any repetition of what happened during the r64os; usually, they cite the Civil Wars specifically as a negative example. In a way, though, this debate over and reaction to the consequences of democratized literacy is necessary for the beginning of English literary criticism.

CHAPTER TWO

"God forgive you Common -wealths-men" Dryden and the Project of Restoration

~

•

It would be decades before English literary criticism assumed its prose and periodical form, but it began the long process of institutionalization after 166o, especially with the work of John Dryden, 1 "the father of English criticism," as Samuel Johnson calls him. 2 There were examples of criticism in English before Dryden, for example Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie (1595), but from the perspective of the Restoration Sidney looks like an exception or maybe a lone pioneer for something that later becomes much more widespread. Following the Restoration, literary criticism became more frequent, often more topical, and somewhat more oriented toward reviewing than it had been before. Dryden, for example, did more than write a defense of poetry (although he did that as well); he also wrote shorter critical essays, sustained across a career, and earned money for doing so. Differences between the first and the fifth editions of Edward Phillips's The New World of Words, published in 1658 and 1696, respectively, suggest an expansion of literary criticism, and of a literary critical vocabulary, during the last four decades of the seventeenth century. The first edition (1658) defines only criticism, whereas the fifth edition (1696) adds words such as author, to criticize, critical, and examine (and new meanings for criticism). One could point to the return of the theater, the volume of publication, or the growth of the reading public to explain the post-166o emergence of literary criticism. But there would still be the question of why this form of literary criticism did not begin to emerge until then. After all, England had theater until 1642, and as we saw in the preceding chapter, there was a great volume of publication in the 164os, with more titles published in

Chapter Two r642 than in any year until r695. 3 These developments did not suffice, though, for literary criticism to be produced on the regular basis that it would after the Restoration. After the Restoration, and after Hobbes's influential analysis, there is widespread agreement that during the Civil Wars "hard words ... /Set Folks together by the ears," as Samuel Butler puts it in Part r of Hudibras (r662). 4 The Restoration sees a range of proposals intended to address what were thought to be the causes of the Civil Wars. The Act of Oblivion (r66o) represented one possibility, ostensibly committing the Restoration to an official program of forgetting. It banned "'any name or names, or other words of reproach tending to revive the memory of the late differences or the occasions thereof."' 5 In "To His Sacred Majesty" (r66r) Dryden endorses this approach, arguing that '"tis our King's perfection to forget." 6 This option seems not to have worked too well, however. The Restoration could not forget the events of the r64os. Even Dryden continued to refer to the Civil Wars in poetry he published in the r68os. Therefore, some proposed tighter restrictions on publication, out of a Hobbesian sense that the press should be held accountable for what happened during the Civil Wars. In r664, for example, Richard Atkyns contended that "the Liberty of the Press, was the principal furthering Cause of the Confinement of Your most Royal Fathers Person." 7 While Atkyns might argue for stricter controls on what is printed, others argued for stricter control on the numbers of printing presses themselves. Roger L'Estrange, for example, claimed, "The Remedy is, to reduce all Printers, and Presses, that are now in Employment, to a Limited Number." 8 After the execution of Charles I, however, and after printing presses had already spread, it was not going to be possible to achieve such control over publishing. Even if the king could somehow control the press, it was understood that the issue was neither the number of books published nor their topics. L'Estrange also provided what was thought to be an important reason why simply restricting the number of titles published would not in itself ensure peace: "Fiction works upon the Passions and Honours of the Common-people." 9 L'Estrange was not alone in this sense that fiction plays on the passions and that it is more likely to do so with the poor. The debate, then, would focus on how to minimize the effects of words on readers. The Royal Society, for its part, attempted to make language transparent during the second half of the seventeenth century (while insisting that print can never be transparent). In Micrographia (r665), for example, Robert Hooke places passages from the Bible under a microscope; his resulting "Observations" contain both descriptions and visual illustrations. It is a particularly important development in the treatment of text.

Dryden and the Project of Restoration

On the one hand, Hooke takes an extraordinarily logocentric approach; he considers empirically the question of whether there is anything to a text. His answer is yes-there is ink in a text, and it is not so attractive when seen up close, either. Thus, on the other hand, the subjective readers' claim that they see the invisible, the meaning, is countered (and countered, that is, by taking the logocentric so seriously). Two years after Hooke, in History of the Royal Society (r667), Thomas Sprat provides probably the most widely known Restoration critique of words' powerful and distorting effects, in his argument against "specious tropes and figures." 10 Although Sprat has a profound distrust of language's tropological dimension, his approach is equally logocentric: only some words are tropes or figures, and it is those words that have led people astray, not the spirited reading of them. In An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (r668), John Wilkins offers a single chart, purporting to arrange all knowledge and all means of knowledge. Seemingly in accordance with Sprat's design, Wilkins aims to clean up and clarify knowledge. Reading, as we will see, has its own peculiar place on that chart. Those whom we now see as early English literary critics focus on making reading more predictable, which often means more reasonable and less politically dangerous. The shift away from the "participatory" model of the r64os' pamphleteering, and toward the "representative" model articulated by Hobbes, vital for the political constitutionalism of the eighteenth century, has an equally important effect on the history of literary criticism. The literary critic becomes a representative reader.U Hobbes might have argued that opinion should be controlled and monitored by the sovereign, but such prepublication containment is no longer politically possible after the execution of Charles; even if a king returns, meaning has already been contested out of the monarchy's personal control. The power of settling interpretations and verbal disagreements never resides solely with the monarch again. There is a way, though, in which criticism can perform some of the same function, after publication. And at least during the second half of the seventeenth century, this function continued to be associated with the sovereign, through the figure of John Dryden. For as the first official poet laureate and an early literary critic, Dryden keeps the textual! deliberative function within the sphere of the monarchy without bringing it back to the person of the sovereign himself. In the process Dryden reveals a settlement with the consequences of the Civil Wars and a bifurcating of what would have been Hobbes's idea for sovereign power. What makes Dryden a "great English critic" 12 is how he incorporates attitudes toward language developed in response to the Civil Wars after

Chapter Two the Restoration, especially those ideas associated with the Royal Society. As part of how reading is reimagined after the Restoration, early English literary criticism might be described as the science of text, meant in part to domesticate print technology. Dryden himself was a member not only of the Royal Society13 but also of its "committee for improving the English language." 14 In "A Defence of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy" Dryden argues that he is following the methods of the Royal Society, casting those methods as a modern version of the techniques of the Ancient natural philosophers: "my whole discourse was skeptical, according to the way of reasoning which was used by Socrates, Plato, and all the Academicques of old ... and which is imitated by the modest inquisitions of the Royal Society." 15 As the approaches of the Royal Society toward books, language, and reading spread, early English literary critics such as Dryden learned from and addressed these scientific developments and arguments. During a remarkably productive span of little more than a year, Dryden published his four most important poems: Absalom and Achitophel (r68r), The Medal! (r682), Mac Flecknoe (r682), and Religio Laici (r682); by merging political, hermeneutic, and literary concerns, each of the four poems combines elements from and contributes to the seventeenth-century debates over literacy and political philosophy. Reviewing Dryden's poetry may not seem the most direct way to understand his literary criticism, but my focus in this chapter is on how an early critic defines and discusses reading and how that definition of reading participates in the debate over reading and politics in the early history of English literary criticism (rather than Dryden's literary criticism per se). For these issues, Dryden's four major poems of r68r-82 are particularly important. With The Medal! and especially Religio Laici, Dryden defends print and language by holding reading responsible for the confusion and unrest associated with language and print. Thus, Dryden defends the book but proposes a form of reading that diminishes the active role of the reader. In addition to the focus on reading (and on less active reading at that), other themes that will be important for the history of early English literary criticism can also be seen in these four poems. As we will see, the Exclusion Crisis raises for Dryden the question of legitimate succession, not just in politics or government but also in literature and authorship. The same question will show up in Hume's and Johnson's discussions of what has come to be known as the canon. Thus James Engell reminds us that "whenever we read an eighteenthcentury critic, we are reading Dryden as well." 16 This also means, however, that whenever we read an eighteenth-century critic, we are reading Dryden's influential decision to make interpretation a problem to be avoided. Applying Dryden's principle from Religio Laici to texts other

Dryden and the Project of Restoration than the Bible would mean avoiding the aspect of texts most closely associated with literature-the tropological, the "obscure." Subsequently, literary critics in the eighteenth century must decide whether or not the events of the r64os represent a local version of a universal predicament of democratic literacy. Dryden's four major poems of r68r to r682 are often seen as pairs, the first two concerned with contemporary politics and the second two with writing and reading, with the first pair understandably sustaining much of the recent, historicist work on Dryden's political poetryY The lessons learned from considering this poetry historically have not been carried over to a consideration of Dryden's relationship to criticism, although the two types could each be considered in the light of the other. In Religio Laici, for example, Dryden sees the Civil Wars as part, on the one hand, of a larger problem associated with a general Reformation spread of the Bible, somewhat like the popularizing and commercializing he discusses in Mac Flecknoe. On the other hand, he also blames the modes of reading he associates with Calvinists in particular. Thus, in Religio Laici Dryden proposes and describes a gentler form of reading, one in which "whatsoever is obscure is concluded not necessary to be known" (preface to Religio Laici, ro2). He does not allow, at least not here, for the possibility of something important being obscure or difficult to comprehend; similarly, he seems not to consider the possibility that it is precisely the difficult to understand that is most related to questions of faith. Instead, he asks the troubled reader not to trouble him- or herself with reading. As a contributor to a Restoration settlement concerned not to repeat Civil Wars seen as related to the democratized press-in other words, for political and historical reasons-Dryden has important motivations for proposing this model of reading. As the narrator claims in Absalom and Achitophel, "never rebel was to arts a friend" (873). It would be unfortunate if, in retelling the history of criticism, we were to overlook the possibility that those reasons are relatively local. Conversely, it is important not to assume that an avoidance of, say, tropes or minimizing the involvement of the reader will always result in a greater and preferable social stability. As allegorical and typological analyses of contemporary political events, these poems would seem to be at odds with the mode of reading Dryden claims to be proposing in them. He adopts the participatory model of reading associated with the radical democrats; his poem about biblical figures is not actually about biblical figures at all. Absalom and Achitophel represents contemporary political events, but Dryden assumes that this allegorical meaning will be legible to readers. Insofar as the "meaning" is in the mind of the reader more than simply in the text

66

Chapter Two

or the event itself, the "typological parallel" at the heart of Absalom and Achitophel is similar to the subjective model of reading proposed by the radical democrats of the r64os. Moreover, Dryden reads contemporary events typologically, not only in biblical terms but also as a new version of the r64os, as if the r64os prefigured the political debate of the r68os. Long after Dryden, the Civil Wars retain this typological significance, as the event to which all sensible people return in order to avoid. Across the history of early literary criticism-in Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and others-this typology replaces any Restoration Act of Oblivion; the need to remember the Civil Wars in a certain way replaces the desire to forget them entirely. Like the millenarianism associated with the typological reading of the r64os, several generations starting in the Restoration looked for signs of the end of the world in contemporary events, in this case checking to see if there were analogies to the Civil Wars. The Restoration's most ambitious, and maybe most notorious, attempts at reimagining the role of words can be found in the arguments made by members of the Royal Society. Works such as Sprat's History of the Royal Society and Wilkins's An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language articulate Restoration versions of Hobbes's concern over words in the Civil Wars. Rather than pursuing the attempt to control the press, the Royal Society proposes science as an alternative to words, famously taking "Nullius in Verba" (nothing in words) as its motto. 18 Arguing that natural philosophy is simpler, cleaner, and more beautiful than language or texts, the Royal Society attempts, simultaneously, to clean up language and to direct attention away from it. In the process, the Royal Society refers to the Civil Wars, and the problems it associates with the models of reading described during the r64os. When members of the Royal Society contend that words need to be reconceived, they are, implicitly, arguing against the uses of language associated with poetryY No language is more palpably tropological than that used in poetry, even when we recognize that there is a tropological dimension to all language. This attempt at minimizing the power of words helps those who are concerned about the power of readers over words, and as the attitudes of the Royal Society spread outside the scientific and linguistic publications from which they originally spring, early criticism learns from these scientific developments and arguments. In r665 Robert Hooke, who had been working as the Royal Society's "Curator of experimenters" since r662, published Micrographia, an illustrated record of observations made possible with a microscope. 20 Hooke described and provided engravings of various objects as he

Dryden and the Project of Restoration

saw them under the microscope. Certainly, this work with the microscope would go on to be the most influential aspect of Micrographia. Stephen Inwood claims that "excerpts [from Micrographia] were used in works on natural history or microscopes for the next 150 years." 21 But Hooke's observations are preceded by a "Dedicatory Epistle" and a preface that set out a different objective for the book. In both prefatory essays Hooke situates his observations in terms of a Hobbesian political and psychological project. In the "Dedicatory Epistle," for example, he claims that Micrographia will add to the "empire" 22 that the "king has established ... over the best of all invisible things of this world, the minds of men" (A2r). While this claim might be attributed to the flattery associated with the genre of dedications, Hooke is also following Hobbes's vision for the role of the sovereign; in both cases the sovereign will control how people think. Like Hobbes, Hooke invokes a classical, faculty model of psychology: the role of the "Understanding is to order all the inferiour services of the lower Faculties" (B2r). For Hooke the role of the monarch is analogous to the role of the understanding. Where Hobbes wants the sovereign to settle interpretive disputes by enforcing the society's founding covenants, Hooke sees the new, experimental technologies of natural philosophy as doing that work instead. He offers the microscope as one tool, but presumably only one, through which truth can be established. In a particularly important development in the Restoration science of textuality, Hooke examines books and printing through the microscope in the very first of his observations. He thus counters both logocentric and subjective approaches to the text. In a form of logocentrism so extreme as to verge on parody, Hooke begins with not just any book but with a miniature Bible. That is, he chooses what contemporaries would have considered the most important book and, in this miniaturized edition, what might have been considered its most refined printing. In keeping with the logocentric approach, Hooke focuses entirely on the book itself. Seen under the microscope, though, nothing less than the Bible appears, he claims, "like a great splatch of London dirt" (3-4). While there is, as the logocentric approach suggests, something to the book itself, what we could not see before the microscope is how dirty and "misshapen" these texts actually are (4). What strikes the unaided eye as "curious and smoothly engraven strokes and points" are revealed under the microscope as "smutty daubings" (4). If this is true of the Bible, then all texts are consigned to this filthy, irregular condition. And Hooke observes copper plates, type, and handwriting, thus effectively debasing all texts, which are said to be "abundantly more disfigured" than Nature, as revealed to the experimental philosopher through the same microscope (4).

68

Chapter Two

Hooke treats as empirical and technological what the radical democratic literacy of the r64os sees as metaphysical: the ability to see the invisible in the visible sign. What had been invisible in the letters is not an abstract, spiritual, metaphysical meaning but rather the way the ink spreads across the grain of the page. That is, Hooke's use of the microscope also counters the subjective idea of reading, that the meaning of any particular symbol is to be constructed by readers able to intuit the meaning of symbols generally. Rather than claiming, as radical democrats did in the r64os, to make the invisible visible, Hooke's work suggests that "there is nothing so small as to escape our inquiry" (A2v). The invisible disappears and turns out to be something for which we had previously lacked instruments to observe. The microscope reveals that the invisible world is physical. For Hooke the dirty irregularities of texts symbolize "the dangers in the process of human reason, the remedies of them all can only proceed from the real, the mechanical, the experimental philosophy" (A2r). After taking logocentrism to its extreme and countering subjective modes of reading in the process, Hooke argues that readers ought to turn away from books and toward the instruments through which the natural world might be observed. Thus he argues that with the microscope "the heavens are opened" (A2v). Not only, then, does Hooke dispel the mystical sense of the invisible that we saw with Calvin, Coppe, and Bauthumley; he also does nothing less than relocate the heavens. They are no longer above, or beyond, but rather all around us, in the natural, material world. Hooke simultaneously clears away the book and opens up the space for the natural world that makes up the remainder of Micrographia. Of course, books are still with us, so one could argue that Hooke's argument fails. But Hooke does help to distinguish the study of the physical world from the study of texts and thereby contributes to the emerging split between modern science and words. In this, his work is particularly influential for, and indicative of, the approach of the Royal Society. With the History of the Royal Society (r667), Thomas Sprat complains about words' tropological dimension rather than about the messiness of print. "Who can behold, without indignation," he asks, "how many mists and uncertainties, these specious tropes and figures have brought on our Knowledge?" (r12). For Sprat the advantage of natural philosophy is that it offers a way to acquire knowledge without indulging in metaphor. Such an antitropological approach would seem to be a familiar, neo-Platonist argument about the deception implicit in imagery, with the mists and uncertainties representing how images distract people from the truth. It is also similar to Hobbes's sense that words necessarily misrepresent. But what is perhaps underestimated is how specifically Sprat ties the problem of tropes to the experience of the Civil

Dryden and the Project of Restoration

Wars. When Sprat narrates a brief history of the English language, he begins with Chaucer, and he concludes with "the beginning of our late Civil Wars" (42). For Sprat, the Civil Wars represent a break in an otherwise continuous development of the English language. Rather than a cessation, however, the 1640s become an interruption in language only because they represent an eruption of language: "a time, wherein all Languages use, is ever, to increase by extraordinary degrees" (42). It is not only that the sheer quantity of verbiage during the Civil Wars alters the history of English. It is also that in times of extraordinary social change language goes through a similarly extraordinary change. According to Sprat, "in such busie, and active times, there arise more new thoughts of men, which must be signifi'd, and varied expressions" (42). Like Hobbes, Sprat sees eloquence as a political problem endemic to democracies. "They who are bred up in Commonwealths," Sprat argues, "busie themselves chiefly about Eloquence" (19). For Hobbes, who conceives of the sovereign as a written creation set up by the people to guarantee meaning, the political problem of eloquence can be minimized by having the central authority address and preclude differences of interpretation. Sprat does not see a way around the disputes that Hobbes's sovereign settles, at least no way that involves words. "Disputing is a very good instrument, to sharpen mens wit, and to make them versatil, and wary defenders of the Principles, which they already know: but it can never much augment the solid substance of Science itself" (18}. Because debate does nothing more than reiterate what is already known, the solution, for Sprat, lies in avoiding words; in fact, a focus on the natural world represents a nonverbal alternative to democratic debate. For Hobbes the sovereign should control words; for Sprat it is almost as if those who are interested in thinking well should move beyond them. Although Hobbes might have used a vocabulary of cause and effect to describe his sense of how words work, he does not go so far as to argue that science is preferable to the use of words entirely. Still, Sprat's argument is paradoxically logocentric. Even as he argues for moving beyond words, he believes that there is something to them. Whereas Hobbes believes that the absence of a guarantor of meaning results in the possibility of a variety of interpretations, Sprat argues that there are two basic types of words-the "tropes" and the "clear" (n2, n3). He assumes that metaphoricity is something that inheres in words, but only in some words-the tropes. The other words, the clear, are intrinsically free of metaphor. It is the tropes that lead people astray, into "mists and uncertainties" (n2). Unlike Hobbes, then, Sprat is concerned not so much with subjective ideas of reading as with the types of words that he thinks result in such disparate and confused readings.

Chapter Two

The project of the Royal Society, Sprat contends, is "to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words" (rr3). In this wonderful crystallization of correspondence theory Sprat assumes that there would (or should) be one clear word for every thing, or a one-to-one correspondence between word and object. Sprat calls this approach "Mathematical plainness" (n3), and it differs significantly from Hobbes's sense that the truth of language is guaranteed by the covenant between the people and the sovereign. With a one-to-one relationship between words and things, words could refer directly to things both in and outside of language; there would be a profound symmetry between language and the world, and thinking would almost become a matter of operating with whole numbers. Setting aside the likelihood that Sprat's theory might require an infinite number of words for an infinite number of things, the advantage of such "Mathematical plainness" is that one word would not represent a variety of different things (n3). Sprat's theory would not allow, therefore, the kind of reading advocated by Milton, according to whom the reader chooses from among the meanings of the words. Words would not have various senses, so there would be no need to make the choices that lead to the disputes that Sprat dreads and associates with commonwealths. In the r66os, with the "happy restoration of the Kingdom's peace," according to Sprat, "when mens minds are somewhat settled, their Passions allai'd," there is no longer any need for the new expressions that Sprat believed emerged during the r64os nor the conditions for producing new ones (54, 42). Under these circumstances the clarity Sprat famously desires can be achieved. Therefore, Sprat makes two recommendations: to avoid metaphor altogether and to organize the language through dictionaries and grammars (42). The first is the more famous of the two, probably because it set such an impossibly high standard for clarity that it has become a touchstone for considering seventeenth-century ideas about language and science. It might also be well known thanks to the telling contradictions in which Sprat finds himself. For example, when he contends that the writing of the Royal Society will, for example, avoid all "swellings of style," it is not clear how the phrase is not itself a swelling of style. Although Sprat is not the last to voice concern over tropes, his second program is more successful than the first. "Some sober and judicious Men," he contends, should "take the whole Mass of our Language into their hands, as they find it, and ... set a mark on the ill Words; correct those, which are to be retain'd, admit, and establish the good, and make some emendations in the Accent, and Grammar" (42). Producing dictionaries and grammars, as difficult as it might be, turns

Dryden and the Project of Restoration

7I

out to be easier than ridding language of metaphor. Thus, we have during the second half of the seventeenth century a profusion of dictionaries and grammars, preparing the way for the methodizing impulse of the first two decades of the eighteenth century (see Chapter 4) and even for Johnson's Dictionary at the middle of the eighteenth century (see Chapter 6). 23 John Wilkins's An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language is among those books that could fit within Sprat's second approach. Although he is not writing a dictionary, Wilkins takes "the whole mass of the language into his hands" (as does each reader of his essay). As Sprat had recommended, Wilkins goes about organizing the language. Wilkins proposes "reducing of all things and motions to such kinds of Tables," arguing that to do so "would prove the shortest and plainest way for the attainment of real Knowledge." 24 Thus the book is a single chart, purporting to arrange all knowledge and all means of knowledge; across page after page Wilkins lists words and claims to record the relationships between them. In addition to complementing Sprat's interest in "easiness" (History n3), Wilkins's An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language also engages the ongoing arguments about language and the Civil Wars: "this design will likewise contribute much to the clearing of some of our Modern differences in Religion, by unmasking many wild errours, that shelter themselves under disguise of affected phrases" (B2v). If Wilkins's book represents what Foucault describes as "the ordered table" of the "the Classical age," 25 it is in part as a reaction to an earlier period of radically democratic religious interpretation. Wilkins's orderly table is supposed to diminish the effect of affected phrases and the other consequences that have followed from religious differences, visible most prominently in the r64os. In his table of knowledge Wilkins makes an important distinction between "spiritual action" and "corporeal actions" (225, 233). Initially, at least, this is a fairly conventional variation on the mind/body dichotomy. But the interest resides in what he puts in each major category. Under spiritual actions he places, for example, "Understanding," "Thinking," and "Deliberating" (225, 227, 228). Under corporeal actions he ranges across "drowsiness," "sleeping," "itching," and "scratching" (234). Significantly, he includes "reading," "spelling," "writing," and "printing" on the same, corporeal side (235). Wilkins thus makes reading and writing corporeal actions, akin to itching, just a few decades after they had been quintessentially spiritual actions. He moves reading away from understanding, thinking, and deliberating; the implication is that reading and thinking are different things. Because Wilkins has merely arranged these terms as a table, the crucial question of whether reading and writing have always

72

Chapter Two

been different, or should be different, or have demonstrated themselves to be so recently is not addressed. In any case his treatment of reading as an almost involuntary, corporeal activity represents the most extreme version of the Royal Society's rejection of words. With Hooke print is a series of smutty daubings; with Sprat eloquence obfuscates; with Wilkins reading is no longer an intellectual exercise but is reduced instead to the same class of activities that includes sleeping and scratching. In his poetry of the early r68os Dryden engages simultaneously the issues raised by the Royal Society and the democratization of print. As carefully constructed allegories of high political events, these poems mean something other than what they seem to be saying-implementing precisely the tropological use of words that bothered Hooke and Sprat of the Royal Society. Hooke, for example, might say there is nothing to the ink's smutty daubings but a poem about Absalom and Achitophel, while Sprat might argue that saying one thing and meaning another entails precisely the figures of speech that leave us unable to think correctly. Part of what makes Dryden so important is that he defends poetry in a time that associates political violence with the tropological dimension of language. Similar to Hobbes's reworking the oppositional, radical democratic vocabulary of rights and covenants to create the absolute sovereign, however, Dryden uses these typological tropes to justify the monarchy at a time when it was facing a succession crisis. On one level Dryden's poetry defends the succession of the establishment and the importance of stability. On another level, though, the question of succession haunts Dryden's sense of poetry itself in the early r68os. In Absalom and Achitophel, for example, Dryden casts Shaftesbury's belief that a new king could be chosen as representing an interruption in the transmission of value or merit, generally, including literary merit. With Mac Flecknoe the popular, commercial press stands for this debasing of merit and is described by analogy with monarchical succession. The Exclusion Crisis of the late r67os and early r68os arose from the fact that Charles II had no legitimate male heirs; his brother, the Roman Catholic James II, would likely ascend to the throne, unless he was blocked, or "excluded," from it. During the late r67os and early r68os, precisely this possibility was considered, with Shaftesbury bringing forward two bills in Parliament to exclude James II. Absalom and Achitophel imagines a series of conversations, featuring Shaftesbury (Achitophel), Monmouth (Absalom), and Charles II (David), each focusing on whether Monmouth/ Absalom might seek the throne. At the same time, the narrator reflects on the developments in and the implications for political philosophy involved in Monmouth's possible ascen-

Dryden and the Project of Restoration

73

sion. Achitophel, for example, makes the case for a contractual theory of government: ... nobler is a limited command, Giv'n by the love of all your native land, Than a successive title, long and dark. (299-301)

The narrator associates such a political philosophy with a republican opposition to monarchy, generally, and is concerned about it. If Parliament were to exclude James, "then kings are slaves to those whom they command" (775). In part, Dryden's point has to do with the definition of the sovereign; a sovereign is not sovereign if subject to contractual arrangements. At the same time, conceding the possibility that a monarchy is a covenant, the narrator also argues for the importance of whatever is established: "grant our lords the people kings can make,/What prudent man a settled throne would shake?" (795-96). With Dryden typology and typological readings take on a new valence and not only because they are used toward Royalist ends. For the radical democrats of the r64os, typology is enlisted so that current events could be understood through the Bible. That same filtering through the Bible is still happening in Absalom and Achitophel. But in Dryden's poem the Civil Wars themselves also take on a typological significance. Consequently, there is at least a triple looking back. First, Dryden looks back to the Bible, consistent with typological analysis as it traditionally performed. But, second, in this case it is almost as if figures in the Bible are also looking at England, concerned about the prospect of another civil war: "The sober part of Israel," we are told, "looking backwards with a wise afright," "Curst the memory of Civil Wars" (69, 71, 74). Finally, and at the same time, this sober part of Israel also represents those chosen few who see similarities between the Exclusion Crisis of the early r68os and the events of the r64os. The narrator contends that the Popish Plot revives the ... old beloved theocracy Where Sanhedrin and priest enslaved the nation And justified their spoils by inspiration. (522-524)

In this threefold process of looking back, the experience of the r64os, like the Bible read typologically, is to be read in Absalom and Achitophel for contemporary significance and resonance. Paradoxically, one thing such a typological reading of political events must watch for is the inspired typological reading associated with the radical democrats of the r64os.

74

Chapter Two

Although Absalom and Achitophel thus invites readers to determine who stands for whom in its typological scheme, individual lines argue against political participation. Throughout the poem the narrator dismisses the people as "the dregs of a democracy" (227), "crowds" (787), and a "public lunacy" (788) and implicitly attributes to them the "madness of rebellious times" (789). The narrator argues that political representation distorts. Absalom and Achitophel complains about "Such Votes as make a Part exceed the Whole" (994). Toward the end of the poem, for example, David exclaims, "God save me most from my Petitioners" (886). Except for the highly unlikely case in which every single person votes exactly the same way on exactly the same issue, any vote could potentially exceed the whole. Even in "direct" participatory democracies, votes are likely cast by a set smaller than the number of people affected by the vote. Moreover, even if all people were to vote, if the results are enacted by majority of votes in a one-person, one-vote system, the results would apply to the whole even though they were agreed to by a smaller group. In representative models, of course, the laws are made by the elected, usually just a small group of people deciding in the name of the whole. Democratic theory usually puts forward a variety of mechanisms to protect minority opinion in these cases-for example, access to the press or independent judicial review. The narrator's argument seems to be that if there were no voting and no petitioning, there would be no way to notice whether there were an aggrieved group, and there would therefore be happiness. In Dryden's poem The Medal!: A Satyre Against Sedition, a response published in early r682 to a medal commissioned to celebrate Shaftesbury's acquittal after a four-month trial on charges of high treason, his political and literary theories begin to come together. "They rack ev'n Scripture to confess their Cause," the narrator claims at one point: "They make it speak whatever Sense they please" (rs6, r63). The problem, we are told, is that "The text inspires not them; but they the Text inspire" (r66). The word inspire could have two meanings in this line. The first, more familiar, option would be the spiritual connotation of a movement toward belief. The second is the more etymological sense of breathing in. In this latter sense the reader "puffs up," so to speak, the implications of the text. We saw this kind of reading with Bauthumley, Coppe, and others, where the important insight that reading requires prior knowledge on the part of the reader results in the best readers not needing to read a text at all in order to know what it says. Opposed to what he calls "inspired reading" and contractual models of government, Dryden continues to read current events typologically while emphasizing the importance of precedence. In an important new twist on the

Dryden and the Project of Restoration

75

typological approach to the Civil Wars, Dryden's narrator removes this type of reading from any particular historical context and treats inspired reading as a generalized problem with democratized reading: " ... the poor injur'd Page:/It has been us'd as ill in every Age" (rsS-59). If The Medal! is right, there is always a threat to stable government from "inspired" reading; consequently, stable governments need stable uninspired reading. In "Epistle to the Whigs," which precedes The Medal!, Dryden performs another act of looking back typologically. He claims that he sees Milton, Calvin, and others in the arguments of his opponents; they share "the same grounds of rebellion," Dryden alleges (40). In this The Medal! echoes Hobbes's concern with the equality of the participants in the Civil Wars: "all are God-a'mighties in their turns" (The Medal!, line no). As we have seen, Hobbes believes that such a presumption of equality dangerously empowers the governed with a sense of entitlement. Dryden, however, differs from Hobbes significantly, in his tracing a line of Calvinist radicalism and in his apparent response to the empowered equality Dryden believes follows from this theology. Rather than a covenant or contractual model for resolving what Hobbes sees as a generalized problem of equality, Dryden defends the monarch without involving the people who become, in Hobbes's model, authors of a strongly centralized government. Thus, despite their shared concern about the reading of the radical democrats, in this way "Dryden's view and use of Hobbes do not, it seems, accord with most modern readings of Leviathan," as Richard Kroll notes. 26 In what will be an important and contentious development for the history of criticism, Dryden has added here a degree of theological specificity, Calvinism, to what Hobbes saw as an aspect of the human experience more generally, either in an ungoverned state of nature (such as a civil war) or in the instability and relative equality of our sense perceptions. If contractual theories of government are true, exclaims Dryden's narrator, What Fools our Fathers were ... Who, to destroy the seeds of Civil War, Inherent right in Monarchs did declare. (The Medal!, II2-I4)

Perhaps because of the format-a satire cast in heroic couplets (and not a propositional statement of political philosophy)-this formulation begs the question. The implication is not so much that democracy is wrong but rather that "our fathers" would be if a democratic sense of the importance of the individual citizen's right to participate is correct.

Chapter Two What radical democrats say cannot be right because if it is, then our fathers were wrong. There is also the explicit claim that their concern was to destroy the possibility of civil war. Again we see the looking back and the profound wish not to repeat the experience of the r64os. Moreover, Dryden's narrator considers "inherent right" in monarchy a way to avoid specifically that renewal of civil war, despite the fact that there were many in the Civil Wars who saw themselves fighting for a monarchy. At the same time, the reference to an "inherent," as opposed to a "divine," right may also be significant. There is a kind of logocentrism to it; the right to be a monarch inheres in the being monarch just like the meaning inheres in the word. To thus argue that a monarch has an inherent right would not concede anything to the contractual side: the monarch's right is not granted. But it does secularize the source of the right, without explaining how the right inheres. In the poem The Medal! the narrator complains about those who see the government as a contract between the people and the ruler. They preach ... to the Crowd, that Pow'r is lent, But not convey'd to Kingly Government; That Claimes successive bear no binding force. (82-84)

The concern here is not only that the mob is being told that power is transferred upward, nor that these ideas are being preached and thus have a radical religious connotation, although both points do rankle Dryden's narrator. Ultimately, what is at issue is Dryden's attitude toward "Claimes successive" (84). That is, when Dryden avoids referring to a specifically divine right of the monarch, we are left with the question of why a right inheres in a monarch. However, this idea of inherent right entails the possibility that precedence creates authority, that claims successive matter as such. Politically, the argument is that a monarchy's perpetuation indicates its continuing relevance. It is also a principle of what would later be called literary history. Those who would oppose the government must somehow counter both the tradition of that government and the conviction that it has worked well over time. "Successive claims" apply to books as well; if one disagrees with the "successive claims" that a text has made on its readers, one "must prove why that ought not to have pleas'd, which has pleas'd the most Learn'd, and the most Judicious," as Dryden claims in ""The Authors Apology for Heroique Poetry; and Poetique Licence." 27 Like monarchs, for Dryden, texts that have survived also have an inherent right to be considered important.

Dryden and the Project of Restoration

77

In 1682 Thomas Shadwell replies to Dryden's The Medall with his own poem, "The Medal of John Bayes: A Satire Against Folly and Knavery." Subsequently, a pirate press publishes an edition of Dryden's Mac Flecknoe. As is well known, in Mac Flecknoe Dryden casts Shadwell as the newly crowned King of "dullness" and the "last great prophet of tautology" (lines 63, 30). Although the poem will become important for subsequent literary criticism, informing Pope's Dunciad (1728, 1729, 1742, 1743), Mac Flecknoe continues Dryden's focus on the question of true succession, both political and literary. Dryden takes the basic problem of the Exclusion Crisis-who should be next in line-and applies it to contemporary writing. As Mac Flecknoe begins, Flecknoe is deciding how "to settle the succession of the state" (line 10). Flecknoe's approach to writing mirrors Shaftesbury's approach to politics: in both cases the assumption against which Dryden is arguing is that succession is a matter of choice. After Dryden and Shadwell both write poems on the Exclusion Crisis, Dryden claims that Shadwell is no more eligible to defend Shaftesbury poetically than Shaftesbury is eligible to defend himself politically. And Dryden does so, of course, in a poem. The very concept of Dryden's response would likely suffice to trump Shadwell and thus ensure Dryden the position his concept claims for him. For a history of literary criticism seen as a debate over theories of reading and related political philosophy, however, the interest in Mac Flecknoe lies in how Dryden describes literary succession and reading in an early representation of a print marketplace. Mac Flecknoe pursues themes familiar from the reading debate, but they are given a new valence through Dryden's locating them so specifically in London and in relation to mass production. At the conclusion of the poem, for example, Flecknoe gives a speech extolling Shadwell's abilities as a writer: Thy genius calls thee not to purchase fame In keen iambics, but mild anagram: Leave writing plays, and choose for thy command Some peaceful province in acrostic land There thou may'st wings display and altars raise. (203-7)

Flecknoe is praising (and Dryden is rejecting) the textual density and verbal self-consciousness that characterizes so much writing from earlier in the seventeenth century. Flecknoe alludes to George Herbert, but his point could apply to many authors, including Milton, who uses acrostics in Paradise Lost. At least in this speech Flecknoe thus celebrates the kind of works that precede the Royal Society's Restoration critique of

Chapter Two tropes. Flecknoe defends what is, for Dryden, precisely the problem with an earlier mode of reading. Flecknoe claims Shadwell can "torture one poor word ten thousand ways" (208). As we have seen in the 164os, ten thousand readers might be able to get ten thousand shades of meaning from the same word or at least the same text. The difference is that the radical democrats would call that process reading; Dryden's speaker calls it torture. In a way, Dryden's claim follows Sprat's sense that some words are more tropological than others, that a writer can organize texts so as to invite the kind of reading Milton describes. Or conversely, a writer can organize texts to minimize such reading. In other words, Dryden's case here is profoundly logocentric. This is surprising since Shadwell's name is abbreviated throughout the poem, seeming to invite readers to become actively involved in the construal of meaning. In one telling instance, Dryden takes advantage of the tension between the logocentric and the subjective modes of reading. Describing the coronation procession, the narrator explains that the route was strewn not with "Persian carpets" (98) but with the "scattered limbs of mangled poets" (101). Dryden's carefully drawn map of London-"Barbican" (67), "Bunhill" and "Watling" (97)-and the image of enough books spilling from "dusty shops" (10o) to fill a London street is an early poetic reference to the size of the book trade in late seventeenth-century London. There are so many books in fact that the narrator claims "loads of Shalmost choked the way" (103). Throughout the poem the same abbreviation has referred to Shadwell. So, it could be that loads of Shadwells are blocking the way, which would be fittingly self-involved for Dryden's argument. At the same time, given that the books are "martyrs of pies, and relics of the bum" (Ioi), the path appears to be impeded by waste ("Sh-"), so much of it that it can block a London street. Combining the two senses of "Sh-," there is also the implication that Shadwell is "Sh-" in the other contextual sense of the abbreviation. Of course, Dryden has not actually declared either of these possibilities. Even if all the conditions for them are set up by the poem, these implications are not exactly in the text per se. On the one hand, embedding the possibilities for more than one reading testifies not only to Dryden's skill but also to his sense that there is something to the words themselves. On the other hand, the words in this case are both abbreviated, which invites the reader's contribution.

Religio Laici, the fourth of the major poems from the early 168os, has been called "Dryden's fullest comment on hermeneutics." 28 It is certainly the most ambitious of the four. Dryden sets out to explain his sense that "Heathens, who never did, nor without Miracle could hear of the

Dryden and the Project of Restoration

79

name of Christ were yet in a possibility of Salvation" (preface to Religio Laici, 99). Despite being the only one of the four poems to tackle a topic as complicated as how far salvation might spread, Religio Laici shares similar concerns and terms with Absalom and Achitophel, The Medal!, and Mac Flecknoe. For example, in the preface to Religio Laici Dryden casts the idea that heathens could not have access to salvation as "a Bill of Exclusion [that] had passed only on the Fathers, which debar'd not the Sons from their Succession" (99). Similarly, the poem concludes with a kind of coda in which the narrator, presumably Dryden, defends his "unpolish'd, rugged Verse" and wonders whether "Tom Sha-ll's Rhimes will serve" (453, 456). Despite such echoes of the other three poems, however, there is a historical sweep to Religio Laici that is unmatched in Dryden's other poems from this period, if in any of his poems. While Religio Laici continues his concern with reading, and with types of readers, in this case Dryden focuses on how the Bible is read. James Winn has described Religio Laici as a "striking departure from the Laureate's earlier styles." 29 Dryden's argument in the poem is less surprising, though, when we see it in the context of the Royal Society's arguments about books, words, and reading, and of Dryden's recurrent preference in established authority. Seen this way, Religio Laici summarizes Dryden's thinking on politics and hermeneutics not only in the early r68os but with reference to the Royal Society's Restoration discussion of words and print. Insofar as he is concerned with the Bible as a popular-culture icon, Dryden's argument harkens back to Hooke's point, that when "truly" seen for what it is, the Bible, like all books, turns out to have "smutty daubings" (4), difficult to read at best. Sprat's sense that words distort, and that they are consequently obstacles to true knowledge, is similar to Dryden's fear that the "obscure" 30 in the Bible might be dangerous if readers "inspire" it too much. And Dryden's forestalling of interpretation would seem to be informed by a sensibility like Wilkins's, which sees reading as a merely physical activity-either that it is or that it should be. Dryden offers a pos!'ible resolution of obscure passages, but this solution too will be familiar: "In doubtful question 'tis the safest way /To learn what the unsuspected Ancients say." 31 Again, Dryden advocates the oldest, most established authorities as the best sources to settle confusion and disagreement. Understandably, much has been made of Dryden's distinguishing in Religio Laici between and rejecting the approaches of both the "Catholics" and the "Fanaticks." But it is also important to note that he refers, again, to the radical democratic (and, to his way of thinking, Calvinist) models of reading put forward during the late r64os. That is, like Hobbes's Leviathan, Religio Laici engages the debate over the political

8o

Chapter Two

effects of democratized reading. Dryden shares with Hobbes a distrust of reason. Where Hobbes sees reason as a form of imagination, Dryden believes that reason is inferior to faith. Hooke, as we have seen, directs reason toward observing the natural world and away from considering the printed word. For Dryden, Hooke's empiricism would likely be no better than reason at illuminating the central mysteries of faith. We have seen that Sprat distinguishes between figurative and clear language and argues for adopting clarity. Dryden seems to share Sprat's sense that some texts, or passages within texts, can be either clear or obscure, as Dryden puts it. But, apparently sharing Sprat's concern about the consequences of focusing on figurative or obscure language, Dryden directs his attention toward the problem of reading itself. Conceding the difficulty in dealing with figurative language, he proposes a model of reading that more or less circumvents reading obscure passages. In this there is a way in which he addresses Wilkins, taking back into the spiritual actions the reading that Wilkins had placed in the category of corporeal action. Dryden, however, does not want reading to be too spiritual an action, and how he draws that fine line is particularly important for his sense of reading. Rejecting the Catholic Church's keeping the Bible at a remove from the believers, and loathing the results of providing the Bible to lay readers, Dryden finds himself in a difficult position in Religio Laici. Although he considers the Bible "a Common Largess to Mankind," he nonetheless regrets that it has been "put in every vulgar hand" (354, 400). Making the Bible available to more readers is usually seen as the central success of the Reformation. In Religio Laici, though, the scorn in Mac Flecknoe for commercial publication extends to the Bible as well. On one level the issue is how much access should be given to the individual reader: the Catholic Church gives too little, and those whom he calls the "Fanaticks" allow too much {preface to Religio Laici, ros). On another level, though, Dryden is concerned with the consequences of new access for new readers. Specifically, he directly ties the outbreak of the Civil Wars in the 164os to translating the Bible in the sixteenth century: "Better had it been for the English nation, that it had still remain'd in the original Greek and Hebrew, or at least in the honest Latine of St. Jerome, than that several Texts in it, should have been prevaricated to the destruction of the government" (ibid.). For Dryden the problem is not only that the Bible was newly, widely distributed; rather, he sees the Civil Wars as a consequence of reading debates embedded within the Reformation. For Dryden, as for Hobbes, the Civil Wars resulted from modes of reading. But for Dryden these modes are implicit in the Reformation. "The Seeds were sown," he argues in the preface to Religio Laici, "in the time of Queen Elizabeth, the bloudy Harvest ripened in the Reign

Dryden and the Project of Restoration

81

of King Charles the Martyr: and, because all the Sheaves could not be carried off without shedding some of the loose Grains, another Crop is too like to follow" (107). Dryden's image of seeds and harvesting nicely inverts the image from Milton's Areopagitica, according to which books "are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men" (492). The difference is that Milton celebrates the same process of seeding and harvesting that has Dryden concerned. Moreover, Dryden's claim represents a new level of reading history typologically that he first sketched in Absalom and Achitophel. According to Religio Laici, the Civil Wars of the 164os are prefigured by the sixteenth century, during which time the seeds for the later wars were planted. Thus models of reading proposed in the sixteenth century become types for the Civil Wars. And because not all the resulting grains could be picked up, the Civil Wars prefigure the current Exclusion Crisis. By this logic it would seem that the Exclusion Crisis represents a late version of the Elizabethan Settlement. Although Dryden dislikes the control the Church had over the Bible, he directs more attention toward the Fanaticks. In part, this can be attributed to Dryden's Fanaticks being the ones who develop the inspired reading with which Dryden disagrees. Where an implied Catholic sense of the infallibility of the Church had once stood, the Fanaticks, Dryden contends, "assum'd what amounts to an Infallibility in the private Spirit" (preface to Religio Laici, 102). Their idea of reading prioritizes the subjectivity of the reader over the text. Dryden could almost be describing Bauthumley and Coppe when he argues that "the Spirit gave the Doctoral Degree" and "Each was ambitious of th'obscurest place" (lines 406, 4II). At issue is the same reading that Dryden criticizes in Absalom and Achitophel and The Medal!. He focuses on this type of reading because he believes that it has proven politically disastrous. They "have detorted those Texts of Scripture, which are not necessary to Salvation, to the damnable uses of Sedition, disturbance and destruction of the Civil Government" (ibid.). This too is by now a familiar response to the upheaval of the 164os, one that, again, echoes Hobbes's Leviathan. But, consistent with Dryden's sense that the Civil Wars of the 164os find their origins in the sixteenth century, Dryden connects this reading (and the political instability it causes) to Calvinism, contending that wherever it "was planted and embrac'd, Rebellion, Civil War and Misery attended it" (ibid., 107). In Religio Laici Dryden proposes a model of reading that he claims can steer between no access and too much interpretation. What he calls a "kinder and more mollified interpretation" (preface to Religio Laici, 101)

Chapter Two represents his way around the impasse represented by these two poles of reading. The problem, as he describes it in Religio Laici, is that people ought to be provided access but that they ought not thereby produce unusual destabilizing readings of the text to which they now have access. He solves this dilemma in the most straightforward way possible: he says that when readers are confronted with an obscure or difficult passage, they should not trouble themselves with what they think its meaning might be: "whatever is obscure is concluded not necessary to be known" (ibid., ro2). Dryden's solution to the problem of wanting people to have access to the Bible and also wanting people not to make outrageous claims as a consequence of that access is to argue that the obscure portions need not be read. If the text proves difficult, the way to respond is to avoid the textual difficulty. In this Dryden assumes both that only certain passages are obscure and that the rest of the text, what he considers to be clear, would be clear to all readers. It is an elegantly simple solution, albeit one that shuts down the interpretive possibilities implicit in so many people reading the book themselves. If part of a text is not comprehensible, a reader should simply go to the next passage. With this kinder and more mollified vision of interpretation, Dryden is proposing a logocentric model of reading, although that is not so surprising given his antipathy toward the Calvinist, inspired and subjective, model. Dryden believes that "the welcome News is in the letter found" (366). In reading, "the Scripture is a Rule" (ro2). That is, Scripture offers itself as the model for how it ought to be read; "it speaks it Self" (368). There is a way in which Dryden is making a form of Luther's argument. For Luther, as we saw in Chapter r, the Bible can be provided to more readers because there is something to the book that will shape-one could say govern-the meaning each reader gets from it. The important difference between them is that Dryden is able to look back on a century and a half of disagreements over what Scripture says. If there were something to Scripture that could shape how it would be read, then there would not have been the interpretive and political differences about which Dryden is so concerned. Of course, the same problem haunts his argument as much as Luther's. If it speaks itself, there should not be any alternative readings against which Dryden feels compelled to write. As part of his logocentric, mollified approach Dryden divides the Bible into two basic types of text, the "clear, sufficient, and ordain'd" on the one hand, and "obscure places" on the other (preface to Religio Laici, ro2). For Luther, conceptually at least, the logocentric approach means that the meaning of the text is accessible to all. Moreover, Luther's analogy between the bread at the Last Supper and the Bible also suggests that the meaning is distributed equally through the text as well. In Dryden's

Dryden and the Project of Restoration

logocentric approach, by contrast, some parts of the text are clear, as Luther indicates they would be. Those sections, Dryden claims, include "all things needful to Salvation" (ibid.). As for the other sections, "whatsoever is obscure is concluded not necessary to be known" (ibid.). In a way the difference between the two types parallels Sprat's distinction between the clear and the figurative. For Dryden and Sprat there is something to the word, including what Sprat sees as a figurative dimension, that distorts understanding or makes it obscure. At the same time, even if it is informed by Sprat's distinction between the clear and the tropes, Dryden's "obscure" is not identical with Sprat's figurative. An obscure passage might not be figurative. Of course, this is a particularly difficult distinction to make in practice. Some readers might find certain passages obscure; other readers might find the same passages clear. To others, even not reading obscure passages will seem a lot like the spirited reading of the r64os, picking and choosing from the Bible what the believer considers to be needful for salvation. Particularly striking about Dryden's logocentric approach, though, is that it is not necessarily rational. It would seem that a logocentric insistence on the text itself would be more reasonable than arguing that one's reading is informed by the Spirit. But Dryden's Religio Laici begins with an assertion of the limits of reason. Dryden sketches a history of religion, according to which "the revealed Religion which was taught by Noah to all his sons" is forgotten, leaving humans only with a vestigial sense of monotheism (preface to Religio Laici, 99). "Revelation being thus Eclipsed," Dryden argues, humans turned their attention to Nature. That is, with the demise of Revelation, what Dryden calls Deism emerges. In a way Dryden's history fits with the experience in England since the r64os. With the passing of Revelation, or having seen the limits of an Interregnum that was in part theologically inspired, England turned to the study of Nature, especially in the work of the Royal Society. As we have seen, Royal Society member Robert Hooke urged a turn to Nature because it would be more reasonable than focusing on texts or, perhaps more important, on one's inspired, revealed interpretation of texts. But Dryden also steps in and argues that reason is a poor substitute for Revelation. In the preface to Religio Laici Dryden contends that "reason is always striving, and always at a loss" (ror). And the very first sentence of the poem claims "Dim ... is reason to the Soul" (r-3). On one level it might be that Dryden, as a poet-and maybe as someone who will later be converting to Catholicism-is defending the mysteries of faith and of representation. On another level, though, we are left with the problem of how to recognize the limits of reason and also to develop a kinder model of reading. It is possible that a model of reading

Chapter Two with a limited sense of reason could be very unkind; that would seem to be Milton's concern in the 164os, for example. Here, Dryden returns to the focus on "Claimes successive" that persists across the four major poems of the early I68os (The Medal!, 84). In response to those who argue that interpretation ought to be guided by an exegetical history, Dryden argues, "Tradition set aside" (276). Dryden concedes that "every Sect will wrest a several way," that sects are made by the differences in their interpretive histories. If one must consider an interpretive tradition, Dryden believes that it ought to be a written one. It is preferable "to learn what unsuspected Ancients say" (436). Again, as it was in Absalom and Achitophel, precedence is a defining characteristic for Dryden. Although he is discussing the Bible here, precedence will become important in literary criticism as well, and the implicit idea of a canon will be transferred from the Bible to literary studies. At the very end of the poem, just before the coda in which he mentions Shadwell, Dryden explains what to do if there were a discrepancy between what the ancients offer and what the thorough examiner of the Bible might have concluded: "private Reason 'tis more Just to curb,/Than by Disputes the publick Peace disturb" (447-48). This will become a particularly important claim or perspective over the course of early literary criticism. First, Dryden makes a distinction between the private and the public, and he ties that distinction to the use of reason. A similar distinction will be seen a century later in Kant's essay "An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?"' Some might see Dryden's formulation as contributing to that sense of early criticism as defining and defending the public use of reason on public policy issues associated with Habermas's idea of the public sphere. Unlike Habermas, however, Dryden distrusts reason, seeing it as lesser than revelation. It is also important to note that Dryden is likely even more concerned about the prospect of disturbing the peace than he is about the limits of reason. It would seem, in fact, that he makes the distinction between the public and the private in order to protect the public from the upheaval that ensued in the 164os when people took their private reasons as the basis for public dispute. Dryden's claim not to disturb the peace, coming as it does at the end of a poem devoted to questions of interpretation, is part of why Religio Laici, while not a work of literary criticism, is such an important document for the debate over reading that occurs across the history of early English literary criticism. Dryden, unlike Habermas, is not proposing free-spirited engaging of policy issues; rather, concerned about what might follow from such a debate, he proposes a mollified interpretation and a separation between public and private reason as part of the same Restoration project.

Dryden and the Project of Restoration

Although Religio Laici represents Dryden's most important statement on reading, it is not his final contribution to late seventeenth-century literary criticism. After r688, as Dryden loses his patronage position, he must try to find a new model for financial support; consequently, "Dryden embraced the role of writer as entrepreneur" in the r69os. 32 In the process he provides several avenues for different developments in the subsequent history of literary criticism. For example, in r695 Dryden contends, "The imitation of nature is therefore justly constituted as the general, and indeed the onely Rule of pleasing both in Poetry and Painting";33 his emphasis on the rule of imitating nature can be seen in the debate over methods just two decades later, to which Pope's An Essay on Criticism will make the most important contribution. Similarly, Dryden's sense that "An Author is not to write all he can, but only all he ought" 34 is reworked in Hume's famous distinction between is and ought, as we will see in Chapter 5· With the preface to the Fables (r7oo) Dryden lays out a sequential model of literary criticism, cast in familial terms but describing something that would now be thought of as textual production or maybe intertextuality: "For we have our Lineal Descents and Clans, as well as other Families: Spenser more than once insinuates, that the Soul of Chaucer was transfus'd into his Body; and that he was begotten by him Two hundred years after his Decease. Milton acknowledged to me, that Spenser was his Original" (25). Richard Kroll reminds us that "Dryden's 'Preface' to the Fables (r7oo) constructs a literary canon whose aesthetic values we have largely endorsed." 35 We do so, though, only after the intervention of Samuel Johnson, whose Lives of the Poets adopts a conception of literary history Dryden offered, as we will see in Chapter 6. Finally, in the preface to the Fables Dryden argues that "the Continual Agitations of the Spirits, must needs be a Weakning of any Constitution" (3o). He is describing how a state of extended excitation (e.g., from reading a riveting story) can be psychologically difficult for an individual. For Dryden, as for subsequent critics, the same point about agitation weakening a constitution applies to the political constitution as well. Still, he also sees in poetry a positive possibility. While comparing Homer and Virgil, he describes Homer as "violent, impetuous," but he also claims to find Homer "more pleasing" than the "quiet, sedate" Virgil (28). Given Dryden's sense of the fatigue that the constant stimulation of the passions can have on a constitution, it is surprising to see him defending a violent and impetuous poet. In part, the difference between Dryden's comments in the r66os and these in 1700 reflects the development of literary criticism, including his own. In this the Royal Society still offers him a solution to the complicated position in which he finds himself as

86

Chapter Two

someone who sees images as potentially beneficial distortions. The critic can distinguish between and classify texts like a natural philosopher can objects in the natural world: the canon, in a word. The critic makes precisely the distinction between uses of words that Dryden makes regarding Homer and Virgil. There is a pervasive and popular assumption that such canonical lists are criticism's central offering, both generally and in its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history. 36 Dryden is understandably seen as among the first to describe such a list. 37 Contending that "the best Authority is the best argument," Dryden indicates that precedence and persistence prove authority: "generally to have pleas'd, and through all ages, must bear the force of Universal Tradition." 38 As we will see, this presumption on behalf of persistence will be taken up later by Hume and Johnson. Finally, as he loses royal patronage, Dryden moves closer to the market model of authorship that he disparaged in Mac Flecknoe. That market model will emerge as a central topic in the writings of Addison and Steele; it is important to note, though, that the path of Addison and Steele was in some ways prepared by the career-especially perhaps the later career-of John Dryden.

CHAPTER THREE

"Avoid Disputes" The Spectator) the Market) and Criticism

.

~

Although modern English literary criticism begins with the periodical criticism of the early eighteenth century, exemplified by the journals of Addison and Steele, it is still a question as to what precisely makes their work modern. 1 Early eighteenth-century periodical critics build on arguments about the related dangers of reading and democracy, arguments that had affected print culture at least since the mid-seventeenth century. But it is true that they do so in a new form. At least after The Tatler (1709), criticism is more likely to be conducted in prose, in freestanding essays (no longer, for example, in the form of prefaces to plays, so widespread at the end of the seventeenth century), and published serially. At the same time, criticism is also said to become "modern" during the eighteenth century because of a defining connection to freedom of expression in modern democracy. As we have seen, Habermas contends that early eighteenth-century English critics participated in nothing less than the creation of modern democracy by shaping a public sphere of debate over policy issues: "In the institution of art criticism, including literary, theater, and music criticism, the lay judgment of a public that had come of age, or thought it had, became organized." 2 And Habermas specifically mentions Addison, Steele, The Guardian, and The Spectator as contributing to this process. Habermas's analysis has been profoundly influential for how early eighteenth-century criticism has been understood. For example, in The Institution of Criticism Peter Uwe Hohendahl asserts that "in the Age of the Enlightenment the concept of criticism cannot be separated from the institution of the public sphere." 3 Similarly, Terry Eagleton's book The Function of Criticism: From "The Spectator" to Post-Structuralism begins with "Steele's Tatter and Addison's Spectator" and, like Habermas,

88

Chapter Three

argues for a relationship between the democratic bourgeois public sphere and eighteenth-century periodical criticism. 4 And in Forming the Critical Mind: Dryden to Coleridge James Engell follows Habermas in emphasizing that "the coffeehouses or 'penny universities' serve as critical dens and switchboards." 5 As critics such as Addison are said to have contributed to the shift from monarchy to democracy, we have received a heroic story of criticism wresting power from a governing aristocracy, using nothing more than the "critical reasoning of private persons on political issues." 6 The stakes for criticism in this story are particularly high: critics such as Addison and Steele are said to lead England, and even Europe, toward modern, constitutional, liberal democracy. Terry Eagleton, for example, argues that "modern European criticism was born of a struggle against the absolutist state." 7 Despite the passage of six decades, Addison and Steele share a concern over the prospect of civil war similar to what we have already seen in Hobbes, Sprat, Dryden, and others. The Spectator, too, is affected by the memory of the Civil Wars, which were only then just passing from the realm of living memory: "I remember," Steele claims in Spectator no. 497, "to have heard an old Gentleman talk of the Civil Wars" (4:262). Criticism, even Addison and Steele's, is participating in a debate over theories of reading, concerned not to repeat the instability associated with the 164os. Indeed, they are able to describe an almost fifty-year lineage, beginning quite specifically with the Restoration's need to get beyond the upheavals of the Civil Wars. Consequently, Addison claims to have avoided party affiliations or, indeed, anything political at all: "my Paper has not in it a single Word of News, a Reflection in Politicks, nor a Stroke of Party" (no. 262, 2:517). Of course, it is not so clear that he succeeds in avoiding parties or politics. In any case Addison's claim to be writing to avoid such discussions contrasts with the Habermasian model of a public sphere that facilitates open, rational discussion of policy and politics. Contrary to the current understanding of the history of literary criticism, Addison does not see criticism as contributing to what we might call democratic public critique. Indeed, he argues, "Among those Advantages which the Publick may reap from this Paper, it is not the least, that it draws Men's Minds off from the Bitterness of Party," a point he associates with "the first Design of those Gentlemen who set on Foot the Royal Society" (no. 262, 2:519). In Spectator no. 291 Addison claims that "it is in Criticism, as in all other Sciences and Speculations" (3:35). By aligning criticism with the "sciences," Addison follows Sprat's Restoration intervention in the treatment of words. After the intervention of the Royal Society, the question for anyone, such as literary critics, interested in linguistic issues will

The Spectator, the Market, and Criticism be in figuring out how to make the study of writing as organized as the study of the natural world claims to be. In the same issue Addison argues that "one who brings with him any implicit Notions and Observations which he has made in his reading of the Poets, will find his own Reflections methodized and explained" (no. 291, 3:35). This sense that criticism is reading methodized represents one particularly influential approach in the early eighteenth century. It finds its most famous expression in Pope's An Essay on Criticism, but Pope is participating in a wider early eighteenth-century debate about regulating reading (see Chapter 4). The Tatler, too, sets out to offer organization and method. But the Tatler admits his organization fails, and in a way this failure leaves the Spectator with the problem of how to respond. In The Spectator, the critic would be a speculator, not a tatler. Thus in Spectator no. r readers are told, "I have made my self a Speculative Statesman, Soldier, Merchant and Artizan" (r:4). The Spectator brings speculating to criticism. In part, speculation involves observing and is thus related to empirical science and to spectatorship. But on another level, speculation also involves buying and selling for a profit, a meaning of the word that begins to emerge in the eighteenth century. The difference, though, is that Addison and Steele's approach reflects the subsequent intervention of John Locke, whose An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Addison includes among the French and Italian critics that "a Man who sets up for a Judge in Criticism, should have Perused" (no. 291, 3:35). In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke devotes one book to a discussion of "Words or Language in General." Locke addresses the double bind in which language is caught after Hobbes's analysis of the king's execution: "Having naturally no signification," words are conventional, not natural. 8 But Locke disagrees with Hobbes, arguing that "nobody [has] an authority to establish the precise signification of words" (3.9·8·479). Where Hobbes's "lexarch" was meant to centralize meaning so as to avoid a repetition of the stateof-nature violence born out of each person deciding for him- or herself, Locke more fully extends the social contract theory to words themselves: the meaning of words is conventional and without an authority to establish precise signification. In "On Words," Locke contends that "when a man speaks to another, it is that he may be understood" (3.2.2.405). By arguing that language is by definition concerned with such direct communication, Locke turns language into an instrument of exchange. Other things that language can do, not involving this kind of an exchange, do not enter into Locke's description of language here. Taken to its extreme, Locke's idea of words can end up ruling out precisely the charged, metaphorical uses of language associated with poetry.

Chapter Three And Addison and Steele do continue Sprat's Restoration opposition to the tropological, complaining, for example, "Our general taste in England is for epigram, turns of wit, and forced conceits, which have no manner of influence, either for the bettering or enlarging the mind of him who reads them" (no. 409, 3:530). Once language is understood as a medium of exchange, knowledge itself is simply a correct correspondence of these exchanges. Thus, Addison contends in Spectator no. 62 that "true Wit consists in the Resemblance of Ideas, and false Wit in the Resemblance of Words" (r:265). In categorizing resemblances of words Addison refers to puns, acrostics, shape poems, and more. Steele is particularly harsh toward puns: "that which we call punning is therefore greatly affected by men of small intellects" (no. 504, 4:288). Nonetheless Addison and Steele reject verbal wit also because of its association with the irrational and violent, perhaps particularly the political violence of the English Civil Wars, during which the theories of reading of the radical democrats rely on precisely the punning and anagrams Addison so dislikes. In Spectator no. 396, for example, Steele refers to a letter from someone who complains about "that Mongrel miscreated (to speak in Miltonic) kind of Wit, vulgarly termed, the Punn" (3 :484). This kind of wit, then, is associated not with just any writer from the seventeenth century but with the one who is also remembered as a regicide, one who was a member of Cromwell's Interregnum government. The Tatler, though, seems to adopt the lexarch function implied by Hobbes's Leviathan: a central authority for determining meaning. In the very first issue of The Tatter, for example, Isaac Bickerstaff claims "to offer something whereby such worthy and well-affected members of the commonwealth may be interested, after their reading, what to think." 9 It is difficult to imagine anything more likely to minimize the role of the reader than proposing to tell him or her what to think. Bickerstaff's claim, however, follows from Hobbes's proposal for centralizing meaning and is similar to Wilkins's earlier separation of reading from understanding, as the readers will know what to think only after their reading (rather than, say, during it). And there is at least the implication that Steele either shares or is aware of the dangers people associate with reading. In The Spectator, for example, he claims that he will reveal how "the most dangerous Page in Virgil or Homer may be read ... with much pleasure, and with perfect Safety" (no. 230, 2:395). Of course, on one level Steele is playing here, convinced that there is no danger at all in reading Virgil or Homer. At the same time, though, it is difficult not to see his comment reflecting something of the sixty years of concerns about the dangers of democratized reading that preceded it. There may be a dangerous way of reading Homer or Virgil, but it is the job of critics

The Spectator, the Market, and Criticism

91

such as Addison and Steele to make sure that such ways of reading are made safer and more pleasurable. Like Dryden, Addison and Steele offer examples and theories for easier kinds of reading. Unlike Hobbes, Sprat, or Dryden, though, Addison and Steele's figures for the destabilizing effects of print are not religious radicals. Rather, women are for Addison and Steele what the religious radicals of the Civil Wars were to the Restoration, because of their similarly new access to print and to the press. According to Nigel Wheale's Writing and Society, "significant increases in female literacy occurred from the 165os onwards in London, coinciding with a distinct growth in numbers of publications by female authors; one in two women in the capital city could write their signature in the final decade." 10 The journals of Addison and Steele register this change. They participate in an ongoing disavowal of tropological reading from the Restoration, but they combine that concern for democratized reading with a new focus on female readers. Addison and Steele repeatedly address their essays to women, often with evident concern about women's reading. After all, the title The Tatler is meant to signal an affiliation between Steele and women, "in honour of whom I have invented the title of this paper," Mr. Bickerstaff claims in the first issue of The Tatler (1:15). Indeed, The Tatler refers to a tension that animates both that journal and the subsequent Spectator: gendered excess verbosity, which Addison and Steele associate with women. In Tatter no. 217, for example, Steele argues that "women are by nature loquacious" (3:136).U Of course, the journal is a "tatler" in another sense as well; as a topical newspaper it will do what women are said to do-be loquacious, add its voice to others, saying yet more. Addison and Steele argue that "being born an Englishman" means being "a man who is sparing of his words, and an enemy to loquacity" (no. 135, 2:135). Conversely, Steele argues that women "both by Nature and Education ... deal mightily in double meanings" (no. 504, 4:288). In other words, Addison and Steele argue that men are less likely to use an excess of words, and women are more likely to use words in the worst way, with puns and metaphors. Addison and Steele are usually considered progressive democrats for their contribution to or construction of a public sphere, but such discussion of women seems to reveal a profoundly undemocratic component. If there is a question that unifies the three strands of recent scholarly approaches to Addison and Steele-public sphere, cultural studies, and feminism-it has to do with the relationship between democracy, taste, the market, and gender. The general attitude toward Addison and Steele recently has been that they cannot be populist democrats, high culture elitists, and male chauvinists all at the same time. Terry Castle reminds us that "throughout the eighteenth century it was commonly held that

92

Chapter Three

literary judgment was-or should be-a privilege reserved for men." 12 It is true that they act from their sense of privileged access to criticism, but they do not reserve this privilege for men alone. They distribute it publicly, arguing that "what is wanting among Women, as well as among Men, is the Love of laudable Things" (no. 79, 1:339). So some counter that at least Addison and Steele offered women something to read-and, more important, a discussion of both how and what it is that readers ought to read. Addison and Steele argue that they are in fact encouraging women to read: "What improvements would a woman have made, who is susceptible of impression from what she reads, had she been guided to such books as have a tendency to enlighten the understanding and rectify the passions, as well as to those which are of little more use than to divert the imagination?" (no. 37, r:rs8). Even if Addison and Steele might be seen as positively offering women new access to a discussion about what to read, it is nonetheless particularly important to wonder what this reading means (for either gender) to Addison and Steele, especially as it seems to cast the imagination in a negative light. Addison and Steele's concern with a dangerous, destabilizing excess that they associate with women persists from The Tatler to The Spectator. Initially, Addison and Steele identify themselves (and criticism) with a potential to disrupt that they identify with women. However, as Erin Mackie contends, "A shift is apparent as The Spectator takes up where The Tatler leaves off." 13 There is a continuity of concern-how to deal with excess and with women as readers. How the two journals address that excess differs significantly, though. The Tatler seems more directly interested in exercising control-it is more "Hobbesian" in that way-sometimes trying almost single-handedly to reorganize society into classes of Steele's own devising. But because he cannot find a place for women within those categories, Steele needs to find some other way of proceeding, some other way of regulating or organizing. The Spectator picks up where a late Tatler essay left off, finding Moderation in the City. Especially with the Public Credit and Royal Exchange essays (Spectator nos. 3 and 69 ), Addison and Steele absorb lessons from Locke and describe the market as creating a circulation that balances extremes or as a mechanism for redistributing excess. Addison and Steele seem to realize that the same disruptive power they associate with women and excess verbiage can be found, modulated, in the market. In The Spectator the critic would be a tatler no longer. But in "the city," viewing-spectatorship-can be combined with the idea of the speculator, providing a new model for public criticism. Thus in a passage we have already seen from Spectator no. r, when readers are told, "I have made my self a Speculative Statesman, Soldier, Merchant and Artizan" {r:4), the Spectator is

The Spectator, the Market, and Criticism

93

on the one hand imagining the life of the merchant and on the other is a speculator, someone who tests value by investing. This turn to the market is central to how Addison and Steele modernize literary criticism. As Mary Poovey points out, "political economy and aesthetics were once part of the same discourse." 14 But it is important to add that Addison and Steele turn to the market to address the by-now persistent concern about democratized literacy. This modulating of excess is the role that Addison and Steele offer as the function of criticism. In this way The Spectator represents what James Thompson has called the early modern "semiological crisis over the concept of value." 15 In a way that The Tatter does not (or maybe could not until discovering the "moderation in the City"), The Spectator brings speculating to criticism. It is also a means by which their literary criticism overlaps with Habermas's public sphere. The market builds in more flexibility-for example, circulation, exchange, negotiation-than the categorical models proposed by the "Censor" in The Tatter (no. r62, 2:403). Others have noted that for The Spectator literature is identified with the city. Scott Black, for example, points out that "Addison provides the terms with which to understand the dynamics of the urban world." 16 Seeing criticism in the marketplace, though, emphasizes the "financial district" meaning of the "the city," for its dynamics also inform Addison and Steele's approach. But the problem remains whether such an idea of the market represents an adequate image of a modern democracy. As Jon Elster reminds us, it is important not to confuse "the kind of behaviour that is appropriate in the market place and that which is appropriate in the forum." 17 The adaptation of Habermas's public-sphere model to the history of literary criticism often focuses on the actual public spaces that supposedly facilitated policy discussions, and most important among these venues was the coffeehouse. Overlooked, at least for the history of literary criticism, is the fact that coffeehouses are not only gendered, male spaces of public critique and debate; they are also markets, insofar as coffee was the result of globalized trade (and also in the more narrow sense of the buying and selling going on in the coffeehouse itself). On this point Habermas insists, more than do those who subsequently adapt his narrative for the history of literary criticism. When Habermas charts the difference between "private realm" and "sphere of public authority," he places three types of public spheres in the middle: the political, the letters, and the "market of culture products." 18 For Habermas, these three spheres are more linked to each other than they are to either the private realm or the state. In Habermas's narrative, it is the market that provides the mechanism for the other two elements of the eighteenth-century public sphere. In the modern public sphere, according to Habermas, "the more properly civic

94

Chapter Three

tasks of a society engaged in critical public debate" can be understood in terms of "the protection of a commercial economy." 19 For Habermas the modern public sphere has its origins in a "new commercial relationship: the traffic in commodities and news created by early capitalist long-distance trade." 20 That is, the public sphere as described by Habermas is initially and centrally market-driven: trade makes news regarding commodities valuable, not only thereby informing trading but also turning news itself into a commodity. This conversion of news into a commodity is important to The Tatler and The Spectator papers and not only because the papers circulated in a way similar to the circulation of goods in the market. By the early eighteenth century in England the market, to use Terry Eagleton's terms, is "poised between state and civil society," at least as much as Addison and Steele's journals are. 21 The Spectator locates itself at the point where the markets for news and the market for cultural products intersect, offering news about cultural products for the market. Recent scholarship on Addison and Steele has considered their work in relation to the market, but this scholarship tends to focus on a tension between the market and the aesthetic or the cultural. 22 For example, in Market a la Mode, a study of fashion in The Tatler and The Spectator, Erin Mackie sees aesthetic value as "constructed on models of consumption and property that reflects market exchange," but Mackie believes that "this is done in order to distinguish between market and cultural value." 23 Similarly, in Making the English Canon Jonathan Kramnick argues, "Exchange value opposes itself to aesthetic value." 24 This repeated insistence on a distinction between cultural and market value in the work of the early critics has many sources, but one particularly important influence is Pierre Bourdieu's work on taste, distinction, and the cultural field. It is difficult to consider the development of criticism without also thinking of Bourdieu's sense that culture "fulfill[s] a social function of legitimating social differences." 25 Bourdieu's sense that attitudes toward the market-rather than their place within it-divide intellectuals and artists does not carry over, however, to the work of Addison and Steele. They were not trying to work in opposition to any market. After all, Addison tells us, "there is no place in the town which I so much love to frequent as the Royal-Exchange" (Spectator no. 69, I:292). Bourdieu is not necessarily considering Addison and Steele, the eighteenth century, or England in his consideration of taste. But that is all the more reason why it is important to be careful when adapting his model for the circumstances of eighteenth-century English literary criticism. Bourdieu's sense of a "class of practices in which the logic of the pre-capitalist economy lives on" relies on an image of a later, nineteenth-century avant-garde that is opposed to, undermines, or circumvents the market. 26

The Spectator, the Market, and Criticism

95

At least in the case of Addison and Steele, even words are themselves understood as a particular aspect of the market. Far from being opposed to what Bourdieu calls, from a later historical vantage point, the capitalist economy, Addison and Steele are quite enthusiastic about the market. Addison and Steele's good critic acts like a stock analyst, determining market valuations, in several senses of the word. That is, if the market is to be considered part of the public sphere, the area within it occupied by Addison and Steele's sense of literary criticism is such a rarified section of that public sphere that it is almost private; few are in a position to have enough knowledge to be able to determine true worth. Those people, after Addison and Steele, are called critics. As early as the fourth issue of The Tatler, which focuses solely on a contrast between "Clarissa and Chloe," women are associated in the journal with extremes: "Clarissa looks languishing; Chloe killing; Clarissa never fails of gaining admiration; Chloe of moving desire" (1:38). Whether it be languishing or killing, gaining admiration or moving desire, women in this discussion are treated throughout in terms of a series of oppositions and not only these particular oppositions. For example, Tatler no. 201 decides that they are both "the destroying fiend" and "the guardian angel" (3:73). In other words, women are, again, the combination of two extremes-so extreme that they can be both extremes at once. Or, conversely, any woman could become an extreme, wholly other to her current state: when a woman "comes to her glass," readers are told, she "endeavours to be as much another creature as she possibly can" (no. 1sr, 2:349). Again, women are so excessive that they can become a new person by working in front of a mirror. In this way, according to The Tatler, women are more of everything. For example, Steele posits a biblical version of emotional creationism, according to which "the fair sex, who are made of man and not of earth, have a more delicate humanity than we have" (no. 68, 1:472). This passage is typical of the journal's attitude toward women: they are more-in this case, more human-than men and consequently more delicate than them as well. Steele is quick to add that women's "volubility of speech" "should be considered with pleasure when it is used to express such passions as tend to sweeten or adorn conversation" (no. 217, 3:136). But this same excess is itself figured as two other further extremes of excess when it is used-inappropriately-"through rage": "I have seen the most amiable become the most deformed; and she that appeared one of the Graces, immediately turned into one of the Furies" (ibid.). Here again, even when women are already excessive, their use of that excess, unless it is within certain bounds, turns into another level of excess, as they swing from

Chapter Three one extreme to another, from amiable to deformed, from Grace to Fury. According to Tatler no. 68, the "delicate humanity" of women means that "a woman is ever moved for those whom she hears lament, a man for those whom he observes to suffer in silence" (1:472). Thus men respond to silence (and probably silently) while women respond to those who are crying out. Implicitly, by crying out themselves women only add to the lamentation, making what was already "extra" (at least when compared with silence) all the more excessive by their addition. The Tatler aims to clarify that the opposition between Clarissa and Chloe is part of a larger pattern of classificatory systems on which The Tatler relies, a system that applies to books as well. In the first issue Bickerstaff explains that various topics will be covered under the headings of different coffeehouses: "All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment shall be under the article of White's chocolate-house; poetry, under that of Will's coffee-house; learning, under the title of Grecian; foreign and domestic news, you will have from Saint James coffee-house; and what else I have to offer on any other subject shall be dated from my own apartment" (no. r, r:r6). The distinctions are spatial and cultural: each shop exists in London, and each is associated with a particular clientele. The separation of the books implies that entertainment, gallantry, learning, and pleasure differ from poetry and that poetry is not entertaining. With the spatial separation of the books, there would presumably be a similar separation of the readers of those books. Another important implication is that reading across the fields is either not necessary or will require traversing great social and spatial distances. This arrangement formalizes differences among readers (and assumes that readers will know in advance which type of book they are going to be reading). It is as if Steele assumes a new kind of logocentrism, according to which the differences in books' topics produce different books, books so different in themselves that readers from one group will not read books from another group, at least not without the effort of crossing over. At the beginning of The Tatler, then, the critic's role consists in getting the right books to the right people, or vice versa, and thus keeping both groups of opposed books and their associated groups of opposed people separate as well. In this process of separation the critic does the work of distinguishing for the reader, consistent with Steele's claim in the same issue that the journal will tell people what to think after they read. One might argue that such prereading is both helpful and required at a time of increased publication. Insofar as the process is one of separation, though, it seems to follow the model set by seventeenth-century Royal Society works such as Wilkins's An Essay Towards a Real Character (see Chapter 2) or maybe Newton's prism.

The Spectator, the Market, and Criticism

97

Tatter no. 162 continues the journal's interest in classification tables. There, Steele, playing the Censor, makes a similar claim to classify people into what he considers their appropriate categories, "ranging them under their several tribes, disposing them into proper classes, and subdividing them into their respective centuries" (2:403). The result is an extraordinary, and playful, range of social distinctions: "Dappers," "Smarts," "Rakes," "Pretty Fellows," "Pedants," "Men of Fire," "Gamesters," "Politicians," "Cits," "Citizens," "Free-Thinkers," "Philosophers," "Wits," "Snuff-takers," "Duellists," "Men of Honour," and "Esquires" (2:403). As Mr. Bickerstaff reflects in this issue on reaching the first anniversary of the journal-"having now enjoyed this office for the space of a twelve month" (2:402)-there is a way in which such organizing represents a version of what Steele had hoped to accomplish in The Tatter. It is all the more important, then, that this oblique "censorship" -using the journal to classify things-fails: women frustrate Steele's system of classification. It is a list of male stereotypes, but women are not invisible or unrecorded through all this organization; rather, women cannot be assimilated into the system of organization being set up. Mr. Bickerstaff admits "having not yet reduced them to any tolerable order" (2:403). Later in The Tatter Bickerstaff uses what he calls a "Church Thermometer" to help him with his process of classification. Like "the ordinary thermometer will be affected by the breathing of people who are in the room where it now stands" (no. 220, 3:150), the Church Thermometer rises and falls with the cries of the religious around it, assessing volubility as a measurement of religio-political sentiments in London. When the Anglican Church marks the middle of the thermometer "between Zeal and Moderation," it is described as female: "the situation in which she always flourishes, and. in which every good Englishman wishes her" (3:150). If the church is to be taken as a representative woman, then women should hover between zeal and moderation; it is of course not clear where that is, but it is important for the history of English literary criticism that the Anglican position is defined as moderate. Most important, The Tatter reports that the thermometer "fell in the lower half of the glass as I went further into the city, until at length it settled at Moderation, where it continued all the time I stayed about the Exchange, as also while I passed by the Bank" (3:151). If, as Terry Eagleton describes it, early criticism like Addison and Steele's is "poised between state and civil society," the Church Thermometer discussion in The Tatter indicates that a model for such a liminal institution was to be found in the Bank and the Exchange. As he walks through London anonymously taking the measure of the city-and locating moderation at the Exchange-the Tatler becomes somewhat more like a spectator,

Chapter Three and this issue marks a transition from the approach of The Tatler to that of The Spectator. With the essay "Public Credit" The Spectator, as early as the third issue, resumes The Tatter's concern with excess. The differences between The Tatler and The Spectator, though, are important here. Not only does The Spectator bring these elements together into a narrative, brief but full of compressed detail, but the discussion of Public Credit so early in the new journal indicates The Spectator's increased focus on commerce and what we would now call the economy. Invoking chauvinist stereotypes, The Spectator refers to the cycles of monetary inflation and deflation; as Terry Mulcaire points out, in the early eighteenth century, "Whig writers began to represent the British economy in the imaginary figure of a young woman." 27 In Spectator no. 3 Public Credit is described as "a beautiful Virgin seated on a Throne of Gold," who varies from one extreme to the other: "in the twinkling of an Eye, she would fall away from the most florid Complexion, and wither into a Skeleton" (r:rs). Again excess and extremes are associated with women. This change in the figure of Public Credit is matched by changes in the "prodigious Heap of Bags of Mony [sic]" (r:r6) that accompanies her. Obviously, the metaphor refers to inflation. This dangerous swing from inflation to deflation is rectified by three pairs that enter the hall: "Liberty with Monarchy," "Moderation leading in Religion," and "the third a Person whom I had never seen, with the genius of Great Britain" (r:r7). Together they revive the flagging Public Credit, and "the Bags swell'd to their former Bulk" (r:r7). This combination of liberty, monarchy, moderation, and religion is a telling reworking of the democratic terms of the seventeenth century, a combination that is important to The Spectator's political philosophy. For Addison, writing after the Glorious Revolution, liberty is allied to the form of government that the radicals of the r64os thought prevented it. And religion is linked to moderation, a combination it had been argued the radical democrats of the r64os could not see. For the development of the Spectator as a character, however, the most important figure in the story of Public Credit is the "Person whom I had never seen," the only one who remains anonymous and unknown. Although this character has been read as King George l-as someone unknown to England-this person is also similar to the character of the Spectator, who, readers are told, "live[s] in the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species" (Spectator no. r, r:4). This idea of the critic as an unseen seer-a spectator-arises in The Tatler, where the theater is said to be "very convenient for seeing, without being myself observed" (Tatler no. ro8, 2:154). But whereas Mr. Bickerstaff might

The Spectator, the Market, and Criticism

99

remain an unseen spectator in the theater so as to "tattle," The Spectator emphasizes a new understanding of spectatorship possible after the Church Thermometer discovers moderation in the city. Like the Spectator, this fifth person in the story of Public Credit can enter the space of exchange without being known to others: "I am known to no Body there but my Friend" (Spectator no. 69, 1:294). This unknown person matters to The Spectator (the magazine) because The Spectator (both magazine and character) claims it can do for literature what the unknown person does for public credit: moderate value. A few months after the Church Thermometer essay in The Tatter discovers moderation in the city, The Spectator describes a "secret Satisfaction" (Spectator no. 69, 1:292) at going to the Royal Exchange, in an essay that at least one scholar has described as "the single most famous essay in the Spectator." 28 It is probably not overstating the case to say that this essay is a central statement of what has come to be known as the Enlightenment project. Describing people who come together in London from all over the world to sell their wares, Addison sees a new world order, one that through a combination of Newtonian physics, Harveyan circulation, and an early sentimentalism he casts the Exchange as a new political possibility. As he mingles among merchants who come to London from Armenia, Egypt, Holland, Japan, and Moscow, Addison thinks that the Royal Exchange is a world government, "a great Council, in which all considerable Nations have their Representatives" (1:293). It is in a new sense, then, that Addison is "like the old Philosopher" in believing "that he was a Citizen of the World" (1:294). This new world government of international trade creates a new kind of citizenship, known best to those who participate in markets such as the Royal Exchange. The merchants who run this government of trade "knit Mankind together" (1:296). The powerful experience of being among those few Londoners who know of the inner workings of this unifying international market sometimes leaves Addison overwhelmed, "with Tears that have stolen down my Cheeks" (1:294). The market solves for The Spectator the problem of organization that had been still nagging one year into The Tatter. Rather than simply categorizing a gamut of differences, as the Censor had tried to do in The Tatter, the Royal Exchange moves excess from one area of the world to another to achieve an overall balance. As Addison and Steele describe it, the Exchange deals in extremes. Because "the Food often grows in one Country, and the Sauce in another" (1:295), the difference between regions necessitates compensating for the seemingly unequal distribution of goods. In this Newtonian model of equal oppositions, a lack in one place is balanced by a surplus elsewhere. Nature has "taken a particular

roo

Chapter Three

Care to disseminate her Blessings among the different Regions of the World" (Spectator no. 69, 1:294). Market exchange is designed to accommodate excess; only the extra can be sold. In this sense the market acts as a regulatory mechanism at the center of global forces arrayed as opposing extremes. Without such extremes, such differences, there is no need for the market, but at the same time the market also offers the model for modulating extremes. For Addison Nature has done this, quite specifically, "with an Eye to this mutual Intercourse and Traffic among Mankind" (1:294). With the market "the Natives of the several Parts of the Globe might have a kind of Dependence upon one another, and be united by their common Interest" (1:294-95). That is, the differences of region and culture can meet in the market, where they will be moderated by the mutual need of one side for what the other offers. In Women and Print Culture Kathryn Shevelow contends that The Spectator is "even more programmatic and prescriptive than the Tatler." 29 However, the circulation, exchange, and negotiation found in the market build in more flexibility than the models proposed in The Tatler, at least when, for example, compared to the Censor's arranging people into categories. The market addresses excess by putting it into a circulation that balances the extremes. It is still not clear that the flexibility afforded by the market is consistent with the claims for democracy recently attributed to the eighteenth-century emergence of literary criticism. If Addison and Steele turn to the market, they do so at least in part as a response to new conditions of democracy, new conditions of access in this case. In the market model, however, Addison and Steele are acknowledging their inability to control the forces that The Tatter tries to classify. Moreover, with the shift to the market, Addison and Steele are put in the position of "selling" their approach. Thus, in The Spectator they cast their readings as one possibility among many, conceding that the reader of The Spectator, like a customer, might choose from among several options of essays and essayists. Spectator no. 262, for example, claims, "I shall not however presume to impose upon others my own particular Judgment on the Author, but only deliver it as my private Opinion" (2:520). Here we see a revision of the attitude that characterizes The Tatler, at least as its plan is outlined in the first issue. Insofar as it was only the critic who could tell the well-affected members of the community what to think, that journal creates the impression that the critic is in unique possession of a right way of thinking. Spectator no. 262, by contrast, allows for the possibility that the reader has a better, alternative reading. The fact that such a reading is "delivered" also reflects the importance of the market to The Spectator. Finally, and most important, though, The Spectator differs from The Tatler in its

The Spectator, the Market, and Criticism

IOI

increased focus on what makes for good reading. If, as Tatter no. r puts it, The Tatler will tell readers what to think, The Spectator is more likely to tell readers how to read instead. The full significance of this speculative side of "the Spectator" emerges when Steele argues, "Words are like Money" (Spectator no. ro3, r:43r). Addison and Steele are not alone in making an analogy between words and money. Hobbes, for example, contends that "words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the mony of fools" (Leviathan 1.4.28-29). For Hobbes, then, the comparison is negative: in the absence of a strong, centralized authority to settle both meaning and value, money is untrustworthy, worthless. A few decades later, Sir William Temple invokes the same analogy when he argues that "the best is to take words as they are most commonly spoken and meant, like coin." 30 But unlike Addison and Steele, Temple explains that we should read "without raising scruples upon the weight of the allay, unless the cheat or the defect be gross and evident." 31 In other words, for Temple money is understood as being worth its weight; thus, like coins that, clipped, were worth something other than their weight, one might as well simply act as if the word (like the clipped coins) is worth what it is supposed to be. But Addison and Steele, writing after and invoking Locke, have access to a quite different way of understanding money. After the shift to paper money that Locke had helped theorize, what Temple calls the weight of the allay has been separated from the worth of the money. Such a separation of the weight and the worth would have represented precisely what Hobbes considered the money of fools. For Addison and Steele, though, after Locke, words being like money means simply that they operate on something like an exchange. In the context of The Spectator's two claims-that the market balances extremes and that words are like money-Locke becomes important for modern literary criticism as Addison and Steele describe it. In the Second Treatise of Government Locke articulates a fourfold theory of value-"intrinsick," "use," "exchange," and "overplus," each building on the other (294, 301, 302). This schema can provide us with a vocabulary for understanding what happens to criticism when Addison and Steele bring it to the exchange. For Locke, intrinsic value represents the worth of an object prior to any intervention of human labor, but because '"tis Labour indeed that puts the difference of value on everything" (296), intrinsic value is merely a mental concept at best. In a pamphlet titled "Some of the Consequences that are Like to Follow Upon Lessening of Interest to 4 Per Cent," Locke himself argues that "there is noe such intrinsicke naturall settled value in anything." 32 The second layer, use value, follows from the purposes to which one could put an object (as, for

I02

Chapter Three

instance, acorns could be eaten, to cite one of Locke's examples from the state of nature). Because it works only in exchange, money has neither intrinsic nor use value; its value is measured in what can be received for it. The same is true for words: they too have neither intrinsic nor use value but work only in the process of exchange, where they acquire a value or a meaning greater than their intrinsic value. "Words," Locke argues, "having naturally no signification, the idea which each word stands for must be learned and retained by those who would exchange thoughts" (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 3·9·5·477). In this way Locke's description of words replays the terms he had already used to describe money. Like money, words have no intrinsic value (or no natural signification). And they are quite specifically instruments of "exchange," like money. That is, Locke argues that words are like coins. Both words and coins facilitate exchange, and both have their "value only from the consent of Men," 33 to quote Locke's description of gold and silver. After Locke (which is to say also and in part after Hobbes, Sprat, Wilkins, and Dryden as well) words have become conventional (not natural) but nonetheless standardized. In Models of Value James Thompson describes an early eighteenth-century "reconceptualization of money from treasure to capital." 34 The same point could be applied to words. Prior to Locke's reconceptualization of words as money, meaning had been a kind of treasure; after Locke, however, meaning is like capital, always changing and meaningful only insofar as it is in circulation. After Locke, writing cannot have intrinsic value. Instead, it can have either use value or exchange value. Writing with mere use value is less valuable than that with exchange value, and nothing is more important than the "overplus," what we call the profit. Consequently, texts, in order to rise to the level of literature, must have an "overplus" derived from their exchange value. If words are like money, then the important thing is to set their value-not their meaning. Steele makes precisely this distinction, claiming "when the current Value of them [words] is generally understood, no Man is cheated by them" (Spectator no. 103, 1:431). Thus describing meaning casts it as a form of accountancy. When words from a "hollow kind of conversation" are "being brought into the account," it can be seen, Steele claims, that "they are meer Cyphers" (r:431). In other words, treating meaning as value can determine between those words that are valuable and those that are simply excessive. And Steele significantly describes such excess verbiage as "driving a Trade of dissimulation" (1:431). Understood thus in terms of trade, in terms of value rather than in terms of meaning, some excessive words create an inflated sense of value and increase the risk or volatility for the market as a whole. In such a

The Spectator, the Market, and Criticism

103

situation Spectator no. 103 claims that "Men's Words are hardly any Signification of their Thoughts" (r:43r); they have no intrinsic value. Thus, when thought of in terms of market exchange, words, like money, require a special, privileged, central market for words, something like the Royal Exchange. Such an exchange would itself need a speculative spectator who can determine what words mean or, perhaps more important, what they are worth. It is not only that literary critics become something like the brokers of what is now called the literary marketplace, determining value. According to this combination of science, economy, and linguistics, the market will absorb only certain uses of words. The successful writer will reign in the metaphors and the figurative language, because doing so will not only communicate better; writers will also find a larger audience for the overplus. At the same time, however, authors need to be aware of Gresham's Law: worse coins circulate more, while coins with a high percentage of metal will be hoarded. The tension in criticism after Locke will be in distinguishing cause and effect in Gresham's Law: does wide circulation indicate that a work is baser; or conversely, does narrow circulation necessarily mean that a work is refined? As the quantities of money and texts coincidentally increase, as they did in the seventeenth century, the value of books could easily have dropped, along with their price. In a sense the fact that the value did not drop has to do with a kind of quality control that literary criticism represented. If words are like money, then not only do words acquire value only in exchange (not in themselves or in use aside from exchange), but criticism as developed by Addison and Steele is tied to analyzing the exchange of exchange. Rather than the alternative to the market that Bourdieu would lead us to expect, this Lockean criticism in the marketplace studies the extras implicit in exchange, the overplus of exchanges that is at the heart of exchange itself. That is, Addison and Steele make literary criticism a form of arbitrage. By placing criticism at the exchange, Addison and Steele commit criticism to a study of what Locke calls the overplus. There are some uses of words whose exchange value so exceeds their use that they are basically a form of overplus. Nonetheless, in the same way that there is still someone who can support the overplus of the land, so, too, there are people who can support an overplus of words. This overplus of words comes to be called literature; criticism is the system that helps to regulate the exchange, and to determine value. The Spectator's move to the exchange puts literature in a sometimes precarious, sometimes powerful position on the outside, as supplement, as superficial, and as surplus. This focus on the exchange of exchange requires an extraordinary level of self-reflection from criticism, putting literary analysis in the most tenuous segment of Habermas's public sphere.

104

Chapter Three

The remainder of this chapter will pursue two proposals through which The Spectator addresses the problem of narrowness, specialization, or access required for such literary-critical brokers. To use the terms of the exchange, we might call the first proposal an index, a review of representative transactions: the canon. The second proposal follows from the first proposal's implicit concession that it is not possible to read everything: an ease of reading that draws on the Restoration contribution to the debate over reading. When it considers the marketplace, the history of criticism usually focuses on the development of the literary marketplace, meaning "both the physical locations for printing, selling, and reading printed matter and ... the transactions and customs regulating the publication of what is known as 'intellectual property."' 35 But understanding the canon as a selection of valuable works is related to the shift to the market associated with the public sphere, and with Addison and Steele's Spectator. With The Spectator Addison and Steele apparently meant to offer this canon to women in particular. Moreover, the logic of the market as Addison described it in Spectator no. 69 is operating even in this transfer of the canon; it goes from those who already have, men, to those who need, women, according to Addison and Steele. This market model also connects to the political constitution that Addison offers. Spectator no. 287, "An Essay upon the Civil Part of the Constitution," provides probably the most complete articulation of a political theory in the journal (3:18-19). Like Hobbes, Addison believes that it is "Equality that we find in Human Nature" (3:19). For Hobbes, though, such equality requires government; otherwise, as far as Hobbes is concerned, equality of opportunity will result in the constant confrontation of each against each, the state of war. Addison, following Locke, sees government's purpose as that of facilitating rather than restraining that natural equality; he defines liberty as that "which exempts one Man from Subjection to another so far as the Order and Oeconomy of Government will permit" (3:19). That is, for Addison the force implicit in government is there to facilitate liberty. This approach combines Berlin's negative and positive liberties: we have the freedom to do as we will, but such freedom requires governmental protection from others. When Addison contends that if "you extinguish his Fear, and consequently overturn in him one of the great Pillars of Morality" (357), he echoes Hobbes's sense that "Men have no pleasure (but on the contrary a great deal of grief) in keeping company, where there is no power able to over awe them all" (88). For Hobbes that power is in the Leviathan; for Addison it is more widely distributed. Addison, unlike Hobbes, defends a mixed form of government. He argues that the "mixt Government, consisting of three Branches, The

The Spectator, the Market, and Criticism Regal, the Noble, and the Popular" (3:19-20), is preferable to either a unified or two-part government. Addison's approach reflects in part the influence of classical republicanism; and it reflects a Whig position on the Glorious Revolution. But it is also the case that with the tripartite arrangement, Addison again focuses on excess, now tamed and regulated not only by the market but also by the English constitution. The unified government, because of its centralization, "is no better than a Tyranny" (3:21). A two-part government is not much different because whichever side wins in a vote over any particular issue will have the same relationship to that issue that the unicameral government would have overall. In a two-part government the opposition would disappear every time an action was undertaken. Thus it is the extra implicit in the three-part government that makes it the best. For Addison, in a three-part mixed constitution, there will always be an additional side on any particular issue, representing an additional interest. As is the case with how the market redistributes from areas that have to areas that need, this excess can operate in several ways to balance the system. It can, for example, oppose, leveraging a balance away from the united other two sides, or it can be the fulcrum, mediating between two sides already in opposition. At any given time, though, or on any given issue, it cannot necessarily be predicted which position any part of the mixed constitution might adopt. In other words, precisely because there is an excess circulating, there is always a new way to balance competing interests. According to Addison, the most important cultural benefits flow from this mixed constitution: "Riches and Plenty are the natural Fruits of Liberty" (3:21). Addison details a definite sequence whereby the balancing excess of the mixed constitution leads to productivity, especially cultural productivity (which, in his circulatory model, will of course be sent to those in need). After taking care of "Necessaries," "we look," according to Addison, "for Pleasures and Amusements" (3:21). Chief among these pleasures are "Reading and Contemplation," which Addison describes as "the two great Sources of Knowledge" (3:21). So, once we possess an excess of necessities, we turn to reading and contemplation. Once that happens, as "Men grow wise, they naturally love to communicate their Discoveries" (3:22). Again, there is the exchange, and again it is identified with communication. In this case the readers, participants in this communication, "emulate, imitate and surpass one another" (3:22). That is, as was also the case with the market, knowledge is placed in the most rarified segment of the exchange: after there is a surplus beyond what is necessary, there will be an exchange of ideas, and within that exchange there are some who are committed to "surpassing" others. There are some, in other words, who are committed to the overplus within the exchange.

ro6

Chapter Three

This move to the market, rather than disengaging Addison and Steele from their concern over women as figures of democratized reading, rearticulates their concern in new terms. In The Spectator, as in The Tatler, Addison and Steele continue to claim that they are addressing women in particular. In Spectator no. ro, for example, Addison argues that "there are none to whom this paper will be more useful, than to the female world" (r:46). While this early claim is consistent with The Tatler's focus on and supposed identification with women, in The Spectator Addison adds that, unfortunately, women's "amusements seem contrived for them rather as they are women, than as they are reasonable creatures" (ibid.). With The Spectator Addison claims to be offering women a version of the reading typically reserved for men; Addison assumes that, as reasonable creatures, men and women could be reading the same books. In thus believing that he is offering to women the best authors, ancient and modern, Addison engages in the same balancing of extremes that we have seen in his discussion of the market. Educated men, he implies, would not need an index or a selection of the best authors; they would have read them already as part of their education. In the same way that the market trades from those who have to those who need, Addison suggests that the (male) critic has something to offer the female reader. If, as James Engell believes, the public-sphere journals from this period of criticism represent "'penny universities,' " 36 then it may be that they do so for those people least likely to attend universities at the time: women. Addison and Steele's discussion of reading not only participates in the ongoing Restoration disavowal of the more subjective models of reading associated with the radical democrats of the r64os and r65os; it also combines that profound concern for democratized reading with a newfound focus on the female reader. Thus Addison argues, "I have often thought there has not been sufficient pains taken in finding out proper employments and diversions for the fair ones" (Spectator no. ro, r:46). In "Commerce, Conversation, and Politeness in the Early EighteenthCentury Periodical" Stephen Copley complains that "the Spectator writers have a considerable investment in confining female concerns to those of domestic consumption.'m It is true that Addison and Steele's "penny university" of democratized literacy for women would result in largely domestic pursuits, reading being a strange hybrid of the public and the private-publishing makes public, and silent reading makes private again (even if the reading is occurring in a public space such as a coffeehouse). In addition to the domesticity of the activity there is the question of what kind of reading Addison and Steel are describing for their female readers, whether they actually are offering anything like their own reading. Insofar as literary criticism is the public record of reading (and a debate over

The Spectator, the Market, and Criticism

107

how to read) this seems like the more important point. When Addison testifies, "as I have taken the Ladies under my particular Care, I shall make it my Business to find out in the best Authors ancient and modern such Passages as may be for their use, and endeavour to accommodate them as well as I can to their Taste" (Spectator no. 92, 1:392-93), there are several important implications about the kind of reading that is at issue. Addison is in the position of knowing what might make a good contribution to the developing reader. But rather than offer those books, Addison claims that he will bring back only certain "Passages." Offering passages raises questions about how much reading Addison thinks his readers should do. The reading has already been performed by Addison, and the reading that The Spectator's readers will do is merely that of selections. It is as if Dryden's admonition to avoid the obscure passages has been anticipated in advance for readers. In Tatler no. 108 Steele argues that "it is impossible to read a page in Plato, Tully, and a thousand other ancient moralists, without being a greater and a better man for it" (2:156). It is a particularly important point for a developing literary criticism; Steele is providing a clear, moral defense of reading. Just sixty years earlier, according to Hobbes, reading some of the ancient moralists causes the dissolution of governments. Presumably, it is not that Steele thinks reading itself can make people better, only that reading particular books can. In part, there is a difference between Steele's and Hobbes's attitude toward such books in themselves. On another level, though, Steele's claim follows from his belief that the reading of such books can be made safe. The question, of course, is how to make reading safe. As we will see, with the "Pleasures of the Imagination" essays, Addison and Steele sketch a kind of model for determining which books might have this effect. In this particular case, though, Steele's would also seem to be a logocentric approach: there is something about the book itself that can positively transform the reader. But whereas others had pointed to the Bible for their example of logocentrism, Steele points to the Greek and Roman classics. On one level Steele's point reflects a secularizing shift within the debate over reading after the English Civil Wars. On another level Steele is following the path set by Dryden, for whom precedence was a central issue in both literature and politics. Of course Steele's claim seems gender specific: a reader of these texts can become a better man. If the word man is not a generic term for human here, then there is the question of what it means for Addison to be at pains to develop "employments" (Spectator no. 10, 1:46) for women if the result of such activities simply makes them better men. While The Tatler may make a preliminary defense for the beneficial effects of reading, The Spectator, especially in the "Pleasures of the

ro8

Chapter Three

Imagination" series, goes further to show "how we may acquire that fine Taste of Writing" (Spectator no. 409, 3:527). Several of the suggestions made in these essays will be adopted and reworked, becoming in the process central to the story that early English literary criticism tells about its practice. 38 In Spectator no. 409, for example, Addison makes a particularly important distinction between two types of reading, "Perusal" and "reading": Upon the Perusal of such writings he does not find himself delighted in an extraordinary Manner, or if, upon reading the admired Passages in such Authors, he finds a Coldness and Indifference in his Thoughts, he ought to conclude, not (as is too usual among tasteless Readers) that the Author wants those Perfections which have been admired in him, but that he himself wants the Faculty of discovering them. (3:528)

Addison might be asking readers to give the author the benefit of the doubt, or to think twice about their own abilities before casting a negative judgment on an author, but in the process he refers to two types of reading. It is not only that the reader should read something twice before deciding whether it is worthy; the reader should also read the same text in two contrasting ways before making a decision. First, there is "the perusal of such writings." This would seem to be the initial reading, the first absorption, of the text under consideration. But this first review covers the entire piece, the "writings." In this first reading the good reader will be delighted. Failing that, there should be a second reading, this one-unlike the first-called a "reading," of "the admired Passages." Unlike the first reading (the perusal, which was concerned with the writing overall), this second reading pays closer attention to certain parts of the text, just passages. Moreover, the first reading seems to be what Addison claims to do as a critic, prior to offering "passages" for readers of The Spectator. It seems, then, that the readers of The Spectator are invited to the closer, second type of reading, "reading," when considering passages selected by the critic. What is so striking, though, is the fact that neither the critic nor the reader of the selected passages is doing the second, closer type of reading to the whole text. The critic will peruse the entire writing, and the reader of the critic's selected passages reads only those preselected items. In other words, in this model neither the critic nor the reader of the critic is actually "reading" the text. The critic only peruses the whole text, while the reader does not have to see the whole text at all, a possibility that may follow on Dryden's recommendation to avoid obscure passages. According to Spectator no. 411, "The pleasures of the imagination have this advantage, above those of the understanding, that they are

The Spectator, the Market, and Criticism

109

more obvious, and more easie to be acquired" (3:538}. On the one hand, this is an important and positive change in the attitude toward the imagination since Hobbes. Hobbes had seen the imagination as inaccurate and deceptive because it is for him a decaying sense and thus interferes with understanding. Addison, by contrast, reverses the terms, treating imagination as preferable to understanding. It can as a consequence be seen why Addison's essays are important for the history of English literary criticism; they are a rare defense of enjoying verbal imagery in those early decades after Hobbes. On the other hand, though, it is equally important to note that Addison implies that understanding occurs without imagination or that imagination hinders understanding. The assumption seems to be that the pleasures of the imagination can be distinguished from the pleasures of the understanding. This separation echoes a similar distinction made four decades earlier, in Wilkins's An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, according to which there are spiritual actions, such as thinking, and corporal action, such as scratching and reading (see Chapter 2). In Wilkins's An Essay Towards a Real Character it is not clear how Wilkins actually evaluates the difference he indicates between understanding and reading. For Addison, though, the disconnect between the two capacities of understanding and imagination is beneficial: "the Pleasures of the Fancy are more conducive to Health, than those of the Understanding, which are worked out by Dint of Thinking, and attended with too violent a Labour of the Brain" (Spectator no. 4rr, 3:539). Not only is the pleasure of the imagination tied, as we have seen, to the pleasure of not thinking, but thinking is understood in terms of "violence." Moreover, Addison defends the imagination because its pleasures are obvious and easy. Several decades after Milton argued that readers should reject the "easy literature of custom," 39 Addison and Steele offer it as the best possibility. It would seem that the consequences of Milton's refusal of ease contribute to Addison and Steele's preference for easiness. For Addison that easiness is precisely why the pleasures of the imagination are so important. Not only is the easiness of the pleasure of the imagination tied, as we have seen, to the pleasure of not thinking, but thinking is understood in terms of violence. When the pleasures of the imagination are separated from understanding and are said to be less violent, we can hear in Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination" essays the familiar Restoration concern with the dangers of democratized reading. Recently there has been a widespread popular and even populist sense that literary criticism and literary studies ought to recover the relationship with the public that Addison and Steele had with it in the early eighteenth century. For example, in Addison and Steele Are Dead Brian

IIO

Chapter Three

McCrea argues that "more important, then, than any tally of its readers is the commitment of The Spectator to popularity," 40 which McCrea believes no longer motivates the writing of literary criticism or the study

of English literature generally. McCrea is not alone in thinking that the study of literature needs to recover its connection to Addison and Steele's popularizing impulse. In The Committed Word, for example, James Engell complains about "the self-enclosed, hermetically sealed nature of much academic writing on the subject of literature," and he refers to "models" for alternatives to the current situation, pointing out that "its earlier practice has been loosely associated, following Jiirgen Habermas, with 'the public sphere"' (170, 167). As important as it might be to find for academic literary criticism a wide audience, however, there are several serious concerns that must be considered before we try to revive Addison and Steele, the most obvious being the complicated relationship their journals have with the female readers they claim to address. Another question we must face before adopting Addison and Steele's approach has to do with their separations, for example, of books and their audiences in The Tatter or of understanding and imagination in The Spectator. It is also important to remember that Addison and Steele are committed throughout to a rarified section of the exchange, the place where the overplus of the surplus circulates. Literature's current complicated position-seemingly open to all and seemingly elitist at the same time-can be said to follow from the perhaps unacknowledged importance of the market in this model of literary criticism. Also there is the related question of how Addison and Steele's putative popularity can accord with their evident concern for what Bourdieu calls "Distinction" in his book of that title. It is not clear that we should uncritically accept the idea that in The Spectator Addison and Steele are early democrats, at least not in ways the term has come to signify. After all, The Spectator advocates "reverencing the Prince's Person, and holding it, according to the Laws, inviolable and sacred" (Spectator no. 384, 3:442). There are certain democracies that now lack a king and that would be ruled out by this aspect of Addison and Steele's political philosophy. And, of course, there is the crucial treatment of women in the essays. As Erin Mackie points out, Addison and Steele associate women with "inconstancy, irrationality, and superficiality."41 Addison and Steele may attribute that superficiality to women's lack of access to education, and they may even attempt to address it in their journals, but again, it is not clear that such presumptions necessitate bringing Addison and Steele themselves back to life, so to speak. Addison and Steele had their reasons for proposing such a model and for claiming to offer it to women in particular. But we run the risk in this

The Spectator, the Market, and Criticism

III

model of losing attentive readings to entire texts. In other words, we run the risk of losing a democratized vision of thorough literacy, of the best type of reading. As important as Addison and Steele's circulatory model might be for the development of literature, understood in a general sense as texts published and discussed, the model is designed to downplay what were before and have since been considered the "poetic" and "literary" aspects of reading and of texts because those represent exactly the dangerous irrational excess about which Addison and Steele were concerned from the beginning. This modulating of excess is the role that Addison and Steele seem to offer as the function of criticism. It must be conceded, though, that such a function seems not to have persuaded all of Addison and Steele's contemporaries in literary criticism. The concern that can be seen in many of the critical titles published during the early decades of the eighteenth century was quite otherwise: it was argued by those around Addison and Steele that there was not yet a model of reading that went far enough in minimizing irrational excess. As we will see in the next chapter, a good deal of literary critical discussion in the first two decades of the eighteenth century was given over to finding an even more regularized model of reading: the Classical Rules.

CHAPTER FOUR

Early Eighteenth -Century Rules for Reading An Act of Settlement

.

~

Nathaniel Bailey's An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, published in 1721, defines to read as "to guess, to divine, or foretel [sic]." 1 In other words, even at this late date in the debate over theories of reading, reading was still associated with the mystical; it was still seen as both religious and irrational. The concern, consequently, remained finding a way of reading that could lessen the guesswork. Over the two decades preceding the publication of Bailey's Dictionary, there had been a turn toward rules and method to stabilize what had sometimes been thought of as mere prophecy. This interest in rules can be seen across the fields at this point in the eighteenth century-in architecture, grammar, literature, and philosophy, to name but a few. 2 The over arching critical preference in this period was for developing a set of rules that might organize texts and their readers. In this way, at least during the three decades from the end of the seventeenth century through the 1720s, The Spectator papers look like an exception to the rule. For although Addison and Steele's turn to the market might have offered the benefit of modulating extremes, it is not after all rational, at least not in the way the rules were thought to be in the early eighteenth century. By turning to the market, Addison and Steele were adopting a modern model for balancing extremes. But in the early eighteenth century the rules were a powerful alternative to this modern approach. This chapter reviews the debate over reason, rules, and reading and considers what that debate offered to the development of literary criticism. Especially with reference to the crucial contribution of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism, the discussion of the rules offers a new vision of judgment methodized.

Eighteenth-Century Rules for Reading

II3

An important new aspect of the agenda for early eighteenth-century criticism can be seen in Glossographia Anglicana Nova (1707). We have seen how Hobbes, Sprat, Dryden, and Addison and Steele argued over how to define reading among already literate readers; their focus was on the consequences of equality of comprehension, differences in approaches to texts, and the distorting effects of words on perception. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, though, Glossographia Anglicana Nova sets out to serve a pedagogical purpose-"begun and carry'd on with the same view of instructing the lgnorant." 3 It is not simply a question of whether one should read literally or through the Spirit, although the discussion of the rules for reading does sometimes entail that as well. This interest in what Glossographia Anglicana Nova calls "instructing the Ignorant" distinguishes early eighteenth-century arguments about reading from those in the seventeenth century. When seen in relation to early eighteenth-century criticism, seventeenth-century arguments about reading turn out to be premised on questions of technique; the differences in reading techniques attendant on the new openness of the press were thought to have potentially devastating consequences. By contrast, early eighteenth-century criticism was built on the question of being "useful even to the lowest sort of illiterate," 4 as articulated by Glossographia Anglicana Nova. The question at this point seems to have been how to combine the seventeenth-century debate over the literal with a pedantic sense of addressing people treated as the great unlettered. There is in other words a public pedagogical component to the discussion of reading in the first third of the eighteenth century. This focus on the rules in the first decades of the eighteenth century is part of the long process of recovering from the related religious and hermeneutic concerns that were thought to have contributed to the Civil Wars: rules for reading are the latest development in a series of attempts to get around the problem of the irrationality that is thought to be at the heart of democratized reading, and of democracy. Thus the discussion of the rules and reading participates in the same concern over the effect of words that we have traced to the influence of Hobbes. 5 It also represents part of a longer process, what Frederick Beiser calls in The Sovereignty of Reason "the formalization of the Protestant conscience." 6 That is, the focus on rules can be said to have been influenced by the late seventeenth-century debate about reason and faith, as we will see in this chapter with reference to John Toland's Christianity not Mysterious (r696). But it also reflects an increasing interest in the rational more generally, something that will later come to be seen as the defining element of the Enlightenment. Although the early eighteenth-century focus on formalization or rationalization reflects Sprat's insistence that

II4

Chapter Four

the relationship between words and their objects be clarified, the scientists of the Restoration-era Royal Society understand science in largely observational terms, and they try therefore to ground language through a comprehensive comparative observation. While "scientific" in the sense of being empirical, the observational, comparative, and descriptive approach of these scientists is not sufficiently systematic to address the irrationality that is apparently the central problem for English criticism. Where Sprat claimed in the r66os to offer a model of descriptive empiricism, the debate of the early eighteenth century has access to a new model of scientific understanding: Newton's natural philosophy.? By revealing the mathematical patterns and mechanical operations of planetary motion, Newton's Principia (r687) seemed to offer a way of redescribing-methodizing-everything in terms of laws or rules. 8 Moreover, Newton's natural philosophy had the advantage of fitting with early eighteenth-century neoclassicism. In the early eighteenth century Newton's laws were seen as being as much Greek and Roman as they were scientific. Like the classical architects, Newton had discovered and represented universal laws. The story of how Newton's work was popularized has already been told by others and stands somewhat outside the interests of this study. 9 Others have considered how Newtonianism might have affected authors writing poetry in the period. 10 But how this debate over rules was incorporated into the then-developing idea of literary criticism is not as well known. It turns out, though, that Newton demands the critic as well as the muse. Central to the rules for reading debate is Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism (r7rr), which develops a sophisticated vision of the rules that incorporates and alters other positions in the ongoing discussion. Pope, who elsewhere describes Newton as "A mortal Man unfold[ing] all Nature's law," 11 has this new understanding of science; he adopts and reworks the methodizing debate, offering in the process a new way of standardizing judgment. Setting Pope in the context of the early eighteenth-century debate over the rules, this chapter also considers him in relation to earlier participants in the existing debate over reading; in An Essay on Criticism Pope picks up and transforms terms such as memory and imagination from Hobbes or wit and judgment from Addison and Steele. At the same time, Pope's argument seems to have generated responses, especially from critics such as Addison, Felton, and Theobald, who wrote about rules in the years immediately after the publication of An Essay on Criticism. It is not overstating the case to say that Pope sets the terms of the debate over reading for at least the next fifteen years, maybe even for decades to come. His idea of "surveying" as a way of understanding good reading becomes very important to the

Eighteenth-Century Rules for Reading

115

debate over reading that is at the center of early English literary criticism; it will, for example, be adapted by both Hume and Johnson. This chapter's review of arguments for rules-based models of reading published in the first two decades of the eighteenth century has several related objectives. First, it is worth noting here that the increasing importance of rules in the early eighteenth century affects the notorious textual editing practices of eighteenth-century scholarsY The eighteenth-century practice of "correcting" seventeenth-century prosody, such as Bentley's edition of Paradise Lost-which Joseph Levine claims "remains a puzzle" 13 -may be more understandable when we recognize that it comes after this debate over methodically regularizing texts. Second, others have argued that the early eighteenth-century Newtonians adapt Newton's work for their own focus on containing the radical democratic potential of the 164os. In The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution, for example, Margaret Jacob argues that "the Newtonian Enlightenment was intended by its participants as a vast holding action against materialism and its concomitant republicanism." 14 How this longue dunie concern over and responses to the republican upheaval shapes early English literary criticism is at the center of The Constitution of Literature. With this interest in the rules, the debate over reading takes on an important proceduralist dimension in the early eighteenth century. The early eighteenth-century debate over the rules offers English literary criticism both an idea about method and a new conviction that an appropriately sensitive method might be found. This attempt at formalizing and rationalizing reading is more than just an important development in a procedural "constitutionalization" of literary criticism; it is also part of the development of modern democracy to which criticism contributes. Hobbes's analysis of the Civil Wars does not separate the problem of democratized reading from the problem of how to organize political life in England. The same is true for debate over the rules. For example, John Dyche's grammar A Guide to the English (1707) includes a dedicatory poem by N[ahum] Tate that contends that "these Rules are well design'd, to take away /The Scandal that upon our Nation lay." 15 In its late seventeenth-century formulation, criticism, I have argued above, is a Restoration project; the idea is to reestablish something at the center, and the attempt is largely ad hoc. In a sense the process is as ad hoc as the projects of the Royal Society, with many people exploring different ways of going about controlling meaning and organizing political life. The 166os, and the 168os, see what might be called experiments in how to recenter English political life. The degree to which it is an ad hoc process can be seen, for example, in the Exclusion Crisis and the Revolution of 1688. However, the late seventeenth- and

II6

Chapter Four

early eighteenth-century debate over the rules coincides with the Act of Settlement (J7or), which sets the rules for how to refill the political center. According to the central stipulation of that document, there will now be a method, a protocol, by which the highest level of the English government will be recentered. The early eighteenth-century debates over the rules of reading are the verbal analogue to this political development. In both cases there is a faith in the possibility of developing procedures and standards. Thus in his Soliloquy, or, Advice to an Author (1705) Shaftesbury discusses what he calls a ''Method of Practice," but he does so with an awareness that "'Tis scarce a quarter of an Age since such a happy Ballance of Power was settled between our Prince and People." 16 If late seventeenth-century criticism should be seen as a Restoration project, early eighteenth-century criticism should be seen as a settlement project. It is still restorative in the largest sense, but there is a new degree of certainty to it, represented by the interest in the rules. The rules are also part of a larger shift from a democracy of belief in the r64os to an Enlightenment democracy of reason. In Christianity not Mysterious John Toland initiates an important theological controversy by arguing, "There is nothing in the Gospel contrary to Reason." 17 Despite the outcry occasioned by that claim, there are assumptions behind Toland's argument that will be familiar from the Restoration project. Central among them is Toland's complaint regarding theologians"What a prodigious Number of barbarous Words, (mysterious no doubt) what tedious and immethodical directions, what ridiculous and discrepant Interpretations must you patiently learn and observe, before you can begin to understand a Professor of that Faculty?" 18 Here we have the old argument, going back at least to Hobbes, that the vocabulary, and presumably the hermeneutics, of religious controversy have become too obscure, too involved for comprehension and must therefore be corrected before they affect the English language overall. Different, though, is Toland's sense that such interpretations and vocabulary serve to hide what would otherwise be a comprehensible text: "the Facility of the Gospel is not confin'd only to Method; for the Stile is also most easy, most natural, and in the common Dialect." 19 As we have seen, Dryden was concerned with obscurity, but even he did not claim that the Bible was easy and natural; instead, Dryden argued that the obscure parts should not be interpreted. For Toland, by contrast, the Gospel offers a method that leads to an easy natural style. Nonetheless, Dryden's Examen Poeticum, the first edition of which was published in r693 (with a second, posthumous edition in 1706), involves the later work of Dryden in this discussion of the rules. Both editions begin with a dedication to Lord Radcliffe, contending that the

Eighteenth-Century Rules for Reading

II7

English language "might be reduc'd into a more harmonious sound." 20 Particularly important in this prefatory claim is the focus on reduction and harmony, that harmony is the result of reducing, a claim that is central to the early eighteenth-century interest in rules. Each edition also features the Earl of Musgrave's poem "On Mr. Hobs," which claims that "by his Reason's Light," Hobbes "put such Fantastick Forms to shameful flight." 21 By tracing a connection between Hobbes, reason, and an avoidance of fantastic forms, this poem rehearses the history of literary criticism as a concern about the tropological dimension of language. For this chapter, though, it is important to note that this connection is being articulated so explicitly in the r69os, for if this poem does not make the connection that will materialize in the early eighteenth-century interest in method, it does at least describe it. The second edition of the Examen Poeticum, though, includes poems not published in the first, including "A Poem on the Civil War, Begun in r64r," by Abraham Cowley and purported not to have been printed before. In the process the second edition further adds to the impression that the early eighteenth-century focus on method and harmony is born out of an anxiety over the Civil Wars and an attention to it that is associated with Dryden and Hobbes as well. Deist John Toland might have attracted several prominent critiques for his Christianity not Mysterious, but his sense that there is a "method" to the writing of the Bible makes his argument important for the subsequent debate over the rules. 22 For the popularity of rules-based models suggests the increasing prevalence of Toland's governing assumption, that there is a "Simplicity of Truth." 23 In Tatler no. 230 Jonathan Swift writes to Isaac Bickerstaff: "I should be glad to see you the instrument of introducing into our style that simplicity which is the best and truest ornament of most things in life" (3:195). In this formulation we have what would become one of the animating tensions regarding simplicity, that is, whether it is compatible with ornament. Here, they are not only compatible but equivalent, and we have another association between reduction and harmony. Similarly, The Needful Attempt to Make Language and Divinity Plain and Easy (r7u) emphasizes simplicity, albeit without the accompanying attention to beauty. The anonymous author proposes "to make it a cheap, and easy, and speedy Business to learn sufficiently well to speak, and spell, and write and read." 24 Here simplicity is associated with easiness and easiness with business. At the time, the word business was starting to acquire its modern sense of trade, commercial, and professional activity; a simplified English would be more profitable. Although it might seem that we have already seen something like this in Addison and Steele's turn to the market, there are important differences.

II8

Chapter Four

First, in The Needful Attempt we have a new emphasis on rules: "let the Rule and practice be this,/To spell as we speak." 25 And second, how The Needful Attempt recommends that we accommodate spelling to speaking is perhaps not so simple ultimately, as can be seen in its first example of phonetic spelling, "Dhe Laurds Prair." 26 This emphasis on simplicity, even if on different kinds of simplicity, shows up in the grammar primers published in the early eighteenth century. For example, in An Essay Towards a Practical English Grammar (r7rr) James Greenwood claims to provide "such a plain and rational Account of Grammar as might render it easy and delightful to our English Youth." 27 Again, there is the combination of the rational, the plain, and the easy. While it is understandable that the authors of such books would want to make grammar comprehensible to young people, it is nonetheless interesting how their description of their subject replays a focus on simplicity and clarity consistent with the discussion of reading and language we have seen at least since Sprat. Thus, the preface to Greenwood's Essay claims that "our English Tongue doth too much abound" with "Ambiguity and unfixed Sense of Words." 28 This may be true, but it is no more true for English than it is for any other language. What is interesting, then, is the persistence of this unease with the tropological dimension of the English language after Hobbes and Sprat. Bellum Grammaticale (r7r2) shares many of the same concerns, claiming that "the Beaux Esprits" believe that "METHOD and ORDER are Things too formal, nay, incompatible with an ESSAY." 29 While the beaux esprits obviously make up a different constituency than that for a grammar, the two books share an insistence on the importance of method and order. Referring to the fact that "Mr. Lock has call'd his admirable Discourse on the Human Understanding, an Essay," the author of Bellum Grammaticale reminds readers nonetheless that Locke "is clear in his Method, as well as his Reasoning." 3° For the author of Bellum Grammaticale, "Confusion could never be the Mother of Instruction." 31 Implicitly, the idea is that anything less than methodical and visible order would create confusion. Published in r7rr, Pope's An Essay on Criticism participates in this early eighteenth-century interest in the rules and influences the subsequent articulation of the issues. An Essay on Criticism probably represents the fullest exposition and discussion of the rules in relation to criticism. Pope's argument brings together Hobbes's psychology, the Newtonian sense of natural laws, and the then-current interest in simplicity. By combining these disparate elements of the debate, Pope creates the most complicated position within it: he defends the rules, sees them as natu-

Eighteenth-Century Rules for Reading

II9

ral, yet describes them as originating in Homer and argues that there is something beyond the rules that only the best poets can achieve. That is, starting with the same anxieties that had motivated criticism for at least the previous half century, Pope comes up with a new hybrid, one that bridges the "nature/ culture" divide implicit in the Newtonian and Addisonian positions, all the while insisting on the importance of the rules. In the process, Pope proposes a model of reading. The terms of Pope's idea of reading have a precedent in The Spectator, but Pope uses them to different effect in An Essay on Criticism. The same terms will be reworked later by David Hume and to a lesser extent Samuel Johnson, although, again, in both cases toward different ends than in either Addison or Pope. An Essay on Criticism opens with a distinction between "Writing" and "Judging" that is similar to the difference between writing and reading, except that "reading" is here tied to evaluating. Over the course of the poem (and indeed by the very fact of his writing An Essay on Criticism as a poem), Pope will try to bridge the gap between what he casts as these two sides of print. But at the beginning of the poem the difference itself is also evaluated by Pope, who argues that the writing side of the polarity is "less dang'rous." 32 In this poem, too, reading is considered more dangerous. An Essay on Criticism, thus, begins as yet another version of the concern over democratized reading: "Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss" (6). The question, of course, is what might be dangerous about so many readers. But it is not only the sheer number of readers that has Pope concerned. There is also the fact that each reader believes her or his own reading is the right one, or, in Pope's famous phrase, "'Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none/Go just alike, yet each believes his own" (9-ro). Thus the poem sets out to address the same problem that Hobbes describes in the Leviathan: not only the number of readers but also the relative equality among them. Early in the poem, when Pope discusses the psychological effects of reading, his terms echo those in Hobbes's discussion of psychology in the Leviathan. But the same terms have a different valence in Pope's model, in part because they are related to the early eighteenth-century discussion of the rules. Pope layers implications that follow on this initial difference between writing and judgment. For example, he claims some are "born to Judge, as well as those to Write" (q). In this case the difference between writing and judging means that they all too often do not come together in the same person. Of course, the very form of Pope's An Essay on Criticism indicates his own claim to be one of those few who can bring them together, one of those who can "censure freely" because they "have written well" (r6). At the same time, Pope casts these abilities as something

120

Chapter Four

innate; they are not, in other words, taught or in some other way acquired. On one level Pope is arguing against those who advocate the rules as pedagogical aids. But on another level Pope is taking very seriously the natural-law aspect of the argument over the rules: Pope's exemplars inherit their ability to combine writing and judging. And this claim is furthered at the end of the poem's second stanza, with an important shift in terms. Although Pope has been considering writing and judging, the poem suddenly asks: "Authors are partial to their Wit, 'tis true,/but are not Criticks to their Judgment too?" (17-18). What had been a distinction between writing and judging becomes instead one between wit and judgment. Paired in Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), "wit" and "judgment" there are said to name psychological categories, the former being the ability to bring ideas together, the latter the ability to separate them. 33 An Essay on Criticism adapts Locke's model of psychology: a tendency to either side of Locke's psychological divide produces in Pope's poem people who fall on either side of the print divide, writing and reading. In the process Pope shows that Locke makes possible another way of describing reading and writing in natural-law terms. For Pope, a tendency toward Locke's psychological capacity for wit results in authors, while tending toward the psychological capacity for judgment is associated with critics. In An Essay on Criticism Pope claims that "Nature to all things fix'd the Limits fit" (52). Similar assumptions would govern claims in An Essay on Man about the placement of humans in the chain of being. But in An Essay on Criticism the natural limits are invoked to describe natural limits within human psychology and the role of the imagination in it. Comparing the relationship between faculties and the effect of the ocean on the beach, Pope claims that "in the Soul while Memory prevails,/The solid Pow'r of Understanding fails" (56-57). This formulation makes memory the problem; remembering is at odds here with understanding. In the abstract one might think that comprehension requires recall. But according to An Essay on Criticism, to remember well is to understand badly. Pope provides no other illustration for his claim, so it is difficult to know what he might have meant by the threat memory represents to understanding. But one way of reading it is to see in Pope's argument a concern over the link between a persistent grievance, or holding a grudge, and revenge. We could think, for instance, of how the Furies become the Eumenides (kindly ones) at the end of Aeschylus's Oresteia; justice is thus said to require that grievances be set aside, sent underground in the case of the play, and that the emotional impact of the crimes be somewhat forgotten. In 17n, though, it would have been difficult not to see Pope's claim that remembering interferes

Eighteenth-Century Rules for Reading

121

with understanding as addressing unresolved political issues of the day. Perhaps it is an argument against the Jacobites, who would be clinging to a dangerous memory, in this case of Stuart kings. It could also be an argument against those who might still look back to what Milton had called the '"Good Old Cause."' 34 Having redirected attention away from memory, Pope goes on to claim that "Where Beams of warm Imagination play,/The Memory's soft Figures melt away" (sS-59). Imagination eases memory; thus, by themselves these two lines would seem to repeat the familiar, escapist sense of imagination as a way to get around reality. But when considered in relation to the two lines regarding memory and understanding that precede them, this argument becomes even more complicated. For imagination has the same effect on memory that memory was said to have on understanding; memory erodes understanding, and imagination washes away memory. The idea that imagination might direct attention away from memory was not new; after all, there is a way in which it would seem to rework the Platonic argument about the deception implicit in images. But in this case imagination erases what would otherwise prevent understanding. What might have been cast as the deception of images becomes in this case the very mechanism through which the truth might be grasped. For Pope, imagination does not distort; memory does; thus, he adopts and inverts the terms proposed in Hobbes's Leviathan. As we saw in Chapter 1, Hobbes describes memory as "decaying sense" (15), not only meaning that memory is inaccurate but also, as Hobbes explains, making memory a form of imagination. In Pope's model, by contrast, memory and imagination are opposed. They can act as counterbalancing forces to obscure or clarify understanding. Some readers might see in Pope's defense of the imagination an early influence on the Romantics. But the question is how Pope believes the imagination, previously taken as distorted images or decaying sense, could be an aid to understanding. This is where Pope learns from and participates in the early eighteenth-century discussion of the rules. And this is also where the Romantics part company with Pope's sense of the imagination. Like others among his contemporaries, and unlike the Romantics, Pope thinks that the rules offer a way of representing Nature. Thus, he argues, "First follow Nature, and your Judgment frame/By her just Standard" (68-69). The crucial terms here are frame, just, and Standard, for in these words Pope begins to indicate what it would mean to follow Nature, while reiterating that to do so would help Judgment. Frame and just have architectural and surveying implications, having to do with how joints come together and how things are joined at right angles. Implicitly, then, there is a geometric precision in (following)

122

Chapter Four

Nature. Moreover, standard can mean both a flag and a regular system of measurement. Thus, the argument is that we should follow the flag (or standard) of Nature; if we let Nature take us where it might, where Nature will lead us will also be regularized (or standard). Therefore, works of imagination that are governed by the rules will also be accurate, facilitating understanding of how things are. Such a standardized Nature is "At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art" (73): a test because it provides a means for measuring; an end because it is the object toward which art should lead; and the source because for Pope, following the Newtonian model, Nature infuses the whole. Pope's argument reflects the Newtonian side of the debate over the rules. Comparing the universe to a body, Pope contends that ... th' informing Soul With Spirits feeds, with Vigour fills the whole Each Motion guides, and ev'ry Nerve sustains; It self unseen, but in th' Effects, remains.

The universe is informed by a force that animates but can be seen only in its effects. As the motions of the bodies in that universe are guided by an unseen force, the image borders on Deism. For Newton, and likely for Pope, that unseen force is God. What Newton's mechanical philosophy offers to Pope and others in the early eighteenth century is the chance to see the pattern behind the events, at every level of the universe: "those Rules of old discover'd, not devis'd,l Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz'd" (88-89). We now use "discover'd" almost to mean devised, so we might need to be reminded that Pope's argument here means that the rules uncover nature. The rules were not created; they were revealed, if that word did not have its Christian, prophetic sense. Consequently, the rules can represent, and maybe even record, how Nature works. The only difference between Nature and the rules, for Pope, is that the rules methodize Nature, to use An Essay on Criticism's famous phrase. At the same time, though, Pope's treatment of Newtonianism in An Essay on Criticism emerges as a form of late Platonism. For example, Pope refers, approvingly, to "those Rules of old." There is a way, then, in which Newtonianism matters to Pope only as the most recent way to understand what was first learned, he argues, by the Greeks. Like the Greeks as described by Pope, the laws of nature offered by Newtonianism "urg'd the rest by equal Steps to rise" (97), an image that invokes the Socratic ladder of philosophy, from The Republic and The Symposium. Pope creates a new position on the rules, one that combines the Newtonian sense of a current, scientific discovery of the laws of Nature with

Eighteenth-Century Rules for Reading

123

the Addisonian sense of the importance of certain works: "Just Precepts thus from great Examples giv'n," Pope describes them in An Essay on Criticism, and points to Homer: Be Homer's Works your Study, and Delight, Thence form your Judgment. (r24, I26)

That is, Pope takes Addison's point about learning by example, adds his own interest in the rules and Nature, and argues that even Virgil learned about the rules and nature from Homer: "When first young Mara ... I A Work t'outlast Immortal Rome design'd" (130-31), he could do no better than copying Homer. Indeed, according to Pope, "Nature and Homer were, he found the same" (135). Thus Pope argues "Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem; ITo copy Nature is to copy Them" (13940). This strange concept-that somehow Homer's poetry captured the laws of nature-makes more sense when seen in the context of the early eighteenth-century debate over reading and value. On some level it is almost as if someone needed to make this claim, precisely so as to craft a "third way" in the debate, one that could combine the natural law argument of the Newtonians and the index/precedent models of Addison and Dryden. After developing this sophisticated hybrid-wit and judgment, natural and historical-Pope is still left with the somewhat more practical question of how one should read in the wake of these guidelines, or how "A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit" (233), as An Essay on Criticism puts it. Pope offers two suggestions. In the first case the reader is told to read "With the same Spirit that its Author writ" (234). In essence, a reader should imagine what the writer might have been thinking. Rather than exploring implications, evaluating a text's arguments, or finding meaning, readers should instead give up their resistance and try their best to intuit the spirit of the author. The trick, of course, is in how to do that when the words would at least seem to be mediating between author and reader. In a way, Pope reworks here Dryden's earlier claim from Religio Laici that readers should simply not read passages they find obscure. In Pope's case it would seem that readers are to assume that they understand the author, not just that confusing passages would need to be discounted. Pope's second suggestion is meant to take care of the problem of obscure passages. Making an analogy between the text and a "well-proportion'd Dome" (247), Pope claims that No single Parts unequally surprize; All comes united to th' admiring Eyes;

124

Chapter Four No monstrous Height, or Breadth, or Length appear; The Whole at once is Bold, and Regular. (2

49-5 2 )

With this idea of the dome Pope contends that a rule-based text will alleviate the possibility of a reader's misunderstanding an author. The regularity of the text, like the regularity of the dome, will facilitate direct communication. Pope's analogy of the text and the dome contributes a new possibility to the debate over theories of reading. The analogy operates in two ways, referring to the well-written text on the one hand and to the well-trained reader on the other. To reflect the natural order, the dome and the text must be "united," at once "Bold and Regular," with "no single Parts." In its regularity the dome is a model for Pope's ideal relationship to nature. In its attitude toward classical architecture Pope's seeing texts as domes has analogues in the Palladian Revival then under way in England. And in the refusal of the "single parts," Pope participates in the antitropological discussion that we have traced, at least from Sprat's Royal Society to The Spectator. Sprat's metaphor and Addison's puns and anagrams are "single parts" that, to their way of thinking, stand out unnecessarily. Insofar as Pope is considering the reader or reading in the analogy, though, the argument is that readers should not focus on the single parts; texts might have metaphors, anagrams, or puns, but the good reader will overlook them, and in the process intuit what the author intended, despite the metaphors, anagrams, or puns: "Survey the whole, nor seek slight faults to find" (235). Pope's idea follows on the period's avoidance of ornament and offers a kind of reduction that will emphasize harmony. This idea of reading as surveying will prove to be an influential contribution to early English literary criticism. As a concept, surveying insists on the visual connection implicit in our response to a dome or a text. But surveying the whole is a particular way of seeing. On the one hand, because it means taking in the entire object in one view, surveying requires a certain distance from the thing viewed. As we have seen, Pope's model of psychology sees memory as a risk to understanding, and it perceives imagination as an aid. In a sense imagination helps us get distance on our memories. Surveying does the same thing for the experience of reading; it gives the reader some distance. By proposing surveying as a metaphor for reading, Pope thereby provides a new way to consider the persistent concern over democratized reading. After Pope's surveying, it appears that the fear has been that readers cannot get enough distance from their reading or are focusing too closely on the text. But as an engineering term, surveying also adds an aspect of measuring a landscape at a single, perspectival view. Like nature as Pope described it early in

Eighteenth-Century Rules for Reading

125

An Essay on Criticism, surveying "fixes the limits fit" (52), albeit in a different sense; surveying helps to set standards, to standardize measurement (in part by regularizing the placement of the observer I reader). In other words, treating reading as surveying offers the possibility of reading methodized. Pope's defense of reading methodized is not only positively prescriptive; in An Essay on Criticism he also briefly describes the reading he is rejecting. As is the case with so many other documents from the history of early literary criticism, we again find references to inspired, empowered, radically democratic reading (associated with the 164os). Pope claims that Once School-Divines this zealous Isle o'erspread; Who knew most Sentences was deepest read; Faith, Gospel, All, seem'd made to be disputed And none had Sense enough to be Confuted.

He goes on to refer to these "School-Divines" as "Scottists and Thomists" (i.e., as medieval figures). Divines, however, some schooled and some unschooled, had overspread the Isle just sixty years earlier, in the form of the religious radicals who participated in and shaped the upheaval of the mid-seventeenth century. As we have seen with Coppe, Bauthumley, and Milton, not only were those "Who knew most Sentences ... deepest read"; sentences that could be read deepest knew most. It is central to Hobbes's treatment of such reading that, as Pope puts it, all was up for dispute, and none could be confuted; relative equality left everyone convinced of their equal relationship to the truth. If Pope is describing these seventeenth-century disputes in terms of medieval Scholasticism, or, conversely, if he understands medieval Scholasticism as contributing to the seventeenth-century disputes, relatively recent religious and political controversies are either way seen as medieval. The implication is that the kind of reading we have seen in the 164os is caught between the ancient and the modern, as lost and inaccessible to contemporary readers as was Chaucer's Middle English. After Pope's An Essay on Criticism-and one is tempted to say because of it-the number of texts that consider relationships between reading and rules increases. Indeed, by 1712 the author of Bellum Grammaticale could claim that "there has been lately a mighty Bent, in the Buyers of Books, to Grammatical Essays; and particularly those which treat of the Nature of our own Language." 35 That bent would continue for some time; the next decade would see the publication of many titles focused

126

Chapter Four

on the question of how to read with method. For the remainder of this chapter we will briefly review their arguments. There are of course differences among these titles, as well as differences between them and Pope. But more important than these differences is simply the sheer number of titles and approaches focused on the question of reading's rules. Recent histories of literary criticism have, I think, downplayed this aspect of early English literary criticism; ironically, though, this focus on rationalization is central to the Habermasian model of literary criticism as creating the modern, democratic, public sphere, where rational debate replaced the will of the monarch on policy matters. As important as this focus on the rules may have been, it also provided a target for the next generation (represented in the next chapter by David Hume) at which to aim in the debate over democratized reading. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that, no matter how much they might disagree, those who would follow Pope are nonetheless indebted to his conviction that criticism and methods of reading might be connected. In the year following the publication of Pope's An Essay on Criticism-and nearly five hundred issues into The Spectator-Addison expounds on the possibility, and the advantages, of writing with method: When I read an author of genius who writes without method, I fancy myself in a wood that abounds with a great many noble objects, rising among one another in the greatest confusion and disorder. When I read a methodical discourse, I am in a regular plantation, and can place my self in its several Centers, so as to take a view of all the lines and walks that are struck from them. (Spectator no. 476, 4:186)

Addison's argument reflects the contemporary discussion of simplicity. For Addison methodical writing has a beneficial effect on the reader, simplifying and organizing what he or she reads. Notice as well the contrast of the confusing wood and the orderly plantation. Here Addison applies the terms of early eighteenth-century gardening to writing, with the geometry of the formal garden becoming a model for well-organized writing. There are also consequent senses of the self's relationship to the world around it. The result of the visit to the woods will be merely impressionistic and synecdochic: "you will have but a confused imperfect notion of the place" (ibid.). With the regular plantation, by contrast, "your eye commands the whole prospect, and gives you such an idea of it as is not easily worn out of the memory" (ibid.). In this orderly plantation the self is centered and in command; as a result the lines of the garden's geometry are etched on the mind of the viewer. It is also a form of surveying. The famous "Pleasures of the Imagination" series makes a similar claim about how the better kind of aesthetic response provides the

Eighteenth-Century Rules for Reading

127

respondent with a special access to the world. "A man of a polite imagination is let into a great many pleasures, that the vulgar are not capable of receiving .... It gives him, indeed, a kind of property in everything he sees, and makes the rude uncultivated parts of nature administer to his pleasure" (Spectator no. 4II, 3:538). Implicit in the "Pleasures of the Imagination" and the idea of the orderly plantation is an image of colonies and of the male colonial subject. On the one hand, there is the distinction between the polite and the vulgar; on the other hand, the possessor of the polite imagination is also the possessor of a new kind of property (which only further serves to distinguish him from the vulgar). Moreover, what the man of polite imagination possesses is nothing less than everything he sees. In the orderly plantation the sight lines are all the more likely to lead off to well-tended infinity. And the rude uncultivated parts of nature could refer to areas outside of but seen from the formal garden, areas that, thanks to the organization of the garden, are beautiful even if untended. Or perhaps the expression "rude uncultivated parts of nature" might unfortunately refer to the slaves and servants who administer to the central plantation owner, possessor of everything he sees. When Addison turns this landscape analogy back on the question of how to write, it is not surprising that this preferable, methodical kind of writing makes it so that the reader "comprehends every Thing easily, takes it in with Pleasure, and retains it long" (Spectator no. 476, 4:r86). This interest in ease is consistent with The Spectator's theory of reading; in this case the focus is on the writing that can produce that easier result. It is striking that Addison should argue that "the Man who does not know how to methodize his Thoughts, has always, to borrow a Phrase from the Dictionary, a barren Superfluity of Words" (ibid., r87). For again, there is the same concern with excess, here called "superfluity." To be clear, Addison is not bothered by superfluity but rather by a barren superfluity. The question is how to distinguish between the two. In the previous chapter we saw how the marketplace offers a model of how to evaluate excess, how to determine the worth of some superfluities. In this essay, though, Addison focuses on "method" as a way of addressing the question of excess. In so doing, Addison is also participating in the discussion about the rules-and about whether reading is rational-that develops during the early part of the eighteenth century. In 1715 Henry Felton published A Dissertation on Reading the Classics, pulling together themes from the early eighteenth-century interest in method and the longer span of the post-Civil Wars debate over reading. Felton was careful to distinguish his focus "only in General Rules" from "the Provinces of the Grammarians and Rhetoricians." 36 Given

128

Chapter Four

that grammar was also being organized according to "method" and "rules," it is not clear how we ought to understand the distinction Felton is making. As Felton goes on, however, it does seem that he is concerned more with reading poetry or what we would subsequently call literature (rather than with the learning about language in general that we have seen in Greenwood's An Essay Towards a Practical English Grammar). Felton makes an argument for Rules that bridges the classical ideas of order with the late seventeenth-century Newtonians: "Rules speak themselves; they draw the Picture of Nature" (vii). Both clauses are important to the early eighteenth-century focus on rules and method. The first clause means both that the rules are valuable in themselves and that they have a clarity that speaks through the materials of any particular work. The second applies to older notions of mimesis and verisimilitude that had shaped the classical idea of rules and to the contemporary belief that the laws of nature had been revealed through natural philosophy. It is this latter sense to which Felton might be referring when he claims that "the present Age seemeth to be Born for carrying Criticism to its highest Pitch and Perfection" (xiii). For Felton the present age has a perfect sense of the rules that govern nature, and it is those rules that can perfect criticism. Like Sprat, Felton is concerned that languages "are in a perpetual flux" (87). But Felton differs from Sprat in proposing that the language be reformed through what we might call a "nativist" approach. As we have seen, Sprat is concerned with a tropological dimension inherent in language generally, even if in the English language in particular, and advocates avoiding metaphor. Felton, by contrast, argues that English speakers can overcome the troubling reality of their language's fluidity by resuscitating older English words: "The Weight, the Strength, and Significancy of many antiquated Words, should recommend them to Use again" (88). Moreover, he advocates avoiding the importation of any foreign words into the language to begin with, casting the matter in military terms as well: "We had better rely on our own Troops than Foreign Forces" (88). Felton performs a similarly nationalist twist on Locke's and Addison's arguments. Like them, Felton writes, "I look upon our Language as good Bullion, if we do not debase it with too much Allay" (90). That is, words are like money, as we have already seen with Locke and Addison. But Felton introduces important differences. First, in comparing words with bullion, he is relying on an understanding of monetary instruments that preceded the late seventeenth-century development of coins that represented value rather than containing a certain weight of it. In the process his argument for the rules and his preference for pure bullion cannot help but make us wonder if the late seventeenth- and early

Eighteenth-Century Rules for Reading

129

eighteenth-century interest in the rules was also responding to the seemingly irrational development in finance: coins being no longer actually worth their weight. For Locke and Addison the words-coins analogy makes possible a new way of understanding value, in exchange. Felton, on the other hand, invokes a feminized image of trade when he complains about those "who corrupteth the Purity of the English Tongue" (9o). They are, according to Felton, "those Modish Ladies that change their Plat for China" (90). Again, he proposes avoiding imports as a way of maintaining English purity and masculinity. During the I7IOS and 1720s many critics work in this vein. Lewis Theobald argues in The Censor, for example, that there is "nothing which is more dangerous than the Misapplication of Wit; and as it may have many fatal Consequences upon my Readers, so I am concern'd, by Vertue of my Censorial Power, to bring it under due Regulations." 37 Here is the familiar concern over the dangers of wit. The critic, here in the capacity of a censor (and thus like Steele's Bickerstaff in The Tatler), saves readers from the possibly fatal effects of their own reading. In the early eighteenth century the road to salvation had been squared off by the rules, regulations, and method of criticism. 38 Theobald also reiterates what increasingly becomes a common assumption concerning a link between reason, sense, and political liberty: "where-ever a true Liberty reigns, there must be a Spirit of Reason and good Sense." 39 In other words, the argument over the rules of reading and writing turns out on another level to be an argument over how to organize a society, how to achieve reasonable arrangements. With A Dissertation Upon the Most Celebrated Roman Poets (nr8} Addison revisits the discussion of rules, claiming, "Of all the Nations in the World, the Romans have most excell'd in the Art of Poetry, among the Romans Virgil has been the most deservedly celebrated; from whom the justest Rules of this Art are rather to be taken, than from the dry Precepts of the Criticks." 40 It is significant that Addison should feel called on to rearticulate a relationship to rules-based criticism. But particularly important is how even his idea of the rules is subject to or is a subset of his "index" theory of criticism. As described here, Addison's rules are not Newtonian or natural. They have instead to do with reputation: the Romans most excelled in poetry and are justly celebrated for it. By claiming that the rules should be derived from Virgil, Addison is again insisting on the use of the index of value, even for determining rules. Although the fact that he is considering the question of rules fits with the contemporary discussion of them, Addison is understanding them in a very different way. Where the Newtonian might cast the rules as transcendental, Addison insists on their contingency. The Romans simply happen to be the best poets. The fact of their coming after and having

Chapter Four been influenced by the Greeks, a point Pope makes, does not affect their value as far as Addison is concerned. It might even have helped the Romans; they could perfect the earlier attempts of the Greeks. Anthony Blackwall's An Introduction to the Classics (r7r9) combines the contemporary emphasis on the rules with Addison's index of value. In the preface Blackwall claims that his aim is "to reform Rhetorick" and "to reduce it to a literal and rational Science." 41 Thus Blackwall follows the contemporary pattern of seeing reformation as a process of rationalizing (along with the interesting assertion that such treatment should also be considered a reduction). Like so many others we have seen, Blackwall connects the current confused state of English to the upheaval of the seventeenth century: "whatever Decays and Alterations English may be subject to, whatever Confusion and Barbarism may be brought in by long Civil Wars" (3). Blackwall proposes a solution familiar from the rules-for-reading debate of the early eighteenth century: "A Man shou'd write with the same Design as he speaks, to be understood with Ease" {28). In a tradition stretching back at least as far as Sprat, and maybe Hobbes, Blackwall tries to shift the burden away from readers. Writers should make texts easy enough for readers not to have to worry about the meaning. But here it is a matter of design, and maybe neoclassical designs for ease. The difficulties that readers might experience with other, less easy, texts Blackwall attributes to the difficulties caused by the passage of time, "by reason of our Ignorance of some Customs of those Times and Countries" (3r). This line of argument is typical of early eighteenth-century discussions: rules will make texts easier through standardization and rationalization. What is different about Blackwall's argument is how it also includes a monetary analogy similar to that developed in The Spectator. Like Hobbes and Sprat, Blackwall contends that "A Trope is a Word remov'd from its first and natural Signification" (149-50). The assumption is that the first signification is natural; it is this assumption, of course, that can justify the development of Newtonian rules for how to use words. Hobbes and Sprat may have been out to stop the misleading use of words in any way contrary to their natural signification. Blackwall, by contrast, believes that "Tropes are the Riches of Language" (r56). On the one hand, this means that for Blackwall (unlike for Hobbes or Sprat) tropes are valuable and should be used because they can enrich a text. On the other hand, the analogy also means that tropes are like money, precisely the same connection developed in The Spectator. Blackwall goes on to explore this connection. Because tropes are valuable, "it will be an Imputation upon a Man to lavish 'em away without Discretion" {rs6). That is, tropes should not be squandered. At the same

Eighteenth-Century Rules for Reading

13 I

time, this argument also means that tropes are instances of language removed from the level of intrinsic value (or from their natural signification). Therefore, the tropological use of language must occur at least at the level of exchange value. What will be needed, again, will be some mechanism for knowing when the trope is being used with the wrong value, for knowing, in other words, just when it is being squandered. This, it is argued in the early decades of the eighteenth century, can be the role of criticism that utilizes the rules. In The Laws of Poetry (r72r), for example, Charles Gildon claims that "the only remedy that I know of (for to reform our education seems an impossible undertaking) is the publication of books of criticism."42 Giles Jacob's The Poetical Register, two volumes of biographies and bibliographies of then-recent and contemporary English poets, can be seen as one example of Gildon's remedy. Jacob attempts to describe what makes good poetry, apparently to an audience that is presumed not to have thought about the issue before. Particularly interesting about the book is that in its address to a seemingly broader audience it falls back on the vocabulary developed for poetry in the recent discussion of the rules. In the "Introductory Essay, on the Rise, Progress, Beauty, &c. of all Sorts of Poetry," Jacob claims that "Language in Poetry ought to have five Qualities; to be apt, clear, natural, splendid, and numerous." 43 At least two of these five, clarity and naturalness, are as we have seen particularly important to the recent discussion of the rules. And the very notion that there need be just five qualities is typical of the reductive reasoning typical of discussions of reading in the early eighteenth century. Like Pope, Jacob contends, "There is something in the Genius of Poetry, too Libertine to be confin'd to many Rules," even, like Pope, citing the "Grace" that is at risk under too much regulation (xxi). At the same time, Jacob reminds readers that "the Poet's Fancy and Wit should be kept within due Bounds" (xxi). The question, then, would be what the difference is between rules and bounds. In terms of the discussion of the rules, the answer could be the difference between Pope's Newtonian sense of universal laws and Addison's sense of plantation space. In any case, Jacob tries to reclaim what he describes as the ancient and original task of criticism. "Criticism, as 'twas first instituted by Aristotle, was meant a Standard of judging well" (xvi). But what is interesting about the debate over theories of reading in the first two decades of the eighteenth century is how Ancients such as Aristotle were modernized. Jacob refers to Aristotle, but others in the early eighteenth century were focused on the question of the standard; Jacob's introductory essay on poetry reflects that contemporary sense of the standards, resituating Aristotle in the eighteenth-century debate.

Chapter Four These debates changed how reading was understood and defined. Indeed, dictionaries published in the decade or so after this debate reveal a changed sense of what to read means. For example, Benjamin Defoe's Compleat English Dictionary (r735) includes Nathaniel Bailey's definition, with which this chapter began-"to guess, divine or foretel," but that definition comes second, after "to Read a book."44 Five years later, A New English Dictionary (1740) does not mention the mystical connotation of read, saying only "to express in proper words any thing, matter, or discourse, that is written, engraved or printed." 45 The mysticism and the guessing that we saw in Nathaniel Bailey's An Universal Etymological English Dictionary two decades earlier have been removed. As important as this change in the definition of reading might be, in the context of the debate over reading since Hobbes, the most remarkable result of the early eighteenth-century interest in standards is the fact that someone could claim, as does Leonard Welsted in r724, that "poetry is not an irrational art." 46 As we have seen, at least since Hobbes's Leviathan, words in general-and the tropological, poetic use of words in particular-have been seen as irrational at best and as inducing irrational violence at worst. After the debate over the rules and standards, this highly charged use of language is now considered rational or, more accurately, "not irrational." With Hume and Johnson both aspects of the new understanding-the definition of reading, and the prospect of a rational poetry47-will come under considerable strain.

CHAPTER FIVE

Hume, the Politics of Passion, and Reading

~

•

When compared with Addison and Steele or Samuel Johnson, David Hume does not figure very prominently in the recent historiography of literary criticism. Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere does not mention Hume, although it does refer to Addison, Burke, Dryden, Marvell, Milton, Pope, Richardson, Steele, and Swift. Nor does Eagleton include Hume in The Function of Criticism. Areview of the recent treatments of English literary criticism creates the impression that opinion of Hume's contribution has changed little since 1904, when George Saintsbury claimed that "the position of Hume in regard to literary criticism has an interest which would be almost peculiar."1 References to and discussions of Hume are scattered through the volume of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism devoted to the eighteenth century. Even there, though, one contributor claims that "although David Hume wrote a number of interesting critical essays, his relevance is mainly that of providing a philosophic support-system." 2 There are several reasons why it is difficult to accommodate Hume in the narrative told about literary criticism. He does not, for example, write periodical or review criticism of the type explored by Johnson or Addison and Steele (nor even of the type examined by Dryden in his prefaces). More important, Hume's skepticism-so thoroughgoing that there is a way in which it extends to reason itself-is at odds with the "rise of reason" associated with the Enlightenment and with literary criticism in the public-sphere model. Each of these reasons for treating Hume as outside the eighteenthcentury literary-critical mainstream also suggests, however, why Hume is particularly important for-albeit in a complicated relationship withthe history of English literary criticism. His skepticism and his related re-

134

Chapter Five

appraisal of passion inform an idea of literature and the arts particularly sensitive to their irrational, and beneficial, effects on our behavior. And while it is true that Hume did not write periodical criticism, his most important statements about writing and criticism are essays that reflect his engagement with the generic prose form of review criticism. Indeed, his attention to the emotional impact of the arts and his writing prose essays may be related. Famously disappointed by the reception of his A Treatise of Human Nature (1738)-which, he wrote, "fell dead-born from the press"-Hume's subsequent decision to write in prose-essay format may indicate his sense of that form's preferable effect on readers. 3 Hume's decision certainly stands in sharp contrast to Pope's poetical form for An Essay on Criticism three decades earlier; after Hume, if not because of him, literary criticism would be conducted predominantly in prose essays. In any case, through these essays Hume articulates an approach toward literacy, democracy, and rationality that lands him in an almost unapproachable netherworld between most opinions developed in the debate about reading over the preceding century or so. Hume begins with a nonfoundational position, what he calls the "impossibility of explaining ultimate principles," but also tries to offer a standard of taste. 4 The difficulty is in trying to understand the relationship between politics and criticism in a figure who calls for standards yet at the same time claims that ultimate principles do not exist. Hume, however, offers the complexity, one might even say ambivalence, of this position as a positive contribution to literary study. To the debate over theories of reading in early literary criticism Hume contributes a model of what we could call attentive reading based on and responding to the politics of passion. Although he is usually treated as "profoundly un-Hobbesian," Hume shares the by-now-familiar concern over the Civil Wars that we have seen since Hobbes. 5 But Hume also offers a way around the critical Hobbesian consensus that sees the ambiguity and emotional power of words as part of the problem. Hume proposes being nonfoundational and concerned with standards, simultaneously, without reconstructing Hobbes's "One Person" model. Ultimately, Hume's solution to the problem of political instability and violence involves the arts. "We shall find," Hume claims, "that a progress in the arts is rather favorable to liberty, and has a natural tendency to preserve, if not produce a free government" ("Of Refinement in the Arts," in Essays, 277). This claim for the stabilizing influence of the arts certainly stands out against the various concerns voiced by literary critics and others in the century since the Civil Wars. Hume invites into his political philosophy the very thing that for so long had been treated as undermining good government-not only the arts but also the emotional responses on which they depend. As

Hume, Politics of Passion, and Reading

13 5

we will see, it is difficult to separate Hume's description of our psychological (and even physiological) constitution from his sense of the arts' beneficial effects. He offers a pioneering vision of the arts' emotional affects as socially valuable and morally good. "The more these refined arts advance," Hume contends, "the more sociable men become" (ibid., 271). For Hume, it is not only that there are refined arts but rather that arts refine; they harmonize conflicting resonances and sensations. Given how prior literary critics seem to have recoiled from the violence they associate with the tropological use of words, it might be surprising to learn that Hume argues "factions are then less inveterate, revolutions less tragical, authority less severe, and seditions less frequent" in an essay on refinement in the arts (ibid., 274). To Hume the arts are conducive to free government because of the calming effect they can have on the citizens. As the influence of the arts spreads from one person to another, it will have a palliative effect. Of course, there is the problem of whether the arts could do this uniformly. It would seem that some artistic productions will rile, some soothe, and that those effects can differ across an audience. Hume's own example in "Of the Standard of Taste" for such discrepancies refers to a scene from Don Quixote in which two expert wine tasters each notice a different tone in a wine-leather for one and iron for the other-only to learn that the barrel contained "on old key with a leathern thong tied to it" (Essays, 235). But Hume's anticipating such differences makes "Of the Standard of Taste" particularly important, for there he attempts to articulate a kind of uniformity, through which, presumably, the arts can have their positive effects. This standard differs, however, from the methodological impulse espoused earlier in the eighteenth century: Hume's "standard" is not the same as Pope's "rule." Hume argues that "men are now cured of their passion for hypotheses and systems in natural philosophy, and will hearken to no arguments but those which are derived from experience." 6 In other words, Pope's rules are too systematic to be consistent with empiricism; no matter how much he may have been influenced by Newton's laws, Pope, by implication, is not offering an empirical claim about the arts' effects on us. Hume, in contrast, accepts the irrational as the price one pays for a thoroughgoing empirical skepticism.? Writing about Hume in Empiricism and Subjectivity, Gilles Deleuze notes, "The question is no longer how to specify the rule, but rather how to provide it with the vividness it lacks." 8 Providing the rule was the focus earlier in the century; providing the rule with vividness is an important part of how Hume at midcentury distinguishes a standard from a rule. Hume's standard is more vivid and thus more persuasive-and memorable-than a rule. Rather than proposing a standard for composing written documents,

Chapter Five

though, Hume focuses on how to read them. In A Treatise of Human Nature he laments that in his own "age," "the greatest part of men seem agreed to convert reading into an amusement, and to reject every thing that requires any considerable degree of attention to be comprehended." 9 Hume is not alone in thinking that reading has been reduced to a form of amusement, and an inattentive one at that. In "Of the Standard of Taste," however, Hume goes further than anyone else we have seen to specify what might constitute the alternative, an attentive reading. In this way the "standard" mentioned in his essay's title refers to a practice, or perhaps to an accumulated form of practices, through which readers can pay attention. Hume writes this essay with a sense that these are practices that can be taught, and he describes a specific process that can be practiced. Hume may do so at a time when he believes readers are no longer interested in such practiced reading, but his essay is meant to communicate his complicated sense of the standard of taste to the inattentive. In the Essays Hume's sentences are self-effecting; they use simplicity to get at refinement, to use Hume's terms. In this sense his "standard" also represents an abbreviated way of describing attention in an age that he believes rejects it. Despite the passage of a century, Hume begins with many of the same concerns we have seen since Hobbes: the trauma of the Civil Wars, how they reveal an absence at the center of power, and the causal role of print. Hume, however, is in the complicated position of rejecting the violence of the Civil Wars while accepting the irrationality that is thought to have accompanied them, and of accepting the freedom of the press (which even he thinks contributed to the Civil Wars) while nonetheless believing that a free press can be used to mobilize the populace for peaceful ends. This acceptance means that many of the usual solutions are ruled out: Dryden's mediating role for the critic would be too monarchical, too like the Leviathan, and Pope's insistence on universal rules would be too rational. Hume's argument must tread a very fine line to avoid contradiction; consequently, he is a remarkably ambivalent writer, steering a narrow course between opposing views. On the one hand, such ambivalence makes it difficult to write about the subtlety of his work. As M. A. Box points out, "Many more contradictory positions have been attributed to Hume than one would expect from a thinker who, unlike Emerson or Nietzsche, was attempting to build a self-consistent system." 10 On the other hand, Hume's work-like Milton's-offers such ambivalence as a contribution to literary criticism. Coming as he does after the contrasting modern and classical approaches of Addison and Steele on the one hand and Pope on the other, Hume's ambivalent prose represents his very interesting position between both.

Hume, Politics of Passion, and Reading

137

The Royal Society, Dryden, and Pope respond in different ways to Hobbes's analysis of the Civil Wars. The pre-Newtonian scientists of the Restoration-era Royal Society, for example, understand science in largely observational terms, and they try to ground language through a comprehensive comparative observation and recording of languages. Although "scientific," in the sense of empirical, that solution does not address the irrationality that is, according to Hobbes, at the center of the English government (and that led to the Civil Wars). Dryden, by contrast, takes the same basic, irrational data about language and argues that the easiest way to overcome it would be to avoid reading obscure passages generally, to leave interpretation to the experts, an important and influential intervention that later appears in claims and techniques of figures as diverse as Addison and Steele, Pope, and Johnson. Dryden's literary expert, so close to Hobbes's Leviathan, reworks Hobbes's "One Person" at the center who can adjudicate disputes, with the crucial difference that this person is the poet laureate designated by the monarch and not the monarch himself (and thus "two persons," and no longer one). Pope, writing as a post-Newtonian, has a different understanding of science, inflected by classical cosmological numerology, and proposes a model of criticism that insists on rules as a way of reasonably addressing what Hobbes had thought of as an irrational absence at the center. For Pope it is not only an Augustinian and Roman Catholic point that "All Chance, [is] Direction, which thou canst not see" (An Essay on Man 1:290). It is also a way of adapting Newtonian mechanical physics to political and literary issues. Pope concedes the perception of the irrational abysmal structure, while making it merely a problem of perception, ultimately reconciled by universal laws. On Newton's model, Pope tries to claim a rational grounding for responding texts. A pattern emerges: agreeing that an irrational factor led to what is taken to be a regrettable act of political violence, various figures each propose ways of overcoming either the irrational itself or the abyss to which it is said to have brought England. Generally, the presumed irrationality or the absence at the center is the problem that the proposal seeks to redress. Hume would seem to follow the pattern. He takes, for example, Dryden's sense of the importance of established, living literary works, Addison and Steele's sense of criticism as a public activity conducted in prose essays (and something of their sense of excess), and Pope's sense of criticism as a form of rules (although not necessarily natural, and therefore not lawlike in the way the rules-for-reading debate implies). Hume's negotiated solution pluralizes Dryden's critic (refracting criticism through an idea of sympathetic sociability), converts Pope's idea of a rule to a standard (refracting it through a Lockean contractual understanding of

Chapter Five rules as conventions rather than "natural laws"), and reconsiders Milton's insistence on the importance of relationality. Where Hobbes's Leviathan and Dryden's critic would guarantee meaning, where Addison and Steele's

market would regulate value, and where Pope's adoption of Newtonian physical laws would provide rules whereby poetry could be written, Hume instead implies that the verbal arts themselves can provide a regulating function not only for verbal arts but for politics as well. Unlike Milton, who is probably Hume's equal for complexity, and whose lengthy, convoluted sentences enact the difficulty of the thought they represent and convey, Hume's sentences are short, often emphatic, and pithy. But the point that Hume is trying to make in the process is often finer or more detailed than the seeming simplicity of his prose might suggest. As the means whereby the passions can be positively affected by printed and written material, reading is central to Hume's political and aesthetic project. We might understand Hume's place in the history of criticism differently, and appreciate it more, if we consider him, and the history of criticism, as a history of debate over what it means to read. Therefore, this chapter aims to situate Hume's standard of taste in terms of that debate. But Hume's standard of taste does not operate separately from other aspects of his philosophy. So this chapter begins with a review of Hume's attitude toward the Civil Wars, contrasting it with Hobbes's. Not only does such contrasting show the persistence of concern over the Civil Wars across what had by Hume's time been about a century. It also entails examining Hume's models of psychology and political philosophy, as both have also repeatedly come up in considerations of reading since the Restoration. Finally, this chapter reviews the role and definition of reading in Hume's standard of taste. Particularly interesting in this regard is the fact that Hume describes more than one way to read, indicates what these ways involve, and claims that both ways are required for each reading. It is the most detailed discussion of reading we have seen since Milton and the radical democrats in the r64os. Therefore, what follows will feature a discussion of a series of pairs, sometimes opposed and sometimes complementary: for example, enthusiasm and superstition, memory and imagination, reason and passion, and vivacity and sympathy. The point is to see how Hume addresses the prior debate over democratized literacy and to consider his important contributions to it: the beneficial effects of the arts, and the two-part practice of reading-surveying and perusing. In Practicing Enlightenment, Jerome Christensen describes Hume as "the most challenging and thoroughgoing moral philosopher who had emerged in the British Isles since Hobbes." 11 While it is important to recognize

Hume, Politics of Passion, and Reading

139

the many important differences between Hobbes and Hume, it is understandable that Christensen should compare them. Indeed, seeing Hume in relation to Hobbes can helpfully clarify Hume's position. Like Hobbes, Hume attributes to writing a central role in the wars of the 164os. "The war of the pen preceded that of the sword," he argues. 12 He believes, as Hobbes did, that writing is causal; it "daily sharpened the humours of the opposing parties" (The History of England, 5:380). Moreover, both Hume and Hobbes see the period of the Civil Wars as an example of what might be called nonfoundational moments, a time when the supports and guarantees provided by reason were taken away and an irrational vacuum opened up. For Hobbes the Civil Wars reveal an absence at the center of democracy, and an implicit perception of relative equality leaves citizens in a state of war. The absence of an overarching power makes possible an equality that, for Hobbes, results in conflict. And this point, too, can be seen, according to Hobbes, in print. With each reader deciding the meaning of the text, there can only be disagreement: "no discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute knowledge of Fact, past, or to come" (Leviathan, 47). For Hobbes words are irrational, and government, if not antifoundational, is at least nonfoundational. Hobbes's solution, to recreate the power at the center in the figure of the Leviathan, reconstructs what the Civil War has removed or destroyed, putting a king figure, the "One Person" (ibid., 120), back at the top of government. This new leader can simultaneously settle hermeneutical and political disagreements (if, again, such a distinction can be made): "it is annexed to the Soveraignty, to be Judge of what Opinions and Doctrines are averse" (ibid., 124). Hume's comments in the Essays and in The History of England, a century after the wars began, indicate the extent to which the Civil Wars exerted their influence on the thinking of subsequent generations. As he puts it, "Even at this day, the impartial are at a loss to decide concerning the justice of the quarrel" ("Of the Parties of Great Britain," in Essays, 68). If, as Hume contends, the impartial are unable to decide what would have been the right outcome of the Civil Wars, this means in a sense that the war is still ongoing. The fact that Jacobites are still trying to reinstall Stuarts can't help but add to the sense that the conclusion of the war cannot be decided. At the same time, Hume's reference to "the impartial" indicates that he believes in some possibility of impartiality. If there was an eighteenth-century rise of political stability, it seems to have been playing out very slowly. Hume, again like Hobbes, complains about the relative equality revealed by the Civil Wars: "every man frames a republic" and "every man had adjusted a system of religion, which, being derived from no traditional authority, was peculiar to himself" (The History of England, 4:3). And when Hume argues that "there is not

140

Chapter Five

a more terrible event, than a total dissolution of the government, which gives liberty to the multitude" ("Of the Original Contract," in Essays, 472), one would think that Hume would agree with Hobbes's proposal for centralized government. It is here, however, that Hume develops a proposal very different from that offered by Hobbes. Hobbes tries to cover that nonfoundational void with a central figure who could restore political, and to some extent epistemological, security. Hume believes, though, that "Hobbes's politics are fitted only to promote tyranny" (The History of England, 6:153). Whereas Hobbes sees the "One Person" as resolving a state of war, Hume reads the Leviathan as the evidence of that very state: "it is probable that the first ascendant of one man over multitudes begun during a state of war" ("Of the Origin of Government," in Essays, 39). The Leviathan's One Person is precisely what Hume would expect to be proposed during war. "As violent government cannot long subsist, we shall, at last, after many convulsions, and civil wars, find repose in absolute monarchy" (ibid., 53). In an oft-cited passage from A Treatise of Human Nature Hume claims that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions" (2.3.462). He thus commits reason to the passions. For Locke, Hume's treating reason as an extension of the passions would make reason unreasonable, as the passions are passionate, not reasoning. For Hume, however, it is unreasonable to think that passions should not be passionate. Indeed, Hume sees that state of affairs as a positive good. For Hume it is reasonable that passions are passionate; that is what they are. Hume's idea of reason has important consequences for freedom or autonomy, implications that apply as much to his political and his literary theory. For although the unreasonableness of passions means that an individual might have trouble controlling them reasonably, Hume is not claiming that passions cannot be controlled. On the contrary, it is the mutability of the passions that makes them so important to Hume's philosophy. For Hume's idea of subjectivity is not subjection to a monarch or to a Leviathan but to what affects the passions. "Actions," Hume claims, "may be laudable or blameable; but they cannot be reasonable" (ibid., 3.r.r.sro). Actions, then, are unreasonable, even if some are somehow better than others. In this way actions are like passions; neither is reasonable in the older sense of the term. If neither can be reasonable, then it is possible for reason to act passionately (which is to say, unreasonably as others might judge it). But if neither actions nor passions need be reasonable, then the impression is created that agency is somewhat diminished, especially if we assume (as had been assumed) that agency is related to reason or that acting requires reasoning. "Reason alone," Hume argues, "can never be a motive to any action of the will" (ibid., 2.3.460).

Hume, Politics of Passion, and Reading

141

Hume argues that "FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but OPINION" ("Of the First Principles of Government," in Essays, 32). Opinion works on the passions, enough to outweigh the strength in numbers that inheres on the side of the governed. To Hume, all government is not only what Derrida calls "an instituted fiction"; 13 it is also an instituting fiction, one that actively organizes political life. Government, then, is the persuasive opinion that creates what Hume sees as the necessary social distinctions. In the mode of Locke's Second Treatise of Government these distinctions are created by government, not given a priori to or protected a posteriori by it. 14 Hume contends in A Treatise of Human Nature that "Government makes a distinction of property and establishes the ranks of men" (2.3.1.450). According to Hume, most political possibilities follow from this instituting fiction of government. Property, for instance, is created, not natural. But then the same applies to justice, especially insofar as justice is concerned with property. "Justice," according to Hume "is not founded on reason" (A Treatise of Human Nature, 2.3.2.547). Not only, then, is justice not reasonable (and not, therefore, in earlier understandings of reason, natural); it is, instead, through Hume's understanding of reason a question of passions. Justice is, in a sense, a matter of opinion, a consequence of the created, instituting fiction of government. Our physiological susceptibility to impressions makes the arts particularly important for Hume's political philosophy. Picking up the terms of the debate over memory and imagination we have traced in Hobbes, Pope, and others, Hume organizes them in a new way. For Hobbes, as we saw in Chapter r, memory is a form of imagination, because both memory and imagination are made up of the results of decaying sense. In Pope's An Essay on Criticism, as we saw in Chapter 4, imagination helps to wash memory away; the arts contribute thereby to overcoming painful histories. Hume believes that "the mind of man being naturally limited, [it] is impossible that all its faculties can operate at once" ("Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing," in Essays, 195). As we have seen, Pope also believes that "Nature to all things fix'd the Limits fit" (An Essay on Criticism, line 52). But Hume takes those limits to mean that human psychology is a zero-sum game, focused on one thing at a time. And the principal players are affections, imagination, memory, and reason. Like Hobbes, Hume sees the mind as working with impressions. For Hume, though, memory's role is "not to preserve the simple ideas, but their order and position" (A Treatise of Human Nature, I.I.3.57); the imagination, by contrast, "transposes and changes them, as it pleases" (r.3 .1.132). Memory preserves order and position; imagination shifts them. Thus imagination and memory are opposed, one trying to undo what the

Chapter Five other has done. At the same time, the imagination's ability to rearrange impressions can be a way around the power of the impressions. In A Treatise of Human Nature Hume compares the human mind to a musical instrument, arguing that it "resembles a string-instrument, where after each stroke the vibrations still retain some sound, which gradually and insensibly decays" (2.3.9-487). This image is consistent with Hume's vision of the mind as a finite range; only so many notes can be played on the instrument, just as only so many things can occur in the mind at once. The analogy also describes the process of change in the mind as an event moves from impression to memory (a process similar to Hobbes's idea of memory as "decaying sense"). Hume, however, compares the mind to a musical instrument not because of how the mind produces but because the mind resonates. Whatever can move the affections acts like a musician on the strings; once moved, the string vibrates long after it has been plucked or strummed. The implication is that we go through experiences, being hammered and plucked, vibrating and resonating, to use verbs that follow from Hume's string-instrument analogy. It is an image of subjectivity entirely subject to sense perceptions; the mind is both instrument and audience. It is also an image of a fairly fragile sensibility, stretched tight and susceptible to "each stroke" (ibid.). For Hume, different aspects of the mind respond differently to these strokes. "The imagination is extreme quick and agile; but the passions are slow and restive" (ibid.). Hume also believes that "the ideas of the memory are much more lively and strong than those of the imagination" (ibid., I.L3.56). That is, the force of imagination is for some reason less than the force of memory for Hume. Hume uses the term vivacity to describe what gives an impression its emphasis, what helps it pluck or otherwise engage the musical instrument of the mind. Only relative "vivacity" and "coherence" can tell us "whether [sense impressions] be true or false" (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1.3.5·134, 132). An impression with a high level of vivacity can help preserve memory and certify the reality of an experience. The distorting effect of vivacity goes both ways, however: a lessening of vivacity can turn memory into imagination, and an increase in vivacity can lend an impression the strength of memory. As Hume says, "an idea of the memory, by losing its force and vivacity, may degenerate to such a degree, as to be taken for an idea of the imagination; and so on the other hand an idea of the imagination may acquire such a force and vivacity, as to pass for an idea of the memory" (ibid., 134). Locke's spatial understanding of the mind has been converted here from the tabula rasa, on which many things can be crammed (and maybe even rewritten), to something like a closet, a small, private space that can accommodate

Hume, Politics of Passion, and Reading

143

only so much at once. In Hume's model even imagination is crowded out: "When the affections are moved, there is no place for imagination" ("Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing," in Essays, 195). For Hume, then, the passions and imagination, like memory and imagination, are opposed, contesting for the same small space. Rather than the imagination distorting images and thus misleading the passions, Hume sees it the other way around: the moving of the passions crowds out imagination. Thus, for Hume the affections do to imagination what Pope has earlier claimed imagination does to memory-they erode it. Hume's model of psychology is highly associative. Struck by an impression, the mind resonates like an instrument; the impression on the mind thus produces something else besides the originating impression. Sympathy is the name Hume gives to this psychological associative principle. "Sympathy," he contends, "is nothing but the conversion of an idea into an impression by the force of imagination" (A Treatise of Human Nature, 2.3.6·474). On one level sympathy names the process whereby the mind's instrument is "played," the process whereby an impression's vivacity has an effect. Like the resonant mind, sympathy can be unknowingly subjected to various imaginative impressions. On another level, though, sympathy represents the social dimension of an impression's effect. Poetic inspiration circulates or, as Hume puts it, "is caught from one breast to another" ("Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences," in Essays, n4). That is, the process whereby the emotional effects of poetry circulate or become a group sensation Hume calls "sympathy." Sympathy is also associative in another sense. As the possibility of a shared experience of an impression's effect on the instrument of psychology, sympathy makes it possible to move beyond our singularity. Sympathy can create associations, both in the sense of linking previously disconnected material and in the sense of bringing groups together out of individualities. Sympathy requires us "in all our calm judgments and discourse ... to neglect all these differences, and render our sentiments more public and social." 15 For Hume sympathy is a natural capacity that can overcome difference through an act of imagination. At the same time, though, it is a moral capacity without a moral valence, a component of the passions through which moral persuasion can have its effects. Because it is imagination that makes sympathy possible, how sympathy is moved can vary. Therefore, this sympathetic, associative capacity is not necessarily benevolent. In fact, sympathy, "when enforc'd with passion, will cause an idea of good or evil to have an influence upon us" (A Treatise of Human Nature, 2.3.6·474). Interestingly, Hume turns to something reminiscent of the English Civil Wars for an example of unfortunate uses of sympathy:

Chapter Five "Popular sedition, party zeal, a devoted obedience to factious leaders; these are some of the most visible, though less laudable effects of this social sympathy" (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 46). The question, then, for Hume, is how the passions are to be moved. It is, again, a question that applies to both his literary and his political theories. In A Treatise of Human Nature Hume contends that "all morality depends on our sentiments" (3.2·5·569). To achieve morality, or a moral order of things, it is imperative to move the sentiments in such a way as to produce the moral outcome, however that might be defined. Thus literature and the arts, through their effects on the passions, are central to Hume's political theory: "Justice is not founded on reason, or on the discovery of certain connexions and relations of ideas, which are eternal, immutable, and universally obligatory" (ibid., 3.2.2.547). Instead, justice, like all morality, is embedded in the passions and in the relationships between people (rather than in overarching judgments made about them) that sympathy represents; the best social order has the most ability to move the passions in the best ways. The extraordinary, almost magnetic, influence that the arts have over the passions curtails our exercise of free will. But for Hume that is the advantage of the arts, properly understood and enlisted. He argues that "liberty and chance are synonymous" (A Treatise of Human Nature, 2.3-3-46o). We could say, then, that the effects of the arts, as they spread from person to person, calm the passions and lessen the prospect of unpredictability. Thus, Hume's vision of freedom is simultaneously irrational (i.e., passionate), social (i.e., passed from breast to breast), and predictable (i.e., reducing chances). As paradoxical as it might seem, Hume suggests that the arts, although irrational, offer the possibility of arriving at a predictable mean or at least a range. What is striking here is the prospect of the irrational somehow decreasing the element of chance. According to Hume, "the more men refine upon pleasure, the less they will indulge in excesses of any kind; because nothing is more destructive to true pleasure than such excesses" ("Of Refinement in the Arts," in Essays, 271). Inverting Addison and Steele, Hume contends that the arts mitigate against excess. Hume implies that excess is unpredictable or that whatever is unpredictable is excessive. Although refined pleasure itself may be a kind of excess, it is an excess that prefers predictability to instability, for instability is too likely to interfere with or interrupt the exercise and enjoyment of refined pleasure. An important corollary of Hume's analogy between the mind and a musical instrument is that the mind, as an instrument, can be tuned. Such tuning is the result of practice, meaning both the repetition involved in

Hume, Politics of Passion, and Reading

145

training and the process whereby a culture transmits its sense of how to address a problem. In "Of the Standard of Taste" Hume describes how the mind might be tuned for reading, for responding to the printed and written verbal arts. He claims that reading requires "a perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object" (Essays, 232). This reading has two parts, perusing and surveying. The remainder of this chapter focuses largely on Hume's description of attentive reading in his essay "Of the Standard of Taste," but this type of reading is not separate from Hume's other historical and philosophical work. Indeed, the discussion of reading in this essay synthesizes important themes seen across Hume's other work: standards are not rules; there is a physiological basis for how we respond to the arts; and established works matter but not necessarily because of universal principles. In "Of the Standard of Taste," though, Hume adds the dimension of practice: "Nothing tends further to encrease and improve this talent, than practice" (Essays, 237). Although Hume contends that there is a difference "very wide between judgment and sentiment" (ibid., 229), it is important for the history of criticism that an idea of judgment can be learned, with practice. For Pope, as we have seen, it seemed that one needed to be born with good judgment. In "Hume's Double Standard of Taste," James Shelley argues that Hume is "not fully confident that the standard is a rule." 16 For Hume, though, the advantage of a standard is precisely that it does not have the same confidence as a rule. It would seem that Hume's use of the word standard to describe taste reflects Pope's use of the term in An Essay on Criticism, where Pope argues we should "Judgment frame/By her just Standard" (An Essay on Criticism, lines 68-69), as we saw in the previous chapter. Through the use of the same word, however, Pope's "standard" provides an illustrative contrast. Pope uses standard as a rule-a natural rule-in a way Hume does not. In the way Hume uses the word, a "standard" represents a way of discussing measurement that recognizes the difficulty of establishing ultimate principles. Hume's standard represents the codification of practices, the abstraction of a variety of opinions-meaning both the result of well-established social practice and the opposite of force. It is therefore not a universal, natural law, as Pope understood it. For Shelley such a definition of a standard "leave[s] Hume with no foundation from which to derive the rules of art" ("Hume's Double Standard of Taste," 443). By beginning with a nonfoundational position, however, Hume can treat the standard as the result of a social-which is to say contingent, arbitrary-combination of influences. Seeing the standard this way has implications for how Hume understands literary history. As was the case with Dryden, precedence

Chapter Five

and being well-established both matter. But that does not mean, as it did for Dryden, that precedence is necessarily related to birth, nor does it mean that the ancient authors had found a transhistorical formal rule, as Pope argued. In "Of The Standard of Taste" Burne makes an important distinction between two types of reading: "It will even be requisite," he contends, "that that very individual performance be more than once perused by us, and be surveyed in different lights with attention and deliberation" (Essays, 238). Of course, the latter term, surveying, suggests again the influence of Pope's model (see Chapter 4). Burne, however, unlike Pope, follows Addison in also describing an earlier, preliminary form of reading, "perusing," after which "surveying" is possible and required. Again, we can see how Burne's position combines both eighteenth-century modern and neoclassical approaches. It is important to clarify, though, that these two types of reading are not different levels of reading analogous to Dante's fourfold theory of interpretation. Rather than describing an increasing range of signification, Burne's perusing and surveying refer to a temporal distinction in the reader's process of construing meaning. Perusing comes before and takes less time than the surveying. Burne claims that "there is a flutter or hurry of thought which attends the first perusal of any piece" (ibid.). Apparently, as there is a first perusal, this preliminary reading is supposed to be undertaken more than once. But even repeated perusals are by definition incomplete; surveying is still required. By virtue of the contrast with surveying at least, perusing seems to consist of the preliminary acquisition of information, maybe even of a sense of scale. Insofar as the perusal is hurried, it would seem that this initial perusing is something like what is today called "skimming." "Perusing" also has an intriguing connection to the Royal Society in the seventeenth century, where it referred to a first reading of the results of a Royal Society member's findings. It is not clear that Burne's use reflects his knowledge of the institutional reading practices of the Royal Society, but it is interesting that in both cases perusing refers to an initial acquisition of informationY As we will see in the following chapter, Burne's "perusing" is taken up by Samuel Johnson in the debate over reading. With his idea that a "flutter" accompanies perusing, Burne again points to the psychological and physiological impact that reading, as an impression, can have on the reader. The "flutter" of the perusal, in other words, refers to the effect of the arts on the passions, especially, apparently, in the initial readings of a work. As the emotional, irrational component of the experience of reading, the flutter is a kind of excitement that drives the reading forward and accompanies it as it goes. The flutter is like enthusiasm as Burne describes it-emotive, contagious, and tend-

Hume, Politics of Passion, and Reading

147

ing to instability. Unlike enthusiasm, however, the flutter may not dissipate or moderate over time. Hume believes that the perusal "confounds the genuine sentiment of beauty.'~ In perusing, "the relation of parts is not discerned: The true characters of style are little distinguished: the several perfections and defects seem wrapped up in a species of confusion" ("Of the Standard of Taste," in Essays, 238). Consequently, a fuller apprehension of the text requires surveying, the term we first saw with Pope. Implicitly, as he describes all that cannot be accomplished in a perusal, Hume also explains what is involved in a survey. Much of his explanation is reminiscent of Pope: relation of parts, the true character, and a clear vision of perfections. In short, surveying entails reflection, looking back on the text, moving beyond the experience of having read it. As Pope suggested, to survey involves stepping back and getting a sense of scale. By taking the longer view, surveying establishes relationships. As the more evaluative reading, surveying is for Hume the more important of the two types. And Hume insists on this: "every work of art, in order to produce its effect on the mind, must be surveyed in a certain point of view" (ibid., 239). Although the difference between the perusal and the survey is temporal-the quicker perusal preceding the lengthier survey-surveying could also have been understood spatially, as it is for Pope. In Burne's model, however, surveying is more than a metaphor to imply getting some distance on the subject. Rather, surveying is an umbrella term, entailing that spatial distance but under which Hume specifies how the reader might develop a resistance to the hurry and flutter-and therefore the emotional effect-the artwork can have on the viewer I recipient. Surveying brings a self-awareness to the reading that is not possible during the flutter of the perusal. Hume is very specific on how to become selfconscious about one's response to the text, on how to survey. First, "it is impossible," he says, "to continue in the practice of contemplating any order of beauty, without being frequently obliged to form comparisons" ("Of the Standard of Taste," in Essays, 238). In a way that is not true in Pope's An Essay on Criticism, to survey is to compare a text to other texts. Comparison, though, has both a mechanical and an evaluative component. In the former sense the reader finds analogies for the text being surveyed; in the latter, the reader determines its worth or "rate[s] the merits of a work," as Hume puts it (ibid.). The first form of comparison makes the second one possible. "By comparison alone we fix the epithets of praise or blame" (ibid.). And it is important to note that Hume describes such comparison as a "practice." Given the great power Hume attributes to the arts, the possibility that anything, including surveying, might help us control our responses to a

Chapter Five

work would seem to be a paradox at best and a contradiction at worst. Prior to this it would have seemed that the arts'. effects operate on a level where they would seem to be irresistible. However, what Hume calls "practice" comes between the power of the arts and our responses to the arts' impression on us. Hume believes that the ideal judge will have a "strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice" ("Of the Standard of Taste," in Essays, 241). Practice can hone capacities at the same irresistible psychophysiological level affected by the arts. Ultimately, with practice, and perhaps especially the practice of surveying, preparation might condition us to withstand the strong stimuli provided by works of art. In part, Hume emphasizes practice because the repetition implicit in practice facilitates the discipline required for "due attention" (ibid., 232). Practice facilitates the comparisons that make up surveying. Practice provides the references required for informed reading. Conversely, comparisons follow from practice: once one is practicing, one compares. Thus, surveying requires practice. At the same time, though, surveying is itself a practice. In this sense practice is more than just the repetitive training implied by the learned activity of making evaluative comparisons. A practice also reflects, summarizes, and perpetuates the behaviors of a group. Indeed, because practice is not a natural or inborn capacity, there is a way in which the latter produces the former. Practice, in the sense of the behaviors of a group, becomes a standard, which might also require practice, in the sense of training. In both cases the result is to make the activity practically invisible to the practitioner. The best reader, Hume claims, "must preserve his mind free from all prejudice, and allow nothing to enter into his consideration, but the very object which is submitted to his examination" ("Of the Standard of Taste," in Essays, 239). It would appear that Hume is arguing for a kind of blank slate preceding the reading of any particular text. Of the reader, we are told, nothing should "enter into his consideration, but the very object which is submitted to his examination" (ibid.). On one level this is what practice makes possible. With the well-trained reader the practice takes over. The resulting evaluation is not simply that of the individual reader. And insofar as this reading is (the result of) a practice, the best reader does not arrive as a blank slate but rather stamped with the materials of the practice. Still, on another level it is not at all clear how a reader can be making comparisons without prejudice; the positing of likeness requires a prejudgment, a decision about which texts are similar, not to mention the familiarity with texts in the context of which a comparison can then be made. For this, Hume's solution is to argue that a reader must forget him- or herself: "I must depart from my

Hume, Politics of Passion, and Reading

I49

situation; and considering myself as a man in general, forget, if possible, my individual being and my peculiar circumstance" (ibid.). On this level, Hume's best reader, or the practices that produce the best readings, overlaps with an Enlightenment vision of universal citizenship. It is, however, a universality built on practices (and on sympathy) rather than on the reason it would later be for Kant. It is also a universality that requires setting aside one's situation and individual being. Reading as Hume describes it requires practice, comparison, familiarity, absence of prejudice, and recourse to generalities, not particularities. The best reading requires quite a complicated combination of skills. It is perhaps no surprise to learn that Hume believes that "few are qualified to give judgment on any work of art" ("Of the Standard of Taste," in Essays, 241). In a passage that reworks the analogy between watches and judgment in Pope's An Essay on Criticism, Hume argues that "the most ordinary machine is sufficient to tell the hours; but the most elaborate alone can point out the minutes and seconds" ("Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion," in Essays, 7). For Pope the analogy implied a concern about the same dangerous presumption of equality that Hobbes set out to resolve in Leviathan, the relative equality that gives us each an expectation of success. For Hume, by contrast, the analogy between the critics and a timepiece stands for the qualitative differences between an ordinary instrument and the more sophisticated measurements. There are only a few who have reached the point of being able to tell not only the arts' equivalent of the hour and minutes but also the seconds. It takes an informed, practiced reader to be able to notice those differences. Hume believes that only "one accustomed to see, and examine, and weigh the several performances" can "assign its proper rank among the productions of genius." Those few, though "rare," are "easily distinguished in society," according to Hume. "A man, who has had no opportunity of comparing the different kinds of beauty, is indeed totally unqualified" ("Of the Standard of Taste," in Essays, 238, 241, 238). Such readers are as created as the text. They are also more likely to occur among the wealthy, because of the time it takes to practice. Unfortunately, Hume's sense of reading as a social practice does not result in his having a similarly flexible sense of why only some people have such familiarity with the best practices that make up the standard. Nor, again unfortunately, is Hume arguing that expanding access will result in more qualified readers. What could have been an argument that good readers are made, not born, becomes instead a clear distinction between the rich and the poor and between the European and the Native American. Coarser beauties "would affect the mind of a peasant or Indian" ("Of the Standard of Taste," in Essays, 238). Although it may

150

Chapter Five

be for contingent reasons of social practices that women, poor people, and Indians are unfamiliar with the standard of taste represented by the practice of good reading, Hume treats their position as if it were a rare instance of a natural category in his work. "The observations of a peasant, the ribaldry of a porter or hackney coachman," Hume writes, "all of these are natural, and disagreeable. What an insipid comedy should we make of the chit-chat of the tea-table copied faithfully and at full length?" ("Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing," in Essays, 191). In "Of the Standard of Taste" Hume reworks Hooke's terms from Micrographia, conceding that even "the coarsest daubing contains a certain lustre" (Essays, 238). As we saw in Chapter 2, Hooke's description of how writing looks under a microscope implies that the radical democrat readers of the 164os were willing to see meaning in nothing more than daubings. Unlike Hobbes, Hume believes that something beautiful can be found even in the ugliest of sources-but only by certain readers. The question remains as to who meets Hume's own standards for reading. Hume himself concedes that "these questions are embarrassing" ("Of the Standard of Taste," in Essays, 241). To ask this question is to put Hume back up against exactly that "uncertainty, from which, during the course of this essay, we have endeavoured to extricate ourselves" (ibid.). Hume's initial response to this embarrassing situation is to argue that the difficulty of finding such a person diminishes neither that person's value nor his or her demonstrable superiority should he or she be found. That such people are valuable and that they should have the attributes Hume gives them in advance indicates, for Hume, the existence of a standard: "they must acknowledge a true and decisive standard to exist somewhere" (ibid., 242). The word must in this sentence could act as a command, asserting that either the true critic or the generality should acknowledge a standard. Asserting the necessity of acknowledging a standard, however, does not establish that there is one and, in fact, suggests its absence insofar as readers now need to be cajoled into acknowledging one. At the same time, Hume's use of the word must in his claim about the true and decisive standard points to a larger tension that characterizes his discussion of a standard of taste: the difference between is and ought that he famously described in A Treatise of Human Nature: In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark'd, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz'd to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not." (3.1.521)

Hume, Politics of Passion, and Reading In the Treatise, Hume insists on the difference between the descriptive and the normative, between the is and the ought. But with the standard of taste, Burne's argument has a tendency to make the same shift from is to ought that he is surprised to see in the work of others. Having described what he considers the best practices for reading, he implies that it is with those practices that one ought to read. If it were an "ought," a standard of taste could undermine the skepticism that characterizes Hume's philosophy. From some of Hume's other work, though, it may be possible to reconstruct how he gets around the problem of the ought. In "Of the Original Contract" Hume argues that "though an appeal to general opinion may justly, in the speculative sciences of metaphysics, natural philosophy, or astronomy, be deemed unfair and inconclusive, yet in all questions with regard to morals, as well as criticism, there is really no other standard" (Essays, 486). Hume distinguishes such general opinion from the process of drawing conclusions in natural philosophy and astronomy. Both presumably have recourse to something like logic. Moreover, what is considered unfair in the sciences turns out to be all that is available to criticism. In other words, criticism can be unfair. There is a way, then, that Hume's claim accounts for the (unfair) gap between the best readers and women, natives, and the poor. Moreover, his claim also begins to address the problem of the ought. It is merely general opinion, and not, for example, a natural law or a divine principle, that provides the standard in morality and criticism. If there "is" a standard of how one "ought" to appreciate a work of art, such a standard, as general opinion, is profoundly contingent but also aided by its social standing. Although Hume does not emphasize longevity as a criterion for the standard of taste, the implication seems to be that the best general opinion has been established over a long period of time. Samuel Johnson explores just this possibility in his preface to the Works of Shakespeare, offering a century as the time required for establishing the worth of a work. For Hume, centrally concerned throughout his work with preserving whatever is already established, the general opinion has the advantage of being established. Hume's concern for the established is so powerful that he slides into several "ought" arguments about it himself. For example, in The History of England Hume contends that "a regard to liberty ... ought commonly to be subordinate to a reverence for established government" (6:533). Consistent with his sense of the role of the passions, Hume recognizes that "human society is in perpetual flux" ("Of the Original Contract," in Essays, 476). But in response he argues that, precisely because there is already such instability, "the new brood should conform themselves to the established constitution" (ibid., 486).

Chapter Five

The same point could apply not only to political constitutions but to the general critical opinion as well. In the same way that citizens should conform to an established constitution, readers should conform to an established standard. The standards are what are established (and, although I am not particularly interested in a strictly biographical reading of Hume as a Scottish outsider here, one might wonder whether he might also prefer what has been established by the establishment, elsewhere). What has been established may have been established by historical accident or without universalizing rules, but this does not lessen its importance for Hume. Because the established is what it is, there is a way in which Hume seems to assume that it ought to be that way, even if it has come to be that way only for inconclusive reasons of opinion, now general. At the same time, Hume believes that what has been established for writing changes less than what has been established in science: "Nothing has been experienced more liable to the revolutions of chance and fashion than these pretended decisions of science. The case is not the same with the beauties of eloquence and poetry" ("Of the Standard of Taste," in Essays, 242). The question is how the established became established. Consistent with his disagreement with Hobbes, Hume argues that the stability that the arts perpetuate could not have first emerged in a monarchy. Because the first people to live under a monarch would have been in a state of slavery, Hume argues that "to expect, therefore, that the arts and sciences should take their first rise in a monarchy, is to expect a contradiction" ("Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences," in Essays, IJ7). Early monarchy, according to Hume, had not achieved the all-important mean: there was too much stability for any exercise of the refined and refining pleasures. Nonetheless, Hume argues that monarchy has subsequently become "most favorable" to "the polite arts" (ibid., 124). In "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences" Hume distinguishes the orientation of monarchs and republics. "A strong genius succeeds best in republics: A refined taste in monarchies. And consequently the sciences are the more natural growth of the one, and the polite arts of the other" (ibid., 126). Between Hume's putative original and contemporary examples, the cultural-political possibilities for monarchs have changed. Like the difference between the notes harmonized on the instrument of the mind, Hume again points to excess and difference as refining, in this case refining government itself. In a variation on Addison's balance of excess in the tripartite mixed constitution, Hume sees the eighteenthcentury English constitution as a kind of predictable mean: "the laws," he argues, "indulge us in such liberty ... derived from our mixed form

Hume, Politics of Passion, and Reading

153

of government, which is neither wholly monarchical, nor wholly republican" ("Of the Liberty of the Press," in Essays, 10). It is the Civil War of the 164os and the Glorious Revolution of the late 168os that contribute to England's monarchy the most self-consciously republican components and political theory. Consequently, "the monarchical form," Hume contends, "owes all its perfection to the republican" ("Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences," in Essays, 125). Somewhere between his preference for a strong monarchy and his revulsion at violent revolution, Hume can argue that "the violent innovations ... in the reign of Charles I ... have proved happy in the issue" ("Of the Original Contract," in Essays, 477). The violence, which Hume rejects, produces a result that he approves. Like enthusiasm, the republican (and earlier radical democratic) arguments against the king have the effect of "moderating" the government over time. So Hume implies he is in a position to move beyond the strict identification of stability with monarchy. For the establishing of the establishment, Hume posits an originary act of violence. "The original establishment was formed by violence, and submitted to from necessity" ("Of the Original Contract," in Essays, 475). In Hobbes's theory, government is intended to solve the problem of violence, on the assumption that all will agree to a peaceful pact after life in the natural state of war. Hume's original government by contrast begins with violence, which only eventually leads to acquiescence (as opposed to the more active idea of choice and consent found in Hobbes and Locke). It is difficult not to hear in this argument Hume referring to a seventeenth-century "origin" of the modern English constitution, forged in the century's various acts of revolutionary violence and only over time acceded to. But no matter how successful he might think the outcome with that particular period of violence to have been, Hume insists on stability over change: "violent innovations no individual is entitled to make" (ibid., 477). It is not clear how low Hume's threshold for contemporary violent innovations is set. In keeping with his preference for what is established, though, Hume thinks that it is better to acclimate oneself to current conditions than to try to change them. Hume implies that the current conditions are already better as a result of earlier interventions. In a way Hume is offering here something that has recently been called an evolutionary theory of democracy. This approach applies to criticism as well as it does to politics. To Hume, we have the benefit, as readers, of what has been written before; there, unlike the sciences, the process of acquiring knowledge can be either additive or, perhaps, variations on a theme played across the generations. For Hume, "a very violent effort is requisite to change our judgment" ("Of the Standard of Taste," in Essays, 247); to create a new establishment

154

Chapter Five

would require violence, a point that would apply both to the individual psychology and to the established standard.

It seems that Hume's contribution to literary criticism gets caught, these days, between literature and philosophy and is not considered particularly important to either field. In r824 John Stuart Mill complained that Hume "was completely enslaved by a taste for literature ... that literature which[,] without regard for truth or utility, seeks only to excite emotion." 18 For Mill this is unfortunate, but for literary criticism Mill is rightly pointing to what makes Hume's contribution unusual in its time: the sense that literature as one of the arts alters emotions, maybe even positively. For Mill such an effect on the passions constituted an enslavement to literature. For Hume, by contrast, the challenge is to enlist this sense of art's effects. For one thing, as we have seen, the "talent" of poets, according to Hume, is their ability "to move the passions" (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 67); the idea would be to let poetry's emotional power move the passions in constructive ways, to create and inculcate stability. For Hume this would probably mean moving the passions in accordance with the standard of taste. Of course, Samuel Johnson, the subject of my final chapter, does as much (and maybe more) to spread and popularize a sense of literature's moral worth than anyone else in the history of English literary criticism up to his day. Thus, although Hume believes that we "must acknowledge a true and decisive standard to exist somewhere" ("Of The Standard of Taste," in Essays, 242), there is a way in which he shares with the radicals of the r64os a similar acceptance of the irrational, although not with a religious orientation toward spirit. Hume's sense of the importance of the arts' emotional, passionate power can be seen in his defense of our personal relationship with the arts. In "Of the Standard of Taste" he compares literary preferences to friendship: "We choose our favourite author as we do our friend, from a conformity of humour and disposition" (Essays, 244). Boswell will later go on to combine friendship and reading, writing about his friendship with Johnson and reflecting on his experiences with someone whom he describes as a voracious reader. Hume, recognizing that such preferences are not rational, is willing nearly to undo the point of the essay he is writing. Strikingly, he contends that our preferences in reading "can never reasonably be the object of dispute, because there is no standard, by which they may be decided" (Essays, 244).

CHAPTER SIX

Samuel Johnson, the Constitution, and the Exuberance of Signification

.

~

The themes of this book come together in the work of Samuel Johnson. The familiar references to the Civil Wars, the association between the wars and print, and the range of analyses of reading from Hobbes through Hume can be found in Samuel Johnson's writing-and are given there new possibilities. In a sense it is not too much to say that the trajectory of this book was shaped from the beginning by the arguments of Samuel Johnson, especially his arguments about other early literary critics such as Dryden, Pope, and perhaps Addison above all. Indeed, Johnson's "Life of Addison" provides perhaps the central insight into a history of eighteenthcentury criticism from a participant in the creation of modern literary criticism but an insight at odds with today's public-sphere vision of early literary criticism. This chapter is thus both an exploration and result of Samuel Johnson's work. At the same time, though, Samuel Johnson proposes another step in the attenuation of radically democratic theories of reading that this book has traced from the I64os through the latter half of the eighteenth century. Johnson's description of reading~which is to say, Johnson's contribution to the debate over theories of reading-has led at least one scholar to claim that readers "suffer the fate of obliteration" in Johnson's work. 1 With Johnson the recommended form of democratic reading becomes particularly diminished at the very moment that criticism becomes most institutionalized, and with the very person who had done the most until that time to institutionalize it. This chapter, with reference to Johnson's writings of the I75os (The Rambler, The Adventurer, the preface to the Dictionary, and The Idler), considers Johnson's definition of reading in the context, and to some extent as the summation, of the debate over theories of reading from Milton to Hume. Across the debate there is a central tension between

Chapter Six those, such as Milton and Hume, who welcome the irrational component of words and reading them, and those, such as Sprat, Dryden, Addison and Steele, and Pope, who are concerned about it. Johnson, significantly, crosses those lines: like Hume, he welcomes-as what he calls the "passions"-the irrational influence of the text; but at the same time, he agrees with the concern over reading reflected in Hobbes's Leviathan, in Sprat's History of the Royal Society, and in Dryden's Religio Laici. 2 In the preface to the Dictionary Johnson writes that "such is the exuberance of signification which many words have obtained that it was scarcely possible to collect all their senses." 3 We can hear in this claim both the wish to fix the language and a sense that words have an irrepressible quality that results in their multiple meanings. Although Johnson sometimes sees the multiplicity of meanings as exuberant, and sometimes as a "barbarity" and an "encroachment,"4 the Dictionary includes various meanings of the words defined and occasionally offers a witty againstthe-grain definition. This combination of a concern over instability and the provision for the multiplicity of words is central to Johnson's contribution to the debate. For through this combination Johnson is self-consciously formulating a constitution of literacy (most importantly in the Dictionary) and of literature (most importantly in The Lives). More than anyone we have seen since Milton, Johnson has already been considered with regard to his ideas of reading. Lawrence Lipking has gone so far as to claim that "Johnson is the Hero as Reader." 5 Alvin Kernan and Robert DeMaria Jr. have helped us see Samuel Johnson as almost a product of print. 6 In Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading DeMaria distinguishes between two approaches to the history of reading, arguing that "the sum of the lives of reading equals the real history of reading; this is distinct from the history of remarks about reading, which is a branch of literary criticism." 7 DeMaria focuses on the first type, the lives of reading or reading practices. I focus here on the second type, setting it in the context of the century-old debate over democratized reading rather than on Johnson's own reading practices-precisely because remarks about reading are a branch of literary criticism, as DeMaria notes. Simply put, the subject of this chapter is not Johnson's reading (DeMaria's focus) but what Johnson says about reading (a branch of literary criticism). It is important nonetheless to note the differences between Johnson's reading practices and Johnson's theories of reading. Illustrating the definitions in the Dictionary, for example, required a reading more intensive than Johnson seemed to be explicitly proposing, including in the definitions of reading offered in the Dictionary itself. Still, the same Dictionary that required such reading from Johnson rewards a more occasional, extensive reading from its readers.

Johnson and Exuberance of Signification

I

57

According to DeMaria, Johnson offers four types of reading: "study" (or "hard") reading, "perusal," "mere" reading, and "curious" reading. 8 We could say, then, that if Johnson was involved in "study" or "hard" reading as a lexicographer, the resulting dictionary might complement "mere" or "curious" reading. More important for the history of criticism, Johnson associates these types of reading with types of readers. For example, to illustrate his first definition of class, "a rank or order of persons," Johnson quotes Dryden on readers: "Segrais has distinguished the readers of poetry, according to their capacity of judging, into three classes." 9 What DeMaria calls "study" or "hard" reading, for example, is not for what Johnson calls the "common reader," 10 but it is probably similar to what was proposed in the r64os as a general and radically democratic model by Milton, and maybe Coppe, among others. The problem for the history of criticism is how to address this split between the "mere" or "curious" reading presumed for the common reader and the "hard" reading presumed for the critic, as the distinction seems to have been instituted by the most influential of eighteenth-century critics. For DeMaria, Johnson's practice is an important analogue for the kind of "random-access reading" DeMaria sees as fostered by the World Wide Web.U But I am concerned about that development not so much in Johnson's practice as in his theory of reading, especially as it affects literary criticism. In recent years, most significantly in a debate between Donald Greene and J. C. D. Clark, the question of what Johnson, as opposed to Boswell, "really thinks" has been given a new prominence. Greene and Clark are focused on Johnson's politics, but the same question of how to evaluate Boswell's representation of Johnson applies to Johnson's ideas of reading. Here too, although there are many variables in the debate, the question of whether we have an accurate vision of Johnson in Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) recurs. Long before Rolf Engelsing used the phrase "extensive reading" to describe a mid-eighteenth-century shift in reading habits, Boswell claimed that Johnson's "reading was very extensive."12 On the one hand, Boswell means that Johnson had read many different books. But on the other, Boswell describes Johnson as reading in a desultory way, with the superficiality that the metaphor of reading "widely" entails. Boswell claims that Johnson "had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end" {r:7r). As we have seen, there are more laborious modes of reading than perusal, but according to Boswell at least even that type was more than Johnson would do with most books. I would, therefore, propose treating Boswell as the first Johnsonian. "I have Johnsonised the land," Boswell writes, "and I trust

Chapter Six they will not only talk, but think, Johnson" (r:r3). Such "Johnsonizing" can apply to Johnson's sense of reading as well. Since much of the recent work on Johnson and print, including the present chapter, is indebted to how Boswell frames Johnson in print, reading about reading in Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson offers a chance to see an early moment of literary criticism becoming an institution in England. Boswell believes that Johnson's form of extensive reading had profound benefits for Johnson's "constitution" (r:7r). According to Boswell there was about Johnson "at all times, an impatience and hurry when he either read or wrote" (r:7r). For Boswell this impatience stems from Johnson's psychophysiological makeup, his "constitution" in that sense. It could also be that such extensive reading might be a technique developed more for qualitative reasons than for quantitative reasons, but it is difficult not to see Johnson's hurried style as reflecting the pressures associated with the increased pace of publishing in the second half of the eighteenth century. At the same time, Boswell claims Johnson's impatient constitution was calmed by such reading. When agitated, Johnson would "take a book, and read, and compose himself to rest" (2:44). We have the possibility, hinted at by Hume, that reading can be soothing. Boswell, unlike Hume, offers an example of the correlation between a particular mode of reading and the possibility that a text might be pacifying. Moreover, although Boswell is referring to how Johnson's own "constitution" can be calmed by reading, there is also the implication in Boswell's story and Hume's idea of reading that a political constitution might be soothed by reading. Boswell's image of the great critic's reading in such a way as to become calmer is an important part of the constitution of literature. Not only has reading been tamed; more important, reading can tame. In this sense Boswell's image of Johnson's being calmed by his book is good for the political constitution as well. There is a tendency in the scholarship on Johnson's reading to see Johnson as revealing a stability in print or of print already established long before his work. For example, when considering Johnson's The Rambler no. 23-in which Johnson describes what he sees as the different ways in which people respond to print and to manuscript texts-Alvin Kernan contends that "knowledge of the leading principles of print logic, such as fixity, multiplicity, and systematization, makes it possible to predict the tendencies" of Johnson's description. 13 The debate over theories of reading, though, indicates that there is not any logic of print itself that creates fixity or systematization. If anything, such logic is proposed for print by the early literary critics, among others, as we have seen. The weight of the evidence from the r64os through the eighteenth century suggests, on the contrary, that Kernan is retroactively assuming print has

Johnson and Exuberance of Signification

159

a stability that Johnson and others before him were at pains to find in it or to give to it. Especially with the Dictionary, Johnson contributes to the historical development of what Kernan sees as a transcendent quality of print. With his essays and The Lives of the English Poets, Johnson, it could be said, helps shape Kernan's sense of literature as a field tied to "the high age of print, between the mid-eighteenth century and the midtwentieth."14 This, however, is why it is important to see Boswell as the first Johnsonian. Boswell's treatment of Johnson goes a long way toward explaining the sense of Kernan, and others, that Johnson "fitted into, understood, and worked well within the new print circumstances," 15 as opposed to Johnson's having made a signal contribution to a debate that was shaping the circumstances of print. The question, both for this chapter and for the history of criticism, is whether something is lost in Boswell's combination of Johnsonian extensive reading and perusing. This chapter examines Johnson in the light of the major figures in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debate over theories of readingMilton, Hobbes, Sprat, Dryden, Locke, Addison, Pope, and Hume-and is arranged roughly chronologically, beginning with The Rambler, The Adventurer, and The Idler. In several essays from those journals Johnson adopts and transforms many of the key terms from the reading debate, starting with the debate's physiological and psychological terms, such as imagination, memory, and sight. By the time Johnson enlists them, these terms have their own literary-critical history; consequently, this section of the chapter will involve a range of comparison and contrasts to distinguish what Johnson does with this by-then almost technical vocabulary. It should then be possible to consider the range of activities that Johnson means by reading: accumulate, peruse, practice, select, and so forth. Again, Johnson adopts, transforms, and adds words to the existing debate, no more so than in the preface to the Dictionary and in the Dictionary itself. In the Dictionary Johnson makes explicit what had been a presumed connection between language, literacy, and government, defending what he calls the "constitution." Finally, in his The Lives of the English Poets Johnson retells the political history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary criticism by way of Milton, Butler, Dryden, and Addison, indicating how he thought the constitution had developed up to his own defining contribution to it. In 1750 Johnson began publishing The Rambler, a journal that would run until 1752 with 208 issues, 201 of them written by Johnson himself. The Rambler aligns Johnson with the most important developments of eighteenth-century literary criticism. Through the form of the twice-weekly periodical essay, he follows Addison and Steele. In the

160

Chapter Six

extraordinary combination of fluidity and density in his sentences, he builds on Hume. Soon after the last issue of The Rambler, Johnson would go on to become a contributor to The Adventurer (1753-54) and then to publish A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Thus, more than his earlier contributions to the Gentleman's Magazine, The Rambler can be seen to signal Johnson's shift toward his standing as the great literary critic of the eighteenth century for which he would come to be remembered. In this chapter, therefore, The Rambler serves as a convenient means for preliminarily examining Johnson's position in the debate over theories of reading. In what follows, The Rambler and The Adventurer are considered in the light of that debate, setting some parameters and terms for A Dictionary of the English Language, The Lives of the English Poets, and Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson. In The Rambler no. 4 Johnson, describing contemporary novels, claims that "other writings are safe, exceptfrom the malice of learning, but these are in danger from every common reader" (3:20). Thus, with this early issue of The Rambler Johnson links his work to the long-standing debate over reading. He invokes a vocabulary of safety and danger, like The Spectator, in which, as we have seen, Steele claims to show how "the most dangerous Page in Virgil or Homer may be read ... with perfect Safety to their Persons." 16 In an important difference, though, where Steele creates the impression that a reader might be at risk from the book (or where Hobbes sees reading as a danger to government), Johnson casts the book as being at risk from the reader. Moreover, he distinguishes between two types of books-novels and other writings-and two types of readers: common and learned. Both kinds of readers apparently exercise their malice on books, albeit different kinds of books: the common readers on the novel, the learned on the other writings. Novels, it would seem, are subjected to this risk because there are numbers of people who actually read them, unlike other writings (a point that underlines the humorous side of Johnson's comment}. Johnson's interest in the common reader is usually understood as part of his contributing to a progressive Enlightenment public sphere. But this sense that the book runs a risk in being read by the common reader raises questions about what Johnson thinks of common readers. Of course, he thinks that other writings will also suffer in the hands of the learned, but more books are threatened by common readers because there are fewer learned readers. In the same essay from The Rambler Johnson complains that "if the world be promiscuously described, I cannot see of what use it can be to read the account" (Rambler no. 4, 3:22). In the context of the essay, he is making the familiar point that the mere fact that something happens, or is in that sense "natural," does not mean that it should be recorded. But

Johnson and Exuberance of Signification

r6r

the phrase "promiscuously described" echoes a similar formulation in Milton's Areopagitica: "promiscuously read." 17 For two essays separated by more than a century, the terms could not be more similar-a combination of the same adverb and a verb, with the adverb sharing the same position in each phrase-nor the evaluation of them more opposed. The similarity of these phrases might be nothing more than a coincidence, but it does point to a larger relationship between the two essays: they both address the author's sense of how to read, either as a process or anethics of reading. In fact, this is not the only phrase in Rambler no. 4 that echoes Milton's Areopagitica. For example, explaining his concerns with promiscuous description, Johnson writes, "while men consider good and evil as springing from the same root, they will spare the one for the sake of the other" (24). Johnson's rejection of the notion of good and evil as springing from the same root parallels Milton's, in which, by contrast, Milton contends, "Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably" (Areopagitica, 514). While both authors claim that good and evil grow up together, Milton insists that they have a complicated relationship. For Milton nothing else but their relationship can convey the difficulty of distinguishing between them. For Johnson, however, the distinctions between good and evil need to be cast in the sharpest relief, with the difference between the two plainly visible. Nothing else but such distinctions, for Johnson, can lead us more directly to avoiding the bad. If anything were to be represented simply because it happens, the crucial moral distinctions between things would be obscured. Johnson believes that "vice, for vice is necessary to be shewn, should always disgust" (Rambler no. 4, 3:24). The difference between Milton and Johnson in this regard is partly a difference between the degrees of control that they believe a reader can have. As we have seen, Milton allows that readers can choose from among various meanings in a text. But Milton indicates both a more empowered common reader and a less powerful textual influence on the reader than Johnson, writing after a century of the democratic literacy debate, sees. Johnson is concerned that "the power of example is so great, as to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will" (Rambler no. 4, 3:22). Although the idea that the verbal arts might seize one's soul is classical and can be found as early as Gorgias, the particular terms of Johnson's claim also reflect the influence of Hobbes and the subsequent debate over the faculties and reading. Johnson mentions power, possession, memory, and violence, terms strongly associated with Hobbes's political philosophy and psychology. As we have seen in Hobbes's Leviathan, memory and imagination are two forms of the same capacity. Knowledge

r62

Chapter Six

is faulty, and understanding is compromised, for Hobbes, by the fact that memories decay into what he calls imagination. For Pope, "warm imagination" has the advantage of "melting" memory away (An Essay on Criticism, lines sS-59). It is as if the powerful grip of the arts, then, could provide us with what Pope elsewhere calls the "Eternal sun-shine of the spotless mind" (Eloisa to Abelard, line 209). Hume contends in "Of the Standard of Taste" that "a very violent effort is requisite to change our judgment" (Essays, 247). Building on the persistent sense of art's power, and on Pope's relatively positive treatment of that power, Hume converts this possibility into a defense of the established. Although Hume believes that it turned out well for England after the Civil Wars and Glorious Revolution of the seventeenth century, he contends that it would now be better to avoid that violence and stick to our existing standard of judgment. Johnson's claim shares the same tension between imagination, or what he calls the power of example, and memory. Rather than representing the decay of a sensory impression as it does for Hobbes, and rather than gently melting unfortunate memory as it does for Pope, imagination in Johnson's model seizes memory. Hume's "violence" is for Johnson built into the operation of imaginative works on the faculties of the mind. Memory is gripped by the power of the example. Not only might words distort, but they do so by making us forget. Moreover, the power of example does this in a way that is beyond our control, without any intervention of the will. It is as if the work of the imagination leaps off the page, reaches into readers' minds, and takes hold of them before they can even recognize that anything has happened to them. In Hume's model practice allows readers to temper reading's effect on them. But with Johnson, because the effect of the example occurs so quickly, it is not clear whether readers could ever realize that they have been thus snatched up. In The Adventurer no. 137 (1754) Johnson argues that books "have always a secret influence on the understanding; we cannot at pleasure obliterate ideas." 18 There are two issues involved here. First, the influence of books is secret. Precisely because each reader would be unaware of the book's influence, it is all the more important, for Johnson, that vice and virtue be cast sufficiently starkly. With regard to a collectivity of readers, each reader's impression can remain internal, that is, secret from others. Both consequences of books' secret influence, though, are dangerous: in the first case to the individuals influenced, unaware of how they are being manipulated, and in the second to those around the secreted individuals. There is still the question, though, of how to understand the connection between the first sentence, about the secret influence, and the second, about obliterating ideas. According to

] ohnson and Exuberance of Signification one reading, the second clause illustrates the first: the danger of reading's secret influence is that it cannot be undone. Another reading would emphasize the qualifier, "at pleasure." According to this reading, ideas can be obliterated but only painfully. This suggests, on the one hand, that we enjoy the secret influence books have on our understanding and, on the other hand, that there is no pleasure to be had in resisting that influence-not that it cannot be resisted. By this second reading, we have another version of Hume's sense that changing our judgment requires violence. In The Idler no. 44 (1759) Johnson contends, "Memory is the primary and fundamental power, without which there could be no other intellectual operation." 19 The primacy of memory distinguishes Johnson's psychology from Hobbes's, whose sense is fundamental, and memory is but decaying sense. Where Hobbes sees a memory as an imagined version of an event, Johnson gives memory two important functions in the retention and creation of knowledge: "collection and distribution; by one images are accumulated, and by the other produced for use" (Idler no. 44, 137). The first case, collection and accumulation, is familiar enough; memory stores memories. But the second case, distribution and production, can be confusing, because it would seem to mirror Hobbes's sense that memory is a form of imagination, where the distinction between retention and creation is blurred. But in this passage memory's ability to "produce" is more like an ability to "retrieve," to put the remembered event forward. Thus, Johnson draws a clear distinction between memory and imagination. Rather than being a simple sliding away from memory, as Hobbes would have it, imagination for Johnson is much more active: "imagination selects ideas from the treasures of remembrance, and produces novelty only by varied combinations" (ibid.). In Johnson's model imagination operates more than it can in Hobbes's. The verbs are important: imagination "selects" and "produces." If we treat Johnson's "memory" as a database, then the imagination is the search engine, "selecting" the relevant item. But this is where his use of the word produce becomes particularly confusing, for it turns out that memory and imagination both produce, even in Johnson's model (which would suggest he has not traveled so far from Hobbes). In the case of imagination, however, Johnson claims that it produces novelty. This form of production distinguishes memory from imagination (and Johnson from Hobbes); in this case memory produces by retrieving, imagination by combining (thereby producing something new). By making a comparative activity possible, Johnson's idea of imagina~ tion reflects Locke's definition of knowledge as "nothing but the perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy,

Chapter Six of any of our ideas" (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4.1.2.522). In Johnson's model imagination facilitates the connections through which, Locke says, we come to knowledge. Because of this ability to select, and thereby to compare and to contrast, imagination matters centrally to Johnson's idea of reading. All good reading is a comparative activity, according to Johnson: "He only can rationally presume that he understands a subject, who has read and compared the writers that have hitherto discussed it" (Adventurer no. rrs, 46o). Moreover, what has recently come to be thought of as the ethical dimension of reading results, for Johnson, from this act of comparison. "All joy or sorrow for the happiness or calamities of others," he writes, "is produced by an act of the imagination" (Rambler no. 6o, 3:3r8). There is the verb produce again-here joined to imagination. What is so striking about this, though, is that it should be imagination-rather than reason-that achieves this connected access to knowledge in Johnson's model. It suggests, among other things, that reading is allied with the irrational in Johnson's model (following Hume and contrasting with Pope, who sees imagination as reducing memory, washing it away). In The Rambler no. rs8 Johnson writes that "criticism ... has not yet attained the certainty and stability of science. The rules ... will be found upon examination the arbitrary edicts of legislators, authorised only by themselves" (5=75). This passage raises many questions. First, there is the question of whether Johnson is proposing that criticism become scientific or is parodying the pursuit of scientific criticism. If he is proposing, then his project follows in a path cleared first by Sprat and some members of the Royal Society (e.g., Hooke, Wilkins), implying that there is a scientific and presumably certain way to deal with words. There is also the question of how criticism could become scientific when its object is not necessarily rational or orderly, as Johnson recognizes. Finally, there is the analogy between critics and legislators. Johnson is clearly concerned about the weight given to, and the source of authority for, the pronouncements of critics. To describe the rules as arbitrary is one thing, and different from early eighteenth-century discussion. But if these rules are not to be authorized solely by critics, then by whom or from what does criticism gain its authority? To describe them as the rules of legislators raises the question of the political form of criticism. If not by the legislature, then should criticism be done by someone like a monarch? Or is it a bicameral arrangement, one house for critics and one house for authors? By implying these questions, Johnson's analogy contributes to the eighteenth-century constitution of literature. In what he calls "The Age of Authors" Johnson details what he thinks

] ohnson and Exuberance of Signification being an author requires, in a way that continues his possible interest in criticism as a science (Adventurer no. rrs, 457). The first requirement is knowledge of the subject, but Johnson sets a very high standard for acquiring such knowledge. An author needs to have "read and compared the writers that have hitherto discussed it, familiarised their arguments to himself by long meditation, consulted the foundations of different systems, and separated truth from error by a rigorous examination" (460). Read, compare, familiarize, meditate, consult, separate, and examine: the verbs show a continual alteration between the acquisition associated with memory, the selection associated with imagination, and the distancing evaluation of reason. At the same time, Johnson has specific requirements for the kind of reading to be done by authors as well. "He only has a right to suppose that he can express his thoughts ... who has carefully perused the best authors, accurately noted their diversities of stile, diligently selected the best modes of diction, and familiarised them by long habits of attentive practice" (ibid., 460). Carefully peruse, accurately note, diligently select, familiarize by long habits of practice: we have here a description of good reading, a description deeply indebted to Hume as it includes "peruse" and "practice," both of which, we have seen, are important for the theory Hume proposes. To the Humean combination of "peruse" and "practice" Johnson adds "note," "select," and "familiarize," clarifying his idea of reading. For Johnson, perusal comes first and seems to be a preliminary reading, as was the case with Hume. Johnson asks that it be a careful first reading. But to peruse carefully is different, he clarifies, than accurately noting. By going on to require that authors "accurately note," he implies that the perusing, careful though it may be, is the least attentive of the several types of reading sketched in the passage. For example, diligence modifies selecting rather than perusing or noting. When Robert DeMaria describes the four levels of reading that he sees in Johnson's reading practice, perusal is relatively intense, close to study /hard reading. In this passage, though, as a preliminary reading, perusal is closer to what DeMaria calls the "mere" and "curious" types of reading. It is also important to note that in this case, at least, Johnson offers these four types of reading for prospective authors; it is not, in other words, necessarily being proposed for his "common reader." For Johnson there is a way in which reading can operate on the passions, just as Newton's optics did on light. In The Rambler no. 176 (1751) Johnson argues that "the eye of the intellect, like that of the body, is not equally perfect in all, nor equally adapted in any to all objects; the end of criticism is to supply its defects" (s:r66). Johnson's analogy of criticism to corrective lenses not only emphasizes the fact of reading's visuality.

r66

Chapter Six

Criticism also becomes a way of correcting sight. The ideal, then, would seem to be for criticism to work like a pair of reading glasses. The implication is very much that of an applied science; the success can be measured by how the changes help us to see things clearly. Johnson continues the vision analogy, complaining that "some seem always to read with the microscope of criticism" and that "others are furnished by criticism with a telescope" (5:167). As we have seen with Hooke's Micrographia, someone actually did put texts under the microscope. Johnson's sense that there is but a narrow range for correcting vision echoes Pope's ear, lier contention in An Essay on Man: "Why has not Man a microscopi~ eye? /For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly" (r:r93-94). The analogy also fits with Johnson's discussion in Adventurer no. 95 (1753) of Sir Isaac Newton's Optics: "It has been discovered by Sir Isaac Newtod, that the distinct and primogenial colours are only seven; but ... from various mixtures ... infinite diversifications of tints may be produced. In like manner, the passions of the mind ... are very few; but those few agitated and combined ... make such frequent alterations of the surface of life" (428-29 ). What is required is the lens of criticism. Such a lens, maybe like the prism, can separate the vice and virtue that might arise together (and to Johnson's regret) in some texts. As we saw in Chapter 4, the rules derived from the mechanical philosophy of Newton were thought to offer the possibility of making criticism rational. In Johnson's case, by contrast, Newton's scientific discussion is brought to bear on the passions, which is to say on the unruly or irrational. In part, Johnson's argument, again, reflects the influence of Hume's interest in the beneficial aspects of the passions. Johnson, though, treats the passions not only as beneficial but also as susceptible to a kind of empirical organization or taxonomy: "the passions: their influence is uniform, and their effects nearly the same in every human breast" (ibid., 426-27). With passion "uniform" and therefore susceptible to the same regularity as, say, light sent through a prism, there is the question of what reason means to Johnson, as it is usually reason that is considered uniform, not passion. For Johnson, reason is the name of the faculty that will help us learn to forget. He argues that we can take control over the process that Hobbes calls the decay of our memory. That is, reason, rather than Pope's imagination, gives us some distance on what has happened to us. In the same way that our memory can be improved with study, or, as Johnson claims, "assailed by method" (Adventurer no. 95, 426-27), so "the power of forgetting is capable of improvement" (Idler no. 72, 226). In Idler no. 72 (1759), Johnson contends that "reason will, by a resolute contest, prevail over imagination" (226). This definition builds on the preceding one, insofar as imagination selects from memory. With both

Johnson and Exuberance of Signification reason and imagination responding to the fundamental power of memory, it is understandable that Johnson should posit a "contest" between reason and imagination. Sometimes, memory has the same supervisory role over imagination that imagination has over memory. When reason is uppermost, it governs the selecting and producing undertaken by imagination. But, as Johnson points out in another definition, "imagination, a licentious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations, and impatient of restraint, has always endeavoured to baffle the logician, to perplex the confines of distinction, and burst the inclosures of regularity" (Rambler no. 125, 4:300). That is, in the contest between imagination and reason, here cast as "regularity," imagination can always break through. There is always a moment when imagination can trump reason. Still, Johnson does not necessarily see either this secret influence of reading or the breakthrough of the passions as a risk (as Hobbes, Sprat, Dryden, and to some extent Addison and Steele might). In part, this is because of the uniformity of the passions, which also means the relative uniformity of how imagination erupts through reason. The publication of A Dictionary of the English Language (I755)-and especially its preface-represents yet a further distillation of and contribution to the debate over reading that Johnson's periodical writing of the I750s engages. At the time of its production, Johnson had come "to be seen as a national institution creating a national monument." 20 The passage of time has done little to lessen this sense, and various editions of the Dictionary continue to be published to this day. It "captured the public's imagination," 21 in part because of Johnson's ability to absorb and apply the lessons of the century-long reading debate. There were English-language dictionaries before Johnson, but no previous dictionary included anything like Johnson's self-aware prefatory materials. Some dictionaries did reflect contemporary developments in the debate over reading and criticism. As we saw in Chapter 2 Edward Phillips's The New World of Words, for example, was revised to include words such as author, to criticize, critical, and examine for the first time with the fifth edition (I696), after the initial Restoration Settlement of criticism. But no previous dictionary brings together as much of the debate as Johnson does in his prefatory material, explaining his process in putting the Dictionary together. With Robert DeMaria's Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning, Alvin Kernan's Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print, and Allen Reddick's The Making of Johnson's Dictionary, I746-r773, the Dictionary has been the focus of impressive, sustained consideration. In the discussion two poles emerge. For Kernan a dictionary is "the

168

Chapter Six

essential book of print ... and a revelation of the metaphysics of print, its ability to abstract, order, and idealize language." 22 DeMaria believes that "the first job of any program to make the language as stable as Latin is to prevent further innovation." 23 Reddick, by contrast, points to the number of editions of the Dictionary revised with the involvement of Johnson between 1755 and 1773 (four unabridged editions and several abridged versions) and argues that we should see the Dictionary as "a text in flux, growing and changing." 24 Noting that Johnson "delineated multiple meanings of words under each entry," 25 Reddick focuses on how Johnson managed to incorporate a kind of instability into the Dictionary. By considering Johnson's preface to the Dictionary, it is possible to articulate a position that combines both sides of the debate: there is a claim for stability, but it is made in the face of constant change. When Johnson claims, "I wish ... that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote" (preface, A1v), we can hear the tension between stability and change of which Johnson is so aware. It is, after all, a wish for denotative permanence. Kernan is right to see the Dictionary in the context of the development of literature as an institution. But the Dictionary can be seen in that context in large part by virtue of how it participates in the debate over reading. In his preface Johnson provides a self-deprecating description of himself as the creator of the Dictionary: "among these unhappy mortals," Johnson claims, "is the writer of dictionaries; whom mankind have considered, not as the pupil, but the slave of science" (Au). Preparing the way for others more fortunate, a "lexicographer" is "a harmless drudge" in Johnson's famous definition (Dictionary 1:15l4r; Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1:296). Commentators have understandably focused on how assiduously Johnson must have worked to compile a dictionary, with preface, grammar, and illustrative quotations, so quickly. Overlooked, though, in this emphasis on the toil of the lexicographer is Johnson's use of the word science. Johnson's scientific vision of the dictionary suggests the reading debate going back at least to Sprat. That is, the preface turns out to be deeply informed by the post-Hobbesian debates over words and reading. Nearly a century earlier, Sprat hoped that "some sober and judicious Men, would take the whole Mass of our Language into their hands, as they find it, and would set a mark on the ill Words; correct those, which are to be retain'd, admit, and establish the good, and make some emendations in the Accent, and Grammar." 26 Although there are dictionaries published after Sprat's History of the Royal Society and before Johnson's A Dictionary, the latter does more to fulfill Sprat's desire for a language of great precision than any of the intervening dictionar-

johnson and Exuberance of Signification ies. Johnson, too, is attempting to bring an order to the language. For Sprat the disorder of the English language is a new development, not something intrinsic to language itself. Referring to what he considers the unfortunate influence of the recent Civil Wars, Sprat says he wants "to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words.'m Johnson shares Sprat's nostalgia for the English language's better days and, like Sprat, dates its decline to the mid-seventeenth century: "our language, for almost a century, has, by the concurrence of many causes, been gradually departing from its original Teutonic character, and deviating towards a Gallic structure and phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavour to recall it" according to Johnson (preface, Crr). Like Sprat-and Locke-Johnson claims in his preface that "language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas" (Arv). The difference, though, is that Johnson includes several meanings for each of the words defined in his dictionary. It is as if (to turn a famous phrase from the preface) the dictionary was begun with the dreams of a scientist doomed at least to wake a poet. At the same time, recounting in the preface how he put the Dictionary together, Johnson also uses terms we have seen developed by Pope and Hume: "when I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order and energetic without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated" (Arr). We have here the vocabulary of "surveying" we first saw with Pope. The issue, as with Pope, is in being able to get an overview of the subject, a view at a distance. For Pope the survey will practically necessarily result in a smoother, more perspectival view; from a distance Pope's exemplary dome is going to be round. Surveying has its tools, but they are neither Johnson's microscope nor the telescope. To survey is to see things at a distance without attempting to compensate for or to bridge that distance. In Pope's An Essay on Criticism the acceptance of this distance highlights the regularity of form. For Johnson, though, the surveying view of the language does not reveal the patterns of regularity. On some level this is not a great surprise, as the language as a whole has not been shaped in any way like the materials of the dome or the poem Pope is discussing. But we might have expected that the perspective afforded by a survey might have helped nonetheless. Although surveying the language itself does not reveal an organization behind words, the shaping of the Dictionary can do to the English language what Pope claims a good poem does to a particular topic. In the Dictionary the word survey shows up as both noun and verb, with four entries for the verb and three for the noun. On one level the

Chapter Six definitions are consistent with what we have seen so far in Pope, Hume, and Johnson. To survey begins with a definition similar to that implied forty years earlier, as we have seen, by Pope's use of the word: "to overlook; to have under the view; to view from a higher place" (Dictionary, 2:25Urr). This is the same perspectival sense of the word implied by the analogy between the dome and the text. And this sense is buttressed by the definition of survey, the noun, as "view; prospect" (ibid.). Still, it is interesting that Johnson's "survey" so clearly implies a looking down. Surveying could also mean a looking across, and we are not often in a position to view a dome from a higher place. With the second entry, though, there is a way in which the idea of looking down might be taken metaphorically, for Johnson also defines to survey as "to oversee as one in authority" (ibid.). Thus, one way of understanding the first definition of to survey is that the view from above is made possible by, to enlist the second definition, the position of authority. In the last two definitions Johnson goes on to define to survey in a way that fits with the process of organizing the Dictionary: "to view as examining" and "to measure and estimate land or building" (ibid.). Johnson suggests that as he began his Dictionary, he assumed a position (a position of authority) from which he could examine, measure, and estimate the verbal ground. When Johnson describes the process whereby he began to organize the materials for the Dictionary, he writes, "I applied myself to the perusal of our writers; and noting whatever might be of use to ascertain or illustrate any word or phrase, accumulated in time the materials of a dictionary, which, by degrees, I reduced to a method" (preface, Arr). We can see here Johnson's adaptation of terms we have encountered in Pope's and Hume's theories of reading: perusal and method. Johnson began with a survey, then undertook a perusal, before reducing to method. This approach reverses the order detailed by Hume in "Of the Standard of Taste," where perusal precedes surveying. For Hume, who associates a flurry of hurried activity with the perusal, surveying is a second level of reading because it involves more reflection than perusing does. For Johnson perusal is apparently more reflective than surveying. But, as we will see, perusal, as it is defined in the Dictionary, is not a particularly reflective kind of reading. There is a way in which the surveying described in the preface puts a new kind of reading in a preliminary, preparatory position, ahead of "perusing," "noting," or "selecting." Moreover, at least as far as the Dictionary is concerned, there is the subsequent step of "reduc[ing] to a method." While it seems to reflect the influence of the century's earlier debate over the rules, Johnson's phrase also speaks to the tension between stability and change that characterizes Johnson's sense of the Dictionary and of the language. On the one hand there is

Johnson and Exuberance of Signification the wish for a method, but on the other there is the implication that to methodize is to reduce, that something is lost in being methodical. Unlike Pope, Johnson associates perusing-not surveying-with method. This allies Johnson with Hume's understanding of the word and with Hume's complicated relationship with method. At the same time, the fact that Johnson associates method with reduction testifies to the complexity of language that Johnson saw in his survey and is concerned simultaneously to address and to capture in the Dictionary. The tension in the Dictionary and in reducing words to a method can be seen in the preface, where Johnson provides two descriptions of words. On the one hand, he argues, in a line noted earlier, "such is the exuberance of signification which many words have obtained that it was scarcely possible to collect all their senses" (B2v). To call the multiplicity of meaning "exuberance" is a relatively celebratory way of referring to the entanglements that Johnson saw when he first surveyed his subject. To contain methodically such exuberance would certainly feel like a reduction or a diminishment. Johnson also contends, however, that there are "spots of barbarity impressed so deep in the English language that criticism can never wash them away" (preface, A1v). In this case there seems to be a resignation about the fact of multiple meanings; as spots of barbarity, and as something to be washed away, multiplicity is here cast as a stain on the language, in which case a methodical treatment is the best that can be hoped for. What is particularly striking in this regard is Johnson's claim, "The tropes of poetry will make hourly encroachments, and the metaphorical will become the current sense" (preface, C2r). Here the multiplicity of meaning is described as a kind of invasion, consistent with the barbarity of language that Johnson proclaims and with his reworking of Sprat. In both cases the concern is with the tropological dimension of language. There is a way in which Johnson thereby associates poetry with the invasion of linguistic change. It is surprising that such an influentialliterary critic would see poetry as a problem that his Dictionary might solve. At the same time, though, there is in Johnson's Dictionary, as there was not in Hobbes or Sprat, an acceptance of the (formerly) metaphorical as the (currently) standard meaning. In the first edition of the Dictionary the first definition at to read. v.a. is "to peruse any thing written" (2:21F2r), a definition that does not reflect the "surveying" implication of reading implied by the preface. It seems that "to read" has become only the first, easiest, and most mechanical of Hume's two parts of reading. Robert DeMaria, noting that reading might be seen as easy in these definitions, counters by arguing that Johnson's "illustrative quotations suggest the required nuances. The kind of reading described in these passages is careful, attentive,

Chapter Six and purposeful." 28 However, the second of the three illustrative quotations for the first definition is from Pope, and it suggests forgetfulness more than purposefulness: "the passage you must have read, though since slipt out of your memory" (2:21F2r). The third illustration, from Isaac Watts, claims that if we do not have the leisure to read the book itself, "then by the titles of chapter we may be directed to peruse several sections" (2:21F2r). Like a reading that leads to a forgetting of what was read, reading that substitutes chapter titles for content of the chapters could not be the most purposeful reading. Moreover, that illustration of to read says it can lead us to peruse. If we turn to the definition of peruse, the situation does not get any less circular. For, as DeMaria notes, "Johnson defined perusal as 'the act of reading,' and he is equally unhelpful in defining to peruse as 'to read.' " 29 At the same time, though, the first edition has a separate entry for to read, this time as "v.n." (an intransitive verb); here we can see a more active vision for reading: "to be studious in books" (2:21F2r). Even here, though, the illustrative quote, "'Tis sure that Fleury reads," does not get much closer to what DeMaria calls study or hard reading. Between the circularity of to read and to peruse and in the difference between the active and the neutral forms of to read, we can see the difficulty and the complexity of Johnson's sense of reading. In its first usage, as an active (or transitive) verb, its definition suggests a particularly inactive concept, the forgetful, rushed perusing. The circularity of the definition of this word and the relative superficiality of its associated type of reading look like the endpoint of a diminution of reading that has been in process since Hobbes's Leviathan responded to the radical reading of the r64os. At the same time, though, there is the second usage of to read, the neutral (or intransitive) one, which is more active and studious. The Dictionary does define study, and it is a quite demanding concept. Including one definition for study as an "apartment set off for literary employment," there are five definitions, four of which focus on the activity. As "application of mind to books and learning," "perplexity; deep cogitation," "attention; meditation; contrivance," and "any particular kind of learning," study is definitely more purposeful than perusing. Perhaps the best example of the tension between the two basic types of reading can be seen in to overlook, another word that Johnson defines as "to peruse." For to overlook can mean "to view fully," which is ·easily connected to the various definitions of study; the best way to view fully would be through an application of mind, for example. When it means "to view from a higher place," overlook also echoes Johnson's understanding of surveying that we have just explored. At the same time, though, to overlook can also mean "to pass by indulgently," as

Johnson and Exuberance of Signification

173

it does in its current usage, meaning "to neglect." That is, to overlook can mean both to view fully and to pass by. In the third of the verb's five definitions, Johnson offers "to peruse." Thus, there is a way in which Johnson's definition of to overlook (and the role of to peruse in that definition) stands for the tension in Johnson's theory of reading: is reading a means to a full view, or is it a means to passing by indulgently? Toward the conclusion of the preface to the Dictionary Johnson makes a claim whose importance for the constitution of literature cannot be overstated: "tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language" (C2v). On one level Johnson thus crystallizes what has been a persistent assumption across the debate over theories of reading: languages and governments somehow reflect and presumably shape each other. 30 This connection has motivated the debate over theories of reading from the Civil Wars forward. But it is not stated so simply until Johnson's preface to the Dictionary, in 1755· On this level Johnson's analogy reveals an important aspect of what has been happening in the political history of early literary criticism. It may be surprising that such an analogy between tongues and governments might show up in a dictionary of all places. But by the time A Dictionary of the English Language is published, Johnson has absorbed more than a century of arguments about the relationship between grammar and politics. In his "Life of Milton," for example, Johnson complains that "the rights of nations, and of kings, sink into questions of grammar, if grammarians discuss them." 31 Johnson might be concerned about the solipsism of the approach, but after his analogy in the preface even the Dictionary seems to spring from this awareness of a connection between grammar and government. On another level, though, Johnson's analogy goes on to connect not only languages and governments but, more specifically, languages and constitutions: "we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language" (preface, C2v). In the end, then, it seems to me that Johnson contributes to the debate over reading this connection between language, government, and constitution. On this level the issue is not just government in general but rather a particular way of understanding government, that is, as a constitution. As defined in the Dictionary, not every government can be said to have a constitution. Government, according to the Dictionary is a "form of community with respect to the disposition of the supreme authority," "an establishment of legal authority," "administration of publick affairs," "regularity of behaviour," and "manageableness; compliance; obsequiousness" (r:roNv). Constitution, according to the Dictionary, can mean "the act

174

Chapter Six

of constituting" and an "established form of government; system of laws and customs" (r:sLv). It is one thing to be a "community," or to have "regularity of behaviour," or to be "manageable," as Johnson believes government can, but it is quite another to have a "system of laws and customs" associated with a constitution. The difference between government and constitution is therefore in the degree of organization. Although it might not last long, there can be a community or a government without a system of laws. In order to survive longer, such a community will likely need a constitution, or an act of constituting itself. Government does not necessarily involve the principles and precedents implied by a constitution. By setting out the principles (as in the preface) and providing the precedents (the illustrative quotations), Johnson's, Dictionary becomes a constitution for modern English, in the sense of a written founding document and in the related sense of an act of constituting. When the Dictionary is seen as contributing to a constitution, as the preface suggests, the inclusion of the multiple meanings takes on a new importance, beyond even Johnson's recognition of a word's multiplicity. Seen constitutionally, the Dictionary organizes the many embedded in the one. As we saw in Chapter r, Hobbes sees the one as being made up of the many; Milton's Areopagitica, by contrast, sees the many as already implicit in the one. The difference is of direction: in Hobbes difference is brought back to the one; in Milton the one does not preclude difference and can help produce it. Johnson's Dictionary is closer to Hobbes's position. Johnson argues that "there is in constancy and stability a general and lasting advantage, which will always overbalance the slow improvements of gradual correction" (r:Arv). That is, the dictionary, like the Leviathan, has the advantage of stability; organizing the linguistic constitution can overbalance the instability associated with (participatory) correction. In this Johnson builds on Hume, who contends that "an established government has an infinite advantage, by the very circumstance of its being established" ("Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth," in Essays, 512). The difference is in the degree of systemization of Johnson's constitutional approach to language. As important as precedent might be to Hume, neither he nor anyone else who precedes Johnson goes as far as Johnson to organize the English language itself. What is new about Johnson's attitude is his combined concern over instability and the provision of the multiplicity. Implicitly, the claim in the Dictionary is that these options for each word's meanings might now be available for the common reader. This provision of the options in advance makes what Patrick Parrinder calls "Johnson's constitutionalism" a liberal democratic version of literacy. 32 The radical democrats of the r64os would probably have argued that by reducing the work of

Johnson and Exuberance of Signification

175

establishing a meaning down to a simple choice from a list, the Dictionary mitigates against that centrally democratic, contestatory moment of determining the meaning of things for ourselves. They also might have seen such reading as an unfortunate analogue to the pacified kind of reading described by Johnson. As Reddick has noted, "The Dictionary can be seen as a precursor to The Lives of the English Poets." 33 Arranging the options for meanings methodically and illustrating them with quotations from other authors makes the Dictionary a constitution for literacy. Johnson's The Lives of the English Poets, usually thought to represent the crowning achievement of his vision of reading for the common reader, builds on the Dictionary and the essays to offer a similar constitution for literature. The Lives expands the Dictionary's constitutional project of clarifying precedent and explicating principle. The Lives provides options in advance just as the Dictionary does. There is, for example, the same insistence on method (in this case, from the "Birth" through the "Works and Character" of each author) and the same reliance on and creation of precedent that we have seen in the Dictionary. Generally, the importance of Johnson's contribution in The Lives is understood as the result of new possibilities in a marketplace of print: inexpensive publication, growing readership, and wider distribution networks are said to create a new demand for a survey of English literature. Johnson's participation through The Lives in the debate over theories of reading should not be overlooked, however. In a way that is not possible in his periodical essays or in the Dictionary, The Lives shows Johnson's idea of reading in action and features discussions of several figures whom we have considered in this book-Milton, Dryden, and Addison. Reviewing what Johnson says about them gives us yet another way of situating Johnson's position in the reading debate. For what Johnson says about the history of English poetry in The Lives contributes not only to the development of an English authorial and textual canon as is so often claimed. More important, it presents a canonical way of reading, a combination of surveying and perusing (and a combination that rejects other models of reading, even if they are the models used by the authors under consideration). As "an acrimonious and surly republican" who also "read all the languages which are considered either as learned or polite," Milton obviously set quite a challenge for Johnson, and for those of us who wish to understand Johnson's criticism (The Lives, r:r54). The question we face is how to understand the differences between Milton and Johnson. For J. C. D. Clark, among others, it is a matter of religious and political differences: "Johnson's commitment to Anglicanism clearly jarred with

Chapter Six Milton's position." 34 At the same time, though, it is important to note how much the model of reading that Johnson brings to Milton's work differs from what we have already seen to be Milton's own theory of reading. It is well known that Johnson disliked Milton's punning and believed that "none ever wished [Paradise Lost] longer than it is" (ibid., 183). But Johnson's claims about Milton thereby indicate the important differences between them with regard to reading. For example, Johnson writes, regarding Paradise Lost, "Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation" (ibid., 183-84). On the one hand, we could say that Johnson is describing the difficulty of reading Paradise Lost, as well as much of Milton's later work, presumably. On the other hand, though, Johnson refers to the "perusal" of Paradise Lost. That is, he does not mention surveying or studying it. Thus, in this sense we could say that the difficulty of Milton's work comes from beginning to read it with a particular conception of how such reading should proceed-as perusal, in this case. Would reading Paradise Lost be a different experience if it were conducted in a different mode of reading, something more attentive than a perusal? For Johnson "another inconvenience of Milton's design is, that it requires the description of what cannot be described, the agency of spirits" (The Lives, 1:184). That is, the abstraction of Paradise Lost's otherworldly characters is part of what makes the epic such a harassing text. When considered in combination with Milton's "play on words, in which he delights too often," this is particularly troubling for Johnson, who follows Addison in disliking puns (ibid., 184). Johnson claims that Milton "saw nature, as Dryden expresses it, through the spectacles of books" (ibid., 178). On the one hand, this clever line gets at Milton's profound interest in reading and the allusive punning that characterizes his work; it also suggests a literary-critical lineage from Dryden through Johnson with a shared concern about reading too closely. But, on the other hand, the idea of "seeing through book spectacles" acquires another resonance in the context of the repeated invocations of the technologies of vision-such as microscopes, telescopes-in Johnson's earlier work. For Johnson, criticism operates like a pair of corrective lenses so that we can see the texts clearly but not too closely. The implication is that Milton both reads too closely and invites too close a reading, as far as Johnson is concerned. Milton's puns and wordplay, Johnson argues, "bear so little proportion to the whole that they scarcely deserve the attention of a critic" (ibid.). That is, Johnson proposes that Milton be read in the same way that Pope advises we look at the dome: consider the whole, with regard to the proportions. In this case, that means actively "overlook-

johnson and Exuberance of Signification

177

ing" the puns and wordplay in Paradise Lost. It is possible, however, that Paradise Lost rewards the stndious reading of the details that Johnson's The Lives rejects. It could also be, as we have seen (in Chapter r) that the wordplay that Johnson dislikes represents Milton's attempt to address the immaterial that Johnson contends cannot be described. In other words, there is the question of what it means to read a poem such as Paradise Lost while consciously avoiding its play of language. In a review of Milton's treatment of unlicensed printing in Areopagitica Johnson argues, "The danger of such an unbounded liberty, and the danger of bounding it, have produced a problem in the science of government which human understanding seems hitherto unable to solve" (The Lives, r:ro7-8). Ostensibly, the topic is Milton in the r64os, but Johnson is also speaking about how the issues are still unresolved more than a century later (and describing them, again, with reference to science, a characteristic aspect of the post-Hobbesian discussion of freedom of the press). Although Johnson covers a range of proposals for how publishing might be handled, this passage reveals the familiar tension between stability and change in Johnson's thinking. Johnson considers and rejects something like what Hobbes proposed in Leviathan: "if nothing may be published but what the civil authority shall have previously approved, power must always be the standard of truth" (ibid., ro8). Johnson is still left, though, with the problem of alternatives. "If every dreamer of innovations may propagate his projects," he contends, "there can be no settlement" (ibid.). Of course, especially by the Restoration Settlement, what Johnson sketches are thought to be the conditions of the r64os, when, with the relaxing of the Star Chamber restrictions, it seemed that everyone could make their case, and there was no settlement, as evidenced by the execution of the king. The solution Johnson proposes is surprising: "punish the authors" (ibid.). This way, he claims, the publication of the book would not be prevented. At the same time, Johnson worries that "this punishment, though it may crush the author, promotes the book" (ibid.). But the grounds on which Johnson believes an author should be punished are not clear, nor is it clear how this solution fits with the traditional public-sphere understanding of early English literary criticism. In his "Life of Butler" Johnson addresses how political changes since the mid-seventeenth century might give readers trouble in seeing why Butler was so important during the Restoration. "It is scarcely possible," Johnson writes, "in the regularity and composure of the present time, to image the tumult of absurdity and clamour ... when every man might become a preacher, and almost every preacher could collect a congregation" (The Lives, r:2I4-15). In other words, it is impossible to imagine

Chapter Six

the circumstances of the 164os. As is to be expected, Johnson argues that a poem responding to those conditions might be "lost to us, who do not know the solemnity, the sullen superstition, the gloomy moroseness, and the stubborn scruples of the ancient Puritans; or, if we knew them, derive our information only from books, or from tradition" (ibid., 214). The point seems to be that the upheaval associated with the Civil Wars has passed from living memory. Thus Johnson can claim that "Our grandfathers knew the picture from the life; [whereas] we judge of the life by contemplating the picture" (ibid.). This might be contradicted by the fact that references to seventeenth-century upheaval, including this reference to the life of Butler, persist this long. More surprising, though, is that Johnson then goes on to describe his own memory of "an old Puritan, who was alive in my childhood, being, at one of the feasts of the church," who refused to partake of the feast's "superstitious meats and drinks" (ibid., 215). This might seem to contradict the previous assertion of the great gulf separating the late eighteenth century from the mid-seventeenth. There is a way, though, in which the two claims are complementary. Part of the distance between the two can be attributed to generational change: Johnson, born in 1709, and writing in the late 1770s, remembers an elderly Puritan from his childhood. But the distance might also be attributed to the later ongoing attempts to achieve such a distance from the approaches that may have led to the Civil Wars, hinted at here by the reference to the Puritan's seeing the feast as superstitious. In the "Life of Dryden" Johnson describes Dryden as "the father of English criticism" (The Lives, 1:410) and offers several important explanations of how Dryden shaped criticism in England. For example, Johnson argues that Dryden was "the writer who first taught us to determine upon principles the merit of composition" (ibid.). As Johnson sees it, Dryden begins the process of systematizing what we would now call literature. Before Dryden, Johnson contends, "audiences applauded by instinct; and poets perhaps often pleased by chance" (ibid., 4n). In other words, we have here another example of Johnson's recognition of theirrational impact that a text can have on an audience. At the same time, insofar as he appreciates Dryden's bringing principle to what used to be instinctual, we also see that familiar Johnsonian tension: how to organize and retain this irrational element. Describing this process in Dryden's work, Johnson contends that Dryden "imported his science" (ibid.). The choice of words here is significant: on the one hand Dryden made writing more scientific, while on the other he imported that approach. With the importing, Johnson refers to Dryden's adaptation of French classicism. With the reference to science, there is the implication that Johnson sees

Johnson and Exuberance of Signification

179

Dryden's work-the creation of English literary criticism-in relation to the Restoration development of science (see Chapter 2). For Johnson part of what makes Dryden scientific is that "his general precepts ... depend upon the nature of things, and the structure of the human mind" (ibid., 413). That is, for Johnson it is not only that Dryden can make the empiricist claim to be able to represent somehow the natural, physical world but also that Dryden's rules match with innate human capacities. Insofar as questions of how texts interact with human psychology become more prominent after Dryden than they would have been for Dryden, this claim shows the perspective afforded by a century of the reading debate. Nonetheless, there is for Johnson another important qualification that makes Dryden so important for the beginning of English criticism: his comparatively light reading. Dryden "could not, like Milton or Cowley, have made his name illustrious merely by his learning. He mentions but a few books, and those such as lie in the beaten track of regular study" (ibid., 416). Because it might seem that a critic ought to have done a lot of reading, this might sound like a complaint from Johnson. But when we remember that Johnson dislikes the effect of Milton's reading on his poetry, it becomes clear that Dryden's lighter reading adds, for Johnson, to Dryden's creation of criticism. Dryden's principles might represent for Johnson the beginning of criticism, but they were still too methodical, he implies, for the increasing massification of print. As Dryden's "manner was in general too scholastic for those who had yet their rudiments to learn," it is Addison who is best able to respond to these new conditions (The Lives, 2:146). Johnson concedes that Addison's "criticism is condemned as tentative or experimental, rather than scientific" (ibid., 145). It might be difficult for us to separate empiricism and science, but as we saw in Chapter 3, Addison is less interested in a scientific approach than in exploring the marketplace analogy, and he is less interested in the rules than are others at the time. For Johnson Addison's unscientific approach is an advantage; it suits the new and larger reading public of the early eighteenth century. According to Johnson, Addison's "purpose was to infuse literary curiosity by gentle and unsuspected conveyance ... not lofty and austere, but accessible and familiar" (ibid., 146). It is not only that Addison brings the materials of print to a new and wider audience but, more important, that Johnson sees Addison as describing or invoking a particular mode of reading, made possible by the accessible and familiar. Johnson points to Addison's discussion of Milton as an example of Addison's successful gentle reading: "by the blandishments of gentleness and facility, he has made Milton an universal favorite, with whom readers of every class think it necessary to be pleased" (ibid., 147). By reading Milton gently, Addison,

r8o

Chapter Six

Johnson believes, popularized Milton. The implication is that making Milton accessible to every class involves reading him gently. Such reading, though, is at odds with Milton's own engagement with the models of reading of the mid-seventeenth century. Because Milton may emerge as more gentle from gentle reading than might be accurate for a "surly and acrimonious republican" (The Lives, r:r54), there is an important question about what such gentle literary critical reading does to the texts to which it might be applied. Describing the development of the periodical press to which Addison would contribute so much, Johnson argues that "this mode of conveying cheap and easy knowledge began among us in the Civil War, when it was much the interest of either party to raise and fix the prejudices of the people" (The Lives, 2:94). By bringing gentleness to periodical criticism, Addison pushes criticism forward, separating it, to Johnson's mind, from the upheavals of the seventeenth century. Thus Johnson situates Addison's essays in a lineage reacting to the Civil Wars: The Royal Society was instituted soon after the Restoration to divert the attention of the people from public discontent. The Tatler and the Spectator had the same tendency; they were published at a time when two parties, loud, restless, and violent, each with plausible declarations, and each without any distinct termination of its view, were agitating the nation; to minds heated with political contest they supplied cooler and more inoffensive reflections. (The Lives, 2:94)

As recipients of a public-sphere history of literary criticism, we might not recognize the origins of literary criticism in the history Johnson sketches, despite the fact that it features the major figures we still associate with the history of early English literary criticism, for in the current history of criticism these figures are seen as struggling heroically to create a public sphere that protects democratic free expression. Johnson, though, sees these canonical figures as quelling dissent. He places Addison and Steele in a lineage that is said to direct attention away from political concerns repeatedly and that begins with the Royal Society. At the very moment that the development of a democratic public sphere is supposed to be making possible the public discussion of policy and political events, Johnson commits literature to a politics of depoliticizing. By not seeing literary criticism, as Johnson does, replaying the Restoration, the publicsphere model of literary criticism overlooks how what is called literary criticism emerges as a reconceptualization-rather than the creation-of the public sphere.

CONCLUSION

The Enlightenment and the Unfinished Project of Deconstruction Democracy contains all the different kinds of constitutions. -Jacques Derrida, Rogues

.

~

The debate over theories of reading at the heart of the development of literary criticism in England suggests a recurrent concern about democracy. Although the valences may vary from author to author, there do seem to be some trends across the period. Soon after the Civil Wars, the concern focuses on what is seen as the political problem of democratized access to print in general; by the turn of the eighteenth century, in the work of Addison and Steele, women are taken to embody a new form of concern over democratic literacy. In this earlier period, though, there is a shared sense that reading ought to be made more rational, that thinking reasonably about literacy will overcome the political challenges thought to be implicit in all those readers determining meaning for themselves. Although there might be differences in thinking regarding what represents such a rational approach to reading-for Dryden it would be avoiding the obscure, while Pope offers rules, for example-there is a shared interest in reasonable reading at least through the third decade of the eighteenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, by contrast, there is an increasing sense of dangers, even political dangers, that might follow from an overly rational approach to literacy and significance. With Hume and Johnson (even more so than with Pope}, the passions are reincorporated into the beneficial effects of the experience of reading, even as Hume's and Johnson's discussions of reading also reflect the increasingly complicated awareness of literacy that is a consequence of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debate over theories of reading.

182

Conclusion

It will not have gone unnoticed that such a concern about democracy among early literary critics is at odds with the familiar story about the eighteenth-century rise of a modern, democratic public sphere in which the citizenry "begin[s] to carve out for itself a distinct discursive space, one of rational judgment and enlightened critique." 1 Indeed, given the historic, defining connection that is said to exist between early criticism and the Enlightenment, finding such concern about democracy in the work of the early critics raises important questions about how to understand the Enlightenment. Consider, for example, Habermas's argument that we can either follow "the path leading from Hobbes to Kant and develop a notion of practical reason that in some way preserves the cognitive content of moral statements, or we can fall back once again on the 'strong' traditions and 'comprehensive' doctrines that ground the truth of the moral conceptions embedded in them." 2 If, as Habermas contends, there is an Enlightenment path of practical reason from Hobbes to Kant, it is cut through a forest of contemporary alternatives that described reason differently, sometimes even involving the irrational-for example, the passions-in the rational. For Habermas and those who defend this Enlightenment line, that forest is precisely the problem, the difficulty that is overcome by the remarkable work of those who blazed a reasonable trail through a forest of superstition. For Habermas we have just two possibilities (and only one real choice): either the rational path that Habermas believes is developed from Hobbes to Kant or the insistence and vagaries of traditions. Although it is not suggested in the polarity Habermas sets up, it is conceivable for some traditions to be considered reasonable, just as it is also possible to believe both reasonably and passionately that some rational arguments are unreasonable. For Habermas, though, the possibilities are few, and the consequences of the choice are stark. If we were to go with what he describes as the comprehensive doctrines, Habermas believes, "we have to cope with the irreducible plurality of worldviews" (ibid., 8r). One might say that we would have to deal with democracy and the differences that are necessarily part of it. If we are concerned about some of those differences and want to address them effectively, we will need be able to make a persuasive appeal, maybe even more than a logical demonstration. During the Restoration and eighteenth century, as some of the earlier critics propose rationality while also lamenting democratic openness, and some of the later critics bring the passions back into consideration, there is a profound tension between and disagreements over the functions of democracy, reason, and the irrational. Those who defend Habermas's diptych of the Enlightenment and its alternative might respond that there is a difference between the Enlightenment as a concept

The Unfinished Project of Deconstruction

and the Enlightenment as a historical period. There may have been only a partial emergence of the Enlightenment during the eighteenth century, they might argue, but that delay can be accounted for by the residue of earlier periods clinging either to the work or to the historical context of the pioneering modern rational philosophers. To an extent not possible for their contemporaries, the distance of the years allows us to see how formative and how radical the path of practical reason was back in the eighteenth century. The fact that this path was beset with detractors only adds to the importance-one might even say the bravery-of the pathbreaking work. Some contend that the eighteenth century saw more than just an unexamined legacy of older traditions that set limits to the path of practical reason; instead, there was an active "Counter Enlightenment" (as Isaiah Berlin called it) 3 that sought actively to undermine the crucial Enlightenment developments of critical, practical rationality. I began with a book on literary criticism, and I end involved in an argument about how we understand the Enlightenment because we have learned to see them as related. Unfortunately, we have also learned to see the Enlightenment in a way that tends toward the categorical and the polarizing. The consequences for our understanding of literary criticism are unfortunately polarizing as well. For as it turns out, the literary critics of eighteenth-century England confound the terms through which the twentieth century and the twenty-first have looked back on the eighteenth. If, for example, there were to be one critic who on the face of it ought to be a counter-Enlightenment figure, it is Alexander Pope, the Catholic who defends Ancient Rules. In part, though, Pope does so because he sees the ultimate English Enlightenment figure, Newton, as a Modern Ancient, paradoxical though that may seem to us. In this way, rather than the rejection of the Enlightenment that Pope's argument might be taken to represent, it appears instead to have been a profound engagement with the terms of the Enlightenment, at least as they were understood at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Between a desirable path of practical reason and a dreaded comprehensive tradition or between the Enlightenment and its putative opposite, the Counter Enlightenment, we can find both the historical period and the conceptual ideal of the eighteenth-century critics. Thus, although Habermas would separate tradition from Enlightenment reason, early English literary critics, including Dryden, Hume, and Johnson, actively engaged in describing an English literary tradition. 4 The point is not that Hume or Johnson are anti-Enlightenment figures but rather that literary critics confound our sense of the Enlightenment in part because it would seem that literature and literary history do so as well.

Conclusion

There is probably nothing so confusing for the current sense of eighteenth-century criticism and the Enlightenment public, rational sphere than the conjunction of reason and passion described in the work of critics such as Hume and Johnson. In The Rambler no. 96 (175I), for example, Samuel Johnson creates an elaborate, albeit brief, allegory through which to explain what he casts as a paradoxical relationship between Falsehood, Fiction, and Truth. According to Johnson, Truth came to us from above, followed by Reason; Falsehood, by contrast, came to us from below. On their arrival here both Truth and Falsehood began to involve themselves in a contest for possession of the world. Initially, Falsehood took an early lead. Truth always moves ahead in a straight line and is therefore easily outmaneuvered "by the oblique and desultory movements, the quick retreats and active doubles which Falsehood always practised" (Rambler 4.rsr). Moreover, Falsehood, being a great mimic, was able to imitate Truth and, "dressed and painted by Desire" (4.152), quickly gained the numerical advantage over Truth. Seeing how successful Falsehood's approach was, Truth adjusts tactics. Truth eventually recognizes that "by the severity of her aspect, and the solemnity of her dictates ... men would never willingly admit her" (ibid.). According to Johnson the Muses then decided to create "a loose and changeable robe, like that in which Falsehood captivated her admirers" (ibid.). Wearing this new garb, Truth was renamed "Fiction" (ibid.). In these clothes Truth, as Fiction, seemed less austere and could thus attract the attention of the Passions, gaining entrance to many more minds than before. Once in the mind, Fiction would be "soon disrobed by Reason, and shone out in her original form, with native effulgence and resistless dignity" (ibid.). The central paradox is Fiction's role in providing us access to the Truth: in order for us to be able to see accurately, reason requires passion and truth requires deception. Although it flies in the face of the "practical reason" history of eighteenth-century criticism (and maybe also through its fantasy of a feminized reason stripping before the mind's eye), Johnson's story has a lot to teach us about the complicated state of English literary criticism at the middle of the eighteenth century. Johnson steps into the ancient debate between literature and philosophy and blurs philosophy's classical connection of truth to reason, with Truth needing to dress itself up, to become Fiction, and thereby appeal to the passions. Combining Truth and Fiction runs up against the separation of reason and emotion that we have been told to expect in so many recent discussions of the age of criticism. In short, Johnson's allegory "levels the genre distinction between philosophy and literature," to use Habermas's terms. 5 But Johnson's combination of Truth and Fiction is important

The Unfinished Project of Deconstruction

r85

for the Enlightenment, despite what we have been told about the rise of practical reason. For one thing, Johnson's theory of fiction's passionate, elucidating effect on reason would later be associated with the "sentimental" approach to literature (and to other people) that would inform the writing and politics of later Enlightenment authors. For another, Johnson's allegory is a helpful corrective. The story usually told about the Enlightenment recounts a shift from a sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury democracy of belief to an eighteenth-century democracy of reason, the Enlightenment. At the beginning of the period reason was not so secularized; at the end of the period it was not so dispassionate either. There may have been a push for the separation of church and state and a shift from reason and religion to reason and the passions (which may itself be a form of secularization, if not rationalization). But countervailing tendencies-including the persistence of a theological frameworkpulled against these changes during the Restoration and the eighteenth century. Not too long ago, in the debates over the Enlightenment, a focus on these countervailing forces might have been described as Tory (because "conservative") or postmodern (because not "secular"). More recently, though, with an apparent, worldwide rise of politicized religion, it has become particularly important to reexamine Enlightenment concepts both as ideals and as part of a historical experience. Reconsidering Johnson's combination of Truth and Fiction against the familiar path of the reason-and-public-sphere narrative of eighteenthcentury criticism opens up new ways of considering both eighteenthcentury literary history and the recent debates over the Enlightenment. As far as eighteenth-century literary history is concerned, when, for example, Burke casts terror and pity as two versions of potentially beneficial "passion" in his Enquiry into the Origins of the Ideas of the Sublime (1757), he pursues a line of investigation also suggested by Johnson's paradoxical combination. 6 The sublime offers the paradox of good terror, grounded, again paradoxically, in emotional response. The sublime is often treated as a pre-Romantic topic, technique, or concern, and to the extent that there is such an anachronistic thing as pre-Romanticism, then Burke can be considered part of it. However, we might as well include Johnson, then, too. Of course, we do not usually consider Johnson a pre-Romantic. But it could be that this is a result of our historiography more than the framework of assumptions possibly common to Johnson and, say, Coleridge, two English literary critics usually thought of as more different than similar. The Romantic sense that eye and ear "half create" (as Wordsworth describes in "Tintern Abbey," line ros) requires preparatory work in seeing how truth and fiction might be allied. Hume and Johnson are among those eighteenth-century literary critics who

r86

Conclusion

do some of that work, although it may be surprising to us to think so today. It could be that we do not see a mid-eighteenth-century legacy of perception affecting the Romantics because we have too much accepted the Romantics' conviction that only they were the poets who were able to speak the language of the common man in their poetry. If so, then we would again be accepting the Romantic history of literature.? It seems equally likely, however, that we are also accepting a story about the eighteenth century that sees the period in terms of the rise of a public sphere of practical reason, in which case the later developments of Romanticism are almost automatically, maybe even tautologically, cast as the return of the emotional and the passionate. Correcting for this overstated binary is one of the reasons we need a Restoration history of criticism, focused on theories of reading in early literary criticism. Wordsworth was not the first to think that the work of art might be related to a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. It is possible, then, that Romanticism is not a break, that even the overflow of feelings was not a spontaneous late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century development. In addition to suggesting that a way was being prepared for what are usually considered later developments in English literary history, Johnson's allegory of Truth and Fiction also has interesting implications for contemporary poststructuralist theory, precisely the kind of criticism Habermas and others have come to see as inimical to the project of the Enlightenment. From Jacques Derrida's 1966 essay "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," to Roland Barthes' 1973 book The Pleasure of the Text, to de Man's 1982 article "The Resistance to Theory," literary theorists have shared a conviction that there were at least two basic levels or types of reading. For Derrida one of the "two interpretations of interpretation" tries "deciphering a truth or an origin," whereas the second "affirms play." 8 For Barthes one type of reading aims to get to the end of the text (or more typically the end of the narrative), whereas the second enjoys the sensual textures of the surface of the language in which the narrative is conveyed. Barthes implied that most readers conduct the first type of reading, but he clearly hopes that they could learn to move to the second. For de Man texts combine both a logical and a rhetorical dimension in an almost chemical suspension; while reading, readers paradoxically must choose between these two. In literary texts, for de Man, "the use of language ... foregrounds the rhetorical over the grammatical and the logical function." 9 For Derrida the tension between these two poles, these two levels of reading, represents the aporia, the difficulty that is always faced in any decision-making process when, one could say, one "must choose" between equally valid options. Of course, the same aporia might also be faced when we are act-

The Unfinished Project of Deconstruction

ing without knowing that we are making decisions, when we are blind to our own insights, or when we are making the only choice we know to make, which in a way is the same as not choosing. The possibility that there are multiple levels of meaning, that reading may involve a moment of indeterminability, that desire might unconsciously shape our reading activity, and that, therefore, the intentional fallacy might apply as much to readers as it had formerly been said to apply to authors has confounded generations of literary critics. Some of these critics would say that such possibilities run directly counter to the great legacy imparted by criticism to the Enlightenment (or imparted to criticism by its emergence during the Enlightenment). If meaning has a residue of indeterminacy, then we cannot really know, they say, the true meaning of a text; moreover, and following from this, they argue that such reading has left reason behind. This commitment to theorizing a variability of meaning is what makes these "postmodernists," they argue, antimodern: they are abandoning the grand narrative of emancipation from the Enlightenment. Thus, Addison and Steele Are Dead, as Brian McCrea puts it in his book of that title, and they've been killed by poststructural theory's commitment to ambiguity, desire, undecidability, and the plurality of meaning. More than two centuries ago, though, in the middle of the Enlightenment's march down the path of practical reason, Johnson not only explores a relationship between truth and fiction, but he also offers it as fiction's benefit. Of course, if Fiction is what Truth wears so that Truth may become more desirable to us, we are left with trying to disentangle which is the truth and which the fiction in what we read. In so doing, we can see that Johnson's yoking of Truth and Fiction involves the same kinds of multileveled reading sketched by poststructuralists.10 We could imagine, ala Derrida and Barthes, a reading that tends toward the Truth side of the combination and another that prefers the play of the Fiction. Or we could say that Johnson's Truth and Fiction are versions of de Man's grammatical and rhetorical modes. In this way the recent debates over poststructuralism are not only the consequences of Enlightenment; they are part of the Enlightenment. 11 Despite Johnson's invocation of the fictive and the irrational in what he casts as the literary depiction of the truth, however, those who are concerned about a poststructuralist opposition to the Enlightenment would be right to point out that Johnson does not actively pursue the multiplicities implied by his allegory. But this is my concern here, about the history of criticism. Often, the Enlightenment critics drew back from the implications of their own ideas about how the text operates on us; they recoiled from the multiplicity and plurality implied by their own theories of texts. Specifically, the vaunted syntactical clarity of the

188

Conclusion

eighteenth-century critics and the related sense that reading can be made less dangerous are both cast as part of a process whereby the possible dangers of, say, the combination of Truth and Fiction could be minimized or managed. There are many reasons for the declining funding and public standing of literary studies today, including the rise of electronic communications, a pervasive ignorance of the need for cultural awareness in a globalizing economy, and even a misplaced sense that cultural awareness is politically destabilizing. But it cannot help literary studies that we have not fully examined the historical basis for the discipline's self-aggrandizing sense of a defining eighteenth-century connection to modern democracy. As authors such as Addison, Steele, and Johnson have become canonical figures of early English literary criticism, the question is whether the models of reading that they developed for the conditions of print after the Civil Wars might have affected subsequent generations of literary critics. If our practices as critics have at all been shaped by the arguments over democratized literacy in the eighteenth century, then we are left with the question of whether we, too, often pull back from multiplicity of meaning when confronted with it. I began with the premise that literary criticism does play a crucial, if precarious, role in negotiating democratic reform and possibilities. The eighteenth century eventually offers a dramatic increase in stability, at least when compared to the mid-seventeenth century. Still, it is a stability haunted by the experience and the memory of the Civil Wars. Whether such stability is democratic depends on "what kind of democracy we seek." 12 After the upheaval of the 164os, and with Jacobite Rebellions until 1745, stability was preferable to an earlier openness-that of the petitioning and publishing of the radical democrats in the 164os, even if that experience was in its way more democratic. At the same time, access to print in the 164os was considered, for at least the next 130 years, as having contributed to political violence at the highest level. So it is important to reconsider which models of democracy were adopted by literary criticism historically. Simply to assume that eighteenth-century criticism is democratic is to risk aligning literary studies with a model of criticism that carries a compromised sense of democracy. At the very least it is to step, sometimes unawares, into a debate over political philosophy and democratic theory. Whether the model of democracy ought to be the radical openness proposed in the 164os or the rules and standards debated and developed through the Restoration and eighteenth century, I leave to readers. My own sense, though, is that it will be salutary-and rewarding-for literary studies to articulate again within its currentand, granted, largely academic-institutions both the openness and the several models of democracy associated with print democracy. If I take a

The Unfinished Project of Deconstruction

historicist approach to the Enlightenment ideal, it is not because I see the Enlightenment as finished (my argument is not "post" -modern in that sense); instead, I take seriously the Enlightenment's central claim for the value of autonomy while reconsidering its treatment in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary criticism. It is part of the eighteenth-century constitution of literature that it emerges at a time when "the autonomy of the aesthetic was thereby explicitly constituted as a project." 13 Habermas, following Kant, understands Enlightenment autonomy institutionally, providing a model in "Modernity: An Unfinished Project" for "the relentless development of the objectivating sciences, of the universalistic foundations of morality and law, and of autonomous art" (45). Thus, Habermas's Enlightenment ideal is represented by Kant's Three Critiques-of Pure Reason (objectivating), of Practical Reason (universal foundation of morality), and of Judgment (autonomous art). This differentiation-the creation of "spheres," to use the term from Habermas's earlier work-is tied not only to the free exercise of reason, what he calls "the rational organization of social relations" (ibid.). Central to Habermas's vision of the eighteenthcentury public sphere is the status of reason in public debate. Habermas calls this combination of autonomy and rationality "the unfinished project" of modernity (ibid.). Habermas describes, by contrast, a critique of the Enlightenment that he believes sees it as finished, and something to be moved beyond; he calls this critique "postmodern," and he associates it with George Bataille, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida. Habermas's postmodernists discuss autonomy in regard to individuals rather than to institutions or, conversely, argue that institutional autonomy, and its insistence on a rational participation, undermines individual autonomy. Throughout this book I have focused on what the aesthetic might have meant to early English literary critics, working as they were just prior to and contemporary with the pivotal eighteenth-century redefinition of the term from sensory perception to the perception of beauty. At the same time, though, through the focus on the critics' political philosophy there has also been the question of what autonomy means. In the r64os, at least in the theories proposed by Bauthumley, Coppe, Milton, Walwyn, and Winstanley, autonomy represents an extraordinary empowerment of the reader, but it does not entail an autonomy of the text produced; as we have seen, the texts of the r64os are deeply involved in contemporary political concerns. Of course, the assertions of the right to self-determination in, for example, Bauthumley or Coppe are contingent entirely on perception of religious belief and are stated in such terms that would not allow for explanation or reason (which raises

Conclusion other questions about the autonomy of what they are arguing). Some, perhaps increasingly as the eighteenth-century proceeds, understand autonomy institutionally, through separate spheres for government, press, and other institutions. For some, openness results in rationality, a progressive diffusion of benefits and a lessening of superstition; others see openness as beneficially resulting in a wider range of voices, which they believe will also mean more dissensus. These differences in approach to autonomy point to tensions in the concept of autonomy itself: does the crucial modern democratic space where the right to say anything cannot be contravened by the government necessarily mean that all productions there have or should have no connection to the political? In other words, does a politically autonomous space necessarily result in aesthetically disinterested productions? Do Kant's second and third Critiques need to be both logically and historically connected? One of my central concerns has been the possibility that works written prior to the eighteenth-century literary-critical contribution to the formation of an English literary canon and any associated protocols for reading may not be reconcilable with or even recognizable to the increasingly extensive modes of reading apparently proffered by the early English literary critics, from whom the subsequent professional study of literature is said to descend. In his preface to An Essay on Pope's Odyssey (1726) Joseph Spence argues, '"Tis this ease of access, 'tis the liberty arising from it, which constitutes and preserves the felicity of the Republick of Letters." 14 Spence's claim supports the current sense that Addison and Steele and other literary critics contribute to an openness and to a public sphere. This ease of access is part of how Spence wishes to democratize letters. Unfortunately, though, it also follows from Sprat's and Dryden's sense that verbal clarity and ease are preferable and easily demarcated. There is also the implication that an additional translation-beyond Pope's translation from the Greek-also needs to occur for the new readers Pope's Homer is finding. This second level of translation necessarily prioritizes ease of access. The question for literary criticism is whether anything is lost in choosing stability and ease of access, to some extent over imagination, in the activity of reading. Two years after Spence's book on Pope's Homer was published, another publication of some import debuted: The Present State of the Republick of Letters, a serial that would go on to merge with and become the Literary Magazine. The preface to volume r reveals an important commitment to the public sphere-and a simultaneous concern over what might have precipitated the Civil Wars. As Habermas's publicsphere model would predict, The Present State believes that by 1728, "Every man may think as he pleases, and publishes his speculative opin-

The Unfinished Project of Deconstruction ions whatever they be, without the difficulty of obtaining a License from a partial or superstitious Censor, or standing in fear of an Inquisition and an Auto da Fe." 15 The Present State describes what it calls "this happy liberty, both of conscience and the press" (i). In keeping with the easy access described by Spence, The Present State claims it will be "very useful, and almost necessary to the curious, who cannot possibly read, or even dip into all the new books that come out" (i). As the volume of publication expands, such previewing will become a particularly important function for criticism. Still, there is the question of whether the critic is presumed to have not only the time but also a capacity for reading that the common reader lacks. The ease of access may be premised on a sense of the common reader that precedes any particular reader. Moreover, and despite the openness and political freedom usually attributed to the public sphere, The Present State also explains that it will not "engage in any party quarrels" and will "enter into no religious controversies" (i). The implication would seem to be that the openness and ease of the eighteenth-century public sphere are made possible by avoiding, or claiming to avoid, party politics and religion. This preference for ease of access or for less inventive modes of reading in the constitution of literature means that early criticism has trouble with authors whose work seems to invite and often requires inventive reading. Consider, for example, Addison and Steele's well-known aversion to puns, or Sprat's earlier dislike of the tropological. This aversion can affect critics' sense even of relatively contemporary authors. According to Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, for example, Johnson believed that "Swift has a higher reputation than he deserves" (1:452). Swift's relentlessly ironic stance often makes his positions obscure and is therefore at odds with the openness and clarity apparently preferred by early English literary critics. The same is true of Sterne, as far as Johnson is concerned. Boswell reports Johnson's contention, "'Nothing odd will do long. "Tristram Shandy" did not last'" (The Life of Samuel Johnson, 2:449). The issue is not whether Johnson was able to predict which books would survive over time; rather, the interesting point is his treatment of the kind of writing found in Tristram Shandy. It turns out that what Johnson considers Tristram Shandy's oddity contributes to its endurance. (The fact that Swift and Sterne are both also Irish-born raises other questions about the limits of democratization and about different points of access to language and the common reader in the eighteenth-century constitution of literature as well.) More important, though, is how this preference for ease of access and less inventive forms of reading affects how early literary criticism understands texts that precede such preferences. The question is whether training in "perusal"

Conclusion and "surveying" suffices for the puns, anagrams, and density of earlier textual productions. In The Work of Writing Clifford Siskin coins the helpful phrase "The Great Forgetting" to refer to "the various ways in which the disciplinary narrowing of Literature was also an act of gendering" (23). I am interested in whether the Restoration and eighteenth-century emergence of literary criticism as a discipline might have resulted in a different kind of Great Forgetting, that of the earlier expectations of readers and reading. To simplify, we could say that the Enlightenment, especially the Enlightenment path of practical reason, preferred the propositional to the tropological, or the grammatical to the rhetorical. The trouble for practical reason is that metaphors, puns, tropes, recursive patterns, and the like exceed propositional logic; they are not clear because with them one can say one thing and mean many things. But often this lack of clarity, this multiplicity built into tropes, is precisely the advantage of the trope. Such uses of language may very well characterize literary texts, and they have certainly come to be associated with literature. But such so-called literary techniques are actually uses of language that long predate the "instituted fiction" of literature in modern democracy. 16 Indeed, "literary devices" whereby one can say one thing and mean another are ways of saying anything under conditions in which saying anything is, strictly speaking, not allowed; they may have been developed precisely because of the lack of a democratic right to say anything. Although the distaste of eighteenth-century critics for Shakespeare is better known, in some ways Milton presents an even greater challenge to eighteenth-century literary criticism. As we saw in Chapter r, in the early r64os Milton describes a model of reading that allows for a range of individual interpretation but recognizes the importance of the words being interpreted as well. Later, Milton makes the case for regicide, aligning himself in some ways with the radical democrats and arguing against Eikon Basi/ike, thought to be essentially the last words of the recently executed king, Charles I. In r66o, as the Restoration is about to occur, Milton is still making the case for a nonmonarchical, republican form of a commonwealth. Through it all, Milton remains committed to a vision of radical democratic politics and to a complementary tropological model of reading. Appreciative though they might be of his ability, Addison and Steele have trouble with Milton's puns and verbal density, and they need to read around such "intensive" elements. In r732 Richard Bentley goes to great lengths to "correct" Paradise Lost through extraordinary emendations. Samuel Johnson, as we saw in the preceding chapter, has similar difficulty with Milton's politics, dismissing him as an "acrimonious and surly Republican" in The Lives of the English Poets (r:r56).

The Unfinished Project of Deconstruction

193

If literature is a modern invention but its linguistic, tropological resources are not, then there is a deep tension between literature (related to the modern institutions of criticism) and the literary (for want of a better term). Indeed, modern, "democratic" readers accustomed to the right to say anything (propositionally or grammatically) might not notice what a text is saying if that text is written with the sense that not everything could be said (i.e., rhetorically or tropologically). There is the risk that something is lost when the historically specific modern institution of literary criticism redescribes the suprapropositional excess of the literary in open, modern, and, above all, propositional terms. Modern readers might also overlook the controversy, and occasionally even the outrage, intrinsic to any institution that in principle allows one to say everything. Because the literary, tropological strategies for saying anything precede and may differ from the institution of literature in modernity-the former saying anything under conditions in which it is not allowed, the latter saying everything under conditions in which it is allowed-a certain kind of attentive reading is also required. For Habermas this attentive, often inventive, reading represents the moment when postmodernity becomes a form of premodernity. As a visible manifestation of a democratic singularity, however, the text in which language under pressure to say all it can (including what cannot be said) encourages a way of reading that heightens awareness. For some it is an increased awareness of beauty, for others an awareness of the secret. For still others the secret has not been hidden, just unread. Such reading can combine the two levels discussed by Derrida, Barthes, and de Man, attentive to the truth and the play of language, the end of the narrative and the sensuousness of its telling, or both the logic and the rhetoric. With the recent return to the ethics of the aesthetic, there may even be additional dimensions to such reading, including Elaine Scarry's sense (mentioned in my introduction) that awareness of injustice requires "perceptual acuity that will forever be opening one to the arrival of beautiful sights and sounds," 17 an acuity that could be gained from attentive, tropological reading. The Habermasian history of the eighteenth century might see such reading as irrational anti-Enlightenment postmodernism, but it indicates how we might be able to measure whether reading has been democratized. Reading on fewer than these multiple levels misses an aspect of signification in the text; therefore, reading on fewer than these multiple levels is a lesser reading. Reading will be most democratized when the most readers have the most access to the processes of the multiple levels of signification, especially the active processes of construing, constructing, and even constituting meaning. Part of what this tropological sense of literacy and of the literary offers, then, is the awareness that every

194

Conclusion

representation is also a constitution, that to represent is to constitute as much as any constitution relies on representation. In Between Facts and Norms Habermas describes the two possibilities in political philosophy as factual and normative. His object is to articulate a position between them in political philosophy, something he calls "discourse theory." 18 Through its ancient connection to images, the literary is, I would argue, before fact and norms. However, rather than simply putting literature in a compromised position, ontologically, literature's position before facts and norms means that it can postulate new possibilities, beyond what is and what ought to be. In this way attention to a history of representation shared by literature and democracy constitutes the unfinished project of deconstruction (in this case of the separation between political and aesthetic representation in the modern constitution). In principle, modern democracies recognize and protect this ability to talk about what is, about what ought to be, and, most important, about what is not. In practice, however, such talk often is not and perhaps cannot be protected, because of how it might impact what is. It has been a governing assumption of the constitution of literature that modern literary criticism and literary studies are both categories within-and very much concerned with-the developing technology of print. Today the emergence of another technology of visual representation of verbal communication, the World Wide Web, is displacing literary criticism's settlement with print. It is difficult, therefore, to consider the history of criticism in its relationships to literacy and political philosophy without reference to the recent discussions of what is sometimes called digital literacy. Indeed, precisely because English literary criticism begins after a moment of newly democratized access to publication (print in this case), it offers a moment analogous to the current democratization of today's virtual publication on the World Wide Web. By reconsidering the constitution of literature, we might be able to consider parallels between the early development of literary criticism and the current developments in hypermedia. Still, saying so may surprise those who describe the democratic advantages of digital publication and digital literacy. For the current discussion of the Web hinges on a polarizing and inaccurate caricature of the book as fixed, stable, and antidemocratic. As Richard A. Lanham argues in The Electronic Word, hypertext allows us "to see more clearly the assumptions that come with a book: it is authoritative and unchangeable, transparent and unselfconscious." 19 "Authoritative," "unchangeable," "transparent," "unselfconscious"-using any of these adjectives to describe books would have stunned seventeenth-century readers, not to mention Swift or Sterne and so many others in the eighteenth. Against a perspective such as Lanham's, the seventeenth-century

The Unfinished Project of Deconstruction

195

experience can remind us of some very important attributes of print: its democratizing effect as a technology, its pliability in the reading, and its self-consciousness (in the best sense of the coming to awareness of the self). Lanham's point does, however, accurately reflect a subsequent sense that print is stable, both technologically and politically. For that we can thank the eighteenth-century development of criticism, among several factors. The problem with this perception, though, is that the distinctions currently made between the book and the World Wide Web treat the eighteenth-century constitution of literature as if it were transhistorical. The stability that the eighteenth-century critics tried to bring to print through their debates over theories of reading was in response to what they often saw as the politically destabilizing effects of the technology of print itself. Many of the current arguments about electronic interactive publication rely on a sense of how the book has been socially constructed, but they mistake that construction for the possibilities in the book itself. And as was the case during the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitution of literature, literacy is treated in the current discussion of the Web as a way of describing political philosophy. Those who today describe the World Wide Web and digital media usually resort to claiming that the new media are more flexible, open, and democratic than the book. For example, when Nicholas C. Burbules contends that "printed texts are by nature selective and exclusive," 20 his point about the exclusivity of print is not entirely restricted to the finite number of words that can be printed on any one page. Rather, he is tying the process of print to political exclusivity. Again, print is aligned with authority, and implicitly authority is undemocratic. The literature relying on these distinctions is quite extensive, going back at least to the work of McLuhan, Ellis, Ong, and even the recently translated work of Vilem Flusser. In a collection of essays on electronic media published by the Modern Language Association, William Constanzo makes what has since become a familiar, circular assertion about the nature of books and of reading them: "Books are linear because their pages are physically bound in a fixed sequence." 21 First, and most obvious, the pages of books do not need to be read sequentially. Not every book is a narrative from beginning to end, and readers can skip passages, even in narratives. (It is also worth mentioning that narratives themselves do not necessarily proceed sequentially.) We have seen, with the models of reading proposed during the r64os, that there have long been those who have theorized about how to read books out of order. Moreover, such disordered reading is exactly what the codex offers readers; it is the codex that makes indexing and cross-referencing possible. 22 Rather than the codex, though,

Conclusion

theorists of digital literacy prefer to see the book as binding, in several senses of the word. There is a correlated distinction in the literature on digital media between the types of readers that print and digital communication produce or assume. Jay Bolter is typical in claiming that print is "sent out to an audience of passive readers." 23 It is not only the radical democrats of the 164os, however, who know that reading is always an active process of constructing meaning, even when the text is on paper. Even if readers are not fully aware of the active process by which they arrive at meaning, that does not make them passive. But the passivity of the glum book reader subjected to the authoritative book is an effective trope for those who want to define digital literacy as "interactive" and, in that sense, new and improved. Johndan Johnson-Eilola, for example, believes that "a key difference between hypertext and linear text is the degree to which hypertext readers are allowed to choose from multiple paths through a body of text." 24 But every book offers multiple paths through the text, from table of contents, to page numbers, or indexes; and, of course, the Internet is loaded with sites whose paths of seeming choice are preprogrammed for the readers, often leading them to virtual spaces they never meant to "choose." Still, from this supposed difference in the degree of choice allowed in reading books and hypertext, the digerati posit a supposedly new democratic political project of print, electronic print, even though readers can make choices along multiple paths in print as well. Similarly, William Constanzo may believe that he is describing only electronic publication when he argues that "readers of hypertext travel along branching lines of narrative within dense networks of interconnected words," 25 but that is simply a definition of reading; regardless of the medium, readers are always traveling along branching lines of meaning, some of them not entirely narrative. These branches are not only those made possible by the codex; they are also, as the early critics knew, cognitive, as meanings signify other possibilities, as memory and imagination perform their complicated operations. And of course there are the branches that readers spread from between the various books that they have read, cognitive branches of interconnected meanings that constitute their own wireless connections in a worldwide web of textual signification. It may be that the treatment of the book in current arguments for digital media has rightly caught on to an aspect of the constitution of literature. Eighteenth-century literary critics may have prioritized stability over openness, but early English literary critics described their visions of reading against the backdrop of the profound instability created, they believed, by other modes of reading. It must also be said that stability is

The Unfinished Project of Deconstruction

197

likely preferable to protracted civil war; even the most libertarian digerati are probably concerned about the democratizing effect the Internet seems to have offered global jihadists. Moreover, within that eighteenthcentury preference for stability there is a wide range of differing opinions on how to organize the constitution of literature, on how to understand literacy and political philosophy, and even on how to understand stability itself. Eighteenth-century critics sometimes make their claims despite other possibilities put forward by contemporaries, such as Swift, Sterne, and others. Most important, the claims early English critics make for textual stability, ease of access, and perusal do not mean that these are necessary attributes of books, writing, or reading. What must be reasserted is the range of reading that books facilitate and that can be found in the history of reading. At the same time, the existence of the debate shows that reading is not linear and that making reading seem more linear took a century of qualifications of the reading process. And it is important to remember both the range within the constitution of literature debate and the alternatives against which they are reacting. Whereas Habermas sees eighteenth-century literary criticism as contributing to the rise of the modern, rational public sphere, the constitution of literature instead traces a contest over democracies, plural. As Derrida contends, "Democracy contains all the different kinds of constitutions." 26 What the eighteenth century eventually offers is a dramatic increase in stability, at least when compared to the mid-seventeenth century, a period that haunts the eighteenth-century sense of "stability." Today's discussion of the World Wide Web needs to consider each of these facets of the development of literary criticism. For the potential political instability, the possible emergence of critical protocols, and debates over models of democracy will all unfold for digital media, and the constitution of literature can provide a powerful, instructive analogue. In the end the book may not be as simple as the extensive-reading model might suggest, and a book intensively read may be as flexible, as liberating, and as interconnected as anything offered in digital communication.

Reference Matter

Notes

Preface r. Derrida, On The Name, 28. Derrida articulates a series of variations on this theme in "'This Strange Institution Called Literature'"; and in "Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism." 2. Derrida, "Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism," So. 3· DeMaria, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading, 220. 4· de Man, "The Resistance to Theory," 15. 50 Ibid., I7. 6. Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," 292.

Introduction r. Engel!, Forming the Critical Mind, 2. Gay, The Rise of Modern Paganism, 132. 3· Black, The English Press, r621-r86r, 5· 4· See Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 2. 5. Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, 175. 6. Raven, Small, and Tadnor, "Introduction," 5. 7· See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 33, 42, 93· 8. Habermas, "The Public Sphere," ro6. 9· Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 27. IO. Ibid., 29. II. Ibid., 53 12. Peter Uwe Hohendahl argues, "In the Age of the Enlightenment the concept of criticism cannot be separated from the institution of the public sphere" (Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism, 53). 13. Terry Eagleton echoes Habermas's Kantian vision when he describes criticism as "poised between state and civil society" and argues that "in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the European bourgeoisie begins to carve out for itself a distinct discursive space, one of rational judgement and enlightened critique" (Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, 9). 2.

0

202

Notes to Pages 2-8

q. Habermas's model can also be seen in Engell's subsequent book, in which he hopes that "the study of literary language and rhetoric in a wider public sphere can be revitalized" (Engell, The Committed Word, 174). Habermas is also implicit in Martha Nussbaum's claim that "the literary imagination is a part of public rationality" (Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, xvi). r 5. See Eagleton, The Function of Criticism; Kramnick, Making the English Canon; Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon; and Siskin, The Work of Writing. r6. Smith, A Collection of Ranter Writings from the Seventeenth Century; Smith, Perfection Proclaimed; and Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, r64o-r66o; see also Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader. 17. Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, 174. r8. The question mark in the title of Julian Hoppit's A Land of Liberty? England, r689-1727 indicates how tentative the association of the eighteenth century and democracy has become. Similarly, the subtitle of Richard Price's History of British Society, r68o-r88o: Dynamism, Containment, and Change focuses not only on the "dynamism" and "change" but also on the recent interest in the period's strategies of "containment." 19. See Clark, English Society, r66o-r832. 20. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 46. 21. Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, r8. 22. Pocock and Schochet, "Interregnum and Restoration," 155. 23. Clark, English Society, r66o-r832, 2. 24. In this I disagree with Clark, who believes that the Civil Wars of the r64os can no longer be considered a defining episode (see ibid., q). 25. Dickens, David Copperfield, 194. 26. Cavallo and Chartier, A History of Reading in the West. 27. Andersen and Sauer, "Current Trends in the History of Reading," r. See also D. F. McKenzie's "The London Book Trade in 1644" and "The London Book Trade in r688." McKenzie provides what I call a "sociological" study, although he also performs a materialist analysis of a particular book in "Typography and Meaning." 28. Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 320. 29. Johns, The Nature of the Book, 5-6. 30. See, e.g., Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market; and Rose, Authors and Owners. On the preliminary developments preceding copyright see Loewenstein, The Author's Due. 31. Chartier, The Order of Books, vii. 32. Ibid. 33· See Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, 249; and Chartier, Forms and Meanings, 17. Both authors cite this intensive I extensive shift. 34· Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, 249. 3 5. Peter de Bolla, for example, argues that "as reading theory responds to the increase in the number of readers and the expansion of the number of texts,

Notes to Pages 8-rs

203

it must of necessity delimit the practice of reading" (de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime, 232). 36. Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets, 2:94. 37· In Letters of the Republic, for example, Michael Warner contends that "we still regard the actors in the Enlightenment roughly as they thought of themselves: as members of a republic of letters" (ix). 38. See Scholes, Protocols of Reading. Scholes takes his title from Jacques Derrida's Positions, where Derrida claims, "Reading is transformational. ... But this transformation cannot be executed however one wishes. It requires protocols of reading. Why not say it bluntly: I have not yet found any that satisfy me" (quoted in Scholes, Protocols of Reading, so, 78). As we will see, early literary critics agreed that reading requires protocols, although the difficulty in finding satisfactory ones results in at least a century of debate over the issue. 39· de Man, "The Resistance to Theory," rs. 40. Ibid., I7. 4L Ibid. 42. Ibid., II. 43· On reading reading in de Man see Waters and Godzich, Reading de Man Reading; on rereading theories of reading see also Wolfreys, Readings, in which Wolfreys selects and evaluates more than thirty statements about reading from Althusser to ZiZek, arranged alphabetically. 44· Cunningham, Reading After Theory. 45· See Bove, In the Wake of Theory; and Johnson, The Wake of Deconstruction. 46. McQuillen et al., Post-Theory; Docherty, After Theory; Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory. 47· An early reflection on the tension between the two can be seen in J. Hillis Miller's 1986 Presidential Address to the MLA, "The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base." 48. Altick, The English Common Reader, 47· 49· Wheale, Writing and Society, 2. so. Skelton, The Candid Reader, 2. sr. Upton, Critical Observations on Shakespeare, 33· 52. Skelton, The Candid Reader, 9· 53· Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, r84. 54· "We can also judge the rationality of a speaking and acting subject by how he behaves as a participant in argumentation, should the situation arise" (Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, r:r8). 55· See Chomsky, "On Cognitive Capacity." 56. Poetic inspiration "is caught from one breast to another" (Hume, "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences," in Essays, rq). 57· Gibbon, "Critical Observations on the Design of the Sixth Book of The Aeneid," 152. s8. Quoted in Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, III. 59· Pope, An Essay on Criticism, line 155 (italics in the original). 6o. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 6o-6r.

204

Notes to Pages I6-z6

6r. For Susan Stewart, "Poetry is encountered with and through our entire sensuous being" (Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 329). 62. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, Sr. 63. Chartier, Forms and Meanings, 91. 64. McGann, Radiant Textuality, n6; McGann, "How to Read a Book," II9· 65. Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon, 2S2. 66. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 25, 36. 67. Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, 29. 6S. According to Nigel Wheale, "the window of opportunity for advancement through the universities diminished significantly after the r63os, when the proportion of gentry in the student body increased .... By r637-9 the proportion of 'plebian' graduates from Oxford had fallen from over half at the beginning of the decade to 37 per cent-27 per cent in 17rr, 17 per cent in 1760, and just r per cent in rSro" (Wheale, Writing and Society, 37). 69. Genette, Fiction and Diction, 4· 70. ZiZek, The Ticklish Subject, rS7. 71. Zizek, "A Leftist Plea for 'Eurocentrism,"' 991. 72. Ibid., roo2. 73· Ibid., 992. 74· Ibid., 991-92. 75· Hobbes, Leviathan, SS. Subsequent quotations from Leviathan will be cited parenthetically in the text. 76. Zizek, "A Leftist Plea for 'Eurocentrism,"' 991. 77· Ibid., 991. 7S. Ibid., 992. 79· Ibid. So. Spectator no. 69, Tuesday, Oct. r6, I7II, in Addison and Steele, The Spectator, r:293. Sr. See Criticism and Modernity, in which Thomas Docherty implicitly points to this possibility of an overlooked "ultrapolitical" context for English criticism generally; and Donald Greene's essay, "Samuel Johnson and the Great War for Empire," which situates Johnson's criticism in particular in relation to a broader geopolitical (and "ultrapolitical") context. S2. Pocock, "Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment," 9!.

Chapter One r. 2. 3· 4· 5· 6. 7·

Dryden, "An Essay of Dramatick Poesie," 33-34. Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing, xi. Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, I64o-I66o, r. Pocock, Schochet, and Schwoerer, "Editorial Introduction," 7· Morrill, "The Causes and Course of the British Civil Wars," 21. Cocks, An Answer to a Book Set Forth by Sir Edmund Peyton, r. See Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 2.

Notes to Pages 26-32

205

8. Ibid. 9· See Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader; Orgel, "Afterword: Records of Culture"; Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade; Halasz, The Marketplace of Print; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic; Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain; Sauer, "Paper-Contestations" and Textual Communities in England, I64o-I675; Sharpe, Reading Revolutions; Sharpe and Zwicker, Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England; Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, I64oI66o; Smith, Perfection Proclaimed. ro. Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, 174. rr. Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 3· 12. Halasz, The Marketplace of Print. 13. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 52· q. See Smith, Perfection Proclaimed; Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, I640-I66o; Halasz, The Marketplace of Print; and Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture. 15. Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, 292. r6. Hill, The English Revolution, I64o; Hill, Puritanism and Revolution; Hill, The Century of Revolution, I6o3-I7I4; and Hill, The World Turned Upside Down. 17. Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, I64o-I66o, 362. r8. Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 7· 19. Worden, "Marchamont Nedham and the Beginnings of English Republicanism, r649-r656," 53· 20. After the pioneering work of J. G. A. Pocock, especially in The Machiavellian Moment, the study of mid-seventeenth-century republicanism now has an extensive bibliography. See Norbrook, Writing the English Republic. 21. Pocock, "Historical Introduction," 15. Pocock's "linguistic turn" has been influential. It can be seen, for instance, in Thomas Corns's sense that republicanism "is an idiom in which a value system and an aesthetic are inscribed, and it is an interferential posture which utterly subverts the assumptions of Stuart monarchism" (Corns, "Milton and the Characteristics of a Free Commonwealth," 42). 22. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 19. 23. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, rs8. 24. Ibid., rs8, 153. 25. Mouffe, "Democracy, Power, and the 'Political,"' 246. 26. See, e.g., Mouffe, "Deconstruction, Pragmatism, and the Politics of Democracy." 27. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 9· 28. Ibid., 22. 29. Ibid., 34· 30. Quoted in Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 95· 31. Pocock and Schochet, "Interregnum and Restoration," 155. 32. Dzelzainis, "Milton's Classical Republicanism," 15.

206

Notes to Pages 32-45

33· Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, I2. 34· Eliot, "Milton II," 148. 35. Milton, Areopagitica, 49I. Subsequent quotations from Areopagitica will be cited parenthetically in the text. 36. Kirby, "Milton's Biblical Hermeneutics in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce," II8. 37· Ibid. 38. Luxon, Literal Figures, ix. 39· Quoted in Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, I8. 40. Luxon, for example, suggests in Literal Figures, how complicated the discussion of Protestant hermeneutics becomes when seen through the literal/figurative distinction: "the normative literal sense of any Scripture passage, according to exegetical tradition, is the sense gathered from the explication of metaphorical expression, not the literal sense of the metaphorical figures themselves" (I2). 4I. Perkins, The Art of Prophesying, 337· 42. Luther, "The Pagan Servitude of the Church, I52o," 250. Subsequent quotations from "The Pagan Servitude" will be cited parenthetically in the text. 43· In Of Grammatology, for example, Derrida contends, "Logocentrism would thus support the determination of the being of the entity as presence" (Derrida, Of Grammatology, I2). 44· Calvin, "Three Forms of Exposition," 538. Subsequent quotations from "Three Forms of Exposition" will be cited parenthetically in the text. 45· Fish, "Driving from the Letter," 238. 46. Ibid., 237. 47· Laqueur, Making Sex, 38. 48. Plato, Phaedrus, 522. Subsequent quotations from Phaedrus will be cited in the text. 49· See, e.g., Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? 38-40, where Fish reads Phaedrus as a "self-consuming artifact." so. Walwyn, "A New Petition of the Papists," 58. 5I. Walwyn, "The Compassionate Samaritane," n2. 52. The "interest of the Divine," Walwyn argues, "is to preserve amongst the people the distinction of Clergie and Laity" (ibid., I08). 53· Ibid., II7. 54· Walwyn, "A New Petition of the Papists," 57· 55· Gerrard Winstanley, Truth Lifting Up Its Head, I28. 56. Milton's combination of the phonocentric, logocentric, and subjective represents a late humanist version of "the principle of harder reading: dificilior lectio potior" (Bentley, "Erasmus, Jean LeClerc, and the Principle of the Harder Reading," 3IO). In a reversal of Occam's razor, according to Jerry Bentley, "when a textual critic is confronted with two or more readings of unequal difficulty, so the principle advises, the more difficult is the better choice" (3Io). 57· Coppe, "Some Sweet Sips, of some Spirituall Wine," 6I. Subsequent quotations from "Some Sweet Sips" will be cited parenthetically in the text.

Notes to Pages 47-6I

207

58. Bauthumley, "The Light and Dark Sides of God," 231. Subsequent quotations from "The Light and Dark Sides of God" will be cited parenthetically in the text. 59· Hamacher, Pleroma-Reading in Hegel, 3· 6o. Quoted in Fish, How Milton Works, 478. 6r. Clark, English Society, I66o-I832, 44· 62. Knott, "'Suffering for Truths Sake,"' 159· 63. [Charles I], Eikon Basi/ike, xiii. 64. According to John R. Knott Jr., "The matter of [Eikon Basi/ike's] authorship was not resolved in Milton's day. It appears now that John Gauden, then Dean of Bocking in Essex and subsequently a bishop, worked from writings of Charles in fashioning the book and smuggled a draft to Charles in Caris brooke Castle for revision and approval" (Knott, "'Suffering for Truths Sake,"' 16o). 65. Sharpe, "'An Image Doting Rabble,"' 26. 66. Milton, Eikonoklastes, 342. 67. Ibid., 582. 68. Ibid., 348. 69. Ranciere, On the Poetics of Knowledge, 20. 70. As Richard Tuck points out, Hobbes believed that "the control of public meanings was the essence of the civil sovereign's role" (Tuck, "The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes," 123). 71. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 4· 72. Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, 120. 73· Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 74· 74· Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 19 (emphasis in the original). 75· Ibid., 17. 76. Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, 336. 77· In The Triumph of Augustan Poetics Blanford Parker points out that "among the feared residue of the Civil War culture was the very practice of Baroque art: conceitful, passionate, sacramental, Iconic, communal, and traditional" (3). Indeed, the "Augustan" dismay about the Baroque can be seen before the Augustan period, as early as Hobbes's Leviathan. 78. As Hobbes writes, "There can be no breach of Covenant on the part of his Soveraigne" (Leviathan, 122). 79· Pocock and Schochet, "Interregnum and Restoration," 161-62. So. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 436.

Chapter Two r. This chapter's title comes from Dryden, "To the Reader," from Absalom and Achitophel, 4· Subsequent quotations from Absalom and Achitophel will be cited parenthetically in the text, with page number for "To the Reader" and line numbers for the poem. 2. Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets, 1:410. Subsequent quotations from The Lives of the Poets will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number.

208

Notes to Pages 62-76

3. See Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 2. 4· Butler, Hudibras, lines 3-4. 5· Quoted in Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, r. 6. Dryden, "To His Sacred Majesty, a Panegyrick on His Coronation," 35, line 88. 7· Atkyns, "To the King's Most Excellent Majesty," B2r. 8. L'Estrange, Considerations and Proposals in order to the Regulation of the Press, 2. 9· Ibid., A3v-A4r. IO. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, II2. Subsequent quotations from History of the Royal Society will be cited parenthetically in the text. II. Thomas Docherty argues, "Modernity thus knows criticism primarily as representation" (Docherty, Criticism and Modernity, I6). I2. Engell, Forming the Critical Mind, 38. I3. According to James Anderson Winn, "Charleton proposed Dryden as a Fellow [of the Royal Society] on I2 November I662; in accordance with the Society's usual procedures, the young poet was elected on I9 November and admitted on 26 November" (Winn, John Dryden and His World, I28). I4· Emerson, "John Dryden and a British Academy," 46. I5. Dryden, "A Defence of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy," 70. I6. Engell, Forming the Critical Mind, 43· I7· See Zwicker, Dryden's Political Poetry; Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry; and Zwicker, Lines of Authority; see also McKeon, Politics and Poetry in Restoration England. IS. Inwood, The Man Who Knew Too Much, 27. I9. James Winn describes "parts of the Society's reform program as inimical to poetry" (Winn, John Dryden and His World, I3I). 20. Inwood, The Man Who Knew Too Much, 30. 2r. Ibid., 75. 22. Hooke, Micrographia, Au-v-A2r. Subsequent quotations from Micrographia will be cited parenthetically in the text. 23. On seventeenth- and eighteenth-century interest in grammar and systematizing the language see Mitchell, Grammar Wars. Titles from this late seventeenth-century interest include Aiken, The English Grammar, or, the English tongue; Clare, A Compleat System of Grammar English and Latin; Coles, The Compleat English School-Master; Coles, The Newest, Plainest, and Best ShortHand; Cooper, The English Teacher; Cooper, Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae; Delgarno, Ars Signorum vulgo Character Universal/is et Lingua Philosophica; Ellis, The English School. 24. Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, B2r. Subsequent quotations from An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language will be cited parenthetically in the text. 25. Foucault, The Order of Things, 75, 57· 26. Kroll, "Instituting Empiricism," 44· 27. Dryden, "The Authors Apology for Heroique Poetry; and Poetique Licence," 90.

Notes to Pages 78-92

209

28. Haley, Dryden and the Problem of Freedom, 81. 29. Winn, john Dryden and His World, 372. 30. Dryden, preface to Religio Laici, 96. 31. Dryden, Religio Laici, 22, lines 435-36. 32. Griffin, "The Beginnings of Modern Authorship," 3· 33· Dryden, "A Parallel, of Poetry and Painting," 6o. 34· Dryden, preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, 40. Subsequent quotations from the preface to Fables Ancient and Modern will be cited parenthetically in the text. 35. Kroll, "Instituting Empiricism," 42. 36. Jonathan Brody Kramnick, for example, describes how "the English literary canon achieved its definitive shape during the middle decades of the eighteenth century" (Kramnick, Making the English Canon, r); see also Trevor Ross, who argues that "the objectivist desire of resolving contradictions in the definition of the English canon ... leads to the rise of interpretation, literary history, and other related critical practices in the eighteenth century" (Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon, 7). 3 7· Earl Miner, for example, points out that "it is to Dryden that England owes its very concept of a literary period and of literary succession" (Miner, "Introduction: Borrowed Plumage, Varied Umbrage," 3). 38. Dryden, "The Authors Apology for Heroique Poetry," 90.

Chapter Three I. This chapter's title comes from [Eustace Budgell], Spectator no. 197, Tuesday, Oct. r6, I7II. In Addison and Steele, The Spectator, 2:274. Subsequent quotations from The Spectator will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. 2. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 41. 3. Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism, 53. 4· Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, 9· 5· Engell, Forming the Critical Mind, 3· 6. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 29. 7· Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, 9· 8. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 3·9·5·477· Subsequent quotations from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding will be cited parenthetically in the text by book, chapter, section, and page number. 9· Steele, The Tatler, r:r5. Subsequent quotations from The Tatler will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. ro. Wheale, Writing and Society, 22. II. For Stuart Sherman, naming the journal The Tatler "is the first of many moves that the Tatler and the Spectator will make to invite women readers to see themselves mirrored in the paper's masthead, substance, and method" (Sherman, Telling Time, 127). 12. Castle, "Women and Literary Criticism," 434· 13. Mackie, Market Ia Mode, rr5.

a

2IO

!4· 82. r 5. r6. 17. r8. 19. 20. 2r. 22.

Notes to Pages 93-n2 Poovey, "Aesthetics and Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century,"

Thompson, Models of Value, 17. Black, "Social and Literary Form in the Spectator," 33. Elster, "The Market and the Forum," 132. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 30. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 15. Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, 9· On Addison and Steele and the market see Kramnick, Making the English Canon; and Mackie, Market ii Ia Mode. 23. Mackie, Market ii Ia Mode, 2rr. 24. Kramnick, Making the English Canon, 9· 25. Bourdieu, Distinction, 7· 26. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 74· In The Rules of Art Bourdieu makes much the same point: "A commerce in things which are not commercial, the trade in 'pure' art belongs to the class of practices where the logic of pre-capitalist economy survives" (Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 148). 2 7· Mulcaire, "Public Credit; or, The Feminization of Virtue in the Marketplace," 1029. 28. Dykstal, "The Politics of Taste in The Spectator," 59-60. 29. Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, 95· 30. Temple, "Of Poetry," !73· 31. Ibid. 32. Locke, Locke on Money, r:r89. 33· Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 302. Subsequent quotations from the Second Treatise of Government will be cited parenthetically in the text. 34· Thompson, Models of Value, 2. 35. Justice, The Manufacturers of Literature, r6. 36. Engell, Forming the Critical Mind, 3· 37· Copley, "Commerce, Conversation, and Politeness in the Early Eighteenth-Century Periodical," 6 5. 38. For example, Hume's essay "On the Standard of Taste" would seem to rework for wine Addison's following image regarding tea: "I knew a person who possessed the one in so great a perfection, that after having tasted ro different kinds of tea, he would distinguish, without seeing the colour of it, the particular sort which was offered him" (Spectator no. 409, 3:527). 39· Milton, Eikonoklastes, 339· 40. McCrea, Addison and Steele Are Dead, 24. 41. Mackie, Market ii Ia Mode, r2r.

Chapter Four r. Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, s.v. "to read". On rules in early eighteenth-century English architecture see Morrissey, From the Temple to the Castle, esp. chap. 2. 2.

Notes to Pages II3-I8

211

3· Anonymous, Glossographia Anglicana Nova, A2v. 4· Ibid., A3r. 5. In A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique Hobbes contends that "all men naturally are able in some sort to accuse and excuse: some by chance; but some by method. This method may be discovered: and to discover method is all one with teaching an Art" (Hobbes, A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique, 39). 6. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason, 24. 7· According to Robert Markley, "the intellectual prominence of Newton's work in the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries would be difficult to overestimate" (Markley, Fallen Languages, I84). 8. It is important to note that the Newtonians differ from Newton. As Robert Markley points out, Newtonians "preserve Newton's analytical vocabulary, ideas, and theories but treat them as 'true,' as unassailable facts, rather than as heuristic constructs" (ibid.). 9· See, e.g., Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution; and Dobbs and Jacob, Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism. IO. See, e.g., Nicholson, Newton Demands the Muse. See also Markley's Fallen Languages, esp. chap. 5, "'The Interposition of Omniscience,"' I78-2I5. II. Pope, An Essay on Man, epistle 2, line 32, SI7· I2. As Marcus Walsh points out, "to a modern eye, the work of the first editor of Shakespeare and Milton in the eighteenth century can seem most unfamiliar" (Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing, 4). I3. Levine, The Battle of the Books, 245. q. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution, 97· I5. Tate, "To My Ingenious Friend the Author upon this Judicious and Useful Performance," I3. I6. Cooper, Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author, 35, 63. I7. Toland, Christianity not Mysterious, 6. I8. Ibid., xxiv. I9. Ibid., so. 20. [Dryden], "To the Right Honourable, My Lord Radcliffe," B4r-v. 2r. The Earl of Musgrave, "On Mr. Hobs," 99-I03. 22. Among the many responses to Toland is Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity, in which Locke argues that "human reason unassisted, failed men in its great and proper business of morality" (Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, 6I); and Swift's An Argument to Prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England, May as Things Now Stand, be attended with some Inconveniences, the caustic title of which indicates Swift's attitude toward Toland's argument. 23. Toland, Christianity not Mysterious, 54· 24. Anonymous, The Needful Attempt to Make Language and Divinity Plain and Easy, 3· 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., I8. 27. Greenwood, An Essay Towards a Practical English Grammar, A3r-v.

2I2

Notes to Pages n8-35

28. [Dr. Wallis], preface to Greenwood, An Essay Towards a Practical English Grammar, 26. 29. Anonymous, Bellum Grammaticale, 7· 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, I44, line 3· Subsequent quotations from An Essay on Criticism will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. 33· Locke argues that wit, on the one hand, consists "in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety," and that "judgment on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully, one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference" (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.Ir.2.r56). 34· Milton, The Ready and Easy Way to establish a free Commonwealth, 462. 35· Anonymous, Bellum Grammaticale, Au-A2v. 36. Felton, A Dissertation on Reading the Classics, ix. Subsequent quotations from A Dissertation on Reading the Classics will be cited parenthetically in the text. 37· Theobald, The Censor, qr. 38. In q26 Theobald would come into conflict with Alexander Pope over how criticism should proceed, and he would subsequently be immortalized by Pope in The Dunciad. But in the interim Theobald and Pope share a concern for rules, even if they have a different treatment of them. 39· Theobald, The Censor, I94· 40. Addison, A Dissertation Upon the Most Celebrated Roman Poets, EuE2v. 41. Blackwall, An Introduction to the Classics, A3r. Subsequent quotations from An Introduction to the Classics will be cited parenthetically in the text. 42. Gildon, The Laws of Poetry, 6o. 43· Jacob, The Poetical Register, 2:xx. Subsequent quotations from The Poetical Register will be cited parenthetically in the text. 44· Defoe, Compleat English Dictionary. 45· Dyche and Pardon, A New General English Dictionary, s.v. "read." 46. Welsted, "A Dissertation Concerning the Perfection of the English Language," 329. 47· See "Rational Emotions," chap. 3 in Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 53-78.

Chapter Five r. Saints bury, A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe, 3=I59· 2. Rogers, "Theories of Style," 367. 3· Hume, "My Own Life," in Essays, xxxiv. Subsequent quotations from Essays will be cited parenthetically in the text by title and page number. 4· Mossner, introduction to A Treatise of Human Nature, 45. 5. Haakonssen, "The Structure of Hume's Political Theory," r86. 6. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, r6.

Notes to Pages 135-57

213

7· In "An Introduction to Hume's Thought" David Fate Norton describes Hume's position as "fundamentally sceptical and fundamentally constructive": "His position is sceptical in so far as he shows that knowledge has nothing like the firm, reliable foundation the Cartesians or other rationalists had claimed to give it; his position is constructive in so far as he undertook to articulate a new science of human nature that would provide for all the sciences, including morals and politics, a unique and defensible foundation" (r). 8. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 50. 9· Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 3·1.508. Subsequent quotations from A Treatise of Human Nature will be cited parenthetically in the text by book, section, and page number. ro. Box, The Suasive Art of David Hume, ix. rr. Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, rr. 12. Hume, The History of England, 5:380. Subsequent quotations from The History of England will be cited parenthetically in the text. 13. See Derrida, '"This Strange Institution Called Literature,"' 36. 14· Knud Haakonssen makes a similar point in different terms in "The Structure of Hume's Political Theory," pointing out that Hume considered the Aristotelian idea of "essences ... inherent structures found in nature itself ... as the philosophical equivalent of the religious hocus-pocus of superstition" (r84). 15. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 49· Subsequent quotations from An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals will be cited parenthetically in the text. r6. Shelley, "Hume's Double Standard of Taste," 441. 17. According to Adrian Johns a "perusal" was a preliminary, weeklong "assessment of the work carried out on behalf of the Society by, generally, two of its fellows" (Johns, "Reading and Experiment in the Early Royal Society," 252). r8. Quoted in Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium, 176.

Chapter Six r. Johns, The Nature of the Book, 19. 2. Johnson, The Adventurer, 425. 3· Johnson, preface, B2v. Subsequent quotations from the preface will be cited parenthetically in the text. 4· Greene, Samuel johnson, 309, 325. 5· Lipking, "Samuel Johnson and the Canon," r6o. 6. See, e.g., Kernan, Samuel johnson and the Impact of Print; DeMaria, Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning; and DeMaria, Samuel johnson and the Life of Reading. 7· DeMaria, Samuel johnson and the Life of Reading, xii. 8. Ibid., 4· 9· Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, r:4Qr. Subsequent quotations from A Dictionary of the English Language will be cited parenthetically in the text.

214

Notes to Pages I57-83

Io. Johnson, The Rambler, 3:20. Subsequent quotations from The Rambler will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume in The Works of Samuel johnson and page number. II. DeMaria, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading, 235· I2. Boswell, The Life of Samuel johnson, L.L.D., r:7r. Subsequent quotations from The Life of Samuel Johnson will be cited parenthetically in the text. I3. Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print, I Sr. 14· Kernan, The Death of Literature, 5-6. I5. Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print, I07. I6. Spectator no. 230, Friday, Nov. 23, r7rr, 2:I84. I7. See Milton, Areopagitica, 507. IS. Johnson, The Adventurer, 491. Subsequent quotations from The Adventurer will be cited parenthetically in the text. I9. Johnson, The Idler, I37· Subsequent quotations from The Idler will be cited parenthetically in the text. 20. Reddick, The Making of Johnson's Dictionary, 2. 2r. Ibid., r. 22. Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print, I84-85. 23. DeMaria, The Language of Learning, I70. 24. Reddick, The Making of Johnson's Dictionary, 8. 25. Ibid., I5. 26. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 42. 27. Ibid., II3. 28. DeMaria, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading, ro. 29. Ibid. 30. By claiming that languages and governments "have a natural tendency to degeneration," Johnson indicates a new development in the sense of the natural, at least for the reading debate. Here decay has become natural, whereas for other, earlier figures, such as Newton and Pope, the natural was equated with stability, and it was the encroachments of the unnatural that were thought to lead to decline. Similarly, Hobbes is concerned about words being used in ways other than those for which he believes they were ordained. This shift indicates Johnson's relative acceptance of change and points toward what would become a more "Romantic" sense of nature as involving the passage of time. 31. Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets, I:II3. Subsequent quotations from The Lives of the English Poets will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. 32. See Parrinder, Authors and Authority, 37· 33· Reddick, The Making of Johnson's Dictionary, II. 34. Clark, Samuel]ohnson, 2 33.

Conclusion r. Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, 9· 2. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, So. 3· Berlin, Against the Current.

Notes to Pages r83-97

215

4· On the eighteenth-century development of the English literary canon see Kramnick, Making the English Canon; and Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon. S· See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, I85-2ro. 6. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 46. 7· On the "Romantic" history of literary criticism see Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse; and Patey, "The Institution of Criticism in the Eighteenth Century," esp. 8. 8. Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," 292. 9· de Man, "The Resistance to Theory," I4. IO. See Lynn, Samuel johnson After Deconstruction. II. See Cascardi, Consequences of Enlightenment. I2. Sunstein, Designing Democracy, IO. I3. Habermas, "Modernity," 47· Subsequent quotations from "Modernity: An Unfinished Project" will be cited parenthetically in the text. 14· Spence, An Essay on Pope's Odyssey, A4r. IS. Anonymous, The Present State of the Republick of Letters, i. Subsequent quotations from The Present State of the Republick of Letters will be cited parenthetically in the text. I6. See Derrida, '"This Strange Institution Called Literature,"' 36. I7. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 6o-6r. I8. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 271. I9. Lanham, The Electronic Word, 8. 20. Burbules, "Rhetorics of the Web," I03. 21. Constanzo, "Reading, Writing, and Thinking in an Age of Electronic Literacy," I2. 22. See, e.g., Stallybrass, "Books and Scrolls." 23. Bolter, "Literature in the Electronic Writing Space," 24. 24. Johnson-Eilola, "Reading and Writing in Hypertext," I97· 25. Constanzo, "Reading, Writing, and Thinking in an Age of Electronic Literacy," I2. 26. Derrida, Rogues, 26.

Bibliography

Primary Sources Addison, Joseph. A Dissertation Upon the Most Celebrated Roman Poets Made English from the Latin Original by Christopher Hayes, Esq. London, 1718. Addison, Joseph, and Richard Steele. The Spectator. 5 vols. Edited by Donald F. Bond. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Aiken, Joseph. The English Grammar, or, the English tongue reduced to grammatical rules containing the four parts of grammar, viz. orthography, etymology, syntax, prosody or poetry: being the easiest, quickest, and most authentick method of teaching it by rules and pictures. London, 1693. Anonymous. Bellum Grammaticale: Or, the Gramatical Batte/ Royal. In Reflections on the Three English Grammars, Publish'd in about a Year Last Past. 1712. Repr. Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1969. - - - . Glossographia Anglicana Nova. London, 1707. - - - . The Needful Attempt to Make Language and Divinity Plain and Easy. 1711. Repr. Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1969. - - - . The Present State of the Republick of Letters. Vol. r. January, 1728. Atkyns, Richard. "To the King's Most Excellent Majesty." In The Original and Growth of Printing: Collected out of History, and the Records of this Kingdome. Wherein is also demonstrated, That Printing appertaineth to the Prerogative Royal; and is a Flower of the Crown of England. London, 1664. Bailey, Nathaniel. An Universal Etymological English Dictionary. London, 1721.

Bauthumley, Jacob. "The Light and Dark Sides of God." 1650. In Smith, A Collection of Ranter Writings from the Seventeenth Century, 227-64. Bentley, Richard. Dr. Bentley's Emendations on the Twelve Books of Milton's "Paradise Lost." London, 1732. Blackwall, Anthony. An Introduction to the Classics: with an Essay, on the Nature and Use of those Emphatical and Beautiful Figures which Give Strength and Ornament to Writing. 1719. Repr. New York: Garland, 1971. Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. Edited by George Birkbeck Hill. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934.

218

Bibliography

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. !757· Repr. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968. Butler, Samuel. Hudibras. Edited by John Wilders. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Calvin, John. "Three Forms of Exposition: Short Treatise on the Holy Supper of Our Lord Jesus Christ." In John Calvin: Selections from His Writings, edited by John Dillenberger, 507-73. Ann Arbor, MI: American Academy of Religion, 1975. [Charles I]. Eikon Basi/ike: The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings. Edited by Philip A. Knachel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969. Clare, William. A Compleat System of Grammar English and Latin . ... London, r69o. Cocks, Roger. An Answer to a Book Set Forth by Sir Edmund Peyton, Knight and Baronet Carrying this Title A Discourse Concerning the Fitnesse of Posture, necessary to be used, in taking the Bread and Wine of the Sacrament. London, 1642. Early English Books, r64I-I700. Wing Thomason Tracts. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilm Reel 251. E 141. Coles, Elisha. The Compleat English School-Master. London, r674. ---.The Newest, Plainest, and Best Short-Hand .... London, 1674. Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Soliloquy, or, Advice to an Author. London, 1705. Cooper, Christopher. The English Teacher, or the Discovery of the art of teaching and learning the English Tongue. London, r687. - - - . Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae. London, r685. Coppe, Abiezer. "Some Sweet Sips, of some Spirituall Wine." r649. In Smith, A Collection of Ranter Writings from the Seventeenth Century, 42-72. Defoe, Benjamin. Compleat English Dictionary. Containing the True Meaning of all the Words in the English Language: ... Deigned for the Use of Gentlemen, Ladies, Foreigners, Artificers, Tradesmen; and all who desire to Speak or Write English in its present Purity and Perfection. London, 1735. Delgarno, George. Ars Signorum vulgo Character Universallis et Lingua Philosophica. London, r66r. Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. r85o. Repr. New York: Penguin, 1996. Dryden, John. "A Defence of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy." In "Dramatic Poesy" and Other Essays, r:6o-76. New York: Dutton, 1950. - - - . "An Essay of Dramatick Poesie." In The Works of John Dryden. Vol. 17, Prose, r668-r69I: "An Essay of Dramatick Poesie" and Shorter Works. Edited by Samuel H. Monk and A. E. Wallace Maurer, 3-8r.Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. - - - . "Astraea Redux. A Poem on the Restoration of Charles the Second." In The Works of John Dryden. Vol. r, Poems, r649-r68o. Edited by Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg Jr., 22-31. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956. - - - . "The Authors Apology for Heroique Poetry; and Poetique Licence." In

Bibliography

219

The Works of John Dryden. Vol. 12, Plays: "Amboyna," "The State of Innocence," "Aureng-Zebe." Edited by Vinton A. Dearing, 86-97. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. - - - . "A Parallel, of Poetry and Painting." In The Works ofJohn Dryden. Vol. ro, Plays: "The Tempest," "Tyrannick Love," "An Evening's Love." Edited by Maximillian E. Novak and George R. Guffey, 38-77. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. - - - . Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern; Translated into Verse, from Homer, Ovid, Boccace, and Chaucer: with Original Poems. In The Works of john Dryden. Vol. 7, Poems, I697-qoo. Edited by Vinton A. Dearing, 24-47. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. - - - . Preface to Religio Laici, or A Laymans Faith. A Poem. In The Works of John Dryden. Vol. 2, Poems, I68I-I684. Edited by H. T. Swedenberg Jr., 98-109. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. - - - . Preface to "To the Right Honourable Roger Earl of Orrery." In The Works of John Dryden. Vol. 8, Plays: "The Wild Gallant," "The Rival Ladies," "The Indian Queen." Edited by John H. Smith, Dougald MacMillan, and Vinton A. Dearing, 95-102. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. - - - . Religio Laici, or A Laymans Faith. A Poem. In The Works of john Dryden. Vol. 2, Poems, I68I-I684. Edited by H. T. Swedenberg Jr., 109-22. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. - - - . "To His Sacred Majesty, a Panegyrick on His Coronation." In The Works of John Dryden. Vol. r, Poems, I649-168o. Edited by Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg Jr., 33-36. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956. - - . "To the Reader." Absalom and Achitophel. In The Works of John Dryden. Vol. 2, Poems, I68I-I684. Edited by H. T. Swedenberg Jr., 3-36. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. - - - . "To the Right Honourable, My Lord Radcliffe." In Examen Poeticum: Being the Third Part of Miscellany Poems, Containing [a] Variety of New Translations of the Ancient Poets. Together with many Original Copies, by the Eminent Hands, A2r-B6v. London, 1693. Dyche, John. A Guide to the English. London, 1707. Dyche, Thomas, and William Pardon. A New General English Dictionary. 1740. Repr. New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1972. Ellis, Tobias. The English School. London, r68o. Felton, Henry. A Dissertation on Reading the Classics, and Forming a Just Style. 1715. Repr. New York: Garland, 1972. Gibbon, Edward. "Critical Observations on the Design of the Sixth Book of The Aeneid." In The English Essays of Edward Gibbon, edited by Patricia Craddock, 133-62. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Gildon, Charles. The Laws of Poetry, as Laid down by the Duke of Buckinghamshire in his Essay on Poetry, by the Earl of Roscommon in his Essay on Translated Verse, and by the Lord Lansdowne on Unnatural Flights in Poetry, Explain'd and Illustrated. London, 1721.

220

Bibliography

Greenwood, James. An Essay Towards a Practical English Grammar. ... London, I?II. Microfilm: Eighteenth-Century Sources for the Study of English Literature, Roll II?. Hobbes, Thomas. Behemoth, or the Long Parliament. Edited by Ferdinand Tonnies. 2nd ed. Introduction by M. M. Goldsmith. London: Frank Cass, I969. - - - . A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique. In The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy, edited by John T. Harwood, I-!28. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, I986. - - - . The Elements of Law Natural and Politic: Part I, Human Nature, Part II, De Corpore Politico {I65o); with Three Lives. Edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. New York: Oxford University Press, I994· ---.Leviathan. I65I. Edited by Richard Tuck. New York: Cambridge University Press, I99L Hooke, Robert. Micrographia, or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries thereupon. I665. Repr. New York: Dover, I96I. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited by J. B. Schneewind. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, I983. - - - . Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, I987. - - - . The History of England. 6 vols. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, I983. - - - . A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by Ernest Campbell Mossner. New York: Penguin, I984. Jacob, Giles, ed. The Poetical Register: or the Lives and Characters of all the English Poets. With an Account of their Writing. Adorned with curious Sculptures Engraven by the Best Masters. 2 vols. London, I723. Johnson, Samuel. The Adventurer. In The Works of Samuel johnson. Vol. 2. Edited by John M. Bullitt, W. J. Bate, and L. F. Powell. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, I963. - - - . A Dictionary of the English Language, in which words are deduced from their originals and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers, to which are Prefixed A History of the Language, and An English Grammar. 2 vols. 1755· Microfilm. New Haven, CT: Research Publications. Reel 677. 9075-3- - . The Idler. In The Works of Samuel johnson. Vol. 2. Edited by John M. Bullitt, W. J. Bate, and L. F. Powell. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, I963. - - - . The Lives of the English Poets. Edited by George Birkbeck Hill. 3 vols. I905. Repr. New York: Octagon Books, I967. - - - . Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language, in which words are deduced from their originals and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers, to which are Prefixed A History of the Language, and An English Grammar. Vol. I, Arr-C2v. I755· Microfilm. New Haven, CT: Research Publications. Reel677. 9075-3-

Bibliography

22!

- - . The Rambler. In The Works of Samuel Johnson. Vols. 3-5. Edited by W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969. L'Estrange, Roger. Considerations and Proposals in order to the Regulation of the Press: Together with Diverse Instances of Treasonous, and Seditious Pamphlets, Proving the Necessity Thereof. London, 1668. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. - - - . Locke on Money. Edited by Patrick Hyde Kelly. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. - - - . Second Treatise of Government. In Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. - - - . The Reasonableness of Christianity. Edited by I. T. Ramsey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958. Lodwick, Francis. The Ground-Work, or Foundation Laid, (or so intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language: And an Universal/ or Commonwriting. And presented to the consideration of the Learned, by a Well-willer to Learning. 1652. In The Works of Francis Lodwick: A Study of his Writing in the Intellectual Context of the Seventeenth Century, edited by Vivian Salmon, 203-22. London: Longman, 1972. Luther, Martin. "The Pagan Servitude of the Church, 1520." In Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, edited by John Dillenberger, 249-359. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 196r. Milton, John. Areopagitica. In Complete Prose Works. Edited by Don M. Wolfe. Vol. 2, edited by Ernest Sirluck, 486-570. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959. - - - . Eikonoklastes. In Complete Prose Works. Edited by Don M. Wolfe. Vol. 3, edited by Merritt Hughes, 337-6or. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962. - - - . The Ready and Easy Way to establish a free Commonwealth. In Complete Prose Works. Edited by Don M. Wolfe. Rev. ed., Vol. 7, edited by Robert W. Ayers, 396-463. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980. - - - . Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. In Complete Prose Works. Edited by Don M. Wolfe. Vol. 3, edited by Merritt Hughes, 184-258. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962. Montaigne, Michel de. "On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children." In The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, translated by Donald M. Frame, 278-96. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957. Musgrave, The Earl of. "On Mr. Hobs." In Examen Poeticum: Being the Third Part of Miscellany Poems, Containing [a] Variety of New Translations of the Ancient Poets. Together with many Original Copies, by the Eminent Hands, 99-103.London, 1693. Perkins, William. The Art of Prophesying. In The Work of William Perkins. Edited by Ian Breward, 331-49. Appleford, Abingdon, Berkshire, England: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970.

222

Bibliography

Phillips, Edward. The New World of English Words: Or, a General Dictionary . ... A Work very necessary for Strangers, as well as our own Countrymen, for all persons that would rightly understand what they discourse, Write, or Read. London, 1658. - - - . The New World of Words: Or, A Universal English Dictionary. 5th ed. London, 1696. - - - . The New World of Words: Or, A Universal English Dictionary. 6th ed. London, 1706. Plato. Phaedrus. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. Poole, Joshua. The English Parnassus: or, A Helpe to English Poesie. Containing A Short Institution of that Art; A Collection of all Rhyming Monosyllables, The choicest Epithets, and Phrases: With some General Forms upon all Occasions, Subjects, and Theams, Alphabetically digested. London, 1657. Pope, Alexander. Eloisa to Abelard. In Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, 252-6!. ---.An Essay on Criticism. In Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, 143-68. ---.An Essay on Man. In Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, 501-47. - - - . The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations. Edited by John Butt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963. Price, William. A Sermon Preached at St. Marie's Epistle, on Wednesday in Easter Weeke April 13th 1642. Before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor, the Alderman, and Sheriff of the famous City of London. London, 1642. Early English Books, r64I-I700. Wing Thomason Tracts. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilm Reel 251. E q6. Skelton, Philip. The Candid Reader, or, A Modest, Yet Unanswerable Apology for All Books that ever were, or possibly can be wrote. Dublin, !744· Spence, Joseph. An Essay on Pope's Odyssey: In Which Some Particular Beauties and Blemishes of that Work are consider'd. 1726. Repr. New York: Garland, 1972. Sprat, Thomas. History of the Royal Society. Edited by Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones. St. Louis, MO: Washington University Press, 1958. Steele, Richard. The Tatler. Edited by Donald F. Bond. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Swift, Jonathan. An Argument to Prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England, May as Things Now Stand, be attended with some Inconveniences, and Perhaps not produce those many good effects proposed thereby. London, 1708. Tate, N[ahum]. "To My Ingenious Friend the Author upon this Judicious and Useful Performance." In Dyche, A Guide to the English. London, 1707. Temple, William. "Of Poetry." In Five Miscellaneous Essays, edited by Samuel Holt Monk, 173-203. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963. Theobald, Lewis. The Censor. 2nd ed. London, 1717. Toland, John. Christianity not Mysterious. 1696. Repr. New York: Garland, 1978.

Bibliography

223

Upton, John. Critical Observations on Shakespeare. London, 1746. [Dr. Wallis]. "Preface." In Greenwood, An Essay Towards a Practical English Grammar. London, I?II. Microfilm: Eighteenth-Century Sources for the Study of English Literature, Roll rr7. Walwyn, William. "The Compassionate Samaritane." 1644. In The Writings of William Walwyn. Edited by Jack R. McMichael and Barbara Taft, 99-124. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. - - - . "A New Petition of the Papists." r64r. In The Writings of William Walwyn. Edited by Jack R. McMichael and Barbara Taft, 56-6r. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. Welsted, Leonard. "A Dissertation Concerning the Perfection of the English Language, the State of Poetry, etc." 1724. In Eighteenth- Century Critical Essays, edited by Scott Elledge, 1:320-48. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961. Wilkins, John. An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language. London, r668. Winstanley, Gerrard. Truth Lifting Up Its Head Above Scandals (1648). In The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, with an Appendix of Documents Relating to the Digger Movement. Edited by George Sabine, 99-146. New York: Russell and Russell, 1965.

Secondary Sources Achinstein, Sharon. Milton and the Revolutionary Reader. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, r8oo-r9oo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Andersen, Jennifer, and Elizabeth Sauer, eds. Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

- - - . "Current Trends in the History of Reading." In Andersen and Sauer, Books and Readers in Early Modern England, r-21. Armitage, David, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner, eds. Milton and Republicanism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Beiser, Frederick. The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Bentley, Jerry. "Erasmus, Jean LeClerc, and the Principle of the Harder Reading." Renaissance Quarterly 31, no. 3 (autumn 1978): 309-21. Berlin, Isaiah. Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. New York: Viking Press, 1980. Black, Jeremy. The English Press, r6zr-r86r. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2oor. Black, Scott. "Social and Literary Form in the Spectator." Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. r (1999): 21-42.

224

Bibliography

Bolter, Jay. "Literature in the Electronic Writing Space." In Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers, edited by Myron Tuman, 19-42. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. - - - . The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. - - - . The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Translated by Susan Emmanuel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Bove, Paul. In the Wake of Theory. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992. Box, M.A. The Suasive Art of David Hume. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Burbules, Nicholas C. "Rhetorics of the Web: Hyperreading and Critical Literacy." In Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era, edited by Ilana Snyder, 102-22. London: Routledge, 1998. Cascardi, Anthony. Consequences of Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999· Castle, Terry. "Women and Literary Criticism." In Nisbet and Rawson, The Eighteenth Century, 434-55. Cavallo, Gugliemo, and Roger Chartier, eds. A History of Reading in the West. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Chartier, Roger. Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995·

- - - . The Order of Books. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Chomsky, Noam. "On Cognitive Capacity." In On Language, 3-35. 1975. Repr. New York: Free Press, 1990. Christensen, Jerome. Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Clark, J. C. D. English Society, r66o-I8Jz. Rev. ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. - - - . Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion, and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Constanzo, William. "Reading, Writing, and Thinking in an Age of Electronic Literacy." In Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology, edited by Cynthia L. Selfe and Susan Hilligoss, n-21. New York: Modern Language Association, 1994. Copley, Stephen. "Commerce, Conversation, and Politeness in the Early Eighteenth-Century Periodical." In British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 18 (spring 1995): 63-77. Corns, Thomas N. "Milton and the Characteristics of a Free Commonwealth." In Armitage, Himy, and Skinner, Milton and Republicanism, 25-42.

Bibliography

225

- - - . Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, r64o-r66o. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Cunningham, Valerie. Reading After Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York: Vintage, 1985. de Bolla, Peter. The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject. New York: Blackwell, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature. Translated by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. de Man, Paul. "The Resistance to Theory." In The Resistance to Theory, 3-20. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. DeMaria, Robert, Jr. Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. - - - . Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. d'Entreves, Maurizio Passerin, and Seyla Benhabib, eds. Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Corrected Edition. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. - - - . On the Name. Edited by Thomas Dutoit. Translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr., and Ian McLeod. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995·

- - - . "Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism." In Deconstruction and Pragmatism: Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Richard Rorty, edited by Chantal Mouffe, 77-88. New York: Routledge, 1996. - - - . Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. - - - . "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." In Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, 278-93. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. - - - . "'This Strange Institution Called Literature': An Interview with Jacques Derrida." In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 33-75. New York: Routledge, 1992. Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter, and Margaret C. Jacob. Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995· Dobranski, Stephen B. Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Docherty, Thomas. After Theory. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1996.

- - - . Criticism and Modernity: Aesthetics, Literature, and Nations in Europe and Its Academies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Dykstal, Timothy. "The Politics of Taste in The Spectator," Eighteenth Century 35, no. r (1994): 46-63.

226

Bibliography

Dzelzainis, Martin. "Milton's Classical Republicanism." In Armitage, Himy, and Skinner, Milton and Republicanism, 3-24. Eagleton, Terry. The Function of Criticism: From "The Spectator" to PostStructuralism. London: Verso, I984. Eliot, T. S. "Milton II." In On Poetry and Poets, q6-6I. London: Faber and Faber, I969. Elster, Jon. "The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory." In Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit, 128-42. New York: Blackwell, I997· Emerson, 0. F. "John Dryden and a British Academy." Proceedings of the British Academy IO (I92I): 45-58. Engell, James. The Committed Word: Literature and Public Values. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, I999· - - - . Forming the Critical Mind: Dryden to Coleridge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, I989. Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, I4JO-r8oo. Translated by David Gerard. Edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton. London: NLB, I976. Fish, Stanley. "Driving from the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Milton's Areopagitica." In Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, edited by Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson, 234-54. New York: Methuen, I988. ---.How Milton Works. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 200I. - - - . Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, I98o. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage, I973· Gay, Peter. The Rise of Modern Paganism. Vol. I of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. New York: Norton, I966. Genette, Gerard. Fiction and Diction. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, I993· Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, I993· Giroux, Henry A. "Literacy, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Difference." College Literature I9, no. I (Feb. I992): I-II. Greene, Donald, ed. Samuel Johnson. New York: Oxford University Press, I984.

- - - . "Samuel Johnson and the Great War for Empire." In English Writers of the Eighteenth Century, edited by John Middendorf, 37-65. New York: Columbia University Press, I97I. Griffin, Dustin. "The Beginnings of Modern Authorship: Milton and Dryden." Milton Quarterly 24, no. I (March I99o): I-6. Haakonssen, Knud. "The Structure of Hume's Political Theory." In The Cambridge Companion to Hume, edited by David Fate Norton, I82-22I. New York: Cambridge University Press, I993· Habermas, Jiirgen. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse

Bibliography

227

Theory of Law and Democracy. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, I996. - - . The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Edited by Ciarin Cronin and Pablo de Greiff. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, I998. - - - . "Modernity: An Unfinished Project." In Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, edited by Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves and Seyla Benhabib, 37-55. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, I997· - - - . The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, I987. - - - . "Popular Sovereignty as Procedure." Translated by William Rehg. In Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, edited by James Bohman and William Rehg, 35-65. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, I997· - - - . "The Public Sphere." In Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by Robert Goodin and Philip Pettit, I05-8. Malden, MA: Blackwell, I997· - - - . The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, I989. - - - . The Theory of Communicative Action. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. 2 vols. Boston: Beacon, I984, I987. Halasz, Alexandra. The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press, I997· Haley, David B. Dryden and the Problem of Freedom: The Republican Aftermath, I649-r68o. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, I997· Hamacher, Werner. Pleroma-Reading in Hegel. Translated by Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, I998. Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, r6o3-I7I4. Edinburgh: T. Nelson, I96I. - - - , ed. The English Revolution, r64o: Three Essays. London: Lawrence and Wishart, I949· - - - . Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. London: Seeker and Warburg, I958. - - - . The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. New York: Viking, I972. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. The Institution of Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, I982. Hoppit, Julian. A Land of Liberty? England, r689-I727. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Inwood, Stephen. The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Strange and Inventive Life of Robert Hooke, I635-I703. New York: MacMillan, 2003. Jacob, Margaret. The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution. New York: Knopf, I988. Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I998.

Bibliography - - - . "Reading and Experiment in the Early Royal Society." In Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England, edited by Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker, 244-71. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Johnson, Barbara. The Wake of Deconstruction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994·

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. "Reading and Writing in Hypertext: Vertigo and Euphoria." In Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology, edited by Cynthia L. Selfe and Susan Hilligoss, 195-219. New York: Modern Language Association, 1994. Justice, George. The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002. Kastan, David Scott. Shakespeare After Theory. New York: Routledge, 1999. Kernan, Alvin. The Death of Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.

---.Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Kirby, Kenneth R. "Milton's Biblical Hermeneutics in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce." Milton Quarterly 18, no. 4 (Dec. 1984): n6-25. Knott, John R., Jr. '"Suffering for Truths Sake': Milton and Martyrdom." In Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose, edited by David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner, 153-70. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Kramnick, Jonathan Brody. Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, I700-I770. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kroll, Richard. "Instituting Empiricism: Hobbes's Leviathan and Dryden's Marriage ala Mode." In Cultural Readings of Restoration and EighteenthCentury English Theater, edited by J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne, 39-66. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995· Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. New York: Verso, 1985. Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Lefort, Claude. Democracy and Political Theory. Translated by David Macey. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Levine, Joseph. The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Lipking, Lawrence. "Samuel Johnson and the Canon." In Interpretation and Cultural History, edited by Joan H. Pittock and Andrew Ear, 153-74. New York: St. Martin's, 1991. Livingston, Donald W. Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume's Pathology of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Loewenstein, Joseph. The Author's Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Bibliography

229

Luxon, Thomas. Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Lynn, Steven. Samuel johnson After Deconstruction: Rhetoric and "The Rambler." Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. Mackie, Erin. Market a Ia Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in "The Tatter" and "The Spectator." Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997·

Markley, Robert. Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660-1740. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. McCrea, Brian. Addison and Steele Are Dead: The English Department, Its Canon, and the Professionalization of Literary Criticism. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990. McDonald, Peter F., and Michael F. Suarez, S.J., eds. Making Meaning: "Printers of the Mind" and Other Essays. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. McGann, Jerome. "How to Read a Book." In The Textual Condition, 101-28. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. - - - . Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave, 2001. McKenzie, D. F. "The London Book Trade in 1644." In McDonald and Suarez, Making Meaning, 126-43. ---."The London Book Trade in 1688." In McDonald and Suarez, Making Meaning, 109-25. - - - . "Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve." In McDonald and Suarez, Making Meaning, 198-236. McKeon, Michael. Politics and Poetry in Restoration England: The Case of Dryden's "Annus Mirabilis." Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

McQuillen, Martin, Graeme MacDonald, Robin Purves, and Stephen Thomson, eds. Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1999. Miller, J. Hillis. "The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base." PMLA 102, no. 3 (May 1987): 281-91. Miner, Earl. "Introduction: Borrowed Plumage, Varied Umbrage." In Literary Transmission and Authority: Dryden and Other Writers, edited by Jennifer Brady and Earl Miner, 1-26. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Mitchell, Linda C. Grammar Wars: Language as Cultural Battlefield in 17thand r8th-Century England. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001. Morrill, John. "The Causes and Course of the British Civil Wars." In The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, edited by N. H. Keeble, 13-31. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Morrissey, Lee. From the Temple to the Castle: An Architectural History of English Literature, r660-I760. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999·

Mossner, Ernest Campbell. Introduction to A Treatise of Human Nature, by David Hume, 41-45. New York: Penguin, 1984.

230

Bibliography

Mouffe, Chantal. "Deconstruction, Pragmatism, and the Politics of Democracy." In Deconstruction and Pragmatism: Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Richard Rorty, edited by Chantal Mouffe, r-12. New York: Routledge, 1996. - - - . "Democracy, Power, and the 'Political.'" In Democracy and Difference, edited by Seyla Benhabib, 245-56. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

- - - . The Democratic Paradox. New York: Verso, 2000. Mulcaire, Terry. "Public Credit; or, The Feminization of Virtue in the Marketplace." PMLA II4 (Oct. 1999): 1029-42. Nicholson, Marjorie Hope. Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's "Opticks" and the Eighteenth-Century Poets. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946.

Nisbet, H. B., and Claude Rawson, eds. The Eighteenth Century. Vol. 4 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, r627-r66o. New York: Cambridge University Press, I999· Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction and the "Unfinished Project of Modernity." New York: Routledge, 2001. Norton, David Fate. "An Introduction to Hume's Thought." In The Cambridge Companion to Hume, edited by David Fate Norton, 1-32. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. - - - , ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hume. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Nussbaum, Martha C. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon, 1995· Orgel, Stephen. "Afterword: Records of Culture." In Andersen and Sauer, Books and Readers in Early Modern England, 282-89. Parker, Blanford. The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Parrinder, Patrick. Authors and Authority: English and American Criticism, I750-I990. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Patey, Douglas Lane. "The Institution of Criticism in the Eighteenth Century." In Nisbet and Rawson, The Eighteenth Century, 3-31. Patterson, Annabel. Reading Between the Lines. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. Pocock,]. G. A. "Historical Introduction." In The Political Works of James Harrington, edited by]. G. A. Pocock, 1-152. New York: Cambridge University Press, I977· - - - . The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought. Princeton, N]: Princeton University Press, 1975. - - - . "Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment." In Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, edited by Perez Zagorin, 91-rrr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Pocock,]. G. A., and Gordon]. Schochet. "Interregnum and Restoration." In

Bibliography The Varieties of British Political Thought, rsoo-r8oo, edited by]. G. A. Pocock, Gordon Schochet, and Lois G. Schwoerer, q6-79. New York: Cambridge University Press, I993· Pocock,]. G. A., Gordon]. Schochet, and Lois G. Schwoerer. "Editorial Introduction." In The Varieties of British Political Thought, rsoo-r8oo, edited by ]. G. A. Pocock, Gordon Schochet, and Lois G. Schwoerer, I-II. New York: Cambridge University Press, I993· Poovey, Mary. "Aesthetics and Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century: The Place of Gender in the Social Constitution of Knowledge." In Aesthetics and Ideology, edited by George Levine, 79-I05. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, I994· Potter, Lois. Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, r64r-r66o. New York: Cambridge University Press, I989. Price, Richard. History of British Society, r68o-r88o: Dynamism, Containment, and Change. New York: Cambridge University Press, I999· Ranciere, Jacques. On the Poetics of Knowledge. Translated by Hassan Melehy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, I994· Raven, James, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadnor. "Introduction: The Practice and Representation of Reading in England." In The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, edited by James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadnor, I-2I. New York: Cambridge University Press, I996. Raymond, Joad. Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Reddick, Allen. The Making of Johnson's Dictionary, 1746-r773· New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Rogers, Pat. "Theories of Style." In Nisbet and Rawson, The Eighteenth Century, 365-80. Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, UK: Belknap Press, I995· Ross, Trevor. The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century. Montreal: MeGill-Queen's University Press, I998. Saints bury, George. A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe: From the Earliest Texts to the Present Day. 3 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead, I904. Sauer, Elizabeth. "Paper-Contestations" and Textual Communities in England, r64o-r675· Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, I999· Scholes, Robert. Protocols of Reading. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, I989. Sharpe, Kevin. '"An Image Doting Rabble': The Failure of Republican Culture in Seventeenth-Century England." In Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution, edited by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, 25-56. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

232

Bibliography

- - - . Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Sharpe, Kevin, and Steven N. Zwicker, eds. Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Shelley, James. "Hume's Double Standard of Taste." journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, no. 4 (fall 1994): 437-45. Sherman, Stuart. Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, r66o-I785. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Shevelow, Kathryn. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. New York: Routledge, 1989. Siskin, Clifford. The Historicity of Romantic Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. - - - . The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, I7DOI83 o. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, I999· Skinner, Quentin. Liberty Before Liberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ---.Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Smith, Nigel, ed. A Collection of Ranter Writings from the Seventeenth Century. London: Junction Books, 1983. ---.Literature and Revolution in England, r64o-r66o. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994· - - - . Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, r64o-r66o. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Stallybrass, Peter. "Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible." In Andersen and Sauer, Books and Readers in Early Modern England, 42-79. Stewart, Susan. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Strauss, Leo. Persecution and the Art of Writing. 1952. Repr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973. Sunstein, Cass R. Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Thompson, James. Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Tuck, Richard. "The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes." In Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, edited by Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner, 120-38. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Walsh, Marcus. Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretive Scholarship. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997· Warner, Michael. Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, I990.

Waters, Lindsay, and Wlad Godzich, eds. Reading de Man Reading. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Bibliography

233

Wheale, Nigel. Writing and Society: Literacy, Print, and Politics in Britain, I590-I66o. New York: Routledge, 1999. Winn, James Anderson. john Dryden and His World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. Wolfreys, Julian. Readings. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2000. Woodmansee, Martha. The Author, Art, and the Market. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Wootton, David. "Introduction: The Republican Tradition: From Commonwealth to Common Sense." In Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, r649-r776, edited by David Wootton, 2-41. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Worden, Blair. "Marchamont Nedham and the Beginnings of English Republicanism, 1649-1656." In Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, r649-I776, edited by David Wootton, 46-8r. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Zaret, David. Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Zizek, Slavoj. "A Leftist Plea for 'Eurocentrism."' Critical Inquiry 24 (summer 1998): 988-1009. - - - . The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. New York: Verso, 1999· Zwicker, Steven. Dryden's Political Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation. Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1972. - - - . Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, I649-r689. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. - - - . Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Index

Achinstein, Sharon, 27, 29, 52, 57, 205n The Act of Oblivion (I66o), 6, 62, 66 The Act of Settlement (I70I), 23, II6 Addison, Joseph, ix, I, 2, 5, 8, I2, 22-23, 60,86-88,92, IOI, I03-I04, I06-I08, II2-II4, II7, II9, I23, I26-I30, I33, I36-I38, I44, q6, Ip, I55-I56, I59, I67, I75-I76, I79-I8I, I88, I90-I92, 2IOn Aeschylus, I20 Aesthetic, 4, I3-I5, 93, 94, I26, I89, I9o, I93-I94 Age of Criticism, The, I, I 84- See also Enlightenment, The Ancients, The, I25, q6, I83. See also Classics Antifoundational, IS, I34, I39, I45 Aristotle, I9, I 3 I Atkyns, Richard, 62 Autonomy, I4, I40, I89-I90 Avant-garde, 94 Bacon, Francis, I2, 56 Bailey, Nathaniel, II2, I32 Barthes, Roland, I86-I87, I93 Bataille, George, I89 Bauthumley, Jacob, 28-29, 32, 34, 45, 47-48, s4-ss,6o, 68,74,8I, I25, I89 Beiser, Frederick, I I 3 Bellum Grammaticale (I7I2), II8, 125 Bentley, Jerry, 2o6n Bentley, Richard, IIS, I92

Berkeley, George, I2 Berlin, Isaiah, II, I04, I83 Berry, Boyd, 3 5 Bible, 62, 65, 67, 79, Io7, II6 Black, Scott, 9 3 Blackwall, Anthony, I30 Bolter, Jay, I96 Book history, xi-xii, 7, 8, 26, I94-I96 Boswell, James, I 54, I 57-I 58, I6o, I9I Bourdieu, Pierre, 94, Io3, IIO Box, M.A., I36 Burbules, Nicholas C., I95 Burke, Edmund, IS, I33, I85 Butler, Samuel, 62, I 59, I77, I78 Calvin, 34-3 5, 37, 39-40, 42-43, 45-47, 59, 68, 8I Calvinist, 40, 42, 56-57, 65, 75, 79, 82 Canon,x, I, II, I7, I9-20,64,84-86, 88, I04, I75, I82-I8}, I9o; precedence, I},74,7~84, 8~ I07, I23, I45-I4~ I75 Castle, Terry, 9 I Cavallo, Gugliemo, 6 Cervantes, Miguel de, I 3 5 Charles I, 5, 26, 29, 48, 49, 52, 8I, I77, I92 Charles II, I, 53, 72 Chartier, Roger, 6-7, I 6 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 69, 8 5, I25 Chomsky, Noam, 203n Christensen, Jerome, I38-I39

Index Clark,J.C.D., 3, 5, I57, I75, 202n Clarkson, Laurence, 28 Classics, The, I2, I07, III, II4, I22, I24, I30, I36-I37, I78 Cocks, Roger, 26 Coffeehouse, 88, 93, 96, I06 Cognitive capacity, I3, I6, I96, 203n. See also Faculty psychology; Imagination; Impression; Judgment; Memory; Passions; Psychology; Understanding Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, I6, I85 Common reader, I65, I74-I75, I9I Constitution, xi, I2, I9, 57, 6o, 85, 88, I04, ISI-I53, IS8-I59, I73-I74, I94 Constitution of literature, the, xi, I7-I8, 23, 28, 43, 45, SI, I 56, I 58, I64, I75, I89, I9I,I94, I95, I96-I97 Contractual theory of government, 53, 55, 58, 73-76, I37· See also Covenants; Democracy Copley, Stephen, Io6 Coppe, Abiezer, 28-29, 32, 34, 45-47, 54-55, 6o, 68, 74, 8I, 125, I57, I89 Constanzo, William, I9 5-I96 Counter-Enlightenment, II, I83 Covenants, 57-60. See also Contractual theory of government Cowley, Abraham, II7, I79 Dante Alighieri, 35, 146 Darnton, Robert, 7 de Bolla, Peter, 202n, 203n Deconstruction, xi, Io, I94 Defoe, Benjamin, I32 Defoe, Daniel, II, 23 Deism, 83, II7 Deleuze, Gilles, I 3 5 de Man, Paul, xi, 9, IO, I86-I87, I93 DeMaria, Robert, Jr., x, I 56-I 57, I65, I67-I68, I72 Democracy, ix, x, xi, xii, 2, 3, 8, 9, II, IS-I6, IS, 29-30, 32-33, SI-60, 63, 6~ 68,73,75-7~78-79, 88, IO~ I38, ISO, I53, ISS-IS~ I74, I8I-I8~ I87-I88, I92, I96; massification, 2, I7, I79; mixed constitution, 29, I04-I05,

I 52; modern, 3, 6, I88, I92, I94; participatory politics, 49, 53, 74; pedagogy, I6; pluralism, xi, p, I82, I87; radical, 3,30-33,52, 53, ss-s7, 59-6o,66,68, 73, 76,78-79, I06, I38, I 50, I55, I74, I88, I92, I96; representative, 63, 99· See also Contractual theory of government; Political philosophy; Republican Derrida, Jacques, ix, I9, I4I, I86-I87, I89, I93, I97,203n Dickens, Charles, 5 Dictionaries, 6I, 7o-7I, II3, I32, I55I56, I59-I60, I67, I69, I73, I75 Digital media, xii, IO, I8I, I94-I95, I97· See also Electronic communication; Hypertext Diggers, The, 44, 48, 49 Dobranski, Stephen B., 205n Docherty, Thomas, 204n, 207n Donne, John, 25 Dryden, John, ix, xi, I, 5, I2, 20, 22, 25, 6o-66,72-8I, 84-88, I02, I07, II3, II6-II7, I23, I33, I36, I37, I38, I46, I55-I57, I59, I67, I75-I76, I78-I79, I8I, I83, I9o; Absalom and Achitophel (I68I}, 64-66, 72-74, 79, 8I, 84; "The Authors Apology for Heroique Poetry; and Poetique Licence," 76; "A Defence of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy," 64; Examen Poeticum, n6-n7; Fables (I7oo), Ss; Mac Flecknoe (I682), 64-65, 72, 77, 79, 86; The Medal/: A Satyre Against Sedition (I682), 64, 74-76, 79, 8I; Religio Laici, 22, 64-65, 78-79, 8I, I23, I 56; "To His Sacred Majesty" (I66I}, 62 Dyche, John, II5 Dzelzainis, Martin, 3 2 Eagleton, Terry, 2, 87, 97, I33 Earl of Musgrave, II7 English literary criticism, ix, I, 3-12, I4, 87, I33, I73· See also History of criticism, the Electronic communication, x, IO, I88, I95I96. See also Digital media. Hypertext

Index Eliot, T. S., 3 3 Ellis, Donald G., 19 s Elizabethan Settlement, The, 81 Elster, Jon, 9 3 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, r36 Empiricism, 12, 114, I3S, 179 Engell, James, 2, 64, SS, ro6, uo;

Forming the Critical Mind: Dryden to Coleridge, 2, SS; The Committed Word, IIO Engelsing, Rolf, 7-9, rS, IS7 English Civil Wars, ix-x, 3-s, S-9, 2s, 33, 49-s2, sS-66, 69, 7s-76, Sr, ss, rr3, II?, 127,130, 134,136-139, IS3, ISS, r62, 169, 173, 17S, rS~ rSS, 190 Enlightenment, The, xi, 9, II, 13-rs, 23, 99, II6, 133, 149, 160, 1S2-1S7, 1S9, 192-193 Excess, 95, 9S, roo, 105, III, 127, 144, 152, 193 Exclusion Crisis, The, s, 64, 72-73, 77, Sr, II5 Faculty psychology, 13, 53-54, 67, r62, 141, 142, 143, 14S, 167, rS6. See also Cognitive capacity; Imagination; Impression; Judgment; Memory; Passions; Psychology; Understanding Felton, Henry, u4, 127-12S Fish, Stanley, 40, 4 I Flusser, Vilem, 19 s Foucault, Michel, 71, rS9 Gay, Peter, I Genette, Gerard, 19 George I, 9S George III, I Gibbon, Edward, 15 Gildon, Charles, I 3 I Gilroy, Paul, 3 Giroux, Henry A., I Glorious Revolution, The, 5, 22, 9S, ros, IIS, IS3, 162 Glossographia Anglicana Nova (1707), II3 Godzich, Wlad, 203n

237

Gorgias, r6r Grammars, 70, 71 Greene, Donald, 157 Greenwood, James, uS, 12S Gresham's Law, ro3 Habermas, Jiirgen, x, r, 3-6, II-I3, I?rS, 20, 23, 27, 29, 32, S4, S7-SS, 103, IIO, 126, 133, 1S2-1S3, 1S9-190, 193-194, 197; Between Facts and Norms, 194; The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 2, I 3 3 Halasz, Alexandra, 27, 2osn Hamacher, Werner, 4S Harvey, William, 99 Hegel, G. W. F., 4S Heidegger, Martin, 1S9 Herbert, George, 77 Hermeneutics, ro, 35, 64, 7S, 113, 116 Hill, Christopher, 29 History of criticism, the, 4, 6, S, 9, ro, 133, I3S History of the book, 6, 9, ro Hobbes, Thomas, xi, 4, 13, 14, 21-22, 26,34, so-s9,62-63,6?-?2,7S,79, So-SI, SS-S9,92, IOI-102, 104,107, 109, 113, 116-119, 121, 125, 130, 132, 134, 136-141, 149-153, 155-156, 159, r6o-r6r, 163, 166-167, 172, 174, 177, IS2, 214; The Elements of Law, sr; Leviathan, 4, 13, 21-22, 34, so, 52-53, 5S, S9,79,SI, 104,119, I2I, 13~ 13~ 140, 149, 156, 161, 172, 177; "One Person," 134, 137, 139-140 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, 2, S7 Homer, Ss, 119, 123, r6o, 190 Hooke, Robert, 62, 66, 72, 79, So, S3, rso, 164, r66; Micrographia, 62, 66-68, rso, r66 Hoppit, Julian, 202n Hume, David, ix, s, 12-14, 16, 19, 6o, 64, Ss, IIS, 119, 126, 132-136, 139-143, 145-146, 149-150, 154-166, 169-171, 174, 1S1, 1S3-rS s, 21on; An Enquiry

Concerning the Principles of Morals, 144, 154; Essays, 139, 141, 143, 147,

Index I49-I5o, I 54, I74; "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion," I49; "Of the Original Contract," I5I; "Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing," I so; "Of the Standard of Taste," I45-I47, I 5o, I 54, I62, I70; The History of England, I39; A Treatise on Human Nature, I4, I34, I36, I40, I42-I44, I50-I5I Hypertext, xii, I94-I96. See also Digital media; Electronic communication Imagination, I3, 5I, 53-54, So, 92, I07IIO, II4, I20-I22, I24, I26-I27, I3S, I4I, I42-I43, I 59, I62-I65, I67, I90, I96. See also Cognitive capacity; Faculty psychology; Impression; Judgment; Memory; Passions; Psychology; Understanding Immaterial, the, IO, I77· See also Invisible; Irrational; Mysticism; Spirit Impression, 54, 92, I4I-I43· See also Cognitive capacity; Faculty psychology; Imagination; Judgment; Memory; Passions; Psychology; Understanding Interregnum, The, 53, S3. See also Protectorate, The Invisible, the, 39, 56, 63, 6S. See also Immaterial; Irrational; Mysticism; Spirit Inwood, Stephen, 67 Irrational, the, I2-I5, IS, 32, III-II2, II4, I29, I32, I34-I37, I39, I44, I46, I5~ I64, I6~ I78, I8~ I87 Jacob, Giles, I3 I Jacob, Margaret, II5 Jacobite, 5, I2I, I39, I88 James II, 72 Johns, Adrian, 7 Johnson, Samuel, ix, I, 5, 8-9, I2-I3, I8, 25, 6o-6I, 64, 66, 8s-86, II5, II9, I32-I33, I37, I4~ I5I, I54-I80, I8I, I83-I85, I87-I88, I9I-I92,2I4n; The Adventurer, ISS, I59-I6o, I62, I66; A Dictionary of the English Language, 7I, I55-I56, I59-I60, I67, I69, I73, I75; Gentleman's Magazine, I6o; The Idler,

ISS, I 59; The Idler no. 44, I63; The Lives of the English Poets, 8, 20, 2 5, 8 5, I59-I6o, I73, I75-I78, ISO, I92;The Rambler, I55, I58-I6I, I64-I65, I84; Works of Shakespeare, I 5 I Johnson-Eilola, Johndan, I96 Judgment, II4, II9, I20-I2I, I23, I45, I62-I63. See also Cognitive capacity; Faculty psychology; Imagination; Impression; Memory; Passions; Psychology; Understanding Justice, I4I, I44 Kant, Immanuel, 84, I49, I82, I89 Kernan, Alvin, I 56, I58-I59, I67 Kirby, Kenneth R., 34 Knott, John R., Jr., 207n Kramnick, Jonathan, 94, 209n Kroll, Richard, 7 5, 8 5 Laclau, Ernesto, 30, 32, so Lanham, Richard A., I94 Laqueur, Thomas, 4I Lea vis, F. R., 48 Lefort, Claude, 52 L'Estrange, Roger, 62 Levellers, the, 4 7, 4 9 Levine, Joseph, II5 Lexarch, the, 52, 57, 89 Liberty, II, I44, I52, I77 Lipking, Lawrence, I 56 Literacy, xii, I, 5, II, I3, I6. See also Reading Literary studies, ix, x, xi, xii, I, 2, 3, 6, IO, I2, IS, III, ISS, I93, I94 Literature, ix, x, xi, 3, II, I5. See also Constitution of literature Locke, I2,2I-22,27, 89,92, IOI-I03, II8, I20, I28-I29, I3~ I4~ I4~ I53, I 59, I63-I64, I69, 2IIn, 2I2n; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 89, I02, uS, I2o, I64; Second Treatise of Government, 2I-22, Ioi; "Some of the Consequences that are Like to Follow Upon Lessening of Interest to 4 Per Cent," ror

Index Loewenstein, David, 202n Logocentric, 37,39-40,43,45, 54-55,63, 67,76,78, 82,96, !07 Luther, Martin, 34-37,40, 43, 45, 47, 59, 82 Luxon, Thomas, 2o6n Mackie, Erin, 92, 94, IIO Market, 9I-93, 99-Ioo, I02-I04, II?, I27, I38 Markley, Robert, 2II Marvell, Andrew, I 3 3 May, Thomas, 3 I McCrea, Brian, I09, uo, I87 McGann, Jerome, I6-I7 McKenzie, D. F., 2o2n McLuhan, Marshall, I9 5 Memory, I3, 5I, 54, II4, I2o, I2I, I24, 138, J4I-I43, I59, I6I-I63, I65, I67, I72, I96. See also Cognitive capacity; Faculty psychology; Imagination; Impression; Judgment; Passions; Psychology; Understanding Metaphor, 9, I5, 35, 55, 69, I24. See also Tropological Method, 7I, 85, 89, u2, II4-u8, I22, I26-I29, I35, I66, I70-I7I, I75.See also Rules; Standard Mill, John Stuart, I 54 Milton, John, 25, 26, 29,32-34,40, 42,45,47-50, 55-56,6o,7o,77,8I, 8s, Io9, I2I, I25, I33, I36, I38, I55-I57, I59-I60, I74-I80, I89, I92; Areopagitica, 33, 40-43,45, 48, 8I, 84, I6o, I74, I77; Eikonoklastes (I649), 26, 48-5o; Paradise Lost, 77, I76-I77; The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 32 Mitchell, Linda, 2o8n Modernity, 3, 87-88, II2, 125-126, I36, I82-I83, I89-I90, I94 Monmouth, Duke of, 72 Montaigne, Michel de, 42 Morrill, John, 26 Morrissey, Lee, 2Ion Mouffe, Chantal, 30, 32, so Mulcaire, Terry, 98

239

Multiplicity, xi, I8, 32, I 56, I74, I8?-I88 Mysticism, I3, I5, 33, I32· See also Spirit; Immaterial; Invisible; Irrational

A New English Dictionary (I740), 132 Newton, Isaac, I5, 96, 99, II4-II5, II8II9, I22-I23, I28-I29,I35, I37-I38, I65-r66, I83, 2IIn, 214n; Optics, I66; Principia, I I4 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 13 6 Norbrook, David, 205n Norton, David Fate, 2I3n Nussbaum, Martha, 202n Ong, Walter, S.J., I9 5 Orgel, Stephen, 20 5n Parker, Blanford, 207n Parrinder, Patrick, I74 Passions, I4, 62, 92, I34, I38, I40-I44, I54, I56, r65-I67, I8I, I84-185.See also Faculty psychology Patterson, Annabel, I7 Periodical criticism, 87, I33-I34, I 59, I75, I8o Perkins, William, 3 5 Phillips, Edward, 6I, I67 Plato, I4-I5, 42, 48, 55, 64, 68, I2I-I22; Phaedrus, I5, 42, 48; The Republic, I22; Socrates, 42, 48, 64; The Symposium, I22 Pocock, J.G.A., 5, 23, 30, 32, 59 Political history, x, 4-5, I 59, I73 Political philosophy, I, 3, 4, 6, 8, I5-I6, 20-2I, 50,72, I94, I97 Poovey, Mary, 9 3 Pope, Alexander, ix, 5, I2, I 5, 23, 6o, 66, 7~ 8 5, 89 , II~ II 4 , II8-I20, I2~ I25-I26, I30-I38, I4I, I45-I47, I49, I55-I56, I59, I62, I64, I66, I69-I72, I76, I8I, I83, 2I4; Dunciad, 77; Eloisa to Abelard, I62; An Essay on Criticism (I?II), 2 3 , 8 5, 89 , II2, II 4 , II8-I20, I2~ I25, I2~ I34, I4I, I45, I49, I6~ I69; An Essay on Man, I20, I37, I66 Popish Plot, The, 73

Index Postmodern, I4, IS9, I93 Poststructuralism, xi, Io, IS6, IS7 Potentiality, 4S-49 Potter, Lois, 2 5 Price, Richard, 202n Print, ix, xi, xii, I-s, 7-S, IO-II, 64, I36, I39, I55-I56, I58-I59, I79, I94-I96 Proceduralism, 3, II5-II6 Protectorate, The, 53, 59· See also Interregnum Psychology, 5I, 53-s6, 6o, II9-I20, I35, I3S, I43, I4~ I54, I59, I6I, 179· See also Cognitive capacity; Faculty psychology Public sphere, x, 2-4, 6, S, 9, II, I4, 20, 2~ 23,2~29,3~91,93, 103-104, IIO, I2~ I33, I55, I6o, I7~ ISO, IS~ I85-IS6, I90-I9I, I97 Puns, I24, I77, 191-I92 Queen Elizabeth, So Radcliffe, Lord, I I 6 Ranciere, Jacques, so Ranters, The, 33, 47 Rational, xi, 2-4, I2-I3, IS, I?, 29, S3, II2-II3, IIS, I26-I27, I30, I34, 137, I66, ISr, IS3, I90; aesthetics, IS; choice, 3 I; consensus, 3 2; public sphere, 3 3. See also Irrational Raymond, Joad, 205n Reader-response, 2S Readers: common and learned, I6o; female reader, I06, I ro Reading, x-xii, I, 4-ri, I3, r6-rS, 2S, 30, 33-35,39-40,43-45,49, sr, 54-56, 63,6s-6S,?3-75,7S, SI-S2, S9,96, I06, IOS, II2, II4-II5, II9, I24-I26, 134, I3~ I3S, I40, I4~ 145-I51, I54-159, 161, 164-165, I69-I77, I79-ISI, I90-I97, 203n; activity of, I 90; as an amusement, I 3 6; attentively, I34, 13~ 145, 14S, I?I, I7~ 193;Canonical, I75; curious, I 57; deformative, I?; democratic, 9, 30, 51, 155-156, I8I; digital, xi, I94; diminution of,

172; disordered, I95; evaluative, I47; extensive, x, 7-S, IS, I 56, I 57, rsS, I90, I97; female, I06, rro; free, rr; gentle, 179-ISo; good, I 50; history of, xi-xii, 6, Io; inattentive, I36; informed, I4S; inspired, 74, SI-82; intensive, x, 7-S, I8, I 56, I92, 197; inventive, I?, I9I, I93; mere, 157; methodized, I25; models of, xi, 65, II5, rr9; modern, I93; mollified, SI, S2, 84; as overlook, I72-I73, I76; pacified, I75; participatory, 49, 63, 65; passive, I96; as perusal, 17, 89, IoS, 13S, 145, 14~ 14~ IS~ I59, I65, I?O-I73, I75-I76, 191, I97; practiced, I36, 144-145, I47-I5I, I 59, 162, 165; pre-, 96; promiscuous, I6I; Protestant, 34; protocols of, 9, 190, 203n; purposeful, I72; radial, I?; radical democratic, 33, 4 5, 55; radically empowered, 2S; radical, I72; randomaccess, I 57; reasonable, ISI; resistance to, x, xi, I, 4, 9; rhetorical, xi, 9, 193; studious, I 57, 172, I76, 177; subjective, 39-40,43-45,49,54-56,63, 66-6S, 7S, S I-S2, ro6, I40-I42; as surveying, 17, II4, I24-I26, I3S, I45-148, I69-I7I, 175-I76, I92; theories of, x, 5, Io, I3, I6, 35; typological, 65, 73, 75; uninspired, 75; voracious, I 54- See also Method Reason, 2-3, I2-I4, So, II6-Ir8, I29, I33, 13S-I4I, I64-I67, IS2, IS4, IS6, IS9, 192 Reddick, Allen, I67, I6S, I75 Reformation, The, 34, 65, So Republican, 29-3I, 49, 73, I05, II5, I53, I So, 192. See also Democracy, mixed constitution; Political philosophy Restoration, ix, I, 4-?, 9, II-I3, r6, 5I, 6I-63, 66, ro6, IIS-II6, I67, I77, I79, ISo, IS~ IS~ I92 Richardson, Samuel, 133 Roman Catholicism, 38, rS3 Romantics, 4, I6, I9, 121, IS5, IS6, 214n,2I5n Rose, Mark, 202n

Index Ross, Trevor, I?, 209n Royal Exchange, The, 97, 99, I02-I03, IIO, 129 Royalist, 53, 59, 73 Royal Society, 8, 62, 64, 66, 68, 72, 77, 79, 8 3 , 8 5, 88, 96, II4-II 5, I2 4 , I 37 , I46, I64, I8o Rules, II2-II9, I22-IJ8, I45-I46, I 52, I66, I69, I79, I8I, I88. See also Method; Standard Saintsbury, George, I33 Scarry, Elaine, I5-I6, I93 Schochet, Gordon, 5, 32, 59 Scholes, Robert, 203n Science, 64, I68, I??-I79 Sentimentalism, I6, 99, I44-I45, I48, I 8 5. See also Faculty psychology; Sympathy Shadwell, Thomas, 77, 84 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, 72, 77 Shakespeare, William, 25, I92 Sharpe, Kevin, 29, 49, 52, 205n Shelley, James, I 4 5 Sherman, Stuart, 209 Shevelow, Kathryn, roo Sidney, Philip, 6I Siskin, Clifford, I 9 2 Skelton, John, II Skepticism, I33, I35, I5I Skinner, Quentin, 3, 51, 6o Smith, Adam, 22 Smith, Nigel, 3, 29, 205n Sokol, Alan, I 5 South Sea Bubble, The, 23 Sovereign, 2, 54, 57-58, 69, 73 Spectator, The, 2, 8, Io, 87, 92-93, 98-II2, II9, I24, I26-I27, I3o, I6o, I8o Spence, Joseph, I90-I9I Spenser, Edmund, 8 5 Spirit, 37, 44, 46-47, 59, II3, I23. See also Immaterial; Invisible; Irrational; Mystical Sprat, Thomas, xi, 63, 66, 68, 70, 72, 78-8o, 83, 88, I02, II3-II4, II8, I24,

I28, I30, I56, I59, I64, I67-I69, I7I, I9I; History of the Royal Society (I66?), 63, 66, 68, 156, 168 Stability, 4, 7, I6, 65, I88, I9o, I95-I97· See also Political philosophy; Zizek, Slavoj Standard, I2I-I22, I25, I30-I32, I34-I36, I38, I45, I48, I 50-I 52, 154, I62, I88. See also Method; Rules Star Chamber, The, 2-3, 26, sr, 57> 177 Steele, Richard, ix, I-2, 5, 8, 6o, 86-88, 92,97, IOI-IO?, II2-1I4, II7, I33, I36-I38, I44, I 56, I59-I6o, I67, I8o-I8I, I88, I90-I92. See also Tatter, The Sterne, Laurence, I9I, I94, I97 Stewart, Susan, I 5 Strauss, Leo, I7 Study of literature, 2 3 Sublime, I6 Succession Crisis, The, 72 Swift, Jonathan, II?, I33, I9I, I94, I97, 2II Sympathy, I38, 143-I44, I49· See also Faculty psychology; Sentimentalism Tate, N[ahum], II5 Tatler, The, 8, 87, 89, 92-97, Io6-IO?, IIo, II?, I29, I8o. See also Steele, Richard Temple, Sir William, IOI Textual: clarity, 77, 82-83, I }I, I92; ease, II?-II8, I3o, I90-I91, I97; intertextual, 8 5; obscurity, 82, n6, I2I, I23, I37, I8I, I9I. See also Tropological Theobald, Lewis, II4, I29, 2I2 Theory, I2; literary, xi, IO; resistance to, xi, 9 Thomason, George, 26 Thompson, James, 93, I02 Toland, john, II3, II6-II?, 2II Toleration, 44, 49 Transubstantiation, 3 5, 3 7 Tropological, xi, 9, I5, I8, 55, 63,65-66, 68-69,72,78,83, II?-II8, I24, I30-I3I, I35, I?I, I9I-I93

Index Tuck, Richard, 207n Understanding, I3, 92, I09-IIO, I20-I2I, I24, I62-I63. See also Cognitive capacity; Faculty psychology; Judgment; Imagination; Impression; Memory; Passions; Psychology; Understanding Upton, John, II Value, IOI, I03, I29, I3I, I38 Violence, I37, I53, I6I-I63, I88 Virgil, 85, I23, I29, I6o Walpole, Robert, 23 Walsh, Marcus, 2II Walwyn, William, 44, 47, 49, I89 Warner, Michael, 203n

Waters, Lindsay, 203n Watts, Isaac, I72 Welsted, Leonard, I32 Wilkins, John, 63, 66, 7I-72, 79, 8o, 96, I02, I09, I64 Winn, James, 79 Winstanley, Gerrard, 44, 46-47, 49, I89 Wolfreys, Julian, 203n Women, 9I, I04, Io6, I 5o; as readers, I06, IIO Woodmansee, Martha, 202n Worden, Blair, 29 Wordsworth, William, I 6, I 8 5 Zaret, David, 3, 27 Zizek, Slavoj, 20-22, 3 2 Zwicker, Steven N., 205n