Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700

Angles of Contingency

Ingo Berensmeyer

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110691405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores literary culture in England between 1630 and 1700, focusing on connections between material, epistemic, and political conditions of literary writing and reading. In a number of case studies and close readings, it presents the seventeenth century as a period of change that saw a fundamental shift towards a new cultural configuration: neoclassicism. This shift affected a wide array of social practices and institutions, from poetry to politics and from epistemology to civility.

1 Historicising Literary Culture: Communication, Contingency, Contexture

Communication

In order to understand early modern literary culture, we need to reconstruct the conditions of literary communication prior to the modern concept of literature as aesthetic (fictional) discourse. How did literature work? What were the functions of reading and writing in seventeenth-century England? My suggestion is to describe literary forms in relation to, and at times in conflict with, socio-cultural formations or arrangements in which these forms are negotiated, modified, and continued. The aesthetic, then, is not an independent realm that can be taken for granted or posited as given. If we want to come closer to an idea of what literary communication might mean, we will have to question and explore more closely the (historically specific) modes of access to (literary) texts.

For a long time, this question of access was deemed unproblematic: either literature was mere appearance and had no genuine knowledge to offer, or it dealt in pseudo-statements with no truth value. As Sir Philip Sidney famously wrote in his Defence of Poesie in c. 1579: “Now, for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth” (Sidney 1973, 102). Literature as fictional discourse cannot lie, cannot not tell the truth, because telling the truth is not the point of fiction. Because literature makes no truth claims, it cannot be judged according to the “fact convention” (Schmidt 1982, 87) that dominates real-life communication. Literary language, in this view, would be a special kind of language, a purely fictional mode of utterance.

In order to go beyond these conventional models, it is necessary to conceptualise and historicise the modes of access to literary texts. It may be useful to begin doing so in terms of a theory that does not conceive of media as message-bearers or carriers of information but as complex sensory arrangements that can trigger a range of experiences. These experiential effects are very difficult to rationalise or to describe either in a clear-cut definition of media or in traditional theories of aesthetics. They are more readily analysed in a communications-oriented approach. In Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, communication is a process that consists of three elements: ‘information’, ‘utterance’, and ‘understanding’. Each of these operational units – (1) the possible intention of an origin, however inferred; (2) the verbal, material utterance, and (3) what a recipient takes the utterance to mean – can then be thematised, marked or underscored in follow-up communications. Communication, according to this theory, always happens, and its initial intent (the ‘information’) can never determine or control its possible outcome (understanding, misunderstanding, response) (Wilden 1987). Other perspectives on the theory and history of discourse, though not sharing these theoretical foundations, do share the assumption that the world they look at is “a world in which […] the utterance cannot wholly determine the response” (Pocock 1985, 34). In media-theoretical terms, one would have to say that the effects of media on their recipients or participants, as the case may be, are incalculable. They can range from absolute fascination, heightened awareness or experiences of “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to lack of interest or absolute boredom. If recipients attribute their emotional responses or aesthetic judgements to intrinsic qualities of what they have seen or heard, they may be subject to a familiar delusion.⁵

But even though there is a certain fixity about the written page so that, provided one knows the meaning of the signs, one should be able to know what a text is – “these words in this order” (Grabes 2013, 44, quoting Cameron 1962, 145) –, languages and contexts of utterance are unstable and subject to change, so that an utterance – even if it consists of the same words – need not, in fact will not stay the same when it is repeated. Texts, understood as utterances, do not remain the same over time but have a performative character. Two initial conclusions to be drawn from this, now commonplace in literary theory, are: firstly, that verbal constructs, such as literary texts, have no intrinsic univocal meaning, but, because of their linguistic nature, are ambiguous or multivalent: the sense of the words in the text has to be constructed by reference to a particular “universe of discourse” (Ogden and Richards 1927, 102) and their relation to the whole of a given text. In reading, then, we should pay attention to the “intratextual interaction of words” (Grabes 2013, 41). The second conclusion, following from this, is that any reading is not merely the reconstruction of a given verbal arrangement but a performative act, “intended to give rise to something else” (Jardine and Grafton 1990, 30). Reading, too, has a history (see, among many others, Darnton 1991, Chartier 1994).

It is the specific and different uses to which texts have (or might have) historically been put that constitutes the focal point of such criticism. For example, the habit of reading Virgil’s Aeneid as a work of fiction is only one option among many; in former times, it was widely put to a rather more practical use as a medium of prophecy (the sortes Virgilianae). The communicative function of a text thus depends on a set of decisions made before, during, or after the actual experience of reading, and these decisions themselves depend on an array of factors (political, social, personal) that determine the reader’s criteria.

Because all texts are essentially geared towards some kind of reader (even in cases when this reader is merely the author him- or herself), no ‘actualisation’ of a text’s potential meaning, no interpretative act can be conceptualised without at least a hazy understanding of the reader’s role. This role is embedded in historical and social contexts, depending on a wide range of variables from psychology to media history. In their effects on different audiences, geographically or historically, media, including texts – including those texts we have become used to calling ‘literary’ – are extremely diverse. It could be said that each act of reading is a unique and unrepeatable historical event. A famous short story by Borges illustrates this: a modern author who rewrites Cervantes’s Don Quijote, though using exactly the same words, produces a completely different novel because he is writing it at a different time (Borges 1962). The meanings and functions of texts are subject to change in different historical or cultural contexts and in varying media arrangements.⁶

Yet a text usually is a determinant of those acts that ascribe meaning to it, so that there is a danger not only of under- but also of overestimating the importance of readers for the generation of meaning. The relation of texts, their language(s), and their contexts is subject to change; this includes earlier responses to a text, which may trigger re-evaluations of individual or communal readings that modify the perception of a text. Certainly, the concept of text would be meaningless without a concept of reading; but it would be an oversimplification to claim that a text consists merely and exclusively of its readings (cf. Fish 1980). After all, reading is not situated outside the historical process but is embedded in and modified by it. The cultural practice of reading is itself subject to change, and so are the ways in which access to literary communication has been and is being codified. A reading is never merely the reconstruction of something given in the text, but an interaction between texts and readers, a process of communication that cannot be controlled completely by any of its constituents: not by the author, nor by the reader alone, nor by the text. To quote J. G. A. Pocock (1985, 17), “when action and response are performed through the medium of language, we cannot absolutely distinguish the author’s performance from the reader’s response.” What one can try to do, however, is reconstruct the unique set of conditions and assumptions involved in the actual performances of writing and reading, or of media experience, in a particular time and place.⁷

Contingency

In order to gain a better sense of literary culture in relation to media and social knowledge formations, I suggest the concepts of communication and contingency as fundamental to understanding how seventeenth-century literature ‘works’ and to account for the way it develops and changes. What do I mean by ‘contingency’ as a framing concept? In the past decades, the concept of contingency has become an increasingly central term in the humanities. From its classical roots in modal logic⁸ to its redefinitions in action theory, phenomenology, and systems theory,⁹ the concept of contingency has now advanced to the status of a key descriptive and explanatory category, if not the “defining attribute” (Luhmann 1998), for understanding modernity. Modernity, in this perspective, is characterised by an increased social awareness of contingency, by a knowledge that implies the knowledge of alternative possibilities to a given reality: the fact that ‘things might as well be different’. This awareness has a dual nature in that it can focus, on the one hand, on the observation that things as they are might just as well be otherwise (contingency as possibility), and on the other hand on the observation that whatever occurs, even if it appears random and is caused by what Shakespeare calls “the shot of accident” and the “dart of chance” (in Othello 4.1), is nonetheless real and needs to be dealt with as such (contingency as destiny). The concept of contingency, in Luhmann’s now classic formulation (1984, 152),

signifies something given (experienced, expected, thought, imagined) with regard to the observation that it may possibly be different; it signifies objects in the horizon of possible alterations. Because it presupposes the given world, it does not signify the possible in general but that which, seen from the point of view of reality, may possibly be different.

This definition can be related to descriptions of modern concepts of reality as variable and plural (Blumenberg 1979). “A new form of order that we can call modern,” writes Bernhard Waldenfels (1990, 18), “makes headway when the suspicion is aroused that the order that seemed so steadfast and all-encompassing might only be one among other possible orders.” It can also be connected, in more socio-political terms, to what has been described as the specific “constructive strategic disposition” of a modern social order, a rational form of social management that “limits contingency through the goal-oriented use of contingencies”, responding to its aspects of indeterminacy by putting its aspects of possibility to good use (Makropoulos 1998, 71; cf. Makropoulos 1997). Modern civilisation can thus be described as a culture of contingency, characterised by the productive duality of indeterminacy and possibility even to the point at which it forms the very basis on which society and social structure are seen to evolve, the point where traditional descriptions of society in terms of custom and grace give way to the political language of fortune (see Pocock 1975).

Beside its philosophical, sociological, and historical significance, the concept of contingency has communicative and epistemological implications. The indeterminacy or unpredictability of the future belongs first and foremost to the dimension of knowledge. In a sociological view, indeterminacy as the “cognitive correlate of contingency” (Hahn 1998, 518, my translation) structures social interaction and produces necessities, inevitabilities, by establishing links between contingencies in communication and thus compensating for the lack of mutual understanding between communicants. This knowledge of contingency – or, more precisely, “this teleologically determined non-knowledge” (Simmel 1968, 259, my translation) – is a motivating force in modernity not only in the formation and evolution of societies, but also in the area of culture, not least in the formation and evolution of literary writing. Early modern forms of narrative, for example, become affected by the possibility that any one story might be told in many different ways, and – perhaps even worse – might be understood, or misunderstood, in as many or even more different ways. Again, there is a dual aspect of contingency that, on the one hand, opens up possibilities for telling many stories in many different ways but, on the other hand, also imposes limiting constraints on the forms in which stories can be told. In the process, narrative is increasingly forced to develop, justify, and defend its own discursive foundations (see Greiner and Moog-Grünewald 2000; Lobsien 2000). This becomes particularly evident in the literary culture of the seventeenth century.

In early modernity, the role of the audience and their understanding is increasingly regarded as the most difficult and unpredictable instance in the communication process; hence all those “peritexts” (Genette 1997) – dedications, prefaces, title pages, frontispieces, errata lists, prologues, and epilogues – that surround the main text and often provide some form of guidance for the reader in an attempt to reduce the number of possible interpretations. There is a growing awareness in this process of the irreducible individuality (or incalculability) of readers and of the concomitant contingency of reading (Kroll 1991, 72–73, 77, 85).

This new predicament of writers in the early modern public sphere calls for new strategies in literary communication. Prefaces, epilogues,...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Revised Edition
• List of Abbreviations
• “Seeking the Noise in the Depth of Silence”: A Naval Prelude with Spectators, 1665
• 1 Historicising Literary Culture: Communication, Contingency, Contexture
• 2 Literary Cabinets of Wonder: The ‘Paper Kingdomes’ of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne
• 3 Writing, Reading, Seeing: Visuality and Contingency in the Literary Epistemology of Neoclassicism
• 4 Literature as Civil War
• 5 Private Selves and Public Lives: Neoclassical Perspectives
• The Augustan Angle: Civilised Contingency and Normative Discourse
• Bibliography
• Index