Renaissance Literature and Linguistic Creativity

James Harmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317066484
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Renaissance Literature and Linguistic Creativity interrogates notions of linguistic creativity as presented in English literary texts of the late sixteenth century. It considers the reflections of Renaissance English writers upon the problem of how linguistic meaning is created in their work. The book achieves this consideration by placing its Renaissance authors in the context of the dominant conceptualisation of the thought-language relationship in the Western tradition: namely, that of 'introspection'. In taking this route, author James Harmer undertakes to provide a comprehensive overview of the notion of 'introspection' from classical times to the Renaissance, and demonstrates how complex and even strange this notion is often seen to be by thinkers and writers. Harmer also shows how poetry and literary discourse in general stands at the centre of the conceptual consideration of what linguistic thinking is. He then argues, through a range of close readings of Renaissance texts, that writers of the Shakespearean period increase the fragility of the notion of 'introspection' in such a way as to make the prospect of any systematic theory of meaning seem extremely remote. Embracing and exploring the possibility that thinking about meaning can only occur in the context of extreme cognitive and psychological limitation, these texts emerge as proponents of a human mind which is remarkably free in its linguistic nature; an irresistible mode of life unto itself. The final argumentative stratum of the book explores the implications of this approach for understanding the relationship between literary criticism, philosophy, and other kinds of critical activity. Texts discussed at length include Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and shorter poetry, George Chapman's Ovids Banquet of Sence, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, and John Donne's Elegies.

Part I

1
A Brief History of Introspection

i

What kinds of representations of linguistic thinking might we expect to see explored by sixteenth-century poets? How did other thinkers before them describe the relationship between thought and language? These questions set us on a long historical road towards the various Renaissance texts that form the focus of this book. This is, though, a road worth travelling, since it makes plain how unclear and unformed a notion linguistic thought—and its creative potential—has been across the Western tradition. Relatedly, an historical overview of the representational history of the thought-language relationship shows that questions about the sources and nature of linguistic creativity have slowly evolved from only a few enduring images of the thought-language relationship. There are two consequences of this. First: the core images of linguistic thought that dominate the Western tradition were fulsomely apparent in the culture inhabited by Renaissance writers. Such core images for the thought-language relationship are an unignorable impetus for their poetic reflection on how they create their art. Second, what are, relatively speaking, very recent literary critical descriptions of linguistic creativity typically remain rooted in ancient intuitions about the nature of thinking that do not adequately explore the problematic implications of those central images. Renaissance poets and modern literary critics, then, are both deeply involved with the term that dominates Western thinking about thinking itself: introspection.

* * *

The term ‘introspection’ emerges in English in the later seventeenth century to denote ‘The actings of the Mind or Imagination it self, by way of reflection’.¹ However, the ideas which the term ‘introspection’ describes are much older ones, as Plato shows when he sketches us a picture of thinking in the Theaetetus:

SOCRATES: Very good. Now by ‘thinking’ do you mean the same as I do?

THEAETETUS: What do you mean by it?

SOCRATES: A talk which the soul has with itself about the objects under its consideration. Of course, I’m only telling you my idea in all ignorance, but this is the kind of picture I have of it. It seems to me that the soul when it thinks is simply carrying on a discussion in which it asks itself questions and answers them itself, affirms and denies. And when it arrives at something definite, either by a gradual process or a sudden leap, when it affirms one thing consistently and without divided counsel, we call this judgment.²

This is, as Myles Burnyeat points out, ‘very much an intellectual’s picture of thinking’.³ For Plato, thinking is ‘serious’ thought—reflective thought, linguistic thought: the kind of thing suited to poetry or philosophy. The Sophist’s dialogue continues the conversation recorded in the Theaetetus, only now Plato’s eponymous interlocutor is in conversation with an Eleatic philosopher, known as the Visitor, who echoes the picture of thinking provided the day before:

VISITOR: Aren’t thought and speech the same, except that what we call thought is speech that occurs without the voice, inside the soul in conversation with itself?

THEAETETUS: Of course.⁴

Indeed, throughout Plato’s dialogues, thinking is ‘simply’ (as he puts it in the Theaetetus) a mental conversation. But how—more precisely—does this mental conversation present itself to us? In both the Theaetetus and the Sophist, Plato tells us that in thinking we hear an inner voice. But, confusingly, Plato also states that we see with that voice, into it, and ultimately through the internal conversation present in the mind. The Visitor explains to Theaetetus that it is by way of internal vision that the true philosopher comes to see truth:

VISITOR: The sophist runs off into the darkness of that which is not, which he’s had practice dealing with, and he’s hard to see because the place is so dark. Isn’t that right?

THEAETETUS: It seems to be.

VISITOR: But the philosopher always uses reasoning to stay near the form, being. He isn’t at all easy to see because that area is so bright and the eyes of most people’s souls can’t bear to look at what’s divine.

THEAETETUS: That seems just as right as what you just said before.⁵

This combination of language and insight in thought that is successfully serious is central to Plato’s work. In the Republic, Plato more expansively uses this picture of thinking to describe the process of philosophical inquiry, combining dialectic—that is, a dialogue in the outside world that mirrors the inner dialogue or ‘talk which the soul has with itself’—with insight, a turning towards the light:

SOCRATES: What mechanism could possibly turn any agreement into knowledge when it begins with something unknown and puts together the conclusion and the steps in between from what is unknown?

GLAUCON: None.

SOCRATES: Therefore, dialectic is the only inquiry that travels this road, doing away with hypotheses and proceeding to the first principle itself, so as to be secure. And when the eye of the soul is really buried in a sort of barbaric bog, dialectic gently pulls it out and leads it upwards, using the crafts we described to help it and cooperate with it in turning the soul around. From force of habit, we’ve often called these crafts sciences or kinds of knowledge, but they need another name, clearer than opinion, darker than knowledge. We called them thought somewhere before.⁶

These two epistemological metaphors, of looking in at the soul and listening in to its conversations, are frequently and complexly intertwined in Plato. There is nevertheless a basic pattern to their co-functioning, whereby the subject looks in at the mind, and then, so positioned, can firstly listen in to its unfolding conversation, and—perhaps—start to ‘see’ by degrees what this conversation ‘means’; to render a deeper kind of looking through language that becomes—perhaps— a vision of reality itself. Critical here is the fact that both the listening in and the looking in are perceptual metaphors, modelled on the looking and listening we do in response to the outside world. When the notion of intro spection as the means of access to thought and language emerges with Plato, it is predicated upon a correspondence between how the mind perceives the outside world and how it perceives its inward language and ideas. However, the blend of literal and figurative elements that inhere in this structural isomorphism between inner and outer sense perception remains mysterious in Plato: are the two forms of sensation actually the same form of experience, or is the relationship largely analogical?

Indeed, although introspection is tout court a core epistemological mechanism for Plato, it remains a sketchy, shadowy presence in his writings; touched on here and there in passages like those we have read in the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Republic, but little examined by Plato’s interlocutors. Indeed, what the specific functions and implications of Platonic introspection are has become a notorious crux for intellectual historians. As Dominic Scott explains, Plato had mooted his development of a coherent epistemology as early as the Meno: ‘Beginning from an analysis of propositional thought into its conceptual components, it has Plato explain the formation of concepts that make language and thought possible’.⁷ However, as Scott further records, ‘[o]n all such matters … the text itself remains completely silent’.⁸ Plato remains richly but merely suggestive in the way that he discusses the mechanisms of epistemology. This surprising lack of explanatory depth is a widespread problem, attaching itself to a wide range of ontological and ethical discussion in the dialogues. The Phaedrus, for example, includes tantalizing remarks on the methodological implications of introspective thought that are so cursory or ambiguous as to leave questions raised ‘at virtually every stage’.⁹ Charles Kahn summarizes that there is nothing in the Phaedrus’ treatment of cognition that more firmly establishes the concepts sketched in book 4 of the Republic: ‘namely the method of hypothesis and the notion that the Form of the Good may be invoked to gain more than merely provisional conclusions’.¹⁰ The portion of book 7 of the Republic that I presented above also marks the climax of what is known as the simile of the divided line (7.534e–536d), which seeks to describe the dialectical progress of inward thought and outward argument from the consideration of the particular example to the general principle. This climax is less a logical one, a step-by-step argument about introspection, than a rhetorical one. We read of the soul being turned around—as it is in the nearby simile of the cave (7.514a–517c)—and being moved up. Plato’s figurations of cognitive orientation are in and of themselves the high water mark of the epistemological analysis.

This blending of conceptual analysis and rhetorical figuration is at once one of the most productive and unsettling aspects of Platonic thought. Plato has become infamous for rejecting the value of almost all poetry and almost all poets, but, as we will see later on, this is a very partial and limited view of Plato’s own relation to rhetorical or literary language. For now, I want to point out the willingness Plato shows to use figurative language as part of what he considers to be a generally reflective or philosophical practice: more specifically, conceitful language is used especially by Plato to express psychological realities; more specifically still, it is repeatedly the register through which Plato represents introspection. Accordingly, be it through the ladder of love that is described in the Symposium, or the flight of the soul in the Phaedrus (images to which we will return in more detail), the epistemology of inner eyes and inner voices central to these broader conceits is expressive of a poetic negative capability that yields a range of possibilities and problems for Plato’s rationalist psychology. Since Plato’s images of mental conversation and insight also appear to suggest that sensing thought...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliographical Note
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• Bibliography
• Index