Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560-1613

Jonathan P.A. Sell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000152371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560-1613, shows how rhetorical invention, elocution and ethos combined to create plausible representations by generating intellectual and emotional significances which, meaningful in consensual terms, were 'consensually' true. However, some traveller-writers betrayed an unease with such representation, rooted as it was in a metaphorical epistemology out of kilter with an increasingly empiricist age. This book throws new light onto the episteme shift that ushered in modernity with its distrust of metaphor in particular and rhetoric's 'wordish descriptions' in general. In response to the empirical desiderata of scientific rationalism, traveller-writers textually or physically made their own bodies available as evidence of their encounters with wonder, thus transforming themselves into wonderful objects. The irony is that, far from dispensing with rhetoric, they merely put the accent on its more dramatic arts of gesture and action. The body's evidence could still be doctored, but its illusory truths were better able to satisfy the empirical demand for 'ocular proof'. The author's main purposes here are to complement, and sometimes counter, recent work on early modern travel literature by concentrating on its use of rhetoric to communicate meaning; and to suggest how familiarity with the workings of rhetoric and its communicative and epistemological premises may enhance readings of early modern English literature generally.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Wonder, Rhetoric and Travel

‘Strange but true’ might be a modern paraphrase of the first four words inscribed in Latin on Theodor De Bry’s frontispiece to his 1590 edition of Clusius’s translation of Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report (Fig. 1). The original Latin reads ‘Admiranda narratio fida tamen’, [‘a wonderful (or marvellous) but credible (or true) narrative’]; a narrative like Othello’s, who swept Desdemona off her feet with his tall tales, his ‘travailous history’ of accidents and slavery, of caves and deserts, of cannibals and acephali. Othello’s speech to the Duke of Venice is well known and has been subjected to much academic scrutiny. What interests me is how Othello reports the effect of his story-telling on Desdemona:

My story being done,

She gave me for my pains a world of sighs;

She swore, in faith, ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange;

’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful.

...

She loved me for the dangers I had passed. (Othello 1.3.159–62, 168)

Firstly, Desdemona evidently believed what Othello told her; she took his wonder-stuffed autobiography to be true. Secondly, she was apparently moved by Othello’s tale, which incited in her pity and wonder. Presumably the literary trope - as old as Homer - according to which a traveller recounts his travails in the hope of receiving some sort of favour would have been familiar enough to Shakespeare’s audience for it to have lent Othello’s favour-currying strategy plausibility. What is more, real travellers, too, attempted to advance themselves by publishing accounts of their ‘travailous histories’. One such exercise in self-promotion is The rare and most wonderfull things which Edward Webbe, an Englishman borne, hath seene and passed in his troublesome travailes, which ran into three editions in 1590, its year of publication. In a sense, Webbe’s work is an amplificatio of the exotic commonplaces Othello reels off before the Duke of Venice: he tells us of his slavery, his jailbreaks and his combat experiences; of high mountains and deserts, of four-headed Arians, unicorns and Prester John. Webbe may not include cannibals and acephali, but another more famous traveller, Sir Walter Ralegh, does.¹ Webbe’s stated purpose in writing up his travels and dedicating his text to Elizabeth I was to find a mutually beneficial job. We do not know whether he was successful, but the almost complete absence of any trace of Webbe in the historical record suggests that, unlike Othello’s, his tales were not deemed sufficiently - in modern parlance - sexy.² The question naturally arises: why not?

The answer that would most readily occur to the modern reader is that Webbe’s tales are a string of fictions, and that, true to the stereotype, Webbe is a traveller-liar. But would a writer seeking self-promotion knowingly lie to his Queen? If so, either Webbe was a foolhardy writer or Elizabeth a foreseeably gullible audience, in contrast to whom sceptical modern readers are commendably wise. More benevolent modern readers, often of an ethnological bent, will confess to their imperfect knowledge and embark upon a quest for some real, historical signifieds to which all those apparently deceitful signifiers honestly referred. Readers of either disposition presuppose that textual representations of reality require a direct relationship of reference between signifier and signified, word and thing; faced with no such relationship, the former deny the existence of any such signified, and the latter set about trying to discover it. Such faith in a hermeneutics of literalism is strange given the mutually overlapping insistence of modern linguists on the inferential nature of communication and of modern cognitive psychologists on the metaphorical nature of cognition. It is a faith reliant on a misprision of the epistemological pretensions of early modern travel-writing in so far as sceptical and benevolent readers alike overlook or misunderstand the extent to which such writing is rhetorical, that is to say, written in accordance with discursive practices and epistemological expectations that are unfamiliar to us today. Stranger still is the widespread assumption that because modern travel literature belongs to the non-fiction list, so too must its early modern counterpart. Underlying this assumption is a modern distinction between fact and fiction which would have been quite lost on early modern readers and writers. The further assumption that because early modern travel writing is in so many ways patently fictitious, it cannot in any way be truthful is quite at odds with the customary interpretative practice of the literary specialists who make it: when engaged in the study or teaching of other early modern fictions (poetry, drama, romance, and so on), they are perfectly happy to jettison notions of specific, empirical truths and seek out instead, as readers from Aristotle to Sidney would have done, implied truths of a general and often moral kind. In short, the key question when reading the representations of early modern traveller-writers is not ‘true to what?’ but ‘what kind of truth?’

The textual transcription of new worlds pushes the problem of credible representation to the limits, and yet an age that witnessed unprecedented levels of geographical discovery and systematic voyaging to parts of the globe that were either entirely new or hitherto scarcely frequented was inevitably exposed to an access of new experiences, new situations, new peoples and new places, all of which demanded some sort of written record. The travel narrative would thus appear to constitute an extreme case of the problem posed by putting things into words; so much is new, so little can be taken for granted, that the rhetorical challenge of finding words for that new matter, verba for those new res, is at its acutest.³ It is significant that Sidney, himself a would-be traveller,⁴ begins his discussion of literary representation, or ‘wordish description’, with a reference to the challenge embodied by an elephant or rhinoceros to the writer who only has words to fall back on (Apology for Poetry 107). This was, of course, precisely the challenge Marco Polo had faced when verbally introducing the rhinoceros to Europe. Famously, he named the beast ‘unicorn’ and likened it in various respects to the buffalo, the elephant and the boar. Sidney’s discussion suggests that the problem of representation is most manifest in the predicament of the traveller-writer with new worlds to describe,⁵ a suggestion this book takes as its premise

When reading a traveller-writer who claims to be relating what no one, least of all the reader, has ever seen before, we are before an extreme case of what communicative pragmatists would term ‘contextual disparity’: the context of the narrative - its situational^ - is entirely different from the reader’s (Roger D. Sell 120). But if rhetoric is to have any perlocutionary force (and if it does not, then it is either bad rhetoric, or not rhetoric at all), that disparity has to be bridged somehow, or negotiated, by reader and writer. And of course, the bridging must be done by rhetorical means. It is that bridging process which has been largely ignored by readers of early modern travel literature whose overriding concern with the ideological content and ambitions of rhetoric has led them to neglect its primordial communicative function. By concentrating on rhetoric as the lackey of ideology, they forget that it was also the handmaiden of cognition.

But how could the infinite flood of new matter crossing the traveller-writer’s retina be bottled up by rhetoric’s essentially closed, stiflingly prescriptive system of schemes, topics, tropes and figures? If we manage to find an answer to that question, we may subsequently be in a better position to appreciate how early modern rhetorical writing in general accommodates itself to and transcribes reality - if at all. At the heart, then, of this study is an interest in representation, in the problem of finding words to express new things which have no previous textual existence, in such a way that the reader may enter into cognition of them. How could traveller-writers use rhetoric in order to give the wonderful or marvellous the ring of truth?

To delimit the discussion of the rhetoric of representation, I focus on the representation of wonder, that psychosomatic response most frequently regarded as symptomatic of an encounter with the new. As Descartes put it, ‘Whenever the first encounter with an object surprises us, and we judge it to be new or very different from what we knew before or even what we had supposed it to be, we are caused to wonder at it and are astonished at it’ (qtd. Fisher 45). More particularly, the early modern reader was perfectly willing to wonder at the natural world. As Juan Luís Vives wrote in his discussion of pleasure:

We never get tired of looking at and admiring prairies, mountains, gardens, valleys, rivers, the sky, the sea. ... Furthermore, the works of nature are more perfect than any work of art, so much so that art itself admires and finds more delight in the works of nature than in its own, seeks them out and aspires to imitate and recreate them.’ (Passions 55)

Accordingly, wonder is an appropriate object of study in the context of travel writing for the obvious reason that traveller-writers bring back news of wonderful new realities, and because wonder is the paradigmatic response of both traveller-writer and reader before such wonders: wherever there is wonder, there is a wonderful object and a wondering subject. Indeed, a ‘topos of wonder’ has been identified as ‘a standard narrative device in English colonial promotions’ which ‘entails two moments of response: a visual enthrallment... followed by a visual mastery’ (Linton 58–9). In her seminal study of travel writing, Mary B. Campbell adumbrates how wonder came gradually to be interiorized as what had once been a material symbol in the external world of God’s providence (a monster, a marvel, a wonder) was transformed into a subjective response before such a wonder. But at the same time, because she believes rhetoric and subjectivity to be incompatible, she is dismissive of rhetoric’s power to transcribe that wonder, to express encounters with the new and unfamiliar (193–4, 249).⁶ In this respect, Campbell aligns herself with a recent theorist of wonder, Philip Fisher, who has argued that the narrative arts are unable to create wonder because they develop sequentially over a period of time, whereas wonder is essentially an instantaneous, fleeting sensation best captured by the visual arts: ‘syntax and grammar are enemies of wonder’ (22–7). I shall try to gauge the extent to which, on the contrary, rhetoric was an effective ally of wonder.

Wonder is not only the emotional response that attends encounters with the new. As a stimulus to cognition, it also has an intellectual aspect, which is why Socrates enthroned wonder as the ‘beginning of philosophy’ (Plato Theaetetus 155c). When defining wonder as ‘broken knowledge’, Francis Bacon was suggesting that it acted as the impulse to repair or add to the imperfect or incomplete body of knowledge. Fisher explains that wonder starts with our surprise or bewilderment at something new or different that doesn’t make sense; that surprise or bewilderment is then superseded by the intellectual effort to make sense of that new or different thing. That is, we pass from a state of ‘not getting-it’ to finally being able to ‘get-it’ (8), much as the rainbow is first wondered at and then, once explained, unwoven. This is why wonder is the beginning of philosophy, since our perplexity before the new or unexpected incites us to embark on a voyage that, in rationalising the wonderful, leads us to an understanding of it. Fisher’s aspiration is to construct a ‘poetics of thought’ (33), to identify ways in which the pursuit of knowledge not only reflects the passage from wonder before a work of art to an elucidation of that work’s meaning, but relies upon the very instruments of cognition that aesthetics provides us with. Taking the rainbow as his paradigm of the wonderful, he shows how in their attempts to explain it philosophers from Aristotle to Theodoric of Freiburg to Descartes employed a method that starts with metaphor (Aristotle paired the rainbow with the echo) and ends with synecdoche (Theodoric’s explanation reduced the rainbow to one drop of water).⁷

This, of course, brings us close to Hayden White’s theory of discourse, the keystone of which is that because discourse ‘constitutes the objects which it pretends only to describe realistically and to analyze objectively’ (2), it is a cognitive instrument which inscribes the conscious process of apprehending new realities. For White, discourse passes from metaphor, through metonymy, to synecdoche in its attempts to characterize and thus assimilate and tame a ‘strange’ and ‘threatening’ parcel of reality (5–6). Naturally, that characterization can only be partial and distorting. In the same way, the truths of science are never more than the best explanation so far and are thus at constant risk of modification or abandonment in the light of new phenomena. Fisher is more reluctant than White to force a distinction between metonymy and synecdoche, and rightly so given the reasonable doubt that there is any difference between them;⁸ and he is also dismissive of White’s contention that the effect of discourse is to ‘domesticate’ the strange. There is, however, agreement on the basic issue that discourse and cognition are symbiotically related, understandably enough as far as representation is concerned, since the ‘wordish description’ of something is the manifest, textual trace of its mental apprehension. Accordingly, a study of the rhetoric of wonder will show what means and strategies enabled traveller-writers to represent new worlds, while additionally throwing light onto the wider issue of the textual inscription of the process of getting to know and of knowledge itself.

Wonder, then, is both the beginning of philosophy and of discourse. It is also the heart of the aesthetic experience. Both Aristotle and Aquinas noticed that the philosopher and the poet were united by their love of myth, which they understood to be a collection of wonderful things (Boitani 19), while Greenblatt has written that ‘since late antiquity [wonder] played a crucial role in European aesthetics, a role that intensified in the Middle Ages and was exhaustively theorized in the generations af...