Bodies, Politics and Transformations: John Donne's Metempsychosis

Siobhán Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409406358
• eBook ISBN: 9781317173496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, critics have predominantly offered a negative estimate of John Donne's Metempsychosis. In contrast, this study of Metempsychosis re-evaluates the poem as one of the most vital and energetic of Donne's canon. Siobhán Collins appraises Metempsychosis for its extraordinary openness to and its inventive portrayal of conflict within identity. She situates this ludic verse as a text alert to and imbued with the Elizabethan fascination with the processes and properties of metamorphosis. Contesting the pervasive view that the poem is incomplete, this study illustrates how Metempsychosis is thematically linked with Donne's other writings through its concern with the relationship between body and soul, and with temporality and transformation. Collins uses this genre-defying verse as a springboard to contribute significantly to our understanding of early modern concerns over the nature and borders of human identity, and the notion of selfhood as mutable and in process. Drawing on and contributing to recent scholarly work on the history of the body and on sexuality in the early modern period, Collins argues that Metempsychosis reveals the oft-violent processes of change involved in the author's personal life and in the intellectual, religious and political environment of his time. She places the poem's somatic representations of plants, beasts and humans within the context of early modern discourses: natural philosophy, medical, political and religious. Collins offers a far-reaching exploration of how Metempsychosis articulates philosophical inquiries that are central to early modern notions of self-identity and moral accountability, such as: the human capacity for autonomy; the place of the human in the 'great chain of being'; the relationship between cognition and embodiment, memory and selfhood; and the concept of wonder as a distinctly human phenomenon.

Chapter 1
Body / Word: Textual Materiality

Descartes’ mid-seventeenth-century reconfiguration of the mind as “the whole soul, which thinks”, also reconstituted the body as a mechanical object.1 Whereas the classical tripartite soul has a variety of faculties, including growth, nutrition and locomotion as well as sensation, imagination and cognition, the Cartesian soul is the principle of thought. Descartes’ argument that the soul and the mind are one made possible his assertion that “our soul is of a nature entirely independent of the body”.2 Prior to this division from the soul, the body held ontological significance. The Cartesian notion of selfhood as the thinking ‘I’ that transcends matter is definitive of the historical phenomena whereby, as Marshall McLuhan puts it in the early 1970s, “our philosophy system excludes techne from its mediations”.3 This remarkable observation is having an important impact on current theory. There is now an increasing recognition that text cannot be conceived outside of its relation to the realm of matter, that the separation of textuality and technology is problematic. The work of today’s most prominent media theorists, influenced also by the advent of digitized technology, concentrates on how the materiality of the text shapes our notions of selfhood, and debates the relation between technology and textuality in terms of agency and meaning.4 Technology, as the etymology of the word, fusing techne and logos, implies, is both concrete and abstract, suggesting a mutually informative relation between consciousness and its physical form of expression.5 The interface between textuality and technology extends correlatively to the complex interrelation between soul, mind and body. When our understanding of one of these terms changes, it correspondingly alters each of the other terms. Although dualism extends back to Plato’s argument that the eternal soul is the essence of selfhood and superior to the perishable body, the body is not passive and mechanized as we find in Descartes’ writings; rather, it has the ability, albeit negative, to distract the embodied soul from its search for knowledge. Aristotle placed much more emphasis on the self as a composite of body and soul. It is through figurative language that he explains their interrelation, comparing the body and soul to the “wax and its shape”.6 Aquinas’ scholastic concept of selfhood, which continued well into the seventeenth century, also guarantees the ontological significance of body in language that, like Aristotle’s, relies metaphorically on technologies of communication: “the blue-print of all we are…may be carried in soul, but it is realized in body”.7

Much as print and digital technologies overlap today, manuscript and the new medium of print not only coexisted as writing technologies in the Renaissance but interacted and competed with one another, each contributing to differing concepts of self.8 Concern with and manipulation of the relation between materiality and textuality, body and meaning, is evident not only in Donne’s poetics, which can be gleaned from both his poetry and prose, but also in his deliberation between the two competing forms of textual production available to him. Donne’s preference was for manuscript circulation of his work. Relatively little of his poetry or prose was published in print in his lifetime.9 Donne feared not for the survival of his poems, but that a much wider audience than he could control would read his poetry.

Donne and Jonson record in their verse how poetry would circulate widely in a scribal community, bringing fame to its author. In “The Triple Foole” Donne recounts his double folly: one, he falls in love with a woman, and two, he writes about it in “whining Poëtry” (3).10 Yet, his rhetorical question, “where’s that wiseman, that would not be I, / If she would not deny?” confidently asserts, advertises, and intertwines his specifically masculine textual and sexual talents (4–5). The poet attempts catharsis through art; he “tames” and “fetters” emotion within his verse, yet ironically that verse, “by delighting many, frees again / Grief, which verse did restrain” (11–16). The poet’s lack of control over his readership determines that “two fooles, do so grow three” (21). In contrast, Jonson desires renown through the wide circulation of his poetry. Such fame is the subject matter of his verse addressed to Sir Kenelm Digby, in which Jonson glories in the thought of how his lines may be read “at the Treasurers bord”, and dreams of “what copies shall be had, What transcripts begg’d” (3–6).11 Jonson, later in his life, sent his poetry to press, thereby increasing his audience, while advertising himself as an established author of his collected Works. While print publication, as I will show, was pertinent to Donne’s concerns on occasion, he never did publish a volume of his poetry due to his apprehension of “some incongruities in the resolution”: “I know what I shall suffer from many interpretations”.12 Donne never fully avowed the role of “poet” in the way Jonson did, and expressed resistance to this as a vocation; nevertheless, as author, he self-consciously recognizes that to change his main mode of textual production from manuscript to print would transform also his audience, and thus the reception of his poems.

For Donne, the very physical and intimate nature of transmission in a manuscript culture not only acknowledges the bodily and contingent nature of language, but also connects the author and reader in an act of physical performance that transports to the spiritual, which the technology of print miscarries: “What the printing-presses bring to birth with inky travail, we take as it comes; but what is written out by hand is in greater reverence”.13 It is because Donne was so self-consciously an author, so hopeful of communication yet so discriminating about his readers, so concerned with the aesthetics and ethics of verse, that he engaged so deeply with how materiality signifies. The concept of individual authorship, associated with the printed book and its illusion of linearity and closure, is a relative one in the early modern period. Although Foucault points to the seventeenth century as the time when “[t]he coming into being of the notion of ‘author’ constituted the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas”, within the still vibrant manuscript culture the circumstances under which copies were produced, the personal bodily sweat and expense involved in physically transcribing (and altering, consciously or unconsciously) a text, not only result in “some confusion” between the role of the author and that of the reader, but link bodies together in a shared act of textual interplay that questions boundaries between the individual and the social body, between flesh and the page.14 The evidence of “part-shared language” that marks the style of manuscript texts testifies to the communal and open nature of their production.15 The early modern manuscript system was far less author-centered, or interested in fixity, than print culture.16 It involved “different material conditions of writing and reading”, different attitudes towards ownership and materiality, which did not allow for an absolute distinction between writer and audience.17

The intimacy between body and book is very important to Donne’s poetics. He plays ingeniously with the analogy between body and book throughout his work.18 His notion of the body as a book differs in essence to the postmodern idea of the body inscribed with and constructed by social discourses. For Donne, the body as text not only illustrates by resemblance the whole of nature, but is also inscribed with God’s sacred text. He describes the human being as a “plentifull Library”, and the heart as a book of instruction presented by God.19 The open heart symbolizes purity. It figures prominently in Renaissance poetics as a metaphor for interior writing, suggesting transparency and equating textuality with both corporeality and an interior subjectivity.20 The line between body and book is blurred; they are imagined as both metaphorically and literally linked in this period. In Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, the image of the heart links both the speaker’s bodily desire and the transparent purity of his textual voice: “know that I, in pure simplicity, / Breathe out the flames which burn within my heart, / Love only reading unto me this art”.21 However, for Donne, man’s subjectivity is conflicted: torn between contingent earthly desires on the one hand, and a priori “testimonies of the conscience”, which are “imprinted” in the memory (contained in the heart) on the other.22 The philosophical significance Donne awards to memory will be discussed in greater detail in due course. What I wish to underline here is that Donne views the body as a book wherein can be read the epic narrative of Christian history: from the Creation, through the Fall, to the Redemption and, finally, the Resurrection. The body is the Alpha and Omega of God, for “his first, and last work is the body of man”.23 Donne’s view of the heart as “imprinted” with God’s image and text is underpinned by his notion of man as microcosm. Donne insists on theologically minded correspondences despite his awareness of, and concern with, the new sciences’ increasing separation of the physical body from the soul. The title of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) suggests that at this historic moment there is not yet the sharp division between the mental and the physical, the body and the text, the psychological and the physiological that characterized the duality of Enlightenment ontology.24 At the same time, however, the divisions and subdivisions within Burton’s vast text provide “a textual example of [the] delight in particularization” and the increasing categorization and fragmentation that characterized this period’s “culture of dissection”.25 This tension between unity and division, as we will see, characterizes also Donne’s work.

Consideration of the textual materiality of Donne’s poetry necessitates a focus on both the body and the page, for “[l]oves mysteries in soules doe grow, [b]ut yet the body is his booke” (“The Extasie” 71–2). In his verse, Donne offers a reading of his microcosmic body / world, where “streams, like veins, run through th’earth’s every part” (“The Bracelet” 38). As Elaine Scarry observes, Donne “lifts the interior of the body directly onto the surface of the page”, and “repositions the page back into the human body”.26 Language takes on attributes of the body in Donne’s work; muscles, sinews and veins are made to signify. Descartes’ later claim that “our soul is of a nature entirely independent of the body” is anticipated and contested by Donne’s remarkable insistence that the soul fully partakes in all that is corporeal: “all that the soule does it does in, and with, and by the body”.27 The material body / book, for Donne, is the only means of encapsulating and expressing what would otherwise be an abstract spirituality. In “Valediction of the Booke”, he states: “though minde be the heaven, where love doth sit, / Beauty’a convenient type may be to figure it” (35–6). Flesh (or parchment) serves as the material out of which spirituality is made known, and through which souls communicate with one another. The body is the conduit or mediating agent connecting and commingling profane and sacred realms. However, as a microcosm, wherein can be read the book of nature and God’s word, the body exists as a site of tension: on the one hand, as in the Platonic tradition, it is the prison-house of the soul, the locus of worldly app...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Spelling and Citation
• Introduction: Riddles
• 1 Body / Word: Textual Materiality
• 2 Thresholds: “Porches and Entries”
• 3 Separation: Genesis and the Fall
• 4 Memory: Reading the Self
• 5 Liminality: Plant / Human
• 6 Devoured Bodies: Birds and Fishes
• 7 Courting Politics: Vivarium of Beasts
• Conclusion: Wonder
• Appendix 1: Author and Text: Manuscript and Print Editions of Metempsychosis
• Appendix 2: Critical Reception: Metempsychosis
• Bibliography
• Index