Infinite Variety

Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688-1730

Wolfram Schmidgen

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780812299908
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria inglese

Unnerved by the upheavals of the seventeenth century, English writers including Thomas Hobbes, Richard Blackmore, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe came to accept that disorder, rather than order, was the natural state of things. They were drawn to voluntarism, a theology that emphasized a willful creator and denied that nature embodied truth and beauty. Voluntarism, Wolfram Schmidgen contends, provided both theological framework and aesthetic license. In Infinite Variety, he reconstructs this voluntarist tradition of literary invention.Once one accepted that creation was willful and order arbitrary, Schmidgen argues, existing hierarchies of kind lost their normative value. Literary invention could be radicalized as a result. Acknowledging that the will drives creation, such writers as Blackmore and Locke inverted the rules of composition and let energy dominate structure, matter create form, and parts be valued over the whole. In literary, religious, and philosophical works, voluntarism authorized the move beyond the natural toward the deformed, the infinite, and the counterfactual.In reclaiming ontology as an explanatory context for literary invention, Infinite Variety offers a brilliantly learned analysis of an aesthetic framed not by the rise of secularism, but by its opposite. It is a book that articulates how religious belief shaped modern literary practices, including novelistic realism, and one that will be of interest to anyone who thinks seriously about the relationship between literature, religion, and philosophy.

CHAPTER 1

Toward a Voluntarist Aesthetic

That theology and ontology are central to understanding literary invention in the early eighteenth century; that genre may not be invention’s most vital arena; that anti-atheist writings help authorize the imagination of new modes of being in poetry and prose—these claims put me at odds with the most influential paradigm we have for thinking about literary invention in the early eighteenth century. Since the late 1950s, the conversation about literary invention among eighteenth-century scholars has been dominated by the novel. Our accounts of the novel have made it not only the most spectacular instance of literary invention in the period but also the central literary protagonist in the stories we tell about modernization and secularization. In these stories, epistemology has dominated. The novel’s purported realism—its empiricist devotion to particular places, particular times, and particular individuals—has been placed at the heart of its modern identity. Such mundane attentions, it has been claimed, keep the novel from directing its gaze upward, from the specificity of observed matters at hand to the general, the universal, or the spiritual. The novel’s form and content make problems of observation, reflection, and knowledge central and thus marginalize questions about being or spirit.

The novel’s association with realism and secularization has been fortified by the alliance literary historians have built between a shift toward practical morality in late seventeenth-century religious life and the rising importance of epistemology in science and philosophy.¹ The protocols of particularized attention advocated by empiricist science, these historians have argued, became a natural ally to the close examination of moral conduct, a good fit for the didactic cast of the early novel. This alliance helped these historians strengthen their argument that epistemology became the secularizing master discipline of moral and natural philosophy in the modern age and that the novel was its supreme literary expression. Epistemology was the obvious intellectual partner of the eighteenth-century novel because this new species of writing showed us self-reflexive, socially situated individuals who pondered minute circumstances to solve practical moral problems. Important aspects of the novel’s form and content have thus been construed through a modern epistemology that makes the powers of deliberate reflection central to emancipating the individual from unselfconscious participation in natural and social worlds.

Emphasizing the secularizing, particularizing, and individualizing effects of a newly empowered epistemology, scholars interested in the emergence of the novel were able to assemble an intellectually riveting case. So much is this true that the limits of this epistemological approach to literary modernity have become newly visible only in the context of fairly recent historical changes that have redirected scholarly attention to the question of being and have prompted, among other things, a turn to ontology in anthropology, philosophy, and science studies.² (I will say more about these historical changes in a moment.) But because such novel scholars as Ian Watt, John Bender, J. Paul Hunter, Michael McKeon, and Catherine Gallagher continue to shape much of our thinking about literary invention in the eighteenth century, a redescription of the epistemological tradition is warranted to clarify its ontological investments.³ This will help us see that the epistemological tradition has given us a rather one-sided history of the work of art and of aesthetic experience in the eighteenth century. It will help us realize what may be gained if we reintroduced theology and ontology into our conversations about invention.

Scholars in the epistemological tradition argue that the novel’s way of representing the world and the way readers consume such representations are shaped by the complexity that results when the explanatory powers of traditional intellectual and social forms decline and when empiricist ways of knowing gain the upper hand. Once this happens, objects, subjects, actions, and circumstances can be leveled, differentiated, and particularized to such an extent that the relationships between these entities keep evolving and have to be continually reassessed. Probability thus becomes the highest form of certainty. It issues from within the operations of the mind, the reflections of protagonist and reader. Particulars, these accounts of the novel assume, no longer lead to the higher truths that lie above or behind them (universals, species, hierarchies, God) and instead become the only thing we have. As a staunch ally of the particular that bans universals, the novel is the nominalist genre par excellence.⁴ Thoroughly this-worldly and without a metaphysical dimension, it refuses to transcend the perceived detail, the concrete and the immediate, and commits its resources to the probable representation of such detail.

Such empiricist dethroning of essences and universals points to a world in which divine order is no longer legible and human participation in divine knowledge questionable. Transcendent spiritual or universal truths disappear in our ceaseless reflections on the worldly particutar, whose meaning can only be approximated when we observe its interactions with other particulars. Only when transcendent spiritual truth no longer holds the world together, no longer permeates being, does the world emerge as an object to a subject, whose role it now is to construct purpose and meaning for the strange and distant particular. The object’s ability to orient the search for meaning withers. In a secularizing world, subject and object lose their community. Modern epistemology creates distance between individual and world, and the novel mirrors this when it asks readers not to immerse themselves but to reflect, with a cooler head, on the shifting probability of its representations.

As Gallagher emphasizes, disbelief becomes the fundamental disposition in the modern world while belief—in fictions or anything else—finds its socially useful role when it assumes the form of “ironic credulity.”⁵ Gallagher uses this phrase to describe novel readers who have learned to appreciate the more sophisticated fictions of the mid-eighteenth century, but the phrase also resonates with Watt’s and McKeon’s characterization of Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a novel whose religious content is either insincere or instrumentalized.⁶ As is especially clear in Gallagher’s account, such ironic credulity serves a protective function that helps fortify the secular, detached individual. The willing suspension of disbelief—to use the more familiar phrase Gallagher and McKeon both adopt—protects readers from the harm the aesthetic object could do them. Under such conditions, the object’s siren call poses no danger, and novel readers are able to sail through fictional worlds with all of the enjoyment but none of the risk they would otherwise incur.⁷

Implicitly or explicitly, exponents of the epistemological tradition reduce the novel’s agency to win its aesthetic autonomy along with the reader’s insulation from the existential risks of belief. A secularizing epistemology helps to disempower the object by the sharply limited, but now exclusive, interpretive power of the subject (reader and protagonist) to construct probable meanings for the object. Ironic credulity neuters the aesthetic object by limiting the subject’s involvement to the enjoyment, in Gallagher’s Kantian echo, of “a seemingly free space in which to temporarily indulge imaginative play.”⁸ Reading fictions has become a matter of indulgence and play. The history of modern aesthetics, then, can be seen to extend organically from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, when Kant completes the rise of epistemology in modern philosophy.

And this is also where these epistemological approaches to literary modernity face a basic problem. They present the empiricist turn of the seventeenth century as the beginning of a story that ends with a Kantian aesthetic in which the subject is severed from the object as the cause of a substantive, concrete, or transfigurative involvement. The early novel is thus pulled into a teleology that nebulously weds British empiricism and German idealism. Obscured in the mist is the circumstance that seventeenth-century empiricism rests on ontological presuppositions that differ sharply from those of Kant, who, as Theodor Adorno noted, “castigates as heteronomous whatever is not born exclusively of the subject.”⁹ John Locke’s insistence that all human knowledge begins in the impressions that external objects make on our senses is an alien sentiment in Kant’s universe. There is no easy passage from such sentiments (which exposed Locke to charges of materialism) to the gulf Kant opens between subject and object.¹⁰

This gulf ensures, in fact, that a central element in the epistemological tradition of novel studies—probability—remains marginal in Kant’s aesthetic. In The Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant argues that exceeding the empirical, not heeding it, is the artwork’s most vital task. We can see this when he discusses artistic invention. Kant praises the ability of artists to stretch their imagination into the realm of ideas and thus “beyond the bounds of experience.”¹¹ He explains:

The imagination … is very mighty when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it. We use it to entertain ourselves when experience strikes us as overly routine. We may even restructure experience; and though in doing so we continue to follow analogical laws, yet we also follow principles which reside higher up, namely, in reason (and which are just as natural to us as those which the understanding follows in apprehending empirical nature). In this process we feel our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the empirical use of the imagination); for although it is under that law that nature lends us material, yet we can process that material into something quite different, namely, into something that surpasses nature¹²

Kant makes clear that empirical nature should not be the final guide in the creation of works of art. On the contrary, he emphasizes the shortcomings of ordinary experience and the possibility to transform such experience by principles of reason that belong to a higher, non-empirical realm. In such transformation, a degree of freedom from the empirical is realized, the freedom of an imagination that, even as it works with established materials and associations, transforms them into something that surpasses or replaces nature.

Kant praises the ability of artists to create entities that are not observable—from “invisible beings” to “the realm of the blessed, the realm of hell, eternity, creation”—as a central expression of their imaginative power.¹³ But even when the poet chooses more ordinary themes like death or envy, “he ventures to give these [themes] sensible expression in a way that goes beyond the limits of experience, namely with a completeness for which no example can be found in nature.”¹⁴ In this way, works of art move beyond the actual and the probable, beyond experience, and toward the realm of ideas. As will become clear later in this chapter, Kant’s views resonate with the account of literary invention I offer. But there is also a point of differentiation. When Kant declares that going beyond nature is the noblest task of the work of art, he explicitly links this task to the artistic genius, whose autonomy, one imagines, owes something to the separation of subject and object Kant presupposes. But because subject and object are not safely differentiated in the voluntarist tradition I examine, the acts of literary invention I observe derive from entanglements with matter and turn on embarrassment, incomprehension, and disability.

A second problem of the epistemological tradition is the modernization narrative that underwrites the passage from epistemology to new literary form. This narrative centrally relies on mechanisms of differentiation. The tradition of novel studies I have discussed relies on three congruent differentiations: the differentiation of subject and object (including its aesthetic consequences: the insulation of the imagined from the real and the priority assigned to the mimetic over the transfigurative function of art); the differentiation of individual and nature (which helped break the divinely guaranteed unity of being and facilitates the scientific, commercial, and colonial objectification of the world); and the differentiation of individual and society (moving us from status to contract, gemeinschaft to gesellschaft and toward the related differentiation of private and public). Nature, society, and art are thus claimed to be taken up by a modernizing process that deploys rationalizing differentiations to resolve whatever remained of the premodern interpenetration of spheres and kinds by placing them in separate quarters. In this reorganization, the operations of a knowledge that has gained confidence in its analytic and reflective powers are primary. The passage from epistemology to novelistic form to Kantian aesthetic is charted around the idea that eighteenth-century people enhance their mental powers so they can differentiate themselves from nature and society, distance themselves from traditional beliefs and practices, and cultivate an autonomous interiority, in the self and in the domestic sphere. The novel promotes this process—or so we have been told.

II

In retrospect, our reliance on epistemology to explain the invention of quintessentially modern modes of writing seems understandable. Larger forces were involved. I am thinking, for example, of the epistemological preoccupations of humanists and social scientists in the second half of the twentieth century, which made the mediation of reality through human perceptions and conventions fundamental to inquiry. Surely, such preoccupations contributed to the epistemological cast of arguments in the line of Watt, Bender, Gallagher, and McKeon. Surely, they helped make Kant’s philosophy a logical destination for literary historians concerned with the invention of the novel.

Even broader developments in intellectual history, it seems to me, helped tune literary historians to epistemology. In “Overcoming Epistemology” (1997), Charles Taylor argues that the seventeenth-century rise of epistemology is tied to “some of the most important moral and spiritual ideas of our civilization,” including the ideas that free individuals are self-responsible, rely on their own judgment, and find purpose in themselves.¹⁵ How could our histories of literary modernity not be affected by such ideas, which still loom large in Western democracies? The novel became the paradigm case of literary invention in the eighteenth century through our one-sided focus on epistemology, but such one-sidedness is not entirely our own. Broader lines of intellectual and social history are involved.

These lines, however, have been weakening. Today, the highway that the novel, epistemology, and secularization built toward literary modernity looks like a piece of aging infrastructure. During the last ten years or so, scholars have been paving different roads into literary modernity. They have rejected the idea that a scientifically warranted empiricism and probability begin to shape literary invention in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.¹⁶ They have qualified and repudiated the separation of subject and object that informs so many of our literary histories.¹⁷ They have shown that empirical and skeptical modes of thought sort freely with religious belief.¹⁸ And they have made clear that the question of spiritual authority remains central in the development of eighteenth-century literature, even as practical morality asserts itself.¹⁹ These developments in literary history have made travel on the old infrastructure of modernity difficult.

This infrastructure has gotten into more genera...