Eastern Resonances in Early Modern England

Receptions and Transformations from the Renaissance to the Romantic Period

Claire Gallien, Ladan Niayesh, Claire Gallien, Ladan Niayesh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030229245
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030229252
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The concept of resonance collapses the binary between subject and object, perceiver and perceived, evoking a sound or image that is prolonged and augmented by making contact with another surface. This collection uses resonance as an innovative framework for understanding the circulation of people and objects between England and its multiple Asian Easts. Moving beyond Saidian Orientalism to engage with ongoing critical conversations in the fields of connected history, material culture, and thing theory, it offers a vibrant range of case studies that consider how meanings accrue and shift through circulation and interconnection from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Spanning centuries of traveling translations, narratives, myths, practices, and other cultural phenomena, Eastern Resonances in Early Modern England puts forth resonance not just as a metaphor, but a mode of investigation.

© The Author(s) 2019

C. Gallien, L. Niayesh (eds.)Eastern Resonances in Early Modern EnglandNew Transculturalisms, 1400–1800https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22925-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Claire Gallien¹ and Ladan Niayesh²

(1)

Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, Montpellier, France

(2)

Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France

Claire Gallien (Corresponding author)

Ladan Niayesh (Corresponding author)

End Abstract

Resonance is music’s hidden architecture.

Maximianno Cobra, conductor and musicologist

(private conversation, August 2017)

As with many experiences in life, the full meaning of a research project often unravels in time and through protracted ripple effects. When thinking of putting together this volume, our aim was to problematise Britain’s receptions of its multiple Asian Easts from the Renaissance to the Romantic period, not along rigidly adversarial or simplistically subordinative lines, but by exploring patterns that could accommodate multidirectional, indirect, or redirected modes of exchange. In other words, our project was to unpack politics and modes of reappropriation that reached beyond a merely polar understanding of cultural encounter, or a regional ordering of a bordered world (Sakaï 2009; Solomon 2016).

The notion of “resonance” gradually imposed itself on us as a way of replacing both the binaries of structuralism and the Foucauldian subordination of knowledge to power by a more phenomenological approach to experience, making room for what Veit Erlmann, summing up Stephen Greenblatt’s use of the notion in “Resonance and Wonder,” calls the “productive intimacy” brought about by cultural practice and circulation (Erlmann 2015, p. 176; Greenblatt 1990, pp. 216–246).

The general definition of “Resonance” provided by the OED is the “reinforcement or prolongation of sound by reflection or by the synchronous vibration of a surrounding space or a neighbouring object.” Resonance is therefore different from the echo , which also prolongs a sound, but does so on a descending scale, gradually fading away. Resonance on the contrary acts as an amplifier of sound, bouncing off on an enclosed, hard surface and producing new vibrations, and is as such associated with an eruption of force and new energy. Resonance also offers a refreshing alternative to the ocular paradigm of reflection, which suggests a disjunction of subject and object, be it through a gaze, a mirror, or a veil. Honouring “the claim of the ear” rather than “the primacy of the eye” (Dimock 1997), resonance entails the collapse of the boundary between perceiver and perceived, as in the example of the practice in jazz or pop music of “corner loading” detailed by Peter Doyle. This happens when a musician recording in studio faces a plastered or wood-panelled corner:

A feedback loop is set up: the musician makes sounds, the sounds resonate off the walls, the musician hears that resonance, as well as the sounds coming directly from the instrument, and accordingly adjusts and intensifies his own manipulation of the sound-making apparatus, be it voice or instrument. […] He plays the room. (Doyle 2005, p. 77)

In this scheme of things, Doyle continues, “room architecture itself is enlisted so as to become a temporary aspect of the self,” (Doyle 2005, p. 78) as the distance between self and surroundings is replaced by an osmosis and a synergy between what is self and what is other.

Using soundscape, and more particularly resonance, as a model therefore allows for displacing the focus to environments, rather than just defining acting subjects and acted-upon objects in them.¹ In doing so, our project turned to the rich musical lexicon recurrently used by critics in recent years to address circulations in the field of cultural geography. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s definition of territory through the notion of “ritournelle” or refrain has been inspirational in this respect. In A Thousand Plateaus , the two authors adapted the motif from a purely musical sense to a philosophical concept related to time and territory. Their chapter “Of the Refrain” reshapes our understanding of physical space classically defined through three linear dimensions, with objects having relative positions in it, determined by coordinates. For Deleuze and Guattari the practice of space—be it through birds’ songs in the example taken by them or through human equivalents—transforms it into “milieus” which are not preconditioned to accommodate specific objects or events, but are in a perpetual state of coding and transcoding:

…one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it, or is constituted in it. The notion of the milieu is not unitary: not only does the living thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another, they are essentially communicating. (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, p. 313)

Deleuze and Guattari’s theorisation complements earlier work by Deleuze, in particular in Difference and Repetition , in which he invited a move from the negative determination of difference—what is “not-this”—to a positive approach. For him repetition is that which differs in itself, that which returns but is never the same: “[d]ifference inhabits repetition,” he asserts (Deleuze 1994, 76). While acknowledging repetition, his approach to difference is thus resolutely non-essentialist.

Accordingly, although the contributions in this volume all address interactions involving early modern England and different parts of Asia, we have chosen to primarily entitle our project “Eastern” rather than “Asian” resonances. Our “East ” is neither an Orientalist, essentialist fiction, nor a single, geographically bounded entity, but primarily a matter of practised spaces and connected milieus. Following the current “global turn” in research across disciplines (Berg 2013), our interest is in the accumulation of meanings that people, objects, and cultural phenomena acquire in their journeys across seas and lands. As with Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello’s example of a seventeenth-century ivory knife from the Victoria and Albert Museum collections, combining a blade made in Sheffield and a handle carved in Goa (Gerritsen and Riello 2016, p. 17), what is of interest to us is to investigate how the narratives of people, objects, and cultural phenomena acquire and shift their meanings through circulations and interconnections. In this endeavour, resonance becomes for us not just an underlying metaphor but a method of investigation.

There are grounds for such an approach within the philosophical and aetiological thinking of the early modern period itself. Mapping the works of such key figures of the Scientific Revolution and of the Enlightenment as René Descartes and Denis Diderot, Veit Erlmann invites us to reconsider that period as “a moment in Western cultural history when reason and resonance developed in contiguity” as they faced “strikingly similar problems concerning the foundations of subjectivity, truth, and sensation” (Erlmann 2010, pp. 11–12). Erlmann underlines in particular the frequent play on the two meanings of the French verb “entendre”—hearing and understanding—in Descartes’ writings (Erlmann 2010, p. 31) and the latter’s reflections on the formation of the fœtus and the sympathetic resonance of the unborn child’s body parts with the mother’s heart.² Erlmann also quotes the sensualist philosopher Diderot’s image of the human harpsichord—“un clavecin organisé,” as he calls it in an Entretien with D’Alembert (Diderot 1951, p. 880)—apprehending the world and constructing its own rational self through haphazard combinations of fragmented sensations:

But vibrating strings have yet another property – to make other strings quiver. And thus the first idea recalls a second, and these a third, then all three a fourth, and so it goes, without our being able to set a limit to the ideas that are aroused and linked in a philosopher who meditates or who listens to himself in silence and darkness.³

A similar approach to the human mind as “endued with a natural disposition to resonance and sympathy” (Jones 1792, p. 57) is represented in our volume in the contribution made by Michael J. Franklin on the work of one of the defining figures of Orientalism, William Jones. Taking as its chamber of resonance the treatise “On the Musical Modes of the Hindus ” (1792), Franklin analyses the contributions of the matter of India to the making of Jones’s proto-Romantic emotionalist theory of the arts and also looks at the ways it is inflected by his earlier tyrannicidal “Ode in Imitation of Callistratus ” (1782), urging the “triple Harmony” of the mixed republic and the call for manhood suffrage. Though not directly taking root in a reflection on eastern musical traditions, the other contributions in this volume follow the same method in using eastern resonances as ways of bringing about reconfigurations of thoughts, identities, and objects in the West. They are presented here in a manner that distinguishes between three types of resonances—symbolic, discursive, and material. Within each section, the chapters broadly follow a chronological order, but with internal resonances between them, according to our main method of investigation.

The first part dedicated to symbolic resonances reflects on questions of models, circulations, and correspondences between England and its multiple Easts. Supriya Chauduri opens this section with an essay on the Bolognese traveller Ludovico de Varthema’s Itinerario (1510) as a work placed at the junction between geographical knowledge, autobiographical account, and translation and print circuits. She locates Varthema as part of the larger community of passeurs culturels and trickster-travellers famously studied by Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Natalie Zemon Davis (Subrahmanyam 2011; Davis 2008), and interprets his account in the light of the larger history of travel writing. The chapter unpacks various strategies of bricolage used by Varthema to define his persona and his mode of writing. It also investigates the resonances of his work in various European linguistic and cultural spaces , in languages such as Latin, German, Dutch, French, and Castilia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Resonant Identities: Models, Circulations, Correspondences
• Part II. Textual Resonances: Receptions, Translations, Transformations
• Part III. Aesthetic Resonances: Material Culture and Artistic Sensibilities
• Back Matter