Surprise

The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen

Christopher R. Miller

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780801453694
• eBook ISBN: 9780801455773
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Today, in the era of the spoiler alert, "surprise" in fiction is primarily associated with an unexpected plot twist, but in earlier usage, the word had darker and more complex meanings. Originally denoting a military ambush or physical assault, surprise went through a major semantic shift in the eighteenth century: from violent attack to pleasurable experience, and from external event to internal feeling. In Surprise, Christopher R. Miller studies that change as it took shape in literature ranging from Paradise Lost through the novels of Jane Austen. Miller argues that writers of the period exploited and arbitrated the dual nature of surprise in its sinister and benign forms. Even as surprise came to be associated with pleasure, it continued to be perceived as a problem: a sign of ignorance or naïveté, an uncontrollable reflex, a paralysis of rationality, and an experience of mere novelty or diversion for its own sake. In close readings of exemplary scenes—particularly those involving astonished or petrified characters—Miller shows how novelists sought to harness the energies of surprise toward edifying or comic ends, while registering its underpinnings in violence and mortal danger. In the Roman poet Horace's famous axiom, poetry should instruct and delight, but in the early eighteenth century, Joseph Addison signally amended that formula to suggest that the imaginative arts should surprise and delight. Investigating the significance of that substitution, Miller traces an intellectual history of surprise, involving Aristotelian poetics, Cartesian philosophy, Enlightenment concepts of the passions, eighteenth-century literary criticism and aesthetics, and modern emotion theory. Miller goes on to offer a fresh reading of what it means to be "surprised by sin" in Paradise Lost, showing how Milton's epic both harks back to the symbolic functions of violence in allegory and looks ahead to the moral contours of the novel. Subsequent chapters study the Miltonic ramifications of surprise in the novels of Defoe, Haywood, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, as well as in the poems of Wordsworth and Keats. By focusing on surprise in its inflections as emotion, cognition, and event, Miller's book illuminates connections between allegory and formal realism, between aesthetic discourse and prose fiction, and between novel and lyric; and it offers new ways of thinking about the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of the novel as the genre emerged in the eighteenth century.

Chapter 1

From Aristotle to Emotion Theory

This book explores the premise that surprise is both an emotion and an element of poetics—both an object of mimesis (the situated experience of characters) and a feature of narrative (the mediated experience of readers or viewers). The first and most influential theorist of that intersection was Aristotle, and I begin this chapter by outlining the salient claims of his Poetics. I go on to consider a series of developments in the intellectual history of surprise: the early modern rehabilitation of wonder as valuable emotional attitude; the Cartesian identification of surprise as a pivotal movement in the passions; the emergence of surprise as a key term in the eighteenth-century discourse of aesthetics; the later role of surprise as rubric in twentieth-century literary criticism; and finally its conceptualization in modern emotion theory. Within this genealogy, several recurring ideas and concerns can be identified: the continuity between the brief jolt of surprise and the sustained state of wonder; a persis tent strain of skepticism about these emotions as debilitating forces, as well as the opposite sense that they are fragile and transitory; the framing of surprise in ethical as well as aesthetic terms; the conception of surprise as both physical fact and inner state; and questions about the repeatability of the experience of novelty.

Aristotelian Ekplêxis and Early Modern Wonder

The eighteenth-century valorization of surprise has its deepest origins in Aristotle’s Poetics, which posited the desirability of the unexpected and formulated an integral role for emotional response in drama. In ancient Greek thought, as David Konstan has shown, emotions were primarily intersubjective and contextual. In the classical city-state, which demanded “a continuous and public negotiation of social roles,” they were seen as arising from particular social situations and external events rather than coming from within.¹ In this way, the Greek word for emotion, pathos, denoted not only a feeling but also an event that befalls a person—often, as Konstan notes, “in a negative sense of an accident or misfortune” (4). Aristotle expressed this narrative understanding of emotion in the both the Poetics and the Rhetoric, defining sudden and drastic turns of event as inspiring a feeling of awe. In the latter treatise, he remarks, “Dramatic turns of fortune and hairbreadth escapes from perils are pleasant, because we feel all such things are wonderful.”² In identifying such moments as occasions for wonder, he expanded upon Plato’s premise in the Thaeatetus that wonder (to thaumaston) is an essential condition of philosophical inquiry.³ In essence, Aristotle asserted a legitimate place for drama in stimulating the emotion narrowly sanctioned by Plato; and as W.W. Fortenbaugh has remarked, this move reflected a larger reappraisal of the emotions as cognitive events rather than as irrational energies.⁴

Under Aristotle’s rubric in the Poetics, the ideal form of the complex plot involves both a reversal of fortune (peripeteia) and the hero’s recognition of that development (anagnorisis), and both are said to turn upon surprises. Aristotle’s term for such jolts, as Terence Cave has noted in his study of the Poetics, is ekplêxis: often translated into English as “surprise,” it denotes a sudden shock verging on fear or panic.⁵ Like purely physical forms of surprise, ekplêxis is an experience of being blindsided or jolted out of oneself; but Aristotle posited that this sudden derangement was only temporary and thus ultimately pleasurable, facilitated by a safe passage between the stage and the viewer’s own world.

For Aristotle, the element of rational cognition is indispensable in any dramatic architecture of surprise, in both the design of the plot and the character’s (and viewer’s) discovery of its workings. Anagnorisis is, as Cave has observed, “the epistemological counterpart or corollary to peripeteia” (33). In Aristotle’s hierarchy of recognition, the higher forms engage the faculties of memory or deductive reasoning.⁶ By implication, Aristotle dismisses what might be called mere surprise—a random shock without redeeming value, a physical jolt without affective or mental mediation. This distinction would later be echoed in neo-Aristotelian English literary criticism. John Dryden addresses the point in The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679), insisting that the dramatis personae should never be overwhelmed by the sheer force and accumulation of events, for “the manners never can be evident where the surprises of Fortune take up all the business of the stage, and where the Poet is more in pain, to tell you what hapned to such a man, than what he was.”⁷ The tradition of disparaging mere surprise has a long history, and can be traced in Alfred Hitchcock’s distinction between surprise and suspense. In the director’s example, surprise would be the detonation of a bomb without warning; suspense would involve a scenario in which “the bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it.” Hitchcock’s axiom: “Whenever possible, the public must be informed.”⁸

Despite Aristotle’s emphasis on recognition and affective response, the Poetics is fundamentally concerned more with the construction of plot than with the internal states of characters or viewers. In Meir Sternberg’s critique, Aristotle “privilege[s] surprise, the first and virtually the only among poetic system builders to do so,” and yet fails to give a broad enough account of the phenomenon.⁹ Sternberg argues that Aristotle’s focus on the well-made tragedy results in disproportionate attention to the design of the plot rather than to the aesthetic response to it; a narrow form of surprise (tragic reversal and recognition) rather than a broader spectrum of the unexpected.¹⁰ Aristotle’s conception of dramatic time is limited to the unity of a beginning, middle, and end; and in Sternberg’s assessment, that account does not register the temporal substance of narrative itself—the dynamic interplay of the three “master functions” of surprise, suspense, and curiosity. The pure shock of an exclamation such as “A fire!” eludes Aristotelian categories but exemplifies the condition of what Sternberg defines as “narrativity” (520), in that it engages all three functions. Though Sternberg rightly notes the limitations of Aristotle’s exclusive focus on tragedy, the larger implications of that focus should not be overlooked: it was Aristotle who laid the groundwork for the eighteenth-century understanding of surprise as pleasurable and edifying rather than painful or merely shocking.

Though Plato and Aristotle both insisted on the intellectual merits of surprise and wonder, these intertwined emotional states went through their own reversal of fortune in medieval scholastic commentary, as Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park have shown in their magisterial study of the subject. Known from the twelfth century onward as admiratio, wonder was treated by thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Eu rope an philosophers mainly as a “taboo passion”; it was associated with the ignorant or unformed mind (Roger Bacon), likened to the stupefaction and cardiac systole of fear (Albertus Magnus), and described as a disabling of intellect and a kind of mental sloth (Aquinas).¹¹

The subsequent early modern rehabilitation of wonder as a more salutary force can be attributed to two cultural developments: the Renaissance literature of New World exploration and the seventeenth-century rise of natural philosophy. Stephen Greenblatt has traced the trope of wonder that runs through the Eu rope an literature of exploration and conquest, while Daston and Park emphasize the seventeenth-century scientific context.¹² In the first case, the encounter between colonial explorer and native inhabitant was a mutual surprise, but the wonder it inspired was represented in two ways: as the vehicle of investigation into the new and exotic; and as heathen fear of godlike visitors. In later Enlightenment discourse, wonder became valued as a goad to intellectual inquiry rather than anathematized as a disabling arrest. By the mid-eighteenth century, Daston and Park note, the valence of wonder went through another cultural change. In scientific discourse, the disinterested attitude of curiosity supplanted the slack-jawed stance of amazement, which came to be seen as “the hallmark of the ignorant and barbarous” (304), banished from the realm of natural philosophy to take up residence in natural theology (as in the Deistic praise of divine order in all things) and its secular counterpart, the aesthetics of the Sublime (323–24).¹³

René Descartes and the Surprise de l’âme

It was Descartes who set a precedent in the seventeenth century for treating wonder with philosophical respect, and for scrupulously distinguishing between good and bad forms of it. It has become a critical commonplace that the Cartesian focus on individual experience in the Discourse on Method (1637) and the Meditations (1641) paved the way for both British empiricism and the rise of the novel; after Descartes, as Ian Watt notes, “both philosophers and novelists paid greater attention to the particular individual than had been common before.”¹⁴ Descartes’s later work, The Passions of the Soul (Les passions de l’âme), published posthumously in Paris in 1649 and issued in an English translation a year later, should be included in that account, particularly with respect to British aesthetics. Descartes posits wonder as the primary human emotion and the template for the passions in general, defining it as “a sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary.”¹⁵ It is worth lingering over that phrase, “surprise of the soul”: in Descartes’s seventeenth-century French, surprise is not a term for an emotion in its own right, as it would become in later French and English usage; rather, it denotes a kind of seizure, as in its earliest sense.

It is characteristic of Cartesian metaphysics that the notion of a surprise de l’âme is a hybrid one. In Descartes’s French, surprise would be chiefly a physical phenomenon, but it is not clear what part of the immaterial soul could be seized or attacked. Wonder, then, must arise in corporeal experience and somehow ramify into a psychic state: perhaps the point of origin lies in the pineal gland, which Descartes speculatively identified as the nexus between body and soul. In modern terms, it might be analogous to the hypothalamus, where present-day neuroscience locates the startle reflex, or the excitable region of the amygdala, a site of fear conditioning and memory formation. For Descartes, as Susan James has pointed out, the passions are unique to human beings, and all states of the Cartesian soul (as opposed to the Aristotelian) are forms of thinking. In an animal, surprise is purely a startle reflex of the body, an autonomic nervous response; but in a human being, it takes on cognitive meaning as a passion of the soul.¹⁶ The Cartesian complexity of any human emotion thus anticipates the modern neurological and psychological conception of emotion, which describes it as a brain function, a physical response with multiple corporeal sites, an array of facial expressions, and a set of rational appraisals.

The primacy of wonder in Descartes’s taxonomy is based partly on the premise that it is an experience of the new, and that unlike other passions, it has no true opposite. Its inverse might be a state of unarticulated indifference and inattention, the absolute absence of passion (but not the later construction of boredom, which involves an attitude toward the world, not a state of neutrality). In the Cartesian scale of feeling, the soul dwells in a default state of dullness until awakened by the new, the sudden, or the unexpected; and that fleeting surprise can lead into one of two sustained emotions: either the moderate state of wonder (l’admiration) or the extreme state of astonishment (l’éstonnement). In French, to be astonished is to be thunderstruck (étonné ), disabled by fear or awe into a state of paralytic muteness; but to be in a state of wonder is to be in a mode of articulate receptivity.

Among the emotions, wonder as defined by Descartes in The Passions is only one of the six primary passions (the others being love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness) to be caused and sustained solely by the soul, not the body or animal spirits (61, Art. 76).¹⁷ The precipitating “surprise of the soul” might have a physical and corporeal basis, although Descartes does not explicitly say so; indeed, he offers the example of tickling to illustrate degrees of intensity in the surprise of any novelty. Since the soles of the feet are accustomed to the full weight of the body, he reasons, the relatively light touch of a feather or fingers imparts an utterly new movement to the soul. This example of differential sensation, however, does not account for the fact that we cannot tickle ourselves; the elements of externality and the unexpected surely play another part in this instance of proprioceptive surprise. In any case, Descartes is less interested in ephemeral stimuli per se than in the soul’s capacity to hold them in memory; his main point is that while wonder has a physical dimension, it is a usefully cerebral passion, instrumental in retaining impressions and acquiring knowledge (59, Art. 75). By contrast, astonishment is an extreme state of arrest: in a trope that would be frequently echoed in eighteenth-century writing, Descartes says that this emotion “makes the entire body remain immobile like a statue” (58, Art. 73); and the mind, likewise, is reduced to a dangerous quiescence. In Descartes’s opinion, there is a fine line between the petrifaction of astonishment and the calm repose of wonder; as much as the latter “disposes us to the acquisition of the sciences…we should still try afterwards to emancipate ourselves from it as much as possible” (60, Art. 76). If surprise is a gateway to wonder, wonder should be a conduit to knowledge, an experience to be surpassed.

In one of the earliest aesthetic interpretations of Descartes’s system, Charles Le Brun, found er of the Académie Royale de la Peinture et de la Sculpture, lectured on the artistic representation of emotion at the Académie in Paris in 1668.¹⁸ Posthumously published in 1698, the lecture was translated and published as A Method to Learn to Design the Passions in 1734; and it exerted an influence on English writers and artists including Jonathan Richardson, William Hogarth, Aaron Hill, and Joshua Reynolds.¹⁹ Building on Descartes’s observations on the causes of the passions, Le Brun focuses on their visible effects, or “expressions”; these he illustrates with an extensive gallery of iconic faces. In his terminology, expression is an activity of both faces and the artists who represent them: as an attribute of physiognomy, it is “what stamps the true characters of everything” and “intimates the emotions of the soul”; and as a product of art, it is “a lively and natural resemblance of the things we are to represent” (12). Following Descartes, Le Brun posits admiration at the head of what he calls the “simple passions”; it is “the chief and most temperate of all the Passions,” whose main facial sign is a simple elevation of the eyebrows. Le Brun goes on to offer a more elaborate physical account of the paralysis suggested by his predecessor’s trope of the statue. It is

a surprize, which enclines the Soul attentively to consider the objects that ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. From Aristotle to Emotion Theory
• 2. Being and Feeling
• 3. The Accidental Doctor
• 4. The Purification of Surprise in Pamela
• 5. Fielding’s Statues of Surprize
• 6. Northanger Abbey and Gothic Perception
• 7. Wordsworthian Shocks, Gentle and Otherwise
• 8. “Fine Suddenness”
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index