MDDM: melancholy, Mason, Lolita

Tue Oct 1 21:15:37 CDT 2002

Yes, you've managed to make connections that
illuminate rather than fog, unlike Mr T and now
"cathyramirez69". Thanks, Dave.  

What strikes me as I've been reading Burton off and on
these past many months is the way his subject always
manages to ooze out of his grasp, amoeba-like, the
more he tries to hem it in with citations and
authorities -- he just can't seem to get to the end of
it -- like trying to love the People in GR, or watch
the map grow to match the territory in M&D -- or like
that story I heard from an old guy, used to go
downtown and watch the bottles thread through the
capper at the brewery, no way to keep up -- so he
makes the most of digression, tangents, the accretion
of detail and repetition.  

Burton offers another take on the great shift in
sensibility that M&D explores:

"The impetus toward a scientific prose derived
ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the towering
intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical
system well in advance of his generation and beyond
his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of
Learning (1605) and the Novum Organum (1620) Bacon
visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally
and comprehensively ordered so that each discipline
might benefit from the discoveries of the others. The
two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight
that there could be progress in learning, that the
limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed
forward, and his inductive method, by which scientific
principles were to be established by experimentation,
beginning at particulars and working toward
generalities, instead of working backward from
preconceived systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at
a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics
and into the domain of mechanically operating second
causes (though he held that the perfection of the
machine itself testified to God's glory). The
implications for prose are contained in his statement
in the Advancement that the preoccupation with words
instead of matter was the first “distemper” of
learning; his own prose, however, was far from plain.
The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is
underpinned by a tactful but firmly persuasive
rhetoric; and the famous Essayes (1597; enlarged 1612,
1625) are shifting and elusive, teasing the reader
toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications. 

"The Essayes are masterworks in the new Stuart genre
of the prose of leisure, the reflectively aphoristic
prose piece in imitation of the Essais of Montaigne.
Lesser collections were published by Sir William
Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben
Jonson (his posthumous Timber; or, Discoveries). A
related genre was the “character,” a brief, witty
description of a social or moral type, imitated from
Theophrastus, and practiced first by Joseph Hall (
Characters of Vertues and Vices, 1608) and later by
Sir Thomas Overbury, John Webster, and Thomas Dekker.
The best characters are John Earle's
(Micro-cosmographie, 1628). Character-writing led
naturally into the writing of biography; the chief
practitioners of this genre were Thomas Fuller, who
included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642;
includes The Profane State), and Izaak Walton, the
biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard
Hooker. Walton's hagiographies are entertaining, but
he manipulated the facts shamelessly; his biographies
seem lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville's
tragical and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major
historical work of the period was Sir Walter Raleigh's
unfinished History of the World (1614), with its
rolling periods and sombre skepticism, written from
the Tower during his disgrace. Raleigh's providential
framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and
Milton; King James found it “too saucy in censuring
princes.” Bacon's History of the Raigne of King Henry
the Seventh (1622) belongs to a more secular,
Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its
lessons in pragmatism.

Prose styles 

The essayists and character writers initiated a
reaction against the orotund flow of serious
Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as
metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or Senecan, but these
terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation
of a clipped, aphoristic prose style, curt to the
point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness,
asymmetry, and open-endedness. The age's professional
stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of
Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne the clipped style is
used to crumble the preacher's exegesis into tiny,
hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated
restlessness. An extreme example of the loose style is
Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a
massive encyclopaedia of learning, pseudoscience, and
anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton's compendiousness, his
fascination with excess, necessitated a style that was
infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas
Urquhart, whose translation of Gargantua and
Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even Rabelais. In the
Religio Medici (1635), The Garden of Cyrus, and
Hydriotaphia, Urne-buriall, or A discourse of the
Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk (1658) of
Sir Thomas Browne the loose style serves a mind
delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
content with uncertainty because of its intuitive
faith in ultimate assurance. Browne's majestic prose
invests his confession of his belief and his
antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an almost
Byzantine richness and melancholy. 

These were all learned styles, Latinate and
sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of the
first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by
interest in the Thirty Years' War, heralded the great
17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership,
a change effected by the explosion of popular
journalism that accompanied the political confusion of
the 1640s. The search for new kinds of political order
and authority generated an answering chaos of styles,
as voices were heard that had hitherto been denied
access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Thomas Hobbes and the
republican James Harrington were advanced within the
traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate,
but they spoke in competition with vulgar writers who
deliberately breached the literary canons of good
taste—Levellers, such as John Lilburne and Richard
Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner;
Diggers, like Gerrard Winstanley with his call for a
general Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose
language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples
were Milton's tracts against the bishops (1641–42),
which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous
abuse and withering sarcasm. Milton's later pamphlets,
on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica,
1644) and in defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of
Kings and Magistrates, 1649), adopt a loosely
Ciceronian sonorousness, but their language is plain
and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
To cite this page:
"English literature" Encyclopædia Britannica
<http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=108552>
[Accessed October 2, 2002]. 

Burton on the cusp of  "the great 17th-century shift
from an elite to a mass readership" with journalists
in the spearhead, yes I like the sound of that.
Pynchon, with is feet in so many camps would seem a
fit heir...

--- Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Burton to Nabokov to Pynchon, per(tinker to evers
> to)chance?  At any rate, an inroad ...
>
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=60002&sort=date
> 
> And see as well ...
> 
>
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0201&msg=64289&sort=date
> 
>
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0107&msg=57609&sort=date
> 
> --- Doug Millison <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > cathyramirez69 at yahoo.com:
> > 
> > You've yet to make the case that Burton's
> treatment
> > of melancholy has anything to do with Lolita, or
> how
> > reading Burton into Nabokov might be relevant to a
> > discussion of Mason & Dixon ...

=====
<http://www.dougday.blogspot.com/>
<http://www.online-journalist.com/index.html>

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