©2011 Melanie Denise Holm ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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©2011 Melanie Denise Holm ALL RIGHTS RESERVED USEFUL FICTIONS AND NECESSARY IDOLS: THE COMEDY OF ENLIGHTENMENT UNDERSTANDING by MELANIE D. HOLM A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Comparative Literature written under the direction of Professor Michael McKeon and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2011 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Useful Fictions and Necessary Idols: The Comedy of Enlightenment Understanding By MELANIE D. HOLM Dissertation Director: Professor Michael McKeon Charging the Enlightenment with naivety for its advancement of human understanding has become a critical commonplace. Yet, in truth, Enlightenment thinkers were their own first critics where understanding is concerned. Eighteenth-century debates raised profound misgivings about the limits of human understanding, including concerns about the integrity of individual judgment and the credibility of knowledge gained by the senses. In my dissertation, I argue that four authors—Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and George Gordon, Lord Byron—employ laughter to resolve anxieties surrounding human understanding. Directing their comic critique at what Fielding describes as “not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species,” these authors depart from traditional forms of ridicule that polemically ostracize particular individuals or beliefs. Instead, they ridicule the flawed nature of all human understanding by exposing the comic results of rating human understanding as an absolute authority or an agent of truth. Laughter at collective foolishness introduces reflexivity in readers that redirects them from the proud error of wanting to know what is true to the social pursuit of living well. These authors reconcile living well with a limited human understanding by ii reconceiving the nature of “fiction” as not falsehood or lie absolutely opposed to “truth,” but as a fruitful mode for achieving collective commitment to practical conventions on the grounds not of ontological rectitude but of increased sociability. I designate these conventions as “useful fictions” and “necessary idols” to emphasize the collaboration of aesthetic invention and practical reason, and remark on “the Comedy of Enlightenment Understanding” to denote the mode of ridicule these authors apply as a specifically literary continuation of the Enlightenment project of disenchantment that disenchants human understanding itself through the critical and clarifying pleasures of laughter. iii Acknowledgements Jonathan Swift rightly acknowledged that “Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly,” yet it has been my great happiness to be continually surrounded by men and women who have graciously laughed me out of my most ridiculous conceits, comical postures, and profound follies. For their generosity and good humor I am deeply thankful. And while it would be a fool’s errand to catalog all who have gifted me with their smiles and laughter over the course of this project, there are those whose care, attention, and commitment should not pass without especial notice. Neither this project, nor its author, could have advanced to their current state without the candor, compassion, and intellectual labor of Prof. Michael McKeon, my advisor and dissertation director: he has been a continual source of intellectual and emotional support, guidance, and the necessary humility for beginning to ask serious questions. There are neither words nor thanks enough. My committee members at Rutgers, Professor Lynn Festa and Lorraine Piroux, have spent countless hours reading, re-reading, and, ruthlessly interrogating the propositions I laid before them. They were not thankless hours, and I am especially grateful for the intensity and seriousness of their inquiry. Yet Professors Festa and Piroux have also gifted me with exceptional examples of how to navigate the academy as a female scholar with both grace and dignity. This perhaps unintentional influence has nevertheless been strongly felt, and my thanks in this under-recognized mode of academic development also justly extends to Professors Carolyn Williams, Anne Coiro, Stacy Klein, Mary Fuller, Diana Henderson, Kristin Girtin, Colleen Rosenfeld, and, though it should go with out saying, my great friend, Kathryn Kaminsky. Officially iv serving in the capacity of my outside reader, Professor James Chandler has been a benevolent source of support and reassurance throughout my graduate career, beginning with the initial assessment that I indeed had the “stuff” to endure graduate school. My confidence in his confidence saw me through many a difficult stretch. In this respect, I am also greatly indebted to the assurances given to me throughout my years in graduate school from my two friends and great mentors, Professor Noel Jackson and Jonathan Sacks, and my colleagues at Rutgers University, especially Michael Masiello and Steven Syrek. My debts to Mr Syrek exceed this one area, but he knows what they are and knows that they can never be repaid. I also owe great thanks to two professors and now, I am happy to say, friends, from my undergraduate experience at MIT: Professor Shankar Raman and Professor Stephen Tapscott. Professor Raman encouragement, though not always gentle, has always been effective, and I am grateful for his continued commitment to getting me to the business of getting to down to business. I don’t know where I would be without Professor Tapscott. I don’t want to know. But I am glad I here and not there. And finally, I thank my father, Col. Peter Holm, M.D., USAF, whose overwhelming generous, sometimes skeptical, but always affectionate and unconditional support has made this scholarly effort, and indeed, everything else. Thanks, Dad. The Program in Comparative Literature and the Graduate School of Rutgers University have given me a good intellectual home for the past years and I am grateful for the opportunities and institutional support of the university. I also thank the University of Constance, The Huntington Library, The Mellon Foundation, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for their support. An earlier version of v chapter two has appeared in print as “‘O Vanity!’ Fielding’s Other Antisocial Affectation,” in Philological Quarterly, volume 89, pages 263-281. All glory, goodness, and merit in the work that follows is the result of those great minds and generous souls mentioned above and those whom I have witlessly omitted; all shame and error, including those of omission here, are undoubtedly and solely my own. vi Table of Contents Abstract ii-iii Acknowlegements iv-vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: ‘Order from Chaos Sprung’: Jonathan Swift’s Argument for 18 Affectation Chapter 2: ‘With Chearfulness and Good-Humour’: Henry Fielding’s 77 Prudent Fictions Chapter 3: The Importance of Being Misunderstood: The Role of 129 Laughter in Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Chapter 4: Byron’s ‘Strange Animal’ and the Problem of Narrative 169 Desire 228 Bibliography vii 1 Introduction George Gordon, Lord Byron, the last of the four authors considered in this study, advises his readers “to begin with the beginning” and “then proceed”—although he admits that “this clause is hard.” To assist the reader as he or she proceeds forward through this study and encourage the “Chearfulness and Good-Humour” that Henry Fielding advances, I hope that it will be useful to begin by examining some of literary, historical, and epistemological influences that gave it shape and helped this author draw together her questions about the unreliability of interpretation, the desire for sociability, and the status of fiction in the British long eighteenth century and beyond. As the title of my work, Useful Fictions and Necessary Idols: The Comedy of Enlightenment Understanding suggests, among the most important of these influences is Francis Bacon, whose The Novum Organon summarized a constellation of anxieties and concerns regarding traditional intellectual authorities, methods, and beliefs within the early modern period that he collected under the term “idola”—“illusions” or “idols”: The illusions [idola] and false notions which have got a hold on men’s intellects in the past are now profoundly rooted in them, not only block their minds so that it is difficult for truth to gain access, but even when access has been granted and allowed, they will once again, in the very renewal of the sciences, offer resistance and do mischief unless men are forewarned and arm themselves against them as much as possible.1 The threat that Bacon’s idols pose is that “illusions and false notions” will influence how man, “Nature’s agent and interpreter,” interprets nature, and, in turn, limit his power over it. He promotes his method of induction as a tool for investigation with which men may “arm themselves against” the idols. I take Bacon’s conceit of the idol as a crucial, 1 Francis Bacon, The New Organon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 40. Furhter citations will appear parenthentically in the text as NO followed by page number. 2 however symbolic, moment because it diminishes the qualities of human interpretation not directly invested in the pursuit of knowledge to foolish superstition or useless excess. Bacon’s de-idolized vision of