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Word, Subject, Nature : Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth 3-^ord Ü>ubject J ^ a t u r e Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Culture Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego Katowice 1996 ord Jg>ubject ature Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Culture Prace Naukowe Uniwersytetu Śląskiego w Katowicach nr 1557 Iffiord Ümbject Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Culture Edited by Tadeusz Rachwał and Tadeusz Sławek Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego Katowice 1996 Editor of the Series History of Foreign Literatures Aleksander Abłamowicz Reviewer Andrzej Kopcewicz Publication subsidised by the Polish Committee of Scientific Research (grant No. 1 PI 03 003 05) Wydanie publikacji dofinansowane przez Komitet Badań Naukowych (grant nr 1 PI 03 003 05) Contents Preface .......... 7 Svenil Erik Larsen Stories of Nature: The Urban Subject between Word and Nature . 11 Francis Ronnau-Bradbeer “Philosophy Directs the Ruling Helm”: Landscape and Political Power in Eighteenth-Century England . .25 Tadeusz Rachwal Liberty and the Art of Walking . .36 David Jarrett Prisons and Pleasure Parks in the Work of James Thomson and Ann Radcliffe ......... 44 Tadeusz Sławek The Spirit of Luxury: Shenstone, Delille, and the Garden Theory . 56 Agnieszka Pantuchowicz The Polish Sappho: Reflections on Elżbieta Druzbacka’s A Description of Four Seasons ......... 70 Marek Wilczyński Spiders, Silkworms, and Ants: Literary Entomology from Edwards to Thoreau .......... 76 Ewa Borkowska Deus sive Natura: The Ethics of Belief . .86 Liliana Barakońska The Dark Room of the Baroque . .94 Piotr Wilczek Word of God and the Problem of Authority in Seventeenth-Century Polish Religious Disputes ....... 101 Claire Hobhs Hobbes and the Body Politic . .106 Martin Conboy Compacts, the Public Sphere and the Subject of Journalism . .116 Andrzej Wicher Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Magic Thinking ......... 128 Debra Bronstein Chevalier D’Eon and the Problem of Wo/manhood . 141 Maciej Nowak Enlightened Stratagems in Tristram Shandy . .153 Madeleine Descargues The Conduct of Spontaneity: Function and Fiction of the Epistolary Form .......... 163 Małgorzata Nitka On Postal Revolutions . .174 Leszek Drong I Read Therefore I Am: Formation of the Autobiographical Subject in Rousseau’s Confessions ....... 181 Aleksander Nawarecki Urtica . • • • • • .189 Streszczenie .......... 206 Resume .......... 208 '■Prefaceш The essays presented in this collection focus on the problems of nature, human self, and their representations in literature and philosophy of the seventeenth and eigh­ teenth-century Europe. As Svend Eric Larsen puts it succinctly at the beginning of his paper, they are “stories of nature [which] always deal with the interplay between the same basic elements: word, nature and subject”. What remains to be done is to map the territories of this interplay and thus obtain a certain coherent vision of reality but, having said this, we immediately realize that both concepts (“reality” and “vi­ sion”) are neither unproblematic nor clearly separated from each other. Many essays therefore approach, in a more or less direct manner, this nodal point of anxiety and uncertainty which is located at the junction of “reality” and “vision”. A philosophi­ cal background behind these works has been largely constituted by a recognition of the fact that one has neither a binding theory of reality nor a decisive theory of vision and, when trying to conceive such theories (or are they mere “descriptions” of “re­ ality” and “vision”?) we inevitably have to move among certain metaphors (some­ times they are as unusual tropes as that of insects and spiders or nettle as Marek Wilczyński and Aleksander Nawarecki respectively show in their papers). Thus, although on the hand one can pursue with Francis Ronnau-Bradbeer the develop­ ment of the eighteenth-century ownership system in its growing nervousness and brutality concerning securing one’s property against potential tresspassers and offen­ ders, on the other hand, one has to simultaneously note with the same author that it is accompanied, if indeed not countered, by the insistent emphasis on the percep­ tion of land as a sphere of harmonious relationships and thus of moral edification. Definitely one cannot pass the word “perception” in silence. As Ron- nau-Bradbeer puts it: “I am interested in tracing the very complex path that has brought us to this perception [emphasis added] of the countryside as a morally qualifying location . .” It is precisely such a path which has been taken by many authors in the volume, the path which weaves its way not only through the Eng- 8 Tadeusz Rachwał and Tadeusz Stawek lish and French eighteenth-century gardens (like Shenstone’s Leasowes, or Delille’s Jardins) but, in order to do so, it must lead us into a narrow passage between reality and vision where questions about both notions are being asked. One could begin with Wittgenstein and his hesitation as to the question of “reality”: “Reality is not a property still missing in what is expected and which accedes to it when one’s expectations come about - Nor is reality like the day­ light that things need to acquire colour, when they are already there, as it were colourless, in the dark.”1 What is at stake is the visibility of the world, a hypo­ thesis that world’s reality depends on the eye and its look not for the very fact that the look takes place, not because the eye merely sees, but because it never sees innocently, and its look always constructs a world on the foundation of the construction of a vision itself. Since there is no “chaos” of the eye, the world must be visible and describable in its outlines, and thus the look always belongs to the domain of art. This is one of the central recognitions of the eighteenth century to which one must add a conviction that the art of the eye consists in such a perception of reality which allows for its placement in between nature and cul­ ture. The eye traces the artless art of - in Pope’s words - “nature methodized”, and - paradoxically - the secret of world’s visibility relies on the eye being able to descreetly see what cannot be seen and what should not be viewed openly - “night, confusion, and absolute chaos”. Hence as Tadeusz Rachwał points out “The art of designing is a secretive activity which must not be seen by others”, since as Shenstone maintains: “Art should never be allowed to set a foot in the province of nature, otherwise than clandestinely and by night. Whenever she is allowed to appear here, and men begin to compromise the difference — Night, gothicism, confusion and absolute chaos are come again.” The visibility of the world may be suspened in this sphere, but it is precisely this region upon which the efficien­ cy of our look is founded. Thus, in a footnote to Wittgenstein’s remark we could claim that our response to “reality” depends upon a degree to which we can think world’s visibility as founded upon the invisible, nature upon art, property upon disappropriation. Thus in the eighteenth-century English garden the eye is an instrument less of geometry and more of art: it incises and marks the smooth and clean surface of objects thus instituting world’s visibility as a certain script. What is visible is what we read as a writing of our eye upon the page of the world (Liliana Barakońska studies the metaphor of writing and seeing in the seventeenth-century work of Burton and Bright and the thought of the Baroque). Reality is where our eye is active, where it constructs and not merely records. In another note Wittgen­ stein more dramatically formulates a similar claim: “We do not see the human eye as a receiver, it appears not to let anything in, but to send something out. The ear receives; the eye looks. One can terrify with one’s eyes, not with one’s ear or nose.”2 1 L. Wittgenstein, Zettel, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), p. 13e. 2 Ibid., p. 40e. Such an understanding of visibility locates many essays in the sphere of cul­ tural geography whose practicioners “interpret landscape not as a material con­ sequence of interactions between a society and an environment . but rather as a gaze which itself helps to make sense of the particular relationship between society and land. They have stressed the importance of the look to the idea of landscape and have argued that landscape is a way of seeing which we learn . ”3 But if one wants to approach the question of a “visual ideology”, of a con­ structing, although, at he same time, mystifying, eye, then necessarily one will have to deal with a question of the self which constitutes the immediate context for the seeing eye. The metamorphosis of the self starts with the construction of the bourgeois rationalist subject praised, as Martin Conboy demonstrates, by Daniel Defoe, the subject which was soon to be modified by the civil subject (a subject as citizen and not merely a merchant) who is trying to find for himself/herself not only an appropriate place in the emerging political order but also to develop his/ her own speaking modes (a development of journalism). The public, social, and economic spheres must somehow be related and made compatible with the indi­ vidual and his/her structures and dilemmas not only of desires and passions but also, as Debra Bronstein points out, of gender. Andrzej Wicher shows that a reconciliation of amour propre and the public good has constituted an important aspect of Adam Smith’s philosophy, whereas simultaneously there were two other important processes which perforated and helped to deconstruct the solidity of the rationalist self. One was a growing insistence on the significance of reading as a self-forming activity (Leszek Drong traces it in Rousseau’s Confessions)-, the other an emerging category of intimacy and discreet communication which, on the one hand, potentially threatened the lucidity and transparency of the public sphere and, on the other hand, formed a new literary genre - the epistolary novel (both aspects are approached by Małgorzata Nitka and Madeleine Descargues).
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