Fetzer, Margret. John Donne’s Performances: Sermons, Poems, Letters, and Devotions. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. [Distributed in the United States by Palgrave Macmillan.] 317 pp. ISBN 978-0719083440. $90.00 cloth.
Drawing upon the Speech Act theory developed in the 1960s by J. L. Austin and John Searle, Margret Fetzer offers a remarkably fresh way of reading Donne’s canon that builds upon traditional fascination with the dramatic qualities of Donne’s voice while providing the most comprehensive context currently available for understanding the relation between speaker and interlocutor in Donne’s texts, as well as that between the writer and his readers. Fetzer’s single greatest strength is her ability to move with ease from what she terms “Pulpit Performances” (sermons) to “Promethean and Protean Performances” (selected love poems, satires, obsequies, and epicedes), “Passionate Performances” (“poems erotic and divine”), “Patronage Performances” (prose letters) and, finally, “(Inter)Personal Performances” (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions)—in that same unusual order—in the process revealing a consistent yet hitherto little-discussed dynamic that informs his canon. The weakness of Fetzer’s book lies in the tentativeness of her conclusions. For this revised dissertation does not demonstrate a very authoritative writing style and too often pulls the rhetorical punch on the verge of delivering its most valuable insights, leaving the reader to tease out the implications of the observations.
“Recognition of the performative power of all language” is “at the core of Donne’s writings” (7). In addition, Fetzer argues, Donne’s engagement with the performative power of language was genre-specific. Such an approach frees her from the strictures of chronology and allows her to make illuminating juxtapositions (as in the complimentary chapters on how Donne fashions himself similarly in the prose letters and the Devotions). Chapter One considers the ways in which Donne’s sermons seek to perform the conversion of his congregation. As other scholars have noted, the sermons manifest a close relationship with theatrical performance that seeks to provide an audience with a cathartic experience. But, Fetzer demonstrates additionally, Donne’s sermons betray “an awareness of both the potential and the risk inherent in theatre and theatricality” (55), most particularly that “the utterance of confession, vehemently recommended to all listeners, not only says but does something, even if it effects the very opposite of what it says” (58). Fetzer’s reading of two of Donne’s sermons on the conversion of St. Paul is particularly astute in its demonstration of the method by which the congregation is encouraged to “respond to the preacher in the same way as Saul did to Christ” (73).
Chapter Two—which I found in one way the most inviting of Fetzer’s chapters but in another the most frustrating—treats a number of poems in passing, but “Satyres I and IV,” “The Canonization,” “Obsequies to the Lord Harrington,” and “The Curse” in great detail, while demonstrating that the “Promethean self” who speaks the poetic world into existence possesses a protean identity that shifts shape and takes on new roles in the course of a poem. Fetzer’s concern with the ambivalent relationship between the “true” self and the performed self in these lyrics is engaging, but her off-putting tendency to take up various critical discourses as she needs them (such as the language pertaining to Speech Act theory, role-playing, or theatricality), only to drop them after just a page or two, is most on display in this chapter.
Chapter Three focuses on the excess that characterizes Donne’s impassioned performances in his “religiously erotic poetry and his erotically religious verse.” “Donne’s erotic and devotional speakers are passionate in the double sense of the word: they are assertive, forceful and determined—and most so when it comes to insisting upon their humility, dejection and suffering. They are object [sic] of the pain they undergo, but also subjects in that they perform that pain in poetry” (150). But, she posits, Donne’s erotic and religious poetry operate in different “communicative situations” (167), the erotic poems nominally addressed to a woman but performed for a male coterie audience, while the divine poems are addressed to the self but—in A. J. Nuttall’s telling phrase—designed to be “overheard by God.” In the Holy Sonnets,
because the speaker’s self is both speaker and audience, the poems become the stage where it performs and watches itself perform simultaneously. The meditating self remains its own theatre. It cannot be one persona with his addressee and a different persona with his audience, as is possible in the erotic poems (178).
Fetzer’s analysis in Chapter Four of the ways in which the writer of Donne’s prose epistles fashions a persona who is humble, supposedly undeserving of the reader’s notice, yet (he paradoxically hopes) deserving of material consideration—and in which the writer is identified with his own text—proves the most provocative portion of her book. “Donne’s letters strive to make the most of their own potential for having material effects and are thus illustrative of a performative concept of language that considers words as deeds” (199). Thus, his letters to his noble-born addressees prove, not idle compliments to potential patrons, but the genuine attempt to form a circle of religious communion in which the soul is found to inhere in the material form of the letter. Although Fetzer does not invoke the notion of “grace,” she demonstrates that Donne’s prose epistles engage in a system of mutual obligations initiated and extended by the favor implored and/or bestowed by the acts of writing and replying. The self that is performed in Donne’s prose epistles proves one of the most engaging in his canon.
Chapter Five makes a neat segue from the prose letters to the Devotions by proposing that the dynamic by which the speaker progresses from communication to communion in the former informs the latter as well:
[T]he Devotions tend to privilege communion, a becoming as one, over ‘mere’ communication. The speaker is quite aware that he will have to await his death in order to experience ultimate communion with the Lord and that any acts of communion effected in this life are but vicarious. Yet a development from communication towards communion is built into the structure of each individual devotion as it consists of the three parts of meditation, expostulation, and prayer. (232)
Fetzer makes in passing a number of perceptive comments regarding the parallels between these two portions of Donne’s canon, but seems at times to lose sight of the central issue of performativity.
Fetzer’s analyses would be strengthened in general, I think, by greater attention to the nature of the implied resistance offered by an interlocutor to the speaker’s performance. As Fetzer notes, “most the time, Donne’s speakers put considerable trust in the powers of performance—but hesitation, doubt, sometimes even panic as to its efficaciousness, surface on a regular basis, and at such moments a notion of inwardness as opposed to external manifestation … betrays itself” (10). While Fetzer notes that “Donne’s texts present us with the here and now of a speaker whose self is performed and evolves as we are reading” (16), she fails to consider the extent to which that evolution (the “shape shifting” that she analyzes in Chapter Two) occurs as a result of the speaker’s desire to provoke the interlocutor to act in a specific way on the speaker’s behalf—that is, to grant him grace, whether sexual, social or spiritual. For example, Fetzer recognizes that, in the sermons, the preacher “acknowledges that all his efforts may be in vain as he is powerless against the potential reluctance and aggression of his listeners as any mediator or ambassador in the service of a higher power” (74). But speaking from a pulpit elevated above the heads of his auditory, the preacher is physically suspended between heaven and earth; in similar fashion he concludes each sermon on a suspended note as he waits to see if the conversion will take effect—if, in fact, his performance will have made something happen.
Similarly, in her discussion of the Holy Sonnets Fetzer observes that “deliberate calculation, which encourages a speaker to act in a certain way in order to trigger the desired reaction, is highly problematic when the addressee is God: he will neither be tricked nor taken in as easily as the various mistresses for whom Donne’s erotic speakers perform” (159). Fetzer seems to assume that performance is a form of dishonesty (she later equates performance with “pretence” in a pejorative way [179])—that Donne’s speakers attempt to pull a fast one on God or the desired woman—whereas any accomplished actor understands the extent to which the deepest truths can be communicated through stage illusion. Rather than tricking or slyly “trigger[ing] the desired reaction” in the woman or God, the speakers may just as fairly be seen to be earnestly attempting to engage the sympathetic attention of disinterested or, even, antagonistic interlocutors.
Thus, while I agree with many of Fetzer’s readings of Donne’s texts, I think that they finally fail to account for the general hopefulness of Donne’s speakers. Those speakers may be uncertain whether they can perform their own salvation by engaging the more powerful interlocutor to act on their behalf, but they are always willing to make as ardent an attempt as possible. I find moving and heroic some of the same speakers that she seems to find duplicitous.
The reader may quibble with other, far less important aspects of Fetzer’s book. For example, her argument would be strengthened by an overview of the relation of speech acts to performance, ritual, and self-fashioning inasmuch as Fetzer uses one term or the other as suits her immediate purpose without attempting to articulate the overriding system that subsumes them all; too often as a reader I felt that Fetzer was losing sight of the forest as she concentrated on individual trees. And biblical David did not have Uriah murdered “in order to be able to marry his widow” (52) but in order to escape exposure as an adulterer. But such quibbles shrink in the light of Fetzer’s demonstration that (in Dryden’s words) Donne’s canon is “all, all of a piece throughout” and his “chase” consistently had “a beast in view”—or at least a single underlying dynamic.
Raymond-Jean Frontain
University of Central Arkansas
43.3.65
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