Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics. By Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld. Fordham UP, 2018. 312 pp. ISBN: 9780823277926. $35.00. Paperback.
Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld’s monograph is an exploration of the poetic misalignment between words and things, or what the author names the indecorous. This thoughtful study examines the kind of thinking that renders the ‘belabored ornament’ (2) and proposes a poetics of conspicuous artistry that shows how ‘figures of speech draw implausibly artificial relations among things’, while ‘those relations also distinguish imaginary worlds and their alternative constructions of possibility’ (93). Rosenfeld’s discussion aptly begins with Edmund Spenser and the ‘spectacle of care’ rendered at the close of Muiopotmos, in which she argues that such an image functions both to represent and demonstrate the value of poetic craft. Spenser’s epyllion is indecorous, Rosenfeld asserts, in its exploitation of the ambiguity inherent in self-referential artifice. The author’s argument builds in part on Ben Jonson’s definition of Poesy set forth in Timber: Or, Discoveries (1640), wherein Poesy functions as an intermediary between the maker and the thing made. Indeed, the labor of Poesy is the principal concern of this book, as the author discusses how certain practices of poiēsis frame the very conditions of possibility afforded by the fictional world of the poem. The figure of speech is the instrument of the indecorous because its conspicuous role as a formula for composition exposes its own materiality. Rosenfeld’s opening gestures – to Spenser, to literary and rhetorical theory and to the kinds of thinking that inform poetic design – mark this book as one of keen interest to scholars of early modern poetics. Moreover, the book’s focus on key texts from Spenser, Philip Sidney and Mary Wroth, assure that Spenserians and Sidneians in particular will find much of interest here.
The book unfolds in two parts, each containing three chapters. The first explores the historical convergence of rhetoric, dialectic, poetics and pedagogy, considering figures of speech in terms of their influence on reading and writing practices in early modern England. Here, Rosenfeld treats in turn the histories of Ramist reform, the humanist schoolroom and early modern poetics. She develops the concept of the indecorous by moving from a model of thinking that asserts the preeminence of the canon of elocutio, to the translation of that model into habits of reading and writing, to the subsequent poetic products of that model. Accordingly, the book’s second part offers a practical application of the theory set forth in the first, and therein the author focuses on a single figure of speech (simile, antithesis and periphrasis, respectively) in three early modern romances: Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Sidney’s Arcadia and Wroth’s Urania. Rosenfeld’s inquiry is a fine accompaniment to recent studies in vernacular rhetoric and poetics by Carla Mazzio, Jenny Mann and Sean Keilin, and the author’s analyses show a marked engagement with several influential essays from the anthology Renaissance Figures of Speech, edited by Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber (2007). Rosenfeld’s notion of the productive materiality of language is indebted to Judith Anderson’s Words That Matter, her account of stylistic world-making via rhetoric, aesthetics and poiēsis owes much to Ayesha Ramachandran’s The Worldmakers: Global Imaginings in Early Modern Europe, and her reading of Spenser’s use of simile builds on Susanne Wofford’s significant study of figuration in The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic.
The first chapter scrutinises the theoretical division between inventio and elocutio in Ramist pedagogy. Rosenfeld’s intricate mapping of the pedagogical reforms of Peter Remus and his English proponents pays special attention to key figures associated with the Sidney circle, namely Abraham Fraunce and Gabriel Harvey, and their response to Sidney’s Defence of Poesy. At stake in these accounts is the question of whether or not figures of speech were instrumental or ornamental to the production of knowledge. In their argument that disciplined thinking belonged exclusively to inventio, Ramists relegated figures to the service of elocutio; thus, the signature tropes and figures of elocutio became frequently aligned with the crafting of beauty, as they were thought to enact a sort of superficial flourish. This chapter features an intriguing example of Ramist ideas regarding poetic meter in Abraham Fraunce’s reading of an interestingly atypical stanza from Book 2 of The Faerie Queene in which Spenser uses the figure of epanodos.
Rosenfeld’s second chapter considers how early modern schoolroom practices of analysis subvert Ramist hierarchy by teaching students to manipulate the figures of elocutio before introducing them to the concepts of inventio. In the humanist classroom, students learned what Rosenfeld refers to as ‘finger pointing’, defined as ‘when one person takes up a poem made by another person and points at its artifice, as if with his finger’ (48). This account of the recognition and naming of figures of speech by early modern readers illustrates how figures became formulas for composition in humanist pedagogy, and hence generative mechanisms for poetic production. Furthermore, the author suggests, these practices expose the cultivation of pleasure in that they engender an ‘activation of the pleasure that a maker might take in his own poetic productions’ (14). Rosenfeld demonstrates her argument via a reading of ‘figure pointing’ in Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia in which Dorus’s song to Pamela’s empty glove ‘conflates the form of the glove with a conspicuous figure of speech and creates an indecorous lyric’ (71). A key highlight of this chapter are images of early modern marginalia in a 1598 edition of Sidney’s revised Arcadia, containing manuscript notations of tropes and figures, ranging from epanodos to prosopopoeia to antimetabole, scrawled in the margins.
Chapter three explores how conspicuous artifice assigns value to things within their fictional spheres by contriving unique hierarchies of evaluation that subvert the concept of decorum. At stake is the notion of decorum as a harmonious, proportionate ideal. Rosenfeld explains that indecorous thinking is not a distortion of form per se, but a poetics that prioritises ‘the member over the corpus, the part over the whole’ (75). This chapter’s argument begins with the suggestion that a misalignment between words and things can function as an act of evaluation, then explains how figures can acts as tools for the production of value, and finally argues that as figures of speech assign value, they act as generative mechanisms for imaginative world-making. Rosenfeld’s example in Wroth’s Urania provides an analysis of Antissia’s epithets and maintains that the conspicuousness of Antissia’s language exposes the central logic of her fictional world, where ‘epithets in the superlative degree mark out the evaluative extremities of the romance’s system of virtues’, (89) and her world is one in which ‘indecorous style is the worthiest style’ (77).
The book’s fourth chapter explores Spenser’s use of a particular simile formula in The Faerie Queene: ‘such as might best be’. In this finely nuanced reading, Rosenfeld unpacks simile’s relation to time in Spenser’s narrative. She argues that if metaphor presumes the ‘act of translation’ in its traversing of conceptual borders, simile’s syntax (its of use of ‘like’ or ‘as’) reveals the method of that translation and compels the reader to repeat the act that metaphor presumes. In this way, the reader is forced to rehearse the act of poiesis and prolong, as Rosenfeld explains, ‘the time it takes for us to get from “this” to “that”’(97). The author’s argument builds on the premise that in the Letter to Raleigh Spenser depicts his literary purview as a mediation between ‘what should be’ and what ‘was’; in this vein, The Faerie Queene proposes an ‘ensample’ of ‘such as best might be’ via the simile’s negotiation between opposing temporal assertions – its representation of an idealised sphere guided by abstraction, and its organisation of the historical and factual. In Spenser’s formulation, Rosenfeld argues, the simile is an instrument for the creation of ‘such as might best be’, but Spenser’s conspicuous use of it exploits the instability of its syntax; hence, it both generates further delay and interferes with meaning, and engenders the ‘digressive narrative threads characteristic of romance’ (which in turn initiate subsequent similes) (100).
Chapter five explores Sidney’s use of antithesis in the revised Arcadia. Here, Rosenfeld asserts, the self-referential prominence of figure stabilises the bounds of Sidney’s imaginative world by making the set of contraries that underlie its organisation both evident and perpetual. At the forefront of this chapter is the author’s reading of the problematic ending of the revised Arcadia. Rosenfeld contends that the never-ending battle between Zelmane and Anaxius is determined by a series of antitheses that allow for utter transparency between their two opposing minds. The coexistence of opposites that underlies the figure of antithesis comprises, for Sidney, a fundamental principle in the fictional realm of the Arcadia; hence, if Zelmane and Anaxius are perfect contraries, the defeat of one by the other would is an impossibility that would, Rosenfeld argues, ‘entail something like the apocalypse’ (122). Furthermore, this coexistence of contraries is authorised by the natural world that the text is understood to portray, and that coexistence held in the conspicuousness of the figure of antithesis manifests the principle of its organisation. In other words, the continuity of the character’s (and the fictional world’s) existence is assured by Sidney’s artifice. This is a fitting formulation for the circumstances of the revised Arcadia for, as Rosenfeld remarks, Sidney’s ‘narrative incompletion becomes not the sign that a work has been abandoned by its maker but proof of that maker’s existence, even at the moment this maker disappears from history’ (139).
The contention of chapter six is that periphrasis provides the organisational logic in Wroth’s Urania by allowing a speaking character to possess what is unnamed. As a device that offers many words in place of one word it does not speak, periphrasis is indecorous in its demonstration of the disconnect between the thing named and the thing itself. Rosenfeld explains that through the act of withholding a word via the performance of many other words, periphrasis offers a logic of possession that grants the observer ownership of precisely that which is deferred. Rosenfeld attends to a curious phenomenon in Wroth’s Urania: the frequent withholding of names. Wroth’s characters often whisper them, refuse to say them, or circle around them. The author’s argument builds on discussions of periphrases in classical and early modern rhetoric to establish its appeal to Wroth. Building on Quintilian’s notion of the ‘decorative effect’ of periphrasis, Rosenfeld notes that whereas the figure enables the avoidance of certain words, that word is made more conspicuous by its being withheld, and as such its materiality is emphasised and that ‘decorative effect’ allows the speaker to lay claim to it. In its emphasis on abstraction and absence, periphrasis fashions Wroth’s Urania into what Rosenfeld terms a ‘space of obscure ornamentation’ that permits Wroth to render the very fictionality of its own imaginative sphere – in other words, ‘what will never be’ (147).
The Coda turns to a reading of figures in Jonson’s play Every Man Out, and begins by attributing the play’s odd structure to what Katherine Eisman Maus’s analogous formulation has termed the ‘law of the conservation of forms’. Rosenfeld contends that Jonson ‘satirize[s] Elizabethan eloquence’ by confining his use of figures of speech to well-known figures that his characters repeatedly emphasise (167). At the same time, the very conspicuousness of these figures inevitably subverts Jonson’s parody by revealing their generative, world-making capacity. While it appears the author’s intent is a sort of meta-reflection on conspicuous figures overall, the Coda is a rather abrupt generic departure from the nuanced readings of Renaissance romance that comprise the first six chapters.
Nevertheless, there is much to admire in this first monograph. The author’s notion of the generative potential of figures of speech is remarkably insightful, and it adds heft to the somewhat esoteric notion of the ‘kinds of thinking’ that inform poetic composition. The function of figures as formulae for composition, demonstrated in the second chapter as ‘finger-pointing’, is particularly compelling, as are the facsimile examples of this practice manifest in the margins of a 1598 edition of Sidney’s revised Arcadia. Furthermore, Rosenfeld’s reading of how similes both enable narrative delay and function to engender the digressive threads of romance (which are themselves generative), is especially useful for reading Spenser, and the view that the generative capacity of periphrasis (in generating many words to replace one) adds value to the word that is not mentioned is a clever treatment of the phenomenon of name deferral in the Urania. While at times there is a sense that the book’s argument is trying to do too much at once, that is likely due to the fact that unpacking how one ‘distinguish[es] imaginary worlds and their alternative constructions of possibility’ is an ambitious endeavour. That said, Rosenfeld’s elegant prose and astute critical acumen make this book a pleasure to read, and her theory of the indecorous is as useful as it is fascinating. Overall, this thought-provoking study is a fine addition to the existing canon of theory in vernacular rhetoric and poetics, and an intriguing foray into what drives the self-referentiality of literary artifice during the early modern period.
Melissa J. Rack
The University of South Carolina, Salkehatchie
49.3.16
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The figure of speech is the instrument of the indecorous because its conspicuous role as a formula for composition exposes its own materiality.
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