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Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve, and Gerard Passanante, The Lucretian Renaissance
by Christopher Burlinson

Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began. London: Bodley Head, 2011. 368 pp. ISBN: 978-0224078788. £20 hardback. [American edition, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: Norton, 2011.]

Passannante, Gerard. The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 264 pp. ISBN: 978-0226648491. $45 hardback.

Everything depends on the swerve. In a passage in the second book of his De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things], the Roman poet Lucretius describes the movement of atoms, the infinitesimal particles that comprise all things of body and matter, as they fall through the universe. Nothing corporeal, Lucretius writes, can ever move upwards by its own force: everything, left to its own devices, follows a path downwards through space. And yet, as the atoms travel through the void, they occasionally, and at times and places that are impossible to predict, deviate from their downward paths—the very slightest of movements, but one responsible for the being of everything that exists, because if atoms did not swerve, if they were to fall straight down and ever onwards in parallel lines like raindrops, then they would never collide, and nothing would be created. Lucretius’s atomic swerve (his verb at this point in the poem is declinare; he later describes the action as a clinamen) is more than just a physical principle; as he goes on to explain, it tells us why things happen at all, and how they are made to happen. The chance deflection of atoms actually acts as a metonym for free will, as well as its cause, explaining why the world is governed not by chains of pre-destinated causality, but by the wills of living creatures. The clinamen wrests will from destiny, Lucretius writes, and allows human beings to go where their desire takes them.

It is for some of these reasons that the swerve is also an important figure in two recent books about Lucretius and the Renaissance: Gerard Passannante’s The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition and Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began (the recipient of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction, as well as a National Book Award for Non-fiction and the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize). Passannante and Greenblatt are interested not just in the early modern reception (and, as Greenblatt sees it, the discovery, or even the unleashing) of Lucretius, but in the causal mechanics of literary reception: how were classical texts taken up into the early modern textual and philosophical traditions, how did they influence and find their way into the writings of early modern authors, and how did they make those people think about influence itself?

Passannante and Greenblatt’s respective answers to these questions are quite different and satisfactory to very different degrees. Greenblatt’s swerve comes out of the blue, and with it the Renaissance itself comes into being. The story of The Swerve is that of Poggio Bracciolini (in Greenblatt’s words, the “book hunter”), who in 1417 made a chance discovery, in a German monastic library, of a manuscript, among other “ghosts . . . from the Roman past” (48), of De Rerum Natura, a poem which had remained, if not exactly undiscovered, then at least dormant and largely unread for a thousand years.

In fact, Greenblatt has two stories to tell about this moment of discovery. One of them is about a set of philosophical principles—in fact, evidently something more elemental and energetic than that—which he wants to claim were released into the world, creating it afresh, when De Rerum Natura was re-discovered. In short, Greenblatt wants to see the early modern (effectively, the modern) opened up through this recovery of Lucretius, and what he discovers in De Rerum Natura is summed up in Chapter 8 of The Swerve, and set out in a sequence of bold bullet points. Greenblatt’s Lucretianism is not only an atomistic philosophy but an atheistic one (“The universe has no creator or designer” [187]), a philosophy of liberty (“The swerve is the source of free will” [189]) and of ingenuity (“Nature ceaselessly experiments” [189]); it decenters human beings within the universe that surrounds them (“The universe was not created for or about humans” [190]) but also frees them from religious superstition (“Religions are invariably cruel” [194]) and launches them into a world in which pleasure, artistic and erotic, has value of its own (“The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain” [195]).

This account of the beginning of the Renaissance has a joyful confidence, but it is deficient in a number of ways, not just methodological but actually factual. Greenblatt relies not only on an extremely simplistic and unreflective model of historical periodization and change, but on a description of those historical periods—medieval and early modern—which is less a simplification than a caricature, and on occasions a falsification. In particular, and as a number of critical commentators have already pointed out, it relies on a view of the Middle Ages as a world of unenlightened intellectual darkness, of religious superstition, of writers and scribes with little critical engagement with the texts that they found themselves copying, a world in which “to be interested in books was already an oddity” (17), in which personal identity could be imagined only within crushing social hierarchies, where “[w]hat mattered was what you belonged to or even whom you belonged to” (15), a world of self-abasement, mortification and (in contrast to the pleasure embodied by Lucretius) a world invested in self-inflicted pain—and one thing to be said for The Swerve is the length at which Greenblatt describes medieval practices and doctrines of self-flagellation. In short, Greenblatt constructs a medieval world that would struggle to accommodate Dante or Aquinas, for instance, let alone Chaucer. The Swerve brims with local color (about the Papacy, about life in monastic scriptoria, and so on); in fact it wears that color on its confidently modern sleeve, but reduces it again and again to a one-sided account of “the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body” (9-10) and which were ecstatically thrown off in the fifteenth century as Lucretius was released into the world.

In a 2010 article entitled “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto,” predating The Swerve, but anticipating many of its arguments, Kellie Robertson points out that “to a fifteenth-century audience, Lucretius would not have been a wholly alien entity: the atomism that he embraced would have been known through Maimonides, through William of Coches, through Macrobius and other encyclopedists, and, indeed, perhaps most famously, through Aristotle’s refutation of the earlier atomic writings of Democritus and Leucippus” (109). Robertson sees in contemporary critical narratives of early modern Lucretian atomism and materialism “another version of new historicist descriptions of early modern subjectivity that were written largely out of a repression of the medieval,” and impresses upon us that seeing “the early modern revival of atomism and the subsequent development of mechanist ideas about the material world in terms of evolution rather than revolution, should, in turn, allow for the production of a more nuanced definition of materialism” (109-110).

It is, unfortunately, this nuanced sense of the historicity of materialism, and of the gradual complexity of historical change, that is sacrificed by The Swerve, but there are other casualties as well, not least in Greenblatt’s insistent implication that (early) modernity be equated with secular, or at least agnostic, materialism—John Milton, for instance, would have struggled to recognize Greenblatt’s rejoicing in a world in which angels and demons were no longer worried over. Greenblatt’s account grants little space to theology as anything other than the domain of superstition. More subtle accounts than his will trace the ways in which writers like Milton and Thomas Traherne attempted to accommodate Lucretian atomism, along with the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century, into a theological cosmography. As an account of a disagreement between Isaac Newton and Richard Bentley recorded in Passannante’s epilogue shows, the atheistic implications of Lucretius were not only recognized but worried over and contested, both philosophically and philologically, for at least 250 years after Poggio’s textual discovery. Greenblatt’s account, though, excludes all of this contention. It flattens the Renaissance, no less than it flattens the medieval. What’s more, and equally disappointing for a book about textual transmission, it has very little to tell us about the dynamics of textual inheritance and influence itself. “[T]hese subversive, Lucretian thoughts,” Greenblatt writes, “percolated and surfaced wherever the Renaissance imagination was at its most alive and intense” (220). Lucretius becomes a liberating social energy circulating through the Renaissance; the Lucretian swerve is not just Poggio’s initial discovery, but the creative deviations that took place whenever those energies resurfaced.

In comparison with Passannante’s excellent, thoughtful, playful The Lucretian Renaissance, the bland reductiveness of Greenblatt’s thinking about inheritance, as well as the blunt deficiencies of his historical periodization, are all the more clear. Unlike Greenblatt, Passannante not only provides a complex and nuanced account of the effect of Lucretian reception on early modern writing and thought, but uses Lucretius’s atomism (including the clinamen) as a way of articulating the many early modern concerns and ambiguities surrounding classical inheritance. In spite of the title of Greenblatt’s book, it is Passannante for whom the swerve has a critical and imaginative force. The Lucretian Renaissance, in fact, re-imagines tradition itself in terms informed by Lucretius. Its first chapter tracks a chain of inheritances through Petrarch, Macrobius, Virgil, and Lucretius, seeing Lucretius as “creatively interrupt[ing] the familiar terms of the conversation about influence” (31). Lucretius’s writing about the Athenian plague, for instance, provided a way for post-Lucretian writers to imagine a kind of literary influence “that [was] invisible and seemingly everywhere” (34), which worked, like Lucretius’s atoms, invisibly but inevitably, and to which a writer might think of himself as worryingly vulnerable. Passannante explores a network of correspondences between Lucretian philosophy (and the absence of divine order in his universe, so worrying to many of his commentators and imitators), the various receptions of De Rerum Natura that tried to restore such an order to that universe, and the concerns that those authors came to articulate about literary inheritance. What did it mean to imitate, or to repeat the words of a classical poet? How could an earlier author have influence over a later? How could the intentions of that earlier author be driven off-course in the process of imitation? “How one interpreted the nature of Lucretius’s influence in Virgil,” Passannante writes, was to many of these writers “closely connected to how one viewed the structure of the universe itself and the tone of [the Georgics] as a whole” (52).

Passannante goes on to further explore this connection between the workings of a Lucretian, atomistic universe and the textual debates of the Renaissance. In his second chapter he turns his attention to the discipline of philology, both contemporary and early modern, in light of Lucretius’s own assertion that letters (endlessly configurable as the smallest particles of words) could be seen as atoms, and the fearful Lucretian void that lay behind every attempt to establish philological certainty—a discipline caught between “acknowledg[ing] the forces of chaos looming behind every conjectural emendation and claim to certainty,” and trusting in the “necessary relativity and contingency of all rational endeavor” (119). How, he goes on, could a later reader take on the afflatus of a writer such as Lucretius, who taught “that the soul was mortal?” (87). The following chapter looks at the encounter, in Francis Bacon’s writings, between a view of Homer’s writings as unchanged and unchangeable, and the scattered presence within Bacon’s own texts of Lucretius; the Lucretian universe forces Bacon to rethink his ideal of textual fixity. And the final chapter looks at three sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers—Edmund Spenser, Pierre Gassendi and Henry More—who imagined their own poetic inheritances in terms of the Lucretian atoms that “flit and fly.” Passannante’s book provides a materialist history of literary inheritance, imitation, and philology, a study of the ways in which early modern debates about texts were informed by a changed understanding, a newly Lucretian picture of the materiality of the universe. “The history of philology,” he writes in his second chapter, became, at that point in the history of classical reception, “entangled with the poetry of materialism” (81).

The Swerve, albeit in a different way, also provides a materialist history of reading and textual recovery; if the first of Greenblatt’s two stories about Poggio’s discovery is a rather misjudged and one-sided narrative of historical change and invigoration by the unleashed forces of Lucretian desire, the second story is a much more engaging account of the materials, and materiality, of writing, reading, and—in particular—textual scholarship. These, I think, are the terms on which Greenblatt’s book can best be appreciated. His engagement with textual materialism is more narrative (and perhaps therefore more circumstantial) than Passannante’s, but nevertheless readable and compelling. His Poggio has “an archaeologist’s sense” of the textual and material past (157), retrieving scrolls and books that were at the mercy of material decay and disintegration. Greenblatt insists that we see Poggio’s scholarship and book-hunting, and the transcriptions of the scribes in the books that he read and copied, as physically laborious and technically dexterous. His relation of the later retrieval of partially-burnt scrolls at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum is a moving account not only of the material fragility of books, but also of the excitement and the precision of good textual scholarship, as well as the physical damage that can be done to early documents by ham-fisted attempts to excavate and recover them.

The Swerve begins, in fact, with an anecdote that accounts for the history of textual scholarship in a way that draws playfully on the Lucretian universe and even on the swerve of the atom. Once upon a time, Greenblatt writes, rooting through a bargain bin in a Yale bookshop during his student days, he happened to come across a translation of Lucretius. “I was struck by an extremely odd paperback cover, a detail from a painting by the surrealist Max Ernst. Under a crescent moon, high above the earth, two pairs of legs . . . were engaged in what appeared to be an act of celestial coition . . . I bought it, I confess, as much for the cover as for the classical account of the material universe” (1). One aspect of this self-deprecating anecdote is clearly an attempt on Greenblatt’s part to portray himself as already in those days a Lucretian, his young undergraduate mind already opened (and perhaps a little blinded) by desire and pleasure. But in the tension between material circumstance and destiny (as the book finds its way into Greenblatt’s hands, swerves, we might want to say, and thereby enables him, in 2011, to articulate what really lay behind the Renaissance), in its attempt to locate meaning in a chance textual discovery, it, like Passannante, brings together the poetry of materialism and the material history of reading.

Christopher Burlinson

Jesus College, Cambridge

Work Cited

Robertson, Kellie. “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto.” Exemplaria 22 (2010): 99–118.

42.2.17

Cite as:

Christopher Burlinson, "Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve, and Gerard Passanante, The Lucretian Renaissance," Spenser Review 42.2.17 (Winter 2013). Accessed March 29th, 2024.
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