The Age of Minerva, Volume 1: Counter-Rational Reason in the Eighteenth Century--Goya and the Paradigm of Unreason in Western Europe [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512803327

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
FIGURES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Overture to Discontinuity
1. The Minervan Hypothesis
2. The Bats of Minerva
3. The Lapsed Enlightener
4. Rational Unreason
5. The Lexicon of Unreason
6. The Nonrational Thought Process
7. Visionary Reason
8. Polymorphosis of Reason
9. Preternatural Science
Transition: The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

THE

AGE O F M I N E R V A VOLUME 1

Counter-Rational Reason in the Eighteenth Century

THE

AGE OF MINERVA VOLUME 1

Counter-Rational Reason in the Eighteenth Century GOYA A N D T H E PARADIGM OF IN WESTERN

UNREASON

EUROPE

PAUL ILIE

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 1995 by the University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of American Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ilie, Paul, 1932The age of Minerva / Paul Ilie. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: v. 1. Counter-rational reason in the eighteenth century — v. 2. Cognitive discontinuities in eighteenth-century thought. ISBN 0-8122-3307-7 (v. ι : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8122-3308-5 (v. 2 : alk. paper) i. Europe—Intellectual life—18th century. 2. Philosophy, Modern—18th century. I. Title. B802.I36 1995 ΐ9θ'·9'θ33—dc20 95-38671 CIP Frontispiece. Francisco de Goya. Portrait of Jovellanos. 1798. Courtesy of the Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Tomywife, M A R I E - L A U R E , . . . for bringing me to this vast quarry.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

xi xiii

Overture to Discontinuity

ι

The Vanished Minerva The Elements of Unreason A Minervan Discontinuity

3 π 18

Chapter One. The Minervan Hypothesis

24

The Partitioned Shield Minerva's Iconological Ambiguity A Civic Iconography of Minerva The Inscription in Capricho 43 The Minervan Temple in Spain

28 36 41 45 48

Chapter Two. The Bats of Minerva

57

The Hybrid Identity of Reason The Paradigm of Unreason The Metamorphic Language of Reason

58 65 73

Chapter Three. The Lapsed Enlightener

78

The Identities of Reason Rational Excess and National Decline Satirical Ambiguity The Epistemology of Madness Irrational Cognition

80 84 90 97 102

viii

Contents

Chapter Four. Rational Unreason

108

Goya's Sterile Desk The Rhenes of Reason A Dictionary of Bizarre Reason Imagination Under Delirium

no 116 122 130

Chapter Five. The Lexicon of Unreason

137

The Semantic Field of "Chimera" Irrational Sign-Making in Shaftesbury Voltaire's Irrationalist Vocabulary Caprice and the Bizarre The Grotesque and the Dehumanized Dream Vocabulary in Voltaire

138 145 154 159 166 173

Chapter Six. The Nonrational Thought Process

178

Quixotic Discourse Moods of Unreason Microstructure Representation Quixoticism as Trope Polyvalence Conclusion

180 184 187 192 198 203 209

Chapter Seven. Visionary Reason

213

Icons of Unreason The Rational Imagination The Millennial Dream Nocturne of the Rational Soul

216 222 227 241

Chapter Eight. Polymorphosis of Reason

253

Feline Emblematics Reason De-rationalized Sublime Reason The Teratogenesis of Rational Values Zoomorphic Liberty

256 261 269 275 285

Contents

ix

Chapter Nine. Preternatural Science

292

Approaches to the Occult Supernatural Intelligence The Eccentric Substrate in Biological Science Occultism and the Pseudo-Sciences Supernaturalism and Preternaturalism Superstition Viewed by the Church Iconography of Superstition

294 297 304 315 323 328 333

Transition: The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

339

Spiritism and Spiritualism Rational Occultism Kant and Swedenborg Interim Conclusion

340 346 356 367

Bibliography

377

Primary Sources Secondary Sources

377 384

Name Index Subject Index

405

395

Figures

Frontispiece. Goya, Portrait ofjovellanos Figure i. Goya, Capricho 43, "El suefio de la razon produce monstruos" (The Sleep/Dream of Reason Produces Monsters)

5

Figure 2. Goya, Sepia Two, "Idioma Universal" (Universal Language)

7

Figure 3. Gravelot, Raison (Reason), Iconoloßie, vol. 4, p. 49

26

Figure 4. Boudard, Raison (Reason), Iconoloßie

27

Figure 5. Boudard, Subtilite de genie (Subtlety of Genius), Iconobgie

28

Figure 6. Boudard, Eloquence (Eloquence), Iconoloßie

29

Figure 7. Boudard, Gouvernement (Government), Iconoloßie

30

Figure 8. Goya, Portrait ofjovellanos, detail of Minerva

34

Figure 9· Goya, Sepia One, "Suefio" (Dream)

hi

Figure 10. Goya, Capricho 43, detail of felines

254

Acknowledgments

During my early ventures into wider eighteenth-century studies, the encouragement of John Pappas, Lester Crocker, and Theodore Besterman sustained me in important ways. My memory of their reception remains vivid. I also feel a long-standing debt of gratitude to Paul Korshin, John Polt, and Russell Sebold, who have been faithful advisers and supporters from the very beginning. In French studies, I have been privileged to know and rely on Gita May, Jack Undank, and Aram Vartanian, the latter two consenting to comment on my drafts whenever I turned to them. In English literature, Howard Weinbrot responded quickly and incisively to my call, as did Virginia Dawson and Stuart Peterfreund in the history of science and Isaac Kramnick in social science. Bernadette Fort, Lionel Gossman, Georges May, and Carol Blum have also been attentive cosmopolitans. Finally, I am honored by the reading given to the second volume by John Yolton, the eminent authority on psychological philosophy. Neither he nor the aforementioned scholars are responsible for the shortcomings of this study. My warmest thanks go to Manuela Mena for her special efforts at the Museo del Prado, and to the staff at the Bibliotheque Nationale. Very generous funding for this publication was obtained from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, and from the University of Southern California.

Wisdom is conceived in the brain of the master of gods under the name of Minerva. The soul of man is a divine fire that Minerva shows to Prometheus, who uses this divine fire to animate man. It is impossible not to recognize in these fables a live painting of nature as a whole. —Voltaire, "Fables," Philosophical Dictionary

Overture to Discontinuity

. . . abstract reasoners seem hitherto to have enjoyed only a momentary reputation, from the caprice or ignorance of their own age, but have not been able to support their renown with more equitable posterity. It is easy for a profound philosopher to commit a mistake in his subtile reasonings—and one mistake is the necessary parent of another. . . . But a philosopher who purposes only to represent the common sense of mankind in more beautiful and more engaging colors, if by accident he falls into error, goes no farther; but, renewing his appeal to common sense and the natural sentiments of mind, returns to the right path and secures himself from any dangerous illusions. —Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding

The focus o f this study has undergone several transformations as new issues arose that required further research. My belief was, and still is, that the eighteenth century was not very different from our own age in one important respect. Its fundamental project of rational knowledge suffered from fragmentations and irrationalities comparable to those that mark the twentieth century. I found it remarkable that scholars had taken frequent but only passing notice of the idea o f discontinuity in the eighteenth century. Their work highlighted the positive growth and continuities o f the Enlightenment as it concerned the arts and sciences. I was struck instead by several contradictory images and paradigms that I intended to study and name collectively the "faces" or "masks" of Reason, "counter-rational Reason," or simply "Unreason" defined partly as the neglected underside o f Reason. The Enlightenment represents the morning clarity o f today's modern age, but the same Enlightenment once witnessed a morning o f its own. My question was whether thereafter its afternoon was sun-filled, with occasional cloudbursts, or whether, as in our own age, the entire century experienced as much disruptive darkness as light. I noticed certain themes and models that configured the eighteenth century as a discontinuous pattern o f advancing shadows and deflected sunrays rather than the steadily advancing stream o f light that other scholars saw. But my perception was too intuitive to solidify such a point of departure.

2

Overture to Discontinuity

As I read beyond the familiar fields of Spanish and French literature, the need for a West European framework of discussion altered that initial focus. The framework magnified the customary labor required for documenting studies confined to national boundaries. My ideal reading audience now consisted of specialists in unrelated subjects: literature (French, Spanish, English), art history, philosophy, the history of biology—scholars who I hoped would charitably receive the incursions into their fields of specialization for the sake of a general thesis that would mark their common interest. As a comparatist, I realized that such readers would need reassurance about documentation for an interdisciplinary study of the discontinuities of Reason. This led me to imagine their objections and to preempt them as I wrote by incorporating new sources of evidence that in turn altered the point of departure. Furthermore, the initial focus depended on my interest in the painter Francisco Jose de Goya and, through him, the elusive subject of irrationality. The irrational supposes a concept of rationality and therefore some description of what "normative" Reason meant in the eighteenth century. Much has been written on this subject that is assumed for this study.1 As for a definition of Reason, let it suffice at this point to repeat what Charles Frankel calls the "faith of Reason" as evinced by such philosophes as Condillac, d'Alembert, Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau, among others. Reason instrumentalizes "the progress of the human mind in obedience to the laws of nature." Reason is the intellectual method that recognizes "the continuity of natural events" even when poorly understood (emphasis added). Because of Reason's "ability to abstract the essential" from a varied reality, its function is social and historical as well as scientific; it rests upon "the natural, reasonable order of the development of ideas out of sensations." But the definition of Reason "as a set of unassailable metaphysical truths" is tempered by doubt that experience can be completely systematized by the analytic method and by incorporation of "a concern to extricate the underlying unity from the variety of details" (emphasis added; Faith ofReason, 155, 95, 101, 154, 99, 72). The multifaceted nature of Reason becomes clear in the present volume by the negative example of its excesses and its

i. See Charles Frankel, The Faith of Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 19+8), and Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Vintage Books, 1968). The standard definitions of Reason in the present volume have their most pertinent context in the section on "Reason De-rationalized" in Chapter 8. See also Chapter 1, note 10; Chapter 3, note 6; Chapter 7, note 2; and Chapter 8, note 20.

Overture to Discontinuity

3

masks. This study also suggests that Reason, like beauty and justice, was a golden speck in the eye of the beholder, serving all parties for all ends. As for my interest in Goya, the chief issue was less Reason's elusive center and more, like ripples spreading from their unruffled source, the disturbing manifestations of a generating rational impetus. Through Goya the idea of fragmentation, of general discontinuity, and of Unreason itself came to be personified paradoxically in my mind by the figure of Minerva, the goddess of Wisdom. Not much is said about Minerva in current eighteenth-century studies, yet she is an unobtrusive presence in the visual arts of France and Spain. The more I noticed the varied representations of her powers and presiding offices, the greater seemed the likelihood of exposing the discrepancy between these symbolic roles and their actual execution in Spain and elsewhere. The Minerva treated by Goya seemed to be symptomatic of his century's failure to reach its ideal of continuity, the ideal that would achieve an integrated linkage among the branches of knowledge and their linguistic signs, and overcome the dichotomy of mind and body. This symbolism was lost upon a body of scholarship otherwise well versed in documenting the nature and applications of eighteenthcentury Reason. When I decided to pursue the idea of a lost or a vanished Minerva whose rational unity had broken down, thereby mirroring the discontinuous faces of Reason, the hypothesis seemed to me overstated, but it became substantiated as my study progressed.

The Vanished Minerva While looking for information about dreams in eighteenth-century Western Europe, I came upon a metaphor in Marcello Malpighi's discourse on anatomy. He calls the human head "the temple or palace of Minerva, goddess of the sciences."2 This type of allusion to classical mythology is not unusual for a late-seventeenth-century scientist. But Malpighi goes further. He calls the brain's medulla a "labyrinth." This close juxtaposition of "temple" and "labyrinth" is a contradiction in spatial imagery as well as overly metaphorical for an anatomy book. The labyrinth summons the image of Ariadne's thread, which Theseus used to find his way out of the Minotaur's labyrinth. Both contexts—that of the anatomist and that of Theseus—deal with the problem of acquiring knowledge. The 2. Marcello Malpighi, Discours anatomique sur la structure des visceres, sfavoir du foye, du cerveau, etc. (Paris: d'Houry, 1683), 83.

4

Overture to Discontinuity

words "thread" and "fiber" were routinely employed in eighteenth-century treatises on psychology and physiology, a chief source of material about dreams. By a curious fusion, the thread of Ariadne came to be the spider's thread in the esoterica of the Enlightenment.3 Minerva, of course, did not spin the disconnected threads of dreams, but she was the supreme weaver. And as the jealous guardian of her knowledge, she did create a nightmare for the ambitious Arachne. By changing this mortal spinster into a spider, Minerva punished her monstrously for aspiring to the perfect mastery of her distaff science.4 My interest in dreams had stemmed from a peculiar disappearance of Minerva in Goya's most famous etching, Capricho 43 (Fig. ι). I say "disappearance" because the goddess does appear in Goya's portrait of the Spanish philosopher Jovellanos (see Frontispiece).5 In the latter she rises as a mysterious green statuette on the enlightener's desk, looking down on the head of the seated subject. In Capricho 43 the goddess is gone, symbolically represented instead by several owls. The Enlightener sits in a position that is nearly a mirror-opposite of that in the portrait of Jovellanos. And, instead of meditating with open eyes, he appears to be sleeping or, more likely, dreaming. The scene also shows a desk bearing the inscription "The Sleep/ Dream of Reason Produces Monsters" (El sueno de la razon produce monstruos). These words make the etching a narrative text as well as a picture, and it was the text rather than the icons that first motivated my research. The dream process has engaged few specialists of pre-Romantic thought, yet in Goya's time dreaming seemed to have implications for more than the psychology of madness or the history of art. Dreams, obviously charged with both emotions and visual images, functioned mostly as a literary convention in Spain and France. Nevertheless, it also seemed intuitively true that dreams could be regarded as a language that abolishes the barriers of verbal languages, as a "universal" language. Such a language had been 3. See Jacques Van Lennep, Alchimie (Bruxelles: Credit Communal, 1985), 166. 4. The conflict between Minerva and Arachne is the subject of Velazquez's painting The Spinners (Prado 1173), which Goya must have known. The scene includes a tapestry of the contest in the background, described by Diego Angulo Ifiiguez, "Las Hilanderas," Archivo Espanol tie Arte 21 (1948): 1-19; and "Las Hilanderas: sobre la iconografia de Aracne," Archivo Espanol de Arte 25 (1952) : 67-84. 5. This famous portrait of Jovellanos in the Prado is dated 1798. An earlier one of 178485, in the Vails y Taberner Collection, Barcelona, is cherished by some Jovellanos scholars. See Pierre Gassier and Juliet Wilson, The Life and Complete Work of Francisco Goya, 2nd English ed. (New York: Harrison House, 1981), fig. 217; and Jose Gudiol, Goya (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 1971), 2: fig. 268. On the 1798 portrait see John Dowling, "The Crisis of the Spanish Enlightenment: Capricho 43 and Goya's Second Portrait of Jovellanos," Eighteenth Century Studies 18 (1985): 331-59.

Figure ι. Francisco de Goya. Capricho 43. "El suefio de la razon produce monstruos" ("The Sleep/Dream of Reason Produces Monsters"). 1798-99. Courtesy of The Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena, California.

6

Overture to Discontinuity

an ideal at least from the time of Leibniz to the Enlightenment. In fact, Goya gave an early version of Capricho 43 the title "Universal Language" (Idioma universal) (Fig. 2). Goya's scene, despite its two titles, was an enigma each time I viewed it afresh. I saw a man slumped over his desk, eyes closed. I saw a large cat at his feet staring blankly into space. I saw a flutter of fierce owls around his head and shoulders. And above these figures I saw a bat hovering in a vaguely sinister way. The order in which I viewed these elements varied. Sometimes the bat caught my noticefirst,sometimes the man, but it might also be an owl or the inscription. Because I could not settle on one centering point of view, I concluded that I did not understand the work. I dramatize this outcome by inviting the reader to recreate the conditions that gave my research impetus. Look at Capricho 43 and notice where your eye tends to settle. Then, as you grasp the entire scene in relation to your focal sector, imagine yourself returning a year later for another look, and for a fresh look still later. Let your eye move randomly over this most complex of Goya's etchings. Where does the glance rest most frequently? Notice the connections made from one glance to the next. Can you say with certainty that the shifting attention weaves logical threads? Or does the eye jump and produce discontinuities in meaning that defy the rational order—the order sought by the eighteenth century in its stratum known as the Enlightenment? The conventional metaphor of threads woven systematically into an orderly fabric is one organizing principle of this book. While discontinuous fibers might describe Goya's dream, the metaphor also supports the idea of a vanished Minerva. She is the perfect weaver of tapestries and thus an excellent emblem for the uninterrupted thread of wisdom pursued by artists, philosophers, and scientists. True, this pursuit is perversely depicted in Capricho 43 by disconnected and even monstrous elements. But this negation may suggest an arcane statement about the eighteenth-century epigones of Minerva's rival Arachne, all aspiring in vain to the highest realms of achievement. Minerva's absence in Capricho 43 remains puzzling. The eye is drawn repeatedly, if not always immediately, to the sleeping man. The defenseless heap slumps over his desk while a half-arc of energetic owls presses around his head and shoulders. Is he a sleeper or a dreamer? Flanking his left is an impassive feline. Behind him, a catlike face peers blankly. Two bats swoop diagonally from above, and so does another, but in the upper background vaguer creatures are winging off in an unresolved trail.

Figure 2. Francisco de Goya. Sepia Two. "Idioma Universal" ("Universal Language"). 1797. Courtesy of the Museo del Prado, Madrid.

8

Overture to Discontinuity

Given the ambiguities of scene and text, most art historians and literary critics will have differing notions of how to approach Goya's iconology. As a literary critic by training, I should like to propose that the text in the lower foreground be given an interim privilege over iconographical context. Here bulges a plain desk, barely carpentered, more a crate than a desk. Its slablike front inscribes a starkly intelligible message, but one that escapes precision after a second and third reading: "The Sleep/Dream of Reason Produces Monsters." Is there a necessary link between the words and the visual anecdote? The word "produces" in this context connotes a psychological process that engenders monsters, an inference that requires a detour into eighteenthcentury writings on the brain and nervous system. The word "produces" also announces causality. To infer causes from supposed effects meant confronting yet another specialized field, philosophy—as much a detour from literary criticism as was art history. Nevertheless, philosophical skeptics in Goya's time certainly viewed Capricho 43. What might a disciple of David Hume have experienced in 1799 while observing the pictorial elements? The Humean would first note the living forms and perhaps infer from the dreaming man a minimal cause-effect relation, but he would probably not discern any continuity among the forms that could be reasoned from effect to cause. No natural or taxonomical process could relate bats to cats, or cats to owls, at least not in this uncannily tranquil menagerie. As for the visual anecdote and its inscribed legend, the Humean would find a still greater discontinuity. Words are words, alien to the category of pictures. This, I felt, would justify the exegetical inclinations of a literary critic. A semantic bridge between verbal sign and icon might exist and should be sought, a bridge that would have to be crossed by imagination rather than logic. Yet an irrational leap would be unfaithful to Hume's reasoned understanding—or would it? Perhaps his writings paid greater tribute to the imagination than his empirical interpreters allowed. Other contemporary viewers of Capricho 43 also came to mind. A natural philosopher would be struck by the felines, the owls, and the bats. How might an illustrator execute drawings for the naturalist Buffon? Some naturalists of the day might have found links among these creatures if they had held evolutionist ideas. If they discerned evolutionary links, they would spread a taxonomical net around the names of those creatures. But the continuity would break down before that net reached the human sleeper. The naturalist who followed Buffon or Maupertuis would extend new threads in order to connect the disparate creatures. Others, like Bonnet, would

Overture to Discontinuity

9

conceive of a staircase with actual steps occupied by each organic being. And who was to say that Diderot, an admirer of Hume, could not provide the adequate metaphor for this enigma of connectedness through his fantasy of a universal "spider-brain"? In any event, a problem of language and classification—of representing reality—was evident. A close study of Capricho 43 might unsettle complacent notions of identity and difference, but if my inquiry pursued these paths there would be philosophical as well as biological trespassing. Initially, then, I thought only to explicate the remaining words in Goya's inscription. Yet even if "produces" could be nicely explicated, the word "monsters" played an equivocal role. It seemed to lean toward the taxonomical problem. How do we classify an owl that is changing into a bat? The question raises deeper questions. Where does normalcy end and aberration begin? What mysteries of transformation and generation do these creatures shroud? The fact is that the eighteenth-century idea of monstrosity sprawls across several specialized fields of research. There were even social and moral dimensions that required historiographical expertise before any profitable interpretations could be ventured. The monsters could be Spanish Inquisitors, French Revolutionaries, corrupt public officials, or, finally, perpetrators of evil in diverse forms. The preceding examples suggest how procedural hesitancies mushroomed in the focusing of this work. A black-and-white etching about a dream became a self-expanding object of inquiry. My imagined readership grew accordingly, falling into partitioned interest groups as if to match my theme of eighteenth-century discontinuity. I have mentioned topics as disparate as textile metaphors and British skepticism, natural science and French literature, cognitive theory and Spanish social history. The obsessions of Capricho 43 demanded a comparably close scrutiny. I could not meet those demands by writing a monograph on dreams. It was equally infeasible to deal with the work exclusively as art. As a result, my roll call of investigative fields increased in the same measure that new sources needed to be incorporated, and that new visual materials needed to be photographed. This volume is the outcome. It is the first of a trilogy about aberrant Reason and the cognitive fault lines that expose the discontinuities underlying empirical reality, fault lines that are embedded in the discourses of literature, art, social analysis, biology, and philosophy. As a result of the far-ranging evidence of disharmony, one topic led to another. A piece of evidence required a second, and then a third, with credit due to scholarly

ίο

Overture to Discontinuity

predecessors. Each documented category of the trilogy had a branching context that originated from an earlier context and reached into yet another one. The charm of the situation was that a common West European matrix sustained all the roots. The despair of it was that only a Minerva could weave a tapestry that might depict the continuity within the disparity. Minervan skill is unerring because it knows where to begin as well as where next to join edges. Any claim to explicate Goya's Capricho 43 must offer an account of dream psychology at some point, but this lateral path would itself branch into a forest of variant terminologies—"impressions," "ideas," "perceptions," "sensations," "soul," "spirit," "sensorium"—having inconsistent usages at the time. Discussion of dreams is therefore deferred to the third and final volume. Conversely, no new account of sensationalist psychology can dispense with the physiological evidence. Here the sifting of evidence faced an obstacle in the competing models of sensory transmission—whether by fluids or by vibrations. This problem will receive attention in the second volume. The remaining problem was that of contextualizing Goya's vision, and this became the immediate task: to establish the pervasion of counter-rational discourse and its relation to Unreason. This will entail citing comprehensive thinkers like Voltaire and Diderot alongside a host of secondary authors whose musings on language, dreaming, blindness, and irrational thought processes have not been examined before under a single conceptual lens. I treat these authors in the present volume and the next respectively. The Minerva discussed in this volume is independent of the Neoplatonist Minerva to be discussed in Volume 3. These versions are also linked, however. My thesis is that the "counter-rational Reason" described in this volume, and the discontinuities of scientific discourse described in the next, are resolved by the Neoplatonist Minerva. Her "universal" dream language is what Goya intuits in response to the fragmentation of knowledge in the Enlightenment. The metaphor for my study is therefore not a Minervan ensemble spun into a single thread. Rather, the appropriate metaphor is a thread separated into strands that further unravel into fibers and slender filaments, similar to the present volume. It is a vision of discontinuity that mirrors Capricho 43. Consequently, although the documentary network may appear discontinuous, it does represent an entirety in the same way that the discontinuities in Capricho 43 also constitute a whole vision. I illustrate this with evidence carded from the cultural web that is Spain, France, and Great Britain. It would be pleasant if the logic of that evidence fulfilled the uni-

Overture to Discontinuity

π

fied ideal of Enlightenment knowledge, but if unified knowledge is personified by Minerva, then she alone is capable of weaving it. The human achievement falls short of that standard.

The Elements of Unreason As in physics, so too in the human sciences: a unified field theory is the desired but still undesigned thought-processor that will link discontinuous paths of knowledge. Confidence that the unifying ideal is within reach periodically runs high. The expectation was plausible in the eighteenth century, when empirical Reason enabled Jean Le Rond d'Alembert to "produce" a genealogical tree of knowledge. However, to read his prefatory discourse for the Encyclopedic is to find paradoxically both a map of filiations and a discontinuous labyrinth. Seen from today's vantage point, the unfulfilled aftermath suggests that the rational century harbored more than its share of countervailing barriers. Signs of irrationality existed in the most distinguished sectors of achievement—in the anomaly of a satirical Goya among court painters, and in the paradoxes of a Diderot among Encyclopedists. Less obvious signs also wrinkled the tapestry of encyclopedic knowledge. Scholars recognize that seeds of irrationality were germinating in what used to be called the Age of Reason. Lester Crocker summarizes four distinct manifestations of the irrational that "help us to grasp its [the Enlightenment's] inner turmoil."6 Diverse studies bring a dark side of the Enlightenment into view: political irrationalism, Gothic fiction, Mesmerism, demonology, and related topics gathered in the miscellany edited by Harold Pagliaro. This "retreat from Reason," as Peter Gay terms it, extends to the Unreason associated with extreme emotional religiousness, as well as to the grotesqueries of painters like Henry Fuseli and William Hogarth and to advocacies of pure imagination by mystical or pietistic thinkers and such poets as Johann Georg Hamann, Edward Young, and William Blake.7 This retreat is but a segment of a wider behavioral gamut that runs 6. The four "forms or manifestations" of the irrational are "irrational beliefs, either religious or scientific"; "rational philosophers contemplating the phenomenon of the irrational"; novelists who portray the irrational in imaginary worlds; and the irrational in real life. Lester Crocker, "What Is Modern about the Eighteenth Century?" in The Modernity of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Louis T. Milic, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture ι (Cleveland, Ohio and London: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971), 87-92. 7. See Harold E. Pagliaro, ed. Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 2 (Cleveland, Ohio and London: Press of Case Western Reserve University 1972); and Gay, The Enlightenment, 207—55.

12

Overture to Discontinuity

"from raving madness through ecstasy and lust to despair and suicide," notes George Rosen. In this view, the crisis of the Enlightenment is a "rift" between emotion and Reason that expands into "the dark, the weird, and the demonic."8 The age-old relationship between the head and the heart ends in irrationality, with unsettling consequences for the relative worth placed on Reason vis-ä-vis Unreason. In other moments of history, these complementary dispositions of the human spirit merely diverge, but they seem openly to repudiate each other as the eighteenth century closes. Rationality is alleged to be insensitive, while feeling is reproached for its waywardness. The mutual antipathy compartmentalizes affective and rational agencies instead of enabling an interactive function. The disharmony has far-reaching implications for today's readings of eighteenth-century art, science, literature, philosophy, and history. Art historian Barbara Stafford recently argued for an antinomial dichotomy of chaotic and interconnected modes of representation.9 The implications extend to the life of the mind itself. At stake are not simply the making and the experiencing of the arts and sciences but the very knowledge of these things. The basis of knowing how mortal beings experience, as well as knowing what they experience, receives a new grounding in psychology and epistemology in the Enlightenment. For the first time, aesthetic expression is numbered among the ways of knowing the world, alongside philosophical and scientific discourse. But the fight waged by the aesthetic category to win equal cognitive status is slower in Western Europe than in Germany and in Vico's Italy. And just as the new empirical science must struggle free of the atavistic coils of pre-Newtonian esotericism, so must the faculty of imagination overcome its subordination to Reason. Imagination is one of two components in Unreason that stand against rationality. The other disorderly element is feeling, or the exercise of "sensibility." Nevertheless, while the cognitive process includes a legitimate role for imagination, this is not the case for the emotions. This difference must be remembered when making generalizations about the Enlightenment. It is one thing to assert that the philosophes also draw rigid distinctions between the imagination's area of legitimate expression and the domain of Reason. It is quite another matter to strike a judicious balance between feeling and Reason in order to assert, with historian Hayden White, that 8. George Rosen, "Forms of Irrationality in the Eighteenth Century," in Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Pagliaro, 256, 258. 9. Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism: Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: ΜΓΓ Press, 1990).

Overture to Discontinuity

13

the philosophes did not impugn the emotions as obstructive to the building of a just humanity.10 Both assertions concern a confronted rationality, but only feeling brings the antagonism to the moral and social grounds of history. This distinction moves White to conclude that the Enlighteners lacked insight into how rational and imaginational faculties "might work in tandem both as guides to practical activity and as instruments of understanding" ("The Irrational," 312). For instance, philosophers were incapable of taking seriously the myths handed down as truths from the past. And this shortcoming is a cognitive one, White suggests. It stems from a deeper flaw in the philosophy of knowledge: the failure to perceive a continuity between the valuative criteria of Reason and imagination. This challenging thesis is not well documented, and as it concerns imagination it is a major concern of this volume. One of White's arguments gives a unifying significance to the diverse studies of the irrational. The cognitive limitation of the West European Enlightenment has a contrasting virtue. Not to detect the calibrated continuity between Reason and imagination also means dissolving the valuative distinction between Reason and Unreason. Such was the thrust of Leibniz, the neglected Vico, and the later German pre-Romantics. The Leibnizian doctrine of transitions in place of oppositions or discontinuities describes reality in terms of evolution and analogy. Even human nature then admits of a graduated continuity between physical and spiritual traits. As for Vico, a similar continuity between imagination and Reason mediates knowledge of reality. Vico also names language as the medium for distinguishing irrational phenomena from rational ones in consciousness. This eighteenth-century forma mentis succeeds in the nineteenth century in establishing "tolerance and sympathy for everything in the past, rational as well as irrational" (White, "The Irrational," 305). But the explanation that language mediates the Reason/Unreason dichotomy carries White's discussion along too rapidly. White explains that thinkers "tended to overvalue the irrational as a causal factor in the historical process and to undervalue it as a possible source of creative social force." This opinion accentuates the contents of historiography. The very opposite claim repeats the emphasis on historical performance when Peter Gay states that the philosophes actually denied that Reason is "the sole or even the domi10. Hayden White, "The Irrational and the Problem of Historical Knowledge in the Enlightenment," in Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Pagliaro, 312.

14

Overture to Discontinuity

nant spring of action" (Enlightenment, 141). However, Gay's richly textured study also regards the Enlightenment nonbehaviorally, which is to say, philosophically, as "a revolt against rationalism." Both scholars focus on collective and external manifestations, in contrast to the internal mechanisms of the individual mind that Goya evokes by "the dream of Reason." The evidence of revolt thus far rests on the philosophes' qualified repudiation of metaphysical speculation, together with their denial that human inquiry can penetrate all mysteries. Add to this Hume's axiom that Reason is the slave of the passions, or in any event that feeling is the basis of moral life.11 The revolt has a more technical proof in the Humean idea that imagination, not Reason, ensures our belief in the continued, distinct existence of bodies. This sort of example addresses the theory of knowledge at its psychological source in the relationship between the reasoning, imaginational, and perceptual faculties of the individual knower. The counter-rational impulse is confirmed by evidence of another kind. Literary texts expose their cognitive bias as expressive vehicles by unveiling the concealed undersurfaces of imagination and eidetic or visually mnemonic activity. Such concealments include the dream mechanism, the capricious fantasy, the grotesque sensibility, and similar perceptual modes that manifest themselves through lexical peculiarities. Critics have already begun to explore these manifestations in rhetorical devices. But the semantic fields of words like "delirium" or "bizarre" remain unmapped, and Chapter 5 of this volume begins the task. There is also the cognitive process itself that drives their expression and increasingly betrays an underlying physiological enigma that is still less understood. These perceptual modes assert their own claims on "true" knowledge. They reveal their authentic place in reality when depicted in the art of Goya, in the literary dreams of alchemist and astrologer Torres Villarroel, and in the philosophical fantasies of Diderot. One literary dream by Diderot allegorizes the aforementioned suspicion of pure Reason. As summarized by Gay, the dreamer Mangogul in Les bijoux indiscrets "sees himself transported to an enormous building suspended in space, inhabited by feeble, aged, and deformed men. Then a small healthy child enters, grows into a colossus, and destroys the building. That building (as Diderot interprets the dream) is the land of hypothesis, the cripples are the makers of systems, the colossus is Experiment" (Enlightenment, 136). This is Diderot's most innocent excursion into dream, and it stops 11. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 6, Modem Philosophy, part 1, The French Enlightenment to Kant (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), 38.

Overture to Discontinuity

15

short of abandoning empirical methods of inquiry. His allegory upholds experimental science just as Les bijoux indiscrets narrates a fundamentally waking reality. However, Mangogul's fantasy is a twofold and grotesque "voyage to the region of hypotheses." As an aesthetic device the dream departs from the rules of verisimilitude. It contradicts narrative conventions and upsets the norms of the fantastic voyage as a genre by relying for literary effect on deliberate plastic deformations of its contents. But as a philosophical method the dream causes the purely aesthetic sphere to converge with the sphere of verifiable knowledge. Mangogul's dream is the most capricious means available for experiencing ordinary reality. Its incongruous experience blunts the conventional instrument of philosophical inquiry while also upholding the oneiric instrument as another way to gain or communicate knowledge. Diderot's literary gesture is cognitively reflexive: it announces its own validity to make a critique. Its critique of system-building—Reason's highest self-fulfillment—becomes a portrait of sheer deformity. Diderot's literary epistemologizing achieves the philosophical synthesis any authentic philosophe would seek: a synthesis that verbal language can achieve. Literary epistemologizing rests on the belief that cognitive acts, whether scientific or philosophical, can be performed within the same continuum of linguistic expression. That language is an imperfect medium is never denied, but confidence in language is confirmed even as its rules are violated by irrationalist discourses like Diderot's. What remains to be examined is whether this revolutionized discourse might also embrace the cognitive power of visual art. Goya, by first calling his dream "Universal Language," believed it did. For this reason, the literary use of dream discourse enters my study alongside imagination and the semantics that expose the irrational thought process. Diderot's use of dream, which is not the same as Goya's, permits two problems to be addressed. What is the most efficacious mental faculty for knowing? And what vehicle best expresses the contents of knowledge? The retreat from Reason, when conducted literarily, answers these questions less radically than the visual arts do. A literature that occupies the same linguistic continuum for imaginative and scientific discourses also reaffirms the concept of knowledge upheld by the Enlightenment. This concept holds that knowledge is a progressively more coherent accretion, and that it develops and augments with each new procurement or modification. Ideally, it will eventually form a continuum of knowable categories. However, the entire continuum eludes the knower's grasp because philosophical

i6

Overture to Discontinuity

language, like scientific and figurative languages, remains an incomplete vehicle of signification. Goya's dream responds to this limitation. He revives the notion of a "Universal Language," which seventeenth-century philosophy conceived as the absolute synthesis of all possible signs. The response made within verbal signs by authors like Diderot is somewhat different. Diderot elaborates an unorthodox discourse that combines paradox, dream, multiple authoritative voices, broken narrative, and unconscious or fanciful rhapsody, as Lionel Gossman points out.12 The response makes partial use of the grotesque, as its cognitive process surrenders to an imagination that governs Reason. Both strategies contest the earlier Leibnizian harmony, a world view in which a perceived deformation can only be a defect of human understanding. In the post-Leibnizian age of Diderot and Goya, the defect (if it may be called that) is transferred to Nature, now conceived problematically as displaying incongruities of its own. Hence the perceived inadequacy of both rational signification and the empirical representation of reality. If Diderot resorts to "the exceptional and the monstrous," in Gossman's phrase, it is to deal purposefully with the hypothetical unity and gradation of natural forms, among other issues. But if Goya resorts to the enigmatic title of Capricho43, it is to suggest that "the dream of Reason produces monsters." There is considerably more to both Diderot's and Goya's thinking than just that. Yet the issues of language and epistemology just outlined are enough to show the staggering implications for aesthetics, ethics, and related conceptual spheres. And Diderot and Goya are actually not far apart in their intuitive glimpses into the primal realities of Nature and human experience, as will be shown. So discontinuity and anomaly are factors that have been newly isolated and reassessed by two geniuses of the eighteenth century. The question about incongruity in the gradation of natural forms can be duplicated for the question of continuity between Reason and imagination or, more generally, Unreason. Gossman formulates this question: "What, then of the 'monsters,' the madmen, the criminals, the blind? Are they too not part of 'nature'?" (French Society 89—90). Diderot's immediate answer is more than a social formula, for it suits the larger epistemological issue. He envisages "the possibility of a single 'first animal' prototype of all animals and even of 12. Lionel Gossman, French Society and Culture: Background for Eighteenth-Century Literature (Englcwood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 85.

Overture to Discontinuity

17

a gradation through the various realms—the mineral, vegetable, and animal"—that is, a synthesized being so perfect in its monstrous parts that it is no longer a monster. In turn we might wonder why, if the natural world can be reduced to the structure of an Ur-monster, the mental world cannot be equally reducible. This question belongs to Goya's Capricho 43, and it is the reason why this study considers the etching to be a paradigmatic statement of a crisis in the perception of reality. Such questions are only intimated during the eighteenth-century; they are never stated explicitly. But discontinuity appears at all levels of knowable reality: in Nature's forms, in mental processes, in the violation of conventional signs, in a preoccupation with blindness and madness. There is also a symmetrical set of preoccupations with continuity that stems from the organizing principle of the Great Chain of Being: the self-contained mechanism of materialist systematizers, the enormous interest in fibers and connectedness, and a comparable fascination with polyps and their regenerative powers. These instances constitute or shape both the subject matter and the expressive forms of much thinking at that time. In light of the foregoing, the "retreat" from Reason is an external event of social history epitomized by the French Revolution. The irrational underside, Unreason, is more a problem of knowledge in its deeply mental and material processes. At one level, Goya inculpates political violence in his title "The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters." But more profoundly, he raises the question of whether an act of imagination is entirely compatible with rational thought. Here cognition becomes a central issue and implicates the languages that express our knowing. Is there a "Universal Language" that can synthesize all knowledge?—that is, can "language," however defined, provide the continuum among all things normal and monstrous, external and internal, rational and irrational, material and spiritual? To answer that question, it is necessary to understand what such a continuum implies. A universal continuum embraces the things of the material world together with the objects of mind and art. Both Nature and its cultural transformations bend toward a common reality where subject and object comprise the matrix of a perfect "language" of knowledge. Such a continuum cannot be perceived, as we know rationally. Any regularizing regimen of continuities must affect not only physical and biotic forms but also their linguistic representations. And so the Universal Language would have to include itself—a manifest impossibility to the rational and scientific mind. Another objection is that the subject must remain differentiated

i8

Overture to Discontinuity

from the object it knows. Even if the subject "knows" without the aid of linguistic signs, it remains discontinuous from the object. At the same time, cognition may adopt alternate means. That occult forms of Reason survived into the eighteenth century has been established by D. P. Walker, Betty Dobbs, Margaret Jacob, and Herbert Leventhal, among the many scholars familiar with the Ancient Theology, Masonism, the demonic, and other esoterica surviving in the eighteenth century. Even science played a role in irrationalism, either by catalytic effect, as in the "visionary physics" through which the poet Blake responded to Newton, or more directly.13 For example, the relation between science and sensibility has been a pioneering topic of study for George Rousseau. The survival of organicist thinking in eighteenth-century biology has been demonstrated by Fran9ois Duchesneau. All this is to say, first, that spiritualist currents in eighteenth-century natural philosophy simmered beneath the empiricist level-headedness of the hard sciences, and, second, that the pleasures of imagination, newly rehabilitated by Joseph Addison and Mark Akenside and quickly diffused throughout Western Europe, joined with a long-lingering supernaturalism to perpetuate the perennial traditions of private and collective irrationality. The birth and childhood of Romantic consciousness occurs well before the end of the eighteenth century, if we agree with Georges Gusdorf and others.14 The consequences of that disintegrating paradigm of Reason are studied in this volume and culminate in Chapter 9.

A Minervan Discontinuity The themes of this Overture underlie the following argument. Eighteenthcentury Reason displayed an alter ego capable of protean powers and often monstrous results, both in the political and moral realms as well as in scientific inquiry. Minerva's manifold roles and ambiguous symbolism indicate 13. See Donald P. Ault, Visionary Physics: Blake's Response toNewton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 14. George S. Rousseau, "Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility," in Studies in the Eighteenth Century 3: Papers Presented at the Third David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar, Canberra, 1973, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C . Eade (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 137-57; reprinted with postscript: The Blue Guitar (Messina) 2 (1976): 125-53. Also, Francois Duchesneau, La physiologic des lumieres: Empirisme, modeles, et theories (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982); Georges Gusdorf, Les sciences humaines et lapensee occidentale, vol. 7, La naissance de la conscience romantique au siecle des lumieres (Paris: Payot, 1976).

Overture to Discontinuity

19

the spread of a rationality in excess, whose forms came to resemble the caprices of Unreason. The result of this excess was to put at risk the empirical representation of reality, exposing the vulnerability of the signifying process. What Volume 1 calls "counter-rational Reason" went contrary to the cohesive center of rationality in Enlightenment discourse. Yet it can be found both in major authors like Voltaire, d'Alembert, Burke, Sade, Young, Mercier, and Kant, and in less studied ones like Caraccioli, Le Masson, Cadalso, and Costadau. These and other authors discussed in this volume display a special lexicon of Unreason that coped with the aberrations intuited both in Nature and in mental activity. Volume 1 documents the extent of this rational Unreason and ends with a discussion of irrationality within the cognitive process, which opens the way to the subject of Volume 2. Volume 1 also argues that the century's desire for continuity and its dread of discontinuity gave impetus to Goya and Diderot in their uninhibited works of imagination. These creators represented in ordinary visual and verbal languages what Western Europe experienced in its alienation from the social rationality conceived by the philosophes. A still more profound significance attaches to the very constituents of irrationality. These constituents—feeling, imagination, and dreams, but also superstition, occultism, fanaticism, and the bizarre perversions of Reason—contradicted the Enlightenment mentality, which epitomized the salubrious energies of the eighteenth century. The contradiction throws open the question of the relation between Reason and Unreason in that era. The relationship unfolded in the social realm in the "Christian Enlightenment," as Chapter 2 explains, but it also unfolded infrahistorically within the life of a mind such as Voltaire's, as Chapter 6 shows, and specifically within the structure of cognition. The unfolding relation between Reason and Unreason exposed a vocabulary and an anxiety that are described in this volume from different standpoints anchored by Goya's Capricho 43 and related sketches. Chapter 1 prepares for the sociohistoric context of aberrant Reason in later chapters by examining literary works that evoked Minerva's temple, symbol of the universal hierarchy that harmonizes oppositions such as State and untamed Nature, Order and Chaos. The question of who spoke on behalf of Reason occupies Chapter 2, which distinguishes the Christian Enlightenment from its empirical counterpart. Chapter 3 examines the social satire that used chimera, caprice, dream, and madness as fine threads for weaving a figure of Spain as an asylum of demented citizens. More comprehensively, an analysis of West European "rational Un-

20

Overture to Discontinuity

reason" emerges in Chapter 4 through an interpictorial analysis of the preliminary sketches for Capricho 43 and the texts of natural philosophers and their popularizers, whose shared terminology ("extravagance," "demented," "delirious," and "frenetic") inhered in the very rhetoric of Reason. Chapter 4 suggests that categories like "imagination," "delirium," and "Reason" coexisted in ways that blurred their mutual boundaries, so that rational and irrational categories existed not as clearly separable zones but as one metamorphic entity. Beneath the aura of confidence surrounding empirical sciences and aesthetic theories, we observe a subtle participation by Reason in its own undoing, in effect creating a "counter-rational" Reason. In response, Goya's "Universal Language" aspired to link unconnected points in the vast field between intelligence and absurdity as well as between the social domain affected by intellectual activity and the domain of biological theory. Chapter 5 confirms the practice of irrational sign-making in rational discourse by analyzing a network of such usages as "chimerical," "bizarre," and "grotesque" that suggests a semantic migration from biological and psychological discourse to literature, and a contrary movement from literary and plastic arts to biological discourses and social discourses like history and anthropology. This lexicon of Unreason overrides original nuances and allows a glimpse of veiled ontological and cognitive concerns. Among these is the vexed relationship of rational discourse to the truthful representation of reality. What Goya intuited through a mediating dream was the underlying chaos of primary reality. True reality, Goya hinted, seethes under and through the gridwork of linear language, thus eluding the mind's rational eye. Hence his notion of a Universal Language that might somehow convey the instinctual core of human nature and the supra-empirical principles of Nature. A similar self-subverting track intruded upon the individual thought process, as Chapter 6 suggests by taking Voltaire as an example. Here philosophically monosemic statements are shown to come under pressure from ludic, ambiguous, or ironic resonances, termed "microstructures." This "Quixotic" category of utterances operated during the production of meaning with more polyvalence than simple figurative language. The representational purpose of discourse, which relies on stable criteria for judging resemblance, analogy, comparison, and their counterparts—distinction, variance, and divergence—breaks down under the digressions of subjective thought. The mechanics of association appear momentarily thwarted by flashes of imagination and belief that exercise a dual power of error and truth, a power that in turn fractures unequivocal meaning. This chapter

Overture to Discontinuity

21

suggests that the cognitive role for imagination at these moments did not concur with the conservative eighteenth-century view of a deranged faculty that clouds judgment. The mental complexion hypothesized for Voltaire, with its interweave of disorder and order, or of Unreason and Reason, confirms Foucault's thesis concerning the altered representation of reality in the eighteenth century, by which a new role for the imagination eroded the postulate of an empirically grounded unified knowledge. Based on the notion of polyvalent Reason and the spectrum of Unreason described in the first six chapters, Chapter 7 examines their cognate features in society. The concept of imagination drifted from its original meaning in literature and philosophy to its application to political affairs. Polarized attitudes toward progressive or conservative social programs arose from a perception of the political danger of imagination severed from Reason. The aversion to social disorder was couched in terms of cosmological chaos, but this was only one symptom of anxiety over the threat of discontinuity or violence in a harmonic universe. In compensation, visionary authors replaced lapsed Reason with fantasy and dream. Truth took the form of millennial and beatific images that drew energy from instinct in what might be called "telekinesis," the energy or instinctual power to know at a distance without regard to intellect. The thesis of this chapter concerns the dream experience that Goya radicalized and that embodied the stereognostic and telemorphic perception of things in their three-dimensional immediacy, a disembodied knowledge or form of "seeing" whose vehicle was extrasensory imagination, the source of dreams but also the source of a more rational universal geometry. The moral implications of this thesis point Chapter 8 toward Goya's iconology and its reflection of Reason's malleability before Nature's inexhaustible recombinatory power. Reason's polymorphic ability had emotional, bizarre, and nightmarish consequences; in libertine writing it was monstrous because it could rework the telos of Providence or protean Nature into a convenient defense of any political, moral, or philosophical position. Furthermore, this universal disorder came under the control of science only in part. Chapter 9 describes the blurred frontiers between science, spiritualism, and supersitition. What might be called the eighteenthcentury cognitive complicity with the occult consisted of a rationally bred preternatural science that linked sound empiricism to a sense of marvel and the supernatural. The mind-body division continued unresolved in biological science, and the notion of intangible forces remained in the vitalist background. The controlling theme of these final chapters is Goya's insight into the

22

Overture to Discontinuity

duality of Reason, which invested intelligence with a polymorphic energy that pulled the mind in spiritualist and empirical directions. Chapter 10 expands on the distinction between spiritualism and spiritism as a means of knowing primary reality through dream, trance, and transport. It discusses the cleavage between material and spiritual experience that placed the very concept of "reality" at stake, now suspended between worldly "meaning," which includes purely mental phenomena, and the "meaning" that is communicated from a nonmaterial realm beyond empirical consciousness. In this cleavage is located the discontinuity of knowledge that Western philosophy sought to overcome. Volume ι ends by positing the connection to exist in at least three sites: in transcendence, in the material brain, or in a meeting point where spirit and matter may fuse into a consubstantial unity made manifest to the subject. This communion is named variously "vision," "true light," or "presence," but it informs the same cognitive act which unites subject and object. The discussion prepares for Volume 2 by opening the question of how unity extends from material reality to immaterial mental consciousness. Is "spirit" the fusing agent? Does an energizing "substance" flow through all of existence? The physiology of imagination will be one key to this problem. The germ of a final argument needs to be documented in Volume 1 before it can be explored subsequently. The idea of a Universal Language that Goya associated with dreaming transcends ordinary verbal and visual languages. It points to a primal reality that is monstrous and yet susceptible to rational or empirical taxonomies. To what extent did Goya reflect a more general intuition about the inadequacy of human language for representing "true" reality? It is important to examine counter-rational discourse for evidence that the authors under discussion glimpsed or revealed inadvertently discontinuities and incongruities in both the natural world and in their own perceptual processes. The mechanics of perception and the processes of cerebration were also the subject of treatises on psychology, anatomy, and natural history. As Volume 2 will show, there are fresh ways of reading those texts that expose certain metaphors of uneasiness regarding the discontinuity between sense perception and thinking, or between matter and mind. The link between the biological sciences and humanistic discourses consists of the fact that new and broad intimations of a deeper reality—the ontological status of apprehended objects—coincided with a searching interest in the physiology of imagination. Another link is the lexical migration of words such as "bizarre" and "delirium" among unrelated discourses. The evidence for

Overture to Discontinuity

23

these interrelationships is to be found in how the authors reviewed in Volume 1 positioned the faculty of imagination in regard to Reason. The sciences came under Minerva's dominion, as attested by Malpighi's earlier remarks, but Athena-Minerva was present in more circumstances than scholars have recognized, and with diversified and ambiguous meanings.15 Her manifold attributes were common knowledge among the educated classes at that time but have been forgotten in our own day. The roles played by the goddess persisted unobtrusively in the eighteenth century behind the problems and governing concepts discussed in this volume. My effort offers an alternate name for that century: not so much an enlightened age of Reason and sensibility but rather the chiaroscuro Age of Minerva. This is the goddess who symbolized the wisdom and knowledge that reaches beyond empirical experience into a transcendent reality where Reason and Unreason fuse into the One. The Minerva of this proposition is not the mythological goddess but the mediating mind between spirit and matter. She is the figure in the Ancient Philosophy whose dispersed remnants persisted in the eighteenth century. In contrast to Minervan Reason, human rationality not only displayed Encyclopedic powers but also strayed into folly or into madness, conceiving Utopia and nightmare alike, and charting empirical continuities or yielding to the discontinuous intuitions of rampant imagination. This "cognitive discontinuity" in Western Europe arose in the absence of Minervan Reason. Minerva's Universal Language harmonizes order and disorder, and one thesis of this study is that Goya intuited her absence in works leading up to Capricho 43• If the term "Age of Minerva" is accurate, then Goya's black-and-white etching, "The Sleep/Dream of Reason Produces Monsters," will serve as a paradigm of its ramifications.

IS- Ε. H. Gombrich studies the political adaptation of conventional symbols, such as the transformation of the Goddess of Liberty into the Goddess of Reason. Gombrich takes Goya's title for his own, but without attempting to explain what Goya meant by it. "The Dream of Reason: Symbolism in the French Revolution," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2 (1979): 187-205.

ι. The Minervan Hypothesis

Alas! what have you done with the austere maxims of this holy shepherd that Minerva once deigned to form in dream so as to give you laws? —Chenier, "La jeune Locrienne" T w o approaches to interpreting Capricho 43 as a paradigmatic statement of the eighteenth century are available.1 One considers Capricho 43 strictly as a visual object, the other interprets the verbal inscription, "The Sleep/ Dream of Reason Produces Monsters." The first, iconological approach invites an overarching interpretation that I call the "Minervan hypothesis." Goya's pictorial anecdote personifies Reason as a man asleep in the presence of owls. The association of the owl with Athena-Minerva is age-old, so it seems natural to assume their correspondence in Goya too. Nevertheless, art historians usually rely on the scene's emblematic meaning.2 They argue for an iconological continuity from the seventeenth century to Goya's day and emphasize Ripa's emblems as an influence. My reservation here is that several iconologies after 1750 do not portray Reason by an owl, much less by a figure antithetical to Goya's sleeper. Gravelot's Iconologie presents Reason as an armed woman wearing a helmet adorned by a diadem. She fits a ι. I agree with Janis Tomlinson that it is a mistake to identify the entire series Los Caprichos with a single image. Tomlinson also points out that Capricho 43 "has become the touchstone for a reductive narrative of an enlightened Goya." My purpose is to argue that Capricho 43 invites multiple interpretations that expose its paradigmatic embodiment of Reason's metamorphic nature, and that reflect the "polyphony" of the entire series. See Janis A. Tomlinson, Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment (New Haven, Conn, and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 6 - 7 . 2. Fölke Nordstrom links the owl to melancholy by way of Henry Peacham's Minerva Britannia (London, 1612) and Albrecht Dürer'sMelancholia I, where a bat wears this emblem (Goya, Saturn, and Melancholy. Studies in the Art of Goya [Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1962], 130). He also follows George Levitine in construing the feline to be a lynx, after Ripa's symbol of Fantasia in the lconologia of 1764. Eleanor Savre contends that "in eighteenthcentury Spain the owl was not a symbol of wisdom but rather of folly, stupidity, and acts committed under cover of darkness" (The Changing Image: Prints by Francisco de Goya [Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1974], 100). Nordström, however, also links the owl to Minerva and notes that the owl on the left offers the artist a pencil. See below, Chapter 8, note 2.

The Minervan Hypothesis

25

yoke over a lion in victory over brutishness, while behind them grows an olive tree, sacred to Minerva (Fig. 3).3 This allegorization limits meaning to the governance over instinctual behavior by Reason. A broader range of meanings emerges from allegories related to Reason that present Minerva physically. Among these allegories are Genius and Eloquence, which are secondary powers or talents that the emblem books ally with the reasoning faculty. They mirror the practical values—social and moral—upheld by any society that prizes efficacy. Significantly for Goya's sleeping Reason, the instruments of Reason take iconic forms that evoke Minerva. The goddess always appears full-figured and nearly always helmeted, usually holding a lance and sometimes wearing her famed aegis. Jean Baptiste Boudard's iconology presents Reason as a matron dressed in a coat of armor; she wears Minerva's aegis on her breast to indicate that she is a higher force of the soul, ruled and defended by Wisdom (Fig. 4). As "Subtlety of Genius" she appears with an owl perched on her casque (Fig. 5). Already she seems modified by the attribute of a mysterious sphynx at her feet. Her conventional militancy alters still further when, as the figure "Eloquence," she discourses with a chain-metal aegis on her bosom while holding a harp and a book (Fig. 6). Here verbal language seems to need a supplementary musical language. Finally, the concept of "Nobility" (not shown) is depicted as a matronly figure duplicated by a smaller statue of Minerva grasped in the matron's hand; the text explains that science and military arms achieve merit and noble sentiments.4 The emblematic history thus suggests a Minervan mode that boasts a triad of characteristics: maturity, modesty, and wisdom (Fig. 7).5 These attributes command a radius of public values that esteem Reason beyond 3. Hubert-Francois Bourgignon, dit Gravelot, Iconologie par figures, ou Tratte de la science des allegories, emblemes, etc., en 3sofiguresßravees, 4 vols. (Paris: Lattre, n.d. [1791]), 3:49. The wide latitude of choices of figures for Reason in Goya's time is demonstrated by Ε. H. Gombrich in "The Dream of Reason: Symbolism in the French Revolution," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies ζ (1979): 187-205. 4. Jean Baptiste Boudard, Iconologie, tiree de divers auteurs, 3 vols. (Parme and Paris: Tilliard, 1759), 3:149; 1:181; 3:5· 5. The clearest example is the emblem for "Government" (see Fig. 7), which completes the range just cited. Here the female holds an olive branch and displays a ship's rudder for her attribute (Boudard, Iconolqgies, 2:50). Athena won the contest with Poseidon for Athens by planting the first olive tree; she also built ships for the Argonauts' enterprise of founding cities. The emblematic background of the rational century is more complex than the above examples indicate; the problem of "iconological discontinuity" is discussed in Volume 3; for discontinuity in general, see Volume 2. At this juncture the interchangeabilitv of the names "Minerva" and "Athena" is assumed without demonstration.

Figure 3. Hubert Francois Gravelot. Raison (Reason). Iconologie, vol. 4,1791, p. 49. Courtesy of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

The Minervan Hypothesis

R A I S O N .

I u

C ι 0

27

I.

Ο Ν peint la raifon fout I« figure d'unc Matrdne vctuc d'une c6te d'armeSj&ayant fur lapoitrne IVgidede Mincrvc , pour marquer qu'elle eft une forcefupeficure de Tame, rcgle'c & dcfendue par la fagefTc. Elle tient une ^pie flamboyante dont elle menace le$ vices, contre leiquelselle eft fanscede en guerre, & qui (ont figures par plufuurj ferpe ai'it qu'elle foule (out fes pieds, & quelle tient enchainls.

C I niene dip'int* fotto form4 di Mitron* veßita di eor.t^ijx , (oil' ttiJt di Minerva fill petto, per dinar are eb' el! Λ i una fortj. fu peri ore dtlf' .mima , r r lol.tt* , t difefa delta / « ! £ < · · Time una fpaia fiammeipante, ton cut minatti4 i IHxj , ai qua I, nwo-ve fiterra eontinuamente , fiprati da narj ferpmti alati, eb'etU tient ineatenali , e talptfta eoi pied/.

Figure 4. Jean Baptiste Boudard. Raison ( theque Nationale, Paris.

. Iconologie. 1759. Courtesy of the Biblio-

its philosophical and moral functions. The point is both double and ambivalent. If Goya depicts Reason, he construes it under an umbrella of Minervan attributes, and if Reason slumbers beneath that umbrella, its emblematic background suggests an antithetical realm in emblematic irrationality. The fact that iconic meaning fluctuates in emblem books surely affects the construable meanings of Capricho 43 and its title, "The Sleep/ Dream of Reason Produces Monsters." A good place to begin an explication of these meanings is Spanish society, because that is the milieu in which the aquatint originates.

28

Chapter One

S

U

Β

Τ

I L

I Τ

j t C U T Z Z Z A

Έ

de g i n i e .

i'lngtino.

L F-s G r e c s exprimoient alligorique« ment ce fujet par i i n e M i n e r v e qui tenoit un j i r e l c t fur ia tcte d'un Sphinx. C ' e f t cc que rapporte P. V a l . lib. 6. lur J'autoritd de Pline.

I Greei rtpprefintavdno dllcgoricdmtntt queiio fourtto per U figur* ii MinerΚΛ , che tenev* Hit iifla breve fopr* U tefti d'unt Sfin$e, come riferifce Tier. Va* Ur. lib. 6. con lUulorila ii VUnio.

EA NIHIL

VERO H A S T « ΤΑΜ

ACUM1NE Q.V I D E M

PAI.LAPI«

ABDITUM.ET

EXERI ,

ST

CUSPIDI J U B J E C T A

RFCONDIYUM

PAI.AM

OSTENDIT,

ESSE , Q U O D

PROFSllRI

NON

JNGENII

POSJIT

:

ITA

SPKYNGES.

F i g u r e 5. Jean Baptiste B o u d a r d . Subtilite

deßenie

(Subtlety o f G e n i u s ) . Iconologie.

1759.

C o u r t e s y o f the B i b l i o t h e q u e Nationale, Paris.

The Partitioned Shield When Reason sleeps or dreams, the "monsters" it produces will include social Unreason.6 There is no better example than the "continued delirium of Reason," denounced in Spain by the civic planner Pablo de Olavide, a 6. "Countless are the disguises and expedients of these monsters—prelates and friars, spies and inquisitors, bureaucrats and petty officials, noblemen and usurers, sycophantic placeholders high and low—who plot to suck the people dry," according to art historian F. D. Klingender, Goya in the Democratic Tradition (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), 92—93. Goya's

The Minervan Hypothesis

t L O Q U E N C E .

C

Ommc il faut nAreflatrement plaire pour perfuader, on reprc'fente I'eloqurncc (ous la figure d'une femme aiinable & belle. Elle a un caique ornif d'une couronne d o r , qui eft l'emblcme de la puiflance peiluafive , ainfi que IVgide de M i n e r v e qui eft (iir fa poitrine. L a lire qu'elle tient polce fur un l i » r e , indique q u e l l e s'inftnue par la douceur de ("es paroles Se f^ait convaincre par la force des raifonnements. E l l e eft en aftion ded^clamer, tenant l o s s fes pieds un foudre , dont les ancicns faifoient l'attrlbut de ce futet par allufion au favant Demnfthenes qu'ils nommoient le foudre de l'lloqucnce.

Ε L 0 QU

£ H

Ζ

29

Λ .

*A ntetfpti ii prevtnirt tolC aUettdmento per d'rivärt d perfttjdere; t! dipingt Γ elotptenzji di form* vezjofd , e belU . Hd in (a no tin elmo ddorno d' und corond d'oro, t fei petto 1' tf.Ho di Miner•ν*, emblemi ii fvd pofTdntj. Lt tetrd poftd ful libra indie Λ , tb' elld s inftnttd tol dolce fttono delIt parole , t twfintt tolld forxji de' fuoi rdfiondmenti. Ε in dtto ii dttUmdrt, eon U fo!%orr [otto i piedi, Attribute delld di lei rdpiditd ; pert be idle di fdtti I'dmmtrdroeo $Ii Antiebi in Demoftent, Jd /or· tbidmdto fulmine £ eloquen-

L

Figure 6. Jean Baptiste Boudard. Eloquence (Eloquence). Iconoloßie. 1759. Courtesy of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

contemporary of Goya. The occasion of Olavide's denunciation is a challenge to public rationality mustered by the enemies of his plan to reform the University of Seville in 1768. Delirium is, paradoxically, the purest strain of Reason that can be bred in Spain. According to one unhumorous contemporary observer, "this continuous delirium of Reason" was the art recontemporary Juan Pablo Forner referred to "perverse inclinations of Reason" that produced "monstrous births" (Dtscursosfilosoficossobre el hombre [Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1787], 145).

30

Chapter One

G O U V E R N E M E N T . I L fc perfonnifie fous lafigured'une Matrönc vctuc modeftemcnt , ayant \m caique & une cgide comme Mincrvc , pour marquer que la maturitc dc läge , ia I'agcll'e &r la modellie (ont les qualitcs requites pour l'art de gouverner. Son attribut ordinaire ell un eouvcrnail. Lc javelot &r la branchc d'olivier qu'elle tient, defignem qu'ellc pent (aire a (on gre la guerre, ou la paix.

S I rapprefentd [otto figurd di Mdtrona modeßdmente •veßitd , con I'tlmo in tcftd , t l'e^He fimile d que Ho it Mincrvd in petto , per moftrdrc, che U mdluritd, U fmittJtA , e U madeflid fono lc qudlitd , tie ft ricbie^ont d ben Iwerndrc. Hd per dftributo orJindrio un timone id ndve. L'dftd, cd it rdnto d'u/ivo, cbe tiene , indtcd , cb' did pit ο mwcrc Λ fno pidccrc U juirra , ο ιηtrdttenere U pACC.

Figure 7. Jean Baptiste Boudard. Gouvernement (Government). Iconologie. 1759. Courtesy

of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

fined by university Scholastics through "tangled logic filled with sophisms that obscure and accustom understanding to false reasonings."7 The equation of a delirious mind with a rational one is what complicates the meaning of Capricho 43• The equation conjures a Reason that is radically different from the idealized Minervan emblem. Now Reason is polarized against itself. One extreme uses "simple and geometric" means 7. Miguel de la Pinta Llorente, Critica y humanismo (Madrid: Archivo Agustiniano,

1966), 36.

The Minervan Hypothesis

31

to find truth, the other extreme raves with its exaggerated version of those means. Olavide's version of Reason does not run incoherently past itself; neither does its self-governing surface flip upside down, exposing a second, unreasonable face. But the "delirium of Reason" that opposes Olavide is an inverted form that employs lucidity for irrational ends. It is the delirious rationality that produces the monsters of Capricho 43, and in Olavide's case it serves the Inquisition that ultimately condemns him. It is what Don Quixote termed "the Reason of Unreason." In another guise, it is the fanatical Reason of state that Burke attributed to the French Revolution, the theories of which were metaphysically true but morally false— "that sort of Reason which banishes the affections." A "monstrous fiction," a "drunken delirium," and public measures "deformed into monsters" are how Burke described the products of political Reason of Unreason.8 In speaking of the Inquisition, Voltaire ends his article in the Philosophical Dictionary with the oft-quoted image of Spain's Count of Aranda being "blessed by all Europe for chewing off the monster's claws and filing down his teeth; but it still breathes."9 If these images explain the "monsters" of Capricho 43, then Goya's meaning surely contravenes the emblematic tradition. In Boudard, Reason is "dressed in a coat of armor, wearing Minerva's aegis. . . . She has a flaming sword with which she threatens vices, . . . which are figured by many winged serpents that she crushes under her feet, holding them in chains" (Iconoloßie, 3 :89). By contrast, two of Goya's owls sit passively while a third flutters among the wilder creatures. Given the owl's conventional companionship to Minerva, these owls are behaving peculiarly, not least by their numerical presence, and their alertness also calls attention to Goya's unconscious human figure. They implicate Minerva by proxy in the general intellectual delirium, even though her physical absence mitigates her responsibility and signals an ambiguous role through the sedentary owls. These surrogates differ markedly from the sinister flying bats. The Minervan hypothesis therefore emphasizes a normative assertion about Reason on the artist's part. To define Reason is far from easy.10 8. Edmund Burke also rails against the "chimeras of a monstrous and portentous policy." See his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, Ind. and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), 32, 60, 80,191. 9. Dictionnaire philosophique, ed. Julien Benda and Raymond Naves (Paris: Gamier Freres, 1967), 253. 10. See below, Chapter 5, note 6, and Chapter 7, note 2. Lester Crocker defines "Reason" not as ratiocination and logic but as what opposes both deduction and the passions. It is

}2

Chapter One

Goya knows the Enlightenment, witnesses its subversion, and expounds the consequences. He is a partisan of "good" Reason insofar as it is distinguishable from intellectual delirium. At the same time, his advocacy does not necessarily mean that deformed Reason produces the only irrationality. Another interpretation might hypothesize a "good" Unreason that consoles the precursors of Romanticism who have grown disenchanted with rational modes. But this approach belongs to a separate discussion. The Minervan hypothesis relies mainly on the pictorial anecdote and the emblematic historical background of its inscription. The approach does not insist that the inscribed title—"The Sleep/Dream of Reason Produces Monsters"—functions either unequivocally as a valuative judgment or as a statement about cause and effect. Rather, it sees the text as a compounded icon bearing visual and verbal signs. However, the only unambiguous signs are "Reason" and "Monsters." The double meaning of sueno (sleep/dream) together with the vagueness of "produces" leads interpreters to other paths of inquiry. One premise of the Minervan hypothesis is that the owls' diversity represents the multiple significance of the goddess. The leftmost owl proffers an empty pencil-holder to the sleeper, which Eleanor Sayre suggests is an indication that he should fill it and exercise his Reason (Changing Image, ioo—ιοί). This gloss assumes a linear identity between Minerva and the active rational process embodied in the owl. The active gesture is nevertheless one of many duties Minerva assumed in eighteenth-century Western Europe. Her inspiring presence for painters, for instance, is allegorized by Augustin de Saint-Aubin in the treatise on painting by the Comte de Caylus. But in the social context under discussion, her rational duties are more conventional. They include being a sage guardian of kingdoms and a shield against the irrational. These alternative roles lead to a second premise concerning Capricho 43: that interpretations should look beyond the etching and reconstruct the social context of allusions to Minerva. This premise an enlightened, unprejudiced use of the faculty of ordinary reflection, rational self-evidence. See Lester Crocker, An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth-Century French Thottght (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), xv-xvii. That Reason may also embody a monstrous form is demonstrated by Crocker's use of Saint-Just's poem "L'organe" (1786): [La Raison] n'est qu'un noir compose D'orgueil adroit et d'orgueil interesse . . . . . . un grand monstre, appele Revolution. Cet animal a la tete pointue, Trois pieds noues et du crin sur la vue. (462)

The Minervan Hypothesis

33

leads to the instructive discovery that Goya within one year displaces the goddess. He includes her in the portrait of Spain's minister of justice, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, in 1798 (Frontispiece). Here Minerva seems benevolent as a custodial statue inclining slightly toward the seated figure. In the reversed seated position of Capricbo 43 in 1799, the sleeper enjoys no such guardian. Whereas the portrait mounts the statuesque Minerva in vigil over Spain's most clear-sighted public official, four owls usurp her place in the symbolic futility and wildness of Capricbo 43. In the portrait of Jovellanos, the sumptuous colors play out a myth depicted often in that century: the armed goddess of wisdom teaching the arts of peace and war to philosophical reformers and their sovereigns. Minerva's most stylized and silent appearance is achieved in this work. Whereas the Minerva of other artists—Jean Antoine Watteau, Noel Halle, Gabriel-Francois Doyen, Augustin de Saint-Aubin—is a full-bodied, animated figure, here she mounts a discreet guard as a green statuette among the rich brown-golds of Jovellanos's furnishings. The man himself seems at peace, remote from the political monsters who in actual history conspire to destroy him. Outside his study, the Spanish nation feels threatened by Revolutionary France. In the portrait, Minerva bestows the dual gifts of civilian crafts and warrier arts. Her knowledge is practical rather than abstract, of the kind that shields even societies inspired by intellectual and political ideals. But her warrier arts are also contradictory gifts that eighteenth-century history cannot reconcile. Only Minerva's shield unites them. The mysterious buckler rests in the shadow of Jovellanos's serene perplexity. It is partitioned into two oval blazons, defensive and offensive, conceivably harmonized by the goddess's practical Reason (Fig. 8). However, the unity is but dimly perceptible by the light of philosophers, statesmen, or scientists. The partitioned shield in this portrait, undeciphered by art historians, emblemizes at the least both the divisive character of Minerva and Reason's duality in that respect. Nonetheless, the interpretive dilemma has a salubrious effect. Today we can look beyond Goya to the implications of a multiform Minerva in eighteenth-century visual and literary arts. As mirror-images of each other, the portrait of Jovellanos and Capricbo 43 reflect her multiple roles. But because these depart from conventional roles, themselves heterogeneous, it is tempting to conclude that Goya's dissent makes an important statement about an even more important epochal image.

Figure 8. Francisco de Goya. Portrait ofjovellanos. Detail, Minerva. 1798. Courtesy of the Museo del Prado, Madrid.

The Minervan Hypothesis

35

One index of epochal prominence involves the paintings and sculpture reported by Diderot in the Salons of 1765 and 1767. These works diverge in their vision of Minerva.11 Their differences hold few surprises, however, considering the large number of attributes listed by the article "Minerve" in the monumental Encyclopedic. Offering a repertoire of symbols for artists and writers who evoke the goddess, the article cites the ancient statues of Minerva, which traditionally display both a casual simplicity and a noble air of gravity. Minerva is modest yet robust, a majestic force but not an awesome one. These traits are projected in Goya's statue as it glimmers forth from its shadows with rust-gold flecks on an olive-green robe. Further Minervan traits cataloged by the Encyclopedic confirm the duality that resists synthesis by human society. As protectress of the arts, the goddess wears a peplum that signifies Genius, Prudence, and Wisdom. The garment must be what in Louis-Claude Vasse's painting in the Salon of 1767 is a short, simply-pleated skirt chosen for the interval during which Minerva awaits a victorious sovereign. In contrast, Goya's portrait drapes her more austerely in a long robe that conceals the bare thighs and casually crossed legs noted by Diderot. As a result, Goya's Minerva is militant and regal rather than what Diderot calls "svelte." Both renditions cast her in obvious roles of state, although the Spanish portrait makes it difficult to reconcile the minister's tranquil wisdom with a nation at war. Goya has Minerva wear the dreaded gorgoneion on her aegis, an appropriate detail for a Spain in need of physical security as well as domestic justice. The detail corresponds to the "burning aegis" in a poem by Mark Akenside, who lectures his British compatriots by showing Minerva holding up the 11. A civic Minerva descends, "crue de ton," leading a diminutive allegorical Peace in Halle's Minerve conduissant la Paix ά l'Hötel de Ville (Denis Diderot, Salon de 1767, Salon de 1769, ed. Else Marie Bukdahl, Michel Delon, and Annette Lorenceau, vol. 16 of Oeuvres completes, ed. Herbert Dieckmann and Jean Varloot [Paris: Hermann, 1984], 88-93). The Minerva in Nicolas Venevault's badly executed Apotheose du prince de Conde brandishes a shield amid trophies for artists and savants (243-44). Apropos of Joseph Vernet's paintings, Diderot recounts an enigmatic fable about Minerva's appropriate clothing after her birth (185-86). He also reproves Jean-Jacques Bachelier's works for their "rape" of Minerva in the sense of violating the norms of historical painting (Salon de 176s: Essais sur la peinture, ed. Else Marie Bukdahl, Annette Lorenceau, and Gita May, vol. 14 of Oeuvres completes, ed. Herbert Dieckmann and Jean Varloot [Paris: Hermann, 1984], 105). A sculpture of Minerva by Louis-Claude Vasse presents a skimpily clad helmeted goddess seated with left hand on her shield and right hand casually holding a crown. She is gazing into the distance, which Diderot interprets as Minerva looking for a victor to crown (Salon de 1767,485). Minerva finds such a victor in Louis XV and extends a laurel garland to him in Augustin de Saint-Aubin's frontispiece for Desormeaux's history of the Bourbons in 1772. Here the monarch joins his hallowed ancestors while the figure of History, induced by Minerva, inscribes the event on a scroll while attended by Renown and Time. See Emmanuel Bocher, Lesgravures franfaises au XVIII e siecle, 6 vols. (Paris: Damascene Morgand et Charles Fatout, 1875-82), 5:55.

36

Chapter One

aegis to the impious Athenians.12 But now the goddess shakes the aegis while pronouncing her "terrors" in a "thunder's voice" for the edification of Britons. The reference diverges from the symbolism of a "higher force of the soul," mentioned on p. 25. Akenside's poem unfolds the paradox of Minerva's bipartite character. Traditionally, Minerva is only a defensive deity. The awful Gorgon's head embosses her aegis and shield to terrify the enemies of those whom she guards. Akenside justifies the active militancy of those who "share the stern Minerva's power" and who "arm the hand of Liberty for war." But he transforms her stern features so that they contour the faces of the Britons: "yet benign, / Yet mild of nature, to the works of Peace / More prone." To complicate the bipartite factor, the Encyclopedic specifies that Minerva neither inspires horror nor displays any shield cover. She is said occasionally to wear a helmet and wield a lance, and whereas both Goya and Vasse keep the helmet, the lance disappears, while Vasse alone emphasizes a cuirass.

Minerva's Iconological Ambiguity The evidence just skimmed suggests that a multiform ambiguity imbues the evocations of this goddess. Further remarks in Diderot's Salon of 1767 confirm this, although the Salon of 1781 also reports Doyen's conventional battle scene, where Minerva wounds Mars. Untypically, Minerva sits placidly in Halle's gorgeous painting, now in the Louvre, mantled in an azure robe set against the ruddy, naked flesh of the muscular Neptune. Her femininity is completed by her delicate grasp of the lance, which she holds between thumb and forefinger as if it were an elongated paintbrush or pencil. No attitude could be more remote from Goya's philosophical or political linkages to Minervan Reason.13 Yet Halle's feminized version finds its own drastic contradiction in the mannishness of an anonymous literary description of Minerva. Here she has the "tall form of a male figure" despite the removal of helmet, lance, and aegis, which all hang above her in a written dream about a Salon scene. A dreamer named Francval glimpses her seated on a throne, with paintbrushes, palettes, "and other attributes related to the Arts. I thought I recognized her, and in effect it was Minerva." 14 This 12. Mark Akenside, Poetical Works (London: Bell & Daldy, 1867), 253. 13. Another painted partial sketch by Noel Halle,Minerve et la Paix (1763), in the Musee Carnavalet, Paris (40cm. x 27cm.) portrays the goddess in blue wearing just a helmet and floating horizontally in clouds directly above white-robed Peace. 14. Le songe, ou La conversation a laquelle on ne s'attend pas. Scene critique (Rome: n.p.,

1783), 1-2·

The Minervan Hypothesis

37

Minerva of 1783 eclipses the virile and vengeful goddess of Homer and Ovid. In another literary version she departs so far from war and distaff weaving that she nearly supplants the Muses as mother of the arts. Now, according to J. J. F. M. Boisard's book of fables, an "ingenuous and timid Muse under Minerva's eyes lends her sentiments in the shadow of her aegis." 15 These departures from classical mythology are important for a hierarchical conception of inspirational sources. Minerva's more powerful place in the universal hierarchy relative to the Muses concerns not simply the arts but also language itself. Therefore the cognitive mechanisms of knowledge also belong to Minerva's realm, and this jurisdiction will motivate Volume 3 of this study. Her creative role in Boisard's fables is more limited to fluctuating between the timid female surrogate just mentioned and the conventional helmeted Minerva. This gamut is illustrated meticulously for Boisard's epilogue to the Fables in an engraving by Saint-Aubin that depicts a female poet in the act of composing while Minerva soars above her equipped with lance and shield. Such feminizing tendencies retain the military vestiges of the goddess, but they do not evoke the Homeric battles. They allude rather to arms-making within the general art of manufacturing and specifically to the site of such activity at Vulcan's forge. In a related allusion, Minerva gives instruction in the art of encaustic painting, depicted in Saint-Aubin's frontispiece for Caylus's treatise. One hand gestures toward a fire where two genies combine color with wax, while the other hand touches the shoulder of a young woman painting a canvas.16 The non-Homeric alternative reaches its culmination when Minerva's ministry among women incorporates female customs and character. Here, classical mythology furnishes the setting while the Enlightenment tilts the angle of view. Again the occasion is a Saint-Aubin frontispiece, this time for Antoine-Leonard Thomas's historical essay on women.17 The figure of Pandora stands amid female harp-players, Vulcan and his torch placed at her feet, and Minerva presiding over the group, escorted by Apollo. Minerva's owl perches on her helmet. The entire nucleus of cloud-borne figures coheres with Pandora against the lone figure of Venus, who is placed 15. J. J. F. M . Boisard, Fables (Paris: Lacombc, 1773), 205. 16. Bocher, Lesgramresfranfaises, 5:155. The cauldron over a fire is an important symbol in another allegory about the five senses conceived for a treatise on perception by ClaudeNicolas L e Cat, Tratte des sensations et des passions en general, et des sens en particulier (Paris: Vallat-La-Chapelle, 1767). In this example, the Minervan powers are located more esoterically in the universal hierarchy just mentioned and are discussed in Volume 2. 17. Antoine-Leonard Thomas, Essai sur le caractere, les moeurs, et l'esprit des femmes dans les differents sieeles (Paris: Moutard, 1772).

38

Chapter One

to one side of the ensemble, while a female Envy flies above them holding Pandora's box of evils (Bocher, Les gravures frangaises, 5: 184). No elaborate exegesis is necessary to grasp the separation of activities between the rival goddesses. The modern note consists of Vulcan's nuanced presence, which deepens Minerva's polyvalent meaning. Vulcan the smithy keeps company with the arts, now associated with general knowledge by virtue of Minerva's owl. At the same time, Vulcan and Minerva together take responsibility for creating Pandora. The scene is a vivid reminder of Minerva's maternal capacity, over-restricted by convention to protecting her favored heroes. The maternal role remains compatible with her sponsorship of the creative arts and with wisdom itself, all of which oppose Venus and her idle qualities. The gradually more feminized Minerva acquires a distinctively versatile eighteenth-century personality. The alteration cannot turn her into a metamorphic Proteus, however, because the styles of painting at this time are heroic and allegorical enough to confine the scope of her themes. The case is different in minor pictorial genres where the evidence, taken together with literary allusions, presents a more arcane thematic network, one that scholars overlook but that reduces the surprise of Goya's bizarre Capricho 43 and its hermetic inscription. On balance, Minerva's numerous manifestations are often free of convention, and she becomes an undeniably transformed signifying agent. The difference can be observed not only in the iconological practice already outlined but also in forerunner mythological paintings, whose best examples include Tintoretto's Mars and Minerva, Rubens's Minerva Protecting FecundityfromMars, and Veronese's Minerva and Mars. These virile renditions lack the traditional owl that accompanies the goddess in the medallions and coins of antiquity. Special mention should be made of the stunningly unorthodox nude portrait by Hendrik Goltius, as well as the Virgin Mary allegories studied by Rudolf Wittkower.18 A new, intellectual note appears when the Minervan owl symbolizes a flash of wisdom in darkness. For this reason the owl is also missing in Claude Lorrain's drawing Minerva and the Muses, as well as in most of the examples cited here as evidence. Exceptions are the feminized Minervas just mentioned which as allegorized conceptions inspire the arts and wear a helmet crested by the owl. The new note suggests that the eighteenth century shelters a nonHomeric, alternate Minerva, wise and creative—indeed, even feminine. 18. Rudolf Wittkower, "Transformations of Minerva in Renaissance Imagery," in Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1977), 129-42.

T h e Minervan Hypothesis

39

This submerged deity is in fact already known to the esoteric cults o f paganism and early Christianity. She is a magus-like Minerva, sometimes wearing a cock on her helmet to symbolize alertness, while the wise yet portentous o w l assumes a mantic position at her feet. S o m e ancient statues portray Athena-Minerva with a long staff instead o f a lance, and in several instances a serpent wraps itself around the staff as if entwining a caduceus. O n e statue shows Minerva in the coils o f a snake drinking from a cup in her hand, and she is known by the epithet " M e d i c a . " 1 9 These details are only part o f a rich mythological lore that spreads symbolic meanings in many directions. Cryptic mergings o f hermetic and hierophantic cults expand Minerva's evocative range in one such direction, less by her visible presence than by being named or by reference to her temple. H e r temple stands near the supreme point in the universal hierarchy, as the locus o f all linguistic essences and spirits that behave like living oracles. 20 B y the end o f the eighteenth century, when G o y a gives the preliminary title "Universal L a n g u a g e " to Capncho 43, his convulsive imagination brings the existing complex o f allusions to a crescendo o f semantic pluralities. G o y a evokes Minerva in Spain's cross-grained historical context, where urban and rural communities are grounded in the warped interlocking strata o f such cultural phenomena as enlightenment, religious piety, superstition, and subcultural interest in witchcraft. T h e owls o f Capricho 19· The famed bronze Athena Callimorphos by Phidias presents a snake-bordered shield. The serpent symbolizes prudence, a trait linked to Minerva, and also health, a trait linked to Hermes and Apollo. Finally, the reptile is transformed by Rococo iconology into the serpent of Aesculapius, whose healing takes the additional symbol of the cock. One statue of Minerva with Aesculapius, as custodian-healers, presents the latter with a scepter and snake, while the medical goddess holds a lance upright like a staff, having placed her shield on the ground. The cock and the owl seem to be interchangeable birds on Minerva's helmet in the cruder emblems executed during the centuries-long drift from the name Athena to that of Minerva. By the eighteenth century it matters little which bird appears, since Minerva-Medica and MinervaErgane are the same goddess playing different roles. Neither symbol is present in the Apollo and Minerva, Physicians engraved by Claude Gillot, which shows only a helmet. See Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N. G. L. Hammond and Η. H. Scullard, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970); M. Mulot, LeMuseum Florence, 3 vols. (Paris: David, 1787), 3:12-18; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, ER903, nos. 6, 7; Louis Reau, La gravure en France au XVIIIe siecle: La £ravure d'illustration (Paris and Brussels: Editions G. Van Oest, 1928), planche 1. 20. In Jacques Guttin's novel Epigone, the high priest explains that "the Temple had been consecrated by Minerva, who had culled the matrix of the first tongues by exact observation of their idiomatic conformities." Minerva "had gathered the debris that survived the confusion during the construction of the famous Tower of Babel," then "locked up their spirits and essences in these crystal tubes, the remains being neither insensible nor dead. And whether they subsisted through the energy of a particular Intelligence or through the Divinity's participation, they grew animated on demand and never failed to respond to any interrogation made to them." Jacques Guttin, Epigone: Histoire du siecle futur (Paris: Pierre Lamy, 1659), 63-64· See below, p. 370.

4o

Chapter One

43 startle viewers because their conventional Minervan semantics discharge a new eeriness. They signify either a perversion of rational wisdom or a knowledge that is more occult and perhaps more sinister than what the awakened mind knows by daylight. Daylight guides civic history, including Spain's. At history's surface, Minerva evolves in the iconology of Western Europe among numerous matronly allegories that borrow one attribute of hers or another. Minerva is evoked by helmeted females representing Victory, Justice, Truth, Fame, and lesser abstractions that gain personification in the graphic arts. The emblematic diffusion causes overlapping and occasional duplication. These shared roles are ratified in the contemporary iconologies of Boudard and Gravelot. But a further ambiguity carries Minerva beyond moral allegory into an unconventional region of truth-seeking not limited to wisdom. She can be replaced by Hygeia in order to emblematize the public service rendered by doctors and surgeons. 21 The same Hygeia can also replace Aesculapius, who by a transposition of attributes is Minerva's surrogate. As a result, the domain of medicine enjoys a rich amalgam of emblematic associations. This domain extends from herbologists, apothecaries, and physicians to the alchemists, physiologists, and anatomists, who increasingly witness discoveries in their experimental laboratories as the century advances. The symbolic diffusion just mentioned does not remove Minerva from traditionally civic activities during the Enlightenment. But as medicine and biology struggle to attain full rationality, her subliminal presence in those less public delvings is an arcane factor that can be linked to certain forms of spiritism. The spiritist factor gains prominence against the background of the mind-body problem and animal spirits, discussed later in this study. There remain, however, prior considerations. Do Minerva's multiform roles and ambiguous symbolism indicate a rationality in excess? Does her ambiguity abet the retreat from Reason and foster the seeds of Unreason? These conjectures need to attend first not to the energies consumed by Unreason but to their origins in a European society that overtaxes secular Reason, causing it to undergo an aberrant metamorphosis. Thus the next consideration is the changing condition of Reason, a condition that Goya's Capricho 43 helps us analyze. 2i. Minerva Alea in the temple at Arcadia stands next to Aesculapius and Hygeia. See Pausanias, ou Voyage historique de la Grece, trans, into French by M. l'Abbe Gedoyn, 2 vols. (Paris: F. G. Quillan, 1731) 2:222-23. The annual festival of Little Panathenaia includes sacrifices for Athena Hygeia. See Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 232.

The Minervan Hypothesis

41

A Civic Iconography of Minerva The frame for considering Minerva's relevance to Goya and to the irrational is civic history. The political and civic attributes of the goddess can be identified with Enlightenment ideals. Yet Goya transforms Minerva's presence from the vigilant statuette in the portrait of the statesman Jovellanos into the wild multiplication of owls in Capricho 43 • But what exactly is transformed? The iconographical shift in representations of Minerva from Renaissance and Counter-Reformation times to the eighteenth century has a complex history of its own.22 From pagan roles to a syncretic relation with the Virgin Mary, the Greek Pallas Athena and the Roman Minerva merge to allegorize diverse virtues or principles, sometimes associated with heroic women as in the case of Rubens's series about Marie de Medici. In spite of the feminizing details, Minerva is also the energetic defender of the Spanish church, a role gradually secularized in rhythm with political changes in eighteenth-century Bourbon Spain. The anonymous eighteenth-century painting in the Gerona Cathedral shows Minerva in the company of a virtuous maiden bearing the Roman fasces. This civic statement is feminized by an unmilitary caplike helmet and an ornamental gorgoneion, while the half-length close-up of the two females makes them appear more like sisters than like allegorical figures.23 Minerva's name continues to be a synonym for spiritual and imperial hegemony, however. One Spanish historian begins his massive chronicle with the phrase "Spain is the glorious head of Europe, mistress of two worlds," and adds, "She is the Minerva of geniuses,. . . first-born daughter of Christianity."24 But his 1738 boast will soon ring faintly in less belligerent circles where the Spain envisioned by reformers glimpses a more secular destiny. Reformers already see an auspicious Minervan future for enlightened despots as early as 1700. This year marks the advent of the Bourbon monarchy in Spain in the person of King Philip V , grandson of Louis XIV, an event that joins the political destinies of France and Spain. Minerva's protective influence is invoked in 1699, when Fenelon writes Telemaque as a didactic narrative for French princes, including the newly crowned Philip. 22. Studies have shown that Minerva embodies coexisting traits of Victory and Chastity and is also the patroness of peace and learning (Wittkower, "Transformations," 136). Titian's allegory in the Prado, Religion Succoured by Spain, presents Minerva with a lance held erect, a coat-of-arms serving as her shield, and wearing earrings that set off her close-cut coiffure. 23. Cathedral of Gerona, untitled painting no. +, Escuela espanola, sißlo 18. 24. Xavier Garma y Salcedo, Teatro universal de Esparia, + vols. (Madrid-Barcelona: privately printed and Marti, 1738-51), 1:2-3.

42

Chapter One

The heroic Telemachus survives his adventures with the aid of Minerva disguised as Mentor, just as Philip of Anjou survives the war against Habsburgian Archduke Charles III thanks to his Bourbon counselors. A dream of disaster troubles the sleep of the Sun King during one recorded night at the outset of the century's first war.25 But in the real world the Habsburg monsters are dispersed, and after 1714 a single dynastic consciousness unifies two nations separated by the Pyrenees—two halves of one Bourbon shield. These dawn-of-the-century heroics would be commemorated by Philip in woven tapestries depicting "The Adventures of Telemachus," three series commissioned in 1727 for the Madrid palace and assigned to Leyniers and his associates of the Brussels school.26 Numerous editions of Fenelon's novel throughout the century also perpetuate Minerva's presence through lavishly engraved book illustrations. The heroic decades extend to mid-century and beyond. When Philip's son becomes Ferdinand VI in 1746, Minerva officiates at the coronation of Wisdom by means of a lyric poem that solemnizes the event 27 In 1751 Minerva hallows the birth of the Due de Bourgogne, her Gorgon shield canopied above the infant's head, lance readied, in an engraving by Madame de Pompadour.28 The birth of twin Spanish Infantes in 1783 also enjoys Minerva's overview in the form of a statue cameoed above the palace door. Her stance here is less militant: she holds a spear but no shield. Sharing her watch is Ceres, and the double guard betrays a distressing element that is banished in this scene but threatens to appear in the future. These goddesses of vigilance and prosperity are presented as the symbols of a peace treaty just concluded, a treaty destined to be troubled by Napoleon's invasion of Spain. The birth of twin princes thus becomes a hopeful yet ultimately futile occasion to celebrate the end of warfare.29 Toward the end of the century the feats of another royal grandson, 25. Louis XIV dreams of Vauban in tears over his daughter's kidnapping. Louis tells him to enlist Vendöme's aid, but the latter appears in dust after a long chase. Madame de Maintenon interprets the dream in order to oppose "chimerical conjectures" of the astrologers, but the angry Louis declares that he can accept losing Spain but not his own cities. See Songe de Louis XIV du 22 mots d'aoüt l'an 1706: Jour de la prise de Menin (Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris: L b 3 7 4311). 26. Paulina Junquera, '"Las aventuras de Telemaco': Tres series de tapices del Patrimonio Nacional," Reales Sitios i+, no. 52 (1977), 4527. The new monarch receives Justice and Peace, who arrive from Olympus to banish warfare, and the temple of Minerva opens so that "the arts and sciences will be exalted on its deserved altars." See Jose A. Porcel y Salablanca, "Cancion heroica," in Poesta del siglo XVIII, ed. John Polt, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Castalia 1986), 108. 28. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris: ER853, no. 8. 29. Agustin Sellent, Nacimiento de los serenisimos ss. Infantesgemelos, y conclusion de la paz, Biblioteca del Palacio, Cartera 2 (127).

The Minervan Hypothesis

43

Charles III, are dictated by Minerva to History in a superb allegory by Manuel Salvador Carmona.30 These feats consist of progressive policies encouraged through Charles's French-oriented ministers, who strengthen the reformist heritage founded by grandfather Philip V. The funeral eulogy of Charles III by minister Jovellanos salutes "the sons of Minerva congregated in . . . the magnificent monument consecrated to wisdom" by the deceased benefactor.31 Jovellanos exhorts the Minervans to apply their "useful truths" on behalf of the general welfare, although the hope-filled future fills with uncertainty. Gathered in the temple, the Minervans "break open the bosom of Nature and uncover her innermost arcana." But only the goddess knows how to unite her contradictory parts into a harmonious whole. Human efforts at political alliances and intellectual linkages prove disjunctive for the rest of the century. The linkages are short-lived and constantly repaired; their eventual breakdown takes the tense form of Capricho 43The eighteenth-century history of bipartisan relations indicates that human societies succeed only temporarily in binding the partitioned shield of Minerva. The contrasting gifts supplied by the goddess elude reconciliation: warriors' chariots and boats built for Spanish Argonaut-explorers; temples of justice and textile weaving. No mortal can reach the ideal even in a single art, as the doomed Arachne learns after aspiring to weave a perfect tapestry. The same human imperfection condemns the Family Pacts sealed in 1733, 1743, and 1761, all failing to prevent intermittent HispanoFrench wars over commercial and maritime interests. These rips in the diplomatic cloth widen under the cutting French scorn for Spanish intellectual achievements.32 There is occasional hope that time's loom will entwine fruitful relations between Spain and France, but the hope wanes beneath a somber pattern traced by French authors who ply the threads of Spanish Inquisition and stagnancy in their texts.33 30. Manuel Salvador Carmona, La historia escribiendo los hechos del Rey Carlos III: Sc los dicta Minerva. . . . Biblioteca del Palacio, Madrid, Catalogo 88. 31. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Elogw de Carlos III (1788), vol. 1 of Obras, ed. Candido Nocedal. Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles 46 (Madrid: Atlas, 1963), 317. 32. Scorn for Spain is epitomized in Nicolas Masson de Morvilliers's article "Espagne" in "Section de Geographie moderne" of Encyclopedic metbodique, ou par ordre de matteres, vol. ι (Paris and Liege: Plomteux, 1782), 554-68. The Spanish text is in La polemica de la ciencia espanola, ed. Ernesto y Enrique Garcia Camarero (Madrid: Alianza, 1970). A celebrated irate response was by Juan Pablo Forner in Oracwn apologetica por la Espana y su merito literario (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1786). The polemic has been much commented on, but see J. J. A. Bertrand, "Μ. Masson " Bulletin Hispanique 24 (1922): 120-24. 33. In addition to Jaucourt's article "Espagne" in the Encyclopedic, ou dictionnaire raisonne, Diderot's summary of Olavide's auto-da-fe describes the climate of superstition and

44

Chapter One

Disharmony of this sort precedes all Minervan interventions and afflicts the history of France as well as Spain. Besides military flare-ups with her sister state, France skirmishes with other nations and enters the Seven Years' War condemned by Voltaire. Whenever peace arrives, it is Minerva who conducts it, as when Halle depicts her welcome by the Parisian merchants at the Hotel de Ville in 1767.34 The event is a provisional healing, as pacification combines with temple ceremony. In the same year, Minerva is painted as a heavy figure resembling Fame or Victory in Alexandre Roslin's allegory honoring the Marechal de Belle-Isle ( S a l o n de 1767, 246). Another field-marshal accepts a verse homage after capturing Metz in 1775, for which "Minerva, long aware of your virtue, has designated your place in the Temple of Memory." Remembered too is the goddess of Justice in order that "hero-citizen" de Broglie may receive the victor's palm and in return give the State sound reform measures. Such instances do not exhaust the list of historical hallowings. They testify to triumphs that are short-lived, ceremonials that prompt a second look at who is the "enemy." The Minervans are caught in a polarity between the harmonic and the monstrous, often allegorized by architectural and bestial signs. A temple column or a book, a dragon or a satyr, can mark the contrasting field of positive and negative values: Reason and Unreason, Good and Evil, State and untamed Nature, Order and Chaos. The icons can even designate the creative and destructive principles themselves. Only the Divinity can harness these dualities, as Goya suggests with the half-discernible shield in the portrait of Jovellanos. But the lesser Minervans assist mortals who cannot maintain enduring results. The just Themis plants her foot on the stubborn back of Envy, while Louis XVI poses between her and Minerva in an engraving of 1776 by Saint-Aubin (Bocher, Les ßramres franfaises 5:105). And yet to stamp out this kind of social monster will require a Utopian temple of Quixotic faith. Where envious intrigue ravages innocent reputations, there rises the unredeemable beast in human nature.35 religious zeal that wearied Charles III. See " D o n Pablo Olavides [sic]: Precis historique," in Diderot, Oeuvres completes, ed. J. Assezat, 6:467—72. See also Marcelin Defourneaux, Pable de Olavide, ou I'Afrancesado (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959)· 34. Diderot reviews Halle's testimony to Minerva's peacemaking role at length in the Salon of 1767, although he ridicules the "crude tone" in which Minerva is badly painted. See note 13 above. 35. Other animalized forms, such as Fraud, Revolt, Cruelty, and Calumny, also seem crushed by the chariot of a victorious Justice in a 1767 painting by Louis-Jacques Durameau. Fresh in Diderot's mind as he reports this work in the Salon of that year is the infamous Calas affair, whose injustice fills Voltaire's letters with repeated indignation.

The Minervan Hypothesis

45

A painting by Durameau in the Salon of 1767 might be improved, claims Diderot, if it portrayed Minerva, the Graces, Love, Discord, and the Furies, in place of the latter-day Minervan surrogates Vigilance, Prudence, Charity, Innocence, Concord, and Force. These tutelary goddesses repel the moral monsters, although one special evil remains for Diderot to stigmatize. A reference to the "blind and fanatic populace" brings Diderot into the moral circle of Voltaire and Goya. Social monstrosity finds its human agent in the blind masses, and this agent precludes the need for political power in order to do harm. The fanatical monster survives changes of minister and of monarch. It spawns the twin virulence abhorred by Voltaire and Goya: malicious public opinion and superstitious customs, blind viruses that infect the ignorant populace with Unreason. Minerva can supervise and confer knowledge, but she cannot change the nature of imperfect humankind. Consequently, her special adversary is Unreason. The history of societies fills its irrational dimension with monstrous forms created by Unreason. Moral values that germinate in ignorance flourish under the protective arguments of perverse Reason. But the irrational forces behind social wickedness and intellectual intolerance create a more devastating private depravity. The transvalued morality of the Marquis de Sade refines Unreason into an exquisitely self-serving eruption of relativistic energy, as I shall show. His moral monsters rationalize their desires skillfully, each building a selfish palace of dreams that results for the Other in a nightmarish torture chamber. If Goya were to choose a single title from his Caprichos to describe these social and ethical antagonisms between Minerva and Unreason, it would necessarily be "The Sleep/Dream of Reason Produces Monsters."

The Inscription in Capncho 44 The title of Capricho 4-3 is filled with interpretive pitfalls. Its lesson is inscribed in the picture for all to read, but the meaning is elusive: el sueno de la razon produce monstruos. Owing to the double sense of sueno, we do not know whether it denotes sleep or dream. The equivocacy gives rise to four possible constructions, each with different implications for interpreting the aquatint. To consider the quadruple meanings requires suspending temporarily the Minervan hypothesis, which ignores the title's ambiguity and focuses instead on the unequivocal verbal signs that take recognizable visual icons:

46

Chapter One

"Reason" and "Monsters." One of the four possible meanings will in fact broaden the hypothesis. But even a procedure that considers all alternative meanings must be limited to Goya's subject phrase. The predicate phrase "produces monsters" stirs a thicker brew of difficulties. Which creatures are the monsters? By what agency do they materialize? Does the "product" represent a perverse Enlightenment, or does it foreshadow a new Romantic attitude? In contrast, the subject phrase has a thinner texture of logical, easily separated strands. The title can mean, first, that Reason sleeps. The notion of a slumbering rational faculty is intelligible: reasoning halts when this faculty is asleep. "Sleep" is merely a figurative term for arrested rationality. However, no entity can be productive in a state of total arrest, whereas Goya's first phrase, "the sleep of Reason," is followed by the predicate "produces monsters." It is therefore not sleeping Reason or Reason asleep that produces monsters, but rather the sleep that produces them. In this sense the true subject of Goya's phrase cannot be Reason, for if it were, no predicate would be possible. If Reason is dormant it should produce nothing at all. Nor can Reason function differently under special circumstances, like slumber. It can behave rationally or not at all; its sole function is to produce rationality, not monstrosity. By ceasing to function, by falling into the oblivion of sleep, Reason cannot behave in any way whatsoever, much less irrationally. Therefore the inscribed title cannot mean that Reason produces monsters when it sleeps. This interpretation leads to inquiry into the nature of sleep. The second possibility is that sleep produces monsters. Sleep is the context and cause, while Reason is the lapsed bystander. It is true that Reason is asleep when it should be awake, and thus it may be responsible in a moral sense for the monsters' presence. But responsibility is not complicity in their production. If Reason slumbers involuntarily or out of negligence, it is nonetheless sleep that is the condition and the medium that makes the intrusion of monsters possible. On the other hand, how can sleep produce anything else but oblivion? Therefore, the title cannot mean simply that the sleep of Reason produces monsters. The third possibility is that a dream produces monsters while Reason is asleep. In this sense, the title "The Dream of Reason" is a phrase that compresses several semantic tiers. While sleep keeps Reason in thrall, the monsters enter through dream. The role of Reason is passive, just as it might be in a daytime reverie or waking vision where Reason cannot intervene. Dream production takes place in the theater provided by sleep,

The Minervan Hypothesis

47

an arena marked by the encircling inertia of limp Reason. But there is no connection between Reason and dream. The monsters are beyond rational control, produced by something activated after slumber neutralizes Reason. Goya's title therefore means that it is possible for Reason "to have a dream." While the rational faculty cannot itself make a dream, its negligent sleep makes the monstrosities of nightmare possible. Implied here is the mediacy of imagination in the visual theater of the mind. In eighteenthcentury psychology, the imagination combines its images extravagantly when release from rational control.36 The sleep of Reason thus permits a dream that "is presented" to passive Reason, a dream engendering monsters. The fourth possibility considers the distinction between "to have a dream" and "to dream a dream." Now the idea of responsibility draws attention. It becomes clear that in the third case Reason falls asleep and involuntarily surrenders consciousness and control. It dreams only in a personified sense, like a rational man "dreaming a dream." Strictly speaking, a person has a dream without the intervention of Reason. A dream is something unpossessed that happens to an individual without regard to choice or responsibility. But whereas the third case makes dream independent of Reason rather than a possession, the fourth case allows that Reason may indeed "have" a dream much the same way that a social reformer might say, " I have a dream." In this possessive instance, "the dream of Reason" is the visionary yearning for, say, social justice or Utopia. The fourth possibility construes a conscious will on the part of Reason by dispensing with the title's double sense of sleep and dream (sueno). Rea36. Two sources, the first a leading treatise on physiology, the second a major treatise on dreams. First,"Imagination, then, is whenever any species, preserved in the common sensory, and in the present perception, excites such other thoughts in the mind as would arise if the perceiving nerve that gave the first birth to the said species was itself affected or changed. This definition is confirmed by the example of the great strength of fancy in certain persons, and those who are delirious; but in every body, in the instance of dreams, in which thoughts arise in the mind, occasioned by the corporeal species reserved in the brain, so as to be not at all weaker than those which were first formed by the change in the sentient nerve, from the external objects. Even more, the attention and rest of the mind, with the absence of all external objects, will often obtain a stronger assent from dreaming, towards the traces impressed in the brain, than that which are excited from external objects." Albrecht von Haller and William Cullen, First Lines of Physiology, Translated from the Corrected Latin Edition, "Printed under the inspection of William Cullen, M.D., and compared with the edition published by H. A. Wrisber, M.D." (1766), 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1786), 2:50. And second, "In order for dreams to exist, the internal organs of sense must remain free so that the imaginative faculty may form images by means of them. This faculty is active during sleep, unfolds without obstacle (the external senses and active memory being inactive), and suffices for all sorts of bizarre and marvelous dreams." Abbe Jerome Richard, Theorie des sondes (Paris: Freres Estienne, 1766), 71-72.

48

Chapter One

son dreams, and sleeping is the prior condition of dreaming. The emphasis on dream reminds us that a monster-haunted nightmare is not the unique form of dreaming. Dream images may also be representational, if often extravagant. Does Goya imply a second meaning by this obvious omission? The Rousseauian idealist might abandon himself to daydream or to a future projection that, however Quixotic, is governed by rational aspirations. In that case, the dream o f Reason is properly called "utopia" because Reason, by the Enlightenment's ideal definition, is able to conceive only the true and the good. This is the Minervan hypothesis in another form. As the supreme value, Reason formulates truthful principles by carrying the true and the good to their logical ends. Consequently, the dream o f Reason can be an unfulfilled Utopian project. Nevertheless, a vision o f dystopia gathers around Goya's monsters. I f nightmare rather than some benevolent dream results, then perhaps Reason has no business dreaming or even daydreaming. Unnatural behavior produces unnatural results. The logic behind this interpretation works in opposite directions. In one way, Reason earns reproach for longing after unattainable goals. In a contrary sense, it has cultivated its rationalizing power so scrupulously that its excessive zeal distorts the result. Both efforts violate the natural order of thought. Excess deforms. To construe Goya's title in this fashion reasserts the Minervan hypothesis while introducing what I might call the "Christian Enlightenment hypothesis." Goya is on the side o f Reason, sympathizing with utopianism but also sobered by the arrogance, pedantry, or malice that bolsters imperfect minds with supreme confidence in their ideas. Rationalism closes its eyes to reality, with monstrous effects: either in its reveries and speculations, or in rigid policies that warp dedication into fanaticism. Minervans who are reasonable optimists, however, may think utopically without exaggerating. Aware of the enemies o f reform, they exalt rational experience along with the friends and books that inspire progress. Their dream o f Reason is indebted to a covenant o f Minervans, but the tabernacle arches against the persistence of Unreason. And Goya is not the only Spaniard to express the tension.

The Minervan Temple in Spain The temple o f Minerva rises on the horizon of memory in one young poet who celebrates his friendship with the older philosopher Jovellanos. Play-

The Minervan Hypothesis

49

ing the role of novice, Juan Melendez Valdes hails his Minervan mentor of the 1760s and 1770s, when Spain began to prosper under the temperate sceptre of Charles III. But the poet's retrospection during the 1780s is edged with the frayed signs of disorder. He summarizes his earlier tutelage under the nation's leading public planner in this acknowledgment: "You led me to Minerva's temple, [yes] you led me." 37 To commemorate their worship, Melendez writes his "Second Epistle to Jovellanos" in 1784. In 1798, Goya would embellish his portrait of Jovellanos with a partitioned shield for Minerva. Between these dates, Spanish history descends gradually into the Unreason that will persecute both Jovellanos and Olavide, a turmoil whose external side is the reactionary Reason of state.38 No more sensitive group of lyrics than young Melendez's dozen poems invoking Minerva can be cited to recreate the involution of enlightened despotism in a society that would be satirized by the Caprichos of 1799. The "Second Epistle" by Melendez sets the norm along the Minervan axis of peace and war. Apprentice and mentor make offerings out of the silent hours that are lulled by intellectual communion. Their silence is the paradoxical conversation-filled quietude of a park at the edge of vociferous Madrid. The city, it cannot be overemphasized, is the Madrid of Goya. Other poets pursue the themes of warfare, the poet reminds us, but neither these themes nor the "horrendous scenes of madness that a frightened humanity watches" entice his pen. Despite his disclaimer, Melendez proceeds to enumerate those horrors and thus documents their ghostly presence in the four years before the death of Charles III. Where then does he stand? He conjectures that "from disorder order is born" (Obras, 2:764). In this aphorism lodges the disciple's gratitude for being "led to the temple": Jovellanos has "dictated" the appropriate themes, and they are meant for "clement" eyes only. Clemency is one of Minerva's civic virtues, and Melendez here plays a civil lyre in a key that still harmonizes personal affirmation with national ideals. He warms to his friend's judicial record in Seville with an earnestness that mutes nostalgia. The years of disorder are ahead, and Minerva will preside somewhat differently in a later epistle when Jovellanos becomes Minister of Justice in 1797. But now, in 1784, the poem installs the goddess 37. Juan Melendez Valdes, Obras en verso, ed. Juan Polt y Jorge Demerson, 2 vols. (Oviedo: Centro de Estudios del Siglo XVIII, 1983), 2:765. 38. The classic study of reactionary Spanish ideology is by Javier Herrero, Los origenes Μpensamiento reaccionario espanol (Madrid: Cuadernos para el Dialogo, 1973).

jo

Chapter One

as an abstraction, the indwelling numen of a tabernacle. The edifice exists only in name, but its architectural counterparts occupy the real space of Spain's municipal gardens, lyceums, and courthouses. Jovellanos writes his tracts on national institutions, tracts that generate constructive ministerial policies. Minerva presides over a personal friendship, but also over a particular phase of Spanish life when social and poetic aspirations meet in the name of intelligence and order. The apex of this phase is 178+, still four years away from the political abyss that will open slowly after the death of Charles III. Now all Madrid basks in Minerva's immanence through the bounty of Jovellanos's public service. As for the tranquil poet, Melendez chants his urban pastorale in counterpoint to the mentor's love of country and "saintly humanitarianism" that is able to "soften hard bronze." The anvil is patriotism and the forge is the "august tribunal" from whose bench Jovellanos issues "infallible oracles," ordained by the tutelary Justice who mounts guard at his right hand. The community goddess, Minerva herself, stands to Jovellanos' left in Goya's portrait of solitary contemplation. This parallel nevertheless diverges into the poet's "good dream" of Reason, and the painter's "bad dream." The divergence involves contrasting use of traditional conventions.39 In traditional terms, Goya's portrait of Jovellanos parallels the lyrical portrait by Melendez. But Goya reverses the image physically and symbolically in Capricho 43• Here the owls of Minerva, as prudent guardians of understanding, are stationed in alarmed watch against the monsters of disorder. The difference between the two versions is best seen through the lens of Melendez's ode to Jovellanos in 1778. Both versions refract a single motif whose title might be, "On the Wings of Dream." Melendez fantasizes the magistrate's return from Seville to Madrid to assume new duties. Harmonious birds proclaim Jovellanos's "discreet prudence" in chorus with joyous nymphs. Here the "good" dream of Reason gently filters Minerva's mili}9. Melendez's literary roots in Renaissance and Baroque traditions have been amply traced by John Polt, who indicates their affinity with the gentler half of Minerva's partitioned shield of attributes. See John H . R . Polt, Batilo: Estudios sobre la evolucion estilktka de Melendez Valdes (Oviedo: Centro de Estudios del Siglo X V I I I ; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 271. Polt's observations permit a coda that suggests how the poet refracts the image of Minerva in its evolving usage. Conventionally, the goddess appears with an owl, the paragon of prudence among birds; her armor befits the protectress of cities w h o must teach citizens the arts of self-defense as well as of peace. Thus Alciati's often reprinted book of emblems shows an owl embossed on Minerva's shield, and includes a gloss about the prudent person who eschews eloquence for silent understanding.

The Minervan Hypothesis

51

tant alertness, in contrast to the "bad" dream of Capricho 43 that throws harsh light on the failings of the goddess's ministers. A later poem celebrates Jovellanos's appointment as Minister of Justice in 1797 by recording the rush of intellectual "wings" in the ascent of Genius. These harmonious pinions also contrast with the fluttering wings of owls and the threatening flaps of bat wings in Capricho 43- Melendez exults, "let the Colossus of error fall once and for all" and then, "Let Minerva's students cease their weeping" ('Obras, 2:801). Later, Goya also paints a "Colossus" whose nightmarish irrevocability of power contrasts with the poet's light fancy. These divergent techniques for representing the dream of Reason display Minervan attributes at their extreme opposites. Melendez anticipates the celebrated Capricho in the haunting prose draft of an elegy to his brother, recently deceased in 1777 (Obras, 1:513; Polt, Batilo, 303). It can be added, regarding the Minervan theme, that the "sacred friendship" in Melendez's dream looks on a winged chorus in a "glorious vision." The nonsensory cognitive term lifts his beatific intention to fulfillment (Obras, 2:717,720), but in Capricho 43 the winged disturbance sweeps Reason in the direction of perversity. The poet's rhetoric waxes as militantly as Minerva's vigilance, but it never mirrors her shield's violent half. Mortal Reason may stumble, as Goya suggests, but the Minerva of Melendez remains a steadfast benefactress with supernatural virtues. In the "good dream," she gives the worthy Jovellanos two gifts: "a superhuman candor" and "the hoary gift of upright counsel" (2:720). These virtues do not exhaust the fund of moral values in Minervan wisdom, but their Jovian "clemency" neutralizes the virile attributes of the Homeric goddess. Her "severe" temperament gains mention in a frothy late poem, and her "grave exercises" are polarized against the "deliriums" of Bacchus (1:131,124). Otherwise, her abstract nature, neither feminine nor masculine, palliates both the unreal Goyesque aura and the deeper symbolisms of owl, armor, and temple. Despite Minerva's subdued qualities, they cannot influence the daylight world of historical reality. A political chasm widens after the French Revolution and during the reign of Charles IV. The merely background threat to Spain in 1784 is audible in 1794 as "chains groaning in the fearful abyss" (Melendez, Obras, 2:921). Honest citizens are menaced by "the bloody fanaticism" of modern times and tremble at this "monster," an epithet repeated four times. The same monster pushes the arts and sciences into shadowy retreat. Only ideological ecstatics can walk firmly amid the civil war, the inquisitional bonfires, and the fanatical hatreds. The monster "descends into the abyss with arrogant tread and empire-breaking sceptre"

52

Chapter One

(2:922), and it becomes clear that the Europe of 1794 is itself the abyss. Melendez's ode for this year might be apocalyptical except for the reality of French Terror as viewed from Bourbon Spain. Each zealot glimpses his own God but is "blind in his atrocious delirium" (2:91-92). These notes of blindness and delirium thwart Minerva's influence and announce profound themes for the Enlightenment that are examined in later chapters. The abyss is a counter-architectural trope, a denial of the temple. Its significance expands with Melendez's own measure of national and personal tribulations. If he were a faithful adept of the Minervan shrine, it would shield the devotee against a delirious world. However, Melendez's temple of worship at times belongs to Venus. He conveys his woes to Jovellanos in the identical vocabulary of the political and moral discourse just discussed. Twelve years before the Revolution, he uses the words "blind" and "blindness" three times in "Epistle XIII," where this condition alternates with such pitfalls as "error," "dream," and "confusion." He admits abjectly to not paying "reverent heed to Minerva's gifts" and to abandoning the "august" pursuit of letters (Obras, 2:831). The fact is that he has preferred the libations offered by Cupid and now the poison of Unreason grips his body. In the next year, he commiserates with Jovellanos, who stares into another abyss, that of professional difficulties in Seville ("This new employ of mine is an abyss" [2:837]). The mentor has resigned the judiciary of Seville to assume tasks "without number." Melendez sends swift encouragement by contrasting his friend's virtuous commitments with "the ignorant masses . . . sealed off from the reasonings of Minerva." A skeptical ear might interpret these tones to mean that Minerva's proselytes lack the countervailing zest to meet the swirl around them. If true, their nemesis is a new and fathomless adversary that confronts the goddess for perhaps the first time in history. The clash concerns values best defined in philosophical and historical terms and mirrored in Melendez's melancholy consciousness, as biographer Georges Demerson has shown.40 The most eloquent example is the appeal to Jovellanos in the "Second Elegy" for aid in escaping "the abyss that some invincible impulse drags him toward." 41 Viewed historically, the poem is dated after the Revolution, which is to say after the dream of enlightened Reason dissolves. The eternal saga of Minerva's invincibility seems to end here. The finality be40. Georges Demerson, Don Juan Melendez Valdes et son temps 1754-1817 (Paris: C. Kliencksieck, 1961). 41. Melendez Valdes, Obras en verso, 2:1011. Russell Sebold cites the passage as an example of lost innocence in Trayectoria del romanticism0 espanol (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1983), 31.

The Minervan Hypothesis

53

comes intelligible when we make the Enlightenment commensurate with the traits of the warrior goddess in an age that supersedes Homeric conventions. Minerva's armor is protective and discreet, her energy is likened to that of the Enlightenment insofar as the belligerence of fanaticism is missing. Her shield is severely rational, and deflects the violence that besieges her ideals. Her aura is prudent, candid, austere, grave, and august—traits appropriate to the allegory of the century's sober-minded progressivism. As for the Enlightenment, it is the nemesis of Chaos, which fills the Abyss and about which the Encyclopedic has much theologically to comment. The clash is solemnized by Minerva. Her virtues divide the universe of values into light and darkness, Reason and Unreason. In Melendez's experience, this wider conflict often subsists as a microcosmic private disorder, quickly surfacing in lyric forms. To generalize in this way from what Lester Crocker calls "the struggle for order against the contrary forces of disorder" is not to overlook the private abyss of melancholy unique to Melendez in the "Second Elegy." 42 However, the same poem also anticipates Goya by alluding to the "monster that troubled Reason can abort in its fatal delirium" (Melendez, Obras, 2:1010). Thus to Melendez individual dejection resembles that which overpowers Coleridge, who broods over the French Revolution and its disappointments. The Spain of the "Second Elegy" is earlier, in 1794, at the height of the Terror and its political repercussions for the Bourbon monarchy south of the Pyrenees. But the depths of the two poets are equally opaque. In the case of Melendez, the emotional disarray is compounded by "the ravings of my blind Reason." Everything "rushes to the chaos of old," while Nature, "her laws broken," shrouds her beauty in the "sad mourning" that falls on the scene. With this evocation of ancient cosmogonies, detailed in the articles on Chaos and Abyss in the Encyclopedic, Melendez sets Nature firmly within the succession of things from primal disorder to civilization. Nature's law is also the law of Minerva, who teaches it to reasonable societies in the human tongue. This consideration also inspires Melendez in a poem conceived during the calm aftermath of 1814, "Ode 34. To My Books." Laws are the cross-fibers that pull orderly creation out of chaotic magma. We learn those laws from books that span the centuries. Melendez's personal 42. Lester Crocker, Diderot's Chaotic Order (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 163. The dichotomy of universal values does not contradict Sebold's well-known description of the "universal ennui," or spleen, of Spanish pre-Romanticism that opens on Romantic Europe. See Sebold's El rapto de la mente: Poetica y poesia dieciochescas (Madrid: Editorial Prensa Espanola, 1970), 135.

54

Chapter One

library, "where provident Minerva watches over its wonders," has rescued him from "the blind labyrinth" of the human heart. In gratitude for the illuminations of "divine Plato" and "sublime Newton," the poet salutes his books as he once did his mentor Jovellanos: "always teachers in my life, always loyal friends." Melendez has overcome the earlier disorientation, and become a dedicated reader who is "in delightful bond" with the ages that toll by as he meditates on their march within "the deep abyss of nothingness" (Obras, 2:690-91). The date of the poem is 1814, and it coincides with the end of Spain's War of Independence against France. Melendez's earliest reference to Minerva as civic goddess is in 1778, at the apex of enlightened despotism under Charles III. The poems in this span form a composite portrait of Minerva: her moral attributes are varicolored, but the hues never obscure the contour of a stable bulwark before Chaos. Midway, two odes of uncertain date reinforce the unchanging contour of Minerva's significance for Melendez. His summary of "Sorrows and Pleasures Mixed, and the Cloth of Life Is Fixed," written between 1798 and 1808, the year of Napoleon's invasion, attests that "for me, the severe labors of Minerva were not a fatigue but an easy recreation" amid the special affliction of a "swarm of fools" {Obras, 1:129). The second ode, with the equally retrospective title "Man's Destiny," records the "electric shock" dealt by Minerva's followers, the sequel to her own feats from Alexander's time onward (Obras, 2:996). Both panoramic poems knit Melendez's ideological concept of Minerva with his personal affinity. The metaphors of electricity and whole cloth—physical Nature and human fiber—are surface tropes that join with the architectural metaphors of tribune and temple mentioned earlier. Rational design balances dynamic energy midway between Unreason and Reason. These insights comprise the underlying metaphor of a synthesizing power that the Enlightenment may wield against disorder. In this vein, the constructional image of an "august temple" serves Melendez in 1797, the latest dated instance that associates Jovellanos with Minerva (Obras, 2:801). This important "Epistle VIII" to the new Minister of Justice links the temple to Themis, but her surrogacy for Minerva is clear. A less remarked metonymy is Hygeia, goddess of medicine, who also stands helmeted in scientific emblems of the period.43 All such constructional images of erecting and consolidating, together with the bold image of electricity signifying intel43. See note 21 above.

The Minervan Hypothesis

55

lectual energy, chronicle the progress in science and letters mentioned daily by Enlightenment authors. The philosopher's self-conscious pride carries what by the end of the century is a familiar conviction: that inspired Reason continues to rally against the growing energies of the dark abyss. These final poems find their structure in the optimistic cry, "let not the students of Minerva weep." The "electric shock" they deliver is one of Europe's earliest poetic allusions to the energy brought from laboratory experiment to salon diversion and now applied to civic matters. Symbolic of power as well as light, electric force is the single aggressive instrument in Minerva's otherwise restrained eighteenth-century repertoire. Although her disciples are tearful because they see "haughty ignorance enthroned," they defend order and intelligence with the prudent tactics described earlier (•Obras, 2:801). Only one violent gesture on behalf of Reason is noted in Melendez's historical survey of human achievement. It involves Minerva's intervention during the bloodshed of Alexander's campaigns, which resulted in treaties that spread rational order throughout Asia. For the rest, the feats of "wise Minerva" fill a tranquil center in the maelstrom of human violence. Here we find the familiar monsters: "horrific fanaticism with most bloody face," "cruel superstition and tyranny," and other "vile phalanges led by sham ministers" (Obras, 2:996). In spite of all, Minerva's providence turns irrevocably bloodless after Gutenberg, in whose "prodigious art / of painting Reason, / divine Minerva inspires perfection," and who disseminates Reason with "magic swiftness." No less peaceably, the printed word routs error, personified as the fierce father of superstition. Similarly, "Man's Destiny," an ode of uncertain authorship that Polt and Demerson believe could be written by Melendez, interweaves historical examples with sentiments that accord with "Epistle VIII" on Jovellanos's appointment to the Ministry of Justice. It surveys the centuries as the warrior cult gradually succumbed to the "beneficent cult" of the "beneficent" and "wise" Minerva. This history is haunted nevertheless by renewed confrontations. Polarized forces reconsecrate the temple only to desecrate it once again; as a result, the Gutenberg invention turns into a sporadic weapon for routing "the fierce father" of error. But Melendez's dream of Reason, unlike Goya's nightmare, is heartening. With Jovellanos as the new Minister of Justice, the "infamous monsters"—the Colossus of ignorance and more savage aggressors like slander and envy—will be extirpated from political and social history. The unsigned ode tracks the steady progress of Minerva's minions, formerly the martyrs of erudition and now the beholders of just laws already legislated. "Epistle VIII" heaves a shudder at

56

Chapter One

the undying monster horde, then looks beyond to the imminent but still unachieved triumph of righteous law. Both poems revert to the standard imagery of harmony set against violence. It bears repeating that Minerva is the most likely numen of the Enlightenment also to be designated the nemesis of disorder. The latter role finds support in the aforementioned entry "Chaos" in the Encyclopedic. This cosmological context sharpens Melendez's architectonic metaphors and their vision of the known universe. The library structures all knowledge, including the jurisprudence that rules civilized societies. The temple, in turn, radiates energy from its spiritual hub outward, to all points where orderly understanding is meager. So too the garden and the tribune, each an enclosure whose design integrates its parts and whose entirety, if not a symmetrical harmony, displays a rationally traceable center. The places sanctified by Minerva have none of the structural meanderings and blind alleys of the labyrinth. Thus "Epistle VIII" represents Jovellanos and Melendez proceeding in the temple to "turn over tranquilly the sacred deposits where Minerva locks her richest treasures" (Obras, 2:801). The specific discipline of jurisprudence, dear to both Spaniards, requires its special deity. Scholars note the verses about the temple of Themis in "Epistle VIII" when citing the poet's censure of bad magistrates (Demerson, Melendez, 197). But there is little doubt that the "mother" of this and all other civilized forms of knowledge presides over the temple. The spatial metaphor for books as crypts that may be unlocked, entered, revisited, and searched systematically—pages turning in succession—summons the larger image of cyclical paths, adjacencies, and connecting relationships that constitute an orderly universe. But, as shown earlier, the temple may also exist in uncultivated Nature. Its metaphorical form as a "monument" bequeathed by enlightened monarchs like Charles III belongs to the same architectural paradigm of the Roman Capitol and the palace of History. The Minervan spirit pervades these places in eighteenth-century visual art as well as in literature. Yet the frequent invocation of the goddess herself in Spanish poetry only retards and does not halt the march toward Unreason begun after the death of Charles III.

2. The Bats of Minerva

All the mutability of our tempers, the disorders of our passions, the corruption of our hearts, all the reveries of the imagination, all the contradictions and absurdities that are to be found in human life, and human opinions, are precisely the mutability, disorders, corruptions, and absurdities of human reason. —William Law, The Case ofReason Minerva parcels o u t her identity between the immobile o w l and its restless siblings in Capricho 43- T h e restless owls share their duties t o the original ministry o f w i s d o m or Reason in progressively more renegade attitudes. T h e first, advisory o w l on the far left is the least strange. This sedentary, mustachioed bird, nearly humanized, clutches a pencil holder. T h e next t w o owls reproduce their companion with greater animation, and seem t o be variant forms o f the same rational emblem. T h e fourth is

fluttering

above the sleeper's head,having abandoned the original role o f counselor. A n d in final full flight, with Minerva betrayed, Reason reproduces itself monstrously. A n owlish blur rises, soars higher, and becomes a gigantic bat amid other disseminators o f delirium. T h e scene inverts the dreamy "wanderings" o f Rousseau's Seventh Promenade, where the soul "roves and glides o n wings o f imagination through the universe in ecstasies." Against Rousseau's norm o f a winged imagination, G o y a pits the unnatural flight o f excessive Reason. T h e contrast, in ideological terms, pits the pastoral vision against the urban one. Ideology is the first ground for interpreting the conversion o f wise o w l into menacing bat. By 1799, Reason has become an urban, institutional resource, specifically in Spain but also in Europe. T h e instrument that the laity and clergy valued equally undergoes deterioration. G o y a parodies Reason's "progress" by means o f its soaring, monstrous replication. But the site o f hybridization is as important as the parody. G o y a reworks the conventional setting for meditation. H e shuts the sleeper in a studio and seals him further within his dream space. T h u s the sleeper is no rustic meditator in the vein o f daydreaming Rousseau.

58

Chapter Two

He inhabits the Madrid of Charles IV or some other European community governed by the institutions of social Reason. His enclosed work place stands for the artist's studio, the monk's cell, the statesman's office, or the private study. In this view, scientist and priest differ less in intellectual fallibility than in social role. The sources of failed Reason are secular as well as theological, liberal as well as conservative.

The Hybrid Identity of Reason Minerva's rebellious owls merge indeterminately with the bats. The blending reflects the hybrid capacity of Reason to be otherwise while showing a simulacrum of its normal identity. Consider the room where Goya places the sleeper. It is windowless, with barely a shadow. The air is as stifling as the bookish atmosphere that can carry ideas to an extreme. Most ideas originate in a den of contemplative retreat. Harmful ideas, fanatical doctrines, and corrupt values that breed social injustice spill out of their normal confines, lose contour, and become misshapen as they diffuse society. As social ideas, they are not unlike Goya's bats, which begin in a column of vigorous wings and end in shadowy blots. That Spain's history can reflect this condition is not hyperbole. Confirmation appears in at least one European contemporary who generalizes from the Spanish example. An apocalyptic fiction by Louis-Sebastien Mercier in 1770 anticipates Goya's unique scene of irrationality for the post-Revolutionary years of 1793 to 1799. Mercier mourns the eclipsed light of Utopia in The Tear 2440, a visionary narrative that Goya further darkens into a hermetic space. Both men take a dystopic view of Europe at particular stages of their philosophy. Mercier's evocation of Spain serves the dystopic purpose particularly well. Spain is guilty of pursuing the "Reason of state" that led to the bloody conquest of America. This stigma is worse than Germany's, whose "possessed furies" and "theological rage" contrast curiously with Germanic "natural coldness" (L'an 2440, 1:136).' Spain is more unnatural, a statue of "bloodveined marble" whose "frightful color is as ineffaceable as the memory o f " thirty-five million mutilated slaves crying out for revenge. The Spaniards had justified their religious fanaticism by citing the idea of missionary duty: they were fulfilling "divine law," said to be the rational support i. Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Van deux nulle quatre cent quarante, 2 vols. (London: n.p., 1785), 1:136.

The Bats of Minerva

59

of morals and politics.2 Mercier also gives a largely retrospective view of Spain's rational perverseness, but then he shifts into a future focus. Instead of lamenting wayward Reason, he observes its end-of-days resumption of an honest course. He imagines a Spanish academy of experimental sciences that invents a new "system" of electricity for world benefit, thus atoning for the Inquisitional barbarities that made Spaniards worse than cannibals (1:381-82). This prophetic vision is not shared by Louis-Antoine de Caraccioli in The Voyage of Reason in Europe (1772). Writing two years after Mercier's visionary narrative, this popular Parisian author finds Spain overly proud to conform to the European age of "delicacy and refinement." Caraccioli, a Christian partisan of Reason, is revolted by what Goya will portray as the bats of Minerva.3 A cloak of traditional habit clings to the Spanish homeland. Any attempt "even to strip a Spaniard of his cape would wrench out his soul" (Voyage, 96). But spread that cape against the wall and pinion him to it—a ritual form of ridicule at Spanish universities— and he will resemble "a bat with extended wings." 4 Spain wants only to be herself, notes Caraccioli, himself no apologist for national fanaticism. The popular Spanish cape is symptomatic of the nation's unadaptability to the century's "refinement," a cloak not yet discarded like "those immense hats that used to throw shadows over the face and that very often masked crimes." Spain's dual nature, retrograde yet desirous of reform, conforms to the chiropteran image designated by Goya.5 Caraccioli is an excellent and overlooked example of what in today's parlance would be viewed as a middle-brow intellectual observer. His wide readership in France and in Spain through translations attests to a propriety with respect to the 2. Mercier is not the only French writer to hold Spain in low esteem. Despite translations and literary imitations of Spanish books, French authors habitually cite the dim success of Reason on the Iberian Peninsula. Montesquieu and Voltaire see in the Inquisition Spain's own epitomizing emblem. Foreign travelers and historians from Abbots Vayrac and Labat to Arthur Young report Spain's achievements in condescending diaries and stereotyped characterizations that finally smack of a distasteful duty. British opinion is often unflattering, as in M. G. Lewis's The Monk and in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, where Lovelace scornfully rejects a proposal to visit Spain (Belford's letter, October j). 5. Louis-Antoine Caraccioli, Voyage de la raison en Europe (Campiegne and Paris: Saillant & Nyon, 1772). The popularity of this work is attested in Mariano Nipho's Spanish translation Viage de la razön por Europa por el Marques Caracciolo, 2 vols. (Madrid: Viuda de Escribano, 1788), which had its fourth printing just a decade before the completion of the Caprichos. 4. Manuel Lanz de Casafonda, Dialoges de Chindulza, ed. F. Aguilar Pinal (Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 1972), 88. 5. The March 23, 1767 mutiny of Esquilache, dubbed "the mutiny of capes and hats," had not faded from memory when Caraccioli published his book. The Spanish monarchy was alarmed by the violence provoked by its order to trim capes and hats.

6o

Chapter Two

"good thinking" prevalent among the educated classes. The importance of Caraccioli's books lies in their summation of prevailing rational tastes in a manner that was acceptable to religious censors, especially in Catholic countries. I shall interpret Capncbo 43 against this background, which will mean entertaining an approach that might be called the hypothesis of a "Christian Enlightenment." Accordingly, a "good" Reason exists in the secular and empirical Enlightenment, but it suffers degrees of transformation in the larger culture. These graded transformations become the full range of winged creatures in Capricho 43- The bats emerge from the metamorphosis of the sedentary wise owl into progressively fiercer variants that end in deformity. At the extreme, the bats remain truly Minerva's, but they are named "monsters" in Goya's title—that is, the sleep/dream of Reason desires to soar beyond reasonable propriety, as alleged in Spain's fanatical devotion to her spiritual expansion. The Christian partisans of Reason hold rationality to be a condition of the true and the good, whereas the wings of Spanish bats embody the overreaching desire just mentioned. The bat is a repulsive symbol because its hybrid anatomy of bird and mouse violates ordinary expectations. The bat's morphology seems deformed, just as Reason's unnatural acts of sleeping, dreaming, and soaring seem incongruent with its true identity. The idea of a "good" Reason distinct from its perverted version anchors the hypothesis of a Christian Enlightenment. Caraccioli furnishes this perspective through the device of an imaginary voyage undertaken by the allegorical hero Lucidor, accompanied by Reason. The assumption is that intelligent readers of The Voyage of Reason in Europe are under the threat of bondage to fashionable styles of recent thought. The narrative's opening event establishes the point of view: "It was amid these modes that tyrannize us that Reason undertook to visit us." The collective "we" exempts no literate person, for Caraccioli indicts all intellectual camps for their addiction to novelty. Spain is not the only European nation visited by Lucidor and his guide. Both traditionalist and progressive nations come under review. In the conservative camp, church leaders rationalize preposterous beliefs after considering empirical testimony. Every Polish family is said to enlist a monk to guide its inevitably superstitious thinking. The "vampire" syndrome gains currency on the testimony of parish priests who apply the term to animate corpses that they themselves have witnessed crying and

The Bats of Minerva

61

wandering.6 In the progressive camp, the English are just as immoderate. They incur censure for confusing freedom with license, although Caraccioli acknowledges freedom to be an indisputable ideal of the era. But freedom carried to its logical extreme becomes a passion as overpowering as religious zeal. In this view, secular England becomes the obverse of the fanatical Spanish Inquisition, displaying what one London nobleman calls "our fanaticism about liberty." Viewpoint is thus an essential factor when interpreting Goya's symbolic bats. If they signify fanaticism, this may mean quite different things to opposite camps. To liberal citizens in the time of Spain's Charles III (1760-88), the bats might represent religious and political intolerance. But to conservative citizens in the same decades preceding the Revolution, the same "monsters" might represent moral and political license.7 During the Revolutionary period, however, fanaticism might consist of the same liberal ideals now implemented in excess. The extreme tendencies of Europe's irrationality and the gradients in between unfold during Lucidor's imaginary journey with Reason. Caraccioli's protagonists witness the credulous emotionalism of Poland, seen to be rivaled more violently in Portugal when they attend the bullfight and the auto-da-fe. But they also notice within the bosom of intellectual Europe that French authors dupe readers unscrupulously by foisting "paradoxes as the greatest truths, and raillery as reasoning" (Voyage, 266). Caraccioli recognizes the Enlightenment in its informed, sophisticated arguments, but he notes that mental stagnation is not the problem. Quite the contrary, the degenerated uses of Reason no longer serve to master human inclinations. West and East, the Christian nations unite the Continent in a sorry reconversion of Minerva's original gift. "Reason Multiplied" would serve as a title for Caraccioli's imaginary voyage as well as for Capricho 43. Goya's etching inverts the portrait of Jovellanos, which places the statuette of Minerva at his shoulder. The etch6. Interest in vampires is attested by the editions of Dom Augustin Calmet's Dissertation sur Us apparitions des anges, des demons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie.. . (Paris: Debure, 1746); enl. ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Debure 1751). See also Bela Köpeczi, "Un scandale des Lumieres: Les vampires," Themes et figures du Steele des lumieres: Melanges offerts a Roland Monier, ed. Raymond Trousson (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 123-35. The book was condemned as humbug by the Encyclopedic (16:828), but it received notice for its careful assemblage of depositions by the Journal de Trevoux (October-November 1746). The third edition (1751) changed its title to the more focused and scientific Tratte sur les apparitions des esprits et des vampires ou revenants de Hongrie. 7. The symbolism of "monsters" is usually construed in reactionary terms, as in "monsters of oppression." See Chapter 1, note 6.

62

Chapter Two

ing redesigns this vigilance so that Minerva's owls accompany the sleeper as false surrogates. So too in the Voyage ofReason in Europe, where Reason's offspring are named "Clever Wit" and "Good Sense." These less virtuous embodiments have replaced rational faculty, which escorts the novice Lucidor as a mere presiding ideal in his didactic journey. Coincident with Reason's transformation is another deficiency that affects national life. The nations that most need to overcome irrationalities of character are the same nations that continue to resist change. There are mutations, but only in appearance. The immutable depths remain beyond rational light. One such illusory metamorphosis stands out in the Iberian Peninsula. While "light spreads over Lisbon strongly" and begins even to "shine on many essential features," the overall diagnosis for Portugal is that "idleness is the country's misfortune" {Voyage, 91—92). Caraccioli's testimony is ambiguous. Surface changes are partial, leaving the underlying nature of the beast in doubt. A hybrid image of Spain is nearly as indecipherable. Spain struggles under a characterological tyranny: "laziness combined with the country's hot weather keeps her soul captive; her spirit, born for great things, restores itself only for the honor of living" (92—93). Nevertheless, "the Spaniards have a germ of greatness that seeks only to develop" (96). Spain's hybrid identity relates to the bats of Minerva. Under Charles III, the goddess boasts "a new existence in her capital." Progress is the new watchword in Madrid, measured as before by the symbol of clothing: "The inhabitants acquire a new form. The filth that once dishonored the Sovereign's residence is no longer visible, and neither are those immense hats that . . . often masked crimes" {Voyage, 95). But still, the national soul is tyrannical: Spain is yet not what she seems to be. Like the bat—neither rodent nor avian—Spain is caught in a metamorphic stasis, a product of incomplete Reason. Arrested development is understood to be cultural or national in Goya's chiropteran symbolism. Both the bat and the nation present uncanny spectacles of the aborted continuity of Nature and Reason. As for enlightened government, Lucidor learns an ambivalent lesson. On the affirmative side, Spain receives Voltaire's enthusiasm for excellent political appointments, such as that of Prime Minister Aranda, whose relatives visit Ferney around this time. On the negative side, "one knows how to create when one knows how to mask crimes. One knows how to create when one knows how to govern." Caraccioli is of two minds, and his wardrobe imagery works metonymously to keep it divided. The Spanish hat no longer casts its masking shadow, but evil still lurks beneath the reformed

The Bats of Minerva

63

surface. Only the "germ" of greatness is visible, not a Spain in full bloom. This judgment is qualified by mixed appearances and changing lights: "In spite of this thick cloud that bewilders the Spaniards, we find among them a few rare men, even sublime ones. The trouble is that the nation pursues studies that narrow the spirit instead of expanding it" (92). Caraccioli takes back with one hand what he praises with the other, just as Spain retreats from progressive values after the death of Charles III. In the decade following 1788, metamorphosis and monstrosity become apt icons for a milieu given over to ambivalent perceptions. The example of the satirist Cadalso in the next chapter will reveal how. What is true for enlightened policy in Spain also applies to how Reason functions in Europe. The creative ability mentioned by Caraccioli thrives on good government, and yet such creativity also masks the "criminality" that goes with it. Securing public order conceals undesired aspects of public life beneath a rational process that also produces an ambiguous mixture of forms. In the Europe visited by Lucidor, Reason hybridizes; it reconciles dissimilar spheres. Without annulling their original identities, Reason breeds new orders of being through misalliance as well as through normal process. Both processes affect concepts beyond the civic order. Goya's bats are monstrous because their vertebrate and mammalian traits belong to different orders. The bats appear to trespass on the strict law of identity. In the same vein, bats metamorphosed from owls suggest that Reason has wrongly attempted to fly above its normal sphere. Reason has lent arguments to zealots and to other cohorts of Unreason, thus perverting its original identity. The violation of Reason's self becomes, in Caraccioli's allegory, a doubling of Reason as le bon sens and le bei esprit. This doubling carries philosophical implications beyond public policy. How is Reason to be classified if it resembles what it is not? The shift from similarity to identity in eighteenth-century discourse is a major event, as an intriguing argument by Michel Foucault reveals.8 Classification should 8. Foucault cites Don Quixote as the harbinger of a new age: "The madman fulfills the function of homosemanticism: he groups all signs together and leads them with a resemblance that never ceases to proliferate. . . . There has opened up a field of knowledge in which, because of an essential rupture in the Western world, what has become important is no longer resemblances but identities and differences." Again, "Similitude is.no longer the form of knowledge but rather the occasion of error. . . . The age of resemblance is drawing to a close." And again, "Resemblance, which had for long been the fundamental category of knowledge,... became dissociated in an analysis based on terms of identity and difference.... This new configuration may, I suppose, be called 'rationalism.'" Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); translated as The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 49-50,51,54.

64

Chapter Two

therefore follow the same rational scheme, whether in the life of the mind or in society and Nature. This is not the case, if we credit Goya's insight. On the contrary, the lives of bat and Reason diverge from the norm of identities/opposites rather than from the norm of resemblances/distinctions. The bat resembles neither the avian nor the mammalian class of creatures, yet it seems to claim membership in both. As for wayward Reason, it is no longer recognizable when Caraccioli locates it "in a corner guarding its incognito while clever wit gives wing to its [own] brilliant chimeras" (Voyage, 276). Like the bat's perverse ability to thwart good sense by appearing to be both what it is and what it is not, le bei esprit is a misbegotten talent, capable of soaring after shedding the feathers of good sense. The problem is phylogenetic, concerning more than one bat or one disruption of the order of things in an unrepeatable hour of eighteenth-century history. This is the philosophical issue. At stake symbolically is the continuity of identifiable categories, an impossible continuity in Capricbo 43. In principle, permanent criteria ought to exist in the life of Reason, but they do not. Those criteria should permit consistent recognition of entities. And their agents should function in predictable, well-defined precincts. Any sphere that lacks this continuity and congruence is a form of Chaos. The Voyage of Reason in Europe is a reminder of how finely the eighteenth century had calibrated the rational values that now seem commonplace. Serious reading is one such value, along with a belief in the hierarchy of discourses. The city of Paris shows a negative side in this respect, despite its cosmopolitan fame. Caraccioli calls Paris the home of le bei esprit, the oracle of "superficial" readers who purchase books where "frivolity is the compass and disorder is the law" (Voyage, 276). The Parisians' clever wit razes the edifice of rational values. It ridicules truth, obfuscates knowledge, encourages neglect of merit, and is "the father of paradoxes, new words, and bizarre ideas" (276—77). In this way, books worthy of the genre known as "philosophical works" dazzle readers with their lively style and impressive obscurity. The omnibus format, according to the very words of le bei esprit, contains no philosophy and may be written as easily as a novel. With this confession of intellectual charlatanism, clever wit boasts of its formula for confecting a successful book: "The imagination heats up, the pen races on, and a work finds itself completed without one's knowing how one began it" (Voyage, 267-8). Skim, brush lightly over, never dig deeply. The formula derives from the fear that contemplation harms the liberated mind. Caraccioli's satire notwithstanding, who can deny that his personified Reason speaks in some wilder shape, unencumbered by the narrator's ratiocination, and all the more pleasing for that? "After attach-

The Bats of Minerva

65

ing ourselves only to surfaces, taste grows purified, voluptuousness refines itself, freedom of thought gains ground.... I love a work that is composed in one day and can be read in one hour. We owe to a few elegant authors the advantage of disencumbering ourselves from reasonings that only make the spirit sluggish" (278). Speaking here is Reason's clever alter ego, competing with le bon sens for an exclusive identity. Clever wit, liberated from argumentation, is intoxicated with itself. It savors the "voluptuousness" of the mind's racing machinery. This too is an intellectual refinement. There is a paradox in the mind's capacity for epigram, neologism, and abstraction at moments when its conceptual powers fail to make them cohere. The bei esprit flutters and rises in perverse violation of the natural order. Each flight soars higher, without pattern or continuity from one effort to the next—a capricho that flits out of control in the end. This denial of normalcy is wrong, argues Caraccioli. The rational mind's natural condition is to "listen" to Reason. To do otherwise is to risk the deformation of any underexercised function that atrophies: the mind grows deaf if it does not "listen." We must be able to hear Reason well, "otherwise Nature is tricked and we are not in any manner what we ought to be" (279). We become an "other" through unnatural mental acts that pervert our identity. The affront to Nature's order consists of violating the categories whose distinctions Reason should preserve. The monstrous results are hybridized rational identities, as symbolized in the Goyesque bats.

The Paradigm of Unreason A definition of Reason that attempts to fit every eighteenth-century thinker cannot satisfy all scholars. No two expressions of Reason are identical: Hume differs from d'Alembert, Voltaire from Diderot, Jovellanos from Burke, Feijoo from Johnson, Cadalso from Montesquieu. It would therefore be pointless to define a normative Reason against which to measure the varieties under discussion. The merit of Goya's vision is that it suggests a nuanced array of rational individualities in the core amalgam of representative thought, rather than a uniform center of rationality. Goya's concern is less the hypothetical center and more the extended Minervan rippling generated by its undefinable rational impetus. This viewpoint is convenient because it permits statements about the Western European matrix at different degrees of its concentric rationalisms.

66

Chapter Two

One rationalism relevant to Spain is the Christian Enlightenment.9 Here the varieties of Reason oppose one other according to conservative and progressive ideologies. The controversy involves infraction of enlightened order by Reason's insubordination to the Christian faith. The revolt by Reason is not outright heresy from the general standpoint of the Christian Enlightenment. But in Catholic Spain the revolt frames the landscape behind Goya's bats and owls, with its foregrounding intolerance of secular Reason by a dogmatic church. As hinted in the previous chapter, the temple of Minerva in Spain nurtured an incipient liberal secularism. By threatening ecclesiastical interests, Minervan Reason also brought an unenlightened ideological reaction from the Right. Therefore, enlightened Catholics would be likely to separate threats to matters of faith from threats to institutional church interests. The mistrust of Reason is thus relative, irrespective of local definitions given to the Christian Enlightenment.10 More generally, Georges Gusdorf reminds us of the evidence that the eighteenth century continued to be a Christian century. Indeed, the ambiguity attached to de-Christianization is often overlooked. Gusdorf shows that the new religious spirit is anticlerical and that mass culture remains Christian. For instance, confession is destabilized, and religious individualism progresses alongside the philosophies of Hume and Kant. But despite Protestant independence the chief issue is not a defiance of church theology. The key point is the acquiescence of Catholic and Protestant believers in what Jacques Roger calls the transformation of God the Disposer into God the Provident Artisan." Speaking for scientific ideas, Roger separates the later eighteenth century from the "reasonable skepticism regard9. "Christian Enlightenment" is the general West European phenomenon of enlightened piety. The concept of a Christian Enlightenment, suggested by Georges Gusdorf, Joel Saugnieux, and others, exceeds my intended scope because it requires dealing with dissimilar Protestant denominations. But even in England the worldly Anglicans and Latitudinarians held assumptions different from those of the Arminians, the Calvinists, and the Evangelicals. I infer from this distinction, as well as from Hume's widely studied views, that similar incompatibilities can be found among the nature and uses of Reason discussed in this chapter. See Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age ofReason, 1648-1789 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, i960), 14—I5V8&—89,144-45,169. 10. The relativism may be judged by the status of the clerical Journal tie Trevoux. Moderate clerics like Benito Feijoo draw on it to disseminate relatively enlightened ideas. The Journal censures materialist Reason, but its moderation contrasts with the harsh censure of Encyclopedic Reason by clerical Gallophobes like Fernando de Zevallos. Conservative Spain detests Voltaire, but it eagerly translates Caraccioli, the defender of "good" Reason. 11. For unresolved de-Christianization sec Georges Gusdorf, Dieu, la nature, I'homme au Steele des lumieres (Paris: Payot, 1972). For Christianity and science, see Jacques Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans lapensee jranfaise du XVIII e siede: La generation des animaux de Descartes a I'Encyclopedie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1963).

The Bats of Minerva

67

ing the powers of human mind" existing up to mid-century. Here, the early savants are all Christians who admire God as Mechanist while renouncing knowledge of "the essence of things" (Roger, Sciences, 249). The later atheism is necessary if Nature is to have its autonomous reality for study. In this sense, Roger contends, the new science eliminates God's intervention for the sake of Nature without denying God's existence or being concerned with first causes. Taken together, Gusdorf and Roger would concede that the dream of scientific Reason appeared blasphemous to church dogmatists, but that the moderates among them were receptive to secular advances in knowledge. Where such advances trod directly on matters of faith, and where philosophical inquiry trod upon matters of morality and politics, there the pious ranks closed with their own use of Reason. Thus the Christian Enlightenment is not the same as an Enlightenment defined solely by secular materialism. Definitions must also vary by national context, as may be judged by comparing France and Spain. The Jesuit Journal ck Trevoux plays a conservative role in France, but it offers Spaniards a major source of progressive ideas in a society where the Encyclopedic is unavailable. The concept of Reason itself varies when associated with Feijoo and Jovellanos or, in contrast, with Helvetius, La Mettrie, and Condillac, largely unknown in Spain.12 At the same time, Scholastic dogmatists attacked Reason for subverting religious faith even as they use it artfully to refute modern ideas. Casuistry, then, is merely a few shades more exquisite than the elaborate rationalist systems ridiculed in Voltaire's attack on Leibniz and others whose Reason lacks the common sense of experience. And here the relativist circle closes. The same hegemony of Reason draws the fire of Caraccioli, who is more acceptable to Spaniards as an Enlightener than Voltaire is. Caraccioli's antideist work, The Enigmatic Universe, belittles human endeavor for the infantile "chimeras" that forget that life is a brief mortality.13 Spain's manner of response to Reason is one indicator of its many 12. Censorship policies differ strikingly in that, in contrast to Spaniards, French readers can readily purchase works by Voltaire, Rousseau, or any British Protestant thinker. See Marcelin Defourneaux, L'Inquisition espagnole et les litres franfais au iS esiecle (Paris: Presses Universitäres de France, 1963); Lucienne Domergue, Censure et lumieres dans l'Espagne de Charles III (Paris: C N R S , 1982); Francisco Lafarga, Voltaire y Espana, 1734-1S3S (Barcelona: Edicions de la Universität de Barcelona, 1982); and J. R. Spell, Rousseau in the Spanish World Before 1833 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1938). 13. Louis-Antoine Caraccioli, L'univers enigmatique (Avignon: Delaire, 1759). Caraccioli argues that nothing in Catholic dogma is repugnant to the rational life. No less than a partisan of the "good" or "right" Reason, he is a religious believer who is confident he can establish "the accord between the Mysteries and Reason." Lecridela verite (Paris: Nyon, 1765), 165-79.

68

Chapter Two

intellectual nuances. Goya's conception of the Minervan bats emerges from the cross currents of the Christian Enlightenment. Far from the deist, materialist, and atheist orientations, Goya's religious milieu incubates a critique of Reason that symptomizes the crisis of the Enlightenment's project and the "flight from Reason" announced in this book's "Overture." It seems too facile to place a materialist Goya on the periphery of Spain's Catholic Enlightenment in the 1790s. His milieu does define him as an artist more apt to associate bats with conservative Unreason than with Unreason in liberal quarters. But given Goya's complex audience, who will argue for an unequivocal chiropteran symbolism that leaves the Encyclopedic revolutionaries of 1793 and 1799 unindicted? The diverse responses provoked by Reason begin within the bosom of Catholic polemics, and this means Spain. But at a more enlightened remove, the French community witnesses five editions of a book by a leading Catholic polemicist whose arguments have a wide audience. In The Modern Philosopher, or The Unbeliever Condemned by the Tribunal of His Reason (1759), Abbot Le Masson des Granges deals with the alleged menace of Unreason disguised as Reason.14 On the occasion of the second edition of Le Masson's work, in 1766, the Journal de Trevoux printed an unusually long tweenty-five-page review. The document is worth considering for its own sake, and also because the journal was, paradoxically, a major source of modern ideas for Spain's leading clerical enlightener, the Benedictine monk Benito Feijoo, who died in 176+. The book and its reviewer speak in the name of "good" Reason, although their rhetoric addictively uses terms applied to Reason's "bad" embodiment. These terms belong to a broad lexicon of irrational words that is paradigmatic of Unreason. Related words also fill the discourse of dissenting secularists like Voltaire, as Chapter 5 will show. The lexicon unfolds a map of Unreason that furnishes both ecclesiastics and secularists with derisory images. In the wake of this common vocabulary, Goya will devise cautionary symbols that might apply to both camps. The word "Unreason" (deraison) shapes the review in the Journal de Trevoux. The reviewer designates Unreason as the general target of Le Masson's treatise, specifically represented by Spinoza, Hobbes, Epicureanism, materialism, and deism. The Catholic reviewer shows his relativistic bias by setting aside Voltaire and Bayle, authors who also incur Le Masson's 14. Abbe Daniel Le Masson des Granges, Le philosophe moderne, ou L'incredule condamne au tribunal de sa raison (1759; reprint, Paris: Despilly, 1766), 12-13.

The Bats of Minerva

69

severity. All such "incredulous philosophers" revive the "palpable absurdities" and the "insensate deliriums" of the worst classical philosophies (Journal., 1766, 2221). Other terms of comparable vividness also characterize the deranged logic employed by the perpetrators of Unreason. The vocabulary doubles its resonance because psychological forms of derangement also invite such terms, as usages in Voltaire will reveal. The Trevoux reviewer pinpoints the corruptions of Unreason instead of treating them sermonically as abstract abominations. He cites disorders in community mental habits, combated by horrified church authorities who use the homiletic equivalents of Goya's visual monsters: "tyranny and usurpation; dependency, weakness, and stupidity;... punishments, odious vexations; in a word, everything in the civil order that is prejudice, habit, interested commerce, and passion" (Journal 2233-34). The scope of irrational energy rebuked here menaces the orderly universe, the reviewer claims. He upholds a Reason that yokes social hierarchies to the greater celestial harmony. Although his tolerance of secularity is typical of many devout journalists at Trevoux, he is not prepared to surrender the doctrinal gridwork of Reason that regulates the impulsive energies of civil life. Amorphous energy alarms the religious orthodoxy even beyond the conservative wing. The year is, to repeat, 1766, one-third of a century before "The Sleep/ Dream of Reason" will depict a similarly uncontrolled force in the shape of wings trailing into amorphousness. And so when Goya confronts Unreason in 1798, his bats present an ambiguous role. Either they misapply their blind energy to the rational ends of one identifiable party, or else their swarm reflects all civic and theological fanaticisms. The bat is monstrous because of the unnatural joining of mouse and bird in a single creature But its symbolically monstrous attribute is its ambiguity. "Good" Reason, in contrast, exhibits clarity in all its roles, except of course when it sleeps or dreams. However, Reason is ambiguous enough to serve all quarters at the same time. Just as Reason is blind in sleep, its blind progeny can work a purposeful ambiguity as surrogate ("produces monsters"). Thus Reason's identity is betrayed, and the betrayal becomes a rallying point for the indignant Le Masson. May thinkers, he asks, wear the guise of one attribute and yet refute it by their every action? In view of their abominations, "do modern philosophers deserve our making such great sacrifices for them? Do they propose so humbly and so blindly to differ from reasonable beings on the weight of their authority and their opinion?" (Journal, 2240). Their blindness defies the rationality of their class, which is the single, unambiguous class for all "reasonable beings,"

70

Chapter Two

philosophers or otherwise. The argument addresses philosophical treason committed against Christian social well-being. The materialist joining of classes, the mixing of interests, the polluting of the sacred by the profane— these disorders unyoke civic structures from the divine harmony. Le Masson's book attracts the reviewer because of the idea behind its subtitle, The Unbeliever Condemned by the Tribunal ofHis Reason. The unbeliever indulges in "insensate deliriums" against Christianity, but he claims Reason as his arbiter. Le Masson appeals to the same rational tribunal. He pleads the case for religion by citing the same maxims of Reason the unbeliever does, even arguing with parallel examples. Their goals are the reverse of each other, yet the reviewer misses the irony while siding with Le Masson. The duplicity of rational thinking allows anyone to exploit its stratagems. The contest is not between unbelievers and clergy but between secular rationalism and Christian enlighteners. The Catholic context exacerbates this contest by impassioned flights into volatile rhetoric.15 The reviewer's discourse matches the volatility of Le Masson's allusions; both reflect what Goya calls the "products" of overambitious rationality. Le Masson uses locutions such as "humiliating deviations" when speaking of "the constant errings of human Reason." His condemnatory emotionalism may not "err," but its irrational flight deviates from "the restraints of healthy Reason" invoked against defective Reason. The latter produces "the most bizarre of illusions." Paradoxically, Reason is also capable of more than just its characteristic acts of reasoning. Lapses in performance betrays its proneness to violate its "perfect" reasoning identity. Furthermore, it can dream and thus transgress the limitations imposed on its social identity. Le Masson distinguishes between health and illness, light and illusion. Reason is faithful to its nature when it resigns itself to a limited illuminating power. It is sound when it cedes to superior Christian mysteries, whose "light" should overpower rational vision. The greater luminosity is also a well-being: it characterizes "a healthy Reason superior to the vain impressions of the senses" (Philosophe moderne, 207). Vain "sensibility" adds to Le Masson's argument, already built on terms like "sickness," "chimera," "deviation," and "absurdity." His accusatory reasoning hones discourse to a metaphorical edge. His prose epitomizes a Christian Enlightenment that marks the threshold between Caraccioli's good sense and clever wit. Thus atheism "is an absurdity that shocks 15. Javier Herrero, Los origenes para el Dialogo, 1973), 103 and passim.

del pensamiento reaccionario espanol

(Madrid: Cuadernos

The Bats of Minerva

71

le hon sens" (Philosophe moderne, 21). Secularist rationality trespasses instead of withdrawing wisely before the unknown. It mistakes "impressions of the senses" for "good sense" and therefore is blind to the fact that the unknown is a void navigated only by faith. Beyond absurdity is imagination, according to Le Masson. The secularist who falls into the chasm of disbelief will clutch at anything within reach. The last straw is the imagination, cited for its errors. The faculty of imagination is perhaps the key to the irrational paradigm. Thus far, the paradigm has emerged from examples taken from the two opposing camps. Secular Reason strays into the hall of Unreason and, depending on the particular salon, exchanges its identity for "illness," "absurdity," "delirium," or "illusion." Similarly, when Christian Reason reviews these multiple identities, its derisory tone and heated indignation—"shocks," "humiliating," "bizarre," "vain"—suggest analogous chambers appropriate to its own camp. At this hyperbolic point the parallelism of the two Reasons ends. Now Goya's insight into Unreason becomes perceptible. The "Sleep/Dream of Reason" could be glossed in his day not as an aberrant metamorphosis but as an abrupt shift to another cognitive planet. The title might be construed not as a critique of Reason but as the precondition for unchecked imagination. Having the faculty of imagination at one's disposal alters the grasp of reality itself. Or, rather, the reality of Reason gives way to a second, irrational reality having its own ontological status. Le Masson watches over the boundaries of Reason so as to avoid "the errors of my imagination . . . [and] my willful inventions of chimeras" {Philosophe moderne, 20). If atheism is an "absurdity" of reasoning, then its belief in a universe of pure chance is an "improper joke," a ridiculous impiety fabricated by "the imagination of a madman who wants things according to his fantasy" (35). Not even imagination acting in concert with Reason can escape Le Masson's blame: he deems Voltaire's poem on natural religion an assemblage of argumentative devices meshed "by satirical traits, flashes of imagination, supposed anecdotes in profusion, and a little reasoning mixed with countless contradictions" (134). If Reason too has a blueprint, it includes space for violations. Thus Voltaire's "contradiction" is a failed strategy of Reason, as faulty as devices like irony or anecdote. The paradigm of Unreason contains features seen with unusual clarity in Le Masson's remarks on Voltaire. These features incline more toward conditions or states of being than toward rhetorical qualities. Thus the mental state of a "madman" occupies a realm that differs radically from the verbal "absurdity" that also belongs to Unreason. From this standpoint,

72

Chapter Two

"delirium" is more than a contemptuous label. It takes on the aura of an independent epistemological category. This distinction goes no further in Le Masson's text. The possibility of a genuine "second reality" of imagination will be Goya's theme to explore. What Le Masson furnishes is the opportunity to expand the conceptual girth of serious thinking about Unreason. The terms "imagination," "fantasy," and subsidiary words derived from their effusions ("caprice," "delirium"), are the equivalent of Reason's ambiguity. The terms connote products of an alternative cognitive process, while their vague fraternity raises questions about the nature of cognition. When Le Masson writes of the "fruit of a heated imagination," the metaphor of temperature is not yet a stereotyped phrase for his period; readers recognize a physiological reference to the brain (Philosophe moderne, 136). Allusions to capricious and delirious ideas have a similar origin, with the aforementioned overlay of disdain for improper argumentative procedure. Le Masson's rhetorical strategy is possible because the terms that are antithetical to Reason (e. g., "caprice") exist in their own lexical and conceptual right as a fully developed category. Christian truths "are not at all imagined by bizarre men, presumptuous slaves of every caprice and every delirium of the erring spirit" (Philosophe moderne, 114—15). The assertion demonstrates the familiar technique of negative assertion based on an antithetical vocabulary. However, the detailed gamut of lexical items comprises a paradigm that awaits a more profound meditation by the generation of Goya. It is not simply that Unreason and true understanding oppose each other. The distance between them is charted by degrees of certitude, oddity, and madness that require nonhomologous maps, both linguistic and ontological, in order to be evaluated. Writers like Le Masson are not major intellectual figures, but their rhetoric is significant. It fills many pages in the books purchased by the confraternity of Christian Enlighteners. Comparable rhetoric abounds in key words of the irrational paradigm, each word differentiated in connotation but joining in a stylistic resonance that announces the same polemical issue in a new epistemological register. In this register, perceptual valuations differ. Reason has its antithesis for Le Masson in both absurdity and instinct. These concepts are quite different from each other and differ as well from caprice, bizarreness, and fantasy. They all belong to the paradigm of Unreason, but each signifies its own aberrant level of perceived reality at the time, comprehended for its individual nuance by readers. Le Masson's discourse therefore does more than illustrate a hypothesis for interpreting Goya's title, "The Sleep/Dream of Reason," as it might have been understood by

The Bats of Minerva

73

moderate Spanish Catholics and Christian enlighteners in general. Where the idea of Reason terminates, there commences a realm whose irrational corners shelter perceptions and feelings that transcend paper logic. The realm may be portrayed as a "void," but the vocabulary demonstrates a "second" reality. To look beyond Le Masson's locutions to his formulation of deration is to glimpse a reality from which he shrank and which Goya openly summons for examination. The instinctually perceived reality opposes Christian Reason and lurks inchoately behind atheistic values. Le Masson's libertine—the prototype of the Marquis de Sade—desires pleasure, discerns no difference between good and evil, pins human behavior to materialist determinants, and exalts the passions above other interests. These four principles comprise a single criterion for the supreme material experience: "voluptuousness, an agreeable sensation" (Philosophe moderne, 158). A new ethic attaches to human experience, but it is the epiphenomenon of the formless reality that inspires the ethic. The four atheistic principles also comprise a single law of moral and phenomenological relationships that may be called "metamorphic exchange." Just as the phenomena of Nature, emblematized by the bat, follow only the law of changing ambiguous forms, so too the amoral libertine embraces exchangeable categories of value—wrong is right and conversely. The same law of relationships in the Marquis de Sade directs his sensual revaluation of virtue, as Chapter 8, on the "polymorphosis of Reason," will show.

The Metamorphic Language of Reason The metamorphic exchange just described marks the reality that horrifies the Christian Enlightenment. This reality is primary. It is the unknown void of Unreason, a pre-taxonomical Chaos of changeable forms that defy the categories of identity and difference. It is the reality intuited by Capricho 43 and more especially by the preliminary version, Sepia Two ("Universal Reason"). 16 Here, the huge bat transgresses the boundaries of natural forms. The bat is the prime symbol for the homologous instinctual force that, in Le Masson's view, invades the pious bounds of human affairs. As for 16. Volume 3 will argue that "primary reality" is the metamorphic ground beneath perceived phenomena that ordinär)' language organizes rationally. Concern for Universal Language in the eighteenth century intuits the failure of language to capture that reality, a domain beyond Reason that Goya depicts through symbolic monsters.

74

Chapter Two

the materialist who transgresses "good" Reason, Le Masson portrays him declaring a new legitimacy: "Reason being well below instinct, it should not therefore be the rule for our customs." The law of metamorphosis asserts "a manifest usurpation of the rights of [customs]" (Philosophe moderne, 159—60). The places of legitimacy are invaded, the ethical order is overturned and supplanted. Christian moralists bear witness to and execrate the usurpation that materialists view as a restoration. Materialists, libertines, atheists—all alleged irrationalists consider the primal order a legitimate province of blood instinct, with Reason arriving subsequently to violate instinct's prerogatives. The confusion of vice with virtue, of injustice with justice, quickens fear among Christian Reasoners. The moral exchange is indistinguishable under the rule of blood instinct: "When I do good and evil, it is my blood that is the cause." The contending worldviews are summarized by Le Masson in aphorisms attributed to Montesquieu and Pope. One aphorism states that "much is needed for the intelligent world to be as well ruled as the physical world." This comparison amounts to a tribute to the natural order's superiority over the rational order, which is unstable and less resistant to usurpation. The second aphorism is more insinuating: "You vaunt the excellence of Reason in vain. Should it have preference over instinct?" (Philosophe moderne, 161). Both texts have consequences that Le Masson leaves unexplored. They suggest why Reason needs a pious monitor to ward off a transvaluating thought process. Le Masson names the guideposts along the irrational way. Instinct is the first, Nature is the second. Together, they replace the barriers to will and desire. Boundaries of all types are to be erased. The goal is "to overturn the authority of Reason in order to establish on its ruins the empire of passions" (163). The ensuing reality is the product of materialist Reason, a rationalism that is insubordinate to faith and thus, paradoxically, a collaborator with Unreason. The function of "good" Reason, here perverted, is to preserve forms, limits, classes, and dominions. Their elimination through the alliance of "bad" Reason and instinct means the reign of amorphousness and chance. Le Masson's chagrin at this prospect fuels his polemic. His Christian Reason denies its sibling, unfettered Reason, for being as reprehensible as unchecked passion and for setting a barrier to faith. The dream of Reason is a cardinal sin: "it is the pride of the spirit, the stubborn attachment to the lights of an imperious Reason that wishes to submit everything to its judgments" (Philosophe moderne, 274). It schemes to yoke all realms under its absolute judgment. Thus Reason meets Unreason by coming full circle

The Bats of Minerva

75

to the zone of imperious designs. Like the "empire of passions" governed by instinct, "imperious Reason" demands every license to advance its will. Both extremes need correction by Christian Reason. At this point, moderate and conservative Catholics divide their ranks between the Journal de Trevoux and the Inquisition.17 The moderate Le Masson indicates the dangers of excess in each of the opposing ranks. He conceives of the human mind as incapable of apprehending either the truth or the falsity of statements regarding religious mystery. Faith must not be the object of rational inquiry. But faith may enlighten Reason on Reason's own behalf. Nevertheless it is one thing for Reason to spare itself the selfabuse of traversing a darkness where it cannot see, and quite another to decide whether there is adequate vision to cross the threshold of faith. The issue is how to balance a double-edged doctrine that Le Masson cannot easily summarize as the pious duty "to sacrifice my mental light." This duty is complex: "I must assure myself whether God has spoken, and not only am I able but I must use my full Reason so as not to stop with a vain or frivolous assurance on this point" (Philosopbe moderne, 159-60). The impressionable believer may not lightly attribute to a divine apparition what science tells him is a dream. Nor may the religious skeptic discredit a miracle when Holy Scripture records it. In one direction, fanaticism rationalizes superstition; in the other direction, rational excess destroys faith. Le Masson's perplexity confirms an epigram by Caraccioli: "This earth is an uncomfortable habitat for Reason" {Langage, 310). The remark applies to more than philosophical thought processes. A comfortable habitat for Reason includes the proper ethic and the proper language. Caraccioli summarizes this idea in the title of his book: The Language of Reason. Reason demands that language follow a specific protocol (181—91). A pious citizenry should know how to sacrifice for the public good. The polemical acrimony that fouls public discourse hold back the desired progress. Ratio17. The erudite cleric Feijoo was hounded by Franciscan fathers for writing about modern issues often learned from the Journal de Trevottx. The late-nineteenth-century historian Vicente de la Fuente observes that the "near persecution" Feijoo suffered for denying local miracles "would have cost him going to the Inquisition a century earlier." Vicente de la Fuente, in Benito Jeronimo Feijoo, Obras escogidas, vol. 1, ed. Fuente, Biblioteca de Autores Espafioles 56 (Madrid: Atlas, 1952), xii. However, I. L. McClelland asserts that "the very fact that Feijoo could speak openly on the subject of clerical ignorance and survive all opposition . . . is testimony to the existence in Spain of a core of influential, progressive Churchmen, some of them at Inquisitional headquarters" (Benito Jeronimo Feijoo [New York: Twayne, 1969] 84—85). Feijoo obtained a decree in 1750 from Ferdinand V I forbidding all attacks against him. See Angel-Raimundo Fernändez-Gonzälez, ed., Feijoo. Teatro critico universal (Madrid: Cätedra, 1983), 14,42-43.

76

Chapter Two

nal communication—a decorous discourse befitting the savoir-vivre of an enlightened faithful—is necessary. Caraccioli glimpses beneath the civic turmoil a personal stratum of spiritual monsters. Intellectual protocols have broken down into the moral blindness of "dissipation." Just as general philosophical discourse bloats into chimeras and extravagant imbrications, so do the individual's emotions grow misshapen and spiritually rank. Unhappiness, impatience, "desires that do not cease to renew, are not the effect of chance or inconstancy but the language of Reason. It is she who speaks to us now, [but this time] in order to detach us from all our pleasures and joys, and to call us to God" (Langage, 231). His argument is strained, but what he says about the nature of Reason supports Le Masson. Whatever Reason brings into being it can also annihilate, if only we understand its language. It breeds emotional "disorders," but it also offers to the eye "a ray of essential, primal beauty that would be stronger than the sun itself" if only we would meditate with Christian detachment. For what, asks this popular author, are these spiritual monsters if not the lexical icons that Reason obliges us to read correctly and then defer to a higher faith? Reason blinds. Then it sheds light through its self-induced shadow. Its brightest ray declares itself dim by comparison with a stronger Light. This self-annihilating language is difficult to comprehend, Caraccioli confesses. His incomprehension is an "exile," for he understands Reason in a "denatured," mortal form. He has employed Reason while being detached from its authentic, celestial domain. That is why the world is "an uncomfortable habitat for Reason. It sees only works that degrade it, understands only discourse that combats it, reads only writings that denature it. But in Heaven, [Reason] will be in its center, and its faculties will extend as far as they are constricted here below" {Langage, 309—10). Terrestrial Reason is yet another reduction of Reason's original source, reduced along with "good sense" and "clever wit"—different names for the owls that usurp the original Minervan bird. The products of terrestrial Reason belong to a single rational patrimony, degraded though they may be. What then exactly is their "monstrosity," as Goya regards it? Their abominable nature is the combined deafness and deftness regarding Reason: deafness to its true "language" and deftness in using false language. That is, their impious philosophy issues from an unnatural transference of qualities. Humbly, Caraccioli confesses his guilt in a lengthy apostrophe to Reason: "It is because I do not hear you that I wish to prolong my exile. I take my terrestrial attachments to

The Bats of Minerva

77

be your language." The signals of instinct and impulse are mistaken for disinterested Christian reasoning. Just as Caraccioli gained many readers in Spain, Le Masson's Modern Philosopher ran through five French editions in a single generation. The popularity of both authors implies an educated reading community well satisfied with their sensitivity to the common Christian welfare. Comparable Spanish texts confirm a "Catholic Enlightenment" in Spain, although many texts extend their tone to fierce polemics. Where Spanish texts echo the moderation of their French counterparts, they tend toward satire and literary dream, as the next chapter shows. Others texts, however, depart from the value system of the Christian Enlightenment because of their fanaticism. Their antithetical semantics will serve to interpret the ambiguous monsters released by Reason's sleep in Capricho 43•

3. The Lapsed Enlightener

Thou god supreme, Jove elutherian, send thy child belov'd, With her Gorgonian aegis, to defend A people struggling not for spoil, or pow'r, Not to extend dominion, but maintain The right o f Nature, thy peculiar gift To dignify mankind. —Glover, The Athenaid, X X X

If the idea of a Christian Enlightenment offers a tenable hypothesis for Capncho 43, then the etching can be interpreted as symbolizing the fanatical life of the mind. The zone of fanaticism may be clerical or secular. Each is as indistinguishable as the indeterminate shapes floating between Goya's bats and owls. Equidistant from the reactionary and the radical extremes is Reason's core identity (see Overture, note i), enlightened by moderation and associated with progress. The monsters of fanaticism occupy an irrational zone that extends from "caprice" to "delirium." These terms, as texts of the period show, belong to a semantic field nuanced by a sophisticated lexicon that includes "extravagance," "chimera," "fantasy," "delusion," and "dream." This graduated territory buffers the frontier between Reason and Unreason. Within the buffer zone, irrational mutants take the measure of Reason—that is, respectable Enlighteners like Rousseau and Diderot avail themselves of irrationality through dream, fantasy, and reverie.1 Their irrational strategies bring Unreason's relation to knowledge into play. Given our rational value system, do those thinkers become lapsed Enlighteners because of their irrationalism? Or does their slumbering Reason differ from the perverse Reason depicted by Goya? i. Wilda Anderson says that Diderot creates "the seemingly bizarre in order to provoke the hidden truths" hitherto concealed, adding that "extravagances" and "reveries" of the natural philosopher are "the sign of his mastery." See Diderot's Dream (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 21-25.

The Lapsed Enlightener

79

These questions invite different answers according to context: the materialist-empirical Enlightenment, the Christian Enlightenment, and the Catholic Enlightenment. The unifying factor is the notion of "dream," which may serve as an umbrella concept for these contexts throughout the eighteenth century. Goya unravels the dream already spun by a social philosopher like Rousseau, whose daytime version addresses themes close to Goya's. Although in Rousseau the term reverie differs from the general French usage of reve and songe, the benevolent and occasionally sublime aura of this semantic family remains. The two French meanings are somewhat absorbed in the versatile Spanish word sueno, since the somewhat different ensueno was rarely employed at that time. But dreaming carries multiple connotations regarding the status of knowledge, judgments, and cognition. These connotations remain to be sorted out according to nation, artist, and writer. N o historical glossary of usages exists to inform us of how songe evolved from Neoclassicism to pre-Romantic meanings. The study by Robert Morrissey is concerned with the waking state of reverie, understood to be "the relations between thought and sensations, mind and body, interior and exterior."2 This places the concept of dream, songe, or sueno in a category separate from the "liminal state of awakened consciousness" that defines the reverie. The condition of songe as described in the Encyclopedic permits Morrissey to distinguish it from reverie on the basis of willful thinking. In songe or reve nocturne, physiological passivity suspends the will and prevents the pleasant illusions from continuing freely, as they do in the reverie. This distinction complicates matters because it admits three terms instead of two: reverie, songe, and the evolving reve. Morrissey's solution is to follow dictionary definitions of reve in Furetiere and the Academy, showing a progression from the older meaning of reve as unreason, delirium, or extravagant notion, to the newer meaning of extravagant imagination. Nevertheless, Morrissey acknowledges difficulty in producing the same semantic development for both reverie and rever. In the end, his study emphasizes tenuous but conscious states of intimate, sensible thought rather than the uncontrolled dreams that arise in sleep (Morrissey, Reveries, n o II).

2. Robert Morrissey accepts Artur Greive's analysis, which shows that the verb songer drifts from its metaphorical sense of "daydreaming" to the semantic field of "thinking," whereas rever replaces songer in the meaning of "to dream while sleeping." See Morrissey, La reverie jusqu'ä Rousseau: Recherches sur un topos litteraire (Lexington, Κν.: French Forum Publishers, 1984), 103—5.

8o

Chapter Three

The Identities of Reason What remains uncataloged are the contradictory nuances that vie for accreditation among the proponents of reasonable, if not rationalist, thought. For instance, Les reveries of General Maurice Comte de Saxe show little proximity to those of Rousseau, although both conform to a meditative ideal that Goya's sueno disintegrates. But by the same token the term chimere in Rousseau signals a value judgment that dissents from the pejorative connotation of chimere. The incongruity of a military officer using "reveries" for the title of his memoirs on the art of warfare, and the elevation of chimeres to the status of philosophical knowledge of the natural world, together symptomize the protean semantic background of Capricho 43This background borders on paradox. In Goya's mercurial climate, the paramount trait in all camps is excess. Excessive Reason proves not only "monstrous" for Goya but also repugnant for Rousseau when its relentless logic proceeds unchecked.3 It is excess too that irritates the satirist Leandro Fernandez de Moratin, who claims in the Defeat ofthe Pedants that an exaggerated Spanish devotion to the "methodical Encyclopedic" spawns pedantic epics, superficial compendia, and "Gallic" translations. These are the labors of "ignorant critics" who "scramble everything together for those people without knowledge or wit of their own." 4 Finally, it is an excess of rationalism that brings revolutionary destruction to Europe: The sciences open a new path every day. . . . In the midst of these new and consoling arts, will we see the ferocity of the centuries withered away by our Reason? Let us then renounce our lights, these arts that cause weeping; let us respect human blood; at least let us not spill it over chimerical views or imaginary advantages.5

This Utopian plea by Mercier occurs in a work of visionary rationalism, where the bizarre and the chimerical are faults laid at the doorstep of the Enlightenment. In tone and vocabulary, The Year 2440 complements Goya's 3. "The study of animals is nothing without anatomy. . . . Therefore the study of dead bodies, tearing them apart, is necessary.... What a frightful apparatus is an anatomical amphitheater, with stinking corpses, oozing and livid flesh . . . frightful skeletons. .. . Come, bright flowers . . . purify my imagination, made filthy by those hideous objects." Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Septieme promenade," in Les reveries du promeneur solitaire, vol. ι of Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 1068. 4. Leandro Fernandez de Moratin, La derrota de lospedantes, ed. John Dowling (Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1973), 53· 5. Louis-Sebastien Mercier, L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante, 2 vols. (London: n.p., 1785), 2:18-19.

The Lapsed Enlightener

81

method of fantasized moralizing. Mercier too has contemplated "the black monster that devours widow and orphan," and he wonders if the age of Reason will be any different from the bloodbaths of previous ages. Whether the background of rational fanaticism is folly documented at this point or not, it may stand as a point of reference. It returns us to the protagonist of Capricho 43 and a central question. Is the etching a portrait of Reason that is co-extensive with the Enlightenment, or is it a vision that dissents critically from Reason?6 Half of the question is really asking about the identity of the sleeping figure; the other half asks about what he dreams. In the second focus, the question depends on the protagonist's character or profession. If he is not Goya himself, we know from the articles on his desk that he is an artist or a writer. He slumps over facing toward our left, a direction antithetical to that of the statesman-philosopher Jovellanos in the 1798 portrait by Goya. The two positions are mirror-images of each other in several respects. The men face in opposite directions, they are similarly clothed, and although Jovellanos sits erect in foil pigment, both men appear in their habitual places at the work table, with every indication that they have creative lives. Jovellanos does not pose artificially among his papers like a vain man of leisure. As a harassed statesman, he ponders a message in a reverie that distracts him from drafting a policy memorandum. The sleeper too, caught unpretentiously, slumps among his papers— what better evidence of consumed creative energy than this?7 The two portraits also reverse each other in ways that make the sleeper an associate of all enlightened Spaniards. Jovellanos epitomizes the progressive minority in Spain by 1798. His elbow and hand propping his attentive head, and a sheaf of papers neatly spread close at hand, Jovellanos's alert bearing invites comparison as a standard of rational intelligence alongside less wakeful or purposeful attitudes. And indeed, Goya's sleeper fails 6. The definition of Reason most commonly agreed on, given its many "faces," is that of Isaiah Berlin: "Voltaire is the central figure of the Enlightenment, because he accepted its basic principles. . . . What were these principles? Let me repeat the formula once more: there are eternal, timeless truths, identical in all the spheres of human activity—moral and political, social and economic, scientific and artistic; and there is only one way of recognizing them: by means of reason, which Voltaire interpreted not as the deductive method of logic or mathematics, which was too abstract and unrelated to the facts and needs of daily life, but as le ban sens, the good sense which, while it may not lead to absolute certainty, attains to a degree of verisimilitude or probability quite sufficient for human affairs, for public and private life." Isaiah Berlin, "The Divorce Between the Sciences and the Humanities," Salmagundi 27 (Summer-Fall 1974): 17. See also above, Overture, note 1, Chapter 1, note 10, and below Chapter 7, note 2. 7. The traditional linkage of Goya and Jovellanos receives cautious treatment by Janis A. Tomlinson, who is skeptical of their "intimate relationship" (Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment [New Haven, Conn. & London: Yale University Press, 1992], 90).

82

Chapter Three

to measure up to this standard. Both elbows sag under his torso, so that the desk serves his body more as a support than as a surface for working. We may conjecture one of two things regarding Capricho 43: that the historical Goya has mirrored himself satirically through the antithetical portrait of an admired thinker, or simply that a creative Spaniard has placed the life of the mind in temporary suspension. It is all the same. An intelligent being is asleep—and he is no ordinary lawyer or scribe, as the quills and appurtenances are absent. The sleeper, then, is a person of elite capability. We may not confer at this point the name "Rationalist" to match the title "Reason," but thoughtful he surely is, an enlightened individual if not an intellectual, and to name him "Enlightener" does not overstate this probability. He is no daydreamer at the window, no hunting sportsman or rich idler in the crowds. Immured in his study, Enlightener suffers a momentary transformation of his contemplative routine. Like Pilgrim, whose progress Bunyan regulates for our edification, Enlightener is a temporarily lapsed model of rational consciousness. His face is the urban anamorph of the rustic Rousseau, in meditation "alone with myself. . . with my pet dog, my old cat, with the birds of the countryside" (Rousseau, Reveries, 1139). Doubt about the sleeper's identity may still linger. Rather than a lapsed Enlightener, why can't he be a sympathizer of the Counter-Enlightenment, or a conservative thinker, or even a superstitious occultist? In fact, occultism is a possibility that will be explored in Chapter 9. As for being a reactionary, the protagonist does not require a sleeping condition in order to be identified with the extremists depicted by Caraccioli and Le Masson. Whatever possibility we choose, the subject of Capricho 43 is Reason on yet another account: the very word is inscribed as a motto within the scene. The motto functions quite apart from verbal syntax as the identifying sign for the fruits of Reason. These fruits are knowledge and wisdom, which are multiplied fourfold in the classic owls gathered next to the sleeper. This fecund air, however, reeks with something bizarre. True, the watchword "Reason" is the supreme call to arms at this time among liberal philosophers and artists who gather against intolerant minds. The single owl of Minerva, far from opposing the sleeper, would seem thus to emblazon the qualities of an Enlightener whose powers of Reason are intact. But if three additional owls seem to turn against him, they surely represent the logical results of his excess. Furthermore, one awakened owl, pencilholder in claw, may substitute for one sleeping reasoner. But what of the reasoner who no longer merely sleeps but dreams? His Reason exceeds

The Lapsed Enlightener

83

its normal function by performing irrationally, thus requiring a portrait of comparable excess and absurdity. The parallel is accomplished by the other three owls that crowd him (a reversal of the usual mobbing of one owl by smaller birds). The situation bespeaks aberration if not monstrosity. Other arguments are also admissible. Our Enlightener has "betrayed" his mission by allowing Reason to escape his control. No longer the regulator of his own mind, he becomes the minister of its monsters. Like the logician turned sophist or the savant drenched in pedantry, the man of talent also grows perverse by allowing Reason to dream. The perversion of goals is also an excess, illustrated by sophistry and pedantry. These are the abnormal results of Reason abusing its process. The interpretation that views Spain historically may argue that the Enlightenment burgeons with a knowledge that can degenerate into extracts, compendia, and formularized thinking. In Moratin's precise image, the "dispensers of public enlightenment" make knowledge available in a way that "anybody curious may learn it like a parrot."8 That unthinking bird, dexterous in repetitive memory patterns, simulates intelligence where Reason grows weary. In the vulgarized sector of the Spanish Enlightenment, the parrot mirrors Goya's debased Minervan owls. Both birds play a satirical role quite distant from the lugubrious owls with morbid premonitory powers.9 The owl quartet culminates in the bats, but their collective horror begins ominously with the threatening third owl. Nevertheless, the owls are polyvalent symbols in a nuanced work. It must be stressed that the point of departure for the Christian hypothesis is the abdication of Enlightener's responsibility. With Reason asleep, the wise owl loses a proportional wisdom. The owl at the far left is the initial sign of the rational disintegration, rather than the final monster produced by Reason's nightmare of fanaticism. It is a complacent owl, the vestige of a well-regulated intelligence prior to sleep. By evoking the best of Enlightener's waking environment, this owl at the same time enters a domestic category. Its erstwhile form in daylight is perhaps a house pet, perhaps only a parakeet now metamorphosed by fantasy.

8. Moratin complains that "the slow and arid study of the sciences" is marketed piecemeal so it can be easily parroted by the witless (Derrota, 72). The evil of degenerated knowledge already hovers over the allegorical figures in Goya's sketch for "Truth, Time, and History." 9. The owl's cheerless traits are suggested by British poets like Young and Gray. It is also true that the owl represents, in European literature from La Fontaine to the pre-Romantic poets, the somber bird that "Atropos takes for her interpreter" (Fables, 11:9).

84

Chapter Three

Rational Excess and National Decline If the sleeper may be named Enlightener, what about his ambience? It is no outdoor world, either in Nature or in society. The scene's hermetic atmosphere nevertheless permits some inferences about the social milieu. One important clue is external to the work. The place of Capricho 43 in the full set of eighty etchings is about midway, number 43.10 It appears to inaugurate a subsequence of scenes that are comparatively cryptic alongside the social caricatures of the preceding sequence. Its world stands apart from the open-air activities of Goya's tapestries or the equally spacious countryside backdrops of his "Black Paintings." No horizon stretches behind the figure at the table, no window or hint of a door or a wall. From its midway position in the series, and from the sleeper's demeanor, the unrevealed ambience is arguably urban, with its honest but corruptible values. The world outside could be the crowded Madrid where Goya in fact worked. The city's inhabitants congregate in uncritical intercourse, like would-be owls at the feet of the misreading vulgarizers whom Moratin satirizes. They parrot current opinion like so much gossip overheard in the narrow streets. Indulging their vices in tiny apartments, they breathe superstition in the parish chapel and receive blind counsel from the confessional. They are as closed-eyed inwardly as Enlightener is physically. Born into this milieu, Enlightener has overcome it while now appearing to regress. After the enlightened despot Charles III dies in 1788, Madrid embraces the "cruel fanaticism" and "abominable monsters" cited in Moratin's lament. Goya's sleeper need not be linked to any particular Spanish intellectual who might have turned apostate or have misused power. The point is what Enlightener forebodes for Spain and for all postRevolutionary Europe. Literary satirists echo the social reality of this time, but their scope narrows under political censorship. Satire and polemic in Spain therefore veer toward xenophilic and xenophobic themes. A major example is the controversy over French cultural influence in Spain. Here the subtheme is shallowness and pretension both in manners and ideas. To read Jose Cadalso and Moratin in this light is to glimpse a Spain that "swarms" with intellectual charlatans who trivialize learning. This is not to say that the ridiculed Spanish translators, compendium-makers, and 10. Capricho 43 was originally intended to be the frontispiece of the collection, according to Jose Lopez-Rey (Goya's Caprichos: Beauty, Reason, and Caricature, 2 vols. [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953], 1:136).

The Lapsed Enlightener

85

erudite commentators of Goya's day make no significant contributions in historical actuality. But the atmosphere parallels the middle-brow excesses of the Enlightenment combated by Caraccioli and Le Masson, who themselves were not members of the intellectual elite remembered today. The most explicit satire against the banal disseminators is Moratin's abovementioned Defeat of the Pedants. This work shares with Goya a vocabulary that imprints the signals of a wayward Encyclopedism. At the same time, the satire gives a peculiarly Spanish twist that is unfamiliar to France and Great Britain. Striking a nationalist tone that narrows the universal perspective of Catholic moderates like Caraccioli, Moratin maintains a dual loyalty to motherland and to rational moderation. This equilibrium obscures his motivating principle. His catalog of contemporary irrelevancies reads like an unsympathetic survey of diverse European interests imitated by inept Spaniards: dissertations on luxury; inoculation; a happy kingdom based on one hypothesis, two illations, and a calculus of the excellent Hottentot and Carib ethics; bread-making with acorns in lean years; the best of all republics; prodigious agricultural increases through use of wheels, pipes, pistons, cylinders, and pinions; tolerance; torture; patriotism; bedbugs. (Derrota 73)

Scarcely a modern secular path of inquiry escapes disdain, yet Moratin is a known cosmopolite. His chief complaint is that useless books are translated from many languages while important ones remain neglected. His indictment is comprehensive: "All the sciences are reduced to a deceptive surface exterior without depth" (Derrota, 79). As an enlightened reformer, Moratin portrays a Spain that disfigures the French Enlightenment. Spain suffers the repercussions of a misunderstood Encyclopedism, and these signs appear to confirm the backwardness mentioned by foreign observers. But Moratin also seems bothered by something not quite relevant. He chafes at the national pride that reaches fanatical proportions and interferes with learned pursuits. Too many Spanish conservatives see the mania for French books as an insult to national honor. They insist that to imitate French authors is to insinuate that nothing native to Spain is worth cultivating. These Gallophobes, in Moratin's view, unreasonably defend the cultural orthodoxy they believe in. Like the religious excess that Caraccioli and Le Masson blame, "the holy name of patriotism" divides the Spanish community against itself. Moratin's au-

86

Chapter Three

thentic patriot, on the other hand, follows a standard of truth that is detached from prejudiced confrontation. What Moratin calls the "languages of the good citizen" sifts the two extremes for their fusible elements. Furthermore, imitative Encyclopedic discourse in Spain uses a deformed language, according to Moratin. He links it to its near relation, literary Francophilia, a fashion decried by contemporary reactionaries. Both deformities mark Spain's cultural decline for Moratin. But he is equally harsh with the language of Gallophobia used by the xenophobic opponent of Encyclopedism. The hyperbole-prone Gallophobes are delivered over to the same "most fertile fantasy" that befuddles the inept Francophiliac imitators. Together both warring factions share one style of thinking by "joining disconnected ideas, vague elements, and misunderstood reasonings." Defeat of the Pedants belongs to a species of self-conscious satire about Spain's real or alleged national decadence. Because this literature responds to foreign opinion and national stereotypes, it tends toward extremism in opposite directions, either justifying Spain as it is or else restoring Spain's lost prestige. By entering the debate as a moderate sympathizer of both parties, Moratin truly shares the enlightened spirit of Jovellanos, Francisco de Cabarrus, and a few others engulfed in the tidal wave of Spanish history after the death of Charles III. 11 Domestic apologists rise up against the Francophiles to exalt everything Spanish regardless of merit. These reactionary polemicists close their eyes to the defects of Spain or forgive them "blindly," while exaggerating the imperfections of foreign countries beyond recognition. By the same token, excessive Francophilia disdains native tradition, preferring an uncritical embrace of foreign culture. These two excesses fill the intellectual scene with emotional atmospherics vented by both sides in the name of sober reasoning. Yesterday, Moratin argues, Spain was less hindered by pedantry or frivolous emulation of other nations; authors concentrated on their own talents without importing every bit of new knowledge published abroad. The lesson for today should be that moderation must rule efforts to rival foreign achievements. Spain would do well to end her stubborn emulation and to remember her own thinkers, largely unread in the frenzy of translated works. In short, the preoccupation with French innovation is a betrayal of national Reason. Francophilia is a debilitating obsession that is both indecorous ii. Charles III died on December 14,1788, seven months before the assault on the Bastille began the French Revolution on July 14,1789.

The Lapsed Enlightener

87

and disproportionate. As a misshapen desire for knowledge, it inculcates unnatural scorn for Spain's own heritage and thus foreordains misbegotten fruits. Such is the ambience of Goya's Enlightener as seen by a fellow satirist in Madrid. If Enlightener is asleep, his loss of consciousness may have one of many causes, depending on where the viewer wants to situate him in the national strife. The cause of the strife is not important; the sleep, the reality of Spain's regression during the 1790s from the earlier advances, suggests that Reason has departed from the national entity as a whole, and not merely from one of the intellectual parties. From this standpoint, if Goya's lapsed Enlightener personifies an integral Spain he has important predecessors. Yet now the consequences of sleep receive not satirical attention, as in Moratin, but grotesque or mad description, as in the metaphors of Father Feijoo and Jose Cadalso. The collective use of Reason is a continuous theme, from Feijoo early in the century to Cadalso at its end. Debate over national recovery extends back into the seventeenth century, where the terms of its analysis include metaphors of heretical infection and social illness. The cradle of Feijoo's education is just such a Counter-Reformational literature, politically moralistic and adaptable through its Baroque imagery to new circumstances. One such image appears in the essay "Honor and Profit in Agriculture," where Feijoo visualizes the homeland stricken with gout owing to gluttonous economic policies. The same physical hulk becomes a gigantic skeleton in Cadalso's Moroccan Letters, where malnutrition is a fleeting image alongside the more symbolic disease of cultural madness. Such figurative devices persist from pietistic literature to satirical prose up to Goya's time. Hyperbolic rhetoric provides the same tropes of national decadence for the writings of both theological rationalism and ratio-empiricism. The mechanisms of Feijoo's Baroque image reveal much by omission. The subject is the nation's farms, whose sickly yield depends on the peasant masses, themselves victims of politically powerful "organs": Spain is gouty. The poor feet of this kingdom suffer great pain. Miserable, indigent, and afflicted, they can neither sustain themselves nor hold up the body.... [Perhaps] when the stomach and guts of this political body swallow or gobble up a lot, there will follow innumerable and incurable diseases that put the entire body in danger offinalruin.12 12. Benito Jeronimo Feijoo, "Honra y provecho de la agricultural in Obras escogidas, vol. i, ed. Vicente de la Fuente, Biblioteca de Autores Espafioles 56 (Madrid: Atlas, 1952), 462.

88

Chapter Three

The rhetorical plasticity of this trope arrests the momentum. The inflated quality of pure metaphor belongs to the style that Voltaire and other French critics ascribe to "typical" Spanish literary bombast. The gorged body politic staggers on gouty legs that cannot hold it up much longer. The limbs are puffed and painful, in perfect harmony with the swollen guts that threaten the flesh with further ravages, if not irremediable ruin. The spectacle is of course deadly serious, although the same image in a satirical context would fall just short of the grotesque. In fact, the portrait is onesided in its present context, and it caricatures the national anatomy with its morbid focus on pathological elements alone. In reality, Spain is "in danger o f " total collapse, but Feijoo admits that it has not yet reached this stage. He mentions "feet" and not "legs," referring to the farm day-laborers who are not only "weak" but "indigent" and "afflicted" by forces beyond their ken. As for the legs representing artisan and textile workers, their omission is required by the law of effective hyperbole. The allusion to bureaucratic administrators in the voracious stomach and intestines is similarly one-sided. The healthy organs of the body politic go unmentioned because Feijoo is attacking policy and not class structure. One main vessel for the national bloodstream is the church, whose positive role could have been mentioned by this monastic author. As for Spain's heart, lungs, and nervous system, any ailment would entail other economic and political forces and inspire caricatures of another sort: mummified paralysis, epileptic behavior, flushed or sallow complexions, and so forth. There seems to be nothing amiss with the brain in this representation. Literary consciousness of the grotesque and its milder roots is widespread in the eighteenth century.13 The grotesque mode is not well exploited, but the density of its allusiveness equals what I have already showed to exist for the concept of Unreason. In both cases, the range of synonyms reveals a nuanced understanding of irrationality despite its condemnation. A characteristic gesture is Cadalso's satire, where irony permits rational disclaimer for irrational technique and subject matter. Just as the zany grotesquerie of Candide is an ironic device for Voltaire's philosophical sobriety, so too the epistemology of madness in the Moroccan Letters reflects both 13. Voltaire's grotesque emerges by lexical analysis in Jean Sareil's Essai sur Candide (Geneva, Droz, 1967). See also Dominique Iehl, preface ("Le grotesque"), Etudesgermaniques, special issue 43 (1988); and Paul Ilie, "Concepts of the Grotesque Before Goya," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 5, ed. Ronald C. Rosbottom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 185-201.

The Lapsed Enlightener

89

a reality and Cadalso's ironic criticism of it. This point will emerge in the sections ahead. Cadalso follows Feijoo in his concern for national decline, but his caricature belongs to an irrationalist repertoire that has a double edge. Where Feijoo personifies Spain by a goutish bloat, Cadalso imagines an emaciated nation. The latter image grows complicated as historical perspective views the nature of history by splitting it into opposing halves. Cadalso is an ingrained secularist, yet his basic traditionalism situates him in the Christian Enlightenment. His position elicits a curious ambivalence toward the ratio-empiricism that he might be expected to profess. On the one hand, his concept of history is an extension of his awareness of Spanish decadence. He refers to the vices of European nations as "the general decline of the states." The progression from growth to collapse even lends itself to precise, mathematical measurement. Cadalso appears to set a rational calculus for studying the health and decay of nations.14 On the other hand, Cadalso's reasoned stance produces a strong image of disequilibrium when portraying Spanish decadence: "At the death of Charles II [1700], Spain was nothing more than the skeleton of a giant" (Cadalso, Cartas, 89). The macabre imageflaysreality to its bone structure. But its cankerous reverberations flout the standards of good historiography just noted. How does the "geometrical rigor" achieve what one speaker calls "the impartiality that I profess" (95) ? His method is described mischievously, as drawing "a middle reason" between two extreme inaccuracies. In one extreme, a historian writing about his own country makes events seem like "marvels" and "wonders" that occur as if "by art of magic." But in the second extreme, a foreign historian writing about the same country is said to be no more capable of "the sounder judgment" desired by impartial observers. Only a rational middle ground, traced deliberately between the subjective extremes, will satisfy the conditions of a proportioned picture (81,188). Good historiography shuns the imagination and its vivid tropes. The historian should be "filled with criticism, impartiality, and judgment," says Gazel, the foreign observer in the Moroccan Letters (Cartas 143). Nevertheless, Cadalso's image of a giant's skeleton participates in literary grotesquerie even as it grazes historical truth. Distortion need not conceal essential fact. As for accuracy, the history-minded Cadalso is skeptical. 14. Jose Cadalso, Cartas marruecas, ed. Joaquin Arce (Madrid: Catedra, 1983), 92.

90

Chapter Three

Historians are prone to nonobjective valuation, he suggests; for instance, works written for popular consumption simply narrate "marvelous events" (220). A "more authentic" approach exists for literate "average people," but it lacks the sincerity needed to uncover "the springs that move the great machines." Neither approach displays the edifying historiography that illuminates public policy for the sake of national restoration.

Satirical Ambiguity The Moroccan Letters is perhaps the only Spanish masterpiece of the century that meets European literary standards. Scholars customarily interpret it as a gently ironic but plain text of social criticism shored up by traditionalist values. And yet its multivocal perspective depicts Spanish reality through an ambiguous discourse that becomes an irrationalist method. Within the West European vocabulary of Unreason, Cadalso takes a short metaphorical step from decadence to disease in the national condition. This liberty permits his satire to use chimera, caprice, dream, and madness as fine threads that meet in a figure of Spain as an insane asylum. The pathological metaphor of Feijoo's "gouty Spain" will be exchanged for an ironic plea for an enlightened Spain. Both authors practice hyperbole, but Cadalso's tropes of national decadence present a more macabre image of disequilibrium. As indicated previously, Spain was "nothing more than the skeleton of a giant" at the death of Charles II. However, against this voice of historical judgment rises the second voice of Nufio, often identified with the author. Nufio serves notice that even the best historical account can seem like mere "fables filled with ridiculous notions and barbarities" (Cartas, 219). This skeptical view controls the meaning of history in the Moroccan Letters and justifies other ridiculing techniques of distortion. Cadalso's caricatures here, as elsewhere, tend toward the Goyesque and the madness that betokens the cultural mind of a diseased body politic. The giant's skeleton serves a literary purpose in addition to depicting historical decadence. Additional words charged with imagistic and ironic nuance enter Cadalso's unerring social critique. He builds figurative and factual descriptions by vocabularies of proportion and disproportion, or of organic regularity and dysfunction. Collectively, the distortions of literary satire do not necessarily conceal essential truths. Nevertheless, Cadalso speaks in several voices, and his equivocality subverts as well as en-

The Lapsed Enlightener

91

riches irony. He honors Feijoo's campaign against superstition in the same ironic vein that reveals Nuno's declared belief in vampires and witches. The double voice reminds us that satire relies on separated communities of readers. Not all contemporaries of Cadalso would read his ironies in the same way. Superstitious readers might take Nuno's belief seriously, as might writers on the subject of vampirism, like Dom Calmet and his reviewers in the Journal de Trevoux. Cadalso's own bantering tone comes under suspicion when the "editor," another of his alter egos, records the narrator's self-mocking dream to end the work. Satire divides society into satirists and those satirized. But what if the satirist himself seems to cross into the unenlightened sector? When Cadalso's "editor" adds his new voice to end the work ambiguously, an element of irrationality enters the entire narrative frame. His frivolity will become ominous as caprice edges toward regions where the communities of Reason and Unreason coexist as inspiration for the "capricho of some demented painter" (Cartas, 128). These communities are not limited to the conventional divisions between elite and popularizing factions of the new learning, or between the progressive clergy and its superstitious opponents. There is also a community of aberrant perceivers of reality. This group cuts across the unenlightened sectors, while also confirming the need for an art of capricho as a way of seeing. If the capricho is a way of expressing for Goya, it is a form of perception in Cadalso. Glimpses into this form of Unreason appear when Cadalso's text flirts with dream-states and grotesque imagery. At these moments the Moroccan Letters stands closer to Goya than to its original model, Montesquieu's Persian Letters. Characteristic of this proximity is an unexpected suspicion of rational understanding. Although Cadalso often prefers precision and even geometrical demonstration, the sum of allusions to methodology seems to place him among the doubters of Reason. Occasionally his evidence collapses as the epistolary text begins to resemble a Goyesque capricho. At other times certain shifts from metaphorical light to darkness destabilize the novel's epistemological core. In such instances, a visionary madness appears to be possible. The cloud over Reason in the Moroccan Letters condenses when the allusions to empirico-rational methods collide with more obscure nonrational allusions. The recommended rule is the "just mean," to be followed by such a "person who might wish to make some use of his Reason" (Cartas., 81). Those who apply the just mean earn respect for taking a personal

92

Chapter Three

risk by confronting people who might retaliate against challenges to their beliefs.15 Cadalso wants to socialize Reason and see it implemented widely, but his alter ego Nufio wavers in this conviction when it comes to popularized philosophy. The license to think may be abused if average people [mlgo] meddle by becoming philosophers and trying to investigate the reason for each establishment. To think of this makes me shiver, and it is one of the motives for my growing irritation with the prevailing group today, which wants to place under doubt everything that until now has been taken for being as evident as a geometrical demonstration. (294)

Here the novice rational observer is unsophisticated when choosing targets for criticism because he learns from skeptics who doubt indiscriminately. The bad critic in both camps is "a wild bull," and "if the comparison seems vulgar to you because it associates a rational being with a beast, believe me this is not the case, since I can hardly call 'men' those who do not cultivate their Reason, but who only use a kind of instinct that remains to them for doing harm" (217). The good critic may also falter, according to the Moroccan visitor who cautions that careful analysis may result in wayward judgment. If the critical method applies a single principle, deemed universal, it loses the empirical advantage of deploying observations in a sequence of phases. In the end, the honest Nufio abandons system for haphazard reflections on any subject that might arise. He concludes that waking reality does not permit arrangement by neat categories: "when I saw the non-method that the world follows in its events, it seemed to me unworthy to study them or write about them" (179)· Given the disorder that plagues existence, intellectual honesty would consist of reproducing "the labyrinth" itself. These cautionary attitudes reflect competing witnesses in Cadalso's satire. The result is a narrative confusion that becomes a designing principle of the Moroccan Letters, permitting multiple perspectives to function without regard for consistency. Satire cannot, of course, cohere into wholly unambiguous judgment, although the social flaws deplored here seem plain enough despite the multivocal narrative. Nevertheless, Cadalso's fictional "editor" accuses the "author" of wearing a mask. Disguises or not, enough inconsistencies exist to fray the commentary and obscure Cadalso's true in15. The student of science is one type of risk-taker who "shapes arguments so as to disabuse fellow men or teach them some new truth. . . . Is that any reason to abandon the sciences? Are men to abandon, out of fear of such dangers, what their rationality perfects and what distinguishes them from the brute's instinct?" (Cadalso, Cartas 255).

The Lapsed Enlightener

93

tentions. His epistolary novel is translucent at best, making it difficult to fix his place in the Enlightenment. If philosophy "illuminates" by its method of classifying observations, it must also disparage the contradictions that erupt in satirical discourse. But this is precisely what the philosophical Nufio does not do in the Moroccan Letters. He reverses his intellectual beliefs and confesses to the reversal. His is a "dark" consideration; he is prone to inconsistency, and by recognizing this fact Nufio denies critical lucidity: "For all I know, some day I'll start applauding what I've always condemned." He adds that "if the Madrid skies were not so clear and beautiful but became sad, opaque, and caliginous as in London," he would publish a still murkier book entitled Liigubrious Nights (which in fact Cadalso did publish under this very title) (1Cartas, 240, 241). The intertextual note furnishes a nonsatirical base for understanding Cadalso. Contradiction is unavoidable in external reality, he suggests. The very condition of thinking is contradictory, because ideas change with altering circumstances just like clear skies that grow dim. Although Madrid is not gloomy London, its intellectual light is not so certain that it may not turn into comparable darkness. This prospect renders an oblique judgment on the English Enlightenment. The references just cited are a clear layer absorbed into the film of irony covering the still more ambiguous multivocal narrative. The motif of concealment fittingly enters the text at the juncture where fiction meets references to the "editor" and to the "author," who, to complicate matters, allegedly wears a "mask." A reader might wonder whether the alleged mask conceals more than simply the author's face. Not only is London's sky "caliginous"—so is the deceptive exterior of Spanish society. Another allusion claims that the witches denied by Feijoo are hidden from his sight and are actually active. The reports sent home by the visiting Moroccan draw complaints from the recipient: "Some things that you write me are incompatible with each other. I fear . . . you are representing things not as they are but as they are represented to you" (Cartas 138). These reports offer reasoned observations of a society that abuses Reason. The recipient Ben-Beley mistrusts them because they may be contaminated by that abuse, to the extent that an Enlightener may be misinformed by his informant. The cultural air breathed by Nufio is recirculated through letter-writer Gazel's mental atmosphere. The original air hangs rife with polemics of all kinds. They exaggerate issues rather than refine them, as only a grotesque polemicist can do, with "strong lungs, a giant's voice, and the gestures of a frenetic" (Cartas, 144). The vignette appears as a faithful

94

Chapter Three

rendition of the intellectual "chameleon" who "defended in the morning that something was black, and in the afternoon that it was white." The absurdity is part of a familiar scene, where it passes for a respectable method accredited by Spanish reasoners: "this was called defending a thing problematically." Practitioners deepen the rot generation after generation by "showing off their problematic genius." Cadalso mocks all such mental corruption, but his discourse turns against him. While the characters of his Active society suggest that language may pervert rational discourse, the question of Cadalso's real society remains. May not the subversive power of his own language also rise up against the satire? Contemporary readers of his work did not need uniformly to discover themselves mirrored satirically in the text. Surely a few took themselves too seriously for self-doubt, and those readers comprise a community deaf to the irony aimed at them. The fact is that Cadalso takes pains to expose the fault lines of language, whose elucidating purpose breaks into ambiguous layers. For instance, politicians irrationalize speech: "with the same tone they speak the truth and lies; they don't give any meaning to w o r d s . . . . They possess a great wealth of equivocal words; they know a thousand phrases with much pomp and no sense at all" (Cartas, 225—26). Authors and editors are not the only people to wear masks. What is irrational in the political arena belongs as much to the motif of concealment as to stupidity; both motifs address the alarming nonsense attributed to Spain's intellectual milieu. Darkness invades mimetic language in the scenes of absurdity and grotesquerie alluded to here. Darkness also crowds out the light of empirical cognition and produces dream. A dream of verbal ambiguity exists in the Moroccan Letters, and it differs somewhat from the dream of "Universal Language" in Goya's Sepia Two. Goya's language is the protean hieroglyph beyond the frontier of rational words. Cadalso wrestles with rational language and its verbal intractability. He sees the irrational interstices of philosophical discourse, its linguistic web of connecting self-contradictions, and the translucent films that obscure the Moroccan Letters. Hence Nufio's projected solution. He plans to compile a rectifying dictionary that will explain "smoothly and plainly the primitive meaning, genuine and real, of each word, and the abuse that has been made of it, that is, its abusive meaning in civil relations" (1Cartas, 109). Delusion has replaced faith in intelligent public discourse. Nufio's dictionary will strike at the semantic roots of social evil "so that nobody is deceived... as I have been deceived... by believing that words . . .

The Lapsed Enlightener

95

have only one meaning, whereas they have so many that they exceed any cipher." The semantic problem signals a crisis in cognition that troubles Cadalso, leading him to abandon expositional criticism for satire. The text reproduces this crisis both satirically and in serious terms, each version posing the question of what reality is: "I was reading gazettes and newsletters, and I could never understand who won and who lost. The very events I participated in seemed like dreams when read according to their published accounts" (Cartas, 129). But the reverse situation is just as bewildering. A full-fledged dream occurs at the end of the Moroccan Letters, reproduced by the "editor." He has dreamed about future reader reactions after the letters are published. Now it is no longer a single episode, such as a newspaper reading, that forms the perceptual framework. The confusion is transferred to the entire narrative confection, and the dream at closure throws doubt on what the work actually means. The editor dreams that the Letters have been judged approvingly, despite their unflattering satire, because they deal only with "light" matters. Readers in his dream warn him against graver matters like patriotism and philosophy because, given his "gloomy and severe" temperament, "such ridiculous matters" would quickly be dealt with as "wholly serious" (304). But this dream contradicts what we, the real readers sharing Cadalso's language, believe we know and understand. Grave matters have indeed been treated, although purged satirically of political specificity. The author has also expressed an amused criticism of his countrymen. These tensions disorient us, as irony should. But they also betray Cadalso's uncertainty about satirical impact. How potent can a satire be if the authorities approve its publication, and if it cannot irritate its fantasied readers? Further ambiguity surrounds the satirical treatment of patriotism and philosophy. If these subjects are "serious" and merit ironic criticism, why call them "ridiculous"? The standard explanation is that self-deprecation is one of the strategies by which irony avoids the traps set by censors who respond to plain-speaking texts. But just as the ironic Cadalso both does and does not take himself seriously, so too are his themes serious concerns for some readers and stamped taboo by others using the term "ridiculous." Cadalso's dream discourse merely adds another ambiguous stratum to a discourse already striated with irony. His utterances are like reversible clothes that, turned inside out, serve at once the contrary circumstances of literary reality and literary dream. Yet both dimensions invoke the historical

96

Chapter Three

reality of Spain together with its real dream of Spanish Enlighteners. The same historical ambience that furnishes Goya with his slumped figure gives Cadalso his setting. But Cadalso describes the state of lapsed Reason by deepening the uncertainty until it prompts ambiguous states of mind and self-identity: The jocose style in your case is an artifice; your nature is gloomy and severe. We know your true face and we will rip off the mask with which you've tried to hide it. From this knowledge we infer that you did not wish to fly up from your study to the lucid realm of literature, but rather first you skimmed the ground, then raised your wings a bit more, and now we don't know where you want to fly. (304)

Speaking here are the dreamed readers, and they pronounce accurate truths about the work's evasive satirical language. The editor receives these statements solemnly on his awakening. He stands accused of not being what he appears to be. The allegation links him to the chameleon-like philosophers attacked by him and Nufio. His status, like reality itself, grows doubtful. Cadalso's readers can confirm a parallel polymorphism. Nufio resembles the changeable philosophers because he holds contradictory ideas, and yet he also resembles the editor by being one more of Cadalso's surrogates. The editor's ambiguous identity, linked to the author's similar elusiveness, is metaphorized by the wings of his dubious flight. The avian trope is not as commonplace as it might seem; it evokes a Goyesque allusion to ambiguous identity elsewhere in the work, "like the bat, which is neither mouse nor bird" (Cartas, 285). The reversible status of reality defies rational understanding. The editor does not question this shift, nor do we as readers. Still, irony and ambiguity do not work harmoniously. The duplicity of satire says one thing and signifies something else. But ambiguity is multivocal, since what is stated and what is "meant" are both in dispute. The ironic sign may be construed unironically by those deaf to satire, while the ironic "meaning" might elicit just the opposite construction. Multivocality becomes the language, and our perception of ambiguity smudges the line between what is true in the narrative and what is false.

The Lapsed Enlightener

97

The Epistemology of Madness What remains certain is Reason's loss of power over language. The dreamed readers of the Moroccan Letters are the allies of philosophical clarity, although the real reader knows that clarity is dubious at best. The readers' censure is paradoxical ("ridiculous matters," "we will rip off the mask"), yet it threatens Cadalso's critical method. The question now is whether the method of disorienting perspectives will work, and this depends on the dream's truth-bearing capacity. In historical fact, portions of the Moroccan Letters appeared in censored installments, a testimony to its truthful essence. It appeared as a complete book in 1793, nearly two decades after its composition. As for the dream, it progresses from mildness to aggressive terror. The dreamed readers are menacing as they assume the garb of judicial authorities. First they are monitory friends of the editor, warning him sternly.16 But soon the dream adopts a nightmarish tone by translating the threatening glance into a litany of punishments: "We are all going to meet in plenary assembly and forbid . . . so odious a reading. . . . We will also succeed in causing you other grief. We will divide up into various troops; each one will attack you from a different side." Then the readers change into "furious censors" and complete the transformation from dream to nightmare: " I woke up from the dream with the same fright and sweat experienced by someone who has just dreamed that he has fallen from a tower, or that a bull has gored him, or that they are leading him to the gallows." The terrified reaction prompts violent comparisons that betray a dislocation in the speaker's sense of reality ("I said to them, wondering if it was a dream or reality: shadows, visions, phantasms" [Cartas, 305]). Radical doubt also persuades the implied author-editor not to write any more, and he announces this decision. This completes the chain of cognitive crises in the work, beginning with skepticism over philosophical language and ending with the reasoner deterred by semantic uncertainties. A disquieting epistemological message grows visible beneath the text's satirical message. Dreams may unveil truths that are concealed to waking reality. Reason forfeits its privileged place, and the door of significant understanding opens briefly on a madhouse of national infirmities. Waking reality is "the universal satire suffered by humanity" (Cartas, 16. "With stern brow, harsh voice, declamatory gesture and exalted f u r o r . . . they threw me a glance capable of terrifying Hercules himself" (Cadalso, Cartas, 305).

98

Chapter Three

198). Laughter is Cadalso's response to the truth that humankind, as seen through a Spanish lens, will threaten and punish any call to Reason. Other nations need also to progress toward the universal ideals of the Enlightenment, and they too "suffer" an affliction that presents itself as a folly. But this initial truth cannot by itself close the distance between the dread that is experienced in dream and in life's familiar foolishness. A more disturbing insight awaits discovery beyond the conventional word associations that create satirical humor in Don Quixote and the Persian Letters, Cadalso's models. Folly is something "suffered by humanity" because, more than an affliction, it is a malady. Cadalso resorts to the metaphor of insanity at three separate moments in the novel. The schemes and projects of his and every other epoch gather within a new category that makes a madhouse of rational history. The gradations of madness spread over a precise vocabulary in the Moroccan Letters. From silly "ridiculousnesses" and bizarre "extravagances," the lexicon advances to a first stage of harmless derangement whose is name is capricho. Words of this kind mottle Cadalso's style throughout the work. But only when the term locura supplies the next degree of irrationality does a sobering cameo of the real problem emerge: Just as someone who enters an insane asylum is astonished by the person he sees in each cell until he moves to another cell where he finds another yet more frenetic madman, so too the century we now see merits first place until the next one comes to replace it. (281)

Lexical nuances ("insane," "frenetic") absorb the new sociological context of medicine.17 Cadalso's innovation consists of the semantic changes imbued in compacted words likefrenetico,which denotes both "frenzied" and "phrenetic," or locura for "madness" and "insanity." In the insane asylum just mentioned, the pathological trope is applied by the foreign observer in a warning about Europe's century of lights: "its deliriums are most exquisite, and let's be clear about this " (281). The asylum is a pessimistic image that befits Spain's Enlightenment, if Goya's lapsed reasoner is any proof. The collective mind falters deliriously and fails to recover despite the remedies proposed by Feijoo a generation 17. New connotations enlarge dictionary definitions, in tandem with institutionalized forms of medicine and together with books describing physical maladies, including dementia and phrenitis, as the next chapter suggests.

The Lapsed Enlightener

99

earlier.18 Now too, a unique flaw replaces the older moral blemish of political ambition, converted to an obsessive dimension in eighteenth-century society. Spanish politicians are driven by a "delirious" resolve, and they conduct their affairs with "convulsive" zeal. Only satire can inoculate a wise society against their noxious influence: Despite the odious impression given to most observers of somebody disturbed by such delirium—somebody who should be chained like a frenetic so that he does no harm to the men, women, and children he may run across in the streets—it is usually entertaining if his behavior is watched at a distance. The diversity of artful tricks and trumps is an amusing spectacle for a person unafraid of them. (206)

Cadalso mentions satire as a defense against the threat posed by politicians to ordinary citizens who take them seriously. But he succeeds in trivializing their political madness only for himself, "a person unafraid of them" at a distance. His distancing tactic does not lighten the danger for others. On the contrary, the tactic dissolves the irony that would otherwise disarm a suspicious censor. Satire "cures" the malady only in the artistic sense. But the threat of political delirium is a reality that no regulatory means will neutralize. Delirium and frenzy are symptoms of the abnormal reality that only Cadalso thwarts by virtue of his distancing tropes. Madness also comes under reassessment, especially for its historical status prior to the eighteenth century: "I will guard against believing that there has been any century when men were sane" (281). The sweeping judgment drains satire of any immediate relevance. The opinion again seems to prevent a reader from giving the satire a careful interpretation. A clue to its true meaning is the editor's "wondering if it was a dream or reality." Given the progressively nightmarish events reported, his statement reflects a depleted irony. Even if construed as ironic, it withdraws to the same amused distance noted for the satirist but unavailable to the ordinary citizens most affected by the delirium under attack. Perceptions flounder as to what is dream and what is reality in Cadalso's mode of analysis. He likens human history to life in a madhouse, and his procedure is to eschew rational distinctions in favor of deranged ones. The lexical nuances grow "exquisite," like deliriums, in a single sen18. Feijoo's essays denouncing astrological and other pseudo-scientific studies appear to have had little effect in Cadalso's time, particularly "the deliriums of judiciary astrology" that remain just as strong (Cadalso, Cartas, 286).

ioo

Chapter Three

tence: "Human extravagances are as ancient as ridiculous, and each era has its favorite madness (281). The shades of meaning separate the irrational act (extravagancia) from the degree and quality of its Unreason (ridtcula): the extravagant act is less severe than delirio, while the ridiculous quality is less severe than the degreefrenetico.These various acts, conditions, and degrees of lunacy belong to the general category locum, whose configuration changes from era to era. Judgments about when these acts are ridiculous or when they are inane, and when insensate or when deranged, are all distinctions that bear a social import rather than a philosophical one. These social and philosophical categories fall within the critical focus of national decline in the Moroccan Letters. Cadalso acknowledges perceptual madness. He does not repudiate the ideal role for philosophy, although it has failed social history. He resigns himself ironically to the prospect that "the world is changing into a spacious insane asylum" (99). The Spain he perceives is a very real society limping into the progressive age with reformers and planners who do not resemble Jovellanos. They are rather the convulsive proyectistas of Letter 24, free citizens who deserve locking up: " D o you know what's needed in each part of your quadripartite Spain? An insane asylum for the proyectistas of the North, South, East, and West" (169). These perceptions of irrationality constitute a perception of historical reality just as fully as they do a criticism of it. They repeat the question asked earlier about the observer reporting on Spain: does he represent things as they actually are or as they are represented to him by others? This is where Cadalso anticipates the Goyesque vision. History seems to be readable in reverse, since philosophical Reason cannot ensure a fixed representation of what reality is. The waking life blurs the perimeters of sense data and merges them with the dream world. The knowable waking world presents itself in epistemological disorder. With the rational method discredited, alternative perceptions may organize events around a contrary principle such as madness. Cadalso's most adequate metaphor for organizing perception is mental infirmity and its material symbols. The madhouse represents cognitive chaos—that is, the brittleness of philosophical systems when they cope with the riotous mixture of waking and imagined realities. Appositely, mental disease is the metaphor of crippled consciousness itself. The very word "infirmity" appears often and in diverse contexts of national and moral decay. Even more, this enfermedad accompanies the notion of disorder. If the mind is weak, so is the body's "machine," a convenient image for emphasizing physical

The Lapsed Enlightener

101

and mental unreliability: "I much regret that depraved customs cause me to fall into the awkwardness of celebrating disorder, but since our machine is so fragile, for all I know, some day I'll start applauding what I've always condemned" (Cartas, 240). The collapse of intellectual order also confirms Cadalso's social perspective regarding Spain's decline. His contemporaries deflect energy away from immediate public concerns and toward their interest in ancient history. Their "indiscreet passion for antiquity [is] so blind and absurd" that anyone who "suffers from this infirmity" deserves to have "an exquisite prank" played on him (192-93). The disease is national backwardness, the atraso caused by retrospective fixations. The victim is Spain, confined in a "hospital" provisioned by the enlightened Europe of Masson de Morvilliers, the author who asked contemptuously, "What does Europe owe to Spain?" 19 To save Spain, a new science of cultural medicine is needed. A particular illness may find its own therapeutic after analyzing its unique case history: "In order to cure a sick person . . . the doctor must have a particular knowledge of the patient's temperament, the origin of the illness, its increments and complications, if there are any. People want to cure every sort of sickness with the same medicine" (260). In Nufio's opinion, Spain's deteriorating health has not yet been traced to its sources. The nobility, with its unearned privileges, has escaped diagnosis. Noblemen treasure their inheritance and hereditary class status, a vanity that provokes Nufio's special laughter. His hilarity is incredulous, bolstered by astonishment over their blindness to social needs as yet unfilled. The antics of the nobility thus resemble "engraved pictures that seemed to me magical, figures that I took to be the capricho of some demented painter" (128). The demented scene anticipates Goya's aesthetic by intensifying caprice among the gradations of madness. No longer just funny, the nobles are the incredible subjects of an aquatint, a medium that works a "magical" effect when capriciously evoking the reality it transforms through picture. The transformed reality, when thus represented, is unbelievable enough to seem like an aberration outside the natural sphere. The appropriate response is the "cackle of laughter" by Nuno and his companion. Nevertheless, the painter's aberrant vision originates in a depraved mind, not a satirical one. Is the vision wholly unreal or infirm on this account? It would seem that a symmetry balances the mental illness of the painter and the social infirmity of the society he observes. His psychological capricho effects 19· See Chapter 1, note 32.

102

Chapter Three

a mimesis, but the fact of his dementia is not what produces the aberrant representation. Rather, dementia can deal with a perceived existing aberration by virtue of its own homologous abnormality. In Cadalso's epistemology of madness, cognitive acts achieve precision through a nonrational medium. The "vision" or insight stems from the larger satirical sequence that constitutes the Moroccan Letters as a narrative of scenes, among which the capricho is a scene within a scene.

Irrational Cognition Madness is one mode of irrational cognition. Magic is a second mode. The "magical" capricho of a "demented" painter (Cadalso's words) can signify more than a scene of caricatured figures. It can also identify the madness of supernatural vision. This is a form of Unreason that gains its full shape in Goya's "Black Paintings" and in certain of his Caprichos.20 Goya's interest in magical beliefs is considered today to have been sociological rather than credulous. However, his interest betrays a more obscurely intuitive penetration into a second reality. This is the view taken by Baudelaire and later by surrealists. In any event, supernatural beliefs are a fact of reality for a particular kind of community not only in Spain but throughout eighteenthcentury Europe. 21 Such a community may not seem relevant to Cadalso, whose satire is commonly held by Hispanists to be aimed transparently at social foibles, among them the superstitions of the pre-Napoleonic decades. However, the irony is less transparent when we consider that readers who delved into alchemy or who were attracted to black magic must have judged the Moroccan Letters to be an uncomprehending gesture against these subjects. Cadalso's straight-faced satire of manners mocks less visibly than Goya's caricature of grotesque social values. Irony is a matter of convention and of community, as Stanley Fish maintained in a debate with Wayne Booth.22 It is logical to assume that 20. In this volume the concept of Unreason, together with madness as one of its cognitive modes, should not be confused with Foucault's ideas concerning deraison and folic. As in the deraison of Chapter 2, my general category refers to the abandonment of Reason and not to a medical disease. Similarly, madness here has a cognitive value rather than the negative sense of institutional insanity. See Jennifer Radden, Madness and Reason (London: George Allen 8c Unwin, 1985), 44-46. 21. Chapter 9 will develop this point at length. 22. See Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press; New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1989). Wayne Booth, noting the "failures of speakers and

The Lapsed Enlightener

103

Cadalso, as a writer and army colonel, belongs to the community that cannot accredit witchcraft. Undoubtedly his fictional personage gestures ironically when he rubs his eyes at eighteenth-century manners, believing himself transported back to the sixteenth century. But when at the same time he alludes to the community of superstitious believers, his irony cannot remove the fact that their affiliated groups do question the reliability of sense perception: " I have come to wonder whether some wizard is representing previous generations to me by some magical art. If that is the case, I wish he could acquire the science of witchcraft so as to bring future ages before my eyes!" (Cartas 188). The enchantments thus invoked are an obvious convention for satire. The ridiculing device nonetheless asserts the existence of a power, illusory or not, acknowledged by the credulous community. These believers affirm the magical force that can level the centuries and arrest the succession of time. The wizard does not alter external reality: he conjures the immutable features of all ages to stand apart in their continuity while the surrounding appearances fade under the solvent truth of his magic. This process is illusory for Cadalso and may therefore be regarded as absurd. But the reality of those continuous features, as if time had stopped, cannot be denied. This reality is affirmed by ironic attribution, and the only plausible explanation for it is the one accepted by the superstitious community that is deaf to the irony.23 Spain in the eighteenth century differs little from sixteenth-century Spain, according to the truth-saying ironist of the Moroccan Letters. And the proof is that the supernatural account of reality, which by being ignorant explains nothing, survives as the sole explanation offered by moderns interpreters to get together," describes the "unstable irony" by which an author "refuses to declare himself, however subtly, for any stable proposition." Critics may also be "unable to believe that an author could really contradict his own beliefs, [and] conclude that he is being ironic." Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago & London: University Chicago Press, 1974), 5, 240, 74. See also John Searle's example of the imprisoned American military officer who recites a German poem to his Italian captor with the intent of conveying the message "I am a German officer" but fails because his poem is understood literally ("What Is a Speech Act?" in Language and Social Context, ed. Pier Paolo Gigliolo [New York: Penguin Books, 1972], 145). 23. Apropos of credulity, the journalist Luis Canuelo complains, "I scarcely hear a sermon that doesn't have some invective against the maxims of the enlightened century, against fashionable learning, against today's philosophers. . . . But I cannot recall ever hearing one single word from the pulpit against superstition. After all, superstition is a crime against religion as well as against incredulity. . . . In contrast to [our atheists] the superstitious can be found everywhere." Luis Garcia de Canuelo, El Censor, ed. E. Garcia Pandavenes (Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1972), 82-83. What qualifies as being "superstitious" becomes clearer in Chapter 9·

I04

Chapter Three

and retrogrades alike—offered ironically by the moderns and seriously by the credulous retrogrades. There is an unintentional irony as well. In an enlightened century, the Moroccan Letters hesitates amid the epistemological doubts mentioned earlier, and it attests to the availability of a supernatural instrument for gaining knowledge beyond Reason's capacity. Enlightened studies cannot encompass the totality of possible experience, as Nuno admits by his historiographical skepticism. Liberal Catholics like Feijoo would agree, but would assign to divine knowledge the complementary part that eludes human understanding. The need for extra-rational insight thus structures both the Christian Enlightenment and its secular dark side. The generation preceding Cadalso's abounds with reports of supernatural phenomena external to religious experience. Feijoo's earlier efforts to combat these errors carry over to the end of the century, together with the errors themselves. Nuno participates ironically in the struggle for knowledge by citing a treatise near completion and directed against the archcritic maestro Feijoo, by which I demonstrate against his most illustrious and most reverend person that the instances of goblins, witches, vampires, ghouls, sprites, and ghosts are very common and consequently not rare, all of which is authenticated by the deposition of trustworthy persons, like governesses, grandmothers, village elders, and others of equal authority. I have hopes of publishing it soon with fine plates and precise maps, especially the engraved frontispiece, which represents the meadow of Barahona with a general meeting of the nobility and commoners of witchcraft. (Cartas, 242-43)

The satirical intent of Cadalso's alter ego appears self-evident. At the same time, there arise too many questions that give pause. O f all the topics to be debunked, why should the well-read Nuno identify his literary talent with this one? If magical thinking is a trivial stain on the Christian Enlightenment, why does he catalog so extensively the population captivated by witchery? The incongruity of handsomely engraved illustrations for ghosts and witches seems to be an ironic device, but what about Goya's commissioned paintings on the subject for the Duchess of Alba? Finally, since the meadow of Barahona is a famous meetingplace for the possessed, is the reference here merely a coincidental anticipation of the "Black Paintings," which in turn offer so disturbing a spectacle of magical rites as to counterbalance Goya's "intention" to denounce them? 24 Could they not 24. Regarding Cadalso's allusion to the meadow of Barahona, the site of superstitious practices in Soria, see Edith Helman's remarks on Moratin's annotations for the Auto de fe

celebrado en la ciudad deLogrofio en los dim 6y?de noviembre de 1610 (Jovellanosy Goya

[Madrid:

The Lapsed Enlightener

105

also be contemplated as an act of participating comprehension—terrifying in Goya's case because their drama is brushed into the very outlines of the huddled practitioners? The passage just cited hardly goes so far in Goya's direction, but rational eyes are useless for reconstructing the Spanish subculture that apparently demanded vigilant counteraction. Nufio must adduce the folkloric testimony of the aged and the subservient, and this dependency weakens the ironic reference to the "authority" of such witnesses as crones, domestic servants, and credulous grandmothers. Only these "trustworthy" sources can characterize the supernatural beings whose material existence is denied by philosophers and theologians. Can any rational person be concerned with the difference between a "goblin" and a "sprite," or a "ghoul" and a "ghost"? Yet these entities are denoted by words that only today seem synonymous. The words presumably came into existence for real and realistic purposes in the lives of those who needed a language to represent experiences of a certain kind. Supernaturalism demands its pragmatism too, if believers are to distinguish among wizards, sorcerers, conjurers, geomancers, oneiromancers, and related specialists in occult knowledge. From this standpoint, Nufio's proposed charts and drawings make clear identifictions, whereas skepticism can unify resemblances only by its rational indifference to distinctions. The result of Nufio's distinctions might be called irrational cognition. The enlightened observer must be receptive at least psychologically to occultist ontological categories. Goya will display that receptivity with fall visionary power. One category comprises the aforesaid ghosts. These include the bruculacos or ghouls—technically, the excommunicated walking dead—which are dismissed by religious thinkers who contend that they are souls whose true state is immaterial and thus invisible. It would require a divine miracle or grace to present them bodily to large numbers of profane witnesses, goes the argument, a grace of unproven deservedness among those who claim to see ghouls. Another category includes the brujas, the witches, whose covens and conclaves are a social reality that cannot be denied by empirical survey. But their powers of witchcraft, not verifiable under ordinary conditions, become suspect due to exaggerated hearsay. Goya's treatment of witches' sabbaths in Barahona permits the inference that Cadalso too was alert to the demonic power allegedly wielded by witchcraft over the ghosts and ghouls that God-fearing religion denies. Taurus: 1970], 148,168,179), which she believes were begun around 1797, the period under discussion here.

io6

Chapter Three

Reason too denies this power, but the visionary eye discerns it and claims the ability to recreate it pictorially in a book that Nuno says will educate the skeptics. Another occult category includes the vampiro, a subject of treatises by Dom Calmet and several others.25 The scientific aspect of vampirism attracts Cadalso much less than the supernatural paradigm that governs it, especially as manifested by bats. The vampire category presents an ontological distinction that brings the metamorphic feature of material reality into play: "neither mouse nor bird"—nor man, we can add—but all of these in a partial sense. The bat's ambiguity conforms to the perceptual uncertainty that afflicts the pragmatic characters of the Moroccan Letters. When Goya resumes the motif of bats, their symbolic monstrosity confirms the dim horror glimpsed by Cadalso, an intuitive alarm that chaos may be lurking behind ambiguity. Nuno's supernaturalism is couched too blatantly in irony to be accepted at face value. Even so, the naive community of governesses and elderly villagers remains impervious to his irony. But are they the only supernaturalists in Spain? The Latin-reading occultists among them must take to heart a quotation from Horace that concludes the dream episode already described. Nuno cites the Horatian amusement at nocturnal phenomena: "You just laugh at dreams, at magical horrors, at 'wonders'; / At night-flying spooks; you think of Thessalian 'portents.'" 26 Nuno believes that, in the light of his nearly complete treatise on ghosts and ghouls, revised readings of the Latin text will be needed. Then the Horatian original can be construed as upholding the converse of what it supposedly now mocks, along the lines of the Wittgensteinian model: "Say 'it's cold here' and mean 'it's warm here.'" Nuno's revision of Horace will undo the latter's irony, while Nuno's illustrated treatise promises to do the same. Both efforts confront the rationalists on their own perceptual ground. The fact is that credulous communities do exist and do welcome supernatural perceptions. Furthermore, although Cadalso satirizes the credulous, he also assails rational perceptions and circumstances, as we have seen. The issue, therefore, is cognitive unreliability. Here lies the significance of the editor's dream, quite apart 25. Feijoo reviews Calmet and takes up vampirism in "Reflexiones criticas a dos disertaciones del padre Calmet sobre Apanciones de espiritus y los Vampiros y brucolacof (Cartas eruditas, 4:20). 26. In Cartas marruecas, 243; see Horace, "Second Epistle," in The Satires and Epistles of Horace, trans. Smith Palmer Bovie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 270.

The Lapsed Enlightener

107

from its irony. It offers the possibility of compensating for maladroit cognition. The dream's glimpse of truth, however shadowy, opens an extrasensory dimension, the same ontological dimension that Nuno's magic and witchcraft belong to, although of a different perceptual order. The fictional editor briefly mingles dream with reality. This mixture, together with the implied author's portrayal of madness in social reality, comprises the first stage of irrationalist skepticism within Spain's Christian Enlightenment. By reiterating the editor's oneiric episode by means of Horace's quotation, Cadalso reinforces Nuno's words in a reversely ironic key. Now that it is inadmissible to laugh at dreams, both delirium and nocturnal magic approach respectability. They are respectable not because their world is perceived by sensory criteria but because their truth can be grasped by a superimposed, flexible irrationalism. It will remain for Goya to take the final step of superimposition by presenting cognition through dream in the place of sensory, rational cognition of waking reality.

4· Rational Unreason

Accurate and just reasoning is the only catholic remedy fitted for all persons and all dispositions, and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon which, being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners and gives it the air of science and wisdom. —Hume, A η Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding

In order to understand the lapsed Enlightener's social milieu, an irrational method of cognition is sometimes required, as the Moroccan Letters indicated. But if the epistemology of madness is Cadalso's extreme method for knowing Spain, the normative version for knowing the larger Western European milieu may be termed "rational Unreason." The preconditions of this counter-rational method can be deduced from social clues embedded in Capricho 43Goya seats his lapsed Enlightener in a peculiar position at the workdesk. The history of painting after the sixteenth century records a fascinating variety of sitting positions and writing tables in the portraits of contemplative figures.1 These scenes often permit the social milieu to be be reconstructed from the material elements they depict. When introspection or intimacy prevails over environment, as in Capricho 43 and the portrait of Jovellanos, the extremes of physical starkness or luxury will also accentuate the mood projected into the environment. The possibility of reconstructing elements of a social milieu from the visual arts also offers a converse method for deciphering the status of Reason. The desk in Capricho 43 contrasts with that shown in the portrait of i. Contemplative portraiture ranges from the saintly anchorite in a cave or wilderness (Ribera's Saint Paul) and the monk at a table adorned with a skull (Dürer's Saint Jerome) to the elegantly furnished desks of distinguished officials and authors (Michel Van Loo's Diderot, Fragonard's Diderot, Jollain's d'Alembert). Chardin's Toung Sketcher Sharpening His Pencil plants the elbow firmly on a plain desk, the face reflecting total concentration, whereas his Boy with a Top portrays the subject distracted from books by what Dorothy Johnson calls a Lockean "concentration" on the sensory world ("Picturing Pedagogy: Education and the Child in the Paintings of Chardin," Eighteenth Century Studies 24 [1990]: 66).

Rational Unreason

109

Jovellanos. Whereas the latter figure sits at an ornate wooden desk laden with the quills and bundled documents of a socially engaged intellectual, the desk in Capricho 43 sets off its meager writing instruments in a way that heightens their abandonment.2 The desk's humble design is not calculated to hold the viewer's attention. Its function in any other scene would be to iconize the waking, workaday reality. But its disuse here serves antithetically to call into question the sleeper's role and obligations. Only this undoubtedly material object displays any real substance in the scene, since the "awakened" creatures around the desk may all be unreal entities produced by the sleeper's dream. The solitary desk also evokes, again by antithesis, the society shut away from its owner's consciousness. It will become clear that the desk is the perfect metonymy for the man named "Enlightener," whatever his vocation, because the workdesk is the relevant sign of social productivity. Yet Goya disposes of the desk in a way that characterizes his protagonist negatively. The condition depicted here involves the sterile activity of Reason. By not behaving as it should, Reason is judged aberrant and futile. The viewer intuits this futility owing to the disposition of the desk and the waking creatures. Several iconic agencies represent this judgment, based on truth-bearing Reason.3 First, the desk inscribes in actual words the motto that the sleep of Reason produces monsters. Second, the watchful creatures, whether the feline or the owls, denounce the lapsed Enlightener by virtue of an independent gaze. Their implied judgment upholds the counter-rational form of Reason termed "rational Unreason." The epithet befits the creatures that remain eerily watchful. The situation seems to indicate that Reason's basic aberration lies in its multiple identities and roles. Whereas the physical place of Reason is at the desk, its role of reasonable judgment is shared out among surrogates that operate counter-rationally. The paradox of Unreason was already apparent in Cadalso's recognition that a peculiar epistemology of madness functions through rationalizing means. The method is not a conventional reductio ad absurdum. Its novelty is the principle that mental illness, not wayward logic, governs the irrational work of Reason. The method takes 2. Jovellanos in this portrait "assumes the traditional attitude of melancholy and lethargy, [which force] him to abandon the work piled on his desk." Janis A. Tomlinson, Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment (New Haven, Conn, and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 90. See also Chapter 7, note 5. 3. So-called "normal" or truth-bearing Reason, for this context, may be considered to be the empirical instrument given by Nature, as conceived by d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse and Hume's Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

no

Chapter Four

milder forms in CapHcho 43, specifically as counter-rational Reason and rational Unreason, distinct concepts in their own right. These overlapping methods for making reasonable judgments suggest that the rational and the irrational do not occupy clearly separable zones but actually exist as a single metamorphic entity. Such categories as "imagination," "delirium," or "Reason" coexist in ways that blur their mutual boundaries. This notion requires several angles of attack, in this chapter and the next, that show the blurring of categories in the vocabularies used by rational thinkers contemporary with Goya. But first, their act of authoring, iconized negatively by the sleeper's desk, requires comment.

Goya's Sterile Desk The desk in Capricho 43 is an unsculpted object. Stripped of the carpentered markings that might dignify it as a piece of furniture, it contrasts blatantly with Goya's practice in the portrait of Jovellanos, which inserts decorative features of desks and tables. Even Sepia One shows greater detail by reproducing a printmaker's table (Fig. 9). Admittedly, the full set of Caprichos exhibits a severe economy of style that number 43 cannot escape. But this etching also displays a less stark styling in the floor area. The front leg of the chair boasts a tiny wheel, while the desk has no legs at all. The legs of Enlightener are also graced by an unspare tailoring of pleated clothes. Thus, despite Goya's deliberate economy, the barren desk alone seems to denounce the plethora of mundane accessories associated with successful authoring and its material extensions: the printing of books, the rich leather bindings, the mass subscription sales, the academy memberships, the private lessons—the entire vulgarization of knowledge lamented in the Berlin Academy by its secretary, Samuel Formey, as le demi-savoir and denounced in Spain by Moratin.4 In contrast to Capricho 43, the desk in Sepia One shows considerable detail by virtue of the shelves or drawers of what seems to be Goya's own 4. The enemy is "le demi-savoir," not the savant: "Everything overflows with essays, studies, researches, dissertations, and treatises. The presses moan, paper grows dearer, and knowledge diminishes at the rate of this progress. It is relegated to the cabinets of a few proficient ones who are not pressed to bring it to the light of day, knowing and scorning the age's frivolity." Samuel Formey, "Considerations sur ce qu'on peut regarder aujourd'hui comme le but principal des Academies, et comme leur effet le plus avantageux: Second discours," in Histoire de l'Academte Royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres, Annie 1768 (Berlin: Haude and Spener, 1770), 363. For Moratin, see Chapter 3, note +.

Figure 9. Francisco de Goya. Sepia One. "Suefio" (Dream). Courtesy of the Museo del Prado, Madrid.

ii2

Chapter Four

printing press. Against one of its sides rests an engraved plate vaguely depicting either an allegorical Minerva or a historical noblewoman. 5 These realistic details do not appear in the final aquatint. To claim that a change of heart persuaded Goya to rub out evidence of his productive career in favor of a symbolic message about life's ultimate sterility would overstate the case. The fact is that he also rubs out the words "Universal Language," appearing on the desk of Sepia Two, in favor of the etching's final title. These erasures are subtle revisions that make Capricho43 a conceptual and graphic palimpsest of controversial and unresolvable complexity. The etching preserves its ontogenic past by its interpictoriality as well as by intertextuality. By removing the metal plate alongside the desk of Sepia One, Goya seems to deny at least one concern of the Enlightenment. Capricho 43 obliterates historical reference, in this case the plate's depiction of a Spanish past that is either allegorically Minervan or factually Habsburgian. The obliteration intensifies an already pessimistic mood. 6 A more conservative interpretation would contend that the unvoluted desk tells more about Enlightener than about Goya. We may think of the figure as either an artist or an author. Several sheets of paper lie atop the desk for sketching or else as evidence of a manuscript whose meager progress is arrested, along with the flow of ink, by the sleep that overtakes the writer. And yet there is neither ink nor, if he is an artist at his cartoons and sketches, any pencil, brush, or paintpot. There are no quills, charcoals, or gravers either. Virtually all portraits of artists in this period luxuriate with many brushes and cutting tools in testimony of creative energy. 7 The desk holds but one pencil-holder and a single instrument, either a burin or a brush. This barren spectacle is loaded with irony. An empty pencil-holder is clutched to no purpose in the talons of the leftmost owl. That a bird should wield the instrument, and not the man who knows how to write or draw, is a mockery of human language. This particular bird is songless 5. The indistinct female figure has been variously interpreted either as Minerva with lance and buckler or as Velazquez's portrait of Margarite of Austria. See Jose Lopez-Rey, Goya's Caprichos: Beauty, Reason and Caricature, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), 1:77; Jacqueline and Maurice Guillaud, Goya, 1748-1828: Peinture-Dessins-Gravures, 13 March-16 June 1979 (Paris: Centre Culturel du Marais, 1979), fig. 219; and Eleanor Sayre, The Changing Image: Prints by Francisco de Goya (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1974), 100. 6. A more devastating interpretation might suppose that the painter Velazquez is the real object of the erasure, for then Goya would be denying the fellowship of artistic example by silencing his own admiration for the master. Such an act would remove the consoling confraternal awareness that often diminishes the isolation of despondent artists. 7. Numerous examples are reproduced in Estampes presentes a l'Academie Royale (catalogue) (Paris: Galerie de la Seita, 1982).

Rational Unreason

113

by constitution, whereas the speechless human has no excuse for inactivity. Further irony tinges the interpictorial history of Capricho 43• The etching sweeps the desk clean of the oval vessels symbolic of creativity—the inkwells, round jars, and liquid substances that are husbanded and linked to the symbols of fertility. Quite the opposite is the fertility of Sepia One, where the dreamer's head engenders its replica, then another head and yet another. The dreamed faces spray upward from the sleeper in a showery cloud as if his head were a grotesquely exploding amniotic sac. Indeed, the metaphor of copulation and conception from demons can be found not only in Goya but also in Spanish literary dreams.8 The allusion to fertility is justified in the light of the spatial composition of Sepia One. A circle of quadrants composes the drawing. One quadrant rounds out into a conical balloon where the dream gives birth to human forms. In the space where the fetal monsters teem, there expands a semi-amorphous sphere. Both spheroid areas float above the dreamer's head in a bicameral cloud that magnifies the womblike space inside the dreamer's brain. The double dream has been engendered in the brain by some demon, in the manner affirmed by the alchemist Torres Villarroel, Goya's near contemporary.9 A comparison of Sepia One with Sepia Two shows a spatial continuity preserved by the empty quadrant in the upper left. The continuity between both sketches and the aquatint consists of the same region of bats: a swelling oval in Sepia One, a more angular space curved against blank convexity in Sepia Two, and a swarming cone in Capricho 4-3· Each oval sector above the unconscious head gives us to understand that the man is dreaming and not just sleeping. The dreamed Goya of Sepia One is actually multiplied into many Goyas whose heads gaze down at the sleeper with a variety of moods showing on their faces. Their expressions all bear witness to the ineffectuality that characterizes the desk beneath them. Unproductive activity thus rules the state of affairs at the desk of Capricho 43. The desk furnishes nothing but a verbal inscription about monstrous productivity, a special case of sterility. And this is not a waking productivity at all, but a shutting of the gates of consciousness to rationality. The desk ceases to serve the artist or reasoner. By its inscription, the desk emblemizes the controlled language of words and icons. Rational 8. In La barca de Aqueronte, Diego de Torres Villarroel explains that "some demonic incubus got my devil of an imagination pregnant and makes it give birth to these monstrosities." See Emilio Martinez Mata, Los "Suenos" de Diego de Torres Villarroel (Salamanca: University of Salamanca, 1990), 53. 9. Diego de Torres Villarroel, Suenos morales y Barca de Aqueronte, ed. Jose Maria Altozano (Madrid: Publicaciones Espafiolas, i960), 265.

114

Chapter Four

control has already been lost prior to inscription in Sepia One. The floating heads of a creative individual proliferate vaguely at the gateway where dream is engaged. Several deductions follow. From one standpoint, Sepia One depicts the doubling of an irrational, unproductive self. Like the willful cat in Capricho 43, whose dark double aligns itself with irrational forces surrounding the dreamer, the sketched dreamer also projects an oneiric self into a similar pandemonium. The etching removes the dreamer from the chaotic group, but the duality remains in mitigated form in the black feline substitute. From another standpoint, Goya sends the bats soaring in order to close off their sinister region from the lower plane of perpendicular and horizontal lines where rational deskwork should be occurring. In Sepia One, the upper and lower shadings in the two areas, together with the similar opposition of curved lines against straight ones, declare the separation between agitated and inert states. Yet a third view brings Sepia Two into the interpretation. Here attention shifts to the side panel of the desk. The verbal message inscribed here changes the title of Sepia One, "Sueno," which is written in the margin. In Sepia Two, the legend reads "Idioma Universal," alluding to the irrationalist language observed in the winged zone of bats.10 The title "Sueno," which plainly means "dream" in Sepia One, is no longer needed, so clearly has the hemispheric dream-shower been stylized into the empty quadrant and the solitary bat's airspace, signifying the dream. The word sueno reappears in Capricho 43 with the more complicated semantics of sleep and dream, discussed earlier. All three interpretations are consistent with one another, and none contradicts the main point about unproductivity or the idleness of fertile Reason. The interpictorial dimension completes this meaning for Capricho 43'· the desk and vicinity are sterile reminders that the mind has taken another course. Dream energy overspans human laxness as the flying bats escape the dreary slab of rational language that is planted on the floor. The uncompromising table, with no legs to stand on, gathers to itself the conditions of impotence; unused instruments on top, an unerect torso to one side, and to the other side a verbal message that is powerless to neutralize the generative surge of seething irrational life above. In short, whereas a desk ordinarily would be the hub of this man's pro10. Chapter 8 discusses the universal disorder of things depicted by the Marquis de Sade, whose vision of monstrosity consists of the blind impulses behind moral perversion that its practitioners convert into a transcendental principle justified by a language of inverted reasoning.

Rational Unreason

115

ductivity and hence would be the symbolic male equivalent of the spherical womb, the desk in Capricho 43 juts forth its square space as a dead-letter slab. It pronounces the demise of verbal linearity, an inevitable consequence when dormant Reason grows moribund. The prospect means, iconologically speaking, that the boxlike mass is more than a block of immobilized space. It is the negative counterpart of the parabolic cone of bats. In its immediate role as message-bearer, the desk's side is a flat poster, but it also becomes one side of a burial container for rationality, the engraved flank of a sarcophagus adorned with linear language. Just as a palimpsest erases one message in order to superimpose a second, so this same second message is the glyphic cry of its own effacement by the bats' nonrational language. The two-dimensional tablet is now the indecipherable side of a sarcophagal epitaph. Its characters are like illegible hieroglyphs before the eyes of those who are present in the scene to read them: the irrational creatures of Capricho 43• That the message may be read and comprehended only by the nonparticipant viewer suggests that the graven block is a monument to linguistic futility. As far as being a statement about the scene itself, the inscription "Universal Language" seems to refer to the language of Unreason preeminent at the time. The meaning produced in this graphesis 11 negates the rational language of writing and asserts the iconic sign of a desk in its place. The sleeping figure, as scribe and scrivener, shrinks from the plastic glyphs that are the beasts overhead. There is also a polar opposite to the desk in Sepia Two and Capricho 43. It is the cone of dream-created forms that arches above the sleeper. These forms are monstrous, to be sure, but they are unmistakably vibrant all the same. The bats comprise a disorderly swarm, but at least they are free and animate. Not so the motionless order of printed language. It is further true that the bats ascend into chaos. However, their flight is quasi-linear and charts a visually intelligible course toward the chaotic infinity. Not so the static words that lead the eye nowhere beyond their graven fixity. At this pole, the sarcophagal desk is a nontranscendent death, fully without consequence. Finally, the bats may be, as Goya phrases it, "products" of the fertile mind of the sleeper. The inscribed words are stillborn, delivered by no internal hand belonging to the pictorial anecdote. The words are begotten least of all by the sterile desk, propped starkly for the external hand that inscribes them. The desk is the only pictorial element that partakes of the 11. The term "graphesis," borrowed from Derrida, is used here to suggest the production of meaning through written signs—in Goya's case a process that is at variance with the iconic function of the inscription.

ii6

Chapter Four

logoccntric world. Its side panel, within reach of the disillusioned Goya's hand, records the insight that verbal rationality in Europe is reaching a dead end.

The Rhenes of Reason Corroborating Reason's dead-end course is the satire on learning by the cosmopolitan dramatist Moratin, among other exact contemporaries of Goya. The sterile corner of the Enlightenment, according to Moratin, consists of "that evil Encyclopedic erudition which has greatly deranged their rationality" (.Derrota, 52). Too many poets, patriots, scholars, and scientists live discordantly in their thought processes, "demented" in their pedantry and prejudice. The groups attacked by Moratin do not uniformly trouble Goya. Both Spaniards are moderate progressives who satirize pedantry and intellectual dishonesty. However, Moratin implicates the Encyclopedic in an unfavorable manner that from today's perspective raises the ghost of reactionary thinkers in Spain who attack the Christian Enlightenment. The contradiction of an enlightened moderate (and visitor to England) who disparages other encyclopedists poses a problem. Harsh lexical choices ("deranged") hardly suit reasonable thinkers or their commentators, least of all the reform-minded Moratin. The unavoidable question is what prompts this tolerant author to impute irrationality to an Enlightener. One plausible answer is that different thresholds of tolerance exist even when observers share a common code of values and similar methods of inquiry. The more interesting answer, however, comes in the form of a more difficult question. Is it possible that the shared discourse of Reason is itself a flawed fabric? If an intellectual moderate like Moratin can detect in Encyclopedic knowledge a threat to rationality, his opinion might reflect the insight that Reason speaks in a seductive tongue. Its terms of discussion presumably can lead even educated minds to betray the cognitive ideal of Encyclopedic Reason. Viewed as a collective faculty, the rational mind would seem to turn against part of itself in disregard of the self-ensnarement. The blame thus can lie with language itself. The vocabulary applicable to Unreason must inhere in the rhetoric of Reason, where it irrationalizes the latter's discourse. In order to confirm this subversion, we must examine the irrational language appropriated by Reason in contradiction to its own nature. This

Rational Unreason

117

requires broadening the range of sources beyond the familiar standardbearers quoted in the epigraphs to these chapters. Rather than the peaks of West European accomplishment, the common eighteenth-century experience for second-ranking and even run-of-the-mill authors will provide the representative context of Reason's overall comportment. The ideals of collective rational inquiry diffuse into ordinary spheres of action and thought. At this level of dissemination, some subject-matter is too mundane to be of formal concern to first-ranking scientists and artists. One such sphere is the "science" or "art" of war. Or should it be called an "art"? The fate of this particular subject in the hands of military authors illustrates a more general phenomenon in the Enlightenment. The dissemination of learning also simplifies knowledge and encourages borrowing from the specialized discourses of art and science. The effort to grace the subject at hand results in rhetorical hybridization, a modest example of the metamorphic exchange that Chapter 2 showed in its excessive form. In this stylistic way, less profound books that are overlooked today illustrate their amalgam of the pragmatic and the poetic. The educated but unexceptional mind notes a commonplace feature of human activity and wishes to elevate it from a practical subject into a system. The same mind seeks to incorporate the subject among the period's pace-setting styles by imitating their terminology, then realizes that the subject eludes systematizing. And so the subject is declared to exist in a second, exalted way, as an art. Such are the Reveries, ou memoires sur I'art de la guerre by Maurice Comte de Saxe.12 This work of 1756 fits the genre of military pragmatics typical of the era. It describes the procedures for supplying food, dress, and ordnance; it lays down rules of troop transport and organization; and it sketches the standard battle formations for infantry and cavalry. It also includes a higher moral discourse, namely, the argument that warfare is an honorable career and that a general's qualities must include, besides excellent health, both spirit and courage. Such a subject obviously holds little promise for methodological abstraction in the "high" tone of Enlightenment discourse. Nevertheless, Saxe gives warfare this very treatment. His premise is the duality of predictable laws and transcendent traits: "war has rules in its detailed parts but none at all in its sublime ones" (Reveries, 1:19). This conception grants that the knowledge of warfare eludes the precision achieved when science applies an organizing principle to an object of in12. Maurice Comte de Saxe, Les reveries, ou memoires sur I'art tie la guerre, 2 vols. (The Hague: Chez Pierre Gosse, 1756).

ii8

Chapter Four

quiry. In order to dramatize this limitation, Saxe borrows the metaphor of darkness and light, which is the period's cliche for the interim limitations of human inquiry. Thus, up to the writing of his book, "war is a science covered with darkness in whose obscurity we walk with uncertain step." Elevated subjects no less than banal ones are plagued by impediments to rational inquiry: "their base is formed by routine and prejudice, the natural issue of ignorance." Saxe is a knowledgeable and unbiased officerwriter, but even great military leaders face a further obstacle to illuminating their subject properly. Despite the unprejudiced assumptions of an honest inquirer, he will be stymied by the fundamental disorder of his presumed field of knowledge: "All sciences have principles and rules; war has none" (Reveries, 1:19). The enlightened commander seems unruffled as he moves easily from the duality of systematic and suprarational features to the paradox that military science defies scientific orderliness. The paradox grows out of serious advances in eighteenth-century art and thought. Faith and confidence in these advances grow justifiably. But the aura of confidence surrounding empirical sciences and aesthetic theories is also a cloud that showers the wider public with a thin fallout of awareness about Reason, method, genius, and the sublime. When Saxe takes the precipitate of these notions, his military context is remote, and he makes warfare neither science nor art, but a bizarre hybrid of both. Military practice is dual and irremediably dissonant: "one of its parts is methodical, that is, discipline and fighting manner, while the other is sublime" {Reveries, 2:198). The word "sublime," rather new in eighteenth-century aesthetics, is not well understood, for the author confuses the sublime, which is a result or condition, with its agent, the gift of genius. He stipulates that the condition for sublime generalship is innate talent that is a natural gift, and one that is inaccessible to rational cultivation since "application rectifies ideas but never bestows a soul, which is the work of Nature." This confusion invalidates whatever similarity may be glimpsed between warfare and the imaginative arts, which do depend on genius for their sublime heights: It is the same for all talents. One must be born with one [genius] for painting in order to be an excellent painter, with one for music to be a g o o d composer, etc. All things that aim toward the sublime are the same. That is why one so rarely sees people w h o stand exalted in a science. (Reveries, 2:198—99)

The false analogy deteriorates further. The term "science" designates military knowledge as being a fit subject for a treatise, but this contravenes

Rational Unreason

119

the artistic implications intended by the notion of talent and its untutored fruits. The conflicting intentions frustrate the author's ambitious scheme of combining what the more refined Enlightenment culture has separated into independent pursuits—the imaginative arts and the positive sciences. Each group of disciplines requires an unmixed set of concepts, whereas Saxe hybridizes both and forms a new species, the "scientific art" of war. If disciplined knowledge is represented traditionally by Minerva's owl, the confusion of species in Saxe may be represented symbolically by the ambiguous bat, which resembles mouse and bird but in fact is neither of the two, as the colonel Cadalso notes in the passage quoted on p. 96. The Comte de Saxe indulges himself in what he calls revenes or instructional daydreams concerning the paradoxical "scientific art" of combat. He is inspired, so to speak, by the bats of Minerva, here not quite the monstrosity depicted later in Goya's campaign against the perversions of Enlightenment values, but a significant distortion nonetheless. Such enthusiasms are usually admonished by enlightened thinkers who themselves belong to the secondary ranks. In fact, the society of rational Unreason from Saxe to Goya is not defined by an Enlightenment of materialists, deists, and atheists. It is rather the Catholic moderates in France and Spain who sympathetically monitor the secular innovations that, before 1750, engrossed enlightened clerical figures like Abbot Noel-Antoine Pluche, the Benedictine essayist Feijoo, and the reviewers of the Journal de Trevoux. Subsequently, the Journal campaigned under Father Berthier's leadership against the Encyclopedic, meeting with Voltaire's counterattacks after 1759. I have distinguished between the Enlightenment as a materialistic heterodoxy armed with new critical methods, and the Christian Enlightenment, the latter showing a moderate progressivism in secular matters cautioned by its core of religious orthodoxy.13 In any event, Pluche and Feijoo preside over their Catholic readerships without succumbing to fanatical cross-currents derived from other parties. As a theological naturalist, Pluche is particularly influential in Spain, more so than the secular naturalist Buffon, after the translation of The Spectacle ofNature toward the end 13. This division of Enlightenment communities might be refined to include the Counter-Enlightenment identified by Isaiah Berlin. This antirationalist prelude to the Romantic movement stands alongside the distinctly separate Catholic rationalism of religious conservatives, who are hostile to most aspects of the aforementioned educated communities. However, this perspective overreaches the framework set by the present study. See Berlin's "The Counter-Enlightenment," in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Viking Press, 1980).

i2o

Chapter Four

of the century. Pluche is an excellent foil to the Comte de Saxe because he has an attitude toward Reason that epitomizes the caution that already is needed at mid-century, when the military dreamer joins other abusers of ratio-empiricism. As a Catholic naturalist, Pluche clarifies in 1732 what Goya in 1797 reconfirms to be, by that time, a perilous misunderstanding about the uses of Reason. Pluche's warning is loudest in the "Letter . . . Touching the Extent and Limits of Reason," which confers with one hand ample praise for Reason's accomplishments as "an active and fertile principle . . . the master and king of everything upon the Earth."14 But with the other hand he diminishes Reason's virtue with unmistakable severity: "It is just and necessary to feel strongly the impotence of Reason in certain aspects." (Pluche, Spectacle, 1:503—4). This admonition does not concern theological matters, as might be expected. By counterweighting the scale against uncritical uses of Reason, Pluche avails himself of the metaphor of power in the material world. He will draw further significance from the familiar imagery of light and darkness cited earlier. Thus, "impotence" contrasts with the power admittedly wielded by Reason over the Earth and the heavens. Geographical exploration and the "new" astronomy fill the sails of the modern "Argonauts," as Voltaire a few years later calls the scientific voyagers to America. The knowledge of La Condamine, Jorge Juan, and Antonio de Ulloa carries them to a dawning age. Pluche domesticates their ocean voyage with restraining imagery: "We resemble travelers walking toward an approaching beautiful day. A gladdening glow, although feeble, begins to color all objects. We distinguish them especially all around us. But let us not confuse the river with the path that borders it. This is enough for us, and we can make our way. But the day has not yet broken" (1:498-99). The judgment is unconceptual, even quasi-poetic, in its sensory figuration. Pluche's subject is rational knowledge, but his phrasing does not match the rhetoric of the discoveries then dawning and later extolled. He hopes for continued discoveries by those philosophical travelers, although he believes their understanding will be less than rational. The glow of discovery beckons, objects take on new tints under the glow, but the distinctions now possible are assuredly crude. Daylight has yet to arrive. Pluche voices more than his doubts about what passes for daylight among enlightened explorers. He underestimates their own subliminal self-doubt. 14. Abbe Nocl-Antoine Pluche, "Lettre... touchant l'etendue et les bornes de la raison," Le spectacle de la nature.. . vol. 1 (Paris: V v e Estienne, 1732), 506-7.

Rational Unreason

121

He is also not convinced that humankind enjoys any real understanding of Nature, the same Nature that Saxe confidently views as the extra-rational source of features that complete our knowledge of objects: The underside and the interior of the spectacle remain concealed to us. The workings of the machine are unknown, the particular structure of each piece and the composition of the whole are things that surpass us. We see the outside and enjoy. But the intelligence or clear view of the bottom and of Nature's mechanism seems not to be a grace accorded us in our present state. (1:498). Concealment and exposure structure Pluche's thinking. The second chamber of Nature is closed to the naturalist's comprehension. While the hidden things resist light, the visible ones merely gratify, and this bicameral obstacle is removable by what can be expressed only as "grace." This religious borrowing does not alter Pluche's worldly focus, however. He assumes that a rational edifice of laws, now unverifiable by eyesight, beckons in the halflight of dawn. The inference is that a mechanistic reductionism can and will explain something that still owes its intelligibility to a future state of intellectual grace. Pluche thus places faith not in Reason per se but in truthful Reason. He is encouraged even before he reaches the "clear view of the bottom," and it is important to note that his faith adopts metaphorical phrasings. His language leaves no doubt that the light of intelligence is no more penetrating than Nature's light, whether at dawn or midday. These are natural limitations, recognized in the preceding quotations. But his thinking is antithetical, and this will ensnare him in a contradiction. If he is skeptical about how profoundly "the workings of the machine" can be known, he is referring to the present, not the future. Neither quotation should deflate Pluche's confidence in Reason since he refers to the natural domain. As for divine mysteries, he claims "it is impossible to follow Reason into all the marvels that it operates on" (1:509). The magnitude of Pluche's admired Reason prompts an ironic question on our part. Which "marvel" will the Argonauts not be able to reach in the company of Reason, and is there a river so wide that no navigator can chart the return? The answer comes in Pluche's remark about contemporary Enlighteners. These savants can easily mislead their less informed readers, he insists. They are often too ambitious, though not in the moralistic sense used by pietistic literature when condemning personal ambition in sinful Catholics. It is rather the mistaken ambition of intellectuals who

122

Chapter Four

make bad choices when they permit inquiry to dote on Reason, spoil it, and set it to dreaming. These savants are capable of choosing marvelous topics that turn Reason against its truthful, waking nature. They are "creators or partisans of a system of imagination that embraces the whole and its parts" (i: 498). Their rational faculty leaves the path and enters the river, which is as wide as the powers of the imaginational faculty. Imagination and marvel are the antitheses of Reason, functioning, it turns out, as such oppositions as concealmcnt and exposure, darkness and light, metaphor and concept. All these arc demarcations—the light not yet graced, the exposure still metaphorized—as well as signals that indicate the power of the rational mind to ensnare and incapacitatc itself. The "dream of Reason" is yet another metaphor. It depicts Reason behaving as if it were the imagination, the agent described by psychology at that time as responsible for dreaming. Reason dreaming is rational Unreason.

A Dictionary of Bizarre Reason Thus far, the title of Capricho 43 has declared an ambiguous "sleep/dream" of Reason. The tension between Reason and imagination has not entered the discussion. The emphasis until now has been that monstrous results will ensue if one of the Enlightenment's cardinal values, Reason, should exceed itself through such follies as an effort to dream. Yet on further reflection, Goya might easily have intended another meaning. Contemporary interpretations of Goya's title include the so-called "Prado" commentary. This gloss explicates: "Imagination abandoned by Reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders" (Helman Jovellanosy Goya, 147). The emphasis on a balanced imagination raises the question of how impartially Goya himself held the scales. The prevailing opinion among Hispanists has been that imagination and Reason are equally the subject of Capricho 43• The difficulty with this view is that after 1793 Goya's art embarks on an increasingly less rational and more demonically imaginative course of paintings and engravings, both in theme and in technical freedom. Why then should he intend Capricho 43-, his manifesto for the second half of the Capricho series, to advocate humbling the imagination with the yoke of Reason? Presumably he would not. In that case, the choice between the title's "dream" or "sleep" of Reason becomes clear. Only the sleep of Reason can release imagination from

Rational Unreason

123

the yoke that enables both faculties to function in the tandem process of enlightened thinking. Still, the yoked team of Reason and imagination is easily deduced in the Comte de Saxe and the successors of Pluche. However, their practice of Reason competes with strong counter-rational aspects of the eighteenth century. If waking thought requires both faculties of the yoked team, the stronger presence often proves to be the imagination. The reasonable anti-scientism of Rousseau and the paradoxes of Diderot contribute to the de-privileging of Reason. Further repudiations of the empiricorationalist branch of the Enlightenment occur with Jovellanos's defection from French materialism and its social policies, as well as with Spain's general disillusion with excesses blamed on Encyclopedism. Finally, the Neoclassical prejudice against fantasy breaks down under new theories of the sublime and the picturesque, not to mention the weight of sentimental and Gothic fiction. All this gains support from the idea that the scientific and social materialism of La Mettrie, d'Holbach, Cabarrus, and Olavide might be seen as a doctrinaire denial of subjectivity, a fanatically one-sided excess of Reason that warrants the name "monster." Consequently, if Goya alludes to the "dream" of Reason, he is citing the alter ego of Reason. It is rational Unreason, the hyperactivity of Reason, that oversteps its bounds into an impulsive realm of blind thoughts. Therefore the "Prado" gloss might be read in reverse—not "imagination abandoned by Reason" but Reason seduced by imagination produces the flaccid discipline that breeds intellectual exaggerations of the kind Hume calls "absurd and chimerical." As Hume remarks through Philo, such a topic as cosmogony can give the philosopher free rein to indulge "the fertility of my invention."15 But the effect is the same whether Reason abandons imagination to its own fertility, or imagination seduces Reason into folly. Mutual restraint between the two yoked faculties preserves moderation, reasoned tolerance, good taste, and Minervan prudence, all values that characterize an enlightened society. Where an enlightened society stumbles, the tripping stone may be traced to the quarry of imagination. The composite idea of Reason implied here is not the strongly veined definition supplied by the Encyclopedic and hewn by the caste of intellectuals. When the vulgarizers define the term 15. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Henry D. Aiken (New York and London: Hafner, 1969), 52.

124

Chapter Four

and when moderate propagators like Caraccioli rail against its abuse, their allusions are mottled references to exaggeration, paradox, chimera, extravagance, and blindness—a full index of their awareness that Reason dreams. The active dream, not a slumber, overpowers the ratio-empirical sensibility. The rational ideal persists, but in the practice of lesser-ranking authors its concrete form is often stripped of good sense. This corrupted sensibility is the bei esprit described earlier, the clever wit that Caraccioli says "is nourished by marvelous brochures and dazzling systems" (Voyage, 277). Caraccioli's value to scholars today is in the way this prolific author of semi-philosophical tracts reflects the average opinion-maker's grasp of advanced thought through cliche and sententious summaries. The obviously sympathetic readership he wins in Spain through translations attests to more than his orthodox Catholicism. His deft restatements of sophisticated formulations do not yet ring stereotypically in the Spanish ear. His opinions about advanced thought circulate widely in a society that is still unprepared for the innovative sweep of the bei esprit. While his conception of how Reason should be exercised may not be entirely representative of the era, the important fact is that he seeks both a definition and an ethic of thinking rationally. The goal of systemizing rational thought prompts the Encyclopedic age to develop the art of dictionaries and special compilations. Philosophical dictionaries, however, unlike lexical and geographical dictionaries, are revealing for their discrepancies, especially when they define an idea like Reason. Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary omits any entry for "Reason," and the word does not appear at all in his article "Philosopher," where the key terms are "wisdom" and "truth." It is significant that Caraccioli's own definition grows refracted as he progresses through his Critical, Picturesque, and Sententious Dictionary, Suitable for Making Known the Century's Usages as Well as Its Bizarreness. His odd choice of title belies the work's sober concept of Reason. The concept spreads out from its epistemological base to ever more curious entries like "chimera," "extravagance," "imagination." He understands the concept of Reason well enough; his refraction consists of describing the practices of Reason, or rather its misapplications. The conventional meaning of "Reason" for Caraccioli is that of a "faculty of the soul whose function is to separate the false from the true."16 Thus, while it is a discerning power, it is not an instinctual power like the 16. Louis-Antoine Caraccioli, Dictionnaire critique, pittoresque, et sententieux, propre a faire connaitre les usages du siecle, ainsi que ses bisarreries, 3 vols. (Lyon: Benoit Duplain, 1768), 2:330.

Rational Unreason

12s

one attributed to physical organs and muscles. Further, the body's "life force" is not susceptible to external distractions when functioning, whereas Reason is so susceptible, suggests Caraccioli. It should not, but it can, bend before such deceiving externalities as beauty or the lures of evil. This twopart definition grafts an ethical maxim to its psychological base. In this form, it betrays Caraccioli's lingering caution as he expounds a modern theory of Reason. He shifts from epistemological precision (a rational faculty in relation to other mental processes) to moral psychology ("should not allow itself to be dazzled by the beauty of an expression"). By making this shift he also changes the terms for defining truth. The exposure of truth is now a dialysis, not a longer a ratio-empirical operation of innate Reason. Reason separates an essential content—the false or the true—from its linguistic shell, which, if expressively beautiful or metaphorical, runs a special risk of deceptiveness. Thus, while Reason remains the mechanism for extracting truth, Caraccioli implies a prior sense of the true and the untrue, an extra-rational knowledge that already can judge the results of reasoning. In Caraccioli's version, beauty's presence can also induce Reason to perform intuitively. Their association enables truth-bearing Reason to "know how to halt where divinity sets its limits. The new philosophy, seeming to want to elevate Reason above its sphere, instead degrades it in a strange way, since to declare man material—that is, the same as a beast— is to bring him to the lowest condition" (Dictionnaire, 2:330-31). But here Caraccioli steps into a philosophical snare, because when mortal Reason bows to spirit it also bows to irrationality. Quoting his predecessor Abbot Noel-Antoine Pluche, he uses the metaphor of light and vision without acknowledging in Reason the self-distortion that he exposes elsewhere: "the stars are ignorant of their source of light, while Reason alone feels and knows it. Placed between God and insensible creatures, it finds itself entrusted toward the Creator" (Langage, 4). Without Reason, the Earth would be "blind." Possessed of Reason, which is located at "the center of God's works, and which makes harmony, intelligence," the Earth resists collapsing into disorder and bestiality. Can Reason ever undo its rational process? It would seem not, provided it belongs to a dualist system. Reason's moral link to divinity is irrevocable, yet its effort to "separate the false from the true" by argumentation warrants the same caution as does expressive beauty. The entry for "Argument" in the Critical Dictionary defines this word as the "reasoning which has grown old, only to leave in its place paradoxes and sophisms" (Dictionnaire, 1:16). Pluche had made a similar objection to Reason's excess,

126

Chapter Four

but the new element is a glimpse into Reason's proneness to self-caricature. Caraccioli's awareness of rationalist extravagance prepares Goya's generation to make the same objection in comparably exaggerated terms. For Caraccioli and Goya, the pitfall of Reason is its capacity for exaggeration. Philosophy is the "study of wisdom and of truth," but "disputatious philosophy is an ergo-ism allowed to subsist in scholasticism in order to exercise the wits, teaching scarcely anything except axioms and distinctions" (2:237). The still-powerful university Scholastics in Spain incur criticism from clerical reformers beginning with Feijoo. Now Caraccioli adds the element of extravagance to the list of faults. The new factor demands its descriptive term, an easy matter for a Critical Dictionary whose title includes the phrase "'the Century's . . . Bizarreness." "The rational" and "the bizarre" would seem to belong to incompatible categories. Yet when Reason behaves extravagantly there is something bizarre about it. One and the same category holds them both. The full range of irrational nuances supplies other pejorative terms in reproach of Reason. The notion of "extravagance" gains its own status in the nonrational and irrational spectrum on being incorporated into Caraccioli's dictionary, although sometimes with contradictory results.17 Caraccioli believes that excess is an extravagance inviting aberration and finally unreality. The language of Reason may cause harm even when respected philosophers handle it. According to Caraccioli, Locke wondered aloud whether physical matter could think, and his followers rushed to affirm this as fact: "In this way philosophy serves to feed passion and prejudice. And in this way Reason is captive" {Langqge, 318—22). He concedes that a skillful bei esprit can and does construct metaphysical visions, but these are "extravagant systems" because they deny that the soul is a spiritual entity (323). Judgments of this kind demand a special vocabulary of reproach—"distilled doubts," "chimerical assertions," "dangerous propositions that contradict experience and Reason" (324). These judgments arise in the camp of Christian Enlighteners, but Caraccioli's religious point of departure is the least significant feature of his analysis.18 His adversary might be called "counter-rational Reason," what Don Quixote once extolled as "the Reason of Unreason." But the ma17. Caraccioli's entry "Extravagance" states: "A dose of it is necessary in our century so as to give some pleasure. Too much Reason is a bore" (Dictionnaire, 1:168). 18. Caraccioli accuses the noxious "clever wits" of having travestied "sublime philosophy," converting truthful Reason into "chimera, Unreason": "In their hands, you have nothing but words stripped of sense, since unbelievers, without experience or principles, know only how to overturn and destroy" (Lang/ye, 326).

Rational Unreason

127

terialist Enlightenment also breeds bizarre creations, so the phenomenon warrants the more general name of "rational Unreason." Caraccioli makes chimera and Unreason synonymous terms, but this is no pleonasm. The entry for "Chimeras" defines them as "dreams or visions, so widespread today in the majority of minds that they are preferred to the most important truths. The slightest system coming on the scene prevails over all the reasons that religion gives us to believe in" (Dictionnaire 1:46). Projected as a chimera, philosophy creates a new space for Reason to burgeon. The growth can be monstrous. A binary design controls the definitions in Caraccioli's dictionary. Conventional distinctions between the true and the false, or the reasonable and the absurd, do not reduce to polarized domains. The important factor is that Reason participates in its own undoing, in effect creating its illusorily antithetical category. If the dictionary fulfills no other purpose, it fashions a language to express the unreasonableness of Reason. A semantic chain links hitherto unconnected points in the vast field between Reason and Unreason. What is reasonable or unreasonable is also sense or nonsense, wisdom or Quixoticism, sanity or madness, reality or dream. The kindred vocabularies of rationality and irrationality intertwine in the Critical Dictionary. Another aspect of this curious work will prepare for the chapters ahead that discuss Quixotic semantics in writers like Voltaire. This concerns the binary relation of intellectual extravagance and restraint. These apparent opposites have metonymies that encompass both contrastive and complementary shades, like a colorwheel for painters. For instance, a subtly constructed discourse like a fable might offer a benign fantasy but also expound a reprehensible morality.19 An entry for the word "darkness" (ternbres) reads: "It is the privation of light, just as evil is the privation of goodness. It has contributed no little to giving birth to all these ghosts and spirits that people use to lull their babies" (Dictionnaire, 3:204—5). So trivial an entry as "Darkness" justifies its inclusion by the chain of associations that moves from antithesis (darkness/light) to metonymy (evil/ghosts). This move enters the network of bizarre rationalization of which lulling babies with ghost stories is one instance. This intellectual vacuum proves nontrivial, however, being filled with spectres—which is to say, popular superstition nurtured by literate fanatics of the kind satirized in the Capri19. In Emile, book two, Rousseau demonstrates the misleading lessons a child might draw from La Fontaine's fables.

128

Chapter Four

chos. Related words follow suit: "chimeras," "extravagance," "darkness," "delirium," "imagination," and "dream," a constellation of terms heralded by the phrase "the Century's. . . Bizarreness" in the dictionary's title. These terms pertain to different phenomenological orders. Yet they all signal gradations along a spectrum that terminates in Unreason. The intellectual sign of Unreason is absurdity while its aesthetic sign is the grotesque. None of the aforementioned degrees actually touches the grotesque extreme, but, like Don Quixote's madness, they all stem from some intellectual or moral distortion, and they occasion others. Thus, while the deformations cited by Christian Enlighteners do not render the world grotesque, they may be monstrous enough to warrant the causality asserted by Goya's title, "The Sleep/Dream of Reason Produces Monsters." Before arriving at the hall of monsters, however, several bizarre antechambers must be crossed. These are named by Voltaire's critical and ludic vocabularies in the next chapter. Caraccioli prepares us for Voltaire by means of semantic usages that form the metonymical network for a concept of rational Unreason. The definitions of "chimeras" and "extravagance" just presented extend a bridge to the psychological conditions responsible for the toppling of rationality. The synonyms given for chimeras are "dreams or visions." While in practice the latter events overturn Reason, they fail as distinguishing terms. They do not isolate the psychological mechanism from the diverse experiences it produces. Other authors more directly concerned with psychic events would have carefully separated the act of dreaming from the experience of visions. However, the everyday language of the Enlightenment reflected in Caraccioli's discourse makes the words "dream" and "vision" synonymous, owing to a shift of meaning from the act itself, or its passive state (dreaming, beholding) to the result of the act or condition (a dream, an apparition), and by extension to a further transfer of meaning to the insignificance of both ephemera. Conversely, the entry for "dreams" (reves) defines them as "things fancied (sendees) during sleep, which stuff [is portrayed] as the greatest of truths by nearly all modern books that offer these chimeras to us" (Dictwnnaire, 3:71). The entry omits the full explanation of dreams. Caraccioli sets aside their imagistic nature, together with the imagination that conceives them, and instead stresses their cognitive invalidity. Dreams sift meaningless data; the data is untranslatable into truth; and what is untrue, in no manner resembling waking reality, earns the pejorative epithet "dream" when encountered in books that pretend to speak truthfully. The word "imagination" figures among the dictionary entries,

Rational Unreason

129

although not as the faculty responsible for dreaming. The same word names both the imagining agent and the product that borders the absurd zone of the semantic colorwheel: "[Imagination is] the most agreeable or the most ridiculous of all the chimeras, [and] is nearly always the cause of our pleasures or our sorrows. It stirs us at will" (Dictionnaire, 1:310). Like the extravagant posture shown earlier to relieve tedious Reason, so does the imagination enliven discourse. Its other face, however, is just as reprehensible as the remaining elements in the paradigm of Unreason. Imagination outflanks Reason during sleep by causing the passions to hold sway, whether these are "our pleasures or our sorrows." It instigates a reign of disorder that compromises reality more gravely than chimeras do. Imagination in its dream-producing role supplants a wholly absent Reason, or what Goya calles the "sleep of Reason."20 The semantic network in the Dictionary ends with the entry "Delirium." As in the overthrown Reason glimpsed by Cadalso, delirium is the "alienation of spirit in a person shaken too violently by fever, or whose passions control him with excessive rule" (1:97). The causal relation between fever and passion separates delirium from the physiological illness of the same name. Rather, fever enters the lexicon of aberrant rational functions through mental alienation. The word "shaken" {agite) is the same word that describes how the imagination "stirs" us in an example cited earlier. In both instances, the agitation works the same effect. Along with fever and imagination, the passions mediate mental disorder. In all cases, the silence of Reason inaugurates the din of a wilder language. However, delirium carries a more severe derangement than the agitated state of solitary imagination. Caraccioli intends these usages to characterize the era's styles of general discourse. Thus their value is descriptive. It is crucial to note at the same time that they rise to independent prominence as irrational terms. They demarcate a new irrational zone in the course of defining the rational domain of "spirit" or "mind." The Christian Enlighteners want to emphasize the perversions of philosophical truth. Unwittingly, they give new status to Unreason by joining the restricted vocabularies of physiology, aesthetics, and moral psychology to the context of Reason's functioning. 20. The "sleep" or absence of Reason permits access to Goya's Universal Language, as I argue in a later volume. Caraccioli remarks, "If Reason should end by silence in the universe, we would hear nothing but the moanings of our emotions. The cries of human beings commingled among those of the beasts would express nothing but disorder and stupidity" (Langage, 4—5). This disorder, however, is surmountable by the Universal Language alluded to in Goya's Sepia Two.

ijo

Chapter Four

Imagination Under Delirium The lexicon portraying Unreason extends to the terms "demented," "delirious," and "frenetic," terms that often bear medical as well as judgmental connotations. Their usage straddles several domains—both the society affected by intellectual activity and the clinical institutions that respond to biological literature, where the words originate. These migrate to nonscientific discourse as descriptive terms that evaluate human conduct. Thus a reference by a government economist to "the delirium of sedition and anarchy" describes Spain just before the reign of Charles III. The perils of a "delirious Reason" are spelled out by another minister, who cites "the most monstrous of errors" in the "extravagant system" of Hobbes and Helvetius.21 Both references take for granted "the sole lights of a healthy and sensible Reason." They assume such health to be threatened by the radical individualism that perverts natural law. The irrationalist lexicon also serves aesthetics and poetry by portraying Unreason in artistic expression and other subjective states of mind. Thus the rhetorician Ignacio de Luzän "censures deliriums" such as the inflated "caprices of fantasy" among poets, whose "monstrous . . . embolism of images" is produced by a "frenetic imagination."22 And in a private crisis of melancholy, Melendez dedicates an elegy to Jovellanos that complains of the "monster that my disturbed Reason can abort in its hopeless delirium" (Obras, 2:1010). Many similar instances converge on a shared concern for truthful perceptions of experience. Reason presumably safeguards the normative status of truth, which aberrant psychology falsifies by fostering a substitute "reality" with its own real and often harmful effects. A benign view of these effects is taken by William Cowper in an age grown ambivalent about the truth value of poetic flight.23 Cowper's times have changed Reason's mission, once compatible with the "gay delirium." Now 21. Francisco de Cabarrus, Elqgio de Carlos III (Madrid: A. de Sancha, 1789), vii. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, "Memoria sobre educacion publica, ο sea Tratado teorico-präctico de ensefianza" (1802), in Obras, vol. 1, ed. Cändido Nocedal, Biblioteca de Autores Espafioles 46 (Madrid: Atlas, 1963), 254, 22. Ignacio de Luzän, Lapoetica, ed. Russell Sebold (Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1977), 278. 23. William Cowper yearns for the "golden times" of earlier poets: . . . airy dreams Sat for the picture; and the poet's hand, Imparting substance to an empty shade, Imposed a gay delirium for a truth. Grant it:—I still must envy them an age That favoured such a dream." (The Task, 4:545-30)

Rational Unreason

131

an empirical concept of reality transfers the poetic truth of dreams to the paradigm of Unreason, alongside deliriums, frenzies, and fantastic monsters of the mind. The terms used for these developments extend from the biological sciences to poetic theory, and carry descriptive as well as evaluative connotations. They enter a larger lexical pool that serves a prescriptive purpose when used to caution against excessive imagination, feeling, or Reason itself. Before examining the larger lexicon, however, it is important to recognize that there was a scientific explanation for the deviations suffered by Reason. Specific physiological conditions were understood to affect all mental operations. This general rule binds discourses of every sort: political, philosophical, religious, and literary. The physiology of mind concerns, first, the nervous system as a signal conveyor to the brain.24 Diderot notes that delirium, along with intoxication, apoplexy, and madness, originates with a disturbance in the meninges, and notes "the delirium where blood is carried violently to the head." 25 Both observations hint at a fluidist theory of signals.26 This model situates mental disorder within a larger chain of spiritual and material links that can degenerate and produce delirium and madness. A more limited model is offered by psychologist Pierre Cabanis. He traces delirium to visceral and neural causes as different as bile accumulation, narcotic stimulation, and organic inflammations. These events all affect the brain with a sudden, overwhelming confusion in the association of ideas. Cabanis deals with delirium, together with dreams and madness, in the same context of interference with the orderly relationship of ideas. The difference among those mental states is one of idea-ordering degree, but the mental disruption is usually initiated by some abuse of sleep. A comparable irrationality results from sensory excess, where visceral and neural concentrations of fluid provide "the exact measure of madness, or of ecstasy, which characterizes all diverse kinds of violent excitation of the cerebral organ, not excepting the incomplete delirium that is given the 24. The physiological details of the intellective mechanism are examined in Volume 2. 25. Denis Diderot, Elements de physiologic, vol. 9. of Oeuvres completes, ed. J. Assezat and M. Tourneux (Paris: Gamier Freres, 1875), 317, 3+7. 26. The fluidist theory belongs to the eighteenth-century debate over vibrations and animal spirits in the transmission of sense data to the brain. Among the fluidists, ClaudeNicolas Le Cat defends a hierarchical scheme that holds that a "universal fluid" gives life by virtue of deriving from the "Divine flame." Subordinate fluids include the spirits, the "conserving fluid," and a "caustic fluid" that can decompose the higher fluids and cause delirium or insanity. "Preface," in Le Cat's Tratte des sensations et des passions en general, et des sens en particulier (Paris: Vallat-La-Chapelle, 1767), 207.

i?2

Chapter Four

name of inspiration."27 In seeking explanations, Cabanis is concerned not so much with moral ramifications as with the intellective process itself, which he finds prone to somatically induced disruption. Cabanis's reference to "inspiration" implicates the imagination for the way it "combines its tableaus" in the absence of sensory data. This limits the explanatory model for delirium to psychological events. The physiology of imagination also induces delirium in La Mettrie's natural history of the soul: a decreased circulation in the brain, which becomes compressed as the medulla fills with fluids.28 But La Mettrie too focuses on common psychological mechanisms. He cites the fact that "the delirium accompanying insomnias and fevers comes from the same causes" as dreams (Histoire naturelle 280). Diderot, similarly, notes "the affinity between dream, delirium, and madness. He who persists in either of the first two would be mad." These distinctions however do not highlight the pathological nature of delirium, but the contrary. Normal mental states include the daily event in which "the passage from waking to sleep is always a tiny delirium"—so much so, suggests Diderot, that the "reasoned delirium and the continuous dream are the same thing; the only difference is in cause and duration" {Elements, 9:360, 362). Diderot's observations close the gap between disease and normalcy. They permit a shared vocabulary to describe states of consciousness by degrees rather than by value judgments. Delirium is not so much a medical or behavioral category as an intellective one, where Reason and error exhibit a quantitative relationship that differs from the proportion exhibited by other categories, like dream or madness. As Daniel Delaroche explains it, the difference between the delirium of maniacs and the sleep troubled by dream is that in the delirium the cerebral excitement is generalized and stronger in some parts of the brain, such as the sensorium, whereas in the dream there is only a local and partial collapse or depression (affaissement) 29 27. Pierre J. G. Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme (Paris: Crapelet, 1802), 2:514-15, 547-50. 28. For La Mettrie, the brain compresses during sleep as nerves relax and fluids fill the medulla. The diminished brain circulation intercepts sensory faculties, so that while dreaming we experience "a rather great delirium by believing that we see countless things beyond ourselves. . . .The immediate cause of dreams is any strong or frequent impression on the sensitive portion of the brain that is not asleep or collapsed (affatssee), and that the objects that affect it so vividly are clearly plays of the imagination. . . . Delirium . . . stems from the same cause." Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Histoire naturelle de l'äme, traduite de l'anglais de M. Charp (The Hague: J. Neaulme, 1745), 277—80. 29. Daniel Delaroche, Analyse des fonctions du systeme nerveux, 2 vols. (Geneva: Villard Fils & Nouffer, 1778), 1:202—3.

Rational Unreason

133

This observation of 1774 repeats La Mettrie's 1745 account of "a rather great delirium" while we dream, "believing that we see, and in effect seeing clearly an infinity of things outside ourselves" (Histoire naturelle, 279—80). These authors characterize delirium by laying primary emphasis on the association of ideas. David Hartley focuses briefly on the disrupted "Reasonings" of the sick person before expanding on the mechanism affecting the "vivid train o f visible images." These grow "wild" and "incoherent" due to neural or vascular ailments, until they affect "Parts still more internal, and consequently the Seats of Ideas purely intellectual." Hartley cites the "internal Causes" that "overpower the Impressions from real Objects . . . so as to make an Inconsistency in the Words and Actions; and thus the Patient becomes quite delirious." 30 Even so early a fluidist as Raymond Vieussens, in 1715, explains delirium as a symptom alongside melancholia and disordered ideas, all caused by the effervescent humors of visceral blockage, and all "troubling the imagination owing to the dryness of brain and spirits [that cause] the patient to create frightening phantoms." 31 Perceptions of external phenomena succumb to error because Reason is absent, not because Reason errs. In its place, the imaginational mechanism succumbs because of organic failure, and not, once again, because it is intrinsically error-prone. These writings make it clear that the nature of imagination grows more comprehensible when regarded in conjunction with its product, delirium. As Cabanis observes, the imaginational faculty intensifies its role in the absence of direct sense data. The physiology of this process is described by Albrecht von Haller, w h o cites delirium and dream as evidence for "the corporeal species" revived by "the refluent motion of the spirits." Haller defines imagination as the power to regenerate past impressions equal to their original vivacity. Imagination, then, is [sic] whenever any species, preserved in the common sensory, and in the present perception, excites such other thoughts in the mind as would arise if the perceiving nerve that gave the first birth to the said species was itself affected or changed. This definition is confirmed by the example of the great strength of fancy in certain persons, and those who are delirious; but in every body, in the instance of dreams, in which thoughts arise in the mind, occasioned by the corporeal species reserved in the brain, so as to be not at 30. David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, 2 vols. (London: S. Richardson, 1749), 1:395-96. 31. Raymond Vieussens, Histoire des maladies internes . . . Neurographie . . . Tratte des vaisseaux, 3 vols. (Toulouse: J.-J. Robert, 1774-75), 1:516-17.

134

Chapter Four all weaker than those which werefirstformed by the change in the sentient nerve, from the external objects.32

A single category, the imagination, accommodates highly fanciful as well as delirious states of mind. Both kinds reel under the imaging effect derived from brain traces. An alternate to "corporeal species" is "the internal species, which are very strong in a delirium." The internal species "may so impose upon the mind, as to make her mistake them for the perceptions of external objects." The unchanging point in either type of imaging process is that the regenerated impressions have a variable intensity, so that the impressions must depend on such factors as will, size of brain trace, and temporal distance. Neither Haller's nor Cabanis's model considers delirium in relation to truth-statements. This relationship is set forth clearly at the end of the century by Philippe Pinel in his distinction between "delirious mania" and "dementia." While imagination and memory are damaged in delirious mania, both the association of ideas and judgment remain unimpaired. The contrary is the case for dementia. Here isolated, unassociated ideas produce no judgment at all, whether true or false.33 Pinel's more general project is to advance beyond nervous and muscular explanations. His new "philosophical medicine" adds "moral" causes to mental disease, including a concept of "nondelirious mania" defined as violent behavior without "any illusion of the imagination." The imagistic vocabulary applied to delirious mania is notable in the current context. Tracing the etiology of delirium from its early form of brooding melancholy, Pinel describes its effects on mania. The effects encompass "acts of extravagances or fury," impelled by a "gay and jovial delirium, released in lively and incoherent outbursts filled with petulance and unreason." The description straddles medical and moral judgments. Manias are the fruit of "everything that enthusiasm can engender of the most exalted and fiery kind, everything that fanaticism and the love of the marvelous can suggest of the romanesque and the chimerical" (Pinel, Traite, 157). Pinel's treatise uses sensibility, the province of novelesque fantasy and religious exaltation, in order to bridge physiological medicine and the new 32. Albrecht von Haller and William Cullen, First Lines of Physiology, Translated from the Corrected Latin Edition, "Printed under the inspection of William Cullen, M.D., and compared with the edition published by H. A. Wrisber, M.D." (1766), 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1786), 2:50 33. Philippe Pinel, Traite medico-phitosophique sur l'alienation mentale ou la manie (Paris: Richard, [1797]), 163-6+.

Rational Unreason

135

psychologies of "mental alienation" arising at the end of the century. But Pinel's truth-oriented terminology is just as applicable to aesthetic theory and social thought. How delirium relates to truth-statements also interests La Mettrie, who portrays the imagination as "true or false, weak or strong." Thus, in the healthy person, the "true imagination represents objects in a natural state," whereas "in the false imagination, the mind sees them other than the way they are." Although the external senses may also collaborate in this delusion, the result is "the belief that objects are really like the phantoms produced in the imagination, and this is a genuine delirium" (Histoire naturelle, 118-19). Here La Mettrie is concerned with the effect of imagination on the quality of knowledge. Even wise men can suffer "this delirium without fever" when they fall into a state of melancholia. The propensity of a "strong" imagination to suffer deranged states justifies caution as a general rule: Flattering and obliging imagination, isn't it enough for you to seek only to please and to be the most perfect model of coquetry? Is it necessary for you to have a truly maternal tenderness for your most deformed and senseless children, so that while you alone are content with your fruitfiilness your products seem ridiculous or extravagant in the eyes of others? (167)

This censure gives knowledge a dichotomous definition, with only one of its faces being genuinely enlightening. Nevertheless, the subject's conviction of truth is no less powerful when confirmed by his imagination than when confirmed by his Reason: "While dreaming we have an inner sense of our selves, and at the same time a rather great delirium, by believing we see and in fact by clearly seeing an infinite number of things outside ourselves" (279). The conviction of truth during delirium and dream is compelling because it evokes a Humean shadow of skepticism concerning rational thought. Hume ponders the power of imagination to combine facts and fictions in a way that in the end makes beliefthe judge of truth and fiction.34 34. For Hume, the imagination can "feign a train of events with all the appearance of a reality . . . that belongs to any historical fact" that is believed with certainty. His only conclusion is a nonrational one, namely, that we adhere to "some sentiment or feeling" and that "in philosophy we can go no further than assert that belief is something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination. It gives them more weight and influence." David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Charles W. Hendel (Indianapolis, Ind. and New York: [Bobbs-Merrill] Liberal Arts Press, 1955), 63.

136

Chapter Four

Although the beliefs induced under delirium and dream lack the credibility of waking beliefs, the proximity of these groupings is emphasized by La Mettrie and Diderot. These thinkers insinuate that the proximity creates a continuum along the general cognitive axis driven by the same physiological agents. If credibility differs, the difference grows less impressive the more proximate these mental states are represented to be. For instance, La Mettrie goes on to state that "the delirium which accompanies insomnia and fever comes from the same causes [as the dream] and that the dream is a half-waking in which a portion of the brain remains free and open to the traces of spirits, while all the others are calm and shut" (280). Therefore delirium too marks a halfway position toward waking cerebral activity. The chief difference is that imagination remains unchecked by rational judgment, as of course it may also remain when the subject is neither delirious nor dreaming. The resemblance of delirium to dreaming is also noted by Diderot, who specifies that the "reasoned delirium and the continuous dream are the same thing." The added terms reasoned and continuous seem gratuitous in that the resulting thoughts would be irrational in any event. But the qualifications obey the same motive that draws these philosophers to the aberrations themselves. Delirium and dream are alternate forms of cerebral activity, whose ideal condition successfully combines imagination with intellection. Mental pathology attracts these philosophers because it brings insight to the normal mental processes. The question of what constitutes "success" and "normalcy" is a question that escapes philosophical boundaries and enters the social sphere of criteria. And this involves the definitions of chimera, folly, Quixoticism, and ultimately madness.

5· The Lexicon of Unreason

Let us not seek to unravel the character o f a nation in tempestuous times . . . in the seditious cries, the furors and fanaticism o f priests and doctors who agitate and mislead the people. The moral order has its eclipses like the physical order. The French nation cast aside fundamental maxims and forgot its character, as a sick man who, casting away Reason in the transports of delirium, speaks against his own interests and opinions. Then France was in the convulsions o f the most violent of frenzies. —Castilhon, On the Genius of Nations

The lexicon of Unreason begins with the usages surveyed in the preceding chapter. I suggested that mental aberration required a technical vocabulary that was also understood by thinkers who pursued many other interests. The physiology of mental processes was not an esoteric subject confined to a few specialists; the same vocabulary extended to standards of social behavior, to rules of rational thought, and to principles governing artistic creation. All these domains shared a common concern for the appropriate relationship between the irrational and the rational. But the concern did not only incline toward illuminating the state of rationality. Rules of propriety are prohibitive as well as advisory. By demarcating the approved sphere of normality, rules also allude to the zone of aberration. The very fact of prescribing orderly conduct acknowledges the disorder to be shunned. These codifications used an accusatory vocabulary that betrayed consciousness of the Unreason that might prevail if such rules were set aside. Words like "chimerical," "bizarre," "monstrous," "grotesque," "extravagant," and "capricious" joined to portray the undesirable as a menacing other reality that stands opposed to rationality and the representational signs that constitute it. The rules themselves appeared in books of rhetoric and literary essays, but their criteria fostered terminology that applied to all types of thoughtful writing. This is not to say that ontological interest motivated individual writings. However, the vocabulary of Unreason was

138

Chapter Five

so widespread that at the level of cultural discourse an ambivalence toward irrational states of being replaced outright repudiation.1

The Semantic Field of "Chimera" Conflicting attitudes toward irrational thought intensified usage of the vocabulary of Unreason. Not surprisingly, the most neutral attitude prevailed in scientific circles. The mathematician Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis refers to the "chimeras of the sciences" that should be forbidden, yet he also believed firmly in certain of "these grand projects, which always seem to have something of the chimerical." 2 Maupertuis's evenhanded use of "chimera" gives a clue to the complex nuances that surrounded the term. Going further, the neurologist Samuel Tissot describes the primary force exerted on that semantic field, identified as a physically infirm imagination. Tissot looks not to the results of intellect but to the mind that conceives them. His treatise on nerve diseases specifically inculpates the imagination in the pathology of men of letters. He cites case histories of literary activity that demonstrate how the typically high mental tension among literary authors must be associated with the dual symptoms of hyperactive imagination and cardiovascular swelling.3 Tissot also notes the delirium experienced among the Enthusiasts. In this religious sect, contemplation is so intense that the waking state appears as if the senses were "chained up" by sleep. Tissot observes clinically that the condition need not be disadvantageous, citing the case of one girl who, in an access of spasmodic delirium, begins to speak in tongues and to reason eloquently (Des nerfi, 263-73). These circumspect scientific judgments contribute to the ambivalent tenor of overall attitudes toward irrational thinking. While the examples of 1. Specialists in French literature will recognize that the lexical focus in this chapter can be expanded to include other authors. The combination of the words "chimera," "fantastic," and "monster" are traceable to Montaigne's essay "On Idleness," while the word "passion," omitted in this chapter, may be associated with the monstrous through the personage of Racine's Phedre. Similarly, literary works in themselves do not come under study, particularly works like Crebillon's Les egarements du coeur et de l'esprit, or the Gothic novels. 2. Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis chides the chimerists for their addiction to squaring the circle, to perpetual motion, to the philosopher's stone, and to the secret of immortality. At the same time, he praises the "grand projects," giving as an example the project of finding a Universal Language. See Maupertuis, Oeuvres, 4 vols. (Lyon: Bruyset, 1756), 2:268,313,399. 3. Samuel Auguste David Tissot, Tratte des nerß et de leurs maladies (1778), vol. 8. of Oeuvres completes (Paris: Sallut, 1813), 242-49.

The Lexicon of Unreason

139

religious and creative activity fit the behavior of rational society, they also overlap the borders of mental deviancy. The ambiguous factor along that frontier is the imagination, which comes to be defined as the equivalent of delirium. In Marmontel's article on "Imagination," this faculty operates dualistically. The ordinary ability to imagine pathetic feelings is simply a display of low-energy power or sentiment; so too is the illusion-prone power to recreate fear, love, and sublime thoughts. More intensely, "in the highest degree of heat, this sentiment is none other than Enthusiasm; and if we call it intoxication, delirium, or furor, the persuasion that we are no longer ourselves but the one we cause to act, that we are no longer where we are but are present where we wish to paint images—all of this is Enthusiasm."4 The Enthusiasts come to exemplify both the plain physiology at work in irrationalism and the obscure process of psychological transport, without reference to their social significance as an impassioned sect.5 Interest in the physiology of imagination responds to wider philosophical intimations concerning the nature of reality. The Enthusiast's experience of transport replaces empirical reality without surrendering its claim to making truth-statements. A similar claim by the mimetic arts rests on how well they fulfill the criteria for artistic representation. The revision of such criteria in the eighteenth century can be seen, in the context of irrational perception, as stemming from a tacit debate over authentic ontological states of being.6 The reality known in exalted states, whether religious or artistic, is mental prior to any external representation. The validity of experiences other than empirical perceptions is a question posed implicitly in the examples that follow. Voltaire's article "Enthusiasm" in the Philosophical Dictionary describes the movement as a misunderstood devotion that exposes "the [emotional] states our poor soul can pass through." These irrational states comprise more than conscious sentiments. They are rather the dynamic springboards for those sentiments, some of them less exalted or active when compared to others. The sentiments enumerated by Voltaire, in increasing order of 4. Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts, et des metiers, new facsimile printing of the ist edition of 1751-1780, Slatkine Reprints. Supplement (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Fromann Verlag, 1967), 3:567. 5. The subject of Enthusiasm has been widely treated. For its origins and historical context, see R. A. Knox, Enthusiasm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950). 6. Barbara Stafford has pointed to painters who seek both to "visibilize the invisible," thus giving real status in the world to mental objects, and to represent the material objects of empirical Nature. See Stafford, "Conjecturing the Unseen in Late Eighteenth-Century Art," Zeitschriftfür Kunstgeschichte +8,2 (1985): 538,341.

i40

Chapter Five

agitation, include approbation, sensitivity, emotion, trouble, seizure, passion, rapture, dementia, furor, and rage. This gamut in its turbulent latter half is more characteristic of Enthusiasm. The conditions are analogous to wine and its effects: "it can excite such tumult in the blood vessels and such violent vibrations in the nerves that Reason is entirely destroyed."7 However, what Voltaire calls "reasonable Enthusiasm" also exists as "the lot of the great poets." Their enraptured state reaches the sketchboard of sublime eloquence in such a way that "Reason now wields the pencil." Although the imagination may heat up in unison with Enthusiasm, the process resembles "a charger that bolts in its course, but the course is regularly traced" in advance by Reason. The achievement is rare enough, for "Reason consists of always seeing things as they are," whereas "he who, through intoxication, sees objects as double is deprived of his Reason." With this opinion, Voltaire enters the century's debate over the degree of esteem to accord passion and imagination. His observations appear to make him a conservative in this regard, an appearance refuted by the uninhibited fantasy practiced in works like Candide. Other lexical items belonging to the family of Unreason include the aforementioned "chimera," a product of overheated imagination. The original mythological creature combines a lion, a goat, and a dragon. Thus rhetoricians regarded it as the metonymy for a fantastic impossibility. In this vein, writers devised the adjective "chimerical" to denote a category of unfulfillable thoughts. The imagination can also delude poets, and Edward Young's call for "original genius" rests on an imitative concept that circumscribes the material, experiential world, distinct from "the empire of chimeras," as Murray Krieger notes. The notion of "chimera" in Young's milieu is generalized to mean "any empty and illusionary creation, any unnatural and phantastic (as opposed to icastic) and therefore monstrous invention that has no correspondent reality."8 In the arts, "chimera" and "the chimerical" designate the particular departure from the classical ideal of beauty, which Diderot specifies as "the true line, beneath which [painters] could dash forward playfully and produce the chimerical: the Sphinx, the centaur, the hippogriff, the faun, and every mixed nature."9 These painters devised "the monster, the grotesque, 7. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosopkique, ed. Julien Benda and Raymond Naves (Paris: Gamier Freres, 1967), 182. 8. Murray Krieger, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 8+. 9. Denis Diderot, Salon de 1767, Salon de 1769, ed. Else Marie Bukdahl, Michel Delon, and Annette Lorenceau, vol. 16 of Oeuvres completes, ed. Herbert Dieckmann and Jean Varloot (Paris: Hermann, 1984), 70.

The Lexicon of Unreason

I+I

according to the dosage of lie demanded by their composition." Behind this descending order of categories, Diderot conceived the limits of artistic verisimilitude, but he also defined Nature in its own naturalness alongside its represented figment. In a letter to Sophie Volland, he reports a discussion regarding "the point to which the arts are permitted to exaggerate when imitating 'belle nature.' This gave me the opportunity to fix the delicate nuances that distinguish the chimerical from the possible, the possible from the marvelous, the marvelous from common nature."10 According to this scale of values, it is more licit to imagine chimeras abstractly than to see them pictorially represented. The hippogriff that Diderot disbelieves on canvas pleases him in poetry, and he asks himself why: "The image in my imagination is but a passing shadow. The canvas fixes the object before my eyes and inculcates in me its deformity. The difference between these two imitations is that of it can be and it is."11 On the same ontological grounds, Voltaire denies any substance to the soul, calling a soul so defined "an entity [made] by Reason, a chimera, rather than a supposed substance that would lose its essence" while asleep and unfeeling.12 The dubious quality extends to the natural world and its literary reflection, in the opinion of strict mimeticists. When Rousseau's interlocutor complains about the unrealistic characters of his "romanesque spirit," he replies defensively that it would be a chimera to expect perfect human beings. Rousseau asks who would dare assign precise limits to Nature. The rebuttal is that by such reasoning "unheard of monsters, giants, pygmies, chimeras of all types would be admitted expressly into Nature. Everything would be disfigured; we'd no longer have a common model." 13 The nuances used by Young, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau tend to balance perceptions of Nature against philosophical beliefs about reality per se. As soon as representation of the natural world ceases to be a goal, and ideational representation takes over, the concept of reality expands in the direction of pure mentalism. At the same time, the notion of a chimerical mind also exists as a type portrayed in the context of philosophical idealism. One eighteenth-century cultural historian contrasts Plato with Aristotle by attributing so-called "chimerical" ideas to illusory standards of absolute beauty and perfection. He contends further that the same men10. September 23, 1767. Denis Diderot, Corresptmdance, ed. Georges Roth (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963). 11. Diderot, Pensees detachees, in Oeuvres, 12:82. 12. Voltaire, Lettres deMemmius, in Oeuvres, 13. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, preface to Julie, ou Entretien sur les romans, and Julie, ou nouvelle Helotse, ed. Michel Launay (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1967), 572-73.

La

142

Chapter Five

tality that marks the Enthusiasts also typifies those who favor the Platonic ideal.14 Under ordinary circumstances, the "ideas of perfection, order, and beauty" belong to the class of rational thoughts that, like all respectable ideas, are arguable and subject to "reasoned errors." However, these "ideas" are here stripped of their rational capacity by the epithet "chimerical," which is tainted further with an air of eloquent Enthusiasm. By evoking religious exaltation and associating it with the imagination, the author effectively diminishes the semantic field of "chimera," including the connotations of its artistic and mimetic origins. At the same time, the emotional connotation added to this field intensifies its irrational resonance, as Voltaire demonstrates. In Voltaire's despair over the calamitous Lisbon earthquake, he refuses to be consoled by "these immutable laws of necessity, / this chain of bodies, spirits, and worlds. / Ο dreams of savants! ο profound chimeras!" These ideas are not disbelieved, although the last-cited verse chides their philosophical fantasy. The emotional drama of this celebrated poem consists in part of the semantic irony of words like "dreams" and "chimeras," which ordinarily carry pejorative overtones. Voltaire adds that "God holds the chain in his hand, and is not bound," meaning that God is blameless of the disaster. Thus a paradoxical truth imbues these deceitful laws, which promise order and justice but prove to be "dreams" and "chimeras" in spite of all. Nevertheless, the chimerical temper may also earn wholesome admiration, as when Voltaire's mind is described to Hume by a mutual acquaintance, Comte de Creutz: His bubbling imagination seizes the beautiful and the ridiculous with equal transport.... He sees universal Reason extending its reign in fifty years. Asia will have no more slavery, Europe no more prejudices. All nations will be free and all men philosophers. One knows very well that these lovely chimeras will never be realized, but the visions are so agreeable that one is easily delivered over to them, and Mr. Voltaire knows how to render them plausible. (Voltaire, Correspondence, ed Besterman, Best.Di238o)

Beyond its metaphorical sense, broader usages of "chimera" retain its figuration as a concrete mythological shape or as an allegory of social 14. ". . . [those] people of imagination and enthusiasm, those who forgive the errors of eloquence, those who prefer a spiritual and sublime metaphysic to a dry dialectic, and touching illusions to reasoned errors, those whose souls are gently and profoundly impressed by chimerical ideas of perfection, order, and beauty." (Antoine-Leonard Thomas, Essai sur le caractere, les moeurs, et l'esprit des femmes dans les differents sticks [Paris: Moutard, 1772], 79.

The Lexicon of Unreason

143

perversion.15 Voltaire's letters are an important source for these nuances because informal language reveals the semantic subsoil of paved formal prose. The nuances have a graphic quality that relates appositely to the imagination. This psychological factor modifies the word "chimera" to the extent that its utterance evokes both mental products and mental processes. The fact that "manias" and "chimeras" are figments of a perturbed imagination is recorded by the article on "Inner Sense" for the Encyclopedic (15:32). But, these "phantoms" of a "heated" fancy also result from a physical aberration: "the nerves, agitated at their origin, augment the force of blood circulation in the brain." This in turn disrupts the animal spirits in their ideational function, so that brain traces are activated by the imagination without the aid of Reason. The status of a "chimera" depends on the "corporeal" nature of imagination "and how close the tie is between the vital movements [e.g., blood] and animal movements [i.e., spirits]." The Encyclopedic deals chiefly with the "Inner Sense," citing chimeras to illustrate the kind of "phantoms" created by the imagination. The word's appearance in this context promotes the accretion of nuanced usages at large, so that its pejorative sense now includes "the sad effects of the derangement of the imagination" (15:33). A word like "chimera" differs from previously cited words that denote qualities pertaining to relatively homogeneous subjects like physiology, philosophy, religion, politics, and poetry. "Chimera" resonates with the heterogeneous semantics of all these subjects at the same time. Any quality or condition of any one of those areas can produce a chimera, and so "chimera" can signify them all. The best way to demonstrate this resonance is to observe the usage of "chimera" in a text that serves a multiple purpose. Such a text is Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon's reference to the mind that "compares chimeras." BufFon seeks to do two things: to name a class of error, the chimera, whose cause is not empirical or logical failure, and to show that the mechanics of this error is an imbalance of psychological faculties. He explains that when judgment is impaired, illusory images replace 15. Voltaire depicts Frederick the Great as a Bellerophon delivering humanity from the "chimera" of fanaticism, particularly from "Catholic chimeras" dressed as theological ideals by the Inquisition. See Voltaire, Correspondence and Related Documents, ed. Theodore Besterman (Banbury, Oxfordshire: Voltaire Foundation, 1968-77), vols. 85-135 of The Complete Works of VoltaireIOeuvres completes de Voltaire, ed. Giles Barber, 238 vols, to date (1968-), Best.Di3649, D14012. (Hereafter, Besterman's edition of Voltaire's Correspondence is cited as "Best.", followed by appropriate numbers.) Voltaire's choice of a mentally graphic creature is due greatly to the sociopolitical impact of persecution that motivates him perhaps more than its theology does. Elsewhere in his letters, the Inquisitional chimera becomes the vivid "monster" of fanaticism.

144

Chapter Five

the "real" ones that arise when the imagination cooperates with a rational faculty.16 True, the term "chimera" is a mode of Unreason insofar as it pertains to judging reality, presumably the act of validating truth-statements. But the term also carries an imagistic impact whose source is a particular mechanism. The inactive rational mind yields to "the inner material sense, the only power now active; it is the moment of chimerical images, of flickering shadows" (Buffon, Histoire, 131). Buffon pits external, sensory-based reality against chimera in a contest whose prize is sound judgment and whose penalty is anxiety or fear. It is significant that Buffon's first use of "chimera" appears in a passage about the passions. In a similar vein, his remarks concerning dreams and imagination permit the term "chimera" to discharge three meanings at once. The metaphorical "flickering shadows" allude to the unstable imagemaking mechanism, and also to their cognitive unreliability. On a third plane, a magical reality is implied in "a scene of chimeras that fill the brain now empty of all other sensations." These shapes take various guises— "hideous phantoms," "grimacing faces"—as "they follow each other with as much bizarreness as speed; it is the magic lantern" (131). Thee usages of "chimera," in conjunction with those found for "delirium," confer as much detail on the nature of Unreason as they do on normal thinking by their contrastive example. In the same way that rhetoricians codify principles like verisimilitude, decorum, and Truth to guard against identifiable aberrations, so do the philosophers specify, as Descartes first indicated, the soul's innate capacity for error and, as Malebranche amplified, imagination's susceptibility to derangement.17 The terms "abnormal" and "unnatural" not only affirm criteria for judging standards of rationality, they also develop an independent concept of irrationality whose recognized existence demands its own description. An historical explanation for this attentiveness to Unreason has been offered by Lester Crocker in the paradox he detects when history pits human experience against Reason. In this view, the eighteenth century experiences the circumstance whereby human endeavor controverts rational norms as often as it fulfills them. The paradox is that "natural, invariable principles of development" are incompatible with "an irreconcilable history which must either be accepted as 'providential' . . . or rejected as 16. Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, ed. Jean Varloot (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 126. 17. Ruth Salvaggio, Enlightened Absence: Neoclassical Configurations of the Feminine (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 102-3.

The Lexicon of Unreason

145

'erroneous,' 'abnormal,' or even 'unnatural.'"18 Either choice leads to some basis of irrationality for representing the nature of reality. One can add that those who undertake this representation in a radical form, like Goya, must surmise that caprice and monstrosity underlie human events. Other forms of testimony appear in the attenuated preoccupation with aberration and its power to displace rational sign-making. Whereas evidence for Unreason and monstrosity is epitomized in the Goyesque vision, lexical antecedents are already present among Goya's predecessors. It is difficult to find another single factor that explains the proliferating usages described here when measured by their relative scarcity in the seventeenth century.19 Later contexts touch on perception and mimesis. The mimetic departures by geniuses like Goya and Diderot are of course uncommon highlights. Nevertheless, the basis for the erosion of mimesis itself pervades the common vocabulary usage of the eighteenth century. Here a gradual intensification may be witnessed in the scale of deviations away from the rational ideal. The descent into aberration moves progressively—hyperbole, bizarreness, caprice, and dream. Within this hierarchy, the normative principles are order, sequence, and proportion, together with their corresponding philosophical values. But behind the principles are structural deformations, moral discontinuities, or aesthetic distortions of Truth, beauty, virtue, and social harmony. These distortions are cataloged as warnings against aberration, but in the aggregate they hint at a destabilizing sense of reality intuited by the thinkers who discuss them.

Irrational Sign-Making in Shaftesbury The extravagances of imagination incur censure from most rationalists and idealists. An exception is Lord Shaftesbury, who allows for certain breaches of rational balance, such as hyperbole.20 Shaftesbury raises exaggerated 18. Lester Crocker, "Recent Interpretations of the French Enlightenment," in The Present State of French Studies: A Collection of Research Reviews, ed. Charles Osburn (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1971), 343. 19. The word "Enthusiasm" is common in England in the earlier century—but in its religious connotations as Ronald Knox shows, rather than in the extended contexts of sensibility defined by Marmontel and Voltaire. 20. My unorthodox treatment of the idealist Shaftesbury should not obscure his widely discussed moral philosophy, with its confident faith in the order and proportion of divine Nature. Basil Willey's medley of contemporary opinions is still informative: "Hume says that he was the first who gave occasion to remark the distinction between two theories of ethics, that which derives them from Reason, and that which derives them from 'an immediate feel-

146

Chapter Five

gesture to the status of a principle for speculation, and he permits it in stage-acting "even to extravagance."21 The heroic style of actors, he maintains, is a style where "the hyperbole has place and must reign." So too in sculpture, hyperbole can find a role as "a plain breach of symmetry, and an error in the magnitudes." This kind of error is not a flaw. Shaftesbury remembers in particular the "noble" statue of Laocoon, and he scoffs at modern judges who blamingly contend that its sculptor "had been such a blunderer as to mistake his sizes."22 Hyperbole invigorates expression not only in sculpture and drama but also in painting, and here Shaftesbury refers to Salvator Rosa's perspectives. The space that frames Rosa's majestic rocks and human figures suffers a loss in shapeliness that Shaftesbury appraises. He analyzes "the most stupendous manner" in which the painter's fancy designs and draws a cave, a magnified rock, or a diminutive figure, without lapsing into a faulty reiterative hyperbole. The latter hyperbole would be the wrong sort, he suggests, turning grandeur into horrible shapes of a "burlesque and absolutely ridiculous" kind. Such an extravagance puts art "all out of tune and order, and renders the whole fantastical and a mere vision, a sick dream, not a clear view."23 The result would sit at the edge of grotesqueness, akin to the "sick dream" of Goya's mature period, where art is the deviate vehicle of a new kind of clarity. Hyperbolic gestures may function credibly for Shaftesbury, but only to the limit when "a clear view" begins to be obscured. There rises a menacing other reality mentioned earlier in connection with the disreputable subjective reality evoked by "chimerical," "bizarre," and "delirium." Legitiing and finer internal sense,' and in recent times Babbitt has signalized him as the precursor of the 'Rousseauist' moralists who transform the conscience from an inner check into an expansive emotion" (Willey, The Eighteenth-Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period [1940; London: Pelican Books, 1972], 60-61). 21. Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl o f ) , Second Characters, or The Language of Forms (1714), ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1914), 154. 22. The contrary of hyperbole is the rule in the standard view of Shaftesbury's aesthetics, with "emphasis on harmony and proportion which is a ground-motif of his metaphysical and ethical theory as well as of his aesthetics. 'The study and love of symmetry and order . . .' (2: 267) is not only the basis of our appreciation of beauty; it is also the source of philosophical and scientific inquiry." Stanley Grean, Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1967), 248. 23. On Rosa's landscape, Robert Voitle recognizes that hyperbole is "a voluntary and premeditated error from the rules of perspective," demonstrated by certain erasures in Rosa's work. While Voitle notices that Shaftesbury makes this topic a separate article in the treatise "Plasticks," he stresses the correspondence of distortion and moral evil. See Voitle's The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671-1713 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 363-65.

The Lexicon of Unreason

147

mate hyperboles include satiricalfiguresof a Quixotic kind, which Shaftesbury approves. His guides to propriety are the concepts of "characteristic" and "second characters." These notions belong to his philosophy of "true knowledge," whose forms may exhibit satirical features, provided that the subjects are limited to "the finer and better subjects of imitation" (Second Characters, 100). He specifically recalls Voiture's delight in the scenes of Don Quixote, a "strange impression of character." Where imitation is concerned, the Quixotic element designates certain truths about real forms and natural beings. The subject-matter of this designation, as in Rosa's hyperbole, is somewhat distant from the Goyesque sensibility and its dream of distortion. Nevertheless the extravagant sensibility of Quixoticism inserts a dissonant margin for itself alongside the harmonies decreed by Neoclassical rhetoric. Shaftesbury opens a tentative space beyond Reason, the importance of which lies in his idea of Universal Language. This ideal resides beyond verbal signs, and the quest for it extends from Leibniz's time to its irrational culmination in Goya's Sepia Two, "Idioma Universal."24 The need for that ideal language can be seen in Shaftesbury's notion of representation. His scheme holds that philosophical truths are expressed transparently by verbal language, which is capable of revealing "the note or character of Nature." These same truths may be reflected in the verbal and plastic arts, whose expressive vehicles he terms "characters." Philosophy thus stands alone by studying beauty and harmony directly, in the natural realm of Being. But literature and the plastic arts are copies after Nature, exhibiting "in truth and strictness historical, moral characteristic" (Second Characters, 101). It follows that whereas reality is knowable without any distorting mediation, the representation of reality can only be mimetic, which makes reality knowable only through second characters. The distinction becomes important when departures from verisimilitude are permitted. The greater role given to imagination not only expands subjective representation in art but also creates chimeras, extravagances, or hyperbolic gestures of the kind that Shaftesbury himself allows. That is, private experience rises to a second-order reality that, when externalized as art, is yet again removed from the so-called real world. When this 24. A review of Universal Grammar as it pertains to the arts may be found in Barbara Stafford, Symbol and Myth: Humbert de Supermlle's Essay on Absolute Signs in Art (Cranbury N.J.: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1979), 132—53. See also Stafford, Body Criticism. Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge Mass.: ΜΓΓ Press, 1990).

148

Chapter Five

art displays irrationality, it is prone to criticism. Shaftesbury himself is circumspect about its latitude, but his consent to the relatively innocuous grades in the scale of aberration just mentioned is an important harbinger of later freedom. The grades of aberration challenge the primary order of Nature and of empirical experience. They mark perceptions of reality that, in historical retrospect, "retreat" from Reason, in Gay's formulation, or else afford glimpses into the "unnatural" condition of things, in Crocker's formulation. From this standpoint, the lapses into fantasy-making and grotesquerie by Voltaire, the experimental irrationalities of Diderot, and the ironic supernatural ism of Cadalso are all signatory events that reflect the discord threatening the ordered representation of a reality which Enlightenment philosophy and science strove to perfect. At the least, the theory of language underlying those literary efforts would need to recognize the inadequacies of rational language, which inaccurately captures the instinctual core of human nature and falls short of describing scientifically the core principles of Nature. Consequently, granted the imperfection of rational truth-statements, the chimerical forms created through mimetic distortions might not be significantly more inaccurate. In fact, the Goyesque vision would seem eventually to arise from the extravagant artistic imagination just described, and to arise precisely as an apt alternative to verbal rationalism at a particular moment in history. Although Shaftesbury does not seek to validate the aberrational visions of artists, his leniency toward the grotesque in art is a theoretical concession, perhaps an innocuous first step in 171+ but a significant antecedent when, in 1797, Goya redefines the Universal Language. Stated less strongly, the secondary language of art can either subordinate imagination to Reason or free it to the point of grotesquerie. But in both cases the result will be unfaithful to reality and comparable to the proneness displayed by rational signs to distort the primary language of philosophical truth. Shaftesbury maintains his faith in philosophical language and its power to represent "the note or character of nature, the form, natural habit, constitution, reason of the thing, its energy, operation, place, use or effect in nature" (Second Characters, 101). But while he defines philosophy as the study of harmony and beauty, it apprehends the latter through "universal numbers and proportions." On this account, Shaftesbury distributes languages so as to separate three classes or "characters." First are notes, which comprise verbal language, "the marks of sounds, syllables, words, speech, and of sentiments, senses, meanings by that medium" (91). The "second characters" are signs that constitute the plastic arts, or what Shaftesbury

The Lexicon of Unreason

149

calls "designatory art," the imitation of real forms and natural beings. The third class of characters is "emblematic," a middle sort that draws from the other two. What this scheme does not declare is its pyramidal hierarchy, whose apex is a Universal Language that demotes presumably transparent verbal language to a flawed status. Nor does the scheme flaunt the power of plastic signs, although their latitude is clearly an ambivalent force for truth or falsity. The assumption here is that a single, all-embracing idiom might succeed in articulating true philosophical knowledge. The belief, also found earlier in Descartes and Leibniz, carries over to the eighteenth century, and while Shaftesbury tacitly shares that belief, his sympathy for plastic signs lends provisional evidence that might deprivilege a purely alphanumerical concept of philosophical language. The latter concept provides no room for equivocal representation, much less for chimerical and emblematic signs. Its index of unequivocal truth lies in the identity of the graphic sign and the real thing, the removal of any distancing "space" between the two. In contrast, an expanded notion of the Universal Idiom or Language ties the index of truth to a "language of forms." A plastic or tactile factor competes with the scriptorial or visual factor in scaling the truth value of representation. This difference can be appreciated by comparing the linguistic and imaginational grounds of cognition. The concept of eighteenth-century verbal language is usually said to hinge on a system that employs metaphorically "written" signs in the cognitive process. This so-called "graphetic" concept is argued successfully by Jacques Derrida, who relies mainly on Rousseau for evidence.25 The key to this viewpoint is the pervasive metaphor of Writing in all philosophical systems, judged by Derrida to condemn language forever to a distancing representation or "trace" of primary reality. The object of cognition is never known in its direct "presence," but rather is signified through its absence by means of the institutionalized sign. So removed is the trace from pri25. Derrida cites Rousseau's reminder that we learn to speak before we learn to write, that writing is a memnotechnical device, and therefore that "writing is the dissimulation of the first, immediate, natural presence of sense to the soul" (Jacques Derrida, De lagrammatoloßie [Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967], 55). This distancing of primary reality is further confirmed by the fact that speech or "the phoneme cannot be imaged, and that no [form of] visibility can resemble it" (66). Therefore, "writing is at once more external to speech, being neither its 'image' nor its 'symbol,' and more internal to speech, itself already a [form of] writing. The graphetic concept [graphic]—even before being linked to the incision, the engraving, the sketch or the letter, [which is] a signifier remitting to a signifier signified by it—. . . implies the instance of the instituted trace. . . . It has no 'natural tie' with the signified in reality" (68).

I50

Chapter Five

mary reality that Derrida even questions the privileging, if not the reality, of "known" Nature.26 Rousseau epitomizes for Derrida the threat to belief in transparent language: "he condemned the universal characteristic," thus opening a breach in the logocentric fallacy of sign-object concomitance. In eighteenth-century philosophy the breach never fills between the real object and its sign, as John Yolton shows for Locke's conception. The representational concept of "presence," of a thing "being present to the mind, of existing in the mind," is not a mirror-like representation but a cognitive one.27 This limitation, insofar as it might be considered an impediment to immediate and direct knowledge of reality, exposes the flawed essence of sequential language. Sequential language being verbal language, it is ostensibly transparent. But its linearity of speech, its clarity of logical sequences, and its insight via speculative writing all prove inadequate for capturing Nature's fundamental reality. The issue is representation. The point is crucial because words are the most utilized signs for reality. In Shaftesbury's terms, the truest signs are the "notes" or "characters" of natural beings. This language belongs to a higher plane than that occupied by ordinary representational language, but it does not eliminate the distancing factor. This shortcoming is what Goya's Universal Language will aspire to remove in order to expose an ultimate truth. What Goya intuits through a mediating dream is the underlying chaos of primary reality. True reality, Goya will suggest, seethes under and through the gridwork of linear language, thus eluding the mind's rational eye. For the irrationalist at the end 26. "[The trace] has no 'natural tie' with the signified in reality. The break in this 'natural tie' puts in question for us the idea of naturalness rather than the idea of a tie" (Derrida, Grammatologie, 68). Derrida also sees in eighteenth-century interest in non-European languages and problems of decipherment a threat to logocentric transparency (147). 27. Yolton does not stress the mind-body breach, but he points out that Locke is silent on "the intersection of these two processes" (i.e., the physical process of bodies first acting on the senses, with impulses then transmitted to the brain, and the psychological process of such mental operations as "attending, considering, conceiving, inferring. . . . Almost all the writers we have examined recognized the role of meaning in perceptual acquaintance. Most settled for concomitance: concurrently with the physical causal process there occurs the cognitive one. . . . [This is] the view of ideas as signs, as the intelligible contents of awareness, where these idea-signs are the cognitive translation of objects, the meaning of things, the intelligibility of the real." See John Yolton, Perceptual AcquaintancefromDescartes to Reid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 220. Yolton argues for "the deontologizing of ideas," stressing the "semantic features of perceptual awareness" and not the notion that "ideas could be taken as representative beings" (221). His reading of Lockeans and even Berkeley dissents from Richard Rorty's belief that most seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury thinkers considered the mind to be a mirror of nature. In any event, the external or "real" object remains mediated by signs, although much more so in Derrida's view of that era than in Yolton's.

The Lexicon of Unreason

151

of the eighteenth century, a chief issue will be the representation, if not the presence, of Nature's disorder. It should be noted that a visual metaphor is at work, not only in Derrida's analysis of language but in such eighteenth-century metaphors as "enlightenment" and the "light of Reason." The further fact that all Western philosophy is logocentric appears to make Writing the self-grounded foundation of cognitive languages. All these metaphors presuppose a figurative eyesight (originally hearing), so that the very idea of representation implicates graphetic, graphic, or visible signs, although not necessarily verbal ones. But visual representation remains a distancing "presence," for the object cannot be touched. The difference grows important in the context of Shaftesbury's interest in Universal Language. His "secondary characters" exercise a plastic mediation through what he calls the "language of forms." These are not exclusively visual signs, for they offer a tactile alternative in cognitive representation. Shaftesbury's interest in anaglyphs or low-relief sculpted ornaments inclines him toward signs that are knowable by touch as well as by sight. Like the monochromes that intrigued Diderot, the embossed object draws attention because chromatic factors play no role in knowing the object.28 In both instances, the low relief requires, literally or figuratively, the sense of touch rather than sight. Such art also departs from the "high" classical forms of representation. The tactile factor relates to the growing interest in problems of sense perception at this time, spurred by discussion between Locke and Molyneux of the man born blind who sees for the first time.29 Later in the century, Diderot's famous Letteron the Blind centers on the relationship between image and object in the cognitive process. The span of these interests across the age is noteworthy—from Second Characters (1714) and Diderot's Letter (1749). In Goya's Sepia Two ("Universal Language") of 1797, plastic and verbal cognitions are fully separated, with emphasis on a dream perception that cannot truly be called visual. Goya's dream world poses the 28. Diderot explains the blind man's use of touch to reconstruct a figure through memory, comparing this to the cammeu, an embossed painting with a single color. Diderot notes that for the sightless, writing, drawing, engraving, and monochrome are all camaieux. He notes further that touch "assures us of the existence of objects external to us when they are present to our sight. . . . fit is] the sense that is still reserved for us to verify, not their shapes and other modifications, but their very presence." See Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, Lettre sur les sourds et muets. ed. Yvon Belavel and Robert Nikiaus, in Oeuvres completes, vol. 4: Le nouveau Socrnte, Idees2 (Paris: Hermann, 1978), 60. 29. The best account of the century-long debate is by Francine Markovits in her edition of Jean Bernard Merian's Sur le probleme de Molyneux (1770-79) (Paris: Flammarion, 1984).

152

Chapter Five

problem of blindness in a different fashion from that of Diderot, where the sense of touch creates order out of chaos. In Diderot, as in Shaftesbury, plastic signs do not require perspective, as they do in painting. For both thinkers, relief work as well as statuary and engraving pertain to tactile sensing. Shaftesbury has a generally rationalist conception of "characters" that are signs or "notations" of verbal meaning. But he also adds a third category for a special type of relief work that he distinguishes from chromatic signs. This is the anaglyphical low relief in lapidary, which is irregular and lacks true perspective.30 Other deviations from classical harmony in graphic signs also gain Shaftesbury's consent, including grotesques, arabesques, and chimerical or capricious forms (Second Characters, 91). But these material forms should not be confused with the pejorative judgments of "grotesque" and "capricious" applied by Neoclassical critics, discussed later in this chapter, who censure ill-wrought works of literature and art. A change in connotation governs newer usages of words like "grotesque," "bizarre," and "caprice" as these terms recur with growing frequency in the eighteenth century. The standard seventeenth-century meaning of "grotesque" denotes something brutish and absurd, a definition that recedes as the word gains familiarity. In time, the very dissonances of the grotesque style acquire respectability, and there begins a revaluation of what bizarreness and deformation actually imply for artistic expression. When Fielding, Smollet, and Sterne introduce Quixotic elements into their novels, the grotesquerie does not diminish their mimetic truthfulness, much less their moral insight. As for Shaftesbury, what becomes a respectable if restricted practice by mid-century is for him an unworthy initiative. He remarks of paintings that "nothing can be more deformed than a confusion of many beauties." He is referring to the practice of "false" imitation that does not know how to sacrifice one type of beauty for the sake of another. As in the case of Rosa's hyperbolic perspectives, where spatial perfection depends on exaggerated proportions, the artist must avoid mixing values. He must reject the "false ornaments of affected graces," which along with "the mere capricious and grotesque" destroy the unity of art. The grotesque design in itself is not proscribed, but the wanton mixing of genres betrays Nature. Mixture is barbarous, even "monstrous," contends Shaftesbury, because the artist's 30. The low relief gains significance in Diderot's monochrome. The entire subject of tactile language and universal signification is addressed in Volume 3.

The Lexicon of Unreason

153

inability to "discountenance" one of two incompatible graces deforms the essential whole {Second Characters, 53, 60, 92). What troubles Shaftesbury is the uncontrolled abandon manifested in style and generated by passion or will. To this important extent he is fully a rationalist who does not countenance the lawless propensity of imagination. This means that the grotesque mode must be regarded as a stylistic phenomenon and a method that may be sanctioned, as distinct from an aesthetic value, which is a response to be reproached. He draws a parallel between the willful violation of artistic boundaries and the violation of boundaries in the natural world of animal genus and species. It is true, he concedes, that some species like dogs and fowls may interbreed without the mixture impeding an eventual return to purity of form. But "the caprice (i.e., wantonness and bestiality) of corrupt man would long since have gone beyond any of the worst painters, grotesque ryparographoi, etc. as well beyond any of the poets in composing new complicated forms of satires, etc., with which the breed would have run out and been lost" (Second Characters, 106). Shaftesbury's complaint aims not at the irregularity of grotesque forms, but at their source in the emotional excess of artistic indiscipline. Borrowing the Greek word ryparographoi to illustrate the ridiculous bent of low comedy, he declares that it blurs the truth of art by vulgarly painting life to be worse than it naturally is. The preposterous quality lies in the aesthetic and moral realm, identified by rational judgment after the visual spectacle is perceived. Nevertheless, the grotesque design itself need not always deform the moral truth conveyed by the artist's subject. Thus Shaftesbury's other sympathies redress his rationalist orientation to Universal Language: "All grotesque painting [is] not ryparography; though most may be such. Witness Raphael's monsters and grotesque after the ancients, in Signr Bartoli's book of prints, etc." (137). The afterthought sharpens Shaftesbury's contradictory opinions about the grotesque style, and he further betrays his ambivalence by lapsing into elliptical prose. Late in the essay, he abandons full expository discussion, writing instead fragmentary statements in note form. Now his example for art concerns a design of "evil dreams in volatile shapes," whose proportions need modification within the perspective of human figures that are also included. One may look ahead to Capricho 43 at this point, with its oneiric owls and bats furnishing the signs for an irrational Universal Language. The dream mentioned by Shaftesbury shows the proportions of comparable winged creatures—the vulture and the eagle—falsely foreshortened and then re-

154

Chapter Five

duced to the size of a raven and a kite. Their sinister and disproportionate aspects parallel those of Goya's winged bat in Sepia Two, also diminished in size in the final etching. Shaftesbury's concluding remark about the grotesque occurs in shorthand form, a thought awaiting expansion. But it ends with an acknowledgment of the grotesque's capacity for making true as well as false statements: "This merely in grotesque work and the emblematic; where all is false and everything so wildly and extravagantly fictitious, with such variety of proteus-forms and different species conjoined; yet not preposterously, absurdly, or without intelligence, speculation and a truth!" (Second Characters,, 165). As a rationalist, Shaftesbury would have been hard pressed to elaborate this enigmatic note, itself an emblem of contrary insights into the nature of Reason and Unreason.

Voltaire's Irrationalist Vocabulary Whereas Shaftesbury's concern with aberration is limited to the truthsaying capacity of plastic signs, the concern becomes generalized when all deformation is projected into the presence of Unreason. Such a projection is evidenced in the writings of Voltaire. The two thinkers differ in vocabulary and in their measure of interest in irrationality. Voltaire sees the whole of human affairs as doing violence to Reason, whereas Shaftesbury does not. Voltaire denounces the "dragons" of superstition, ignorance, and persecution. As a result, his philosophical language employs an emblematic vocabulary conventionally reserved for discussions of art and literature. His assumption is that excessive imagination and emotion do more than simply plague mimetic representations; the excess holds consequences throughout reality. This global assumption explains why tropes of distortion and, more generally, all figurative language unite to serve all of Voltaire's expressions of perceived reality, whether they are philosophical, artistic, or social. When Voltaire complains that the novels of Scudery have ruined good taste, his chosen terms of censure are "novelesque sentiments" and "bizarre expressions." These terms encode value judgments about broader rationalities under assault from the new literary expression. The bizarreness alluded to stems from "a new jargon, unintelligible and admired." Voltaire's complaint about a choice of style is not as important as what it exposes. The troublesome fact is that the natural properties of language—vocabulary

The Lexicon of Unreason

155

and syntax—can obscure understanding as easily as promoting it. Novels fall into low esteem among many eighteenth-century critics because they overthrow the proprieties of feeling, style, and decorum. But the censure involves more than the criteria of good taste. The imaginative indulgences of novels violate general principles of Reason, and this indictment of the irrational mentality is not just a literary matter for Voltaire. The phenomenon of disorder itself engages him. It is not a mere surface structure of things but an ontological trait. On this account, Voltaire's names for deviations from literary precepts appear in diverse contexts beyond the rules of poetics. Realms of being like Nature, history, and fantasy come under his scrutiny for disorderly episodes. As a polymathic philosopher, he applies a single nomenclature of distortion to serve his many discourses. The term "novelesque" ordinarily presupposes a literary orientation, but Voltaire uses it in order to condemn real-world fanaticism,31 and he associates the word "caprice" with the imagination's power to alter conceptions of reality. He refers several times to the fables that misrepresent historical reality as "caprices of imagination" (Dictionnairephilosophique, 196). When he refutes an unsound idea in physics, its semantic field widens as a result of a literary insertion. He calls the notion of plenitude "chimerical" and describes the cosmological system it belongs to as "founded on imaginings; it is merely an ingenious novel without verisimilitude" (Oeuvres, 22:511). These lexical imports, implanted in nonliterary discourses, bring the real villain into view: the power of imagination to confound empirical representation. Abstract invention projects chimeras, whereas verifiable observation secures truthbearing statements. The difference is one of method, posing the "dilemma" for novelists examined at length by Georges May.32 It is precisely the factor of veracity that motivates the aversion to nonmimetic fiction. Since Voltaire himself writes short novels in the face of his own criticism, the irrational undercurrents he rails against are not negligible issues. Does his practice therefore reflect ambivalence? A glance at the opinions of his contemporaries confirms this possibility. Jaucourt's Encyclopedic article on novels is unenthusiastic about the genre. The cleric Jacquin, in his Entre31. Voltaire invites the history-minded reader to "regard with pity all the fables whose fanaticism, novelesque spirit, and credulity have crowded the world scene in all ages" (Essai sur les moeurs, 2 vols., ed. Rene Pomeau [Paris: Gamier Freres, 1963], 2:800). e 32. Georges May, Le dilemme du roman au XVIII siecle (New Haven, Conn, and Paris: Yale University Press, 1963).

156

Chapter Five

tien sur les rotnans of 1755, concedes that novels operate on the principle of verisimilitude, but he also mentions their danger.33 The Abbot Du Bos points to several standards of verisimilitude. Du Bos cites the "fabulous divinities, the noble chimeras with which poetic imagination . . . enriches Nature" (apud Saisselin, 88). But he also separates fable from history, with the new objectives in writing history standing remote from fauns, sirens, tritons, and nereids. The term "chimera" signals a transformational field of meaning, both pejorative and complimentary. The bivalence suggests the transitions of criteria at play in these early to mid-century decades. In historiography, as in physics, the cognitive goal never departs from the cardinal ideal of le vrai, attainable only under a strictly harnessed imagination. So too in mathematics, where Voltaire assesses Descartes's contribution with the reservation that "he erred in everything that he imagined because he followed only his imagination," with efforts ending in "a long novel deprived of verisimilitude" {Moeurs, 2:844). While the underlying responsibility lies with the imagination, the literary term "novel" has its analogue in representation within the cognitive process. It enters the philosophical vocabulary as the excess that perverts mimetic truth. The same term identifies all error and judgmental excess in the disciplines beyond narrative fiction. The terminology is unitary. It interdicts the nonrational propensity of mind regardless of domain. The censured targets are authors who "do not know Nature at all. They paint chimerical characters by chance; the false, the base, the gigantesque, are dominant everywhere." 34 Voltaire's coinage "gigantesque" further refines the idea of an untrustworthy imagination. The adjective takes its place alongside "novelesque" and "chimerical" in the lexical paradigm that assesses the domains of artistic representation and rational knowledge. Gigantism, more than the extravagant exaggerations mentioned earlier, invokes by antithesis the norms and exactitudes of rational knowledge that are lost through error or nonreason, whether in art or in scientific inquiry. The additional nuance shows clearly in Voltaire's reproach of Shakespeare for "bizarre and gigantesque ideas." Such ideas convert certain of his plays into "monstrous farces" (Lettres philosophiques no.18). Gigantism refers less to the misrepresentation of Nature than to the potentialities of the imaginative faculty itself. The endless re-

33. Cited by Remy Saisselin, The Rule of Reason and the Ruses of the Heart (Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), 133. 34· Voltaire, Vie de Moliere, in Oeuvres completes, ed. Louis Emile Dieudonne Moland, 52 vols. (Paris: Gamier Freres, 1877-85), 23:104.

The Lexicon of Unreason

157

sourcefulness of imagination to fabricate unreality makes it a fearsome faculty. Still other figurative images show the same concern for representation that unifies all discussions of art and conceptual knowledge. Voltaire's article on somnambulism and dreams conveys the powerful autonomy of imagination by a striking analogy involving the involuntary mechanism of memory. He compares the flash of remembrance to a candle flame. A person might remember and then forget an absent acquaintance: "his image was pictured to you when you least thought of it; your imagination was lighted up without your thinking about a snuffer" (Dictionnaire philosophique, 619). The unusual reference to a tardy candle-snuffer intensifies the illumination surrounding the pictured memory. The incandescence obliterates belated rational moves. The image is more spontaneous than the reasoning that rises up to control it. It is what lights its unwilled way through consciousness. Moreover, adds Voltaire, the mechanism works both in the waking state and in dream. Incandescent irrationality is a metaphor that finds its combustible counterpart in Voltaire's criticisms of society. When flamelight contrasts with "good" light apropos of burning Truth at the stake in Marmontel's Belisaire (chap. 15), Voltaire contributes his own version: "Truth gleams by its own light, and spirit is not enlightened by the glimmer of bonfires" (Voltaire, Correspondence, Best.D14.184, D14161). Allusions to burning are among Voltaire's most potent tropes, and they belong to the lexical network that enhances the philosophical undesirability of unregulated imagination. These tropes convey a warning about imagination's incendiary power and also about its harmful consequences to society. Voltaire uses them frequently in private letters to depict Inquisitional persecution, and the vocabulary does not change in a usage by d'Alembert where the topic is irrational political judgment.35 The destructive overtones of the link betweenflamesand imagination persist after Reason is suppressed. Voltaire perceives his enemies' attacks as 35. See Voltaire's gory description of a glossectomy and corpse-burning; a graphic portrait of a live roasting; and especially in 1776 when Parlement is said to be burning its prey (Conseils raisonnables, in Oeuvres completes, 17:50, 66, 293· See also his letters, Best.Di9ii2, D14184, D14161, D14185, D15284, D19887), in Correspondence and Related Documents, ed. Besterman (see note 15 above). D'Alembert observes the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain in 1767 and remarks in a humanitarian tone that their crimes are no longer heinous since they have not "burned" anybody except in intention, but that "imagination . . . works upon this canvas" to attribute "the most odious crimes." D'Alembert, Seconde lettre a Mrxxx conseiller au Parlement de *** sur l'etat du Rot d'Espagne, pour l'expulsion des Jesuites (n.p., n.d [Paris, 1767], 20-21).

158

Chapter Five

unnaturally injurious: "it is like lighting two torches at once in the hands of criticism, but my skin is hardened as a result of being scorched by this monster" (Best.Di8oo4). The allusion to monstrosity also belongs to the lexicon of Unreason, and its foretaste of the Goyesque "dream of Reason produces monsters" duplicates Voltaire's earlier references to dream and somnambulism. But in this instance, the symbolic destructiveness of fire is the noteworthy feature, owing to its metonymic relationship with the "torch" of an irrationally illuminated imagination. The collective imagination is similarly consumed by the abominable fire. Voltaire reports that the Calas affair "further fired up the heated imagination of the people." 36 The trope contrasts implicitly with Reason's cold light, which does not convert illumination into counterproductive heat. The two extremes of illumination set up a graduated range between them that defines the limits of rational representation. The point where light becomes a potential conflagration marks the fulcrum of stability in a mind prone to undoing its own dispassionate judgment. Voltaire's cautious position was not universal, as indicated earlier. Some critics esteemed pure imagination in composing poetry, even to the extent of valorizing metaphorical fire on spiritual grounds. In Michel Mourgues's treatise on poetry, we read that "imagination is the principle of Enthusiasm; that is the divine fire that renders the spirit fertile and inventive, a source of beauties and of faults" (apud Saisselin, 165). Nevertheless, "judgment serves to regulate this fire, which must not resemble drunkenness or a burning fire but rather a moderate heat, a pure and light flame." The cautionary note does not, however, place Mourgues in the camp of the rationalists who use the vocabulary of disorder in order to warn against it. Whereas Voltaire borrows terms like "chimerical" and transfers them to philosophical discourse for the sake of exposing imagination's representational guile, Mourgues is not concerned with defending Reason. For Voltaire and for authors like Mourgues, the issue is the same: securing a cognitive process that ensures truth-statements about reality. However, Mourgues is able to retain the metaphors of fire and heat in "moderate" forms because he prizes intuition above Reason and presents feeling as the alternate door to knowledge. At century's end, Goya proposes an antithetical cognitive possibility. Even so, a bridge extends between Goya and Voltaire in the concept of caprice, which achieves a macrodefinition embracing numerous states of irrational consciousness. 36. Voltaire, Tratte sur la tolerance, vol. 25 of Oeuvres completes, 21.

The Lexicon of Unreason

159

Caprice and the Bizarre "Caprice," in the terminology already noted for Voltaire, is one of the mild deformations in which unconstrained imagination may indulge. This same faculty of imagination produces "bizarreness." The bizarre issues from a subagency of imagination that locks it with caprice into the same chamber of irrational cognition. Anything that a "wise" imagination can perform will be "natural," says Voltaire, whereas "false imagination assembles incompatible objects; the bizarre paints objects that have neither analogy nor allegory nor verisimilitude" (.Imagination, in Oeuvres, 19:434). Voltaire calls the bizarre-bearing agent fantaisie, described in a separate article bearing this very word for its title. Thus, "bizarreness conveys the idea of disparity and bad taste that fancy does not express: he had the fancy to build, but he constructed his house with bizarre taste" (19:88). Fancy can also mean, through a semantic synecdoche, its own product, such as "a singular desire or passing taste: he had a fancy for games, balls." But more, it is to be capricious, "to have extraordinary tastes that do not last": "Caprice can mean a sudden and unreasonable distaste: he had a fancy for music and out of caprice he found it distasteful." Such usages suggest that fancy weds the bizarre and the capricious to the same category of flippancy and bad judgment. This is precisely the equivalency given to them by Bellegarde in Reflections on the Ridiculous.37 At the same time, the adjective "bizarre" enters historical and anthropological writings as a contrastive term. An implicit norm appears in Voltaire's assertion that "the Asiatic ceremonies are bizarre, the beliefs absurd, but the precepts just" (Moeurs, 2:809). Such contrasts can result in a faint ambiguity, as when he describes the dances of American Indians: "although their movements are absolutely different, according to the bizarreness and caprice of their imagination, no [dance] loses its rhythm" (Moeurs, 1:123). Similarly, the semi-religious dances of Christianized Indians in St. Thomas are, in another commentator's opinion, "nevertheless less bizarre" than the Spanish sacramental plays, which he finds offensive to God. 38 These qualifications of excellence suppose a rational hierarchy whose principle is congruence. From pinnacle to base, the hierarchy implies a fixed absolute 57. Abbe Jean-Baptiste Morvan de Bellegarde, Reflexions sur le ridicule et sur les moyens de l'evtter (Paris: C . Robustel, 1723), 327-46. 38. Ceremonies et coütumes religteuses des peuples idolätres representees par desfiguresdessinees de la main de Bernard Pieart, avec une explication historique et quelques dissertations curieuses, 8 vols. (Amsterdam: J. F. Bernard, 1723-36), 3:183.

i6o

Chapter Five

that is at times defined by Divinity. At the basest level is the family of Demons, acting inconsistently with greater or lesser influence owing to "the very bizarreness of their nature, after the departure from the [established] order." 39 At its secular pinnacle, "the palace of the Chinese emperor is still more bizarre, a mass or rather a crowd of masses without proportion, without taste, without design, an immense and monstrous composition of isolated rooms, a labyrinth to become lost in."40 Here an aesthetic standard enters to judge "this ridiculous and bizarre taste in architecture," a standard that at its own highest level is an absolute that Diderot portrays as a fragile excellence. Diderot's setting for the bizarre is the Salon of 1767, where it is remarkably clear "how much bizarreness and diversity" is bound up with the artistic choice of technique and subject. He responds pithily to this fact: "In all times and everywhere, the bad engenders the good, the good inspires the better, the better produces the excellent, the excellent is succeeded by the bizarre, whose family is without number." The pejorative connotations here are not error or deficiency but excess, whose source is a more general "praise of folly" that marks a work like Le neveu de Rameau, where such words are so frequent.41 This bizarreness burgeons from excellence rather than emerging at the bottom of the hierarchy. This proliferation in art seems to be confirmed by the iconologist Gravelot, who reproaches Ripa's iconology for lacking good taste: "this multitude of monstrous figures that should be proscribed in painting." Included "among these bizarre figures" are Gluttony, Invincible Concord, Fraud, and Eternity.42 However, no prohibition applies to portraying the idea itself of bizarreness, as Gravelot reveals in his own emblem for Sleep, which depicts a youth slumbering alongside a cornucopia "from which there escape, amidst a light vapor, bizarre figures, an allusion to dreams" (Iconobgie, 3:97)· The semantics of the bizarre in these instances appear to be the inverse of the semantics of delirium noted earlier. Instead of a lexical migration from biological and psychological discourse to literature, a contrary move39. J. Bcllon dc Saint-Qucntin, Superstitions anciennes et modernes, prejuges vulgaires, qui ont induit les peuples α des usages et α des pratiques contraires a la religion, 4 vols. (Amsterdam: J.-F. Bernard, 1733-36), 1:162. 40. Jean Louis Castilhon, Considerations sur les causes physiques et morales de la diversite du genie, des moeurs et du gouvernement des nations (Bouillon: Societe Typographique; Paris: Lacombe, 1769), 497. 41. Apostolos P. Kouidis, "The Praise of Folly: Diderot's Model for Le neveu de RameauStudies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 185 (1980): 238. 42. Gravelot (Hubert-Francois Bourgignon, dit), Iconologie par figures, ou Tratte de la science des allegories, emblemes, etc., en 3S0figuresgravies, 4 vols. (Paris: Lattre, n.d. [1791]) i:xi.

The Lexicon of Unreason

161

ment occurs from literary and plastic arts to social discourses like history and anthropology, but also to biological discourses.43 The description of dreams in the Encyclopedic is a physiologically oriented entry that cites the "bizarre combinations" of ideas in the brain as well as "the bizarreness, the extravagant appearance" arising from random cerebral tracings (15:355a). The very first sentence of this article defines dream as "a bizarre state in appearance, where the soul has ideas without a reflexive knowledge of this state." Clearly the connotations of "bizarre" run deeper than Voltaire's jeers at Scudery's novels, or his examples regarding spirits that shoot cannons from heaven, and angels blasted in half by cannon balls and reunited again. The terms of censure are not methodological but qualitative, not those of wrong logic but those of eccentric deviation. In Diderot's hierarchy, there is implied a larger notion of disorder arising from order. The lexical migration just reviewed is more than a minor change in discourse. It involves the dominant conception of systematic knowledge at that time. The bizarre originates in irrational contexts of capricious energy and even genius. More primitively, the bizarre rises up in "the system of knowledge among the animals" as conceived by Condillac. Here, the "whorls" of needs "swallow up" one another until they grow confused when the needs are satisfied and "only a chaos is seen. Ideas pass and return without order. They are moving tableaux that offer only bizarre and imperfect images" until new needs give them coherence.44 Cognitive rationalism distances itself from these contexts, best characterized as contexts of random imagination. This is to say, the bizarre has outdistanced its literary and artistic origins and become the name for all quirky expression and proneness to deviate from norms. This distinction explains why d'Alembert can assert that "in general the name Art may be given to any system of knowledge which can be reduced to positive and invariable rules independent of caprice or opinion."45 Thus some sciences can be viewed as arts that display their practical side. The converse would seem irrefutable: as long as stable order is preserved, even art may claim a cognitive legitimacy. At work is 43. The physiologist Lemery defines the structure of a monster in the reproductive process as "this bizarre and extravagant union" of bodily parts ending in "ridiculous assemblages;" and again: "bizarre and unreasonable alliances." See Jacques Roger, Les sciences de Ια vie dans lapenseefranfaise du XVIIIe siecle: Lageneration des animaux de Descartes a I'Encyclopedie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1963), +11. 44. Abbe Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Tratte des animaux (Amsterdam and Paris: Debure, 175s), 84-85. 45. Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans, and ed. Richard N. Schwab and Walter Rex (Indianapolis, Ind., and New York: BobbsMerrill, 1963), 40.

i62

Chapter Five

"true" imagination, not the fantaisie of fancy that makes allies of the bizarre and the capricious. The link is nowhere more genetically exposed than in the article "Caprice" in the Encyclopedic. In this article, the energy of imagination clearly bonds the triangular relationship of fancy, caprice, and bizarreness. The Encyclopedist notes that the bizarre connotes distance from artistic precepts. A "bizarre composition" is "a metaphor" for "Caprice," as in Boromini's architecture, where "imagination is as fertile as it is uncontrolled" (.Encyclopedic, 2:637-38). The same irrationalist terminology defines certain freestyle musical compositions as a "caprice or fancy." Both as a product of the imagination and as the latter's sub-agency, caprice is a worthy category for Encyclopedic analysis. The judgmental factor ("good," "bad") is negligible in these instances. Their compelling feature is the inference, already stated openly by d'Alembert, that a cognitive alternative claims legitimacy. The context should not be limited to art alone, as proven by the aesthetician Batteux's use of the term caprice. He writes that the arts "do nothing more than discover what already existed; they are not creators except by virtue of what they have observed. . . . The arts therefore, do not create the rules; the latter do not hang on their caprice, but are invariably traced by their model, nature."46 As a genre, the caprice has a history prior to the Enlightenment originating with Jacques Callot's quaint engravings. Voltaire's ambivalent fascination with the grotesque is linked to Callot's caprices. They place Voltaire on his guard by defying mimetic orderliness and jumping from whimsy to caricature and drollery. On one occasion, Voltaire considers a certain statue only to dismiss it because it might resemble a figure by Callot. But on another occasion, he speaks of Callot and Raphael in the same breath, noting the execution of human figures that strike different stylistic attitudes. Voltaire objects to the "mixture of styles," a decadent practice that in his opinion joins capricious elements to classical ones. Voltaire's ambivalence surfaces in his circumspection upon learning about caricature drawings of himself that he derides with the word "ridiculous" (Correspondence, Best.D14.099). The word "caprice" must be reserved for fickleness and unpredictable contexts. This certainly applies to the miscellany of letters on history, literary topics, and natural history titled Caprices d'imagination by 46. Abbe Charles Batteux, Les beaux-arts reduits a an meme principe (Paris: Durand, 1746), 58.

The Lexicon of Unreason

163

Bruhier d'Abalaincourt, who jumps from divining rods and chiromancy to philters, philosopher stones, sirens, tritons, and weird fires.47 The rich semantic extension of "caprice" as a concept, however, is reserved for Goya's own culture. Prior to his renovation of the capricho genre, the use of both "caprice" and "capricious" in Spain suggests an intricate semantics encompassing the pictorial and valuative meanings assigned by Voltaire. The spectrum of locutions embodying both pejorative and favorable judgments in human behavior and the arts has been described elsewhere.48 The absorption of these words into the general discourse begins early in the century. Their original overtones of bizarreness or grotesquerie attenuate considerably thereafter. The most common usages denote the idea of quirk or passing fancy. But Spanish authors also employ the terms approvingly to describe imaginative elements in painting and architecture. Therefore Goya's end-of-century use of capricho to designate his series of etchings is simply a generic usage harking back to Tiepolo and Callot before him. At the same time, Goya draws a parallel between caprice and inventiveness. Both are a creative source, cited in 1794 when he desires "to occupy my imagination" in compensation for the routine of commissioned paintings "where caprice and invention are given no room." 49 The statement separates capricho from imagination, the latter being the creative faculty and capricho a subsidiary resource involved with the product of that faculty. It would be a mistake to draw the inference of free fantasy, uncontrolled passion, or demented imagination merely from the title of Capricho 43'· "The Sleep/Dream of Reason Produces Monsters." Quite the contrary, the only aesthetician in Spain writing at this time, Esteban de Arteaga, distinguishes between coefficient creative faculties. This follower of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and Johann Joachim Winckelmann judges the Ideal in art to be often misunderstood "as an unfounded product of caprice or of fancy," rather than "as a deduction of the intellect, drawn from sensible ideas."50 Two separate abilities seem to exist, each capable of participating in the creative act without reference to rational or sensorial activity. While 47. Jacques-Jean Bruhier d'Abalaincourt, Caprices ({'imagination, ou Lettres sur differents sujets A'histoire, de morale, de critique, d'histoire naturelle, etc. (Paris: Briasson, 1740). 48. See Paul Ilie, Capricho'l'Caprichoso': A Glossary of Eighteenth-Century Usages," Hispanic Review 44 (1976): 239-55. 49. Edith Helman, Jovellanosy Goya (Madrid: Taurus, 1970), 142. 50. Esteban de Arteaga, La belleza ideal. Obra completa castellana, ed. Miguel Batllori (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1972), 159.

i64

Chapter Five

the precise relation of caprice to imagination is unclear in Arteaga, the distinction between product and faculty is plain: "the artificers of bad taste [are those] who prefer the caprices of their imagination to the physical and moral perfections that they would find in nature if they looked for them" (Arteaga, Belleza ideal, 48-49). Therefore capricho may be either a defective imaginary product or a psychological mechanism producing that defect. Nowhere does Arteaga use capricho in the sense of ridiculous or extravagant, which is a frequent meaning among his contemporaries. His vocabulary is remarkably restricted and consistent, given his numerous rebukes of the ridiculous in art. He may complain that an author "falls into affectations and extravagances," that "he makes one laugh by the extravagant nature of his description," that "everything is exaggerated, beyond what is natural, everything is illusion," and that "if we saw the wind converted into a man on a horse crossing the sea, the image would seem to us not only extravagant but ridiculous." But capricho never appears as a synonym, even when the topic is the work of wild fancy (Belleza ideal, 35,102,117,132,143). By contrast, the aesthetic meaning of capricho, as indicated, relates to imaginational activity, which stimulates the production of artistically and morally faithful representations of Nature. Disconformity with the principles of imitation and good taste amounts to a fall from ideal beauty to personal vision. And here caprice gains recognition, if not full approval, by the preceptist Arteaga. To heed the very impulses of imagination that defy mimetic good taste is to encourage imperfections of form and value. Imagination is the faculty that artists may enlist in the service of ideal beauty, but that faculty also harbors darker, idiosyncratic resources. A rapid overview of the six types of meaning assigned to the Spanish term capricho will complete this discussion. The first usage signals emotional tonality, in the lighthearted range of bright and lively feelings pertaining to festive or amusing circumstances. A "capricious jig" might contrast with a stately march, while a "capricious songbird" might cheer a toiling farmer.51 The word "capricious" also denotes an improbable, illusory character, as when an individual hears imagined sounds and detects unreal effects and "capricious ideas." A second category of everyday meaning includes the idea of whim or quirk. Capriciousness is a woman's fickle behavior, or a faddish desire, or a sudden and unmotivated change of mind, or a strange event or odd chance, or a momentary twist in fortune. Span51. For details in context, see note 48 above.

The Lexicon of Unreason

165

ish use in these instances is ambivalent, either approving or not. As in the category of emotional tone, capricho when used pejoratively implies resignation, but in both positive and negative contexts the emphasis falls on ideas of disorder and uncontrollability. A third semantic category allows capricho to serve for general irrationality and extravagance. The evidence again shows a continuity of meaning in diverse contexts throughout the century. The capricious element in architecture is an unpredictable, erratic force that interferes with inherent qualities. In architecture, there are "essential parts that are distinguishable from those introduced by necessity or added by caprice." This adventitious irrationality is foolish or absurd because it lacks any basis in empirical reality. Thus a philosopher like Feijoo disparages the "dreams or nonsensical caprices" derived from seemingly reliable erudition or philosophical reflection (Obras, 1:545a). Feijoo's context is pragmatic skepticism. He will not tolerate unexamined notions in his own discourse, which stands moderately between philosophical rationalism and religious dogma. Stated in other terms, he balances unquestioned faith against free scientific inquiry, rejecting both popular and learned "superstitions." Here the notion of capricho involves a creation divorced from experience in the waking world. A final variant in this category relates caprice to the fantastic. Just as fantasy and fancy are antithetical to Reason, so is caprice contrary to careful method. The designer must be careful "to justify that not everything in his proposed system is fantastic or of pure caprice."52 The link between caprice and fancy points to the fourth semantic type, concerning the aesthetic effects of art. In architectural space, a pleasing irregularity in the design of a wall is said to produce "the most elegant, capricious form" when viewed against symmetrical arches. Extended to sculpture, the gracefulness of caprice may affect even the grotesques in relief work. Generic mixtures may also evoke a pleasingly confused variety, as in the half-wild garden against whose edge are counterposed a brook, rocks, lawn, and house, all "enameled in capricious relief." In music, intensely emotional moments arise through the irregularity of spontaneous effects, such as the alternating intervals of uniform and agitated tempos that delight the "capricious taste." As the rhetorician Luzan remarks, the role of fancy in these instances is detectable in the sense of wonder and agitation caused by the artist's "selecting among his mental images and 52. Martin Sarmiento, Sistema de los adornos de escultura del Nuevo Real Palacio deMadrid (1743-47), in Opuscules gallegos sobre Bellas Artes de los siglos XVIIy XVIII, ed. F. J. Sanchez Canton (Santiago de Compostela: n.p., 1956), 200, 211.

i66

Chapter Five

uniting the simple, natural ones by their similarity, relation, and proportion, [to] form a new capricious image which, because it is wholly the work of imagination, we call the artificial fantastic image."53 The aesthetic experiences just described inevitably bring discussion of the imagination into play, thus raising the issue of creativity itself. The fifth and sixth semantic categories of usages encompass the psychology of creative activity and the postpsychological phase of this process, whereby some haphazard agent or impulse affects the design. At times, it is a negative principle. The impulsive urge brings a corresponding erratic result into art, to the detriment of imitative norms. In other instances, the caprice remains within permissible bounds of verisimilitude, even when the representation is a wholly fantastic invention. Even grotesques can be "of excellent caprice and taste," while certain classical compositions are found to be executed "with ingenious caprice."54 The sixth and last designation for capricho is a role in the creative mechanism alongside Reason, will, and imagination. Either the artist's caprice "usurps" Reason and bypasses Nature, or his "genius wanders astray, abandoned to the inspirations of caprice."55 More positively, the architect may abandon controlled decision for the interplay of willed and capricious executions.56 In all cases, the psychological process comes to be an accepted and inevitable fact: images derive from retinal impressions and from "the ideas and caprices that artful fancy represents in the dream-induced illusions, which seem really to be true as experienced by each person" (Palomino, El museo pictmico, 303). A liaison between caprice and dreaming is acknowledged, and this foregrounds Goya's interlacing of subsequent more profound oneiric images. At the later stage, however, the term "caprice" surrenders its psychological meaning to the more important concept of dream process, while reverting to the term's original generic meaning in the pictorial arts.

The Grotesque and the Dehumanized The capricious "picturesque" of Rosa's style is a flamboyance that appears together with Tiepolo's influence in the architectural medleys termed Gro53. Ignacio de Luzän, Lapoetica, ed. R. P. Sebold (Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1977), 261. 54. Antonio Palomino, El museo pictoricoy escala optica (1715; Madrid: Aguilar, 1947), 233,1167. 55. Gaspar M. de Jovellanos, "Elogio de don Ventura Rodriguez" (1785), in Obras, vol. 1, ed. Cändido Nocedal, Biblioteca de Autores Espafloles 46 (Madrid: Atlas, 1963), 371. 56. Benito Bails, Arquitectura civil (Madrid: J. Ibarra, 1783), 738.

The Lexicon of Unreason

167

teschi by Piranesi in 1750. The word "grotesque" is defined, in one contemporary dictionary, by citing Felibien's emphasis on the "licentious manner of representing the somewhat chimerical kind of beasts and men in relief or in painting," imitative of the grotto decorations left by the Ancients.57 The style's luxuriance or excess implies a disproportion later transposed to the human realm. Thus in sheer physical terms the extremes of ugliness and ungracefiilness make an exotic people appear "grotesque," relative to European beauty, a relativism judged unfortunate by the Abbot Desfontaines in his preface to The New Gulliver. The pejorative connotation lingers when the word "grotesque" is applied to human behavior, although not without tolerance. In one definition, "grotesque persons can only succeed in society as a result of their singularity. One is amused as if by an object that is to be viewed as a picture."58 A deliberately grotesque style in literature exists in Spain, beginning with Francisco de Quevedo and Baltasar Gracian in the seventeenth century and subsequently in the satirical sketches of Diego de Torres Villarroel, Jose Francisco de Isla, and Jose Cadalso. The literary tradition culminates in Goya's art, which carries the grotesque mode into the Romantic aesthetic that eventually fascinates Baudelaire and Gautier. Independent of Goya, however, the eighteenth-century Spanish grotesque is a modality or expressive manner that employs deliberate distortion for the sake of incongruity itself. There exist at least four categories of activity that deviate from Neoclassical norms by their exaggerated elements, which, if not purely deformational, elicit censures such as "monstrous," "extravagant," "delirious," "chimerical," "demented," and "dissonant."59 These categories range from the festive masks and carnivals of semi-folkloric background to moralistic caricatures, grotesque portraits, and infra-mimetic techniques whose lexical impact produces violence, phantasmagoria, and various antinatural effects that are incorporated into diverse literary genres. In contrast to these practices, certain Spanish treatises on rhetoric and aesthetics place restraints on capricious artists with strong imaginations. Ignacio de Luzan, Gregorio Mayans, and Rafael Mengs, among 57. M.D.C. de l'Academie Fran^aise, Le dictionnaire des arts et des sciences (1688), nouvelle ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Rollin Pere, 1732), 1:533. 58. Louis-Antoine Caraccioli, Dictionnaire critique, pittoresque, et sententieux, propre a faire amnaitre les usages du steck, ainsi que ses bisarreries, 3 vols. (Lyon: Benoit Duplain, 1768), 1:268-69. 59. See Paul Ilie, "Concepts of the Grotesque Before Goya," in Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture 5, ed. Ronald C. Rosbottom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 185—201. For wider aspects of the grotesque aesthetic see Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1963), trans. Ulrich Weisstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); and Arthur Clayborough, The Grotesque in English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).

i68

Chapter Five

others, cross-reference the dictionary definitions of "grotesque"—ridiculous, extravagant ornamentations—with the fantastic or chimerical deformations that they associate with bad taste. Antonio Palomino approves of Bosch's "preposterous inventions," but he anticipates the Jesuit aesthetician Arteaga in frowning on comparable grotesqueries in their own age for violating the norms of "ideal beauty." In sum, while literary practice upholds ludic distortions, a conservative theoretical base links the exercise of pure imagination to rationalistic idealizations of verisimilitude. The circumstance is somewhat different in France, as suggested earlier, where the caricatural style of Callot is accepted by Voltaire in the same spirit that Rosa's exaggerated proportions are admired by Shaftesbury. Such proportions, when slightly deformed, permit a grotesque style to be wrought, but this permissible style must be distinguished from the mixing of several styles, which becomes "grotesque" in the very different sense of warranting an adverse value judgment. Like the ambivalent attitudes toward "caprice," the term "grotesque" and its manifestations converge into ambiguity. The word evolves like the phenomenon itself, a dual testimony to the Enlightenment's expanding consciousness of discourse and its relation to representation. In poetry, as Voltaire remarks of the "Bouffon," when satirical styles are not "pleasant, light, natural, and familiar" they are "grotesque, buffoonish, base, and especially forced."60 Voltaire's distinction is countered by his own poem La Pucelle, characterized favorably as a "grotesque poem" that revealed epic genius to some contemporary readers (Besterman, Voltaire, 389). An early ambivalence on the matter appears in Voltaire's own remarks of 1732: "A Muse descends with the false taste of burlesque / frisking at times in a gown of grotesque: / we may lower ourselves in passing to this caprice, / less for applause than to let ourselves go" (Oeuvres, 2:458). What is grotesque or not meets a varied standard. It is sometimes identified disagreeably by its unnatural representations, but it is also known for enhancing satire. One of its chief morphological attributes is the display of strange animal-like forms. What appears unpleasantly deformed is often a hybrid mixture of fauna too wondrous to be natural. Voltaire hints at this trait in a modified self-caricature, alluding to a friend's proposal that a sculptor create a bust of him: "if your Phidias is eager to do a grotesque by sculpting an old, toothless monkey of 82 years . . . I am entirely at your orders since you like caricatures" (Correspondence, Best.Di98i5). The self60. Voltaire, Oeuvres, 7:171,10:472.

The Lexicon of Unreason

169

caricature can be shared by caprice and grotesquerie alike, but the latter retains uniquely a zoomorphic element that violates human likeness. While the monkey belongs to the lower rungs on the scale of inverisimilitude, being a familiar parody of human form, the higher rungs support impossible shapes that defy credibility. Here the morphological sphere converges with value judgment under the sign of "monstrosity." Speaking of a theatrical piece and its ill-composed proportions, Voltaire deems it a "distasteful monster" whose unbelievable episodes are no worthier than a pantomime (Oeuvres, 24:221). Clearly Voltaire does not carry his animal imagery to the rungs of inverisimilitude, where the grotesque reaches toward monstrosity, but confines it to the historical range of grotesquerie, pushing beyond animal fables into humorous or implicitly savage exaggerations. He transforms the conventions of fable-writing perfected in La Fontaine's creatures without reaching Goya's sinister birds or domesticated satirical monsters. At this halfway mark, Voltaire's zoomorphic grotesquerie finds its naturalistic homologue in modified images tailored to an epoch of persecution. Government agents become vultures pouncing on his colony of tannery workers, while fellow citizens are made to torment one another like beasts alternately clever, stupid, or merely cruel: "The French will always be half tigers and half monkeys," or "I cannot understand how thinking beings can live in a land of monkeys who so often become tigers."61 These metaphorical conversions from human to bestial constitute moral homologues to the grotesque in art rather than conforming to conventional fable strategies. Nevertheless, they are mild examples of a grotesque transformation whose paradigm receives an Ovidian evocation ("monkeys metamorphosed into tigers") in one instance where fanaticism is condemned (Best.Di352j). Underlying these usages is a reductive conception of the human condition. It is not a consistently dehumanizing conception, and I would not insist that it is characteristically Voltairean. However, the satirical tendency to portray people as automata glares forth in Voltaire's letters and elsewhere. While derived from La Mettrie's mechanist model, it is conducive to the grotesquerie that Reason would oppose. It can serve Voltaire as a censuring device, as in his reference of 1766 to "the barbaric marionettes" of the fanatical South who should learn the lesson of tolerance from the educated citizens in the North (Best.Di35ii). In 1768 the same image refers specifically to Catholic dogmatists, where it contrasts the thoughtless "devotees 61. Voltaire,Correspondence, Best. D20559, D20654,D13544, D13428, D. app. 279,18:298.

I70

Chapter Five

of Rome" with the less numerous intelligent Catholics: "The world is filled with automatons who don't deserve to be spoken of. The number of wise men will always be very low" (Best.Dijuö). This image taints Voltaire's own mood with its deforming severity when, in 1770, a self-distancing moment prompts him to equate all mortal gestures as a "vanity of vanities": "men are amused by any kind of spectacle. One goes just as easily to the marionette show, the St. John's fireworks, the comic opera, High Mass, a burial. My statue will make some philosophers smile" (Best. D16431). The awareness of marionettes and automata has a particular context. Both the philosophical milieu and trends in manufacturing mark one illustrative statement by Voltaire: "We make automata that move by mechanical parts; God makes automata that have feelings. But, you say, I don't understand how God gives feeling and ideas to automata. Truly I do believe it, but would you understand it better if you had pronounced the word soul?" (Oeuvres, 25:259). The allusion to manufacturing underscores the philosophical mystery, whichVoltaire echoes in another dialogue where the point is that for all he knows human beings may as well be automata and, indeed, often look like them (Oeuvres, 25:464). The similarity between automata and marionettes is clear enough, yet in the distance between external behavior and its internal cause there is a qualitative difference. Voltaire maintains the distinction to the end of his life. Regarding human conduct, he reviles "the fanaticism in Paris, more violent than ever," on the occasion of Helvetius's arrest in 1777, there being "always in this city marionettes on one side and autos-da-fe on the other" (Best.D2o6}2). But what continues to elude Voltaire is an explanation for the mystery of social behavior. He addresses a learned man with the epithet "my big automaton" and concludes, "Let us repeat more than ever with Aristotle, Everything is a hidden quality." To discuss human beings, as he attempts, is to commiserate over the "poor marionettes of the eternal Demiurge, whom we know not, nor why nor how an invisible hand makes our springs move, then throws us out, and packs us up in the box!" (Oeuvres, 20:181). The nonsatirical turn of these grotesque or deforming epithets moves in the direction of Voltaire's rationally held beliefs. The epithets encroach specifically on the mechanistic concept that "we are pure automata upon whom an invisible power operates" by some incomprehensible force to set our limbs in motion (Oeuvres, 27:526). This force is the "universal principle of action," which furnishes ideas and feelings that do not "belong" to us. More than a coolness to the innatist concept of a pure soul, there is the insistent deflation of rational human will: "We, create ideas? poor folk that we are! What! it's evident that we have no role in creating primary ideas,

The Lexicon of Unreason

171

and that we are the creators of the secondary kind!" Any other notion would be "insolent and absurd," and to demonstrate this Voltaire resorts to the example of dreams. The semantic associations with dream activity add one more register to the network "caprice-grotesque-marionette-automaton." This solemn turn is consistent with the ambiguous function of the vocabulary discussed earlier. Just as these nonrational lexical items add substance to the subject they degrade and enlarge the subject's discursive space by their elaborate notice of its existence, so too in Voltaire's belittling of the human responsibility for the rational process. By removing from humanity all autonomous control over Reason, Voltaire disparages the rational status of the human condition while preserving the prestige of Reason's independent agency. The example of dreaming that follows thus joins the semantic field that describes Reason by displaying its opposite. Voltaire makes dream the surrogate of life itself.62 He conjectures that if our lives were divided equally between sleeping and waking, and if we dreamed whenever we slept, then it would be demonstrated that our lives do not depend on our rational or voluntaristic capacities. Furthermore, "supposing that we spent eight hours dreaming out of twenty-four, clearly one-third of our days do not belong to us in any manner. Add childhood and all the time engaged in purely animal functions, and see what remains. You will be astonished to confess that at least half your life does not belong to you at all" (Oeuvres, 28:527). By this logic, Voltaire concludes "that the universal principle of action does everything in you." Nevertheless, man's rational mind convinces him that he does everything for himself. By discrediting the human origins of Reason, Voltaire means to uphold the automatistic portrait of the man-machine. The paradoxical concept of an automaton, as suggested, is conducive to those deformations, inverisimilitudes, and grotesqueries that Reason seeks to annihilate. Beneath the surface paradox is the deep-seated problem of cognitive origins.63 This is not to claim for Voltaire a characteristically antirational thought. 62. Voltaire illustrates for the sake of argument why the human condition is not characterized by the proposition "My soul is an unknown substance whose essence is to think and feel," and why it is absurd to contend otherwise (Oeuvres 28:456). 63. This problem is discussed in detail by Ira Wade, who stresses Voltaire's divinityoriented basis for cognitive and ethical ideas in The Intellectual Development of Voltaire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969). The ironic distancing indicated in my examples fits uncomfortably with Wade's characterization. Nevertheless, my contention all along has been that dissenting moments and other lapses or retreats are precisely the revealing occasions when the Enlightenment focuses on Unreason as a more complexly defined concept than ever before. Alongside Wade's evidence of 1769, which aligns Voltaire with Malebranche in making God inseparable from nature and hence the universal principle of all things, the quotations in this chapter are from the Lettres deMemmius a Ciceron (1771).

172

Chapter Five

Nevertheless, the mockery in the preceding quotations grows compelling in one quip that denies that "my soul is a portion of the universal soul": "what a charming divinity, which is born between the bladder and the rectum fand] which spends nine months in an absolute nothingness" (Oeuvres, 28:456). The humor situates Voltaire unequivocally with respect to the rival theories of knowledge that bring Malebranche into dispute with Locke. Voltaire's materialist ideas in 1771 negate the proposition that "my soul is an unknown substance whose essence is to think and feel." He cites the dreamless sleep of the senses to prove that the soul cannot be a sixth sense. If the soul had such a substance, it would always be thinking and feeling, just as any matter fulfills its nature by never ceasing to be without bulk or solidity: It is quite certain that we do not always feel or think. One has to have a ridiculous hard-headedness in order to maintain that in a deep sleep, without any dreaming, one has feelings and ideas. [The soul] is therefore an entity [made] by Reason, a chimera, rather than a supposed substance that would lose its essence during half of its life. (28:456)

The ridiculing stratagem upholds the materialist position as much as it refutes Malebranche. Its significance carries over into Ira Wade's much different inquiry into Voltaire's religious philosophy as expressed in the essay "Tout en Dieu, commentaire sur Malebranche" (Wade, Intellectual Development, 716—19). The preceding quotations share, withu regard to ideas about cognition, a focus on the dormant state of human existence, which amounts to one-half or one-third of its total life. Too many inexplicable factors persist in the philosophical periphery for Voltaire merely to treat mental activity in its narrow waking consciousness. By expanding the context to include quiescence or unconscious passivity—known commonly as "sleep"—he does more than suggest the binary constitution of the physical organism. He discusses cognitive faculties in relation to the total human condition, an approach that contrasts with the conventional formulations of the problem, where sensory-rational activity is the exclusive focus. Voltaire's hesitancy concerns the origin of knowledge, partaking of his century's reassessment of the evolving deductive and inductive methods. Scholars will debate what his alternate remarks about materialism, deism, and traditional religion actually signify for the chronological development of his thought. What is certain is Voltaire's denial of a truly

The Lexicon of Unreason

173

generating intervention on the part of the human organism in the production of its own ideas. The perceptions "received by our machine seem to present themselves to our will. We believe we create ideas." But in this we are mistaken (Oeuvres, 28:526). Therefore, "says Voltaire, God, who produces everything, produces ideas, in whatever way he chooses" (Wade, Intellectual Development, 717). To this a further point may be added. If knowing is "given" in some inexplicable way, then the human machine embodies rationality in an involuntary and contingent sense. Voltaire intuits this thesis and he chooses two examples to illustrate it. He presents the example of the waking experience in a solitary sentence, whereas, oddly, he elaborates the example of dormancy in two paragraphs. Together the examples span the continuum of living reality that ranges from wakefulness to sleep. But the dormant range of experience appeals at greater length to Voltaire, with results that are described in the next section.

Dream Vocabulary in Voltaire The thesis of this chapter is that rationally oriented discourse employs a lexicon of Unreason that, when regarded as semantic network, overrides original nuances and allows a glimpse of veiled ontological and cognitive concerns. Such lexical items as "caprice." "grotesque," and, in Voltaire, "marionette" and "automaton" do more than augment the discursive space of the objects they deride by virtue of frequent use. They also invoke the agents that produce them: dream and imagination. The review of Voltaire's irrational vocabulary just completed moved imperceptibly into a discussion of the soul and its cognitive agents. Voltaire himself facilitated the elision by adding "dream" to the lexical network. In semantic terms, this word simply denotes a more extreme irrationality than does "caprice" (both terms obeying an aberrant imagination),. However "dream" also opens a more sophisticated register that makes discussion of cognitive experience inevitable. The texts cited from the Lettres de Memmius a Ciceron imply that the difference between waking and sleeping is negligible insofar as any rational component is concerned. This inference follows from Voltaire's focus on nonrational factors in the cognitive act. He insists that the rational component in waking and dormant states of mind is subordinate to extra-rational factors and, moreover, that it functions as a contingency to the universal principle of action. What is more, the rational function occupies only one

174

Chapter Five

sector of the full continuum that ranges from wakefulness to sleep, filling less than half a life span. Voltaire nearly equates dormancy and dream with the experience of the man-machine. He details the argument in a two-paragraph sequence asserting that it is perfectly clear that everything in dreams is done without our having the slightest role. We confess that we are then pure automatons, upon whom an invisible power operates with a force as real and as strong as it is incomprehensible. This power fills our head with ideas, inspires us with desires, passions, wills, and reflections. It sets in motion all the members of our body. (Oeuvres, 28:526)

Voltaire's purpose is philosophical in the Lockean vein rather than literary or psychological. He proposes to elucidate the mental processes, cognitive as well as affective. Yet his language grows eloquent and discursive, and actually ends with examples of outlandish dreams. The subject of these paragraphs is the mechanism that is activated during sleep. Its sheer potency stems from an unidentified but decidedly not divine source. The force or mechanism might, in some other context, be attributed to the inspired imagination. But the chosen context is the dream state, despite its traditional association with discredited mental phenomena. Dreaming is cited not for the purpose of disparaging its contents relative to rationality but, on the contrary, to demonstrate a capability homologous with the conscious mind. Dreams are further proof of the principle of action, of the fact that, awake or asleep, the mind is not responsible for its thoughts or feelings. The text just cited is remarkable for what it leaves unsaid but assumed. Anyone who claims "that, in a deep sleep, without any dreaming, one has feelings and ideas" shows a "ridiculous hard-headedness," according to Voltaire. Ideas are impossible events in a dreamless sleep. Yet Voltaire takes the trouble to ridicule the notion of any such possibility, then remarks that ideas do fill our dreams. Why he belabors this fact, and why he finds it significant, are worth pondering. Lexical items such as "ideas" and "sentiments" belong to the vocabulary of philosophical discourse. They are conscious events, associated with awakened mental faculties. Yet the dormant mind produces comparable events when dreaming. With Reason asleep, the mind still may dream. Stated differently, sleep may give rise to dreams, which contain ideas and feelings even though dreams are involuntary—formed independently of Reason, conscious memory, and sense

The Lexicon of Unreason

175

perception. If this observation about dreams seems unremarkable today, it apparently merited Voltaire's labored attention at the close of a long philosophical career. Its novelty in eighteenth-century discourse may be judged by the low frequency of oneiric references in seventeenth-century accounts of mind and soul in Descartes, Locke, and Malebranche. An arrested rational faculty does not hobble other agencies that might rouse the mind from somnolence. Oneiric arousal can border on madness, and Voltaire recommends to the philosopher who wishes to understand madness "that he reflect on the parade of ideas during his dreams" (19:159). The analogy between dreaming and madness clarifies Voltaire's thinking with respect to Reason's neutralization: "Restless dreams are really a passing madness." Just as madness consists of "having incoherent thoughts and behaving accordingly," so too do dreams exercise their own illogic. They prompt the dreamer to produce, if not Goyesque monsters, "a thousand incoherent ideas that upset him." People who dream are afflicted, perhaps even ill, just as people who are mad suffer in the waking state "an illness that prevents them necessarily from thinking and acting like others." Voltaire holds the prevailing view that dreams, particularly agitated ones, originate in some physiological malfunction. The same physiological explanation applies to madness, but its significance lies elsewhere. Like the dream, madness explains the fundamentals of rationality— or rather, they both explain why cognitive states depend unaccountably on a nonrational factor. Just as the arrest of Reason during sleep does not entirely account for the condition of Unreason, owing to the presence of oneiric ideas, so too in madness. The mad person's mind also constructs ideas that are nonrational: "this man is not at all deprived of ideas; he has them just like other men in the waking state and often while he sleeps" (19:159)· An ideational mechanism is still to be identified, one that is responsible for the paradoxical condition whereby a cognitive act may be carried out in the absence of Reason. Such acts would be intellectually absurd, but they preserve an independent status from feelings and sensory experience. In this paradox, the nature of rationality may be glimpsed. Mad ideas do not attain the status of rational thought, but they do arise from the transactions completed by a mental agency that administers the conversion of sensations into ideas. The irrational mind takes credit for "receiving the perceptions that the wisest men experience." Nevertheless, an independent factor renders the mind prone to convert everything it apprehends into "an extravagant assemblage" (19:160). The influencing factor may be understood by a negative concept.

176

Chapter Five

Rather than an enabling influence whose result is the "extravagant assemblage," the decisive factor is the prevention of rationality owing to the absence of a cohering agent. Ideas are present, but they lack linkage, consecution, and continuity. The unnamed synthesizer, so to speak, ordinarily follows sensory conversion. But as Voltaire notes, in both "madness during wakefulness" and in dreams, an unspecified interference disables the process. He intuits these facultative distinctions without identifying the mechanisms involved. At best his explanation is physiological: "Nature punishes us for taking too much food or choosing it badly by giving us thoughts; for we hardly think while sleeping except for bad digestion" (19:159). He verges on an insight when he puzzles, "my madman has the same perceptions as [wise men]. There is no apparent reason why his mind, having received by their senses all their tools, cannot use them" (19:160). But here his analysis halts: "the faculty of thinking, given by God to man," is "like the other senses," that is, "it is subject to derangement." He concludes weakly by falling back on physiology: "A madman is a sick man whose brain suffers, just as a man with gout is a sick man who suffers in the feet and hands." The neurophysiological details of derangement and their precise locus remain unclarified. From another standpoint, Voltaire approaches nonrational intellection by attacking the innatist concept of the pure soul, mentioned earlier. How can it be, he asks, that when sleep suspends all ordinary senses there still can remain "an internal sense that is living"? How can it be that dreams constitute a visual and auditory phenomenon despite the inactivity of eyes and ears? The immediate answer seems to be that those sensory instruments are not "the only operating organs of the machine." Voltaire follows an interim logic only to dismiss it soon after. Can it be therefore that "the pure soul, removed from the senses' control, enjoys its rights of freedom"? (20:433). If those organs can act alone to produce dreams, then they ought to be just as capable of producing ideas in daytime. Yet they do not. Hence some other faculty must participate. If the "pure soul" acts alone to produce ideas during sleep, with the other senses hanging in suspension, why are these ideas nearly always "irregular, unreasonable, and incoherent"? Surely it is extraordinary, suggests Voltaire, that precisely at the moment when this soul is most free from external disturbances, "there is more trouble in all of its imaginings" (20:434). Astonishingly, the soul at full liberty seems to go mad. It is logical to expect the opposite: if the theory of innate ideas is correct, then the soul would be most energetic and philosophically at its peak condition when the body is asleep:

The Lexicon of Unreason

177

If [the soul] were born with metaphysical ideas (as claimed by so many writers who dream with open eyes), its pure and luminous ideas of being, the infinite, and first principles should awaken in it with the greatest energy when its body is asleep: one would only be a good philosopher in dream. (20:434)

The believer in innate ideas is thereby cautioned. His belief stumbles over the involuntary arrival of ideas during sleep. This nonrational ideation cannot be accounted for by other known relationships between brain and soul or between memory and either one. Nor does Voltaire account for it in his article on dreams. His unsystematic scholia on cognition leaves open to inference the possibility that idea-formation (idees) and image-formation (;imaginations) are governed by a faculty that indiscriminately presides over waking and sleeping activities. The further inference is that any description of this faculty may profit as much from the evidence of dreams as from rational evidence. This is not the place to link Voltaire's text to the cognitive implications of the dream mechanism. The pertinent feature is the "affinity between dream, delirium, and madness," mentioned by Diderot in Chapter 4. This represents an expanded view of where to locate cognitive activity for study. It also marks a horizon free of the value judgments that conventionally define the rational process as a subject of investigation. Corresponding to the new subject-matter and vocabulary is a propensity for certain authors to write in many different veins. Again Voltaire and Diderot assert their presence. Their variable styles, multiple registers, and heterogeneous points of departure for discussing the nature of knowledge carry disciplined writing beyond the forms recognized by the expository writers of preceding generations. The later authors exhibit the public's diverse moods through nonrational markings in published writings, and they display their personalities in private letters. The unpredictable results comprise an alternate discourse of uneven thought processes, in contrast to the orderly thought commonly associated with enlightened discourse. The next chapter takes the example of Voltaire to describe thinking in this nonrational alternate form.

6. The Nonrational Thought Process

Oh, he'll be brilliant, that writer who is entirely delivered unto his genius, who abandons himself to voluntary negligences, sows cheerful and varied traits with a free hand, condescends to make mistakes, takes pleasure in a certain disorder, and is never so interesting as when he is irregular. Thus the man of taste par excellence. After him, only fools delight in dull symmetry, all lively imaginations want to borrow yet more wings, . . . writers want to be in continual activity like elementary fire... . He who is born to write is lively, dazzling, swift, above all rules.... Thus Voltaire: a stag racing through the field of literature . . . and other authors are frozen, or crawling tortoises. —Mercier, L'an 2440 When a prominent philosopher indulges in self-derisive lapses, no psychologizing is needed to see the tension between Reason and Unreason. Voltaire's automata and marionettes are devices that comment sardonically on the vanity of human effort, as we saw in his self-reflective moment of 1770. Voltaire devised a similar ironic epithet for himself in a letter to the Marquise du DefFand two years earlier: " I am an old Punchinello w h o needs a comrade" (Correspondence, Best.Di5i63). The fact that a self-subverting track can intrude on a philosophical frame of mind is significant. Punchinello intrudes, whether the mind wills it or not, at a deeper level than the self-subverting discourse generally cited by deconstructionist critics. Certainly the phenomenon exists as a mental propensity prior to language, finding written description later through demeaning or frivolous images. The allusion to Punchinello may also be linked to other themes in Voltaire's writings (Oeuvres, 25:260—76). M y own purpose is to link this allusion to the lexicon of Unreason described in the preceding chapter. Within this semantic field, being a clown or a D o n Quixote affords Voltaire the chance to be a tentative confounder of Reason. Voltaire's self-irony is an important manifestation of a mind in doubt, or in ludic repose, or in both at different moments. In every case, the display

The Nonrational Thought Process

179

uses a particular vocabulary that exposes the space where the philosophical mind shifts into nonrational thinking. If thinking is a rational act, it may sound like a contradiction in terms to speak of a philosopher's "nonrational thought process." Yet not all thoughts are rational, nor do all rational thoughts reach the printed page through a logical process. Some written thoughts can be separated from the sentiments behind them. Some ideas cohere only after sentiments arising concurrently are screened out. And some utterances merely spin filaments of thought. The quips, the asides, and the metaphorical digressions making for a rich, multiple-clause prose style are all microstructures that weave in and out of simple thought-structures that compound the "main idea" of an utterance. Such locutions often thread spontaneously through the thought process, microstrands spun out without any deliberate logic. Microstructures appear suddenly to break the surface of discourse and interdict rational univocality. They also "weave" into the discourse compatible inflections that compound the simple design of the original thought. This is not a form-content distinction. The compounding operation is most readily observed under informal circumstances such as personal letter-writing. When Voltaire asks what the benefit of rational activity is, and dubs Descartes's philosophy an "extravagant novel," this private metaphorical impulse does not negate his public career as a thinker who expects to be taken seriously (Best.D14634). While Voltaire disdains metaphysics, he respects the problems that foment it. He insists in the same letter that, much as he esteems Newton, the "hidden cause" of gravity remains unknown. The derisively metaphorical moment ("extravagant novel") reveals a distancing ability within the rational gesture. Like the self-dubbings "Punchinello" and "Don Quixote," the distancing is capricious, but the immediate dissonance is assimilable to the larger meaning. Voltaire goes on to say that the first thinker who discoursed philosophically had plunged the world into "a labyrinth from which we cannot today remove ourselves." Modern philosophy is not doing any better, he adds, since the latter-day Cartesians had jumped "into the abyss" or, in another metaphor, continued to grind the metaphysical millstone "like a blind man." These figurative informalities are phrases that betray Voltaire's private opinions as a letter writer. Similar and repeated instances, as well as their characteristic appearance in the correspondence of other great authors, suggest a phenomenon worth exploring in any book concerned with the irrational. The example of Voltaire in this book may stand as a hypothesis

i8o

Chapter Six

needing further corroboration before it can be generalized. But since even one example requires ample documentation, the discussion here must be confined to a single author.

Quixotic Discourse The failure of Cartesian rationalism cited in Voltaire's 1768 letter takes a more qualified form in his published essay "Nature" of the same year. Here he states that human affairs are a "chaos" arising from mental blindness. Yet he also believes that philosophical error is correctable as far as the laws of Nature are concerned. Reason's failure turns out to be relative and ultimately remediable. Thus the published essay typifies Enlightenment discourse by favoring rational dispositions that shun metaphysics. Unlike the private letter, the public form of writing curbs sentiment and impassioned imagery and villifies the monster of Unreason. Nevertheless, the essay "Nature" also claims that the laws governing political societies eventually awaken "the fury of emotions that... blind the spirit" (Oeuvres, 27:170). Such locutions—fury, blindness, chaos, dream, extravagance—denounce the enemies of legitimate Reason and paradoxically ruffle the discourse of an Enlightenment often identified with rational tranquility. Voltaire's essay troubles its rational texture by these fervid terms, necessary for identifying a threat to its own enlightening purpose. Such terms signal not only abstract sources of error but also tangible harm to eighteenth-century conditions of life. The agitation has its counterpart in states of mind that require restraint in the same way that social affairs need correction through Reason. Mental responses wax passionate as well as appealing to cold logic. This is not to say that Enlighteners generally abhor nonrational vehicles. To distinguish between feeling and reasoning is not to divide human beings into rational and nonrational groups, but does help to situate polymaths like Voltaire and Diderot with respect to the Montesquieus, Humes, Johnsons, and Jovellanoses of their day. These Enlighteners also cultivated several genres or styles by patterning their orderly careers with extravagant intervals of writing. There are qualitative differences, however, in the unconventional fantasy of Voltaire's Candide, which appears bizarre alongside the dignified frame of his philosophical stature. And what is true for Voltaire also applies to Diderot, a thinker who helped produce the Encyclopedic and yet whose D'Alembert's Dream spurns conventional forms of

The Nonrational Thought Process

181

conceptual sequence. Some of the most original ideas of the Enlightenment are perceived by Diderot's character amid the chaotic associations of delirium, a condition joined to a rational dialogue itself paced by whimsy, guesswork, and eroticism.1 If the lifelong careers of certain Enlighteners can range between irrational and rational phases, it is plausible to hypothesize the same oscillation for mental activity itself. Many degrees of disorder and order intervene between the polar states of feeling and reasoning, a span that should discourage any idealizing notion of rational coherence. But oscillating mental states are not just long-term events. A single session of thought can traverse the same rational-affective scale. This scale is often obscured. An author's discursive calculation at any particular time may conceal whim, fervor, or sobriety in order to produce the desired uniformity of tone or style. Such an author thinks, nonetheless, with a single mind, though custom and scholarly convenience separate the writings later in accordance with private and public roles. These considerations argue for elevating private letters to the status of writings intended for publication. Letters usually play an ancillary role in intellectual history and biography. They are used to corroborate thoughts already expressed in more public formats. Yet letters constitute a discourse that may challenge the primacy of published reasoning. They are often the occasion for the nonrational side of an observed mentality. In Voltaire's case, the nonrational side is a capricious one that seems to have nourished his intellectual stamina throughout a career of shifting degrees of rationality. These shifts do not careen from one extreme to the other. They alternate by shorter degree spans, thereby investing positive value in otherwise unaccountable utterances and expressive gestures. The question is whether these impulsive moments should be esteemed less worthy of serious attention than the unexpected published whimsies or fantastic satires that enliven the collected works of "serious" thinkers. So-called "extravagant" expression, private or otherwise, is perhaps nothing more than the incongruity experienced by readers who suddenly find a creative mind exposing its antipodal talents at the same time. A perceived "capricious" gesture may be merely an unexpected glimpse of an imagii. Perhaps Rousseau is the rare exception, by "drenching" his prose in sentiment in order to achieve "a celebration of Reason," as he does in the Profession of Faith, notes Peter Gay in The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2 of The Sciences of Freedom (1969; reprint New York: Norton, 1977), 546. My methodological argument sustains Gay's argument for "the Enlightenment's rehabilitation of the passions" (192).

i82

Chapter Six

nation torn free of Reason's control. If so, the word "extravagance" need not carry a pejorative connotation. A fair assessment would grant that the actual thinking process transcends purely rational criteria. The fruits of a thought process thus would be ideas that might be no less intelligent for being affect-laden and perhaps conceived capriciously. The discarded factor would be the rhetorical strategy that clothes discourse in rational or irrational robes without regard to the idea itself. These observations provide an incentive for examining Voltaire's incidental writings. His letters arguably confirm Reason's spectrum of unreasonableness. Count Gustav Filip Creutz recognized his imagination to be the harmonizing site of his nonrational mechanisms. Regarding a period often said to witness Reason's "infinite progress," he wrote (as cited briefly on p. 142) to David Hume that his bubbling imagination seizes the beautiful and the ridiculous with equal transport, . . . the most illuminating reflections are born naturally and effortlessly. Accustomed to generalizing about things, he always presents them from a philosophical viewpoint. Sometimes he strolls in the meadows o f imagination, the books of destiny being open to him. H e sees universal Reason extending its reign in fifty years. Asia will have no more slavery, Europe no more prejudices. . . . One knows very well that these lovely chimeras will never be realized, b u t . . . Voltaire knows how to render them plausible. (Best.Di238o)

This profile of Voltaire's mind clearly paints no incompatibility between rationality and the chimeras of an ebullient imagination. It does highlight the multiform aspect of his thought process. The portrait does not literally convert Voltaire into a Don Quixote searching for chimeras. At any rate, the epithet does not call him a "quixotic figure." A Don Quixote, by today's standards, is either a madman or a foolish idealist misguided by an overdose of reading. The contrasting term "quixotic" evokes by any standard someone "idealistic to an impractical degree, especially marked by rash, lofty romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action" (Webster's New Collejjiate Dictionary, 1973). If to this definition we add Voltaire's many moments of self-identification with Don Quixote, along with the moods and self-assigned roles that accompany these moments, there emerges a significant divergence from rationality. I shall call these moments "Quixotic" rather than "quixotic" in the ordinary sense. The approach I am suggesting requires a brief comment. Reading a philosopher for random utterances may not turn up material that substanti-

The Nonrational Thought Process

183

ates his formal thought, but such utterances can disclose expressive patterns of importance. Readings limited to public formats risk excluding authentic statements that are taken for uncharacteristic or nonrational utterances. Such an exclusionary approach, however, would require discarding the rare but integral grotesquerie of Candide from a full account of Voltaire's style. At the same time, there is a danger in overestimating the casual patterns of private correspondence. Specialists in Voltaire should not misconstrue my intention when I isolate allusions to Don Quixote and group them into one category of epistolary references.2 The existence of an epistolary mass of Quixotic and quixotic allusions is beyond dispute. Their function is either random and trivial, or consistent and symptomatic. I shall provide a skeletal chronology of references to establish the continuous nature of Voltaire's allusions to the Spanish knight. However, the significance of this continuous presence is what concerns me. Its evaluation depends on the concept of microstructure. This will be a matter of hermeneutic strategy rather than of influence study or historicist commentary.3 The allusions that make a Quixotic judgment are more fully charged than are the merely literary allusions. Their frequency is most noticeable during the 1750s, continuing spottily throughout the 1760s and intensifying to a final dense interval between 1770 and 1772. No Quixotic references appear during the last four years of Voltaire's life. It is tempting to glimpse a common bond between the fifty-year-old Spanish knight and the fifiyish philosophical Frenchman who begins to evoke him earnestly. No less inviting is an attempt to discover in the philosopher an aging but wise 2. My purpose does not include ascribing a direct influence by Cervantes' novel Don Quixote on Voltaire's thinking, much less proving familiarity with specific episodes. This would be a question of Voltaire's "solid reading" of a book, an issue tied to whether or not he kept the novel fresh in mind as a source for textual citation. Far from this factual problem, my purpose is to interpret the momentary swerve from rationality within the rational thought. 3. The Voltaire specialist is justified nonetheless in wondering precisely what "mass" of Quixotic allusions can be gleaned from the correspondence. A preliminary sampling will gauge the chronological span of fanciful references over an epistolary lifetime. Just past the midpoint, in 1758, an impetuous Voltaire can be discovered with his real-estate schemes slipping out of control. In a moment of symbolic embellishment of his acreage, he wanted to erect a mill on the brook running through Les Delices, thus providing his retreat with an evocation of Don Quixote. A flabbergasted friend cut down this impractical project with a prompt admonishment (Correspondence, Best.D788i; see Chapter 5, note 15, above). The whim seized the otherwise shrewd money-maker Voltaire at the time he was completing Candide under the lax reins of a riotous imagination. At a less capricious moment, in 1735, the forty-one-year-old author described himself as a philosophical Don Quixote living in atonement (Best.D886), while at age thirty he wrote certain poems that moved a friend to describe related musings on the Spanish knight (Best.D222). Two years before Voltaire's death, he painted a moral portrait of himself as the redresser of wrongs, "a species of Don Quixote" (Best.Di905o). Dozens of similar comparisons through his life mark rather different moods and circumstances.

I84

Chapter Six

combatant who deems his past idealism to have been heroic and foolish. But neither youth nor old age demonstrably affects the case for observing a mind simply reflecting Quixotic or quixotic thoughts.4 These epistolary slips into the guise of Don Quixote are revealing for their nonconceptual interest, whereas Voltaire's references in published writings to Cervantes's novel illustrate conceptual thought by impersonal example. When the same references carry over into private letters, however, they echo mood and temperament. The relationship between these two bodies of writings foreshortens the distance between them, a point to which I shall return. It bears repeating that the issue of whether Voltaire was wellread in the novel Don Quixote is immaterial to my discussion. So too is the question of whether he was as ignorant of Spanish literature as he once modestly insisted (Best.D5832). His reaction to a package of books sent by a Spanish acquaintance is, "I don't think they are at all interesting; I think there is nothing of interest in Spain except for Don Quixote" (Best.Di7i73). This opinion is important for a different reason, however, since it rests on long-held literary criteria regarding genres and talents.5

Moods of Unreason Certain strands in Enlightenment discourse exhibit ambiguities that crack the mirror of rational and nonrational representations of reality. This capricious feature of the Age of Reason calls attention to the sparse scholarly commentary of aesthetic alternatives to the better-known practices of writers at the time. Voltaire's use of terms like "bizarre" and "extravagant" points to the corresponding pair of terms "grotesque" and "imagination" in the following remark in the Philosophical Letters, 22: "It would be difficult to decide whether knight errantry is turned into ridicule more by Cervantes' grotesque pictures or by Ariosto's fertile imagination." These aesthetic classifications extend beyond Renaissance literature, persisting in 4. As for their linguistic peculiarities, a certain interest inheres in such lexical curiosities as Voltaire's early coinage "Welsh donguichotes" who are neither base nor fanatical (Best.Di7762). However, vocabulary and style adhere for the most part to the tonally distinctive norms established by the correspondence as a whole. 5. Recommending certain books to an English correspondent, Voltaire adds, "For the Spanish authors j [sic] know not many worthy of y r perusal, besides don Quixote in point of ridicule, the Conquest of Mexico as to history, and Quevedo in point of imagination" (Best.D48si). The qualities of "ridicule" and "imagination" match a taste for the bizarre and the incongruous noted earlier, and partly explain his being engrossed with Don Quixote in 1753, when a spate of allusions plainly translate his reading into personal homilies (Best.Ds475).

The Nonrational Thought Process

18s

the Enlightenment's critical discourse. Their persistence is measured by experiments like Candide, Rameau's Nephew, the "futuristic" fiction studied by Paul Alkon, and forms further afield like Füseli's paintings, each a harbinger in its own way of creative freedom beyond the norms of an age epitomizing rationality. If that age earns the equibalanced epithet "Enlightenment," then the Quixotic vein in Voltaire is a sign of growing perturbation. This sign may not necessarily be an aberrant impulse, but tradition relegates it to a minor position. Thus everything in Voltaire that is whimsical, fantastic, and jocose belongs to the supposed deviation that was his story-writing. It is true that his stories bear the adjective "philosophical," but despite their popularity in his own time their hilarity and novelesque form diminish their status relative to "serious" genres in the eyes of everyone, including Voltaire. In this sense of eccentricity, the Quixotic world clings to Voltaire, stimulates his nonpublic self to ironic comparisons with the Spanish knight, and expands his fantasy-making powers of expression. The propensity spans a quadrilateral bridge across Voltaire's thought process; it links simultaneous registers of published and private discourses, each of these reaching into national culture and the history of the Enlightenment. Voltaire's moods of Unreason depend considerably for expression on Quixotic allusiveness. The pathos filling his political fortunes is also embodied in the figure of Don Quixote, who does not merely symbolize the disasters of foolhardy idealism in Voltaire's career. In a pensive moment after his break with Frederick the Great, he wishes plaintively: "I hope at least that the roads will be clear, and that your skinny Don Quixote will find no more Yangüeses on the way" (Best.D5528). The comparison follows an attack on the kind of scholarly foolishness that a Voltairean Don Quixote might wish to eradicate and replace with Cervantean wisdom. Lest the notion of a forlorn Voltaire seem incongruous with the future author of Candide, we need only remember the countless notes of solitude and of disguised or half-veiled self-pity that echo through his letters. With these notes audible, his self-attributions of Quixotic repentance are not easily dismissed as casual comparisons. The same bleak mood while contemplating the future also steals over his journeys in exile. Having little motive to play-act before his niece, he tells her, "here I am at the Duchess of Barataria after doing penance on the Black Mountain. Don Quixote was very much like me, a knight of the sorrowful countenance, but he had good health and I do not" (Best.Ds475). The year of this remark, 1753, is particularly critical because the wan-

i86

Chapter Six

dering Voltaire had not yet settled in Les Delices. Nevertheless, the mood and its vehicle had appeared in a letter eighteen years earlier. A younger and more vigorous Voltaire then wore the penitent's robe more festively: "The peaceful philosopher whom you mock, Monseigneur, is meanwhile in his mountains doing penitence like Don Quixote awaiting his Dulcinea" (Best.D886). Having withdrawn to the secluded Cirey while under harassment for the Philosophical Letters, the forty-one-year-old Voltaire wears a mask of innocence that will become habitual in later adversities. His identification with Don Quixote in this case ignores the knight's older age, a disparity that excepts Voltaire from any literal comparison. Yet the very choice to make this equation binds him to the seemingly discontinuous penance declared eighteen years later. The "youthfully" made allusion is fitting because it summarizes the injustice that torments the champion of "the good cause." The situation is unjust not least because the champion is peace-loving. The contradiction invites satire in the Cervantean framework owing to the ethical anachronism and the hero's old age. In the Enlightenment's unhumorous framework, however, the Quixotic allusion bears a moral truth that readjusts any disparity and denies the inefficacy attributable to Voltaire's idealistic values. Why then does Voltaire avow some failure in himself? The unanswerable question pursues him into exile, where his self-image reflects a wandering Quixotic penitent. The nature of his fancied guilt and merited punishment remains unclear. Faced with the world's hostility, he reacts with a metaphor that carries overtones of fantasied unworthiness and salvation, whose religious and psychological implications go beyond this discussion (Best.D2472). Perhaps he believed that his physical illness was affliction enough, mentioning it so often that now scholars dismiss the motif as hypochondria. At any rate, it is notable that his reaction occurs at the time of La Condamine's mythopoeic adventure to Peru in 1735, which in turn coincides with Alzire, a play that marks Voltaire's sedentary recreation of how Spain conquered a noble indigenous culture (Best.D96i). Dramaturgy, however, is obviously not a satisfactory substitute for scientific exploration. When the dramatist is also a philosophical historian who is excoriated by his ungrateful society, the questions of "Why punished" and "How to atone" join hands Later, in the penance of 1753, Voltaire envies Don Quixote his health, metamorphosing his own lifelong "hypochondria" into a comparison sustained more by his periodic failure to see justice triumph than by reminders of bodily frailty. These opaque moods tending toward uncharacteristic introspection

The Nonrational Thought Process

187

may be brushed lightly to one side of weightier published ideas. But they do conform to a characteristic irony employed by Voltaire in substantive expression. A Quixotic reference in one such instance indicates a mind-set inclined toward regretfulness or puzzlement over its actions. The moment is revealing because Voltaire is hardly given to contemplative reminiscence, yet here the stock-taking moment awakens his Quixotic consciousness. It is ten years before his death, and he recounts with irony a litany of lifetime feats: After that, I would boldly defy the Jansenists and the Molinists; and if I were still slandered, I would place these new trials at the foot of my cross. When I die, I aim to put you in charge of my canonization. While we wait, rest assured that no penitent in the world loves you as much as I; my health is rather weak. I don't know how I shall be able to offer the hospitality of my retreat to the two pleasant Spanish gentlemen whom you mention. Ask them, I pray you, for their deepest indulgence; let them believe they are coming to see Don Quixote doing penance on the Black Mountain. (Best.D14.983)

Such trials cause him to believe he is eligible, if not for sainthood, then for knighthood. He has thrown down challenges and is drubbed spiritually for his efforts. On his Black Mountain, a forest of countervailing irrationalisms, he refortifies himself through the mortifications preserved by memory. This is no contrite Voltaire ready to exchange Reason for selfabasement. His penance arrives with the castigation wreaked by remembrance, but he will prepare yet another sally into the printed medium.

Microstructure What I am calling "Quixoticism" in Voltaire is a notion of how fantasymaking can sometimes entwine with nonaffective truth-statements. In the production of meaning, the thought process sometimes weaves truthstatements from separate rational and imaginative strands. The process affects the way we define the Enlightenment's general discourse in terms of a cognitive process. This discourse has been characterized as having unraveled the fabric of similitude into the threads of sameness or identity (versus difference). In its first phase, the unravelling typifies Cervantes' novel, according to Michel Foucault.6 The epistemic scale or "episteme" Foucault 6. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 46—50, 210—11.

i88

Chapter Six

describes is vast. If it were to be reduced for comfortable textual analysis, I suggest that the Quixotic allusion in Voltaire illustrates it aptly. His philosophically monosemic statements come under pressure from ludic, ambiguous, or ironic resonances in many of his literary representations. A complicating factor in Voltaire's thought process is his polymathy. His thought ranges across so many subjects that itfillsboth the logical and the imaginative registers of discourse. Logic is reputed to be the antagonist of imagination by philosophies and rhetorics prior to the eighteenth century.7 Yet the polarity is refuted by a Quixotic rationalist. When such a thinker utters a multivalent allusion, it tends to be constituted by rational and nonrational impulses. The paradoxical polarity can even be observed over the span of a lifetime such as Voltaire's. On the one hand, he feels an attraction to the orderly deistic universe of Alexander Pope, and to the Newtonianism that dismantled the "reveries" of Descartes. Viewed as a matter of practical rationality, Voltaire's aversion to Cartesian "reveries" is an aversion to a universe deemed a "figment of the imagination to which nothing in reality corresponded."8 This position would seem to exclude dream and imagination from Voltaire's cognitive values. On the other hand, Voltaire nurses an impassioned imagination and a satirical bent that close ranks with his antipathy toward systematic philosophy and metaphysics. These divergent leanings pose no contradiction for critics like Ira Wade. Yet even while it may seem reasonable to find Voltaire disparaging Malebranche as a "dreamer," it is an eccentric reasonability for him at the same time to have possessed as many books by Malebranche as by any other thinker and, furthermore, actually to discover in Malebranche much to recommend (Wade, Intellectual Development, 713). Such a circumstance follows a pattern formularized by Don Quixote in the expression "the Reason of Unreason," a mode of thinking honed by the practice of excess, specifically the excessive reading of books. This very formula serves Voltaire when he likens the paradoxical Rousseau to "Achilles who rose up 7. Eighteenth-century wariness of imagination remains strong; a famous instance is Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, chap. 18. In psychology "the imagination will run its own course, alone or in the company of understanding; and as soon as the latter allows it to do so, it will quickly disorient" (M. Beguelin, Memoire sur l'art de connaitre les pensees A'autre a l'aide de la metaphysique, vol. ι of Choix des memoires et abrege de l'histoire de l'Academie de Berlin [Berlin, 17671,428-307). 8. Ira O. Wade,The Intellectual Development of Voltaire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), 618. 9. Benjamin R. Barber. "Rousseau and the Paradoxes of the Dramatic Imagination," Daedalus (Summer 1978): 79.

The Nonrational Thought Process

189

against glory." Again, Rousseau is also "like Malebranche, whose brilliant imagination caused him to write against imagination."9 The spirit of contradiction can take many forms, as can paradoxical outcomes and irrational allusions. For discussion purposes, I shall focus on a single category of nonrational epistolary discourse. Voltaire's allusions to Don Quixote are apparently random, but in fact they are a subcategory of all subjective allusions. Taken together, the Quixotic utterances expose the mind's nonrational activity. Such allusions comprise a microstructure. They are one of numerous textual microstructures that reflect the multifarious activities of the same mind. The Quixotic impulse behind the allusion subsists along with other generators of mental activity. The impulse manifests itself as a literary allusion, but the allusion entwines with more rational utterances to reflect the thought process at the moment of writing. At that moment, the Quixotic portion shadows forth the entire thought. My contention is that Voltaire's letters expose nonrational operations that surge against their dominant cognitive order. These operations emerge with special clarity in moments when he remembers Don Quixote. Such moments of imagination and faith are "Quixotic" by virtue of their ambiguous effect on discursive precision—on the representational purpose of discourse, as Foucault might put it. Quixotic allusions skew the precision of the thought process. Ambiguity ensues. The rationally structured utterances that make the text reasonably monosemic submit to the counterrational microstructures inserted among them. Granted that all texts are subject to interpretation, their relative unambiguity may still be conceded, even in expository discourse such as a private letter, where clear representation emerges in the relative absence of rhetorical strategies. The distinction between unequivocal and equivocal utterances also depends on their length. If the utterance—a verbal structure of any size—is clear or rational, this must be because its structure outmeasures the counter-rational component. The term "microstructure" reflects this scale of proportions. In the case of allusions to Don Quixote, they multiply the meaning of an utterance that otherwise says only one thing. By not contributing to univocality (Foucault calls it "homosemanticism"), these allusions function at a microstructural level of meaning, in contrast to the unequivocal meaning of the utterance. They comprise one class of microstructure, of which there are many. For the purpose of this study, all such classes are represented by the microstructure that displays a Quixotic signification. The intricate mental complexion just hypothesized, with its inter-

I90

Chapter Six

weave of disorder and order, or of Unreason and Reason, typifies both the Enlightener's personality and the century itself. A vivid description occurs in Diderot's terse self-portrait: In a single day I had a hundred different physiognomies, depending on the object I was affected by. I was serene, sad, dreamy, tender, violent, passionate, enthusiastic.... Who knows what I am capable of? I don't feel that I have yet put half of my energies to use. Up to now, I have only trifled. 10

Here in miniature are crosscurrents that have their magnified analogy in the eighteenth century itself. Irrational currents flow through it, a CounterEnlightenment runs against its materialist direction, and diffused at a broader, deeper plane spreads a parallel Christian Enlightenment.11 O f all the currents, the most dramatic are the subjectivist, near-Romantic, and ambiguous eddies within the main seas of enlightened thought itself: a Rousseau tiding against the La Mettries, the undertow of the Diderots beneath the d'Alemberts, a Blake or a Beaumarchais billowing imagistic sentiments rather than orderly concepts. Diderot's self-portrait does not mention one obvious condition about his described day. A context of rational orderliness exists that identifies his mental life with that of a philosophe. This context overarches the mental spectrum that also determines Voltaire's private letters, whose "hundred different physiognomies" peer out through as many different microstructures, including the Quixotic allusion. Both thinkers display the oscillating range of rationality that characterizes the eighteenth century. In this sense, it is possible to delineate a "Quixotic self-awareness." The term should suggest a propensity in both the individual mind and the century's collective mind to relax into disorder. Voltaire's numerous allusions to Don Quixote are but one kind in a general category that undermines representational thought. All references in this larger category are truly "Quixotic." They are the capricious strokes of an Enlightener's selfportrait brushed in with the alternate colors of Unreason. Each whimsical instance of the Quixotic reference occurs when thinking itself occurs. Thus, the particular references to Don Quixote are instances of the larger ambiguity-making. They are more than incidental ripples: they function 10. Cited by Lionel Gossman, "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale," Forum (Houston)

16,2 (1978): 55-

11. The complexities and revisions in thinking about recent Enlightenment scholarship are presented succinctly by Roy Porter in The Enlightenment (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1990).

The Nonrational Thought Process

191

within the swell of thought as comparisons, as tropes, or as evocations. Taken figuratively, they permit some measurement of the otherwise protean dimension filled by the subject-matter of Voltaire's letters. We may approximate the conversions and semantic contiguities of his thought process, an ebb and flow of moods as well as concepts spilling over from the private correspondence but receding just prior to the margins of published writing. The transformatory feature in this flux is due to the microstructure. This internalized signal bears subordinate meanings that are absorbed when the utterance is construed as a rational thought. The Quixotic microstructure illustrates such a signal, a subgroup of the type. It is generated by secondary feelings or notions that become perceptible when the overall meaning dissolves. It is a mental event that in turn must fade from our attention in order to bring overall meaning into view. Diderot's observation about having a hundred faces in one day implies that an experience holds simultaneous significations. At the least, a sequence of experiences is so rapid that to recapitulate a single day requires a polyvalent statement. Thus we may expect, and I would contend, that a text representing a single hour or writing session, as reconstituted in an informal letter, will amplify or muffle the meaning to be construed. The line between rational and nonrational utterances often fades altogether, as the brilliant letters by Diderot to Sophie Volland demonstrate. And yet this fact alters neither the intelligibility of the writer's thoughts nor the reasonableness of those thoughts. One and the same mind produces "enlightened" thought through playfulness, ambiguity, and non sequitur, as well as through logic and transparent exposition. The distance between formal writing and informal epistolary discourse shortens through another factor. If it is true, as Foucault suggests, that eighteenth-century discourse alters the rational nature of Western representations of reality, then it would be opportune to suspend the scholarly distinction between public and private discourse. The ludic eruptions and nonrationalities that color conversations and letters in informal reality surely represent the discourse of coherent thinkers just as authentically as their formal writings do. Thus to separate the unpremeditated texts of Voltaire's daily correspondence from his purposefully philosophical publications would achieve, in a sense, a distortion of his mentality. Not that serious minds like Voltaire's cannot and do not screen out capricious thoughts during many disciplined acts of formal writing. However, the temperament that determines all mental acts cannot itself be screened out. And

192

Chapter Six

so terms like "formal" and "spontaneous" become inadequate, for who is to say that a conceptualized principle in the Philosophical Letters did not surface in the creative process as a brilliant impromptu, or that a hilarious scene in Candide did not arrange itself through a painstaking resolution of many drafts? Ideas and impulses need not be incompatible. Nor will their utterances be valid only when thought processes correspond to the formal discourse alleged to reflect them. If a description of Voltaire's "thought" is at stake, we must be prepared to discover its inflection during private moments of articulated awareness.

Representation The single writer's microcosm is a valuable object of study when it corresponds to the intellectual macrocosm of his era. Voltaire's Quixoticism appears at a historical moment described by Lester Crocker as rife with humanism but also with cosmic pessimism. It is a moment whose Scholastic background of rationalism grows increasingly infused with Quixotic fantasy and introspection. Although Crocker mentions Don Quixote in the context of Rousseau, the counter-rational backdrop is more generalized and can be studied through Voltaire's frequent allusions to the Spanish knight. The phenomenon is recognized by scholars in several ways. First, there is the perception that a thinker committed to an intelligent reordering of ideas or programs nevertheless may disorder our reasonable expectations about that commitment by disordering his own rational procedures in that regard. A representative Enlightener like Voltaire has indeed been observed in occasionally Quixotic behavior. Second, this behavior is a symptom of a shift in the cognitive mode of discourse in the Enlightenment described by Foucault, a point I shall elaborate soon. The Enlightenment, for its part, has never been described uniformly.12 The varying profiles seem less than hospitable to the polymathic and Active discourses in Voltaire, to say nothing of diverse "physiognomies," such as Young's visionary lyric, Sade's moral Unreason, and Goya's dream of monster-producing Reason. However, Paul Hazard's general character12. The variety of general characterizations range from Peter Gay's summary, a "volatile mixture of classicism, impiety and science," in The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. i, The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 8; to the quite different profile along the lines of Nature, Reason, and the Rights of Man offered by Jacques Maritain in Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 82-84.

The Nonrational Thought Process

193

ization hints at coexistent dissonances within the familiar orientation of mainstream scholarship. That is, the Enlightenment's symmetrical designs imbricate concealed antinomies that make intellectual history a wave in ceaseless transformation.13 This view invites consideration of contradictory factors that undo the equilibriums recognized as characteristic. Thus far two terms have contrasted with the systematized rationality or pure order called rationalism. The term "irrational" means the incoherence associated with chaos or with unintelligible disorder, and the term "nonrational" means some degree of coherence or intelligibility notwithstanding disruptive factors. But a third term, "counter-rational," presents itself when we consider Foucault's thesis concerning the altered representation of reality in the eighteenth century. As he suggests, a counter-rational stream runs through the Enlightenment, and, if this is correct, might it not also run quietly through Voltaire's works? A counter-rational tendency in Voltaire, if visible, would address Foucault's description of Classical philosophy in disintegration. This view assigns to imagination and to faith a dual power of error and truth. In this depiction, the Enlightenment postulates a unified knowledge whose universality is fractured by considerations regarding subjectivity and imagination that erode the empirical domain after 1775. The regularity ensured by comparison and judgment in the reasoning process fosters a reliable concept of resemblance. But resemblance breaks down under the digressions of the imagination. As a result, the mechanics of association are irregular. This view of imagination does not concur with the conservative eighteenth-century view of a "deranged" faculty that is an "enemy of judgment."14 Foucault's discussion of resemblance excludes Voltaire's thought, although he analyzes Don Quixote's cognitive process for the earlier period. Nevertheless, both cognitions share the same epistemological flaw. Foucault argues that signs free themselves of mere similitude and become coextensive with representation itself, a shift that occurs in the novel Don Quixote and in Classical philosophy. This change solicits our inspection of Voltaire's Quixotic self-consciousness. Since his recurrent mood simulates the mind-set associated with the Spanish knight, the examination of such moments might suggest the extent to which Voltaire inhabits a transcen13. Paul Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Meridian Books, 1967), 279-83. 14. Voltaire's article on this point notes approvingly that there was much more imagination in Archimedes' head than in Homer's. Its activity is "ardent and wise, does not crowd together incoherent figures" but rather "arranges these received images and combines them in a thousand ways" (Oeuvres, 19:436-37).

194

Chapter Six

dental field where "resemblance places itself on the side of imagination" (Foucault, Order of Things, 68). The cognitive fault-lines detected by Foucault in both Classical and Enlightenment mentalities—that is, in Don Quixote's mentality and in Voltaire's—have already been glimpsed by scholars in a more historical and biographical way. They note the contradiction of a Quixoticizing Voltaire who was also renowned as a rational empiricist, historiographer, moral ironist, and enemy of superstition. Can he then epitomize any single intellectual stance? If he can, this stance will be what Voltaire called the rationalizing idea of the just and the unjust in law and society.15 Reason's fragility, however, is a rule that surely does not exempt Voltaire alone among writers. As Hazard noted, Voltaire was a charming, even delicate spirit, but he was as well so "wholly extravagant" in attacking Christianity and "infamy" that he was "whipped to a frenzy. The thing became a mania" {European Thought, 412). If by temper he was "passionate, impulsive, violent in his hates as in his loves," in George Havens's phrase, could this trait be suppressed by a controlled prose style?16 By ruffling Voltaire's rationalist image with these questions, we acknowledge the "impossible labyrinth" of his life, as biographer Haydn Mason calls it.17 The evidence of Voltaire's letters continues to be used in a subordinate role. My own suspicion is that a new interpretive priority— namely, the puzzle of a Quixotic rationalist who resists a frozen portrait, may emerge by following an epistolary hermeneutic.18 The method might confirm by other means Gay's assertion that Voltaire never diverged from the "enthusiastic radical" of his young manhood, but that he long husbanded his rage until 1760 when he "discarded all compromise and threw away much of his caution" (Gay, Rise of Modern Paganism, 390,395). In his last years he was "the Don Quixote of the Alps," writes A. Owen Aldridge.19 His controlled radicalism is consistent with the "emotional temperament" 15. " I n the fury of passion one commits innumerable injustices, as one loses his reason when intoxicated; but when the intoxication wears off, reason returns, and that is in my opinion the sole cause of the preservation of human society." Quoted by Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightemnent (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 245. 16. George Havens, The Age of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1965), 229. 17. Haydn Mason deals with the problem of how to choose interpretive "priorities" by identifying the "abiding characteristics" of Voltaire's personality. See Mason, Voltaire: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), xi—xiii. 18. I have attempted this hermeneutic in " T h e Voices in Candide's Garden, 1755-1759: A Methodology for Voltaire's Correspondence," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 148 (1976): 37-113. 19. A . Owen Aldridge, Voltaire and the Century of Light (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 367.

The Nonrational Thought Process

195

judged by Norman Torrey to be capable of retaining a grip on practicality notwithstanding factors that contravene. Voltaire "was in a sense a Don Quixote in the fight for justice, but he wasted little time on windmills."20 Nevertheless, it is arguable that Voltaire's incaution and uncompromising radicalism were less than practical. They betray "the two dominant elements in Voltaire's personality," in Theodore Besterman's phrase, a passion for justice and an oxymoronic faith in Reason. These extra-rational stirrings nourish, paradoxically, the conviction that "law and not whim" is the source and basis of civilization. Voltaire is not so naive, warns Besterman, as to "believe that men behave rationally, but only that they should so behave." 21 Such a belief generates "the faith of reason," another paradox that Charles Frankel aptly calls "the insane idea of becoming wholly reasonable."22 These paradoxes are born of Reason but also of faith and extra-rational idealism. They bind the individual writer to his milieu. Voltaire's thought process follows a Quixotic thread not only because the mind functions through free imaginative associations interspersed with systematic representation. The shaping influence of his social and intellectual background also intervenes. He responds to the abuse of Reason, to the errors of rationalization that make "infamy" possible. Yet by taking ridicule to be as useful a strategy as logical argument, his nonrational discourses delivered truth-statements through incongruity. The term "ridicule" in Voltaire's vocabulary belongs to the paradigm that deviates from the models of verisimilitude. The paradigm includes the bizarre, the grotesque, the burlesque, and related distortions of conventional representation. The same mimetic deviance marks eighteenth-century writing at large: discourse disrupts its own norms of literary order by visionary poems or by extravagant narratives such as imaginary voyages and experimental fictions. While the Age of Reason is not misnamed for instrumentalizing rational values for society and advocating imaginational restraint in literature, it fosters a contrary impetus. At work is a Quixotic disparity between the ideal and the reality that cracks the Foucaultian mirror of resemblances and orderly signification. A corresponding disparity between norm and deviation is conjecturably manifest on a reduced scale within the thought process of an individual writer.

74-ff-

20. Norman Torrey, The Spirit of Voltaire (Oxford: Marston Press, 1963), 132. 21. Theodore Besterman, Voltaire, 3rd ed. ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), 311. 22. Charles Frankel, The Faith of Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948),

196

Chapter Six

From the foregoing standpoint, Voltaire's many allusions to Don Quixote suggest a disruption of similitudes and representations in the actual formation of a thought. This does not mean that a dozen or more casual appearances of any allusion should command special notice. As far as Voltaire's purely intellecttud profile is affected by such frequency, the Quixotic microstructure is conceptually shallow. But these unconceptualized filaments of thought can be shown to shape the mental operation that produces the complete thought. The demonstration, if successful, would confirm the allusions to Don Quixote as being an apt category to illustrate all such formative microstructures. By functioning eccentrically, the references would indeed be "Quixotic" allusions worthy of the epithet. Conversely, the Quixotic category would be symbolic as well as illustrative if we were required to select one category of microstructure to illustrate the nonrational thought process in general. The world of Don Quixote is a world where nothing is what it seems. Idealism degenerates into extravagance; Reason is unavailing and often disguises itself as Unreason. Cervantes's novel, taken as a satire, is like Candidly a cognitive voyage that follows the routes of burlesque and grotesque adventures and ends in disillusion with idealist pieties. This parallel should not be forced. Nevertheless, both novels reflect ambiguity, as their numerous interpretations attest. Before Don Quixote's appearance in CounterReformational Europe, the conditions for sufficient knowledge were satisfied when things and signs bore a resemblance. However, Don Quixote is cruelly mocked because things do not conform to the signs that represent them. Here lies Foucault's contention: that when the classical age of resemblance draws to a close, similitude is less the form of knowledge than the occasion of error. In the reputedly rational era of Voltaire, the new field of scientific knowledge replaces resemblances by identities and differences. What remains unaccounted for in the Enlightenment are the ambiguities that weave themselves capriciously through an otherwise rational texture of thought. The Quixotic strands in Enlightenment discourse may be considered in two ways. Either they constitute the variance that makes it impossible for any epoch to be homogeneous, in which case we need not reconcile Voltaire's caprice with his rationality, or else they are Quixotic elements within the Enlightenment thought process itself—strands such as Candide, D'Alembert's Dream, Justine, Moroccan Letters, Night Thoughts, Capricho 43— that join together in forcing the next closure in sensibility. In this second case, the closure begins a new cognitive era of transcendental imagination,

The Nonrational Thought Process

197

described first by Cassirer and later by Foucault. It arises from fissures in the gridwork that distinguishes fantasy from reality, syncopes in the very rhythms of imagination and Reason, or trope and idea, produced by the precursive works just mentioned. While the collective mind cannot easily be studied, microstructures like the allusion to Don Quixote throw light on one author's cognitive process in several ways. The allusion functions comparatively as a trope by marking resemblances. Voltaire reproaches one historian through a comparison that figures his likeness to another order of roles—chivalry— instead of mirroring a likeness from the same order: "The author is a very learned man. But he resembles Don Quixote, who saw knights and castles everywhere when other people saw only millers and windmills" (Best.Dii7i5). The Quixotic allusion also functions ludically. At the least it functions ironically to undermine serious thought-structures at their base. In one instance, Voltaire comments on his fortunes as a narrator might comment on a protagonist's progress: Misfortune might still arrive; one might go too far: a Cyrus might find a Tomiris; a dark alley is all it takes to ruin a good gambler. I string out proverbs like Sancho Panza, but the fact is I'm accustomed to Don Quixote: just see how Charles XII ended up. (Best.D7263)

This example encompasses all functions of the Quixotic allusion in the cognitive process. The thought structure is complete in the first two clauses, which state philosophically the idea of life's uncertainty. But the figurative comparison to Cyrus removes the truth-statement to a fantasist order. The additional reference to the gambler insinuates a Active parallel with Voltaire himself. Next, the dual identifications with Sancho and Don Quixote amplify the literary reference to Cyrus. The progression diverts the thoughtstructure from its initial sobriety. But the subversive microstructure, in turn, links its Quixotic nuance to the historical analogue Charles XII, which Voltaire is fond of citing. The primary meaning of the thought is thus restored to some extent. These ludic filaments around the serious thought are not gratuitous. Their ambiguous force points to the ever-present opposition of rational and nonrational capacities of minds and discourses. If eighteenth-century philosophical and historical rationalism appears confirmed in Voltaire, its disintegration also appears foreshadowed in the Quixotic microstructure

198

Chapter Six

through the reagency of imagination. Stated differently, ambiguity suspends the principles of difference and identity that mark rational discourse after the age of resemblances, an age satirized by Cervantes in Don Quixote. Voltaire's self-juxtapositions with Don Quixote belong to a broad eighteenth-century category known as comparaisons, referring chiefly to similes and metaphors. Within this category, specific comparative types are biblical, historical, and literary allusions. These often serve Voltaire's own purposes.23 But he also discourages use of such imaginative devices because their function is detachable from their meaning. When comparisons function properly, they transpose their likenesses, but only if the predicate is fully comprehended. He explains, for instance, that " I string out proverbs like Sancho, but the fact is I'm accustomed to Don Quixote. . . ." When terms A and Β share traits, these traits are lucid only if the stress falls on those nuances of the descriptive term Β that the reader is already likely to know. In this case, Sancho is known to cite proverbs. Therefore "I string out" is intelligible and contrastive to the microstructure "but. . . I'm accustomed to Don Quixote." However, nuance may sometimes inhere only in the microstructure. Rather than supply further meaning to the complete thought-structure, as in the example just given, the nuance may fulfill ludic and ambiguous functions.24

Quixoticism as Trope Voltaire respects Cervantes's novel for its opportunity for multivocal expression. Not only do his Quixotic allusions permit the univocal representation of an idea that governs his thought process—an idea, say, about his self-image or about history—but the allusions also permit nonrational associations that diverge from that idea. These divergences include tropes, chiefly metaphors. Voltaire converts the Quixotic antihero into such a trope, which then functions in a bipolar manner. Don Quixote elicits 23. Oeuvres, 23:358,22:257. 24. For instance, apropos of Charles XII Voltaire says, "[It was] the enterprise of a desperate man who did not reason at all. The rest of his conduct for nine years was that of a Don Quixote" (Best.D94.08). This interpretive judgment consists of two halves. The first sentence conceptualizes the monarch's career by the idea that desperation replaces rationality. However, the judgment trails off into a hyperbolic functioning of the Quixotic allusion. As a result, the conceptual element of the context is split off from the figurative element that follows. The role of the microstructure here is strictly functionalist, unspecifying, and nonrational; the nuance does not modify the idea's inherent meaning ("desperation"), but remains a spontaneous adjunct.

The Nonrational Thought Process

199

laughter, but he also represents an index of seriousness. The dialectic is essential to any satire, where the reader must understand the tacit basis for its mockery. The satirized figure appears ridiculous because his negative example evokes everything serious, true, and appropriate that he himself lacks. He points to the exemplary norms that mark his deficiency. Don Quixote is incapacitated by his epistemological misjudgments. His deluded perceptions make reality other than what everybody else judges it to be. Each display of his genius for misjudging reflects an idealistic ought/is relationship that pits imagination against Reason. This polarity is appealing because it is exploitable. Its allusive potential achieves metaphorical status when Voltaire surrounds one idea's singularity with multiple impressions. On this account, Voltaire's literal familiarity with Cervantes' novel is not an issue. Rather than keeping it fresh in mind like a manual to be consulted for analogies, he remembers the Quixotic personage as being an idealistic misperceiver afflicted with the incompatible virtues of Reason and Unreason. On this account too, Voltaire's memory does not always summon the most famous episodes of Don Quixote.25 Imaginative comparisons with the knight or his squire are richly colored by their fantasy-making capacity, available as renewable sources that adapt to numerous mental situations. The episode where Don Quixote tilts at windmills is so familiar that it is a stereotype, and yet its allusive power can signal dissimilar thoughts and feelings to readers. The scene prompts thoughts ranging from courageous and idealistic, to defeated and spiritually humbled. The combat itself can allude to the sense of being caught between reality and appearances, or to a sense of chaos or commitment, or to moods arising from feelings of altruism or foolhardiness. In short, this one episode alone is suggestive enough for Voltaire's purpose without resorting to others.26 Other episodes are extraordinary not for any biographical match with Voltaire's immediate circumstances but because he 25. During a lifetime of letter-writing, at least ten different episodes from the novel spring to mind for their figurative value. The proverbial tilting at windmills is evoked only during the years 1 7 5 9 - 6 4 , the period of Candide's success. A t this time, the powers of imagination find vindication together with the validity of extravagant discourse. But earlier, at the age of forty-one, and later when Voltaire is sixty, he evokes odd scenes that can scarcely be regarded as commonplace recollections of past readings. A s early as 1735 he compares himself symbolically to the knight performing penance, and in 1771 his mirror of impressions is Sancho Panza, governor of the island Barataria. 26. Voltaire could have cited it for comparison when describing his isolated pursuits at Cirey in 1735, or again in 1771 when describing the demise of his watchmakers' colony. Instead, he chose comparisons from a wider repertoire of extravagant episodes: the infidelity of Maritornes, the Yangueses fiasco, arrivals at wayside inns, fantasized demonic persecutions, and occasions o f Sanchoesque pithiness.

200

Chapter Six

delivers himself to them in the midst of a monosemic utterance. They are imagistic signs capable of undoing a thought that is intended to be a clear representation. Because Voltaire indulges his reality-denying impressions by shifting to a Quixotic register, the microstructure that effects the shift exposes the separate strands of his thought process. These strands might lead to dreams or to complex planes of reality in a more radically fantasist artist than Voltaire. The episodes cited are just a sample of the wider range of Quixotic internalizations in the private correspondence. An additional twenty instances enter the conversions and referentialities of his thought process, references that establish his acquaintance with Don Quixote. But the revealing fact is that Voltaire symbolically identifies the Quixotic scene with the nuance of some idea in the process of formation. The nuance resonates the idea, but it also dissociates the idea's value from the entire utterance. One example of resonance is a comment on biographical history: "the history of Charles XII would please those who like novels, if only this Don Quixote had a Dulcinea" (Best.D9428). The allusion opens several resonating paths and the reader must decide which one takes precedence. Does the thought mainly portray history as fiction? Or does it mainly represent a formula for historiography and perhaps novels? Whom does the representation involve—the political hero named as the subject, or Voltaire as a historian who characterizes his own writing? All choices are valid, not to mention others. The allusion to Dulcinea raises the problem of the hero's failure ever to see her. Voltaire's offhand comparison obviously means something more to him, although the remark in other instances would remain a subsidiary microstructure of slight impact on the main thought. In this case, however, the remark is a striking trope because its obscure intent multiplies implication despite the specificity of the allusion. The microstructure challenges the aims of intellectual representation, which depends on how successfully the reader can hierarchize overt and implied meanings. The challenge mirrors, in reduced scale, the fault-line that Foucault traces when distinguishing the discourse of resemblance from the discourse of identity and difference. A resemblance between Charles XII and the implied Don Quixote is suggested. It breaks down because a decisive difference exists between the two heroes, only one of them having a lady-love. The identity of each is irreconcilable to the other despite the attempted similitude. The result clouds the representational clarity of the idea about the history of Charles XII. The entire utterance allows all the aforementioned choices of meaning, but nothing is resolved. The Quixotic microstructure

The Nonrational Thought Process

201

obliges a semantic pause despite its independence of the primary clause in the quotation. To pause before so "trivial" a text is to realize how quick the reader is elsewhere to construe Voltaire's complex thought by driving ahead to the text's primary meaning. But even for the simple context just quoted, the thought regarding Voltaire's book on Charles XII draws attention away from primary meaning. Although historiography is the main referent, the thought process has teased the filament of Don Quixote to the surface. The filament displays the subliminal association informally, but this is not a handy reference that is trotted out cursorily. The Quixotic trope subsists in the matrix of Voltaire's intellectual habits. He says elsewhere that the Swedish monarch is "half Alexander, half Don Quixote" (Best.Di334). The microstructure is readily summoned to reshape a given context, but it does not surface arbitrarily. It is not an ad hoc response to the writer's need to refine his primary idea. If the descriptive role were all there is to "half Alexander, half Don Quixote," no resonance would be audible beyond the utterance's primary meaning. But the microstructure resonates in a new key by entwining history with the Actively heroic temper. Charles XII exemplifies contradictory traits: grandeur, folly, the noble but rash gesture, and the idealistic but untimely value code. These traits find confirmation in the aggregate of Voltaire's writings, and they comprise, as Lionel Gossman phrases it, his "polyphony" of Charles XII. 27 But the idea of relating history and fiction in this instance is a note struck in the Quixotic signature. Consequently, the secondary meaning suggested by the microstructure rises briefly to the first semantic power. The issue, then, is to distinguish between the primary meaning or representation of an utterance and its wider nonrepresentational diffusion. The latter is a resonance made possible by microstructures like Don Quixote rather than by simpler allusions. A primary meaning represents an idea or concept, whereas the resonance may vie with the idea's importance within the thought process. The resonator in the preceding allusions is the comparison of history with romance. Other allusions often display a simpler metaphorizing tendency when Voltaire speaks out on issues dear to him. When championing the victims of intolerance, he takes up a chivalric sword against the "hydra's head" (his phrase), the self-regenerating menace to rational societies. The monster is the appropriate fantastic image for 27. Lionel Gossman, "Voltaire's Charles XII: History into Art," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 25 (1963): 691-720.

202

Chapter Six

a thinker who fancies history to be in kinship with romance—the idea of duty being the slayer of the "dragon" of persecution (Best.Di?i58). Voltaire shelters these fantasizing metaphors in a relaxed epistolary space rather than in published works. Informal letters are his format for dealing with the problem of European rationality confronted by the countervailing forces of Unreason. His polymathic view of the polarities in European societies, as well as his own need for polysemia, responds to the paradoxical efficacy of Reason's aspirations. Voltaire's mind is the intellectual conscience of an Enlightenment championing the indisputable unequivocacy of progressive truths but finding its intention deflected by another tendency within itself. What makes Don Quixote an enabling trope for that self-awareness is the structure of satire, with its irony and multivocality. In this context, it is understandable that Voltaire brings Cervantes to Marmontel's notice as the model of the contemporary French writer's situation.28 Voltaire portrays Cervantes as a fellow champion of the "good cause" against the "monster." Yet Cervantes also satirizes the activist idealism that intrigues Voltaire. There is no serious contradiction here. The Quixotic allusion gathers to itself several threads in the Voltairean thought process that otherwise seems discontinuous. This gathering function, inspired by the imageries of narrative romance and activated in relatively unguarded moments of letter-writing, conforms to an ironical concept of Don Quixote. The knight is Cervantes's satirical agent, and satire is Voltaire's cherished mode of judging the world nonrationally. The philosopher in Voltaire must share his consciousness with this satirist, as must Voltaire the historian, political essayist, and literary critic. True, Voltaire's satires are but a small portion of his polymathic output,29 but this fact is as irrelevant as the question of how thoroughly Voltaire knew Cervantes's novel. The Quixotic allusion tugs no less firmly at the twin strands of the Voltairean thought process: the rational idea whose just cause is unjustly defeated, and the imaginative irony that acknowledges the inefficacy of Reason. 28. Voltaire deplores the creative duress under which both men work, resorting to a mythological imagery of the "monster" of fanaticism (Best.Diijoo). He adds, after complimenting Marmontel's style, "Miguel de Cervantes said that without the Inquisition Don Quixote would have been even more amusing. In France, there is a sort of inquisition regarding books that will prevent you from being as useful as you might be for the interest of the good cause." He then reminds Marmontel that only philosophy can triumph over the "monster," a triumph that offers a consoling unity among thinkers. 29. It should not be surprising that Voltaire held satirist Rabelais in distaste until he produced the raucous Canditk (Best.D853j, D.308).

The Nonrational Thought Process

203

Polyvalence A Quixotic microstructure in any author can be any subordinate utterance in a rational thought that will expose the thought's nonrational resonance. I have illustrated the "Quixotic" microstructure in Voltaire with literal references to Don Quixote because a happy coincidence displays both the phenomenon and its name in the same illustration. However, Cervantes's hero is only emblematic in Voltaire; he exemplifies all similar moves beyond univocality after imagination confronts Reason. The examples cited from historiography may have conveyed the impression that a consistently representational purpose informs Voltaire's discourse. The case is just the opposite. Because Voltaire's polymathy generates disparate discourses, the sum of Quixotic allusions is little more than a random set of fragments, mainly epistolary ones. They do not cohere in any fixed relationship with one another, or with any single perspective in Enlightenment discourse. The allusions call attention instead to the discontinuous circumstances of a polymathic mind. Their randomness is the precise condition for their uniform function in generating ambiguous and polyvalent meaning. In order to study them, however, they needed to be identified; the existence of a homogeneous group of examples has fulfilled a methodological requirement as well as being an opportune happenstance. My procedural handling of these allusions is a question that should not be ignored. The following review of possible procedures will reveal the same polyvalence. The most logical arrangement for examining the allusions is a chronological ordering, but this method reinforces the semantic disconnectedness of the allusions. They can also be examined by contexts, assuming that the circumstance preceding an allusion also triggers it. This approach has the virtue of identifying the generating condition of an utterance prior to any stylistic or substantive description. The question might then be: what prompts Voltaire to mention Quixotic things so often? The result, however, soon leads to questions of motivation. Here Voltaire's selfawareness moves in two unexceptional directions. Either he wants to take distance from himself, as a spectator might watch an actor, or his theatrical distance collapses into intimate feeling when the motive is introspective.30 30. T h e self-regarding stance: " O n arrival in Herford . . . the sentry asked my name; I replied, rightly so, that my name was Don Quixote, and I entered under that name" (Best.D2j65). T h e introspective stance: " I confess I am a kind of Don Quixote w h o uses feelings to discipline himself." These and other occasions reveal simply that the trope is universally adaptive (Best.D7996, D.8430, D.17225).

204

Chapter Six

Yet another approach to the corpus of allusions looks for their emotional tone. Do they comprise a definable range of attitudes convoking some atmosphere? Moods do in fact constitute an organizing category. At one moment Voltaire plainly feels at peace behind his desk after journeying "from princes to Yangüeses, and from palace to prison and hostel, and I have worked tranquilly for five hours," whereas at other moments he awaits his "Dulcinea" expectantly at Cirey, or else he is aggressively critical of haughty Spain, or alternately jocose, harried, apologetic, or much besides (Best.D5485, D.886, D.1277, D.io699).The moods are usually Voltaire's own, although sometimes they are narrated by the epistolary mot as well as assigned to other persons. They are like the contexts of allusion: a patternless variety of nuances beyond the margins of decisive meaning. A final organizing method focuses on the moralistic power exerted by the Quixotic comparison. If the comparing term features a censurable trait, it can obscure the object of the comparison, thus attenuating the censure. When Voltaire refers to his infidelity to Mme Denis through reference to the maidservant Maritornes, the comparing term betrays what he wants to silence: "Don Quixote committed a momentary infidelity to Dulcinea with Maritornes. Farewell, farewell. When I think about infidelities I am so ashamed that I fall silent" (Best.D4426). This moral vignette deflects its mirror-image, changing a deed into its possibility or intention. Although Voltaire recognizes himself in the unfaithful knight, the reported reflection changes from "committed" to "think." Did he in fact transgress? The comparison fades into a diffuse double as Voltaire retreats from his plain meaning to that of uncertainty.31 But neither this comparative role for the allusion nor the comparative self-portrait cited earlier suggests a dominant signification for Don Quixote. On the contrary, the same moralistic reference is as polyvalent as the earlier instances. The breadth of nuances argues for a single conclusion: the individual trope may cluster as many meanings, mood props, and functions as there are occasions for Voltaire to invoke it. Less elusive than a metaphor, more homogeneous and referent-bound than a casual analogy, the Quixotic microstructure is polyvalent. It bends to the speaker's spontaneous purpose with a semantic pliability that is absent in other frequently cited figures, like Servet or Newton. Polyvalence does not, however, prevent a dominant significance from emerging. Voltaire compounds the ambiguity of Cervantes's Quixoticism, but his Quixotic utterances allow the primary representation of meaning 31. In another instance, his allusion assumes a hortatory role as a model lesson (Best.Di277).

The Nonrational Thought Process

205

to remain distinguishable from its nonrational, microstructural resonance. What happens is a doubling of the cognitive gesture in the thought process. For instance, in the moralistic self-portrait just described, the blunt idea of infidelity is virtually denied by the emotional circumlocution. In the following reference to narrative history, a counter-historiographical epistemology results from an allusion to narrative romance. I am doing this history based on the Petersburg archives, which have been sent to me; but I doubt that it is as entertaining as the life of Charles X I I , for Peter was only an extraordinary sage, while Charles was an extraordinary madman w h o fought, like D o n Quixote, against windmills. (Best.D8484)

Voltaire's emphatic point concerns national heroes, a factual truth evoking another truth about madness that eludes historiography. Thus he reaches beyond document for an imaginative resonator ("madman . . . like Don Quixote"), but in doing so he denies the idea of plain historical evidence in favor of a fictional mode of cognition. Archival evidence suffices to demonstrate one monarch's wisdom, but the other monarch's inspired madness is demonstrable only by reference to a commensurate fiction. Voltaire's wryness in this passage is somewhat playful. Yet while an "entertaining" history has additional merit, the point remains that Voltaire intends the metaphorical "madman" to be as valid a historiographical judgment as the documented "sage." At work is an informal comparison that certifies fantasy's power to illuminate historical truth. This notion subverts the idea of privileged ("archival") evidence, stated so plainly at the outset. The passage describes conventional historiographical discourse, but the comparison reclassifies this discourse by adjusting its cognitive role. Alongside the nonrational comparison for history just seen, there is a refocusing of evidence and its role. Voltaire implies that writing history is more than a rule-bound art, and that a moral truth underpins factual discourse. He depicts the world by centering on principal actors, whose conduct is to be judged by the heroic standards of grandeur or villainy, wisdom or folly. These standards do not define historiography by its technical discourse and methods alone. Its didactic and ludic functions can show literature often to be the reverse side of history. This is not to negate historian Brumfitt's view that while Voltaire prizes drama's role in the humanistic "art" of history, his most positive achievement is to apply principles drawn from the natural sciences.32 Even so, the role of creative imagination 32. J. H. Brumfitt, "Voltaire Historian," in Voltaire: A Collection of Critical Essays, cd. William F. Bottiglia (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 77,82.

206

Chapter Six

stands out in Gossman's richly drawn thesis of Voltaire's history as baroque spectacle.33 The question therefore is why Voltaire should care about history's ability to entertain. As long as veracity is achieved, why indeed should he situate a monarch's historically-grounded madness within the realm of narrative fantasy? It is not that his basic idea about history loses its monosemic rationality. Rather, the very thought process uncovers its own polyvalent dimension through the Quixotic microstructure. Within the sober act of a univocal statement, a nonrational resonance joins the truth-statement. On the one hand, factual reference underpins Voltaire's rational argument, while on the other hand his feelings about truth-statements—about representation—realign the rational structure. He expresses certain desires regarding the impact of historiography on the reader, and these feelings surface elsewhere as well. Remarking on the nature or function of historical discourse, he defers its philosophical impact in favor of its value to imaginative experience: It is true that I am currently busy with the history of Peter the Great; it is not perhaps as entertaining for the average reader as that of the Don Quixote of the North, who slept in his boots and who with his cooks and secretaries did battle against ten thousand Turks; but the history of a legislator who has created towns and men is well worth the prowess of a knight errant in the eyes of a philosopher like you. Thirty years ago, in my history of this extraordinary man, half hero and half madman, I said that his example ought to serve as a lesson to conquerors who might have as much ambition and less valor. (Best.D85i5)

A grain of drudgery smudges the current project, and Voltaire the adventure-lover grows a trifle defensive before his philosophically minded correspondent. Granted that his subject is an unspectacular law-giving emperor, he justifies its value not from his own standpoint as a perfectly accredited philosopher but from the standpoint of his correspondent. That is, Voltaire's current mood, reinforced by remembrance, inclines toward the hero as a man of action. He says much more about what he is not writing than about Peter the Great. Clearly, he is for the moment on the side of "the average reader," and as a counterweight he transposes his own novelesque interest into a homiletic served on his correspondent ("well worth the prowess of a knight errant in the eyes of a philosopher like you"). The 33. Gossman, "Voltaire's Charles X I I " (see note 27 above).

The Nonrational Thought Process

207

entire passage embraces Voltaire's simultaneous perspectives of a historian, novelist, philosopher, and moralist. He is a polymath, and his thought process has woven independent strands into an ostensibly seamless explanation. The central idea remains rational: the history of a legislator is worthy. But on analysis, the Quixotic microstructure renders the idea indeterminate with respect to the thinker's entire "thought" at the moment—his feelings about the idea, and the intellectual alternatives to the idea that he entertains. The indeterminate motion is a discontinuous form of cognitive polyvalence. The mind does not cease to function as a conscious whole in a given moment just because it can create ideas for one discipline at this moment and for other disciplines at later moments. Over a lifetime, the clear and purposeful meaning of Voltaire's public life is represented in the miscellaneous categories of his multifaceted, published discourse. So too, when viewed on a daily basis, the life of this intellectualizing, fantasizing, and communicative mind is no more compartmentalized than the private letter that reports one day's multiple thoughts. Within the moment of one letter, the mind pulls its rational thread through a network of microstructures that refract the proposed rational meaning. This polyvalent process is not readily apparent. It peeps out from the author's private correspondence, where meanings may freely multiply from a single utterance. The complex, living moment allows a monosemic representation, but the truth value of this representation cannot absorb the utterance's nonrational side, whose own representation is the microstructure. The entire utterance frames a miniature scale of polyvalent events. The scale is proportionally analogous to a lifetime scale of variegated social and private experiences, where diverse roles exhibit just as many sides of a single personality. Voltaire himself seems to intuit this analogy.34 His own self-analysis intimates that his entire life has been a series of Quixotic episodes. It is not simply that his subjective inclination refigures history into a Actionable entertainment. Existence itself appears often to be a kind of 34. Certainly his biographer Theodore Besterman intuits this analogy by remarking that "the multiple character created by Voltaire is Voltaire himself: he moves that character around like a puppet" ("The Real Voltaire Through His Letters," in Voltaire: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Bottiglia, 43). His fantasizing activity generates both his living identity and his literary creations, making prose tales like Candtde a kind of "interior autobiography." A similar reference to his "chameleon skin," Voltaire's own self-description, is made in Rene Pomeau's biographical estimate of "an unstable man, improvising and versatile," who continually bares himself secretly behind his "masks and roles." See Pomeau, "Pour une biographie de Voltaire," in Themes etfigures du siede des lumieres: Melanges offerts a RolandMortier, ed. Raymond Trousson (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 200.

2o8

Chapter Six

romance for him. In a revealing declaration, he portrays life's Active quality. It dawns on him that his letters to Mme Denis can turn into an imaginative narrative when read as an episodic series. After rereading these letters, he states that he loves to "adjust them, and make of them a collection that constitutes a continuous story, rather varied and interesting. They are naive, a story in letters like Pamela.... Everything is put in the most exact truthfulness" (Best.D562i). The declaration suggests that, in these informal letters, the biographical Voltaire has been narrating his life to himself chapter by epistolary chapter. The introspection is also repeated Quixotically. He contrasts his idealistic ambitions against the achieved realities of pragmatic men. Looking backward over the years, he sees the sadness of his "dream" world spread before him. Just as Voltaire had cast La Condamine, a scientific explorer, in the role of a mythic hero while he himself played the sedentary Don Quixote in 1735, so too in 1771 he admits that his reclusive life has set imagination free to spin illusory meanings. Now his foil is the military hero, the Due de Richelieu, who plays against Voltaire's deluded Sancho Panza, here brought to his senses: M y hero was right to tell me that my little vanity of being the Sancho Panza of the village of Barataria is a game not worth a candle, but that was an undertaking at a time when I had full protection, when I did whatever I wished, when Sancho Panza had not approached me, when Crosses of St. Louis, pensions, and honorary titles rained down at the least request. The dream is over. (Best.Di7309)

Voltaire's assessment of his life is rational. Yet it amounts to Quixoticism in the Cervantean sense—namely, a monosemic idealism that aspires irrationally to legislate practical and rational justice. This doubly paradoxical aspiration is doomed for both the Spaniard and the Frenchman. Their ideal of justice is Voltaire's lifetime public purpose. Nevertheless, he refracts this rational ideal by his private, Quixotic self-deflation. He comprehends the alternating powers of Reason and Unreason, factors that affect his alternating choice of rational exposition and imaginative literature. When he reads the interwoven discourse of his own letters, his life's events seem to resemble a form of romance. His letters attest to a life of multiple significations constituted by literary, philosophical, historical, and mundane thoughts—in episodic order. The events of a lifetime comprise a polyvalent narrative of diverse meanings that encompass the vicissitudes that aid and thwart the Voltairean ideal. The narrative scale has a miniature analogue

The Nonrational Thought Process

209

that rises up in the twists and turns of the thought process. Just as a polymath's life is comprehensible through a main rational meaning refracted by vicissitudes, so too is a single utterance comprehensible in the plural meanings produced by its constituent idea and figural microstructure. The analogue is visible in each letter: the miniature scale of his thought process is the condensed parallel of larger experiences.

Conclusion The thought process of one moment is a private experience not yet transposed into a written utterance. The transposition often represents both an idea and some nonrational modifier that makes the utterance a polyvalent representation. Prior to a thought's grammatical form, its rational and nonrational features are fused in a simultaneous mental experience of intellection and nonrational imagination. In contrast, the transposition of those features into written discourse takes place within a time sequence, as in a narrative. The written utterance represents some primary idea, which is understood to be the chief intellectual content of the thought and which usually controls the written utterance. The idea is monosemic in the sense that its rational representation dominates and is readily understood independently of any nonrational nuance that may also have arisen in the full pre-verbal thought. Indeed, textual analysis indicates that imaginational features such as comparisons often accompany a given idea and, as nonrational microstructures, refract its rational meaning. The utterance therefore is a polyvalent representation, narrating two mental events one after the other but being experienced simultaneously prior to their written transposition. Transposed into an utterance, the thought dissolves its mental simultaneity and becomes temporal, as a syntactical sequence of two events, the main idea followed by a subordinate figure or allusion. A discursive boundary appears between thinking in one narrative discourse, which is rational, and another destabilizing discourse. Polyvalence involves just this latter dislodgment of representation through a nonrational accessory. At the same time, the single, private experience is not the only frame that exhibits a nonrational resonator. The total sequence of experiences in a polymathic lifetime also exhibit it. For this reason, Voltaire likens the sum of thoughts and events recorded in his letters to a fictional narrative. Quixoticism is his trope for a lifetime of polyvalent episodes. The fact is

2io

Chapter Six

that a single microstructure, the Quixotic allusion, also reappears discontinuously in numerous contexts; it exhibits multiple meanings in the same utterance and serves noncommensurate interests in a polymathic career. Whereas formal, published writings maintain their generic discipline, the free-form private letter adjusts its representational discourse to a nonrational register. Public discourse is complex but usually controlled with care; its figurative language seldom attains the range of shifting moods and purposes that are found in the unrestrained letters of a Voltaire or a Diderot. The place where a polymath's thought process reveals its multivocal nature is in his private correspondence. On these epistolary occasions, the primary agent is the imagination. Unrestrained, the imagination generally dominates what psychologists of the period called the "passive soul," whose rationally unfocused states eventually produce reverie and, yet more passively, dreams. The same faculty affects introspection, and in Voltaire's letters it conditions the depth and focus of the thought process. Even an apparently gratuitous act of fantasy making can disguise a complex review of thoughts. One occasion is an account of the breakdown of Voltaire's coach on the eve of his audience with Frederick the Great. His letter to the monarch is no simple exercise of commonplace allusion. While its strategy is to foster wit and grace through play-elements, there is also the spectacle of a cultivated mind operating nonconceptually. Voltaire's annoyance over the accident cannot, for etiquette's sake, be represented by a reasoned complaint. At the same time, it might seem eccentric, if not hazardous, for Voltaire to present himself in a ridiculous guise in these circumstances. Furthermore, his guise fits an unseemly Spanish framework, interspersed with verses and unpunctuated by any solemn note until the letter's final sentence.35 This Quixotic allusion controls too many functions for it to be a ludic trifle. It represents a biographical occurrence, not a literary gesture, and it transcribes an unpalatable experience into a fictional analogue. It verbalizes the sector of the thought process that concentrates rational singular mean35. Voltaire drafts this delightful letter to the monarch during his very first journey to Berlin in 1740, having accepted at last the king's long-standing invitation to court. Bearing also a diplomatic message from Fleury to Frederick, he is particularly self-conscious about the visit. The letter is too long to quote fully, but it casts Voltaire as an enchantment-plagued D o n Quixote: "as for me, in velvet knickerbockers, silk hose, and bedroom slippers, I mount upon a stubborn horse . . . Thus it was of yore that the hero vaunted by Cervantes was seen lost with his squire and Rocinante in the midst of the forest" (Best.D2363). Voltaire had been vexed by trivial mishaps that would have been unworthy of royal attention except for their metamorphosis through the convention of mock-chivalric literature.

The Nonrational Thought Process

211

ing but is engaged by nonrational factors related to the unpalatable experience. More pleasant experiences undergo a similar refracted transcription. Voltaire steps easily into Sancho Panza's shoes, either to assume the squire's proverb-citing compulsion or to characterize himself with mocking distance (Best.Di5025, D.16138, D.4294). And yet self-caricature cannot be the only factor in the ironic stance. On the ceremonious occasion of Voltaire's taking possession of his estates in Tournay, he recalls: "I made my entrance as Sancho Panza did on his island. I was only missing his belly" (Best.D7996, D.7998). The deflating second sentence does not refute the focused meaning of the first, but it dissolves the boundary between two forms of thinking. The original concept of a judicious entrance seeks an illustration. The comparison with an imaginary Sancho illustrates the concept but also dilates the rational focus. The result makes room for the further detail of the "belly" that turns away from the original concept. Why this amusing detail is chosen cannot be known, but its nonrational presence undermines the concept's representational unity. Such transcriptions of nonrational and ironic mental states confirm contemporary accounts of how imagination functions during meditative moods like reverie. Imagination need not be activated by a sensation or by a fully reasoned concept. Often it responds to the wisp of an idea and carries the mind "a hundred leagues from the object" of consciousness. In the midst of its unfolding reverie, a "foreign idea" might arise whose novelty or appeal to a private need will engage the understanding and turn the mind back to representation. Otherwise, "the imagination fills the empty space of understanding. This seems to be the most natural operation of the soul. . . . It suffices not to be expressly in opposition, and the imagination will run its own course, alone or in the company of understanding; and as soon as the latter allows it to do so, it will quickly disorient" (Beguelin, L'art de connaitre, 428—30). These thought sequences entail brief spans of consciousness, including ephemeral reveries and, as in Voltaire's case, representations of consciousness through sentence-thoughts of limited duration. Instances of their polyvalence fill letter after letter, comprising an episodic chain in a lifetime of experiences described by Voltaire himself as a Quixotic romance. Not only does he read his own correspondence as if it were Pamela, he qualifies his unequivocal brief for "humanity and justice" with self-detracting portraits: "I have become a kind of Don Quixote and a rectifier of wrongs. But I very much fear I shall not succeed any better than he" (Best.D19050). The subjective afterthought compounds the monosemic public stance against

212

Chapter Six

"barbarity," analogous to the way the Quixotic microstructure of an utterance refracts, on a miniature scale, the rational meaning of the whole.36 In the end, Voltaire's life and writings, both public and private, cohere under the polymathic world view that sustains multiple significations. This feature of the Enlightenment reveals itself microscopically in the polyvalent thought process, a process that takes expressive form thanks to the nonrational allusion. Digression and refocus mark the semantic pace of a momentary thought that, when set down in a letter, threads one clause after another into a narrative of idea and microstructure in sequence. The nonrational detail—the imaginative comparison—appends a new notion to the main idea, much like an episode lengthening the exposition of a narrative. No single meaning prevails, even in this minute span. As for the larger span of Voltaire's life, his polymathic mind contemplates it in a similar episodic way, especially when it digresses and refocuses in a new register or method. Both the macrocosmic and microcosmic sectors alike reflect Enlightenment discourse, itself typified by multiple and crosswoven meanings.

36. Voltaire builds on a retrospective self-portrait of moral naivete. He informs the worldly Due de Richelieu: " I declare, I am a kind of Don Quixote who works up the passions for self-discipline" (Best.Di7223). He reviews his lifelong combativeness, sustained because " I love passionately to speak truths that others do not dare to speak," rushing to "fulfill duties that others do not dare to fulfill." His heartfelt outcries and transparent deeds had displayed none of the ambivalence that now tinges old age: "since I do not have long to creep upon this globe, I have set myself to be more naive than ever. I have listened only to my heart, and if it is deemed wrong that I follow its lessons, I will go and die."

7· Visionary Reason

Leap out, imagination, and tell me where the center of centers is, the source of sublime geometry, the point of departure of . . . all the mechanical laws that despotically rule the universe. —Mercier, L'an 2440

The irrational vocabularies outlined in the previous two chapters parallel the polyvalence suggested earlier for Capricho 43. In another parallel, the etching's ambiguous inscription ("The Sleep/Dream of Reason Produces Monsters") corresponds to the multiple concepts of Reason described in earlier chapters. The etching's multiform meanings also parallel a heterogeneous century's nurture of both traditional thought and several Enlightenments. These parallels encourage comprehensive analysis of Goya's work for the way it condenses its epoch's cultural inflections. By recognizing the paradigmatic statement about the eighteenth century in Capricho 43, we can pose enough questions to provide a declension of the philosophical, social, and psychological issues among thinkers in Goya's day. At the same time, Goya's title is so deeply ambiguous that it promotes disparate starting points for interpretation. The disparity confirms the multifaceted character of Reason, one of the etching's focal points. The least disputable textual meaning is that Reason is the principal subject, as represented by the unconscious figure. But even here the man's half-concealed face reintroduces uncertainty. His identity and relationship to the social and intellectual background invite competing interpretations. Complicating the sleeper's uncertain identity is the coexistence of a materialist Enlightenment and a Christian Enlightenment, whose differences were described earlier.1 These factors reduce the chief issue to Reason's protean status, conditioned by competing eighteenth-century users and by its own manifold i. Both Enlightenments depend on historical and philosophical factors that lead the viewer in separate although connected directions. Iconological difficulties also compound the ambiguity of Capricho 43, as previous references to Ripa and Gravelot suggest.

214

C h a p t e r Seven

relationship t o the degrees o f Unreason. It bears repeating that n o normative account o f Reason will fit all West E u r o p e a n thinkers and at the same time find universal approval a m o n g scholars. 2 A s I pointed o u t in the O v e r t u r e and in C h a p t e r 2, G o y a presents the radiating manifestations o f Reason's basically undefinable center. Its many degrees eventually require consideration o f its functional kinship to imagination, caprice, and related irrational forms. Capncho

43 functions polyvalently, in the Voltairean sense o f a poly-

mathic discourse that submits to numerous interpretive cross currents. Its pictorial scene confirms its title and thus perhaps offers a m o n o s e m i c truthstatement. Nevertheless, picture and text also waver semantically because o f their microstructural constituents. T o this extent the w o r k recreates the nonrational t h o u g h t process outlined in the preceding chapter. T h e pictorial circumstance takes f o r its vehicle w h a t G o y a calls the "caprice," a subgenre that uses an irrational m e t h o d corresponding to the irrational circumstance it represents. T h e m e t h o d includes such elements o f U n r e a s o n as the h o v e r i n g bats, w h i c h b y iconological convention are disassociated f r o m Reason. 3 B y e m p l o y i n g a caprice, G o y a matches a representational m e t h o d to his theme. O n e interpretation might be that the match iden2. For previous references to "normative Reason," see Overture, note 1; Chapter 1, note 10; and Chapter 3, note 6. For the present case, to take but a few examples, Ernst Cassirer calls "the method of reason" that of "starting with solid facts based on observation . . . [that] upon closer inspection reveal an interdependence" produced by "the 'higher' powers of the mind, contrasting these powers with sensation." This "analytic" definition joins the Leibnizian "philosophical synthesis" to produce "the entire intellectual structure of the eighteenth century." See Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953), 21,25, 35. Less clear-cut is Peter Gay's choice of Gibbon's definition: "All that reason has weighed... is the business of criticism. Intellectual precision, ingenuity, penetration are all necessary to exercise it properly." Gay's view is that the philosophes "lived in a world at once exhilarating and bewildering, and they moved in it with a mixture of confidence and apprehensiveness." Thus the Enlightenment's definition of philosophy is "the organized habit of criticism," on one side "latitudinarian" and on the other "it banished verbal play or system making from the true province of thought." Gay cites Cassirer to support a definition of the Enlightenment's "fundamental intellectual energy" as both "the drive for knowledge and control [and] a restless Faustian dissatisfaction with mere surfaces." See Gay, The Enlightenment, An Interpretation. Vol. i, The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 27, 130-31. Finally, John Yolton eschews the word "reason" (not to say Goya's abstraction, "Reason") and replaces it with "perceptual acquaintance," which is "a significatory response to natural signs." Physiological causation is necessary but not sufficient; "the causation that results in understanding" is "perceptual response." "The idea as conscious content of awareness must result from cognitive processes," understood in the tradition of Arnauld, Locke, Hume, and Reid. See Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance From Descartes to Reid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 217-18. 3. Ripa's figure for "Superstition" shows a bat on its head, although also with an owl at its side on the ground. (Iconologie [Amsterdam: Timotheus ten Hoorne, 1699], 31.31.

V i s i o n a r y Reason

215

tifies the artist w i t h the users o f the lexicon o f Unreason w h o w e r e reprimanded b y the Christian Enlightenment, as C h a p t e r 2 explained. T h u s G o y a ' s aesthetic practice ostensibly makes thim an irrationalist. A second interpretation m i g h t hold just the opposite view. T h e fact that personified R e a s o n is sleeping in the presence o f bats suggests that it must contend w i t h independent agents f r o m the domain o f Unreason. T h e r e f o r e Reason is b e i n g reprimanded b y the Christian Enlightenment. T h e latter's critique upholds a truth-bearing, discreet rationality that I have called " M i n e r v a n R e a s o n . " 4 In the real w o r l d , this agent appears surrounded b y disorder, excess, and irrationality in a manner suited to visual depiction b y the v e r y scene in Capricho 43. B u t is Reason merely "sleeping," or is it actively " d r e a m i n g " ? T h e question is essential, because, if Enlightener can actually see the sedentary o w l s and flying bats while dreaming, these icons m a y represent the s p e c t r u m o f U n r e a s o n described in the previous chapters. T h e y w o u l d b e integral components o f the subject's thought p r o c e s s — Q u i x o t i c microstructures—rather than independent agents in the surrounding world. T h e choice is difficult, but any answer must avail itself o f interpictorial evidence. 4. See "The Temple of Minerva" in Chapter ι and "Interim Conclusion" in Chapter 10. The specific association of Minerva with a special truth-bearing rationality is easily documented. The chief translator of Plato in the eighteenth century, Andre Dacier, notes that "Minerva (spirit) gives the design and the knowledge through the imagination, which is like a beam that she sends from above, for the Arts are imitations of the Spirit or Intelligence." Dacier quotes Proclus on this extra-rational Reason (Les oeuvres de Platon, traduites en franfais avec des remarques., et la vie de ce philosophe, avec l'exposition des principaux dogmes de sa philosophie, 2 vols. [Paris: Chez Jean Anisson, 1699], 2:469). Another French classicist identifies Minerva with "wisdom, inspired in man by God." He then quotes a second authority: "The name Minerva means the wisdom of the living Being, divine truth inspired in man. Jupiter is a compound word meaning Divine Father. . . . Thus the wisdom born of Jupiter's brain is an allegorical expression rendered by the word Minerva, . . . meaning wisdom [truth] in Hebrew." Jean-Marcel Cadet le Jeune, Memoire sur tesjaspes et autres pierres precieuses de l'isle de Corse, suivi de Notes sur l'Histoire naturelle, de la Traduction du Critas et de diverses morceaux du Timee de Platon (Bastia: La Veuve Batinia, 1785), 164. Another erudite study, by Richard Payne Knight, observes that Minerva is "born without a mother from the head of Jupiter, who was delivered of her by the assistance of Vulcan. This, in plain language, means no more than that she was a pure emanation of the Divine Mind, operating by means of the universal agent Fire, and not, like others of the allegorical personages, sprung from any of the particular operations of the Deity upon external matter. Hence she is said to be next in dignity to her Father, and to be endowed with all his attributes; for, as wisdom is the most exalted quality of the mind, and the Divine Mind the perfection of wisdom, all its attributes are the attributes of Wisdom, under whose direction its power is always exerted." See Knight, An Account ofthe Worship ofPriapus, lately existing at Isernia, in the Kingdom of Naples. . . to which is added A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, and its Connexion with the mystic Theology of the Ancients (London: T. Spillsbury, Snowhill, 1786), 88-89. A fuller account of the Platonic Minerva will appear in Volume 3 of this study.

2i6

Chapter Seven

Such evidence arrives in the dream provided by the earlier sketch, Sepia One, but also in the portrait of the awakened Jovellanos, whose productive desk contrasts with the sterile one in Capricho 43·5 Jovellanos meditates in the company of a statuette of Minerva, who is an ambiguous icon in her own right.

Icons of Unreason If the Enlightener is dreaming, a clue to what he "sees" appears in Sepia One. A burst of rays divides neatly into one lighted hemisphere of human faces and one dark hemisphere of monsters. The least distorted faces seem to correspond to the tranquil owls of Capricho 43• The most normal face gazes down to contemplate the lapsed Enlightener, its attitude suggesting a reminder of his waking self and thus perhaps a reprimand by the Christian Enlightenment. In this way Goya presents rational Unreason and counterrational Reason in their complementary aspects: Reason under reproach in the left hemisphere of the dream, and the extravagant imaginings of Reason in the right hemisphere of monsters. The latter half will eventually dissolve into the bat-infested cone of Capricho 43A second clue to the icons of Unreason appears in Goya's portrait of Jovellanos.6 Here and in Sepia One the men have their faces turned away, although they are cognizant of what is behind and above them. Physical sight is superfluous where inward knowledge is depicted. The reference to eyesight and insight is of course a common metaphor for logocentric cognitive experience.7 Sighted knowledge is decidedly not what the divided dream of Sepia One depicts. This dream finds its analogue in the portrait of Jovellanos, and together they establish the polar axis of rational and visionary Reason. In the portrait, an extraordinary detail wells up with mysterious suggestiveness. This detail appears in the dimly lit statuette of Minerva rising behind Jovellanos. Against her thigh rests the famous shield, but it 5. Art historian Janis A. Tomlinson contends, in contrast, that "Goya's portraits of Jovellanos and Guillemardet are formal and formulaic representations of bureaucrats posed before writing tables that serve as props hinting at their official duties." See Tomlinson, Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment (New Haven, Conn, and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 91. See also above, Chapter 4, note 2. 6. For the painterly and historical aspects of this portrait, see Tomlinson, Goya, 90-92, and Dowling, "The Crisis of the Spanish Enlightenment." 7. The role of blindness is discussed in Chapter 8, section on "The Teratogenesis of Rational Values." The overthrow of eyesight has many ramifications that will become clear in later volumes.

Visionary Reason

217

is not emblazoned by any conventional sign. Instead, it is divided into two sections, one of them depicting a militant figure, the other appearing to be an apparent void. The full scene of Jovellanos and Minerva with shield is a double iconization: the goddess is aware of the shield—her symbolic attribute—just as the enlightened Jovellanos is aware of his symbolic attribute, Minerva. The doubling in Sepia One is of another kind. Each half of the dream reproduces one aspect of the aforementioned complements of rational Unreason and counter-rational Reason. In contrast, rational and visionary Reason form a polar axis linking Jovellanos with Minerva and her shield.8 Their icons and attributes paint a faint allegory of intuitive knowledge. Jovellanos is aware of Minerva as possessor of the shield, but he cannot share her direct awareness of it. The portrait's meaning takes shape by contrast to Sepia One, where the dreamer is close to the partitioned dream and "knows" its contents. He can in fact be identified with one of the faces in the dream that resembles Goya. He thus stands in two places at once, a doubly cognizant knower. The reverse state is iconized in the portrait. Whereas the dreamer of Sepia One is aware of the knowing faces, perhaps sharing their knowledge, Jovellanos is twice distanced from the source of corresponding knowledge depicted on the shield. Because he is awake, the shield cannot be as close to him as the partitioned dream is to the unconscious Enlightener. Yet the parallelism is exact. If Jovellanos were a dreaming Enlightener, he would know what Minerva knows, standing cognizant of the shield from her place, as it were, at one remove from the object in itself. In effect, if Reason has a dream content, it is iconized in Sepia One by what Enlightener knows unconsciously, and in the portrait of Jovellanos by what Minerva knows as being present to her mind. Within the portrait of Jovellanos is another sort of parallelism, one that involves the mysterious scenes faded into the divided shield. On one 8. Minerva's link to transcendent knowledge of the Logos is acknowledged after the late seventeenth century by contemporary thinkers with Neoplatonist inclinations. Ralph Cudworth speaks of "Minerva the Divine Wisdom and Understanding," in The True Intellectual System of the Universe: The First Part; wherein All the Reason and Philosophy ofAtheism is Confitted; and its Impossibility Demonstrated (London: Richard Royston, 1678), 450. Andre Dacier writes: "Minerva (spirit) gives the design and the knowledge for the imagination, which is like a beam that she sends from above, for the Arts are but imitations of Spirit or intelligence, and they give form and adornment to the matter on which they act" (Les Oeuvres de Platon, 1:469). These ideas originate in part with Proclus, who becomes available in English through Thomas Taylor's translation, The Philosophical and Mathematical Commentaries of Proclus, surnamed Plato's Successor, on the First Book of Euclid's Elements, and his Life byMarinus, "Translated from the Greek with a preliminary dissertation on the Platonic doctrine of ideas," 2 vols. (London: T. Payne et al., 1788).

218

Chapter Seven

half, a militant figure bears a sword or epee and holds aloft a crucifix. He faces the other half of the shield, which appears void of content but which enlarged photographs reveal to contain partially effaced geometrical signs looming out of the darkness. What this shield is to Minerva, so is her statue to Jovellanos. The shield functions as an icon for Minerva's world of mythology, while she herself is an icon for Jovellanos's world of Reason. And just as Minerva's effigy looms beyond the man's direct attention, so the shield's crucifer occupies a similar space in relation to the goddess. Both "inserted" figures stand transcendent to the individual whose world they iconize. The mythological world of Minerva is represented by the warrior, while Jovellanos's enlightened world is similarly iconized by Minerva's statue. But now a metamorphic synthesis reveals itself, since pagan Reason appears Christianized by the warrior's cross and epee. The crusader preserves the militant feature of the goddess' mythological fame while fusing it with eighteenth-century religious nationalism. Instances of this synthesis abound in the symbolic use French and Spanish artists make of Minerva when they glorify their Christian kings.9 The goddess, in relation to Jovellanos, embodies the modes of intelligence and language for the "pagan" Enlightenment, as Peter Gay puts it, whereas the swordsman with crucifix embodies the vigilant faith of the Christian Enlightenment. For comparative purposes, then, the two partitions—that of the shield and that of the dream in Sepia One—are homologous. However, they are not perfectly isomorphic, and here we enter a series of underground chambers beneath the Minervan temple that open into the unknown. Goya's reasoner can dream of the dim hemisphere and glimpse the bat among the formless beings. In contrast, the Christian warrior faces an indecipherable oval of darkness in the opposite half of the shield. Whether he is beckoning to a believer with his cross or using it to repel a devil, obscurity effaces 9. Allegories of Minerva and royalty are widespread since Rubens's series for Marie de Medici (Louvre). Minerva as protectress and patron is common, as when she appears seated holding an oval portrait of Louis XV, by Antoine Coypel, engraved by Tardieu (17+4, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, 74C 68025). See also "Bernard Picart, Portrait de Philippe d'Orleans avec un eloge d'Henri Philippe de Limiers" (1720), Revue de la Bibliotheque Nationale 27 (Spring 1988): 11. The most striking renditions are the maternal Minervas by Gregorio Ferro, Presentaciin de infantes nacidos, and bv Cosme de Acuna y Troncoso, Nacimiento del Infante. Both portray a matron with plumed helmet; Acuna presents her with aegis but no gorgoneion (Cataloßo de laspinturas, Museo Municipal de Madrid, Ayuntamiento, 1990). Other allegories include the Portrait du Regent (Due dOrleans) by Coypel and Picart, with the legend "Toy que Minerve guide et qu'inspire Apollon" (1720, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, 77C 82952/ QB 1720 [QBi]); and Espana conducidaporHimeneo al Templo de Minerva, presenta el Infante [Carlos Clemente] reden nacido, ante las aras de la Diosa. ("En el escudo de esta se ven gravadas las Insignias de la Orden de Carlos I I I . . . " ) Grabado, 1771 (Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, 45920).

Visionary Reason

219

the pictorial signs. Only linear and curved tracings survive the obliterated image, and they make clear one fact alone: the shield is not Jovellanos's coat-of-arms.10 Goya undoubtedly intended to convey a perceptible obliteration, even if he traced nothing specific at the shield's bottommost layer of paint. The existent markings are too geometrical for Goya not to have desired an arcane effect, the sign perhaps of an abyss that only faith may contemplate unperturbed. The tracings resist rational understanding, and by this token their linearity encourages imaginative speculation. The amorphous zone mirrors back the imaginings of its particular contemplator, like the universe set in order by an enthusiastic cosmologist, or like the unknown that awaits a pious believer who faces death. And these thoughts may be as chimerical or as terrifying as the shapeless things in Capricho 43 that recede infinitely behind the unequivocal bat. The sequence of winged recession in Capricho 43 is the reverse of the illuminated hemisphere in Sepia One. The winged sequence reveals the pictorial counterpart of contemporary visionary writings, whose cosmological unease is discussed later in this chapter. Analysis of this dream sequence may clarify what the crusader contemplates, which in turn will illustrate how those visionary authors circumvent Hume's philosophical impasse regarding natural cosmology.11 From the dreamer's head in Sepia One rises a column of faces, beginning with a distorted expression and ending with a placid one. The last and dominating face beams down from above in the same way that the lighted crucifix functions as a beacon and deterring power. Other grimacing faces circle the periphery without upsetting the controlling center, where the perpendicular column peaks. The spatial convergence rules the sequential order and trim linearity that define Reason's traits. These traits signify precisely the opposite of the progressive anarchy of owls and bats in Capricho 43• To understand why is to grasp the balanced structure of Christian Reason, where irrational beliefs and imagi10. Do the shield's markings emblazon some arcane symbol, perhaps of a secret society? The preoccupation with Freemasonry was intense among Spanish officials at the time, but there are no hints that Jovellanos was a member. 11. Hume's skepticism about knowing the "order of the universe" may be summed up thus: "You find certain phenomena in nature. You seek a cause or author. You imagine that you have found him. You afterwards become so enamored of this offspring of your brain that you imagine it impossible, but he must produce something greater and more perfect than the present scene of things, which is so full of ill and disorder. You forget that this superlative intelligence and benevolence are entirely imaginary, or, at least, without any foundation in reason." See Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understandingj, ed. Charles W. Hendel (Indianapolis, Ind. and New York: [Bobbs-Merrill] Liberal Arts Press, 1955), 147.

220

Chapter Seven

nation play coordinated parts. And here Sepia One should be viewed first in terms of Capricho 43 and then in terms of literary evidence. Only an impatient critic of Capricho 43 would venture the attractive interpretation that the leftmost, sedentary owl takes possession of Enlightener's desk in the final stage of irrational subversion. Such a view might hold that the takeover commences with the tiny bats coming into sight. They grow larger in their invading descent to the middle ground, their leader changing from a giant bat into a fierce, hovering owl. In the last phase of the invasion, the second owl might be regarded as a dissimulator showing ostensible tranquility, while the business of usurping Reason culminates with the occupying presence of the mustachioed imposter on the left. An interpretation of this sort, however, contravenes the universal tendency of dreamwork to elaborate greater and greater incongruity, not the other way round. Such a view would also cordon off evidence of freedom and symbolic anarchy that parades before dormant Reason in the shape of the bats. This ominous spectacle is reversed in the series of progressively less incongruous faces that reach a climax in the serene center of Sepia One. The central shining face, like the cross glowing on Minerva's shield, beams a tranquil reassurance toward the other half of existence: its faith confronts despair, its moderate Reason faces wild imaginings, its composure resists anarchy. And while Sepia One has no religious significance, the central face is homologous with the cross-bearing knight in the Jovellanos portrait. The homology strengthens by virtue of the antithesis of Christian Reason and Unreason. The antithetical structure contrasts in both instances with Capricho 43 and appears in the partitions already described. Whereas the row of owls ascends into the burgeoning bats that diminish conically, no such continuity exists in either the dream hemispheres or the shield. The winged creatures of Capricho 43 may be said to represent the advance of unlicensed imagination as it abandons wise restraint in a wild flight of freedom.12 But this imagination has its discontinuous place in the right hemisphere and left oval, respectively, of the dream in Sepia One and the shield in the Jovellanos portrait. The latter scenes segregate Reason from Unreason. They also redefine the limits of the irrational. As for Capricho 43, it displays an uncanny wild12. The most celebrated gloss of Capricho 43 is that of the Prado manuscript: "Imagination abandoned by Reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders." See Edith Helman, Jovellanos y Goya (Madrid: Taurus, 1970), 147,155-

Visionary Reason

221

ness in even the most sedentary zone of the winged spectrum. It confirms how ubiquitous the irrational can be. The same presence is true of Christian Reason, which embraces the irrational by accommodating dogmatic belief and pious imaginings, although neither irrationality is as unrestrained as monstrous Unreason.13 This contrast is visible in the Minervan crusader of the Jovellanos portrait. When the crusader squares against the shield's black unknown, his Christian Reason has already taken faith for its tutor. His imagination resembles that of all believers: strong enough to bolster faith by conceiving the religious mysteries that defy secular thought. Joined with the radiant crusader in this exemplary role is the beaming countenance in Sepia One. Both are more than adversaries of "wrong" irrationality; they also suggest how the "correct" mode of irrationality may be superior to Reason. A "correct" Unreason may be inferred from the geometrical tracks on the dark unknown opposite the crusader. These markings belong to the human world of signs, now transposed as tokens of the crusader's will to order. They are not random streaks or tracings, but stake out the void by a vertical division and a round center. Thus, they are specific enough to allow belief in something more than a Chaos. Yet they are also vague enough to promote imaginings of the kind inspired by the visionary Reason of Emanuel Swedenborg, Edward Young, William Blake, and LouisSebastien Mercier. Art historians have not taken notice of these peculiar signs in the Jovellanos portrait, much less interpreted them in their context. Photographic magnification reveals a perpendicular bar and a crudely roseate disk slightly above midpoint, somewhat too vague to emblemize the values of a disguised cross and rose of the Freemasons. Yet some unidentified holy order inspires this Christian knight's resolved stance. His resolve acts as a counterweight to Minerva's pagan values, a resolve that must be wholly irrational given the unfathomable void before him. To say that crusading will fires Reason into an exalted perceptiveness is not an imprudent judgment, especially if we compare this believer's situation with that of a skeptic's. The philosopher Hume describes the bafflements of abstract deadends this way: 13. Father Feijoo, writing about false miracles, blames the credulous, half-enlightened masses and the "scholar-herd" for constituting "a nation of chimeras. There is no monster that does not find its germ for birth and nourishment in the confused chaos of their ideas. The dream of one individual easily becomes the delirium of an entire region." See his "Milagros supuestos" in Obras escqgidas, vol. 1, ed. Vicente de la Fuente, Biblioteca de Autores Espanolcs 56 (Madrid: Atlas 1952), 113. Feijoo treads the fine line between dogma and superstition with such terms as "delirium," "labyrinth," and "chaos" in "Tradiciones populäres" (261) and "Sobre Raimundo Lulio" (528).

222

Chapter Seven Reason here seems to be thrown into a kind of amazement and suspense which, without the suggestions of any skeptic, gives her a diffidence of herself and of the ground on which she treads. She sees a full light which illuminates certain places, but that light borders upon the most profound darkness. And between these she is so dazzled and confounded that she scarcely can pronounce with certainty and assurance concerning any one object." (Inquiry, 165)

The advantage of Goya's Christian knight is that his Minervan Reason has a supplement in the visionary's will. He retains his rational capacity for truth while consenting to the exalted, lyrical discourse of imagination.

The Rational Imagination A lyrical critique of Christian history emerges when Louis-Sebastien Merrier rallies to the formula described for Goya's symbolic portrait. Mercier's invocation to The Year 2440 is rationally impassioned: "Leap out, imagination, and tell me where the center of centers is, the source of sublime geometry, the point of departure o f . . . all the mechanical laws that despotically rule the universe."14 The esteemed values are rational, but quite another vehicle brings their mathematical truth closer to human understanding. Visionary Reason is the solution to the transcendental impasse in the thicket of abstract proofs just cited in Hume. If Hume sets the cosmological limits of natural philosophy, his lesson applies to the cultural battleground of France and Spain. Here Catholic philosophy reacts violently against the more tolerant Christian idealism as well as against outright materialism. According to the most zealous clerics and rigid believers who live apart from their moderate counterparts, theological rationalism demands the irrational credulity of blind faith. The same intolerance to scientific imagination also wars against political and social reform. 15 These are the broad factors that underlie Hume's impasse, and they also bring Goya's vision into prophetic focus. Imagination competes unsuccessfully against Reason for methodological preeminence in lighting 14. Louis-Sebastien Mercier, L'an deux mille quatre cent quamnte (London, 1785), 2: 8. 15. T h e zealous clerics include Charles-Louis Richard, Fernando de Zevallos, and Lorenzo Hervas; among the enlighted are Abbots Antoine Pluche, Jean-Antoine Nollet, and Jose Marchena. T h e military conflict with the Revolutionary Convention from 1793 to 1795 shows excess on both sides, as Jose Ferrer Benimeli demonstrates in Masoneria, y/lesia, e ilustracum: Un confiicto ideoligico-poUtico-religwso, 4 vols. (Madrid: Fundacion Universitaria Espaftola, 1977). See also Jean Rene Aymes, Laguerra de Espana contra la revolution jrancesa I793-I79S (Alicante. Instituto de Cultura "Juan Gil Albert," 1991)·

Visionary Reason

223

up the "profound darkness" without becoming "dazzled and confounded." Can imagination forge a world view that will accommodate individual experience as well as social order? If so, the new synthesis will be the modern microcosm of a universal vision that reverses the relationship expressed most clearly in the literary quarrel between Ancients and Moderns. In the quarrel, the Ancients' Reason steps firmly on the head of modern fantasy without giving much quarter in subordinating inventio to imitatio,16 But if imagination is a dangerous ally of the traditional preceptivist, its liberty must alarm the social hierarchist, who survives by precepts forged in the Counter-Reformation and perpetuated in the Ancien Regime. The Bourbonist Catholicism of Spain and France is not the only alarmed context framed by these concepts. When Edmund Burke reflects on the French Revolution in 1790, he bids farewell to "the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal." Everything that politics has promised in the way of social harmony is to be dissolved by "this new conquering empire of light and Reason." But the concept of imagination in Burke—as in Goya, Mercier, and their forerunner Young— has nothing in common with the ogre feared by the despotic monarchists and detested by the literary Ancients in their manuals of rhetoric. Imagination for the Christian Enlightenment, whether it inspires Burke's Tory world, Hume's empiricist enclaves, or Mercier's visionary world, exerts an ethical check on rationalism on all sides. One of Burke's metaphors predates Goya's geometrical markings on the shield of a statue owned by a Spanish statesman, but it displays the same dread of an unwanted void: All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. (Reflections, 67) 16. The Ancients-Moderns dispute has been widely treated. Most recently, Joseph M. Levine concludes that the schism lasted to the end of the century (The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991])· A recent review that opens the bibliographic door is by Paul H. Meyer, "Recent German Studies of the Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns in France," Eighteenth-Century Studies 18 (1985): 383-90. See also Joseph M. Levine, "The Battle of the Books and the Shield of Achilles," Eighteenth-Century Life 9 (1984): 33-61. For the issues involved in the quarrel, see the sections on "Imitation," "Nature," and "Truth and Verisimilitude" in Remy Saisselin, The Rule of Reason and the Ruses of the Heart (Cleveland, Ohio and London: Press of Case Western University, 1970). See also Herbert Dieckmann, "The Transformation of the Concept of Imitation in Eighteenth-Century French Esthetics," in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 49-85.

224

Chapter Seven

In order to pursue the implications of a clothing metaphor for the "moral imagination" a book-length excursion into the determining ideological currents would be necessary. Even so, the monstrous void revealed by disrobing is explained by Burke specialist Isaac Kramnick for psychobiographical reasons as an "inversion of the Chain of B e i n g . . . unleashing forbidden sexual desires."17 What nineteenth-century Spain will variously call the clash of the "Two Spains," "Europeanization," or simply "heterodoxy versus orthodoxy" has its roots in the attitude toward imagination and order. This major concept is yet to be studied for eighteenth-century Spain in relation to the European Enlightenment. Here imagination becomes politicized, although it would seem to be an idea linked primarily to art and literature.18 Spanish conservatives juxtapose imagination to philosophy, poetry, and politics, forming a Counter-Enlightenment that is the antipode of what Isaiah Berlin has described for Germany.19 Now the creative faculty acts with deformative powers in all realms. Beauty, a debased concept, grows ironic through semantic contamination—clothing, ornament, deceit—and the indictment culminates in the secondary coupling of passions and senses to the imagination. It is a curious coincidence that even the Encyclopedie endows the imaginative faculty with a metaphorically political function. The article on "Dreams" affirms: T h e imagination when awake is a policed republic, where the magistrate's voice restores everything to order. T h e imagination during dreams is the same republic in the state of anarchy. T h e passions too are frequent assaulters against the legislator's authority. (Encyclopedie, 15:355a)

In sum, we witness a unified concept of imagination as either a creative or a disruptive force in art, morality, politics, and philosophy. From its crucible emanate the fumes of Unreason, however this may be perceived ideologically. A progressive Catholic Enlightener like the Abbot 17. Isaac Kramnick. The Rage of Edmund Burke (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 153—56. 18. One anti-French rallying cry during the War of Independence, begun in 1808, stigmatizes the secular Encyclopedists as libertinists. Ample proof of Counter-Enlightenment feeling exists in Javier Herrero's study and can be summarized in the following bilateral coupling of imagination to both ideology and poetry: "False philosophy, engendered by the passions, aborted by the imagination, welcomed applaudingly by the senses, beautified with the ornaments of poetry, tries to erect its throne in the temple of the Lord. Frederick II, Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Alembert attempt to place Dagon on the side of Jesus Christ." Herrero, Los origenes del pensamiento reaccionario espanol (Madrid: Cuadernos para el Diilogo, 1973), 334· 19. Isaiah Berlin, "The Counter-Enlightenment," in Against the Current: Essays in the History ofIdeas (New York: Viking Press, 1980).

Visionary Reason

225

Marchena can cite the Unreason of counter-revolutionary Catholic thinkers and brand it as a rational device for systematic tyrannies.20 Thus the Counter-Revolution denies what Marchena favorably calls "sublime" in French politics, using the "chains" of unquestioning religious obedience to bolster a loosening social hierarchy. In contrast, church reactionaries summon theological Reason to their side and would applaud Goya for depicting the monsters of Capricho 43- In this interpretation, the sleeping Reasoner presides over unleashed revolutionary monsters. This clerical logic is far removed from the vocabulary of Marchena's oft-quoted remark that "superstition may put a people to sleep for an instant in the chains of slavery; but if Reason awakens it, beware, hypocrites and oppressors."21 Capricho 43 may be construed in either way, as justifying a call to awaken revolutionary Reason or as encoding the demand to retreat from French political fantasy.22 The hostility to unlicensed freedom is immediately political, but it is profoundly rooted in a world view of chain-linked order that rivets imagination firmly in place. In fact, Burke's metaphorical language betrays a widespread aversion to social disorder, couched in terms of cosmological Chaos (.Reflections, 8, 93— 94). This aversion is but one symptom of the eighteenth-century anxiety over the general threat of discontinuity. To generalize in this way may seem idle in its political application, for who was not hostile to unlicensed freedom? Indeed, the French Revolution itself surely regarded some freedoms as illicit. And as for being anxious over social disorder, would this not be discernible in any era? There is, however, a specific historical connotation attached to the eighteenth-century concept of imagination, which migrates from its original meaning in literature and 20. Marchena devotes a poetic epistle to political freedom and calls a sulpherous Inquisition "that colossus born of Phlegethon" in F. Diaz Plaja, La historia de Espana en sus documentos: Siglo XVIII (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Politicos, 1955), 333· 21. Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 275-76; Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution 1789-1820 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 327. 22. Indeed, the strange and hybrid creatures of Thermidor seem to carry over from the earlier fantasy world of Watteau's L'embarquement pour Cythere. The political significance of 1794, Thermidor Year Two, is "a vast charade in which the official nomenclature and the official costumes contrasted quite horribly with the ugly realities" they disguised, writes Richard Cobb in "Thermidor, or The Retreat from Fantasy," in History and Imgination: Essays in Honor ofH. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), 279. Not only had Robespierre been the victim of his own fantasies, but many literate and committed people began to recoil from the republican symbolism and myth. Consequently, the Revolutionary Convention brings together in its opposition two dissimilar outlooks: the Inquisitional Spain of Charles IV and the Christian Enlightenment of great conservative minds like Burke's.

226

Chapter Seven

philosophy to its application to political affairs. The attendant anxiety is not endemic in its political for or in any other form, but rather wells up in a variety of preoccupations manifested in different periods, as I shall show. Burke's view of "moral imagination" and its innovative freedom is implicit in his concept of organic unity.23 He places political systems in "a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world." The condition is one of "unchangeable constancy," that moves on "through the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression." This political mode of existence is not entirely rational, however. Beyond human understanding is "the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race." Mystery and transcendental understanding inform Nature and must be respected by "preserving the method of Nature in the conduct of the state" (30). Not even the creative energy of Nature, which we might call the analogue of human imagination, may exceed the preestablished organic whole. Attempts to contravene this disposition are predictably wrong in political matters. Burke warns against the "unprincipled facility of changing the state as often and as much and in as many ways as there are floating fancies of fashions" (83). Such capriciousness means that "the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of summer" (83). These familiar ideas on preserving and reforming but not rebelling or overthrowing are the political counterpart of the Encyclopedie's assertion that "the imagination when awake is a policed republic," where "republic" is construed in the generic sense of "state."24 Both versions of building the new on the old shrink from what the eighteenth century abominates most in different forms: discontinuity. It is not the irrational that of itself is execrated by the Christian Enlightenment, since neither religious faith nor creative inspiration belongs to Reason's perversities. It is autonomous Unreason that terrifies, its capacity to inflict violence on the harmonic uni23. Burke's "moral imagination" differs from "the wild and unbounded regions of imagination" that plague idle moments (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790], ed. J. G. A. Pocock [Indianapolis, Ind. and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987], 89). It is, rather, the kind whereby "under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom beyond the vulgar practice of the hour; and you would have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired" (30-31). 24. Despite their similar view of imagination, Burke implicates the Encyclopedists in the "literary cabal" that devised "a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion" (Reflections, 97).

Visionary Reason

227

verse believed in almost piously. Thus Burke's language resembles that of a political alchemist sworn to keep hermetic laws of compounding the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. . . . [Not to do this is to] . . . separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate community, and to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles. (85 ) The great horror is Chaos, a state of infinite disbandment and fantasied as the outcome of disobeying Nature. Punishment of the rebellious will be exile from the world of order and Reason "into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow." Between Reason and Unreason, then, is Burke's moral imagination, weaving "all the decent drapery of life." The culprit is Reason, not for sleeping while the Revolution opens the door, but for dreaming that its political wisdom is infinite. The disillusion that results is paradoxical. Utopias are usually constructed from ideas carried to their logical extremes, though consequently they appear concocted by euphoric imagination. Conversely, if Burke were to compose a literary work of lyrical expression for his dysphoria, it would appear to have been engendered by the rational imagination adducing the metaphors just analyzed. His work would be one of Visionary Reason, and although he did not write such a work, LouisSebastien Mercier did.

The Millennial Dream Writing several years before the Revolution, Mercier perceives reality's slide away from the goals aspired to by empirical, analytical, Cartesian, and deistic Reason. This down-slope toward apocalypse made rational discourse ill-suited for his sense of dysphoria.25 Mercier is the visionary rationalist fulminating in historical righteousness. His style glories in the rich vocabulary of pan-European dystopias. He judges the nation of Poland

25. Mercier's irrational discourse has been compared with that of surrealism. See Philippe Berthier, "Mercier surrealiste?" in Louts-Sebastien Mercier, precurseur et sa fortune, ed. Hermann Hofer (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1977), 301-9.

228

Chapter Seven

to be capable of self-laceration when inflicting the atrocities of a modern Crusade. Germany is similarly divisive and plagued by theological rabidness. Mercier even evokes demonic spirits when characterizing Germanic "furies" and "energumens." He condemns Spain's fanatical record in the New World; she is the guiltiest of wicked sisters among the nations. The historical vision turns lyrical and macabre as the subject of Spain enshrouds precise facts with superstitious or sanguinary allusions. Thus Spain is said to "moan" after covering the New Continent with millions of corpses. Spain seeks out the remaining populations in forest grottoes and "trains animals gentler than she to drink human blood (L'an 24401:136). Mercier's discourse becomes a mosaic of inquisitional emotions and stimuli: "living shrouds," "slaughtered under the blade," "burning torch," "horrible dungeons," "the smell of firebrands," "bloody traces," "contrived tortures," "dreadful night," "barbarity," "burning with indignation," "torn by pity" (1:136-37, 381). The contrasting social visions of Mercier and Goya are instructive. The Capnchos betray a brutal pathos, despite Goya's dehumanizing technique; Mercier's millennial idealism conveys disillusion over the cultural failure of Reason. His admixture of history and fantasy beholds the kingdom of Reason, light, and justice in an outlandish strategy of utopic amalgams that leave even his Romantic critics ambivalent.26 But contrary to later opinion, Mercier's conception of language and truth redresses the eighteenthcentury wariness of imagination. His lyrical fantasy blends with his fidelity to a literary ideal—namely, Reason's primacy in matters of invention and discourse. He makes imagination—the "source of sublime geometry"— the final arbiter over language in its function of forming truthful statements about the historical world. Mercier upholds a belief deemed erroneous by rationalists, namely, that impressions and intuitive thoughts retain their accuracy when translated into their direct verbal utterances. The disagreement revolves around a concept of similitude and identity whose importance becomes clear later in this book but which warrants a reference at this point. Conventional eighteenth-century thought, as defined earlier in this 26. One unfavorable nineteenth-century verdict of Mercier's vision concerns "the chimeras of his imagination; a dream, in fact, where the natural crosses the implausible and where sound ideas blend with extravagances." M. le Dr. Hoefer, Mercier: Nouvelle Biographie Generale depuis les temps lesplus recules jusqu'ä i860 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1968), 21—22.

V i s i o n a r y Reason

229

v o l u m e , is suspicious o f the imaginative faculty, w h i c h can intervene during linguistic production and cause errors o f judgment. 2 7 In this view, n o t even a consummate control over language guarantees truthful discourse, because the determining factors o f accuracy are pre-linguistic. 2 8 T h e y reside in the relationship between thought-perceptions and m e m ory, w h i c h in turn entails the imagination. T h e problem is stated well b y Berlin academician Jean Bernard Merian in his Philosophical Reflections on Resemblance,29

T h e problem is that the truth o r error o f o u r impressions

depends o n the relationship between sense perception and image-linking, and b e t w e e n these t w o and memory. A disparity is always observable in comparisons o f things absent and present, because in one case an image is remembered, while in the second case a sensible reality is perceived. In such comparisons, error usually occurs on the side o f the absent object, n o t because m e m o r y preserves imperfect images but because such images d o not withstand m o r e p o w e r f u l image-making interventions b y the imagination, w h i c h " w i l l often copy the present subject [i.e., object] and substitute its false picture in the place o f the true image o f the absent subject [i.e., o b ject] : especially w h e n these t w o subjects have a considerable resemblance" (.Reflexions, 1 0 - 1 1 ) . Consequently, imagination works its effect prior t o lin-

27. Both Voltaire and Diderot regarded the force of imagination as the source of abnormal judgment, such as fanaticism and prejudice. Their position is typical of the Enlightenment, according to Jacques Marx, "Le concept d'imagination au X V I I I e siecle," in Themes et figures du siecle des lumieres: Melanges offerts a RolandMortier, ed. Raymond Trousson (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 147-59. However, John Falvey points out that in La Mettrie's philosophy all mental faculties are reducible to the imagination: "it is inseparable from judgement and insight." "It is thus incorrect" and a misleading abuse of words, argues La Mettrie, "to distinguish rational from imaginative faculties." See Falvey, "The Aesthetics of La Mettrie," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 87 (1972): 427. In Remy Saisselin's survey of representative texts, Condillac keeps the Cartesian distinction between the voluntary and involuntary (more subversive) imagination. See Saisselin, The Rule of Reason and the Ruses of the Heart (Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), 104. For the history of alternate concepts of imagination, both analytical and aesthetic, that in German philosophy fuse and become the synthesizing source of knowledge in the Romantic era, see John Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). 28. For the treacherous effect of imagination on language in Rousseau, see Jean Starobinski in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et I'obstacle (Paris: Plön, 1957), 193—99, and in L'oeil vivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 133-34. Not only did Rousseau urge in Emile that imagination be kept dormant during pre-adolescent education, but "the misdeeds of his [Rousseau's] imagination" interfered with communication and moved him to "desire a language more immediate than language," an unambiguous "secret language" cleansed of "the magic of signs." 29. Jean Bernard Merian, Reflexions philosophiques surla ressemblance in Choix des memoires et abrege de l'histoire dt l'Academie de Berline (Berlin: Rozet, 1767), 2:1-49·

23o

Chapter Seven

guistic activity, so that words and tropes chosen later can represent only the observer's effort to translate an eidetic event into a verbal one.30 This account summarizes the technical reason for the widespread caution that kept most eighteenth-century thinkers loyal to the precept of Reason's authority.31 Mercier departs from this standard by replacing sensory image-linking with dream. His role in transforming the relation of dream to cognition in his time is essential, as Henry Majewski has pointed out.32 An entirely new relationship between dream imagery, vatic knowledge, and language is the result. The visionary reality is pure immediacy. The verbal icon representing it pertains to what Goya's Sepia Two will call "Universal Language," where the object and its icon are the same.33 Mercier redeems irrational language through a philosophical allegiance to Reason. His vehicle is extrasensory imagination, which is both the source of dreams and the source of universal geometry. Thus the "space" between eidetic phenomena and alphanumeric language is narrowed. Mercier's lyrical monologs are like Goya's belief in a Universal Language. They presuppose a direct truth undeflected by the "difference" between signal and meaning, between signifier and signified. Nevertheless, Mercier's expostulary visions also sound like the glad tidings of a rationalist evangelism. His rhetoric sets intuitive form against conceptual content. These antinomies of wave and undertow carry the visionary experience to opposite discursive shores in the same work. These diverse tendencies bring Mercier into a multilateral alliance with Goya and others. His concern for the grotesque dream of Reason links him 30. Eidesis is the process of recalling images. Modern experiments in mnemonics or imagery processes show that "measures of verbal meaning are, in fact, clearly weaker and inconsistent in their effects than concrete imagery processes." Akhter Ahsen, Psycheye: SelfAnalytic Consciousness: A Basic Introduction to the Natural Self-Analytic Images of Consciousness. Eidetics (New York: Brandon House, 1977), 46. 31. The emphasis on intellectual history has not taken into acccount the "pre-romantic" literary currents that cultivate sensibility, the supernatural, and related nonrational strategies appealing to sentiment. 32. The illuminist motifs of Mercier's pre-Romantic Songes d'un bermite (1770) and Songes et visions philosophiques (1787-89) promote an "effort at scientific speculation and divination of the future . . . in order to gain superhuman power or knowledge." Henry F. Majewski, The Pre-Romantic Imagination of L.-S. Mercier (New York: Humanities Press, 1971), 56. 33. The standard definition of Universal Grammar involves the language schemes from Wilkins and Leibniz to James Harris. See James Knowlson. Universal Language Schemes in England and France, 1600-1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975). Universal Language in the context of painting and writings about art is surveyed by Barbara Stafford, Symbol and Myth: Humbert de Superville's Essay on Absolute Signs in Art (Cranbury, N.J.: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1979), 132—53. The present idea that Goya's Idioma Universal unifies sign and object requires a separate discussion of the unitary Minervan wisdom, whose evidence will appear in Volume 3 of this study.

Visionary Reason

231

to Goya, whereas his spiritualist concepts bordering on mysticism evoke Young and Blake. Focusing his troubled imagination on Nature, observed in direct detail, Mercier witnesses a spectral Walpurgis Night. InMon bonnet de nuit, the artist interprets reality through a supernatural prism, becoming "a kind of magician, a word-interpreter of the hidden meaning of the universe" (Majewski. 74—75). In one nocturnal re-creation he plunges Newton into a morass of fallacious images and deformed figures, prompting the narrator to ask how so shining a Reason could fall into this eclipse (Berthier, 301). Coupled with Mercier's illuminist and fantasist tendency is his sense of decadence in history, reminiscent of Jose Cadalso. The idea of decadence is perhaps the great silent theme of the better-known Tear 2440,34 but historical decay is a special deterioration for Mercier, rather than an edging off from greater to lesser well-being. Decadence is the measure of Reason's potential set against actual performance, whereby admirable deeds and events nonetheless sow doubts about their effects. Decadence thus motivates a constant projection toward some redemptive future. Undoubtedly, an age will come when justice will reign in proof of God's existence; and yet, "Will not the century when all lights correspond . . . be at all distinguished from other centuries? . . . Will a sum of knowledge unknown to our ancestors become useless to the current generation? Will blood flow in huge currents as in those barbaric times we have learned to scorn?" (L'an 2440,2:18). These questions are one and the same. Can sturdy Reason withstand humanity's instinctual destructiveness? Reason builds magnificently, but on foundations set in the shifting sands furrowed by the regular surges that history witnesses in human behavior. On those foundations stand pillars mounted by the Enlightenment and acknowledged by Mercier. But here his irrationalist perception identifies an Unreason of irresistible proportions. Such consoling marvels and scientific vistas as the approaching perfection of mechanics, the arts, and agriculture cannot allay Mercier's recurrent insecurity: "Amid these new and solacing arts, will we have the ferocity of those barbaric centuries that our Reason blasts? Let us therefore renounce our lights, these arts that cause tears, or let us respect human blood; let us at least not spill it for 34· Paul Alkon has studied Tear 2440 as the first "futuristic Utopia" in his Origins of Futuristic Fiction (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1987). See also Alkon's article, "The Paradox of Technology in Mercier's L'an 2440" in Utopian Vision, Technological Innovation, and Poetic Imagination, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn and Reinhold Grimm (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätverlag, 1990), 43-62.

232

Chapter Seven

chimerical views and imaginary advantages" (2:18-19). These antitheses of "lights" and "blood," "arts" and "tears" sharpen the difference between imagination and the imaginary, or between irrational knowledge and chimeras. The enlightened arts and sciences have become chimerical, barbaric allies opposed to constructive Reason. Mercier suggests that what the heart knows irrationally is the truth about dreams of Reason. These dreams in league with our destructive instinct produce deformed consequences. They rouse the intellect to fulfill chimerical desires or worse when abetted by imagination to conjecture, scheme, lust after, and finally engender the impossible delusions that crush our sense of proportion. The dreaming rationalists are unaware of this. Mercier knows it through a visionary imagination that holds measured Reason in respect. His antagonist is the overgrown sense of the imaginary, whose wildest shapes are the bats in Capricho 43· The imaginative vehicle in Year 2440 is a voyage into the future framed by an ostensibly conventional dream.35 But the technique steps beyond dependence on sensory-linked imagination. It is significant that chiaroscuro rather than color prevails in Mercier's dream sequences. The nonsensory basis for dreaming is vastly important not only in Year 2440 but also, crucially, in Goya, whose Universal Language embodies reality without sensory or verbal mediation. Accordingly, Mercier must declare a concept of dreaming, and he must devise a rhetorical strategy for making the contents of dream—his "vision"—utterly immediate. The dream will be his vehicle, but it will not be different from the reality made present. It will not mediate by placing distance between the narrator and the reality he "sees." The contents of sight will differ from the reality actually beheld only in that "seeing" must be represented to the reader in the chosen literary device. There is a further refinement, however, since Year 2440 includes an apocalyptic vision that is accessible only to those who, at the end of days, are resurrected or reawakened to a post-mortem eyesight. Mercier will aim 35. That Mercier resorts to the device of dream seems unimportant to Alkon and others, except as a way of materializing the Utopian future into which the narrator awakens and describes. The rational elements that eventually triumph in Mercier's Utopia have received critical notice, but his alternative response to the rational method itself warrant attention. Mercier's popularity and influence have long been recognized. See both Hanno Beriger, "Mercier et le 'Sturm und Drang,'" in Louis-Sebastien Mercier, ed. Hofer, 47-72; and Everett C. Wilke Jr., "Mercier's L'an 2440·. Its Publishing History During the Author's Lifetime," Harvard Library Bulletin 32 (1984): 5-35. See also, Jean-Louis Vissiere, "L'actualite de Mercier," in Mercier, ed. Hofer, 311-27; and Jürgen Fohrmann, "Utopie und Untergang: L.-S. Merciers L'an 244ΰ," in Literarische Utopien von Morus bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn and Ulrich Seeber (Königstein/Ts.: Athenäum, 1983), 105-24.

Visionary Reason

233

to "see" exactly as if he were dead and newly awakened. But because he plainly is not yet resurrected, his literary representation of what he saw in an afterlife must be mediated by the imagination. Yet now imagination is visionary, an enemy of autonomous Unreason. It is the faculty that serves rational ideals in the face of their perversion by the dream of Reason. In fact, a dream within the dream brings the narrative to a climax, as will become clear. With cultural decadence at its apogee, the recourse to a dream-concept acknowledges the impotence of rationality. In Reason's place is a drunken luminosity framed by a potent dream of a "happy" world: When the man surrendered to sleep on this happy earth, his body ceased to act among the terrestrial elements and placed no barrier to the soul. In a dream adhering to truth, the soul contemplated the luminous region, throne of the Eternal, where soon it would be elevated. The man came out of his light sleep, untroubled and enjoying the future tranquilly through an intimate feeling of immortality. He grew drunk on the image of an approaching, still greater happiness. (2:185)

These beatific images arise from an intuitive process that intoxicates the mind. Mercier's creative imagination makes truth voluptuous, so to speak. His dream ignores the cumbersome body, a barrier to spiritual perception, and replaces its kinesthetic activities with a state of being that is Presence, an unmediated contemplation of the luminous Absolute. However, the process gives access to immanences that are as "tangible" or "concrete" as sensory perceptions. We may speak of a "telekinesis" that cognizes distant things and that draws energy from instinct or the irrational rather than from the intellect. In any event, the concreteness and tangibility of sensations are metaphorical terms, because both the sensory and the oneiric experiences are felt to be substantive apprehensions that therefore are indifferently material or immaterial.36 The entire notion of matter and spirit becomes moot after sensationalist psychology traces the ladder of conversions from material object into sense data and successively into impressions and ideas, then into images and abstract concepts. Consequently, Mercier's 36. The skeptical Hume remarks: "By what argument can it proved that the perceptions of the mind must be caused by external objects, entirely different from them though resembling them (if that be possible), and could not arise either from the energy of the mind itself or from the suggestion of some invisible and unknown spirit or from some other cause still more unknown to us? It is acknowledged that in fact many of these perceptions arise not from anything external, as in dreams, madness, and other diseases" (An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 161).

234

Chapter Seven

dream can avail itself of references to space ("region"), to time ("soon," "future"), and to aesthetic feeling ("tranquilly enjoying," "intimate feeling," "drunk"). Above all, the experience of light prevails. This reality has nothing to do with any ordering of materialities. Rather, the dream beholds a reality constituted by a rational order already perfected. Only the method is intuitive. Whether or not Mercier stands fully within the Christian Enlightenment, he shares its moderating use of both Reason and imagination for cognitive purposes. His devotion to the imaginative faculty is matched at one point by disdain, shown in a contemptuous flash of comprehension about what superstitious beliefs entail: " I perceived none of the ghosts whose darkness had struck my credulous imagination" (1:182). Whereas superstition is usually blamed on ignorance or misguided piety by clerics like Feijoo, Mercier identifies the imagination. The same function is what the poet Edward Young characterizes as fancy creating "Bugbears of a Winter's Eve" and false notions about death.37 Mercier brings his telekinetic eschatology to a convergence of rational values and irrational vehicles. Nevertheless, the instrument is an imaginative faculty purified of fanciful impulses. By binding idea to vehicle, Mercier makes two statements in one. He alludes to Reason in the afterlife, and he reveals the means of knowing this truth. His eschatological idea is simple enough: the afterlife fulfills what Reason cannot fulfill on earth. But to glimpse this notion also requires an instrument that helps inescapably to fashion the notion. Mercier must imagine the afterlife; he cannot experience it directly. He resorts to a visionary process and language. Because he is not an Ezekiel inspired by God with a moral truth, however, he is aware that his imagination does not behold an immediate reality. Furthermore, he must represent the experience in a manner that does not denigrate either its process or its means of representation, which is the imaginative act. The newly awakened dead can see what Mercier can only envision. But this difference needs to be made intelligible, for how can the dead "see"? The explanation arrives through the role played by light. If the afterlife provides "sight," its reality must be constituted by light. True reality exists after death, when the deceased emerge from darkness and can see. Therefore mortal life, by contrast, must consist of false visibility, a darkness that imagination sometimes illuminates. Mortal life thus witnesses the 37. "Man makes a death, which nature never made." Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4:15-17. References are to canto or Night and to verse. For the fall context, see the next section on Young.

Visionary Reason

235

unfulfilled task of Reason on earth. But mortals can resort to an irrational instrument for divining Reason's ultimate fulfillment. Mortals do not "see," but they can fantasize or dream—hence the adage "Life is a dream." The afterlife is genuine life and consists of the true "dream," a life unaided by imagination. For Mercier to convey this chiaroscuro ontology, he must first imagine the state of death itself, then be able to describe the mortuary condition as one phase in the eventual visibility of the beyond. Thus, he makes "sleep" his first metaphor, with "darkness" a figure of emptiness, to designate the grave and also as a foil to the subsequent flash of illumination. His second metaphor is "dream." Dream encloses the truth it illuminates, but in turn it too is enclosed by the imagination that conceives it. The disparity here is that several so-called dreams are involved: the true post-mortem "dream" that is reality, and the mortal dream that is the illusion called life. There is also the dream conceived by imagination that pictorializes the true dream. Mercier's narrative develops this progression in an obscure lyrical episode that nearly dispenses with the logical transitions between successive moments of the vision. The protagonist-narrator becomes lost in darkness during an unexpected eclipse of the moon. He wanders in the black night amid thunder and "the flaming wings of lightning" (1:180). He treads on mounds of human bones until he reaches an open "grave that was waiting for a dead body": " I fall in. The tomb receives me alive." The buried dead salute his arrival, he shivers with icy sweat, and thereupon he "swooned into a lethargic sleep." In this state, "the veil covering eternity" lifts before him and, as he describes this event, his temporal status—consisting of previous mortal life, present condition, and future life—is suspended inexplicably. The narrator speaks from the atemporal consciousness of imagination, fusing all modes of time: I have no horror of life at all; I make it enjoyable, and I endeavor to put it to worthy use. But everything cries out from the bottom of my heart that the future life is preferable to this present life. Meanwhile I regain consciousness. A feeble daylight begins to whiten the starry vault of heaven. (1:181)

These monochromatic events actually happen. The narrative betrays no dyschrony to indicate a second perspective that might undo their occurrence, no ambiguity of trope hinting at a contrary-to-fact sequence. As the rays of light multiply and filter through the clouds, the pro-

236

Chapter Seven

tagonist leaps out o f his grave, now called a "coffin." The eclipse is ending, and his eyes make out "the moon's disc half detached from shadow." T h e approaching dawn reassures him against the terrors now said to be engendered by his "credulous imagination." The dream discourse is over, and a rationalizing discourse ensues. The protagonist-narrator had believed, he says, that what he saw was a tableau o f death. He had fallen into an open grave, "but I had fallen asleep, a gentle slumber that even had its voluptuousness. If this scene was frightening, it only lasted an instant. I awakened into the gentle clarity of a pure day." So t o o "after this passing sleep called death, we will awaken to the splendor o f this eternal sun," the headsource o f truth that exposes the folly o f bugbears (1:182). The text and transitional deictics are unclear at this point. Does Mercier mean that he has merely been exercising his fantasy and that the promised "splendor" was not experienced by visionary means but is known to him by analogous thinking? I f so, why does he narrate stages o f experience before his final metaphorical statement, a statement that negates the atemporal perspective o f his imaginational consciousness one sentence earlier? The fact seems to be, on the contrary, that the protagonist did glimpse the lifted "veil," or at least that he experienced this illusion within a narratable sequence of events. Before the narration, he did fall into the illusionist pit, did meet the buried dead, and did fall into a sleep that produced the final revelation. Mercier's two-tiered episode is more oneiric than eidetic in that memory does not recall sensory experience. Image is more powerful than verbal sign because the experience is visionary. For this reason the two-tiered episode corresponds to Goya's doubling in Capncho 43• The events in Goya's dream may be construed in one of t w o ways. Either they fill a real space around an oblivious sleeper, or they belong to an ontological sphere independent o f the sphere where this sleeper dreams them. But in both cases, these events belong to a single discourse in opposition to the moralistic text inscribed within the etching. In Goya, as in Mercier, the textual afterthought supplements the experience thus narrated but cannot supersede its reality. Put another way, the chiaroscuro that marks the eclipse and the veil-lifting is the visible form taken by the dream-reality antithesis; the relation o f darkness to light parallels the relation o f human language to the "luminous" truth beheld by Mercier. Verbal idiom is ancillary to the dream experience in this pre-Freudian period. The value o f dream lies in what it presents directly that verbal language cannot. Although speech may occur in dreams, the words merely stand for the things themselves. In contrast, dream language does not mediate but causes the dreamer to be present

Visionary Reason

237

among things, as Goya's dreamer is among the bats and owls. Dream language captures the stereognostic and telemorphic perception of things in their immediacy or "presence." Mercier's didactic explanation is an antechamber to reality, the graphs and glyphs that substitute for the spatial dynamics beyond mortal eyesight. His chiaroscuro technique underscores this separation.38 Chiaroscuro is necessary for perceiving the two-tiered experience, here situated by a mortuary device. Mercier subtitles his dream "A Solitary Man is Speaking." Like Rousseau's experience in the literary "promenade," this one is lyrical and harks back superficially to the epistemology of Rousseau's reverie. Mercier's narrator also inhabits a rustic cottage in a meditative air of felicity, but the resemblance ends here. Mercier's cottage is symbolically bi-frontal, offering in one prospect a country landscape with its pleasures, and in the other prospect a cemetery with its solemn inscriptions. This bi-frontalism releases discourse from the constraints of time and Reason. It shatters the temporality of consciousness, whose fissures brim over with the lugubrious emotions of a chiaroscuro vision. Here the verbal reve of Rousseau's hermit dissolves into a quasi-Goyesque space. The cemetery lifts the theme of decadence above national contexts. As the collective dwelling place of bygone endeavors and hopes, the cemetery lends itself to multilevel interpretations. It attests to the ephemeral value of moral and rational life; its tombstones bear inscriptions that invite deciphering; its shadows at twilight alter the spatial relations familiar to daytime perception; and its contrast with the surrounding natural life presents a varied symbolism. These four levels of meaning—the philosophical, the glyphic, the sensorial, and the symbolic—revert to the coaxial basis of Goya's inscribed title, "The Sleep/Dream of Reason Produces Monsters." The philosophical level deems the death of rational man to be a hideous sleep, a decomposition that, in Mercier's vision, ends in a happy awakening ("I fix a motionless and serene eye on this tomb where the man slumbers to be reborn" [1:176—77]). At the glyphic level, the gravestones inscribe legends that, where legible, tell the story of vain dreams but also, by their concealed meaning, cover a ghostly void with silence ("What does a name matter to someone who no longer has a name! An epitaph of lies sustains these sad syllables in a daylight more cumbersome than the night of oblivion" [1:178]). At the sensorial level, the masses of obliterating shadows en38. On chiaroscuro in relation to Goya, discussed below, see Barbara Stafford, "Conjecturing the Unseen in Late Eighteenth-Century Art," Zeitschriftfur Kunstgeschichte 48,2 (1985): 353-56, 361-62.

238

Chapter Seven

hance nonvisual sensations that inspire elevated thoughts at nightfall ("[in] the thickness of shadow, I take hold of my lyre.... majestic darkness! raise my soul while eclipsing before my eyes the changing scene of the world"). The words "lyre" and "majestic" are ill-suited to Capricho 43, but eclipsed light and metamorphosis suit very well. The transformations that occur in chiaroscuro summon forth the symbolic level of meaning, where Nature provides a disquieting contrast to the silent tombstones. Natural life in Capricho 43 seems to be an irrelevant theme at first glance, but its kinetic essence is a key idea. The row of owls and the columns of bats bring a wildness to the scene that thrusts Nature into a clash with the civilized setting. Nature symbolizes unnatural vitality in Goya, whereas in Mercier it sets the norm. But Mercier and Goya coincide in their depiction of a metamorphic bird. Goya's domesticated owl changes into an invading creature, and its reversion to natural type transforms emblematic wisdom into a predatory symbol. Mercier's wild bird also changes, but in reverse—from its mournful cry in Nature to its symbolic revelation of wisdom in the graveyard: "My ear followed the flight of the solitary bird. Soon it fell down upon the bony remains, and with the sweep of a wing it set a head to rolling, with a dull noise, a head which formerly lodged ambition, pride, and foolishly bold projects." The shallow homily, tagged on to the spatial dynamics, gains moral resonance. The skeletons lay in a motionless heap, the accusing proof of human vanity. The bones suffer a macabre and gratuitous animation provoked by the owl. The skull transfers its accusatory role to the owl and is jostled by a wing, the same wing that a moment earlier is comparably aggressive ("the nocturnal bird, releasing a lugubrious shriek, rends the shadow's thickness in its heavy flight"). The owl displaces the skull, translates its ominous lesson by a screech and a swoop that split open the darkness with moralistic light beyond language. Space and motion, but also shadow and sound, are the paired vectors of the visual energy experienced by Mercier. He sees nothing, and so space contracts, but he hears the owl's flight, and so space reasserts its depth through another sensor; then he hears the jostled skull, whose noisy motion transports his awareness into moral abstraction. The chiaroscuro is the surrogate of verbal language, no less than are the kinetic elements. Chiaroscuro in Capricho 43 does not reveal the source of light, while in Mercier the lunar source casts real shadows and symbolic light. Blocks of darkness must be spanned—a problem of space—and must be lit up, a problem of intelligibility. Thus chiaroscuro in both Mercier and Goya is also a conceptual matter. The horizons of moonlight and moral

Visionary Reason

239

abstraction converge, so that darkness makes a photosensitive link to the light of abstract Reason lodged in the skull's message. In Capricho 43, actual words are engraved as pure abstractions on the sarcophagal desk. Here and in Mercier's lunar scene, the owl plays a mediating role between spacefilled darkness and intelligibility. The owl's flights and hoverings command space, while its symbolic knowledge—the open beak that rends the night, the wing that sets the skull rolling—illuminates the spiritual night. The inscriptional aspect of Capricho 43 will be discussed separately, but in Mercier the inscription bears directly on the theme of light and lunar eclipse examined earlier. His graveyard scene poses the idea of decadence beyond politics as an axiological problem. The extinguished scenic light is both a natural eclipse and a valuative statement about mortality and human Reason. Life is a fragile rationality, prone to break down or to yield delayed fulfillments—of justice, equality, well being—all postponed to the Utopian future. Mercier envisions this future under divine auspices, when vain ambitions disappear into the eternity beyond death. The gravestone emblemizes vanity, inscribing a name that preserves a nominal life that no longer is. The abstract verbal presence also betrays an absence, like the light under eclipse or the Reason dissolved by the sleep of death. Absence, or concealment, grounds the principle behind Mercier's analysis of decadence: the deterioration of rational life. His counter-principle is revelation: the vision of redemptive Reason. Both principles reveal themselves through the hermeneutics of graveyard monuments. The topic of tombstones urges caution on several counts. The risk of elevated critical foolishness accompanies any discussion of vain inscriptions and final truths. Names are put on stones so that the living will know where the dead are buried. But this pragmatic approach may also leave room for idealist and spiritual readings of gravestones, encouraged by the author Mercier himself. In these latter readings, the occupied grave is an oxymoron for the hollowness that cradles the remains of absent life. Above, the tombstone raises its solid mass to counter the skeletal emptiness. A pragmatic reading of memorials must insist that they are a way of symbolically incorporating the respected dead into the living. As Howard Weinbrot demonstrates for Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, the symbol speaks beyond the family, and as the emblem of human mortality it educates other mortals passing by.39 At the same time, an idealist reading of Mercier may glimpse behind a stone-graven epitaph the intention to com39. Howard Weinbrot, "Gray's Elegy. A Poem of Moral Choice and Resolution," in Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," ed. Harold Bloom (New York, New Haven, Conn, and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 69-82.

240

Chapter Seven

pensate for the void by supplying a substantive meaning. Words and glyphs are abstract and lack substance. They communicate vanity: "upon the cold stone where ostentation has engraved names no longer read" (1:177). The inscription speaks vainly, serving not final truths but the worldly desire to be remembered. The implication is that the carved stone, as a monument, aspires to replace permanent reality with transient language, a futile intellectual ambition. Books are yet better examples of futile exercises, said Samuel Johnson in "The Vanity of Human Wishes," and Mercier echoes that their abstractions bear their own epitaphs in the form of "chimerical titles." On all these counts, inscription speaks falsely. Language replaces the absent life, but it is a mortal language, insubstantial in the end because it eludes the durability of concrete reference. Since words refer to beings and deeds that are no more, they conceal rather than reveal their true significance. Both visionary Reason and the Goyesque dream intuit the inadequacy of human language and eyesight. One vehicle other than writing and worldly light will put mind into direct contact with reality. That vehicle is dream, which has a special idiom still to be discovered. Surface meanings conceal truth in buried language, unknown to this life and invisible in ordinary light. Appositely, reality reveals itself after the eclipse and death-sleep just mentioned. Its truth is elucidated in the post-mortem dream of awakening. This transcendental language consists of the logogryphe, the single word that explains all physical and philosophical problems, the semantic network that leads everywhere and back again to itself in one luminous utterance (1:250). The universality of the logogryphe, which contains every other word, consists of the retention within its constituents of all meaning, which it irradiates like filaments of light from an inexhaustible sun. It is the knowledge of the final encyclopedia, the absolute cognition that escapes the nerve fibers and that cause the obsession with fibrous images among the physiologists at this time. Although the semantic concept remains undeveloped in Mercier, it inspires his chiaroscuro allusiveness, the play of contrasts involving moon and eclipse, false Reason and truth, the apparent and the hidden. Each antipode refers to the ephemerality of the graphic and the glyphic, which erode and fade away, unlike the logogryphic, which endures forever. The belief that human language does not utter truth, that "an epitaph of lies sustains these sad syllables in a daylight more cumbersome than the night of oblivion," joins Goya's concept of Universal Language.

Visionary Reason

241

Inscription carves false meaning into the stone surface, just as the desk in Capncho 43 displays a sarcophagal message that conceals the deeper statement of Goya's preparatory Sepia One. Goya's symbolic analysis involves the dreamwork, which pierces the cognitive darkness that shapes the illusion of reality. Through a similar chiaroscuro, Mercier's dream dislodges the syllabic architecture of tombstone and cemetery. The pseudo-rational codes of the earth's orderliness betray their chimerical structures when subjected to lunar eclipse and the true light beyond. Mercier's eclipse is the occasion for deciphering truth, the tidings that Reason governs with immutable light after death. That illumination dispenses with all tropes, organizing reality and consciousness without disfigurement. Before that apocalypse, a visionary Reason alleviates the dysphoria of worldly decadence.

Nocturne of the Rational Soul In Mercier, absolute luminosity is located at the geometrical center of reality; it is the ideal that he designates as Truth. Quite the opposite reality is the chaotic darkness of Goya's vision. Both conceptions are transcendent, and both portray realities that are felt rather than seen. The polarity between Goya and Mercier is noteworthy for its extension from an earlier period. Not only does Burke recoil from the cosmic Chaos intuited in social disorder, but Edward Young polarizes the powers of dreaming so that they produce either grotesque horror or benign idealism. While Young does not pull dream into the Goyesque orbit of a nightmare engulfing the human bestiary, he does envision a grotesque underside from which the soul mounts up "from Feculence and Froth / Of Ties terrestrial . . . / To Reason's Region." 40 Young presents the act of dreaming as an experience that may either rescue the soul or injure it. He defines Man as a composition of "marvelously mix'd natures"—Burke's "linking the lower with the higher natures"—and also as a "connexion exquisite of distant worlds." The notion of "feeling" reality rather than "seeing" it runs intermittently through mid-century British letters. The modes of "perceptual expansion" described by Patricia Spacks for British poets is of "vital importance" to the eighteenth century.41 Similarly, the "poetics of conversions" 40. Young, Night Thoußhts, 4:571-73. 41. Perception of this sort, according to Patricia Spacks, typifies Collins, Smart, Cowper, and Thomson, reflecting intimations of "the ordinarily invisible (the supernatural) or the construction of new appearances which may be supposed miraculous, but may also be, like

242

Chapter Seven

in Great Britain described by John Sitter validates truths through fancy rather than memory.42 In the visionary religious thought of William Law, sensibility and instinct replace rational authority. Law conceives both the rational and the imaginative faculties as implementing the same form of remembered or visualized images. The mind is too busy with outward fictions, and ignores what he terms the world's "magnetism." Law speaks literally of "sensibility" and feeling not as emotions but as if the experience were kinesthetic, a visceral enclosure akin to the tactile knowledge mentioned earlier (Sitter, 67). This retreat from eyesight and aversion to light also characterizes a certain kind of "sublime" poem that privileges darkness.43 Edward Young's impact on the Western European continent is well known, including his particular influence on Cadalso's Lugubrious Nights.** His association with the Goyesque sensibility may not be as close as the bat-shaped likeness of Young imagined by Saint-Aubin 45 Nevertheless, the symbolic bat corresponds to Goya's inkling of the chaos that insinuates British poetic consciousness and that Collins exemplifies in "Ode to Evening," where his description of a bat "verges on disorder" (Spacks, Poetry of Vision, 1967: 215). As for the autophagous snake in the vignette, Young is recognized for comprehending the "reptile Fancy'" of nocturnal space, as will be discovered (Nyjht Thoughts, 1:158). In this regard, a brief glance at Cadalso's imitative repudiation of sunlight will bear out dreams, products of the imagination." Spacks, The Poetry of Vision (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 2. This sensibility will be discussed more fully in Chapters 9 and 10. Spacks takes her point of departure from insights by Yvor Winters and Donald Greene, who long ago concurred in characterizing the structure of poetry in this period as not controlled by logic or intellect. Indeed, the conclusion of all three critics is that reasoning appears largely directed toward undoing Reason's authority (214-15). 42. Imaginative truth supersedes even empirical observation in such poets as Collins and Young. John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 1982), 167. In William Law, the "Outside" of reality and remembrance merely sanctifies what is absent. Authentic knowledge of the "Inside," so to speak, depends on "a theology of presence, attentive to our 'vital Sensibility' or 'Instinct of God' and freed from the limits of reason and memory" (Sitter, Literary Loneliness, 66). 45. Martin Price points out the "asylum" of darkness that appears as a positive value in the poetry of the 1740s, in a shift from earlier poets like Pope and Milton. See Price, "The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers," Tale Review 58 (1968-69): 194-213. 44. See Nigel Glendinning's edition of Noches Itigubres (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1961); and E. Allison Peers, "The Influence of Young and Gray in Spain" Modem Language Review 21 (1926): 404-18. 45. Saint-Aubin's vignette appears in a medallion set within an oval formed by a snake swallowing its tail and canopied by a black bat with extended wings. See Emmanuel Bocher, Lesgravures franfaises au XVIIIe siecle, 6 vols. (Paris: Damascene Morgand & Charles Fatout, 1875-82), 5:99·

Visionary Reason

243

the eyesight-denying perception of Truth under review in this chapter. Cadalso's heliophobia is reminiscent of William Blake's invective against Newtonian optics, which is more than a salutary corrective to the excessive adulation of Newton by earlier poets. In Cadalso's hands, the antiNewtonian stance follows an anti-Minervan maxim: daylight optics produce ghosts, while the vision of darkness brings substantive forms. For the hero of Lugubrious Nights, "the sun never rises" because Tediato's heart "remains covered in dense and frightful darkness." He follows the British poets into the "asylum of darkness" observed by Martin Price to characterize the anti-empirical turn away from Pope's celebration of light. More profoundly, Young prides himself on being the first poet to invoke the moon as Muse (Sitter, 161-62). The objects sighted in daylight "are phantoms, visions, and shadows to my sight. . . . Some are infernal furies" (Cadalso, Noches, 33-34). While such intelligibility controverts normalcy, it is the wisdom of "sorrow by which my eyes have seen the star deemed benign . . . The sun [is] said to be the least imperfect image of the Creator" (36-37). Both sun and moon are the "object of my melancholy." Rational goodness is malevolent for Tediato. Sunlight afflicts, eyesight is superfluous, and knowledge through emotional channels flows into the underground chambers of Minerva's temple. Here sensibility consists primarily of hearing and touch, not sight. Tediato detects the monster of reality panting next to him before it escapes. His brush with an invisible Unknown instills a terror that Reason copes with only fleetingly; then an overpowering knowledge drives him to unconsciousness: I heard some sort of tight breathing. Trying to grope, I knew that the shape fled bodily from my touch. M y fingers seemed moistened in cold, disgusting sweat. There was no type of monster that did not come before me, however horrendous, extravagant, and inexplicable. But what use is human Reason if not to defeat all such objects and weaknesses? I conquered all those fears, but the first impression they made—the grief poured out before the apparition, the lack of food, the night's coldness, and the sorrow that rent my heart for so many days before—placed me in such a state of weakness that I fell into a faint inside the very hole from which the terrible object had emerged. (Noches

20-21)

This irrational experience is not clarified by our attributing its cause to physical hardship. Tediato is just as weak before sensing the monster, yet he does not faint away until he actually "knows" it. His tactile knowledge overwhelms him, but not before his fingertips commingle their damp tex-

244

Chapter Seven

ture with the "disgusting" exudation from the monstrous being. The icy experience reverses the mystical warmth of divinely exalted minds, which also perceive most intensely when the body is macerated and famished. In both instances, the knower reaches the absolute; he is absorbed, or else "falls" into the very abode of the immanence about to be known. In Tediato's case he reaches the nadir of reality and grazes the unnameable. It has shape but he cannot describe it; it has bulk but is impalpable; it lives and breathes but eludes structured thought. Tediato's tactile descent terminates not in ignorance but in a cognitive act beyond the visual order, where the maximum sign of Presence is acoustical space. He tries to touch and suddenly he "knows." It is an incomplete stereognosis, but it verifies the primal reality that escapes sensory and rational knowledge. Although Cadalso follows Young's nocturnal path, he traverses the horrendous fringe of reality without entering Young's byways of dream. Both authors share with Goya the sense that an unnameable zone exists beyond the senses. Young's raven is imbued with dark abstraction and signals an ominous destiny as a "black Raven hovering o'er my Peace" (Night Thoughts, 3:74). Like the birds that obsess Capricho 43, the raven is a physical disrupter yet "not less a Bird of Omen than of Prey." The poem's visionary aspect tends toward allegory and conceptual lyricism. Both tendencies cast a sensory pallor on the vaporal work, making the physical environment difficult to visualize. The raven is disembodied even as it incorporates the presaging sign of fatality. The pitch of night yields to the unlit zone of abstract death, "Where Darkness, brooding o'er Unfinished Fates / With Raven wing incumbent, waits the Day" (3:256—57). The imminence is too figurative to provide any pictorial basis for successful dream imagery. Unlike the owls in Goya's "Sleep/Dream of Reason . . ." the "Raven wing incumbent" hovers over an intellectual abstraction, its extended shape unaccented by any other subjacent shape. The entire experience is ignored by Blake, who illustrates the truncated edition of 1797.46 Converging Blake with Goya on the subject of allegory requires a specialized iconographic discussion beyond the present scope, but limited remarks concerning Blake's simple drawings for Night Thoughts are useful without including his more complex art. Young's span "from feculence . . . to Reason" (4:571-73) fails to stir up in Blake the horrifying vistas that might anticipate Goya. Rather, an idealizing overview illustrates the 46. Night Thoughts, or The Complaint and the Consolation, illustrated by William Blake, text by Edward Young, ed. Robert Essick and Jenijoy La Belle (New York: Dover Publications, 1975).

Visionary Reason

245

higher Reason that conquers darkness in Young's cosmos. This Reason also informs Blake's softly-proportionedfigures,so remote from Goya's angularities. Whereas Goya's monstrous shapes jut out hard-edged planes with a focused eruption of sinister energy, the Blakean masses curve their classical fullness into the curbed harmonies of stasis or controlled movement. The contrast points agitation against lassitude. In both instances, the unreality depends on the same concept, expounded in Young as the surrender of Reason, whose structuring power dissolves before another energy. These general comparisons can orient a view of the continuum that frames Young's dream-world. Young does not inspire Blake to explore the concept of dream, as Goya does. But neither Young nor Blake polarizes dream against Reason, as Goya does. Young approaches dream paradoxically through two controlling factors: conceptualization and imagination. His dichotomy of soul and body rests on a tripartite function of Reason, imagination, and dream, at least in the first four "Nights." During sleep or waking vision, the soul is released and treads "phantastic Measures" or dances "with antic Shapes wild Natives of the Brain" (1:92—97). These forces are explicit, as in Goya, whereas Blake illustrates them as shapes that are symbolic of an aethereal universe rather independent of Young's. This difference shows the separate fantasizing traits of illustrator and poet, since Blake follows Young's anecdote of the marvelous rather than following the philosophical theme. Curiously, Blake's illustrations for the first four Nights appear in the same year, 1797, as Goya's portrait of Jovellanos. Blake's sleeper represents a person of creative ability who relinquishes waking powers in exchange for an unconscious receptive disposition. His muscular relaxation contrasts with Goya's slumped figure and constricted shoulder and arm positions. The same abandon is visible in Blake's arc of dream scenes released progressively from the bottom to the top of the page. These scenes faithfully portray Young's "unconfined" soul, which may enter "Fairy Fields" or either be "hurl'd headlong" or swim or simply grieve. Beyond this, Young conceptualizes whereas Blake aetherealizes. Blake's visionary step transcends Young's idea that the "aerial, tow'ring" soul is composed "of subtler Essence than the trodden Clod" (i:9iff.). Young's theme is the mechanism that liberates the rational soul, a liberation that also sets limits to the higher state of Unreason. So much for the visual and graphic parallels. It is also true that Young's chief purpose in the comprehensive poem is to persuade Lorenzo and humankind that immortality will be the Christian's reward. This purpose should not obscure the verses that show how

246

Chapter Seven

the soul benignly exercises its cognitive faculties. On this issue depends spiritual liberation—the poet's as well as his character's. In fact, it often seems that Lorenzo's voice and the narrator's voice reveal two sides of the poet's personality. The point is both psychological and epistemological. If Night Thoughts can be read in such different ways, the poem's irrational component must be as integral to the work as its hortatory doctrine.47 Imagination and despair strain against Reason and hope, an altercation that makes inevitable the nonsensory mode of knowledge under discussion. For Young, the cognitive soul is dialectical beyond the tension of imagination against Reason. The "wild natives" of the brain not only delight the soul with dance, but also are capable of enmeshing it in bleaker moods. Now a "reptile Fancy" spins its filmy threads "till darken'd Reason lay quite clouded o'er" (1:159-60). The soul no longer dreams its "nightvisions," but it remains just as free of rational control. The soul engages in "waking Dreams," like a fanciful mind "self-fetter'd" and "grovelling" in its own confection: "How, like a Worm, was I wrapt round and round / In silken thought" (1:157—58). The irrational mind is nonlinear. It reproduces its uncoiling self in the imagination, and the self winds again around itself, the worm shrouded by the reptile in an obscurity of thought no less delicate than mummifying. This imagery of curvature succeeds in spatializing most of Young's despondent moods. Curvature in this instance attaches a pejorative value to the irrational mind. It is the tracery of reptilian fancy, which relates to imaginational malfunction and must be held distinct from dreaming itself. Young is suspicious of fancy, expressing this in a revealing if modest example. He dismisses the common fear of death as a mere fixation on graves and decomposition—the "Bugbears of a Winter's Eve"—all these being distractions that convert the intelligent person into "Imagination's Fool." Such fears terrify only the living, not the dead: "Man makes a Death, which Nature never made; / Then on the Point of his own Fancy falls, / And feels a thousand Deaths in fearing one" (4:15—17). The delusive capacity of mind resides in this eighteenth-century notion of imagination. The delusive capacity differs from the illusive one. Delusion persists in the logical vacuum of self-deception; illusion is a visionary spectacle that may be esteemed in a later rational moment. The soul may either founder or soar between episodic extremes of fancy and Reason, episodes portrayable 47. Stephen Cornford, editor of Night Thoughts (see note 37 above), remarks on Young's dual personality as voiced by the narrator. He also calls the poem "a seminal work in a secular cult of sepulchral melancholy" (Night Thoughts, ed. Cornford, ix, 7).

Visionary Reason

247

as "night thoughts" released by psychological mechanisms. Not so dreams. These have a different status, a function not so much of soul as of the soul's state of being. The triadic relationship is clear: From Dreams where Thought in Fancy's maze runs mad, To Reason, that Heaven-lighted Lamp in Man, Once more I wake . . . . (3:1—3). The awakening refers to a conditional change in consciousness (asleep/ awake) and not to any change in the use of a given mental faculty. Reason may indeed be a "Lamp," but the locution is synecdochal: the poet awakens to Reason, to that condition in which he implements Reason, just as he has awakenedfromdreams. And here dream is not a mechanism or instrument but a phenomenological framework, the state of awareness where imagination's mechanism functions. Within the dream-state there extends "Fancy's maze," held by most eighteenth-century psychologists to be the neurological tracks along which the faculty of imagination traces its images in sequence. Consequently, the triad of Reason-dream-imagination does not permit any polarity of Reason and dream; if anything, the true polarity would set Reason against imagination. As for the concept of dream, it distinguishes between nocturnal dreams and the pseudo-oneiric counterparts produced by daytime conditions. The former category wins Young's preference: "Night-visions may befriend . . . / Our waking Dreams are fatal: How I dreamt / Of things Impossible! (could Sleep do more?)" (1:163-65). This distinction would be more comprehensible if Young were alluding to structural features working in each type of soul-state. But he offers nothing beyond the hint that the verb "to dream" means in this context "to imagine" or "to fantasize," as in the reverie studied by Robert Morrissey, or as in a statement like "I wouldn't dream of attempting such an impossible thing!" Daydreams do in fact delude, and here Young parts company from the French authors whose reveries are meditative and profitable. Among the "things Impossible" dreamed about by Young are the self-contradictory desires that defy the laws of human experience: "Of Joys perpetual in perpetual Change! / Of stable Pleasures on the tossing Wave! / Eternal sunshine in the storms of life!" (1:166-68). Such instances of deluded fantasy differ from genuine dream by dissolving moral truth in entrancing images that are unfulfillable by any definition of reality, natural or divine. Appropriately, waking dreams are described in the imagistic terms of a deceptive moral gallery:

248

Chapter Seven H o w richly were my noon-tide Trances hung With gorgeous Tapestries of pictur'd joys? Joy behind joy, in endless Perspective! (1:168—70)

The entranced belief in the reality of joyful figments culminates in a paradox. The noonday sun fails to dispel a false perspective; the failure dismantles the symbolic function of light as the standard-bearer of eighteenthcentury Reason. Moral error is only one effect of the delusive dream. Another error is its trancelike sway. This effect derives from the dream's pictorial seduction, a rich quality in the decorative "Tapestries" that compel the eye. The viewer stands apart from the sighted image, his gaze serving as guarantor of the distance between eye and image. The dream is merely seen, and not experienced or assimilated to higher spiritual faculties. The contrast of sight and experience removes the superficial sensory perception of vain objects ("gorgeous Tapestries") from the sensorial knowledge that infuses the spirit. The same contrast recurs as a dilemma when the poet intuits the music of celestial harps: "Hear I, or dream I hear, Their distant Strain, / Sweet to the Soul and tasting strong of Heaven . . . ? " (4:651-52). The soul binds the senses to Reason, and this bond secures the benevolent role of dreaming sensorially beyond sense perception. As a genuine experience, dreaming is a spiritual activity, not a rational one; it entails an unearthly sphere, not everyday reality. The experience transcends vain immediacies and avoids "reeling through the wilderness of Joy; / Where Sense runs Savage broke from Reason's chain, / And sings false Peace till smothered by the Pall" (3:21-23). Young warns, D o not mistake the transitory spell for permanence, or mortal pleasure for eternal gratification. This message sustains the ideal world, where Time defies measurement and sets off its earthly counterpart with a sobering lesson: temporality cuts short the false dream we call life's voyage. Not to comprehend or to quest after that timeless Ideal constitutes an inversion of values: "We give to Time Eternity's Regard; / And, dreaming take our Passage for our Port" (3:404-5). The Ideal remains invisible in the lowly dream, which cannot adjust the terrestrial distortions of its images. Thus debased by its infratranscendence, the false dream even seems capable of forming loathsome representations after death, where damnation opposes the Ideal. And so the anguished Young corrects himself for envying the dead: " I wake: How happy they, who wake no more! / Yet that were vain, if Dreams infest the Grave" (1:7-8). Under the low horizons

Visionary Reason

249

of the anti-Ideal, the potential nightmare in dreams grows imminent. The dream that occurs in a spiritual void ceases to be anything more than the sensory irrationalism of a disenfranchised soul. In Young's conception, the death of the soul as a disarticulated mind approaches the horror of physical death. The necessary "helm of Reason" disappears, replaced by the images of disordered consciousness. These the idealist has no choice but to reject: I wake, emerging from a sea of Dreams Tumultuous; where my wreck'd, desponding Thought From wave to wave offancy'd Misery, At random drove, her helm of Reason lost. (1:9—12) The navegational metaphor exposes the erstwhile connections among mental faculties: the independent powers of fancy and Reason are coequal but not mutually interactive. Reason may act on fancy, but fancy may not act on Reason. However, fancy may function without Reason so as to convulse the matrix of consciousness where dream-thoughts emerge. A thought will be misshapen by fancy's engulfing process unless the latter submits to correction by Reason's vigilance. These functional relationships, however, do not indicate the experiential dimension that leads Young to disqualify dreaming of this type. Thought distorted by fancy counts less than the experiences of vertigo and wreckage intrinsic to such dreams. Opposing the linear order of rational experience—an architectonic form of encounter with reality ("nurse the tender Thought / To Reason, and on Reason build Resolve, / [That column of true Majesty in man!]" [1:29-31])—is the curvilinear and arhythmic experience of anarchic fancy. The poet awakens from an amorphous "sea of dreams." The sea's tumult prevents the thought "waves" from reaching serial regularity or spatial order. Thoughts billow unpredictably under the chance activity of shaping imagination, a shaping deprived of guide, like a helmsman directing thought but still "at random drove." Such "desponding" thought, goaded aimlessly, fails to reflect the Ideal and confirms the breakdown of the transcendent impulse in the soul. Nevertheless, dream in its superior form parallels Reason in its divine origins. Dream's higher condition constitutes an inspirational medium. When Young invokes the moon goddess, he does so by inviting her complicity in a "Theft divine," which will be to "whisper in mine ear" "the Soul of Song" from "Heavenly Banquets" (3:49—51). Thus inspiration would be

25 ο

Chapter Seven

essentially auditory, a conventional enough process and yet hardly symmetrical with the pictorial deceit that glitters in false dreams. In fact, the process suggests an alternative transmission of divine song: "or in propitious Dreams, / (For Dreams are Thine) transfuse it thro' the breast / Of thy first Votary" (3:51-53). The sources will "transfuse" the song through dreams, but who or what are the perceptual agents of such dreams? Their mechanisms go unnamed, and the senses lapse into subservience. Young stresses the spiritual experience itself over its agency, for several reasons. The Ideal is present in the divine "Soul" as well as in the "propitious" or propitiatory intention of the gods. And more to the point, the experiential condition arises in the very bosom of the poet. Spirit transfuses "through the breast" as a corporeal and yet otherworldly visitation. The mortal dream escapes the sensorial abyss of despondency. The dreamer, surmounting the vanities of flesh, not only beholds the Divine but partakes of it as a "first Votary." Such communion is possible because Young endows the true dream with a rationality missing in the false dream. The structuring power of Reason "speaks in all: / From the soft Whispers of that God in man, / W h y . . . to Frenzy fly? (2:103—5). Moreover, it is a trinity that speaks: "Our Reason, Guardian Angel; and our God!" (3:10). The structuring power is itself structured and, as suggested earlier, dissolves before another creative energy. Yet Reason seems to operate here by contradiction. If Reason is not frenzy or folly—which is to say, if Reason still adheres to its rational self—how can its creative energy also yield "antic Shapes wild Natives of the Brain" (1:98)? The answer is that Young's Reason is not that of meddling philosophers "whose fatal Love stabs every Joy." He excoriates the analytical chill spread by rationalists who "Spike up their Inch of Reason on the Point / Of Philosophic Wit, call'd Argument" (4:769, 777-78). The earthly realm is in fact a "world of rationals" but, notwithstanding mortal intelligence, humans debase their intellect by systematic rationalization, which they name "pure Reason." The waking life encases the soul in moral darkness and twists its reasoning powers to serve squalid ambitions. Although the soul yearns to restore its rational wholeness, it is trapped in putrefaction: So joys the Soul, when, from inglorious Aims And sordid Sweets, from Feculence and Froth Of Ties terrestrial set at large, she mounts To Reason's Region, her own Element.... (4:570-73)

Visionary Reason

251

The pure rationality of mortals is remote from Reason as conceived by Young. Earthly reasoning preserves its value by, among other functions, restraining rampant imagination and preventing false dreams. But this activity is not the "All-sacred Reason, Source and Soul of all" (4:731)· Quite the contrary, earthly thought wallows in "the Rational foul Kennels of Excess" to the extent that even a purifying element such as religious piety can misdirect its spiritual fire (3:344). Young chides the quietists who softly address Heaven and who consider "'Reason alone baptiz'd? alone ordain'd / T o touch Things sacred" ( 4 : 6 3 0 - 3 1 ) . Is his song too turbulent too warm? he asks—"Are Passions then the Pagans of the Soul?" (4:629). These pietists, like the philosophers, have wrongly defined the role of Reason because they cannot grasp its essential mode: O h ye cold-hearted, frozen, Formalists! O n such a Theme 'tis impious to be calm; Passion is Reason, Transport Temper here. ( 4 : 6 3 8 - 4 0 ) Theirs is an idolized Reason, deified after its death, whereas ideal Reason is faith itself, an emotional flame on the wick of thought. The interkindling of passion and logic can light the soul's way to Young's true dream of higher reality. The transcendental definition of Reason thus removes the soul's temporal quandary of waking life, together with its difficulty in relating Reason to imagination. The soul, in its dream of true wisdom, mounts to "her own element" where "Passion is Reason" and "Reason pursued is Faith." 4 8 4«. It would be pointless to untwine Young's interlaced concept of impassioned Reason, whose beatific roots in orthodox Anglican theology are a given. This concept is quasi-mystical, and its reiteration over the course of nine Nights confirms the impression of many modern readers that the poem is a rambling essay on commonplace Anglican theology. The preceding discussion recognizes the pitfall of seeking a unified theme in a 9,500-verse poem written over a six-year period. The more limited scope of thefirstfour Nights reveals a visionary rationalist whose capacity for dream need not be sustained over the entire poem in order to draw critical attention. The poet in this guise is more than a solitary, funereal voyager, as some critics claim while recommending that the poem be read not under close scrutiny but instead with "a sweep of the eye across broad tonal effects and washes of color" (Sitter, Literary Loneliness, 68—69; Eric Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 1660-1780 [Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981], 145). Howard Weinbrot, in a private letter, calls my attention to Samuel Johnson's characterization of Night Thoughts in the Lives of the Poets. For Johnson, the poem's excellence lies not in exactness but copiousness, in its power of the whole rather than in particular lines. While that may be the case, Young's quasi-mystical Reason and "knowledge" is both precise and "tumultuous." His truth rests on absolute religious precepts. Yet intermittent personal moments in the first four Nights indicate afluctuatingmind capable of envisioning alternatives without embracing them and, rather, projecting them upon the faltering Lorenzo.

252

Chapter Seven

Young's Reason mulls its irrational component without bequeathing an overt contemplative grace ("On argument alone my faith is built: / Reason pursued is faith; and, unpursued / Where proof invites, 'tis Reason then no more; / And such our proof, that, or our faith is right, / Or Reason lies, and heaven design'd it wrong" [4:742—46]). Faith will remain the child of a superior Reason, contrary to Dryden's earlier precept in the Religio laid: "Reason saw not till Faith sprung the light." Young is satisfied with a relationship thus stabilized: Reason, we grant, demands our first regard; The mother honour'd, as the daughter dear. Reason the root; fair faith is but the flower: The fading flower shall die; but Reason lives Immortal as her father in the skies. (4:749-53) Thus faith remains subordinate to its engendering force, just as this force bends to a higher paternity. The hierarchical design governs transitory and transcendent realities alike, but the governing terms do not mention any visionary grace that may result. In fact, the knowledge possessed by Young remains entirely logical: he grasps it rationally, declares it didactically, and omits reference to its having revealed itself in a nocturnal thought. Young's dream of Reason is a "true" dream not debased by fancy; it instructs him concerning the Reason of ideal reality. Yet his description in the fourth Night removes all hint of dreaming and instead presents a homiletic account. After so many allusions to dream and imagination throughout the previous three cantos, this flatly sermonizing plateau slackens the poem's earlier thematic tonality. But the point is that the higher reality has been experienced through dream in preparation for the revelation of the fourth Night. Young recoils from his horrendous images and the "feculence" so revolting to Burke. The rational soul abandons fancy after using it, content with escaping the epistemological abyss that Cadalso and Goya more willingly confront.

8. Polymorphosis of Reason

Reason, an ignis fatuus in the mind Which, leaving light of nature, sense, behind, Pathless and dangerous wandering ways it takes. Through error's fenny bogs and thorny brakes; Whilst the misguided follower climbs with pain Mountains of whimseys, heaped in his own brain, Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down Into doubt's boundless sea, where, like to drown, Books bear him up awhile, and make him try To swim with bladders of philosophy; In hopes still to o'ertake th'escaping light, The vapor dances in his dazzling sight Till, spent, it leaves him to eternal light. —Rochester, "A Satire Against Mankind" T h e preceding chapters have traced the multiple forms o f Reason, w h i c h tend t o move toward their least rational function. Rational activity, extending from empirical Reason's improvised methods to other modes o f Reason (cerebral mechanism, analytical instrument, judgmental power), has displayed an alter e g o capable o f protean powers and monstrous results, in b o t h the political and the moral realms, and in scientific inquiry as well. Unlike Reason's analytical or empirical modes, visionary Reason can "see" nonsensorially through imagination and dream. This paradox violates the rational concept o f knowledge as metaphorical sight, a paradox that widens further into a pluriform condition o f metamorphic proportion. Reason's multiform nature appears in the o w l quartet that replaces the goddess Minerva in Capricho 43• M o r e reductively, the Reason/Unreason dichotomy has a counterpart in the grey and black felines depicted in the same etching (Fig. 10). T h e feline I shall call Greycat crouches in full figure and gazes enigmatically into space. 1 This creature's alter e g o peers over Enlightener's hip in the form o f a black cat, exposing only its head. W h e n the i. Greycat's name follows the tradition of Grimalkin, which is the grey cat Malkin or Matilda personified as a specter or familiar spirit. See the section "Supernatural Intelligence" in Chapter 9.

Figure ίο. Francisco de Goya. Capricho 43. Detail of felines. Courtesy of the Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena, California.

Polymorphosis of Reason

255

dichotomy is considered within the framework of Reason's digressions and perversions, Greycat becomes an emblem of its multiple transformations. The philosophical implications of Greycat's location alongside Enlightener requires an iconographical preface. Is the feline truly a cat, or is it a lynx? The question seems easily answered within the emblematic tradition of art history.2 Closer to the issue is Sepia Two, whose cat is the forerunner of the feline in Capricho 4.3 because of its identical location and stance. Its gaze and features, however, are somewhat different, expressing, as Levitine notes for Ripa, "the supernatural penetration of the mental eye offantasia." But what about Greycat's significance within the philosophical and social contexts of the preceding chapters? Cats are domestic animals, and therefore a congruent presence in the cabinet depicted in Capricho 43. However, this cat's distinguishing feature is a peculiar gaze that resists facile explanation. Should Greycat's expression be called penetrating or visionary? attentive or startled? or simply blank with abstraction? The crouched body points in one direction while the head is turned in another, a study in dual purposes. It looks toward the sleeper, but there is no certainty that it sees him rather than something beyond. A corresponding duality portrays the Reason that is both visionary and logical to a fault. Preceding chapters have presented a bizarre Reason and "rational imagination," as well as states of reverie that confirm the hybrid identity of Reason. The roles and conditions assumed by the so-called rational mind have indeed resembled the inversions displayed by the grey feline and the black cat. Their reality is "inverted" in the sense used by Jean Starobinksi, who portrays Reason as being fascinated by "the inverse without which it would not be light."3 2. George Levitine takes the feline to be a lynx, citing the authority of Orlandi's edition of Ripa in 1764. See Levitine, "Some Emblematic Sources of Goya "Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 22 (1959): 121. Ripa specifies the lynx's symbolism to be Fantasia because its eyesight is the sharpest among the animals and represents "the acuteness of the intellectual eye." Fölke Nordström adopts the same interpretation and further cites antecedents in medieval iconology (Goya, Saturn, and Melancholy: Studies in the Art of Goya [Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1962], 124-26). In contrast, the distinguished Goya specialist, Jose Lopez-Rey, describes the feline as a "wide-eyed outsize cat" (Goya's Caprichos: Beauty, Reason, and Caricature, 2 vols. [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953], 1:137). The cautious art historian Eleanor Sayre refers to the "lurking cat" in Sepia Two, the preliminary sketch (The Changing Image: Prints by Francisco de Goya [Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1974], 100). See above, Chapter 1, note 2. One difficulty with accepting Ripa's authority is that later iconologies by Gravelot and Boudard are more contemporary with Goya and more likely to be models. The unresolved issue belongs to a larger problem that might be termed "iconological discontinuity." 3. Jean Starobinski remarks that rational light knows "what intimate ties unite it to these monsters," because its own demands, by being rejected, are the source of their birth. See Starobinski's, Les emblemes de la raison (1973; Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 131.

256

Chapter Eight

To be and yet to be otherwise. To be elsewhere as another self. To take a political example, the feline's ditopic identity can be a countersign of clandestine Freemasonry, which Mozart exalts and his exact contemporary the arch-Catholic Lorenzo Hervas denounces for its nefarious magical ubiquity. 4 What "Reason" means to a systematic materialist is not what it means to a theologian. To be in two places at the same time, to define an entity by its opposite—these variations on the problem of identity apply to Reason as well as to the grey feline of Capricho 43. It bears noting that Greycat is neither black nor white. The cinder-shaded fur is a compound color that invites symbolization for a century where magic and science coexist, even while religion, morality, and politics negotiate their own rationalities and irrationalities. Opposites and inversions shape the mentality that evolves from the early eighteenth century to the Enlightenment, and from there to Revolution and Terror. Examples include, as will be shown, the moral transvaluation espoused by the Marquis de Sade, the "unnatural" phenomena identified by Edmund Burke, and the cognitive frontier that pinions the Encyclopedists between mind and heart. Almost every domain can turn experience inside out. In Sepia Two and Capricho 43, a comparable process internalizes its own sketched and redesigned record.

Feline Emblematics Greycat assumes an alert position, her foreleg elongated at a ninety-degree angle to Enlightener's legs. She is plausibly a female cat (as will become clear), resting in a crouch made famous by the Egyptian Sphynx. Her riddle insists itself by the way her head turns back to face the sleeper. Does she really belong to a normal household or does she sense the presence of the other creatures? Greycat customarily prowls the study, and it would not be unusual for her habitual place to be beside the chair. Nevertheless, her presence where a dog would be more appropriate for a male protagonist should give the viewer pause.5 4. Abate Lorenzo Hervas y Panduro. Causas de la revolution francesa en el αήο 1789 y medios que se ban valido para efectuarla los enemigos de la religion y del estado [1807], Seleccion y estudio preliminar de Nicolas Gonzalez Ruiz (Madrid: Ediciones FE, 1944), i88ff. See also Simonetta Scandellari, "La 'Tesi del complotto' nelle Causas de la Revolution de Frantia en el αήο 1789 di Lorenzo Hervas y Panduro," in Apres 89: La Revolution modele ou repoussoir: Actes du Colloque international (14.-16 mars 1990), ed. L. Domergue et G. Lamoine [Toulouse-Le Mirail: Presses Universitaires de France], 1991), 35—48. 5. The canine tradition in philosophical male poses is already well represented by 1600 in Carpaccio's Vision of St. Augustine, where a well-manicured dog sits upright on its haunches to the right of the theologian's table and regards him at a certain distance. Another scene,

Polymorphosis o f Reason

257

U n t i l t h e e n d o f the century, d o g s are the c o n v e n t i o n a l e m b l e m o f " F r i e n d s h i p . " T h e d o g appears u n d e r this rubric in G r a v e l o t ' s

Iconology.

T h e canine also e m b l e m i z e s " S u r g e r y " b y licking its sores t o s i g n i f y t h e gentleness o f t r e a t m e n t in the surgical art, w h i l e another canine in G r a v e l o t a c c o m p a n i e s " M e m o r y " t o represent all animals that t e n d n o t t o f o r g e t . G o y a ' s c h o i c e o f a cat against this b a c k g r o u n d o f activities alerts t h e v i e w e r t o a c u r i o u s shift. M o s t striking is a contrastive S p a n i s h antecedent in G o y a ' s o w n century. A scene s h o w i n g astrologer D i e g o d e T o r r e s V i l l a r r o e l asleep at his desk features a d o g in the general area o f the cat in

Capri-

cho 43-6 T h e t w o s o m n o l e n t scenes are so similar in c o m p o s i t i o n a n d title ( " S u e f i o [ s ] " ) that G o y a ' s cat seems radically t o o v e r t u r n c o n v e n t i o n . I f the d o g ' s presence adds a flourish t o intimate scenes that e x e m p l i f y l e a r n i n g a n d d o m e s t i c values, the feline has a m o r e c o m p l e x history o f roles in pictures a n d fables. 7 T h e lion in D ü r e r ' s St. Jerome,

its s a v a g e w i l l m a s -

tered at t h e desk o f C h r i s t i a n v i r t u e , survives in G r a v e l o t as an e m b l e m a t i c attribute f o r " R e a s o n , " w h e r e the lion is n o w y o k e d securely in s y m b o l i c d o m i n a t i o n o f h u m a n passions. B y the t i m e cats appear in e i g h t e e n t h c e n t u r y i n d o o r scenes, their crafty wildness stands o u t against the d o m e s t i c tranquility o f g o o d b o u r g e o i s households. 8 A g a i n , G r a v e l o t is instructive, since t h e e m b l e m f o r " L i b e r t y " includes a cat as the e n e m y o f constraint. 9

engraved by Theodore Galle done after Jan Van der Straet, depicts a scholar at his desk with book and compass and accompanied by a dog lying at his side. It is also true that the celebrated eighteenth-century painting of Philosophy Asleep by Jean-Baptiste Greuze places a lap dog on the cushioned woman leaning back from her desk, a scene filled with books and astrolabe (Bocher, Lesgravures franfaises 95, no. 251). In another genre, a small dog rests in the bottom-left foreground of Chardin's domestic scene, The Laboring Mother, which captures female virtue in the mother and daughter at their needlework. However, the canine companion for philosophers is so well established that, in its satirical form, two dogs accompany the philosophical monkey in the illustration "Cesar de Malaca, Singe-Babouin-Metif de la Grande Espece Ecrivant aux animaux de son espece" (Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, La decouverte australe, vol. 3 [Leipzig and Paris, 1781; ed. Paul Verniere, Paris and Geneva: Slatkine, 1979], 18). 6. The striking portrait shows Torres with head on palm and right elbow resting on a desk that holds an astrolabe, a compass, a ruler, an open book, and an inkwell with pen. See Torres Villarroel, Hospital de ambos sexos, Sola de Hombres: Segunda parte de los Desabuciados del mundo y de la Gloria (Salamanca: Juan de Moya, 1737). I owe this reference to Guy Mercadier, who learned it from Antonio Rodriguez Monino. The pose may be traced to the more embellished engraving of Francisco de Quevedo in Quevedo, Obras, vol. 1 (Amberes, 1726), 229. 7. It is natural to recall Dürer's famous engraving of 1514, St. Jerome in His Study, even though it is a lion that crouches before the saint's writing table, a lamb at its side. 8. The cat's admirable characteristic of freedom also takes a destructive turn. A fishloving cat sets its paws firmly on a piece of flesh in Chardin's The Skate, and a bird-hungry cat stealthily climbs behind the sofa to catch the perched pet in Fragonard's Sleeping Maiden. 9. Hubert-Francis Bourgignon, dit Gravelot, Iconologie par figures, ou Tratte de la science des allegories, emblemes, etc. en 350figuresgravies, 4 vols. Paris: Lattre, n.d. [1791]), 2:31.

258

Chapter Eight

Behind these attributes and contrivances, a long tradition of moralistic bestiaries intertwines with an equally venerable heritage of fables. This genre must not be overlooked for Goya's milieu, where poets like Iriarte and Samaniego preserve and modify the cat's role. They draw on conventions dating from Aesop, Marie de France, and La Fontaine, when the cat is renowned for astuteness.10 These fabulists all admire feline intelligence, yet it awakens misgivings. La Fontaine standardizes the semiotics of feline subtlety in several fables, adding a sly, dissembling hypocrisy. This, then, is the heritage received by Goya's literary contemporaries. Despite the pattern of pragmatic intelligence, the literary folklore of cats is complicated in Goya's day by Felix Samaniego's five fables. None of Samaniego's cats display virtue: they are foolish, vain, superficial, anything but the alert and intelligent personifications that might represent the many faces of Reason. This fabulatory transformation stands somewhat independently of Gravelot's iconology and its tradition. However, the fables also parallel an alternative emblem manual available at this time. In Boudard's manual, the cat emblemizes "Rebellion," in contrast to Gravelot's "Liberty." The shift from "Liberty" to "Rebellion" is notable for its increment of violence. Boudard also implies an irrational quality by giving a political explication to the emblem: "the hieroglyph of the people, who suffer with difficulty any subjection or constraint." 11 A further irrationality attaches to the cat in the emblem for "Night," where it is held in the hand by the "Sixth Hour of Night." These subversions of conventional feline virtue disrupt the balance of evidence for interpreting Capricho 43• Against this background, Goya's art is not unilateral. He reflects Samaniego's version of the cat's vanity in a sepia drawing of "The Feline Magistrate," a self-admiring man before a mirror whose image stares back at him as a cat. Still wilder renditions are discussed later. The evidence discourages a decisive explanation for the cat and its relation to Reason or to dream in Capricho 43- The specialists on Goya cited earlier, turning to emblem literature, find it tempting to view the enlarged, anamorphic Greycat as an authentic lynx. This interpreta10. In "The Cat and the Fox," collected by Marie de France, the escaping cat knows a single strategy against the attacking hounds, while the fox knows a hundred but cannot save itself. La Fontaine's cats all display the same well-fed, dangerous stripe. In "The Cat and the Old Rat," the cat is a subtle master of deadly ruses. Its brutality is pitiless in "The Old Cat and the Young Mouse," while its clever deceit is murderous in "The Cat, the Weasel, and the Little Rabbit." A touch of hypocrisy shows in "The Chick, the Cat, and the Baby Mouse." 11. Jean Baptiste Boudard, Iconoloßie, tiree de divers auteurs, 3 vols. (Parma and Paris: Tilliard, 1759), 3:92·

Polymorphosis of Reason

259

tion has the advantage of linking Reason to the imaginative faculty.12 The iconological authority is Ripa, however, who pre-dates Goya's milieu. Efforts to explain Goya's feline on other grounds gain support from Levitine's interpretation of "the supernatural penetration of the mental eye offantasia." The elements of imagination and supernaturalism are possibly laden with nuances of witchcraft, as I shall show. However, acute eyesight cannot really accompany fantasia, if Levitine's criterion is the inscription "The Sleep/Dream of Reason Produces Monsters." In fact, the notion of fantasia, or imagination, is authorized by the Prado and Ayala contemporary explanations for the entire set of Caprichos. How authentic these occasionally contradictory glosses are presents a methodological problem of its own. Concerning Levitine's idea of fantasia, the gloss favors viewing the feline as a lynx rather than a cat, again on Ripa's authority. In any event, any adjudication should take into account the general theme of felines in all the related drawings and prints by Goya. No such study exists, and I shall approach the general problem in Chapter 9. The specific argument in the current instance is that Greycat's ears are too pointed for a cat, but similar ears may be found elsewhere in Goya, and indeed on Chardin's cat in The Skate. As for clear-sighted cats or lynxes, we find blind "Justice" personified in the magistrate-cats of Capricho 21, two of whom devour a defendant while the third stares blankly into space like the feline of Capricho 43. Thus there need be no quarrel with Levitine's idea that the dark forms of fantasy threaten Enlightener, who is guarded by a clear-sight feline, in contrast to the light-blinded owls. It is simply that the feline's identity is as easily attributed to a cat, with the further advantage of explaining its significance with respect to multivalent Reason. According to popular wisdom in Goya's time, the cat is "a philosophical animal that acts only with prudence and design," as Caraccioli states (Dictionnaire, 1:40). And while cats continue to be associated with domestic scenes, one such scene also allegorizes eyesight.13 Therefore to follow Lopez-Rey's epithet of a "wide-eyed outsize cat" for the feline of Capricho

12. The word "lynx" symbolized intellectual acuity in eighteenth-century Spanish usage. Father Feijoo writes: "There are lynx-like understandings for some things and moles for others" ("El error universal," Obras escogidas, ed. Agustin Miliares Carlo, Biblioteca de Autores Espafioles 141 [Madrid: Atlas, 1961], 3:360). 13. Saint-Aubin's depicts a young woman embroidering behind a cat that plays with a ball of twine in the foreground. This scene also happens to be an allegory for "Sight" in a series about the five senses executed in 1760. See Emmanuel Bocher, Lesgmvuresfranfaisesau XVJIIe Steele, 6 vols. (Paris: Damascene Morgand et Charles Fatout, 1875-82), 1:115-16.

26o

Chapter Eight

43 brings Goya into the eighteenth-century orbit of Boudard and Gravelot rather than the earlier though still known Ripa. In sum, the numerous variants in literary and iconological traditions hinder an unequivocal elucidation of Capricho 43• Goya specialists do not regard the other Capricho scenes emblematically, and it may be asked why they treat Capricho 43 differently. The question resists settlement on sociological grounds: it is impossible to determine whether cats or dogs are the preferred companions in places where philosophers and artists work. Goya's choice of Greycat, whom he then duplicates in a charcoal inverse peering behind the sleeper's hip, pleads a special exegesis in the context of so pivotal an etching. This scene's subject and eccentric icons are absolutely unique when set alongside the other Caprichos in the series, as is often noted. That is why the peculiar domesticity unfolding while the master sleeps returns the viewer to the contrast between cat and dog. If the sharp-sighted feline is guarding the master against the monsters of fantasy, why is it so passive? A dog might sooner be expected to guard the home or rouse its proprietor with a warning bark. Indeed, any ordinary cat would stalk the nearest bird the way any hunting dog would. In fact, Goya's most immediate model for this scene is the aforementioned portrait of Torres, where a dog crouches alongside like Greycat, but in a lazy position.14 Greycat's behavior, then, is untrue to breed. Goya's decision to use her seems based on more than her putative superhuman eyesight. As a supernatural presence, cats may reasonably be said conventionally to evoke an uncanny domestic life. Associations with hearth fires, cooking, brooms, sweeping, and the solitary females who tend to them all—these elements cluster to form intimations of witchcraft. A natural inference would be that the nearby cat is an accomplice, if not an embodiment, of Satan in the manner shown by anthropological studies.15 Such a possibility would explain a feline vigilance that excludes fidelity and warning. Greycat stares not at Enlightener but into an indeterminate distance where her unworldly consciousness belongs. These preternatural coincidences do not change the fact that Enlightener is a male and not a crone, yet the very difference may explain all. Could he be a reasoner turned magus, a Voltaire turned Torres? The only 14. Goya departs from his allegorical practice in The City of Madrid, which shows the white-robed female in the company of a canine in the bottommost plane, a foil to the cherubic heralds aloft. 15. Xose Ramon Marino Ferro, Satin, sus siervas, las brujas, y la religion del mal (Vigo: Edicions Xereis de Galicia, 198+), 88-91.

Polymorphosis of Reason

261

mode of Reason that keeps itself awake is enlightened Reason; otherwise, sleep or dream fits Reason with any of the masks described in previous chapters. This morphological variety requires the wide-eyed Greycat, homologous with waking Reason, to have at least one oneiric counterpart: the charcoal cat that dwells among the monsters of witchcraft or alchemy. Even so, Greycat's smoke-white and carbon-grey coat already blends the extremes of white to black. The same gamut traverses the range of character traits in traditional feline fable and emblematics: "white" being intelligence and "black" being murderousness, with the intervening degrees being prudence, astuteness, craftiness, dissembling, vanity, hypocrisy, treachery, and brutality. From ash to cinder, the chiaroscuro palette calls up a psychomoral gamut that Greycat spans at diverse moments of activity. The range is no less versatile than Reason's. It never shrinks to a single band, except for the blackness that takes the special form of Greycat's alter ego. The identity of Greycat, like Reason itself, is elusive. Identity cannot be detached from near-identity, the similarity of charcoal grey to darker carbon. But identity is also difference—Greycat as coal-black cat—the inversion of sameness in the way that Reason can be Unreason, "the inverse without which it would not be light."

Reason De-rationalized Light is recognizable as light because it dispels darkness. The same logic should apply to defining Reason, and yet the eighteenth century throws Reason into so many contexts that its nature resists unequivocal formulation. Reason's identity is like the numerous variants that make Goya's wideeyed cat so elusive. Identity materializes by an inverse relation to function. Reason is conventionally thought to be what it is because it presents the alternative to instinct, passion, and madness. The alternative can, however, overlap the faults it tries to avoid. The most rational of mechanist materialists, La Mettrie, pushes his principles so far that his sophisms are "a chaos of Reason and extravagance," according to Baron d'Holbach and Diderot. This "eulogy of vice," Voltaire complains, makes La Mettrie an obvious precursor of the Marquis de Sade.16 The polar opposite, moral virtue, 16. On La Mettrie's philosophical chaos, d'Holbach declares that he "reasons like a true phrenetic." Voltaire accuses La Mettrie of inviting the reader to indulge in "all the disorders" of social immorality. Cited by Paul-Laurent Assoun, La Mettrie: L'homme machine (Paris: Denoel-Gonthier, 1981), 13.

262

Chapter Eight

connects Reason with its conventional opposite, feeling, as in Rousseau. Eighteenth-century authors more commonly disconnect Reason and feeling, a point documented by Robert Mauzi in his exhaustive book on the idea of happiness.17 Even in Rousseau's exceptional "passion of Reason," the apparent fusion of opposites actually exposes a fractious antinomy. His "sublime Reason" in The New Heloise draws on "the same vigor of soul that creates grand passions." Nevertheless, the heart surges with desires that are incompatible with the social order, while Reason's natural function is perverted by this same society. These deflections from empirical Reason dismantle the convenient polarity of Reason and Unreason. They unhinge the facile dialectic of irrationalism and diverse rational forms practiced by the natural philosopher, the systematic materialist, the theologian, and the political or moral thinker. Just as the concept of Unreason cannot be corseted within such terms as "insanity" and "chaos," so too any definition of Reason that excludes feeling and imagination constricts its meaning. The graduated middle ground absorbs qualities from both extremes. Only a literary perspective based on Neoclassical values will stigmatize imagination while calling Reason a cognitive faculty. The Encyclopedists term their systematic work a "reasoned" dictionary, but its Preliminary Discourse combines the performance of imagination with that of Reason and memory. The tripartite structure of mind outlined by d'Alembert suggests that two kinds of cognitive knowledge are available, one produced by Reason's combination of direct, primitive ideas, and the other produced when imagination joins ideas that resemble or imitate the objects of those direct ideas. Nevertheless, d'Alembert takes examples from art and poetry, which yield a knowledge based on feeling and taste rather than on the ratiocinations that define knowledge by evidence, logical certitude, or probability. The two types of knowledge just mentioned enjoy implicitly an equal value in the crucial Preliminary Discourse. Although the "evidence of the heart" differs from the "evidence of the mind which concerns speculative truths, it subjugates us with the same force."18 Moreover, the faculties that mislead thought are not limited to imagination. The "science of reason17. Robert Mauzi points to Rousseau's oxymoron, the "passion of Reason," which is both the genuine source of wisdom and the antagonist of the society that perverts it. See Mauzi, L'idee du bonheurdans la litterature et lapenseefranfaises au XVIIIe Steele (Paris: Armand Colin, i960), 157-38. 18. Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, Trans, and ed. Richard N. Schwab and Walter Rex (Indianapolis, Ind. and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 45·

Polymorphosis of Reason

263

ing," called Logic, can expose false judgments but it also "cloaks them in a subtle and deceiving form" (Preliminary Discourse, 30). On the other hand, imagination alone may not claim exclusive jurisdiction over its form of knowledge because conscience "is very Reason itself, regarded as instructed in the rule or natural law we must follow.... Often too we take conscience for the very judgment that we bring to the morality of our actions" (apud Mauzi, 522). In the end, a qualified rational order wins out among the Encyclopedists. D'Alembert specifies that he does "not put Reason after imagination," as did Bacon, because he wants to follow the metaphysical order of mental operations (Preliminary Discourse, 76). But the evidence of the heart proves to be compatible with Reason, and is thus admitted to the rational scheme. Despite Reason's analytical function, d'Alembert finds that imagination is a superior force in its swifter access to truths when compared with philosophical reasoning. If the operations of Reason precede those of imagination, they produce only the initial sequence of ideas. After that, the imagination moves much faster than Reason once it has made its first steps. Imagination has the advantage of operating on objects which it produces itself, whereas Reason all too often exhausts itself in fruitless investigations, since perforce it is limited to the ideas which lie before it, and [is] forced to check itself as each instant. (70—71).

But false leads and self-deceptive reasoning cannot persuade d'Alembert that Reason is any less estimable than imagination. On the contrary, an undeclared quality makes it the finer faculty, despite imagination's equal truth-making capacity. It is worth examining the analysis that the mathematician d'Alembert uses to weigh Reason and imagination in his esteem. He insists that the great geometrician and the great poet should not disdain each other regardless of how much their mental operations contrast. Yet he contends that imagination deals only with material objects. Spiritual objects comprise Reason's abstract domain. D'Alembert also contends that mental operations progress naturally so as to carry imagination in the wake of Reason and memory. Imagination is "a creative faculty, and the mind, before it considers creating, begins by reasoning upon what it sees and knows," or else remembers. When the mind finally imagines, it creates only objects similar to those already known through direct ideas. The result "abstracts" mental operations from their sensory and intellectual sources. This process shows

264

Chapter Eight

the defect of its creative virtue. On one hand, imagination plays a key role in rational sciences like geometry and metaphysics, but on the other hand, the abstract process of imagined ideas imitates Nature only to stray from verisimilitude: "the more [the mind] departs from these objects, the more bizarre and unpleasant are the beings which it forms." This is why even artistic invention is subjected to rules (51). The analysis seems to privilege Reason and consign imagination implicitly to the sphere of poetics. At any rate, d'Alembert forecloses discussion of imagination's deeper structures and cognitive implications. Reason enjoys no clear hegemony among d'Alembert's contemporaries. They too rely pragmatically on its methods and results. Reason is functional, as Diderot suggests in Mangogul's dream about System and Experience in The Indiscreet Jewels. The dreamer stands before a symmetrical edifice that nonetheless lacks foundations, and he mingles with its feeble visitors, who are the misshapen adherents to hypotheses. An elderly man blows soap-bubbles while a child approaches from the distance, changing shape until it grows into a colossus. This allegory, discussed in detail by Paul Hazard, Peter Gay, and others, portrays the empirical method arriving to dispose of authority and error through experimentation.19 The metamorphic child shuns aprioristic notions in each new approach. While changeable procedures might seem to confuse the way to rational truth, the opposite is the case because of the reasonableness of Reason, its flexibility through intuition and common sense. Mangogul's dream nevertheless brings a conflict into the open. Enlightened Reason shuns caprice and personal sentiment while upholding the axiom that Nature speaks with one voice, the voice of rational order. But this monistic axiom runs against the flexibility just illustrated, not to mention the "evidence of the heart." The conflict is ostensibly resolved by Alexander Pope's famous paradox about the natural order and human understanding in Essay on Man: All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal Good; And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, One truth is clear; whatever is is right. 19. O n Mangogul's dream see pp. 14-15; and Paul Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century ( N e w York: Meridian Books, 1967), 28-229; and Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, an Interpretation, vol. 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 136.

Polymorphosis of Reason

265

In effect, this truth leaves Reason exposed to suspicion. Its inherent capacity for error makes it the available scapegoat for any misunderstanding between mind and Nature. Along the fault line separating Reason and Truth appears a divided knowledge—that of mind and that of sensibility. For if Nature is the final arbiter of truth in the face of rationalism, then the maxim "Whatever is, is right" must come under close scrutiny. Here the fault-line reveals the dilemma of witnessing vice and injustice triumph. Also apparent is the polarity between Reason and imagination, which has been the issue all along. How is the Enlightenment to interpret Pope's key verb "is"? By observation of the external world? But the senses, and especially eyesight, may prove unreliable. By regarding the inner world of private perceptions and sentiments? But subjectivity deprived of Reason— Rousseau is not Pope—incites irrational powers to action. Or, finally, by limiting the verb "is" to the present? If so, then all existing phenomena of consciousness must be recognized, including the capricious imaginings and dreams that exist indisputably owing to irrational mental powers. When Ernst Cassirer analyzes the elusive concept of Reason, he cites without comment an extraordinary metaphor in d'Alembert's Elements of Philosophy concerning the new method of philosophizing: Spreading through Nature in all directions like a river which has burst its dams, this fermentation has with a sort of violence swept along with it everything which stood in its way. . . . The fruit or sequel of this general effervescence of minds has been to cast new light on some matters and new shadows on others, just as the effect o f the ebb and flow of the tides is to leave some things on the shore and wash others away, (apud Cassirer, +)

This imagery eliminates the possibility of permanent order, to say nothing of stable truth. Despite d'Alembert's confidence, what persists in his optimistic account is the process itself. The constant flux and reflux configure harmony at some moments, but at others they also configure chaos. Perhaps the debris on the shore is valuable treasure. If so, it will be contained by new "dams" of rational language until they too burst. Presumably the river will again ferment and swell beyond containment. Here is one motive for the skeptical dialectics of System and Experience in the dream fashioned by Diderot. And here too may lie the justification for Hume's profound skepticism in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, where Philo raises irrational hypotheses to the level of reasonable ones much the same way that Dr. Bordeu does for Diderot in D'Alembert's Dream.

266

Chapter Eight

For Cassirer, however, Reason does have a focal definition. He concludes that intellect pursues divergent routes in an effort to encompass all of reality. But divergence is not dispersion, since "all the various energies of the mind are, rather, held together in a common center of force" (Cassirer, 5). What the eighteenth century characterizes as "Reason" is just this "force" or "homogeneous formative power." Its unity and immutability, recognized by Pope, are unquestioned. But the flexibility cited earlier has its own manifestation in the new "systematic spirit," which Cassirer distinguishes from the "spirit of system" of the earlier rationalist philosophies. As distinct from the esprit de systeme, the new esprit systematique refrains from expecting to know the order of phenomena before acquiring knowledge of the phenomena themselves. Both regularity and law are discovered in the correlation of object and subject, of reality and truth. Consequently, rationality is not anticipated at the outset in the form of a closed system, but rather conforms to a "logic of facts" that grows progressively in clarity: "the mind must abandon itself to the abundance of phenomena and gauge itself constantly by them" (Cassirer, 9). Nevertheless, Cassirer's own evidence includes texts whose metaphors betray his rational purpose. He quote Duclos on the "universal fermentation" of the age, and Montesquieu on "the Inst for knowledge" that drives intellect ever onward from idea to idea in unsated desire (Cassirer, 13—14, emphasis added). Not only eighteenth-century metaphors but also Cassirer's own words de-rationalize the orderly effect he attributes to Reason. He reports new thoughts as "eddies and whirlpools" that are not to be "dived into," but somehow navigated by seizing the helm of intellect. He assumes that all things comprise a chain straight to the core of Nature, although the human mind can never wrest the inner mystery from the things contemplated. The Enlightenment thus embraces Reason as "a kind of energy, a force which is fully comprehensible only in its agency and effects. What Reason is, and what it can do, can never be known by its results, only by its function." Cassirer's account flies in the face of the Preliminary Discourse in its fundamental project.20 But his discerning interpretation is in accord with a new 20. Reason is also "a concept of agency, not of being," according to Ernst Cassirer. It dissolves and rebuilds "a new structure, a true whole." It is commonly held with Cassirer that "the rationalistic postulate of unity dominates the minds of this age." Thus "the function of unification continues to be recognized as the basic role of reason." See Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 22-23) · This does not cancel Cassirer's nebulous metaphors quoted earlier. Citing this statement, Richard Schwab proceeds nevertheless to discuss d'Alembert's "ambiguity and uncertainty" when the understanding concerns sentiment-oriented disciplines such as ethics and aesthetics. Here, analysis involves

Polymorphosis of Reason

267

cognitive status acquired by imagination alongside Reason toward the end of the century. The functions of Reason include "its power to bind and to dissolve." Under the analysis of monist naturalism at this time, beliefs based on authority and experiential evidence dissolve into component parts. But then follows the task of reconstruction: "Reason cannot stop with the dispersed parts; it has to build from them a new structure, a true whole. . . . Only in this two-fold intellectual movement can the concept of Reason be fully characterized, namely, as a concept of agency, not of being" (Cassirer, 13-14). Here Cassirer looks ahead to the Romantic philosophers and the post-Kantian synthesis. But the question for the Enlightenment remains unresolved: what else lies beyond the structure produced by Reason? If wide-eyed Greycat has a counterpart in the elusive black feline behind Enlightener's shoulder, does Reason also include a transcendent experience in its well-ordered "totality"? Cassirer's metaphor of "eddies and whirlpools" has an ingenuous but accurate cognate in Abbot Terrasson's aphorism: "The passions are the winds that drive our ship, and Reason is the pilot that conducts it. The ship would not move at all without the winds and would get lost without the pilot" (apud Mauzi, 451). Sensibility dwells in an internal world that also informs Nature. From this view, it is possible to rationalize the irrational. If Reason's most noble function is to reveal Truth, this function need not prevent it from becoming the heart's accomplice. Reason mediates man's transactions with Nature, now defined "euphorically" as an idea that valorizes the human need to legitimize instinct as well as Reason. From Christian myth to Rousseau and the theorists of gardening, sensibility has never been considered divorced from Reason in their origins: "The passions subjected to Reason never perturb the heart, and the love of pleasure has always conformed to the love of order."21 The limits of Reason grow clear in the measure that thinkers can reduce confusion over its status as a functional method and as the privileged "instinctive judgment" as well as Reason. See "Translator's Introduction" to d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse xxxiv-vii. Similarly, Paul Hazard's account of the Encyclopedic identifies the chief problem: "How was the analytical discontinuity, which the alphabetical order of a dictionary necessitated, to be reconciled with the synthesis, which was the dream of the age?" Hazard then adopts the metaphor of a single, continuous line to represent knowledge: "That line may be intersected by obstacles or interrupted by halts. So far from being a straight line, it is much more like a twisting lane, or the tortuous circumvolutions of a maze." See Hazard, European Thoitght in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Meridian Books, 1967), 205, 207. 2i. Cited by Mauzi (L'idee du bonheur, 561) from Valmire's God and Man in 1771. A similar dictum by Vauvenargues assimilates Nature to the human being: "the nature of man, who is nothing but the coexistence of his instinct and his Reason" (564).

268

Chapter Eight

illuminator of Truth. Its instrumental power of analysis has little to do with the revelation of normative principles and standards for behavior. Rousseau makes this plain in his Letters on Virtue·. The art of reasoning is not Reason but often its abuse. Reason is the faculty that orders all the faculties of our soul appropriately toward the nature of things and their relation to us. Reasoning is the art of comparing known truths in order to compose other unknown truths that we may uncover by this art. But it teaches us nothing about knowing the primitive truths that serve as elements for the others. When in their place we insert our opinions, passions, and prejudices—far from enlightening us, it blinds us. It does not elevate but rather saps the soul, and it corrupts the judgment that it should perfect. 22

As a method, Reason is "reasoning" power. As an illuminator, Reason is linked to the soul's other faculties in the role of "judgment." This extra-rational factor is lost among the rational monists, like d'Holbach, who are consumed by the bipolar theme of error and Truth so that they devise antagonistic families of words that encode value judgments. The dark words are: "Enthusiasm," "imagination," "credulity," "unhappiness," "fear," "imposture," "authority," "tyranny," "superstition," "ignorance," "error," "chimera," "phantom." The benevolent, radiant words are: "Reason," "experience," "Truth," "interest," "virtue," "happiness," "society," "Nature," "atheism." These two lexical series legislate the normative conception of Reason among materialists. It would simplify matters if rational materialists alone were partisans of what La Mettrie calls "the skeleton of cold Reason." But in fact, rational optimism also characterizes moral philosophers like Saint-Hyacinthe, who traffic in vaguer terms like "inner testimony," "inner approval," "virtue," and "happiness." A cold reasoner like La Mettrie stands accused by moralists of wrecking Reason by divorcing happiness from the concept of Truth. Yet his guilt consists of respecting the conclusions of a logical and empirical ethic, conclusions that recognize the demonstrable fact that well-being may be experienced, as in Sade, by perversion, drunkenness, dreaming, and other gratifying forms of "Untruth" that have nothing to do with a life of rational inquiry into Truth. This point, grasped by Mauzi, cannot abolish his evidence of the confusion prevailing among the multiplied defenses and functions of Reason. Like beauty and justice, Reason appears to 22. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettres sur la vertu: Oeuvres et correspondance inedites (Paris: Michel-Levy Freres, 1861), 145-46.

Polymorphosis of Reason

269

be a golden speck in the eye of the beholder, serving all parties for all ends. Mauzi offers an extensive discussion of the different modes of Reason— normative, critical, instrumental—and its reconciliation to sensibility regarding the ideas of order, progress, and Nature. Although his focus is the idea of "happiness" in the eighteenth century, his documentation remains a veritable thesaurus of lengthy quotations that may be conveniently borrowed for the present discussion.

Sublime Reason The references to Reason quoted by Mauzi appear in the perspective of sensibility. Taken as a group, these quotations appear to diminish Reason's ascendency over sensibility, at least in regard to how d'Alembert's rational perspective weighs them both. The middle path between deprecating sensibility and exalting it was seen earlier in Abbot Terrasson's conceit of the pilot controlling the wind-tossed ship of life. This middle path can also be glimpsed in a revealing book title like The Man of This Century Led to Truth by Sentiment and Reason}1 In this book, the moralist asserts: "it is in delirium that wisdom is found. From the Enthusiasm of true love is born that sensibility of imagination which creates a tender friendship" (apud Mauzi, 482). If love can be elevated to a plane where delirium and passion are coequal with wisdom, then Rousseau's conclusion is logical: "sublime Reason is only sustained by the same vigor of soul that makes the great passions. Philosophy is served with dignity only by the same fire that one feels for a mistress."24 Philosophy and Reason do not lose status, but the assumptions about their function are now altered so that their identities are unrecognizable from the standpoint of a d'Alembert. A concept like Reason may lose its equilibrium under the myriad functions imposed by a heterogeneous cultural discourse. By tilting toward one function or the other, Reason's stable center, if not its orderly nature, will alter. Reason coerced into defending the irrational—whether Rousseauian sublimity or Sadie morality—erodes not only its normative meaning but also the justification for its functional energy, to use Cassirer's terms. The erosion itself serves to measure the reservoir of caution that 23. The main title chosen by Loaisel de Treogate is Dolbreuse (Amsterdam and Paris: Belin, 1783). 24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie ou La nouvelk Helotse, ed. Michel Launay (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1967), 134.

270

Chapter Eight

dams up against philosophical Enthusiasm. Reason again moves to ascendency with respect to sensibility, but not in isolation. Mauzi cites both Diderot's ambivalence toward rationality and the natural historian Buffon's scientific flexibility, in order to show how tenuous rationality can be.25 Mauzi's evidence signals not an eruption of irrationalism but a weaning of Reason away from its seigneurial privileges and toward an unaccustomed modesty in the cognitive matters that are veiled in mystery. When an author like Delisle de Sales proclaims "Reason does nothing on Earth: it is the passions that make it move and upset it," the statement is a pragmatic observation rather than an aggressive manifesto. Where Reason fails to penetrate Nature's dark corners, it may no longer denigrate these areas with its stock vocabulary. Under the revisionary rule, a declaration like Abbot Mably's cannot signal abandonment of Reason but rather a concern for its survival: " I know too well the limits of my understanding to dare believe myself cleverer than Nature. She often appears to me enveloped in mysteries, and I adore them respectfully. I feel that without the help of the passions, my Reason would freeze and become reduced to a crude instinct" (apud Mauzi, 448). The viewpoint attests to an ascendent sensibility without implying the intent to betray Reason. In sum, when Reason and feeling or imagination are polarized for the purpose of analyzing moral values, the mechanist concepts of La Mettrie, d'Holbach, and Helvetius are being applied to the theory of affect. Countless texts supplied by Mauzi demonstrate this point for values like well-being and happiness. His copious excerpts from writings on the ethics of pleasure and wisdom treat these values as functions both of the heart— such as love, ambition, fear, pity, hope—as well as of the mind, such as heroism, sacrifice, wisdom, philanthropy. Prevailing opinion on the subject of moral psychology fills an irrationalist substrate composed of second- and third-ranking authors such as Delisle de Sales, Levesque de Pouilly, and Mably, but also of first-ranking and seldom quoted philosophers such as Samuel Formey and Johann Georg Sulzer. But they all revert to a concept of imagination already dignified by d'Alembert's tripartite scheme shared by Reason and memory, and further privileged by La Mettrie's eloquent investiture of imagination on the summit of mental faculties. 25. Buffon speaks of the "systematization" of the physical senses, which can produce a moral "delirium, the brusque possession of the soul by the senses that changes the emotions into disasters." Diderot warns against "the impetuous movements of the heart, fantastic desires, blind inclinations." Yet his preventive is self-defense through "indifference" and "insensibility," adding in the same breath that "indifference breeds sages and insensibility breeds monsters" (Mauzi, L'idee, 440,450).

Polymorphosis of Reason

271

Imagination and sensibility rise to a crest that salvages words linked to aspects of reality that rational inquiry traditionally jettisons. No longer does the word "magic" exclusively conjure up superstition, nor do "abyss," "torrent," and "wandering" denote just intellectual confusion, as we shall see. As these terms gain respectability, they fit in among the conventional locutions of cognitive discourse while also transforming the texture of such discourse. Interpretations may differ as to whether the epithet "irrationalism" accurately designates the type of knowledge entailed by those terms, and whether their sensibility closes the space between d'Alembert's two kinds of cognition. The best testing ground is perhaps the subject of the Sublime, a subject already examined by many scholars.26 A comparative analysis of the Sublime and the Gothic or melancholic modes might be profitable, however, if focused on the rhetoric of cognition. The pervasion of these modes within the literary infrastructure is as important as the example of reverie noted earlier for the military officer Saxe. In the following example of a rugged mountain scene, the problem becomes one of clearing away the irrationalist vocabulary in order to see how mental faculties operate. This example is followed by a second, which adds Goyesque undertones to a Nature already imbued with irrational elements. Comparison of the two texts should bring out the subjectivized role of Reason in contrast to its object of inquiry, here an extra-rational world that escapes human understanding regardless of which mental faculty dominates. The first text appears in the Military, Literary, and Sentimental Miscellany by the Prince de Ligne, who notes how all the mental faculties should be "intercepted by the noise of sublime cascades": The eye and the mind love to grow confused in the shadow of these immense and rocky hollows that the earth seems to open up to the curious. One might say that it wishes to share its secrets in confidence. The imagination loves to let itself be carried along by a torrent, with which it will become lost without knowing whither it l e a d s . . . . In the wandering of [the soul's] vast and vague reflections presented by these objects, one is precipitated with its ideas into these frightening abysses, (apud Mauzi, 32J)

The lexical paradigms align themselves sharply in this passage: both the cognitive act and its agents are on one side, and the objects of cognition are 26. On the sublime see W. J. Hippie, The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957); and Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

272

Chapter Eight

on the other side. Mental activity ranges from perception and feeling to reflective thought, without acknowledging Reason explicitly ("eye," "mind," "imagination," "reflections," "ideas"). The instruments of cognition are similarly engaged beyond the limits of rational control ("grow confused," "carried along," "become lost," "wandering," "precipitated"). And the object of this knowledge is no less veiled from Reason, exhibiting mysterious attributes ("shadow," "hollows," "secrets," "abysses") that are disorienting as well as fearsome ("immense," "seem to open," "without knowing where," "vast and vague," "frightening"). Imagination is the faculty that presides over disorderly phenomena, internal and external alike. Nevertheless, imagination behaves in Nature just as Reason might; to state this in La Mettrie's terms, "it too can measure her. It reasons, judges, penetrates, compares, goes deeper" (L'homme machine, 114). Experiences of the Sublime like the preceding are never incoherent or unsatisfying in the knowledge they furnish of the ineffable in Nature. The contemplator simply "understands," although the contents of understanding elude rational expression and are organized through sensibility. Words and images are usually so closely traced on the brain in La Mettrie's materialist psychology that "it is rather rare for us to imagine a thing without its name or the sign attached to it." A major exception is the Sublime, as we have seen. And yet to experience it is to know a reality, as distinct from a supernatural realm that no waking activity can penetrate. The fact is, the imagination alone . . . represents all objects with the words and figures that characterize them, and thus again is what the soul is, since it plays all the roles in [the soul]. With it, and with itsflatteringbrush, the cold skeleton of Reason acquires live rosyflesh,the forests speak, the echoes whisper, the rocks weep, marble breathes, everything among the inanimate bodies takes on life. (113) La Mettrie concludes his eulogy to imagination with a reference to the dual injustice done to it by those who condemn it and those who glorify it, both instances resulting from ignorance of its true character. The "scathing" attitude of La Mettrie toward the "uncreative intelligence" has been pointed out by John Falvey, who also records La Mettrie's refusal to separate rational and imaginational thinking.27 The naturalist monism of psychologists like La Mettrie materializes all mental 27. John Falvey, "The Aesthetics of La Mettrie," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 87 (1972), 426-27.

Polymorphosis of Reason

273

phenomena, said to be of the same substance as all other phenomena in the external world. Nothing exists beyond the physiology of aesthetic and religious experiences, as Falvey indicates, since soul and body are one and the same. But while Reason is made sensible in this monistic perspective, there can be no inkling that the extra-rational side of Nature might indeed conceal more than even imagination knows. This is where Goya's intuitive "Universal Language" drives a wedge between imagination, or the dream of Reason, and the contents perceived thereby. Without going this far in the current discussion, we find already in La Mettrie's quoted text a brooding Nature laid bare to "creative intelligence" or reflective sensibility, agencies that nonetheless prevent a glimpse into dimensions that require a more elevated power. The text quoted earlier from the Prince de Ligne suggested an aesthetic rapture before the Sublime. This response both satisfies the monist in regard to cognitive instruments and their object, and permits the dualist to have a share of enigma. A second literary text, by Jean-Marie Morel, opens the breach more widely: A shadowy and mysterious day, a profound solitude, a silence so much more gloomy that it is interrupted only by the lugubrious accents of the birds that flee the light, the ensemble that turns the soul inward to absorption and brings it to experience a kind of religious terror. . . . Such is the magic of the great effects presented to us by the spectacle of Nature. They alone, cloaked in a veritably imposing character, stir the soul powerfully with the aid of the senses. The objects they constitute, although insensible and inanimate, act upon the intellectual faculty and succeed in elevating our mind to the sublimest meditations, (apud Mauzi, 322)

The reference to owls fleeing the light sounds an alarm in keeping with aspects of the Goyesque vision mentioned before. The owls' denial of symbolic light plainly alludes to something other than enlightened Reason. The allusion carries the notion of "the magic of the great effects" into an irrationalist if not supernatural sphere of knowledge. Once again the lexical paradigms show that the psychological faculties perform independently of Reason ("turn inward to absorption," "soul," "aid of the senses"). The reference to "intellectual faculty" confirms its subservience to sensibility. The text does not name imagination. The mood and emotional aura support the needed grasp of the known object without regard to the images of sense data. The sole sensory reference is to "accents" of birds, which belong not to the known object but to the natural setting.

274

Chapter Eight

In fact, the experience just described fails to reveal what precisely is known beyond the self-contemplating experience itself. The text discloses only the emotional structure accompanying that cognitive act ("religious terror," "stir the soul," "elevating our mind"). Otherwise, the seemingly "intellectual" exaltation defers to an unexplained "magic," which is something more than the meditator's intuitive sense of a magical atmosphere. The "magic" is supernatural, although not in the vein of scientific charlatans or occultist practitioners unworthy of philosophical attention. Instead, we are in the presence of what a Swedenborg might experience, and of what persuades a Kant to write in response to the visionary—more of both in Chapter 10. This "magic" is an "effect" produce by Nature. It belongs to "the spectacle of Nature"—no longer rational as Pluche might present it, though perhaps as sacred as hefinallyportrays it. The "magic" is primarily a concealed language of signs that are neither sensorialized nor verbalized. Such is the "imposing character" or set of characters that "cloaks" what the moral senses perceive as merely inert objects. External appearances, therefore, are not true reality, nor does the language that dresses them reach beyond the stage of manifestation labeled "effects." These effects are the true externality within the deceptive sensorial one. The reality beyond or within, presumably the truly real, barely surfaces. Its existence emerges through quite another irrationalism, the one eventually cultivated by the Romantic imagination, although with different implications. The text just analyzed is from J.-M. Morel's Theory of Gardens, and this scene of 1776 lingers between pietist and Gothic atmospheres before settling unambiguously on the "intellectual faculty." Morel's work is fundamentally innocent, but it exposes a polar cognitive axis whenever imagination undermines Reason without risking its own prestige in the effort. Hints of impending incoherence in eighteenth-century discourse appear in Mauzi's own critical vocabulary, although he does not pursue their implications in his documentation. The entire subject of reverie, sensibility, and their cognitive potential needs no comment here, as many scholars have commented heavily on its eventual outpouring into Romanticism. What concerns this discussion is how Mauzifindsin such authors as Chenier, Prevost, Rousseau, and even Voltaire a "dream of repose" whose pastoral core of "poetic magic" harbors seeds of contradiction. Here both ennui and concealed ambivalence can at any moment dispel the ideals of refuge and voluptuous well-being furnished through the repositioning of Reason either vis-ä-vis imagination or within the triad of mental faculties, a triad pivoted on Reason in d'Alembert and on imagination in La Mettrie.

Polymorphosis of Reason

275

The aftermath of the dispelled dream of repose is a "bizarrely emerged" melancholy or anguish, if nothing worse (Mauzi, L'idee, 333—36).

The Teratogenesis of Rational Values The rationalized sensibility just surveyed is a "sublime Reason" that also bears a nightmarish consequence. The nightmare consists of the extreme sensibility that libertines claim to be the most pleasurable good, another form of the ideal of happiness that Mauzi documents. The prime example is the Marquis de Sade, who inverts conventional morality on behalf of social order and individual liberty. The theme is complex in Sade's extensive writings, but its germinating principle can be found in the earliest version of his novel Justine, titled The Misfortunes of Virtue. These misadventures of morality exemplify the validity of libertinism, which the novel affirms. However, moral inversion is merely the outer membrane of a cosmic organism that Sadie Reason mirrors. The universe is as capricious as life itself, argues Sade. The response to universal caprice must be to advocate Unreason and to defend it on rational grounds. The reasoning for Sade's defense can only be persuasive, however, if Sade preserves Reason's original mission, which is to reflect the order presumed to exist in the universe. The contradiction dissolves when Sade redefines the cosmic order, leaving Reason untouched. Thus the parallelism subsists, but in a new way. How Sade manages all this is a fascinating display of motifs that undercuts much of Enlightenment thought.28 Sade shares with Goya and Diderot an interest in problems of value and form, major concerns that shade philosophical discourse in their century. This affiliation arises at a crucial moment, late in the Enlightenment and early in Sade's career, when the philosophical uncertainty best documented in Diderot and the moral monstrosity satirized by Goya converge and shape Sade's bold revaluations.29 Two problems find metaphorical and scientific expression at this time: the developmental process in natural 28. These motifs are the primal chaotic reality, monstrosity, blindness in light, and the true reality of the Many and the One whose dream-knowledge comes under the aegis of metamorphosis. Discussion of these will dominate the second and third volumes of this study. 29. Diderot's uncertainty expresses itself in La promenade du sceptique, where the "authorial attitude shared with the narrator" undercuts skepticism itself among other philosophical positions, in Jack Undank's judgment: "Enlightenment, illumination, reason turn out to be instruments of unacknowledged supposition, an 'instrument inutile"' (Diderot: Inside, Outside, and In-Between [Madison, Wise.: Coda Press, 1979], 76-77).

276

Chapter Eight

forms, and how this development relates to human values. Sade maps social conduct within the history of natural phenomena in his early novel. He maps the roots of value in Nature, and he offers a morphocartology of existence from one end of the experiential scale to the other. The idea that empowers Sade's bold anticipation of Nietzsche has two components. Nature recombines its elements constantly, and it remains indifferent to the outcome. Hence Nature offers the model that permits libertines their indifference to the moral order respected by rational beings. These premises turn The Misfortunes of Virtue into a foreshadowed depiction of Goya's "monsters" in the aftermath of Reason's displacement. Behind Sade's title stands the notion that the many are One. The manifold forms of suffering inflicted upon the heroine revert to an original, single calamity. But this calamity, Virtue destroyed, is only the moral surface of a deeper catastrophe wreaked by the forces of Nature. Sade's narrative, with its thematic variations on a single debasement, brings to focus the abiding disorder of existence. Blind and chaotic, the capricious workings of Providence tumble human destiny into diverse misfortunes that reiterate the same primary experience of pain. Justine exemplifies the permanent condition announced in the novel's overture, that of man "tossed about by the caprices" of Providence.30 Paradoxically, the immutable quirkiness of these caprices, called "bizarre" at several points, preserves the constancy of disordered Providence. A further paradox inheres in Sade's announced project. The elusive and unpredictable force named "Providence" furnishes philosophy with a mission: "The triumph of philosophy would be to throw light on the darkness along the paths that Providence follows when achieving the ends it proposes regarding man." As if it were possible to discern "a few rules" along those dark ways, we are told we can understand and even interpret "the decrees" of what is inherently unintelligible. More, we can trace "the route" that evades a Providential force already portrayed as wayward and presumably unmappable. Thus Sade proves to be a rationalistic stepson of the Enlightenment despite his instinctual predilections and preNietzschean transvaluations. The opposition set up between darkness and light is a commonplace of eighteenth-century discourse; it is one of the "emblems of Reason," in Starobinski's phrase.31 But the daylight metaphorized by Sade repre30. Marquis de Sade, Les infortunes de la vertu, ed. Beatrice Didier (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 75· 31. Starobinski, Les emblemes de la raison (see note 3 above).

Polymorphosis of Reason

277

sents the single truth that will explain the manifold enigma of a Providence armed with variant caprices. Light, with its singularity of truth, will match the constancy of Providential disorder. Such correspondences and contradictions serve the antithetical imagery of darkness/light and release it from conventional meaning. There are ancillary metaphors too—of blindness, veiling, and polymorphosis—which bring their lexical elements into a semantic convergence with the fundamental paradox of a dialectical and mappable disorder. Thus at the novel's end Juliette makes a self-styled "intelligent" decision to leave her lover and become a Carmelite. Her claim is that she can decide wisely even though "these caprices of fortune are enigmas of Providence that are not our portion to unveil" (Infortunes, 254). She insists she is not "seduced" by these enigmas when they bestow wealth: "do not think that I am blinded by the false glowings of happiness." Yet while her words express the transparent motives required by narrative events, the words are also the semiophores of a transformational subtext. They execute plain meaning unambiguously while carrying forward a semantic substrate transformed by metaphors already neutralized in plain speech. Indeed, Juliette's plain meaning cloaks the metaphors assimilated by her language. Her point is that nobody can fathom life's mysteries, whereas anybody can grasp the error of lusting after dishonest pleasure. Thus her locutions "to unveil" and " I am blinded" contrast with each other only in their ordinary sense. Although Juliette will never comprehend Providence, she now does understand which "route" must be chosen. She "sees" her former mistake, which consisted of being blinded by the false allure of vice. Her restored sight will depend on shutting her eyes to vice, on blinding herself with a new morality so that the "glowings" of vice will not be visible. Juliette unfurls the moral banner that denounces "false glows," thus veiling the light that once dazzled her. These repressed metaphors thrust themselves chiasmatically to the surface of Sade's hermetic meaning. The simple contrast just noted between mystery and certainty, between the enigma that it is impossible to "unveil" and the moral resolution not to be blinded ("do not think that I am blinded"), is a contrast that on the philosophical level becomes a metaphorical interchange. We will find that the concealed enigma unveils its character while the libertine, her sight regained, unwittingly spreads the veil of misperception over her future prospects. Juliette must repent by mortifying her flesh if she aspires to happiness in the next world. But this self-punishment, plausible enough, is a perfunctory conclusion to Sade's

278

Chapter Eight

narrative, and furthermore it lacks conviction on Juliette's part. A peculiar absence of Christian allusions undercuts the fact that her destination is a Carmelite convent. Pseudo-religious references abound: "eternal path," "the supreme being," "a better world," "great piety." But the experience anticipated by Juliette, as described, does not convey the spirit of Catholic penitence in its affirmative, if not joyous, assumption of austerity. Perhaps this is too much to expect of a former libertine. But she anticipates her prospective religious life to be a relentless wearing down of the body, a slow, softening process to be endured passively for the sake of a later reward. She hopes that "the macerations by which I am going to expiate my crimes in the unhappy years remaining to me, will permit me to see you again one day" (255, emphasis added). The lexical choices here betray a fantasy-laden concern with physical torment, and they need not be belabored. In the end, Juliette's repentance is a blind ritualism. It serves a more refined though no less egocentric happiness than what she had pursued in earlier circumstances. And conversely, the metaphor of veiled Providence is betrayed by a clarifying explanation. Its enigmatic and bizarre caprices typify the "fatality to which we assign twenty different names." The very heteronymy of this concealment strips the phenomenon to its naked polymorphic structure. Its image is mirrored in vice: "reproduced under a thousand diverse forms, it has diverse branches for each age" (121). Through vice, sensations revive themselves and adopt innovative forms. In their multiple renewals they reflect metaphysical heterogeneity. As in human vice, so too in Nature, the nameless archetype and hence polynomial transcendence, reveals itself. Indeed, Nature indifferently reshapes the permutative elements of Providential life in endless and amoral recombinations: All forms are equal in the eyes of Nature, nothing is lost in the immense crucible where their variations take place. All the bits of matter tossed in there are incessantly renewed under other figurations, and whatever actions we may take in their regard do not injure them." (125)

The "crucible" is the headsource of caprice, and its ferment generates disorder among the fraternity of forms. The equality or equity among forms never alters in the process of alterity. A single rule, indifferent change, secures the ontic sameness of diverse forms, whether these are harmonious, hybrid, or monstrous. So too in the realm of human values. The "bits of matter" might refer to Juliette or to any "mass of flesh that conforms

Polymorphosis of Reason

279

today to a female" and that "will materialize tomorrow under the form of a thousand different insects" (126). Why should Nature care? asks Sade. In a neutral universe, it is of no axiological consequence that a so-called crime of murder transforms a woman into a fly or a head of lettuce. Metamorphosis thus justifies moral disorder. Change is the only law of Nature; therefore it permits lawlessness to rule society. Metamorphic law is purely formal and bears no relation to meaning. It can oversee the alteration of one form into another, but it carries no semiological weight. Polymorphosis, in contrast, entails the One as the Many. It is the state of alterity which, more than just a law, invests Being itself and concerns the nature of meaning in existence. Thus Juliette's "conversion" exchanges female form for female form yet preserves her original egocentrism, in the guise of self-abnegation. She is not metamorphosed. Rather, she is the multiple-in-one, a Carmelite now and Madame de Lorsange before that. She embodies the presence of a heteronymous Nature that conceals the unnamable force whose externality dispenses bizarre Providential caprices. Sade presents a moral monster in the case of Juliette, while in the case of Justine he presents a Sophie imaged variously in men's eyes as a thief, a desirable virgin, or a deflowered outcast. Sade insists on this immanent polymorphosis and its accompanying moral polysemy. Because "everything that vegetates on this globe... has an equal price" in Nature's eyes, it is inconceivable that "the change of one of these beings into a thousand others" should be misjudged or condemned. Men, plants, and animals all grow, live, and decompose by the same peaceful or violent means. They never undergo an actual death, but rather "a simple variation" by which "in an instant under one form and the next instant under another they can change, by the will of the being that so wishes or can move them, thousands and thousands of times in a day" (126). The thousandfold and more capacity for organic transformation is an idea that derives from competing theories of evolution in the mid-eighteenth century: the simplistic metamorphosis of Maillet, the transformism of Buffon, the fortuitous yet transmissible mutations of Maupertuis. But the evolutionist ideas most relevant to Sade's philosophical implications are those of Diderot. Diderot is also the most imaginative and playful of organicist thinkers. He hesitates before all proposed systems, out of intellectual subtlety, and therefore he willingly proposes other cosmologies for the sake of hypothesis rather than conviction. His point in On the Interpretation of Nature is that, short of a religious explanation of origins,

28ο

Chapter Eight

innumerable theories are advanced concerning the secret of Nature, all equally false and hence all equally plausible.32 A latent skepticism emerges in Diderot's remark about progress in knowledge. If Nature is perpetually in flux, with each entity still in a developmental stage, then natural history is nothing more than the incomplete science of an instant. Indeed, all science is as transitory as the spoken word itself. The unreliability of meaning has a moral consequence as well as a scientific one, as we shall see. The immediate point is that transformation may entail deformation. There is no certainty that man, "this deformed biped," is anything more than the image of a passing species that will lose its name "by becoming still more deformed" {Oeuvres pbilosophiques, 298). Tentative form in organic Nature, and a corresponding ephemerality of meaning in language, are the factors that prepare the ground for more radical relativism. Indeed, morphologically speaking, Nature seems marked by a prevailing disorder that resists taxonomy. In D'Alembert's Dream, forms emerge in a pellicule of imprecision because each present moment is a transition between a stage just ended and another stage about to commence. As d'Alembert remarks: "Every animal is more or less a human being, every mineral more or less plant, every plant more or less animal. . . . There is nothing clearly defined in Nature." 33 Moreover, these forms are ontologically ambiguous owing to their flux, quite apart from the elusiveness stemming from shifts in scientific language and its transient nomenclature. Diderot recognizes less of the capriciousness and indifference that Sade discovers in the universe. But his allowance for the Chain of Being in D'Alembert's Dream makes room for a metamorphic perspective that, if foreshortened perversely as in Sade's treatment, can distort the moral significance of organic change and recombination: Alive, I act and react as a mass . . . dead, I act and react as separate molecules. . . . Don't I die, then? . . . To be born, to live, and to die is merely to change f o r m s . . . . And what does one form matter any more than another?... Each form has its own sort of happiness and unhappiness. From the elephant down to the flea . . . from the flea down to the sensitive and living molecule which is the origin of all, there is not a speck in the whole of nature that does not feel pain or pleasure. {D'Alembert's Dream, 182)

32. Denis Diderot, Oeuvres pbilosophiques, ed. Paul Verniere (Paris: Gamier Freres, 1956), 240—41. 33. Denis Diderot, Le reve de d'Alembert, ed. Jean Varloot (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1971), 43-44; translated by L. W. Tancock as Rameau's Nephew: D'Alembert's Dream (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), 181.

Polymorphosis of Reason

281

D'Alembert's ravings are "high philosophy" in Bordeu's opinion, unsystematic yet inspired, as Diderot himself advocated in his article on philosophy in the Encyclopedic. The remarks make Sade's ruthless ideas less jagged, as if ripped from the larger cloth of evolutionary theory and then torn loose from the connected design that impedes polymorphosis. Even so, the nameless entity overarching all of matter confronts Diderot no less than Sade. Thus d'Alembert denies morphological wholeness to independent entities. He declares that there exist no individualities, only "a single, great individual, which is the whole"—within which, like a machine or complex animal, there are constituent parts. To reach this truncating vision is indeed to tempt reckless conclusions, and it is possible to imagine Diderot verging on a pre-Sadic value code both in D'Alembert's Dream and in his article "Liberty" in the Encyclopedic. Here he plants the seed of doubt as to whether moral language is meaningless. The germ of what might be termed moral monstrosity appears in the assertion that, given man's likeness to an automaton, the concepts of virtue and vice become irrelevant. Better terms are "happy" and "unhappy," or "welldoing" and "ill-doing," for if one is born without liberty one is born into either fortunate or unfortunate circumstances. One is destined thereafter to the causality of linked events.34 Diderot sets the stage for Sade in several respects. Despite Diderot's principle of the linking chain, the phenomenon of metamorphosis defies prediction. Therefore, the fact of a disordering principle in Nature must be faced. Sade faces it squarely and enlists unpredictable metamorphosis on behalf of a new moral heterogeneity that awaits the "deformed biped," as d'Alembert called him. Diderot's greater intellectual scope dwarfs the perverse seed in his preoccupations that blossoms later in Sade. Diderot's chief concern is the problem of continuity, an ideal everywhere negated by empirical evidence or by competing hypotheses. The Chain of Being is to organic metamorphosis what cosmology is to physiology—namely, the same reply to the threat of discontinuity posed by different fields of inquiry. Sade recognizes the threat as an insoluble condition that licenses a moral freedom corresponding to the discontinuities of Providence. Rebellion and revelry are the twin agents of moral monstrosity in Sade. From them are born a monstrous, self-justifying Reason, a pro34. Diderot retreats from this position at the end of his article "Liberty," admitting that it authorizes "every monstrous infamy" and "disfigures" the human species. See Emita Hill, "The Role of 'le monstre' in Diderot's Thought," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 77 (1972): 149-261.

282

Chapter Eight

cess of teratogenesis. The rebel indulges his instincts after overthrowing the rational order. His instincts, in turn, win legitimacy by their genetic link to a transcending disorder in Nature. They exult in the orgies whose imaginative excess moves Justine to ask, "Can such bizarre caprices ever be regulated?" (175). Sade's immoral rebel also excels in producing disproportionate irregularity through a moral code that thwarts Reason so as to employ the "deranged imagination" of bacchanalia and perverted sensations. This regulation of the irregular rationalizes the monstrosities inflicted by Justine's captors. However, the rationalization perverts philosophical logic. Sade circumvents illogic by attributing to Nature a corresponding, inherent, and providential irregularity. Against Justine's opinion that Providence seeks both order and virtue, her interlocutor rejoins with countless examples "of its injustices and its irregularities." By its cosmic perversity, Providence justifies vice, and it is also the microcosmic source of rebellion in human instinct: "Is there a single one of our wishes or our sensations that does not come from it?" (226). The blind impulses behind moral perversion are not simply capricious. They find their transcendental principle in the universal disorder of things. This disordering principle, in different episodes, is expressed by Sade within the same lexical network. An immoralist engages in "shameful disorders" or in "the excess of his disorders" (120). The "frightful disorders" witnessed by Justine ensue from racing "blindly" into sensuality (118). The practitioners are "monsters" (168, 212), their debauchery is a "monstrous impiety" (187), their unbridled libertinism satisfies "monstrous pleasures" (197). But the greatest monstrosity of all, unidentified by Justine yet implicit in the judgment of any rational moralist like her, is the inverted reasoning that sanctions vice. Here Sade reveals a precursory transvaluation of values in the manner of Nietzsche. The keynote argument rests on a mythic scene of primal usurpation. The legitimate deity that binds Justine/Sophie to her virtuous code is demythified by her seducer Brissac. His seductive argument denies authority to the law-giver and even denies the lawgiver's divine affiliation: This god you recognize is but the fruit of ignorance on the one hand and of tyranny on the other. When the strongest man wished to enchain the weakest, he persuaded him that a god sanctified the irons he crushed him with. And the one who was brutalized by his misery believed everything the other one wished. All religions are the fatal result of thisfirstfable. (122)

Polymorphosis of Reason

283

The genealogical problem remains, however, because the transvaluator merely disrobes Justine's deity to expose the moral strong man in human form. Yet this metamorphosis accompanies a deeper change. The divine genesis of morals is now a second-order fable. From its place at the beginning of things, the genesis is removed one step to become an event told during an originating scene where the physically powerful Brissac subjugates the weak Justine. The fable, then, is an invention inscribed into Brissac's "true" account. His circumscribing account cannot be history, owing to its speculative and undemonstrable character, and so it must be a kind of encapsulating myth. The two versions, one inscribing the other, are allomorphs of the same rational effort to legitimize the genealogy of values. But Brissac's allegedly true version assumes a mythic proportion by assimilating the other version into its own reasoned discourse. What traditional morality might call the "monstrous" feature of Brissac's discourse, then, consists not only of an impious explanation but, more dramatically, also of a protean telos ascribable to all such genealogical discourses. The ways of Providence are metamorphic and hence multivalent. So too the axiological account, just quoted, which is the first one in the novel and which cedes to another form when Dalville argues his own brief. Polymorphism is thus, first, the formal disposition of narrative as it unfolds and transforms its single chiasmatic theme—maiden into debased female (Justine/Sophie) and libertine into penitent (Juliette/Mme. de Lorsange). And second, this polymorphic trait extends to the many forms of moral deformation illustrating the monstrous. Dalville's enormity may be judged by Sade's own words. A natural "order" sanctions the libertine's power over Justine, and he invokes its irrevocable law because his despised "civilization, on overthrowing the institution of Nature, nevertheless takes away none of his rights" (210). A new genealogical variant is born here, attributing legitimacy to Nature. Socalled natural "institutions" enjoy primacy and power—or by rights should enjoy them—in the same way that Brissac claims that the idea of legitimacy is designed by the strong to disguise their domination. The question once more is which explanation is the true one, Brissac's mythic usurpation or Dalville's natural hierarchy? The central value in question also changes form. Its original state is, as earlier with Brissac, the advantage of strength over weakness, and so Dalville's mythic account of Nature stresses that "at the origin she created strong beings and weak beings. Her intention was that the latter always

284

Chapter Eight

be subordinated to the former, as the lamb always is to the lion, and the insect to the elephant" (210). This original value, conceived metaphorically as an irreversible hierarchy, quickly submerges beneath a superseding value. Dalville now argues that intelligence and social class have replaced the law of Might Makes Right. The original value remains, of course, an enabling substrate of the new rationalization. But the new form also becomes a buried value when Dalville reaches his real interest, which is not really naked power but wealth. Sade's early narrative allows logic, aided by mythifying inventiveness, to evade the linearities of its own constructions. What is privileged through strength changes into privilege owing to intelligence, and changes again into what is privileged through wealth. In the later works of Sade, value takes the form of sexual desire and pure will, but in The Misfortunes of Virtue the power of Reason to work morphological shifts in valuation by means of sheer analogical discourse is stunning. Reason's self-display of excessive ambition confirms Goya's dictum that the dream of Reason produces monsters: The skill and intelligence of man varies with the position of the individual. No longer was physical force the determinant of rank, it was the force acquired by his wealth. The richest man became the strongest, the poorest became the weakest, but in regard to the reasons that established power, the priority of the strong over the weak always belonged in the laws of Nature, which was indifferent to whether the chain which kept the weak captive was held by the richest or the strongest, or whether it crushed the weakest or the poorest. (210)

What shatters this logic is a hopeless contradiction: the endlessly permitted metamorphosis of value is irreconcilable with the immutable structure of Nature's order. Two non sequiturs occur in a single statement: "the poor man is part of the order of Nature. When she created men with unequal strengths, she convinced us of her desire that such inequality should be preserved even in the change that our civilization would bring to her laws" (218). The first antilogy is the identity of relative strength and relative wealth, despite the premise limiting the natural order to the relativity of strength. The second antilogy attributes to Nature a power and a will capable of reaching beyond the natural province into civilization. By supposing this extended influence, Dalville can describe the laws of an immutable natural sphere as being "intended" for enforcement in a mutable and unnatural sphere—namely, human society. Even so, he causally trans-

Polymorphosis of Reason

285

forms the law of natural strength or weakness into a social law of wealth or poverty. Dalville's subterfuge is the assumption that relativity is an underlying structure adaptable to any spectrum of opposites. He contends that "the poor man replaces the weak" on the pattern of Nature's alleged original opposition of poverty and wealth. Thus he may also insist that "to comfort him is to annul the established order; it is to oppose Nature's order; it is to upset the balance that is the basis of our most sublime arrangements" (218). The precise structure is otherwise, however. Relativity is not a formula restricted to the paradigm of superiority/inferiority, whose pertinent variations in this instance are three in number: strong/weak, intelligent/ stupid, rich/poor. Quite the opposite, relativity is here an elastic structure that abolishes the hierarchy alleged by the immoralists. This elasticity has little to do with "the balance that is the basis," for it converts each inferior thing into something that is nevertheless superior to another still more inferior thing. This polymorphism of value goes unadmitted by Dalville, even though he notices how it operates in societies that differ from his own in law and custom. The crimes of one nation, he notes, may not be considered crimes somewhere else, and so "at bottom nothing deserves reasonably to be called a crime, for everything is a matter of opinion and geography" (226). As intellectual history shows, it will remain for the later generations of relativists to internalize this formulation of good and evil, and to apply it to local communities within a single nation. Eventually, individuals rather than groups will justify unsocialized behavior by asserting the common variant "everything is relative." Dalville's philosophy, while sophisticated, stands as the vulgate of moral relativism for post-Revolutionary individualism. However, Sade's morphological underpinning, fashioned out of Diderot's more rudimentary dissonances, anticipates Nietzschean strategies that look beyond Christianity.

Zoomorphic Liberty Sade rationalizes his moral polymorphism into a libertine monstrosity that finds a fitting symbol in Goya's grey feline. The cat belongs among the emblematic attributes of "Liberty," representing in principle the hatred of constraint. But iconologies often provide the inverses of such concepts.

286

Chapter Eight

When we turn to the antithesis of "Liberty" in Gravelot, which is "Obedience," the inverses named are "Rebellion," "Revolt," and "Insurrection." Here "public measures are deformed into monsters," as Burke remarks of the Revolutionary National Assembly in 1790.35 There are further complications in these concepts, but the emblemist's point is that the feline hatred of constraint should not imply any invitation to revolt. Greycat must not throw off the leash of lawful order, a limitation made plain by Gravelot's emblem of "Revolt," where a helmeted woman with a javelin indignantly breaks the chains of Reason. A yoke lies at her feet, symbolizing justice and lawful society (Gravelot, Iconotyfie, 3:85-86). This much is clear in the various communities opposed to libertinism, whether their beliefs are spiritualist or materialist. These distinctions grow resonant in the hands of commentators today. The interpretation that Capricho 43 is a warning against unrestrained imagination regards the grey feline as a lynx with the supernatural vision of fantasy's moral eye, keenly vigilant to decry monstrosity. What Sade portrays for ethics, Goya portrays for the creative process.36 There are also historical ramifications of excess, and much of Goya's work may be understood politically, as Fred Licht, Ronald Paulson, and Janis Tomlinson have written.37 Yet the original emblematic insight by Levitine need not be so confined. The emblem of feline liberty and moral restraint is transferable. In terms of biological evolution, the parallel between obedience and domesticity in the animal realm permits BufFon to speak with the borrowed vocabulary of political values. In his chapter on "Domestic Animals" in 1753, BufFon observes that the human rule over beasts is a "legitimate reign that no revolution can destroy."38 It is also the reign of spirit over matter, he adds, a gift from God and not simply a right granted by Nature's inalterable laws. Despite BufFon's assurance, his text becomes disquieting when we place Capricho 43 under a different interpretation. It may also be argued that Greycat is a supernatural creature in another sense, aligned more with 35. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, Ind. and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), 60. 36. Edith Helman, Jovellanosy Goya (Madrid: Taurus, 1970), 146-47. 37. See Fred Licht, Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art (New York: Universe Books, 1979); Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789-1820 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983). Only Janis Tomlinson is cautious about identifying Goya's art with explicitly political thought: Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment (New Haven, Conn, and London: Yale University Press, 1992). 38. Georges-Louis Leclerc de BufFon, Histoire naturelle, ed. Jean Varloot (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), Si—53-

Polymorphosis of Reason

287

the monsters than with Enlightener. In this occult sense, her alert posture may well augur some imminent revolt. Her distant gaze may bring her a telepathic glimpse of the charcoal feline relation that peers from the background. In this interpretation, Greycat has an avatar harking back to the wild abandon enjoyed by its cohorts. BufFon's evolution is thus reversed, and the domesticated feline now threatens to become savage. BufFon's account of human origins describes an earth inhabited by monsters preying on unsheltered, unarmed, and naked men. Gradually, humankind purged the land of these gigantic, harmful creatures, as their fossils attest, and human efforts to domesticate animals date from that time. The political lesson is the same in either interpretation of Capricho 43· If Greycat is an emblem of "moral" domestication, it cherishes independence in the same way that Burke upholds human rights: not in any metaphysical extreme, but in the moral frame of "the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns" (Reflections, 54). Similarly, a "wild" Greycat demonstrates, by its warning example, the peril of instinctual freedom that reverts to the primeval condition of humans among BufFon's savage beasts. In another guise, it is the fanatical Reason of State attributed by Burke to the French Revolution, whereby theories were metaphysically true but morally false. Again Burke provides the appropriate vocabulary in Reflections on the Revolution in France, describing the "monstrous fiction" perpetrated by the "gang of assassins" and "clubs composed of a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations." Burke's eloquent and bloody account needs no summary here, but his references to Reason and Nature warrant mention with respect to their metaphorical quality. The rebellious situation is "unnatural," resulting in "the public measures [that] are deformed into monsters." These are the fruits of a "barbarous philosophy," the offspring of "cold hearts" using "that sort of Reason which banishes the affections." The epithets Burke uses to describe the products of political Reason include "these chimeras of a monstrous and portentous policy" and the references to "monstrous" measures cited in Chapter 1 (.Reflections, 32,55, 60, 68). The metaphor of light also enters Burke's rhetoric. He applies a Newtonian figure to the collision of metaphysical Reason with practical morality. This involves a glass prism, representing the repercussions when political theorists propose extreme rights that are metaphysically true and morally false. These rights, entering "the gross and complicated mass" of life as through a prism, "like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of Nature, refracted from their straight line. . . . [T]he

288

Chapter Eight

primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction" (54). This image of light and wakefulness lacks the expected elements of vision and insight. Burke and Goya share the imagery of faulty eyesight and deformed, visionary metaphysics, but with a difference. In one interpretation of Capncho 43, Greycat can be on the side of either enlightened Reason or wild rebellion. The prudent, lynx-like feline sits alertly during the "sleep of Reason," when, as Burke says, "sanguine declarations tend to lull authority asleep" while encouraging "perilous adventures of untried policy." By the same token, a supernatural and wild feline stares contemplatively at Enlightener's "dream of Reason," either ready to enter his dream or already part of it. In this interpretation, Enlightener indulges in theoretical excess, of the sort that forces the French to issue as edicts "the polluted nonsense of their most licentious and giddy coffee-houses." Burke and Goya are not the only ones to echo Young's cry against "the rational foul kennels of excess." In William Blake's version of "The French Revolution," the Archbishop of Paris reports a vision in which the population has become "a godless race / Descending to beasts."39 The spatial figure "descending," which evokes the evolution of beasts, complements Buffon's temporal metaphor of monsters. Regression to savagery is a violence against natural Reason and can be portrayed as a topography as well as an evolutionary history. Blake scans the space traversed by pestilence, murder, hunger, and other monsters that "walk in beasts and birds of night." A special corner is set aside for Unreason, but it fails to contain the bestial pressure; "the bars of Chaos are burst," and they remove the resistance to the expanding space where the godless may tread. Now the human beast is lower than the animal, the blood of revenge appearing "in bestial forms, or more terrible men." While such zoomorphic portraits in literary tradition are not new, the coincidence of a political context diagramed spatially opens a broad semantic field. Revolution as Chaos is the state of reality that produces the infinite space of a Utopian impulse. A state of mind is Utopian when it is incongruous with the concrete reality in which it occurs, as Karl Mannheim once observed. One manifestation of incongruity in discourse is the "theriomorphic and demonic humanity" appearing in the vignettes of 39. William Blake, The French Revolution, in Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Prose, ed. Louis I. Bredvold, Alan D. McKillop, and Lois Whitney, prepared by John M. Bullitt (New York: Ronald Press, 1973), 1464.

Polymorphosis of Reason

289

Saint-Simon.40 Other manifestations are the apocalypses already noted, and the imaginary voyages, pastoral daydreams, prophetic wish-dreams, and diverse utopic circumstances that compensate for the dystopia lamented in present times. These escapist forms point to the "good place," what Harry Levin calls eutopia, located nowhere in space (Utopia) but in a "good" temporal frame (euchronia) when compared with the lamented now.41 The Goyesque manifestation adheres to the Saint-Simonian outlook of a world peopled by monsters engaged in prodigious and inconceivable events.42 All such manifestations expand the possibilities of Reason's polymorphosis. No longer does it hold sway over imagination; nor does probable reasoning govern matter-of-fact comparisons or discoveries of relations between perceived objects and ideas; nor, finally, is Reason a demonstrative function that compares by interposing other ideas. Reason is now an intuitive process carried to excess: the comparison of two ideas directly, one immediately real and the other either ideal or its opposite. The effect is as though imagination were the active instrument. Incongruity results in both instances. In one case, where the real and the ideal are juxtaposed, revolutionary dissatisfaction invents a Utopia that cannot be fulfilled by metaphysical Reason, as Burke argues with his images of incongruity. In the other case, the juxtaposition of the ideal and its opposite explodes into grotesquerie. Ronald Paulson has shown this aspect clearly with respect to Goya.43 In this view, the grotesque makes "legible" the demons of political disorder. Goya's centrality in the circle of inverted Reason rests on the radii of political and aesthetic monstrosities he projects. Capricho 43 is his theoretical statement at a moment when historical circumstances justify discarding the conventional strictures imposed on icons and themes. The monster is, for Paulson, "an amalgam of repression and revolution; of government, enlightenment, and Francophilia confronting another of church, nobility, the beggarly mob, and nationalism. In this context, with ridicule as one aspect, a grotesque mode is justified." The statement applies as well to the allo40. See Yves Coirault, L'optique de Saint-Simon (Paris: Armand Colin, 1965), 55off. 41. See Harry Levin, "The Great Good Place," New York Review, March 6,1980, 47-50. 42. An index of Saint-Simon's pictorial bestializations appears in Coirault's study, including those of Abbot Dubois as a mole, a ferret, and a toad frequenting the black bowels of society; another portrays Noailles as the enemy of light ascending from infernal depths. 43. Ronald Paulson finds Goya's caprichos to be matched in their gathered tension by the revolutionary Jacobins and sans-eulottes caricatured in Gillray's A Little Supper, Parisian Style. However, Goya restates the atmosphere of defense and anxiety grotesquely so as to banish dark powers and liberate the mind from their uncanny and demonic menace. See Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 33s.

290

Chapter Eight

morphs of Reason concocted by Sade, as we saw. The polymorphic ability of Reason is grotesque, or monstrous, because it can rework the protean telos of Providence or Nature into convenient defenses of any political, moral, and philosophical position. 44 Polymorphosis does not arrive abruptly with the French Revolution, although Goya and Sade articulate the matured process. What makes the Revolutionary moment crucial is the relation between Reason and politics during the transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism. The standard view of this relation is summarized by Hugh Honour: "the excesses of the revolution under the terror and the betrayal of its principles under the Empire overturned the belief in the possibility of establishing an ideal society, or art, based on human Reason." 45 Beyond this, what determines the revolts against the present order is the perception of reality in general. The same epistemological factor determines the retrojections or projections to uchronias and Utopias of all types. The issue ultimately becomes one of epistemology, and it too informs Capricho 43. Which of the two is madness, the capncho or our own dissipated reality? asks Paulson. His political answer for the 1790s is applicable to the doubts about cognition and Nature that pervade the eighteenth century. Just as the revolutionary political present that thrusts against imaginary futures or pasts can be understood as a dichotomy of social desire, so too can an epistemological desire be detected for that present framework. The eighteenth-century quest for monism is dichotomized by two rival philosophies, mechanism and vitalism. The monist desire corresponds to a concept of Identity that replaces the epistemology of resemblances of the preceding epoch (described in Chapter 6). Identity and difference, or sameness and otherness, are the binary points between the fluctuations of the Many from the One. Within this epistemological flow, the phenomenon of metamorphosis gains prominence. The tendency of Reason to adopt many forms, and to suffer abuse as a result, is a surface example of more generalized dualities and polyvalences that extend from the lexical and iconological items cited previously to the multiple meanings that can be assigned to Greycat. The unstable condition of "reality"—whether defined as Nature,

44. This inexhaustible turning over and recombinatory power also has a physical and physiological counterpart that will be discussed in Volume 2. 45. Hugh Honour, The European Vision of America (Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975), 186. Beyond the political factor is the disillusion with Reason from the standpoint of psychohistory, an absorbing probe of which has been made by Rudolph Binion in "Notes on Romanticism," Journal of Psychohistory 11 (1983), 43-64.

Polymorphosis of Reason

291

society, or mental world—obsesses Goya in CapHcho 43 and accounts for the paradigmatic quality of the etching. The scene is fundamentally indeterminate and interpretable from diverse contemporary perspectives. Obscure as the aforementioned epistemological flow is, Goya casts still greyer shadows by subverting the distinctions between waking and sleeping, Reason and madness, and language and Chaos.46

46. These concerns will be themes for study in succeeding volumes of this work.

9. Preternatural Science

Yesterday the prophets brought down heavenly fire with their voices, today children do the same with a piece of glass. Joshua halted the sun, an almanac maker brings it to eclipse. The miracle is more impressive still. Abbot Nollet's cabinet is a laboratory of magic. . . . A truly singular spectacle are these marketplaces of Paris. . . . I saw, at the time of writing this, two separated portable machines, one of which ran or stopped at the precise will of the person who ran or stopped the other. . . . I saw something even more surprising; it was many heads of men, savants, academicians, who ran to the miracles of convulsions [in Saint-Medard] and who returned all a-marvelling.

—Rousseau, Letters Writtenfromthe Mountain Reason bends to the service of superstition to produce preternatural science alongside empiricism. The reality of superstitious beliefs in the eighteenth century is so multiform and deeply rooted that it has drawn frequent notice. No one has ever seriously proposed that Goya actually believed in the superstitions satirized in the Caprichos or depicted so ominously in the "Black Paintings." However, Goya portrays intensely what Voltaire just as insistently condemns: the irrational phenomenon that warrants a taxonomy of its own, as outlined in Chapter 5. The explanation for this phenomenon pertains to history as well as to cognitive philosophy. The supernaturalism that persists beyond the seventeenth century is not confined to the illiterate populace. Learned authorities also foster supernaturalist error through religion and even through science. The mix of old superstitions and new knowledge within the very sphere of literacy has many illustrations. In France, a royal command to produce a book of uses for instruments that calculate stellar distances results in astronomer Robert de Vaugondy's Usages de globes (1751), which intersperses mythical stories of the Pleiad and the twelve constellations with technical descriptions of the "spherico-goniometer." In Spain, the library of an economic reformer like Pablo de Olavide contains Le Lorrain de Vallemont's La physique occulte, which enjoyed printings in 1693, 1696, 1709, 1722, 1747,

Preternatural Science

293

and 1762. Other books in Olavide's possession include Laurent Bordelon's Imaginations extravagantes de Μ. Oufle and Balthazar Bekker's Le monde enchante, a work by a pastor who denies oracles and miracles but retains his unshakable belief in the devil's handiwork. Too many marginal thinkers in the eighteenth century linked the marvelous to science. Their number caused Abbot Nollet to complain that the love of wonders is a "seductive poison" that the best of minds barely resist. One formula for mass-oriented, factual digests is "less the useful than the new, the rare, and the marvelous," announced by the compendium-maker Alleon Dulac in 1763. Inside the cloister, a "rational" brand of irrationalism begins theologically to couple the miraculous and the scientific, as witnessed in arguments fortified with references to science.1 Beyond the cloister, divination as a subject continues to preoccupy learned authors. The mathematician Maupertuis surveys the polemic regarding astral divination and decides that the arguments refuting it are just as weak as the arguments supporting it. This member of the Berlin Academy does not admit belief in prediction by stars or by any other means, but he argues that if everything in the universe is linked, and if a necessary relation between its parts is a fact, then events are merely necessary consequences. It is thus possible for an individual to succeed a given number of times in reaching certain conclusions from planetary configurations.2 The foregoing examples, with Maupertuis excepted, begin to document le demi-savoir denounced before the Berlin Academy by Samuel Formey in 1770. In a lecture complaining of the superficial half-command of new knowledge, Formey cites the spread of learned publications as the "enemy" of the specialist savants? Recent scholarship has developed specific categories that distinguish empirical science from witchcraft, the Hermetic tradition, pantheistic naturalists, and other "marginal" viewpoints that eventually fell by the scientific wayside. These far from extinct schools of thought in the eighteenth century testify to a cultural complexity marked by constituent communities unsure of what destiny their tenets would have in later centuries. Adherents of the empirical community could not know in advance the outcome of their tentatively verified findings. The message, therefore, delivered by 1. See Daniel Mornet, Les sciences de la nature en France au XVIIIe siede: Un chapitre de l'histoire des idees (Paris: Armand Colin, 1911), 14,29-71. 2. Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Oeuvres, 4 vols. (Lyon: Bruyset, 1756), 2: 303. 3. Samuel Formey. "Considerations sur ce qu'on peut regarder aujourd'hui comme le but principal des Academies, et comme leur effet le plus avantageux: Second discours," in Histoire de l'Academie Royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres: Annee 1768 (Berlin: Haude & Spener, 1770), 357-66.

29+

Chapter Nine

the distinction between Newtonians and "radicals" advanced by Margaret Jacob, and the recast distinction between the "fixed" world of mechanics and the "more fluid" world of alchemy made by Ruth Salvaggio, is that eccentric forces joined with "rational" science to shape the Enlightenment.4 In the biological sciences most of all, current investigation must cope with an irrational process at work within its own precinct.

Approaches to the Occult The increasingly bizarre cohabitation of marvel with science in the eighteenth century persisted parallel to a budding arrangement of irrational psychological states. One such state moved the intellectual to weave received superstitions into empirical knowledge. Another psychological state was religious fanaticism beyond religion's value system and social function. Ordinary "fanaticism" differed from the folie relijjieuse that Voltaire defined in terms of trances, visions, and dreams mistaken for realities.5 These mental states varied in their causal mechanisms and epistemological contents. They comprised a field of inquiry for commentators. They constituted a world view arising independently of the emotional contents of "Enthusiasm."6 The trance was not a vision, nor could it be a dream. The trance was a condition that makes possible the "transport" mentioned by Voltaire: an entranced individual found herself (witches being the common example) situated in a second place, somewhat like Greycat and her black double. The witch was "transported" either physically or mentally by means of selfdelusion. Similarly the diviner, the self-acclaimed prophet, and the seer might also use the media of trance, vision, and dream. Of interest here is the condition of transport itself, which reveals the historical spillover of earlier beliefs and illustrates Goya's paradigmatic role in depicting the eighteenth-century cognitive complicity with the occult. 4· See Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981); Ruth Salvaggio, Enlightened Absence. Neoclassical Configurations ofthe Feminine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); and Brian Easlea, Witch Hunting, Magic, and the New Philosophy (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980). 5. On Voltaire's view of fanaticism, Ira Wade offers this equation: " 'Fanaticism is to the enthusiasm of the superstitious what transport is to fever.' It leads to trances, visions; the [mad zealot] mistakes dreams for realities, imaginings for prophecies, and these hallucinations lead to crimes." See Wade, The Intellectual Development of Voltaire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), 744-45. 6. The definitions of "Enthusiasm" were discussed in Chapter 5. Swift's view of "Enthusiasm" will appear in the Transition.

Preternatural Science

295

Several approaches t o that complicity are possible. A Western E u r o pean perspective that takes Spain, France, and Italy as a historical unit will find c o m m o n g r o u n d in the Inquisition and the belief in demons. I n this approach the felines o f Capricbo 43 become a key icon. T h e y appear in t w o places and allow an interpretation along the lines o f dual identity and dual location, w h i c h c o n f o r m s t o the state o f transport. A second avenue o f discussion w o u l d take the social milieu into account. H e r e institutionalized fanaticism m a y b e seen to give g r o u n d t o a tolerance f o r transports and spells, n o t so m u c h by lending them credence as by preserving intellectual interest in their surviving forms. T h i s historical development can also b e observed in the status o f demonology, w h i c h already played an enlightened role in the seventeenth century. T h e substantial carryover o f such distinctions t o the eighteenth century cannot be doubted. 7 T h e r e is also the rise o f preternatural science, a topic discussed separately in this chapter. A n o t h e r approach to the status o f occultism w o u l d stress the c o g n i tive factor. T h e distinction made historically by the Inquisition separated real witches' sabbaths f r o m hallucinatory ones. 8 T h e difference g r o w s m o r e refined in G o y a ' s separation o f hallucinatory f r o m oneiric states o f mind. 9 7. In Italy, the benevolent vagabonds known as the "Benandanti" attempted to prevent the evil effects of spell-casting witches in tandem with the Italian Inquisition. At this time, the Inquisitors prosecuted visionaries in peasant rituals, but they distinguished hallucinatory black sabbaths from "the real, tangible sabbath" of heretical proportions. See Carlo Ginzburg, Batailles nocturnes: Sorcellerie etrituelsagraires en Frioul (Paris: Verdier, 1980), 43. Furthermore, serious attention to demonology never flagged in the eighteenth century: Renaissance authors like Jean Bodin and Jacques Cazotte were still remembered and read, while the seventeenth-century Comte de Gabalis was reedited in 1700,1742, and 1788 as part of the "literary exploitation." See Paul Verniere, "Un aspect de l'irrationnel au X V I I I e siecle: La demonologie et son exploitation litteraire," in Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Harold Pagliaro, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cleveland, Ohio and London: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972), 289-302. 8. According to Julio Caro Baroja, "during the entire eighteenth century many countries continued condemning witches and sorcerers severely," although in Spain the heresy of witchcraft became a "common crime, comparable to fraud." Caro Baroja adds, "it can be said that by the middle of the eighteenth century that the battle between those who defended a magical conception of the world and those who fully attacked it was nearly over in favor of the latter, in the dominant classes at least" (Las brujas y su mundo [Madrid: Alianza, 1966], 259,263). For a description of cult rites to the end of the seventeenth century, see Margaret A. Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921; reprint, Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1971). By 1736, penal laws against witchcraft were "swept away," according to Pennethorne Hughes: "in the majority of cases brought for trial . . . educated opinion was, by the middle of the eighteenth century, on the whole opposed to witch prosecution" (Witchcraft [1952; reprint, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965], 191). 9. Caro Baroja is struck by the terrifying impact of Goya's witchcraft themes when contrasted to earlier paintings created during witchcraft's apogee. He attributes this impact to Goya's insight that "the dark states of consciousness of witches" might be used to contemplate the "mysterious psychic sufferings" that led to "the violence and suffering of society" at that

296

Chapter Nine

Either his sleeping Enlightener is dreaming the scene of animal creatures surrounding him, or those creatures actually exist in a preternatural space that is undetectable to the waking mind. In either case, Goya represents the multiplication of such creatures as a spatial fact. The dreamer and the dreamed are independent entities, occupying separate spheres that correspond to the real-world dichotomy of observer and object observed, this object being mediated by a mental representation distinct from the reality. Among these creatures are Greycat, crouched near the dreamer, and her alternate black form peeping above his hip. The doubling parallels the dichotomy just mentioned. At the same time the cat's association with witchcraft underscores the occult mode of cognition that Goya may be exploring. As the witch attempts metamorphosis into a cat, the escape from human form entails a spiritualist ascent or transport.10 The effort and its aftermath have a single purpose: to release the soul from rational bounds. The soul's power to escape during the sabbath ritual portends a knowledge of divine proportions. Churches understandably denounce witchcraft because it challenges their own power over souls and over the knowledge that gains access to the Absolute. From a neutral standpoint, both God and Satan are anagrams of absolute knowledge. The soul, or transported mind, is conceived to be a flying nocturnal creature in the form of a cat or mouse (Ginzburg 42—43). Goya's rendition conforms closely by affiliating the cats with bats, both species symbolizing superior forms of cognitive energy.11 These powers account for the fascination the eighteenth century had for supernaturalism. One may thoroughly disbelieve them, as Voltaire does, or study the literature about them, as Olavide does, or, finally, allow for one of their forms to be a scientific possibility among other possibilities, as Maupertuis does for divination. Behind their sphere of rational speculation, another, dark reality rises in psychological transport, sustained by the preternatural ideas circulating in the gloom. 12 time, an insight precipitated by the depression brought on by deafness (Las brujasysu mundo, 274-76). 10. Anthropological studies indicate that among the creatures in Capricho 43 the form of the cat is the only animal form taken by Satan. See Xose Ramon Marino Ferro, Satan, sus siervas, las brujas, y la religion del mal (Vigo: Edicions Xereis de Galicia, 1984), 88—91. In traditional witches' sabbaths, the devil's metamorphoses include cats, both black and white, no less than he-goats and cocks. The sorceress attempts to simulate these forms through witchcraft, becoming an avatar of "the polymorphous feminine divinity." See Ginzburg, Batailles nocturnes, 135-36. 11. With respect to Ginzburg's evidence, cats are kindred to the mouse species in folk etymology, as suggested by French word chauve-souris for "bat." 12. In the same way that aesthetics will develop intuitionist notions of the sublime and the transcendental imagination, so too epistemology develops notions of self-reflexive con-

Preternatural Science

297

From this transcendent standpoint, Capricho 43 addresses the nature of inspiration and its mysterious supernatural sources. The dream is an infusion of spirit, or of an incubus. The poetic reverie is a blank page awaiting inscriptions of envisioned shapes. These and other images about creativity belong to sexual and birth imageries, where the ultimate source is an occult knower. One aspect of the magical tradition described by Ginzburg involves writing on "virgin paper." The "paper" is made from an infant's caul, the amniotic membrane believed to have magical properties.13 The technical craft required to manufacture such paper, the intelligence to write on it legibly and eloquently, and the social climate that facilitates acceptance of the parchment by a learned magistrate all belong not to the nocturnal world of fantasy but to the daytime world of practical activities buttressed by "scientific" knowledge loosely defined. The human knower, being mortal, stands "here" and relies on a higher power standing "there." The sorcerer, wishing also to stand "there," cultivates the divining arts, dreaming, or sabbath transport. The ensuing duality involves space as well as mind or soul. This means an ontological condition as well as an epistemological angle of view. Such a framework permits an interpretation of Capricho 43 that sets forth the elements of preternatural states.

Supernatural Intelligence Several modes of stasis control spatial meaning in Capricho 43• The immobile Greycat appears unnaturally frozen beside the equally motionless figure of Enlightener. Stillness and sleep are kindred conditions in the human, but this is not the case for an awakened feline. Greycat's trancelike stiffness complements the stasis of the leftmost owl, a conventional emblem of Wisdom. The owl contrasts with the suspended intellect of Enlightener, and alongside the latter rests the cat in transfixed vigilance. Unlike Enlight-

sciousness and duality of mind. Inspiration, transport, dualist idealism, and transvaluations of demonic netherworlds will modulate several Romantic impulses in the nineteenth century. The point has been documented extensively through the occult sources of Romanticism studied by Auguste Viatte, Les sources occultes du Romantisme: IUuminisme-Theosophie, 1770-1820, 2 vols. (Paris: Honore Champion, 1979). See also the classic volumes by Max Milner: Le diabk (i960; reprint, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982); and La fantasmagorie: Essai sur I'optique fantastique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982). 13. "Virgin paper" was prepared for winning lawsuits, among other practical uses cited in a study by T. R. Forbes, "The Social History of the Caul," Tale Journal of Biology and Medicine 25 (1953): 495-508.

298

Chapter Nine

ener but like the owl, the cat too can see, but unlike the owl the cat spatially looms larger than life in her watchful immediacy. Three cognitive states are apparent. The owl's stillness is an alert repose that is inversely consonant with Enlightener's suspended condition. The owl reflects a traditional allegory, filling the space abandoned by human intellect with a proverbial unruffled wisdom. After the human loss of consciousness, the owl remains a passive witness to truth's continuity. In contrast, Greycat's muscular stillness bears a trace of unctuous composure that is nearly sacerdotal. Whatever the cat's knowledge may be, her silence amid the whirring wings of owls and bats sets off a zone of permanent sanctity, a confidence in the fixed order of things. Not even the church, its power challenged by the metamorphosed witch, maintains a more immobile stance toward secular unrest. We might argue that the cat represents an ecclesiastical vigilance in the face of the "dream" of a hyperactive "Reason" that "produces monsters." Nevertheless, the cat's inquiring gaze will not be translated into temporal action.14 Quite the contrary, what Greycat knows is craftiness and duplicity, to the extreme of projecting her spatial counterpart in the charcoal cat behind Enlightener. Wide-eyed night vision rather than pious wisdom is what comprises Greycat's hidden knowledge. She replaces the faithful dog that conventionally shares the master's vigil. Her lore is nocturnal but as solid as her shoulder. Yet she is a creature of stealth: aloof, perhaps untrusted, an unpredictable pet by day and by night a witch's companion through her alter ego. In the imagination of a superstitious populace, the cat supplies a convenient body for Satan. Greycat thus embodies by association the extra-rational vision of the transcendental or the fantasic. Either dimension exceeds empirical experience. She is not poised to spring but rests heavily behind forelegs that seem as immovable as the undislodged superstition practiced in Goya's Spain. The fantastic and the occult hold no contradiction for each other, but rather have a relationship. This relationship emerges from the feline symbolism found in several other caprichos. Whether stationary or in motion, behaving innocently or in unnatural acts, Goya's cats enliven the fantastic without being its source. Their link to erotic play and fertility rites becomes incidental beside this 14- Greycat's gaze is either impassive or inquisitive. If impassive, the gaze is indifferent to temporal disorder, and if inquisitive, the gaze is not inquisitorial in the way it might be for the owl. One Spanish word for "owl" is autillo, which evokes the auto-da-fe made famous in Goya's circle by an edition of the 1680 auto prepared by Moratin. See Edith Helman ,Jovellanos y Goya (Madrid: Taurus, 1970), 165.

Preternatural Science

299

evidence. In Capricho 60 ("Trials"), two cats occupy the second plane, a lynx-eared cat facing front and the companion showing its hind-parts to the viewer. Both play a minor role behind the skull and waterjug in the foreground. The dominant third plane shows a witch suspending a levitated nude male by the ear, perhaps also branding it during levitation. A he-goat in the background supervises this Satanic lesson in sex-imbued occult science. The diminutive cats are therefore adjuncts to the practicing irrationalists, not conjurers of fantasy in their own right.15 In Capricho 66 ("There It Goes"), the large cat gnaws at the broom mounted by the flying witch and devil. The demonic figures orchestrate the flight, whereas the cat, their mirror-image in animal form, gets caught up in the wild mischief. This vein of witchcraft is the kind of evidence that needs emphasis, given the misleading tranquility of Capricho 43', otherwise, the charcoal cat provides the only hint of the occult knowledge possessed by Greycat. The larger point is that all Goya's large felines display an irrational energy juxtaposed to Unreason itself. Unreason is confined in Capricho 43 to the impressions that Enlightener generates through the interrelation of Reason, imagination, and dream. These impressions submit to two interpretations: as the "dream" of Reason or the "sleep" of Reason. During the "dream" of Reason, the imagination uncovers an irrational reality that reflects back to the real world. In contrast, the "sleep" of Reason severs imagination from materiality, exposing a more primal and transcendent plane. The "sleep" of Reason holds Enlightener blameless of all Unreason. The "dream" of Reason refers to his responsibilities under both normal and lapsed capabilities. The dreamer alone allows the fantastic dream to emerge, and while he himself may no longer be cognizant of its philosophical levitations and moral deformations, the felines and other creatures in the entourage are present to bear witness to the transcendent plane of reality. A reasoner delivered over to occultism would be the magus noted in Chapter 8, although not necessarily in league with Satan. He would be superior to the witch as far as his knowledge is concerned. He would not, however, possess the Universal Language that reaches the source of all being. The knowledge acquired through occultism concerns primary reality and the source of all being. Here substance and essence are one. They grow separate again upon transforming themselves into the manifold ways 15. Similarly, in Capricho ("Tale-Bearers/Blasts of Wind") the cats act only to transport flying devils, but in Capricho 6s ("Where's Mother Going?") the feline augments the symbolism of sexual instincts. Here several hags command the fantastic aerial doings, while the cat above them clutches their parasol and seems to have joined the flight for the ride.

300

Chapter Nine

known to the human mind as waking, empirical "reality." Philosophy formulates this knowledge as the mind-body dilemma. Its linguistic form in discourse addresses the question of identity.16 The questions of identity, of sameness and difference, or of self and other is what Foucault terms the great problem of the eighteenth century, as noted in Chapter 6. Actually, the theme of identity is the semiotic form taken by the encompassing issue of discontinuity. In pictorial form, the theme helps to clarify the feline puzzle as well as the relation between Capricho 43 and Sepia One. These works are not discontinuous. Connections exist between the faces of the two sleepers. Given this fact, a comparable relation may exist between the oneiric faces in Sepia One and the two cats in Capricho 43• If so, the assumption is that these works expose parallel links. One link joins the enigmatic face peering down from the dream-world and the sleeping face. The second link joins the black supernatural feline and the domestic Greycat. Without such links, Capricho 43 loses the scope I claim for it—namely, that it exposes the disintegrating paradigm of Reason, which twists back toward its irrational inverse by comprising science, moral philosophy, and political values. If Greycat "knows" the presence of the strange creatures surrounding Enlightener, her knowledge is the transposed experience of having been there. Hers would be the witch's knowledge that permits a metamorphosis into her black counterpart. Her "soul" would have been transported to that place, as it had been from her human avatar, and back again to Greycat. As Greycat, she emblemizes the insight of fantasia, and serves as the surrogate of an Enlightener aspiring to the very same absolute knowledge. The viewer may follow this logic in Capricho 43 and Sepia One. A first glance at the arching row of owls in Capricho 43 does not readily detect the black feline. Its charcoal head lodges in the groove of the man's waist and looms behind his back like the sinister shadow of its domestic grey cousin. Thus stationed, the black cat sides with Unreason in fulfillment of complicity with the occult hinted at earlier. The contrast is not just spatial. The cat's haunting stare grows ominous behind the inexpressive gaze of Greycat. Sepia One anticipates these contrasts in the form of polarities. A housecat is similarly present and seems by its gaze to be wholly oblivious to the "bicameral dream," described earlier in Chapter 4. There is no feline double in this drawing. Awareness belongs to the doubling of the dreamer, 16. An account of the contents of absolute knowledge and the language capable of containing both spirit and matter will appear in Volume }.

Preternatural Science

301

the sleeper's alter ego, whose beaming face descends from a supernatural or transcendent realm. Many lesser selves float in the agitated sea of faces, later to be transformed into owls. But only one untroubled face expresses rational composure, the dominant one that hints at a privileged wisdom. The oneiric heads in Sepia One are finally effaced in Capricho 43. This does not mean that the sleeper's cognitive powers are transferred to the owls and the black cat, but neither does it mean that a rupture occurs between those creatures and the luminous, oneiric face of Sepia One. The truth is that the black cat points back to Goya's inclusion of himself in the dream-cloud of Sepia One. The originary self-duplication in the sketch of 179? cannot be said to anticipate an intended later surrogacy by the black cat of 1799. Quite the opposite, the black feline is the analeptic surrogate of the oneiric Goya's darker powers. Why this is so requires an explanation of feline alignments and kinships. First, Capricho 43 divides its scene into two ontic realms, one rational but asleep, the other fantastic. The division aligns Greycat with the powerless Enlightener, and transports her black cousin beyond the pale of natural events. Second, there is a spatial homology between the black cat and the central, luminous face in Sepia One. The alignment brings the two spectral figures into the same rank of transcendent powers, whether sinister or benevolently creative. In short, the signs of vitality in Capricho 43 may be found only on the fantastic side of the ontological pale. The kinship between Greycat and her charcoal double is strengthened through their common animated consciousness. But the kinship between dreamer and dreamed artist in Sepia One now appears shattered by their opposing affiliations with reality. The gazes of the two cats, although occupying polarized domains, converge toward Enlightener. Now Greycat's ambivalent role may be observed. Greycat belongs to the natural world, along with the sleeping Enlightener. Her fixed stare in his general direction forms the axis of their relationship. A second axis, Greycat's kinship with the black cat that bestows sight from the preternatural place of the "monsters," draws Greycat into the irrational sphere, exposing her dual orientation. She is neither black nor white, but ash grey. Her double allegiance corresponds both to the domestic hearth and to the fires of Lucifer. The duplication confers on Greycat a second identity, just as the doubling of Enlightener in Sepia One imposes the antithetical name "Magus" on his radiant, irrational self. Any suggestion that the oneiric, radiant Goya may be a sorcerer or supernaturalist is offset by the Prado gloss of Capricho 43, which identifies

302

Chapter Nine

the culprit as imagination unaided by Reason. Given this identity, a similar blame falls on the display of Goya's radiant countenance in Sepia One. He consorts with the fantastic animals in a misalliance, the shame of which is remedied in the final etching that suppresses the dreamed face and conceals Enlightener's face. Yet there is something else to consider here. The oneiric Goya of Sepia One is a contemplating self peering down at the unconscious artist. He is open-eyed and unharried among the wild animals. The historical Goya has bifocalized his self-portrait. The sepia drawing is his personal fantasy, a caprice mediated by his own imagination. Thus endowed, he renders himself as a dreamed self. The latter Goya is multiplied beyond recognition in other distorted faces; more to the point, he is dreamed as situated among the monstrous partisans of untamed will and liberated fantasizing. He is a dreamed double shimmering in the place later reserved for the aberrations of fantasy. Since the historical Goya executes the scene, can it be that he has joined the party of Unreason? If not, then it is a peculiar form of condemnation that allows an errant self to float safely amid the reputedly harmful misconceptions of irrationality. Indeed, the suffering faces in Sepia One are metamorphosed into comparably contorted animal shapes in the aquatint. Only the radiant face of Magus, beatific and demonic, escapes. He appears capable of communicating with both preternatural and everyday sectors of reality. With his transmigration to Enlightener's anatomical midpoint—Capricho 43's dead center—his unfathomable radiance has blackened into its feline inverse. The seat of reality is in fact total obscurity, never probed completely either by dream or by the senses, and still less by Reason. Capricho 43 presents antinomial roles and realities in an exquisite merger. It creates an inner dialogue whereby Enlightener and his projected contemplating self communicate across mutually opposed realms. He and Magus are two yet the same, like Greycat and her black Other. The latter pair erases the human doubling of Sepia One's dream-cloud artifice, without removing the evidence that supernatural cognition is possible. Thus the charcoal cat is an important addition among the "monsters": it becomes the retrospective surrogate of Magus. The supernatural state of Reason in Sepia One is altered by Capncho 43, which replaces Enlightener's human alter ego by a feline icon. Just as the sketched Magus is reduced to head and neck, so the black cat is reduced to bust-size proportion. The dreamed double and the black surrogate now are assimilated to a single role whose compound meaning is magic and monstrosity. This fusion accounts for half a reality, leaving the rational sphere un-

Preternatural Science

303

accounted for. This returns us to Greycat and her double, positioned in opposite directions and raising further questions. How does her physical posture denote the rational and irrational Enlightener more fully than the black cat might? Which faculty of mind does she symbolize? And, once again, by what logic is Greycat a female? For one thing, Greycat sits in the human world while having access to the fantastic world through the black double. She is not committed to a single reality in the same way that her double and Magus are. Greycat is an astute, ordinary domestic cat in Sepia One, disconnected from the irrational realm owing to the absence of the black cat. Her function does not involve disclosing the irrational realm to the artist, since Magus performs this duty. In Capricho43, on the other hand, she is poised before the female dimension of witchcraft and sexuality. Available to her is the revelatory mediation of her supernatural black relative. Even so, she participates in the Enlightener's world by behaving characteristically. Her physical location ensures her independence and link to the master. Ninety degrees separate her body's length from a companionable parallel with him. A full 180degree turn is needed for her to join her coal-black cousin. Yet it would be no about-face for any feline to change purpose, follow a caprice, willfully disdain a master's wish. The essence of "catness" is enigmatic intelligence. How then does the feline icon function in a scene where Reason is the protagonist? The cat's intelligence displays a precarious reliability in conforming to human command. This trait forces an analogy with the Reason's inability unswervingly to obey a higher ideal. The cat's philosophical prudence, cited by Caraccioli, conflicts with Gravelot's emblematic "Liberty," which makes the cat an enemy of constraint. Its will to freedom shortens the distance between feline wiliness and the hypocrisy depicted in traditional literary fables. The conflict represents the human condition, pitting instinct against rational values, where the moral and political arenas are torn up by endlessly rationalized ideological energies. The polarities of nighttime and daytime, witchcraft and science, instinct and Reason, freedom and restraint, vice and morality, anarchy and order—all are tonalities of the symbolic spectrum from darkness to light, the range of blacks, greys, and whites that identify Greycat and her attributes. It would be digressive to consider the subsequent image of the cat in French and Spanish literatures were it not for this value-laden symbolism, which makes Goya relevant to Sade, Swedenborg, and the occult scientists. A long journey separates the Goyesque feline from the sensuous cats of Baudelaire, just as long as the distance from the Baroque cats of Lope de

304

Chapter Nine

Vega's satire.17 This lack of emotional affinity, no less than the cold, sexual distancing, is the crux in Goya. He omits the solace of feline voluptuosity. Raw sex is starker yet in Capricho 62, and it leaps out like an alien fury. The Sadie presence here appears perhaps in the unnaturalness of sexuality out of control, a perversity repeated in the title "Who Would Have Thought It?" Its morally hideous cat at the lower left is open-fanged, with front paws clawing upward, and spitting a furious energy far superior to that of the wrestling hag who straddles the naked, hair-pulling male partner. The relevance of this sexuality to Enlightener's cat lies in its irrational license, the unrestraint that pulls at a right angle to repose. Capricho 62 highlights the willfulness and spite of feline energy released from monitored control. With Reason neutralized in Capricho 43, the organism may surrender to irrational energies, in this case supernatural rather than sexual. A decision impends, either to reassert the daytime light of morality and philosophical self-discipline, or to succumb to consequences of darkness and disorder. Greycat's taut body embodies the frozen tangle of potentialities, a creature at odds with itself and released ditopically by its black alter ego. The latter protrudes from the Enlightener's renal area, a future symbol of sensuality for Baudelaire.

The Eccentric Substrate in Biological Science The instinctual energies symbolized in Goya's cats flow in concrete historical directions—toward superstition and toward eccentric science, or what I would call "preternaturalism." It is by no means farfetched to conceive of biological instinct in its material, historical form. Goya depicts monarchical energies in this way in The Disasters of War 73.™ A deeper homology appears in the way biological transformism takes metaphorical shape in political

17. Goya trades the scrappy hilarity of Lope de Vega's Gatomaquia for the murkier violence of a soundless world. Yet his lean and rowdy cats throughout the sketches and caprichos possess none of the sleek, voluptuous composure admired by Baudelaire in " L e chat." The snarling cat in Capricho 62, which springs upward toward the fornicating human couple, is much larger in shape than their struggling, deformed bodies. Although this scene fascinated Baudelaire, according to Jean Prevost, his response lacked the contemplative excitement before a consummate voluptuousness. 18. In The Disasters of War, number 73, a crouching cat is attached at the mouth to a flying owl, while a hooded monk bows to them reverently in a scene of crafty royal powers renewed under the adulation of owlish but evil counselors. See Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, Los "Desastres de la ßuerra" y sus dibujos preparatories (Barcelona: Instituto Amatller de Arte Hispänico, 1952), 185-86.

Preternatural Science

305

radicalism, as Aram Vartanian shows for Diderot.19 Such symbols, parallels, and metaphors acquire their own reality when the biological energies they represent are perceived to intervene in human affairs. Preternatural science then becomes a collaborator of political goals, as when Catholic Spain judges Freemasonry. The anti-Masonic tract on the Causes ofthe Revolution in France by Lorenzo Herväs y Panduro alludes to the processes of Nature. But his allusions are garbled by incomprehension and hostility to the Masonic "monstrosity" nestled in the bosom of Christianity. Herväs invokes "right Reason" when accusing the Freemason lodges of practicing black magic in their secret ceremonies. He indicts Swedenborg and Jose Balsamo, the false count Cagliostro, among those who engage in "mystical machination." It is not scientific Reason or research that Herväs seeks to protect, but the church-oriented state, menaced by the awesome powers of science in alleged misalliance with the perverted iluminados, who confabulate "dreams or deliriums" in their magical initiation rites under the hierophantic high priest.20 An eyewitness account of one Masonic ceremony, reported by Herväs, ties the older science of alchemy to Rosicrucianism and to the belief in ghostly spirits. Herväs distorts the scene in a polemical intent to create revulsion by emphasizing burning pitch, crawling snakes, an altar with skeleton bones, and libations of a green elixir. The vast literature on Freemasonry makes it impossible to discuss this subject in the light of Herväs's mutilated allusions, which themselves require sorting out and commentary.21 The historical eventuality was that the traditional Hermetic science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was gradually eclipsed by experimental science and grafted on political ideology, only to become horribly distorted in the eighteenth century at the hands of this reactionary propagandist. Herväs's version succeeds in disfiguring both alchemy and politics, although he is effective less in scientific details than in the cumulative impact of his narration. He reports an eight-hour ordeal in an 19. T h e vital force of the zoological sphere becomes a metaphor for subtle revolutionary metamorphoses. The transformist hypothesis makes "subversion the supreme law of Nature," to the extent that Diderot recoils with bourgeois distaste on discovering that the "democratization of Nature has reached its limits." See Aram Vartanian, " T h e 'Reve de d'Alembert': A Bio-Political View " Diderot Studies 17 (1973): 47,59. 20. References throughout are to Abate Lorenzo Herväs y Panduro, Causas de la revolution francesa en el ano 1789 y medios que se han valid*) para efeetuarla los enemigos de la rely ion y del estado [1807], selections and introductory study by Nicolas Gonzalez Ruiz (Madrid: Ediciones F E , 1944), 2 5 , 4 6 . 21. See, in general, Jose Antonio Ferrer hemmeii, Masoneria, tglesia, e ilustracion: Un conflicto ideoltigico-politico-religioso, 4 vols. (Madrid: Fundacion Universitaria Espanola, 1977); and Frances A . Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).

3o6

Chapter Nine

initiation chamber decorated in black cloth and illuminated by seven black candles, officiated by two ministers of death. The novice will ritually "die," renounce his birthplace, and be released from his loyalty to country and its laws. Allusions to altar, fire, bones, potion, and stench comprise the polemical residue of what in Masonic reality might have been Hermetic science applied to spiritualism. Hervas also mentions a religious component: the novice receives a crucifix from the priests, who bind his forehead with a bloodstained ribbon and paint his body with crosses of blood. Finally, a trace of occult animism lingers in the transparent figure emerging from a pile of burning clothes. Hervas deforms this animism by playing on his readers' credulity and alluding to phantoms crawling out of holes. He also appeals to religious piety by mentioning five prostrate ghosts that convulse and shriek blasphemous oaths (Causas, 118-32,158-59). The alliance of occult science and politics stirs hostility in West European quarters beyond orthodox Catholicism. The opposition is more benign and more ridiculing, but its history grows confused with pseudoscientific remissions. This history differs in pace when Spain, France, and Britain are studied separately.22 The irrationalist currents in science that culminate in Mesmerism are also known, but they are not confined to the popular excesses and extravagant gadgeteering documented by Robert Darnton.23 Similarly, the political and intellectual impacts on British society made by the Hermetic and occult traditions are amply documented.24 22. The evolution of British alchemy enters its charlatan stage after 1680, when it begins to be practiced by cranks. But its Hermetic philosophy as received from Robert Fludd and Thomas Vaughan is absorbed into the Masonic secret fraternity. See F. Sherwood Taylor, The Alchemists, the Founders of Modern Chemistry (London: H. Schuman, 1951). The influence of the Freemasons in France diffuses occult knowledge, with results that are politically measurable but of uncertain effect on attitudes toward science. After 1730 a sense of saturation and ignorance sets in to close the great period of discovery begun in 1660. See Jacques Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la penseefranfaisedu XVIIIe Steele, la generation des animaux de Descartes d I'Encyclopedie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1963). The cult of naturist mysticism, with its idea of magic inhering in all things, has been described in regard to such eighteenth-century followers of Jacob Boehme as Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin. See Armand Abecassis et al., Sophia et l'&me du tnonde (Paris: Albin Michel-Cahiers de l'Hermetisme, 1983). 23. See Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). The widespread seriousness attending Mesmerism met a countervailing mass ridicule, to judge by the popular Parisian Almanac of Modern Follies in 1785, which featured songs about fashionable whims, including one that calls Mesmer a charlatan (as did Buffon), and where engravings illustrated Mesmer's tub, a magic divining rod, and a balloon flight. "Folly" herself is portrayed with sheep's bells and a torch to light the world. See John Grand-Carteret, Les almanacksfranfais:Btblio-Iconographie, 1600-189S (Paris: Alisie, 1896), 108. 24. See Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment; Margaret Jacob,The Radical Enlightenment (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981); R. D. Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982).

Preternatural Science

307

In Spain, on the other hand, theosophy and alchemy continued to be vigorous, but they are difficult for scholars to document because of the selfmonitoring Catholic culture that severely cramped scientific materialism.25 Still more difficult to document are unorthodox practices in Spain. Even so, it is clear that the West European matrix of irrationalist science has a tripartite rhythm, with Britain in strongest acceleration. Hermetic science in Spain after Juan Caramuel survives through Feijoo's interest in Athanasius Kircher, and in Torres Villarroel's interest in alchemy.26 But the alchemical current goes quickly underground after its political annexation to Masonry. At the same time, its link to theosophical and Rosicrucian thought appears in the three-volume manuscript of Francisco Fernandez de Obecurri, which remained unpublished for reasons of censorship. Obecurri's dialogues on physics, cited by Garcia Font, suggest that he was not a crank. His death in 1796 occurs during Spain's spasmodic moment of political fear, resurgence of witchcraft, and philosophical isolation.27 In France, matters are more complex, as we shall see. These few instances of an eccentric substrate in West European science should give an inkling of the direction taken by irrational cognitive energy. To return to Goya's felines, their binary kinship of occult knowledge (Greycat) and preternatural instinct (the black cat) is homologous with the aforementioned deviancy from rational norms. As for French science, it resists historical summation with respect to hermeticism and spiritualism. However, its phases and structure in biology serve to focus the 25. One rare source is by Raymundo Amunärriz y Labrit, Tobias sistemäticas de la creation del mundo (Pamplona: Herederos de Martinez, 1745). According to Iris Zavala, "Viaje a la cara oculta," Nueva Revista de Filologia Htspanica 33 (1984): 20, this work is an "extensive treatise on demonology and eroticism as practiced among witches and people possessed by the devil. Demonology and the magical and divinatory arts served [Amunarriz] to create an extensive nominal theory of devils and angels. According to his genesis in Spain, the demon Concortron mingled with [se mezclaba am] women and from their union issued the Bocornes; this fact tainted the future of the Spaniards in a particular way, for given this genealogy they were destined for evil." See also Juan Garcia Font, Historia de la alquimia en Espafia (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1976), Jose Ramon Luanco y Riego, La alquimia en Espana, 2 vols. (Madrid: Tres, Catorce, Diecisiete, 1980). 26. For Kircher, see Volume 2, Chapter 3 of this study. For Caramuel, see Julian Velarde, "La filosofia de Juan Caramuel," ElBasilisco 15 (1983): ioff. The seventeenth-century occultist Geronimo Cortes enjoyed numerous reeditions of Secretos de la naturaleza . . . as well as of one work expurgated by the Inquisition's decree of June 13, 1741: Libra de fisonomta natural (Madrid: Domingo Fernandez Arrojo, 1762; reprinted Valladolid: Viuda e Hijos de Santander, 1788). 27. Julio Caro Baroja describes a deep ambivalence toward the "magic theater" popular in Goya's day, indicating an ingrained taste for white magic in the populace and a more equivocal response in the treatises contemporary with Spanish theater. See Baroja's Teatro populary tnagia (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1974).

3o8

Chapter Nine

concept of instinctual energy manifested by Goya. The evolution of French biology has of course been documented by Jacques Roger, but certain issues relative to Goya's preternatural vision remain unstated. Specifically, the fruits of scientific discovery contained irrationalist seeds. Furthermore, older hypotheses persisted in new garb whose vogue cannot be dismissed as a regression. When historian Pierre Chaunu summarizes the "field of knowledge" at this time, he places Mesmer and Swedenborg in the same context as the Freemasons and Rosicrucians, all of them illustrating the fact that the Enlightenment had not burned every bridge to the earlier civilization of magical and satanic mysteries. But Chaunu does not decide whether these bridges represent vestiges or continuities. When he surveys the biological "space" from Linnaeus to BufFon, he wedges into it the "prehistory" of transformism illustrated by Benoit de Maillet's novelesque curiosity TeUiamed.28 The question is whether Maillet's mixture of brilliant and outlandish ideas is more than an isolated case of irrational science. Chaunu invites a reconsideration of standard views about how general science developed, even though he orders historical evidence in an unobjectionable way. Biology aside, scientific progress in publicly visible areas, such as machinery, electricity, and aerostatics, undoubtedly "intoxicated" readers and uneducated masses alike with the illusion of limitless vistas. Robert Darnton maintains: "Mesmerism expressed the Enlightenment's faith in Reason taken to an extreme, an Enlightenment run wild, which later was to provoke a movement toward the opposite extreme in the form of romanticism" (Darnton, 22-23,39)—that is, a progressive scientific swell culminated in an unmanageable peak. In the latter stage, people's inability to discern the real from the imaginary was the irrational symptom of the rational age: "it was bewildered by the real and imaginary forces with which scientists peopled the universe." While this explains the Mesmerist phenomenon, the context is physical science rather than biology. Still to be considered is the vitalism that Roger calls "heterodox" science. After 1740, diverse vitalist conceptions replace mechanism. Roger's evidence imposes on this evolution two different focuses. The first falls on the spiritualist battle against mechanical materialism, a battle that ends in a triumphant empiricism that remains experimental and skeptically indifferent to inscrutable mysteries. The second focus is more relevant to Goya's visionary response. This concerns the reaction to materialism that 28. Pierre Chaunu, La civilisation de l'Europe des lumieres (Paris: Flammarion, 1982), 219, 260-61.

Preternatural Science

309

revives the older animistic science and its link to spiritual explanations of incomprehensible forces. These two directions in the history of science must be related to intellectual history in general. Their encompassing frame continues also to shelter theological supernaturalism of several kinds, including the preoccupation with witchcraft and sorcery. There is a clearcut evolution of empirical science, in both the biological and the physical branches. But to the extent that modern irrationalism draws on twisted scientific roots for its concern with the intangibilities of psychological and transcendental forces, the eighteenth-century terrain is crisscrossed beyond clarity. This crisscrossed region is the "preternatural science" described in these pages. Regarding Roger's first focus—the status of mechanism—it is an orientation generally accepted in Western Europe by 1700. The age of discovery from 1660 to 1745 brings hegemony to the mechanical position even among theologians, who seek experiments bearing out the laws of divine will. However, this period ends in divergent orientations. In terms of modern science, the wealth of discoveries brings a new recognition of Nature's complexity, so that the skeptical materialist is content to refine observations and experiments without attending to the "mysteries" of life and cosmology that continue to engross spiritualists. This Cartesian dualism is defeated by scientific monism. However, philosophy cannot cope with the sheer factual mass of new discoveries and fails to provide a balanced theory of knowledge. Consequently, an orientation emerges that is the second focus, a visionary or preternatural focus by which to observe the shift from mechanism to vitalism after 1745. This orientation responds more keenly to hypothesis than to experiment, especially in physiology and psychology. The retrenchment following monist materialism is not merely a "heterodox science" of unprovable governing concepts, as Roger indicates. It is significant that there is no uniform regression to the "dream" held by earlier decades, as he implies. The retrenched concepts perpetuate an unbroken dualist tradition that formerly included theological metaphysics but that later acquired a materialist hue. In the vitalist school of physiology, such hypotheses as mold theory, plastic natures, hylarchic principles, and aether effect are "chimeras" only in their literary and theological applications. They are echoes of serious natural philosophy, which speculates on scientific findings but carries controlling principles into the general history of ideas. These developments need a more slowly paced exposition in the light of Goya's insight into Reason, dream, and vital energy. If Greycat is a mul-

3io

Chapter Nine

tiple symbol of instinct and supernatural intelligence, her appearance at the end of the century must signify a culmination of West European experiences with scientific findings in physiology and its relation to mind or soul.29 The historical background of this relationship may be acknowledged here. The mechanical position within Cartesian dualism had global appeal before 1745 because it held that nothing in live Nature exists by chance. This position satisfied both the early experimental scientists like Malpighi, Swammerdam, and Leeuwenhoek, as well as later botanists, entomologists, and microbiologists like Reaumur, Trembley, Bonnet, and Needham. But theologians accepted mechanism too, since it lent support to the metaphysical design attributed to God. Science and theology converged to form a dualistic current that proved useless to the emerging monistic empiricism but that also sustained the credit of supernaturalism in its own preternatural version of science. This phenomenon was reflected in studies called "ichthyotheology," "lithotheology," "testaceatheology," and other such systems cited by Roger. But another dualism was more scientific for having discarded theology while preserving the mind-body distinction. This dualism enjoyed an experimental status under the hypothesis of animism. The animist position within the history of science yielded position to both theory and experiment after 1745, but it remained significant for intellectual history in general, and it regained lost ground as vitalism gained ascendency. This development became a source of general confusion for neurophysiology and the mind-body dilemma. The problem begins with La Mettrie's theoretical attempt to dispense with a superior essence that can explain the sensory-motor system and its relation to the cognitive processes. La Mettrie's monism for the manmachine's body is actually a shifting materialism that fails to satisfy natural philosophers like Diderot who wish for a larger synthesis. His anatomical explanation for "the flimsy texture of understanding," in Frederick IPs phrase, centers on a radical mechanism that collapses the Cartesian dualist model of clock-plus-w cqgitans into a hylomorphic singularity of organic organization. The eye sees because it is organized as it is: there is no causality other than the structure of its material substance. Organized matter has certain fundamental properties, such as impenetrability, motility, extension, electricity. Another such property is thought. Cognition is a property of the mind's organization, and beyond this we cannot go. Thus La Mettrie ends in "experimental agnosticism," a phrase used by Paul-Laurent 29. The link between the mind-body problem and eighteenth-century biology is discussed in Volume 2 with reference to polyps and aethereal spirits.

Preternatural Science

311

Assoun to characterize a key passage in Machine-Man: "Let us not lose ourselves in the infinite: we are not made for having the slightest idea about it. It is absolutely impossible to go back to the origin of things. . . . What folly it is to torment oneself about what is impossible to know."30 Such skepticism or agnosticism does not quite mean that everything in science not strictly materialist must be disdained as being captive to the "dream of Reason." Rather, the heritage left by La Mettrie and Condillac consists of a transferred dualism, one that shifts from a spiritualist to a crypto-materialist base. The concept of "soul" now becomes the concept of "mind." The soul loses its transcendent link to God, but it perpetuates the mystery of what precisely links tangible substance to abstraction. Eighteenth-century science barely progressed in explaining the physiology of consciousness.31 Laboratory observation discovered much about the anatomical mechanics of sensations, but the connection of nerve to brain remained fuzzy. The actual transmission of sense data through the nerves continued to be an unresolved issue among vibrationists and fluidists. Furthermore, the steps from sensory impression to its altered form as an idea, was a subject rarely addressed as an independent problem of biological connections. In terms of modern science, the period may be said to have formulated psycho-physiological issues by inquiring after the anatomical nature of the cerebro-nervous system rather than by inquiring into the nature of the neural signal itself. La Mettrie's skeptical tone is widespread in scientific discourse, and the warning is not meant only for philosophical dreamers. Buffon cautions readers against the analogical thinking of Reaumur, whose rigorous methods would appear to be unchallengeable. Yet Reaumur theorizes on the intelligence of bees by comparing it to the human mind, and Buffon remarks: "The observer will attribute to [the bees] all the penetration and mental purposes that they lack. He will wish to justify each action, and soon each movement will have its reason, and from here will arise marvels or monsters of reasoning without number."32 Such self-monitoring reproaches are built into the scientific method, but in this period they 30. Paul-Laurent Assoun, ed., La Mettrie: L'homme machine (Paris: Denoel-Gonthier, 1981), 20,126,142,149-50. 31. For a discussion of British physiology as it explains abstract thought, see John Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). His evidence in the light of French physiology is examined in Volume 2 of this study. 32. Georges-Louis Ledere de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, ed. Jean Varloot (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 149.

312

Chapter Nine

also build a climate of uncertainty as they chart the limiting boundaries of existing knowledge.33 This empiricist evolution moves parallel to certain factors that link a sense of marvel and the supernatural to science. These factors make it difficult to assert, from the standpoint of intellectual history, that a rational Enlightenment terminates in an irrational reaction to Reason.34 The sources of Unreason pervade the entire century and carry forward in many forms the irrationalism of earlier times. There is, of course, witchcraft, which has its intellectual counterpart among well-read, clandestine alchemists and practitioners of white magic. More of this later in the chapter. Elsewhere, the pietist and visionary current within theological streams of thought is the reverse side of Daniel Mornet's evidence that science appeals "obstinately" to theology for support.35 There is also the impact of books reflecting a seventeenth-century mentality that continue to be reprinted throughout the Enlightenment. A syncretic effect operates on authors like L e Lorrain. 36 Theological mysteries intermingle with factual knowledge of magnetism, transplantations, and astronomy to foster advocacy of quasimagical items like divining rods, philters, or sympathetic cures. Such authors are not irrational, considering their enviable argumentative skills; rather, their syncretic Reason cannot stand up to empirical Reason. The very concept of encyclopedism perpetuates such scientific ambiguity. The Dictionary of the Marvels of Nature, published in 1781, went 33. Similar instances, as in microscopy, demonstrate the unease beneath the optimistic surface of rational continuities that sustains most scientific motivation at this time. These are discussed in Volume 2. 3+. Lester Crocker contends that "the Age of Reason, paradoxically, might be called the Age of Unreason, or the Age of the Irrational," owing to philosophical occultists, novelists, and even philosophers contemplating the irrational. See Crocker, "What Is Modern About the Eighteenth Century?" in The Modernity of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Louis T. Milic, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cleveland, Ohio and London: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971), 87—92. 35. See Mornet, Les sciences de la nature en France (see note 1 above). This is not to dismiss "the high noon of rationalism" in church matters that Gerald Cragg leads up to while documenting the enlightened religious diversity of European nations. The temper of Scottish worship changes enough that "belief in devils, witchcraft, and sorcery fell into the background." However, as the Spanish example suggests, a progressive church is not everywhere the case. Cragg himself cites the "extravagance" of Jansenists speaking in tongues. For the historical perspective, see Gerald Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648-1789 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, i960), 87,195. 36. Abbot Le Lorrain de Vallemont maintains an enduring interest for credulous readers. The learned Abbot's treatise compares the systems of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Ptolemy, yet his enduring appeal to readers is La physique occulte . . . (Paris: Anesson, 1693), reprinted four times in the eighteenth century and bearing the subtitle Tratte de la baguette devinatoire et de son utilite pour la decouverte de sources d'eau, de minieres, des tresors caches, des voleurs et des meurtriersfugitifi.

Preternatural Science

313

through three editions, and while author Sigaud de la Fond claims the premise that "everything in Nature is a marvel," his compilation is limited to "extraordinary" phenomena, including animals discovered in living bodies, human freaks, fertility fountains, and, once more, the success of divining rods. "Erudition" of this sort meets with objection from Moratin in Spain and from Formey in Berlin, but the significant point here is the underground, supernaturalist appeal that factual science generates by the simple choice of topic. Thus Sigaud's Dictionary has entries for catalepsy, caverns, corpses, and electricity but subordinates their empirical, daytime identity to their nighttime interest for the lapsed Enlighteners portrayed by Goya.37 In this light, it bears remembering that a quarter-century after the bizarre and suggestive scientific mosaic of Maillet's Telliamed (1748) the science-fiction episodes of Restif de la Bretonne's La decouverte australe appear. In that novel of 1776, Restif writes in the hour of illuminists: Mesmer, Dom Pernetty, Cagliostro.38 Rationalism is too dry, as Paul Verniere indicates, and the thinkers surrounding the Buffons, Diderots, and d'Alemberts are "doubtful satellites"—Delisle de Sales, Robinet, Bonnet— who multiply Nature's systems. Rushing in to relieve the rational dryness are fake science, dream, and fantastic Utopias. Verniere's perspective coincides with Darnton's, and with that of most critics of Goya's art who see an end-of-century revolt on all fronts against Reason, from political and aesthetic thought to irrational science. An alternative perspective would look for a stream of thought that widens as the century advances, absorbing scientifically sounder elements in its wake but not quickly casting off unsound residue. Such a view would regard a given moment in intellectual history as a transitional flux between a prior and a future moment. Stability would continue to be perceived nonetheless, but found instead in the continuity of a preoccupying theme running through the age. This is the case with Restif's belief in atomism, which carries forward from corpuscular medicine at the beginning of the century. His belief in 1780 in atoms liberated during bodily decomposition, with the subsequent regen37. A long entry on the brain includes pseudo-facts that construct a meaningless image of "ministering": from the brain spring the body's nerves, "the ministers of the mind and the veritable motors of all parts of the machine." There is also the information that human infants born without a brain show life and signs of feeling, a fact that assigns the explanation of why to the realm of marvel. See Joseph Aignan Sigaud de la Fond, Dictionnaire des merveüles de la nature, 2 vols. (Paris, 1781), 1:123. 38. Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, La decouverte australe (1776-81), ed. Paul Verniere (Paris and Geneva: Slatkine, 1979).

3i4

Chapter Nine

eration of other bodies composed of these same particles, reverts to an earlier animist organicism. At mid-century, when Telliamed appears to coincide with BufFon's interest in transformism, the animist position has been displaced by an empirical monism. Yet the hues of attendant vitalism offer the same glimpse into the universal fermentation that Restif preserves Actively twenty-five years later. When Diderot poses difficult questions about BufFon's mold theory, he points to a problem regarding the concept of matter and energy that concerns the entire century.39 This subject is present in Restif and coincides with illuminist extravagance, but it does not make the regenerationist idea extravagant. What determines its quirkiness is its discourse, not the date. High fantasy breeds eccentricity, the fruit of aberrant genius that is unwelcome in scientific discovery. Fantasy's main defect is its leaning toward undemonstrable attributions. Invisible (i.e., undemonstrable) attributions to the natural world invite spiritualism in one guise or another. Such dualism is noxious to the empirical tradition after La Mettrie. In spite of this, the concept of intangible forces preserves its presence in the vitalist background. The mind-body division continues unresolved in biological science no less than in philosophy. It is against this background that the century-long irrationalist substrate must be viewed. Contemporary witnesses differ in their opinions, blurring the sharp edges between science, spiritualism, and superstition. In the second half of the century, well-accredited scientists try to demonstrate that superstition in France is eradicated even as they denounce it as a hindrance to medical discovery. Samuel Tissot testifies that not even ignorant Frenchmen are superstitious, although elsewhere in Europe charlatans and sorcerers take advantage of credulous people. Another neurologist, Daniel Delaroche, claims nonetheless that bizarre and superstitious ideas are the cause of slow progress in medicine. Tissot complains of quack cures for real symptoms, but his testimony blames "inflamed" imagination, which permits victims to accept quackery and, worse still, to believe they are possessed or else to dream of being transported to other places. In turn, Delaroche writes technically about the "laws of the nervous system" but feels compelled to act as prosecutor against spell-casters and exorcists, magicians and visionaries, who victimize patients. Both scientists are concerned with the social impact of 39. The best summary of scholarly positions on this subject is Jean Varloot's "Preface" to Buffon: Histoire naturelle, 24-25.

Preternatural Science

315

their work. Their concern points to a supernaturalism whose formidable reality owes more than a little to the ideas of the science that attacks it.40

Occultism and the Pseudo-Sciences The preternatural encroachment on rational knowledgefindsexpression in diverse iconographical forms. Many of the same symbols and concepts that apply to empirical Reason—light, scientific instruments, predictability— also appear in contexts of superstition, although in a corrupt state. In Boudard's iconology, the emblem for "Superstition" shows an elderly woman holding a lighted candle and a globe of planetary signs.41 The woman's haglike mien is uneasy despite the illumination, which admittedly is weaker than Reason's torch or flaming sword in other emblems. In this less confident astrology for superstitious minds, eighteenth-century knowledge of astronomy is a degenerated science. An owl and a raven are at the crone's feet, hollow symbols of wisdom and portent, both marking the pretensions of knowledge evoked through superstition. Other icons of ancient science also appear in the emblem for "Divination" (Boudard, 1:154). Here a priestess bends over an eviscerated lamb on an altar. At the altar's base stands a burning pot, a multivalent symbol found in diverse allegories of Minerva, Truth, Science, and the Five Senses. The divinatory vessel belongs among the artifacts of oracular interpretation, their object of study being animal entrails. At the same time, birds flutter around the head of the priestess, announcing natural inspirations such as dreams. Thus a single image emblemizes two types of divinatory medium: natural dream and augury. These conceptions of "superstition" encroach on the explanatory field occupied by Reason. The term "superstition" itself pales in meaning because it now involves more than the groundless supernatural beliefs illustrated in Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary. What is involved begins in the preceding century, when magic and divinatory science become lofty forms of explanation alongside the ignorant practices of rural witchcraft. This 40. Samuel Auguste Tissot, Tratte des nerß et de leurs maladies, vol. 8 of Oeuvres completes (Paris: Sallut, 1813), 263—73; Daniel Delaroche, Analyse des fonctions du systeme nerveux, 2 vols. (Geneva: Du Villard Fils et Nouffer, 1778), 1:29-32. 41. Jean Baptiste Boudard, Iconologie, tiree de divers auteurs (Parma and Paris: Tilliard,

1759), 3:i5l·

JI6

Chapter Nine

"urban" occultism slowly attains a learned status, accompanied by practical manuals. It is often syncretic with ancient theology and the Hermetic tradition, whereas witchcraft or sorcery is the unlettered "country" version of occult lore ceremonialized through fear and credulousness. The rise of empirical science initiates a discrediting process, and two separate developments make superstition an increasingly vague concept. In one area, idolatrous customs of so-called uncivilized cultures are newly described by anthropologists and confirm the Christian religions in their rationality. Superstition, in the writings of such clerical leaders as Pierre Le Brun and Abbot Guyon, consists of spiritual beliefs proven false by the standards of Christian Reason, a point not contradicted by the new cultural tolerance and typological antiquarianism. In another area, scientific Reason stigmatizes religion as an unverifiable knowledge. When this spiritual knowledge attempts to work on the material world, it is called magic or conjuring. And here, pseudo-science fills an entire spectrum from nonempirical experiment to exorcism, spell-based healing, enchantments, and bizarre concoctions. All such supernatural overlays for natural phenomena are "superstitions," but, as already noted, the term diminishes in utility as the deviations adopt specialized practices to achieve particular ends. This fragmented spectrum can be illustrated by two polar examples, one a seventeenth-century ink drawing of a witch before a cauldron, the other a frontispiece of 1784 called "Mesmer's Bucket," which depicts a magnetic apparatus in operation.42 The spectrum extends from supernaturalism to scientific materialism, although by empirical standards the illustrations representing each pole are considered superstitious quackery. Nevertheless, the examples illustrate the relation of the practitioner's self-image to the nature of science. In the first drawing about witchcraft, the crone sits reading a book, her feet planted within a cabalistic circle; the foreground displays a smoking cauldron that delivers the material results of her learned incantation, and the background outlines flying bats that provide the ominous atmosphere surrounding the mysterious summoned forces. The witch's self-perception is one of a serious practitioner of occult natural science, while the artist's perception of her is just as serious but allows the additional note that she is trafficking in spirits. In contrast, the frontispiece, "Mesmer's Bucket," 42. Hechicera, in Angel Maria de Barcia, Catdlqgo de la coleccion cU dibujos ordinales de la Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid: Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas ν Museos 98, num. 641 [1906]. An. 96. Al. 87. C.); "Le baquet de Mesmer," in Paul Lacroix, Le XVIIIe siede: Lettres, sciences, et arts (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1878), 45.

Preternatural Science

317

shows Mesmer's magnetic rays focusing on an ailing young woman. His serious self-perception is suggested also, seconded by the attending observers' belief in his materialist science. However, the artist's perception is satirical, as manifested by the bell-capped fool behind Mesmer and a comic mask above his contraption. Both illustrations neatly trace two histories of supernaturalism and science, together with contemporary attitudes toward them. Just as natural science detaches itself from the supernatural, a sharper discernment also separates unscientific materialism from true science. The French Academies of Science and Medicine in 1784 reject Mesmer's cures as being the hazardous result of the patient's overwrought imagination, as Paul Lacroix points out. As for spiritualist versions of natural science, they have remained serious and true in the minds of occultists to the present day. The disbelief and ridicule awakened by witchcraft and demonic possession are amply documented,43 but the number of individuals who remained in awe is not the crucial issue. Credulity is a phenomenon that becomes transferred to magneticist and mystical sects, to Freemasonry, and to spiritualist eruptions of the kind typified by Emanuel Swedenborg. Examples of this transfer studied by Kay Wilkins suffice to argue that the endurance of credulity deserves scholarly emphasis because of the iconographical form taken. Not only do book illustrations and almanac engravings supply documentary details but their anecdotal perspective is an instructive contrast to Goya's own heavily ambiguous compendium of Reason and Unreason in Capricho 43 and Sepias One and Two. An illustration for one French almanac of 1759 shows an astrologer in his observatory surrounded by disciples and examining the stars. Below the tower, the populace grabs avidly for falling leaflets with news of the "Cabala," which is also the engraving's title. The scene resembles one in the earlier Demi's Almanac of 1738 depicting Satan scattering books on the earth from above.44 Some of these activities are more respectable than others, but the link between prognostic astrology, cabalistic study, and quack medicine remains firm throughout. Secret partisans of the philosopher's stone, universal medicine, astrology, and the Cabala could always be found in Paris, according to Duclos's memoirs. Around 1730, the incan43· See Kay Wilkins, "Attitudes to Witchcraft and Demonic Possession in France During the Eighteenth Century," Journal of European Studies 3 (1973): 348-62; and "Some Aspects of the Irrational in Eighteenth-Century France," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 1 4 0 (1975): 107-201. 44- See V t c de Savigny de Moncorps, Les almanachs illustres du XVIIIs Steele (Paris, 1909), 4 0 ; and John Grand-Carteret, Les almanachs franpais: Biblto-Iconqgraphie, 1600-iSgs (Paris: Alisie, 1896), 4 4 - 4 5 .

?i8

Chapter Nine

tations of the chevalier de Saint-Maur, intoned amid lighted candles and acolytes assisting the "commerce with elementary genies," hoaxed many wealthy Frenchmen, just as the charlatan Jose Balsamo later succeeded in doing around 1785 as the count of Cagliostro, by working cures through ostensibly empirical treatments. The aforementioned satire of Mesmer is a frontispiece that testifies to many persistent forms of occultism, which Lacroix describes in detail. No sooner is Mesmer unmasked than Cagliostro establishes a Masonic lodge and forges links with a serious political movement. Nevertheless, his magic elixir dupes followers into believing its chemical power, akin to the philosophical stone. Certain Masonic lodges in Provence had already adopted a cabalistic rite owing to the Illuminist teachings of Martinez de Pasqualis and his followers. In turn, the Martinists adopt the visionary maxims of Swedenborg, which touch on matters both divine and infernal. Thus political aims take a direction not followed by the regressive substrate of supernatural science, itself one tier of a spiritualist stratification. Occultist undertakings related to Cagliostro's elixir, described by Lacroix, "titillate" human avarice but also perpetuate the unbroken tradition of Hermetic philosophy. The parlor seance, either chiromantic or telepathic, is only the manicured bourgeois version of the country sorceress in her smoky grotto. The overlay of knowledge makes each practitioner a specialist, and the best of them are interdisciplinary students of alchemy, numerology, astrology, oneiromancy, and faith healing. Each of these disciplines boast its corresponding books. However, the synthesizing vision aspires to the spiritual Absolute, in principle if not always in practice. This communion permits the ultimate legitimation of their science, which links the physical world to the realm of apparitions, and material health to a spiritual salvation through some deity. The efforts of animal magnetism and alchemy noted earlier are sensational expressions of belief in the unknown forces Nature, which resist discovery by empirical science. More pervasive than those expressions are the undercurrents of awe before Nature's mysterious causes, but these follow more reasonable patterns of expression. The result of such quasiHermeticist excursions is their competition with empirical science. Yet the irrational admixture lacks the mercenary flavor and demonistic motives that calibrate the spectrum from Mesmerism to witchcraft. This admixture is exemplified by the aforementioned Abbot Hervas, who fulminates against Freemasonry. He also cultivates a learned interest in scientific achievements, and his four-volume Ecstatic Voyage to the Plane-

Preternatural Science

319

tary World (1793) purports to praise astronomy through pietistic respect for God's natural wonders as much as to inveigh against the "useless sciences." Hervas addresses future "cosmopolite" readers in a mood described as "ecstatic delirium." He urges them to contemplate the skies and the plurality of worlds, though always in deference to Christian faith. While the idea of plurality is as old as Fontenelle, the curious fact is that Hervas sustains a three-volume imaginative journey of mechanistic explanations of sun and planets, only to add a fourth volume praising divine power and voicing skepticism of scientific knowledge. His accounts of Pythagoras, Kircher, and Huygens are followed by accusations against "modern philosophers," characterized as "gigantic monsters of arrogance, swollen heaps of fantastic illusion, deep abysses of vain curiosity and dark ignorance."45 Hervas's querulous reversal of scientific discourse internalizes powerful tensions. His stabilizing axis is theological, but it is a gyroscopic axis and not a vertical foundation planted on firm soil. His spinning second axis is the faculty of imagination, which can unsettle Reason by pulling it either toward the speculative "useless sciences" or in the opposite direction toward heretical materialism. Hence a horizontal third axis is supplied to fix a scientific middle way that avoids the "labyrinth of useless speculations" where "presumptuous curiosity might lead us" (Viaje estatico, 4:218— 21, 297). His discourse thus resembles a gyroscope that exhibits an overall tranquility covering internal turbulences that are finally absorbed, though not silenced, by religious piety. In the end, Hervas recants his imaginative flight: "With this discourse I have loosened the reins of fantasy and sowed seeds of illusion in your fantasy, which is a plague against Reason and proper instruction. What I have said, hold as not having been said" (4:145). The renunciation begins an aggressive finale: first aimed against medical anatomy ("each point of the human body can awaken countless doubts"), then against naturalists who study plant growth and regeneration. The inner workings of organic parts belong to the "final causes" of Nature's arcane dimension. To recognize this limitation is to know the difference between true and novelesque philosophy (4:292—95). Nevertheless, Hervas's self-denial cannot erase three volumes of astrophysical descriptions, one devoted entirely to the sun, a second devoted only to Mercury and Venus, and a third to the moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. However erroneous or antiquated its information, the work is a 45. Abate Lorenzo Hervas y Panduro, Viaje estätico al mundoplanetario, 4 vols. (Madrid: Aznar, 1793), 4:305. For the general context of this work see Monroe Hafter, "Toward a History of Spanish Imaginary Voyages," Eighteenth Century Studies 8 (1975): 265-82.

32o

Chapter Nine

rhapsody, not a fantastic dream. By narrating a putative scientific journey, Hervas is purposefully serious, following literary convention without imitating "those rambling, half-asleep authors who uses such titles as dream, entertainment, or diversion, and who speak of the heavens while capriciously creating new worlds" (i:xvii). His "ecstatic" purpose ultimately is to glorify the Deity through science, and in this aim he must recruit imagination as well as facts. Yet astronomical truth in Herväs's hands will be rapturous, a state of illumination quite different from the oneiric lessons provided by the undisciplined Diego de Torres Villarroel. Hervas prefers to cite Clavel's anti-Newtonian optics rather than to miss an occasion for showing the harmonious relation between colors, temperature, and music by means of the "clavichord of colors" (1:131-36). Herväs's technical explanation for optic phenomena prepares an optical effect of its own. His discourse is heavily imbued with allusions to light rays, spectral effects, and luminous gases, causing sentences to arrive in waves of lengthy clauses that dazzle more than clarify. Thus, he barely differs from the imaginary literary dreams he scorns, and he concludes with the advice to marvel at it all. Typical of those scorned literary dreams is a meditation on light that ends in philosophical bafflement— a most beautiful clarity bathes the study where I am now writing, and distinguishes for me the surrounding objects. What is this phenomenon? The clarity is light. Beautifully so. I know that the clarity is called light, but where does the latter or the former come from? The light is fire . . . but what is fire? Light is aethereal matter, but what is this matter? Light is a very subtle and very rapid body, but how does it become that way . . . ? I remain without knowing what light is.46

The speaker is the literary persona of a satirical journalist and lawyer, Luis Canuelo. His uncertainty about the light of natural clarity coincides with the generalized uncertainty about the light of Reason described earlier. The varieties of Reason are so numerous that crisscrossing threads of dualism and monism become entangled in the space between Christian Reason and its empirical counterpart. The nature of light similarly preoccupies the eighteenth century; as a central metaphor for the age, light becomes a source of entangled interpretations: religious illumination, a blinding force, aethereal substance, a medium for visual optics, visual understand46. Luis Garcia dc Canuelo, El Censor, ed. E. Garcia Pandavenes (Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1972), 2,92.

Preternatural Science

321

ing. Christian light and secular Reason tend toward a spiritualist cognition. They frame thinking that is empirically unscientific but that claims for itself a nonsectarian Christian science. The dream just cited and the Ecstatic Voyage may be dismissed as badly comprehended science, but this would miss the point about the "dream of Reason." The irrational is not a late-century phenomenon that builds toward an eventual reaction to scientific excess around the time of the Revolution. The irrational process is bred by science and rationalism themselves throughout the entire century. It involves interaction of philosophy and science in the quest for governing principles of knowledge. A clue to this process appears in Leibniz's Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas (1684), where the metaphor of light separates the threads that will become a tangle of rational and irrational discourses. Leibniz states that knowledge is either clear or obscure, and that if it is clear then it is either distinct or confused. If distinct, it is either adequate or intuitive, and if intuitive it is either symbolic or blind. The bifurcations continue, each thread separating into two more slender filaments that distinguish signs from things. Perfect knowledge is both adequate and intuitive at the same time. Here Leibniz reasons logically but admits the irrational within his system, even suggesting that confused knowledge is clearer than obscure knowledge. While not exactly a labyrinth, this account thwarts the purpose of Reason as a decisive instrument. The scientific counterpart to Leibnizian "light" appears in the Physical Astronomy of 1740 by Gamaches, who is obliged to admit the influence of imagination everywhere except in mathematics. Despite his technical formulas, Gamaches explains that experiments with light have not removed the need to declare that matter exists even where it is invisible, an admission made in spite of scientific Reason: H o w e v e r disabused w e think w e may be, it is certain that a marble block will always seem to be something more than a similar volume of aethereal matter. I avow that the error is in our imagination: our mind rejects it, but in w h a t manner? B y furnishing us with other false ideas that, to the shame o f Philosophy, have found grace. 4 7

Yet the error goes deeper than the human imagination, by Gamaches's own testimony. The senses also interfere, notwithstanding the exalted role +7. P. Etienne Simon Gamaches, Astronomie physique, ou Principe!getteraux de la nature, appliques au mecanisme astnmomique et compares aux principes de la philosophic de Μ. Newton, 2 vols. (Paris: Charles-Antoine Jombert, 1740), 1:8-9.

322

Chapter Nine

given to eyesight. The senses delude observation from infancy onward: "Everything is masked for us in nature. The universe is a spectacle where everything brings us illusion, and what is irritating is that the first form under which we see [an object] becomes in some manner the only rule for our judgments." Then too, scientific philosophy itself earns reproach. First, Gamaches complains about the illustrious emulators of savants in our nation; what progress have they not made in the Arts? Geometry seems to hide nothing from them; everything submits to their calculations. But hear them philosophize: you no longer recognize them—they are no longer the same men. In the pursuit of abstract truths, mind is entirely given over to itself, and no mechanical way whatsoever can lead it. (Astronomie physique, i: 31)

This complaint might seem to exonerate empirical science. The difficulty is that scientific observation also depends on the senses and philosophical induction, making it just as prone to error: But what is most irritating of all is that science itself often serves as a passport to error. One man will have better eyes than the others; he will have persevered to find the subtle operations of Nature and what commonly might escape [detection]. And behold, this suffices to obtain him a title,. . . people accede to his decisions, there is bias in his favor. That is to say, just because he has seen better than the others it is thought that he knows how to think better. (1:32)

This self-criticism also exists in other scientific contexts. Its effect from the standpoint of the history of science is to filter out what modern empiricism will call "bad" or "irrational" science. But within the ongoing turmoil of activity itself, the nonempirical precipitates will remain influential for a time in one domain or another, including spiritualist circles that continue to draw on legitimate scientific findings. The evolution of science cannot be discussed as a unitary process, if only because astronomy and energy physics develop at a different pace and along philosophical avenues different from those of physiology and generative biology. Even so, Christian science does not break cleanly with empirical science, and the stages of differentiation remain to be studied by historians. One fact is plain: the dividing line is not a simple matter of dualism and monism, spiritualism and materialism. The vitalists who succeed the mechanist biologists, for example, keep open the mysterious frontier with

Preternatural Science

323

inexplicable forces. The real difference between "heterodox" science and modern empiricism lies in the methods of verification, not in the hypotheses and acceptedfindingsof both camps. And here the tangle may be sorted out by following attitudes toward detailed issues throughout the century.48 As a result, opposing views are discernible even within the clerical camp of Christian Reason. But these disagreements are not significant for representing successive stages of false and true science. Actually, Le Lorrain de Vallemont is one of the earliest clerics to trumpet the alliance of experiment and Reason in the new physics. The truly important factor is that false understanding is carried forward in detailed factual information that decades of new readers marvel over. When presented with a case like Le Bran's refutation of palingenesis, later readers could easily think that his experiment failed because it was conducted improperly, rather than doubt the theory itself.

Supernaturalism and Preternaturalism While experimental science diverged from philosophical discourse, there remained a corps of thinkers who preserved an integrated concept of spirit and matter in the universe. For these people, old scientific associations loosened slowly, so that empirically incompatible topics did not easily detach from one another. The kind of erudite compilations and critiques just described also existed for the "science" of demonology. As a result, despite clerical repudiations, the very act of preservation sustained general interest. Symptomatic of the amalgam is Laurent Bordelon's 1710 satire, Monsieur Oufle, whose "extravagant imaginings" deliberately evoke those ofDo« Quixote, except for the difference in their cause.49 The work's lengthy sub+8. For instance, palingenesis, the blanket term for spontaneous generation, is embraced in the theological botany developed by Le Lorrain de Vallemont in 1705. He cites earlier British scientists, such as Digby and Coxe, who allegedly revived plants from ashes. Another cleric, Pierre Le Brun, rejects palingenesis after minutely describing an experiment that burns a plant, places its ash in a vessel heated with chemicals, and fails to produce the stem, leaf, and flower that were falsely reported to reappear. See Le Brun, Histoirc critique des pratiques superstitieuses, 4 vols. (Amsterdam: Jean-Frederic Bernard, 1755-36), 4:349-51. This work, reedited in Paris in 1750, embodies a span of skepticism in which modern theories of generation are proposed contemporaneously with Maillet's Telliamed, whose reassertion of the spontaneous generation Le Brun refutes. 49. Laurent Bordeion, L'histoire des imaginations extravagantes de Monsieur Oufle, causees par la lecture des livres qui traitent de la maßte, dugrimoire . . ., 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Estienne Roger, 1710).

324

Chapter Nine

title describes Oufle's extravagance as "reading books that deal with magic, the grimoire, demons, sorcerers, werewolves, incubi, succubi, witches' sabbaths; with fairies, ogres, will-o'-the-wisps, genies, phantoms and other ghouls; with dreams, the philosopher's stone, astrology, horoscopes, talismans, good-and-bad-luck days, eclipses, comets, and almanacs; in short, with all kinds of apparitions, divinations, bewitchings, enchantments, and other practiced superstitions." Bordelon had already opposed superstitions in De l'astrologie judiciaire (1689). However, a prophetic feature marks Monsieur Oufle in a style textured with irrationalities—"troubled imaginings," "mad imaginings," "extravagant superstitions," "bizarre persuasions," "strange deformities," "frightening spectres." These and related terms comprise a modern thesaurus of Unreason. The work's prophetic aspect consists of the precision gained by those terms. Instead of being obsolete, they become relevant to the categories of eighteenth-century irrationality: fantasy, dream, delusion, and madness. As an example, the term idees phantastiques does not simply denote "fantasies" suffered by the hero but also enfolds a compounded meaning (fanciful, phantasmal, fantastic) that later splits into separate lexical items for each type of idea, along the lines described earlier for Voltaire's vocabulary. The remarkable feature of Bordelon's narrative is the hero's library, cataloged in the second chapter. This narrated bibliography of several dozen works ranges from the sixteenth-century Bodin's Demonomanie and Delrio's Disquisitiones magicae, to Fontenelle's more recent Tratte des oracles. Bordelon's annotations regarding these works reflect familiarity with their contents, much as Cervantes authenticates his own mastery of courtly rhetoric by placing phrases from chivalric novels in Don Quixote's mouth. Indeed, in imitation of Cervantes, Bordelon causes Oufle's readings to end in actual practice—in this case performing magic, then believing he is a werewolf and discoursing on apparitions. To read Bordelon as a source of occult information is to recognize separate categories of preternatural inquiry that become the object of treatises as the century advances. The nature of delusion and dream, as well as the cause of apparitional phenomena, are topics approached within a systematic frame of inquiry. The worthiness of this inquiry should be judged only from the standpoint of its own time. The literate population as a whole is of course limited in number. Within the educated classes, writing of this kind commands at least as much attention as treatises in technical language, and they are more easily understood. One author concerned with ghostly

Preternatural Science

325

apparitions introduces a problem of mutual interest to biologists and occultists. Addressing the scientific principle of molecular decomposition and the theory of fluids, the subject eventually approaches Goya's world of instinctual energy. Another author, Bellon de Saint-Quentin, writes in 1733 that atomists have used microscopic evidence to prove that corpuscles are infinitely tiny and thus unbreakable by air or by larger bodies. These particles are emitted along the route of an escaping criminal owing to the correspondence of moving animal spirits and emotions, which are agitated during rapid blood circulation and other irregular fluid movements. The information is taken from a letter by a Dr. Chauvin in 1692, and reproduced in Bellon's work forty years later.50 Other supernaturalist confirmations appear in Saint-Quentin on the authority of Le Brun as a historian of magic and an ecclesiastical interpreter of natural phenomena. Saint-Quentin states that the apparitions observed in cemeteries are real but not ghoulish walking dead (revenants), and that their presence can be explained by the exhalation theory. In this version, chemists demonstrate what Athanasius Kircher earlier claimed to verify, that the salts of buried bodies are exhaled from the earth, which warms and expels them during decomposition of the body, with the result that the original bodily outline is produced above ground. A similar explanation by Alphonse Costadau in 1720 stresses oily vapors exhaled by the decomposing corpse in proportion to the original body shape (Tratte, 5:12). Both the saline and the oleaginous theories of exhalation belong to the cyclical concept of corpuscular physics, joined to the theory of sympathies held by Sir Kenelm Digby and others.51 Allied to this account is another, whichexplains why divining rods can track down murderers as well as locate underground elements, and here Le Brun devotes nearly the entire treatise to the notorious Jean Aymar's uncanny tracking ability, which is corroborated by the testimony of villagers. These instances are mere tokens of a vast literature that today's intellectual historians dismiss. The esoterica of alchemy and marginal pantheism in France and in Spain has been studied by a wide number of other specialists.52 Lest the incidence of supernaturalism be regarded as pertinent 50. J. Bellon de Saint-Quentin, Superstitions anciennes et modernes, prejuges vulgaires, qui ont induit les peuples α des usages et α des pratiques contraires a la religion, 4 vols. Amsterdam: Jean-Frederic Bernard, 1753), 1:4-5. 51. Lester King, The Road to Medical Enlightenment, 16SO-169S (London: Macdonald; New York: American Elsevier, 1970), 140-42. 52. See the works of Armand Abecassis, Constantin Bila, Antoine Faivre, Jose Luanco, Diego Nüfiez, and Jose Peset, to which must be added the bibliographers Albert Caillet and

326

Chapter Nine

only to modest sectors of society, mention should be made of the handbook for gentlemen published in Lausanne by Maubert de Gouvest in 1754. Among the didactic dialogues in this work, the one devoted to childhood prejudices and proper education reflects concern that the young nobleman has only recently escaped the influence of a preceptor who is fond of reciting tales about demons and spirits. It emerges that a taxonomy of pedagogical superstition can be developed based on observation. The wetnurse and governess begin the child's education by feeding his credulity with stories of "sorcerers, ghouls, and similar hideous marvels credited by legend," thus teaching the child to fear. As Locke suggested by other means, "these first impressions strengthen with age and come to blend in with our Reason." Misunderstood sacred oracles, and parochial authorities in the church itself, reinforce fearful credulity with homilies of saintly tribulations inflicted by demonic temptations. As an adult, the penitent may be inspired by an ecclesiastic to adopt "so disordered a love of his religion" that the result is both intolerance and inordinate fear of the afterlife, not to mention abject credulity.53 Diverse genres of writing, therefore, constitute a library of texts that represent quite independent categories of Unreason. A medley of superstitious folklore, scientific generalizations, religious warnings, and magical practices find their way into individual volumes that publishers print because an educated public continues to purchase them. This literature may

Robert Yvc-Plessis early in this century, and Andre Savoret more recently. In Great Britain, a single example of witchcraft should be added to the broader occultist studies by D. P. Walker and Sherwood Taylor. The case involves Wordsworth's "distancing strategies of the witchcraft poems" detected by Alan Bewell in "The Mad Mother" of the Lyrical Ballads. The heroine's "preoccupation with melancholy and magic" is really a case history transformed, and the poem may be read as a reevaluation of medical and philosophical discourse prior to 1798 (Alan J. Bewell, "A 'Word Scarce Said': Hysteria and Witchcraft in Wordsworth's 'Experiential' Poetry of 1797-1798," English Literary History 5} [1986]: 585-86). The woman's real hysteria and her claimed surrender to an incubus hold implications for the social dynamics of witchcraft accusations. 53. Maubert's aristocratic dialogue continues ambivalently with a historical review of kings and dukes afflicted by supernatural beings, a review that appears to credit if not the current likelihood of such affliction then at least the historical truth of the example cited. As in previous examples, sorcerers are a significant category, now judged through the eyes of the law to be "wicked fanatics and poisoners." The author also identifies the category of magicians, "a problem I leave to our doctors to resolve." Finally, the subject of the dead and buried brings the explanation that spectres hovering over tombs may be real but not miraculous: ". . . [after] bodily decomposition, the corpse breaks up, each specie or part returns to its element, the grosser ones remaining in the earth whence they came, the more subtle ones charging the air." The account follows in the mold set by Costadau and other authors just mentioned. See Jean Henri Maubert de Gouvest [Mr. M. B. de G.], Ecole dußentilhomme (Lausanne: Pierre A. Verney, 1754), 60-72.

Preternatural Science

327

not be swept under the general rubric of mere superstition. The rubbish of intellectual history, as described earlier and will again be seen, is assimilable to the varieties of Reason. Occultism and pseudo-science claim a place everywhere—whether as spiritualism or as a potent imaginative activity—except perhaps in the physical and the mathematical sciences. As for the idea of "superstition," the term grows meaningless under its pliable applicability. When Carl Becker alludes to the rationalistic company that includes d'Holbach, Helvetius, and La Mettrie, he remarks: "The Goddess of Reason had guided them safely out of the long night of superstition into the light of day."54 In this usage, the term derives from materialist science and refers to the spiritualism inspired by religion. In turn, Christian religions limit superstition to idolatry and to belief in false gods, yet Christian superstition also exists when believers baptize an animal or a dead infant, when they ritualize bathing, or when they fetichize certain ornaments, utensils, or clothes for the Eucharist, according to Bellon de Saint-Quentin. The pyramid of accusations descends from the empirical apex to the base of religion, and from there down to the foundation in pious superstition and lower still to bedrock belief in magic. However, the practice of magic and the belief in its powers revert again to science and its misunderstood applications. Thus magic is deemed a superstition both by science and by religion, while it borrows from both to produce a pseudoscientific supernaturalism, or what Roger calls "heterodox science" in its least credible form. Finally, astrology and alchemy ossify alongside astronomy and chemistry, but their bonds with the Hermetic tradition seem strengthened, although the result is a twofold bastardization of spiritualism in the directions of sectarian groupings and individual eccentricity. These interrelationships encourage a more precise classification than previously conceded, precisely because they hold an ambiguous place in the Enlightenment. They are condemned on the one hand by orthodox religion and quantifiable science, while on the other hand they are exploited for aesthetic value by imaginative discourse and art. In fact, the very role of imagination wavers in the same ambiguity: it is incriminated for lengthening the bizarre fringes of science, mocked for inflaming minds to quackery, caressed into poetic solitude, and hailed as the coordinating faculty of mental processes. Imagination and superstition are not categories of the same order as magic, demonology, and alchemy, in contradistinction to scientific 54. Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1932), 75.

328

Chapter Nine

Reason. Rather, superstition and imagination are the adjustable emblems and attributes of Unreason itself. They are transmutable elements of categories that rationalize supernaturalism in defiance of the amorphous sprawl known as irrationality.

Superstition Viewed by the Church One way of converting the loose term "superstition" into precise categories of supernaturalism is to adopt the perspective of Goya's Spain, whose bulwark is the Catholic church. This perspective makes it clear that superstition worried church authorities to the point of polarizing orthodox doctrine against heretical forms of spiritualism. The result identified sophisticated degrees of Unreason that could be studied rationally like any other discipline of knowledge. The further result was a perpetuated awareness of occultism despite efforts to negate its beliefs. Supernatural sanctity and supernatural heresy sustained each other even as one combated the other. Catholic theology had a demonology to balance its angelology, while the converse of that demonology was demonolatry. Knowledge and ritualism occupied two poles of the same supernatural axis. The Catholic demonologist followed patriarchal authorities, while demonolatry, or Satanism, promoted teachings that were alluded to if not actually advocated by authors listed on Index librorum prohibitorum ,55 These teachings could be gleaned by careless or malevolent readers who disregarded the caveats of compilers, often clerics. Sacred and patristic literatures related inversely to the oral tradition of sacrilegious lore that they anathematized. Holy worship and sacramental Communion were opposed by diabolic magic, its devotional feature reinforced by cabalism and pagan spiritism. Liturgy and ceremonial practice were counterposed by incantatory diabolism. Finally, there was ascetico-mysticism, whose inversions were trancelike states like lycanthropy, demonic possession, and somnific transport. Vampires in particular were a "scandal of the Enlightenment."56 A chief weapon against all illicit states was exorcism, itself derived from demonology. Other supernaturalist varieties were simply polemicized 55. The Index of 1790 lists, among other works, De maqorum daemonomania by Joan Bodinus; Exorcismorum adversus tempestates et daemones by Christophoro Lasterra; Recherches sur la nature du feu de l'enfer, et du lieu ού il est by Mr. Swinden. See Indice ultimo de los libros probibidosy mandados expurgar. . . (Madrid: Sancha, 1790), 31,155, 259. 56. See Chapter 2, note 7.

Preternatural Science

329

and proscribed to the faithful. But these heretical varieties boasted their own knowledge, mainly in the forms of divination. One such form was visionary prophecy, while others approached the natural world through alchemical and other pseudo-sciences. Among these were the "sophisticated" sciences cited by the monastic Father Feijoo: crystallomancy, pyromancy, hydromancy, ceromancy, geomancy, aeromancy, capnomancy, chiromancy, dactylomancy, and necromancy. Sixty seven such mantic sciences are counted in Kay Wilkins's study. On the subject of mantic knowledge, Feijoo's writings demonstrate the inextricable ties between rational and irrational scientific thinking that exist within the dualistic or spiritualist framework. As a Spanish Benedictine, Feijoo was intellectually liberal-minded and inclined to critical moderation in regard to natural philosophy. While opposing superstition in all forms, he follows the common distinction between malefic or "black" magic, and theurgic or "white" magic. Both the diabolical and the natural forms of magic are practiced by individuals of divergent educations. The distinction between sorceress and witch is something that Feijoo as well as Goya himself must have realized.57 The distinction also suggests Feijoo's discrimination between the "holy magic" of pagans who had commerce with divinities, and the devil-conjuring enchantments of Christian heretics. Idolatry in the first case, and demonolatry in the second, meet along the boundary separating ignorance from evil. Obviously Feijoo spurns both, but he hints at a church laxity that may tolerate perpetuation of magical thinking. Motivating his concern is the "real" power of Satan.58 Feijoo firmly believes in satanic power. Where it intervenes in experiments with the natural world, Feijoo urges stronger church supervision. Belief in the philosopher's stone, he contends, breeds more than experiments to convert base metal into gold. Not only does chrysopeya fail in practice, but also "the intrinsic deformity of such superstitious operations" may be connected with "some sacrilegious cult of the devil" ("Cuevas de 57. This distinction is proposed by Julio Caro Baroja in chapter 2 of Las brujas y su mundo (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1961). For Goya, see Enrique Lafuente, Goya en sus dibujos (Madrid: Urbion, 1979), 109, in. 58. Benito Jeronimo Feijoo, "Cuevas de Salamanca y Toledo y migica de Espana," in Obras escogidas, vol. 1, ed. Vicente de la Fuente, Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles 56 (Madrid: Atlas, 1952), 374-81· Additional references will be to "Milagros supuestos," 1:112-22; "Duendes y espiritus familiares," 1:103-7; "Honra y provecho de la agricultura," 1:456-67; to vol. 2, ed. Agustin Miliares Carlo, Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles 141 (Madrid: Atlas, 1961), "Artes divinatorias," 133-44; "Uso de la magica," 161-86; and to vol. 3, ed. Agustin Miliares Carlo, Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles 142 (Madrid: Atlas, 1961), "Transformaciones y transmigraciones magicas," 77-84.

33o

Chapter Nine

Salamanca," 1:376). Other hearsay alterations in Nature also seem to defy rational accounting. While denying false miracles in Nature, Feijoo admits to the existence of witches' spells ("Uso de la mägica," 2:161). Minor devils and goblins also exist, he concedes, since the church performs exorcisms against them. But he points out that whereas some exorcisms are "approved," others are simply "permitted" ("Duendes," 1:106). He rejects claims of false doctrines, such as Islam, in the same breath as alleged feats of dervishes, but these and "more marvelous things do not exceed the devil's power, at times directed through other magicians" ("Milagros," 1:117). Thus Feijoo dismisses with one hand the reports of supernatural fecundity or immaculate conceptions, while he points with the other hand to alleged miraculous births that instead "may be attributed to the abominable commerce with incubi." The existence of incubi and succubi is dismissed, it should be added, by Feijoo's contemporary historian of superstitions, Le Brun. As a protagonist of the Christian Enlightenment in Spain, Feijoo's critical rationalism is dualistic. He argues that "without a higher light, men cannot distinguish true miracles from false ones because the devil, by means of appearances, can play tricks with the information supplied by the senses" ("Milagros," 1:117). The epistemological argument against the senses is not a scientific one, however. It assumes that reality is miraculously capable of disobeying fixed laws. The position allows unscientific explanations on both the devil's side and the deity's, but not on the side of witchcraft or sorcery. The boundaries fixed for this camp extend to the edges of alchemy and medicine, where Feijoo combats heresy-prone beliefs and practices. His deductive reasoning and empirical argument reject claims for supernatural interventions through magical means. Certain rustic cures for illnesses, such as incantations, had been observed failures since medieval times, when the church pronounced their inefficacy, and yet they persisted to Feijoo's time. Feijoo insists that eyewitness testimony for ghostly visitations proves unreliable upon examination. Finally, he calls the persistent belief in goblins and household spirits a theological absurdity: "poltergeists are neither angels nor separated souls nor aereous animals; there remains nothing else that they can be. Therefore there are no poltergeists" ("Duendes," 1:103). Numerous such instances in Feijoo's prolific writings dramatize the fact that so learned an author devotes impassioned energy to refuting obvious nonsense. The implication seems to be that credulous zones had preserved their influence not only among the naive and the illiterate but also among the learned, including Feijoo's brethren. His own discourse highlights the

Preternatural Science

331

supernatural beliefs legitimized by Christian faith. He describes doubtful miracles in detail before dismissing them, and his style fosters a vivid knowledge of spiritual "deformities" despite their historical remoteness. Reviewing the ancient idolatries, Feijoo resuscitates the "bones of the deceased, entire corpses, blackened victims, entrails throbbing and blood gushing, tender infants inhumanly beheaded.... There existed deities that were tormenting, melancholy, terrible . . . [and] living in darkness corresponding to sad cults that were terrible, lugubrious, bloody" ("Cuevas," 1:376). Passionate sentiment in similar passages enlivens Feijoo's ordinarily laconic prose, as if distant history is passing before his inward eye. His imagination leads him into the ghost-haunted thinking of his own day in one furious refutation of household spirits, those "playful demons" who frighten by breaking dishes: "God never permits the devil such apparitions, except as an exercise for good people, [and] as a correction, warning, or punishment for bad people" ("Duendes," 1:105). Feijoo has just given an example of exorcism, and now he allows for the appearance of poltergeists. He does not stipulate whether the event is an "approved" exorcism or merely a tolerated, "permitted" one. Although Feijoo's omission should be insignificant considering his general disbelief in ghosts, he seems to acknowledge demonic activity in the incubus-succubus form, as noted before. The current example offers a conjurer exorcising a woman he believes to be possessed: "an incubus-demon" who violently oppressed a woman in a certain part of the house. Because the conjurer is a magus rather than a priest, his work does not merit sanction. Clearly Feijoo ranges over an odd mixture of harmless and injurious examples of the supernatural and the superstitious. His discrediting effort leaves an aperture of ambivalence that Goya will exploit in the witches' sabbath paintings devoted to the social reality of these examples. The bridge between monk and painter is nowhere more cogently stated than in Feijoo's psychological analysis of mind over matter. He points to the role of the imagination in "perceiving" supernatural phenomena, and to its collaboration in the endeavor to conjure or to consort with spirits: Timid and superstitious minds (qualities that usually go together) attribute to the poltergeist every nocturnal sound whose cause they do not know. In the dimming light, the imagination of pusillanimous individuals makes substance out of shadow and sometimes also makes shadows out of substance with no lesser risk. If a night sound awakens them, their fright puts disorder into the movement of the troop of humours; which then represent strange images to them, much helped by the fact that in those first waking moments

332

Chapter Nine Reason has not yet shaken off all the clouds of sleep.... If fear is excessive, the fancy becomes so perturbed that the error of the eyes is shared for them by the ears or by the imagination, apprehending that it hears articulated words. ("Duendes," 1:104)

The culprits are imagination and unreliable sensory perception, a combination that accounts for the sleep of Reason that produces monsters. The very same culprits are named by the aforementioned physicist-mathematician Gamaches when he reproaches scientific error. His empirical science can of course correct itself by repeating the circumstances of cause and effect, but the world of magic offers no similar opportunity for corroborating apparitions. The magus does not reveal his secrets, and the spiritualist phenomena are beyond human control. The very irrefutability of preternatural phenomena probably explains the unbroken fascination for occultism among eighteenth-century Spanish and French clerical authors. The social utility of this work is indisputable, for they wrote to protect the illiterate masses from heresy. However, their writings address educated lay and clerical readers who hold opinionforming social positions. As Feijoo's essays insinuate, credulity within the ranks of the church cannot be discounted in this regard. But from the standpoint of intellectual history, the large-scale motivation to compile and classify such information strikes an odd note. Granted, the epoch displays a historiographical and anthropological aversion to excluding any form of human experience from the project of systematized knowledge. Yet the rationalized approach to occultism, set alongside other investigative work in cultural history, psychology, and even science, is too painstaking in its reportorial conservation of error to function merely as a refutation. The recurring references to outdated sources, the absorbing details that crowd out any polemicizing tone, the intrinsic interest of such inventive and little-known practices—all convert the occult materials into objects of renewable stimulus. The varieties of superstition are never boring, whether they entertain or edify as a monument of superseded cultural naivete. On the contrary, they usually present a fresh facet to be pondered. It is paradoxical, therefore, that the scientific spirit should be the agent that, by recording occultisms and superstitious customs, preserves their continued interest for gullible readers even while overturning their validity. From this standpoint, when the Spanish Index librorum prohibitorum of 1790 repeats earlier bans on spiritually unhealthy books, more is involved than dogmatic vigilance. A good example is the banning of a book

Preternatural Science

333

printed in 1612 and condemned earlier by the Index of 1747: the treatise on oneiromancy by Anselm Julian, titled The Art ofDreams and Nocturnal Visions. The repeated listing in the Index of 1790 exposes at least one criterion for decisions against dropping titles from revised Indexes. Although the Inquisition routinely proscribed books on magic, such bans were not merely a preventive against religious heterodoxy. They also suggest an attitude toward mental processes as such—witness Feijoo's phrase "troop of humours." There is a perceived need to supervise cognitive faculties and their irrational impulses, whose power can transform behavioral patterns in the real world. The very structure of reality is the prize when imagination gains the upper hand over rational order. In matters of faith, religious enthusiasm can and does replace authorized holiness. In worldly matters the private, inner vision dictates values that may conflict with established public structures. Like black magic, oneiromancy requires no disproof by empirical science because, quite simply, it does not work. But both the magus and the dream teller require a fantasizing frame of mind. Their mind-set opens vistas that threaten the institutional beliefs that put science to use. Spontaneous exercise of pure fantasy in both magic and oneiromancy means an unsanctionable break with the church and social discipline. Unchecked imagination begins by stimulating supernaturalism and ends in unsupervised privacy, which is deemed lawless by nervous public authorities. On this account, the Index's banning of Julian's Art ofDreams involves heresy and devotional tradition only in part. Beyond these issues rises the power of the irrational mind itself. Divination is an irrational refinement that, like witchcraft, detaches believer as well as citizen from institutional constraints by erecting an alternative economy of actions and laws that compete with present norms.

Iconography of Superstition The argument is not that readers actually suspended belief in the scientific laws of nature after studying the esoterica of Feijoo, Bordelon, Guyon, Costadau, Le Brun, and Bellon de Saint-Quentin. But the information purveyed in their books held an undeniable contemplative value both for consumers and for suppliers. There is no census count of individuals who pursued careers as sorcerers or necromancers. However, if enlightened authors continued to write about preternatural science, and if publishers con-

334

Chapter Nine

tinued to reprint long-dead unenlightened preternaturalists, it is difficult to doubt that many readers welcomed the subject matter and were able to suspend judgment at least as far as they might for any other aesthetic experience. Whether witchcraft was as practical in effect as science is not the issue. The point is the value of preternatural suggestive power, with its convincing air of providing access to unexplored regions. This value may explain Diderot's appreciation when viewing Jean-Baptiste Le Prince's painting, The Necromancer (1775), which he declared "so beautiful a work." It may also explain why at the close of the century the Duchess of Alba commissioned Goya to do a series of paintings on popular superstitions. In fact, to examine this theme in painting, so out of step with heroic, rococo, and domestic themes then characterizing the visual arts, will be to expose its deeper attractions for the writers mentioned earlier. The preternatural subgenre has at least one precursor that should be cited: the Witch ofEndor by Salvator Rosa, whose hyperbolic proclivity was discussed in Chapter 5. The painting emphasizes the subject's biblical context by alluding to Samuel's ghost, which appears to Saul after he compels the witch of Endor to tell his future. Regardless of whether Saul can see the ghost, the spectator can, as does the pythoness herself. Already a displacement occurs in the seat of spiritual authority: the viewer experiences the success of unorthodox powers, and the biblical monarch consults an outcast sorceress instead of his priestly caste.59 A later example of the preternatural is The First Experience, or The Sorceress'Den by Antoine-Fran9ois Saint-Aubert. In this secular scene a young woman of means is being instructed by a soothsayer seated opposite reading her sibylline book at a table styled after Louis XV. Another young female in the background prepares to fly up the chimney on a broom after being undressed and anointed by a servant. Unlike the almanac satires mentioned earlier, this scene evokes the demonic world soberly by depicting a cloud of infernal monsters in the upper plane, the center occupied by a devil giving his benediction (Preaud, 43)· Well-known artists also acknowledge supernaturalist activity. A quadripartite painting by Saint-Aubert is titled Arrival at the Witches' Sabbath and Homage to the Devil. The central segment depicts young women, masked and armed with brooms, arriving astride hideous animals. The other three segments show documentary attention to specific forms and traits, as if to repudiate Le Brun's debunking of ghouls, cabalistic spirits, 59. Maxime Preaud, Les sorcieres (Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale, 1973), 131.

Preternatural Science

335

and apparitions.60 The importance of the painting lies in the nuances that parallel Le Brun's critical history of superstitions. Paintings and books together document what seems to be an unflagging spiritualism. SaintAubert socializes the fearful unknown by depicting its accessibility to bourgeois desire. He deals soberly with this familiarity while concealing his own skepticism. Le Brun, in contrast, shows a clerical desire to combat superstitious practices. His reports on cabalistic animism, and the precise vocabulary for apparitions, are nevertheless echoed realistically by SaintAubert.61 Natural or white magic is separate branch of supernaturalism; it contrasts with sorcery and witchcraft by employing nature's impersonal laws. This sort of magic is a secret knowledge that mystifies natural laws. Its work differs from the intervention of good or evil spirits conjured by incantation or crafted devices. This distinction, pointed out by Lester King, supplies a context for scientific Reason prior to its detachment from animistic and vitalistic thought, particularly in seventeenth-century biological sciences like medicine. Le Brun carries forward the distinction in the eighteenth century with regard to the issues of palingenesis, alchemical resurrection of dead plants, pseudo-religious "miraculous" conceptions, continued rebirths, and metempsychosis. Authors like Le Brun use the idea of natural magic to explain real spiritualist encounters, or else realistic descriptions of such experiences comparable to Rosa's painting of the apparition confronting Saul. These events arise from the secret effects of natural processes. In this view, the conglomerate of phenomena must be recorded in detail, true or not. The historicizing distance on the part of Le Brun and other authors validates the publication of their work. Thus Bellon de Saint-Quentin, who while believing in the devil also argues that superstitions have natu60. Preaud, Les sorcieres, 62-63. The dark foreground features scraggly, jagged-toothed earth-beasts; the rear left opens into a grotto where a horned idol on a pedestal is worshiped by human figures; above, a fire-breathing, serpent-shaped dragon carries men and women skyward with the devil. An interesting stylistic analysis in itself would be to investigate the scene's iconological uniqueness compared with its debt to tradition. 61. Le Brun's account of cabalistic animism invests the four elements with separate spirits: sylphs in air, gnomes in earth, salamanders in fire, ondines in water. He also furnishes a detailed vocabulary for apparitions: the Roman spirits of the dead are manes, lemurs, and, when the deaths are tragic, larves. The sorceress who devours children at night is a lamie, but the same word identifies a monster resembling a shark, perhaps akin to Saint-Aubert's scraggly beasts from the depths. Le Brun's documentation of pagan animism is balanced by a trinitarian spiritualism of the artist's. Angels, demons, and souls form a Catholic hierarchy withstanding conversion by alchemists and crypto-illuminists standing in the shadow of pious but gullible salon habitues, among whom surely figure the patrons who commissioned Saint-Aubert's work in this genre.

336

Chapter Nine

ral explanations, offers another argument for recording these practices. It is important to study them because Satan uses them to gain control of people's souls. While Satan does not himself work superstitions, his power over human behavior depends on the credulity they thrive on.62 These concerns enter the social climate in which Saint-Aubert paints, and he is joined by others before Goya, including William Hogarth and Claude Gillot. These fashionable artists make room for the beliefs of a respected sector of society through occasional supernaturalist works. In Saint-Aubert's case, such beliefs may not easily be dismissed as the entertainments of idle ladies. The scene in Hogarth's Huidibras and Sidrophel is a masculine exchange, which Ronald Paulson comments on at length. This work attests to the extended life span of books like Jean Bodin's Demonomania of Sorcerers (1587), but it also documents the magician's instruments interspersed with legitimate scientific ones. These not entirely imagined appurtenances take second place to the horoscope that dominates the disputed consultation painted by Hogarth. But their detailed rendition suggests that the practices recorded by Bellon de Saint-Quentin are hardly evanescent. Hogarth's Huidibras illustrates the problem of preternatural conviction. Both the practitioner and his client indicate degrees of persuasion as to magic's efficacy. The painting itself affirms the fact that painters as well as intellectual writers are persuaded that the subject is worthy of attention to minute detail. A second issue is the "legitimacy" of scientific instruments. Are they perhaps judged "unscientific" prematurely in the light of historical retrospection? Hogarth's scene offers an array of instruments, including a knife blade inscribed with cabalistic markings and a flask containing a homunculus (Preaud, 131). This juncture of the physiologist's laboratory and the mystic's cave—or the witches' grotto in Saint-Aubert—is more likely the product of direct observation in London than a perusal of ancient pictures. The flask and knife seem like magical artifacts alongside the astronomy instruments, just as the book of Merlin's prophecies seems incongruous alongside books by Plato, Copernicus, and Pliny the Elder—or is it the other way round? From the believer's standpoint, the presence of scientific tokens legitimizes the magical ones. The reversible perspective just offered can be extended to pose an epistemological problem, which Gillot does in his engraving of a well-to62. J. Bellon de Saint-Quentin, "Lettre de Μ. de Sal . . . medecin, a Μ. I'abbe de M.D.L." (1731), in Dissertation critique sur l'apparition des esprits, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: JeanFrederic Bernard, 1736), 90—95.

Preternatural Science

337

do lady who rides to a witches' sabbath on a skeleton-mule. The title of the engraving is in the form of a question offered from the lady's viewpoint: Is It An Enchantment? Is It An Illusion? (Preaud, 54-55). As she enters the devil's secluded consorting grounds, she glances up at her stag-headed companion. The latter sits astride his horse, he the satanic knight and she the novice squire—a new Quixotic turn to Bordelon's Ouffle. The episode teems with sabbatic rituals, torture devices, and macabre or lycanthropic figures. The engraving testifies splendidly to the rich lore available to the tempted and the curious, as well as to the artists and writers who preserve their memory. Basically, the question about demonic spirits turns away from whether they exist and asks instead whether human beings can harness their powers. Ascribing superhuman power to Satan or to God becomes inconsequential when the goal is knowledge partaking of their omnipotence. Christian Reason attempts to balance this secular thirst against the divine barriers to human understanding. Bellon de Saint-Quentin's chronicle of superstitions attacks credulity but does not deny the powers themselves. He admits that certain events arise from nonmaterial causes that are not attributable to God, but the demons responsible for those events do perform God's will. They are limited in power, active at one time but not at this moment, or else effective here but not there. Their fortuitous, "bizarre" nature makes professional predictions impossible, since no mortal has the wisdom to thwart their deceptive roles as tempter, liar, seducer, traitor, mocker, and trickster (Superstitions, 1:161—62). This line of reasoning discourages exploration while preserving the reality of supernatural manifestations. By acknowledging this reality, historians and clerics transferred the debate to the evolution of scientific ideas at that time. Today their acknowledgment is judged unscientific, but their spiritualism can also be judged in the context of eighteenth-century biological theories. Here philosophical dualism persisted and abetted the very intangibilities of perception that Christian Reason struggled with when writing about superstition. Materialism eventually triumphed as the emerging "rigorous" empiricism grounded the physical sciences. But the life sciences have continued to grapple with intuitive realms down to the present day. Early in the eighteenth century, Christian Reason applied its spiritualist view to an animistic concept of Nature. This lent support later to mystical overlays in vitalist conceptions of physiology, where mental phenomena are concerned. But it even lent support to the mystical astronomical physics of the kind seen in Herväs after the French Revolution.

338

Chapter Nine

In this context, Christian Reason can be renamed "spiritualist rationalism." The term "preternatural science" used in this chapter applies to one pincerof the dual squeeze on Nature that produced modern science. In this pincer movement, pure scientific hypothesis held unanswerable puzzles in skeptical abeyance, puzzles such as the nature of the life force and aether. This skepticism was overtaken by spiritualist thought, always eager to affirm puzzle as solution. In one aspect of spiritualism, the alchemical residue of thought persisted in such authors as the mathematician-astrologer Torres Villarroel. This residue combined with vitalism, being applied in literary form to explain dreams according to their contents of moral truth. From another direction, the quest for a Universal Language borrowed from neurophysiology to suggest, in Goya and in end-of-century illuminists, that such moral truth may well be communicated through dreams from an unknown spiritual beyond. More of this in the Transition.

Transition The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

Reason-dreamers have a certain relation with sensation-dreamers, among whom are usually counted those who occasionally deal with spirits." —Kant, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer

The chapters in this volume have described how the strands of Reason unravel into threads of irrational perception and expression, but two particular strands discussed in the preceding chapter do not unravel entirely. Reason's empirical strand still adheres to the Christian strand despite the latter's spiritualist bias. They form a common thread in the tenet that a unity underlies all of reality.1 In one view, empirical reality obeys universal laws; in the other view, spiritual reality adheres to divine will. In either case, a divisive problem separates the strands of Reason once again. If unity characterizes reality, the link between matter and thought remains a mystery. The union of concrete reality and abstract consciousness lacks a definable contact point between them. Is the fusing agent something called "spirit"? Or does an energizing "substance" flow through all of existence? These questions hinge on the preoccupation with unknown processes of change. The answers implicate Christian Reason more than they do its empirical counterpart. They invoke such world views as animism and vitalism, which empirical Reason barely tolerates because they make room for spiritist occultism. Yet the occultist factor is what spiritualist rationality flirts with. All spiritualist and spiritist orientations concede that mystery shrouds the living organism and its place in the cosmos. This unknown inspires competing names: metamorphosis versus mechanical transformation, animal magnetism versus electricity, i. Burke declares, "Political reason is a computing principle: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically, true moral denominations." See Burke,

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, Ind. and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), 5+.

34o

Transition

immortal spirit versus vital force, divine illumination versus aetherial inspiration. But all names reduce to the fact that Reason slumps ineffectively between supernaturalism and monist mechanism, like Goya's Enlightener slumping between the black feline and Greycat. The space resists connecting explanations, revealing the discontinuity of spirit and Reason as well as spirit and matter.

Spiritism and Spiritualism The aforementioned discontinuities highlight the ongoing dualism that continually reassesses all aspects of the supernatural. But the ally of dualism is not Christian Reason alone. The Encyclopedists also attend diligently to occultism, although mainly as a historical phenomenon. The result nevertheless invests eighteenth-century discourse as a whole with an irrational presence. Topics such as apparitions, lycanthropy, and magic are not entirely refuted by clerical authors like Dom Calmet and Abbot Lenglet Dufresnoy. Other topics—sorcery, alchemy, Hermetic philosophy —receive nuanced though skeptical treatment in the Encyclopedic, which becomes a good measuring standard for Enlightenment thought in this regard. The brief entry on "Sorcery" calls this practice a "dementia," but there is also an extensive article devoted to "Sorcerers" (15:369—72). This Encyclopedic article takes a historically distanced, skeptical outlook, but it also cites Malebranche's contention that genuine sorcerers continue to exist in rare numbers. People should be on guard against "the reveries of demonographs" and their enchantments, because belief in apparitions and black magic still survives. This concession to the possibility of workable black magic strikes an odd note in Encyclopedist discourse. Why should a level-headed article introduce Malebranche's opinion, unless his prestige had not slackened among Catholic readers of the Encyclopedic > The note of credence resonates alongside allusions to respected Ancients who also believed in black magic and sorcery, including Tacitus and Suetonius. The comfort derived from these Encyclopedic notes by occultist-prone readers is a matter for conjecture. Only they and anthropologically inclined readers would have been motivated to consult the article.2 Historically 2. Here they would find preserved the eerie information that the sorceress of antiquity was called a lamie and that the striges were the nocturnal birds of evil portent whose name later becomes a synecdoche for spell-casting witches. The article eliminates references to the impressive cluster of French books on magic published between 1585 and 1615 by Jean Bodin, Henry Boguet, Giambattista della Porta, Pierre de Lancre, and I. de Nynauld, but leaves intact the name of Martin Anton Delrio.

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

341

minded readers would remain unaware of the winnowing of discredited beliefs—the proof of enlightened progress—and they would be left with the article's acknowledged sources of magical information. If occultism was moribund at this time, how can we explain Voltaire's lengthy entries on the "pursuing monster" of "absurd superstitions"? The philosopher evidently pored over countless examples of "inflamed brains" in Lenglet's collection of 1752,3 and he concluded that all such individuals have undoubtedly seen apparitions, classifiable as sent either by God or by the devil. To be convinced of seeing does not, of course, confirm the reality of what is seen, and this is Voltaire's point. But the sociological fact of belief is also a significant point in historical perspective. So too is the interest in the psychological mechanism that turns nonempirical phenomena into a reality within the persuaded mind. And of final significance is Voltaire's amused dedication to identifying separate categories for superstitions reputedly in decay. Around mid-century, Dom Calmet's Dissertation on the Apparitions ofAngels, Demons, and Spirits, and on the Walking Dead and the Vampires of Hungary is received seriously. Visible again is the documentary spirit of modern historiography, but the implications go deeper. Not only does the Journal de Trevoux review the book when it appears in 1746, as mentioned earlier, but an enlarged edition follows in 1751. Vampirism, Voltaire snickers, was once dead and now lives again. But the case grows more complicated because the subject of occult phenomena develops in two registers. The major register describes supernatural elements, building an atmosphere to match them, while the minor register either warns against those elements or dismisses their truth. The second one is the register picked up by the Journal de Trevoux (October 1746:1974—75). The alarmed reviewer glimpses the fanaticism behind villagers' belief as reported by Dom Calmet and his lycanthropist predecessors, Tournefort and Nynauld. In one instance, terrified inhabitants abandon their homes andfleeto the countryside in order to escape death from the devil-possessed vampire; in another instance, town dwellers demand a ceremonial stake-burning, and the flames touch 3. Voltaire, Questions sur I'Encyclopedie, vol. 17 of Oeuvres completes, ed. Louis Emile Dieudonne Moland, 52 vols. (Paris: Gamier Freres, 1877-85), 334 and passim. Voltaire's contemptuous irony notwithstanding, he does not group these superstitions under a single heading, as he does for the article "Enchantment," which includes the categories of "Magic" and "Sorcery." He devotes much space to these topics but adds separate, mocking entries for "Vampires" and "Augury," quoting Cicero's appeal to extirpate the "roots of superstition." Going further, Voltaire includes two separate articles for "Apparitions" and "Visions" with reference to Abbot Lenglet Dufresnoy's Tratte historique et dogmattque sur les apparitions, les visions, et les revelations particulieres, vol. 1 (Paris: Jean Noel Leloup, 1751). He calls such visitations either madness or humbug, and his remarks can also be applied to visions.

342

Transition

the accused vampire's body to become "a true fire of joy" for these fanatics. What credence might Christian believers have lent these reports? As Calmet indicates, the rational explanation for supernatural phenomena becomes complicated because no theological or philosophical account explains the means by which apparitions materialize. The true believer grants that the devil exists, conceding too that demonic powers may either be transferred to a consorting agent or invested in an unwilling one. As for apparitions, they are a more circumscribed puzzle addressed equivocally by Calmet in the same vein.4 Readers of Calmet might have scoffed at his observations on spirits and witches' sabbaths. He forestalls criticism by disavowing any desire to foment credulity. And yet his prefatory statement of purpose leaves his skepticism open to reader credulity: I write only for reasonable minds and not for predisposed ones, those who examine things seriously and without emotion. I speak only to those who give their assent to known truths with maturity, who know how to doubt uncertain things, suspend their judgment for doubtful things, and deny what is manifestly false. As for the so-called strong-minded, who reject everything in order to distinguish themselves and place themselves above the average commonality, I leave them in the sphere of their elevation, (apud Trevoux)

Consequently, only materialists would find no appeal in the book. As for pious believers, faith in spiritualism could lead to the spiritism of earlier centuries. The two "isms" are quite different. Whereas spiritualism encompasses fanatical practices that originate in the extreme zones of Christian piety—icon worship, spirit-conjuring, miracle medicine, communal ecstasy—spiritism claims no link to the Divinity in its moral and eschatological benefits to humankind. The spiritist—sorcerer, seer, Hermeticist, Satanist—focuses on the transient material immediacy of sempiternal, immaterial forces. The difference not only banishes the spiritist from ordinary religious reverence, it brings him closer to the scientist in the concern for overcoming the matter-spirit dichotomy. Contrary to reli-

4· The Jesuits believed that concrete evidence existed for apparitions within the heart o f Catholic piety. Their unsigned History of the Devils of Loudun (1752), published by the Company in Amsterdam, ruminates over the possessed Ursuline nuns as much as it seeks historical detail. D o m Augustin Calmet holds that spirits that have been separated from their bodies receive special attributes from God in order to act upon sublunary beings. Special circumstances may arise involving severe alterations of the earth's condition. See Calmet, Dissertation sur les apparitions des anges, des demons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie.. enl. ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1751), 1:242-43; on the witches' sabbath, see 1:157-63. Cited in Journal de Trevoux, October 1746.

.,

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

343

gious superstitions that require divine mediation, spiritism conjures occult forces directly, and usually for material purposes. Spiritualist faith contends strongly against Reason, and the evidence of such irrationality abounds not only in Catholic France and Spain but also in Protestant Britain. In the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment, George McKenzie publishes Satan's Invisible World, providing, as promised by its subtitle, "a choice collection of modern relations, proving, evidently against the Atheists of this present age, that there are devils, spirits, witches, and apparitions." Better known is Daniel Defoe's History of Apparitions (1752), based on modern as well as ancient authorities, and presenting "a view of the Invisible World."5 Defoe's occult writings are sincere expressions of belief in this "invisible" sphere, according to Rodney Baine, and they do not fall into the category of meretricious or charlatan superstitions. However, the idea of superstition threatens to blur as judgments about religious customs conflict among sects or nations. Within the Spanish church, excessive popular piety is termed "superstition," including special devotions to saints or to the Virgin Mary. No fewer than 65 eyewitnessed miracles are recorded between 1700 and 1779 solely for the Virgen de la Pefia de Francia, according to Joel Saugnieux, who also suggests the need for a detailed study of parish inventories of saints' images. He finds among the most popular devotional forms in Spain the cult of the Souls of Purgatory, a preoccupation, we may add, that is conducive to private icon worship in the home as well as to interest in apparitions.6 Misguided worship increases the peril of spirit-trafficking, as in cases of families witnessing a death without sacrament, or an incurable disease. A lay appellant's unsupervised invocation to divine powers, beyond ordinary prayer, risks the judgment of summoning the devil. Again, Spain perhaps more than France ventures to the edge of heterodox worship, where iconolatry is widely accepted and the Inquisition is more zealous. Determining heresy lies in the Inquisitor's ability to distinguish orthodox spiritualism from spiritism. In France, miracle-working takes the form not of demonolatry or heresy but rather Convulsionism, whose partisans

5. George McKenzie, Satan's Invisible World Discovered (Edinburgh: P. Anderson, 1780). For Defoe see Rodney Baine. Daniel Defoe and the Supernatural (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968), 87-89. See also Robert D. Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Brown to William Blake (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982). 6. See Joel Saugnieux, "Catholicisme eclaire et religiosite populaire: Le culte marial dans l'Espagne du XVIIIe siecle," in Culturespopulaires et cultures savantes en Espagne du moyen age aux lumteres (Paris: Editions du C N R S , 1982), 113-26.

344

Transition

heal through the method of convulsions developed in the well-received practices of the healer known as Monsieur de Paris.7 These examples suggest that the borderline between spiritualism and spiritism may be undetectable except in the refined terms whereby the Encyclopedists distinguish fanaticism from superstition. But in cases of miracle-working through devotion or mediation, overzealous belief in "the spirit" may be both tolerated and at the same time abhorred as heresy. When the clergy itself is divided, who is to know where Satan stands? A second issue concerns spirit operating on material reality, in this instance on the human body. The convergence of religion and medicine through faith marks a regressive turn to the Ancient Philosophy, which views science as an "art" that induces spirit and matter to function coextensively. The symbol of Minerva-Medica characterizes this convergence, which takes different forms according to culture and historical period. What Voltaire disdains among the pharaonic magicians is the knowledge transferred from Hermes and Aesculapius to Minerva and Hygeia (Oeuvres, 9:850-52). The knowledge is putative, but it is nonetheless expanded and pursued by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century followers of the Ancient Philosophy and Hermeticism. Its alchemical current survives in the eighteenth century, as noted earlier. Black magic and maleficent possession are excluded from these forms, but the animist cosmology embraces them all. It consists of the attempt to dominate good and evil forces believed to be interlocked within a unitary Nature of spirit and substance.8 Spiritualist-spiritist practices pose an elusive problem of taxonomy, as it did for the lexicon of Unreason discussed earlier. The categories of faith-healing and sorcery have little in common when these terms appear generically in the same context. But to specify the one as "Convulsionism" 7. Recorded by Louis-Basile Carre de Montgeron. Demonology is in fact the subject of the second volume of his La verite des miracles opens par l'intercession de Μ. de Paris et autres appellants (1737), 3 vols. (Cologne: Libraires de la Compagnie, 1745-47), but the other volumes tell the story of this disbelieving author's conversion after going "with arrogant air" to an exhibition at the tomb of the healer of Paris. The controversial healing process is defended by the bishops of Auxerre and Montpellier, but it is also attacked and eventually banned, although Carre's book itself is published by the Jesuits. 8. Thomas Taylor cites a Neoplatonic scholium concerning "the summits of the universe" between which there are mixed regions "participating of the extremes." He says, "Just in the same manner as cogitation is the medium between intellect and soul: but opinion is seated between the phantasy and the soul; and sense between the phantasy and body. And these mediums mutually penetrate, and extend through each other, from body to intellect, and participate all their surrounding natures." See Taylor, The Philosophical and Mathematical Commentaries of Proclus, sumamed Plato's Successor, on the First Book of Euclid's Elements, and his Life by Marinus, translated from the Greek with a preliminary dissertation on the Platonic doctrine of ideas, 2 vols. (London: T. Payne et al., 1788), 2:274-75.

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

345

or "Enthusiasm" and the other as "possession" is to overlook their common inflammation of mind and body fanned by one spiritist atmosphere. Alter the atmosphere by putting them both in opposition to empirical medicine, and possessed states join the category of trancelike exaltations of mystical and divinatory kinds. Heterodox supernaturalism runs its own strange gamut, beyond Christian Reason, from diabolism to divinity. The span is what makes Goya's Capricho 43 a paradigmatic statement for the age. In one interpretation of "The Sleep/Dream of Reason," witchcraft is the determining historical background. Accordingly, the interpretation invokes a concept of animistic Nature that cannot be verified by empirical Reason. With regard to Goya's paradigmatic insight, the problem of choosing a scholarly approach should not be overlooked. Social historians will note that Spain lacks the sect of Enthusiasm as practiced in Great Britain, or the Convulsionism practiced in France—countries free of a Spanish Inquisition so zealous in matters of orthodoxy. However, intellectual historians may cite the evolving dualism that endures despite the challenge from empirical Reason. If Goya implies blame for a wildly misguided imagination, this faculty stands indicted by an empiricism that dismisses supernatural perceptions of reality. Nevertheless, the scientific challenge does not prevent dualism from persisting later under the combined auspices of revised vitalism and a new prestige for transcendent imagination. Left behind are the cruder forms of supernaturalist practice. Spain in Goya's era experiences most arduously the tensions between credulity and modern Reason. The Spanish laity walk a narrow path in the international sphere. As the dramatist Moratin wrote to the philosophe Forner, "The age we live in is very little favorable to us. If we go against the current and speak the language of credulous people, [enlightened] foreigners will mock us; even at home there are some who will take us for fools. And if we try to dispel glaring errors and teach the ignorant, the Holy and General Inquisition will apply to us its customary remedies."9 While the Holy Office monitors Enlightenment values and suppresses materialist ones, Spain fosters a compensatory taste for aesthetic diabolism.10 Moratin belongs to Goya's circle of acquaintances, who are curious about demonic acolytes, and the dramatist's personages enter into a speech and 9. Cited by Xavierde Salas, Goya (Barcelona: Compaflia Internacional Editora, 1980), 58. 10. Aesthetic diabolism has not been studied closely thus far, although it parallels the resurgent interest in witchcraft. Two literary examples are the "comedies of magic," such as El anillo de Gtges, by Jose de Canizares, and La venganza mas horrenda y muerte de Marijuana, by Leandro Fernandez de Moratin.

346

Transition

double chorus of dogs and toads, all accompanied by "diabolical nocturnal creatures: cats, bats, and owls." 11 Such examples evoke Spain's midnight world, divorced from open-eyed policies of economic reform and university self-examination. Why Goya should be commissioned by a duchess to paint scenes of witchcraft, a question posed in Chapter 3, now takes on another emphasis: what real source inspires the creation of the characters presented by Cafiizares, Moratin, and Goya? Can these nighttime denizens be at the same time pious churchgoers by day? Why indeed write a satirical poem like "The Treacherous Bat," where Diego Tadio Gonzalez mentions women burning bats' blood? 12 Moratin's much-cited reprint of the 1680 auto-da-fe remains to be analyzed as a sociological event within the context of unchanging historical mentalities.

Rational Occultism Occult supernaturalism survives in the eighteenth century owing to several factors, among them the aesthetic thrill and credulous expectations from pseudo-science mentioned in earlier chapters. A third factor is religious celebration verging on occult experience. The sacred and sacrilegious boundaries of occult supernaturalism are mystical transport and divinatory trance. Voltaire's article on the "Possessed" in the Philosophical Dictionary evokes olden days of belief in the devil. Each village had its sorcerer, each prince his astrologer; the possessed walked the land. Voltaire slyly compares their long nights filled with entertainments to the current insipidness of card-playing. Taking matters more seriously, the Benedictine scholar Feijoo refers to one underground chamber in a ruinous home reserved for celebrating magic rites. Such grottoes harbor "huge bats" once feared as demons invested in animal bodies.13 Statistic-laden studies show that significant religious aberration underlies the Inquisition's witch trials in New Castile; the same religiosity prompts the defense of women accused of witchcraft in the Basque region. 14 But proving or disproving the resurgence of witchcraft is difficult, 11. Cited by Edith Hclman, Jovellanosy Goya (Madrid: Taurus, 1970), 167. 12. Poetas Itricos del siglo XVIII, ed. Leopoldo Augusto de Cueto, Biblioteca de Autores Espafioles 61 (Madrid: Los Sucesores de Hernando, 1921), 186-87. 13. Benito Jeronimo Feijoo. "Cuevas de Salamanca y Toledo y magica de Espana," in Obras escqgidas, vol. 1, ed. Vicente de la Fuente, Biblioteca de Autores Espafioles 56 (Madrid: Atlas, 1952), 379. 14. See Juan Blazquez Miguel, Inquuicion y brujeria en la Tecla del siglo xviii (Yecla: La Levantina, 1984); Sebastian Cirac Estopafiän. Aportaciön a la historia de la Inquisicion espanola:

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

347

because denunciations to the Inquisition apparently diminished, and with them the activity of Inquisitors. However, many Spanish records were destroyed, so that reports of strong vestiges in northern Spain cannot be discounted when carried into France during the nineteenth century. The French eighteenth and nineteenth centuries preserve earlier traditions of rural sorcery through song and legend, according to Le Roy Ladurie. In Italy, the link shown by Carlo Ginzburg between witches' sabbaths and peasant fertility rites practiced by the Benandanti is more than a local link, to judge by Goya's symbols of birth and sexuality suggested in the "Black Paintings." These sacrilegious rites are a variety of religious experience that celebrates spiritist forces. Their "sinful" excess stems from an unauthorized ritualizing imagination. The rites may have been confined to the illiterate class, but the psychological phenomenon per se attracted intellectual interest as an irrational feature in the changing national landscape whose final shape aspired to consonance with Christian Reason. Within this framework, imagination collaborates in the conventional dualism that posits matter obeying scientific laws at the discretion of suprarational laws for spirit. But religious excess may also stem from ultra-orthodoxy as well as from heresy. Such zeal may be symmetrical with the magic ritualizing of spiritual forces just mentioned. Now, however, the excess will be deemed a fanaticism rather than a superstition in the eyes of religious authorities. Examples of condoned fanatical experiences are scourging and possession, both classified by the disinterested observer as exceeding the norms of Christian Reason. The street processions in Spain that highlight barefooted flagellants are linked to ancient spiritism. The flagellation is "accompanied by much fanaticism"—a moderate description—but the practice fits into the broad category of "aspersions" and "lustrations" also practiced by pagan spiritist cults.15 Whether such lashings purify the soul by leather thongs or by the laurel, the hyssop, or the olive branch, the expiation represents a physical intervention into the spiritual world. The connection with occultist thought appears when the author of Religious Ceremonies cites the dream of ill omen warded off by lustrations: through water from a sacred fount, through fire and incense-burning, or through air by the shaking and oscilLos procesos de hechicerias en la Inquisition de Costilla Nueva. (Tribunales de Toledo y de Cuenca) (Madrid, 1942); and Gustav Henningsen, El abogado y las brujas: Brujeria vasca e Inquisition espanola (Madrid: Alianza, 1983). 15. Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses . . . , 8 vols. (Amsterdam: Jean Frederic Bernard, 1725-36), 1:187.

348

Transition

lation of the polluted body. The ritual violence goes beyond concepts of penitence and guilt, which are local to specific religions. The belief in ritual violence centers on a matter-spirit relationship that is uninterrupted from realm to realm, a relationship where the natural world may intervene either to contaminate the soul or to purify it. These one-sided rituals set the deity aside and confer powers on the practitioner to alter spiritual conditions. Magic no longer merely coaxes supernatural forces to intervene on the body but, conversely, also works materially and physiologically to influence the soul. As in the Convulsionist faith-healing cited earlier, an iatric premise underlies spiritual ceremony. Internal energy is directed by the subject, no longer a passive recipient of energy from without. The most dramatic instance of occult energy disguises magical spiritism with momentarily modern scientific and religious overlays. The year is 1704, but the premises and elements remain unchanged throughout the century. The example involves religious Enthusiasm as Jonathan Swift describes it ironically in his Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. Here too, spirit does not descend from without, but proceeds from within. In Martin Price's discussion of this idea, Swift's "mechanical" method is materialist rather than mystical or demonic. For Swift, the Enthusiasts "abstract themselves from matter, bind up all their senses, grow visionary and spiritual. . . . The reasoning faculties are all suspended and superseded, that imagination hath usurped the seat, scattering a thousand deliriums over the brain." 16 This account records neither inspiration nor possession, according to Price. The Enthusiast seeks to overleap the senses and reach a supra-mundane realm. He closes off the senses to the outside world and denies rational judgment. The result permits imagination "to create a new world in which glandular secretions will be spent in fantasies of power." The physiological allusions make it clear that Swift is employing contemporary mechanical theory based on the fluidist model of spirits in mental experience. The topic merits a brief note for the role played by imagination. This faculty behaves deliriously, in Swift's opinion, but his judgment should not be confused with the Enthusiast premise itself. Here the continuity between matter and spirit resides in "glandular secretions" generated by the individual himself. Thus neither demonic possession nor mystical grace exerts an external force on the practitioner. Instead, physiology that liberates consciousness from matter through the 16. Quoted by Martin Price, "The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers," Tale Review 58 (1968-69): 194-95·

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

349

medium of imagination. Yet this faculty remains integral to mental structure and to the anatomical moorings of the brain and its secretions, including the spirits that flow and mysteriously become transformed into the signals and signs that replace sensory impressions and later ideas. Unsympathetic observers, if they are pious, will rule that the Enthusiast's condition displays religious fanaticism; if these unsympathetic observers are scientifically inclined, they will rule that the superstition reflects a "usurped" mind crowded with "deliriums." But to observers interested in occult experience or in alternate modes of perception and cognition, the concept of Enthusiasm represents a waking transport that brings body into communication with spirit independently of the senses. Similar to dream in its nonsensory cognition, the visionary experience begins with the fluidist physiology of imagination and ends in spiritual abstraction.17 Tying spiritualist rationality to spiritist occultism is the abiding animist concept of the universe. The instances reviewed thus far illustrate numerous other circumstances at both educated and illiterate levels of society that all share a common dualist premise. Against this background, it is arguable that the end-of-century interest in witchcraft by Goya and his contemporaries responds to a deeper cognitive incrustation. The feline doubles in Capricho 43, the rational owl, and the metamorphic bat all symbolize, in this interpretation, Reason's dream of a supernatural knowledge that might unify material and spiritual spheres. Such unity eludes the Enlightenment mind. Even philosophers who are willing to privilege the imagination, like Kant, inveigh against the visionary tradition cultivated by Swedenborg and others, as will be seen shortly. The background that provides a spiritist perspective for understanding Goya is the same one that also fits into place the significance of books on superstitions by Costadau, Guyon, Le Brun, and Bellon de Saint-Quentin. Their interest in superstitions and occult "signs" is reducible to a desire to naturalize spiritual language. But at the same time, the quest for an ultimate, synthesized knowledge preserves and carries forward the very material intended for debunking. Consequently, there are several ways to read epitomizing works over the century. Alphonse Costadau's Historical and Critical Treatise ofthe Prin17. The fluidist model in neurophysiology will be examined in Volume 2 of this study. See George S. Rousseau, "Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility," in Studies in the Eighteenth Century 3: Papers Presented at the Third David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar, Canberra, 1973, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 137-57; reprinted with postscript in The Blue Guitar (Messina) 2 (1976): 125-5 j.

350

Transition

cipal Signs That Serve to Manifest the Thoughts or the Commerce of Spirits (1720) is a historically based compilation wherein exorcists may find rules, doctors may find hidden interventions, and casuists may find odd analogies. Costadau embraces all the ancient doctrines in his multivolume work. The same may be said for Guyon's extensive survey in the Ecclesiastical Library.18 Between these two thesauruses an entire century of efforts to rationalize the supernatural is summarized. And yet spiritual reality itself is never denied. The authors would deliver magic from evil even while they recognize the nonmaterial sphere that magic claims to master. This sphere is neither sacred nor damned, but a spiritual reality that fills the aether between God and mortal flesh. Its usurpation by magus, sorcerer, and occultist occurs through a mystifying art that wrests control from secular intelligence and, at worst, sows terror and sin. The authors object to any such spiritual deviations, together with any false language that alleges to explain enigmatic phenomena. The authors' own language is more scientific, though not strictly empirical. And their purpose is not so much to restore to religion what the devil has stolen as to develop a proper semantics for spiritual mystery without resorting to pietistic explanation. In fact, Costadau acknowledges the existence of demons, whose proof is the Bible. He believes in the incubus-succubus, although without explaining why. Similarly, he points to a society of sorcerers and magicians who can metamorphose into monsters, snakes, and frogs. Nevertheless, the vast majority of reported cases are either lies or attributable to physical causes. The remaining cases afford grounds for belief in their veracity (Traite, 5:132—37, 164—67). These qualifications redefine enigmatic spirituality by pruning the explanatory vocabulary. Discredited items include amulets, speaking in tongues, luminous spectres, and lycanthropy. But the power of signs, diabolical as well as sacramental, exists to be used both for communicating with the devil and for warding him off through purification (5:186-87). A modern concept of superstition arises that places holy devices like relics, incense, and incantations in the same discredited spectrum as talismans, brews, and curses. Instead, a physiological terminology enters discourse to focus attention on brain activity. The rearrangement of categories clears the field for three major areas: true supernatural enigma, natural causation, and the work of imagination. 18. A l p h o n s e Costadau, Tratte historique et critique des principaux signes dont nous [nous] serpens pour manifester nos pensees (Lyon: Guillimin, 1717), 2nd ed. revised and corrected, 12 vols., 1720—24; A b b e Claude-Marie G u y o n , Bibliotheque ecclesiaste par forme d'instructions dogmatiques et moralessur toute la religion, 8 vols. (Paris: Delalain, 1771).

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

351

Two phenomena that retain credence despite Costadau's exposures are lycanthropic behavior and possession by demons. In the werewolf syndrome, the victim suffers from a melancholic vapor occupying the brain and altering his temperature, so that he howls, bites, and behaves as if he were a wolf. In the demonic seizure, the adduction of black bile toward the muscles occurs during a trance, usually accompanied by an atribilious rage resulting in contortions, horrible frothings, and superhuman strength (5:5—6). Costadau resorts to fluidist theory for his explanations without relying completely on mechanical monism. If the humors may be disrupted and the senses deceived, so too can the imagination be troubled and induce delusions of metamorphosis. The victim believes that he is changed into a cock or a goat because images are "traced by the involuntary and deranged impression of animal spirits" on the mind, producing "strange extravagances" (5:10). These and related analyses fulfill for occult science what the chronology of documentary cases fulfills for history. They narrow the sphere of doubtful spirituality while depriving it of a legitimate descriptive language. What remains is truly supernatural—demonic force, occult experience, the magus's power—a concession to the unexplainable and to the rare exception. But if this realm exists, where are the words to represent it? The resulting problem of linguistic representation is one factor behind Goya's quest for some "Universal Language" that would represent enigmatic spirit as well as familiar matter. The linguistic problem is joined to a new condition. The reduced, genuinely spiritual realm, independent of devil and deity, is clearly circumscribed. Authors like Costadau and Guyon preserve this realm by eliminating the supernatural from a physically observable arena. True sorcerers cannot be visited by fashionable ladies, the grounds haunted by real spectres cannot be located, and intercourse with incubi or succubi cannot take place except by way of dreams that vanish with the night. The successful removal of the occult from its concrete topography corresponds to the aforementioned success by science and history in pruning away the clutter of observable, recorded phenomena so as to shape intelligible categories. But this second achievement is profoundly important for redesigning the seat of spiritualist activity in mental experience. Occult forces will still be knowable, but as spiritual events they will be known through neurophysiological spirits: through the subtly refined fluids that impress images on the brain. The faculty of imagination and the interlude of dream will become preeminent factors in a redefined dualism. The fusion of matter and spirit will now depend less on solutions favoring

352

Transition

transcendent or materialist groundings. Instead, a phenomenology of mind will begin to be possible. Attacks on the imagination will redouble, as will its defense; groping questions about neurophysiology will arise, and vitalist speculation will murmur beneath biological analysis. Precise formulation of questions in phenomenology will have to await the nineteenth century, but the intellectual atmosphere grows fascinated with and perplexed over seemingly unrelated subjects, such as dream process, aether energy, and regenerating polyps. The philosophers of the Berlin Royal Academy begin to explore the psychology of irrational consciousness in the 1760s.19 The immediate point is that the Enlightenment has no vocabulary for naming the site of dualist resolution. The fusion of matter with spirit is beyond scientific comprehension, and so too are the process and the vehicle of internalizing such a fusion. The deficiency revives both a yearning for the "Universal Language" of Goya's Sepia Two, and fantasies about the power of dreams to reach into the reality of primal signification. These issues are barely formulated as such, although the symptoms of concern are visible. Their most obvious form is the quest for continuity, betraying an anxiety over the discontinuities that mark many explanations. But the stubborn preoccupation with the history of magic also harbors the same concern for unifying all knowledge. The issue ultimately narrows down to what constitutes cognition itself: its mechanisms, its representational signs, and its contents. The dream of Reason is cognitive unity, a dream that supplies and satisfies materialists and spiritualists alike regarding the true character of reality. Only such a quest, stated explicitly or not, can explain why a dualist like Guyon fills one volume of his Ecclesiastical Library with accounts of witch trials and related historical anecdotes up to the seventeenth century. His revealing comment is that whenever diabolic magic is mentioned as a subject, it provokes ironic smiles from people despite the evidence produced. Guyon cites authorities from Saint Augustine and Agrippa to Malebranche, whom he also credits for denying the effectiveness of witches' sabbaths and for conceding that the devil may work through sorcerers in order to exercise his evil power (Bibliotheque, 8:261). In Guyon's instance, Christian Reason fulfills its skeptical role toward unorthodox supernatu19. For polyps, see Virginia Dawson, Nature's Enigma: The Problem of the Polyp in the Letters of Bonnet, Trembley and Reaumur (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987). For the Berlin Royal Academy, see Johan Georg Sulzer, Observations sur les divers etats ou l'äme se trouve en exer^ant ses facultes primitives, celle d'appercevoir et celle de sentir," in Histoire de l'Academie Royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres, Annee 1763 (Berlin: Haude & Spener, 1770), 407—20.

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

353

ralism without abandoning the spiritual sphere unaccounted for by either God or Satan. It is conceivable to Guyon that weak individuals might be convinced in waking life, or else by dreaming, either that a thousand fantastic shapes appear before them or that they are changed into wolves, have commerce with a succubus, or make sacrifice to the he-goat and the devil (8:308-9). The experience is mental, and while induced through physical weakness of varying sorts, it conforms nonetheless to an age-old belief in metamorphic forces beyond Nature. The unspoken issue here is the lingering belief of the kind appearing in Guyon's sections on necromancy, mental transport, and the oneiromancy practiced by modern cabalists and ancient theurgists (8:319-21, 377-83). It goes without saying that Guyon's Ecclesiastical Library disputes the false "illusions" and the "frivolity" or "chimera" of talismans and ceremonial artifacts. It is simply that an unaccounted area of experience remains that belongs neither to legitimate religious states nor to the secular condition of intellectual awareness. The vigorous research into occultism during the Enlightenment does not prevent a biased register from slipping into its dispassionate discourse. Within the history of ideas, the bias perpetuates the cognitive difficulty posed by authentic supernatural phenomena. Thus the issue in Abbot Guyon's discourse is not the danger of evil triumphing over good, although he intends this religious message. Rather, something else is at stake when he explains that black magic invokes aid from devils in order to produce effects contrary to Nature. The prize is unsequestered power over Nature, allegedly available through magic. So too for the necromancer who yearns for the power to create phantoms and raise spectres. Only the "devil of darkness" is both able to and desirous of performing these acts, a rare impulse unlikely to be exercised by God. Metamorphic knowledge is the reward, an unnatural possession for mortal minds and yet nonetheless real as far as it encompasses a dimension of the universal order. The power to create disorder, whose subset is metamorphosis, is a power that belongs somewhere in the order of things, a place as yet undiscovered and perhaps knowable solely through irrational experience. Whatever this dimension of reality may be, it is expressed most vividly by Guyon's account of spiritual transport. The event persuades individuals that they are removed from bodily ties, whereby the "veil" lifts and permits them to "reenter through death into light." This illumination occurs in the place where they had enjoyed well-being before arriving on earth. In this state, the transported consciousness resembles a divinity, which in fact is its origin. Such individuals can "see clearly the most secret things" (8:319). If we set aside

354

Transition

the regressive or immortalizing fantasy suggested here, the interpretation most suited to Goya's context is the cognitive immanence attainable by the Universal Language of languages, although the metaphor of light is problematic. From the standpoint of the history of cultural mentalities, the status of sorcery and spiritism also fits that of alchemy. Persistence of spiritist belief, or simply a fascination for the subject of occultism, betrays a desire for power over Nature. At some level, the survival of these interests reverts if not to a philosophy then to a unitary hope for communion and transubstantiation of creative powers between human and eternal spheres. This avenue of interpretation can of course lead far afield, with psychoanalytical and anthropological implications for the Enlightenment that remain for others to examine. But insofar as the ideas of death, immortality, and human creativity guide eighteenth-century thought in divergent spiritualist and materialist directions, the complication of occultist curiosity in this period suggests more than ethnological dispassion. More persuasive than the clerical testimony of a third sphere between concrete matter and divine spirit is the scientific wavering before mystery in the empirical circle itself. If ambivalence can be detected among empiricists, it will confirm the seductive breach opened by the failure to repair the discontinuity between substance and essence. In this respect, the space between chemistry and alchemy illustrates the room for vacillation by an open-minded if skeptical materialist. Indeed, the magical element shared by both chemistry and alchemy does not escape the notice of Enlighteners. Thus the practitioners of alchemy are not alone in the quest for the nameless power that aligns their art with other types of magic. As Diderot observes about chemistry, it is "the imitator and rival of Nature; its object is almost as extended as that of Nature.... It either decomposes beings or revives them or transforms them." The Encyclopedic article on "Alchemy" quotes this opinion while suggesting that chemistry has used "with ingratitude the advantages it received from alchemy: alchemy is mistreated in the majority of books on chemistry" (ι: 248-49). The demiurgic motive in alchemy is sanitized in Diderot's vignette of chemistry, but this motive propels the oldest of arts to ambitions whose methods contain "something of the wondrous and mysterious." The transformatory process is now lost, notes the Encyclopedist; current false alchemists "seek the unknown without passing through the known." Here then is the required tribute to modern science, but it does not provoke extreme judgments of either "disbelief or superstition." On this subject, the Ency-

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

355

clopedist is scrupulous, for he eliminates the philosopher's stone from his article. The result is a judicious stance: To say that alchemy is but a science of visionaries and that all alchemists are madmen or impostors is to bring an unjust judgment against a real science to which sensible people of probity may apply themselves. But it is also necessary to guarantee against fanaticism of some sort. . . [and by principles] to pass from the known to the unknown. (Encyclopedic 1:249)

The debunking gesture is reserved for the article on "Hermetic," which is defined as a philosophy. "It is the most honorable name of alchemy," asserts the Encyclopedic (8 :i69-7i). The author avers that he has read all the books and manuscripts available while researching this article, at considerable sacrifice of time; he assures the reader of the "nullity of the art and the frivolity of its alleged pretexts . . . a quite bizarre mania." However, this framework differs from Diderot's in that the subject shifts from chemical to philosophical alchemy. That is, what is "honorable" no longer seems pertinent, for by the eighteenth century the subject is the philosophy of the "grand elixir," the philosopher's stone that permits transforming ignoble metals into silver and gold. Supernatural laws, not natural laws, inform Hermeticism, excluding it from the category of science. More irritating to the Encyclopedists, the alchemists pretend to be unique philosophers by setting themselves apart as initiates. They write obscurely on purpose. Their unpardonable error is the replacement of material causes by elusive immaterial ones. Hermeticist philosophers resort to spiritual demonstration, which requires a rhetoric that inevitably grows obscurantist as well as cultist, making for themselves "a mystic jargon, an Enthusiast manner." And yet the flaw does not consist in convoluted style or recondite argumentation, as might be supposed for the similar chimerical hypotheses said by Hume and Diderot to be tolerated by metaphysical systems. Rather, the flaw is the supernatural experience implied in such "mystical jargon," an elitist state of mind comparable to religious Enthusiasm. The real fault, then, is not the difficulty of Hermeticists' language but the fact that "they have borrowed, out of a fanatical and extravagant eccentricity, the tone and very expressions used by Christian eloquence to establish the preeminence of truths. . . . They esteem the ordinär)', common, human sciences with a cold and sententious disdain. They treat their own as being supernatural and divinely inspired." The foregoing critique is significant for its deliberate specificity of

356

Transition

subject and the involuntary generalization of target. By limiting Hermeticism to philosophical alchemy, the article omits the entire Neoplatonist and cabalist traditions that pass through Kircher and Leibniz in the Catholic countries, and through Ramsay and the Rosicrucians in Protestant countries. These seventeenth-century Hermetic currents resurface in diluted, secular forms in Freemasonry and individualist activities, often eccentric ones. Worthy or worthless in the eyes of posterity, such orientations survive in their eighteenth-century forms.20 However, the world view they represent, and the relationship they assume between the human and transcendent mind, are denied implicitly in the Encyclopedic's rejection of a "supernatural and divinely inspired" knowledge. Private experience openly proclaimed is the enemy; it is an uncorroborated empiricism intended for visionaries and frauds. It is easily refuted by deflating the alchemical pretensions to metallic conversion. But this single failed instance need not speak for the entire metamorphic paradigm, much less for the spiritual and even spiritist communion that remains untested and, despite all, affirmed by individual testimony.

Kant and Swedenborg One such spiritist testimony wells up from the "closest intercourse with spirits and deceased souls." Thus Immanuel Kant remarks about Emanuel Swedenborg, the "Arch-Dreamer among all the dreamers."21 Swedenborg's purpose is to receive news from the other world, which he publishes without any apparent deceit or charlatanry. Kant acknowledges this blameless reputation, noting incidents that prove the visionary's extraordinary capacities. Despite Kant's concession, the two transcendentalist thinkers face each other across a gulf of rationalism. Kant's point is that Swedenborg 20. For these Hermetic currents see Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972); and Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981). For Neoplatonism see Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: ΜΓΓ Press, 1990). 21. Immanuel Kant, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Illustrated by Dreams of Metaphysics, trans. Emanuel F. Goerwitz, ed. Frank Sewall (London: Swan Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, 1900), 92-93. In her Spanish translation, Cinta Canterla alludes to Kant's "naturalist hylozoism," or hypothesis of nonmaterial beings who animate matter, a position in keeping with his interest in aether and electromagnetic phenomena as explanations for spiritual phenomena (Suems de un visionario explicados mediante los ensuenos de la metafisica [Cadiz: Universidad de Cadiz, 1989], 17-18).

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

357

represents a doubtful mixture of Reason and credulity.22 It has always been "and, probably, always will be the case, that certain nonsensical things are accepted even by rational men, just because they are talked about" (Dreams 96). But now Kant is referring to the divining rod, sympathetic healings, signs of foreboding, and meteorological effects on the body. He reserves his antagonism for these media of explanation rather than for Swedenborg's concept of spirit. History witnesses many false seers, because "the weakness of man's Reason, together with his curiosity, brings it about that, in the beginning, truth and deceit are snatched up promiscuously. But, gradually, the ideas are purified; a small part remains, the rest is thrown away as offal" (97). Why should Kant take up the Swedenborgian vision in this connection? His critique of the "visionary Reason" discussed earlier actually bends the spectrum of Unreason into a circular band of (ir)rationality. To pass from the rational half of the circle to the irrational half is an inevitable move because "the borders of folly and wisdom are marked so indistinctly." Like Hume, Kant asks "why should it be more creditable to be deceived by blind confidence in the pretenses of Reason than by incautious belief in misleading stories?" (95). But these "stories" are accounts that narrate and explain phenomena; again the explanatory medium is at issue, not the substantive content dealing with spirituality. As for Swedenborg's visions, Kant carefully indicates that he has "mostly avoided quoting the visions themselves as such wild chimeras only disturb the sleep of the reader" (HI). He retains a rational explanation for stories about apparitions, and this becomes the preamble to an essay on phenomenology. He will discredit spiritism, but not the spiritualist events in the imagination that no mechanical psychology can account for. Kant's debunking notes a first confusion to be dispelled in regard to appearances and reality. Events both internal and external to the perceiving subject may be at once spiritual and real. They may appear to be real when some deception beguiles the subject. In this deception, the senses and imagination suspend their customary interaction. In Kant's words, 22. Peter Gay emphasizes Kant's satirical intent, calling him "a character from a Voltairean conte" in his method of ridiculing Swedenborg. See Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. i, The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 136-37. Emile Brehier emphasizes a different point, that Kant holds that spiritual phenomena are either translatable into "negative predicates" or "do not fall within the realm of experience" (The History of Philosophy, vol. 5, The Eighteenth Century, trans. Wade Baskin [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971], 203-4).

358

Transition Pure spirits can indeed never be present to our external senses, nor communicate with matter in any other way than by acting upon the spirit of man . . . in such a way that the ideas which they call up in man's mind clothe themselves in corresponding pictures according to the law of imagination, thus causing any objects which fit into the picture to appear as if they were outside of him. This deception can affect any one of the senses, and, however mixed it may be with incongruous fancies, it should not keep one from supposing spiritual influences on it. (Dreams 72)

The passage confirms the existence of spirits and their ability to communicate with the human realm. But the interchange may not be regarded as sensorially material, nor less be projected externally as a real, independent event. The communication appears real but in fact is imaginary, and in a dualistic refinement it is unreal insofar that sensory perception ceases, although it is real insofar that the event registers in the imagination. Kant's analytical passage comes with a harsh judgment against "the mass of wild and unspeakably absurd forms and figures which our dreamer believes to see quite clearly in his daily intercourse with spirits" (109). But his opinion retains the idea of "spirits" and proceeds to introduce a new element that concerns "meaning." Those absurd forms must be derived from the fact that, whenever spirits communicate their thoughts to the souls of men, these thoughts take the appearance of material things, which, however, present themselves to the subject only on the strength of their relation to an inner meaning, but, still, with all appearance of reality. (109)

At this point Kantian philosophy enters the complex lexical weave of "thoughts" and "meaning." The source of one is external and attributable to spirits, while the source of the other is presumably the imagination. Nevertheless, the spirits "communicate" to the imagination, and this constitution of "meaning" must intrigue the nonspecialist reader. The question here no longer concerns an apparent reality or a deceptive materiality, for either case makes the second text repetitious. Now Kant has inserted the problem of communication between spiritual and material realms, the same problem of discontinuity glossed over by mechanists like La Mettrie as well as by vitalists and naturalists. The Kantian conception of imagination resolves metaphysical difficulties in his general philosophy. But pure Reason and practical Reason persist as the dualistic solution to the unresolved dualism of reality. Kant assumes the role of antagonist to the visionary Swedenborg, but, it seems, with-

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

359

out removing the core belief in spirits that both of these transcendentalists share. If we analyze briefly the first of Kant's two texts, the shared belief becomes clear. What shall the reader highlight—imagination or spirits? We may paraphrase Kant by saying that spirits "clothe themselves" in images registered by the imagination. Its "laws" are pictorial and internalized when the senses are normally active. But the visionary experience suspends sensory perception and projects the picture beyond consciousness. The seer "imagines" that an external event is impinging on his senses, and about this delusion Kant actually states: "This deception can affect any one of the senses." Juxtaposed to this account are the "spiritual influences" that Kant authorizes us to suppose, since the external senses may receive only material data—that is, spirits may not be perceived except "by acting upon the spirit of man." In conclusion, despite the visionary incongruities that may build fancifully on an original deception, the vision is spiritual and real. The only qualification is that the vision may not be assigned to the external sensory world and be called an "apparition." The juxtaposition of Kant's analytical psychology to his spiritualist assumptions accentuates the cleavage between material experience and "spiritual influence," a phrase he uses twice. The very concept of "reality" is at stake, now suspended between worldly "meaning," which includes purely mental phenomena, and the "meaning" that is communicated from a nonmaterial realm beyond empirical consciousness. In this cleavage is located the discontinuity of knowledge that Western philosophy perennially seeks to overcome. The connecting resolution may be posited to exist in at least three sites: in transcendence, in the material brain, or at a meeting point where spirit and matter may fuse into a consubstantial unity made manifest to the subject. This communion is named variously "vision," "true light," or "Presence," but it informs the same cognitive act that unites subject and object. These notions of fusion and light are more than metaphorical. They entail assumptions about dual realms of reality that Kant himself addresses in passing as he accounts for the visionary experience of spirit. He balances "the advantages and disadvantages which might accrue to a person organized not only for the visible world, but also, to a certain degree, for the invisible (if ever there was such a person)" (73). We might anticipate at this point a primal moment in human history that is mythified in two ways: first, by Diderot, whereby men had no eyes to see the world but could know it through the sense of touch;23 and sec23. "a blind people could have statuaries, and draw the same advantage as we of perpetuating the memory of fine actions and persons dear to them. I do not even doubt that

36ο

Transition

ond, by German mystics, whereby God's word is known epidemically by a breath on the human face.24 Kant speculates on such invisible knowledge, although he confuses Minerva with Juno: Such a gift would seem to be like that with which Juno honoured Teiresias, making him blind so that she might impart to him the gift of prophesying. For, judging from the propositions above made, the knowledge of the other world can be obtained here only by losing some of that intelligence which is necessary for this present world. (73)

Kant goes on to mention the impracticality of such a gift, and his point is decisive for the empirical world. Nevertheless, it is not a skeptical philosophy that motivates Kant's misgiving, but rather a respect for the transcendent spirit whose realm only tenuously permits cognitive apprehension. What Kant leaves unsaid about the "invisible world" fills a silence that removes him from the company of Hermetic philosophers. Their assumptions imply a spiritualist or spiritist force that Kant also leaves nameless. This void separates Kant's philosophical speech from the magical sign. As if more distance were needed, he sets about to write a chapter titled "Antikabala," which aims to abolish communion with the spirit-world. His premise is the hope that individuals will "wake up" to the common sense shared by all people who exercise Reason empirically. However, his focus falls not on spirit but on the mental instrument that reveals it. Kant does not refute spirituality or define its essence, but instead exposes the erroneous spiritism bred by imagination. This faculty permits metaphysicians or "air-architects" to inhabit individual imaginary worlds to the exclusion of others. And these "Reason-dreamers have a certain relation with sensation-dreamers, among whom are usually counted those who occasionally deal with spirits" (75). Kant shifts grounds from the Swedenborgian phenomenon to its more inclusive category, the general problem of philosophical chimeras that imagination creates and offers as real. This shift puts Kant squarely among the eighteenth-century philosophers. It also carries discussion away from the superstitions and magical contexts mentioned earlier. But these contexts overrun other cabalist and the feeling that they would experience by touching the statues would be livelier than what we feel by seeing them." Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, Lettre sur le sourds et mutts, ed. Yvon Belavel and Robert Nikiaus, in Oeuvres completes, vol. 4: Le nouveau Socrate, Idees 2 (Paris: Hermann, 1978), 4.6. 24· Antoine Faivre, "Magia Naturalis: Theologie de la lumiere et de l'electricite dans la 'Naturphilosophie' romantique," in Lumiere et cosmos: Courants occultes de la philosophic de la nature, ed. Antoine Faivre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981), 211.

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

361

Hermetic frameworks that come down in broken extensions to the early eighteenth century. Complicating their intersections is a close-knit fabric of themes from the scientific dualism of naturalists and theologians who unite corpuscular explanations of natural phenomena with the later mosaic of supernatural overlays. The example of academician and physiologist Claude-Nicolas Le Cat illuminates these themes in regard to dualist psychology. On the subject of apparitions, Le Cat adopts the purely materialist view that animal fluid in the brain affects the imagination and that people see spectres as if they really are before their eyes, because "the effervescence of nervous liquors and saps {sues)" operates on the same principle as the digestive juices.25 In contrast, the figments of delirium and madness arise when the "divine flame" degenerates owing to the decomposing action of caustic fluid (Tratte, 207). The imagination, in Le Cat's conception, functions partially through the "nervous sap wherein is found the permanent library holdings. The structure and arrangement of these holdings . . . will always be an incomprehensible mystery" (198). In a similarly ambiguous materialism, Antoine-Leonard Thomas attributes a stronger imagination in women: "Their moving senses scan every object and carry off the image. Unknown forces, secret links, quickly transmit every impression to them. The real world is not enough for them; they love to create an imaginary world. . . . Spectres, enchantments, prodigies, everything that exceeds the ordinary laws of nature are their work and delight."26 The author writes throughout the book in praise of women's virtues, not in disparagement. Therefore the last sentence affirms "their" creative work beyond the laws of nature. However, the second sentence appears structured so as to state a fact, lending credibility to an independent sphere that only the female mind can know. Much respectable thinking remains trapped in the dualist mansion while empirical materialism escapes through the window. La Mettrie restates the problem of mind in mechanical terms without pretending any ultimate knowledge of how neurophysiology affects it. Indeed, his treatise on the origin of the human soul affirms that the soul is a "substance" prior to matter: "it is born like a fire lighted by another fire" by means of the seminal fluid.27 As the century advances, natural philosophers like 25. Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, Tratte des sensations et des passions en general, et des sens en particulier (Paris: Vallat-La-Chapelle, 1767), 181-82. 26. Antoine-Leonard Thomas, Essai sur le caractere, les moeurs et l'esprit des femmes dans les differents siecles (Paris: Moutard, 1772), 113. 27. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Venus metaphysique, ou Essai sur l'ortyine de l'äme humaine (Berlin: Voss, 1752), 10. See also Aram Vartanian, LaMettrie's "L'homme machine": Α Study in the Origins of an Idea (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, i960), 13—14.

362

Transition

Diderot will maintain vitalist leanings because the methodological sorting out undertaken by Kant has not yet occurred. Not that the concept of spirit is later eliminated, but the grounds for understanding materiality and transcendence will have shifted to the arena of instrumentality. Instead of debating the reality of ghosts, philosophy will examine the mental faculties that permit supernaturalist contentions to be advanced. The shift involves two overlapping phases. In the first, a common externality is attributed to diverse spiritual phenomena, whether they are termed "vital force," "vaporous emanations," or "apparitions." Second, the physiology of perception exposes the internal source of many such phenomena without solving the ulterior problem of dualism. But even as the materialist foundations of the new psychology wedge between the contending issues among mechanists and vitalists, fluidists and vibrationists, atomists and energists—the very basis of perception comes under a new analysis by the phenomenology of consciousness made possible by Kant and his contemporaries. This is not the place to outline the history of epistemology. The controlling theme of these chapters continues to be Goya's insight into the feline duality of Reason, which invests intelligence with an instinctual energy pulling the mind in supernatural and empirical directions. What Ernst Cassirer calls the "perturbations of the mind"—desires and passions of the senses—are also incentives to revise rationalism in the late Enlightenment under the aegis of imagination. Nevertheless, a crucial ambiguity in Goya destabilizes this revision. As we have seen in one interpretation, his "dream of Reason" makes the rational mind responsible for its aberrations, which often stem from a runaway imagination. But another interpretation might contend that Goya's "sleep of Reason" acquits the rational mind of responsibility for imagination's flight toward the transcendental spirit. In the dream of Reason, what holds true is Cassirer's conception of an evolving rationalism under revision. Goya insinuates the need for such a revision in the interests of correcting supernaturalist chimeras. But in the sleep of Reason, the aesthetic potential of imagination overwhelms the phenomenological balance conceived by Kant. Before examining the Kantian "Antikabala" in relation to Goya, we should note the significance of the epistemological evolution described by Cassirer. From the Goyesque standpoint, everything is eventually a question of what knowledge is grasped as well as how it is grasped. Thus the irrational becomes as meaningful as the rational with respect to the passions of the senses and the appetites of will and imagination. These mental

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

363

"perturbations" come to be regarded by Enlighteners, according to Cassirer, as "the original and indispensable impulse of all the operations of the mind." 28 As illustrations, the exemplary Hume makes Reason the dependent rather than the governor of the lower "faculties," and Vauvenargues finds true human nature to reside in the passions, and not in Reason. Voltaire himself contends that without the passions, vanity, and the desire for fame, human progress would scarcely be possible. The culminating legitimation of this irrationalizing current takes place in subsequent German philosophy, where its shape is an aesthetic category within epistemological theory. Thus Cassirer notes carefully the nonideational mechanisms, pointing to Hume's earlier belief that Reason needs sensibility and imagination in order to function. In the end, imagination conquers a place in cognition as a combining faculty and finally as an original creative faculty.29 Literary critics tend to stress the philosophical implications of the creative imagination in the context of poetics and aesthetics.30 More profoundly, the power of the "poetic" or "theoretical" imagination reaches back to the cognitive spark itself, where light surrounds subject and object in a synthesizing Presence. The context of neurophysiology, therefore, also warrants emphasis in discussing the epistemological revision whose first apex is Kant. As the revision evolves, empiricism is a pivotal method for abandoning Cartesian rationalism and embracing modern theories of functional psychology. But empiricism would also abandon oneiromancy, ghosts, and magical conjurings—the claptrap of illiterate superstition that nonetheless clings to spiritualist thought in educated, dualist formulations. And these refined superstitions, when posited in terms of dreams, imagination, and "irrational science," retain the concept of spirit that motivates transcendental and phenomenological theories of knowledge. It is true that eighteenth-century Anglo-French epistemology seeks to structure knowl28. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 105—6. 29. Replacing sensationalism are new definitions both of logic and of the origins of ideas, definitions that dispute the "shower of impressions" that defines "concept." Even "concepts" of relation (as distinct from "concepts" of things) are considered by sensationalists to be connected with what is concretely given by perception. In contrast, later German Enlighteners like Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Georg Sulzer, and Johann Nicolas Tetens take the position that "no matter how much thinking may be stimulated by the sense impression, by the empirical datum, it is never content to stop here. For thinking not only forms concepts as mere aggregates but it rises to ideals. And these ideals are not comprehensible without the aid of the 'plastic power of the imagination'" (Cassirer, Philosophy, 128). 30. See James Engell, The Creative Imagination. Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1981).

364

Transition

edge on its own foundation, autonomous and immanent, without dependency on spiritual agents. But while this position marks an advance over the lineage of Descartes-Malebranche-Lenglet-Richard, it falls psychologically short of the German lineage of Leibniz-WolfF-Tetens. The evolutionary path of this epistemology bends off into many byways with a complexity that cannot be studied here,31 yet it can be followed by keeping in sight one of its tracks: dreaming and the role of imagination. Where this track passes alongside Kant's "Antikabala," the forest of superstitions thins into a cluster of beliefs in apparitions and visions. Here the spiritual physiology of Swedenborg claims to transform the Holy Spirit by the body's rhythmic action of breathing and circulation to the brain via the internal organs.32 Kant's technical interest lies in accounting for such mind-disturbances by locating the "focus imaginarius" of the vision inside the thinking subject. He explains such pictorial phenomena physiologically as well as psychologically: they are "a distortion of brain fibers," a "contortion of nerve tissue," and "any accident or disease [where] certain organs of the brain are distorted or thrown out of their equilibrium in such a manner that the nerve movements, vibrating harmoniously with certain fantasies, occur according to such lines of direction as, continued, would meet outside of the brain" (Dreams, 80—81). The extreme case is insanity, a permanent confusion where the subject projects figments of imagination and considers them objects externally present to the senses. Thus Kant forges a psychophysiology by showing, first, that the waking state distinguishes sense impressions from fantasized images when the "focus imaginarius" is properly internalized. Under this condition, the "phantom sensation" is so vivid that it seems externally material when organic tissue is troubled enough to project images copied in the imagination on a spot beyond the subject's body. Kant's psychology owes much to the empirical psychology of Christian Wolff, who distinguishes strong from weak representations, or dreams from fantasmata. The waking dream allows weak perceptions or representations to become strong ones.33 This technical classification goes hand in hand with Kant's distinction between waking dreamers and spirit seers. The two classes differ not only in degree but also in kind, he contends, 31. The biological foundation of this epistemology will occupy Volume 2 of this study, and its link to modern psychological studies may be observed in the more general revision described by Cassirer. 32. Emanuel Swedenborg, Le livre des reves, ed. Regis Boyer (Paris: Berg International, 1985), 68, 70. 33. F. Lourtes, ed., Kant. Revesd'un visionnaire (Paris: Vrin, 1977), 149-51.

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

365

because although spirit-seers are awake and experience other sensations vividly, they also "place some imagined things among the external objects which they really perceive." Explaining how the deception is possible, Kant also provides an inadvertent gloss on Capricho 43• Kant designates the class called "sensation-dreamers," while Goya's ambiguous title refers to "Reason-dreamers." The two types are related in that they both "have a communication of their own with beings which reveal themselves to nobody else." Because these "apparitions rest upon mere fancies, the term 'dream' then becomes appropriate to them in so far as both are self-created pictures which nevertheless deceive the senses as if they were true objects" (75, 77)· Nevertheless, only Goya's Enlightener is justly called a waking dreamer. This individual is "so absorbed in the fancies and chimeras of his ever active imagination as to pay little attention to the sensations of the senses." These "need decrease only a little more in their intensity and he will be asleep, and his chimeras will then be true dreams." Why is this so? Because the waking dreamer perceives his dreams as being in himself, but other objects as being outside of himself; "consequently he considers the dreams as effects of his own activity, but the perception of objects as part of his received impressions from the outside." As a result, in his waking state, the dream-pictures cannot deceive him, however clear they may be. Even though he has "in his brain a fictitious impression of himself and his body, which he puts in relation to his fantastic pictures—nevertheless, the real sensation of his body, by means of the external senses, establishes a contrast with those chimeras, or distinction from them, which goes to show the ones as self-created, the other as perceived." If the Reason-dreamer "falls asleep, the idea of his body derived from impressions disappears, and only the fictitious idea remains.... There is no sensation present which would furnish a basis for a comparison of the two whereby the original could be distinguished from the phantasm, i.e., the outside from the inside" (76). Here then is why the spirit-seer differs, although also awake. He alone experiences sensations vividly, even while at the same time failing to compare them with his fantastic pictures, which he also places among the external objects really perceived. The "Antikabala" is a terminus of sort in the analytical history of eighteenth-century phenomenology. It banishes spiritism to the same discredited milieu that favors black magic and sorcery. Its argumentative basis is both physiological and psychological, conforming to emergent theories of mental disease and the structure of perception. Kant even limits this particular discussion of imagination to its nontranscendent activity,

j66

Transition

thus eliminating for the moment any spiritualist implications. Nevertheless, this terminus is uncharacteristic of the Enlightenment, which preserves fluidist and vibrationist frames of explanation even at the century's end, when pathology begins to dominate attention. The vexing doubts raised by these competing frames perpetuate the mystery of imagination's relation to intangible phenomena. In this way, such concepts as "spirit" and "soul" maintain a communal reality that does not yet aetherealize into the later "intimations of immortality" of the Romantics. In the Enlightenment, perceiving intangibility entails feelings and other irrational intuitions, but it never abandons the neurophysiological base ("sensorium," "animal spirits") that supports the emotional superstructure. Thus, the aesthetic orientation of Goya's time also rests on the conceptual and scientific base that Kant sets aside in the "Antikabala." Among the emotional pleasures available to "the man of sensibility" are the happy effects provided by Mesmerism, intoned in the second canticle of the long didactic poem Imagination by Jacques Delille, begun in 1785. With his poetic tribute to the imagination, Delille traces the many irrational streams of eighteenth-century sensibility—the sublime, the Gothic, the grotesque, the sentimental—back to their psychological headwaters. But his synthesis epitomizes, by its very poetic banality, the pervasive values of the established Enlightenment sensibility, which never relinquishes dualism and in fact keeps alive its central problem: "I know that our instinct differs from Reason. One is the lightning bolt of the senses, the other is the daylight of the soul. In short, if the image is traced in the brain, how can thought be printed upon the body?"34 In sum, we must take several chronological steps back from Kant in order to appreciate the refinement placed upon Goya's "Sleep/Dream of Reason" by Kant's distinction between Reason-dreamer and spirit-seer. The fusion of matter and spirit remains an unknown process along the imagination's interface with sensate events. This enigma becomes more scientific in nature in the measure that Christian pietism and Hermeticist beliefs fall by the wayside. However, the emerging psychology after 1785 loses interest in the dualist problem and instead pursues pathological questions. The developments that lead to Philippe Pinel's work on mental alienation at the turn of the century rise out of the technical neuropsychology of Samuel Tissot and Daniel Delaroche, who emphasize nervous diseases. The 34. Jacques Delille, L'imagination (1785-94), 2nd. ed. enl. by d'Andrezel et al., 2 vols. (Paris: Didot l'Aine, 1816) 1:45.

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

367

faculty of imagination comes increasingly under an iatro-diagnostic focus in the sciences. In contrast, the terrifying underside of Nature beckons as a reality after all, to be glimpsed through an exquisitely heightened imagination notwithstanding disbelief in superstitions. Therefore, aesthetic sensibility intensifies at the expense of scientific findings. The experienced terror is not necessarily malevolent, although transcendent evil does eventually figure alongside diabolist themes. Rather, the terrifying underside produces an awe that surpasses sublime terror and that subsequently requires harnessing by means of benevolent pantheistic schemes.

Interim Conclusion The critique of Reason surveyed in this volume does not place Goya squarely among either the skeptics or the antirationalists. He may be one or the other and still invite other interpretations. Certainly the hybridized varieties of Reason provoke a defense of "authentic" Reason within the Christian Enlightenment that arguably includes Goya among the defenders. This position falls under the Minervan hypothesis, which assumes, among other things, the normative concept of Reason described in Chapter 8. Goya from this standpoint bears testimony to a subverted Enlightenment that is both overmaterialistic owing to the blinders worn by empirical Reason, and sluggish owing to spiritist fanaticism in all denominations. To be capable of adopting this perspective, which can take all sides while criticizing them all, is truly superhuman. It requires the wisdom of Minerva and the exercise of Minervan Reason. At the same time, Goya's intuitive grasp of absolute Wisdom illustrates a transcendent dimension that is entirely independent of human Reason and its alter egos. Indeed, Capricho 43 may not only represent a synthesizing and ideal cognitive process, but also intuit the absolute structure of reality that escapes human languages. These possible interpretations turn on a single issue: the limits of human freedom. The boundless freedom that ensures an individual's selfdetermination is a modern ideal deriving from the Enlightenment. The factors that fall within the individual's full exercise and control are three: Reason, will, and imagination. But do they suffice to explain the so-called monsters of Capricho 43? Bearing these factors in mind, it is far from clear that free methodological choice or willfully exercised imagination can alone

368

Transition

or together account for the creatures surrounding the unconscious Enlightener. If the creatures are monsters, they are so judged from the standpoint of empirical Reason. But if Reason is asleep, it cannot judge their presence at all. Only if Reason actively dreams can the monsters be judged as such. However, an independent Minervan Reason does achieve such judgments, with the multiform and panlinguistic results noted in Chapter i. In another interpretation, if Reason merely sleeps, the "monsters" may be visionary creatures that respond to some other agency, such as imagination or a preternatural force external to humankind. In these cases, the truths gleaned thereby are either civic and moral in the visionary category, or else the truths are ontological when arising in the preternatural sphere. The distinction recognizes the era's concern for social institutions and individual values, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the problem of representing a universally immanent reality. The latter problem of course exceeds human capacities. The knowledge of "true" reality is reserved for a Minervan intelligence. The powers of Minerva, being absolute and transcendent, indeed shift from function to function The multiple significance of the goddess—another premise of the Minervan hypothesis—is demonstrated by the four owls around Enlightener's desk. In fact, Minerva's absence in Capricho 43 one year after her custodial role in the portrait of Justice Minister Jovellanos signals her ambiguity. Her winged surrogates compromise her as the wilder owls blend into the sinister bats. The ensemble thereby implicates Minerva in the overall delirium. This condition constitutes the deeper reality beyond empirical knowledge. It is knowable by "good" Unreason, and it is representable through the Universal Language Goya was seeking. The diverse interpretations, therefore, are as follows, (i) Goya is a partisan of "good" Reason, as distinct from the degrees of intellectual delirium within the scale of rational activity. (2) Goya is a radical skeptic of Reason, on the evidence of Reason's remissive activities; it can either fall asleep or willfully dream, neither case benefiting the Enlightenment's project. (3) Goya is an antirationalist on the evidence of the swarming monstrosity that symbolizes intellectual Unreason whose adversary is Minerva. The second interpretation accentuates the nature of Reason; the third accentuates the nature of irrational phenomena, two differing accents that are in accord with the two segments of the title "(The Sleep/Dream of Reason) (Produces Monsters)." (4) Goya is an irrationalist, on the evidence of

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

369

the visionary and preternatural creatures in the realm accessible solely by the imagination. This interpretation emphasizes irrational phenomena as an alternative to Reason. (5) Goya inclines toward a "good" Unreason that intuits the polymorphic reality beneath perceived order. In all cases the question might be: what exactly disarms Reason in the first place? Conventional explanations are as follows. If intellectual disorder stems from Reason's endeavor to dream, then Goya must be reproaching the rationalist dreamer for his idealistic miscalculations. The monsters thus represent the disproportionate ambitions of a willful system-builder or an ideological fanatic. The dreams of Reason are the wish-fulfillments of a reasoner's conscious reveries running amuck. In this view, Reason employs both the will and the imagination when producing its irrational creations. In another explanation, it may be simple fatigue and sleep that disarm Reason. An involuntary condition arises owing to the unconscious state of mind: Enlightener loses grasp of his faculties. Spontaneous mechanisms subsequently go into motion, springing away from the will. These mechanisms—imagination and dream—announce their own freedom in the face of inactive Reason. As a result, in one view, symbolic monsters flurry to the scene in defiance of human freedom. Here "freedom" is defined as the choice to control or to liberate at will either Reason or imagination, with different consequences. In yet another view, the human condition defined as rational order succumbs to disorder in a fundamentally ontological sense that surpasses mere social or philosophical aberration. I shall return to this point. The minimal choice posed by the title of Capricho 43 is dual: the human mind is free to be intellectually awake or to slumber. But once the mind sleeps, its dreams are independent events that mock its erstwhile freedom. There are several attitudes that Goya might adopt. As a skeptic, he terminates one type of rationality and portrays reality dystopically as it might eventuate after Reason's overthrow. Or, as an irrationalist, he embraces the reality that can be revealed only through the agencies of imagination and dream, a revelation couched either in socially utopic terms or with Romantic inklings of a demonic cosmos. In both cases, the vision exposes irrationality in its own right. Either Goya's concern is that freedom risks surrendering to independent destructive forces when Reason slackens, or Goya is depicting some doctrine of irrationalism that presages Romantic transcendency. In this regard, Georges Gusdorf has underscored the dark side of the Enlightenment that expresses the occult, demonic, and anti-

370

Transition

rational phases that culminate in Goethe's Werther and Sade's Justine. It is noteworthy that so rigorous an intellectual historian as Lester Crocker has approved of this approach.35 The chapters in the present volume adopt the interpretation that Goya recognizes the necessary limits of freedom in relation to ever-lurking disorder. He recognizes those limits in the context of a Christian Enlightenment where many aberrations of Reason are possible, including supernaturalist and spiritist ones. The implications extend to the creative arts. The pessimistic view of freedom suggested by Capricho 43 preserves one vestige of Reason's virtue amid the dissolution of rationalist aesthetics. Here, Goya does not hesitate to break free of artistic conventions that hamper the representation of disorder. He extricates himself from the mimetic equilibrium of Neoclassical and Rococo art without compromising his affiliation with an empirical Enlightenment that, at least in Spain, might have dominated and did not.36 But Goya does not bind himself to the Christian Enlightenment. His ambition is to duplicate the Universal Language known only to the multiform Minerva. The eighteenth century conceals a magus-like Minerva, not only wise and creative but also Hermetic and feminine. Her temple, as narrated in a seventeenth-century episode by Jacques Guttin, is the oracular fulcrum of linguistic essences and spirits, all designed to harmonize the universal disorder.37 The present volume has cited Minerva's symbolic plurality, which appears contradictory only to mortal Reason: civilian crafts, but also warrior arts; the articles of Christian faith, but also the arcana of pagan Nature. A partial synthesis of her qualities appears in the Christian knight of Goya's portrait of Jovellanos, where Minervan Reason accedes to 35. The contagious power of imagination and its "natural magic," both mediating nature and the supernatural, are cited by Georges Gusdorf, Les sciences humaines et la naissance de la pensee occidentale, vol. 7, La naissance de la conscience romantique au Steele des lumieres (Paris: Payot, 1976), 421 and passim. The anti-rational forces in the Enlightenment are discussed by Lester Crocker, "What Is Modern About the Eighteenth Century?" in The Modernity of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Louis T. Milic, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 56 (Cleveland Ohio and London: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971), 87-92. 36. Janis Tomlinson correctly observes that "to represent late eighteenth-century Spain as a coherent succession of reforms is historically inaccurate: rather than Enlightenment, this was a period of sparks, a few of which caught fire but most of which burned out quickly of their own accord" (Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment [New Haven, Conn, and London: Yale University Press, 1992], 18). On Spain's incomplete modernization in the eighteenth century, see Julian Marias, LaEspanaposible en tietnpo de Carlos III (Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1963). 37. See above, p. 39, n. 20. Jacques Guttin, Epigone: Histoire du siecle futur (Paris: Pierre Lamy, 1659), 63—64. This linguistic theme will be elaborated in Volume 3.

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

371

the discourse of imagination. But visionary imagination yields to Goya's more radical, bat-filled vision of the imaginary, which encompasses the instinct that overpowers all controls. Here Capricho 4-3 captures the synthesizing Minervan Reason that harmonizes the universal energy of Chaos. These themes are elaborated in the next volumes. A major difference between human Reason and Minervan Reason is the role played by metaphorical sight and cognitive light. Some kind of knowledge prevails in the subterranean vaults of Minerva's temple, where sensibility consists primarily of hearing and touch, not eyesight. Such is the anti-Newtonian position taken by Cadalso. The "touchsight" of darkness presents substantive forms to the mind, whereas daylight optics produce only ghosts. Cadalso's pre-Romantic hero detects panting next to him an invisible, monstrous reality so terrifying that Reason cannot cope with it. Beyond the physiological basis of knowledge, this apperception occupies an equivocal position between preternatural science and spiritism and the emerging portion of empirical science that will survive in later centuries. The "touchsight" intuited in darkness by Cadalso hints at a deeper reality beyond that known by ordinary lights. His sensory perception, being essential to empirical Reason, has no part in either dreaming or imagining. But because the latter's truth-value remains strong despite their nonsensory status, the entire extrarational cognitive process comes under inquiry. This includes both the imagination's mechanism, intimately linked to waking neuroanatomy, and the physiological basis of dreams. While these topics await further study, the immediate point is the link between the biological sciences and humanistic discourses. The link consists of the fact that the new and broad intimations of a deeper reality—the ontological status of apprehended objects—coincides with a searching interest in the physiology of imagination. Another link is word usages such as "bizarre" and "delirium" that reveal a lexical migration from biological and psychological discourse to literature, and conversely from literary and social discourses to biology. The lexical migration studied in Chapter 5 both increases and undermines verbal accuracy. In the latter case, a challenge arises from irrational modes of cognition like dreaming. Representational language is the key to making the phenomena of reality "present to the mind." The adequacy of verbal language comes into question whenever enlightened knowledge meets with skeptical reception. A vivid example concerns the nature of light, and it occurs in a literary dream written by lawyer-journalist Luis

372

Transition

Garcia de Canuelo. His most radical use of imagination is that dream rather than the light of day promotes philosophical reflection. Canuelo falls asleep while reading a puzzled analysis of light: a lovely clarity bathes the office where I am now writing. It allows me to distinguish the objects surrounding me. What can this phenomenon be? That clarity is light. Beautifully. I know that clarity is called light, but where do the latter and the former come from? Light is fire . . . but what is fire? Light is aethereal matter, but what can this matter be? Light is a very subtle and quick body, but where does it come from? . . . I remain without knowing what light is.38

The passage is quoted by the moral polemicist Juan Pablo Forner in his widely read Oracion apologetica. What Forner calls the "soporific quality of such a book" induces Cafiuelo's dream about a country whose inhabitants have "strange physiognomies" and speak an unknown language that he nevertheless understands intuitively. The dreamer duplicates the sterile rumination of his reading. The strange country's leader is an absurd sophist whose reasoning "disfigures" the scientific conjectures of more reasonable observers but who earns acclaim from the crowd. Cafiuelo's dream is an imaginary reproduction of his historical ambience, studded with mimetic distortions. Its philosophical lucidity depends on the darkness of sleep and the powers of imagination that come under censure in the empirical world. In a further irony, Canuelo publishes his dream with an introductory disavowal of "celebrated dreamers" like Montesquieu, whom he disparages. Nevertheless, his dream-narrative vindicates the imaginative process by declaring that "the talent to dream methodically and with order is [a form o f ] g r a c e " (El censor, 291).

The discourse of darkness remains an alternative to the celebration of light and Newtonian optics that Marjorie Nicolson described for British poetry. Not only do enlightened thinkers like Burke and Diderot offer painters the dictum to cultivate "obscurity," but also the Gothic novel and much nonfictional discourse follow suit.39 The representations of "dark" reality extend to the supernatural, although chiefly as a source of aesthetic pleasure rather than knowledge. The eighteenth century also rehabilitates 38. Luis Garcia de Canuelo, El censor, ed. E. Garcia Pandavenes (Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1972), 292. 39. Diderot's advice after viewing Vernet in the Salon of 1767 is to "be tenebrous," a dictum adapted from Burke's concept of obscurity in the Sublime. See Salon de 1767, Salon de 1769, ed. Else Marie Bukdahl, Michel Delon, Annette Lorenceau, vol. 16 of Oeuvres completes, ed. Herbert Dieckmann and Jean Varloot (Paris: Hermann, 1984), 235.

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

373

the age of superstition exploited by Shakespeare because, as Ernest Tuveson explains, the barbaric ages revered Nature in awe and terror, living closer to Nature despite their ignorance compared to enlightened times. The sublime terror admired by Addison and described by Burke is for the most part aesthetically pleasing, that is, benign rather than terrifying. The alternative concept of terror, as an emotion of unreasoning fear, exceeds aesthetic control and its reassurance that danger is remote. In Tuveson's account, a new conception of the nonrational and the unconscious becomes possible in the Lockean association of ideas. But it remains unexplored in England, except for Laurence Sterne and Henry Fuseli.40 On the Continent, in contrast, the aesthetic yields to the philosophic owing to an additional role for imagination. The "visual" and "visionary" poetry of Christopher Smart, William Collins, James Thomson, and William Cowper deals with essences—both subjective thoughts and supernatural insights, as Patricia Spacks has shown.41 Mercier (and Young in England), as noted earlier, raise imagination to a rational function. It not only becomes the "source of sublime geometry" in Mercier, but also challenges the belief in accurate verbal translation of mental events. The fallacy of monosemic written language can be demonstrated in cases where capricious thought-mechanisms rechannel the author's primary linear intention. The Quixotic microstructures in Voltaire's ostensibly univocal writings have illustrated how such polyvalent meanings are generated when the polymathic mind shifts registers. The new role of imagination exonerates it from the suspicion that it causes errors of judgment during linguistic production. The suspicion derives from the belief that thought-perceptions preserve their accuracy after verbal translation. However, the budding phenomenology of consciousness described here and in Chapter 7 suggests that the imagination is the final arbiter over language in its function of forming truthful statements. That is to say, the determining factors of accuracy are pre-linguistic, residing in the relationship between sense- perception and image-linking, and between these two and memory. If representational fallibility occurs, the culprit is verbal language and not eidetic activity. As a result of this insight, a new relationship arises between the concept of language and dream imagery. Reason's authority loses ground to 40. Ernest Lee Tuveson, The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, i960), 129,179. 41. Patricia Spacks, The Insistence of Horror: Aspects of the Supernatural in EighteenthCentury Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962).

374

Transition

the extent that its rhetoric is not adaptable to nonempirical discourses. Moreover, visionary authors redeem irrational language through the vehicle of extrasensory imagination. This mechanism is the source of dreams. It replaces sensory image-linking with a visionary reality that is pure immediacy and the source of all being, where substance and essence are one. Here "present to the mind" means just that. Cognition takes a stereognostic form. A figuratively tactile perception replaces the figurative distance inserted by logocentric vision and writing between the viewing subject and the object. Cognition occurs in the collapsed space where shape is "touched" and is thus known. This telemorphic perception of things fulfills Goya's notion of "Universal Language." It closes the taxonomic space that causes the phenomena depicted in Capricho 4-3 to appear disconnected and monstrous. It also closes another kind of discontinuous space. The knowledge conveyed by Minerva's language arrives undeflected by the "difference" between neural signal and meaning or between signifier and signified. Telemorphosis therefore ensures a closure between shapes so that there is no "difference" between an object's substantive fullness and its iconic shape. Besides the dualities just described is what philosophers call the mindbody dilemma. The separation is ubiquitous in eighteenth-century texts that make reference to "spirit," "soul," and "mind," alongside "brain" and "sensorium." The dichotomy of terms focuses attention on the conversion of a material neural signal into a cognitive awareness that physiology cannot easily account for in this period. The breach between matter and "something else" is the microcosmic counterpart of the breach between Nature and its preternatural counterpart. Efforts to close the breach in the eighteenth century have been amply documented in this volume. The failures of human language and eyesight in this regard turn Goya to the vehicle that will put mind into direct contact with primal reality. This vehicle is dream, which has a special language still to be discovered. Surface meanings obstruct truths, unknown to empirical life, that arrive through signals that are not detectable in the waking light. Their language is the "Universal Language" inscribed in Sepia Two, referring to Minerva's language of "good" Unreason. What Minerva possesses, instead of mediating signs, is the synthesizing cognition that escapes the fibrous neurocerebral system. Spirit and matter are one in the underlying reality that eludes rational signifiers but reveals itself in manifest immanence. These ideas will be elaborated in future volumes of this study. The issues raised in this transitional chapter concern cognitive theory in the

The Discontinuity of Reason and Spirit

375

eighteenth century, which will be the subject of the next volume. Historians of literary, scientific, and philosophical thought have written much about associationism, mechanism, and vitalism that virtually completes today's understanding of both the psychology and the physiology of perception, and hence of the nature of knowledge in the eighteenth century. However, a broad cross-section of better known and lesser known authors should again be examined thematically by asking new questions that establish fresh analytical categories—Chaos, discontinuity, fibers, matter, scientific metaphor, aether—that together will make the discussions in the next volume a bridge to the final volume about Minerva's Universal Language.

Bibliography

PRIMARY SOURCES

Akenside, Mark. The Poetical Works. London: Bell & Daldy, 1867. Alembert, Jean Le Rond d'. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. Trans, and ed. Richard N. Schwab and Walter Rex. Indianapolis, Ind. and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. . Seconds lettre äMrxxx conseiller au Parlement de xxx sur l'etat du roi d'Espagne, pour I'expulsion desjesuites. N.p., n.d. [Paris, 1767]. Amunarriz y Labrit, Raymundo. Tobias sistemäticas de la creacicm del mundo. Pamplona: Herederos de Martinez, 1745. Arteaga, Esteban de. La belleza ideal: Obra completa castellana. Ed. Miguel Batllori. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1972. Bails, Benito. Arquitectura civil. Madrid: J. Ibarra, 1783. Batteux, Abbe Charles. Les beaux-arts reduits a un meme principe. Paris: Durand, 17+6. Beguelin, M., Memoire sur l'art de connaitre les pensees d'autre a l'aide de la metaphysique. Vol. 1, Choix des memoires et abrege de l'histoire de l'Academie de Berlin. Berlin, 1767. Bekker, Balthazar. Le monde en change, ou Examen des communs sentiments touchant les esprits, leur nature, leurpouvoir... 4 vols. Amsterdam: P. Rotterdam, 1694. Bellon de Saint-Quentin, J. "Lettre de Μ. de Sal . . . medecin, ä Μ. l'abbe de M. D. L." (1731). In Dissertation critique sur l'apparition des esprits, 2:90—95. Amsterdam: Jean-Frederic Bernard, 1736. Bellon de Saint-Quentin, J. Superstitions anciennes et modernes, prejuges vulgaires, qui ont induit les peuples ä des usages et ä des pratiques contraires ä la religion. 4 vols. Amsterdam: Jean-Frederic Bernard, 1733—36. Blake, William. "The French Revolution." In Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Prose, ed. Louis I. Bredvold, Alan D. McKillop, and Lois Whitney. 3rd ed., prepared by John M. Bullitt. New York: Ronald Press, 1973. Boisard, J. J. F. M. Fables. Paris: Lacombe, 1773. Bordelon, Laurent. L'histoire des imaginations extravagantes de Monsieur Oufle, causees par la lecture des livres qui traitent de la magie, dugrimoire. . . . 2 vols. Amsterdam: Estienne Roger, 1710. Boudard, Jean Baptiste. Iconologie, tiree de divers auteurs. 3 vols. Parme and Paris: Tilliard, 1759. Bruhier d'Abalaincourt, Jacques-Jean. Caprices d'imagination, ou Lettres sur differents sujets d'histoire, de morale, de critique, d'histoire naturelle, etc. Paris: Briasson, 1740.

378

Bibliography

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc de. Histoire naturelle. Ed. Jean Varloot. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Burke, Edmund. Rtflecttons on the Revolution in France (1790). Ed. J. G. A. Pocock. Indianapolis, Ind. and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987. Cabanis, Pierre J. G. Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme. Vol. 2. Paris: Crapelet, 1802. Cabarrus, Francisco de. Elogio de Carlos III. Madrid: A. de Sancha, 1789. Cadalso, Jose. Noches lugubres (1789-90). Ed. Nigel Glendinning. Madrid: EspasaCalpe, 1961. Cadet le Jeune, Jean Marcel. Memoire sur lesjaspes et autres pierres precieuses de l'isle de Corse, suivi de Notes sur l'Histoire naturelle, de la Traduction du Critas et de diverses morceaux du Timee de Piaton. Bastia: La Veuve Batinia, 1785. Calmet, Dom Augustin. Dissertation sur les apparitions des anges, des demons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie . . . Paris: Debure, 17+6. Enlarged edition: Tratte sur les apparitions des esprits et sur les vampires ou revenants de Hongrie . . . 2 vols. Paris: Debure, 1751. Cafiuelo, Luis Garcia de. El censor. Ed. E. Garcia Pandavenes. Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1972. Caraccioli, Louis-Antoine. Dictionnaire critique, pittoresque, et sententieux, propre ä faire connaitre les usages du Steele, ainsi que ses bisarreries. 3 vols. Lyon: Benoit Duplain, 1768. .Lecridela verite. Paris: Nyon, 1765. . Le langage de la raison. Paris: Nyon, 1763. . L'univers enigmatique. Avignon: Delaire, 1759. .Voyage de la raison en Europe. Compiegne et Paris: Chez Saillant et Nyon, 1772. Carmona, Manuel Salvador. La histona escribiendo los hechos del Rey Carlos III: Se los dicta Minerva ... Biblioteca del Palacio, Madrid, n.d. Catalogo 88. Carre de Montgeron, Louis-Basile. La verite des miracles operes par l'intercesswn de M. de Paris et autres appellants (1737). 3 vols. Cologne: Libraires de la Compagnie, 17+5-+7· Castilhon, Jean Louis. Considerations sur les causes physiques et morales de la diverstte dugenie, des nweurs et dugouvernement des nations. Bouillon: Societe Typographique; Paris: Lacombe, 1769. Caylus, Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubieres, Comte de. Memoire sur la peinture a l'encaustique et sur la peinture ä la cire. Geneva: Possot, 1755. Ceremonies et coütumes religieuses des peuples idolatres representees par desfiguresdessinees de la main de Bernard Picart; avec une explication historique et quelques dissertations curieuses. 8 vols. Amsterdam: Jean- Frederic Bernard, 1723-36. Condillac, Abbe Etienne Bonnot de. Tratte des animaux. Amsterdam and Paris: Debure, 1755. . Tratte des sensations. 2 vols. London and Paris: Debure, 1754. Cortes, Geronimo. Libro defisonomta natural (1607). Madrid: Domingo Fernandez Arrojo, 1762; reprinted Valladolid: Viuda e Hijos de Santander, 1788. Cortes, Geronimo. Secretos de la naturalezay efectos maravillosos de ellas. Madrid, 1742. Costadau, Alphonse. Tratte historique et critique desprineipaux signes dont nous [nous]

Primary Sources

379

servonspour manifester nospensees. Lyon: V v e de J. B. Guillimin, 1717. 2nd ed., revised and corrected. 12 vols. Lyon: Freres Bruyset, 1720-24. Cudworth, Ralph. The True Intellectual System ofthe Universe: The First Part; wherein All the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted; and its Impossibility Demonstrated. London: Richard Royston, 1678. D'Alembert. See Alembert, Jean Le Rond. Dacier, Andre. Les oeuvres de Platon, traduites en franfais avec des remarques, et la vie de ce philosophe, avec l'exposition des principaux dogmes de sa philosophic. 2 vols. Paris: Jean Anisson, 1699. Delaroche, Daniel. Analyse des fonctions du systeme nerveux. 2 vols. Geneva: Du Villard Fils et Nouffer, 1778. Delille, Jacques. L'imagination (1785-94). 2nd ed. enlarged by d'Andrezel et al. 2 vols. Paris: Didot l'Aine, 1816. Diccionario [deAutoridades] de la lengua castellana... Compuestopor la Real Academia Espanola. 3 vols. Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, 1726-37. Diderot, Denis. Correspondance. Vol. 9. Ed. Georges Roth. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963. . Clements de Physiologie. Vol. 9 of Oeuvres completes, ed. J. Assezat and M.Tourneux. Paris: Garnier Freres, 1875. . Oeuvres completes, ed. J. Assezat and M. Tourneux. 20 vols. Paris: Garnier Freres, 1875-77. . Oeuvresphilosophiques. Ed. Paul Verniere. Paris: Garnier Freres, 1956. . Ratneau's Nephew. D'Alembert's Dream. Trans. L. W. Tancock. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966. . Le reve de d'Alembert. Ed. Jean Varloot. Paris: Editions Sociales, 1971. . Lettre sur les aveugles, Lettre sur le sourds et muets. Ed. Yvon Belavel and Robert Nikiaus. In Oeuvres completes, vol. 4: Le nouveau Socrate, Idees2. Paris: Hermann, 1978. . Salon de 176s: Essais sur lapeinture. Ed. Else Marie Bukdahl, Annette Lorenceau, and Gita May. Vol. 14 of Oeuvres completes, ed. Herbert Dieckmann and Jean Varloot. Paris: Hermann, 1984. . Salon de 1767, Salon de 1769. Ed. Else Marie Bukdahl, Michel Delon, and Annette Lorenceau. Vol. 16 of Oeuvres completes, ed. Herbert Dieckmann and Jean Varloot. Paris: Hermann, 1984. Encyclopedic, ou dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts, et des metiers. New facsimile printing of the ist edition of 1751-80. Slatkine Reprints. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Fromann Verlag, 1967. Estampes presentes ä l'Academte Royale. Paris: Galerie de la Seita, 1982. Feijoo, Benito Jeronimo. Obras escojjidas. Vols. 1, 2, and 3. Biblioteca de Autores Espafioles 56,141,142. Madrid: Atlas, 1952,1961. Vol. 1, ed. Vicente de la Fuente ("Cuevas de Salamanca y Toledo y mägica de Espana," 374-81; "Milagros supuestos," 112—22; "Duendes y espiritus familiares," 103-7; "Honra y provecho de la agricultural 456—67); vol. 2, ed. Agustin Miliares Carlo ("Artes divinatorias," 133-44; "Uso de la magica," 161-86); vol. 3, ed. Agustin Miliares Carlo ("Transformaciones y transmigraciones mägicas," 77—84). Formey, Jean Henri Samuel. "Considerations sur ce qu'on peut regarder aujourd'hui

38ο

Bibliography

comme le but principal des Academies, et comme leur effet le plus avantageux. Second discours." In Histoire de l'Academie Royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres, Annee 1768, 357-66. Berlin: Haude & Spener, 1770. Forner, Juan Pablo. Discursosfilosoficos sobre el hombre. Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1787. . Oracion apologetica par la Esparia y su merito literario. Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1786. Gamaches, P. Etienne Simon .Astronomie physique, ou Pnncipcsgenemux de la nature, appliques au mecanisme astronomique et compares auxprincipes de la philosophic de Μ. Newton. 2 vols. Paris: Charles-Antoine Jombert, 1740. Garma y Salcedo, Xavier. Teatro universal de Espana. 4 vols. Madrid and Barcelona: Privately printed, and Marti, 1738—51. Gravelot (Hubert-Francois Bourgignon, dit). Iconologte par figures, ou Tratte de la science des allegories, emblemes, etc., en 3S0figuresgravies. 4 vols. Paris: Lattre, n.d. [1791]· Guttin, Jacques. Epigone. Histoire du sieclefiitur. Paris: Pierre Lamy, 1659. Guyon, Abbe Claude-Marie. Bibliotheque ecclesiaste par forme destructions dogmatiques et morales sur toute la religion. 8 vols. Paris: Delalain, 1771. Haller, Albrecht von and William Cullen. First Lines of Physiology, Translated from the Corrected Latin Edition. "Printed under the inspection of William Cullen, M.D. and compared with the edition published by H. A. Wrisber, M.D." (1766). 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1786. Hartley, David. Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations. 2 vols. London: S. Richardson, 1749. Herväs y Panduro, Abate Lorenzo. Causas de la revolucion francesa en el αήο 1789 y medios que se han valido para efectuarla los enemigos de la religion y del estado (1807). Selections and preliminary study by Nicolas Gonzalez Ruiz. Madrid: Ediciones FE, 1944. . Viaje estatico al mundoplanetario. 4 vols. Madrid: Aznar, 1793. Horace. Satires and Epistles. Trans. Smith Palmer Bovie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959. Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Ed. Henry D. Aiken. New York and London: Hafner, 1969. Also Ed. Norman Kemp Smith. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1981. . An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Charles W. Hendel. Indianapolis, Ind. and New York: [Bobbs-Merrill] Liberal Arts Press, 1955. Indice ultimo de los librosprohibidosy mandados expurgar. . . Madrid: Sancha, 1790. Journal de Trevoux. See Memoires... Jovellanos, Gaspar M. de. "Elogio de don Ventura Rodriguez" (1785). In Obras, ed. Candido Nocedal, 1:369-90. Bibliotecade Autores Espanoles46. Madrid: Atlas,1963. Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de. "Elogio de Carlos III" (1788). In Obras, ed. Candido Nocedal, 1:311—17. Biblioteca de Autores Espafioles 46. Madrid: Atlas, 1963. . "Memoria sobre educacion publica, ο sea Tratado teorico-präctico de ensenanza" (1802). In Obras, ed. Candido Nocedal, 1:230—67. Biblioteca de Autores Espafioles 46. Madrid: Atlas, 1963. Julian, Anselm. Arte de los suenos, y visiones nocturnas, y juntamente de la fisiognomia

Primary Sources

381

y visiones fantasticas, con su declaration. By Maestro Anselmo Julian, of Leon, 1612. Cited in Index Librorum Prohibitorum (17+7), 1:76. Kant, Immanuel. Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Illustrated by Dreams ofMetaphysics. Trans. Emanuel F. Goerwitz. Ed. Frank Sewall. London: Swan Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, 1900. Knight, Richard Payne. An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus, lately existing at Isernia, in the Kingdom ofNaples... to which is added A Discourse on the Worship ofPriapus, and its Connexion with the mystic Theotyy of the Ancients. London: T. Spillsbury, Snowhill, 1786. La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. Histoire naturelle de l'äme. "Traduite de l'anglais de M. Charp." La Haye: J. Neaulme, 17+5. .L'homme machine. Ed. Paul-Laurent Assoun. Paris: Denoel-Gonthier, 1981. . Venus metaphysique, ou Essai sur l'origine de l'äme humaine. Berlin: Voss, 1752.

Lanz de Casafonda, Mariano, Dialogos de Chindulza. Ed. F. Aguilar Pinal. Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 1972. Le Brun, Pierre. Histoire critique des pratiques superstitieuses. Amsterdam: JeanFrederic Bernard, 1733-36. Le Cat, Claude-Nicolas. Tratte des sensations et des passions en general, et des sens en particulier. Paris: Vallat-La-Chapelle, 1767. Le Lorrain de Vallemont, Abbe Pierre. La physique occulte, ou Tratte de la baguette devinatoire et de son utilite pour la decouverte de sources d'eau, de minieres, des tresors caches, des voleurs et des meurtriersfügitifi. Paris: Anesson, 1693,1696,1709, 1722,1747,1762.

Le Masson des Granges, Abbe Daniel. Lephilosophe moderne, ou L'incredule condamne au tribunal de sa raison (1759). Paris: Despilly, 1766. Lenglet Dufresnoy, Abbe Nicolas. Tratte historique et dogmatique sur les apparitions, les visions, et les revelationsparticulieres. Vol. 1. Paris: Jean Noel Leloup, 1751. Loaisel de Treogate, Joseph-Marie. Dolbreuse. Amsterdam and Paris: Belin, 1783. Luzan, Ignacio de. Lapoetica. Ed. Russell Sebold. Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1977. Malpighi, Marcello. Discours anatomique sur la structure des visceres, sfavoir du foye, du cerveau, etc. Paris: D'Houry, 1683. Masson de Morvilliers. Nicolas. "Espagne." In Encyclopedic methodique, ou par ordre de matteres, vol. 1, sec. "Geographie moderne," 554—68. Paris: Panckoucke and Liege: Plomteux, 1782. Maubert de Gouvest, Jean Henri. [Mr. Μ. B. de G.]. Ecole dugentilhomme. Lausanne: Pierre A. Verney, 1754. Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis Moreau de. Oeuvres. 4 vols. Lyon: Bruyset, 1756. McKenzie, George. Satan's Invisible World Discovered. Edinburgh: P. Anderson, 1780.

Μ. D. C. de l'Academie Fran^aise. Le dicttonnaire des arts et des sciences (1688). New ed. 2 vols. Paris: Rollin Pere, 1732. Melendez Valdes, Juan. Obras en verso. Ed. Juan Polt y Jorge Demerson. 2 vols. Oviedo: Centro de Estudios del Siglo XVIII, 1981,1983. Memotres pour l'Histoire des Sciences et des Beaux Arts. Trevoux.

382

Bibliography

Mercier, Louis-Sebastien. L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante. 2 vols. London: n.p., 1785. Merian, Jean Bernard. Reflexions philosophiques sur la ressemblance. In Choix des memoires et abrege de l'histoire de l'Academie de Berline, 2:1-49. Berlin and Paris: Rozet, 1767. . Sur le probleme de Molyneux. Postscript by Francine Markovits ("Merian, Diderot et l'Aveugle"). Paris: Flammarion, 1984. Moratin, Leandro Fernandez de. La derrota de los pedantes. Ed. John Dowling. Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1973. Morvan de Bellegarde, Abbe Jean-Baptiste. Reflexions sur le ridicule et sur les moyens de l'eviter (1696). Paris: C. Robustel, 1723. Mulot, Francis-Valentin. Le Museum Florence. Vol. 3. Paris: David, 1787. Palomino, Antonio. El museo pictorico y escala optica (1715). Madrid: Aguilar, 1947. Pausanias, ou Voyage historique de la Grece. Translated into French by M. l'Abbe Gedoyn. 2 vols. Paris: F. G. Quillan, 1731. Pinel, Philippe. Tratte medico-philosophique sur l'alienation mentale ou la manie. Paris: Richard, [1797]. Plato. See Dacier. Pluche, Abbe Noel-Antoine. Espectäculo de la naturaleza, vol. 13. Trans. Estevan de Terreros y Pando. Madrid: Gabriel Ramirez, 1755. . "Lettre . . . touchant l'etendue et les bornes de la raison." In Le spectacle de la nature . . . , vol. 1. Paris: V v e Estienne, 1732. Porcel y Salablanca, Jose A. "Cancion heroica." In Poesia del siglo XVIII. Ed. John Polt, 3rd ed., 105—9. Madrid: Castalia, 1986. Proclus. See Taylor, Thomas. Restif de la Bretonne, Nicolas-Edme. La decouverte australe (1776-81). Leipzig and Paris, 1781; ed. Paul Verniere. Paris and Geneva: Slatkine, 1979. Richard, Abbe Jerome. La theorie des songes. Paris: Freres Estienne, 1766. Ripa, Cesare. Iconolojjie. Amsterdam: Timotheus ten Hoorne, 1699. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Julie, ou Entretien sur les romans, and Julie, ou La nouvelle Helotse. Ed. Michel Launay. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1967. . Les reveries du promeneur solitaire. Vol. 1 of Oeuvres completes. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. . Lettressur la vertu. In Oeuvres et correspondance inedites. Paris: Michel-Levy Freres, 1861. Sade, Marquis de. Les infortunes de la vertu. Ed. Beatrice Didier. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Sarmiento, Martin. Sistema de los adornos de escultura delNuevo Real Palacio de Madrid (1743—47). In Opusculesjjallegos sobre Bellas Artes de lossißlosXVIIy XVIII. Ed. F. J. Sanchez Canton. Santiago de Compostela: n.p., 1956. Saxe, Maurice comte de. Les reveries, ou memoires sur l'art de la guerre. 2 vols. The Hague: Pierre Gosse, 1756. Sellent, Agustin. Nacimiento de los serentsimos ss. Infantes ßemelos, y conclusion de la paz. Biblioteca del Palacio, n.d. Cartera 2 (127). Shaftesbury, Lord [Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of]. Second Characters, or

Primary Sources

383

The Language of Forms (1714). Ed. Benjamin Rand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914. Sigaud de la Fond, Joseph Aignan. Dictionnatre des merveilles de la nature. 2 vols. Paris: Hotel Serpente, 1781. Songe de Louis XIV du 22 mots d'aoiit I'an 1706. Jour de la prise de Menin. Cologne: n.p., n.d. (Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris: Lb 3 7 43ii) [Le] songe, ou La conversation a laquelle on ne s'attendpas. Scene critique. Rome: n.p., 1783. Suedenberg, Emmanuel. Le livre des reves. Ed. Regis Boyer. Paris: Berg International, 1985. Sulzer, Johann Georg. "Observations sur les divers etats 011 Fame se trouve en exergant ses facultes primitives, celle d'appercevoir et celle de sentir." In Histoire de l'Academie Royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres, Annee 1763,407—20. Berlin: Haude & Spener, 1770. Taylor, Thomas. The Philosophical and Mathematical Commentaries of Proclus, surnamed Plato's Successor, on the First Book of Euclid's Elements, and his Life by Marinus. Translated from the Greek with a preliminary dissertation on the Platonic doctrine of ideas. 2 vols. London: T. Payne et al., 1788. Thomas, Antoine-Leonard. Essai sur le caractere, les moeurs et l'esprit des femmes dans les dijferents siecles. Paris: Moutard, 1772. Tissot, Samuel Auguste David. Traite des nerfi et de leurs maladies (1778). Vol. 8 of Oeuvres completes. Paris: Sallut, 1813. Torres Villarroel, Diego de. Suenos morales y Barca de Aqueronte. Ed. Jose Maria Altozano. Madrid: Publicaciones Espafiolas, i960. Vallemont. See Le Lorrain de Vallemont. Vaugondy, Robert de. Usages deglobes celestes et terrestres, fait par ordre du Roy. Paris: Antoine Boudet, 1751. Vauvenargues, Luc de Ciapiers, M' s de. Introduction aux connaissances de l'esprit humain. Ed. Jean Dagen. Paris: Flammarion, 1981. Vieussens, Raymond. Histoire des maladies internes. . . . Neurographie. . . . Traite des vaisseaux. 3 vols. Toulouse: J.-J. Robert, 1774-75. Voltaire [Frangois-Marie Arouet]. Correspondence and Related Documents. Ed. Theodore Besterman. Banbury, Oxfordshire: Voltaire Foundation, 1968-77. Vols. 85-135 of The Complete Works of Voltaire /Oeuvres completes de Voltaire, Giles Barber, gen. ed., 238 vols, to date, 1968-. . Dictionnatre philosophique. Ed. Julien Benda and Raymond Naves. Paris: Gamier Freres, 1967. . Essai sur les moeurs. Ed. Rene Pomeau. 2 vols. Paris: Gamier Freres, 1963. . Lettres philosophiques (1734). In Oeuvres completes, ed. Louis Emile Dieudonne Moland, 22:75—187. Paris: Gamier Freres, 1879. — —. Oeuvres completes. Ed. Louis Emile Dieudonne Moland. 52 vols. Paris: Garnier Freres, 1877-85. Young, Edward. Night Thoughts. Ed. Stephen Cornford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. . Night Thoughts, or The Complaint and the Consolation. Illustrated by William

384

Bibliography Blake. Text by Edward Young. Ed. Robert Essick and Jenijoy La Belle. New York: Dover Publications, 1975.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Abecassis, Armand, et al. Sophia et l'ame du monde. Cahiers de l'Hermetisme. Paris: Albin Michel, 1983. Ahsen, Akhter. Psycheye: Self-Analytic Consciousness: A Basic Introduction to the Natural Self-Analytic Images of Consciousness. Eidetics. New York: Brandon House, 1977. Aldridge, A. Owen. Voltaire and the Century of Light. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975. Alkon, Paul. Origins ofFuturistic Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. . "The Paradox of Technology in Mercier's L'an 2440." In Utopian Vision, Technological Innovation, and Poetic Imagination, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn and Reinhold Grimm, 43-62. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätverlag, 1990. Anderson, Wilda. Diderot's Dream. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Andioc, Rene. "Al margen de los Caprichos. Las 'Explicaciones' manuscritas." NRFH 33(1984): 257-84. Angulo Iniguez, Diego. "Las Hihndcras." Archtvo Espanol de Arte 21 (1948): 1—19. . "Las Hilanderas: sobre la iconografia de Aracne." Archivo Espanol de Arte 25 (1952): 67-84· Ault, Donald P. Visionary Physics. Blake's Response to Newton. Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1974. Aymes, Jean Rene. Laguerra de Espana contra la revolucwn francesa, 1793-1795. Alicante: Institute de Cultura "Juan Gil Albert," 1991. Baine, Rodney. Daniel Defoe and the Supernatural. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968. Barber, Benjamin R. "Rousseau and the Paradoxes of the Dramatic Imagination." Daedalus (Summer 1978): 79—92. Barcia, Angel Maria de. Catälogo de la coleccitm de dibujos originales de la Biblioteca National. Madrid: Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos 98, num. 641(1906). Becker, Carl. The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1932. Beriger, Hanno. "Mercier et le 'Sturm und Drang.'" In Louis-Sebastien Mercier, precurseur et sa fortune, ed. Hermann Hofer, 47—72. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1977. Berlin, Isaiah. "The Counter-Enlightenment." In Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Isaiah Berlin. New York: Viking Press, 1980. . "The Divorce Between the Sciences and the Humanities." Salmagundi 27 (Summer-Fall 1974): 9-39. Berthier, Philippe. "Mercier surrealiste?" In Louis-Sebastien Mercier, precurseur et sa fortune, ed. Hermann Hofer, 301—9. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1977.

Secondary Sources

385

Bertrand, J. J. A. "M. Masson." Bulletin Hispanique 24 (1922): 120—24. Besterman, Theodore. "The Real Voltaire Through His Letters." In Voltaire: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. William F. Bottiglia, 31-63. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968. Besterman, Theodore. Voltaire. 3rd ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976. Bewell, Alan J. "A 'Word Scarce Said': Hysteria and Witchcraft in Wordsworth's 'Experiential' Poetry of 1797-1798." English Literary History 53 (1986): 357-90. Bila, Constantin. La croyance a la magic au XVIIIe Steele, en France dans les contes, rowans, ettraites. Paris: Gamber, 1925. Binion, Rudolph. "Notes on RomanticismJournal ofPsychohistory 11 (1983): 43-64. Blazquez Miguel, Juan. Inquisicion y brujeria en la Tecla del siglo xviii. Yecla: La Levantina, 1984. Bocher, Emmanuel. Lesgravuresfranpaises au XVIIIe Steele. 6 vols. Paris: Damascene Morgand and Charles Fatout, 1875-82. Booth, Wayne. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Brehier, Emile. The History ofPhilosophy .Vol. 5, The Eighteenth Century. Trans. Wade Baskin. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Brumfitt, J. H. "Voltaire Historian." In Voltaire: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. William F. Bottiglia, 77-86. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968. Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Trans. John Raffan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985. Caillet, Albert. Manuel bibliographique des sciencespsychiques ou occultes. 3 vols. Paris: L. Dorbon, 1912. Canterla, Cinta. Suenos de un visionario explicados mediante los ensueüos de la metaßsica. Cadiz: Universidad de Cadiz, 1989. Caro Baroja, Julio. Las brujasysu mundo. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1961. . Teatro populary magia. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1974. Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy ofthe Enlightenment. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Chaunu, Pierre. La civilisation de l'Europe des lumieres. Paris: Flammarion, 1982. Cirac Estopanän, Sebastian. Aportacion a la historia de la Inquisicion espanola. Los procesos de hechicerias en la Inquisicion de Costilla Nueva (Tribunales de Toledo y de Cuenca). Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1942. Clayborough, Arthur. The Grotesque in English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Cobb, Richard. "Thermidor or the Retreat from Fantasy." History and Imgination: Essays in Honor of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 272—95. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981. Coirault, Yves. L'optique de Saint-Simon. Paris: Armand Colin, 1965. Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy. Vol. 6, Modern Philosophy, part 1, The French Enlightenment to Kant. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964. Cragg, Gerald. The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648-1789. Baltimore: Penguin Books, i960. Crocker, Lester G. An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth-Century French Thought. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959. .Diderot's Chaotic Order. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974.

j86

Bibliography

. "L'analyse des reves au XVIII e siecle." Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 23 (1963): 271-310. . "Recent Interpretations of the French Enlightenment." In The Present State of French Studies: A Collection of Research Renews, ed. Charles Osburn, 331-69. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1971. . "What Is Modern About the Eighteenth Century?" In The Modernity ofthe Eighteenth Century, ed. Louis T. Milic, 87-92. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 56. Cleveland, Ohio and London: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971. Cueto, Leopoldo Augusto de, ed. Poetas liricos del sigloXVIII. Biblioteca de Autores Espafioles 61. Madrid: Los Sucesores de Hernando, 1921. Darnton, Robert. Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968. Dawson, Virginia. Nature's Enigma. The Problem of the Polyp in the Letters ofBonnet, Trembley and Reaumur. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987. Defourneaux, Marcelin. L'Inquisition espagnole et les livresfranpais au i8e siecle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963. . Pablo de Olavide, ou I'Afrancesado. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959·

Demerson, Georges. Don Juan Melendez Valdes et son temps, 17S4-1S17. Paris: C. Kliencksieck, 1961. Derrida, Jacques. De lagrammatologie. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967. Diaz Plaja, Fernando. La historia de Espana en sus documentos, siglo XVIII. Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Politicos, 1955. Dieckmann, Herbert. "The Transformation of the Concept of Imitation in Eighteenth-Century French Esthetics." In New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange, 49—85. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979. Dimic, Milan. Man andNature. Ed. Robert J. Merrett. Vol. 3. Edmonton, Alberta: Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 198+. Domergue, Lucienne. Censure et lumieres dans l'Espagne de Charles III. Paris: CNRS, 1982. Dowling, John. "The Crisis of the Spanish Enlightenment: Capricho 43 and Goya's Second Portrait of Jovellanos." Eighteenth Century Studies 18 (1985): 331—59. Duchesneau, Francois. La Physiologie des lumieres: Empirisme, modeles, et theories. The Hague: Martinus NijhofF, 1982. Easlea, Brian. Witch Hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980. Engell, James. The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. Faivre, Antoine. L'esoterisme au XVIIIe siecle. Paris: Seghers, 1973. . "Magia Naturalis. Theologie de la lumiere et de Pelectricite dans la 'Naturphilosophie' romantique." In Lumiere et cosmos: Courants occultes de la philosophic de la nature, ed. Antoine Faivre, 191—216. Paris: Albin Michel, 1981. . Mystiques, theosophes et illumines au siecle des lumieres. New York: Georg Olms, 1976.

Secondary Sources

387

Falvey, John. "The Aesthetics of La Mettrie." Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 87 (1972): 397-479. Fernandez-Gonzalez, Angel Raimundo, ed. Feijoo: Teatro critico universal. Madrid: Cätedra, 1983. Ferrer Benimeli, Jose Antonio. Masoneria, iglesia, e ilustracion: Un conflicto ideologicopolttico-religioso. 4 vols. Madrid: Fundacion Universitaria Espaftola, 1977. Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press; New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1989. Fohrmann, Jürgen. "Utopie und Untergang: L-S. Merciers L'an 2400." In Literarische Utopien von Morus bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn and Ulrich Seeber, 105—24. Königstein/Ts.: Athenäum, 1983. Forbes, Τ. R. "The Social History of the Caul." Tale Journal ofBiology and Medicine 25 (1953): 495-508. Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Translated as The Order of Thirds: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1966. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Frankel, Charles. The Faith ofReason. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948. Garcia Camarero, Ernesto and Enrique Garcia Camarero, eds. La polemica de la ciencia espanola. Madrid: Alianza, 1970. Garcia Font, Juan. Historia de la alquimia en Espana. Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1976. Gassier, Pierre and Juliet Wilson. The Life and Complete Work of Francisco Goya. 2nd English ed. New York: Harrison House, 1981. Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment, an Interpretation. Vol. 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Vol. 2, The Sciences of Freedom. 1969. Reprint, New York: Norton, 1977. Ginzburg, Carlo. Batailles nocturnes: Sorcellerie et rituels agraires en Frioul. Paris: Verdier, 1980. Gombrich, Ε. H. "The Dream of Reason: Symbolism in the French Revolution." British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2 (1979): 187-205. Gossman, Lionel. "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale." Forum (Houston) 16, π (1978): 51-61. . French Society and Culture: Background for Eighteenth-Century Literature. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972. . "Voltaire's Charles XII: History into Art." Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 25 (1963): 691—720. Grand-Carteret, John. Les almanachs Jranpais. Biblio-Iconographie, 1600-189S. Paris: Alisie, 1896. Grean, Stanley. Shaftesbury's Philosophy ofReligion and Ethics. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1967. Gudiol, Jose. Goya. Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 1971. Guillaud, Jacqueline and Maurice Guillaud. Goya, 1748-1828: Peinture-DessinsGravures. 13 March—16 June 1979. Paris: Centre Culturel du Marais, 1979. Gusdorf, Georges. Dieu, la nature, l'homme au siecle des lumieres. Paris: Payot, 1972.

388

Bibliography

. Les sciences humaines et lapensee occidental. Vol. 7, La natssance de la conscience romantique au Steele des lumieres. Paris: Payot, 1976. Hafter, Monroe. "Toward a History of Spanish Imaginary Voyages." Eighteenth Century Studies 8 (1975): 265-82. Hagstrum, Jean. The Sister Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Havens, George. The Age ofIdeas. New York: Free Press, 1965. Hazard, Paul. European Thought in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Meridian Books, 1967. Helman, Edith. Jovellanosy Goya.. Madrid: Taurus, 1970. Henningsen, Gustav. El abogado y las brujas: Brujeria vasca e Inquisition espanola. Madrid: Alianza, 198g. Herr, Richard. The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958. Herrero, Javier. Los origenes delpensamiento reaccionario espanol. Madrid: Cuadernos para el Dialogo, 1973. Hill, Emita B. "The Role of 'le monstre' in Diderot's Thought." Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 77 (1972): 149—261. Hippie, W. J. The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesqtte in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957. Hoefer, M. le Dr. Mercier. Nouvelle Biographie Generale depuis les temps les plus recules jusqu'a i860. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1968. Honour, Hugh. The European Vision ofAmerica. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975. Hughes, Pennethorne. Witchcraft. 1952. Reprint Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965. Iehl, Dominique. Preface to "Le grotesque." Special issue of Etudes Germaniques 43 ?I988).

Ilie, Paul. " 'Capricho' / 'Caprichoso': A Glossary of Eighteenth-Century Usages." Hispanic Review 44 (1976): 239-55. . "Concepts of the Grotesque Before Goya." In Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 5, ed. Ronald C. Rosbottom, 185-201. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976. . "The Voices in Candide's Garden, 1755—1759: A Methodology for Voltaire's Correspondence." Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 148 (1976): 37-113. Jacob, Margaret. The Radical Enlightenment. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. Johnson, Dorothy. "Picturing Pedagogy: Education and the Child in the Paintings of Chardin." Eighteenth Century Studies 24 (1990): 47—68. Junquera, Paulina. '"Las aventuras de Telemaco': Tres series de tapices del Patrimonio Nacional." Reales Sitios 14, no. 52 (1977): 45-52. Kayser, Wolfgang. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. 1963. Trans. Ulrich Weisstein. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. King, Lester S. The Road to Medical Enlightenment, 1650-169$. London: Macdonald; New York: American Elsevier, 1970. Klingender, F. D. Goya in the Democratic Tradition. 1948. Reprint New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

Secondary Sources

389

Knowlson, James. Universal Language Schemes in England and France, 1600—1800. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975. Knox, R. A. Enthusiasm. Oxford: Oxford University of Press, 1950. Köpeczi, Bela. "Un scandale des Lumieres: Les vampires." In Themes etfiguresdu stiele des lumieres. Melanges offerts a Roland Mortter, ed. Raymond Trousson, 123—35. Geneva: Droz, 1980. Kouidis, Apostolos P. "The Praise of Folly: Diderot's Model for Le neveu de Rameau." Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 185 (1980): 237-66. Kramnick, Isaac. The Rage ofEdmund Burke. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Krieger, Murray. Theory ofCriticism: A Tradition and Its System. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Lacroix, Paul. "Le baquet de Mesmer." In Le XVIII' Steele: Lettres, sciences, et arts. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1878. Lafarga, Francisco. Voltairey Espana, 1734-1S3S· Barcelona: Edicions de la Universität de Barcelona, 1982. Lafuente Ferrari, Enrique. Los "Desastres de la guerra" y sus dibujos preparatories. Barcelona: Instituto Amatller de Arte Hispänico, 1952. . Goya en sus dibujos. Madrid: Urbion, 1979. Levin, Harry. "The Great Good Place." New York Review, March 6,1980: 47—50. Levine, Joseph M. The Battle ofthe Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. Levitine, George. "Literary Sources of Capricho 43." Art Bulletin 37 (1955): 55—59. . "Some Emblematic Sources of Goyz" Journal ofthe Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 22 (1959): 106-31. Licht, Fred. Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art. New York: Universe Books, 1979. Lopez-Rey, Jose. Goya's Caprichos: Beauty, Reason, and Caricature. 2 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953. Lourtes, F., ed. Kant: Reves d'un visionnatre. Paris: Vrin, 1977. Luanco y Riego, Jose Ramon. La alquimia en Espana. 2 vols. Madrid: Tres, Catorce, Diecisiete, 1980. Majewski, Henry F. "Mercier and the Pre-Romantic Myth of the End of the World." Studies in Romanticism 7 (Autumn 1967): 16-29. . The Pre-Romantic Imagination of L.-S. Mercier. New York: Humanities Press, 1971. Marias, Julian. La Espana posible en tiempo de Carlos III. Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1963. Marino Ferro, Xose Ramon. Satan, sus siervas, las brujas, y la religion del mal. Vigo: Edicions Xereis de Galicia, 1984. Maritain, Jacques. Man and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. Markovits, Francine. "Merian, Diderot et l'Aveugle" (Postscript). In Sur leprobleme deMolyneux, by Jean Bernard Merian. Paris: Flammarion, 1984. Martinez Mata, Emilio. Los "Suenos" de Diego de Torres Villarroel. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1990. Marx, Jacques. "Le concept d'imagination au XVIII c siecle." In Themes etfiguresdu

390

Bibliography

siecle des lumieres: Melanges offerts d des RolandMortier, ed. Raymond Trousson, 147—59. Geneva: Droz, 1980. Mason, Haydn. Voltaire: A Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Mauzi, Robert. L'idee du bonbeur dans la litterature et la penseefranpaisesau XVIII' siede. Paris: Armand Colin, i960. May, Georges. Le dilemme du roman auXVIIIe siecle. New Haven, Conn, and Paris: Yale University Press, 1963. McClelland, I. L. Benito Jeronimo Feijoo. New York: Twayne, 1969. Meyer, Paul H. "Recent German Studies of the Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns in France." Eißhteenth-Century Studies 18 (1985): 383—90. Milner, Max. Lediable. i960. Reprint, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982. . Lafantasmagorie: Essai sur I'optique fantastique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982. Mornet, Daniel. Les sciences de la nature en France au XVIIIe siecle. Un chapitre de l'histoire des idees. Paris: Armand Colin, 1911. Morrissey, Robert J. La reverie jusqu'd Rousseau. Recherches sur un topos litteraire. Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1984. Murray, Margaret A. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. 1921. Reprint Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1971. Nordstrom, Fölke. Goya, Saturn, and Melancholy. Studies in the Art of Goya. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1962. Nunez, Diego y Jose L. Peset. Desde la alquimia al panteismo. Marginados espamles de los siglos 18y 19. Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1983. Oxford Classical Dictionary. Ed. N. G. L. Hammond and Η. H. Scullard, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Pagliaro, Harold E., ed. Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 2. Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972. Paulson, Ronald. Representations of Revolution, 1789-1820. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983. Peers, E. Allison. "The Influence of Young and Gray in Spain." Modern Language Review 21 (1926): 404-18. Pinta Llorente, Miguel de la. Criticay humanism). Madrid: Archivo Agustiniano, 1966. Polt, John H. R. Batilo: Estudios sobre la evolucion estilistica de Melendez Valdes. Oviedo: Centra de Estudios del Siglo XVIII. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. , ed. Poesta del siglo XVIII. 3rd ed. Madrid: Castalia, 1986. Pomeau, Rene. "Pour une biographie de Voltaire." In Themes et figures du siecle des lumieres. Melanges offerts a Roland Mortier, ed. Raymond Trousson, 191-201. Geneva: Droz, 1980. Porter, Roy. The Enlightenment. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1990. Preaud, Maximt Les sorcieres. Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale, 1973.

Secondary Sources

391

Price, Martin. "The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers." Yale Renew 58 (1968-69): 194-213· Radden, Jennifer. Madness and Reason. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985. Reau, Louis. L'artfranpaissur leRhin au XVIIIs Steele. Paris: Champion, 1922. . La gravure en France au XVIIIe Steele: La gramre d'illustration. Paris and Brussels: Editions G. Van Oest, 1928. Roger, Jacques. Les sciences de la vie dans la penseefranpaisedu XVIII' Steele: La generation des anitnaux de Descartes a I'Encyclopedie. Paris: Armand Colin, 1963. Rosen, George. "Forms of Irrationality in the Eighteenth Century." In Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro, 255—88. Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 2. Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Case Western Reserve University 1972. Rothstein, Eric. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 1660-1780. Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Rousseau, George S., "Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility." In Studies in the Eighteenth Century 3: Papers Presented at the Third David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar, Canberra, 1973, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade, 137—57. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1976. Reprinted with postscript in The Blue Guitar (Messina) 2 (1976): 125-53. Saisselin, Remy. The Rule of Reason and the Ruses of the Heart. Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970. Salas, Xavier de. Goya. Barcelona: Compania Internacional Editora, 1980. Salvaggio, Ruth. Enlightened Absence: Neoclassical Configurations of the Feminine. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Sareil, Jean. Essai sur Candide. Geneva: Droz, 1967. Saugnieux, Joel. "Catholicisme eclaire et religiosite populaire. Le culte marial dans l'Espagne du XVIII e siecle." In Culturespopulaires et cultures savantes en Espagne du Mayen Age aux Lumieres. Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1982:113-26. Savigny de Moncorps, V t e de. Les almanachs illustres du XVIII' siecle. Paris: H. Leclerc, 1909. Savoret, Andre. Cahiers de l'hermetisme: Alchimie. Paris: Albin Michel, 1978. Sayre, Eleanor. The Changing Image: Prints by Francisco de Goya. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1974. Scandellari, Simonetta. "La 'Tesi del complotto' nelle Causas de la Revolucion de Francia en el αήο 1789 di Lorenzo Herväs y Panduro." In Apres 89: La Revolution modele ou repoussoir: Actes du Colloque international (14-16 mars 1990), ed. L. Domergue et G. Lamoine, 35-48. Toulouse-Le Mirail: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991. Searle, John. "What Is a Speech Act?" In Language and Social Context, ed. Pier Paolo Giglioli, 136—54. New York: Penguin Books, 1972. Sebold, Russell P. El rapto de la mente: Poeticaypoesta dieciochescas. Madrid: Editorial Prensa Espafiola, 1970. . Trayectoria del romanticismo espanol. Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1983. Sitter, John. Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England. Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 1982.

392

Bibliography

Spacks, Patricia. The Insistence of Horror: Aspects of the Supernatural in EighteenthCentury Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962. . The Poetry of Vision. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967. Spell, J. R. Rousseau in the Spanish World Before 1833. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1938. Stafford, Barbara. Body Criticism: Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. Cambridge, Mass.: ΜΓΤ Press, 1990. . "Conjecturing the Unseen in Late Eighteenth-Century Art." Zeitschriftfür Kunstgeschichte 48, 2 (1985): 329-365. . Symbol and Myth: Humbert de Superville's Essay on Absolute Signs in Art. Cranbury, N.J.: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1979. Starobinski, Jean. "Goya." In Les emblemes de la raison (1973), 123-35. Paris: Flammarion, 1979. .Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l'obstacle. Paris: Plön, 1957. Stock, R. D. The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. Taylor, F. Sherwood. The Alchemists, the Founders of Modern Chemistry. London: H. Schuman, 1951. Tomlinson, Janis A. Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment. New Haven, Conn, and London: Yale University Press, 1992. Torrey, Norman. The Spirit of Voltaire. Oxford: Marston Press, 1963. Tuveson, Ernest Lee. The Imagination as a Means ofGrace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism. Berkeley: University of California Press, i960. Undank, Jack. Diderot: Inside, Outside, andln-Between. Madison, Wise.: Coda Press, 1974.

Varloot, Jean. "Preface" to Buffon: Histoire naturelle, 24-25. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Vartanian, Aram. La Mettrie's "L'homme machine": A Study in the Origins ofan Idea. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, i960. . "The 'Reve de d'Alembert': A Bio-Political View." Diderot Studies 17 (1973): 41-64. Velarde, Julian. "La filosofia de Juan Caramuel." El Basilisco (Madrid) 15 (1983): 10-43· Verniere, Paul. "Un aspect de l'irrationel au XVIII e siecle: La demonologie et son exploitation litteraire." In Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Harold Pagliaro, 289—302. Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 2. Cleveland, Ohio and London: Press of Case Western Reserve University 1972. Viatte, August. Les sources occultes du Romantisme. Illuministne-Theosophie, 1770-1820. 2 vols. Paris: Honore Champion, 1979. Vissiere, Jean-Louis. "L'actualite de Mercier." In Louis-Sebastien Mercier, precurseur etsafortune, ed. Hermann Hofer, 311-27. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1977. Voitle, Robert. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury. 1671-1713. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. Wade, Ira. The Intellectual Development of Voltaire. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969.

Secondary Sources

393

Walker, D. P. The Ancient Theology. Studies in Christian Platonismfromthe Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century. London: G. Duckworth, 1972. . "The Astral Body in Renaissance Medicine." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (1958) 119-33. . Spiritual and Demonic MagicfromFicino to Campanella. London: Warburg Institute, 1958. / Weinbrot, Howard D. "Gray's Elegy: A Poem of Moral Choice and Resolution." In Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," ed. Harold Bloom, 69-82. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psycholtg/y of Transcendence. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. White, Hayden. "The Irrational and the Problem of Historical Knowledge in the Enlightenment." In Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro, 303—21. Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 2. Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972. Wilke, Everett C. Jr. "Mercier's L'an 2440: Its Publishing History During the Author's Lifetime." Harvard Library Bulletin 32 (1984): 5—35. Wilkins, Kay. "Attitudes to Witchcraft and Demonic Possession in France During the Eighteenth CenturyJournal of European Studies 3 (1973): 348-62. . "Some Aspects of the Irrational in Eighteenth-Century France." Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 140 (1975): 107—201. Willey, Basil. The Eighteenth-Century Background: Studies on the Idea ofNature in the Thotight ofthe Period. 1940. Reprint London: Pelican Books, 1972. Wittkower, Rudolf. "Transformations of Minerva in Renaissance Imagery." In Allegory and the Migration of Symbols, 129-42. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1977.

Yates, Frances. TheRosicrudan Enlightenment. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Yolton, John. Perceptual AcquaintancefromDescartes toReid. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. . Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Yve-Plessis, Robert. Essai d'une bibliographicfranfaisemethodique et raisonnee de la sorcellerie et de la possession demoniaque. 1900. Reprint Nieuwkoop, 1971. Zavala, Iris. "Viaje a la cara oculta." Nueva Revista de Filologta Hispanica 33 (1984): 4-33·

Name Index

Abecassis, Armand, 306 η. 22, 325 n.52 Achilles, 188 Acufta y Troncoso, Cosme de, 218η Addison, Joseph, 18, 373 Aesculapius, 39 n. 19, 40η, 344 Aesop, 258 Agrippa, 352 Ahsen, Akhter, 230 n.30 Akenside, Mark, 18,35-36 Alba, duchess of, 104,334 Alciati, Andrea, 50η Aldridge, A . Owen, 194 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d': in Diderot, 280-81; and imagination, 157, 262-65, 270, 274; and concept o f knowledge, 11,16162, 271; and Reason, 109 n.3, 262-65, 266η, 269; mentioned, 2,19, 65,190, 224 n.18, 313 Alexander the Great, 54,55, 201 Alkon, Paul, 185, 231η, 232η Amunarriz y Labrit, Raymundo, 307 n.25 Anderson, Wilda, 78η Angulo Iniguez, Diego, 4 n.4 Apollo, 37,39 n.19 Arachne, 4 n.4, 6, 43 Aranda, conde de, 31,62 Archimedes, 193 Argonauts, 25 n.5, 43 Ariadne, 3, 4 Ariosto, Lodovico, 184 Aristotle, 170 Arnauld, Antoine, 214 n.2 Arteaga, Esteban de, 163—64,168 Assoun, Paul-Laurent, 261η, 311 Athena. See Minerva Ault, Donald P., 18 n.13 Aymar, Jean, 325 Aymes, Jean Rene, 222 n.15

Babbitt, Irving, 146 n.20 Babel, 39 n.20 Bachelier, Jean-Jacques, 35η

Bacon, Francis, 263 Bails, Benito, 166 n.56 Baine, Rodney, 343 Balsamo, Jose, 305, 313, 318 Barahona, meadow of, 104,105 Barber, Benjamin R., 188 n.9 Barcia, Angel Maria de, 316η Bartoli, Pietro, 153 Batteux, Charles, abbe, 162 Baudelaire, Charles, 167, 303, 304 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 163 Becker, Carl, 327 Beguelin, M., 188 n.7, 211 Bekker, Balthazar, 293 Belle-Isle, marechal de, 44 Bellerophon, 143η Bellon de Saint-Quentin, J., 160 n.39, 325, 327, 333, 335, 336, 337, 349 Benandanti, 295 n.7, 347 Beriger, Hanno, 232η Berkeley, George, 150 n.27 Berlin, Isaiah, 81 n.6,119η, 224 Berthier, Pere Guillaume Francois, 119η Berthier, Philippe, 227η Bertrand, J. J. Α., 43 n.32 Besterman, Theodore, 143η, i68,195, 207η Bewell, Alan, 326 n.52 Bila, Constantin, 325 n.52 Binion, Rudolph, 290, n.45 Blake, William, 11,18,190, 221,231,24345, 288 Blazquez Miguel, Juan, 346 n.14 Bocher, Emmanuel, 35η, 44, 242 n.45, 257 n.5, 259 n.13 Bodin, Jean, 295 n.7, 324,328 n.55,336,340η Boehme, Jacob, 306 n.22 Boguet, Henry, 340η Boisard, J. J. F. M., 37 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 42,54 Bonnet, Charles, 8, 310, 313 Booth, Wayne, 102,103 n.22

396

Name Index

Bordeion, Laurent, 293,323-24,333,337 Bordeu, Theophile, 265 Boromini, Francesco, 162 Bosch, Hieronymus, 168 Boudard, Jean Baptiste, 25-31,40, 258, 260,315 Bourgogne, due de, 42 Brahe, Tycho, 312 n.36 Brehier, Emile, 357η Broglie, Victor Francois, due de, 44 Bruhier d'Abalaincourt, Jacques-Jean, 163 Brumifitt, J. H., 205 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc de, 8,14344, 270, 279, 286,306 n.23,308,311, 313,314 Bunyan, John, 82 Burke, Edmund: horror of Chaos, 224-27, 241; and imagination, 223; and monsters, 31,286-89; on Reason, 339η; and sublime, 373; mentioned, 19, 65, 252, 256, 372 Burkert, Walter, 40η Cabanis, Pierre J. G., 131-34 Cabarrus, Francisco de, 86,123,130 Cadalso, Jose: ambiguity, 93-96; antiNewtonian "touchsight," 371; epistemology of madness, 97-109; national decline, 87-92; nocturnal sensibility, 24344; and Young, 242; mentioned, 19, 65, 84,87,148,167,231, 252 Cadet le Jeune, Jean-Marcel, 215η Cagliostro. See Balsamo Caillet, Albert, 325 n.52 Callot, Jacques, 162,163,168 Calmet, Augustin, dom, 61 n.7, 91,106,340, 341-42 Canizares, Jose de, 34s n.io, 346 Canterla, Cinta, 356 n.21 Cafiuelo, Luis Garcia de, 103 n.23, 320,372 Caraccioli, Louis-Antoine: and antideism, 67; on bizarre Reason, 124-29; on hybrid Reason, 59-65; on Reason's language, 75-77; mentioned, 19, 82, 85,167 n.58, 259,303 Caramuel, Juan, 307 Carmona, Manuel Salvador, 43 Caro Baroja, Julio, 295 n.7, 307 n.27,329 n.57 Carpaccio,Vittore, 256 n.5 Carre de Montgeron, Louis-Basile, 344 n.7 Cassirer, Ernst, 197, 214 n.2, 265—67, 269, 362-63

Castilhon, Jean Louis, 137,160 n.40 Caylus, Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubieres, comte de, 32, 37 Cazotte, Jacques, 295 n.7 Ceres, 42 Cervantes, Miguel de, 183,184,185,186, 196,198,199,202, 210η, 324. See also Don Quixote Chardin, Jean-Baptiste Simon, 108η, 257 n-5,259 Charles II, 89 Charles III, 43,49,50,54,56,61,62, 63,84, 86,130 Charles III, archduke, 42 Charles IV, 51, 58, 225 n.22 Charles XII, 197,198 n.24,200, 201, 205 Chaunu, Pierre, 308 Chenier, Andre, 24,274 Cicero, 171 n.63,173, 341 n.3 Clavel, Alfonso, 320 Clayborough, Arthur, 167 n.59 Cobb, Richard, 225 n.22 Coirault, Yves, 289 n.40 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 53 Collins, William, 241 n.41, 242, 373 Colossus, 51,55,225 n.20,264 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, abbe, 67,161, 229 n.27,311 Copernicus, 312 n.36,336 Copleston, Frederick, 14η Cornford, Stephen, 246η Cortes, Geronimo, 307 n.26 Costadau, Alphonse, 19, 325, 326 n.53, 333, 349-51 Cowper, William, 130,241 n.41, 373 Coypel, Antoine, 218η Cragg, Gerald, 66 n.io, 312 n.35 Crebillon, Prosper Jolyot, 138 n.i Creutz, Gustav Filip, comte de, 142,182 Cudworth, Ralph, 217η Cullen, William, 47η, 134 Cyrus, 197 Dacier, Andre, 215η d'Alembert. See Alembert Darnton, Robert, 306, 308, 313 Dawson, Virginia, 352η DefFand, marquise de, 178 Defoe, Daniel, 343 Defourneaux, Marcelin, 44 n.33, 67 n.13 Delaroche, Daniel, 132, 314, 315η, 366

Name Index Delille, Jacques, 366 Delisle de Sales, Jean-B.-Claude, 270,313 Delrio, Martin Anton, 324,340η Demerson, Georges, 52, 55 Denis, Marie-Louise Mignot, Madame, 204, 208 Derrida, Jacques, 115η, 149-51 Descartes, Rene, 144,149,156,175,179,188, 229 n.27,309,310, 364 Desfontaines, Pierre-Francois Guyot, abbe, 167 Desormeaux, Joseph Louis Ripault, 35η Diderot, Denis: on alchemy, 354-55; on the bizarre, 160-61; blindness, 51-52, 359-60,372; on chimera, 140-41; on delirium, 180—81; on dream, 14—16,177; on Minerva and painting, 35-36,43 n.33,44 nn.34-35,45, 65, 78η, painting; on Nature, revolutionary, 305; on philosophical uncertainty, 275; on polymorphosis, 279—81, 285; self-portrait, 190-91; vitalism, 362; mentioned, 2, 9,10,11,19,123,131,132,136, 145,148,190,210, 229 n.27,261, 264, 265, 270, 310, 313,314 Dieckmann, Herbert, 223η Digby, Sir Kenelm, 323 n.48,325 Dobbs, Betty, 18 Domerge, Lucienne, 67 n.13 Don Quixote, 31,63, 98,126-28,147,178-79, 180-212,323,324, 337. See also Quixoticism Dowling, John, 4 n.5, 216 n.6 Doyen, Gabriel-Francois, 33, 36 Dryden, John, 252 Dubois, Guillaume, abbe, 289 n.42 Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste, abbe, 156 Ducheneau, Francois, 18 Duclos, Charles Pinot, 266, 317 Dulac, Alleon, 293 Durameau, Louis-Jacques, 44 n.35,45 Dürer, Albrecht, 24 n.2,108η, 257 Easlca, Brian, 294 n.4 Engell, John, 229 n.27, 363 n.30 Ezekiel, 234 Faivre, Antoine, 325 n.52,360 n.24 Falvey, John, 229 n.27,272—73 Feijoo, Benito Jeronimo, padre, 65, 66 n.n, 67, 75η, 87-91, 93, 99,104, Ιθ6 n.25, 126, 165, 234, 259 n.12 Felibien, Andre, 167

397

Fenelon, Francois de Salignac de La Motte, 41,42 Ferdinand V I , 42 Fernandez de Moratin, Leandro. See Moratin Fernandez de Obecurri, Francisco, 307 Ferrer Benimeli, Jose Antonio, 222 n.15,305 n.21 Ferro, Gregorio, 218η Fielding, Henry, 152 Fish, Stanley, 102 Fleury, Andre Hercule de, cardinal, 210η Fludd, Robert, 306 n.22 Fohrmann, Jürgen, 232η Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 324 Forbes, Τ. R., 297 n.13 Formey, Jean Henri Samuel, no, 270, 293,313 Forner, Juan Pablo, 29η, 43 n.32,345,372 Foucault, Michel, 63,102 n.20,187,189, 192-94,195,196,197,300 Fragonard, Jean Honore, 108η Frankel, Charles, 2,195 Frederick II (the Great), 185, 210, 224 n.18,310 Furetiere, Antoine, 79η Fuseli, Henry, 11,185, 373 Gabalis, comte de, 295 n.7 Galle, Theodore, 257 n.5 Gamaches, Etienne Simon, 321—22,332 Garcia Camarero, Ernesto and Enrique, 43 n.32 Garcia de Canuelo, Luis. See Canuelo Garcia Font, Juan, 307 Garma y Salcedo, Xavier, 41 n.22 Gassier, Pierre, 4 n.5 Gautier, Theophile, 167 Gay, Peter, 11,13-14,148, ι8ιη, 192η, 194, 214 n.2, 218, 264,357η Gibbon, Edward, 214 n.2 Gillot, Claude, 39 n.19,336 Gillray, James, 289 n.43 Ginzburg, Carlo, 295 n.7, 296, 297, 347 Glendinning, Nigel, 242 n.44 Glover, Richard, 78 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 370 Goltzius, Hendrik, 38 Gombrich, Ε. Η., 23η, 25 n.3 Gonzalez, Diego Tadio, 346 Gonzalez Ruiz, Nicolas, 256 n.4, 305 n.20

398

Name Index

Gorgon, 35, 36, +1,42, 218η Gossman, Lionel, 16,190 n.io, 201 n . 2 7 , 206 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jose de: and almanachs, 317; arcane signs in, 219, 223; and Blake, 243—45; and Burke, 288; on blindness, 151-52; and caprice, 163, 214; and chiaroscuro, 236; contrasted to Merrier, 241; in emblematic tradition, 31; 123, 126; and Feijoo, 331; and the Goyesque vision, 148; instinct, 325, 362; and Kant, 363, 365; and liberty, 285—86; in literary tradition, 303-4; mature period, 146; and politics, 17; and "present to the mind," 374; radical representation in, 145; on Reason, 313,368-69; and Romanticism, 46,167, 369; and Sade, 275, 286; selfportrait, 301—2; self-satirized, 82; and Sepia

One,

216-17, 219-21, 241, 300—303;

and Sepia Two, 151,154, 230, 352; on sleep, 129; and supernaturalism, 296,334,34547, 349, 364; and Universal Language, 148,150, 232, 272; mentioned, 146,158, 166,169,192, 213, 225, 228, 252, 284. See also

Black Paintings; Capricho 43; Sepia One; Sepia Two Graciin, Baltasar, 167 Grand-Carteret, John, 306 n.23, 317 n.44 Gravelot (Hubert-Francois Bourgignon), 24, 25 n . 3 , 40, 286,

160,

213η,

257,

258, 26ο,

303

Gray, Thomas, 83 n.9, 239 Grean, Stanley, 146 n.22 Greene, Donald, 242 n.41 Greive, Artur, 79η Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 257 n.5 Gudiol, Jose, 4 n.5 Guillaud, Jacqueline and Maurice, 112 n.5 Guillemardet, Ferdinand, 216 n.5 Gusdorf, Georges, 18, 66, 67, 369, 370 n.35 Gutenberg, Johann, 55 Guttin, Jacques, 39 n.20, 370 Guyon, Claude-Marie, abbe, 316, 333, 349— 50, 351, 352-53 Hafter, Monroe, 319η Halle, Noel, 33,35η, 36,44 Haller, Albrecht von, 47η, 133 Hamann, Johann Georg, 11 Hammond, Ν. G. L., 39 n.19 Harris, James, 230 n.33

Hartley, David, 133 Havens, George, 194 Hazard, Paul, 192-93,194, 264, 267 Helman, Edith, 104η, 122,163 n . 4 9 ,

n.20 220η,

286 η.3ό, 298η, 346 n.n

Helvetius, Claude-Adrien,

67,130,170,

270,327

Henningsen, Gustav, 347 n.14 Hermes, 39 n . 1 9 , 3 4 4 Herr, Richard, 225 n.21 Herrero, Javier, 49 n.38, 70η, 224 n.i8 Hervis y Panduro, Lorenzo, abate, 222 η.15, 256, 305—6, 318-21, 337 Hill, Emita, 281η Hippie, W. J., 271η Hobbes, Thomas, 130 Hoefer, M. le Dr., 228 Hogarth, William, 11, 336 Holbach, Paul Henri Dietrich, baron d \ 123, 261,

268,

270,

327

Homer, 37,193 n . 1 4 Honour, Hugh, 290 Hughes, Pennethorne, 295 n.7 Horace, 106,107 Hume, David: and cosmology, 219; on discontinuity, 8; on imagination, 123,135; on the irrational, 355, 37; on mental energy, 233η; on Reason, 1 , 1 4 , 1 0 8 , 1 0 9 n . 3 , 2 2 1 22, 363; skepticism of, 265; mentioned, 65, 66,142,182

Huygens, Christian, 319 Ilie, Paul, 88n, 163 n . 4 8 , 1 6 7 Iriarte, Tomas de, 258 Isla, Jose Francisco de, 167

n . 5 9 , 1 9 4 n.18

Jacob, Margaret, 18, 294,306 n . 2 4 , 3 5 6 n . 2 0 Jacquin, Armand-Pierre, abbe, 155 Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier de, 43 n . 3 3 , 1 5 5 Johnson, Dorothy, 108η Johnson, Samuel, 65,188 n . 7 , 240, 251η Jollain, Nicolas-Rene, 108η Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de: on genius, 166 n . 5 5 ; mentor of Melendez, 48,52,54, 55; and Minerva, 51; opposes materialism, 123; persecuted, 49; on policy, 50; portrait of, 4, 33,44, 61, 81,109-10, 216-19, 245, 368, 370; and "sons of Minerva," 43, 86; mentioned, 65,67 Juan, Jorge, 120

Name Index

399

Julian, Anselm, 333

Lenglet Dufresnoy, Nicolas, abbe, 340,

J u n o , 360

34m, 364 L e Prince, Jean-Baptiste, 334 Leventhal, Herbert, 18 Levesque de Pouilly, Louis-Jean, 270 Levin, Harry, 289 Levine, Joseph M . , 24 n.2,223 Levitine, George, 24 n.2, 255,259 Lewis, M . G . , 59 n.2 Licht, Fred, 286 Ligne, Prince de, 271, 273 Limiers, Henri Philippe de, 218η Linnaeus, Carolus, 308 Loaisel de Treogate, Joseph-Marie, 269 n.23 Locke, John, 108η, 1 2 6 , 1 5 0 , 1 5 1 , 1 7 2 , 1 7 4 , 1 7 5 ,

Junquera, Paulina, 4 2 n.26 Jupiter, 215η

K a n t , Immanuel, 19, 66, 2 7 4 , 3 3 9 , 3 4 9 , 356-66 Kayser, Wolfgang, 167 n.59 K i n g , Lester, 325 n.51 Kircher, Athanasius, 307,319,325 Klingender, F . D . , 28η K n i g h t , Richard Payne, 215η K n o w l s o n , James, 230 n.33 K n o x , R . Α . , 139 n.5,145 n.19 Köpeczi, Bela, 61 n.7 Kouidis, Apostolos P., 160 n.41 Kramnick, Isaac, 224 Krieger, Murray, 140

Labat, Jean-Baptiste, abbe, 59 n.2 L a C o n d a m i n e , Charles Marie de, 120, 186, 208 Lacroix, Paul, 316η, 317,318 Ladurie, L e Roy, 347 L a f a r g a , Francisco, 67 n.13 L a Fontaine, Jean de, 83 n.9,169,258 Lafuente Ferrari, Enrique, 304 n.18 L a Mettrie, Julien Offray de: and cryptomaterial " m i n d , " 3 1 0 - 1 1 , 3 6 1 ; on delirium, 1 3 2 , 1 3 3 , 1 3 5 , 1 3 6 ; on imagination, 229 n.27, 272-73, 274; and Reason, 268,327; as Sade's precursor, 261; as Voltaire's source, 169; mentioned, 6 7 , 1 2 3 , 1 9 0 , 2 7 0 , 3 1 4 , 3 5 8 Lancre, Pierre de, 340η L a o c o o n , 146 Lasterra, Christophoro, 328 n.55 L a w , William, 57, 242 n.42 L e B r u n , Pierre, 316, 323 n.48, 325, 333, 334-35, 349 L e C a t , Claude-Nicolas, 131,361 Leeuwenhoek, A n t o n van, 310 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, baron von, 6 , 1 3 , 1 6 , 6 7 , 1 4 7 , 1 4 9 , 214 n.2, 230 n.33, 321, 364 L e Lorrain de Vallemont, Pierre, abbe, 292, 312, 323 L e Masson des Granges, Daniel, abbe, 19, 68-77, 82, 85 Lemery, Louis, 161 n.43

326, 373 L o p e de Vega, Felix, 303 Lopez-Rey, Jose, 84η, ii2 n.5, 255 n.2, 259 Lorrain, Claude, 38 Louis X I V , 4 1 , 4 2 Louis X V , 218η, 334 Luanco y R i e g o , Jose R a m o n , 307 n.25, 325 n.52 Luzän, Ignacio de, 1 3 0 , 1 6 6 n.53,167 Mably, Gabriel Bonnet de, abbe, 270 Maintenon, Madame de, 4 2 n.25 Maillet, Benoit de, 279,308,313 Majewski, Henry F . , 230, 231 Malebranche, Nicolas de, 1 4 4 , 1 7 1 n . 6 3 , 1 7 2 , 175,188,340,352, 364 Malpighi, Marcello, 3, 23, 310 Mannheim, Karl, 288 Marchena, Jose, abate, 222 n.15, 225 Margarite of Austria, 112 n.5 Marias, Julian, 370 n.36 Marie de France, 258 Marie de Medici, 41, 218 Marino Ferro, Xose R a m o n , 260 n.15, 296 n.io Markovits, Francine, 151 n.29 Marmontel, Jean Francois, 139,145 n.19, 157, 202 Mars, 36 Martinez de Pasqualis, Jacques, 318 Martinez Mata, Emilio, 113 n.8 Marx, Jacques, 229 n.27 Mary. See Virgin Mary Mason, Haydn, 194 Masson de Morvilliers, Nicolas, 43 n . 3 2 , 1 0 1

4-00

Name Index

Maubert de Gouvest, Jean Henri, 526 Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis Moreau de, 8,138, 279,293, 296 Mauzi, Robert, 262, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 273, 27+, 275 May, Georges, 155 Mayans y Siscar, Gregorio, 167 McClelland, I. L., 75η McKenzie, George, 343 Melendez Valdes, Juan, 49-56 Mendelssohn, Moses, 363 n.29 Mengs, Rafael, 167 Mercadier, Guy, 257 n.6 Mercier, Louis-Sebastien, 58-59, on imagination, 222; 227-41, 373; mentioned, 19, 80,178, 213, 221, 223 Mercury, 319 Merian, Jean Bernard, 151 n.29, 229 Merlin, 336 Mesmer, Franz, 11, 306, 308, 313, 316-17, 318, 366 Meyer, Paul Η., 223η Milner, Max, 297 n.12 Milton, John, 242 n.43 Minerva: aegis of, 25, 31, 35—36; in Antiquity, 35, 38, 39; and the arts, 33, 36-37; betrayed, 57; bipartite character of, 36; and blindness, 360; civic viritues of, 4 9 51; feminized, 36-37,38,41,51; in fable, 37; garments of, 35; Hermetic, 370; hypothesis concerning, 24, 31-32,45, 367, 368; iconology of, 25; and language, 37, 374; as Magus, 39,370; masculinized, 38; metamorphic nature of, 38; in Melendez, 49-56; as Minerva-Medica, 39,334; multiple roles, 39-45, 368, 370; owl of, 24 (see also owl); parodied, 57; and Plato, 10, 215η; role in politics and history, 41, 44,49; shield of, 33, 218; statuette of, in Goya, 216-19; symbolism of, 3, 6, 23, 31, 33-36; synthesizing power of, 54,56; and tactile sensibility, 243; temple of, 19,39, 4 2 , 4 3 , 4 4 , 4 8 - 5 6 , 6 6 ; traits linked to, 53; transcendent meaning of, 10, 23 Minotaur, 6 Molyneux, William, 151 Montaigne, Michel de, 138 n.i Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 59 n.2, 65, 74, 91, 98, 266, 372 Moratin, Leandro Fernandez de, 80, 83, 84—87,104η, no, 116,313,345,346

Moreau de Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis. See Maupertuis Morel, Jean-Marie, 273, 274 Mornet, Daniel, 293 n.i, 312 Morrissey, Robert, 79, 247 Morvan de Bellegarde, Jean-Baptiste, abbe, 159 n.37 Mourgues, Michel, 158 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 256 Mulot, Francois-Valentin, 39 n.19 Murray, Margaret Α., 295 n.7 Napoleon. See Bonaparte Needham, John Turberville, 310 Neptune, 36 Newton, Isaac, 18,54,188,204,243,287, 372 Nicolson, Marjorie, 372 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 276, 282, 285 Noailles, Maurice, due de, 289 n.42 Nollet, Jean-Antoine, 222 n.15, 293 Nordström, Fölke, 24 n.2, 255 n.2 Nüfiez, Diego, 325 n.52 Nynauld, I. de, 340η, 341 Olavide, Pablo de, 29, 31, 43 n.33, 49,123, 292-93, 296 Orleans, Philippe, due d', 218 n.9 Ovid, 169 Pagliaro, Harold E., 11 Palomino, Antonio, 166,168 Pamela, 208,211 Pandora, 37,38 Paris, Monsieur de, 344 Paulson, Ronald, 225 n.21, 286, 289, 290,336 Pausanias, 40 Peacham, Henry, 24 n.2 Peers, E. Allison, 242 n.44 Pernetty, Antoine-Joseph, dom, 313 Peset, Jose, 325 n.52 Peter the Great, 205, 206 Phidias, 39η, i68 Philip V , 4 1 , 4 3 Philip of Anjou, 42 Phlegethon, 225 n.20 Picart, Bernard, 159 n.38, 218η Pinel, Philippe, 134, 366 Pinta Llorente, Miguel de la, 30η Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 167 Plato, 54, 336. See also Neoplatonism Pliny the Elder, 336

Name Index Pluche, Noel-Antoine, abbe, 119-23,125,222 n.15,274 Pocock, J. G . Α., 3i n.8 Polt, John H . R . , 42 n.27,50η, 51,55 Pomeau, Rene, 334, 335 n.6o, 336, 337 Pope, Alexander, 74,188, 242 n.43, 243, 264, 266 Porcel y Salablanca, Jose Α., 42 n.27 Porta, Giambattista della, 340η Porter, Roy, 190 n.n Poseidon, 25 n.5 Preaud, Maxime, 334, 335 n.6o, 336, 337 Prevost, Antoine-Fran^ois, abbe, 274 Price, Martin, 242 n.43, 243, 348 Proclus, 215η, 2i7n Proteus, 38 Punchinello, 178 Pythagoras, 319 Quevedo, Francisco de, 167, 257 n.6 Rabelais, Francois, 202 n.29 Racine, Jean Baptiste, 138 n.i Radden, Jennifer, 102 n.20 Raphael (Raffaello Santi), 153,162 Reau, Louis, 39 n.19 Reaumur, Rene-Antoine Ferchault de, 310, 311 Reid, Thomas, 214 n.2 Restif de la Bretonne, Nicolas-Edme, 2S7 n.5,313,314 Ribera, Jose de, 108η Richard, Charles-Louis, 222 n.15 Richard, Jerome, abbe, 47η, 364 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, due de, 208, 212 Ripa, Cesare, 2 4 , 1 6 0 , 213η, 214 n.3, 255, 259 Robespierre, Maximilien Francois de, 225 η.22 Robinet, Jean Baptiste, 313 Rochester, John Wilmot, earl of, 253 Rodriguez Mofiino, Antonio, 257 n.6 Roger, Jacques, 66, 67,161 n.43, 306 n.22, 308, 309, 310, 327 Rorty, Richard, 150 n.27 Rosa, Salvator, 146,152,166,334,335 Rosen, George, 12 Roslin, Alexandre, 44 Rothstein, Eric, 251η Rousseau, George S., 18,349 n.17 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: and chimera, 80,

401

141; compared with Goya's dreamer, 57, 79,82; compared with visionary Mercier, 237; and Don Quixote, 192; on fables, 127; and imagination, 188-89, 229 n.28; on language, 149—50; and rational sentiment, i8in, 262, 269; on Reason, 268; on science, 123, 292; mentioned, 2 , 1 4 6 , 1 9 0 , 224 n.18, 274 Rubens, Peter Paul, 38,41, 218 Sade, comte Donatien Alphonse Francois, marquis de: relativistic energy of 45; and teratogenesis of rational values, 114 n.io, 275-85; and moral Unreason, 192, 256; mentioned, 19,73,261,303,370 Saint Augustine, 352 Saint-Aubert, Antoine-Fran^ois, 334-35, 336 Saint-Aubin, Augustin de, 32, 33,35η, 3 7 , 4 4 , 242, 259 η. 13 Saint-Hyacinthe, Themiseul de, 268 Saint-Martin, Louis-Claude de, 306 n.22 Saint-Maur, chevalier de, 318 Saint-Quintin. See Bellon de Saint-Quintin Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, due de, 289 Saisselin, Remy, 156,158, 223η, 229 n.27 Salas, Xavier de, 345 n.9 Salvaggio, Ruth, 294 Samaniego, Felix, 258 Samuel, 334 Sarmiento, Martin, 165 Saturn,319 Saugnieux, Joel, 66 n.io, 343 Saul, 334, 335 Savigny de Moncorps, vte de, 317 n.44 Savoret, Andre, 326 n.52 Saxe, Maurice, comte de, 8 0 , 1 1 7 - 1 9 , 1 2 1 , 123, 271 Sayre, Dorothy, 24 n . 2 , 3 2 , 1 1 2 n.5,255 n.2 Scandcllari, Simonetta, 256 n.4 Schwab, Richard, 266η Scudery, Madeleine de, 154,161 Scullard, Η . H . , 39 n.19 Searle, John, 103 n.22 Sebold, Russell P., 52 n.41,53 n.42 Sellent, Agustin, 42 n.29 Servet, Miguel, 204 Shaftesbury, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of, 145-54,168 Shakespeare, William, 156, 373 Sigaud de la Fond, Joseph Aignan, 313 Sitter, John, 242, 251η

402

N a m e Index

Smart, Christopher, 241 n . 4 1 , 3 7 3 Smollet, Tobias, 152 Spacks, Patricia, 241 n . 4 1 , 2 4 2 , 373 Spell, J. R., 67 n.13 Stafford, Barbara, 12,139 n . 6 , 1 4 7 n . 2 4 ,

230

n . 3 3 , 237η, 356 η . 2 θ

Starobinski, Jean, 229 n.27, 255, 276 Sterne, Laurence, 152, 373. See also Pamela Stock, Robert D., 306 n.24 Suetonius, 340 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 270,352η, 363 n . 2 9 Swammerdam, Jan, 310 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 221, 274,303,305, 308, 317, 349, 356-57, 360, 364 Swift, Jonathan, 294 n.6, 348 Swinden, Tobias, 328 n.55 Tacitus, 340 Tardieu, Pierre Francois, 218η Taylor, F. Sherwood, 306 n.22 Taylor, Thomas, 217η, 326 n.52, 344 n.8 Teiresias, 360 Terrasson, Jean, abbe, 267 Tetens, Johann Nicolas, 363 n.29, 364 Themis, 44 Theseus, 3 Thomas, Antoine-Leonard, 37,142η, 361 Thomson, James, 241 n.41, 373 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista, 163,166 Tintoretto, II (Jacopo Robusti), 38 Tiresias. See Teiresias Tissot, Samuel Auguste David, 138,314, 315η,

366

Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), 41 n.22 Tomlinson, Janis, 24 n.i, 81 n . 7 , 1 0 9 n . 5 , 286,

370

Torres Villarroel, Diego de, 260,

307,

320,

n . 2 , 216

n.36 14,113,167,257,

338

Torrey, Norman, 195 Tournefort, 341 Trembley, Abraham, 310 Tuveson, Ernest Lee, 373 Ulloa, Antonio de, 120 Undank, Jack, 275 n.29 Valmire (Pierre-Louis Sissous), 267 n.21 Van der Straet, Jan, 257 n.5 Van Lennep, Jacques, 4 n.3 Van Loo, Michel, 108η

Varloot, Jean, 314η Vartanian, Aram, 305, 361 n.27 Vasse, Louis-Claude, 35 Vaughan, Thomas, 306 n.22 Vaugondy, Robert de, 292 Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, marquis de, 267 n . 2 1 , 3 6 3

Vayrac, Jean de, abbe, 59 n.2 Velarde, Julian, 307 n.26 Velazquez, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y, 4 n.4,112 nn.5-6

Venus, 37,38,52 Vernet, Joseph, 35η, 372 η.39 Verniere, Paul, 295 n.7, 313 Veronese, Paolo, 38 Viatte, Auguste, 297 n.12 Vico, Giovanni Battista, 12,13 Vieussens, Raymond, 133 Virgin Mary, 38, 41, 343 Vissiere, Jean-Louis, 232η Voitle, Robert, 146 n.23 Voiture, Vincent, 147 Volland, Sophie, 141,191 Voltaire (Francis Marie Arouet): and Callot, 162,168; and caprice, 159; on chimera, 141-43; character of, 194-95; and Don Quixote, 182-84,196-212; on dream, 173-77; on Enthusiasm, 139-40; and the grotesque, 168-71; irrationalist vocabulary of, 154-58; letters by, 179,181,189; on madness, 294; and monsters, 31; and nonrational thought, 178-82,189, 373; and Reason, 194-95; on the soul, 172-73; on supernaturalism, 296,315,341, 344,346; mentioned: 2,10,19, 20, 21,44,59 n . 2 , 6 2 , 65, 67, 69, 71, 88,120,124,127,145 n . 1 9 , 148,156,161, 224 n . 1 8 , 229 n . 2 7 , 260, 261, 274, 324, 373 Vulcan, 37,38,215η

Wade, Ira, 171 n . 6 3 , 1 7 2 , 1 8 8 , 2 9 4 n.5 Walker, D. P., 18, 326 n.52 Watteau, Jean Antoine, 33,225 n . 2 2 Weinbrot, Howard, 239, 251η Weiskel, Thomas, 271η White, Hayden, 12-13 Wilke Jr., Everett C., 232η Wilkins, John, 230 n.33 Wilkins, Kay, 317, 329 Willey, Basil, 145 n.20

Name Index

403

Wilson, Juliet, 4, n.5 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 163 Winters, Yvor, 242 n.41 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 106 Wittkower, Rudolf, 38,41 n.22 Wolff, Christian, 364 Wordsworth, William, 326 n.52

Young, Arthur, 59 n.2 Young Edward: on chimera, 140; use of dream, 241; and Goya, 231, 288; and fancy, 234; his influence in Europe, 242; his visionary Reason, 244-52; mentioned, 11, 1 9 , 1 4 1 , 1 9 2 , 221, 223, 373 Yve-Plessis, Robert, 326 n.52

Yates, Frances Α., 305 n.2i, 306 n.24,356 n.20 Yolton, John, 150, 214 n.2, 311 n.31

Zavala, Iris, 307 n.25 Zevallos, Fernando de, 66 η. 11, 222 n.i5

Subject Index

Absolute. See Ideality abyss, 51-53,54, 55, 179, 219, 252, 271, 319· See also disorder aegis, 25,31, 35-36 aether, 245, 320, 321,340,350, 372. See also animal spirits alchemy, 306-7,354-56 allegory: for art, 38; for error, 55; historical, 218 n, 315; for intuitive knowledge, 217, 298; moral, 4 0 , 4 1 , 4 5 , 1 6 0 ; political and social, 42, 44; for progress, 53,54; for science, 14—15, 264; for sight, 259; 25, 54 almanachs. See iconology ambiguity: satirical, 9 0 - 9 6 ; 69, 72,119, 188-91,196, 203 Ancient Philosophy, Theology. See Hermeticism Ancients and Moderns, 223 animal spirits, 131,133,136,143, 525,348-49, 351, 366. See also aether bats: ambiguous meaning of, 61,69, 96, 106,115; analogous to social ideas, 58; and demons, 346; as emblem o f Nature, 73; metamorphosed from owls, 57,60,63; o f Minerva, Ch.2; as symbol: o f ambiguity, 96,119, 219; o f anarchy, 220; o f instinct, 73, 242, 296, 316, 371; and Unreason, 68-69, 214-15 beauty, 140,141,146 n.22,152,164, 224 bizarre, 71,72,122-29,159-66, 337 biology, 72,84,98,104,131,134,304-15, J6i. See also neurophysiology Black Paintings, 84,104, 331,347 blindness: and cognition, 125,151—52,179; o f masses, 45,52; moral, 76, 84, 86,277,282; o f Reason, 53,54,56,69,180, 268,359. See also light brain: o f dreamer, 113; physiology of, 47η, I3I-I34,136,16i, 245, 246, 3 " , 313 n.37, 348, 349, 350-5I, 364, 366, 374

caduceus, 39 Caprice: 159—66; as art o f seeing, 91, 214, 302; as derangement, 98; as mental illness, 101-2; among noblemen, 101; in the state, 226; universal, 275, 277, 279; use of, ch. 4 - 5 passim; 72 Capridio 4-3- broken harmony in, 6, 8, 43; chiaroscuro in, 239, 241; contemporary glosses of, 122, 259, 301; diverse meanings of, 45-47, 286-87, 288, 299, 345, 349, 367, 369; and dream, 4 , 4 6 , 2 3 6 ; emblematic meaning of, 24, 27, 258, 287; hermetic ambience of, 84,108; inscription in, 8, 32, 45-48,113, Π4,115,122,163, 213, 237, 241; monsters in, 31, 284 (see also fanaticism, monsters); ontic realms of, 301; as paradigmatic statement, 17, 23, 24, 33, 35, 213, 291, 294, 345; its place in the set o f Caprichos, 84,298-99, 304; and sleep, 4 6 47, 87,122,129; and sleeping figure, 81-83, 108,112,115, 213-14, 299,301-2; social context of, 32,108, 295; spatial meaning in, 99,113, 297; stylistic economy of, n o ; unresolvable complexity of, 6, 8,112, 21314, 258, 260, 291, 317. See also bats; cats; G o y a ; owls; Sepia One; Sepia Two caricature. See satire cats, 114,253-61,285-88,295, 296,304,307, 309-10,340. See also Capricho 43 Catholic Enlightenment. See Enlightenment Chain o f Being, 17, 224, 280, 281. See also continuity Chaos, 19,21,53,54,56,64, 73,100,106, 115,152,161,180, 221, 225, 227, 241, 242, 261, 265,275 n.28, 288, 291,371. See also Disorder chiaroscuro, 23, 235,236,237-38,240-41,261 chimeras, ch. 5 passim; 70, 76, 78, 80,124, 126-27,138-44, 232,357,360 Christian Enlightenment. See Enlightenment

4o6

Subject Index

church, 41, 60, 66, 88, 225, 298, 326, 32833, 343

classification, 8-9, 63—64,153, 280, 326—28, 344, 374

cock, 39 cognition: absolute, 240, 244,352,374; and consciousness, 359; and discontinuity, 23,374; and dream, 230, 233, 352; and fantasy, 187-88; and imagination, 363; and language, 271; and nonrational microstructure, 195-96; and nonrational thought process, 13, ch. 6, 271-73, 349,371; occult forms of, 298, 302, 307, 312; process of, 16, 72, 95-99,100,102-7,125,151-52, 171,173-74,176-77, 229, 310-11, 352, 374; spiritualist 321. See also knowledge; microstructure; touchsight; truth-statements continuity, 2-3,15-17, 64,136,220, 267 n.20, 298, 313, 348,352. See also Chain of Being; Ideality Counter-Enlightenment, 119η, 190 Delirium: and imagination, 130-36,348; physiology of, 131,181,361; of Reason, 2 9 32, 98-99, 368; in social context, 28—29; and spirit, 129; 52,57, 69,70,72,319; and wisdom, 269 discontinuity: in Capricho 43, 8—11; cognitive, 23, 267 n.20,358,374; and Minerva, 3; of Nature and Reason, 2, 62; of the polymathic mind, 203, 207; of spirit and Reason, 340; as problem, 16,17, 22, 300, 352,354; as theme, 9 - 1 0 ; threat of, 225, 226, 281. See also anarchy; Chaos; labyrinth disorder: and anarchy, 224; cosmic, 56, 227, 280, 282; epistemological, 100—101; and incongruity, 16; as method, 192; moral, 279-80; and the novel, 155; ontological, 369; order as result of, 49; order as source of, 161; philosophical, 64, 70, 94; political, 289; 53,123; threat of, 225, 226, 281. See also Chaos; labyrinth; order; Unreason Divinity. See God dogs, 256-57 dream: art of, 333; bicameral, 113,300; in Blake's drawings, 244-45; and caprice, 166; as key to cognition, 174-75, 372, 374; and disproportion, 153; dualism redefined by, 351; emblem of, 160; " g o o d " and "bad," 50,146, 248, 250; and imagi-

nation, 210, 224, 230, 236; and irrational forces, 114; and language, 236, 240, 374; literary, 14-15, 320; of Minerva, 36; and nightmare, 45, 97; ontologically independent, 171,173-74, 235, 236, 295-97; phenomenology of, 247-48; physiological origin of, 175,176; in poetry, 50-51; polarized powers of, 241; and Reason, 46-48, 123-24,245, 247-48,321,352; related to delirium and madness, 132—33,136,175, 177; and reve, reverie, songe, sueno, 78-79, 100,119, 247, 274; satirical, 95; and sensory perception, 107, 234, 237,250,364-65; in Sepia One, 216-17; and somnambulism, 157; and soul, 161, 297; and Swedenborg, 356; symbol for, 315; and truth, 97,128,135, 234-35, 247-50,338; of verbal ambiguity, 94; and vision, 128, 232, 294, 320, 364—65; and well-being, 274 dualism: and animism, 310,337; dualities harnessed in, 44; epistemological, 290, 297, 358; matter-spirit, 348, 351; and mindbody problem, 3 , 2 1 , 4 0 , 3 0 0 , 3 0 9 - 1 0 , 3 3 7 , 340, 366, 374; and monist psychology, 272-73; resolved, 352; and scientific laws, 347; and "sensation-dreamer," 364-65; subject-object, 296-359; of universal values, 53 dystopia, 48,58,227, 241,369 ecstasy, 131,140,142, 319, 320. $te also transport eidesis, 14, 230, 236, 373 electricity, 54-55, 59 emblems: historical usages of, 24-25, 41, 50, 256-57, 285-86, 315; and language, 149, 154; Minerva as, 6; rational, 57; for Reason, 276; and sciences, 40; for sleep, 160; for superstition, 315; tombstones as, 239; untraditional use of, 31, 255, 257-59 Encyclopedic, 11,35,36,43,53,56, 67, 79, 80, 85, 86,116,123,143,155,161,162,181, 224, 226, 262-63, 267 n.20, 281,312,340,354-56 energy: biological, 305, 309-10, 235; intangible, 309, 314; irrational, 21, 69, 296, 99, 303,304, 333; and life force, 338; of mind, 233, 266, 362; of Minerva, 53; transcendent, 250. See also instinct Enlightenment: Catholic Enlightenment, 69, 77, 79,119, 348; Christian Enlight-

Subject Index enment, 48, 60, 66-68, 70, 77-79, 83, 89,104,107,116,119,190, 215,216, 218, 223, 226, 234,330,367,370; continuity and fragmentation in, 6 , 1 0 - 1 1 ; Counterrational, 119η, 123, ΐ9θ, 2i6, 224; and dualist sensibility, 366; heterogeneous, 192-93; 134,138-40,142,145 n.19,158,213; irrationality in, 11,13-19, 275, 290, 308, 312, 362-63,369-70; pagan, 218; thought process of, 187,196-97, 202, 212, 266 Enthusiasm, 134,138-40,142,145 n.19,158, 269-70, 345, 348-49, 355 exaltation. See ecstasy extravagance, ch. 5 passim exaggeration. See hyperbole fables, 127,155,156,169, 258, 282-83,303 faith, 2, 66-67, 71, 75,135, 219, 221, 222, 251-52,319 fanaticism, 51,53,55,59, 60, 61, 69, 75, 77, 78, 8l, 83, I43n, 169, 170, 202 n.28, 294, 341, 347

fantasia. See imagination fancy. See imagination feelings, 12-14, 74, 242, 262-63, 267-68, 270,363 France, 137. See also Spain freedom, 61,115, 220, 225, 246, 257, 258, 281, 285, 303, 304, 367, 369 Freemasonry, 18, 219 n.io, 221, 256, 305-06, 308, 317, 318, 356 French Revolution, 17, 31, 51,52, 53, 223, 225, 227, 286, 287—88, 290, 321, 337 genius, 118,140,166 Germany, 58, 228 gigantism, 156 God, 142,160,170,173,176, 215η, 282, 296, 3IO-II, 320, 337 graphesis, 115 grotesque, ch. 5 passim, 88, 89, 93,128, 152-53, 241, 289 harmony. See order Hermeticism, 18, 23, 305-6, 316, 318, 327, 340, 344, 355-56, 360-61 history: erased in Goya, 112; as a fixation, 101; and historiography, 89-90,104,156, 205—6; indeterminate, 200—201, 207;

407

as madhouse, 99; paradox of, 144-45; visionary, 228, 231 homosemanticism, 189 hybridization, 57,153 hyperbole, 57,145-54 iconology: and almanachs, 317; civic iconography and, 41-45; continuity of, 24; discontinuity of, 41, 255, 258, 260; genres of, 38; and iconography of superstition, 333-37; and science, 316-17 Ideality: and absolute knowledge, 38,240, 244,250, 359; and harmony, 56, 70; nameless, 281; the One as the Many, 23, 275-76, 278—79, 290, 299; and organic whole, 84, 226—27; and synthesizing power, 54, 267; and time, 248; and unity, 11,16,22,43, 233, 267, 281, 339, 354, 374, 349; and unity of matter-spirit, 349, 351-52; and universal principle, 131 n.26,171 identity and difference, 9, 63-64, 73,196, 200, 228-29, 256, 261, 278, 290,300,374. See oho resemblance illusion. See perception imagination: and caprice, 163-64,181; as agent of polyvalence, 210-11; combinatory, 8,132,182, 262, 267,363; and credulity, 234-36; and delirium, 130-36, 139, 348; and dream, 79,113,128—29, 210, 224, 247, 299; and error, 144, 229, 321; and Enthusiasm, 142, 269; extrasensory, 21, 230, 331-33, 348, 357-59, 362, 366, 369,

374; and fancy, 159,162,165, 246-49; and fantasia, 255, 258, 300, 324; and feeling, 271, 366; contrasted to the grotesque, 184; heated, 64, 72; and idealism, 199, 208; incendiary power of, 157,158, 370; language affected by, 138,196, 272, 373; and literary pathology, 138; and memory, 157, 229; and Minerva, 217; moral, 223—24, 226, 227; phantastic, 140; physiology of, 22,132, 133, 139,143, 247, 348-49, 351, 36i, 366-67, 371; politicized, 224; psychology of, 47; relation to Reason, 12,13,14,16, 71,12223,140,156,188, 211,222-27,246—47, 249, 263—64, 272, 319, 373; and representation, 21,147,155-57,164,193, 205, 229; reptilian, 246; in Rousseau, 57; in society, 223; and supernaturalism, 259, 314, 327, 348—49, 358, 360, 370; transcendental, 196-97, 213,

4o8

Subject Index

imagination (continued) 222,345,362; and truth-statements, 134-35, 145,1S5, 222; uncontrolled, 162, 211, 22021,251; unified concept of, 224; "wise" and "false," 159,162 Index librorum prohibitorum, 328, 332—33 Inquisition, 9, 31, 43, 59,143η, 157,170, 2θ2 n.28, 295, 333, 343, 345, 346 instinct, 73, 74, 233, 242, 267, 282, 303. See also energy irony, 96,102-3,106-7,112-13,142, 211 Jesuits, 157 Journal de Trevoux, 61 n.7, 66 n.n, 67-69, 75η, 91, 341-42 knowledge: (dis)continuity in, 15,17, 267 n.20,359; and dream, 15, 230, 275 n.28; Encyclopedic types of, 262, 271; and irrational cognition, 159,176,193,240, 273; imagination's power over, 14,135,149; and feeling, 158, 232, 265, 271; and hyperbole, 147,156; intuitive, 217, 232; as labyrinth, 11; and language, 17,149, 240; through magic, 104; conferred by Minerva, 37; "mother" of, 56; nonsensory mode of, 244, 246, 331, 360; occult, 21,40,104,105, 294, 298, 300, 351; as a problem, 15, 22, 366-67; and protean semantics, 80; relation to Reason, 80,121-22, 321; and sight, 216; skepticism about, 219 n.n, 265; tactile, 151-52,242-44; of ultimate mysteries, 266, 270, 272, 296, 300,337,351, 363,367; unified, 349, 352; unstable, 265, 267 n.20, 280; vulgarized, 83, 84-85; no, 117. See also cognition; truth-statements labyrinth, 3,11, 54, 56, 92,160,179,194, 267 n.20, 319. See also Unreason language: of citizenship, 86; classes of, 148; confidence in, 15; dependent on imagination, 229-30, 373; and dream, 236, 240, 372; futility of, 115—16, 240, 367; graphetic concept of, 149; and lexical migration, 20, 37,130,160, 371; linear, 20,115, 246; and logogryphe, 240; metamorphic, 353; Minerva's ministry of, 39, 370, 374; and music, 25; philosophical, 15,148-49; and plastic glyphs, 115; political, 94; polyvalence in, 191, 203—9, 277—78; primary

and secondary, 148; protocols of rational, 75; mediates Reason and imagination, 13, 14; Reason's effect on, 140; Reason's selfbetrayal caused by, 118; satirical, 95-96; semantic resonance in, 143, 200—201, 205— 6; and signification, 124,145-54,189,195, 196, 203-12,230, 272, 274, 277, 349,352, 374; and silence, 129; skepticism about, 22, 97, 280,373; spiritual, 349-50; and static writing, 115; subversive power of, 94; transparent, 150-51; of Unreason, 127-28; vocabulary of irrational, 154—58 libertinism, 21, 73, 275-78, 282, 285, 286 liberty. See freedom light, 22,53,55,58,62,70, 76,91,94,118,12021,125,151,157,158, 216,217, 222,223, 233, 234-35, 238-41, 242-43,248,252,255, 273, 276-77,287, 320-21,353,359,366,371-92. See also blindness logocentrism, 116,150, 216 logogryphe, 240 London, 93 lycanthropy. See werewolf lynx, 255,258,286,288,299 madness: and dream, 132,175; epistemology of, 97-102,290; and mania, 134; physiology of, 131, 361; visionary, 71, 90, 91, 99, 205 Madrid, 42,49,50, 58, 62, 84, 93 magic, 102-5,144, 271, 294, 297, 302, 305-6, 308, 312, 315-16, 327, 329, 335, 340, 348, 352. See also supernaturalism magus, 260, 299,301-3,331 masses, 45,52,66,158,258,332,345 materialism, 67, 74, 268, 308-11, 337, 361 mechanism, 69,170-72, 270, 290,308-10, 348, 361 medicine. See biology memory, 14,157, 229, 242, 257,262, 263,373 metaphor: of animals, 168; architectural, 52, 54,56; biology as, 361; for caprice, 162; chimera as, 142; clothes as, 223—24; and comparison, 198, 201-2, 205, 209; creativity as, 113; dream as, 235; flight as, 96; heat as, 72,157,158; for imagination, 140, 144; light as, 118,125,151,157; madness as, 90, 98,100; national decadence as, 87-90; navigation as, 249, 267; for philosophy, 179; power as, 120; progress as, 54-55; and

Subject Index semiophore, 277; sight as, 151; sleep as, 235; spider-brain as, 9; threads as, 6 , 1 0 ; for unstable knowledge, 265-66; writing as, 151 metamorphosis, 9,73,74,83,117,238, 275-85, 296, 300, 302,339, 353,356 microstructures: in thought process, 179, 189-92,197, 207, 373 mind-body division. See dualism monsters: in art, 152,160; and the bizarre, 161 n.43; of criticism, 158; of disorder, 50—51; and dystopia, 48; of fanaticism, 78,143η, 20i, 202 n.28; and freedom, 115, 302; identity of, 9, 46, 367-69; and imagination, 140; moral, 21, 69, 81,114, 270η, 275, 279, 281-83, 319; in Nature, 1 6 17; political, 31, 33, 42, 44,53, 225, 287, 288, 289; and primal reality, 22, 243, 302, 371; and Reason, 55,56, 6 0 , 6 1 , 6 3 , 7 6 , 83,123, 311; signifying ambiguity, 69; as social Unreason, 28, 286; source of, 47; spiritual, 76 morality. See values multivocality, 90-91,92,188-89,198, 202 Nature: animist, 345; creative, 226; incongruities in, 53,56,65, 67; metamorphic, 21, 73, 74, 78, 238, 276-85; mystery of, 43, 270-73, 280, 309, 318, 320, 337-38, 339, 367, 373; and politics, 226; power over, 353, 354; relation to Reason, 62,267; unity of, 264-65, 344, 374 Neoclassicism, 147,152,167, 262,370 Neoplatonism, 344 n.8,356. See also Plato neurophysiology, 361,363, 366,371,374. See also biology nightmare, 45,47,48,51,83,97, 241,275 narrative fiction, 155—56, 205, 208, 209, 210 occultism, 294-97, 307, 315-18, 328, 340-56. See also supernaturalism One as the Many. See Ideality order: and beauty, 146 n.22; and congruence, 159; disorder related to, 49,161,190, 264; ethical, 74; threatened harmony of, 69, 225—26; and hyperbole, 145-47; and intelligence, 49-50,53; natural and rational, 74, 219; as organic unity, 226; social, 69, 225; threat to, 148, 224-25. See also Ideality

409

owls: into bats, 57,60; emblematic role of, 4,57,119, 238, 273, 297-98,315; and Minerva, 24,239,368; and Reason, 7 6 , 8 2 83,220; mentioned, 25,31, 32—33,37, 38,39, 50-51 painting, 108,146,152 Paris, 64 passions. See feelings patriotism, 85 people. See masses perception: ambiguous, 106; and cognition, 151,311,363; and dream, 247-48; and delirium, 131,134; and dream, 151; enchanted, 103-4,330; and illusion, 246,322,35859; physiology of, 362; of reality, 99-100, 102,139, 233, 241; sensorium, 47,132,133, 366,374 physiology. See biology Poland, 227 polymorphosis, 96 polyp, 17 polyvalence, and representation, 191, 203-12 populace. See masses Portugal, 62 Presence, 22,149-50,151 n.28, 233, 244,359, 363, 371, 374 Providence, 21, 276-79, 282-83 Quixoticism, 182-84,187,189-91,195-98, 202. See also Don Quixote rapture. See ecstasy reality: confused with dream, 99-100, 235; irrational, 71-73, 358; and magic, 103—5, 144, 274, 296-97; primary, 7 3 , 1 4 8 , 1 4 9 50, 243-44, 274, 275 n.28, 299, 352, 371, 374; perceived uncertainly, 9 7 , 1 0 0 , 1 4 5 , 1 4 6 , 290, 358; spheres of, rational and irrational: 302-3, 337, 359-60, 369; second-order, 149; states of being in, 139,296-97, 301; test of, 144,147,149, 359, 368; unified, 17, 302, 339. See also Presence; representation; visionary reality Reason: ambiguity of, 72,190, 260η; asleep, 46,78, 299,332,362,368; autonomous, 171,173,176; as bei esprit, 62—64,124,126; bizarre, 122-29; as bon sens, 1,62, 63, 65, 71; blind, 53, 76, 222; Christian, 71, 73, 7 4 76, 219, 221, 316,320, 323, 337, 339, 340,

4io

Subject Index

Reason (continued) 347; counter-rational, 10,14,19, 20,10910,126,189-90,192,195; and delirium, 29—31, 71,131-32; derationalized, 261-69, 300; dreaming, 47, 74,122,129,175, 227, 247,252, 299,321,360,362,368; duality of, 33, 63,122; emblemized by cat, 261; emblemized by yoked lion, 257; empirical, 91—92, 312, 315, 339, 360; error-prone, 116, 127, 253,265,268-69,322; excess of, 19,40, 48,57, 61, 80, 82-83,123,284, 289,321, 357; and faith, 195, 221, 222,252; and feeling, 12,13,221, 251,262, 267, 270; fertile and sterile, 109,113-14,120, 202, 233; and God, 125; "good" and "bad," 60, 68, 69, 74; habitat of, 75; "healthy," 70,121; (hybrid) identity of, 18,58-65, 254, 261-62, 26667; ideology of, 57; and imagination, 12, 13,122-23, 133, 199, 246-47, 249, 263-64, 314, 363, 369; and instinct, 74; language of, 76,116,127; betrayed by language, 116, 125; metamorphic, 2-3, 21, 60, 213-14, ch. 8; metamorphic language of, 73-77, 290; Minervan, 23,215,367,368,370,371; and national decline, 84-90; and nationalism, 218; normative, 2, 31, 65, 81,124,132,136, 214, 266, 268; parodied, 57; perversion of, 45, 65, 70,74,78; and physiology, 140, 176; polarized against itself, 31, 71, 76,116, 127,195; political, 31, 86,225; and Quixotic thinking, 182-84, 208; and rational soul, 241-52, 268; and religion, 66—67, 70—71, 125; retreat from, 11,17,40, 68,148, 219 n.n, 313; scientific, 67, 308-9, 316, 321, 335; secular, 40, 66, 71; source of disorder, 57-58, 63,76,100; sublime, 269-75, 326; syncretic, 312; and truth, 125, 250-51; Universal, 182; visionary, 80, ch. 7, 216-17, 221-22,227,239,357 religion: and credulity, 61; and divinity, 67; and Reason, 222. See also faith representation: aberrant grades of, 148; and caprice, 166; crisis of, 19, 20, 22, 93,368; dichotomized, 12; and hyperbole, 14548,152; ideational, 141; and imagination, 155; and language, 149-50,154, 200,240; of the occult, 351; polyvalent, 95—96,191, 203-12; and Reason, 158, 206; reversible, 100; and thought process, 161,192-98;

verisimilitude in, 15,144,145-46,149, 156, 264 resemblance, 20, 63-64,187,193-94,195, 196,197,198, 200-201, 228-29, 290, 300. See also identity reverie. See dream Romanticism, 18,32,46,119,167,190,267, 274, 290 n.45, 296 n.12,308, 360 n.24, 366,369 Rosicrucianism, 356 Salons, 35,36,44,45,160 Satire: and ambiguity, 90—96, 202; and caricature, 88,162,168; as a defense, 99; dialectic of, 199; and irrationality, 88; of occultism, 323-24, 346; of pedantry, 116; unstable, 102-4; mentioned, 85,202 Scholasticism, 30, 67,126,192 science: dualist, 361; empirical, 18,118—19, 155, 354,363; marginal communities of, 293; preternatural and pseudo-, 21, ch.9; progress and error of, 308, 322-23 sensorium. See perception sensory perception. See perception Sepia One, 110-14, 216—20, 241,300-303 Sepia Two, 73,112,113,114,115,151, 255, 256, 352 serpent, 27, 31, 39, 242, 246 sight, 216, 232, 234, 238, 241, 242-43, 259, 277, 301, 322, 371 similitude. See resemblance signification. See language soul, 57,118,139,141,144,170-72,176-77, 210, 233, 241-52,272-73,296,300,311,348, 361,366 Spain: anti-Revolutionary, 33; under Charles III, 49-51, 62; cultural conflict in, 39,224-25; defended by Minerva, 35; and France, 41-45,52,53,54, 85-86; hybrid identity of, 62; national decline of, 49,51, 56, 63, 86, 87, 89, 90,100-101; negative image of, 59-60, 62, 86, 228; Reason and religion in, 66-69, 222, 225; scorn for, 43, 59,101; trivializes knowledge, 85 sphynx, 25,28,140, 256 spiritism, spiritualism. See supernaturalism stereognosis, 21, 237, 244, 374 Sublime, 118, 269—73 supernaturalism: ch. 9, Transition, esp. 29394, 298,350-52,361-63; and cabalism,

Subject Index 18, 317—18, 355,336,360; and spiritism, 22, 40,339-75; and spiritual forces, 347; and spiritualism, 22, 339-75; mentioned, 18, 21, 40,102,105-6,163, 259, 260. See also magic; superstition; witchcraft superstition, 55, 60,91,102,103—6, 225, 234, 298,315, 343-45, 349-50. See also supernaturalism symbols: aegis, 25, 31, 35—36; bat, 60, 62, 65, 68-69, 73,106, 242, 296; cat, 256, 296, 298-99; clothing, 62; cock, 39; creativity, 113; Don Quixote, 196, 200; for dreams, 315; fire, 158; grave, 239; of harmony, 19; light, 238, 303; Minerva, 3, 218; owl, 4, 83, 238-39, 273, 315; political, 42,51,55; for Reason, 315; serpent, 27,31,39 synthesis. See Ideality taxonomy. See classification telekinesis, 21,233,234 telemorphesis, 21,237,374 time, 248 touch, 151-52,242,243, 244,359 touchsight, 371 trance, 294, 346 transport, 139, 294, 296-97, 300, 346, 349See also ecstasy transvaluation. See values truth, 233-34, 236, 243, 263, 268, 320; and truth-statements, 75,134-35,139, '44,148, 149,154,157,158,187,195, 206, 207, 214, 371, 373. See also knowledge unity. See Ideality Universal Language: and disorder, 129η, i5o; and dream, 4, 6; and grammar, 230 n.33; and the grotesque, 148,153; and irrationalism, 114-15; and representation, 147,149,150-51, 230, 368,370; semantic plurality of, 39; unifying power of, 10,15, 17, 20, 273, 299, 338, 351, 352, 354, 374 universal principle. See Ideality

411

university, 29 univocality, 189 Unreason: aims of, 74; as caprice, 19, 91; and chimera, 144; degrees of, 11,13,19, 100,102,128,139-40,145,148,190, 329; energy of, 45, 299; "good," 32, 221,368, 369,374; and imagination, 12,13, 224, 302; inheres in rational rhetoric, 116-19; lexicon of, 19,20, ch. 5, 68,70, 72m 129; and occultism, 300,312; origins of, 40; paradigm of, 65-73, 326; political, 49, 226, 288; and Quixoticism, 190; rational, ch. 4, 127—38,188, 225, 275, 310; as Reason's alter ego, i, 8,123,196; as relativistic energy, 45; semantic field of, 78,98,124,127-29,324; and sign-making, 145-54; threat of, 226. See also abyss; Chaos; disorder; labyrinth Utopianism. See visionary reality values: and moral allegory, 40, 41, 45,160; moral blindness, 76, 84, 86, 277, 282; and moral disorder, 279-80; and moral imagination, 223—24, 226, 227; moral monsters, 69, 81,114; and transvaluation, 74, 268, 270, 275-87, 304 vampires, 60, 91,106, 328, 341 verisimilitude. See representation vibrations, 131 n.26 visionary reality, 25, 47-48,51,58-59, 80, ch. 7, 288-89, 318, 349, 364-65, 373-74· See also reality visions, 128,133, 341, 342, 343 vitalism, 290, 308-14, 322-23, 335, 337, 339 voyage: imaginary, 15, 60,120,319 warfare, 117-18 werewolf, 351 whole. See Ideality witchcraft, 91, 93,105, 260, 295-96, 298-300, 315-17, 326 n.52, 330, 334, 346, 352 zoomorphism, 285-88

This book has been set in Linotron Galliard. Galliard was designed for Mergenthaler in 1978 by Matthew Carter. Galliard retains many of the features of a sixteenth-century typeface cut by Robert Granjon but has some modifications that give it a more contemporary look. Printed on acid-free paper.