In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviews 189 Marchitello, Howard, Narrative and Meaning in Early Modern England: Browne's Skull and Other Histories (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 20), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997; cloth; pp. xiv, 229; 23 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. AUS$95.00. The title of this book is its first mystery. 'Narrative' and 'Meaning' are uninformative, while the subtitle, 'Browne's Skull and other Histories', sounds like an enticing joke. Each component does make sense in the light of the book as a whole, but the content is as intriguing and quirky as the title. It used to be said (although one hears it less often in these worldly-wise days) that literature and related written forms order the chaos and incoherence of lived existence, allowing us to discover consoling patterns in even the most distressing experiences. The form of tragedy, for example, can confer significance on the messiness of death. Often it was argued that human beings 'need' such a process, to make life bearable. All such sentiments, and even the terms they are couched in, are n o w regarded as problematically untheorised. A n d yet here w e have a book expressly taking inspiration from Derrida, Foucault and N e w Historicism, arguing a case which at times seems unnervingly close to just such a position. Or rather it demonstrates and analyses such meaning-making in action, arguing that there is a story to be told about the storytellers. Any artefact (and in this 'artifactual' book examples are taken from literature, the body, maps, and a famous skull) is presupposed to have meaning, and this meaning is assumed to be primarily sequential and narrative: it tells a story, or at least a story can be told about it. Where this book differs from the older 'order out of chaos' readings, of course, is that the author does not assert that meanings are actually immanent within objects and works, since time and history prove that meanings change, as if they are placed upon the works by 'readers' w h o operate in a time-bound context. Cleverly, Marchitello begins the Introduction by confessing it was written after the rest of the book, when he could with 'anachrony' interpret his o w n work in a new way. This raises another question pursued thematically, the question of proprietorship: who owns the artefact which can be narrated in so many different ways by so many different people? Is even a person's skull common property? Othello's anxiety about sexuality stems from his belief that Desdemona's body is a signifier of undisclosed meaning, and he makes up a narrative to 'discover' the signified fact, which he takes to be adultery. Marchitello draws on the increasingly documented study of seventeenth-century anatomy, finding that even in the 'scientific description' of female anatomy made by Vesalius, narratives are already apparent which aid Othello in his pursuit of the 'ocular proof of his wife's sexuality and infidelity. In many more ways than one, Desdemona didn't have a chance to set any records straight, and her tragedy is as much social and cultural as literary. 190 Reviews After drama, cartography and travel writing provide Marchitello with related cultural practices that exemplify the construction of 'master-narratives' in the context of evidence that purports to be value-free and professionally neutral, claiming simply to represent the world 'the way it is'. The argument here is that maps in fact 'are documents meant to establish and maintain certain social, economic, and political circumstances' (p. 82). After the work of Greenblatt (Marvellous Possessions), Gillies (Shakespeare and the Geography ofDifference) a N e w World discourses analysed in postcolonial studies, the various 'narratives of possession' advanced have nowadays a ring of familiarity—except that there is a politely sharp reminder that 'to claim otherness as one's own, is still to claim possession' (p. 123), and is just another master-narrative. Sir Thomas Browne's skull (if indeed it was his) was exhumed in 1840, and for a century afterwards virtually became the property of phrenologists. To the dismay of some, it revealed a forehead that receded backwards (just as the only...

pdf

Share