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Reviewed by:
  • Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson
  • Heather Zias
Jonathan Kramnick. Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson. Stanford: Stanford, 2010. Pp. vii + 307. $65; $24.95 (paper).

“My right Hand writes, whilst my left Hand is still: What causes rest in one, and motion in the other?” Locke asks in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. “Nothing but my Will,” he answers, “—a Thought of my Mind; my Thought only changing, the right Hand rests, and the left Hand moves. This is a matter of fact, which cannot be denied.” Locke’s question, according to Mr. Kramnick, represents a basic philosophical concern of the long eighteenth century—the concern to account for functions of the mind in a physical world increasingly reducible to cause-effect explanation. Are minds subject to natural laws, or are minds distinct from matter? How does thinking produce physical changes like causing hand movement? And what effects do physical changes have on minds? Locke’s “matter of fact” answer that weds physical movement to conscious willing is one solution among several explored in Actions and Objects; readers will discover by the end of the exploration that in the eighteenth century the “hard problem of consciousness” remained (as it does to this day) unsolved.

If Actions and Objects were no more than another rehashing of Locke, Hume, and Hobbes, readers should not will their right or left hand to pick it up, but Mr. Kramnick does not so much chart the history of a philosophical debate as he traces the recurrence of a structural impasse. This impasse is represented in the scene of Locke pondering his own hand moving, a scene, asserts Mr. Kramnick, that “reappears in different guises across the literatures of the period” from Haywood to Rochester to Richardson. The content of this scene shifts—Haywood ponders sexual consent; Rochester, his uncontrollable erection; and Richardson, Clarissa’s refusal of marriage—yet each scene arrives at the same representational crossroads. Should mind or matter be preeminent in the depiction of characters’ actions? Writers in the period, Mr. Kramnick implies, can be loosely grouped based on whether or not they “blur” (Rochester, Haywood) or “etch in stone” (Richardson) the dividing line between physical states and states of mind.

Situating the “mind-talk” of the period within the context of depicting characters’ actions enables Mr. Kramnick to question the narrative that the eighteenth century brings into being the modern subject by rhetorically cordoning off an interior, private space. If the period is a “heyday for the importance of consciousness” as critics such as Ian Watt, Marshall Brown, Deidre Lynch, and Nancy Armstrong claim, it is so precisely because marking the boundaries of consciousness is so difficult. Contours continually shift; external factors consistently exert their force. Mr. Kramnick discerns within the period’s literatures that “the line between persons and their component parts, persons and society, the mind and the body, one mind and another, all come under meaningful pressure.” Consequently, his counternarrative is that the period’s basic questions are ontological rather than epistemological—what constitutes an agent and an action is far more important than how already constituted agents act and know.

Excellent close readings, particularly of Rochester and Haywood, help Mr. Kramnick confirm this thesis. For instance, he discovers that desire in Rochester’s poetry [End Page 139] has no interior origin; rather, desire operates “in reverse,” originating in diffuse external objects and then glomming onto bodies. Those diffuse parts do not necessarily add up to a whole, and the mind appears as a superfluous afterglow of an independently functioning physicality. Similarly, Mr. Kramnick argues that in Love in Excess and Fantomina, Haywood represents the interior lives of her protagonists only to make those interior lives “blend into their surroundings,” becoming indistinguishable from setting, other characters, and even the narrator’s voice. “Terms of mind splatter over the sentences only to become the actions they represent or consider.” The period’s philosophical and fictional works, in Mr. Kramnick’s view, are jointly constructing an interpretive framework for understanding ontology; especially important, the epistolary novel purports to offer readers an insider’s view of characters’ motives.

These significant and suggestive claims are downplayed by Mr...

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