Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment: Vitality from Spenser to Milton by Garrett A. Sullivan Jr (review)

In Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment: Vitality from Spenser to Milton, Garrett Sullivan defines “sleep” as anything but a state of dormancy. Instead, it is an active space in which bodies make contact with their environments; appetites and desires undermine ethical choice; man approximates beast or plant; and epic confronts romance. Sleep finds its place here within a broader narrative about early modern appropriations of Aristotle’s theory of the tripartite soul (composed of the rational soul unique to humans, the sensitive soul shared with animals, and the vegetative soul common to both, as well as plants) as set against Cartesian mechanism. Sleep and romance together allow us to appreciate the influence of the tripartite soul before and during the rise of Cartesianism, and they organize the book’s “imaginative investigation of what it means to be human while also being (and not being) plant and beast” (150).

Sullivan works through vast layers of material with economy. He reveals the “blurring of boundaries between forms of life” (43) in texts ranging from Spenser’s Faerie Queene to Dryden’s All For Love. He shows how these texts cross a “vertical” axis that stressed hierarchy and human exceptionalism and a “horizontal” axis that stressed bonds across species. Expanding the work of Giorgio Agamben, Sullivan reveals the ways in which “the vertical might always turn horizontal” and situates the problem in a deeply literary context by arguing that this “recognition is articulated through relations between epic and romance” (46).

The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on a different treatment of the tripartite soul. Part 1 demonstrates how Spenser (The Faerie Queene, book 2), Sidney (The Old Arcadia), and Shakespeare (1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V) affirm “the tripartite soul’s status as the conceptual bond between, and point of convergence of, different forms of life” (29). These bonds do not always promote positive physiological or ethical relations; rather, they act as both threat and opportunity. Sleep typifies this paradox. It is both “the ground for biological being—that which binds man to animal” as well as “the condition that must be transcended to be fully . . . human” (95). At the same time, we see in characters as different as Guyon, Pyrocles, and Falstaff how sleep can both facilitate “reason-directed somatic self-discipline” (50) and frustrate that ethical project by inducing “a time when the operations of reasons are suspended, and thus desires have the opportunity to hold sway” (51).

Part 2 shows how Milton critiques Descartes’s rejection of the vegetative soul at the same time that he revises Aristotle in monist terms. Along with sleep, the vegetative soul functions in Paradise Lost as “the basis for representing both man’s Fall and his redemption” (111)—a redemption that “necessitates both generic revision and a continued commitment to the Aristotelian tripartite soul” (129). Both fall and redemption pivot on vegetal vitality that, like sleep, can either serve as “the basis for a spirituous ascent toward the divine” (103) or a form of gluttonous overindulgence. While the Fall recalibrates Adam and Eve’s relation to the vegetal, sleep points to Christ’s resurrection, which “supplants Aristotle’s vegetative soul as the principle of postmortem vitality” (122).

Milton’s “continued commitment” (101) to Aristotelian models is not necessarily shared by Dryden, the focus of part 3. In All For Love, Dryden conveys a “skepticism about Cartesianism that is divorced from any commitment to Aristotelianism,” but nevertheless “assumes a Cartesian conception of the human that reduces the relationship between forms of life to a metaphoric one” (133). For example, Antony’s relationship to sleep emerges in terms of poetic fancy so that “what were once ontological connections derived from Aristotelian thought appear . . . as fanciful connections drawn from the human imagination” (139). In retrospect, we can see how the bonds between species that took physical hold in part 1 are...