Carnal Reading: Early Modern Language and Bodies by Joseph Pappa (review)

This book is eminently clear about its disciplinary location. Pappa's aim is to understand how early modern readers responded to erotic texts, but he is aware that this cannot be done without confronting significant difficulties of method. Historical studies of reading, erotic or otherwise, cannot simply extrapolate from modern studies grounded in sociology or psychology because they lack, and cannot hope to produce, comparable data. So the options as Pappa sees them are twofold. The first is a study of "reader response" according to the disciplinary practices of literary studies, and the second is an intellectual history of language and reading as they were understood in early modern times. He opts resolutely for the second of these and expressly sets the first aside. In general terms, the historian cannot expect to show how readers actually felt at that time when reading erotic texts, merely how they were perceived to feel (17). The particular contribution of this study is therefore to expound "a theory of erotic reading" derived from a study of early modern texts, identifying assumptions that characterized and presumably inflected the practice of reading (11). In the absence of any direct information about how readers responded psychologically and physically, he describes "the philosophical background that outlines how bodies were perceived to feel" (17). This is a sound approach, and it allows Pappa to develop a carefully documented account that will surely prove informative to the most specialized readers. His key argument is that language and its functions were seen by early moderns in physiological terms. In the practice of reading, imagination was not abstracted from the physiological, and language was seen always to have a bodily impact. "What makes early modern language usage so much different from today," he says in summary, "is the role the earlier period accorded to the body in interpretation" (111).

In expounding this historical theory, Pappa is at pains to avoid anachronism, and he is largely successful in doing so. He eschews the term "pornography," for example, arguing that it "should be avoided simply because it is anachronistic" (13, 84). Scholars who share Pappa's concern to avoid anachronism may occasionally be disconcerted by his free and easy use of certain terms that had no place in early modern English. "Sexy" occurs from time to time with no discussion of whether it might have had an early modern equivalent. "Teenage" and "media" are also used without consideration of their twentieth-century genealogy. In practice, none of those lexical indulgences has the effect of undoing the book's disciplined historicism, although the use of "slap-n'-tickle" to refer to the seventeenth-century School of Venus is an unhelpful distraction, assimilating as it does an early modern genre of erotic conduct to one so characterized only since the twentieth century (101).

One of Pappa's decisive moves is to set aside literary studies in order to develop a historically located theory of erotic reading, but that involves more difficulties than he recognizes. Having stated early that he aims to "understand reader response" as it occurred during this period, he returns eventually to a brief discussion of reader response as it is standardly framed by literary studies (14, 84). Against that kind of work, Pappa asserts his historicist position without equivocation. He persuasively rejects general theories of reader response precisely because of their implicit universalism, which is bound to produce anachronistic effects. It is only possible, he contends, to construct an "ideal reader" of early modern texts by superimposing on them a modern idea of what counts as erotic (14). So the "reader response" of literary scholars is for his purposes undeserving of sustained uptake.

But there is another aspect of literary studies set aside by Pappa that might well have been taken up more usefully: the study of genre. He announces forthrightly that his "approach is relatively inattentive to genre" and justifies this position by the fact that literary scholars supposedly take genres to be stable...