N+2, or a Late Renaissance Poetics of Enumeration

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In a complex machine like the Space Shuttle or a computer network any single component or system (n) will sooner or later fail. Given this, typically engineers add another similar or identical component (n+1) to carry the load should it become necessary. N+2 means that there is a backup for the backup.¹ Such redundancy, however, is nothing new, even if it formerly had different motives and implications. Many Renaissance machines, such as those invented by Agostino Ramelli, and displayed in his Le diverse et artificiose Macchine (1588), tend, literally, to be more ingenious than useful. With Ramelli aesthetic considerations often trump functional ones. As such, his mechanical designs cultivate redundancy or, at the very least, similarity and repetition. And if Ramelli’s individual machines are ingeniously, extravagantly engineered, the “repetitive nature of the designs,” so striking in the sequences of his drawings, further confirms how he prizes the ornamental function of redundancy (Sawday 104).²

An analogy thus suggests itself, one I hope to justify in the course of this essay: just as the concept of redundancy in computer and mechanical engineering is born from the experience of system failure, or from aesthetic motives, so a poetics of enumeration (re)emerges in late Renaissance literature that flirts ingeniously with redundancy in response not only to the failure of reigning styles to serve as vehicles for new ideas and subjectivities, but also to the waning viability of the humanist, encyclopedic ideal.³ For the wits, the engineers, of much late Renaissance literature (ca. from 1500 to 1700) the first component usually proves sufficient; but it also often occurs that this first component – be it a word, phrase, or more complex syntactic structure – is presented as failing to create enough eloquence or affect, or to convey the richness, variety, grotesqueness, ineffability, or sublimity of the world as it perceived. When this happens a backup, a supplement, or better yet a paratactic sequence of supplements, is adduced to ensure success. The poem or discourse then “redounds” or “superabounds” in the Latin sense of the word, redundare, to “overflow.”⁴ Further, the rhythms of redundant, paratactic enumeration disdain closure or, alternately, cultivate ingenious ways of summing up the copia they produce. Disdaining concinnity, the poetics of enumeration often has affinities with the lists and indices characteristic of encyclopedic writing; but frequently, too, it borders on the cataphatic, as the great affectus or insight that fuels it finds no curb, resolution, or end that satisfies. Yet whether indexical or cataphatic, such enumeration differs significantly from Descartes’s enumeratio or Bacon’s “true induction” as it does not promise to be the means of achieving certain knowledge.⁵ Poetic, rhetorical enumeration tends to spurn the epistemological comforts of axioms and concepts, preferring instead to linger in the material precincts of language, where multiplicity and contingency can be best experienced, catalogued, and often given some metonymic order. As we shall see in various exemplary cases, it self-consciously fails – as a sixteenth-century Aristotelian might say – to grasp or to induct the universal. Rather, the redundancy cultivated by François Rabelais’s prose or Quirinus Kuhlmann’s combinatory verse tends to heighten the reader’s sense that, despite the author’s mastery and ingenuity, language (verba) has failed to furnish that definitive, supplementary part, and that this failure is now itself the subject, the matter (res), at hand.

My analogy aside, we know that the Renaissance revival of classical rhetoric spur humanists to rethink what eloquent, decorous enumeration might be, and how and why it might flirt with redundancy and pleonasm, or, conversely, become a viable form of discovery or even analysis. Quintilian, the most influential classical authority on rhetoric in the late Renaissance, uses the word redundare to refer to style when he prescribes and proscribes lyric poets to the aspiring orator. After praising Pindar, he turns to Anne Carson’s second favorite classical poet:

Stesichorus’s powerful genius is shown also by his subject, for he sings of great wars and famous leaders and makes his lyre bear the weight of epic . . . if...