Reading Description in Sidney's New Arcadia: A Differential Analysis

MICHAEL McCANLES Reading Description in Sidney's New Arcadia: A Differential Analysis Comment on Sidney's descriptive practice in the Arcadia has been sparse, and what little there is readily indicates why this is the case. Virginia Woolf's comment in her essay on the Arcadia about prose that 'must be careful to tum away from what is actually before it' is echoed in Ian Watt's more judicious remarks: Elizabethan stylistic decorum was a further bar to realism. Actions are usually presented with adornments which detract from the physical reality ofthe action itself, at least for the modern reader ... our identification with the efforts of the hero is lost in our attention to the metaphors, and we realize that the actions themselves are not the writer's main objective '.. For Sidney and his readers ... words are a finer expression of reality as they conceived it than any realistic description could be.' Clearly operative for both readers is a modem, 'realistic' decorum of novelistic description, according to which verbal text should be a transparent medium through which the reader passes easily into contact with a nonverbal, physical reality that lies beyond it. And within this perspective Arcadian description can only appear as an almost obsessive mass of rhetorical encrustation layered heavily over a physical reality of action and landscape it purports to mediate. Oddly enough, the same opposition between word and picture occurs in the onlyextended attempt to rescue and justify Sidney'S descriptive practice, Forrest G. Robinson's The Shape of Things Known: Sidney's 'Apology' in its Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1972). In an argument I shall take up again at the end of this essay, Robinson sets forth Sidney'S debt to contemporary Ramism, according to which Sidney invites the reader of the Arcadia to pass through its verbal texture not to a material reality, but to a schematized, spatial image in the mind. Though my own argument parallels Robinson's to some extent, I would see his position as essentially the same as that of Woolf and Watt in that all three denigrate the purely verbal and rhetorical dimension of the Arcadian style. Reading Arcadian description, it seems to me, involves something more than doing away as quickly as possible with the text of the description itself. In a sense I am seeking here to answer the question 'What information is necessary to make the Arcadia readable?' although my UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 53, NUMBER I, FALL 1983 SIDNEY'S Arcadia 37 immediate purpose limits my concern to passages that deal with description of objects and human action, and excludes the larger, ultimately more important matter ofthe Arcadia's presentation of human ethical reality. In reference to the Arcadian style readability does not refer here to recovering stylistic theories of composition thrust on readers and writers alike in Sidney's time by numerous textbooks and handbooks of rhetorical devices. To the degree that sixteenth-century rhetorical theory assumes that rhetorical figuration is a deviation from 'normal' or 'ordinary' syntactical and semantic modes of expression,2 the Arcadian descriptive practice can only appear as it does to Woolf and Watt, namely an extrinsic layer of ornamentation obtruding on an otherwise direct account of physical scenes and human actions. Rather, by readability I mean the rules of syntactic, semantic, and rhetorical interpretation which the texture of Sidney's text requires the reader to discover for himself simply in order to parse and untangle the rhetorical schemes through which most of the Arcadia structures the human and physical realities it mediates. I shall show that the rhetorical dimension of Sidney's text conveys much of its essential meaning. This meaning for Sidney, and for the reader in the process of reading the Arcadia, is that there is simply no reality that is not verbally, that is rhetorically, structured. Sidney does not force rhetorical figuration on his story; rather, his story forces rhetorical figuration on him, on his characters, and on the reader alike. This means that the Arcadian style invites the reader to discover the complex logical interaction among the elements of a figure, and, more important, to formulate for himself the logical rules that govern...