Are You Experienced?: Restoration Literature and the Critique of Cynical Reason

Those of us who teach and write about Restoration literary culture typically face a daunting problem: for many of our colleagues, the period seems, at best, either an ante-chamber to an often attenuated idea of the Enlightenment or a coda to the Renaissance. We don't even rate a category of our own on Amazon: in early Spring of 2016, Lucinda Cole's book, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740—which includes chapters on Rochester, Thomas Shadwell, and Abraham Cowley, among others—quickly reached number one on Amazon's "Hot New Releases" in . . . Medieval Studies. In odd ways, though, this erasure, or misidentification, of the Restoration actually tells us a good deal about the period we study, 1660 to 1700 (or 1689 or 1710), and the profession of literary criticism as a whole. Much of the Restoration literature we teach—satiric poetry and drama, in particular—resists, ignores, or satirizes the very values and assumptions that are encoded in our field's disciplinary DNA: the old formalisms and new that still define the institutionalization of literary study. Some of the best recent criticism of Restoration literary culture has tried to address this problem by resituating texts and authors within the complex dynamics of their late seventeenth-century political, intellectual, and scientific contexts. And yet, to many of our colleagues, those of us who write about the period seem out of step with a profession that celebrates a tradition of "great" literature and sanctions teaching only a handful of Restoration texts, like Oroonoko, that can be accommodated to a Whiggish history of the rise of the novel and the rise of the modern self.¹ The values, assumptions, and formalist tendencies of literary history often seem antithetical to the presumed aristocratic bias of seventeenth-century court literature and indifferent to Restoration audiences' fascination with topical satire, wit comedy, and heroic drama.

In a compelling critique of the genetic codes of twenty-first century criticism that may help us understand the (mis)fortunes of Restoration literature, Mary Poovey argues that formalism "treats [all] its analytic objects as if they were lyrics" and consequently privileges what she calls the "objectification of the poet/poem/reader complex." Given this dominance of a lyric formalism, the critic's purpose becomes to bring "hidden truths and patterns to light" and, in the process, to "reanimate the literary text" (433). This process of reanimation, Poovey suggests, locks critics into modes of analysis devoted to (re-)producing the presumed organic unity of the original work of art. In the nineteenth century, Baudelaire put the implications of formalism this way: the purpose of poetry is to "distill the eternal from the transitory" (Baudelaire 402). This alchemical process may distill its intimations of immortality from close readings (and of course re-readings), but this objectifying process exists in "isolation from other kinds of social and political experience" (421). Therefore formalism polices the boundaries between "the eternal" and "the transitory" in ways that restrict what counts as "serious" literature, even as it trails in its wake a clutter of assumptions and values about art, literature, identity, cognition, and (not least) our roles as literary critics (Markley "Aesthetico-Constructivism").

In writing about the limitations of formalism in other disciplines, Bruno Latour makes the crucial point that "almost no one has the courage to do a careful anthropological study of formalism. The reasons for this lack of nerve," he adds, "are quite simple: a priori. . . . it is toward the mind and its cognitive abilities that one looks for an explanation of form" (Latour 246). Poovey's view that formalism returns us endlessly to the "objectification of the poet/poem/reader complex," in this respect, helps to explain why Restoration literature remains an outlier in the hive mind that is Amazon. Taken as a whole, the Restoration has little interest in what Poovey calls "the modern orthodoxy of aesthetic autonomy" because many of its exemplary works opt out of an aesthetics that treats form as a "distill[ation]" of profound truths about human nature (419). Instead, as Rochester's speaker puts it...