Aphra Behn in Search of the Novel

Aphra Behn in Search of the Novel ROSE A. ZIMBARDONMLKJIHGFEDCBA In zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA his brilliant book, The Discourse of Modernism, Timothy J. Reiss traces the development in Western discourse from what he calls “the discourse of patterning” to “analytico-referential discourse,” the dis­ course of modernism that was born in the seventeenth century: “a pas­ sage from what we might call a discursive exchange within the world to the expressions of knowledge as reasoning practice upon the world.”1 A work of art rendered in the older “discourse of patterning” is what Paul de Man calls a “calligraphy” of emblems “rather than a mimesis.”2 That is to say, within the older system of discourse a work of art is the organiza­ tion of a pattern of emblematic figures or abstract concepts “whose function is ‘to guarantee ideal convertibility between the celestial and the terrestrial. . . the universal and the individual. . . nature and history.’ ”3 This is the process that I described elsewhere as the “Imitation of Idea” which obtained in English dramatic art in the decades of the 1660s and early 1670s.4 The newer “analytico-referential discourse” creates distance between the eye of the perceiver and the objectified “reality” perceived. Reiss uses Galileo’s invention of the telescope as a nexus of the change with which he is concerned. This newer discourse of modernism required the inven­ tion of the novel as its best artistic medium. Under the governance of the older discourse of patterning the function of a work of dramatic art was 277 278 / KJIHGFEDCBA Z I M B A R D O to show a closed system of ideational relationships to the spectator which would reveal to him or her the harmonious systematic interaction among ideas, a model of the whole cosmological reality. It is true that the larger aim of such dramatic discourse was to disclose a method by which human participation within the metaphysical order occurs; that partici­ pation was of a kind by which we, as a species, are placed within the celestial-terrestrial system which the abstract discourse of patterning shows. For example, a character in one of Aphra Behn’s early plays, fedcbaZYXWVUTS The Young King, says: Orisames: I to my self could an Idea frame Of Man in much more excellence. Had I been Nature, I had varied still, And made such different Characters of Men They should have bow’d and made a God of me Ador’d and thank’d me for their great Creation, (act 2. sc. I)5 Here “nature,” or “reality,” is a configuration of ideas; dramatic charac­ ters are concepts, and the function of dramatic discourse is to pattern a rhetorical design, a closed system analogous, as the human mind itself is analogous, to a metaphysical system of reality. The new analytico-referential discourse created distance between sub­ ject and object, the human being and the world at which he looks; it also established a more intimate relationship between the human eye and the scaled down “reality” which the human eye could perceive and the human tongue describe. The older discourse erased the importance of the indi­ vidual human being. Indeed, in English drama of the 1660s and early 1670s it is relatively unimportant which speaker declaims a set rhetorical speech; what is crucially important is the position of that set piece within the whole rhetorical design of the play. The newer discourse brought a manageable “outside” reality into the range of human perception, posses­ sion, and control. As Reiss puts it, “Its exemplary formal statement is cogito-ergo-sum (reason-semiotic mediating system-world). ... Its prin­ cipal metaphors will be those of the telescope (eye-instrument-world) and of the voyage of discovery (self-possessed point of departure —sea journey— country claimed as legitimate possession of the discoverer).”6 It is interesting that Aphra Behn’s late, best work, Oroonoko, not only employs the new analytico-referential discourse whose operation Reiss describes here, but also enacts what he considers one of its principal metaphors —the narrator “I” ’s journey to Surinam, the reader’s discov­ ery of that colonial possession, and even the politico-economic conse­ quences that such “possession” entails. Aphra Behn in...