The veil, in some of the poems I have discussed, functions as a kind of antimirror: a representation of the hidden side of nature. That idea extends toward a similarly antithetical model of literature in relation to experience. Just as I suggested in chapter 1 that Spenser’s notion of the writing process is countermaterialist, so I might say—of the debate I imagined in chapter 5 between Milton and Levinas over the ethics of the face—that Milton’s sonnet is, finally, antiphenomenological. This resistance to the world allows for the mutability and scalability of image I see in Donne, but it is never a comfortable position to take, as should be clear from the deeply frustrating inner conflict in Paradise Regained. Milton’s difficulties with description demonstrate that this contrarian position does not lead to a consistent philosophy: obscurity’s poetic utility fades when theorized (which is why Sidney’s Defence and the other theoretical treatises I have discussed avoid it).
What does persevere, though, is the distinctive role of poetry, and I believe my illumination of that role might be particularly meaningful now. In recent years, the study of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, within both the curricula of English programs and the discipline of literary criticism, has moved toward an emphasis on drama (and increasingly toward nonliterary prose and ephemera as well). Part of what makes drama compelling for our time is its mimetic promise: as social history has become more important to our understanding of the past, drama’s clearer representations of the daily world seem more compelling and more urgent. But such clarity is not the only goal of literature, and by offering a reminder of the diversity of Renaissance writing and thinking, I intend this book as a defense of poetry. Poetry preserves precisely those ideas that are not well suited to the immediacy of representation the stage affords, and thus gives us a fuller sense of the Renaissance writerly mind. That is not to say that poetic obscurity shifts representation to the poet. Part of my goal here has been to show how difficult (and in some cases undesirable) a writer’s self-representation is. This book is attentive to the ways in which Colin Clout is not Spenser and Astrophil not Sidney, and I could say the same, without the help of fictitious names, about Donne and Milton, whose resistance to representing their mistresses and wives in their lyrics reflects on themselves.
The preoccupations I have explored here are not of merely historical interest, however; they are fundamental to the category of literature. If the connection between the poem and what it describes is questioned, what is left is the relationship between poem and reader. The chief claim to importance I can make for the unimagined as a literary category is that it is never far from imagination itself and thus never far from reading. Marvell calls the mind “that Ocean where each kind / Doth streight its own resemblance find” (“The Garden” 43–44). He seems to understand perceptions to enter the mind in a kind of raw state, where they are categorized alongside similar perceptions that have entered in the past, allowing for identification. “Yet it creates, transcending these, / Far other Worlds, and other Seas” (45–46): the identifying power of the mind gives way to the greater creative power. Marvell does not specify, exactly, the relationship between these powers, surely because they cannot be separated. After all, the kinds do more than seek their resemblances in the mind and create new kinds: they also discover the kinds they expect to correspond with—in the mind, the tusk seeks the elephant; daylight seeks the sun. Such correspondences are neither perceptions nor (because they are not creative) imaginations, but they are inevitably associated with both. They blur the boundary between what is perceived and what is not. The afterimage, that chromatically reversed form that hovers in the air when we look away from something, involuntary and physical though it is, can be indistinguishable from the things we see only because we expect to. When we perceive the dim outlines of eyes, nose, and mouth beneath a veil, it is hard to know how much we are seeing and how much we are imagining because we know it is there. The face anticipates the painting, and the painting notices the absence of the face—even the most accurate painting is not a mirror but a “counterfeit presentment” (Hamlet 3.4.53).
The River Bregog in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe disappears and returns but is never really gone because any part of a stream implies further stretches of water above and below. Shade is the presence of night during the day, and night the reminder of shade. The corpse is implied by the tomb—but the tomb is also a promise, one that Spenser summarizes with his word “waste,” the end to which humanity tends individually and collectively. In these correspondences, perception merges with metaphor and truth at once. That wing of Milton’s that allows him to report to us “things beyond earthly sight” anticipates his own sainthood; we are never given an image of Milton as saint, but that assumed future is essential for his “higher argument” to function. The manikin, that model by which artists manage the proportions of the human figure, anticipates (as Dee says in the passage I quote in chapter 3) the patterning by which such models can be applied to anything on land or sea, proportion itself being the pattern that, in Renaissance thinking, underlies the universe as a whole.
For the most part, the distinction between visible and invisible, imagined and unimagined, is clear. The veil is there to be lifted. When the veil’s opacity overwhelms even the possibility of a face, the result is a disruption of the expected workings of poetic visuality. Such disruptions are fissures that can threaten to break literature (as the excoriation of description in Paradise Regained seems to leave too little room for poetry to function) but also reveal its inner structure, and that revelation is, presumably, the reason to risk such a fracture.
These disruptions are not merely visual; indeed, I have previously made similar arguments about the limitations of aural representations in poetry.[1] They also extend beyond the poems in which they occur, affecting literary history as a whole, in a way that deserves further study. There is no doubt that the Renaissance sense of mimesis was enormously influential for the development of literature during subsequent centuries. Though that influence has been amply studied since Auerbach, the role of obscurity in the history of literary representation has not. It should be, for the limits of mimesis help delineate the boundaries of literature. The closeness of the visual to the nonvisual, and the potential for ambiguity between them, mean that the poetry of the unimagined distorts not only its own representations but all representations, introducing ripples in the mirror held up to nature.
Any investigation of these larger issues should take into account the complex relationship between representation and genre. It is not possible, separate from the mechanisms of the craft of poetry, for a poet to have a position on how the things and events of his world are to be represented. In this sense, an attention to genre would allow for an expansion of the question of obscurity beyond the Renaissance, even to our own time. Influenced by the confidence in imaging introduced by photography and the seeming transparence of the imagination to modern psychology, we tend now to think of representation as immediate, reliable, and inescapable. That view of representation can sometimes make the history of literary genres harder to make sense of.
It also affects the way we think of writing. Despite (or because of) the speed of contemporary publication, one of the great obsessions of our age is writer’s block, which seems inexplicable and especially dangerous—to the writer and her accountant, but also to the reader, as if the mere possibility of silence constituted a threat to reading itself.[2] Writer’s block seems so strange because we assume that representation in its proper form is immediate and exact.[3] Sidney’s and Spenser’s views of a reality that shies away from being represented, and of a poetry whose material is insufficient and must be supplemented by the imagination and by the mechanisms of poetic technique, are an effective counter to the modern sense of the obstacles confronting the blocked writer.
The skepticism of verisimilitude discernable in Renaissance poetry might similarly illuminate the history of other genres, particularly prose fiction. We should not think of the immersive mimesis of the novel as something that was just waiting to be invented in the seventeenth century. Realism suggests a correlation between the representability of the world and the worldliness of representation; alternatives to both are necessary to understand why realism was attractive in the first place and why it still has limits. The same skepticism might temper our sense of the later influence of Renaissance poetry and of poetry’s later history in general. Donne in particular is often read by modern poets with a feeling of mutual sympathy.[4] I am not suggesting that such sympathy is illusory—indeed, I don’t believe current models of representation would be utterly foreign to Donne and his era. On the contrary, Donne acknowledges the potential immediacy of poetic image but keeps it at a distance. Ezra Pound declared image to have a kind of ideological urgency for poetry and poets, but they did not always think that way. A nonimagist account of the progress of poetry would be possible and profitable. There is an alternative history of poetry lying in the dark interior of the well-wrought urn.
1. Mattison, “Sweet Imperfection: Milton and the Troubled Metaphor of Harmony,” Modern Philology 106 (2009), 617–47.
2. Myles Weber offers a different (and intriguing) view in his Consuming Silences: How We Read Authors Who Don’t Publish (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), in which he argues that writer’s block itself has sometimes been marketed and sold as part of a writer’s output.
3. William Maxwell says of a story that “came right the first time”: “I thought—mistakenly—that I had had a breakthrough, and stories would be easier to write from that moment on; all I needed to do was just say it” (Maxwell, preface to All the Days and Nights [New York: Knopf, 1995], x). This happened fairly late in his life, and surely he had discovered before that writing is hard, but there is always something tantalizing about the idea that experience can be directly and painlessly translated into language.
4. Eliot reflects such sympathy when he writes of Donne’s “direct sensuous apprehension of thought”; he recognizes his own task when he says that the “metaphysical poets” as a group “were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.” Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays: 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 246, 248.