This book explores the premise that surprise is both an emotion and an element of poetics—both an object of mimesis (the situated experience of characters) and a feature of narrative (the mediated experience of readers or viewers). The first and most influential theorist of that intersection was Aristotle, and I begin this chapter by outlining the salient claims of his Poetics. I go on to consider a series of developments in the intellectual history of surprise: the early modern rehabilitation of wonder as valuable emotional attitude; the Cartesian identification of surprise as a pivotal movement in the passions; the emergence of surprise as a key term in the eighteenth-century discourse of aesthetics; the later role of surprise as rubric in twentieth-century literary criticism; and finally its conceptualization in modern emotion theory. Within this genealogy, several recurring ideas and concerns can be identified: the continuity between the brief jolt of surprise and the sustained state of wonder; a persis tent strain of skepticism about these emotions as debilitating forces, as well as the opposite sense that they are fragile and transitory; the framing of surprise in ethical as well as aesthetic terms; the conception of surprise as both physical fact and inner state; and questions about the repeatability of the experience of novelty.
The eighteenth-century valorization of surprise has its deepest origins in Aristotle’s Poetics, which posited the desirability of the unexpected and formulated an integral role for emotional response in drama. In ancient Greek thought, as David Konstan has shown, emotions were primarily intersubjective and contextual. In the classical city-state, which demanded “a continuous and public negotiation of social roles,” they were seen as arising from particular social situations and external events rather than coming from within.1 In this way, the Greek word for emotion, pathos, denoted not only a feeling but also an event that befalls a person—often, as Konstan notes, “in a negative sense of an accident or misfortune” (4). Aristotle expressed this narrative understanding of emotion in the both the Poetics and the Rhetoric, defining sudden and drastic turns of event as inspiring a feeling of awe. In the latter treatise, he remarks, “Dramatic turns of fortune and hairbreadth escapes from perils are pleasant, because we feel all such things are wonderful.”2 In identifying such moments as occasions for wonder, he expanded upon Plato’s premise in the Thaeatetus that wonder (to thaumaston) is an essential condition of philosophical inquiry.3 In essence, Aristotle asserted a legitimate place for drama in stimulating the emotion narrowly sanctioned by Plato; and as W.W. Fortenbaugh has remarked, this move reflected a larger reappraisal of the emotions as cognitive events rather than as irrational energies.4
Under Aristotle’s rubric in the Poetics, the ideal form of the complex plot involves both a reversal of fortune (peripeteia) and the hero’s recognition of that development (anagnorisis), and both are said to turn upon surprises. Aristotle’s term for such jolts, as Terence Cave has noted in his study of the Poetics, is ekplêxis: often translated into English as “surprise,” it denotes a sudden shock verging on fear or panic.5 Like purely physical forms of surprise, ekplêxis is an experience of being blindsided or jolted out of oneself; but Aristotle posited that this sudden derangement was only temporary and thus ultimately pleasurable, facilitated by a safe passage between the stage and the viewer’s own world.
For Aristotle, the element of rational cognition is indispensable in any dramatic architecture of surprise, in both the design of the plot and the character’s (and viewer’s) discovery of its workings. Anagnorisis is, as Cave has observed, “the epistemological counterpart or corollary to peripeteia” (33). In Aristotle’s hierarchy of recognition, the higher forms engage the faculties of memory or deductive reasoning.6 By implication, Aristotle dismisses what might be called mere surprise—a random shock without redeeming value, a physical jolt without affective or mental mediation. This distinction would later be echoed in neo-Aristotelian English literary criticism. John Dryden addresses the point in The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679), insisting that the dramatis personae should never be overwhelmed by the sheer force and accumulation of events, for “the manners never can be evident where the surprises of Fortune take up all the business of the stage, and where the Poet is more in pain, to tell you what hapned to such a man, than what he was.”7 The tradition of disparaging mere surprise has a long history, and can be traced in Alfred Hitchcock’s distinction between surprise and suspense. In the director’s example, surprise would be the detonation of a bomb without warning; suspense would involve a scenario in which “the bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it.” Hitchcock’s axiom: “Whenever possible, the public must be informed.”8
Despite Aristotle’s emphasis on recognition and affective response, the Poetics is fundamentally concerned more with the construction of plot than with the internal states of characters or viewers. In Meir Sternberg’s critique, Aristotle “privilege[s] surprise, the first and virtually the only among poetic system builders to do so,” and yet fails to give a broad enough account of the phenomenon.9 Sternberg argues that Aristotle’s focus on the well-made tragedy results in disproportionate attention to the design of the plot rather than to the aesthetic response to it; a narrow form of surprise (tragic reversal and recognition) rather than a broader spectrum of the unexpected.10 Aristotle’s conception of dramatic time is limited to the unity of a beginning, middle, and end; and in Sternberg’s assessment, that account does not register the temporal substance of narrative itself—the dynamic interplay of the three “master functions” of surprise, suspense, and curiosity. The pure shock of an exclamation such as “A fire!” eludes Aristotelian categories but exemplifies the condition of what Sternberg defines as “narrativity” (520), in that it engages all three functions. Though Sternberg rightly notes the limitations of Aristotle’s exclusive focus on tragedy, the larger implications of that focus should not be overlooked: it was Aristotle who laid the groundwork for the eighteenth-century understanding of surprise as pleasurable and edifying rather than painful or merely shocking.
Though Plato and Aristotle both insisted on the intellectual merits of surprise and wonder, these intertwined emotional states went through their own reversal of fortune in medieval scholastic commentary, as Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park have shown in their magisterial study of the subject. Known from the twelfth century onward as admiratio, wonder was treated by thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Eu rope an philosophers mainly as a “taboo passion”; it was associated with the ignorant or unformed mind (Roger Bacon), likened to the stupefaction and cardiac systole of fear (Albertus Magnus), and described as a disabling of intellect and a kind of mental sloth (Aquinas).11
The subsequent early modern rehabilitation of wonder as a more salutary force can be attributed to two cultural developments: the Renaissance literature of New World exploration and the seventeenth-century rise of natural philosophy. Stephen Greenblatt has traced the trope of wonder that runs through the Eu rope an literature of exploration and conquest, while Daston and Park emphasize the seventeenth-century scientific context.12 In the first case, the encounter between colonial explorer and native inhabitant was a mutual surprise, but the wonder it inspired was represented in two ways: as the vehicle of investigation into the new and exotic; and as heathen fear of godlike visitors. In later Enlightenment discourse, wonder became valued as a goad to intellectual inquiry rather than anathematized as a disabling arrest. By the mid-eighteenth century, Daston and Park note, the valence of wonder went through another cultural change. In scientific discourse, the disinterested attitude of curiosity supplanted the slack-jawed stance of amazement, which came to be seen as “the hallmark of the ignorant and barbarous” (304), banished from the realm of natural philosophy to take up residence in natural theology (as in the Deistic praise of divine order in all things) and its secular counterpart, the aesthetics of the Sublime (323–24).13
It was Descartes who set a precedent in the seventeenth century for treating wonder with philosophical respect, and for scrupulously distinguishing between good and bad forms of it. It has become a critical commonplace that the Cartesian focus on individual experience in the Discourse on Method (1637) and the Meditations (1641) paved the way for both British empiricism and the rise of the novel; after Descartes, as Ian Watt notes, “both philosophers and novelists paid greater attention to the particular individual than had been common before.”14 Descartes’s later work, The Passions of the Soul (Les passions de l’âme), published posthumously in Paris in 1649 and issued in an English translation a year later, should be included in that account, particularly with respect to British aesthetics. Descartes posits wonder as the primary human emotion and the template for the passions in general, defining it as “a sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary.”15 It is worth lingering over that phrase, “surprise of the soul”: in Descartes’s seventeenth-century French, surprise is not a term for an emotion in its own right, as it would become in later French and English usage; rather, it denotes a kind of seizure, as in its earliest sense.
It is characteristic of Cartesian metaphysics that the notion of a surprise de l’âme is a hybrid one. In Descartes’s French, surprise would be chiefly a physical phenomenon, but it is not clear what part of the immaterial soul could be seized or attacked. Wonder, then, must arise in corporeal experience and somehow ramify into a psychic state: perhaps the point of origin lies in the pineal gland, which Descartes speculatively identified as the nexus between body and soul. In modern terms, it might be analogous to the hypothalamus, where present-day neuroscience locates the startle reflex, or the excitable region of the amygdala, a site of fear conditioning and memory formation. For Descartes, as Susan James has pointed out, the passions are unique to human beings, and all states of the Cartesian soul (as opposed to the Aristotelian) are forms of thinking. In an animal, surprise is purely a startle reflex of the body, an autonomic nervous response; but in a human being, it takes on cognitive meaning as a passion of the soul.16 The Cartesian complexity of any human emotion thus anticipates the modern neurological and psychological conception of emotion, which describes it as a brain function, a physical response with multiple corporeal sites, an array of facial expressions, and a set of rational appraisals.
The primacy of wonder in Descartes’s taxonomy is based partly on the premise that it is an experience of the new, and that unlike other passions, it has no true opposite. Its inverse might be a state of unarticulated indifference and inattention, the absolute absence of passion (but not the later construction of boredom, which involves an attitude toward the world, not a state of neutrality). In the Cartesian scale of feeling, the soul dwells in a default state of dullness until awakened by the new, the sudden, or the unexpected; and that fleeting surprise can lead into one of two sustained emotions: either the moderate state of wonder (l’admiration) or the extreme state of astonishment (l’éstonnement). In French, to be astonished is to be thunderstruck (étonné ), disabled by fear or awe into a state of paralytic muteness; but to be in a state of wonder is to be in a mode of articulate receptivity.
Among the emotions, wonder as defined by Descartes in The Passions is only one of the six primary passions (the others being love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness) to be caused and sustained solely by the soul, not the body or animal spirits (61, Art. 76).17 The precipitating “surprise of the soul” might have a physical and corporeal basis, although Descartes does not explicitly say so; indeed, he offers the example of tickling to illustrate degrees of intensity in the surprise of any novelty. Since the soles of the feet are accustomed to the full weight of the body, he reasons, the relatively light touch of a feather or fingers imparts an utterly new movement to the soul. This example of differential sensation, however, does not account for the fact that we cannot tickle ourselves; the elements of externality and the unexpected surely play another part in this instance of proprioceptive surprise. In any case, Descartes is less interested in ephemeral stimuli per se than in the soul’s capacity to hold them in memory; his main point is that while wonder has a physical dimension, it is a usefully cerebral passion, instrumental in retaining impressions and acquiring knowledge (59, Art. 75). By contrast, astonishment is an extreme state of arrest: in a trope that would be frequently echoed in eighteenth-century writing, Descartes says that this emotion “makes the entire body remain immobile like a statue” (58, Art. 73); and the mind, likewise, is reduced to a dangerous quiescence. In Descartes’s opinion, there is a fine line between the petrifaction of astonishment and the calm repose of wonder; as much as the latter “disposes us to the acquisition of the sciences…we should still try afterwards to emancipate ourselves from it as much as possible” (60, Art. 76). If surprise is a gateway to wonder, wonder should be a conduit to knowledge, an experience to be surpassed.
In one of the earliest aesthetic interpretations of Descartes’s system, Charles Le Brun, found er of the Académie Royale de la Peinture et de la Sculpture, lectured on the artistic representation of emotion at the Académie in Paris in 1668.18 Posthumously published in 1698, the lecture was translated and published as A Method to Learn to Design the Passions in 1734; and it exerted an influence on English writers and artists including Jonathan Richardson, William Hogarth, Aaron Hill, and Joshua Reynolds.19 Building on Descartes’s observations on the causes of the passions, Le Brun focuses on their visible effects, or “expressions”; these he illustrates with an extensive gallery of iconic faces. In his terminology, expression is an activity of both faces and the artists who represent them: as an attribute of physiognomy, it is “what stamps the true characters of everything” and “intimates the emotions of the soul”; and as a product of art, it is “a lively and natural resemblance of the things we are to represent” (12). Following Descartes, Le Brun posits admiration at the head of what he calls the “simple passions”; it is “the chief and most temperate of all the Passions,” whose main facial sign is a simple elevation of the eyebrows. Le Brun goes on to offer a more elaborate physical account of the paralysis suggested by his predecessor’s trope of the statue. It is
a surprize, which enclines the Soul attentively to consider the objects that seem rare and extraordinary to her; and this surprize has such a power as sometimes to force the spirits towards the Part which receives an impression from the Object, and she is so taken up with considering such an impression, that few spirits are left to supply the Muscles: hence the body becomes as a statue, without motion; and the excess of Admiration causes Astonishment; and Astonishment may happen before we know whether such an object be agreeable to us or not. (16)
It is understandable that Le Brun, court paint er to Louis XIV, would trace a different path of admiration from the one laid out by Descartes: not toward the acquisition of knowledge but toward the aesthetic realm of pleasure and appreciation. In its suspension of motion, the soul is given “Time to deliberate upon what she has to do, and attentively consider the object that presents itself to her; which if uncommon and extraordinary, what was but, at first, a simple emotion of Admiration, then becomes Esteem” (24). Though the body becomes like a statue in this process, it is frozen in an attitude of attention rather than Ovidian petrifaction; the soul is inclined toward the object, like a connoisseur leaning in to inspect a painting or medallion. Surprise and wonder might be called preverbal and precritical, but in the aftermath of the initial arrest, the mind comes to a rational judgment about what it has beheld.
At the dawn of eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse, Joseph Addison locates some form of surprise or astonishment at the heart of three categories of imaginative experience: Greatness, Novelty, and Beauty. (It is thus apt that Samuel Johnson would later use a quotation from Addison in his Dictionary to illustrate the meaning of the adjective “surprising.”) With respect to the earlier Cartesian account of the passions, Addison’s essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” (1712) are conspicuously devoid of any denigration of astonishment. In narrow terms, Aristotelian poetics paved the way for Addison’s intellectual move, but it was John Dennis’s commentary on the Longinian sublime in the Grounds of Criticism (1704) that opened up the premise of surprise as an affective component of literary engagement. Dennis here exalts ideas that “Ravish and Transport the Reader, and produce a certain Admiration mingled with Astonishment and with Surprize.”20 In his argument, terror originates in surprise, an agitation of the soul in which the imagination becomes especially receptive to deep impressions; and a poetic image can induce such a feeling as well as an immediate experience.
With respect to Dennis’s paradigm, Addison expands both the range of surprise (beyond the emotional realm of terror) and its domains of experience (beyond poetry or rhetoric). In essence, he retains some of the language of what Dennis called the “Enthusiastic Passions” but softens the emphasis on terror or trauma. In Addison’s account, which focuses primarily on the visual, the experience of greatness means being “flung into a pleasing Astonishment,” as when we behold “unbounded Views”; and the experience of Beauty is an entirely pleasurable version of Cartesian wonder, in that “the very first Discovery of it strikes the Mind with an inward Joy, and spreads a Chearfulness and Delight through all its Faculties.”21 In effect, novelty is the aesthetic distillation of surprise: “Every thing that is new or uncommon raises a Pleasure in the Imagination, because it fills the Soul with an agreeable Surprise, gratifies its Curiosity, and gives it an Idea of which is was not before possesst.” Ronald Paulson has speculated that this category might have inspired Addison’s interest in aesthetic matters in the first place; less an object or grouping of objects than a “discursive mode,” it offers an important adjunct to Shaftesbury’s dichotomy of the beautiful and the ugly.22
By insisting on the role of surprise in aesthetic experience, Addison makes a significant revision to Horace’s dictum that poetry should either delight (delectare) or instruct (prodesse), but preferably do both.23 Addison’s substitution has several implications. First, it marks an important distinction between surprise and delight: though the two terms grew more closely intertwined in the eighteenth century, they were far from interchangeable in 1712; indeed, Addison seeks to explain how surprise can produce delight. Second, Addison’s axiom represents an expanded field of inquiry: his aesthetic principles apply to a range of experience that encompasses both the poetic and visual arts, and both artifacts and natural phenomena. Third, it reflects a turn away from the overt claims of didacticism: it is not that Addison excluded the potential of art to instruct; rather, he shifts his emphasis away from the content of instruction toward the cognitive and emotional experience of viewing or reading.
Rather than insisting primarily on moral edification, then, Addison focuses on the process of reception: an agreeable (rather than jarring or frightening) surprise, followed by a spreading sense of pleasure or joy.24 All three categories of experience involve spatial tropes of amplitude: with Greatness, we are “flung into a pleasing Astonishment” and given “an Image of Liberty”; with Novelty, the soul is “filled” with an agreeable surprise; and with Beauty, the object “spreads” delight through the mind’s faculties. Addison’s notions of expanding or filling imply the acquisition of knowledge, but they mainly denote sensory pleasure or intellectual delight. Surprise might be an ephemeral stimulus, but Addison’s metaphors extend its effect along spatial and temporal axes. Finally, instead of banishing the Horatian value of instruction, Addisonian surprise registers a new assumption about it. Under Addison’s empiricist premise, anything surprising is necessarily more memorable (because more strongly imprinted on the sensorium), and therefore instrumental to didactic purposes.
In the decade after publication of “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” Jonathan Richardson elaborated on Addison’s principles in his Essay on the Theory of Painting (1725)—notably advancing his predecessor’s formula of “surprise and delight.” Like Addison, Richardson asserts the visual faculty as superior to all other senses, for “the pleasures of the Eye are like those of Heaven, Perpetual, and without Satiety”; and he offers instruction on the components of painting by which the artist can best provide those pleasures.25 But his parting advice to the paint er goes beyond the formulation of rules to posit an element that eludes codification—indeed, it represents the very antithesis of aesthetic rule-following: “In the foregoing Treatise I have been shewing what I take to be the Rules of Painting, and tho’ Anyone had understood, and practis’d them all, I must yet say One thing is wanting, Go, and Endeavor to attain the Sublime. For a Paint er should not Please only, but Surprize” (256). In eighteenth-century aesthetics, as David Marshall has observed, the a priori standards of neoclassical poetics gave way to a new focus on the subjective effects of a work of art on readers or beholders.26
The problem of this turn lay in the potential chaos of individual response, as Marshall notes in alluding to Shaftesbury’s famous caveat that without standards of taste, aesthetic response might be mystified into the “je ne sais quoi to which idiots and the ignorant would reduce everything.”27 Though Richardson’s prescription of surprise risks that gnomic reduction, it also reflects the challenges of any aesthetic theory. Inevitably, it confronts its own explanatory limits—that its formulations are generalized from already-accomplished works of art. To escape from that bind, Richardson gestures to a necessarily unnameable element of the unexpected in any successful painting, as well as to some work of art or artist yet to come. “Who knows what is hid in the Womb of Time!” Richardson exclaims, in hopes of the messianic emergence of a great English paint er. In effect, he apostrophizes unknown artists of the future and says, “Surprise us.”
Despite the new embrace of surprise in aesthetic discourse, vestiges of the old skepticism about its disabling effects persisted. This strain of thought is discernible in David Hume’s philosophy and in Johnson’s literary criticism: both offered caveats about the flaring emotions excited by the new or strange. In Hume’s account, “admiration and surprize” are passions that incline one toward particular beliefs, especially a susceptibility to the marvelous claims of “quacks and projectors”: “The first astonishment, which naturally attends their miraculous relations, spreads itself over the whole soul, and so vivifies and enlivens the idea, that it resembles the inferences we draw from experiences.”28 This analysis of emotion echoes both Addison’s spiritualization of Novelty (the expansion of the soul) and the Aristotelian notion of enargeia (the vividness of an idea); what distinguishes this account is its wariness about the human disposition toward awe and credulity, which Hume deems a “mystery” that would require study beyond the scope of his treatise. Hume, however, is enough of a skeptic and materialist to see this response as an inevitable function of the body in a wholly physical world—surprise as a kinesthetic phenomenon, emotion as literal motion. In its default state, the mind or soul (Hume uses both terms) dwells in an inertial “unpliableness” until something “excites the spirits” and stimulates “surprize,” along with “all the emotions, which arise from novelty” (II.iii.5, 470).
There is a coda to this moment, however: in Hume’s longer timeline, any such emotional experience has a cognitive aftermath, the familiarizing effect of custom and repetition: “the novelty wears off,” “The hurry of the spirits is over,” the initial agitation subsides into an “orderly motion” of the mind, and “we survey the objects with greater tranquility” (470). In effect, Hume’s model of cognition—grounded in the accumulation of experience and the generalizing effect of repetition, habit, and association—suggests a gradual waning of the human capacity for surprise and wonder. And yet by the same empiricist premise, nothing is absolutely certain, and the most ordinary expectations of the world are only provisional. “Every past experiment,” Hume remarks, “may be consider’d as a kind of chance,” since the idea of cause and effect is derived from experience rather than a transcendental law; and “there is no probability so great as not to allow of a contrary possibility; because otherwise ’twould cease to be a probability, and ’twould become a certainty” (I.iii.12, 185–86). Hume’s picture of consciousness is a mental landscape of quiescence and inertia occasionally punctuated by surprise, a life of certainty and predictability shadowed at the edges by a void.
In a more strongly ethical framing of Hume’s model of consciousness, Johnson in his Rambler essays repeatedly cautions against the disabling effects of surprise and wonder and advises a middle way between quiescence and excitability. On the one hand, he asserts, in a Lockean vein, that “nothing can strongly strike or affect us, but what is rare or sudden,”29 and he laments the deadening effect of custom; on the other hand, he recommends the stoic wisdom of insulating oneself against life’s shocks and disappointments. That desideratum, however, is overshadowed by Johnson’s typically dark view of mortality and the sense that all calculations of probability are tragically flawed when it comes to the survival of the self. On the premise that “No man believes that his own life will be short,” he acknowledges in Rambler 71 that “it often happens, that sluggishness and activity are equally surprised by the last summons, and perish not more differently from each other, than the fowl that received the shot from her flight, from her that is killed upon the bush.”30 In a meditation on the subject of expectation, Johnson’s word “surprised” is inflected by the classic double meaning, denoting both the cognitive frustration of an expectation (I expected to live longer) and the physical ambush of death itself, which Johnson makes ominously visible in his hunting metaphor.
In effect, Johnson dissents from Addisonian criticism in his refusal to valorize wonder; and he is perennially suspicious of novelty without edification. In Rambler 4, the famous essay on realist fiction, he argues that the contemporary novelist, in a departure from romance narrative, is obligated “to keep up curiosity without the help of wonder” (19); and in another essay, he suggests that wonder is “a sudden cessation of the mental progress,” ending “when it recovers force enough to divide the object into its parts, or mark the intermediate gradations from the first agent to the last consequence.”31 Johnson was always doubtful that wonder would reliably take this path. In one caveat, he faulted the metaphysical poets for being “wholly employed on something unexpected and surprising” and, in what seems to be a deliberate echo of Addison’s definition of novelty, he adds that “they never attempted that comprehension and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second rational admiration.”32 Johnson’s criticism, here and elsewhere, harks back to the old suspicion of surprise as a mere physical reflex rather than an edifying mental process, an ephemeral moment rather than a lasting effect.
For Edmund Burke, by contrast, surprise is simply not strong enough; it is a few steps short of the Sublime. Echoing Hume’s model of cognitive development, Burke effectively dismisses the experience of novelty as a state associated with childhood.33 From the opening page of his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), surprise is tacitly displaced by the more potent forms of wonder; indeed, the word “surprise” is conspicuously absent from the treatise. Summarily ignoring the category of the Novel, Burke collapses Addison’s triad into the dyad of the Sublime and the Beautiful, completing his predecessor’s transformation of astonishment into an aesthetic desideratum, a constituent of all sublime experiences. Following Descartes and Hume, Burke proposes that the default attitude of the mind is “indifference,” focusing on the salient categories of experience that transport us out of that state.34
In Burke’s aesthetic vocabulary, surprise is replaced by its stronger cousin, astonishment. Noting the latter word’s French etymology, Burke defines it as “that state of the soul, in which all motions are suspended, with some degree of horror,” and places it above the “inferior effects” of admiration, reverence, and respect. This is a significant reversal of Descartes. Burke does not dispute the Cartesian definition of astonishment as physically and mentally disabling, but he revalues it as a divinely ordered feature of consciousness: the Creator decided that our experiences should not merely be governed by reason but rather by “powers and properties that prevent the understanding” (97). At the same time, he acknowledges that with repeated exposure, even the most extreme experiences might subside into indifference: “the effect of constant use is to make all things of what ever kind entirely unaffecting” (94). In other words, the essential elements in Burke’s political vision of a stable society—custom and habit—are ultimately hostile to the aesthetic experience of the Sublime. The well-ordered state ensures against unpleasant alarms, but in the private experience of the individual, shocks of various kinds are still to be courted and valued.
Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) helps us to see what Burke excludes from his account. The astonishment of the Sublime, as Frances Ferguson has observed, is essentially solitary and asocial, an individual confrontation with immensities—alpine mountains, oceanic vistas, celestial panoramas.35 Surprise, by contrast, is a typically social emotion, especially as Smith posits it: a function of our interpersonal relationships and expectations of others’ behavior—the realm, in short, of realist fiction. Smith’s distinction between surprise and astonishment mirrors Burke’s binary of the Beautiful and the Sublime: “The amiable virtues consist in that degree of sensibility which surprises by its exquisite and unexpected delicacy and tenderness. The awful and respectable, in that degree of self-command which astonishes by its amazing superiority.”36 Such lexical discrimination is typical of eighteenth-century theories of the passions. Smith begins his treatise on “The History of Astronomy” with precise definitions of three affective terms: wonder is the response to “what is new and singular; surprise is a reaction to “what is unexpected,” and admiration arises in the presence of “what is great or beautiful.”37
Hugh Blair would later echo Smith’s distinctions in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), proposing an emotional taxonomy based on categories of stimulus: “I am surprised with what is new and unexpected; I am astonished, at what is vast or great; I am amazed with what is incomprehensible; I am confounded, by what is shocking or terrible.”38 Blair’s main purpose here is to attack vagueness in English usage, but the remark has a political valence: it is grounded in the claim that exaggeration about emotional states should have no place in a stable, civilized society in which there is very little to induce genuine shock. By contrast, “the savage tribes of men are always much given to wonder and astonishment. Every new object surprises, terrifies, and makes a strong impression on their mind; they are governed by imagination and passion, more than by reason.”39 In Blair’s terminology, “surprise” would be the most commonly used word in polite society, and then only sparingly.
Blair and Smith agree in emphasizing the unexpected in their definitions of surprise, but in his treatise on astronomy, Smith is more explicit about formulating a surprise of the ordinary: “We are surprised at those things which we have seen often, but which we least of all expected to meet with in the place where we find them; we are surprised at the sudden appearance of a friend, whom we have seen a thousand times, but whom we did not imagine we were to see then” (3). Smith’s mundane illustration of suddenly running into a friend has great relevance to experience in eighteenth-century prose fiction, but it has no place in the paradigm of the Sublime and the Beautiful. That absence highlights what is largely missing from Burke’s account: the intersection of time and place, and the temporality of consciousness. To be sure, Burke factors in temporality when he distinguishes between immediately painful sensations and the diminished or moderated pain that can amount to sublimity. But he tends to abstract the essential features of sublime and beautiful objects or experiences. These features are in dependent of what animates the experience of surprise—what might be called narrative context. (A person might be considered innately beautiful, but not always surprising.) A notable exception lies in Burke’s famous illustration of the pleasure that people take in certain visceral yet distanced spectacles of horror: a theater would be immediately emptied of spectators, he says, if they suddenly heard of a public execution about to take place in an adjoining square. It is telling that Burke here uses an anecdotal narrative to demonstrate the comparative inferiority of a narrative form: the two spectacles are not merely presented as a set of choices but as one event impinging upon another—the shock of a happening with real consequences breaking in on an artistically designed and mediated one.
On the side of benevolence rather than darker human inclinations, Smith also conceived of behavior in terms of reflexes; and like Burke, he stages a kind of surprise to prove a point. This one, however, is entirely internal, a matter of faculty psychology rather than spatially contiguous choices. The inner faculty that Smith personifies in The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a “man within” is not only a judge and spectator but also an agent of morally salubrious shock—one who “calls to us, a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better or other than it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration” (194). In this attack of conscience, the higher moral voice both calls to the self and shamingly calls it out—the better to assert its interchangeability with other selves. Rather than describing this moral pang as a species of passion in its own right, Smith suggests that it is a kind of Archimedean lever against all passions of self-interest, capable of “astonishing” them into paralysis and proneness to scrutiny. Smith’s interior scene could well serve as ethical sequel to Burke’s drama of spectacular choices: after rushing to the public execution, the subject, suddenly removed from the crowd, is surprised by a pang of guilt over his own schadenfreude.
As a dramatic psychomachia, Smith’s illustration reflects what Marshall has identified as the deep nexus between sympathy and theater in eighteenth-century discourse: while the experience of watching a play enlists the spectator’s sympathetic identification, the act of sympathy involves a complex act of theatrical spectatorship—watching oneself, imagining the perception of others.40 More than theater, however, the passage above evokes the genre of the novel: the trope of sudden shock and subsequent introspection that frequently appeared in prose fiction before and after Smith’s treatise, from the diaristic introspection of Robinson Crusoe to the free indirect discourse of Sense and Sensibility. In the literary vein of Daniel Defoe or Jane Austen, Smith here illustrates what an attack of conscience is supposed to feel like, but in his normative model of education, he seems to imply that such moments should eventually wane, if not entirely disappear.
Elsewhere, in a discussion of pain, Smith suggests that “the view of the impartial spectator” would over time become “perfectly habitual” (208–9). Ideally, the editorial voice of conscience should merge with the social voice of the self. It is striking, then, that Smith does not go so far as to claim that the scene of moral astonishment represents only a phase of youth or immaturity. In narratological terms, the anecdote has both diachronic and synchronic aspects: it is a phase in a longer story of moral education, but it is also a moment that can be repeated across a lifetime. With habituation, one perhaps becomes less susceptible to the kind of shock that Smith describes, and yet morally instructive surprise is never truly at an end—especially not in the novel. The judgments and responses that become automatic and subconscious in Smith’s philosophical account cannot be taken for granted in narrative representation of internal states.
Much of the writing on surprise that I have thus far considered addresses the experience of first exposure; but as Smith’s model of the moral conscience reminds us, repetition is an important corollary issue. Do Crusoe’s “surprizing adventures” continue to live up to their titular promise on a second reading? Can the reader step into the same narratological footprint in the same way twice? Not if surprise is strictly determined by prior knowledge and expectation; but in a more robust, eighteenth-century understanding of the term, surprise could have greater longevity. In mimetic terms, the experiences described in the novel are always surprising to Crusoe; and in Smith’s conception of affective poetics, they have the potential to exert the same effect on the reader, over and over. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argues that even with repeated exposure to a novel or poem, the reader can “enter into the surprise and admiration which it naturally excites in him” (2). The startling implication is that feelings of surprise and admiration are renewable resources—funds of emotional energy always available to the reader. More profoundly, the phrase “enter into” suggests how that energy is to be used: through an imaginative act of sympathy. Throughout his treatise, Smith returns to this spatial metaphor of intimacy to define sympathy: it means not only creating a mental representation of another person’s feeling but inhabiting it. In Smith’s account, when we reread a novel or a poem, we reenter our earlier experience of the work in the same way that we sympathetically participate in the feelings of another. By implication, in our earlier reading, we were a different person, but by an act of imagination, we can recapture the feelings of that earlier self, just as we can enter into the affective world of someone else.41
What is at stake in Smith’s formulation of aesthetic reexperience and sympathetic imagination comes into even clearer focus when we consider Burke’s contrasting account of novelty in his “Introduction on Taste” (1759) appended to the Philosophical Enquiry:
In the morning of our days, when the senses are unworn and tender, when the whole man is awake in every part, and the gloss of novelty fresh upon all objects that surround us, how lively at that time are our sensations, but how false and inaccurate the judgments we form of things? I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most excellent performances of genius, which I felt at that age from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible.42
Burke here mourns the loss of original perceptions: the sharpened faculty of judgment has banished—but not entirely compensated for—those first pleasures. His language registers the loss with a Hamlet-like melancholy: though the adult judgment condemns the work, the memory preserves it as an excellent performance of genius. In moral terms, Burke and Smith agree that the faculty of judgment improves with age and experience, but on an aesthetic level they part ways: for Burke, judgment supervenes upon the earlier exposure to “genius,” but for Smith it cannot interfere with the original capacity for enjoyment. In asserting the repeatability of literary surprise, Smith in effect resists the privileging of the first exposure to a work, which has run from the eighteenth century to the present day—with the contemporary “spoiler alert” routinely invoked in reviews of films, television shows, and novels. If you do not wish to ruin the surprise, the reader is advised, avert your eyes from the following paragraph.
Notably, Smith confronts questions of rereading more directly than novelists of the period. In general, authors such as Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne were more concerned with the reader’s first engagement with the narrative than with voluntary revisitations, and when they addressed the temporality of reading, they more typically imagined variations on the theme of an endless story. At the beginning of Tom Jones (1749), for instance, Fielding proposes that if he could “hash and ragoo” his narrative fare with enough seasoning, his reader “might be rendered desirous to read on forever,” as a gourmand might desire to eat without cessation.43 In a letter to Aaron Hill, Samuel Richardson grudgingly allowed that his rival had achieved some measure of that culinary mission, mainly by way of acknowledging the rigors of his own recent novel: “While the Taste of the Age can be gratified by a Tom Jones (Dear Sir, have you read Tom Jones?) I can not expect that the World will, bestow Two Readings, or One indeed, attentive one, on such a grave story as Clarissa, which is designed to make those think of Death, who endeavour all they can to banish it from their Thoughts.”44 Banishing or forestalling death was precisely Sterne’s point in having Tristram Shandy propose an ever-expanding novel that would devote two volumes to every year of his life.
A few decades later, it is the possibility of an endless story that Austen’s character Catherine Morland fantasizes about in Northanger Abbey. Absorbed in The Mysteries of Udolpho, Catherine exclaims to her new friend Isabella Thorpe, “I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.” Reading, not rereading: Catherine suspects that the novel’s surprises can be experienced only once. Although she admits that she is “wild to know” what is hidden behind a black veil in a key scene, she exercises forbearance: “But do not tell me—I would not be told on any account.”45 The young heroine is wild to know a great many things, both in fiction and in lived experience; but, as she discovers, the novel is no pastoral refuge or inexhaustible delicacy, and the freshness of its surprises will not last. The deeper implication of the novel is that Catherine might eventually grow from an enthusiastic consumer of gothic romance into a discerning reader of Austen’s own novels. Might she also become a rereader of such works, just as all of Austen’s heroines learn the importance of rereading and revising their first impressions of people? Perhaps. And yet in Northanger Abbey, the experience of reading a novel is still presumed to be subordinate to the lifelong activity of reading character; it is a useful medium for learning about the world, but it is not an experience that necessarily demands to be repeated.
The practice of rereading becomes indispensable when literary criticism becomes a professional discipline—when a Henry Tilney turns his bellettristic opinions into monographs. And yet, as J. Hillis Miller has observed in Fiction and Repetition (1982), that practice works against the possibility of surprise: the critical interpretation of any work of literature exerts a normalizing effect, in that it identifies repetitions—of motifs, events, words, images, character types—and assimilates them into a structure or pattern. That process of familiarization, Miller suggests, threatens the aesthetic freshness of the work: the language of academic mastery pushes aside the language of novelty, the results of the fifteenth reading supersede the impressions of the first. Nevertheless, each individual work of literary scholarship makes its own claim to novelty; it promises to surprise the reader, in large and small ways, with new interpretations, overlooked contexts, and buried textual connections.
In essence, Miller revisits the problem that New Criticism had earlier articulated: the reduction of a literary text (particularly a lyric poem) to a set of ideas or propositions—or what Cleanth Brooks called “the heresy of paraphrase.”46 Like Brooks, Miller argues that what must be preserved is a flexible sense of discovery: “The specificity and strangeness of literature, the capacity of each work to surprise the reader, if he can remain prepared to be surprised, means that literature continually exceeds any formulas or any theory which the critic is prepared to encompass it.”47 Miller’s key words—the related terms of strangeness and surprise—hark back to earlier veins of twentieth-century literary criticism: the “defamiliarization” of the ordinary formulated by Viktor Shklovsky and the surprise celebrated by Brooks and other New Critics. And his prescription for the reader’s willed accessibility to surprise recalls Smith’s notion of the reader’s imaginative recovery of a prior experience. The critical difference lies in Miller’s deconstructive conception of textual indeterminacy. For Smith, it is assumed that the self changes through time, so that the act of rereading a text is an act of sympathetic and even nostalgic recovery of a former response; but in Miller’s account, both the self and the text are in constant flux, since the latter is not a stable entity but rather a palimpsest of readings. The Heraclitean premise that one can never traverse the same text twice turns out to be the best defense against overfamiliarity, a preservative of surprise.48
In a related academic context, the art historian Bertrand Rougé has argued that in any engagement with art there is an inattendu attendu: the thing that is at once anticipated and utterly unexpected. This paradoxical phenomenon resides in the viewer rather than in any inherent quality of the object; it depends on a predisposition or openness to surprise.49 The éclat is not necessarily mitigated by repeated viewings or readings. Rougé draws an analogy to a child’s wished-for gift from Santa Claus: the gift itself does not really surprise, nor does the ritual of unwrapping the paper (“on pourrait dire que l’object de la surprise est sans surprise”); and yet there is an “atmosphere” of surprise nonetheless, a pleasurable simulacrum of the utterly unexpected and unbidden (9).
Though I devote the majority of this study to prose fiction, an eighteenth-century musical example can help illuminate the formal issue of repeatable surprise. Joseph Haydn’s “Surprise” symphony (No. 94) offers a useful anecdote about English tastes in the late eighteenth century and an illustration of the claims I wish to make about surprise as a structure of feeling. The first people who heard the piece—composed in 1791 and performed in London the following year—were undoubtedly startled by the loud tutti chord that the composer inserted into a deliberately soporific passage; and it has become part of the symphony’s legend that this was meant as a critique of a complacently dozing English audience—a trick designed, in the phrasing of John Keats, “to startle princes from easy slumbers.” Later scholars have debunked this as wishful myth, however: one has suggested that Haydn added the fortissimo “to please the tastes of the London audience rather than to chide them.”50 In other words, Haydn’s audience paradoxically expected a certain kind of surprise from the maestro. In light of the intellectual history I have been tracing—in which surprise became an aesthetic desideratum—this makes perfect sense. While it might be amusing to imagine the first audience jumping up from its collective afterdinner sleep, it must be acknowledged that the trick cannot long remain a secret, and cannot startle subsequent audiences in quite the same way. At the same time, a prior rational expectation does not necessarily drain the piece of its capacity to surprise.
In music, a virtual or cognitive surprise—if not an actual narrative one—can be enabled by form: the metrical and dynamic shape of Haydn’s andante is designed to lull the reader into a state of receptivity that allows the shock to be felt as if for the first time.51 The arts of music and theater excel in this capacity of sensory conditioning and physical immediacy; and, as I show, eighteenth-century novelists often sought to approximate it, even as they registered the difference between prose narrative and its sister arts. On the other side of the equation, the legend of Haydn’s symphony could be said to rely on a novelistic understanding of surprise: in the retelling, audience members are recruited as characters in a satirical set piece, subject to a mild form of Fieldingesque ridicule. (Or Hogarthian caricature: it was Hogarth who memorably captured the soporific effect of a compulsory cultural ritual when he depicted a parson putting the laity to sleep with his sermon.) The art of surprise, in other words, occupies the intersection between sensory stimulus and narrative expectation, physical experience and literary imagination.52
The body–mind dualism in Descartes’s and Le Brun’s accounts of surprise and wonder exemplifies a larger issue in the philosophy and psychology of the passions. As Martha Nussbaum has suggested, this Western intellectual tradition consists of two conflicting accounts of emotion: the Greek Stoic conception of emotions as evaluative judgments about persons and things concerned with the individual’s well-being; and the “adversary” idea of emotions as “unthinking energies” and functions of our animal or mechanistic nature.53 Without denying the corporeal and involuntary element of emotion, Nussbaum insists on the Stoic account; quoting Marcel Proust, she calls emotions “geological upheavals of thought,” in a phrase that captures the transaction between the external world and the act of cognition. Regarding the study of emotion in modern psychology, Paul E. Griffiths has elaborated a similar debate between a “feeling theory” and a “propositional attitude theory”: in the first, emotions are “introspective experiences characterized by a quality and intensity of sensation”; and in the second, they are not merely internal events but phenomena mediated by language and subject to rational analysis and moral examination.54
Within the disciplinary framework of developmental psychology, Jerome Kagan effectively conflates these two theories by positing four components of emotion, a cascade of events: 1) a change in brain activity; 2) a consciously processed change in feeling; 3) a cognitive interpretation of that feeling in thought or language; and 4) a behavioral response or preparedness to act.55 With new technologies of neuroscience, emotion has been studied as a brain state, and the Cartesian question thus arises as to whether emotion should be described neurobiologically or psychologically. Must an emotion involve a conscious registration of a feeling state, or can it pass below the psyche’s evaluative radar? Is it useful to posit a set of fundamental human emotions that can be classified and recognized across cultures and periods, or is emotion more properly understood as always culturally constructed and contingent? Mindful of the lack of critical consensus within his own discipline, Kagan insists that no emotion can be solely defined or understood by a brain profile, since neural firings can ramify into a variety of possible responses, depending on the individual. His paradigmatic example is the flash of lightning in the night sky: though it might startle the perceiver and induce alertness for the expected clap of thunder, it does not necessarily cause fear. The event might or might not be described by its perceiver as a surprise, but the degree of its intensity can be described as a function of experience and mental conditioning.
The most basic experience of surprise can be located in the neural firings of the amygdala, a section of the medial temporal lobe that makes discriminations between pleasant and unpleasant, safe and dangerous. What the Greeks called thumos (the capacity for intense feeling, akin to the traditional locus of “the heart”) and Descartes called the “sudden surprise of the soul” can be understood partly in neurobiological terms as the excitation of this brain region. The amygdala helps trigger the startle reflex, temporary body immobility, and reluctance to explore an unfamiliar area—in short, a state of anxious caution,56 precisely the paralysis of the spirits described by Descartes. Kagan notes that controlled experiments have shown that amygdalar activity decreases with repeated exposure to an event. “It appears,” he says, “that evolution rendered the amygdala an early component of the brain’s response to unexpected, unfamiliar, or ambiguous events, whether they are safe, pleasant, aversive, or potentially dangerous” (74).
In effect, both Descartes and Le Brun described amygdalar functions—Descartes in the neural seat of surprise and Le Brun in its outward expression. Meanwhile, the taxonomies of the latter—and even the word “expression” itself—anticipate the modern work of the research psychologist Paul Ekman, who has made a career of studying feelings as they are reflected in the face. The core of his work is the formulation of a group of basic and universally recognizable expressions, including anger, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise.57 While Le Brun’s project was primarily aesthetic (offering models for visual artists and actors), Ekman’s is scientific and juridical, in that it seeks to locate a fundamental truth in involuntary, spontaneous expression and offers ways of recognizing feelings in the faces of others. In one study, Ekman makes a distinction between forms of surprise—or, more precisely, between the startle reflex triggered by sudden loud noises or physical movements and other responses that are conventionally grouped under the heading of “surprise.” The study involved firing .22-caliber blanks behind seated subjects under various conditions: warned or not forewarned; asked to stifle a reaction or asked to feign a reaction. Ekman and his coauthor conclude that “being startled feels very different from being surprised, much more different in kind than the difference in feelings between terror and fear, or between rage and anger.”58
From a clinical perspective, one cannot convincingly fake the salient experience of being startled, a universal, neurobiological response; but within a social context, one can certainly counterfeit the more amorphous affect of surprise. In this sense, surprise can be called, in Rei Terada’s phrase, a “construct of thought.” As Terada points out, the word “emotion” itself (from the Latin e +movere) suggests the idea of “something lifted from a depth to a surface”; and while detractors fault deconstructionist criticism for discussing representations of things rather than things themselves, she argues that in this expressionist understanding of emotion there is only representation, the projection of some notional interior source, whether that biological origin is called thumos, the heart, or the amygdala.59
In effect, eighteenth-century fiction was fixated on the psychobiological fact of startlement as defined by Ekman but equally interested in the sociolinguistic construction of surprise as elaborated and theorized by Nussbaum, Kagan, and Terada. Moreover, it registered the distance between the two—the translation of immediate sensory and emotional experience into fiction. The primal functions of the amygdala—particularly the operations of stimulus distinction and familiarization—can be recognized in the conventional distinction between unpleasant and pleasant surprises, as well as in the Aristotelian category of poetically induced terror, which produces aesthetic pleasure and edification rather than pure fear and alarm. The novel is at one further remove: without the sensory immediacy of drama, it can only report and approximate visual, aural, and kinetic surprises. This limitation, as we will see in subsequent chapters, became a catalyst for mimetic innovation. The experience of surprise, which had been structurally located at the Aristotelian pivot of plot, assumed a new ethical relevance in the eighteenth century, in questions about characters’ and readers’ susceptibilities to shock, as well as their capacities for rational expectation and moral edification. Before novels, however, those human vulnerabilities and faculties were rigorously explored in Paradise Lost, and it is to that work that I now turn.