Though little-known and only once republished, “A Treatise of the Bulk and Selvedge of the World” (1674) by Nathaniel Fairfax, physician and fringe member of the Royal Society, remains a remarkable document, literarily and historically. Conceived at the apogee of what might just be the most awkward moment in English letters – when respected intellectuals like Samuel Parker could take the floor of Parliament and demand (from a rapt audience, presumably) that metaphor itself be banned* – Fairfax’s “Treatise” brought the paroxysm shaking literary criticism into the sharpest focus (however unintentionally). (Descartes, in the austere wake of Talon & Ramus, was of course tremendously influential, rationalism and neo-classicism were in vogue, while ‘rhetoric’ and all things ‘ornate’ had become, under the vigilant watch of the Royal Society, catch-words for anything resistant to a kind of “precept”-oriented, analytic circumspection.)
The historical novelty of the attacks on metaphor can perhaps be attributed to the playful metaphorical language with which they were waged. As A. K. Croston observes in the introduction to the 1949 edition, “The movement towards unvarnished expression associated with the Royal Society goes so far in Fairfax as to confound itself – the ideal of Perspicuity is lost in the distracting oddities of the surface we are supposed to look through” (Croston x). To be sure, lines like the following are not easily reconciled with the author’s self-declared project of absolving discourse of the “bewitcheries of speech that flow from Gloss and Chimingness” (36):
“So long as he who has but a teeming brain, may have leave to lay his eggs in his own nest, which is built beyond the reach of every mans puddering pole, why should the ears of all the neighborhood be dinn’d & grated with the Cackle, as if the whole world besides were all Weasils and Poulcats, vermine and Lurchers?” (35)
Fairfax may lack Parker’s vitriol, but their goals are comparable: the restoration of clarity in, and extrication of superfluity from, wordplay — which, in terms of schools and influence, translates to rolling back the baroque literary movements of the seventeenth century – e.g. euphuism (from John Lyly’s Euphues), gongorismo (Luis de Góngora), conceptismo, concettismo (conceit), marinismo (Giambattista Marino), secentismo, préciosité, etc. As is clear in Parker’s speech – which associates a diversity of interpretations with the scattering and weakening of a nation (see the footnote below) – Fairfax’s opposition to the baroque is expressed through stolid, conservative affirmations of nation, class, and gender.
- “And indeed however our smoother tongued Neighbours may put in a claim for those bewitcheries of speech that flow from Gloss and Chimingness; yet I verily believe [page] that there is no tongue under heaven, that goes beyond our English for speaking manly strong and full.” (36-37)
- “For the words that are every day running to and fro in the Chat of Workers, have not been gotten into Books and put aboard for other Lands, until this way of Knowing by Doing was started amongst us. So that we and others of the Handed Philosophers may either find better words among our own Yeomanry, for such businesses of workmanship as are already known by name, or at least coin fitter for new ones in a likewiseness to the old, than can be lent us from that Tongue wherein we know not how the Folks talkt in the Country, nor do any body else or ever shall do. Whereby too we shall not only vvith more ease, and kindliness be understood by the Pains-taking men amongst us, whose Crafts will be more helpful to an hail Philosopher, than the Bookishness of others.” (41)
- “But as Learnings being lockt up in the Tongues of the Schools, or Love’s being lickt up in the more womanly simprings of the lips, and the smiling kissing speeches of some others abroad, have been enough to enkindle in us a panting after, and fondness for some of those Outlandish dynns” (41).
Where Parker, always the extreme case, is obtuse, Fairfax is subtle, conflicted, and, so it seems, self-consciously embroiled in the paradoxes of communicating clarity and precision through what is inevitably an unwieldy, figurative apparatus. To be sure, the immediate concern is to describe the relation between a preface – the preface he’s writing – and the book prefaced. Not simply a matter of introduction and elaboration, which in fact threaten the text (as “extravagance”), but rather, as a result, the opposite problem of “detension”, where to curb your thoughts, where to end, how to determine what is proper to the subject and what isn’t – in short, closing off what might otherwise turn out to be an endless chain of thoughts, or, vis-à-vis Descartes, a countering to define where the self folds back and forms a whole (–not extension but de-tension). The greatest danger is to say too much, to chatter, to fail to keep close to the subject “at hand” (an image that recurs throughout, e.g. the “Handed Philosophers” above).
Generally speaking, this kind of strategy marks, in part, the modern beginnings of what is now considered self-evident – the honing of a self-disciplined, fastidious writing style, the rigorous refining of an economy of thought that at every turn must ask itself if what it thinks is essential and relevant or excessive and rhetorical. Indeed, in a remarkable passage, in which Fairfax both aligns himself with the Royal Society, against metaphor and Conning, and characteristically engages in a profusely metaphoric, playful language, he describes his thinking as a kind of interior journey or wandering through a discursive landscape.
“That finding in my self a kind of forwardness towards Philosophy, and mainly to that part of it which takes [page] knowledge of Bodies; as which, of all others, I found I could receive most helps and furtherance in, from those spreading lights and wealthy stores, with which the Royal Society at home and others abroad, set into the way bye their showing and enheartned to go on by their works, had both enbellisht and enricht it, I let my mind alone to take its full swing in the Conning of Bodies, this and that; and forthwith or ere I could well help it, I fell a Roving, and plung’d out from what I was medling with and tossing of, to another thing that was earlyer and Bulkier, and to somewhat still that was more betimes and more of Boak; and being quite lost in wilde and a frightful on and on, I e’en took back again where I was, and fell to unravel the thing that was too big to be fathom’d, that I might make it little enough for my mind to grapple with: but I was as unluckie at lessening and narrowing as I had been before at widening and bigning. As the one had wrackt and limm’d my thoughts, with endless tenters and boundless retchings out; so had the other nipt in my soul and shrivell’d up my thoughts, with restless gripes and unwearyed parings off: so that I had both lost and benothing’d my self in the lessenings made within [page] myself, as I had lost and bewildred my self in the scopes still left without my self.” (27-29)
As an interior, subjective version of the problem Diderot encountered in writing the “Encyclopedia” entry for the Encyclopedia (see Creech), where the question arose as to how to curb the endless chain of referrals (to other entries), Fairfax (above) considers the correlate problem in writing:
“I let my mind alone to take its full swing in the Conning of Bodies, this and that; and forthwith or ere I could well help it, I fell a Roving, and plung’d out from what I was medling with and tossing of, to another thing that was earlyer and Bulkier, and to somewhat still that was more betimes and more of Boak; and being quite lost in wilde and a frightful on and on, I e’en took back again where I was […]” (28)
Before he knows it, he’s off topic – to something “earlyer and Bulkier,” and so into abstraction, “more of Boak”; fright returns him to where he started, as if retracing a trail or doubling-back. Thus caught between a censure on narrative excursions, on the one hand, and a reluctance to ‘return home’, on the other, the question turns toward the establishment of a scale or view capable of circumscribing ‘exactly’ the right amount; he describes his own thinking as, “as unluckie at lessening and narrowing as I had been before at widening and bigning.” Then:
“Nor could I be at rest in my mind, till I had tryed, whether I could not cut off Boundlessness and endlessness, so as at length I might have ease, to find, that Body, which I had to do withal, had both beginning and end, an inmost part and an outmost whole, as I my self had […]” (29)
Now, while the self, for Fairfax, is supposed to be finite, defined, and more or less empirically determined, it is nonetheless always primordially dispersed, ‘exterior to itself,’ and so in need of a border to set himself off or cut himself back from an otherwise pervasive ubiquity. The self, insofar as it here theoretically and philosophically precedes the body, is in a state of exposure and loss of exterior form. Curiously, the body does not already exist ‘as such’ (although in what sense remains unclear), but must be carved out of the ‘boundlessness and endlessness’ from which it is presumably drawn. And though this gesture is certainly Cartesian in its project of ascribing finitude to the universe, the figuration of the body’s delimitation from that world speaks to the Scholastic problematic of “ubiety,” perhaps especially as it pertains to the writings of Duns Scotus and Liebniz.
The “inmost part and an outmost whole, as I my self had” recalls, and transforms, the dialectic of presence and absence as conceived in the question of haecceity – i.e. the exception to ubiquity that must nonetheless inter-face with it, often tropically rendered as an outer limit ‘touching’ an enveloping inner limit (via a Scholastic-Aristotelian physics). But here, in Fairfax, the border of the self literally frays and assumes the image of a “selvedge” – etymologically, “its own edge,” the corruption self + edge (as descended from Biblical usage, referring to the dark edge of Creation, e.g. where Cain wanders). In Fairfax’s piece, the finitude of the universe merges with a spatially conceived finitude of the self, such that to establish the one is to establish the other. Where the world provides a limit to inquiry and knowledge (and, as Croston observes [ix], this text is motivated in part by his objection to Henry More’s claim that the universe is boundless), the self or the mind finds correspondent limit to its otherwise wheeling, disorienting excursions of thought:
“and when I came at the Selvedge of Bulk, I took heart afresh to think with my self, that there was all, and nothing at all beyond and I need weary my self with no more wandrings in a wast, but might come home again fair and soft” (29).
Similarly, the “handle” – the preface, this preface – by which the book itself is to be taken, reappears as the figure for limit itself: “Thus having shaken off the things I could never grasp, and taken Body by the right handle, I found I was freer to think, and better at ease to work” (30). The handle, which is at once the preface that abbreviates what follows and the proper view or access to the Bulk itself, thus smartly defines the interface of self and world as identical to that of preface and book. (“I am wont hastily to take forth to the Forespeech for the Reader, as thinking that to be the handle, that I am to hold the Book by, which, according as I relish or mislike, oftentimes so fares the whole with me.” [27]) All of this is to say that the self is a preface to the book of the world, and in prefacing it abbreviates it, re-presents it in microcosmic form, without residue or lack. The edge of the self – which is what allows there to be a self – is likewise explicitly dependent on the figure of the boundary of the universe, its edge, a selvedge, self + edge. There is more than a hint of Leibniz’s monadic structure, on the one hand, and the problem of its interaction – ubiety – with a pervasive, all-embracing ubiquity, on the other; but the essential concept is Bodies: The Body of the self depends on the Body of the universe, and words themselves must in turn refer to Bodies — objects, things, material — or else they are so much rhetoric:
“For inasmuch as almost the whole of those words, that we speak in things or knowledges of things that are body, and spoken in a borrowed meaning from thence, either as they have Beings from God, or a Suchness of being from our handy-work: so all the words about body and hangers on to body that we have to do with, are either such as flow from or mainly well fall in with those that are utter’d by Workmen, for such things as are done by hand-deed.” (40)
The closer one looks at this text, the more difficult it becomes to assign enduring importance to the curious blend of dogmas at work within it; but in this ‘failure’ lies, to a certain extent, its value or novelty. For one, it shores up the Cartesian paradox of establishing a hyper-materiality through its opposite, an intensive inner rumination. How will thought itself return and confirm the materiality — which in the Cartesian tradition is a matter of space, extension — of the body itself, which has, until now, been suspended. Descartes’ “I” is, after all, dramatically bodiless; that it should be subject to a highly theoretical determination seems an inevitability. Sense, perception, presence are conspicuously absent from the pages of this elaborate proof, and in their place an imagery of thought itself: borders, edges, “boundless and endlessness,” “widening and bigning,” thought ‘roaming’ and ‘plung’d’ – its movement, specifically, to fix it in its proper place. This place – the selvedge – where the proper frame or distance to comprehend an object is achieved is, however, also the border of the self, where the self begins and ends. Thus they share a border without distance: “so that I had both lost and benothing’d my self in the lessenings made within myself, as I had lost and bewildred my self in the scopes still left without my self.” This kind of sentimental wordplay, where the object is meaningfully lost in the folds of its articulation, is of course still with us, if in different form.
Notes
[*] The reference to Parker is Croston’s, as well; but, with a little digging on EEBO, I’ve dug up the passage, which is worth producing in full.
“And thus is the Nation shattered into infinite Factions, with sensless and phantastick [page] Phrases; and the most fatal miscarriage of them all lies in abusing Scripture-Expressions, not only without but in contradiction to their sense. So that had we but an Act of Parliament to abridge Preachers the use of fulsom and luscious Metaphors, it might perhaps be an effectual Cure of all our present Distempers. Let not the Reader smile at the odness of the Proposal: For were men obliged to speak Sense as well as Truth, all the swelling Mysteries of Fanaticism would immediately sink into flat and empty Nonsense; and they would be ashamed of such jejune and ridiculous Stuff as their admired and most profound Notions would appear to be, when they, want the Varnish of fine Metaphors and glittering Allusions. In brief, were this a proper place to unravel all their affected Phrases and Forms of Speech, which they have learn’d like Parrots to prate by Rote, without having any Notion of the Things they signifie, it would be no unpleasant Task to demonstrate, That by them they either mean nothing at all, or some Part or Instrument of Moral Vertue. So that all Religion must of necessity be resolv’d into Enthusiasm or Morality.” (75-76)
References
James Creech, “‘Chasing After Advances’: Diderot’s Article ‘Encyclopedia’” Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 183-197. [Link]
Croston, A. K. Introduction to Two Seventeenth-Century Prefaces, iii-xi. London: University Press of Liverpool, 1949. [Link]
Fairfax, Nathaniel. “A Treatise of the Bulk and Selvedge of the World,” In Two Seventeenth Century Prefaces, edited by A. K. Croston, 25-51. London: University Press of Liverpool, 1949. Originally published, 1674. [Link]
Parker, Samuel. A discourse of ecclesiastical politie wherein the authority of the civil magistrate over the consciences of subjects in matters of external religion is asserted: the mischiefs and incoveniences of toleration are represented, and all pretenses pleaded in behalf of liberty of conscience are fully answered (1671), Bodleian Library (P460, 1533:10)
