Generating Texts: The Progeny of Seventeenth-Century Prose.

Sharon Cadman Seelig. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1996. x + 202 pp. n.p. ISBN: 0-8139-1676-3.

Of the following six authors - John Donne, T. S. Eliot, Sir Thomas Browne, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Burton, and Lawrence Sterne - whose work is distinctively "metaphysical" in style and attitude? Sharon Cadman Seelig would answer "all of the above," and her book, Generating Texts, seeks to identify several of the "progeny" of seventeenth-century prose. Seelig offers detailed thematic, structural, and stylistic comparisons of three pairs of works: Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and Eliot's Four Quartets, both treated as examples of meditative form; Browne's Religio Medici and Thoreau's Walden, both read as "normative" autobiography; and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Sterne's Tristram Shandy, both deconstructive texts "engaged in a radical undermining of form" (3). As Seelig writes, "more important than the issue of whether . . . post-Renaissance writers considered or made use of Browne, Donne, or Burton is the question of whether they adopted the same rhetorical strategies, the same mode, the same method; it is the similarity of conception - the nature of the persona or voice, the nature of the quest, the nature of the inquiry - and of the structure that emerges to which I have tried to turn attention" (155-56). By thus emphasizing the "structure that emerges," Seelig acknowledges that arguments regarding "progeny" necessarily raise questions of genre.

Though brief, Seelig's initial discussion of genre theory is well-conceived. Proceeding from the assumption that genre is itself generative, she notes that "the similarities among these texts are not only those of subject matter but of approach; they are rhetorical as well as conceptual" (3). For this reason, "the most illuminating kinds of comparisons . . . may be not those based on considerations of external form but rather on a view of the world and the self, seen in relation to rhetorical approach, indeed, as a determiner of that approach" (3). In other words, more than a static taxonomy or interpretive function, an artist's notion of genre lies at the heart of the composing process. Quoting Ann Imbrie - herself indebted to Rosalie L. Colie, who defines genre famously as a set of "... 'frames' or 'fixes' on the world" (Resources of Kind [6]) - Seelig notes that genre "is not merely a matter of formal qualities, but in the deeper sense the expression of 'a larger epistemological system, a way of seeing and interpreting the world'" (2). And while the term "metaphysical" is modal rather than generic, referring broadly to habits of thought, argument, and style or "rhetorical stance," Seelig suggests - convincingly, I think - that a "metaphysical" attitude toward subject will dynamically affect genre. (In deference to Seelig's argument, I leave unquestioned the appropriateness and precision of such a term as "metaphysical," particularly when applied to authors so divergent as Donne, Browne, and Burton - not to mention Sterne and Thoreau!) By such reasoning, the prose genres of "metaphysical" authors will bear distinctive marks that reappear in later authors (like Eliot, Thoreau, and Sterne), whose writings presumably return to seventeenth-century patterns of thought - to structured meditation, for example, or argument by analogy. In fact, expressing a sensitivity to differences as well as similarities, Seelig observes that the "generic links" discovered between each pair of texts "will make evident how similar impulses or conceptions are modified in altered philosophical, religious, or cultural climates, from one century to another" (12). After a brief theoretical introduction Seelig devotes a chapter to each author.

Seelig argues for a range of such "links" between Donne and Eliot, authors for whom meditation is a way of exploring and reshaping or restructuring reality" (60). Reading Donne's Devotions as a text both "linear and cyclical" (36), she finds a similarly complex structure in Eliot's Four Quartets: "just as Donne's work is made up of cycles within a narrative cycle, a repeating structure of meditation, expostulation, and prayer that occurs twenty-three times within the work, so Eliot's work is composed of smaller and larger units that are both cyclical and progressive" (37-38). One might note that Seelig here downplays distinctions between verse and prose forms, just as her pairing of Sterne with Burton downplays distinctions between fiction and non-fiction. (Whether her choice of "generic links" demands that we ignore other, perhaps equally salient, generic features remains debatable.) Yet the comparison is largely successful and in some ways not at all surprising, even Eliot's deep sense of tradition and appreciation of seventeenth-century literary culture.

More controversial, and somewhat less convincing, is Seelig's claim that Thoreau writes with a "metaphysical wit" (87) reminiscent of Sir Thomas Browne, with whom he is said to share a "dual" or "paradoxical" world view (5) - that is, a view of reality "simultaneously mundane and universal," the "central point of connection" between the two authors being "a sense of the cosmic, the metaphysical implications of everyday actions, and the linguistic and rhetorical means by which that conception is represented" (83). Is Thoreau thus a "latter-day apostle" (104) of seventeenth-century prose, as exemplified by the Religio Medici? Such an assertion might come as a surprise to readers of Walden, for whom Thoreau's habits of metaphor (particularly when describing physical nature) sound more typically Romantic than "conceited." Compared to Browne's constant habit of analogical reasoning, Thoreau's occasional use of macrocosm/microcosm analogies seems little more than decorative. Still, Seelig's comparison of each author's self-image bears a germ of truth. Describing both as "normative autobiographies," each work, she claims, "presents a self that is both particular and universal; each offers an account that, for all its disclaimers about its idiosyncracies and its limitations, is nevertheless set forth as exemplary" (62). On this point Thoreau diverges from his Romantic contemporaries, and Browne seems as good a model as any.

Seelig's third pairing, of Burton's Anatomy with Sterne's Tristram Shandy, is the most interesting and, of the three, perhaps the only instance in which a later author made extensive, conscious use of his seventeenth-century predecessor. (As Seelig notes, Sterne's borrowings from Burton have long been established; in contrast, Eliot's and Thoreau's debts to predecessors are indirect at best, the result of a shared world view rather than deliberate imitation.) Observing Burton's generic playfulness and extreme digressiveness, his citations of authority that serve to undermine authority per se, his "attempt at order that manifests disorder, a strategy of completeness that testifies to incompleteness" (110), Seelig discovers "similarities of attitude and method" (129) between Anatomy and Tristram Shandy, with which it shares "an essentially similar approach to the process of composition" (129). In short, being itself a deconstructive performance, "the instability of Burtons text is the mode that makes Tristram Shandy possible" (157).

Ultimately we might ask, does Seelig's comparative approach make us better readers of such works? Even if one is not convinced by the full range of her arguments, Seelig illuminates the individual works in a variety of ways. (And, beyond the necessary perspective provided by her theoretical introduction, each pairing of chapters offers an independent, self-contained argument.) Her comparisons are mostly circumspect, careful to acknowledge alternative sensibilities and to avoid overreaching. At the least, she succeeds in demonstrating "that genre is not fixed outside of time, that works do indeed respond to other works, and that our conception of genre is influenced by every other work considered part of that genre" (9-10). Students of these six authors and of genre theory generally stand to learn from Seelig's broadening of contexts.

JAMES S. BAUMLIN Southwest Missouri State University