Origin and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Milton, Butler.

Alvin Snider's study brings into conjunction Bacon, Milton, and Butler - three writers "generally thought to have little in common" (16). His topic is the seventeenth-century problem of res et verba, construed in terms of origin and representation: whether the truth language represents resides in "real things," in the speaker, or in the system of representation itself, or whether error is inevitable. Snider's study begins with "Bacon's confident prediction that correct method and scientific collaboration could lead humanity back to determinate origins," unifying words and things (201). For Milton, Snider argues, "retrieving origins from a distant Edenic site" was much more difficult and uncertain, even though the poet shared Bacon's belief that words referred to a prelinguistic realm of "solid things," wherein truth resides (201). Butler was the most critical of language, no matter what the content or speaker, and the most skeptical about the possibility of knowing the original truth of things. Although Snider seems to suggest that Bacon's confidence led to Milton's ambiguity and Butler's skepticism, this linear progression is belied by the claim that all three writers "reflect, refract, and reproduce" the "climate of doubt" that dominated the century (240).

Snider acknowledges debts to David Quint and John Guillory, who study the problem of origin in terms of literary history, and to theorists who study the problem in larger cultural terms: Foucault, Said, Lyotard, and Jameson. Foucault, the figure who most influences Snider, reads modernity as a rejection of the myth of a unitary origin, and therefore of a unitary truth. Snider retains the category of authorship to tell his cultural story, but shares Foucault's sense that history "condemns us to constructing discourses about discourse and abandoning the quest for origins" (238). Snider's concern, like that of many critics in cultural studies, is fundamentally with representation and its problematic relation to truth. He also follows Lyotard, who defines postmodernism as a loss of confidence in the metanarratives of emancipation and progress, be they Christian, Marxist, or liberal. What replaces these narratives, figured here as Baconian science and Miltonic epic, is the postmodern method that Frederic Jameson terms "pastiche" (169). Although Snider seems to promise a narrative that will trace the failure of the seventeenth century to locate the truth in and of representation, his book illustrates instead the postmodern method (and problem) of the pastiche. He provides excursions into the history of mirrors, the life and ideas of Robert Sanderson, the topos of Babel-Babylon in mid-century polemics, seventeenth-century imitations of Virgil, and much else, but too often they seem as arbitrary as they are fascinating. He "makes no pretense of studying the seventeenth century exclusively according to its own codes and vocabularies," and sets up a straw man of "history as an autonomous and stable domain" only - and not surprisingly - to knock it down (12).

Snider reads Bacon's work as an attempt to undo error through the observation of things. In order to reduce the gap between words and things, Bacon relies on aphorism as that mode that distills and clarifies observation. Snider attends to the important reconsideration of Bacon that has been taking place in recent years, discussing the contributions of feminist scholars as wall as of works of historians of language, science, and literature who do not emphasize the role of gender. Most significant is his citation of Martin Elsky's Authorizing Words and other major studies of the materiality of language. For the most part, however, Snider does not offer a close reading of Bacon's work.

Close reading is reserved for the chapters on Paradise Lost. In these three chapters, Snider explores Milton's fascination with the origin of epic, the origin of human consciousness, and mirroring as a metaphor for authenticating the self in relation to another. In each case, Snider argues that "questions of doubt and certainty in the poem relate to Milton's originary epistemology of belief and self-discovery" (92). By centering on the narrator, on Adam's account of coming into being (Book 8), and on Eve's narrative of her creation (Book 4), Snider gives his argument a dramatic focus and clarity. His analysis of Eve's narrative follows the model set forth by post-liberal feminist critics, who find in this episode not the achievement of subjectivity but the enactment of subjection. It might have been helpful to see more discussion of the way Eve acts as a verbal mirror of Adam: she tells him what he said and describes what he did. She constitutes him, even as she says he constitutes her. In reading Book 8, Snider turns to the problem of Adamic language, in which words and things cohere, and to the seventeenth-century controversy about "pre-Adamitism", i.e., that Adam was not the only source of succeeding generations, and that the primitive peoples of Africa and the New World descended from different ancestry (134-36). Missing from Snider's discussion, however, is any analysis of the way Milton treats this issue later in Paradise Lost, when he portrays the change in Adam and Eve from prelapsarian mythic figures to postlapsarian primitives, comparing them to "Indians known / In Malabar or Decan" or "the American so girt / With leathered cincture, naked else and wild" (PL X.1102-17). Here moral difference is represented through the discourse of racial difference. Snider also omits any discussion of the creation narrative in Book 7, which treats origin as the product of divine language ("God said..."). That is to say, Milton says what Raphael says God said - and both poet and angel reflect on the problem of language and representation. However, Snider's reading of the poem centers on the relationship of three human attempts to recover origin and truth. These attempts are problematic and poignant, and in discussing them Snider at his best moves away from the terminology of philosophy and toward the particularities of poetic language and experience.

The most original and important section of the book concerns Samuel Butler, whose critique of Baconian linguistic and political materialism is set against that of Milton. It is common to juxtapose Milton's epic and Butler's mock-epic, or Milton's dissent and Butler's attack on dissent, but Snider goes beyond these familiar contrasts to illuminate the challenges to Baconian ideas late in the seventeenth century. Paradise Lost affirms a covenant of truth despite the taint of fallen language, while Hudibras attacks the "corrosive equivocation" that ruled out verifiable knowledge and invited disastrous social consequences (183). By focusing on Butler's philosophical motives, Snider gives us a reason to read Hudibras as more than an ephemeral parody of epic form and an attack on dissenting politics. Butler attempts more than topical satire, questioning even his own belief that origin could be recovered and authority reclaimed. Any political theory is apt to produce dystopia, any language error. In Snider's reading, the conservative Butler seems more ontologically insecure than the radical Milton, less convinced that an original truth could be recovered and a political ideal realized.

Snider's argument cuts across literature, philosophy, and politics. His book, while perhaps too selective in its focus on postmodern theory for some readers, typifies the new work in seventeenth-century cultural studies that is reinvigorating the study of literary genres, political history, and philosophy, breaking down old categories and establishing new connections.

SARA VAN DEN BERG University of Washington