Essay 2—
"Self-Consumption"

Bacon opens his Essays with an attack on skepticism. He sees it as a form of impatience: "What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."^[1] In his next sentence, Bacon notes, disapprovingly, that there are some persons who are Pilates (in this sense) by nature, who "delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief." At least in his critical persona, the author of Self-Consuming Artifacts seems to be such a person.^[2] He delights in "giddiness," in showing that in texts that he values there are no stabilities, no certainties, no positions, no place in which the mind can legitimately rest. The good reader of these works, according to Stanley Fish, learns to count it a mistake, if not a bondage, to fix a belief. Ultimately, for Fish, the writers that he admires in SCA all "affirm nothing" in both senses of this phrase: they do not make definite particular assertions, and they affirm a sort of nihilism with regard to normal conceptual, ontological, and moral distinctions. A truly self-consuming text, for Fish—a valuable text, for him—leaves itself and its reader literally nowhere.^[3]

[1] "Of Truth," in Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (1625), in Selected Writings of Francis Bacon, ed. with an introduction by Hugh G. Dick (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1955), 7. Unless otherwise noted, all citations of the Essays are to this edition.

[2] Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Fish are from this book (hereafter cited as SCA ). Page references will hereafter be included parenthetically in the text.

[3] On the question of value, see chap. 7 of SCA ("The Bad Physician: The Case of Sir Thomas Browne," and the Epilogue ("The Plain Style Question").

I believe this view of the seventeenth-century texts in question to be brilliant, seductive, and deeply misleading, a bewitching scheme. Fish's nihilism is just as misleading as Tuve's "tradition"; the low priori is just as misleading as the high.^[4] I have argued elsewhere that, with regard to Herbert's poetry, Fish mistakes a theological distinction for a philosophical one, and by overgeneralizing the point loses its specific content and force.^[5] Here I will focus on Fish's treatment of two primarily secular writers, Francis Bacon and Robert Burton, though we shall see that Fish's treatment of all three writers (discounting some special strategies for dealing with religion) are very similar. I mean to attack Fish at his strongest. The chapter on Bacon's Essays is the longest in Self-Consuming Artifacts , and the chapter on Burton is the one that seems least assailable, the essay that has the most obvious plausibility and the most straight-forward evidentiary base. I will try to demonstrate that the readings that Fish offers are systematically skewed, skewed in a way that produces not "plausible readings from a particular point of view"—the best that pluralism can hope for—but mistaken readings, readings that call into question the validity of the point of view from which they are produced. I will argue that Fish's readings systematically (as with Herbert) eliminate the particular content from the texts in question and equally systematically assert a generalized (negative) content for them. I will argue both for the importance of particular assertions and positions in these texts and against the ascription of extreme moral or epistemological negativity to them. I will try to show, in brief, not that the texts could not work in the ways that Stanley Fish says they do but that they do not do so, and I am happy to agree that this is equivalent to saying that they do not mean what he says they do, and what he says they don't.

I will begin, as Fish himself does, with Bacon's Essays . As Fish acknowledges, he is one with many other recent scholars in accepting R. S. Crane's linking of the Essays to Bacon's larger project for "the advancement of learning."^[6] This means seeing the Essays as in some sense "scientific." Fish claims that what is "scientific" about the Essays is not a matter of the views they express but of the way in which they express

[4] For the "high priori road," see the Introduction, n. 9 above.

[5] See "Interlude: Theology or Philosophy?" in Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 61–83. "The Holdfast" and "Love" (III) are the central poems for this discussion.

[6] Ronald S. Crane, "The Relation of Bacon's Essays to his Program for the Advancement of Learning," in Brian Vickers, ed., Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1968), 272–92; SCA , 78–79.

their views: "Bacon's concern as a scientist is wholly with the form of his presentation" (81; emphasis mine). The essential point of the Essays is not to put forth any particular views—"Machiavellian," traditional, or other—but to question all strongly asserted views. This thesis about what is "scientific" about the Essays is not one that Fish sticks to consistently, but it does lead him into a number of important premises and procedures. It allows him, first of all, to treat the announced topic of any essay as of no real interest to either Bacon or his (proper) reader. The topics are merely occasions for providing a certain kind of epistemological experience: the generation of skepticism about generalizations. All the essays, for Fish, do the same thing; they are actually, from a "formal," philosophical point of view, identical. Seeing the essays in this way affects Fish's readings on both the macro and the micro levels. On the macro-level, it leads Fish to a generalized model of how the essays must proceed; on the micro-level, it leads him to view certain kinds of sentences as always intended to be objects of suspicion.

The pattern that Fish sees in the best of Bacon's Essays is very similar to that which Helen Vendler sees in the poems of Herbert that she likes best; it is the pattern of what Vendler calls "re-invention."^[7] The writer initially puts forth a dull, commonplace, or standard view, which is then repudiated, undermined, or complicated in the course of the work. This is a perfectly possible pattern. The trouble begins when it is taken either as a general procedural model or as the criterion for value. The critic who does this, whether it be Vendler or Fish, is thereby committed to showing that the opening move of every significant or successful text by the writer in question is a jejune commonplace that we are meant to recognize as such. The model allows only for dialectical and not at all for linear development. A text that is highly valued cannot proceed either by apprehending the truth of a truism or by beginning with a complex or unfamiliar view.^[8] For Fish, it is impossible that Bacon could not be mocking the "high speech" quoted at the opening of the essay on

[7] See Helen Vendler, "The Re-invented Poem: George Herbert's Alternatives," in Reuben Brower, ed., Forms of Lyric (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1970), 19–45; and The Poetry of George Herbert (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), chap. 2. I have commented on this schema in Vendler in "'Humanizing' Herbert," Modern Philology 74 (1976): 78–88.

[8] On apprehending the truth of a truism as a model for great lyric poetry, see Yvor Winters, "The Sixteenth-Century Lyric in England: A Critical and Historical Reinterpretation," in Paul Alpers, ed., Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 95–96.

adversity; it is equally impossible for the first sentence of the essay on "Simulation and Dissimulation" to be simply pejorative about dissembling and dissemblers (SCA , 102). The pattern of development must always be dialectical. This model determines Fish's view of the opening sentences of all the final versions of the essays; it also determines his view of the revision of the essays. Here too, with regard to the revisions, the movement must always be from simplicity and optimism to complexity, confusion, and darkness. Although Fish reprehends another critic for taking the moral attitudes of the 1612 Essays to be "uniformly clear" (SCA , 127), Fish's schema for describing Bacon's revisions requires Fish himself to hold the view that he reprehends. And, of course, he does so; he is relentlessly true to his scheme. The 1612 version of the essay on ambition is said to be utterly "high-minded and highly moral" (119); the 1612 "Of Love" is said to be "a perfectly straightforward piece of conventional moralism" (109). It has to be this, since it has not yet been "reinvented" into its mature (1625) form. Yet the 1612 essay sees love as "ever rewarded" either with reciprocity "or with an inward and secret contempt," and ends by worrying that love interferes with the proper pursuit of self-interest—views that are hardly "conventional moralism."^[9]

When a critic as intelligent as Stanley Fish falls into embracing a view that he correctly reprehends others for holding, one can say with some confidence that there must be systemic pressures at work. We can see this even at the micro-level of analysis. Fish falls into a theoretical fallacy that he has written a strong essay cogently attacking. In "What is Stylistics and Why are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It," Fish argues—completely convincingly, I believe—that one must never attribute a fixed meaning to a particular linguistic feature.^[10] Yet in his work on Bacon, Fish assumes that a certain linguistic form, regardless of its context or content, always has a particular meaning or effect. Fish's view is that aphoristic utterances, especially "Senecan" ones with highly foregrounded parallel members and pointed schemes, are always to be seen as attempting "to secure the kind of facile assent Bacon is always warning against" (100). In the world of Bacon's essays, as Fish sees it, aphoristic or Senecan form always signals simplicity, falsity, or patness of content. But is it clear that Bacon intended the reader's response to the final

[9] For the 1612 versions of the essays on ambition and on love, see A Harmony of the Essays, etc. of Francis Bacon, ed. Edward Arber (London: English Reprints, 1871), 222–28, 444–46.

[10] See Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 77 et passim. "What is Stylistics" was originally published in 1973.

maxim in the 1625 essay on adversity ("Prosperity doth best discover vice, but Adversity doth best discover virtue") to be, as Fish puts it, "That's all very nice, but . . ." (101)? Isn't it possible that we are supposed to contemplate the truth of the maxim?

An even clearer example of the non-pat and non-false aphorism is the sentence with which "Of Suitors" begins in both 1597 and 1612: "Manie ill matters are undertaken, and many good matters, with ill mindes." Fish points to the rhetorical figures employed and concludes that this highly wrought sentence necessarily leaves the reader "little, if anything, to do" (120). But this is to ignore content altogether. The interjection of "and many good matters" is shocking and puzzling. The reader of this aphorism is left with a lot to do, namely, to try to understand and come to terms with what it is saying, with its content. What does it mean to say that many good matters are undertaken "with ill mindes"? Does it eliminate the distinction between good and ill "matters," or does it merely locate this distinction elsewhere, outside the realm of the intentions or motives of the agent? Can this latter view be made coherent? There seems to be much "to do" here, though it all involves coming to terms with, not rejecting, the content of the maxim.

Moreover Bacon, as opposed to Fish, always praised aphorisms. Fish sees Bacon's preference for aphorisms over "methods" as purely a matter of "psychological effect" and not at all a matter of content. "The content of aphorisms," says Fish, "is not necessarily more true than the content of methodological writing" (87). This is a trick sentence: not "necessarily" but usually. Bacon's main praise for aphorisms, in the passage that Fish quotes from the Advancement , is that, since they are shorn of so much ornamentation, they "cannot be made but of the pith and heart of sciences," that is, from solid truths. In order to have any chance of success, the author of aphorisms must have "some good quantity of observation," that is, of true observations. Such an author must be, as Bacon puts it, "sound and grounded." Bacon's emphasis on the importance of content to aphorisms could hardly be more explicit. Bacon sees "methods," on the other hand, as merely having to be internally consistent (and Bacon distinguished sharply between truth and mere consistency), and he sees methods as dangerous in their "carrying the shew of a total." The complete disjunction between the way in which Bacon sees aphorisms and the way in which Fish does becomes apparent a few pages after Fish's discounting of the importance of the content of aphorisms. Whereas Bacon distrusted methods and praised maxims, Fish soon starts to use "method" as a positive term (94), and "aphorism"

as negative. In doing this, he entirely reverses Bacon's usage and supplants it with his own.

With these caveats in mind, it might be worthwhile to examine Fish's work on some individual essays. Every reader of Bacon's Essays would agree that "Of Goodness, and Goodness of Nature" and "Of Friendship" are major pieces. It is not surprising, therefore, that Fish singles them out for analysis, but I do not believe that Fish chose these essays, or most of the others that he analyzes at length, purely (as he pretends) on the basis of their formal characteristics. I believe that Fish was actually attracted to what he takes to be the content of these pieces, namely their (supposed) moral skepticism or cynicism, rather than merely to their form. And I believe that he misconstrues both their content and their "form" or effect. There is no doubt that, as Blake sardonically pointed out, Bacon was in fairly full retreat from the gospels in the "Goodness" essay, but Fish misdescribes the nature of Bacon's anxiety.^[11] Bacon insists that self-love is "the pattern" for all love and "Love of our neighbors but the portraiture." In response to the gospel injunction to "sell all thou hast, and give it to the poor," Bacon, as a proper devout humanist, cautions that this makes sense only if "thou mayest do as much good with little means as with great."^[12] Fish sees in this passage "more than a hint" that "the lessons and sayings of the Bible may be too 'high' for its intended pupils who are for the most part naturally malign" (116). This sounds reasonable, and appeals to our complicity in natural low-mindedness, but it is important to see that the question of whether the gospel commands are too "high" for human nature is entirely imported into Fish's analysis. It comes from Fish's very dubious ironic reading of the phrase "high speech" at the beginning of the essay on adversity. This question or image of moral "height," in other words, does not exist in the essay on "Goodness"; it is entirely imported by Fish. What Bacon is worried about is not that men can't or won't follow the gospel but that they will. Fish gets the matter exactly backward. The view that he ascribes to Bacon is the familiar kind of cynicism that we tend (for reasons that it would be interesting to explore) to equate with sophistication. But Bacon is doing something less easy and familiar.

The major effort of the "goodness" essay is to warn men against the temptation to excessive goodness, not to suggest that goodness is im-

[11] See Blake's annotations to Bacon's Essays in The Poetry and Prose of William B]ake , ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 613.

[12] For a consideration of the role of this and similar arguments in early seventeenth-century moral and religious thinking in England and France, see Essay 5 below.

possible. Unlike Fish, Bacon does not say or seem to think that persons "are for the most part naturally malign." Fish does not quote Bacon's description of the "deeper sort" of naturally malign men as "like flies that are still buzzing upon anything that is raw."^[13] Bacon seems to mean it when he describes persons with such dispositions as "the very errours of human nature." So we are, as Fish notes, surprised when Bacon adds, "and yet they are the fittest timber to make great politiques; like to knee timber, that is good for ships, that are ordained to be tossed." What is unjustified is Fish's conclusion that "we are all, of course, such 'knee timbers' [sic ], for we are all ordained to be 'tossed'" (117). "Of course"—this is another bullying and preemptive move. And it is worth pausing for a moment over Fish's misquotation: the shift from an abstract category, "knee timber," that is clearly one kind among many, to an infinitely and easily expendable plural, "all such knee timbers." Extension of a special case into a general rule is one of Fish's (and deconstruction's) most characteristic procedures (let's call it the technique of illegitimate extension). The authorization that Fish provides for such extension ("for we are all ordained to be 'tossed'") is entirely noncontextual; it comes close to relying on "the tradition." Moreover, Fish gives the impression that Bacon's sentence ends after "tossed." He suppresses the fact that the sentence goes on to qualify seriously the usefulness of the rather unusual species of misanthropi ; they are "good for ships, that are ordained to be tossed, but not for building houses, that shall stand firm ."^[14] Fish entirely suppresses this contrast between ships and "houses, that shall stand firm" (of which, Bacon certainly counts on us to think, there are many more than there are ships in the world). Fish does not want anything to "stand firm," but Bacon sees the crooked ("knee timber"), who make "great politiques," as a special and not especially admirable case. The examples of goodness that Bacon lists are not conditional.

Fish's reading of the 1625 essay "Of Friendship" is similar. He uniformly darkens—and therefore simplifies—the picture that Bacon presents. A very complex and nuanced sentence is described as "disorienting" to Fish's postulated reader, a figure who is oddly sensitive in some respects and oddly obtuse in others. The important claim is Fish's suggestion that when Bacon says that it is "solitude to want true friends," Bacon might be saying that it is solitude to desire true friends, and that the world may in fact be without true friendship. In context,

[13] Bacon, Selected Writings , ed. Dick, 35.

[14] Bacon, Selected Writings , ed. Dick, 36; italics mine.

however, there is no ambiguity. Grammatically, the objective sense, "to want" as "to lack," is the normal seventeenth-century usage; the suggestion about the nonexistence of true friendship is entirely unwarranted. Fish has to postulate a special rhetorical situation for this essay. He postulates a naive speaker for it, one who intended simply to praise friendship but who somehow failed to notice "the unsettling implications of his examples" (142), various "Roman Villains," as Blake said.^[15]

But why should we assume a foolish persona rather than a competent author? Isn't it simpler and more plausible to assume that the aim of the essay never was simple praise? The examples then become proof of the strange extent of the human need for friendship, even at the hazard "of safety and greatness." Fish treats the explicit logic of the essay as mere "surface rhetoric" (139). I think we should be wary of such locutions even though they are extremely common in interpretive literary criticism. They are common because their major function is to create the authority of the critic ("this text may seem, to the uninitiated, to be saying X, but the true professional will see that it is really saying Y"). And they are based on a "surface/depth" dichotomy that is by no means self-evidently intelligible. What justifies dismissing the "surface"? I think that one needs a very good reason—which in some cases can certainly be provided—for dismissing the "surface" of a text, its obvious syntactic, logical, and semantic structure. Fish is always ready to dismiss "surface" meanings (and thereby to enhance the authority of the critic). In this case, he creates a hidden structure that makes the ideal of the essay not true friendship—which Fish, not Bacon, declares chimerical—but Stoic self-sufficiency. This is a historically intriguing suggestion, though Fish does not present it as such. The psychological and social thinking and feeling of many figures in the Renaissance was deeply and incoherently divided between Stoic ideals of self-sufficiency on the one hand, and Christian and other ideals of mutuality and community on the other. As Lacey Baldwin Smith puts it, the idea of the friend both "fascinated and repelled Tudor Society."^[16] Yet in Bacon's essay, the ideal of self-sufficiency exists only as a possible implication of Bacon's stress on the hazards of friendship. Bacon cites Trajan and Marcus Aurelius as examples of "goodness of nature," but Fish insists that they must be examples of "the Stoic doctrine of self-sufficiency" and therefore of

[15] Blake, Poetry and Prose , 618.

[16] Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 45.

persons "presumably . . . independent of outside supports" (144). This presumption is then deployed by Fish, in a manner that we would now call deconstructive, to counteract all the assertions—that is, the "surface rhetoric"—of the essay about the importance and the usefulness of the true friend.

A noncontextual association imported by the critic is brought forth as the central point of the text (compare "we are all ordained to be 'tossed'"). We might call this the technique of noncontextual importation. It is a powerful and, I think, pernicious technique—if, that is, we are interested in understanding what a text might actually be saying or doing rather than merely in having it confirm what we already "know." This technique is often used together with that of illegitimate extension. In Fish's analysis of the 1625 essay on friendship, this occurs when Bacon's warning against taking counsel from too many is seen as "finally a warning against taking any counsel at all" (146). The "true moral" of the section is found, according to Fish, "buried in a parenthesis." This is perfectly possible if we disregard all "surface rhetoric," but to do so cuts against the "affective stylistics" that Fish claims to be practicing, since it is not clear that a reader could experience something so buried as "the true moral" of the passage.^[17] Affective stylistics would seem, in fact, to lead one to respect the surface of a text. In any case, the true moral regarding counsel in "Of Friendship" is said to be the phrase, "better perhaps . . . if he asked none at all" (147). Fish creates this moral by sheer sleight-of-hand, not to say deception. What Fish elides from the quotation is a single word, the word "than." The passage actually reads, "better perhaps than if he asked none at all."^[18] Bacon's claim is not that asking counsel is a mistake but that any counsel is probably better than none, despite the dangers involved. Fish elides Bacon's point into its opposite. A complex concession is turned into a simple negative. Complexity disappears into generalized cynicism.

The same process occurs in Fish's reading of the end of the essay. In Fish's paraphrase, Bacon is there saying that a person "may rely on a friend to do those things that might better have been left undone" (148). What Bacon actually says is that a person may rely on a friend to do those "many things" which a person "cannot, with any face or comeliness, say or do for himself." There is no suggestion of "things that

[17] For "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics," see the Appendix to SCA , 383–427; Is There a Text , 22–67.

[18] Bacon, Selected Writings , ed. Dick, 74.

might better have been left undone." Fish entirely ignores Bacon's emphasis on "face or comeliness," on decorum. This allows Fish to read the final maxim of the essay ("where a man cannot fitly play his own part; if he have not a friend, he may quit the stage") as suggesting that the ideal is to play one's own part successfully, to which there is no real alternative. Yet Bacon is still, with perfect continuity, discussing how useful friends are in the many practical situations in which, not from incompetence or lack of opportunity but from the very nature of normal social life, "a man cannot fitly play his own part." Again, Bacon's world is much more dense, nuanced, and social than Fish's.

With Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy , Fish would seem to be on firmer—that is, truly absent—ground. The Anatomy of Melancholy does often seem close to nihilism, and Burton is given to sudden and surprising inclusions that sweep away apparent distinctions. In Burton, Fish would seem to have found a writer whose "delight in giddiness" and hyperbole match his own. Yet Fish's treatment of The Anatomy of Melancholy in Self-Consuming Artifacts is at least as misleading as his treatment of Bacon's Essays . Fish wants Burton always to be self-canceling, never taking or implying a firm position, but Burton simply is not always so.

Burton's treatment of the figure of Democritus (the namesake of Burton's persona in the astonishing prologue to the Anatomy , "Democritus Jr. to the Reader") is probably as tricky as Fish says it is. Where Fish begins to skew the picture is in analyzing a sentence in which Burton seems to be making a moral distinction. "'Tis an ordinary thing with us," says Burton, "to account honest, devout, orthodox, divine, religious, plain-dealing men idiots, asses, that cannot or will not lie and dissemble, shift, flatter, accommodare se ad eum locum ubi nati sunt , make good bargains, supplant, thrive, patronis inservire,  . . . that cannot temporize as other men do, hand and take bribes, etc., but fear God and make a conscience of their doings." Fish argues that "since the force of the verb phrase ('to account') lessens as the sentence continues, the groups whose confusion Burton is supposedly lamenting become, in the experience of the prose, more and more confused" (320). But the groups do not become confused. It is impossible to miss the contempt in Burton's list of corrupt practices, and this tone is certainly part of an actual reader's "experience of the prose," an experience of content and tone as well as of syntax (Fish's reader does not seem to "experience" tone). The sentence does come to focus more on the vicious than on the virtuous, but that is a separate point. The sentence ends, moreover, by

returning to the virtuous, another fact that Fish entirely occludes. Burton sees the groups as utterly distinct. It is Fish, not Burton, who brings into this passage the phrase and the idea that "'tis all one." This phrase is Burton's, and it is indeed from "Democritus Jr. to the Reader," but it occurs in a different passage, a passage where, it should be noted, the phrase is used fairly straightforwardly in that the distinctions it negates are not very sharp to begin with.^[19] What is lost in Fish's interpretive sleight-of-hand is any feeling for the passion of Burton's prose, for the intensity of his hatred for particular abuses , for, in this passage, accommodation, temporizing, and fawning. Needless to say, any sense of specific positive values (making "a conscience of their doings") is also lost.

There must be no positive models in the Anatomy , especially not in "Democritus Jr. to the Reader." So Fish must discount Burton's praise of particular "bodies politic" as peaceable, rich, flourishing, and non-melancholic. Burton cites Augustan Italy, contemporary China, and "many other flourishing kingdoms of Europe" (79). Fish discounts the reference to Augustan Italy by noting that it was "conveniently in the past" for Burton and was marred by Catiline's rebellion (which Burton mentions later). Fish also notes that China is said (also later) to be "infested" with wandering Tartars. How these later passages affect the "experience" of the passages one reads earlier is unclear and stands as another case of Fish not doing affective stylistics. As to the "many other flourishing kingdoms of Europe," Fish simply dismisses this and pretends to be at a loss as to what kingdoms Burton could possibly have in mind (SCA , 324–25). But Burton obviously does not see (as there is no reason to see) Catiline's abortive rebellion, which took place under the republic, as destabilizing Augustan Rome, and Burton consistently refers to contemporary China as a social and legislative norm (Anatomy, 91, 93, 103). Most importantly, Burton specifies at length exactly what "flourishing kingdoms of Europe" he has in mind, namely, the Low Countries, "those rich United Provinces of Holland, Zealand, etc." (86). Burton's praise of the Low Countries is sustained and straightforward (88–89); he explicitly contrasts the "flourishing" of these con-

[19] The passage is about different senses of "melancholy": "So that, take melancholy in what sense you will, properly or improperly, in disposition or habit, for pleasure or for pain, dotage, discontent, fear, sorrow, madness, for part or all, truly or metaphorically, 'tis all one." Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy , ed. with an introduction by Holbrook Jackson (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1977), 40. All citations of Burton are from this edition. Page references will be included in the text.

temporary bodies politic with the relatively wretched condition of contemporary England. In meditating on this contrast, Burton offers both an analysis (81–95) of the social and political causes of social wretchedness and some general guidelines for reform. Burton consistently asserts that "the most frequent maladies" of bodies politic "are such as proceed from ourselves" rather than from nature (e.g., 80) and are therefore subject to reform.

Fish must deny all of this. He cannot allow Burton to assert the possibility of "flourishing" through ordinary means. Fish passes over in silence the entire section I have indicated. He has something much more important to discount. In order to assert Burton's nihilism, what Fish has to discount most of all is the idea that, as J. Max Patrick put it, "there is a Utopia in Burton's preface" to the Anatomy .^[20] The attack on this thesis is a job that Fish relishes. He hastens over the problem of the "flourishing kingdoms" to get to what is for him the crucial moment, the knockdown argument, a passage Fish likes so much that he quotes it twice (325 and 339). It is a passage that occurs when, after fifteen pages of analysis and recommendation, Burton stops and seems to undercut (as Fish would have it) the whole idea of social reform. Burton makes fun of millenarian fantasies of total reform (96) and asserts that "these are vain, absurd, and ridiculous wishes not to be hoped." Most important of all for Fish, Burton then makes the complementary assertions that "all must be as it is" and (Fish's very favorite), "there is no remedy" (97). Fish would seem to be unassailable here. The undercutting of Utopianism would seem to be complete. Yet again, Fish will not stay for an answer. He does not take into account what follows "there is no remedy." Where Fish's analysis stops, Burton's continues. The beginning of the next paragraph draws a further conclusion about reform. Insisting strongly on continuity with what has just been said, Burton writes, "Because, therefore, it is a thing so difficult, impossible, and far beyond Hercules' labours to be performed, let them [people in general] be rude, stupid, ignorant . . . let them tyrannize, epicurize, oppress," etc. (97). The object, in short, of Burton's satire here is the idea of giving up all attempts at reform. He is satirizing the idea that "all must be as it is" if things cannot be perfect.

It is in this context, in the context of praise of Holland and criticism of millenarianism, that Burton offers his Utopia. Fish entirely misses the

[20] See J. Max Patrick, "Robert Burton's Utopianism," Philological Quarterly 27 (1948): 345–58; SCA , 329.

nature of this Utopia, treating Burton's project as if its premise were, as Fish puts it, "the banishing of human nature" (326). Fish passes over another five pages of specific proposals—common granaries, public schools, good roads, long leases, etc.—to get to what he sees as another devastatingly anti-Utopian passage. "If it were possible" (already thereby, for Fish, giving up the game), Burton states that he would have perfect versions of all the professions and states of life ("such priests as should imitate Christ, charitable lawyers," etc.), but, he concludes, "this is impossible, I must get such as I may" (102). Fish is triumphant. Burton here "admits defeat," not only—and here we get the familiar move from the specific to the universal—"on the particulars" but "on Utopia itself" (328). With this acknowledgment of human nature, for Fish, the Utopian idea fails. But Burton's project was always to conceive of a "Utopia" within the bounds of the easily conceivable, a "Utopia," in fact, rather like Holland or China. To use J. C. Davis's immensely helpful distinction, Fish confuses the idea of a Utopia with that of a perfect moral commonwealth.^[21] In the text, the assertion that "I must get such as I may" is not a moment of "weary" conclusion, as Fish says (328), but of renewed energy. Burton immediately returns to his specific, non-millenarian reforming proposals. Right after "I must get such as I may," Burton continues: "I will therefore have of lawyers, judges . . . etc. a set number" (102). His nonrevolutionary Utopia continues with unabated energy for five more pages after he has (according to Fish) supposedly given up in weariness and disillusion. And Burton knows exactly what he is doing. His treatment of the place of usury in his Utopia (106) exemplifies perfectly the kind of ideal that he is imagining—that he is, in fact, proposing.

Fish's "all or nothing" framework makes him especially unable to acknowledge moments of nondisillusioned realism. "I must get such as I may" is one such moment; Burton's treatment of war is another. Fish is certainly justified in finding the latter discussion unsatisfactory. I would argue, however, that the reasons for this are historical and specific, having to do with the nature of this particular topic, not with the Utopian project in general. Burton tended, as did Erasmus before him, toward an extreme revulsion toward war. Burton's revulsion was so powerful that he felt it necessary explicitly to deny that he was a total pacifist like

[21] For the distinction, see J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chap. 1. For Davis's fine treatment of Burton, see chap. 4.

"those phantastical anabaptists" (59). In his treatment of war, Burton was stymied, I think, precisely by his commitment to a nonrevolutionary, nonheretical Utopia. Whether or not this is the correct explanation for Burton's problems with the topic of war in his Utopia (a topic with which More also had notable problems), I am convinced that it is the right kind of explanation.^[22]

We can see another example of Fish's difficulty with nondisillusioned realism if we return briefly to his treatment of friendship. Bacon asserts that "if a man have a true friend, he may rest almost secure that the care of those things [the person's long-range projects] will continue after him." Fish can only read "almost secure" here as devastatingly ironic: "a more uncomfortable state can scarcely be imagined" (148). Yet Bacon wants to be reassuring—without being unrealistic. The tone of his phrase is difficult to capture, but to see it as a crudely jocular sarcasm is surely to miss the balance that Bacon is attempting. If the most that can be hoped for is not everything, surely that doesn't make it nothing. This is an important point. The assumption that the failure of a postulated absolute means that nothing can be positively asserted is familiar as the central premise of the metaphysics and epistemology of deconstruction ("We will never know for sure what Nietzsche wanted to say. . . .").^[23] But surely—again—this is to set the ante too high.

The experience of the texts that Fish discusses is simply not as he describes it. The texts are more nuanced, less wildly and frantically paradoxical than Fish asserts. Most of all, the texts espouse values. They are not endlessly ironic. They have positions. They have moments of passion and earnestness. They do not leave the reader nowhere, even if they do not leave him or her in a world of simplicities and perfection. There is an intelligible place to stand in these works between total

[22] For Erasmus and More, see the superb treatment in Robert P. Adams, The Better Part of Valor: More, Erasmus, Colet and Vives, on Humanism, War and Peace, 1496–1535 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962); for Erasmus's role in the history of pacifism, see Peter Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 61, 90.

[23] See Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles , trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 123. Italics in the original. For a brilliant account, with regard to a crucial text, of the problems with Derrida's way of reading (which is very close to Fish's), see Foucault's critique of Derrida's reading of Descartes's Meditations in Michel Foucault, "My Body, This Paper, This Fire," trans. Geoff Bennington, Oxford Literary Review 4 (1979): 9–28. Derrida's "Cogito and the History of Madness" appears in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 31–63.

ignorance of the world and total capitulation to it. Politics, ordinary politics, is possible. Particulars matter. All distinctions do not, a priori, break down. Attending to content gives us variety. I am afraid that the model of "self-consuming artifacts" is precisely the sort of bewitchingly attractive and oversimplifying schema that Fish rightly presents Bacon as eager to combat. Like not only Bacon but Wittgenstein, we must struggle against such bewitchment.^[24]

[24] See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 47e. The German is "Verhexung " (47).