An Analysis of the Chapter on Robert Burton In Stanley Fish's Self-Consuming Artifacts

At the outset I encounter the difficult task of relating my treatment of this topic (Robert Burton's retractions or palinodes) to Professor Stanley Fish's chapter on "Democritus Junior to the Reader"in his Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). I can only say that the effect of Professor Fish's theory of "literature in the reader" has been, in the analysis of Burton's works, singularly unhappy, resulting in misreadings big and small. For this, two reasons appear: the reading done by Professor Fish's ideal reader is atomistic, and it is ahistorical. First, this ideal reader seems so fettered to the individual sentence, that he fails to recall titles, topic sentences, and references by Burton to his own activities as a writer, which, though widely spaced, are set up as guideposts to various parts of the discourse. Second, this ideal reader misreads technical terms and topical references whose meanings have become obscured since Burton's lifetime. Let us take these points--atomism and ahistoricity-- in turn.


The Anatomy viewed as a whole--a view which Professor Fish earnestly enjoins us not to take, but let us, arguendo, take it anyway--falls into two parts: "Democritus Junior to the Reader," and the Anatomy proper with its three Partitions and their Sections, Members and Subsections. When the book first appeared in 1621, it consisted of the second of these parts only. (Add footnote) When Burton added "Democritus Junior to the Reader" to the 1624 edition, he termed it on the title page "a Satyricall Preface, Conducing to the following Discourse." Surely this should alert us to the necessity of treating the satirical preface and the Anatomy itself as two distinct though related things. If it does not, Burton explicitly demands that we avoid confusing the preface with the treatise in his conclusion to the former:

To conclude, this being granted, that all the world is melancholy, or mad, dotes, and every member of it, I have ended my task, and sufficiently illustrated that which I took upon me to demonstrate at first. At this present I have no more to say...

And although...I had a just cause to undertake this subject, to point at these particular species of dotage, that so men might acknowledge their imperfections, and seek to reform what is amiss; yet I have a more serious intent at this time: and to omit all impertinent digressions, to say no more of such as are improperly melancholy, or metaphorically mad, lightly mad, or in disposition... which no new Hospital can hold, no physick help: my purpose and endeavor is, in this following discourse, to anatomize this humour of melancholy, through all his parts and species, as it is an habit, or an ordinary disease...that it may be the better avoided; moved thereunto for the generality of it, and to do good, it being a disease so frequent...(ed. Holbrook Jackson, New York, 1977; Part I, p. 120)

He could hardly have made his intent clearer.It seems there are two kinds of melancholy :melancholy in disposition, which impels one to act foolishly or suffer fear and sorrow without apparent cause on occasion, and melancholy in habit, which makes one so act or suffer all the time. A whole subsection of the Anatomy (I.i.1.5)expounds this distinction and states repeatedly that to use the word melancholy, when one means melancholy in disposition only, is to use it in an "equivocal and improper sense" (I, 143). Now "Democritus Junior to the Reader" is, as the passage just quoted explains, about melancholy in disposition, and the treatise is about melancholy in habit. To this distinction a second is subjoined: one can be either "metaphorically mad, lightly mad"; or else the victim of an "ordinary disease," the madness precipitated by some forms of melancholy prope dictum."Democritus Junior to the Reader" considers metaphorical madness and the following discourse considers the disease. The scope of the book's two parts must be very different, for all human beings are melancholy in disposition and metaphorically mad, but only some are melancholy in disposition and the victims of the disease.The intent of the two parts must also differ, for "no physic [can] help" melancholy in disposition, but a sound treatise on melancholy in habit can help the latter to "be the better avoided." Finally, the value of the two parts must also differ, since the first, apart from a wistful hope expressed in passing that men may, presumably by Christian repentance, "reform what is amiss,"only seeks to describe a condition, while the second seeks to change it. The intent to write the second is "more serious"; compared with the second, the first is an "impertinent digression."

I dwell at such length on these distinctions because a great part of Professor Fish's reading of the Anatomy consists in his finding Burton involved in the absurdity of his prescribing cures for a disease after declaring it incurable, and treating melancholy as the affliction of some after proclaiming it the condition of all. Burton's insistence, in "Democritus Junior to the Reader," that man's madness is universal and all of a piece throughout, is taken by Professor Fish to reduce the subsequent"dividing, subdividing...choosing, anatomizing" to "exercises in futility" (p.323). Professor Fish refuses to accept the preface's concluding promise of a "more sober discourse to follow" because, he says, "sober discourse itself is an impossibility given the world the preface reflects and describes"(p.314). All this would be true but for the distinction between melancholy in disposition and melancholy in habit.

Professor Fish's failure to distinguish between the two senses of the word melancholy, and between the Preface and the Anatomy proper, is, in his interpretation of the following passage, complicated by a further misunderstanding.

Yet one caution let me give by the way to my present or future reader, who is actually melancholy, that he read not the symptoms [footnote:PartI, sect. 3] or prognosticks in this following tract, lest by applying that which he reads to himself, aggravating, appropriating things generally spoken to his own person (as melancholy men for the most part do), he trouble or hurt himself and get in conclusion more harm than good. I advise them therefore warily to peruse that tract... The rest I doubt not they may securely read, and to their benefit (I, 38; quoted by Fish, p. 318).

This passage, according to Professor Fish, posits a class of non-melancholic readers, an "empty category" according to the rest of the preface, and states that "the only people who can read the Anatomy are those who don't need it," thus rendering it questionable how the book can be medicinal to anyone (p.318). But the word "actually" prefixed to "melancholy" clearly means "literally, not merely in a manner of speaking," that is, melancholy in habit or in the full clinical sense of the term; and the phrase "symptoms or prognosticks," as the footnote shows, refers to the fivefold division of the treatise into Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics, and Cures--a division, as J.L. Lowes assures us, "as traditional as the five acts of a play" (add footnote) in the medical literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Burton does not here forbid all men to read his treatise, but only warns a well-defined group to avoid two-fifths of it. Nor does he tell this group that the remainder permitted them will do them no good; on the contrary, he feels certain that the sections on Kinds, Causes, and Cures will be "to their benefit."

We may now turn to Professor Fish's assertion that the preface "and finally the whole of the Anatomy ... is a series of false promises which alternately discomfort the reader and lead him on" (p.304). Promises there certainly are, and what is more, there are resounding claims to have kept them; I have already quoted the preface's concluding remark that "I have ... sufficiently illustrated that which I took on me to demonstrate at first" (I, 137). Burton, in fact, regularly interrupts himself to explain either where he is going or where he has been. This is shown by the following selection of sentences, which, assuming or usurping a privilege forbidden to Professor Fish's ideal reader, I cull from their context in the preface:

Gentle Reader, I presume thou wilt be very inquisitive to know what antick or personate actor this is... I would not willingly be known. Yet in some sort to give thee satisfaction, which is more than I need, I will shew a reason, both of this usurped name, title and subject. And first of the name of Democritus ...

You have had a reason of the name. If the title and inscription offend your gravity...I could produce many sober treatises, even sermons themselves, which in their fronts carry more phantastical names...

If any man except against the matter or manner of treating of this my subject, & will demand a reason of it, I can allege more than one. I writ of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy...

Yea, but you will infer that this is actum agere...

And for those other faults of barbarism, Dorick dialect,extemporanean style...(I. 15, 20, 22, 26)

What is already clear can be made doubly so by putting these sentences in outline form:

I. Possible objections to this treatise

1.The author's pseudonym, "Democritus"

2. The title, "Anatomy"

3. The text

A. Subject

a. Whimsically chosen?

b. Already handled by others

B. Style...

And so forth.

Are the promises of coherence and consecutive treatment implicit in these topic sentences actually false? The answer is twofold. Yes, they are false, if we expect Burton's prose either to conform to the standards of twentieth-century textbooks that forbid the forms stigmatized as "sentence fragment," "dangling modifier," "remote reference of pronoun," and so forth, (add footnote) or to resemble the Sixteenth-Century "builded" style in prose.We have known since Morris Croll's epochal essays that Senecan prose sought to present la peinture de la pensee , the portrayal of a mind thinking , rather than the effects of thought.(add footnote) But if we try to think along with Burton, by keeping in mind the provenance of the passage in hand as announced in its topic sentence, we shall generally find that he speaks to the point and performs the expository task he has set himself. For example, let us consider the sentence, "Thou thyself art the subject of my discourse,"which occurs in the passage designated I.1 in the outline above. Professor Fish's ideal reader comes to it "wondering if he will ever find out what is going on,"and it strikes him as "enigmatic."It adds to his confusion because it starts a new subject (the reader himself) when two other subjects (melancholy and Democritus Junior) have already been started without being finished. But it entices the reader by appealing to his "self-interest" (pp.305-6).

But if we bear in mind that Burton is explaining his choice of a pseudonym, we shall find no cause for confusion. The name Democritus on the title page suggested several false inferences about the subject of the Anatomy which any Seventeenth-Century reader ("as I myself should have done," writes Burton, I, 11) could make. The first was that the book would be satire.Horace had written ( Satires II. i. 194), "Si foret in terris rideret Democritus," and in consequence "the laughing philosopher" had come to symbolize the spirit of satire. Though Burton may have wished to offer partial gratification to this expectation by furnishing the Anatomy with a satirical preface, the treatise itself is no satire. The second false inference, based far more soundly on the work of the historical Democritus, was that the book would be a treatise on cosmology. Democritus, a physicist, had propounded atheism, materialism and atomism in such manner as to provoke, at least according to early tradition, the wrath and condemnation of Plato. (add footnote) Is Burton, perhaps, a modern atheist, materialist, or atomist trying to escape obloquy or persecution by palming off his treatise as a recently-discovered manuscript by an ancient philosopher? On the contrary.

'Tis not so with me

Non hic Centauros, non Gorgonas Harpyasque

Invenies, hominem pagina nostra sapit.

No Centaurs here, or Gorgons look to find,

My subject is of man, and human kind.

Thou thyself art the subject of my discourse.

Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas,

Gaudia, discursus, nostri farrago libelli.

Whate'er men do, vows, fears, in ire, in sport,

Joys, wandrings, are the sum of my report.

My intent is no otherwise to use his name, than Mercurius Gallobelgicus, Mercurius Britannicus use the name of Mercury ...(I, 12)

First, says Burton, my subject is man, not physical nature. Second, one may conceal his authorship under a name drawn from classical antiquity without seriously intending to be identified with the original bearer of the name. The writers of newsletters sent out from Cologne and London do not intend you to think that they are really Mercury; concealment, not false attribution, is the idea.

The statement, "Thou thyself art the subject of my discourse" is thus seen merely as a defensive definition of the topic put in a very abrupt and emphatic way-- and also a very traditional way, since it obviously paraphrases one of the most oft-quoted Latin tags, "De te fabula narratur," from the same book (Horace's Satires )where Burton found the stock figure of laughing Democritus.(add footnote) This statement makes no attempt to confuse the reader by broaching a new subject, but rather makes a reasonable contribution to the subject in hand.

My second point concerns the ahistoricity of Professor Fish's reading, in which connection I must quote the passage he analyzes on pp. 216-17 of Self-Consuming Artifacts :

And I doubt not but that in the end you will say with me, that to anatomize this humour aright...is as great a task as to reconcile those chronological errors in the Assyrian monarchy, find out the quadrature of a circle, the creeks and sounds of the north-east or north-west passages, & all out as good a discovery as that hungry Spaniard's of Terra Australis Incognita , as great a trouble as to perfect the motion of Mars & Mercury , which so crucifies our Astronomers, or to rectify the Gregorian Calendar (I, 37).

Professor Fish seizes on the second item in Burton' list of six difficult projects, noting that "even today one hears 'you might as well try to square the circle,'when a project is declared unfeasible" (p. 317). Assuming that the unfeasability of this project was also proverbial in 1624, he then infers that the other five projects are likewise unfeasible and that Burton thus implies that the writing of the Anatomyis a "grand piece of folly" (ibid.). Neither the assumption nor the inference has any warrant.

The phrase "quadrature of the circle," circuli quadratura , meant, in Burton's lifetime, two things: first, a solution to the ancient chestnut, first propounded by the pre-Socratics, "using a compass and ruler only, construct a square or other rectilinear figure whose area shall exactly equal the area of a given circle"; and second, a computation of the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference-- in other word, a computation of pi. The first of these problems may be called the constructive quadrature, and the second, the numerical quadrature. (add footnote) Thus, for example, Christian Huygens's Theoremata de Quadratura...Circuli (Leiden, 1651) concerns the numerical quadrature only; Huygens believed the constructive quadrature impossible. (add footnote) Thus Burton, in speaking of the quadrature of a circle, may well mean the numerical quadrature, or computation of pi; and in his lifetime (1577-1640), that problem might have stood as the shining symbol of a rewarding, though laborious task. Just because pi cannot be exhaustively expressed in numbers, but can be approximated more or less closely, the task of approximating it offered the Seventeenth-Century mathematician a double incentive: the inspiration of successful labors by his forerunners and the possibility of surpassing them. It was neither a problem that had been solved nor a problem that had not been solved; it was being solved better all the time. Sometime late in the Sixteenth Century, Adrian Metius the Elder gave the ratio between the diameter and the circumference as 113 to 355;( add footnote) Francois Viete or Franciscus Vieta in 1579 approximated pi to ten decimal places; Adrianus Romanus attained fifteen; and in 1596 Ludolph van Keulen, by efforts so herculean that pi came to be traditionally called the Ludolphian number in Germany, reached thirty-five.This success-story continued straight through Burton's life and culminated after his death in the creation by Newton and Leibniz of the differential and integral calculus, facilitating the computation of pi to as many decimal places as any purpose could require.

However, if by "quadrature of a circle," Burton meant the constructive quadrature, he was by no means implying a hopeless task. The group of men, each of whom, before and during the Seventeenth Century, thought not only that the circle could be squared but that he himself had done it, included Nicholas of Cusa, Oronce Fine, Joseph Justus Scaliger, Christian Longomontanus, Gregoire de Saint-Vincent and Thomas Hobbes. (add footnote) From this stellar collection one name may be taken to show how very much alive the problem of the constructive quadrature was during Burton's lifetime: that of Gregoire de Saint-Vincent, 1584-1667, who was at various times professor of mathematics at Rome, mathematician to the households of the Emperor Ferdinand II and Philip IV of Spain, and librarian to the City of Ghent. He announced in 1647 that he had found not one but four ways of performing the constructive quadrature of the circle. Christian Huygens, who was then at Breda, heard about Saint-Vincent's book and wanted to read it,but being temporarily unable to obtain a copy, had to content himself with asking his fellow mathematicians what they thought of it. "they found themselves unable to reach a conclusion, not daring to state absolutely whether he had attained the quadrature or not." (add footnote) It was, according to Hermann Schubert, not until late in the Seventeenth Century that well-informed mathematicians began to suspect the impossibility of the constructive quadrature and to look around for a method of demonstrating this impossibility--a feat not attained until 1882. (add footnote)

Moreover, every one of the items on Burton's list of difficult intellectual tasks resembles the quadrature of the circle, inasmuch as each appeared, in 1624, full of promise.(add footnote)Burton obviously compiled this list with great care to impress upon us, not that the anatomizing of melancholy is a grand piece of folly, but that it is a grand intellectual adventure, worthy of its distinguished age.We may take his work at his own valuation, as Sir William Osler did in calling the Anatomythe greatest medical treatise ever written by a layman, (add footnote)or we may refuse to do so; but we cannot say that Burton chose to invalidate it himself.

To say all this is by no means to contradict the widely-held notion that Burton, behind his array of authorities, must actually be, in some sense, a skeptic.(add footnote) It is the kind of skepticism imputed to Burton by Professor Fish that I question. One can be a skeptic with reference to particular things (say, for example, the Virgin Birth), or a skeptic in the Pyrrhonic tradition, who denies the capacity of the human mind to know anything whatever. But he cannot be both, for the very act of singling out a particular story as incredible assumes the existence, both of a reality extrinsic to oneself, and of one's own ability to know what it is. For one story to be incredible, many others must be credible; it takes a great deal of belief to make unbelief possible, and thus one is not surprised to learn that many of the philosophical or Pyrrhonic skeptics of the Renaissance proceeded straight from their wholesale condemnation of the impotence of the human mind to facile acceptance of religious dogmas. (add footnote) I should like to argue that Burton's skepticism regards particular things, and thus cannot be Pyrrhonism. He doubts many current ideas of his age, and writes to weaken the hold of these ideas on the reader; but the very statement that he so doubts and so writes, denies Professor Fish's version of Burton as a man trying to make us abandon hope of ever having a correct idea at all.