Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart begins with a sincere belief, that understanding supposed ‘mad’ writing through pathological means is wrong. This is not only because it puts a needless straitjacket on interesting and creative interpretations of a work but because it’s what the rich and powerful want you to do, they want you to dismiss new ideas and enthusiasm as madness. People like Christopher Smart wrote as they did, not because of madness, but because they were writing in a rhetoric of mania.
First the book needs to define the manic style, give examples of its use and then apply it to the writing of Christopher Smart – and the book does it very well. I was a little sceptical at first – Jubilate Agno certainly struck me as a work where Smart is working through his thoughts, ideas and psychoses but it is also true that writing it off as only the product of an unspecified madness is to diminish an extraordinary work of literature.
Hawes begins by defining the features of this manic rhetoric. Beginning with a feeling of socio-economic resentment, a use of lists, mixtures of genre bending and a ‘peculiarly serious playfulness with language’. All of this grounded in what he calls the ‘manic first person’, a peculiar, porous form of first person that sometimes incorporates the divine and the listener within it. The manic rhetoric also includes certain tropes and ideas, many of them with a biblical base. He calls them topos and topoi. As a writer, Hawes loves his topos and topoi, everything is a topos or topoi, at one point I began wondering whether I was a topos or topoi.
The book theorises this manic style was developed in the messy time of the English Civil War and the Commonwealth period shortly after. In this time, the people went to war against their anointed king, won it, put him on trial and executed him. With the old way of structuring society ripped up, there was a brief period where multiple alternatives competed for dominance. Being the time it was, these ideas were naturally conceived and disseminated within biblical example and structures. While this revolution seemed to have ended with the reversion of the status quo, one of the groups vying for a say were those later known as ranters. One of these ranters that forms a case study in this book was called Abiezer Coppe.
I have to thank Hawes for introducing me to Abiezer Coppe and his Fiery, Flying Roll in particular. Immediately after reading this I bought myself a copy of it and will write about it separately, but it’s a phenomenal, strange, funny and powerful work. In his writing, Coppe took is place as an outsider, thinking thoughts that were considered extreme even in that time of intellectual maelstrom and turning it into a liminal space - essentially he positions himself as someone who is not on the edge but the doorway between different worlds.
As a random aside, I also learnt a little about a Quaker called James Naylor who rode into Bristol on a donkey with naked women praising him and singing, and that the Quaker mode of calling each other ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ was not a symptom of excessive formality but actually of radical informality - those being the informal versions of ‘you’ and ‘your’.
The next writer who serves as a case study is Swift. He’s adopting the rhetoric of mania to parody it. He uses many of the features that Hawes finds in Coppe and will later find in Smart. Swift also supposes this manic rhetoric to be the default mode of a Grub Street hack, as he particularly shows in the narrator of A Tale of the Tub. Swift doesn’t get a lot of space though, as Hawes is keen to move onto the real subject of the book (and the reason I got it), Christopher Smart and Jubilate Agno.
First, Hawes locates Jubilate Agno as a work that sits in almost the exact space as Swift’s parody writer, between the ranters and Grub Street, but for real. There’s a lot of interesting discussion about the structure of the piece, particularly the alternating of ‘versicles’ beginning ‘let’ and those beginning ‘for’. There’s been a lot of rethinking about the poem from this angle, with it first being printed as clumps of ‘let’ followed by clumps of ‘for’, to being published with alternating ‘let’ and ‘for’. One interesting idea in this book is that it was not intended to be read by two people, one reading ‘let’ and one ‘for’, but for one person reading the ‘let’ parts out loud and the ‘for’ parts in their head. The idea that the poem is celebrating the public and the private. Personally, I feel that the purpose of the poem changed as it was being written and so may have been intended to be read in different ways at different times - and then not intended to be read at all.
One thing Hawes does brilliantly is show how wonderfully slippery Jubilate Agno is and how the constant wordplay and constant shifts of meaning in it make it at once elusive and all-encompassing. He states that the poem works in “a state of absolute metaphor in which anything can potentially stand for anything else”. He also says that in the poem, “all creation is related, so that arbitrary connections are just as meaningful as logical ones.” Another quote I wrote down as being extremely accurate to reading Jubilate Agno was, “Smart’s wordplay is a renegotiation of the gulf between the immeasurable realms of the private and idiosyncratic, on the one hand, and the universal on the other.” It’s a poem where the word ‘translated’ is used a lot and things are constantly being translated into other things.
He’s great at unpacking lines of Smart, in more detail than even the footnotes of the Oxford edition. He writes a chapter about the ‘horn’ section of the poem, where Smart uses metaphors of horns to write of his emasculation and the loss of his inheritance and family, transfers into boasting about the Horned Moses (an idea born of mistranslation that Moses has horns), which then transfers into talk about horns of plenty. His point is to explain how these different elements reposition Smart and his masculinity in different ways, leading to a writing that is oddly positioned outside gender in a way he saw a similar to a passage in Coppe. Personally, I saw it as a way of self therapy, the section starts with huge hostility to his wife, who he sees as cuckolding him, working through those feelings and ending up as a call for God to be merciful to his wife.
Finally, Hawes arrives at his last big idea on Jubilate Agno, which he really bigs up as the key to the poem. A notion of space in the poem, redrawing boundaries between those inside his Godly ark and outside. It was a complicated idea, but I took it to mean that this manic rhetoric grew as a way of expressing a utopia but the trouble with utopias is that they are dead on arrival - and so the slipperiness of manic rhetoric is to create an idea of utopia that doesn’t congeal into something dead but stay as an alive idea. He says, “Smart’s incessant wordplay, which often induces a sense of infinite semiotic regress, works against any possible petrification of his exuberant work into dogma.”
The last part of the book is about how Smart has been read and interpreted and about how he’s ultimately been done dirty and reduced into a diagnosis (often the diagnosis I’ve made of him having a bi-polar disorder). While he doesn’t deny that Smart may have been suffering a neurochemical illness, his writing is more than that. As Hawes sees it, his writing (like Abiezer Coppe’s before him) is political, not pathological and to read it as the later ultimately serves the voice of the powerful over the powerless.
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