Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination - Hardcover

Gee, Sophie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691139849 ISBN 13: 9780691139845

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Why was eighteenth-century English culture so fascinated with the things its society discarded? Why did Restoration and Augustan writers such as Milton, Dryden, Swift, and Pope describe, catalog, and memorialize the waste matter that their social and political worlds wanted to get rid of--from the theological dregs in Paradise Lost to the excrements in "The Lady's Dressing Room" and the corpses of A Journal of the Plague Year? In Making Waste, the first book about refuse and its place in Enlightenment literature and culture, Sophie Gee examines the meaning of waste at the moment when the early modern world was turning modern. Gee explains how English writers used contemporary theological and philosophical texts about unwanted and leftover matter to explore secular, literary relationships between waste and value. She finds that, in the eighteenth century, waste was as culturally valuable as it was practically worthless--and that waste paradoxically revealed the things that the culture cherished most. The surprising central insight of Making Waste is that the creation of value always generates waste. Waste is therefore a sign--though a perverse one--that value and meaning have been made. Even when it appears to symbolize civic, economic, and political failure, waste is in fact restorative, a sign of cultural invigoration and imaginative abundance. Challenging the conventional association of Enlightenment culture with political and social improvement, and scientific and commercial progress, Making Waste has important insights for cultural and intellectual history as well as literary studies.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sophie Gee is assistant professor of English at Princeton University and the author of "The Scandal of the Season" (Scribner), a novel based on the story behind Alexander "Pope's Rape of the Lock". She writes regularly for the "New York Times Book Review", the "Washington Post", and the "Financial Times".

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"This is a vivaciously written, multidimensional study of the problem and promise that waste posed to the eighteenth-century English imagination. It is surprisingly and commendably concise, given its topic, and it frames economic, political, anthropological, and historical analysis with a very fine literary sensibility--one that actively appreciates the role that imaginative writing played in the negotiation of a paradox that turns out to be constitutive of modern English identity."--Jayne Lewis, University of California, Irvine

"Making Waste is a pleasure to read--vividly, gracefully, wittily written. It will be a valuable contribution to eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies."--Cynthia Wall, University of Virginia

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"This is a vivaciously written, multidimensional study of the problem and promise that waste posed to the eighteenth-century English imagination. It is surprisingly and commendably concise, given its topic, and it frames economic, political, anthropological, and historical analysis with a very fine literary sensibility--one that actively appreciates the role that imaginative writing played in the negotiation of a paradox that turns out to be constitutive of modern English identity."--Jayne Lewis, University of California, Irvine

"Making Waste is a pleasure to read--vividly, gracefully, wittily written. It will be a valuable contribution to eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies."--Cynthia Wall, University of Virginia

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Making Waste

LEFTOVERS AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IMAGINATIONBy Sophie Gee

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2010 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13984-5

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.....................................................................................viiIntroduction: Making Waste..........................................................................11. The Invention of the Wasteland: Civic Narrative and Dryden's Annus Mirabilis.....................182. Wastelands, Paradise Lost, and Popular Polemic at the Restoration................................413. Milton's Chaos in Pope's London: Material Philosophy and the Book Trade..........................674. The Man on the Dump: Swift, Ireland, and the Problem of Waste....................................915. Holding On to the Corpse: Fleshly Remains in A Journal of the Plague Year........................112Afterword: Mr. Spectator's Tears and Sophia Western's Muff..........................................137NOTES...............................................................................................145BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................169INDEX...............................................................................................187

Chapter One

The Invention of the Wasteland

CIVIC NARRATIVE AND DRYDEN'S ANNUS MIRABILIS

During 1665, the plague evacuated London's streets and public buildings. Then in September 1666, as citizens were returning to the capital and resuming normal life, the Great Fire razed central London in four days. The city was debilitated, its streets filled with blockages and displaced persons, its buildings in ruin, its crowds dispossessed: "[T]he people who now walked about the ruines, appeared like men in some dismal desart, or rather in some great Citty, lay'd waste by an impetuous and cruel Enemy," wrote John Evelyn, the celebrated seventeenth-century diarist. Evelyn was giving a term to the new geography of postfire London: it was a wasteland. Evelyn used waste to convey a calamity of biblical dimensions, an imagined apocalypse that had suddenly become actual. The word took hold; waste, wasteland, and its affiliated terms (vast, devastation) became catch-cries in the fire's aftermath. Evelyn probably used the word on impulse, as he searched for an adequate phrase in the vocabulary of disaster. But unwittingly he stumbled upon what was to become one of the most resonant images in the history of writing about London. Something about a landscape of waste described London with uncanny precision. As Evelyn pointed out in the same diary entry, the landscape was both "desert" and "city," filled with people but giving out the sense of emptiness, of void.

Descriptions of wasteland would become central to writing on the Great Fire. The image dominates sermons, poems, civic treatises, and official proclamations from the period. Nathaniel Hardy described the "houses of God ... burnt up, and laid waste in the City," in a sermon at St. Martin in the Fields; William Sancroft, in a sermon preached before the king, spoke about "the earth wasted, and utterly spoiled, and turn'd upside down." As late as 1668, Thomas Jacomb, a nonconformist divine, pressed for the "reedification" of "waste and desolate Habitations." Samuel Rolls, an advocate of commercial growth through urban expansion, likewise wrote a treatise in 1668 urging "that the now wast, and desolated City of London should be reedified." The wasting of London was attributed variously to religious and secular causes: the restoration of Charles II, increased religious toleration after 1660, liberty and license in the capital. But as these quotations makes clear, wasteland was imagined as an apocalyptic site of judgment and collective ruin. Biblically speaking, wasteland is a place of residue, spiritual and moral as well as material.

But the fire had outstripped even the Bible, turning London into a literal desert. This was no longer the terrain of literary conceit or biblical allegory. All of a sudden, real waste threatened to overwhelm England's once thriving capital. After the fire, the imagery and language used to describe biblical wasteland doubled as a way to convey the imperilment, commercial and psychological, of modern life. Such a transition from the biblical to the real had always been at issue in early-modern London: as Nigel Smith points out, people lived with the sense that fire was imminent throughout the seventeenth century, and "we should not be surprised that the rhetoric of many sermons suggested that the Apocalypse had all but arrived with the fire." In 1666 Dryden and other secular writers had, at last, a new way to describe modernity: an alienated, precarious landscape that, rather than trying to escape, they gladly embraced. Even though Londoners did try to mend the city after the fire, the notion that they were living in a desolate landscape was never eradicated.

Wasteland is one of several eighteenth-century literary tropes to be drawn from the Bible. As Michael McKeon and J. Paul Hunter have shown, early novels borrowed heavily from biblical and religious texts because such antecedents enabled novels to register as "real" or at least trustworthy—they included redemption and conversion narratives, providential stories, as well as guide literature and "occasional meditations." Wastelands, both urban and "desert," were already established as settings through which to explore selfhood, nationhood, and communal life. But the convergence of lived experience and biblical narrative gave wasteland a virtually unprecedented literary power. It was a believable setting because it was real, and it was symbolically resonant because it was biblical. "Urban life is neurotically, nauseatingly close, exaggertedly so in the concertina-ed dwellings that artisans (nonconformists among them) inhabited. No wonder it felt on the edge of time: just about ripe for a Second Coming," Smith writes. Aptly enough, Simon Ford, a Puritan minister (later a conformist) proclaimed in his postfire poem "London's Resurrection" that "waste is merit." Precisely so. Theologically speaking, the value of wasteland was clear. Desolation is the condition of salvation; without waste, resurrection is impossible. "On the one hand, fire is the ultimate means of destruction, a wholly uncontrollable force. On the other hand, it signifies the power of purification. Fire cleanses the elect, burning away the tainted dross in the world." The surprise is that this was to hold true for secular writing, too. We might expect that, in reality, waste wouldn't seem meritorious at all. People would just want to clean it up and make it go away. But the idea that "waste is merit" proved compelling. Now that they had their real-life wasteland, English writers were not going to tidy it away.

I

After 1666, the landscape features that would define the new geography of London were the same rubble, rubbish, and dust that had defined the wastelands so prominent in Puritan pamphlets of the 1640s and 1650s prophesying millennial violence and the last days. The civic and commercial disaster in London could be explained in terms of apocalyptic imagery, but its primary significance lay in its real, massive impact on the rhythms of London life. Sancroft, dean of St. Paul's and later the archbishop of Canterbury, could hardly credit that so familiar a phrase, "we are but Dust and Ashes," could have been so vividly realized: "not only Dust in the course of ordinary Frailty, but Ashes too in the merit of a far sharper Doom; perceive that God should bring us to Dust, nay, even turn us to Ashes too, as our Houses," he declaimed.

Edward Stillingfleet, an Anglican divine who was to become archdeacon of London, also recognized that the imagery of biblical apocalypse had been matched by the real. Like the stricken inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, Stillingfleet points out, Londoners had no time at all to flee, either:

Surely that [force] was very great which consumed four Cities to nothing in so short a time, when God sis pluere Gehennam de caelo as one expresses it, rained down hell-fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah. And this is that which some think is called the vengeance of eternal fire, which all those in Sodom and Gomorrah are said to suffer; i.e. a Fire which consumed, till there was nothing left to be consumed by it.

Stillingfleet, like Evelyn, noticed that emptiness is the defining characteristic of wasteland. "Consumed, till there was nothing left to be consumed by it."

The emptiness of Stillingfleet's wasteland, though, isn't only a sign of the moral desolation like the judgment that afflicts Sodom, Gomorrah, and Jerusalem. It is, rather, made richer and more complex by the secular, commercial echo in the midst of his biblical imagery; it is a symptom of the real. The image of consuming fire leads the listener associatively to another kind of consumption; London has consumed, commercially as well as morally, until there is nothing left. The familiarly dire images of hellfire and vengeance in Sodom and Gomorrah become vividly real in Stillingfleet's sermon as he describes a wasteland that is recognizably commercial in character: "Look now upon me [London], you who so lately admired the greatness of my trade, the riches of my merchants, the number of my people, the conveniency of my Churches, the multitude of my streets, and see what desolations sin hath made in the earth." "Desolations" is the crucial word here. We get the despair and moral regret that the congregation ought to feel, but we're also reminded that postfire London is a wasteland because it is a commercial capital, stripped of its capacity to function. Robert Elborough, another prominent Anglican cleric, works through the same set of associations when he asks his congregation, "what are become of your Houses, Shops, Goods, Estates and Warehouses, when you could not keep them from being destroyed, and they could not keep your houses from being consumed?"

Speaking in his powerfully titled sermon Lex Ignea; or, The School of Righteousness, Sancroft also read the disaster as a replication of God's judgment on Jerusalem, since phrases describing the disaster in the Bible map onto the actual circumstances exactly:

[The] City of Confusion, which is broken down, a City turn'd Chaos again ... the City turn'd into a Heap, or a Ruine ... into one great sepulchre to it self, burried in its own Rubbish, [Isaiah] Cap. xxv. 2.... The City desolate, and forsaken, and left Wilderness, and Desart all over, [Isaiah] Cap. xxvii, 10. Are but so many variations on the same phrase, and signifie all the same thing, the burning of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, or Tartar, or (as some will have it) by both.

But when the words "confusion," "broken," "chaos," "heap," and "ruin" are no longer merely the rhetoric of millennial sermon-writers—when the city is literally "burried in its own Rubbish"—the power of wasteland as a secular, literary landscape begins to make itself clear. It is a glut of worthless matter, a chaos of rubbish and ruin, and yet it is literally formed from the abundance that was once so prized: prosperous trade and prolific commerce. Even though the wasteland is a void, it teems with ghastly surplus.

Divines talked about the wasted cities of the Bible for the obvious reason: it was their job to make people draw connections between their own lives and biblical catastrophes that, most of the time, seemed remote. Although Stillingfleet, Sancroft, and others appeared to be intoning biblical commonplaces, they also laid the foundations for a new kind of urban writing. In this new discourse, desolation is a form of despair that is secular, psychological, and commercial in character, and the most desolate of landscapes, wasteland, is also disconcertingly full—of people, goods, and ruins in profound disorder. Disorder becomes a condition that writers are fascinated by. The image of wasteland emerges, in other words, as a rich, symbolically complicated terrain—as it turns out, a terrain that will be a central feature of urban writing for the next three hundred years. In this chapter we watch as a group of early modern writers feel their way toward the wasteland that T. S. Eliot would eventually realize as the most desolate, and yet compelling, of all literary landscapes.

When John Evelyn describes the burning city of London he turns to the Bible, but not for the precise political and religious implications of his imagery so much as for the broad symbolic framework that the imagery of biblical apocalypse imparts to the modern setting. He uses the biblical imagery to express the fact that the Fire had literally wiped away early modern London, displacing an internationally renowned metropolis with a wasteland: "[T]hus I left it this afternoone burning a resemblance of Sodom, or the last day: It call'd to mind that of 4 Heb. non enim hic habemus stabilem civitatem: the ruins resembling the picture of Troy: London was, but no more." Evelyn might begin by making a typological comparison between London and Sodom and a mythological comparison with Troy. But Sodom and Troy ultimately give Evelyn the images he needs for a realist description of the city: "London was, but no more," which sounds rhetorical but is literal. By declaring that London is "no more," Evelyn makes it clear that the wasteland is important because it is a void, an evacuated geography, and a new, empty literary landscape that needed to be filled in by an entirely new set of literary images and devices, hitherto unexplored.

The emptiness that all these writers comment on is, perversely, what gives wasteland its value. Being empty, it opened the way for new kinds of writing. Cynthia Wall points out that "over and over again, the city is called a 'heap,' shapeless, prostrate, its indistinguishability its distinguishing mark.... Language itself seems collapsed, the familiar discourse inadequate to express the cultural and spiritual horror." Wasteland reflects both spatial void and psychological emptiness—exactly what English writing, urban, often disaffected, self-consciously modern, turned out to need.

The terrain of psychic distress and disorientation counteracted other emerging literary settings—the private closets and domestic spaces of words—places that functioned to celebrate psychological autonomy and self-determination. In J. Paul Hunter's account of the origins of the novel, "the validation of individuals, not necessarily trained individuals, as observers and interpreters" is at the heart of the genre's rise, and "once unleashed, the power of the individual was impossible to control." Autonomous individual readers are commemorated by the intimate spaces and modes of writing (diaries, letters) of early novels. But the opposing phenomena of psychological peril and personal alarm, symptomatic of self-determined but frequently disoriented individuals in urban society, relied upon a different Protestant trope: barren desert. Wasteland would figure a dark side to Ian Watt's claim that "modern realism ... begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses," a position established by Descartes and Locke. Desolate urban landscapes expressed the reality that individuals confronted disorientation and confusion as much as they experienced enlightenment—a reality that would help carry novels from the Whiggish optimism of the early eighteenth century to the epistemological crisis of literary modernism.

Stillingfleet's sermon on the Great Fire captures this vividly, describing the psychological alienation and alarm that wasteland inspires: "And no kind of Judgments are so dreadful and amazing, as those which come most unexpectedly upon men; for these betray the succours which reason offers, they insaturate men's councils, weaken their courage, and deprive them of that presence of mind which is necessary at such a time for their own and the public interest." Amazement, weakness, deprivation are the psychological debris which fill in the "desert" terrain of urban wastes; insaturation and betrayal of reason describe a newly disordered, confused mode of apprehension with which people responded to ruined and displaced urban space. This literal apocalypse gave modern writers a new landscape, characterized by physical and psychological confusion and alienation, by an incoherent abundance of people and matter, and by a sense of profound void. As Stillingfleet and Evelyn tell us, wasteland is a nothingness, and yet it is uncomfortably full. The glut of ash and debris had, days before, been an abundance of prosperity. This literal wasteland forced observers to recognize that unwanted remnants and glorious surplus were, literally, one and the same. Because waste was debased it had value: it was an expressive term for psychological imperilment.

John Evelyn's walk through London the day after the fire describes an abundance of material waste that has taken the place of known streets and passages:

I went this morning from Whitehall as far as London bridge, thro the late Fleete-streete, Ludgate Hill, by St. Pauls, Cheapside, Exchange, Bishopsgate, Aldersgate, & out to Morefields, thence thro Cornehill, &c: with extraordinary difficulty, clambering over mountains of yet smoaking rubbish & frequently mistaking where I was, the ground under my feet so hott, as made me not onely Sweate, but even burnt the soles of my shoes & put me all over in Sweate. The bie-lanes and narrower streetes were quite fill'd up with rubbish, nor could one have possibly known where he was, but by the ruines of some church, or hall, that had some remarkable tower or pinnacle remaining.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Making Wasteby Sophie Gee Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691139849
• ISBN 13: 9780691139845
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 216
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar