Debapriya Sarkar, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) 265 pp. $65.00 Hb. ISBN: 97815128-2335-6
In Chapter 4 of Possible Knowledge: The literary forms of Early Modern Science, Margaret Cavendish’s lady with an earring remains unknowing as a whole cosmology comes to life and is annihilated within the jewelled reaches of her bauble. Toggling between craftsmanship on the micro- and macro- scale, Debapriya Sarkar explores the mechanisms of ‘poesy’ in literary world-building in the intellectual ferment of the early modern period (ca 1500 -1700).
Sarkar does not situate herself within a tradition that ‘recognize(s) the “literary as science”’; rather, she posits that her work is opposed to that project ‘by reclaiming the imaginative dimensions of emergent scientific methods as components of a literary epistemology, rather than rebranding the apparatus of early modern poiesis as scientific [.…] this intellectual history centers ways of knowing rather than objects of knowledge’ (5-6). She contests the claim that the ‘literature follows the scientific’, highlighting non-empiricist methods by ‘moving across scales – from the micro level of grammatical mood to the macro-level of the cosmos’ (6). Through Sarkar’s book is present the urge to inspect processes ripe in expectancy, holding within themselves an epistemological open-endedness that is the spur to further investigation – as she notes in a companion interview, as early modern thinkers were not always thinking (only) in probabilistic ways, the ambit of the ‘possible’ is fairly vast.[1]
The ‘possible’ in Sarkar’s analysis encompasses key nodes that require philosophical and authorial resolution – a method that Sarkar herself emulates through her conjectural thinking and ‘possible-worlds’ philosophising. To quote, ‘[t]his methodology revels in a form of knowing that early modern poesy repeatedly performs – the ability to locate an entire universe in a single phrase, “what may be and should be”’ (8-9), drawing on Philip Sidney in In Defense of Poesy. Sarkar’s use of the term poiesis hints to the ‘bringing-forth’ and the threshold occasions of Heidegger’s discussion – the momentous moment and the complicity between the master craftsman and the essence of his medium, in shaping it to Nature’s ends. These questions also touch on varied anxieties about profusion of words (verba) interfering with the materiality (res) and substantiality of philosophical investigation: Possible Knowledge ‘reveals that what we have long understood as criticisms of the materiality of language and the art of rhetoric are equally anxieties about the ontology of fiction’ (10-11) – and what place it has in the epistemology of scientific enquiry.
Sarkar engages a diverse range of genres with ‘poesy’ standing in for a range of imaginative modes of construction and philosophical projects. The teleological unfolding of events in the chosen texts follow an internal logic germane to their genre – whether it is the wandering ‘loser’s epic’ of Spenser’s the Faerie Queen, the prophecy and the ‘recipe’ in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ontologies that vary based on their animating physics in Margaret Cavendish’s works, the framing and reasoning by analogy in Milton’s Paradise Lost and, central to the work, Bacon’s inability to seal off the potentialities of his work, whether his middle aphorisms or the variant ontology of his Utopian project. The book’s analysis seems to resolve into two portions – the elucidation of the Spensarian epic modality building up to the Baconian inductive method, i.e. intellectual strands predating or directly culminating in the establishment of the Royal Society; thereafter, the two sections on Margaret Cavendish and John Milton, which are dialogue with post-Baconian traditions in the Royal Society.
Chapter 3, ‘Francis Bacon’s Endless Worke’ is a keen deployment of Sarkar’s attempt to transmute the relations between ‘res and verba’, as she points out that, while Bacon’s own deeply-held convictions that linguistic extravagance interfered with an understanding of actuality, his work offers much of the open-endedness and call to interpretative resolution that he decries. Sarkar points out that his ‘middle aphoristic’ form remains ‘generative’ as words do, and thus engenders inconclusive and multiple conclusions, mirroring the ‘unverifiable, fanciful and the non-existent’ acts of poesy. Per Sarkar’s analysis, Bacon’s induction is formally similar to Spensarian romance, by way of the reading that the methods of ‘romance’ provided a schism with classic ‘epic’ literature and introduced new epistemologies that relied on readerly action, suspended time and polychronism. Bacon’s own Utopian island of New Atlantis is an uncertain existence constructed by the knowledge of visitors, leading to the pronouncement – “let it be further inquired” (109).
Two compelling instantiations of poetic epistemology book-end Bacon’s chapter: ‘William Shakespeare’s Prophetic Recipes’ and ‘Margaret Cavendish’s Physical Poetics’. In the former, Macbeth and Banquo’s treatment of the certainty of the three witches’ ‘prophecy’ is shown to engender their eventual dramatic fate. Macbeth concerns himself with the prophecy-as-recipe; once events confirm the truth of one element, it establishes internal congruence and sets into motion the rest. Banquo, true post-structuralist, questions the ontology of the beings providing the information and thus the multiplicity of their ends. To quote Sarkar, ‘While Macbeth repeatedly turns to denotative language and reads the prophecies conclusively – and consequently, as prescriptions – Banquo’s implicative reading, in which he marks ambiguities and gaps among seeming, being and knowing, position him as the character most clearly able to decipher dissembling language’ (66). Examining the provenance and intertextuality of recipes themselves in a ‘culture of uncertainty’, Sarkar contrasts the structured way that recipes ‘offer a prescription for action’, whereas prophecies are occluded by the occult. The prophecy is the secreta generated by unknowable epistemic processes, as opposed to the scientia of the prescriptive recipe.
Sarkar next introduces us to the contrarian Margaret Cavendish, who sees ‘Fancy’ as truly original, constitutive and infinitely fecund as Nature is – she hangs up worlds with it: “If atoms four, a world can make, then see // What several worlds might in an ear-ring be”. Sarkar highlights the contrastive ethos between Cavendish’s approach to ‘Fancy’ and empiricist anxieties about the unreliability of imaginative / subjectivity put forth by scholars such as Sprat. In sum, she states that ‘such denunciations link how fiction works to the kinds of entities it produces’ and that ‘(…)instead of imitating objects in ‘Nature’, or even engendering ‘forms such as never were in nature’, Cavendish’s literary-thought experiments ‘grow in effect another nature’ by making and remaking the matter of fictional worlds’ (122). Sarkar holds that the authoress judged atomist physics to be inadequate to shape a stable cosmology in her ‘atomist trilogy’ of poems. On the contrary, the Duchess in the prose work ‘Blazing Worlds’ inspects and discards various scientific and proto-scientific theories as being disharmonious with her Fancy’s acts of creation, and rejects atomistic or mechanist conceptions in favour of a vitalist physics of world-making – showing the concordance between the ‘way poesy thinks’ and the way scientific method may think. Sarkar thus classes this episode as echoing ‘the Baconian and Spenserian projects that implore readers to “more inquire”’ (135).
Sarkar’s Possible Knowledge resists any easy reliance on personal papers, intellectual milieus and intellectual lineages, focusing on fine-grained analysis of different textual forms. Therefore, the reader arrives at a history of epistemology expressed through shared tropes, shared questions of genre, and shared reckoning with the possible, rather than a consistent philosophical project. ‘Poesy’ proved incredibly intellectually productive, and its processes also constitute a strand of scientific prehistory in post-Renaissance and early-modern period of generalised intellectual insecurity.
Exhaustively referenced, brilliant and uneven, this is a book that is fascinating for scholars of literature, medievalists and parvenus of early science, but also fits within the rising focus on ‘weak knowledge’ and the inspection of bodies of knowledge that have lost ground by substitution, starvation or abandonment. It presents an intriguing pathway for interdisciplinary researchers seeking an epistemological bridge between the scientific process and the literary, where artefacts of scientific analysis are not sought merely in text, but in methodological analysis of artistic process.
Sravya Darbhamulla, NCBS Archives
[1] Folger Shakespeare Library (The Collation) (11 July 2023). Interview and excerpt: Debapriya Sarkar, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science, Retrieved from: https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/interview-sarkar/.
