Charactonymic structures in
by Marvin Hunt
"We see we cannot play at chess
but that we must give names to our chessmen."(1)
In his Course in General Linguistics
Ferdinand de Saussure compares language to a game of chess: "just as chess
is based entirely on the combinations afforded by the various pieces, so too a
language has the character of a system based entirely on the contrasts between
its concrete units." This system, arising from differences between its
components, provides a set of rules that govern acceptable manipulation of
those entities, whether it be a move in chess or a meaningful utterance in
language. These rules become the primary concern of the analyst, as Saussure
concludes: "One cannot dispense with identifying them, nor move a step
without having recourse to them."(2)
In the epigraph to my essay,
To understand
Hermogenes sounds very much like a
rudimentary Saussure. And just as the structuralism of Saussure provides the
starting point for poststructuralist thought, so the structuralism of the
Cratylus does not rest with Hermogenes' insistence upon the basic principle of
ethos as the source of rightness in naming. In fact, to show that ultimately
language is inadequate to reveal Truth, Socrates introduces another charter
concept developed by Saussure. Meaning is assigned to names according to their
function within a governing system, but within this system names signify solely
by virtue of differences between the entities that comprise it. Again, to quote
Saussure, "Language has the character of a system based entirely on the
contrast between its concrete units" (my emphasis).(4)
From this Saussurian position,
poststructuralists have devised a linguistic model where the value of the word
in its system is assigned negatively, the result of difference alone. This
concept, of course, is now well known as Jacques Derrida's differance, a term
that encompasses both difference and deferral.(5) Because the word has no
positive meaning, but only value assigned negatively, there can be no teleology
in the process of naming. Meaning is always not something else, permitting a multitude
of possibilities, so that definition is continually elusive, infinitely
deferred. Saussure anticipated this development when he remarked that
"diachrony has no end in itself."(6) As we shall see, Socrates'
exploration of difference in the Cratylus inevitably leads him, and later
Sidney, to discover the problem of deferral and to confront some of its
troubling consequences.
Since Plato's focus on naming serves
as a complex gloss on
I
The Cratylus fully articulates but
does not resolve the debate about rightness in naming.(7) When Socrates
intervenes, he interrogates Hermogenes' argument that aptness is culturally,
not divinely, determined; and then, briefly but pointedly, he challenges the
position of Cratylus's belief in a natural affinity between words and their designates.
The dialogue concludes, devastatingly for Cratylus (a follower of Heraclitus),
with Socrates insisting that Truth is supra-linguistic. If the world is subject
to continual flux, as Heraclitus would have it, a rational man will not
"trust in names and their makers to the point of affirming that he knows
anything" (440C). Names and those who name have no way of deducing Truth
into their signifiers.
This, of course, is a familiar
Socratic strategy: agree and disagree with both disputants, and by this
muddling of their positions lead them to a superseding argument that no human
language can be said to derive from or to reveal Truth. As Thomas M. Greene
writes, this strategy testifies "to Plato's felt need for an
extralinguistic grounding of the word."(8) The difficulty, of course, is
that it leaves the contest unresolved. Though there can be no doubt that
Socrates is more comfortable with the argument of Cratylus, nevertheless it is
Socrates who most forcefully articulates the protostructuralism that we
associate with Hermogenes. Socrates talks; Hermogenes listens and agrees.
Furthermore, in his conversations with both Hermogenes and Cratylus, Socrates
discloses nearly every vital structuralist tenet, stopping just short of an
outright admission of arbitrariness between signifier and signified.
In response to Hermogenes' facile
assertion that we can apply to things whatever names we want, Socrates mounts
what appears to be a devastating rebuttal. Hermogenes' position rests
vulnerably upon Protagoras's famous dictum that mankind is the measure of all
things. Socrates attacks this position and concludes: "In naming ... if we
are to be consistent with our previous conclusions, we cannot follow our own
will, but the way and the instrument which the nature of things prescribes must
be employed" (387D). By pointing out that individual speakers lack the
freedom to alter at will affiliations between signifiers and signifieds,
Socrates appears to have disproved Hermogenes' theory and so confirmed
Cratylus's. But this is not the case.(9) For Socrates has not demonstrated the
claim that words accord naturally or divinely with the objects and actions they
nominate. In fact, when he turns his attention to Cratylus, he will demonstrate
that words do not systematically agree by nature with what they designate, that
the Cratylean system of natural signification is invalid.
In seeming here to deny Hermogenes
his premise, Socrates has tacitly affirmed a vital tenet of Saussurian
linguistics, inevitable in any rigorous application of Hermogenes' ideas about
language: a signifier may not be changed at whim by individual users of a
language.(10) Socrates reminds us that we have no choice but to call a horse a
horse. Even in the case of prodigies--a calf born of a mare, for example--we
would call the offspring after its kind, a calf not a foal (393C). As I
suggested, it is no oversight on the part of Socrates that the essential and
vital question of the entire debate, whether we call a calf a calf because of
some natural relationship between a linguistic sound and a thing or because we
merely contract that relationship, is left uninterrogated. An integral part of
his strategy is to allow the Cratylean theory of aptness to stand, for the time
being, as a valid assumption.
Having offered no proof of
Cratylus's position, Socrates enunciates a second important Saussurian premise,
made also by Sidney in his rebuttal to the charge that poets lie (Defence
102.16-103.28, discussed below), that the function of words within a system of
language, rather than any property inherent in words themselves, determines
their meaning.(11) The function of an instrument, Socrates argues, determines
its form and identity. Use constitutes the ideal model that governs the work of
every shuttle-maker, every ironsmith, every word-maker. Like a chess piece that
can be wrought in various shapes and of different materials, the value of a
word is determined by its role in the endeavor to communicate reality, not by
its local character. This endeavor provides a system of ideal governance,
Socrates notes, evident even across linguistic borders (389E-390A).
Saussure, who argued that ideas are
never given in advance but rather emanate from within a linguistic system,
would disagree with Socrates' concept of ideal governance.(12) But he would no
doubt agree that the function of an instrument, rather than any a priori
quality, determines its form. For this reason, the navigator rather than the
shipbuilder or the ship's captain is the proper judge of a ship's worth (390C).
Authority is displaced from the makers of signs to their users, from the
creator of words to human speakers, chiefly the dialecticians, who determine
correctness (390D). Although Socrates is supposed to be rebutting Hermogenes,
this shift from epistemological absolutism to relativity in epistemology is
clearly a shift toward Hermogenes' position that "no name belongs to any
particular thing by nature, but only by the habit and custom of those who
employ it and who established the usage" (384D).
Following a lengthy investigation of
etymologies which seems to support a Cratylean view of rightness, Socrates then
turns to Cratylus who, throughout the grilling of Hermogenes, has presumed to
enjoy Socrates' agreement that aptness in names results from a natural affinity
between signifier and signified. But the tables quickly turn on him. In a
preliminary stage of his critique of natural likeness, Socrates convinces
Cratylus that there are correct and incorrect names, just as there are true and
false statements, good and bad paintings (431E). Yes, Cratylus replies, it
appears so, but in fact "it is not true," he argues, that a
misconstrued name "is written, but written incorrectly; it is not written
at all," Cratylus maintains, "but immediately becomes a different
word, if any such thing happens to it" (432; my emphasis). If Saussure
were to comment on Cratylus here (curiously he cites no Platonic dialogues in
the Course), he might list paradigms like pat/bat/sat/hat/fat in which the
alteration of a single initial sound alters meaning. In such cases
mispronunciation is effectively impossible since almost any variance, any
difference at all, is semantically critical, the word "becoming a
different word, if any such thing happens."
Cratylus has presented the definitive
concept of structuralism and the starting point of poststructuralism: a
recognition of difference as determinate of meaning, a recognition implicit, as
Socrates will later demonstrate, in Cratylus's Heracliteanism. At this point
Socrates turns away from the radical implications of Cratylus's
remark--"Perhaps we are not considering the matter in the right
way"--only to confirm in the following discussion of images the same
principle of difference. "The image," says Socrates, "must not
by any means reproduce all the qualities of that which it imitates, if it is to
be an image" (432B). An image must, in other words, be different from what
it imitates. Otherwise we could not conceive of Cratylus and an image of
Cratylus but only two Cratyluses (432C). From here the concept of difference as
imperfection (incompleteness) proceeds through the system of language, breeding
error and misunderstanding, disjoining signifier and signified, spreading from
letter to noun to clause and sentence (432E), anticipating the complete denial
of linguistic truth that comes at the end of the dialogue.
Still holding out the possibility
that at least ideally signifiers express their signifieds by a natural linkage,
Socrates soon draws from Cratylus the surprising admission that custom or
convention rather than natural affinity frequently shapes and governs the
meaning of words (435B). Then, staging what will be a final assault upon
Heracliteanism, he returns to question again the ability of words to convey
Truth, using precisely the same investigation of etymologies he had employed
with Hermogenes to show that even some ancient words appear to signify
haphazardly, or at least only by agreement among speakers. These contradictory
etymologies, moreover, cannot be dismissed as exceptions that confirm the rule:
"Are we to count names like votes," Socrates asks, "and shall
correctness rest with the majority?" (437D).
Intellectual rigor demands that
Socrates advance until the case for natural likeness is destroyed. Tellingly,
the final attack is not directly upon Cratylus's theory of language but upon
the philosophy of his mentor Heraclitus who claimed perpetual change--perpetual
stages of difference--as the basic principle of the universe.(13) The debate
over language in the Cratylus, no less than our own arguments about language,
is grounded in conflicting philosophical beliefs. If the image of beauty
"is always passing away," Socrates wonders whether we can
"correctly say that |beauty~ is that, or must it inevitably, in the very
instant while we are speaking, become something else and pass away and no
longer be what it is?" (339D; my emphasis) Socrates has thus come very
close to affirming the concept of differance, indicating not only the primary
concept of difference that must underlie any philosophy of change but also the
infinite deferral of truth such a philosophy entails. In his challenge,
Socrates has finally revealed that the philosophy of Heraclitus implies the
radical linguistic principles that Cratylus had entered the dialogue hoping to
see disproved. But Cratylus does not break under this withering critique; at
the conclusion of the dialogue he maintains his philosophical allegiance to
Heraclitus and so exiles himself from language. Cratylus went off into the
country, Aristotle tells us, and lived a life of perpetual silence.(14)
II
Although heavily obscured, the
structuralism and incipient poststructuralism of the Cratylus were available to
any Renaissance mind naturally disposed to sophisticated views of language.(15)
Though Sidney makes no reference to the Cratylus, it was a prominent item in
the Platonic corpus.(16) In addition, a significant piece of anecdotal evidence
suggests that the structuralist perspective was pervasive in Sidney's thought.
In the revised Arcadia Philisides appears at a tilt bearing the impresa "a
sheep marked with pitch, with this word Spotted to be knowne." According
to Abraham Fraunce, this is a version of one of Sidney's own devices, "A
sheep marked with the planet Saturn, with the motto Macular modo noscar."
Whatever else it signifies, "Spotted to be knowne" first of all
insists that difference is identity.(17)
It is perhaps not surprising, then,
that an onomastic pun early in A Defence of Poetry suggests a structuralist
characterology by giving the appearance of substance to signifiers and at the
same time denying that possibility. The opening discussion of John Pietro
Pugliano's horsemanship, which Sidney concludes by wishing himself a horse,
turns on the coincidence of philippos (Gk. "horse-lover") and
Philip.(18) As in "Philisides" and "Astrophil," Sidney
inserts himself into his text, signifying a natural subject by a novel
charactonymic formulation. At the same time, however, such a charactonym,
because it is artificial ("constructed" or "made up")
denies the basis for identifying a natural signifier with an historical
signified. Few serious critics in the last twenty years have failed to take
into account the difference between Sir Philip Sidney and Astrophil. Sidney
both is and is not Astrophil. Such an approach to naming implies Sidney's
understanding that rightness or aptness--character validity, that is to say--is
the effect of conventional rather than natural mechanisms.(19)
This important theoretical position
is taken up later in the Defence in Sidney's exoneration of the poet from the
charge of lying. Against Plato's claim that art is an instrument of deceit, an
issue that lies at the heart of the Cratylus as well as the Defence, Sidney
cites Aristotle's proposition that mimesis depicts what should be rather than
what is or was: "What child is there," he asks, "that, coming to
a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old door, doth
believe that it is Thebes?" (103.6-8). If the difference between poetic
convention and actuality should be evident to a child, he continues, then how
much more apparent should it be to putative right readers/viewers, with fully
developed powers of discernment? Those who understand poetry "will never
give the lie," he insists, "to things not affirmatively but
allegorically and figuratively written" (11-12). Confronting not history's
imperfectly grounded "bare Was" or moral philosophy's wholly
ungrounded "bare rule" but rather the particular species of poetic
endeavor called fiction, readers "shall use the narration but as an imaginative
ground-plot of a profitable invention" (15-16).
Sidney then responds to the quibble
that by giving his characters names shared by actual persons the poet lies
(103.17-18). From an analogy charged with the theoretical matter of the
Defence, Sidney teases out the fundamental structuralist tenet of the
arbitrariness of signs:
And doth the lawyer lie then, when
under the names of John-a-stiles and John a-nokes he puts his case? But that is
easily answered. Their naming of men is but to make their picture the more
lively, and not to build any history.
(103.18-22)
Sidney insists that the imperatives
of mimesis, like the customs of judiciary, alone ordain meaning in the images
created by poets. "Painting men," he writes, "they
|lawyers/poets~ cannot leave men nameless" (103.22-23). Sidney appears
simply to suggest that poets, having created human-like characters, must give
them names; but his point is rather more subtle than that. Sidney restates it
in an analogy that structuralism since the Course in General Linguistics has repeatedly
called upon, that "We see we cannot play at chess but that we must give
names to our chessmen" (103.22-24). Not pieces alone but the names of
pieces enable the operation of the game. To his proposition of the autonomous
systematics of fiction, in other words, Sidney has appended its diachronic
correlative: the concretization of synchronic codes is achieved through
particular diachronic events--that is, through linear or durational images such
as the charactonym. Signifiers, Sidney suggests, bring into existence their
signifieds.(20)
Such a sophisticated understanding
of language depends upon the recognition that like a chess piece the value of a
character comes not from any inherent identity it possesses, but rather from
vital relation to other discrete signifiers operative in the same system. So
Saussure writes that "just as chess is based entirely on the combinations
afforded by the various pieces, so too a language has the character of a system
based entirely on the contrasts between its concrete units."(21) Only when
a piece is named and entered into the game, which it simultaneously helps to
define, does it acquire a necessary and unchangeable identity. Only within a
community of signifiers, both Sidney and Saussure insist, does the systemic unit
acquire an inalterable value. The poet's naming of characters--his establishing
of concrete oppositional characterologic units--is what enables the system of
mimetic fiction to express itself. One major advantage of such a conception of
mimesis is that, because poetry is a feigned system always feigning images, it
cannot be subject to Plato's charge that it misrepresents Truth. Poetry cannot
lie because it cannot presume to present actuality. In fact, Sidney concludes
this discussion of naming with a brilliant statement of the natural-unnatural
binary, evoking poetry's exquisite difference: "and yet methinks, he were
a very partial champion of truth that would say we lied for giving a piece of
wood the reverend title of a bishop" (103.24-26).
III
In the Arcadias, Sidney employs a
structuralist characterology to express plenitude, a motive that ultimately
takes him beyond structuralism toward the endless deferral Socrates discovered
in the Cratylus. His method is apparent in the development of a class of characterologic
metaphors, the princes Pyrocles and Musidorus, remarkable for their ability to
cross generic, social, and gender boundaries.(22) In the original version of
the Arcadia four collections of verse, the Eclogues, demarcate the five
encompassing prose Books or Acts.(23) The Eclogues, in other words, create a
textual as well as a psychological, artistic, and social boundary that
Musidorus crosses with obvious ease. After his initial reluctance, he indicates
this transgression when he, like his cousin Pyrocles, falls in love and assumes
a new identity. Loving Pamela, "Musidorus" abandons the designation
and status of prince, an identity suitable for heroic action, and moves into a
separate division of the text, the Eclogues, where as "Dorus" he
behaves in full accord with conventions of pastoral eloquence, values inversely
related to those indicated by "Musidorus." Once he enters the
Eclogues as "Dorus," he becomes instantly a full participant in a new
characterologic milieu that requires of him no apprenticeship as a condition of
entrance.(24) As "Dorus," he joins in the singing competition with
Dicus and the other shepherds as a master player in their game. Instantly,
effortlessly, the character is re-signed in another context.
The characterologic instability
resulting from repeated traffic across generic and textual boundaries prompts
us to ask exactly what-prince or shepherd-this figure is meant to signify.(25)
Is he "Dorus" or "Musidorus"? In which poetic ethos, verse
Eclogue or prose narrative, do we assign him a primary place? Mindful of the
Renaissance preference for epic, most of us have no trouble assigning first
importance to the identity signified by "Musidorus." But while urging
us to endorse this particular identity, the hierarchical nature of such logic
necessarily suppresses the complementary value of "Dorus." It has
been pointed out that this is hardly a fruitful approach to understanding the
structure of the Arcadias which articulate multiple signifying communities.(26)
Sidney's text(s) presents the reader with various reciprocating communities of
literary conventions juxtaposed, the compositeness of his book registering
multiple characterologic environments deployed at roughly equal valences. This
is an important element of the design of Sidney's work that even a careful
analysis of the structure of the new Arcadia can obscure.
"Perfection" in the Arcadias, Nancy Lindheim writes, "is
characterized for Sidney by reciprocity and harmonious interchange. It is a
higher state than mere opposition. Perfection resolves-no, dissolves-all
contraries, superseding elements originally worked out as some sort of
antithesis."(27)
The plenitude of the revised Arcadia
could not, however, result from the dissolution of the oppositional tensions
that constitute it. Synthesis does provide a solution to the warring between
Helots and Lacedaemonians whom Pyrocles (Diaphantus) subsumes under another
nation.(28) But this is not a strategy characteristic of the Arcadias. The
constituent elements of multivalent structures actively resist obliteration.
"For this word 'one,'" Pamela tells Cecropia in her famous defense of
honor, "being attributed to that which is all, is but 'one,' mingling of
many and many 'ones' ... wherein the under-ones ... cannot ... regard to any
preservation but of themselves ... so far are they from a conspired unity--but
that a right heavenly nature, indeed as it were unnaturing them, doth so bridle
them" (NA 3.361.17-26; my emphasis). Such reasoning suggests that to
suppress any identity assumed by a character in pursuit of synthesis--as it
were to eliminate pawns or bishops from chess--would be to decommission the
system of mimesis, that "right heavenly bridle" which effects
"the conspired unity" of the work.(29)
Semiological complication forever
resisting the sacrifice of differentiation is the principal means whereby in
the Arcadias Sidney attempts what he cannot possibly accomplish, the
realization of perfect characterologic plenitude. Sidney's effort in the
Arcadias is not synthesis, then, to the extent that that implies a sacrifice of
differentiation, but compositional profusion. The nephew of Euarchus is both
"Musidorus" heroic Prince and "Dorus" shepherd singer,
though never one when he is the other. That composite
"Musidorus-Dorus" represents a linear sophistication of character in
the direction of plenitude.
For Pyrocles, the semiological
context of such extensions of identity is more apparent. When in the old
Arcadia he takes on the disguise of the warrior princess "Cleophila,"
he becomes a literal inversion of his beloved's name,
"Philoclea."(30) In becoming a reformation of the woman he loves,
Pyrocles thus not only takes on a new charactonym, but also sacrifices most of
what is associated with his princely identity, notably his manhood.
"Transformed in show, but more transformed in mind," he
"cease|s~ to strive, with double conquest foiled" (NA
1.69.20-21).(31)
The taking on of disguise and alias
always signals a radical transformation of identity. A different name indicates
a different being. Yet, as McCanles rightly argues, in becoming
"Cleophila" and "Dorus," the characters erstwhile signified
by "Pyrocles" and "Musidorus" have not been invalidated but
rather temporarily acquitted.(32) Yet, in remission these identities continue
to exist in a synchronic dimension of Sidney's work, from which they may be
retrieved at any moment before the final scene of Book Five. When Sidney has
Pyrocles assume the identity of the Amazon princess Cleophila (Zelmane in NA),
he suggests a relational basis for character, a community of identities it may
embrace. He activates a syntagmatic dimension in the Arcadias in which Pyrocles
the man/woman, prince/princess, lover/beloved must be understood as an
equilibrium of opposing experiences and values.
IV
The possibility of such dialectical
charactonymic signifiers as "Musidorus-Dorus" and
"Pyrocles-Cleophila" would seem to confirm McCanles's view of the
structure of the Arcadias as dialectical, for everywhere reciprocating
pairs-man/woman, hero/shepherd, freeman/slave, court/country, sea/land,
foreign/domestic-unfold in the narrative.(33) Indeed, most of the onomastic
structures I discuss in this essay are reciprocal differentials. However,
"Pyrocles-Cleophila" is not a formulation limited to dialectical
opposition. To it, theoretically, may be added an infinite number of new
values, extending the spectrum of character to register ever greater
complications of identity. The possibility of unlimited additions to such
structures--the endless deferral of perfection they imply--becomes apparent
when we recognize that a hybrid name is a characterologic version of the
syntagma, a fixed linear configuration of discrete units yielding a valid new
semantic event, such as, Saussure remarked, the phrase "contre tous,"
which achieves its precise meaning by an inalterable affiliation of morphemes
occurring in praesentia as a meaningful statement.(34) In names like
"Musidorus" ("gift of the Muses") and "Pyrocles"
("fire and glory"), Sidney coins charactonymic syntagmas which have
as the basis of their intelligibility a necessary order of succession among a
certain number of elements. And because, theoretically, the charactonymic
syntagma, like character and narrative, may be linearly extended indefinitely,
it is the instrument by means of which Sidney, like Socrates at the end of the
Cratylus, anticipates certain essential problems of poststructuralism. These
problems in turn may help us understand why Sidney left the revised Arcadia
unfinished.
The limitations of the dialectic as
a model of the Arcadias' structure can be readily pointed out. The
"Musidorus-Dorus" formation, reciprocally excluding and implicating
the worlds of hero and lover, seems straightforwardly dialectical, a formation
sustained and contained in binary opposition. But the figure is rather more
complex than that, for Musidorus also appears in various other
avatars--"Palladius" and "The Forsaken Knight"--for
instance, that suggest other dimensions of character. Similarly,
"Timopyrus" and "Diaphantus" figure in Pyrocles' repertoire
of identities. Indeed, the "Pyrocles-Zelmane" differential in the new
Arcadia is significantly obviated by the existence of a "real"
Zelmane, daughter of Plexirtus, who, disguised as the page boy
"Diaphantus," dies for the love of Pyrocles. As a tribute to her
sacrifice Pyrocles, having fallen in love with Philoclea and courting her in drag,
takes the name of "Zelmane"--that is, a "real" name for an
assumed identity. To complicate the structure further, Pyrocles as
"Zelmane" later becomes "Diaphantus," an identity assumed
by the "real" Zelmane in her pursuit of Pyrocles.(35)
As in the
"Pyrocles-Zelmane" construction, so in the
"Musidorus-Dorus" and "Pyrocles-Cleophila" formations the
characterologic syntagma has its origins in the experience of love, one of
whose directives is, as Freud pointed out, the emotional, psychological, and in
sexual love the physical imperative of joining oneself to one's beloved.(36)
Consider, for example, the scene from the Captivity Episode of the new Arcadia
(Book 3) in which Philoclea is forced to witness the execution, she believes,
of her sister Pamela. The intense horror of the experience causes Philoclea to
realize that sisterhood has welded of the princesses a composite being we might
name "Philoclea-Pamela." "Dear Pamela," Philoclea cries,
how hast thou left me to all
wretchedness and misery? Yet while thou livedst, in thee I breathed--of thee I
hoped. O Pamela, how much did I for thy excellency honour thee more than my
mother, and love thee more than myself! Never more shall I lie with thee. Never
more shall we bathe in the pleasant river together. Never more shall I see thee
in thy shepherd apparel. But art thou gone-and where am I? Pamela is dead! and
live I?
(NA 3.426.32-427.1)
Here, Philoclea's grief is
concentrated upon the destruction not of the individual Pamela but of the
composite sign wrought by the bond of sisterhood. Value and identity result,
her comments indicate, only from an articulation of the two women, and a
composite, transcendent identity ("Philoclea-Pamela") alone is valid
and operative. Recognizing shared identity, that her own life depends upon the
life of her sister, Philoclea yearns to reestablish the syntagma of sisterhood
in the place of the dead. Her guards prevent her suicide, however, and she is
consigned, so she thinks, to inert existence as a broken statement.
Of course no such fate awaits Philoclea,
but in her pledge to take her own life she effectively enunciates a theory of
structure most evident when the characterologic syntagma is threatened with
destruction. For this reason Sidney's allusion to the legend of the nightingale
at the end of this scene--"And so, like lamentable Philomela, complained
she the horrible wrong done to her sister" (3.427.14-15)--is particularly
interesting. Not only is the legend of the maiden who witnesses the apparent
murder of her sister thematically apropos, her name designates the syntagma of
identity Philoclea fixes upon in the depths of her grief: "Philoclea"
+ "Pamela" = "Philomela."(37) It is unlikely that this is
an accidental occurrence. Indeed, in The Countess of Montgomeries Urania and
Pamphilias to Amphilanthus, Lady Mary Wroth appears to exploit the same
charactonymic formula herself: her "Pamphilia" is another amalgam of
"Pamela" and "Philoclea."(38)
The psychology of love, this mock
execution suggests, operates precisely according to a model of Saussurian
semiotics, always locating value in routes between signifiers rather than in
signifiers themselves. In Book 3 of the Old Arcadia, Pamela anticipates
charactonymically the coupling of lovers actualized in their lovemaking and the
eventual birth of children to them. Fleeing trouble, Musidorus places Pamela on
a white horse and the two lovers set out through "the wildest part of the
desert" toward the sea and the promise of freedom, toward a place where
they can escape the political and moral complexities of their forbidden love.
En route to the coast they rest in a grove of tall pines whose "broad
heads" meet to form "so perfect an order that every way the eye being
full, yet no way was stopped" (OA 3.197.35-198.2). Against this heightened
setting, Musidorus arranges "fruits and other cates" over a
"fair carpet of the green grass." Meanwhile, Pamela strolls under the
canopy of trees shading the lawn. What was an idealized scene to begin with now
becomes fantastic as Pamela's imagination objectifies her desire to couple with
the prince she loves. In the barks of the pines she makes "pretty knots
which tied together the names of Musidorus and Pamela." The result is a
patent syntagma composed of lover and beloved: "sometimes intermixedly,"
she changes them to "Pamedorus" and "Musimela" (198.6-9).
As products of a sophisticated
understanding of character, the children of the royal marriages, named at the
end of the old Arcadia, represent perhaps the highest expression of
characterologic multivalence in Sidney's fiction. The problem is that, because
new births demand new stories, they indefinitely (and in theory infinitely)
defer closure of the work. This is a fact that McCanles, whose dialectical
model implies global containment, does not consider in his discussion of plot
resolution in the old Arcadia.(39) For though the oracle is indeed fulfilled in
the awakening of Basilius and the exoneration of the princes, there is only the
overwhelming appearance of resolution at the end of Book 5. Fatigued by his
labors, so he claims, Sidney quits the old Arcadia anticipating the future,
considering what yet of life in Arcadia remains to be written. There are, first
of all, the weddings of Pyrocles/Philoclea and Musidorus/Pamela, with
accompanying entertainments "full of many comical adventures," to
describe. But there are also important new stories to tell: of Artaxia and
Erona, Plangus and Amasis, Menalcas, and "poor Philisides in the pursuit
of his affections." Such matters, the narrator hopes, will "awake
some other spirit to exercise his pen in that wherewith mine is already
dulled" (5.417.13-25).
Sidney realized that the imperative
to continue extending the book was inescapable. Yet he chose not to confront
this demand, in effect infinitely deferring the problem of infinite deferral.
Perhaps as early as 1582, he began the Arcadia again and worked through toward
a resolution which, had he gotten there, would have been no resolution at all,
but only another beginning. There are surely many reasons why Sidney chose to revise
his work rather than to undertake a sequel to it. Perhaps one of them was the
weariness and distress he must have experienced faced with the enormous task of
expanding the Arcadia to represent generation after generation of
yet-unconceived royal children. He nevertheless tentatively responded to the
imperative to develop his narrative beyond its superficially neat conclusion,
to open the Arcadia up to the future. Before closing the work Sidney named the
new generation of royal lovers: the son of Pyrocles and Philoclea shall be
called "Pyrophilus"; the daughter of Musidorus and Pamela,
"Melidora."(40)
As charactonyms,
"Cleophila," "Philomela," "Pamedorus" and
"Musimela," "Pyrophilus" and "Melidora," like the
multiple identities assumed by the princes and the compositeness of Sidney's
Arcadian texts, betray a distinctly structuralist-and ultimately
poststructuralist--conception of both characterology and narratology. To
overlook Sidney's handling of the charactonymic syntagma is to obscure an
important device whereby he achieved in the revised narrative a copiousness
which, like the ideal syntagma, would ideally extend to infinity. Perhaps this
is why Sidney quit the exquisitely polysemous new Arcadia, more than twice the
length of the complete original, in mid-sentence mid-way through Book 3. He may
have sensed again, half-way through the revised version, what he confessed of
his own "young head," in a telling metaphor of pregnancy, to his
sister in the dedicatory letter of the 1590 Arcadia: "Having many many
fancies begotten in it, if it had not been in some way delivered, |it~ would
have grown a monster" (OA "Dedication," 3.18-20). Sidney may
have realized that his conception of mimesis ultimately admitted no closure,
that character and fictive worlds might--indeed must--be articulated
indefinitely beyond the term of the writer's life, story unfolding upon
unfolded story without end, monstrously. Perhaps like Anaxius, "having
never done so much before in his life" (the last words of the revised
Arcadia), Sidney realized that because signs are endlessly iterable and
compoundable, it was quite useless to continue. As with the old Arcadia, he may
finally have seen no possibility of concluding the new one, and so abandoned
the project at the moment of recognition, crushed by the weight of the endless
unwritten future.
NOTES
1 Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of
Poetry, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones
and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 59-121,103.23-24;
citations to the text of the Defence will be indicated parenthetically by page
and line.
2 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in
General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris, ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye,
and Albert Riedlinger, 3rd edn. (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986), p. 105.
3 S.K. Heninger, Jr., Sidney and
Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press,
1988), pp. 114-16. See also Alfons Nehring, "Plato and the Theory of
Language," Traditio 3 (1945): 13-48, esp. 13-30. Citations to the
Cratylus, trans. Harold North Fowler, Loeb Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1926), will be indicated parenthetically by page and section.
4 Anticipating the negative
valuation resulting from the operation of difference, Saussure acknowledges
that "delimiting" it is such a tricky problem that one is led to ask
whether |difference is~ there.
A language thus has this curious and
striking feature. It has no immediately perceptible entities. And yet one
cannot doubt that they exist, or that the interplay of these units is what
constitutes linguistic structure. (p. 105)
5 Jacques Derrida, "La
Differance," in Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl's Theory
of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press,
1973), pp. 129-60.
6 Saussure, p. 89.
7 Heninger, p. 115.
8 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in
Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1982), p. 6. Ross G. Arthur delineates a bifurcated tradition of
rightness by nature and by convention (ad placitum) descending into the Middle Ages
from Aristotle's Peri Hermeneias. This tradition, he argues, effectively
licensed poets to create signs that demanded of their audiences the ability and
will to discover multiple meanings in things (Medieval Sign Theory and
"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" |Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press,
1987~, esp. pp. 19-81). Lawrence Manley explores in detail the problematic
relations between conceptions of the natural and the conventional in
Elizabethan discourse in Convention: 1500-1750 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1980), pp. 67-134.
9 John Sallis, in Being and Logos:
The Way of Platonic Dialogue, 2nd edn. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press International, 1986), pp. 183-311, provides an important reading of the
Cratylus as a radically "problematic" text that, because of its
self-reflexive nature, its being "a logos about logos,"
"persistently tends towards assuming the character of a comedy" (pp.
184-85).
10 Saussure, pp. 71-72.
11 Saussure, esp. chap. 4,
"Linguistic Value," pp. 111-20.
12 Saussure, pp. 114-15.
13 Paul Friedlander, Plato 2: The
Dialogues, First Period, trans. Hans Meyerhoff, Bollingen Series 59, 3 vols.
(New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1964), 2: 212-15; and Sallis, pp. 305-11.
14 Aristotle, Metaphysics IV 5 1010a
12, noted by Friedlander p. 214.
15 The merits of Hermogenes'
argument were obscured even in ancient times when the dialogue acquired its
title. A virtual suppression of that position was effected when Christianity in
its appropriation of the Cratylus approved an affinity between the pagan
argument for physis or natural likeness and important biblical conceptions of
language--the account of Adam naming the creatures of Paradise as well as the
Greco-Hebraic conception of God as Logos. Here is Richard Mulcaster of the
Merchant Taylors' School, arguably the most influential headmaster of the
Elizabethan period, attempting to limit the intertextuality of classical and
Christian documents on the matter of rightness:
We nede not to prove by Platoes
Cratylus, or Aristotles proposition as best authorities, (tho men be sufficient
to prove their own inventions) that words be voluntarie, and appointed upon
cause, seing we have better warrant. For even God himself, who brought the
creatures, which he had made, unto the first man, whom he had also made, that
he might name them, according to their properties, doth plainlie declare by his
so doing, what a cunning thing it is to give right names, and how necessarie it
is, to know their forces, which be allreadie given, bycause the word being
knowen, which implyeth the propertie of the thing is half known, whose
propertie is employed.
(The First Part of the Elementarie
|1582; rprt., Menston, England: Scholar Press, 1970~, pp. 168-69)
Conspicuously, there is no mention here of the argument for convention, the
side of the Cratylean debate attributed to Hermogenes. Mulcaster registers the
impact only of Cratylus who had insisted that "he who knows the names
knows also the things named." The nature of something, in Mulcaster's more
modest claim, is at least "half known" by its name. By a kind of word
magic, the right name gives access to an otherwise inaccessible (because
immaterial) signified--what Mulcaster calls "the propertie of the
thing." Adam's naming of the creatures in Paradise--by analogy, the poet's
naming of characters in the fictional world--is then an attempt to disclose
rather than create a kind of inherent rightness that stabilizes in language an
actuality stored up prior to expression that could not, except by the
preordained name itself, be made knowable.
16 Sidney and his circle were most
familiar with the Greek and Latin text of Plato by Jean de Serres and Henri
Estienne (Geneva: 1578), a copy of which Estienne sent to Sidney in 1579. See
S.K. Heninger, Jr., "Plato and Serranus' Plato," ELR 13, 2 (Spring
1983): 146-61.
17 For the biographical and thematic
functions of this impresa, see Alan R. Young, "Sir Philip Sidney's
Tournament Impresas," Sidney Newsletter 6, 1 (1985): 6-24, esp. 10-12. For
a more thorough treatment of Sidney's use of such devices see Robert W. Parker,
"The Art of Sidney's Heroic Impressas," ELR 20, 3 (Autumn 1990):
408-30. I have used the text of The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The Old
Arcadia) (OA) edited by Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) and the
1590 Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The New Arcadia) (NA) edited by Victor
Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); hereafter cited parenthetically
with book, page, and line references. The conflated 1593 text, the only version
of the Arcadia read for nearly four hundred years, is edited by Maurice Evans
(London: Penguin, 1977).
18 For the Renaissance interest in
name-play, see F.B. Williams, "Renaissance Names in Masquerade," PMLA
69, 1 (March 1954): 314-23; Frank L. Borchardt, "Etymology in Tradition
and in the Northern Renaissance," JHI 29, 3 (July-September 1968): 415-29;
and K.K. Ruthven, "The Poet as Etymologist," CritQ 11, 1 (Spring
1969): 9-37. See also Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method
in Theology (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1977), esp. pp. 130 ff.
19 It is by means of such
articifiality that mimesis presents to us a golden world when nature can yield
only a brazen one, as Sidney insists early in the Defence (78.34).
20 Similarly, Saussure presented the
fundamental concepts of signifier and signified as dialectical reciprocals,
each defining that which it is not, but together constituting the complete
sign. See Saussure, pp. 66-68, 112-16.
21 A similar reciprocation of
abstract and concrete underlies Sidney's important but problematic claim in the
Defence (79.6-10) that "any understanding knoweth the skill of each
artificer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the
work itself." For immediately, as it were in the same breath, he qualifies
this privileging of synchronics over diachronics with a statement so worded as
to weaken the anteriority of the fore-conceit, at least as far as mimesis is
concerned: "And that the poet hath that idea is manifest, by delivering
them forth in such excellency as he had imagined them." If ideas were not
manifested as images, they would have no effective existence--no role--in the
system of mimetic representation.
22 On the importance of translatio
to Sidney's conception of mimesis, see S.K. Heninger, Jr., "Metaphor and
Sidney's Defence of Poesie," JDJ 1, 1-2 (1982): 117-49.
23 See Michael McCanles, The Text of
Sidney's Arcadian World (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1989), esp. Part Two:
"The Dialectics of Plot and Genre," pp. 111 ff. Robert Stillman, in
Sidney's Poetic Justice: The Old Arcadia, Its Eclogues, and Renaissance
Pastoral Traditions (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1986), demonstrates
the great complexity of Sidney's pastoralism and suggests, concomitantly, the
fluidity of structural boundaries in OA. There is an even greater dispersion of
poems in the narrative of NA than in OA, many of the verses pilfered from the
OA Eclogues. There is no way to tell from the NA MSS, whether Sidney intended
even to include eclogues in the revised work.
24 We should note, however, that the
education of Pyrocles and Musidorus, devoted to "the making up of princely
minds," includes training in song, storytelling, and debate. Cf. NA
2.163.11-164.27.
25 The range of generic claims for
the Arcadias emerges from A.C. Hamilton's survey of its sources in
"Sidney's Arcadia as Prose Fiction: Its Relation to Its Sources," ELR
2, 1 (Winter 1972): 29-60.
26 See McCanles, p. 188, n. 32.
27 Nancy Lindheim, The Structures of
Sidney's Arcadia (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 167.
28 "The distinction of names
between helots and Lacedaemonians |shall be~ quite taken away," Pyrocles
decrees, "and all indifferently to enjoy both names and privileges of
Laconians" (NA 1.41.17-19).
29 Cf. Defence, pp. 78.35-79.4,
where Sidney presents the figure of Aeneas as a composition of discrete values
("so excellent a man in every way") found in lesser heroic figures,
Theagenes (love), Pylades (friendship), Orlando (valor), and Cyrus (right
rule). Aeneas is the ideal friend, lover, knight, and prince. Note the similar
characterologic compositeness of Spenser's description of Arthur as the
subsumption of twelve discrete virtues in the "Letter of the Authors"
attached to The Faerie Queene.
30 J. de Oliveira e Silva,
"Recurrent Onomastic Textures in the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor and the
Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney," SP 79, 1 (Winter 1982): 30-40, 38, notes
this inversion.
31 Interestingly, retransgressing
sexual boundaries seems more difficult than transgressing them. The depth of
gender ambivalence in the Pyrocles/Cleophila (Zelmane) figure, for example, is
registered in the narrator's habit of referring to the prince with feminine
pronouns even in commentary to the reader who knows that Cleophila (Zelmane) is
really Pyrocles, that "she" is really "he." On this
"anomaly" see McCanles, pp. 156-58, who terms Pyrocles "a kind
of hermaphroditic oxymoron."
32 See McCanles, pp. 143-61.
33 Note McCanles's comment that
"Ramism gives us today a curious prefiguration of modern structuralism, to
the degree at any rate that both feature ... recuperations as a preface to the
discovery of meaning" (p. 190, n. 6).
34 Saussure, pp. 121-25. My use in
this essay of the terms value and identity may suggest to readers a positivism
inimical to structuralism. But by value and identity I mean only to indicate
that in order for differences to become apparent, oppositions must be
established among concrete units. Saussure acknowledged that "although
signification and the signal are each, in isolation, purely differential and
negative, their combination is a fact of a positive nature" (pp. 118-19),
and also that "in semiological systems, such as languages, where elements
keep one another in a state of equilibrium in accordance with fixed rules, the
notions of identity and the value merge" (p. 109).
35 Graduated identities generated
syntagmatically are also apparent in Pyrocles' appearance as the
"Ill-apparelled Knight" (NA 1.102.22-104.16), the "Ill-appointed
Knight" (1.102.15), and the "Ill-arrayed Knight" (1.98.var.), syntagmas
varying only in medial elements, "-apparrelled,"
"appointed," and "-arrayed."
36. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and
its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961),
p. 13.
37. Discussing
38 In the "Elegie for
Astrophil" Spenser appropriates the same onomastic formula to link
Astrophil and Sidney, exploiting the etymological axis of "Philomell"
and "Philip" to create a new composition signifying
39 McCanles, pp. 161-76.
40 The pattern of charactonymic
syntagmas built upon the "gift"-stem ("Dora/-us") is
extended retrogressively in the name of Dorilaus, Musidorus's father:
Dorilaus m. (unnamed sister of
Euarchus) Musidorus m. Pamela (Pamedorus) |male~ Melidora |female~
Marvin Hunt is an Assistant
Professor of English at Campbell University.