Oct 03 2001
Jack Donne, Trickster
essay by Brian Charles Clark
A naïve reader, I, reading now what was written in the 16th century, prove by way of demonstration that to study poetry and to make critiques is to live dangerously. When I first passed through John Donne’s “Communitie,” I stumbled into Donne’s trap of logic, his Ramist rhetoric of knots tied over from Medieval philosophy with a knife-twisting joie de vivre that is the Renaissance.
Peter “ram it down yr throat” Ramus, late of Paris and the Sorbonne circa 1490, who stood his in defense of his Master’s thesis for a legendary number of hours, set loose a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a wolf whose taste in clothing set a trend. Like the Medieval schoolmen, and as was still the standard for scholarly work in western Europe as late as the beginning of the 17th century, Ramus wrote and argued in Latin, and he employed the classical terminology of rhetoric, using an argument of parts, the syllogismus, the enthymema, inductio, and exemplum. Of these parts, the enthymema, or enthymeme as it is called in modern English, will tell us a few things about the twist Peter Ramus put on the art—and accessibility—of argument, a twist that transferred to England like a virus spread through intimate contact. By understanding the psychological function of what we call in theory the enthymeme, we may be able to shed some light on a few of Donne’s poems.
What my initial gloss of “Communitie” was is too obvious to mention, except for the fact that it was blithely ignorant of the shared knowledge of linguistic codes—what we “ways of speaking,” as in street, straight, or academic ways of speaking–that shaped the minds of Donne, and his milieu. An obvious, but often overlooked, component and functionality of codes is that they depend on shared knowledge. This is where a theory of the enthymeme comes in handy: it provides an elevator, through the long study of rhetoric, onto a pleateau that has a vista over the psychology of shared knowledge. Once I read of “Communitie” that it operated on a “false logic,” women are communal property, I got Donne’s satiric scold, I caught the slash of the trickster’s whip on the back brain.
Satire functions in part by means of enthymeme: the deliberate (as either a shared knowledge assumption or by “crafte”) suppresion of one or more premises of an argument. The enthymeme is the bit you need to know to get the story, to get the picture—and that’s quite a lot of bits, actually. In “Communitie” the enthymemic bit is an analog of Swifte’s: you wouldn’t really eat children, would you? You wouldn’t really treat women as sexualized communal property—would you? The logic of the poem toys with the ambiguities of that answer, answers “visible as greene”,” for “they were good it would be seene”. What’s seen as good is the ticklish question: there’s enthymemic foreplay going on here. Donne achieves deep interpenetration in some of his other poems.
In several, Donne uses enthymemic implication to create halls of mirrors among logical and cultural premises that reflect their ambiguity in a way that expects the listener or reader to respond in kind. The skeptical self reflection of the ambiguities of culture and self are processed enthymemicaly as shared knowledge, especially as deeply held assumptions about love, sex, and death. This self reflection is given its phemenological depiction “when I saw thou sawest my heart” in “The Dreame” (15). The energy of Renaissance skepticism, its psychological tidal flux and flow, is like the “Moone” with power to “draw… up seas to drown” us “in thy spheare…” in “A Valediction of weeping” (19-20). Already an archaism, Donne is deploying the hermetic absurdity of the theory of the “spheares” to stand duty for emotional intensity: “Since thou and I sigh one anothers breath,” then “Who e’r sighes most, is cruellest, and hastes the others death” (…Weeping, 26-7). Dire pillow talk indeed: the statement has the intimacy of a kiss of death that Donne rams home: “Kill, and dissect me, Love; for… / Rack’t carcasses make ill Anatomies” (41-2).
The enthymeme is Donne’s concentricity, as it is Dickinson’s circumference. In “Loves exchange” he writes “Love, let me not know that this/ Is love” (17-8): in the command is the wishful thinking of one who knows that any attempt at definition polltues that which angels cannot even see. To name the unamable, to expresess the inarticulable, is to expose the workings of faith: “Let me know not that others know / That she knowes my paines, lest that so / A tender shame make me mine owne new woe” (19-21). To name the natures of love, the names of the lovers, was to “aske” for “dispensation”, “to draw / A non obstante on natures law” (8, 10-11), but of course every lover is “Loves minion” (14) and so the work of the enthymeme is exposed, its seductiveness revealing itself as something that can be “elemented” (Loves growth, 13).
Shared knowledge, like who to love and how, is “mixt of all stuffes, paining soule” (9). Donne tosses his rhetorical rocks, spreads his mutant Ramist inspired love of the satiric twist, of strong lines full of imperitive constantives, that “are all concentrique unto thee” (24). The skeptical Renaissance virus, transferred in part by Donne’s Songs and Sonets, is in the “awakened root” which cannot resist “the Spring” and “the Sunne” (20, 16, 18) of the “new science” and its new questions, whichever way they “do bud out now” (20).
