Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes
2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.53.3.e-10
ISSN1528-4212
Autores ResumoThe extent to which individual words can both reflect and effect change is the subject of Roland Greene's Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Moving effortlessly between linguistic and literary traditions in Western Europe and the Americas from the early sixteenth to late seventeenth centuries, Greene presents an account of cultural change refracted through five words: invention, language, resistance, blood, and world. Greene's work is not literary criticism in the traditional sense; his method of “critical semantics” is instead a form of literary criticism with “words, rather than authors or works, as the primary objects of investigation” (12). The result is a unique, compelling, and often dazzling approach to literature and culture of the early modern period.Invention, the subject of Greene's first chapter, “is perhaps the signal concept of early modernity” (18). During the early modern period, the meanings of the term invention—as well as its linguistic counterparts in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese—move away from the concept of discovery and toward the concept of creation. That is to say, the nature of invention shifts subtly from existing matter to novel conceptions. Crucially, however, the term operates as a semantic palimpsest, in which each iteration of the term necessarily conjures other, perhaps contrasting meanings. This palimpsest is a mutable surface upon which Renaissance thinkers reflect on the relationship between themselves and their world in terms of knowledge both received and newly conceived. Brief but pithy readings of Rabelais, Roger Ascham, Jerónimo Osório, and Anne Lock illuminate and reshuffle the senses of invention between discovery and creation. Greene thus reads Sidney's “Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show” as a process by which the author finds invention through experience, not matter, thereby accomplishing “in little what is happening semantically to invention throughout this era” (35). The chapter illustrates the manner in which one word, across several different linguistic contexts, can accrue meanings that shape early modern understanding of what is new.The second chapter is titled Language, although Greene in effect tells the story of both language and tongue, with special attention to the tension between two words at times—but not always—taken as interchangeable. Greene describes these terms as “semantic pendents,” evoking the sense that the words can exchange places and meanings within a text (indeed, at times, within a single sentence). In some cases, these terms uphold distinct definitions—tongue is natural, native; language is abstract, learned—but increasingly, the terms productively interact, providing “distance and perspective on each other” (53). Shakespeare's Tempest, for example, is a play of languages, not tongues—Caliban is taught Prospero's language and profits by the ability to curse; Ferdinand hears Miranda speak his language and it reminds him of his estrangement from home. This ability for speech to connote both wide horizons of native origin and individual isolation and estrangement reflects two crucial impulses within the play and the century in which it appears: “a longing to turn (or return) a language to a tongue,” and “a humanist's urge to step away from his usual circumstances and hear his own tongue as a language” (61). This semantic pendency is further illustrated in his discussion of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's 1609 Comentarios reales de los Incas, in which the chronicler makes one subject of his study—Quechua, the “General Tongue of the Indians of Peru” (65)—by turns familiar and foreign over the course of a brief passage.The image of the semantic “cartoon” (or cartone) governs Chapter 3, Resistance. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we learn, a rough sketch of a term gains color, shade, context, and nuance. The earliest iterations of the term, which tend to articulate a material conflict or tension between two physical forces, take on metaphorical meanings until we see the more modern sense of resistance as a complex phenomenon of philosophical and moral value. The consequences of this increasingly vibrant cartoon are significant, especially for considerations of political power in relation to dissent. Greene's extensive reading of Philip Sidney's two versions of the Arcadia argues that resistance emerges as a naturalized, domesticated concept “generated as much by the abrasions of individual action as by tyranny” (95). Returning to the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Greene demonstrates the inherency of resistance to narratives of colonial conquest, such that “resistance becomes an ideal that must be either anticipated or attempted for conquest to declare itself in full” (101).While the first three chapters, generally, trace their words' semantic movement away from the material and toward a more abstract definition, the chapter on blood surprises in its compelling and consequential reversal of this trajectory. What distinguishes blood from the other terms is its motion toward literal manifestations, such that the blood of heroism, honor, or passion gives way to blood as “a liquid that has a reality apart from the allegories of religion, history, and medicine” (109). Greene is quick to note that the contexts of race, class, religion, and medical theory that dominate blood's place in the common imagination in the early modern period are no less allegorical than those of nobility or honor a hundred years prior. The model of a “conceptual envelope” introduced in this chapter instead implies that the apprehension of blood shifts from one set of imagined constructs to another; for Greene, the latter allegories “seem less abstract, they accord with the new science, and they make sense to societies that find their centers in emerging populations and standpoints below the aristocracy” (110). This intrusion of blood's material reality into the traditional theories of blood's place in the social order emerges vividly, for example, in The Merchant of Venice, a play that ultimately reinforces the notion that blood is nothing more than an individual, indivisible form of material property. Greene's reading of several spectacular instances of bloodshed in Don Quijote concludes that Cervantes renders blood “a substance whose ideality is pure illusion” (141). Within the book's main argument, this chapter illustrates beautifully that the evolution of cultural meaning within and through language is not always intellectual “progress” from the material world to abstract thought. In the case of blood, it is precisely the material reality of blood that irrevocably frayed the conceptual envelope through which blood was understood.The final chapter imagines the term world as a “semantic engine,” that is, a term capable of “generat[ing] effects not only in its near set of corresponding terms but across a cultural terrain” (158). The connections to other terms or horizons, and the focus on movement between them, are reflected in some of the core questions surrounding world during the period: does the term indicate a totality or plurality? If multiple worlds can exist, how are they made? What is the relationship between the individual self and the world or worlds occupying the Renaissance imagination? Milton's Paradise Lost and Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World help to illustrate a moment in which the concept of world promises multiplicity, constructedness, and invention instead of wholeness or discovery.As Greene acknowledges, the object under scrutiny in Five Words is not literature; the names of Shakespeare and Cervantes in the book's subtitle (and the relative frequency with which they appear as examples in the book) are not meant to suggest their works are at issue here. Greene's critical semantics is an invitation for literary criticism to “abandon some of its insular conventions in exchange for a less certain office on a larger intellectual stage” (176). Each chapter of Five Words is engaging and useful in its own right, and certainly research in any one of these five areas would be enriched by Greene's extensive work on that subject. The book's greatest achievement, however, is in demonstrating how these five words together animate the worlds of Renaissance thought and culture.
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