Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688–1730

Abstract

Although Wolfram Schmidgen’s rich, rewarding new study would rather patiently unpick the logic of an eighteenth-century text than intervene in a present-day critical controversy, the book does set itself against an antagonist: secularization. Schmidgen calls into question the stories about religion’s decline that underpinned influential accounts of the early English novel for fifty years, from Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel (1957) to Michael McKeon’s Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (1991) and Catherine Gallagher’s “Rise of Fictionality” (2006), works that describe the emergence of literary modernity in terms of realism, epistemology, and probability. In Schmidgen’s view, these landmark histories agree that disbelief became fundamental in the eighteenth century and that the literary imagination consequently turned mimetic, committing to “the perceived detail” and its “probable representation” (17). Sarah Tindal Kareem’s Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder (2014) and Jesse Molesworth’s Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2010) have complicated the picture considerably, and Schmidgen joins their effort by seeking alternatives to disenchantment in a theological tradition he calls voluntarism.Voluntarism reaches back at least as far as medieval thought. Its emphasis falls on the utter sovereignty of the divine will (voluntas). Order doesn’t inhere in the world. Order comes only from God, who ongoingly shapes unruly nature from the outside and who could conceivably alter its structure on a whim. Creation, far from a perfect book, turns out to be (as in Sheila Heti’s recent novel, Pure Colour) a messy draft: arbitrary and obviously, awkwardly flawed, a rough-and-ready sketch. Through a voluntarist lens, physical reality looks “less certain and true, more constructed, and more subject to construction” (27). God may come across as a bit of a blunderer, but at least God comes across. Divine creativity proves indispensable. That’s why late seventeenth-century Anglicans seized on this quirky tradition to counter what they saw as the atheist tendency to dispense with the deity altogether and treat material necessity, inexorable natural law, as the real force driving earthly life. If atheism was their enemy, it was atheism defined as necessitarianism, the notion that the world is as it must be. For Christian apologists who interpreted disbelief in this way, affirming the world’s contingency or plasticity came to serve as a means of defending belief. Creation might well be different, thanks be to God. The imagination, therefore, doesn’t have to turn mimetic. It may freely go utopian or counterfactual instead, envisioning horses with four eyes or six legs. Later literary writers keeping faith with voluntarism could decompose existing hierarchies or categories and spin out improbable alternate realities. And a modern scholar attuned to their religiously motivated efforts might be able to loosen secularization’s explanatory hold on the eighteenth century.Two early chapters in Infinite Variety set a vibrant intellectual scene, offering particularly valuable commentary on Boyle Lectures delivered around the turn of the eighteenth century by Richard Bentley and Samuel Clarke (he of the four-eyed horses). The literary payoff becomes clearer in the third chapter, on Richard Blackmore, whose 1712 philosophical poem Creation is interpreted as celebrating the idea that because nature could be otherwise, artists have sanction to “create works that exceed, improve, or contradict the natural” (73). Schmidgen bends intellectual history into literary criticism by reconstructing what he calls a “logic of invention” (11), though that phrase may make the result sound too static. He’s interested in what writers think they’re doing as they write, and he’s at his best when demonstrating how his capricious voluntarists give themselves license to drift, refusing to be subservient to anything resembling a tightly coherent design or, rather, refusing to allow any abstract ideal of coherence to limit the freedom of their authorial will. They, too, allow changes to happen on a whim. In Blackmore’s similes, vehicles spring loose from their tenors and never quite return. In John Locke’s replies to Edward Stillingfleet (examined in what may be my favorite chapter), “letters metamorphose into books and small books swell into large volumes”; mental matter “uncontrollably creates its own unshapely forms” (120). Jonathan Swift, suspicious of depth, sees constructive or even utopian potential in the surfaces and ordinary circumstances on which he stumbles. Daniel Defoe finds his way in Robinson Crusoe by having “no plan” (208). Like the protagonist’s multiform tools, each serving more than one purpose and needing more than one name, the disparate parts of the castaway’s narrative “do not add up to any one thing” (208)—and certainly not, Schmidgen persuasively argues, to a thing consolidating itself as realism. Various kinds of writing mix and multiply in these chapters, largely because the personalities in view keep shifting their ground, aware of their slips but increasingly pleased with the thought that imagining the world differently might somehow make it different. The authors in Infinite Variety appear most winningly godlike when they seem most humanly flawed and when they can’t help imprinting their flaws on creations that are all too malleable.Schmidgen, to his credit, focuses on reconstructing and contextualizing their perspective and mostly avoids criticizing it. Still, it seems in keeping with the spirit of his book to ask about the limits of the freedom claimed by his writers. Literary or linguistic form is one potentially limiting factor. Blackmore sounds almost Blakean in theory, revering energy as an idol and wanting to shatter the binding chains of structure, perhaps yearning to escape from form altogether, yet in practice he remains quite content to work in heroic couplets that hardly break new technical ground. One could wonder whether G. W. Leibniz (who, in a brief appearance here, looks different from the Leibniz featured in Gallagher’s 2018 book Telling It Like It Wasn’t) was right to object that the imagination’s grooves can’t accommodate the fully irregular. Fallenness is another such factor that goes unaccentuated by the voluntarists, who emphasize human finitude without quite insisting on frailty or depravity of the sort that would constrain the fallen will’s liberty to act. Their theological sensibility touches on a further question invited by the book: how peculiarly Anglican a project is literary voluntarism? Defoe stands as an outlier, but almost all the key figures are Church of England men. And although Schmidgen introduces voluntarism as a counterattack against atheist necessity, it appears at least equally well calibrated to oppose the argument from design that was circulating in the same era, and in the same Anglican circles, under the banner of physico-theology, which held (in blunt terms) that there is order in nature because God put it there. Perhaps, then, the voluntarists don’t have to be defined by their antagonistic relation to unbelief. They could be believers whose primary disagreement is with other believers, with competing apologists.The pertinent split may cut through a single religious tradition. If so, the voluntarists might not neatly fit within the traditional framework of secularization, the decline-of-belief thesis, that Schmidgen accepts even as he justifiably doubts the traditional conclusions. Maybe his subjects belong more readily to what Charles Taylor (2007: 299) calls the nova effect, in which religious belief, though it becomes fragmented in modernity, doesn’t uniformly wane as a result but sometimes oddly proliferates. Other revisionist scholars, as Peter Coviello (2019) points out in a helpful recent summary, have stressed that in a globalizing context secularism doesn’t really seek to vanquish religion. It aims to sort good religion from bad religion or to determine which varieties of belief get to count as religion at all, a process with profound implications for racialization. That isn’t the story Schmidgen is telling, and in any case his fascinating book’s implications far outstrip its antisecularist framing. Infinite Variety should inspire further work, especially, on theology and speciation and on the thought experiment as a literary mode. Yet for some readers the new secularity studies can place this book’s authors in an intriguingly different light. Locke, Swift, Defoe, and company may not be standing against the tide of modern unbelief. These globally minded drifters could themselves be secularizers, only not in the way that twentieth-century studies of the rise of the novel imagined. Perhaps, to borrow language from Coviello (2019: 45), it’s only by becoming “secular moderns,” sorting good religion from bad and finding all the transcendent difference they need in the strange world around them, that the voluntarists “become gods.”