Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment Vitality from Spenser to Milton by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment Vitality from Spenser to Milton by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr Susan J. Wiseman (bio) keywords sleep, Aristotelianism Descartes, soul, vitalism, Spenser, Milton, romance, Dryden Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment Vitality from Spenser to Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ix + 206 pages. $79.00. This study investigates the place of the Aristotelian soul in key literary texts from the 1590s to the 1670s. In exploring texts from Spenser to Dryden, Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment turns on the question of the survival and change of the Aristotelian human after Descartes’s reconceptualization of the soul. Thus, the central argument traces the Aristotelian tripartite soul beyond a Cartesian denial, into a world where, Sullivan argues, Cartesian thinking may not have triumphed conceptually but nevertheless intervened in Aristotelian assumptions concerning a blurring of the boundaries among human, animal, and what we consider environment. In tracing the place of the tripartite soul and the challenges to it, Sullivan analyzes sleep and what he refers to as “the romance episode,” a moment in texts when the romance mode is foregrounded. In these contexts and others, he finds vegetative moments in texts. Overall, these examples demonstrate the immersion of his chosen texts in an Aristotelian world. Sullivan investigates the importance of all three aspects of the Aristotelian soul—the vegetative, sensitive, and rational—as, crucially, intercommunicative or, in his terms, connected horizontally as well as vertically—that is, by association, episode and accumulation as well as by hierarchy. He tracks the ability of the human actor to be motivated by all three. While acknowledging the importance of hierarchy in the understanding of the soul and therefore the moralised aspect of human sliding to bestial status, Sullivan also indicates the moments in texts which evoke the blending of human into environment through the dominance of the sensitive or vegetative souls. Sleep, though used in multiple ways in relation to the soul, is consistent in showing the intercommunicative aspects of the Aristotelian soul and, at the same time, in mediating the “romance” and “epic” states of a text or a hero. Thus, the “romance episode” within epic is for Sullivan a key generic location making visible this interplay. There is a focus on the vegetative soul—in Aristotle the foundation of connected life, possessing the kind of vitality shared by plants, creatures, and humans, but little studied within either literary studies or ecological thought, though, as Sullivan notes, some contemporary philosophy uses the concept. [End Page 145] Sullivan’s introduction offers a productive discussion of the conceptual implications of the tripartite Aristotelian soul, which deftly explores the importance of the vegetative soul as the source of all life. He discusses the soul in the formation of vegetative, sensitive, and rational; the soul which was refused so significantly by Descartes. This exploration of the vitality of all living things (and many, indeed, that we would not now consider to be exactly living) sets the scene for the place of both hierarchy in life forms and connectedness among plants, animals, and humans. His study explores the tensions amongst these ways of thinking in The Faerie Queene (1590) and Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry IV (1598) and sets these and Sidney’s Old Arcadia against post- (albeit, broadly speaking, anti-) Cartesian understandings of the vital soul in Paradise Lost (1667) and Dryden’s All For Love (1677). He is also concerned with the “play” of sameness and difference between epic and romance, where the two share the aim of heroic conclusion, but romance defers, postpones and diverts the achievement of renewed heroic hierarchy, substituting a continuous wandering. Sullivan identifies both the body and the environment as enacting the competition between the heroic achievement of hierarchy and the romance contiguity, and particularly explores attraction between romance episodes and heroic modes. This gives a significant framing to, for example, Sidney writing as author of the Old Arcadia who both fears and identifies with the sleepy irresolution of his figures in romance as opposed to heroic mode. Discussing the place of Verdant in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene, Sullivan teases out the importance of the vegetative soul in locating the...