Izaak Walton

Start Free Trial

‘Study to Be Quiet’: Genre and Politics in Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: Radcliffe, David Hill. “‘Study to Be Quiet’: Genre and Politics in Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler,” in English Literary Renaissance, 22, No. 1 (Winter, 1992): 95-111.

[In the essay below, Radcliffe examines the issues of discourse, inclusion, and community in The Compleat Angler.]

Izaak Walton's famous discourse on angling and devotion exhibits the values of inclusiveness and heterogeneity rather than exclusion and methodical rigor. These are not values generally associated with discursive formations, nor is the “brotherhood of anglers” typical of what recent criticism regards as a discursive community. Walton's discourse can thus serve as a counter-example to accounts of literary and social formations which identify discursive formations with hegemonic structures. While any text can represent current thought about “discourse” only to a limited extent, Stanley Fish's recent discussion, “Being Interdisciplinary Is So Very Hard to Do,” seems exceptional primarily in the rigor with which he pursues the logic of incommensurability and contestation to its most extreme conclusions. One is that disciplinary communities cannot respond to “questions one might put from the outside, questions like (for teaching) ‘why is it that you want your students to learn?’ or (for criminal law) ‘why should we be interested in the issue of responsibility at all?’ or (for history) ‘why would anyone want to know what happened in the past?’ You can't be seriously asking these questions and still be a member of those communities, because to conceive of yourself (a phrase literally intended) as a member is to have forgotten that those are questions you can seriously ask.”1 Since scholars and teachers obviously do ask and provide answers to such questions—if not as often as one might like—the issue turns on definitions of “seriously” and “community.” Both words are being used in a limited and rather special sense, to refer to a set of constitutive principles. One might doubt whether academic disciplines require or even pretend to such categorical grounds of intellectual possibility. But I would like to pursue the matter inductively. What if we consider structures of discourse as a problem in history rather than a problem of logic? If disciplines as we know them are always contingent, wouldn't we do better to employ conceptions of discourse for which difference and historical change are not “unthinkable”?

The best way I know to pursue this inquiry is to treat “discourse” as an evolving kind rather than a meta-historical category. Empirically considered, genres and groups of genres exhibit a bewildering variety of relations: closed or open, hierarchical or subversive, regulative or indeterminate, inclusive or exclusive. Discourses may or may not exhibit categorical assumptions about origins, closure, or first principles—the generic designation applies to both open-ended conversations and to deductively argued treatises—but to define discursive structures a priori is to beg the question of how discourses might originate or change their functions. By considering the genres of “discourse” as historical processes rather than as logical categories we can account for ways in which works might differ from themselves and from the genres of which they are an instance. By thinking of the genre “discourse” as a differential structure—involved in historical and cross-generic relations—we avoid the conclusion that discursive communities, academic or otherwise, require the kinds of “disciplinary” structures Fish paradoxically undermines and upholds.2

The word “compleat” in Walton's title—The Compleat Angler or the Contemplative Man's Recreation—indicates a type of discourse whose constituent principle is comprehensiveness rather than exclusion.3 The title also points to a mixture of arts—or “disciplines” as we now refer to them. Angling cannot be reduced to contemplation, nor contemplation to angling, but Walton sees fit to treat both together. The Compleat Angler is “interdisciplinary” in part because its author wishes to address the same set of issues which provoked Fish's essay. First published in 1653, it appeared at a time when the limits of discourse must have been painfully obvious to anyone engaged in political life: clear and distinct arguments were met with opposing arguments equally clear and distinct; the most scabrous satires (the common recourse where reason fails) were never quite scabrous enough to shame an opponent into submission. Discourses produced factions; factions produced discourses. If the “brotherhood of the angle” is one such faction and The Compleat Angler one such discourse, Walton's fishing manual differs from contemporary satires, sermons, and treatises which handle similar political material. Formally and thematically, it is predicated on values of toleration and inclusiveness rather than a desire for closure and conformity.

The brotherhood is an early instance of a social formation which came to dominate the intellectual landscape of the English Enlightenment: the community of private individuals pursuing social change through reforms of language and manners. Later examples would include the Royal Society, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, the Kit Kat Club, the Scriblerians, and the salon. Such institutions responded to the problem of centralized authority by diffusing power and knowledge among citizens and lesser gentry. Diffusion encouraged tolerance, and tolerance diversity. Both qualities are broadly visible in the genres which celebrated the public role of private life: the conduct book, the essay, the newspaper, the tract, the familiar letter, and polite conversation above all. While not democratic, such communities, like the genres which articulated their differences, were heterogeneous and interpenetrating.

Writers such as Walton understood very well that in order to make over society it would be necessary to make over the kinds of discourse on which community was based. This was a contestatory enterprise, although in the case of the Angler not a violent one. Walton situates his discourse on angling and contemplation amid a whole range of literary forms, appropriating them, opposing them, transforming them. In retrospect, we can see how Walton's response to the interregnum prefigured much of later literature. In founding virtue on manners rather than rank, he renders satire polite and transforms the conduct book into prose fiction. In making natural processes rather than sacred texts the basis of civic and religious education, he was among the first to popularize the georgic mode. In expressing social harmony through lyric song, he brought the hymn down to earth and recognized the significance of ballads and popular song for national life. The Angler's peculiar mixture of politeness, politics, and poetry makes distinctions and recognizes limits, while remaining a very open structure. To comprehend how this discourse on recreation can “seriously” offer itself as a discipline we need to consider its manipulation of genres in historical terms.

This is not possible as long as we think of genres as discrete categories. The question “what genre is it?” is less useful than the question “how does it transform the genres of which it is an instance?” John R. Cooper's fine study of Walton's sources is a good example of the troubles a categorical approach invariably encounters: “With the domain of literature divided neatly by critics and librarians alike between the imaginative and the useful, fiction and non-fiction, the case of The Compleat Angler presents special difficulties” (p. 5). To circumvent these difficulties, he turns to Renaissance genres in which different distinctions are made. Even so, Cooper is unable to find a Renaissance genre against which to judge the merits of Walton's work: “[Pastoral] elements are certainly in The Compleat Angler, but it is equally true that there are long passages in which Piscator discourses on the art of angling, or on social, moral, or religious questions, and which, if these narrative passages of the Angler are its only source of interest, must be considered aesthetic flaws” (p. 3).

Cooper makes astute use of genre in tracing Walton's sources, but the idea that genres should be discrete categories leads him to wonder how georgic, pastoral, and dialogue might be integrated into a “unified whole.” While it contains georgic and pastoral themes, Cooper argues, The Compleat Angler cannot be a member of these categories because it is a prose dialogue. “Is there a design that comprehends both the rhetorical development of georgic instruction and the satirical pastoral drama about society?” (p. 99). Cooper thinks not, and concludes that the work must be considered something of a failure: “[the mixture of genres] is a somewhat mechanical arrangement, however, and we are less conscious of this process in reading the Angler than of the fact that passages of instruction alternate with passages of natural description or of pastoral play” (p. 100). But Walton promises compleatness, not unity. We should not be surprised that The Compleat Angler cannot be reduced to a single genre—it is a very heterogeneous work, containing not only georgic, pastoral, and dialogue, but proverbs, lyrics, recipes, illustrations of fish, and a musical score. If the Angler does not exhibit formal unity or logical coherence, it is because Walton is concerned with other kinds of generic order.

Rather than retooling an obviously inadequate conception of genre, many Anglo-American critics have dismissed genre and pursued other kinds of order in structures of consciousness, gender, ideology, or “discourse.” Anna K. Nardo looks for unity in a reader's response: “how does The Compleat Angler achieve its effects on the reader, and how is its hybrid form part of the unified aesthetic experience of reading?”4 She argues that coherence resides not in the form of the work per se, but in the reader's imagination: “The Compleat Angler is a reenactment (a re-creation) of a play experience (a recreation) and, as such, becomes a recreation for the reader as well as the author. Indeed, Walton carefully leads the reader into the play experience of angling, through the fictional situation” (pp. 303-04). If rural contemplation and pastoral idealization were important in the production of the work, “they do not account for its effects on two centuries of readers who have not faced the troubles of the Interregnum.” Her reader-response approach attempts to account for the work's appeal to “the reader of no-matter-what century” (p. 307). Setting aside the issue of how much the experience of reading resembles the experience of angling, we might ask whether the rules of fictional play can operate without a basis in genre and history. When a “fictional” situation is invoked, rules of genre are implied: the rules of prose fiction. One can certainly read the Angler as a novel, but at the cost of excluding most of the work. This is indeed a “disciplinary reading,” although a historically contingent rather than a logically necessary one. Other readers respond differently; Samuel Johnson used it as a reference work on ichthyology. A more comprehensive literary strategy would be to correlate the variety of generic structures in the work with the variety of historical responses.

The generic heterogeneity of The Compleat Angler has made possible a wide range of such responses. If at first its natural history made it useful as a fishing manual, in later years its descriptions of local customs made the work an antiquarian curiosity, its sentimental piety recommended it to the devout, its prose interested students of belles lettres, and its landscapes attracted illustrators. Yet the book began as a discourse on retirement and contemplation written in response to the political and religious controversy surrounding the Puritan revolution. It is as an (anti)controversial work, I suggest, that the Angler might speak most directly to the critical issues of our own time and place. If the historical contingency of my interest in discursive communities leads me to emphasize some aspects of the work at the expense of others, I can at least claim that Walton's political intentions are bound up with the very structure of the work, extending even to those parts not overtly political.

Walton's title describes the work as a “recreation,” a generic indicator which I will devote much of this essay to unpacking. “Recreation” had more meanings in the seventeenth century than today (fictional reenactment was not, as far as I know, among them). It could mean a pastime (OED, recreation1 3), but also culinary “refreshment” (recreation1 1). Punning on satura or “dish of various ingredients,” the preface promises a chowder of heterogeneous kinds of writing: “And I wish the Reader also to take notice, that in writing of [angling], I have made a recreation of a recreation; and that it might prove so to thee in the reading, and not to read dull, and tediously, I have in severall places mixt some innocent Mirth; of which, if thou be a severe, sowr complexioned man, then I here disallow thee to be a competent judg” (p. 59).5 Walton's “recreation” is a menippean satire in the intellectual tradition of Lucian's dialogues, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Erasmus' In Praise of Folly, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. While diversity is characteristic of most genres, menippean satire is unusual in that it makes diversity a mark of belonging. The hallmarks of the genre, such as they are, are inclusiveness and heterogeneity; with its mixture of dialogue and narrative, poetry and prose, songs and proverbs, catalogues of fishes and flowers, dinner parties and discourses, the Angler is in many ways a paradigmatic menippean satire on contemplative themes.6 The concept of mixed discourse, which goes to the heart of Walton's ideals of sylvan community, is radically opposed to the disciplinary structures Stanley Fish discerns in the groves of academe.

So also Walton's concept of humor. Fish comments that “you can't be seriously asking these [foundational] questions and still be a member of those [disciplinary] communities, because to conceive of yourself (a phrase literally intended) as a member is to have forgotten those questions you can seriously ask.” Implicit in this formulation is the idea of a strict separation between discourse ex-cathedra and non-disciplinary speech, between seriousness and play. While Walton recognizes that “sowr complexioned” men will reject his interdisciplinary mixture of the art of angling and the art of contemplation, he insists on mixture because he regards good humor as both the means and end of the disciplines he practices. Hence the third pun on recreation (recreation2): a re-creation of character by re-mixing the temperament. Re-creating (as opposed to conceiving) a self presupposes a mutable disposition rather than a fixed constitution. As Walton goes on to say, “the whole discourse is a kind of picture of my owne disposition, at least of my disposition in such daies and times as I allow my self, when honest Nat. and R. R. and I go a fishing together” (p. 59). Recreation may imply a change in disposition, but not an opposition between workday seriousness and holiday mirth. Walton conceives the “complexion” of a self, a book, or a community as an aggregate mixture—as a disposition subject to change. His discipline is “disciplinary” only to the extent that it excludes the exclusive.

I will develop the implications of Walton's discourse on “recreation” by considering the Angler generically: as a conduct book, as meditational literature, and as a lyric evocation of social order. Not the least of Walton's objections to Interregnum society was the bad manners displayed by “Covenanters, Confusion, Committee-men, and Soldiers … you may be sure Dr. Sanderson, who though quiet and harmless, yet an eminent dissenter from them, could not live peaceably.”7 Much of the noise disturbing the likes of Sanderson took the form of menippean satire. Eugene P. Kirk's bibliography of the form lists 150 surviving examples from the period 1640 to 1653. With titles such as The Schismatick Stigmatized (1641), The Arminian Haltered (1641), or A Case for Nol Cromwell's Nose and the Cure of Tom Fairfax's Gout (1648), these motley pamphlets were written by factionalists of all political persuasions and employed the whole battery of Lucianic devices: symposia, dialogues of the dead, and voyages to imaginary worlds. If the Angler is modeled on the contemplative satires of Boethius and Burton, its menippean satura also parodies the prime controversial genre of his time. Lest this point be missed, Walton opens his discourse with a pair of characters pointedly alluding to Lucian:

Sir, There are many men that are by others taken to be serious grave men, which we contemn and pitie; men of sowre complexions; mony-getting men, that spend all their time first in getting, and next in anxious care to keep it. … We enjoy a contentednesse above the reach of such dispositions”.

(p. 64)

The bad manners of the London Puritans are matched by their libertine counterparts:

I pray bid the Scoffer put this Epigram into his pocket, and read it every morning for his breakfast … Hee shall finde it fix'd before the Dialogues of Lucian (who may be justly accounted the father of the Family of all Scoffers:) …

“Lucian well skill'd in scoffing, this has writ,
Friend, that's your folly which you think your wit:
This you vent oft, void both of wit and fear.
Meaning an other, when your self you jeer.

(p. 66)

Parliamentarians may be pious, but their sour dispositions forbid making proper use of the goods the world has to offer. Scoffers are well acquainted with worldly pleasures, but their impiety makes them reprehensible. Walton's good-humored satire attempts to avoid either extreme.

In seeking to correct bad manners through recreation rather than raillery or jeremiad, Walton produced one of the most worldly contemplative manuals ever written. Pleasure was a political issue in 1653; in opposition to official values, Piscator is quick to defend “honest pleasures”—the printed ballads and lavender-scented rooms of “Trout Hal” (p. 83), singing and story-telling (p. 88), “shovel-board” (p. 147), and wholesome meals (passim). He goes so far as to compare favorably the spots on a trout to the use of cosmetics: “which gives them such an addition of natural beautie, as I (that yet am no enemy to it) think was never given to any woman by the Artifical Paint or Patches in which they so much pride themselves in this age” (p. 121).8 Yet there are limits to what gets included in the Angler; compendious as it is, the satura excludes intemperate forms of discourse such as sour sermons and bawdy epigrams; they are engaged only to define contrary values through generic difference.

“Temperate” citizens are necessarily complex characters. We are simple, Piscator argues, only “if by that you mean a harmlessnesse, or that simplicity that was usually found in the Primitive Christians, who were (as most Anglers are) quiet men, and followed peace; men that were too wise to sell their consciences to buy riches for vexation, and a fear to die; men that lived in those times when there were fewer Lawyers” (pp. 66-67). Angling is not to be confused with the summertime activities of country louts: “But if by simplicitie you meant to expresse any general defect in the understanding of those that professe and practise Angling, I hope to … remove all the anticipations that Time or Discourse may have possess'd you with, against that Ancient and laudable Art” (p. 67). By art, Walton means a science or discipline whose precepts can be codified in a discourse. Like fencing (p. 60), angling is a gentlemen's art practiced not for sustenance or financial gain, but for higher purposes: it is, like “Vertue, a reward to it self” (p. 68). Men of leisure—or citizens on holiday—pursue angling as a liberal art.

As a conduct book, The Compleat Angler defines the character of a proper citizen through piscatory metaphors. Manners were necessarily a primary concern under a republican form of government.9 Citizens should combine learning with practicality, action with contemplation: “both these meet together, and do most properly belong to the most honest, ingenious, harmless Art of Angling” (p. 69). Walton, who made his living in trade, was sensitive about such matters: “I would rather prove my self to be a Gentleman,” Piscator remarks, “by being learned and humble, valiant and inoffensive, vertuous and communicable, then by a fond ostentation of riches; or (wanting these Vertues my self) boast that these were in my Ancestors” (p. 68). The new dispensation required men of talent as much as men of rank. Jesus sought out such men in the lower occupations, like the fisher-disciples elected to be founders and leaders. Litigious Parliamentarians are condemned not as upstart proles, but as bad gentlemen; they might learn from the patient art of angling:

          None do here
          use to swear,
          oathes do fray
          fish away,
          we sit still,
          watch our quill
Fishers must not rangle.

(p. 149)

“Watching one's quill” is a mark of good character—one that is gentle as well as genteel. As an angler and as a satirist, Walton takes care not to trouble the waters in which he wishes to fish.

During the Interregnum, of course, Anglicans had few practical alternatives but patience. Walton supplies a type for their situation: “the very sitting by the Riverside, is not only the fittest place for, but will invite the Angler to Contemplation: That it is the fit test [sic] place, seems to be witnessed by the children of Israel, who having banished all mirth and Musick from their pensive hearts, and having hung up their then mute Instruments upon the Willow trees, growing by the Rivers of Babylon, sate down upon those banks bemoaning the ruines of Sion, and contemplating their own sad condition” (p. 70). One must not forget the old ways; but unlike the Jews, Anglicans should string their harps and sing lustily of better times. Walton regards the art of poesy as an integral part of both the disciplines he promotes. The interpolated songs also have a complex political resonance. In the republican thought of the time, hierarchy was not regarded as incompatible with equality under the law, nor does Walton's participation in elite culture imply exclusion of popular literature. While distinctions are observed, the anglers incorporate popular songs into their discourse just as they mix on familiar terms with those of lower ranks. Piscator admires “the good old Song of the Hunting in Chevy Chase” (p. 145) and enjoys the broadside ballads pinned to the walls of an “honest alehouse.” At the same time he can recite a copy of verses accessible only to the elite. The Angler includes inset lyrics by a number of courtly poets: Herbert, Donne, Wotton, Marlowe, and Ralegh. The alliance of polite poetry with popular song—Marlowe's and Ralegh's lyrics are sung by two milkmaids believing they are old ballads—underscores the hedonistic values common to both court and populace.

If the Angler offers pleasure as a bait to fellowship, it also offers song as an inducement to contemplation. Walton's capacious regiment of rural meditation finds a place for both. While the satura contains didactic poems and jolly poems, the key poems in the little anthology are devotional meditations, including the first and last. These lyrics, along with occasional meditations in prose, operate as contrary genres to sour sermons and tomes of controversy; they are inter-denominational, non-contestatory means of devotional discipline. The inset poems and essays eschew the methodical exposition favored in Puritan discourses; addressing themselves to “God's other book” they seek an uncontroversial text for exposition; substituting wit for logic, they aim at winning conviction through pleasure. Bishop Hall, who popularized the form, describes the occasional meditation as a form of recreation, a way “to improve those short ends of time which are stolen from … more important avocations.”10 Walton, of course, accords recreation a higher status.

While it is a work in prose, the Angler is typically georgic in combining contemplation with praxis. Addison describes how this form “raises in our Minds a pleasing variety of Scenes and Landskips, whilst it teaches us: and makes the dryest of its Precepts look like a Description. A Georgic therefore is some part of the Science of Husbandry put into a pleasing Dress, and set off with all the Beauties and Embellishments of Poetry.”11 Like the famous digressions of georgic literature, the “characters” of the fish are inserted as recreations for readers who might find unadorned precepts dull. Walton alters the “occasional” meditation by weaving his poems and essays into a continuous narrative—a georgic device. Much of the literary art in The Compleat Angler lies in its subtle modulations from topic to topic, a generic device Addison describes as “unforc'd Method”: “we see the variety, without being able to distinguish the total vanishing of the one from the first appearance of the other.”12 In this sense, the Angler can claim to be a methodical discourse without displaying the clear and distinct partitions of a treatise. But while Walton consulted halieutic poems in Latin and neo-Latin poetry, he does not (Du Bartas excepted) quote from the georgic poets. He includes a catalogue of rivers, a georgic feature, but his recreational theme excludes celebrations of labor, just as his oppositional stance excludes celebrations of national prowess or progress. Walton recreates georgic to fit the disposition of the times.

Walton's concern with manners and desire to entertain his readers leads him to personify several of his subjects. The occasional meditations sometimes veer towards politics, as in case of the pike: “All Pikes that live long prove chargeable to their keepers, because their life is maintained by the death of so many other fish, even those of his owne kind, which has made him by some Writers to bee called the Tyrant of the Rivers, or the Fresh-water-wolf, by reason of his bold, greedy, devouring disposition” (p. 122). In this case the character grows into a narrative in which we are told how a particular pike, over-reaching himself, was dragged ashore by the mule to which he had attached his rapacious jaws. This “natural history” closes with a maxim: “It is a hard thing to persuade the belly, because it has no ears” (p. 122). It would be difficult to establish whether or not the bad character of the pike glances at the Protector, although beast fables were often used for just such a purpose.13 This episode is typical of the fluidity with which Walton interweaves themes (angling, manners, science, politics) and genres (character, anecdote, meditation, proverb).

Pastoral is often interwoven with Walton's meditations on the creatures. Viator notes the lyrical pull of Piscator's discourse: “Sir, take what liberty you think fit, for your discourse seems to be musick, and charms me into attention” (p. 73). In a passage where fishing and flower-gathering become metaphors for rural meditation, culling flowers of reflection is contrasted to material possession:

I thought this Meadow like the field in Sicily (of which Diodorus speaks) where the perfumes arising from the place, makes all dogs that hunt in it, to fall off, and to lose their hottest sent. I say, as I thus sate joying in mine own happy condition, and pittying that rich mans that ought this, and many other pleasant Grove and Meadows about me, I did thankfully remember what my Saviour said, that the meek possess the earth; for indeed they are free from those high, those restless thoughts and contentions which corrode the sweets of life.

(p. 150)

In comparing his own contemplations to the rich man's “law Suites,” Viator's meditation underscores a contrast between kinds of discourse and modes of appropriation. Such innocent poaching might also be contrasted with the “imperial designs” (p. 21) Stanley Fish regards as a necessary and possibly beneficial consequence of academic discipline; the difference is between a plenitude to be shared and a territory to be annexed. This passage is especially pastoral in its artful reflexiveness: the perfumes overpowering the dogs represent the effect Walton's lyric prose was intended to have on his listeners, drawing them away from those who would make a business of politics and religion. There are better and worse ways of using the creatures.

In this and other passages the Angler uses pastoral to dramatize social conflict. Pastoral allegory was well suited to articulate the alienated sentiments of those taking refuge in retirement; writing in this ambiguous mode, Walton could preach Anglican values to those at either extreme of the social hierarchy. As it begins to rain, Piscator and Viator prop their rods and retire under a tree:

And let me tell you, this kind of fishing, and laying Night-hooks, are like putting money to use, for they both work for the Owners, when they do nothing but sleep, or eat, or rejoice, as you know we have done this last hour, and sate as quietly and as free from cares under this Sycamore, as Virgils Tityrus and his Meliboeus did under their broad Beech tree: No life, my honest Scholer, no life so happy and so pleasant as the Anglers, unless it be the Beggers life in Summer; for then only they take no care, but are as happy as we Anglers.

(p. 112)

Appropriating a commercial maxim, Walton's reflection thrusts at fiscal policies he finds reprehensible.14 During Cromwell's reign (as in the time of Augustus, to which the passage alludes), the government found it expedient to confiscate land to finance its wars, thereby making beggars of owners. But by making good work of their leisure, the new class of beggars can turn their material loss to spiritual profit.

As I have tried to demonstrate, the strategy of rendering pleasure innocent and innocence pleasurable requires a mixture of genres, an interdisciplinary “discourse.” But it is less the fact of mixture than the kind of mixture which defines this brotherhood as a discursive community. If Walton's green world is composed as a sylva, or mixture of literary kinds, it is a landscape in which the genres of pastoral and georgic enter into an unprecedented relationship. In the Renaissance these were contrary genres: pastoral was predicated on leisure and simplicity, georgic on labor and refinement. The project of recreating a community of primitive Christians in modern times required recasting a complex structure of differences: pastoral innocence loses its “simplicity,” as it becomes reconstructed through a georgic education. The Compleat Angler was the first of many schemes to recreate an innocent community in bad times by (variously) combining elements of pastoral with elements of georgic: other instances include Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe, Emile, and The Prelude. Two centuries after Walton, critics no longer distinguished pastoral from georgic.

In describing the apprenticeship Viator must serve before becoming a master singer of the Anglican rite, Walton dramatizes the discipline required for membership in the community. Limits are not imposed “from above,” but established dialectically through juxtaposing kinds of discourse. Because Walton is aware of the subversive power of anacreontic song, he is careful to delimit its use. If he pits song against sermon, he also offers a sermon against the abuses of pleasure. There must be no snakes in the garden; the host of the “Thatched House” is condemned for his lascivious jests: “For which I count no man witty: for the Divel will help a man that way inclin'd, to the first, and his own corrupt nature (which he alwayes carries with him) to the latter. … such discourse as we heard last night, it infects others; the very boyes will learn to talk and swear as they heard mine Host” (p. 82). Improper forms of mixture—corruption—thus come in for censure, although the anglers usually avoid such pointed reflection. Part of the discipline of contemplation is the avoidance of controversy. Rather than learning to debate, the initiate is taught to harmonize differences. The degree of civility is the measure of belonging; as Piscator remarks, “Trust me, brother Peter, I find my Scholer to be so suitable to my own humour, which is to be free and pleasant, and civilly merry, that my resolution is to hide nothing from him” (p. 93). Walton's republican emphasis on civility should not be confused with leveling: anglers may be citizens, but they are always gentlemen.

Pastoral song acts as a regulative principle within the community; as Piscator comments: “I love civility, yet I hate severe censures: I'll to my own Art” (p. 82). In speaking of “art,” Walton underscores the equivalence and opposition between the methods of controversy and his own generic strategy. As a discourse, The Compleat Angler aims at comprehensiveness, yet its parts generally intersect rather than coalesce. This relation is dramatized in the three singing contests, which emblematize the harmony of literary and social formations Walton strives to recreate. There is potential agon as Maudlin sings Ralegh's “Come live with me and be my love,” and her mother responds with Marlowe's knowing “If all the world and love were young.” Yet conflict is averted when “parts” are allowed to differ; the elder milkmaid comments, “I learned the first part in my golden age, when I was about the age of my daughter; and the later part, which indeed fits me best, but two or three years ago” (p. 89). In the second episode Corydon underscores reciprocity by insisting that all must take part in pastoral singing: “I wil sing a Song if any body wil sing another; else, to be plain with you, I wil sing none … 'Tis merry in Hall when men sing all” (p. 93). The final contest is no contest at all; “Come, we will all joine together … and then each man drink tother cup and to bed, and thank God we have a dry house over our heads” (p. 151). Walton prints the tune to Viator's catch, inviting his readers to participate as well. In contrast to the “hodge-podge of business and money, and care” censured in the song, the catch's intertwining parts represent social harmony expressed through difference. In response, Peter apostrophizes music: “With what ease might thy errors be excus'd / Wert thou as truly lov'd as th'art abused” (p. 151). Walton's tolerance is quick to seize upon such possibilities: he knows that the value of a genre derives from its local disposition. As the meaning of one of the embedded forms turns on its place in the satura, so the meanings of the work itself turn on intersections with the genres of which it is a part.

Such concepts of order go unrecognized when critics equate “hybrid” works with internal contradiction or regard them as products of a “fragmenting and fragmented world.”15 The “compleatness” Walton advocates is better understood as a complex assemblage of social differences articulated in a diversity of literary forms. Walton's generation was well aware of the ill consequences following from demands for conformity, from whichever end of the political spectrum. In addressing problems of difference, he adopts generic strategies as various as the materials he combines: accretion (natural histories, lyrics, occasional meditations), modulation (georgic and pastoral), inversion (sacred parody, Lucianic dialogue), alterity (menippean satire). In the interest of contesting contestation, relations among a whole range of genres are transformed. Predicated on mixture and change, Walton's discourse avoids the dilemma of unspeakable foundational questions: values are established through a dialectical play of differences. The Angler proved hospitable to difference: over time the frame was altered and large amounts of material were added; it was continued by another hand; in the later editions manners, religion, and republican politics received rather less attention and natural history rather more. Walton's work is a particularly vivid illustration of a general truth: each instance of a genre recreates the genre.

I am in broad sympathy with Fish's critique of those who would abolish disciplinary study, yet I would resist his conclusion that the only alternative to disciplinary rigor is undisciplinary confusion. The notion that coherence requires closure leads him to posit just one means by which a discipline can change: by annexing territory from other disciplines. Substantial change would require a new discipline (p. 21). Academic disciplines are more dialogical than that: less like Euclidean geometry and more like the evolving genres in which they articulate their continuities and their differences. As Walton's discourse might remind us, the issue at the heart of disciplinary formations is less one of foundational principles, than of kinds of limits, kinds of mixture. Such questions cannot be adequately addressed on the basis of categorical reasoning; one needs to take into account the dispositions of a community amid the flux of history. A generic history of the structures of discourse could only contribute to such an understanding.

Notes

  1. In Profession 89 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1989), p. 20. A version of the paper was presented at the 1988 MLA Convention.

  2. This of course requires rethinking the concept of genre. The received idea is conveyed by C. Hugh Holman's Handbook to Literature, Fourth Edition (Indianapolis, 1980): “A term used in literary criticism to designate the distinct types or categories into which literary works are grouped according to form or technique or, sometimes, subject matter.” Both structuralist and poststructuralist discussions have generally taken closure and uniformity to be properties of genre, much as exclusion and subordination have been seen as properties of discourse. See, for instance, Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cleveland, 1973), pp. 3-23; or for a post-structuralist view which assumes generic purity in order to deny it, Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Glyph 7 (Baltimore, 1980), 202-32; for a “discourse” theory of genre, see Adena Rosmarin, The Power of Genre (Minneapolis, 1985), pp. 23-51. None of these writers considers genres as combinatory forms which change over time. Historically-minded critics sometimes take quite a different view. On generic mixture and generic change, see Alastair Fowler's Kinds of Literature, An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), a work which treats genres historically without historicizing the concept of genre. A more thoroughly historicist theory of genre is offered by Ralph Cohen, “History and Genre,” New Literary History 17 (1986), 203-32.

  3. Other instances of instructional discourses include Peacham's Compleat Gentleman (1622), Markham's Complete Farriar (1639), Digge's Compleat Ambassador (1655), and Evelyn's Compleat Gard'ner (1693). On Walton's use of the instructional dialogue, see H. J. Oliver, “The Composition and Revisions of ‘The Compleat Angler,’” Modern Language Review 42 (1947), 297-98, and John R. Cooper, The Art of the Compleat Angler (Durham, N.C., 1968), Chapter 3.

  4. Anna K. Nardo, “‘A recreation of a recreation’: Reading The Compleat Angler,South Atlantic Quarterly 79 (1980), 303.

  5. Citations are from the text of 1653, included in Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler, ed. Jonquil Bevan (Oxford, 1983). Later editions substitute “Venator” for “Viator” and make considerable additions.

  6. See Eugene P. Kirk, Menippean Satire, An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism (New York, 1980). Kirk's critical introduction is far and away the best account of the genre; other references can be found in his bibliography. John Dryden is perhaps the most insightful seventeenth-century commentator, in his Essays, ed. George Watson (London, 1962), 2.113ff.

  7. Life of Sanderson (1678), sigs. G2v-G3v.

  8. The parenthetical remark disappears in later editions. Walton also omits references to drinking or changes “ale” to “barley wine.” Self-censorship in such small matters indicates just how sensitive these issues were. On revisions to the Angler, see Oliver, p. 310.

  9. On manners in relation to republican thought, see J. G. A. Pocock's essay, “Virtues, rights, and manners: A model for historians of political thought” in Virtue, Commerce, and History, Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 37-50.

  10. On rural contemplation, see Joseph Hall, Occasional Meditations (1633), rep. in F. L. Huntley, Bishop Hall and Protestant Meditation in Seventeenth-Century England (Binghamton, N.Y., 1981), and my own essays, “These Delights from Several Causes Move: Heterogeneity and Genre in ‘Coopers Hill,’” Papers on Language and Literature 22 (1986), 352-71, and “Sylvan States: Social and Literary Formations in Sylvae by Jonson and Cowley,” ELH (1988), 797-809. Simultaneously with Walton, the chemist Robert Boyle was using a fishing expedition as the occasion for devotional recreation. His “Discourse Touching on Occasional Meditations” underscores the complementary relation of this irregular form to “lectures” on ethics or theology: “He that is versed in making reflections upon what occurs to him … can make the little accidents of his life, and the very flowers of his garden, read him lectures of ethicks or divinity” Robert Boyle, Works (1744), 2, 162.

    Meditators used natural landscape as a “common ground” in contrast to the divisions imposed by artificial discourse:

    In Merionetshire in Wales there be many mountains whose hanging tops come so close together that shepherds sitting on several mountains may audibly discourse with another. And yet they must go many miles before their bodies can meet together, by the reason of the vast hollow valleys which are betwixt them. Our Sovereign and the members of this Parliament at London seem very near agreed in their general and public professions … And yet, alas! there is a great gulf and vast distance betwixt them which our sins have made, and God grant that our sorrow may seasonably make it up again.

    Thomas Fuller, Thoughts and Contemplations, ed. James O. Wood (London, 1964), p. 47.

  11. “Essay on the Georgics,” in John Dryden, The Works of Virgil in English, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Alan Roper (Berkeley, 1987) 5:146.

  12. The Georgics of Virgil, tr. Dryden (New York, 1931), p. iii. On Walton's georgic sources, see Cooper, pp. 30-58.

  13. See Annabel Patterson, “Fables of Power,” in Politics of Discourse, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 271-96.

  14. On Walton's pastoral sources, see Cooper, pp. 59-76. Annabel Patterson describes how “fragments of the Eclogues became nodes of political theory” in Caroline England. “Pastoral versus Georgic: The Politics of Virgilian Quotation,” in Renaissance Genres, Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation ed. Barbara Keifer Lewalski, (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), p. 249.

  15. Nardo, p. 311.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Altering the Life-Text: Walton's Life of Donne

Next

Time in Walton's Lives