SOURCE: Hodges, Devon L. “Anatomy as Reason and Madness.” In Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy, pp. 107-23. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985.

[In the following excerpt, Hodges considers The Anatomy of Melancholy to be a treatise poised between humanism and rationalism, focusing on how the work countenances the coexistence of madness and reason in seventeenth-century thought—a condition rejected by the eighteenth-century quest for “objective knowledge.”]

Compared with Bacon's dynamic, scientific project to inaugurate a new order of things, Burton's great lumpy Anatomy of Melancholy looks particularly hesitant and unfocused. And because of this, Burton's work serves as a reminder that the institution of “analytico-referential” discourse did not end all questions about the proper way to get at the truth. The Anatomy of Melancholy is narrated by an “I” that worries about its madness rather than by a persona confident of its powers—and this “I” is madly ambivalent about its own anatomical practice. As a result, The Anatomy of Melancholy seems both a return to older, marginal anatomies and a harbinger of our own moment of epistemological uncertainty. I don't want to suggest that Burton is simply a protodeconstructionist but rather that Burton's Anatomy helps complicate our sense of history as a progress from one discourse to the next by failing to exemplify the growing dominance of analytical discourse in the seventeenth century. We are particularly able to sympathize with this failing, I think, because of our own uncertainties about how writing constitutes the truth of God, nature, and the self.

Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, the best known example of the Renaissance anatomy, is the last instance of the anatomy as an immensely popular literary mode. It is also the last anatomy of the period that self-consciously exhibits the paradoxes of the form. The Renaissance anatomy certainly gives rise to the anatomies written in the Age of Reason, but it lacks the single-minded attachment to the discourse of rationalism that characterizes most of them. Yet that discourse fathered by Bacon has so influenced our own thinking that it is difficult not to defend Burton's Anatomy by suggesting that it meets criteria for literary excellence—the work's truth to life, its organic unity—established in the eighteenth century. One critic, for example, writes that Burton uses the “method of anatomy because it enables him to unify the diversity of human knowledge and reduce madness to method.”¹ This statement raises hope that Burton, even more than Bacon, will satisfy a reader's desire for a unified and clear meaning. Perhaps Burton, unlike other anatomists, has a godlike ability to organize “human knowledge” and perform the difficult trick of turning madness into reason. Certainly the Anatomy of Melancholy, with its elaborate scholarly apparatus, attempts to give the reader an orderly account of an unruly subject, melancholy madness. But how do we reconcile the scholarly strategies of the Anatomy with Burton's swirling disorderly prose?

A possible reconciliation is inherent in Burton's chosen mode of writing: an anatomy will reduce a body to order by turning it into a heap of fragments. The strength of the Anatomy lies in this paradox. Animated by a struggle between reason and madness, order and fragmentation, Burton's text demonstrates its power not by imposing order, but by escaping all efforts to have an order imposed on it. Anatomy of Melancholy is located on the boundary that lies between reason and madness. It is a scientific and theological treatise—and a mirror of the madness that is the book's subject. No wonder, then, that critics have found it difficult to classify Burton's text.² The titles and subtitles of critical commentaries—Sanity in Bedlam; The Tangled Chain: The Structure of Disorder in the Anatomy of Melancholy; “The Anatomy of Melancholy: Confusion and Order” (the central subheading of an article)—record the coexistence of two antagonists, reason and madness, in the same text.³

Yet the full title of Burton's life work, The Anatomy of Melancholy What it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptomes, prognostickes & severall cures of it, is not an announcement of textual ambiguity. Instead, the title prepares us for a comprehensive medical study, perhaps the sort of book one physician has claimed it to be: “a great medical treatise, orderly in arrangement, serious in purpose, and weighty beyond belief with authorities.”⁴ Burton's concern with medical material, his provision of synoptic tables, copious footnotes, and an index all do suggest rigorous order. Certainly the work is serious in purpose. Like other anatomists, Burton has a commitment to revealing the truth that lies at the heart of things; and, as a divine as well as an anatomist, he has a double commitment to the revealed truth. There are good reasons to believe that Anatomy of Melancholy is a comprehensive work of knowledge.

Burton even sounds like Bacon when he announces his goals. In the opening section, he says he will “perspicuously define what this melancholy is, show his name and differences” (1.1.169).⁵ This labor is justified by its usefulness: Burton will make melancholy “more familiar and easy for every man's capacity, and the common good, which is the chief end of my discourse” (1.1.139). A rigorous anatomical analysis is for the “common good” because it leads to the recovery of absolute truth as it cures madness. In the preface, Burton imagines an anatomizing orderer who is able to “root out barbarism,” “cut off our tumultuous desires,” “root out atheism, impiety, heresy, schism, and superstition,” though Burton takes a milder course (P, 97). He will cure madness by subjecting it to a structure of reason. If madness is the condition that has beset all men since the Fall, reason should be able to cure it. Such a cure is of unusual importance: “I know not wherein to do a more general service … than to prescribe means how to prevent and cure so universal a malady” (120-21). An anatomy of melancholy will undo one of the gravest consequences of the Fall, man's loss of perfect reason. Perhaps even more than Bacon, Burton insists on the power of his fragmenting technique to restore wholeness: his anatomy will restore human reason so that all will know the original truth.

As we saw in Bacon's work, a commitment to recovering the naked truth by conducting an anatomy requires a new kind of language. Burton too announces that he has adopted a style in which words will be subordinate to matter:

I am aquae potor [a water-drinker], drink no wine at all, which so much improves our modern wits, a loose, plain, rude writer, ficum voco ficum et ligonem ligonem [I call a fig a fig and a spade a spade], and as free, as loose, idem calamo quod in mente [what my mind thinks my pen writes], I call a spade a spade, animis haec scribo, non auribus [I write for the mind, not the ear], I respect matter, not words; remembering that of Cardan, verba propter res, non res propter verba [words should minister to matter, not vice versa], and seeking with Seneca, squid scribam, non quemadmodum, rather what than how to write: for as Philo thinks, “He that is conversant about matter neglects words, and those that excel in this art of speaking have no profound learning.”

(P, 31-32)

To call “a spade a spade” is in accord with Burton's project to get at the truth through the process of anatomy: “I will adventure to guess as near as I can, and rip them [the causes of melancholy] all up, from the first to the last, general and particular” (1.2.177-78). With zeal characteristic of the anatomist, Burton will rip up the truth and present it without embellishment; he wants to discover a true model of a universal disease, melancholy.

Burton announces that his is a plain style, tells us his intention to cure disease, gives his text a scholarly form; so a reader expects the Anatomy to be clear, useful, orderly. Yet Burton himself questions this view of his text. His assertion that he will provide a complete description of melancholy is deeply qualified. Burton will “adventure” to “guess as near as he can” about the causes of this madness. A guess does not have the authority of one of Bacon's forms, “solid, and true and well-defined.” Furthermore, Burton's protestation against words is excessively wordy. He may repeat the claims of scientific discourse to a “naturalness” that allows it to represent things without the interference of words, but when we read the text what we notice are the words the “plain style” means to efface. Finally, the Baconian hope for anatomy as a method of restoring a “whole” truth, whether of nature, man, or God, cannot be sustained. Indeed, it occurs to Burton that the very desire for the “whole” truth might be a symptom of madness: “To insist in all particulars were an Herculean task, to reckon up insanas substructiones, insanos labores, insanum luxum, mad labours, mad books, endeavours, carriages, gross ignorance, ridiculous actions, absurd gestures …” (P, 116-17). Says Jean Starobinski: “Ce clergyman mélancholique a parfaitement démontré l'aspect désespérant et désespéré de tout ce qui s'est appelé science jusqu'à ce jour: à force de sagesse accumulée et juxtaposée, il a rendu manifeste une secrète folie.”⁶ Burton exposes the madness of the desire to represent the truth, even as he adopts the strategy of anatomy precisely because he believes it is a pathway to truth.

The tension between Burton's belief in reason and his suspicion of its limits exists even in the first partition, the most scientific section of the Anatomy, which gives the reader reason to doubt the very possibility of reason. The section begins with a discussion of “Man's Excellency, Fall, Miseries, Infirmities, the causes of them.” Man has been separated from the truth as a result of the Fall and, according to the words of the Bible, this original transgression is punished by God with yet more “madness, blindness, and astonishing of heart” (1.1.132). The body too is an obstacle to rational understanding: man is “bad by nature” (1.1.136). And this is not all that interferes with the ability to see things clearly. In the “Digression of Spirits” which follows, devils, witches, and magicians also assault the minds of men. Confusion, it seems, is man's inheritance.

The mind is blinded, the body corrupt, and “dwelling” between the confines of sense and reason are “pertubations and passions” (1.2.258). Whether passions and pertubations are initiated by the mind (the soul's effort to “smite the body”) or by the body (“they follow sense more than reason”), they seem to mark the place where the body and mind meet and interfere with each other. The passions disorder the already disorderly realms of matter and mind with the help of the major instrument of the passions, the imagination.

The imagination is a faculty that causes the confusion of fiction and fact. Burton tells stories of those whose imaginations have turned illusions into reality:

that melancholy men and sick men conceive so many phantastical visions, apparitions to themselves, and have such absurd suppositions, as that they are kings, lords, cocks, bears, apes, owls; that they are heavy, light, transparent, great and little, senseless and dead. … can be imputed to naught else but to a corrupt, false, and violent imagination. It works not only in sick and melancholy men only, but even most forcibly sometimes in such as are sound. … And sometimes a strong conceit or apprehension, as Valesius proves, will take away diseases: in both kinds it will produce real effects.

(1:2:255)

In this remarkable passage, Burton tells us that reality may be a product of the imagination. The imaginations of both the sane and the insane have “real effects.” A reality built of the projections of the mind is always shifting: it is the play of transformation that Burton attempts to articulate by naming the multiple and contradictory roles that comprise the unstable “reality” of men. But Burton's discourse, however long-winded, is never long enough to describe them all, for as a result of the workings of the imagination, “reality” is always in flux and cannot be fully articulated.

As we have seen in earlier chapters, anatomy causes confusions similar to those Burton attributes to the workings of the imagination. As an anatomy empties out a body in order to make its hidden content visible, those contents are turned into surfaces, images, appearances. Anatomy, then, may itself be a cause of the “shipwreck of reason.” Yet paradoxically, the failure of anatomy to discover a stable truth is a key to the success of Burton's work. Because the anatomy is a process of ordering that discovers disorder, it is a method suited to uncovering the disorderly nature of madness, though not to curing it.

The nature of melancholy is to elude all order. Even the simple classificatory scheme of the theory of humors used to isolate melancholy and place it in a rational order does not work for Burton (traditionally, melancholy is one of the four humors, coldness and dryness are its major qualities, and its primary seat is in the spleen). He tells his readers that melancholy may be “hot, cold, dry, moist” (1.3.399) and “no physician can truly say what part is affected” (1.3.411). Its causes cannot be classified (“there is no one cause of this melancholy humor”) nor can its symptoms:

Who can sufficiently speak of these symptoms, or prescribe rules to comprehend them? … The four-and-twenty letters make no more variety of words in divers languages than melancholy conceits produce diversity of symptoms in several persons. They are irregular, obscure, various, so infinite, Proteus himself is not so diverse; you may as well make the moon a new coat as a true character of a melancholy man; as soon find the motion of a bird in the air as the heart of man, a melancholy man. … Who can distinguish these melancholy symptoms so intermixed with others, or apply them to their several kinds, confine them into method? 'Tis hard, I confess; yet I have disposed of them as I could, and will descend to particularize them according to their species.

(1.3.408)

Burton's long apologia tells us that the nature of melancholy escapes classification. Melancholy is determined to remain mad in spite of all efforts to “confine” it “into a method” and make it obey reason.

Burton's discussion of the humors reveals his awareness of the failure of rational schemes to adequately represent the object of his study, melancholy. The theory of humors, as he shows, is not able to make melancholy perfectly intelligible; there is a gap between the theory and what it represents. And when we look at Burton's synoptic tables and compare them to his sprawling text, we feel a similar disjunction between a referent, here the text, and a representation of it, the synopses. Certainly the tables indicate Burton's interest in making his text appear coherent and well planned, and readers who share this desire tend to see the tables as the center, a kind of “skeleton,” of the text.⁷ These readers who privilege the tables over the text are optimistic anatomists. But the order of the synoptic tables is a kind of mask that not only hides but also gives rise to the disorder so basic to the anatomy form.

At first glance the tables appear to provide a clear picture of the text. David Renaker, one of Burton's most perceptive critics, says that “a close comparison of these charts with the text shows that they are not mere mystification; they are a map of the book.”⁸ Nonetheless, there is a great difference between the order of a map and the complex windings of Burton's narration. One reason for the clarity of the map is its clear spatial organization. Anatomists, of course, have an attachment to spatial models—the process of anatomy is meant to reduce a body into discrete parts that can be placed within the order of an anatomical table or chart. In this instance, the tables provide a spatial representation of the body of Burton's narration, which is a temporal discourse. And Burton's narration is protracted—each new edition is different from the one that precedes it—whereas from edition to edition the tables never change. In some sense, then, the tables lend the text a false simplicity and coherence.

Burton seems to have realized that his tables had the power to provide his text with the appearance of order, no matter how complicated a maze of details, anecdotes, and paradoxes his text became. Renaker shows that the logic of the tables seems to give Burton license to indulge his fascination with all the divergent ways that melancholy manifests itself. Because of the solidity of the tables, Burton “felt free to regard each part of his world, for the moment he was treating it, as an absolute, ignoring or forgetting its relation to the others.”⁹ He uses the same information to prove opposite points, an illogical practice, while trusting the tables to provide an overall logic. The tables, then, do their job too well.

Burton's contradictory text thus diverges from the orderly tables. Yet, remembering that in the process of anatomy the inside becomes the outside, we might expect to find something of the text's ambiguities in the tables that frame it. And they are there. The tables do not so much provide a picture of order as a picture of the difficulties an anatomist has in creating coherence through a process of fragmentation. When we look at the tables, we see that subsections proliferate and entries that cannot contain their subjects end with “etc.” To the extent that the tables do mirror the text, they participate in its disorder.

Burton's numerous citations are also symptoms of the interplay of order and disorder characteristic of the anatomy. The citations found in the text and in its margins advertise it as scholarly and well ordered. References, after all, are normally used to establish that an author has carefully researched a topic and has taken pains to use source material so as to neither falsely appropriate it nor distort it. Yet Burton's references are anything but an assurance that he values a truthful representation of other texts: instead of carefully repeating the words of others, he actively manipulates them. David Renaker has recorded the transformation that one name, Cleombrotus of Ambracia, goes through when Burton cites it. The result of his investigation gives proof that Burton's scholarship is similar to Nashe's linguistic play: Cleombrotus of Ambracia becomes “Theombrotus Ambrociato,” “Theombrotus Ambraciotes,” and “Cleombrotus Amborciatus.”¹⁰ Burton's quotations are often inventions, and what seems his own invention is sometimes a quotation. F. P. Wilson has discovered a passage from what is supposedly Burton's prose that is in fact an “almost verbatim” quotation from another text.¹¹ Like the tables, the notes provide an assurance of order while contributing to disorder.

Burton is not always comfortable with using quotations as a means of appropriating the words of others. Sounding much like Nashe, Burton complains about “pilfering” writers who dissect old texts: “they pilfer out of old writers to stuff up their new comments, scrape Ennius' dung-hills, and out of Democritus' pit, as I have done. By which means it comes to pass, ‘that not only libraries and shops are full of our putrid papers, but every close-stool and jakes’” (P, 23). Yet later he cheerfully admits that his text is “all mine and none mine” (P, 24). The announcement reflects his belief that texts inevitably undergo a transformation when placed in new contexts:

The matter is theirs most part, and yet mine, apparet unde sumptum sit [it is plain whence it was taken] (which Seneca approves), aliud tamen quam unde sumptum sit apparet, [yet it becomes something different in its new setting]. … I must usurp that of Wecker e Ter., nihil dictum quod non dictum prius, methodus sola artificem ostendit, we can say nothing but what hath been said. …

(P, 25)

Here Burton discusses and demonstrates how old texts gain a new life by being assimilated into new ones: what he “usurps” sounds as if it is his own. Apparently the anatomizing practice of ripping pieces of texts from their context may be either a means of fertilizing a text or a way of signifying a decay of invention. Quotation in Burton's text is both fertile and sterile. At times, particularly in the first partition, the text is a lifeless repetition of what has already been said. But, for the most part, in repeating and restating, Burton creates a distinctive mode of writing: a particular style of excessive quotation is recognizably his.

Fragments of texts provide the not very solid foundation of the Anatomy, and from this learned debris Burton digresses. He moves from the texts of other writers ever deeper into the realm of displaced representation; digression constitutes a breaking off from what has already been broken off. No wonder that it is not always easy to tell the difference between Burton's quotations and his own prose, or to establish the beginnings and ends of his narrative detours. In the “Digression of Air,” Burton makes a connection between the flights away from his own material and the diving, probing process of anatomy: “But hoo! I am now gone quite out of sight, I am almost giddy with roving about: I could have ranged farther yet, but I am an infant, and not able to dive into these profundities or sound these depths, not able to understand, much less to discuss” (2.2.60). The “Digression of Air” begins with Burton's famous comparison of his progress of discovery to the flight of a “long-winged hawk.” This is a happy metaphor of a voyage free from any secure ground: even if he is almost “giddy,” the voyager enjoys that freedom. The passage also tells us that the hawk's flight from is also a dive into matter. Burton's metaphor, then, acknowledges the circularity of his investigative strategy—and its inevitable failure to arrive at any fundamentals, any “profundities.” Instead, Burton's groundless text circles and repeats.

A world in which everything is dislocated from the ground of its meaning is a mad world. Stanley Fish remarks in exasperation: “nothing … can maintain its integrity in the context of an all-embracing madness. … Even syntactical and rhetorical forms—sentences, paragraphs, sections—lose their firmness in this most powerful of all solvents.”¹² Fish blames madness for the condition of Burton's prose, but perhaps method is to blame, for the means that Burton uses to control madness, anatomy, is itself a kind of solvent. Instead of curing madness, Burton's Anatomy seems to create it. And if Burton's discourse is mad, how do we separate the object of investigation from the language that presents it to us?

By turning madness into language, a process of externalization basic to anatomy, language is turned more and more into madness—a condition it apparently has long participated in. Burton compares the “chaos of melancholy” to the effects of the Tower of Babel (1.3.397) and remarks that madness takes as many forms as the “variety of words” made by “four and twenty letters” (1.3.408). Once the original unity of words and referents is lost, words multiply, transform, and become impediments to meaning. To find a man who is not mad, Burton suggests we look for one who is silent: “vir sapit qui pauca loquitur [he is a wise man who says little]: no better way to avoid folly and madness than by taciturnity” (P, 117-18).

Bacon tries to tame the swirling world of words by adopting an aphoristic style that requires as few of them as possible, but Burton's technique generates more and more words: with each new edition the Anatomy grows. It grows because Burton believes that knowledge comes from the books he quotes even though he also fears that too much learning may lead to madness. His pride in his scholarship is tempered by his sense that learned men are creators of and sufferers of madness: “Bale, Erasmus, Hospinian, Vives, Kemnisius, explode as a vast ocean of obs and sols, school divinity. A labyrinth of intricable questions, and unprofitable contentions, incredibilem delirationem [an incredible doting] one calls it. … Much learning cerediminuit-brum, hath cracked their sconce” (P, 111-12). He also calls learned men “crazy rhetoricians,” “note-makers,” and other terms that point to their verbosity. But even as he exposes these scribblers, Burton keeps on writing. In the process of cutting through false words, he generates more surface, more debris, more madness.

As with Nashe's literary criticism, the works Burton anatomizes reflect characteristics of his own work. Since Burton says that a book full of “intricable questions” is a symptom of a “cracked sconce,” we might suspect that Burton's head was also cracked. Joan Webber and other critics have noted that the Anatomy is a kind of mirror of Burton's mind, which as Burton tells us is pained by a “kind of imposthume” called melancholy (P, 21).¹³ In anatomical terms, we could say that Burton's mind is the “inside” substance that is externalized through the process of anatomy. Burton uses metaphors of the theater to describe the externalized condition of the self: “I have put myself upon the stage” (P, 27). This condition is apparently universal: “he, and he, and he, and the rest are all hypocrites, ambidexters, outsides, so many turning pictures” (P, 65). Because of the operation of anatomy, or perhaps because the world itself is mad, the self lacks a secure foundation.

Burton took pains to insure that the “I” of his narration was an “outside” or “turning picture,” as the development of the Anatomy shows.¹⁴ In the first edition Burton makes an effort to anchor his “I” to his own name: he attaches a conclusion in which he takes off the mask of Democritus that he has put on in the preface. “The last section shall be more to cut the strings of Democritus visor, to unmaske and shew him as he is.” The unmasking takes the form of a signature that ends the book: “From my Studie in Christ-Church Oxon—Robert Burton.”¹⁵ In the first edition, then, the text seems to move from the veiled “I” of the preface to the unveiled “I” of the conclusion, a kind of revelation that seems compatible with the act of anatomy as a process that cuts through false appearances and brings the truth to light. In later editions, however, Burton deliberately frustrates the equation of author and persona, dropping the conclusion and adding a frontispiece in which he includes a picture of himself. This picture offers assurance that we will find the real Burton inside the text, but the text turns this apparently unified identity (but an identity that is only an “outside”) into a series of yet other masks. From the clarity of the picture, we move into a discourse in which the “I” of the narrator is never given the stability of Burton's name.

Although the narrator does claim a proper name for himself, “Democritus Junior,” this does not secure the narrator's identity, for, as Stanley Fish has pointed out, “we have as many Democrituses as we have sources for his life, and not all of them are compatible.”¹⁶ However, the Anatomy gains by this instability. The mask of Democritus allows the narrator “to assume a little more liberty and freedom of speech” (P, 19). The excesses of the voice Burton adopts, its violence and liberties, are spoken by “another person”:

If I have overshot myself in this which hath been hitherto said, or that it is, which I am sure some will object, too phantastical, “too light and comical for a divine, too satirical for one of my profession,” I will presume to answer, with Erasmus in like case, 'Tis not I, but Democritus, Democritus dixit: you must consider what it is to speak in one's own or another's person, an assumed habit and a name. …

(P, 121)

“'Tis not I, but Democritus”—Who is speaking here? The “I” is clearly different from Democritus, though Democritus is also a replacement for it. If the “I” is Robert Burton, it is Robert Burton as an “outside” created by anatomy: “I have … in this treatise … turned my inside outward” (P, 27). But the confusion caused by the process of turning an inside outward makes it difficult to separate outside mask and inside self.

The same problems arise when we try to separate the preface from the “serious” content of the Anatomy, as some critics have done. The preface incorporates parts of the conclusion that Burton discarded after the first edition, which makes the preface simultaneously a beginning and an ending. It is based on “inside” content—a conclusion follows from the reading of a text—and yet seems to stand “outside” the text as a point of entry. Once again, inside and outside merge. And does the reader remain safely outside this troublesome discourse? The narrator tells the reader: “Thou thyself art the subject of my discourse” (P, 16). With these words, the reader is pulled inside the text and the reader's interior is made into something external. Such maneuvers exacerbate the problems caused by anatomy—and lead us into madness.

This madness is apparently inescapable because “we are all mad” (P, 71). In the second edition Burton finds only one exception to this general condition, and that exception is “Nemo”:

Nemo; nam, Nemo omnibus horis sapit, Nemo nascitur sine vitiis, Crimine Nemo caret, Nemo sorte sua vivit contentus, Nemo in amore sapit, Nemo bonus, Nemo sapiens, Nemo est ex omni parti beatus [Nobody; for Nobody is sensible at all times; Nobody is born without fault; Nobody is free from blame; Nobody lives content with his own lot; Nobody is sane in love; Nobody is good, Nobody wise, Nobody is completely happy], etc.

(P, 117)

When the anatomist gets to the truth, nothing is left. Nobody is fit to reside in Burton's utopia, the nowhere in which life is properly ordered. If the mad world of man is without substance, so is the one the anatomist hopes to discover through his anatomical cure of melancholy.

Adrift without anchor, the melancholy mind is conventionally depicted to be “at sea.”¹⁷ Michel Foucault notes that melancholy, “la maladie anglaise,” was believed to result from the influence of a maritime climate which could make the mind lose its firmness. English freedom was also proposed as a cause for melancholy because freedom leaves men uncertain about what to believe: “the penalty of liberty” is “indecision” and an “irresolute attention, of the vacillating soul.”¹⁸ The vacillation that is so much a part of Burton's Anatomy leads finally to despair. In the final section, Burton writes about despairing men who are “tossed in a sea, and that continually without rest or intermission” (3.4.405). The Anatomy that begins as a voyage to discover an original truth arrives at despair about the existence of such a truth. Of course, this despair also vacillates. Burton's closing command offers solace: Sperate Miseri [Hope, ye unhappy ones], before taking it away: Cavete Felices [ye happy ones, fear]. If Burton's text leads to despair and frustration because it goes nowhere, it is also engagingly dedicated to journey, to endless promise. What is surprising is that there was such a large audience for this kind of narrative, such a shared sense of the uncertainty at the foundation of things. This uncertainty made necessary and enjoyable a flood of words not subservient to any clear pattern of meaning.

Does Burton's Anatomy reveal the human condition in the country from which the French name the disease? Or does he simply project his own condition on others? Critics have written about the Anatomy as a document of social and economic change that reflects the rise of scientific rationalism that threw all in doubt. Others have pointed out that Burton's text reveals his own uncertain position as scholar and divine.¹⁹ Mueller, for one, writes that scholars were often poor, jobless, and lonely. In the “Digression of the Misery of Scholars and why the Muses are Melancholy,” Burton writes that scholars “striving to be excellent lose health, wealth, wit, life, and all” (l.2.306). They lose all because they are neglected by patrons and because their labors often produce no fruit. Like Lyly and Nashe, Burton was a displaced and marginal man whose anatomy offers a critique of the society that could not offer him a better place. Yet Burton, equivocal as always, wonders if the scholar's exile from the domain of power might not be deserved: what seems to be the striving for excellence in the service of others might be only the fruitless activity of a mind turned in on itself. His uncertainty about whom to blame for his condition, and the condition of those like him, blunts the force of the Anatomy as social criticism—though given the vacillating nature of the melancholiac and the plethora of contradictory information turned up by the anatomist, this uncertainty is not surprising.

Anatomy and melancholy have an affinity; they are both an effect of loss—the loss of meaning, the loss of any clear path to the truth, the loss of power to master an uncertain world. In the anatomies of Lyly, Nashe, Shakespeare, and even Bacon, we find that something is lost that cannot be restored: constancy, coherence, the essences of love and of truth (“a true model of the world”). A melancholy sense that something is lost propels a desire to conduct an anatomy—and anatomy itself creates loss. Anatomy, then, is a cure for melancholy that creates the conditions that produce it. No wonder that Burton endlessly writes his Anatomy of Melancholy.

From the outset Burton knows, and does not know, that his method is cause and cure of melancholy. He believes in the power of anatomy as a method for gaining knowledge, yet he also reminds us in the “Preface” that his method of clarification is linked to the undoing of serious, formalizing method with its expectation of making knowledge visible. His task has a “serious intent” and is also a “playing labor.” It is a cure for melancholy—“I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy”—and it sustains melancholy by expanding a mad world of appearances. That mad world is a kind of cure too: the world of illusion is a source of sweetness: the melancholiac feels no fear or sorrow when placed with “phantasms sweet.” Much of the Anatomy of Melancholy demonstrates the pleasures of a discourse freed from the desire to manifest the truth: “I shall relate things which never have happened and never will happen, merely to show my literary skill …” (2.2.58). The Anatomy's digressions, its plethora of contradictory information, the exuberant performance of the preface, the display of melancholy's power of metamorphosis (the power of metaphor itself) which makes Burton's prose almost infinitely rich in stories of transformation are all achievements of the work's subversion of order—and its efforts to discover order. The Anatomy remains the equivocal product of both madness and reason. In fact, nothing is conclusive about the Anatomy except its lack of conclusion. It ends not because of some internal necessity but because the body of its author fails: only by the accident of Burton's death does the Anatomy conclude. But this work does mark another kind of end—the end of anatomy as a popular genre.

Burton's text begins in the unreliable terrain of fragmented words and equivocal meanings—where other anatomies end. It is located at the extreme verge of the form's domain, where reason and madness converge most dramatically. A theological, scientific, and mad work, the Anatomy of Melancholy presents the crazy idea never quite spoken by its predecessors: religion, science, and madness may speak the same language. Such a way of unifying the diversity of knowledge is certainly more disconcerting than its compartmentalization. As Foucault writes, “the world of the early seventeenth century [was] strangely hospitable, in all senses, to madness.”²⁰ Later periods were decidedly not. Madness and reason were wrenched apart; institutions were built to contain madmen and positivist doctors attempted to cure madness by silencing it rather than by letting it speak.²¹ Anatomy was a mode of writing that had supported the development of a rationalist discourse that could separate truth and falsehood, but because of a paradoxical attachment to the world of appearances, to the uncertainty and excess well demonstrated by Burton's Anatomy, it was not the best way to set forth the objective knowledge of the Age of Reason.

Another displaced Anglican divine, Jonathan Swift, adopts the form in The Tale of a Tub, but he has as much contempt for his method of exposure as for the contemporary writers he attacks.²² The voice of the Hack, a persona as unstable as Democritus Junior, has this to say about anatomy:

And therefore, in order to save the charges of all such expensive anatomy for time to come, I do here think fit to inform the reader, that in such conclusions as these, reason is certainly in the right, and that in most corporeal beings, which have fallen under my cognizance, the outside hath been infinitely preferable to the in; whereof I have been farther convinced from some late experiments. Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse. … I justly formed this conclusion to myself; that whatever philosopher or projector can find out an art to sodder and patch up the flaws and imperfections of nature, will deserve much better of mankind, and teach us a more useful science, than that so much in present esteem, of widening and exposing them (like him who held anatomy to be the ultimate end of physic).²³

For Swift, the Hack's modern practice of reason with its emphasis on surfaces and contrived unities is not objective or sane, yet surely the Hack is right about the violent consequences of flaying a body. Not only does an anatomy ruin the human form, the “ultimate end of physic” finally renders bodies as empty as the hollow orders of the projectors. With savage intensity, Swift's Tale shows us that the literary anatomy has life in it yet. But for all its power, it is a form without a future: nothing comes of it for the modern scribbler or his opponent. In the eighteenth century, the future of the anatomists' enterprise, their quest to uncover the nature of things, lies in a new form—the novel.

Notes

1. Ruth A. Fox, The Tangled Chain: The Structure of Disorder in the Anatomy of Melancholy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 39-40. Fox insists that Burton's work is a cure for melancholy because it is “art” that bestows on its parts an “organic” unity (pp. 9, 272). But everywhere she reveals Burton's text to be full of contradictions that can only be given a coherent meaning by insisting that the form of the book binds its numerous parts into a single, idealized object. While her interpretation allows us to feel that Burton is almost a god because his text can contain everything within a sublime order, this explanation will not satisfy the reader who marvels not at the work's totality but at its openness, its mad refusal to make any truth the ultimate one. For a brilliant discussion of the critical practice of shaping texts into objects of the reader's awe, see William Beatty Warner's discussion of the “humanist sublime” in his Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 241-56.

2. The range of responses to Burton's work extends from William Osler's view of the text as a “great medical treatise, orderly in arrangement” (“Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy,” Yale Review 3 [1914]: 252) to Stanley Fish's insistence that unreliability is normal in the Anatomy: “nonmethod” is “methodized” (“Democritus Jr. to the Reader,” in Self-Consuming Artifacts, p. 332).

3. Lawrence Babb, Sanity in Bedlam: A Study of Robert Burton's “Anatomy of Melancholy” (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1959); Ruth Fox, The Tangled Chain; James Roy King, “The Genesis of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy,” in Studies in Six 17th Century Writers (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966), p. 59.

4. Osler, “Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy,” p. 252.

5. All my citations from the Anatomy are to Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. with an introduction by Holbrook Jackson. Each citation includes partition, section, and page number. Citations from the “Preface” are marked P with page number included. Brackets within quotations are those provided by Jackson except for my explanation of the pronoun, in the citation from 1.2.177-78.

6. Jean Starobinski, “La Mélancolie de l'Anatomiste,” Tel Quel 10 (1962): 22. A translation of the passage is “This melancholy clergyman has perfectly demonstrated the desperate and despairing aspect of all that has been called science up to the present: the accumulation and juxtaposition of this wisdom manifests a secret madness.”

7. I use Fox's terminology here. See The Tangled Chain, p. 8.

8. David Renaker, “Robert Burton and Ramist Method,” Renaissance Quarterly 24 (1971): 212.

9. Ibid., p. 219.

10. David Renaker, “Robert Burton's Tricks of Memory,” PMLA 87 (1972): 393.

11. F. P. Wilson, “Robert Burton,” in Seventeenth Century Prose: Five Lectures (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), p. 34. Wilson quotes a passage in which Burton's praise of fishing really belongs to “a ‘Treatise of Fishing with an Angle’ printed by Wynkyn de Worde as early as 1496.”

12. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, p. 329.

13. See Joan Webber, The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968). See also Rosalie Colie's discussion of the Anatomy of Melancholy in Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966) and Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).

14. In “Training his Melancholy Spaniel: Persona and Structure in Robert Burton's ‘Democritus Jr. to the Reader’,” Philological Quarterly 55 (1976), Reinhard H. Friederich discusses how Burton developed his persona to demonstrate and exemplify a melancholy world.

15. Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, “The Conclusion of the Author to the Reader” (Oxford, 1621), Ddd I.

16. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, p. 306.

17. The connection between madness and the sea, symbolized in the Ship of Fools, is an old one. Burton uses the metaphors of the sea frequently in his descriptions of the space of melancholy. Here is a good example: “Give me but a little leave, and I will set before your eyes in brief a stupend, vast, infinite ocean of incredible madness and folly: a sea full of shelves and rocks, sands, gulfs, euripes and contrary tides, full of fearful monsters, uncouth shapes, roaring waves, tempests, and siren calms, halcyonian seas, unspeakable misery, such comedies and tragedies, such absurd and ridiculous, feral and lamentable fits …” (3.4.313).

18. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon, 1973), p. 213.

19. William Mueller, The Anatomy of Robert Burton's England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952), p. 85. See also Robert M. Browne, “Robert Burton and the New Cosmology,” Modern Language Quarterly 13 (1952) and Richard Barlow, “Infinite Worlds: Robert Burton's Cosmic Voyage,” Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973). See also Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” upon Seventeenth Century Poetry, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960).

20. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 37.

21. The story of the classical experience and treatment of madness is narrated by Foucault, ibid.

22. As I pointed out in an earlier note (chap. 1, n.18), Ronald Paulson believes that Swift parodied anatomies and Denis Donoghue thinks that Swift wrote in earnest. Edward Said in Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975) describes Swift's writing in terms that could easily be attached to Burton: the narrator/author of Swift's Tale of a Tub is “perhaps the most thoroughly imagined bibliomyth ever produced” and later “Swift [is] extraordinarily addicted to quotation” (pp. 21-22). Frank Kinahan, in “The Melancholy of Anatomy: Voice and Theme in A Tale of a Tub,” Journal of English and German Philology 69 (1970), suggests that the moderns are anatomists: “When the Hack praises the division of knowledge into systems, abstracts, and indexes, what he is really doing is describing other sorts of skeletons. The moderns seem to themselves to be moving through ordering to knowledge but what they are in fact doing is rendering knowledge impossible by emptying out the objects of knowledge” (p. 289). Reiss points out that Swift is writing after the discourse of patterning has “yielded completely” to the dominance of analytico-referential discourse—he doesn't, then, have all the stylistic choices available to him that Burton does. See Reiss, Discourse of Modernism, pp. 328-57.

23. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings, ed. Louis A. Landa (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 333. Swift doesn't call his work an anatomy perhaps because he hopes his satiric purposes will distance him from all forms. His work is, however, bounded by the forms he must work within.

Works Cited

Babb, Lawrence. Sanity in Bedlam: A Study of Robert Burton's “Anatomy of Melancholy.” East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1959.

Barlow, Richard G. “Infinite Worlds: Robert Burton's Cosmic Voyage.” Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973): 291-302.

Browne, Robert M. “Robert Burton and the New Cosmology.” Modern Language Quarterly 13 (1952): 131-48.

Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy: What it is with all the kinds, causes, symptomes, prognostickes and severall cures of it. Edited by Holbrook Jackson. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

Colie, Rosalie L. Paradoxia Epidemica. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.

Donoghue, Denis. Jonathan Swift: A Critical Introduction. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Fish, Stanley E. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon, 1973.

Fox, Ruth A. The Tangled Chain: The Structure of Disorder in the Anatomy of Melancholy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976.

Friederich, Reinhard H. “Training his Melancholy Spaniel: Persona and Structure in Robert Burton's ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader.’” Philological Quarterly 55 (1976): 195-210.

Kinahan, Frank. “The Melancholy of Anatomy: Voice and Theme in A Tale of a Tub.” Journal of English and German Philology 69 (1970): 278-91.

King, James Roy. “The Genesis of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.” In Studies in Six 17th Century Writers. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966.

Lyons, Bridget Gellert. Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.

Mueller, William. The Anatomy of Robert Burton's England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952.

Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” upon Seventeenth Century Poetry. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960.

Osler, William. “Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.” Yale Review 3 (1914): 251-71.

Paulson, Ronald. Theme and Structure in Swift's Tale of a Tub. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960.

Reiss, Timothy J. The Discourse of Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.

Renaker, David. “Robert Burton and Ramist Method.” Renaissance Quarterly 24 (1971): 210-20.

—. “Robert Burton's Tricks of Memory.” PMLA 87 (1972): 391-96.

Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books, 1975.

Starobinski, Jean. “La Mélancolie de l'Anatomiste.” Tel Quel 10 (1962): 21-29.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings. Edited by Louis A. Landa. London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Warner, William Beatty. Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979.

Webber, Joan. The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968.

Wilson, F. P. Seventeenth Century Prose. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960.