SOURCE: Fox, Ruth A. “This New Science.” In The Tangled Chain: The Structure of Disorder in the Anatomy of Melancholy, pp. 45-53. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

[In the essay below, Fox examines the digressions from the conventional structure of the medical treatise in The Anatomy of Melancholy, proposing that the tension between the digressions and the more straightforward sections reflects an ambivalence about the reliability of knowledge.]

For out of olde feldes, as men seyth,
Cometh al this newe corn from yer to yere,
And out of olde bokes, in good feyth,
Cometh al this newe science that men lere.

—Chaucer, The Parlement of Foules

Robert Burton's book conforms to that traditional order for the discussion of disease set forth in the title: The Anatomy of Melancholy. What it is, With all the kinds, causes, symptomes, prognostickes, & severall cures of it. In three Partitions, with their severall Sections, members, & subsections. The structure may be “imposed” on Burton by the example of contemporary medical treatises (Simon, pp. 422-423), but to admit that the order is not of his invention does not force us to conclude, as Simon, Finlay, and others do, that Burton does not use his traditional structure to inform the Anatomy with its own peculiar meaning. Most obviously, by confining himself to the traditional schema of definition, cause, symptom, cure, Burton seems explicitly to declare that the subject of his discourse is the “causes, symptoms, cures” of a definite “ordinary disease”—that he is dealing with the matter of a material disease, the physical disorder of humors. The traditional order proclaims it as certainly as Democritus Junior does when he turns from the Preface to the Anatomy proper:

And although, for the above-named reasons, I had a just cause to undertake this subject, to point at these particular species of dotage, … yet I have a more serious intent at this time; and to omit all impertinent digressions, to say no more of such as are improperly melancholy, or metaphorically mad, lightly mad, or in disposition: … my purpose and endeavour is, in the following discourse to anatomize this humour of melancholy, through all his parts and species, as it is an habit, or an ordinary disease, and that philosophically, medicinally, to show the causes, symptoms, and several cures of it, that it may be the better avoided.

(Preface, 120; my italics)

Yet as he has already spoken of “such as are improperly melancholy” in the Preface, so Burton opens up the traditional schema, turning more than once, in the space of the “following discourse,” away from the system which he has accepted for his book and from the subject matter the system defines for him. He digresses long and largely.

But we must recognize the portion of the Anatomy from which Burton turns aside, for the digressions exist only in the First and Second Partitions, which together complete his investigation of the “ordinary disease.” From definition through cures, Partitions I and II fully describe humoral melancholy; they are together the whole anatomy of the disease which is “proper to parts” (Synopsis I), which allows him his traditional medical book schema, and from which he does not stray at random but digresses formally and purposefully. The medical treatise in I and II fulfills the expectations raised by the title for complete rehearsal of the physical disorder. In these partitions Burton selects and organizes the facts known about melancholy. He builds up vast lists of causes, symptoms, and cures in passages which seem to do little more than pad the citation in the synopsis with appropriate authors and a qualification or two, sometimes a tale. Indeed, in the last two sections of the Second Partition, Burton picks up speed with hurried incantations of facts about pharmaceutical and chirurgical cures. It was especially Partition II that Sir William Osler called a “strictly medical treatise, in which the author has collected all the known information about the treatment of mental disorders; the entire pharmacopoeia is brought in, and Burton writes prescriptions like a physician” (Osler, pp. 175-176). The two partitions make a complete system. There are three kinds of melancholy, and these are defined; general and particular causes, and these are set forth; common and peculiar symptoms, good and bad prognostics, cures lawful, unlawful, dietetical, pharmaceutical—all are distinguished, laid out in sections, confined by the structure to an order which perfectly encompasses all the indefinable material. If foods are causes and cures, then they are treated under cause and under cure. Fear is cause and symptom; purges are general and particular cures. Burton puts everything where it belongs in the design, physically capturing, in his sections and subsections, the physical disease. For melancholy's “perpetual fume and darkness,” the system makes clear, is material, physical reality, an “object which cannot be removed” yet which must be removed before counsel or other “immaterial” cures can hope to have effect (I.3.3; 421).

But in among the systematized facts of the matter of melancholy are the digressions, and we must ask whether they are pertinent to Burton's statement in the Anatomy or merely “impertinent digressions,” because our answer will greatly qualify any estimation of Burton's art. In the first place, hardly anyone concerned with reading the Anatomy critically is now truly interested in black bile or hellebore. Scholarship is spent on the Preface with its mask, on Love-melancholy, or on the many stories that pack the book; or it is spent on the Nature of Spirits, the Misery of Scholars, the Air, the Consolation and Remedies of Discontents—all of these last, of course, being digressions. And if one tries to account for humoral psychology as the stated topic of the Anatomy—if one deals with it at all—one will likely end by agreeing with Babb's sentiment:

In composing The Anatomy of Melancholy, a scholar has drawn upon the accumulated wisdom of mankind to present a characterization and criticism of human nature and human experience. In spite of the title, the primary theme is the infelicity of man. … The lasting interest and value of the book lie in its animated satiric representation of human life, in its perceptive explanations of life's harshness, and in the sympathetic counsel and consolation which the author extends to all whose burdens are too heavy.

(Babb, p. 109)

Nor, it must be admitted, was Burton himself seemingly very interested in the medical treatise. Expansion through the six editions does not come in the information about the ordinary disease, but instead, the “discussions of geography and travel, of spirits and devils, and of every sort of love matter were greatly enlarged, and … constantly increasing stress was laid upon the social and moral criticism in the book” (Hallwachs, p. v). There is something static, for Burton as well as for us, about the very discussion which gives rise to his book. We look at the assumptions underlying the book's makeup—the facts about the physical disease, anatomy, the form of a scholarly treatise, all the jargon and the painstaking accumulation of authority—and we agree that the “lasting interest and value of the book” do not lie here. The digressions, I shall hope to show, point up Burton's own awareness of his “primary theme, the infelicity of man,” by creating tension within the more stolid medical discourse, tension between matter and mind, between physical “ordinary disease” and “improper” or “metaphorical madness,” tension finally between the medical book itself and questions about the very trustworthiness or usefulness of human knowledge which makes possible the writing of textbooks in traditional schemata designed to transmit accepted fact, or Truth.

Digression becomes, in Burton's art, necessary to the transmission of knowledge because it makes us question and see what knowledge is. But in not noticing the context of the digressions (Partitions I and II in general, and, in particular, certain sections of those partitions), critics have most often missed Burton's way of locating for us the “true matter and end” of his traditional discourse as well as of the digressions from that discourse.

The digressions have been seen as pleasant side trips unrelated to the central issues of the Anatomy, as “resting-points” on our “orderly march through [Burton's] melancholy terrain.”¹ Now a digression, certainly, is a turning aside of some kind, one which defies or interrupts a literary work's ordered progression and in general indicates a straying from the main theme. This is not to say that digression cannot be an artistic means of opening up the statement of a work, but it does so by way of addition; and there is, I think, in the term an assumption that the additive is not inherent in or necessary to the statement, no matter how much it may modify the given work. For the most part, Burton's digressions have been accepted as this kind of addition. Lievsay calls them “resting-points”; Simon suggests that they are “autant de parenthèses, dûment ouvertes et dûment refermées, qui n'altèrent nullement la régularité de la construction” (p. 423). King feels that digression conflicts with the planning evident in the synopses and so indicates an “almost comic inability to manage the most fundamental problems involved in writing a book,” and he cannot allow the Burtonian digression to be other than, at worst, a “free ride on a hobby horse,” wholly irrelevant to the “structural fabric” of the book (King, pp. 82-84). But Burton's digressions have their planned places in the structure. They are part of the order, occupying, as their very presence in the synoptic tables indicates, positions within the formal structure of the book. Burton has no unit of his structure made especially for use when he wishes to turn aside; a digression occupies whatever existing forms fit its breadth and length. There are digressions filling out a whole section, like the Consolatory Digression; or a member, like the Digression of Anatomy; or a part of a subsection, like the Digression of Compounds. Thus the digressions are built into the structure of the first two partitions, not inserted like so many afterthoughts—or interruptions of thought (parentheses)—but woven in as threads of the discourse. Simon is right that the digressions do not alter the lines of construction; from a purely formal standpoint, they are part of Burton's very formal construct, and I hope to show that they are also essential thematic constituents of the Anatomy.²

Still, the digressions do digress from something: they turn aside from the sequence of definition, cause, symptom, cure. From the point of view of the orderly exploration of humoral psychology, they are, in fact, digressions. But even as they digress, thus apparently denying the massive and painstaking organization of the book, they become part of the organization by being shaped into the forms of the ordered progression which they would seem to defy.

And they are not, from the point of view of the whole matter of the Anatomy, “so many closed parentheses.” The discontinuity of subject matter suggested by calling them digressions is, to the reader who has been “forepossessed” of Burton's method by the book's apparatus, simultaneously revealed to be continuity in the broader vision of the entire book. The careful reader is always made aware, by section heading if not by overt statement in the text, when Burton is going to digress and into what territory he will divert his discussion. And, thus alerted, one discovers in Partitions I and II a complex interrelationship between the system stated in the title, and a “system” implied in the progression from one digression to the next. … [A] discourse on knowledge, its causing and curing of the disorders of post-lapsarian man's life, intermingles with and counterbalances the Anatomy's “proper” investigation of humoral psychology, that presentation of facts which make up Burton's traditional discourse.

The form and content given him by his title and his overt methodology, which commit Burton to finding and ordering facts, is (most emphatically in the Digression of the Air) opposed to or superseded by a new understanding of what such methodologies imply. Ordered human thought through the ages, auctoritas, is not final and total; but the necessary roving from formal artificial limits into digression shows us that such ordered “knowledge” is the firm groundwork upon which new and always possible truth can be learned, tested, transmitted as “science.” Authority is less undermined than it is redefined as knowledge's starting place, as rational man's textbook rather than his summa or his Scripture. Following the introduction in I.1.1, which places melancholy in the context of man's fall from perfection, Burton begins his Anatomy of Melancholy by making—of all things—a Digression of Anatomy. Each successive digression is then as pertinent and necessary to our understanding of the science of the Anatomy as this first one, for while the formal progression of the book is concerned with all the facts that men know about melancholy's definition, causes, symptoms, and cures, the “system” of the formal digressions is concerned with definitions of knowledge itself, with man's failure to know and his hopes for achieving understanding. Man asks what he can know, falls short of knowing all he can, discovers answers in the form of both statements and more questions. And so the digressions allow the reader learning about melancholy to learn as well what it means for him to be man, the rational, learning, knowing animal.

Notes

1. John L. Lievsay, “Robert Burton's De Consolatione,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 55 (1956), 329.

2. Lyons (pp. 126-130) suggests readings of the digressions more sensitive than those of the critics cited above. She sees them as “variations or elaborations on the outline plan” and notices that they are “far better integrated into the treatise than is sometimes thought” (p. 127).

Works Cited

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

Rosalie Colie. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton University Press, 1966.

Daniel Henry Finlay. “A Study of Form in the Anatomy of Melancholy.” Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1966.

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

Robert G. Hallwachs. “Additions and Revisions in the Second Edition of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.” Ph.D. diss., Princeton, 1934.

James Roy King. Studies in Six 17th Century Writers. Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1966.

Bridget Gellert Lyons. Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.

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

Richard L. Nochimson. “Robert Burton: A Study of the Man, His Work, and His Critics.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia, 1967.

Sir William Osler, Edward Bensly, and others. “Robert Burton and the Anatomy of Melancholy.” Ed. F. Madan. Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceedings and Papers, 1 (1927).

Jean Robert Simon. Robert Burton (1577-1640) et L'Anatomie de la Mélancolie. Paris: Didier, 1964.

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