Aphra Behn, Part 5

Clarification of Terms: Scarification of the Flesh of Experience

Now for the clarification of terms, at least insofar as they are proper within a Classical-Christian milieu, that which seems appropriate for Aphra Behn taken at face value as an Englishwoman of the mid-seventeenth century:

Fable is today a popular term and a classical category for the kind of brief narrative—usually no more than two or three scenes, though sometimes only one, and a small cast of characters, again in the range of two or three at most—that sets forth some moral or thematic meaning.  It is assumed mostly that the characters are not human beings, although they may be—and usually are—anthropomorphized animals, plants or even non sentient beings (such as leaves, implements, or natural forces like the wind).  The etymological root of the term itself derives from the Latin verb feri = to speak or the  Greek phēmē = an utterance or a report. Hence the earliest recorded usage of the term fable means nothing more than a narrative stripped to a simple statement of its plot.  It is thereby related to the word fame from fama in the sense of a report (an articulate statement of something that has happened and is worthy of hearing) or a rumor (a murmur that is heard unclearly and without authority).  Fabula develops into a more specific semantic zone of meanings that at once particularize the report, rumor or narrative as more than just the method of hearing and remembering, passing on and discussing the statement, but the content and the significance of the message.  Because through fable and fabliau, the content becomes restricted to non-representational characters, settings, events and meanings, the sense of the term enters an area of unreality, mystical or fantastical reports. 

Meanwhile, other earlier near synonyms for the fable as a plot or a report or a reputation develop other special qualities, it must be distinguished from the parable, the anecdote and the allegory.  These three sub-types of brief narratives designate, in the sense of parable, a story whose characters tend to be domestic, social or occupational types—a father and son, a rich man and beggar woman, a farmer and a priest; an anecdote, a typical action occurring in the recognizable present of the teller and listener with or without actual historical basis—Mr Jones and his wife travelled towards a big city to meet with the king; and an allegory, wherein the names applied to people, places and objects tend to be either their “real” names—Christian and Christiana, Sloth and Diligence—or symbolic allusions to some external argument that is enacted by the plot.  Finally, though the allegorical or symbolic names of the characters, places and actions may only appear in this last category, all the forms of such fabulation carry an explicit or an implied “message”, moral, or meaning. 

Myth, though the term we tend to use ever since the nineteenth century to designate a narrative that has gods, spirits and heroic human beings in its cast of characters, and deals with world-transformative actions set on the boundary between cosmic or divinely creative events and those within normative history, was rarely used in ancient, medieval or even Renaissance times with any other sense than fable, that is, a plot, a report or a rumor of things that have happened or are in the process of happening outside of the ordinary and profane reality.  In a sense, then, mythus could be a word, an utterance, or a report of an action; something to be enacted in tragedy or comedy, that is, a drama, drumenon, or recited in a poem, especially an epic poem—a long narrative of world-transformative and world-historical events by characters who live at the meeting of the supernatural and the natural and often merge the two realities or cross over from one to the other.  Whereas fable came to create a category of the fantastic, unbelievable, and either purely literary or merely exaggerated, myth developed around itself an aura of the serious, spiritual and cosmic, until it too was crushed by the positivistic philosophy of the nineteenth century and became a “mere” myth, an invented, unreal and foolish story, including the kind of characters, events and meanings assigned to it.

Poem, however, from its roots in ancient Latin poiein and Greek poietes with the sense of to make, the thing made, and then the creative act, gathered into itself the basic meaning of a verbal making, a product of language manipulation—its resources of measure (“numbers”), patterning (verses) and figurative expression (imagery)—other than and sometimes above that of normal day-to-day discourse or formal and professional rhetoric.  By the early nineteenth century, thanks to Romantic theory and practice, the poetic became the synonym or enhancement of the terms creative, inventive, speculative and even prophetic.  Poems were removed from the category of public, traditional rhetoric as learned speeches and became expressions of private, individual and spiritual minds.  The poet came to replace the priest and the prophet as the source of higher insights and natural energy to move other minds and hearts.  The poetic thereby stood opposed to the ordinary, the common sense, and the rational or bourgeois mentality, and by the middle of the nineteenth century could stand as an alternative to science as a revelation of how the universe worked and what it meant. 

Rhetoric is the name for a way of arguing, a manner of expressing traditional and collective truths, a body of knowledge taught in schools and granted authority by formal institutions, and thus a set of rational standards to evaluate people, places, things, events and feelings or passions.  While the rhetor was the teacher of the principles and practice of oratory, orations were words shaped by the mouth (oris, os), such shaped and vivid speech was memorable and authoritative until the late Renaissance, when the reform in education separated out rhetoric from logic, and logic proceeded to develop into science, a scientia that sought its authority in experience (engagement with nature and testing of the self in controlled circumstances) and non-verbal language (mathematics).  Without logic (dialectic)—the invention or discovery of knowledge in traditional paradigms, the disposition of topoi or arguing points in a sequential order from the known to the unknown or from the familiar to the shocking, moving and convincing and the choice of language in literal, figurative and allusive expressions—rhetoric became mere rhetoric; that is, it was reduced to the choice of  decorations and adornments to already always known truisms, the strategies of formal delivery in oral or written format, and the techniques of memorization.

Three other terms we introduced earlier in this essay indicating at the same time that they need some meditation in order to allow our approach to Aphra Behn to be undertaken, first, in the terms that superficially mark her out as the wom,an behind the persona of the young traveler from Surinam who arrived out of nowhere and suddenly to become a denizen of the theatre district, to have skills as a playwright, translator and government intelligencer for the newly restored monarchy of Charles II—and yet a woman also marked by the taints of immoralty and perhaps inversion for her strident “masculinity”.

History to us today tends to be taken as an account of what went on in the past and by extension that matrix of events and ideas in which we travel towards the future, so that it overlaps with our own existential present and sometimes carries forward into the projects understood as occurring in the future (which therefore begins as we experience it now and trails off behind us into the past).  It is also the term used for the discipline of recording and preserving narratives, monuments and other relics of the past, usually the stories, opinions and learning in documents that constitute more or less formal archives; the standards and techniques for interpretation of such material constitutes historiography.  But there are two hints of earlier meanings to this term that signal its primary significance in those many ages before the Darwinian model of progress made scholars almost implicitly and without question seek for an understanding of the past, present and future in moments or movements of “origin” out of which all else develops in slow, gradual and logical stages of improvement and refinement.  One of these hints is in the theatrical zone of semantic usage wherein the players or actors are known as historians, in the sense that they embody personages of the past, both fictional and real, whose acts, words and “presence” they imitate and thus make meaningful in the present of the audience or spectators reality.  The other lies dormant in the classical usage of historia as a juridical account of events that prove or disprove the guilt or innocence of a lawyer’s client, that is, as an argument meant to be so vivid and persuasive that it cancels out or overrides the version of historical events, political character and moral personality of the person laying a complaint or adduced as the voice of the state or crown or imperial persona which lays charges against the accused.  Both of these older meanings place a quality of fabrication and some degree of falsification on the sense of history long before it carries the weight of indisputable truth, verifiable through logical analysis of archival documents, and thus firmly registered as that past upon which the present plays itself out and thus opens the world of men and institutions to its future. 

Fiction, with the sense of what is made or constructed, comes into its own when rhetoric and poetry as creative literature are pushed aside as the proper discourses of science and philosophy, when, that is, logic as an academic course of study, as institutionalized paradigms of truth, and as a body of information out of which reality is constituted, give way to natural modes of speech, apprehension, memory and evaluation of character or personality.  Fiction comes to mean less imitation (mimesis) of past experiences recorded in books, speeches, and non-verbal works of memorial art, than imitation of nature herself, including human nature.  As the modern age we live in comes into focus, the nature to be imitated is one to be interpreted from symbols, signs and symptoms of superficial experience, to be found deep within the body of activity, language and imaginary mental activity, so that every expression becomes increasingly eccentric and individualistic.

Science, though it at first means only what is known and then logically achieved or interpreted categories of knowledge, in the modern world comes to point towards a process of discovering, interpreting and then applying what is known to useful technologies.  The discourses of science turn away from those of rhetoric, on the one hand, because the paradigms that allow one only to know what is memorable and therefore already known, no longer fit a world where new discoveries everyday invalidate what is known from yesterday and must be submitted to constant rigorous testing to have any application in the future; and on the other, from poetry, in the broad sense of creative activities based on inspiration, figurative enhancement, and private verification of emotional states.  Thescei.ntific discourse we see in Behn’s narrative is not only to be found in her careful descriptions of natural phenomena or anthropological details, but also in her evaluation of the colonial economic advantages to be gained through settlement of the land, foundation of towns, and use of slave labor. But such discourses stand in juxtaposition to those of epic or romantic adventures, erotic feelings and poetic responses to the exotic and colorful places the narrator sees.  Such jarring juxtapositions can be described as grotesque, satiric or even pastoral, as we shall discuss in the next section.