Content area
Full Text
Digressing toward Truth Reid Barbour and Claire Preston, editors Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed NEW YORK: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 20?8 XiI + 368 pages; isbn 9780199236213
IS IT TRUE, AS THE EDITORS of this excellent collection celebrating the 400th anniversary of his birth tell us, that Thomas Browne is "among the most influential of writers in the history of English literature" (1)? In a league with Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Keats? The case could have been made more easily a century ago. As Barbour and Preston suggest, "a rough count yields at least twenty effusions entitled Religio Something-or-Other in the past three-and-a-half centuries" (1) - but the most recent they can cite is Gilbert Murray's Religio Grammatici (1918), a text whose debt to Browne (beyond its title) is nugatory. Readers of the past seventy-five years seem less concerned to probe Browne's "wingy mysteries" than were those Victorians whose well-thumbed copies of his selected essays still turn up regularly in used bookstores, and the only modern writer discussed here who displays Browne's influence (and almost the only one even to mention him) is Jorge Luis Borges. Roy Rosenstein traces Borges' lifelong fascination with Browne (whom the Argentine writer once said he wished to "become"), focusing especially on a passage about memory in Borges' translation into Spanish of Urne-Buriall- long thought an inspired imitation, but which turns out to be Borges' rendering of a genuine, unpublished passage by Browne, "restored" into the text. Curiously, though, Rosenstein never quite explains what made Browne so important to Borges.
Even more of an obstacle than modern secularism is Browne's notoriously digressive and diffuse prose. As linguists have amply documented, average sentence length has sharply declined in English over the last three centuries, and few nowadays, even among ambitious undergraduates, have patience for Brownian "ampliations" and "excursions." Nearly all the writers included here feel compelled to defend Browne against his recent detractors, most of all against Stanley Fish, whose portrayal of Browne in Self-Consuming Artifacts (1972) as a "bad teacher" who simply likes to hear himself talk still has currency. Sometimes this rehabilitation means seeking to recreate the pleasures of leisurely reading, as Sharon Seelig does in a graceful tour of "The Styles of Thomas Browne" (arguing as well that, despite...