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Description
[T]he historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should
be but to what is, to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine. Now doth the peerless poet perform both. --Sir Philip Sidney (1)
For years, a central issue in the discussion of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave. A True History has been whether it is true or false, factual or fabricated. (2) While most now believe the tale's core to be authentic, based on Behn's real stay in Suriname, others question the need to ascertain the truthfulness of the work; after all, who would write pages on the factual fallacies of Robinson Crusoe or Gulliver's Travels? (3) There are reasons to question the incessant interrogation of truthfulness in Behn's text in comparison with more accepted canonical figures--her texts have received much unfair criticism, though this attention has also been productive of detailed and meaningful inquiries into her works. (4) While I believe the search for truth within Behn's work is still a meaningful one, there is a need to revisit the motives and aims of that search, to contextualize Behn's exploration of truth with respect to the period's changing notions of truth's relation to and representation of fact and fiction. (5)
Sir Philip Sidney, immediately following the epigraph I have given, argues that "whatsoever the [moral] philosopher saith should be done, [the poet] giveth a perfect picture of it in someone." (6) Behn, as I will develop further, enacts within Oroonoko's character this performance of morality that Sidney locates at the juncture of poetry, history, and moral philosophy, displaying what she sees as appropriate truth--moral exemplarity and the truth of moral character that her finally bleak work suggests is missing within her own culture. Behn ostensibly argues against Sidney's praise of poetry, emphasizing in her opening lines the strict truth of Oroonoko without the embellishments of the "Poets Pleasure" as encouraged by her period's focus on empiricism and post-Baconian rhetorical practices. (7) However, Behn also performs the role of Sidney's poet, using Oroonoko as a representative of truth and wonders yet unknown (or misunderstood), a moral example of what "should be" in her own world. (8) In many ways, then, Oroonoko is a text about truth's place in Behn's world, fictional and actual. Accordingly, there is a need to refocus the text's analysis to a moral rather than biographical or historical reading for truth. Behn's frames for her work, before and within her tale, and her emphasis on authorizing her narrative through a variety of gestures suggest Oroonoko seeks to assert cultural models of moral truth and exemplarity.
Furthermore, the models that Oroonoko asserts are not new; rather, Behn uses wonder (especially in the character of Oroonoko) and the current vogue of travel narratives to reassert humanist traditions of moral exemplarity, tied up with noble and singular heroism--the "Great Man" to whom she refers repeatedly throughout her introductory epistle passing out of currency in her time (pp. 34-7). (9) This idea of singular exemplarity also reinforces Behn's royalist perspective. (10) As my epigraph from Sidney suggests, I believe that reading Behn as a participant in and conservator of an earlier humanist tradition of exemplarity instead of primarily, as is commonly done, the beginning point of the novel and new models of historicity helps to explain many of the seeming incongruities and ruptures of her text, especially in terms of her treatment of truth and fiction, history and morality. (11)
In "The Epistle Dedicatory" of Oroonoko, Aphra Behn commends her sponsor, Lord Maitland, proclaiming his virtue and valuable example to others: "'Tis by such illustrious Presidents as your Lordship the World can be Better'd and Refin'd" (p. 35). She adds that the value of a pen-written portrait of character, compared with a pencil drawing, lies in the emphasis the pen gives to "the Nobler part, the Soul and Mind; the Pictures of the Pen shall out-last those of the Pencil, and even Worlds themselves" (p. 35). (12) She continues by emphasizing the importance of recording the histories and characters of great men so that they may serve as examples to others, reiterating that Lord Maitland's learning derives from having "Read innumerable Volumes of Men, and Books, not Vainly for the gust of Novelty, but Knowledge, excellent Knowledge" to be shared with others through honorable service and moral example (p. 35). (13) Finally, Behn recommends Oroonoko to her sponsor as such a volume, both true and foreign, a story authorized by the central protagonist, Prince Oroonoko, and his exemplary character:
This is a true Story, of a Man Gallant enough to merit your Protection; and, had he always been so Fortunate, he had not made so Inglorious an end: The Royal Slave I had the Honour to know in my Travels to the other World; and though I had none above me in that Country, yet I wanted power to preserve this Great Man. If there be any thing that seems Romantick, I beseech your Lordship to consider, these Countries do, in all things, so far differ from ours, that they produce unconceivable Wonders; at least, they appear so to us, because New and Strange. What I have mention'd I have taken care shou'd be Truth, let the Critical Reader judge as he pleases. 'Twill be no Commendation to the book, to assure your Lordship I writ it in a few Hours, though it may serve to Excuse some of its Faults of Connexion; for I never rested my Pen a Moment for Thought: 'Tis purely the Merit of my Slave that must render it worthy of the Honour it begs; and the Author of that of Subscribing herself, My Lord, Your Lordship's most obliged and obedient Servant, A. BEHN. (14)
According to Behn's account, then, veracity--including the Romantick (though true) "Wonders" of "the other World"--and the authorizing "Merit" of a royal and moral character create the core and the value of her work. (15) Behn is intent on using the honorable character of her royal and foreign subject to authorize the narration; she is merely a medium of the story.
This authorizing subject's place--a subject who, significantly, also acts as a primary agent in and of the narration--is reinforced by Behn's vehement avowal of the truthfulness of her tale, which is in turn strengthened by her frequent inclusions of verifiable facts mixed with detailed ethnographic observations that support her role as eyewitness to the narration's occurrences. (16) In addition, both truth and character also rely on the vogue for "Romantick" wonders that absorbed thinkers and audiences of the time. (17) Thus, within a frame of revealing 'Truth," though "New and Strange," Behn's work rests its authority on an interlinking of observation and secondhand narration based upon the unimpeachable moral character of Oroonoko. Significantly, as I will develop further, Behn also hints at the fiction of her work, showing her piece to be interested in moral more than narrowly factual truth. (18)
Unconceivable wonders, for Behn, do not limit the delivery of truth. Rather, in her period truth is frequently tied to the wonderful and to the unknown. Katie Whitaker affirms the "broad interest in rarities and wonders of all sorts, natural and artificial" in the seventeenth century. (19) Whitaker's work also connects wonder to everything from feathers to the unusual human being (interestingly, each plays a role in Oroonoko), always emphasizing the place of reason and religion in the study and appreciation of wonder. (20) In his insightful examination of wonder and the marvelous in the early modern period, Peter G. Platt notes that even "late in the seventeenth century, wondrous beasts still make appearances in the Transactions of the Royal Society of London." (21) Aphra Behn plainly worked within very different understandings of science, nature, truth, and history than those to which we are accustomed, just as she worked within different conceptions of narration and literary form. As Nicholas Jardine and Emma C. Spary point out, "[T]he boundaries between the natural and conventional, artificial and social have been continually contested and relocated." (22) To Behn, and to many of her readers, wonder was closely related to truth as either a source of truth or an acknowledgment of truth unknown. Truth was not always about knowledge; in fact, many of the greatest truths were not known or thought to be knowable.
Tracing the early modern use of wonder in natural science and travel writing, Platt identifies two overlapping though somewhat contradictory views. One locates wonder as the means of discovering reason beyond current knowledge (a particularly Aristotelian approach), and another establishes wonder (and thus ignorance) as an end in itself, an active state of belief and acceptance. (23) Michel de Montaigne, who seems to hold at different times both of these stances, states in his essay "On the Lame" a defense of the second view: "amazement is the foundation of all philosophy; inquiry, its way of advancing; and... |
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