Misfit Forms by Nandrea Lorri G.;

Author:Nandrea, Lorri G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

4. Verisimilitudes

Curiosity, Wonder, and Negative Capability

The spring of action which, perhaps more than any other, characterized the whole train of my life, was curiosity … I could not rest till I had acquainted myself with the solutions that had been invented for the phenomena of the universe. In fine, this produced in me an invincible attachment to books of narrative and romance. I panted for the unravelling of an adventure, with an anxiety, perhaps almost equal to that of the man whose future happiness or misery depended on its issue. I read, I devoured compositions of this sort. They took possession of my soul.…

—William Godwin, Caleb Williams (4)

He was the kind of man people looked at twice, deciding whether or not to stare. What are the criteria for gaping? Samson wondered.

—Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room (80–81)

Recent literary and historical scholarship on curiosity, and the related affect of wonder, has shaped a history in which wonder undergoes a sea change during the Renaissance, and then yields cultural prominence to curiosity during the Restoration.1 Both terms—oddly ambidextrous in that they can refer to either subjects or objects, and thus imply a special relationship between the two—have been subjected to intellectual, religious, and moral condemnation, often riding seesaw with each other. Throughout the Middle Ages, curiosity was understood as a major sin of intellectuals, a transgressive desire “to know more than God permits” (Benedict 18); the variant “curiositas” remains, today, associated with pornography and other taboo materials. However, enlightenment thought was more favorable to the spirit of inquiry curiosity connotes; Francis Bacon, for example, defended curiosity by associating it with “the social utility of knowledge” (Benedict 19). He situated curiosity as the opposite of wonder, condemning the latter as the enemy of understanding (Daston and Parks, 317–21). On the other hand, in his 1640 Treatise of the Passions, Bishop Edward Reynolds directly links wonder or “admiration,” the primary passion, to “Curiosity or the desire of Knowledge.” In Reynolds’s account, wonder gives rise to curiosity, which he, like Bacon, situates as “the mother of all knowledge” (qtd. in Johns 401–2). Likewise, Lord Kames, trying in 1762 to explain why people would leave home and endure the discomfort of long-distance travel, concludes that it must be attributed “to curiosity undoubtedly, a principle implanted in human nature for a purpose extremely beneficial, that of acquiring knowledge, and the emotion of wonder, raised by new and strange objects, inflames our curiosity to know more about them” (qtd. in Leask 25).

Like all of the passions, curiosity and wonder were believed to occur in different strengths, and to become harmful in excess; wonder or “admiration” that was too intense or prolonged might even result in cataleptic stupor (Johns 403). As this danger suggests, within the language of the passions, “wonder” referenced a passive state of “unsystematic absorptiveness” (Leask 29), as opposed to curiosity’s active pursuit of knowledge. It is, in fact, wonder’s pleasure in a state of not-knowing that leads scientists, from the seventeenth century forward, to distance their epistemological projects from wonder.

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