Possible Knowledge by Debapriya Sarkar;

Author:Debapriya Sarkar;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)

The Durable Worlds of Vitalist Poetics

When skepticism leads to world annihilation, how does one stabilize fictional worlds? To overcome the disconnect between the creating self and created world—as well as her fear that she will be “Annihilated to nothing” (Poems, and Fancies, “To Naturall Philosophers,” sig. A6r)—Cavendish requires a new physics. Her aspiration to link imaginative production to the creativity of the natural world finds its most harmonious focus in The Blazing World, which enacts how fictional realms constructed out of a vitalist philosophy (in which Nature is volitional and “self-moving,” composed of sensitive and rational matter) are more compatible with the authorial self with which she identifies. By applying a different philosophy of Nature to create more durable fictional universes, Cavendish seems to resolve a key question underlying her literary ambitions: How might the materialist cosmos best serve the “natural” author in her act of making “fiction” from her “fancy”?

The Blazing World is physical poetics at its most ambitious, and perhaps most successful. The changeable natural world offers both matter and method for creation; modeling fictive realms on Nature’s variability results in a hybrid form in which we witness the evolution of utopia and to which we can trace the origins of science fiction.35 The culmination of Cavendish’s prolonged efforts to harmonize the author’s relation to Nature, The Blazing World reflects a realization that shifts in poiesis demand an adjustment of physics. Earlier in this chapter I proposed that Cavendish needs a revised physics only when she is writing in prose. Based on our study of the rifts between self and world that occur in Poems, and Fancies, we can now refine this claim: she must renounce atomism for the sake of creating durable fictional worlds.

As she foregrounds the epistemological underpinnings of poiesis in her later works, Cavendish yokes together the realms of words and things that English natural philosophers had been trying to separate. In the paratextual materials of The Blazing World, she underscores the distinct work of “fancy” by theorizing the entanglements of truth and fabrication. She highlights the epistemic values of fancy by connecting its origins to that of reason: “The end of reason, is truth; the end of fancy, is fiction: but mistake me not, when I distinguish fancy from reason; I mean not as if fancy were not made by the rational parts of matter; but by reason I understand a rational search and enquiry into the causes of natural effects; and by fancy a voluntary creation or production of the mind, both being effects, or rather actions of the rational parts of matter” (“To the Reader,” 123–24). Fancy is as substantial as reason, and they both represent activities rather than fixed entities. They originate in the “rational parts of matter,” but the mind’s activities aim toward different ends. Thus, instead of distinguishing fact from fiction along an axis of truth and falsehood, we need to recognize “truth” and “fiction” as distinct end points of the exercise of “rational parts of matter.” Fancy emerges from within the creator’s mind and mirrors Nature as a repository of “voluntary creation.

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