Tenebrosity of the interior

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In a 13 July 2015 New York Times review of a biography of Browne, Jim Holt aptly calls him "a minor writer with a major style." Browne's prose cannot be mistaken for any written before or since. It is grand, sonorous, and stately, but also fresh, quirky, and bursting with ingenious connections. Holt observes that, "At a time when the prevailing plain style was growing dull and insipid (John Locke is an example), it was Browne who showed the way to new possibilities of Ciceronian splendor. In doing so, he became a prolific contributor of novel words to the English language. Among his 784 credited neologisms are 'electricity,'  'hallucination,'  'medical,'  'ferocious,'  'deductive' and 'swaggy.' (Other coinages failed to take: like 'retromingent,' for urinating backward.)"

Many of Browne's words, whether newly coined or common, come from Latin or Greek roots. He deftly draws readers on through brisk colloquial strings of short Saxon words to the polysyllabic abstractions and analogies on which he wants their attention to linger. "Break not open the gate of Destruction, and make no haste or bustle unto Ruin. Post not heedlessly on unto the non ultra of Folly, or precipice of Perdition. Let vicious ways have their Tropicks and Deflexions, and swim in the waters of sin but as in the Asphaltick Lake, though smeared and defiled, not to sink to the bottom" (Christian Morals 1.30). "Which conceit is not only erroneous in the foundation, but injurious unto Philosophy in the superstruction" (Pseudodoxia Epidemica 2.6). "The world that I regard is my selfe, it is the Microcosme of mine owne frame, that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my Globe, and turne it round sometimes for my recreation.... whilst I study to finde how I am a Microcosme or little world, I finde my selfe something more than the great. There is surely a peece of Divinity in us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun. Nature tells me I am the Image of God as well as Scripture; he that understands not thus much, hath not his introduction or first lesson, and is yet to begin the Alphabet of man" (Religio Medici 2.12).

Joyce's parody focuses on such weighty anchor-nouns, and a few similarly ponderous adjectives and verbs. He exaggerates the neologisms, the strange locutions, the classical learning, but the spirit of Browne's original is preserved in his whimsical imitation. Stephen starts by observing that canonical texts have little to say about his subject: "This tenebrosity [darkness, from Latin tenebrae] of the interior [his mind, the Latin word meaning "further within"], he proceeded to say, hath not been illumined by the wit of the septuagint [an early Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, from the Greek word for "seventy" because supposedly produced in 72 days by 70 scholars] nor so much as mentioned for the Orient [the resurrected Christ, from the Latin oriens, "rising," used in the Vulgate translation of Luke 1:78] from on high which brake hell's gates visited a darkness that was foraneous [uncertain meaning––Gifford defines it as "utterly remote," but without any attribution; the OED documents a 1656 use referring to a market-place or court, from the Roman forum, which seems inapplicable]. Assuefaction minorates atrocities [becoming accustomed to them reduces their impact] (as Tully [the great Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero] saith of his darling Stoics [the Greek and Roman philosophers whom Cicero studied]) and Hamlet his father [i.e., Hamlet's father, in an early modern form of the possessive] showeth the prince no blister of combustion [he declines to disclose the effects of Purgatorial fire to his son]."

Then Stephen sketches a schematic of human life in which darkness becomes representative of an underlying truth: "The adiaphane [Aristotle's Greek word for "non-transparent," pondered in Proteus] in the noon [middle] of life is an Egypt's plague [Exodus 7-12] which in the nights of prenativity and postmortemity [Latinate pre-birth and post-death] is their most proper ubi [Latin "where"] and quomodo [Latin "in what manner"]. And as the ends and ultimates of all things accord in some mean and measure with their inceptions and originals [the two Latinate pairs articulate an idea from Aristotle's Physics], that same multiplicit concordance [manifold correspondence] which leads forth growth from birth accomplishing by a retrogressive metamorphosis [development in reverse] that minishing [i.e., diminishing] and ablation [Latinate "carrying away" or "removing"] towards the final [end, from Latin finis] which is agreeable unto nature so is it with our subsolar being [life under the sun]."

Finally, Stephen meditates on the biblical life of Moses as a paradigm of the symmetry of birth and death: "The aged sisters [the three Fates of Greek mythology, and the midwives on Sandymount Strand] draw us into life: we wail, batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they bend. First, saved from water of old Nile, among bulrushes [sedges, perhaps papyrus stalks, made into a small boat in Exodus 2:3] a bed of fasciated [bound together, from Latin fascia, "band"] wattles [poles woven together with twigs or reeds]: at last the cavity [hole, from Latin cavitas, "hollowness"] of a mountain, an occulted [Latin occultus, "concealed"] sepulchre [Latin sepulcrum, burial vault] amid the conclamation [Latinate coinage, "great shouting together"] of the hillcat [perhaps a cougar, a.k.a. puma or "catamount"] and the ossifrage [bearded vulture, or lammergeier]. And as no man knows the ubicity [location, from ubi above] of his tumulus [Latin for burial mound] nor to what processes we shall thereby be ushered nor whether to Tophet [the Hebrew "place of burning" corpses and sacrificing infants, read typologically by Christians as an image of Hell] or to Edenville [Stephen's coinage for the earthly paradise in Proteus] in the like way is all hidden when we would backward see from what region of remoteness the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness."

In Nestor Stephen inverts a famous phrase from John's gospel to explore an anti-Christian metaphysics inspired by writers like Averroes, Moses Maimonidies, the pseudo-Dionysus, Henry Vaughan, and William Blake: "and in my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds"; "dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend." In Oxen of the Sun he returns to "This tenebrosity of the interior" via the style of Browne, who shares with fellow 17th century writer Vaughan an affinity for metaphysical conceits. Stephen says that tenebrosity is not "illumined" or even mentioned in the Bible, despite the fact that Christ, after his resurrection, descended into the "darkness" of Hell to rescue the virtuous souls of the Hebrew scriptures (the so-called "harrowing of hell"). The darkness of Purgatory, presumably similar, receives no better illumination in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

After the first two sentences Stephen turns from the ontology of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory to the existential psychology of human beings. In "the noon of life"––the "brightness" of this world evoked in Nestor––opacity ("The adiaphane") seems an affliction dreadful as those described in Exodus. But on either side of life's brightness are "nights." Life is a passage from darkness to darkness though a brief interval of light. (In the Ecclesiastical History Bede vividly articulated this view with an image of a bird flying through an open window into a lighted room and back out into darkness.) Nature forms us into complicated, capable beings, and then, since "the ends and ultimates of all things" correspond to "their inceptions and originals," it tears us down, unmaking what it has made. Mythical old women see us into life and then out of it. As babies they hide us in arks, and as corpses they put us in places where only wild animals hunting for meat may find us. None of us can know where we are going after death, any more than we can know where we came from before birth.

Half of one sentence has been omitted from this paraphrase, as it quotes directly from Browne, requires some contextual framing, and presents interpretive difficulty. As first noted by Thornton (Robert Janusko adds the observation that Joyce came across the words in Saintsbury's study of English prose styles), "Assuefaction minorates" reproduces two of Browne's strange coinages. Christian Morals warns against trusting in visual reminders like memento mori icons to keep one's thoughts focused on human mortality and divine beneficence: "Forget not how assuefaction unto any thing minorates the passion from it, how constant Objects loose their hints.... When Death's Heads on our Hands have no influence upon our Heads, and fleshless Cadavers abate not the exorbitances of the Flesh; when Crucifixes upon Men's Hearts suppress not their bad commotions, and his Image who was murdered for us with-holds not from Blood and Murder; Phylacteries prove but formalities" (3.10). Thornton also quotes a sentence from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations that may account for Stephen's remark about Tully's "darling Stoics": "anticipation...of the future mitigates the approach of evils whose coming one has long foreseen."

Many of Stephen's thoughts appear to have been inspired by one small section of the Religio Medici ("Religion of the Doctor") in which Browne reflects on the impossibility of predicting how long a human being may live. All lives may contain "sufficient oil" for the biblical seventy years, he writes, but "in some it gives no light past thirty," suggesting that "There is therefore a secret gloom or bottom of our days." God works darkly within the natural processes of birth, growth, and death: "There is therefore some other hand that twines the thread of life than that of nature: we are not only ignorant in antipathies and occult qualities; our ends are as obscure as our beginnings; the line of our days is drawn by night, and the various effects therein by a pencil that is invisible; wherein, though we confess our ignorance, I am sure we do not err if we say, it is the hand of God." Several of Stephen's ideas pick up on ideas in these sentences: the linking of human "ends" with "beginnings," the eternal presence of "gloom" or "night" within the light of life, and the myth of Fates spinning out and cutting the thread of an individual life.

In addition to the Christian Morals and Religio Medici, Joyce seems to have paid close attention to Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial. (The English in the title translates the Greek.) Prompted by the discovery of some four dozen Anglo-Saxon funerary urns in Norfolk, this impressive work surveys the many known ways in which human beings have disposed of their dead, before concluding in the magnificent final chapter that all such archaeological and anthropological knowledge is rendered superfluous by Christian belief in the soul's salvation.

Janusko observes that one sentence in the work's first chapter anticipates Stephen's linking of birth ("a bed of fasciated wattles") and death ("an occulted sepulchre"). Browne does it by associating the shape of the human uterus with a common type of urn: "the common form with necks was a proper figure, making our last bed like our first; nor much unlike the Urnes of our Nativity, while we lay in the nether part of the Earth, and inward vault of our Microcosme." Janusko notes too that Joyce took the word "fasciated" from a different passage in the first chapter which describes Jesus breaking the "fasciations and bands of death" in his Resurrection. By taking this word which Browne applies to death and using it to describe the boat that saved baby Moses, Joyce links birth and death in his own way, in "a conceit worthy of Browne himself" (65).

The intertextual connections do not end there. Stephen says that Moses was buried in an "occulted sepulchre" in the mountains, reflecting the biblical belief that "no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day" (Deuteronomy 34:6). Gifford notes that this burial is mentioned in the first chapter of Hydriotaphia. Two other details, the tumuli in which many ancient peoples interred important leaders, and the cremation implicit in "Tophet," also suggest awareness of Browne's subject matter. But, like Browne, Stephen is more interested in the life of the soul.

Gifford and Slote hear a reference to still another of Browne's works, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, two paragraphs later when Bloom tries to assure Stephen that thunder and lightning are nothing but "the discharge of fluid from the thunderhead." Browne's scientific thinking probably does figure here, but it hardly justifies Slote's opinion that his prose style lingers for two more paragraphs after the "tenebrosity" sentences. The writing in these later paragraphs is utterly dissimilar. Stylistic influence must be sought in other sources.