Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe. by Ian WattReview by: Sara EatonThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 530-532Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2543467 .

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530 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVIII / 2 (1997)

ences from other lands or cultures, especially the effects of the Reformation upon England, the strength of the local schools, and changes in music functions caused by the assumption of the throne by Edward, and then Mary, after the death of HenryVIII.The best sources for such subjects lie in the two chapters by Alison Wray on the sound of Latin before and after the Reformation.jane Flynn's chapter on the education of boy choristers dwells mostly on musical matters, but she touches upon some other subjects as well. On the whole, the book offers a variety of topics treated in great detail by several distinguished musicologists. I rec- ommend that it be seriously considered for purchase by musical scholars of the period and their university libraries.

Philip Jackson .......... Ball State University

Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robin- son Crusoe. IanWatt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 293 pp.

$27.95.

In the preface to this book, Ian Watt indicates that "this book is essentially an amateur's study, and it is addressed not to the scholar but to the general reader."The book also is a post- humous publication. Watt was evidently working on the final revisions of the manuscript when he became ill and died; Linda Bree is credited by the press with editing the now pub- lished manuscript.While this book has been favorably reviewed elsewhere, I assume by gen- eral readers addressing more of the same, early modern scholars unfortunately will find this "an amateur's study," as Watt indicated in the preface.

Watt's overall project for this book was to trace how the figures of Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Crusoe are textually transformed in subsequent rewritings of their stories from their first appearances in print. These transformations provide Watt with a history of "modern individualism" beginning in 1587, with the publication ofJohann Spies'Faustbuch, and ending in 1969, with MichelTournier's Friday, or The Other Island, as well as an argument for his chosen figures' status as representative myths of individualism in the Western world. He traces Faust's prepublication history in Germany, the translation of Spies' book in English, and its subsequent retreatments by Marlowe, Goethe, and Thomas Mann. Quixote, widely translated in the seventeenth century, is rewritten by a number of primarily Roman- tic writers in the eighteenth, including Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote in 1752, and reappears in Pushkins'Yevgeni Onegin, Dostoevsky's The Idiot, and Graham Greene's Monsieur Quixote. Don Juan, originally the hero ofTirso's play, El Burlador, reappears in Moliere's play, Mozart's opera, Byron's poem, Zorilla's play in 1844, and, played by John Barrymore, in one of the first "talkies." Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, more alluded to than rewritten by Rousseau and Marx, does inspire Johann Campe's Nouveau Crusoe and Johann Wyss' Suwss Family Rob- inson (subsequently immortalized in the Disney film by the same name).

Watt is proficient in demonstrating that Faust, Quixote, Don Juan, and Crusoe are returned to again and again by Western authors who revise the original stories to suit their own purposes and times. Providing critical readings of these works along the way, he also takes some unusual, frequently interesting, byways in his discussions of the influence of these texts on other thinkers, finding in Goethe, for example, Johann Herder's understandings of myth, and in Marx's Das Kapital, revisions of Crusoe. There is no doubt that Watt was an accomplished, often brilliant teacher and scholar in his lifetime; the general reader may find scintillating the book's erudition displayed in and through readings of possibly familiar works.

Academic readers are going to find this book more frustrating in its purposes and conclu- sions. As Mephistopheles might say, "the devil's in the details."Watt seems to have completed

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Book Reviews 531

his research for the book in the early 1980s at best. References to scholarship after that are minimal.While it may have been expeditious to ignore the shifting intellectual currents of the last fifteen years while he wrote (Foucault is quoted as an example of "excessive abstrac- tion," for example), these omissions have important repercussions for his arguments about the transmission of myths and "modern" individualism. A 1969 Malinowski Memorial Lec- ture by Percy Cohen serves to focus his discussion of secular myths, along with essays by Levi-Strauss and others in an anthology published in 1965. Referring to Bakhtin or subse- quent work by Clifford Geertz and his followers would have complicated his definition about the social purposes of myth, but Watt finally argues that his four figures are mythic because most readers respond as if they had actually lived. The New Cambridge Modern History's The Counter-Reformation and Price Revolution 1559-1610(1968; rpt. 1971), Dickens' The Counter-Reformation (1968), and Bossy's The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (1968) pro- vide the background for an extended discussion of the intellectual environment in the six- teenth century-and early modern scholars will be surprised to see Marlowe's world referred to as Counter-Reformation England. The most recent source buttressing a long discussion of witchcraft, a phenomenon largely Luther's fault "for having created a void between God and man," according to Watt, is Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic (1973).

I focus on works familiar to readers of this journal here, but the list could go on. There also are bibliographic oddities as well as omissions: the chapter on El Burlador, a Spanish text Watt reads in translation, for example, has a long footnote glossing "the more modern Chris- tian and universalist conception embodied in the word truth."Without questioning his asser- tion about more modern universals, the footnote cites the OED's definitions of "truth's" meanings in fourteenth century England. A discussion of how Faust, Quixote, and Crusoe emphasize close relationships between men is untroubled by Eve Sedgewick's analysis of Western literature's homosocial components. Moreover, "it is a striking fact that there is no female in the Western pantheon of myth.".

More serious than topical failures to account for current scholarship is Watt's reliance on Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and social scientists' definitions of indi- viduality confronting community for framing his own theory of what constitutes the modern individual of his title. The Renaissance Man Burckhardt claimed emerged in the fourteenth century for Watt is typified in the original Faust, Don Juan, and Quixote, while Crusoe is a protocapitalist revision of the Puritan ethic. As examples of a nascent, individu- alistic, and single culture, they are, Watt insists, modern, here defined as committed to real- izing personal goals. Reflecting deeply ambivalent desires of their original authors for per- sonal success, the four also are unsuccessful in their quests for autonomous action in their original versions. The Romantics shift the emphasis in these stories from failure at the end to the heroics of the quest itself, which, Watt argues, is how we still rewrite and read these works.

Watt constructs an "historicized" and "universal" development of the Western individual from these texts, one basically unchallenged by questions about the history and nature of subjectivity currently being discussed in the academy. ForWatt, since the 1580s, the appella- tion "modern" applies. Don Juan's lack of self-reflection in El Burlador, Faust's failures to rec- ognize his self-degradation, Sancho Panza's final insistence on the reality of Quixote's dream- world, Crusoe's accounting of his consciousness through his possessions are noted but attrib- uted to authorial intentions and failures of personalities, not in discrete cultural and historical differences inscribed within the works.

The "modern" also fails him. In the latter half of the book, which is less tightly argued than the first halfWatt turns to a critique of the twentieth century, one he perceives as dom-

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532 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVIII / 2 (1997)

inated by the mass media and a "new illiteracy." Agreeing with Christopher Lasch's critique in The Culture of Narcissism (1979),Watt suggests that the "perversions of modern individual- ism" were first unleashed in his four mythical figures and concludes: "I must confess that a dialogue from King Lear arose unbidden out of my memory. Kent asks Edgar, 'Is this the promis'd end?' Edgar sadly answers,'Or image of that horror?"'

Students and friends of Ian Watt may delight in the kind of personal reflections frequent- ing the last half of this book.They can be amusing; for example, after confessing that he has little sympathy for Goethe, Watt suggests that in his Faust "the only operative principle of value is endless motion, a quality it shares with modern physics, the Protestant ethic,jogging, and the Marquis de Sade." Much that is right and wrong with this book is reflected in this sentence. I can appreciate the consolation this authorial voice must offer to those who mourn him. However, in this time of tight library budgets, the book's shortcomings are seri- ous, and I cannot recommend it for purchase by any but those compelled to own a copy of every book Ian Watt wrote.

Sara Eaton .......... North Central College

Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Quentin Skinner. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, xvi + 477 pp. $49.95.

This book is nominally about how Thomas Hobbes changed his mind about the value of rhetoric. It turns out to be about the dominant tradition of English philosophizing. More, it is distinctly two books in one. All this suggests a very big book, worth the thirty years' wait since Quentin Skinner began to publish about Hobbes. Skinner's presentation should also finally silence those critics who have steadily faulted him for not having applied the method he painstakingly worked out at the beginning of his career. Skinner's Hobbes is unquestion- ably set in context.

That context looks considerably different than it once would have even in Skinner's hands. Concepts still matter, but they are now not "substantive" concepts-the meaning of commonwealth, or of political obligation, for example-as much as they are the concepts behind those concepts, and above all, those of style. Skinner is less concerned about what Hobbes had to say, than with how he said it. While many critics have used attention to Hobbes's rhetoric as yet another stick with which to dismiss his ideas, Skinner manages to treat both style and substance, in a nuanced fashion.

The first half of the book is a primer in the history of Renaissance, mainly English, rhet- oric.While this section is not quite as innovative as Skinner claims, there is indeed no single treatment as comprehensive as his. Basing himself wherever possible on Hobbes's translation of Aristotle's Rhetoric, Skinner goes back to the classical rhetoricians and exhaustively dem- onstrates how their sixteenth-century epigoni faithfully reproduced their prescriptions. As the attention to Aristotle indicates, Skinner's work will contribute to the revaluation of the Stagirite's role in Renaissance rhetoric, in the same way as that of Skinner's friend and former collaborator Charles Schmitt did to Aristotle's place in Renaissance philosophy. Some of the treatment becomes a little too detailed and technical, but even here Skinner's approach gives an excellent sense of how seriously the rhetoricans took their science. There might perhaps have been a little more engagement with literary theoretical work on rhetoric, but there is already a great deal here, and Skinner at least acknowledges the value of what literary critics have done.

The concept of rhetoric most central to Skinner's case is ornatus, or the deployment of figures and tropes.When Hobbes changed his mind about rhetoric, ornatus lay at the heart of

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