Fumerton 1991

Fumerton, Patricia Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and Practice of Social Ornament. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Introduction, A Still Life: Clock, Jewel, Orange

"My focuse is the trivial selfhood of the aristocracy in the English Renaissance: a sense of self, as we will see, that was supported and, indeed, constituted by bric-a-brac worlds of decorations, gifts, foodstuffs, small entertainments, and other particles of cultural wealth and show." (1)

"to study history as a broken confection or disjointed pile" (1)

"the past aestheticized itself. It was precisely the broken, disconnected, and 'detached' quality of historical fact that enabled the Renaissance to achieve an aesthetic understanding of itself as cultural artifact" (2)

"what would a total, wholly representative, or nonfragmentary reading of history and/or literature look like?" (11) -- impossible, undesirable

"In sum, that part of us that hearkens back to a continuous historical universe wishes to say, 'The King is dead; long live the King.' But continuity, I would argue, is not history as Charles lived it or as our own scholarship has most recently tried to understand it in breaking with traditional intellectual history. As epitomized in my story of Charles's life and death, history can also be perceived as truncation. AS every moment, history is the interregnum felt within the continuum." (12)

"it is not the case that the breakaway moments in history that have always been the great motivators of new historical methods inhere only in such loud political events as interregnum or civil war. Rather, the moment of fragmentary history I seek to elucidate saturates cultural and literary history even in its quietest and smallest events.

"history as truncation or fissure" (13)

"I create a mosaic or collage of broken history from passages and events that are often themselves about the broken, the detached, or the trivial. And I use my collage to model history as brokenness rather than to reach back to some impossibly whole scene in the background." (18)

"Fragments are to a unified sense of self, we may say, as the peripheral is to the central. What is the Renaissance self in these terms? My answer is that it is the identity whose central awareness is that of the peripheral. Like the strands of Charles's hair on a book cover, the fragmentary history of the aristocratic subject is not so much a text within as a weaving outside. It is a sense of identity estranged from the center." (18)

"Layer within layer, then: the artifacts and ornaments that encrust the surface of history are at once peripheral and strangely central. As we will see, the Renaissance aristocrat's identity was suspended within intricate and endless regressions of artifacts (rooms in a house, miniatures, jewels, poems, masques, even meals at a banquet) each of which was pivotal precisely to the extent that it was marginal." (21)

"In the aristocratic context, the peripheral was also that which was decorative. Strangely fragmentary and peripheral history, I suggest, is finally as trivial as the history of ornament. Or rather, history in the view I offer is ornament -- a notion I offer for the express purpose of taking us from historical to aesthetic experience." (21)

"Decoration, in other words, allegorizes or alludes to a world of cultural value that could not otherwise be represented except by means of oblique, allusive adornment. ... the 'meaningfulness' of an experiencing subject whose total 'meaning' is embeddedness in a culture inexpressible except in token fragments." (22)

"The ornamental urge, in sum, is one with the historical urge: the drive to be part of the cultural whole (if only a part as fragmentary and peripheral as a link in a jeweled necklace). That urge is especially marked in the plethora of trivial ornaments surrounding the aristocracy of the English Renaissance. Whenever we see a piece of such ornament -- a jewel, an epic simile, any peripheral fact or artifact that merely 'adorns' the center -- behind it lies the historical. There is no such thing, in other words, as 'pure' ornament. Pure ornament, pure aestheticism, always hangs around the bespangled neck of history; and, reciprocally, history never appears naked of ornamentation." (22)

"To put the issue succinctly: I suggest that art that seeks to purify and coserve is not so much the opposite as the uncanny double of the destructive truncating, chopping, and fragmenting of history." (24)

"It is through a critical understanding of aestheticism that we can beign to think about Renaissance subjectivity -- a self like a mutifaceted jewel in an ornamental setting." (26)

"The Elizabethan and Jacobean aristocracy occupied the uneasy interface between the historical and the aesthetic, the central and the peripheral, the unifeid and the fragmentary. They lived the practice of social ornament." (26)

"By studying such fancy ornamental gifts as the miniatures of Nicholas HIlliard and the sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney, I will argue that the subjectivity that formed within the collective cosmos of Elizabethan cultural exchange was deeply divided between public and private sensibilities. It wished at once to exist in exchange with others and to bar all exchange capable of unlocking its closed miniature or sonnet of meaning -- an experience of self-splitting, as we will see, both like and crucially unlike our modern sense of self." (27)

"Public and private selves were both faceds for a detached particle of nothingness, a truly alien or existentially alienated self, lurking within." (28)