What is wonder, anyway?

To begin to answer the question I posed at the end of the sublime post (yes, I mean "sublime post" in both ways), I turn to Peter Platt’s article, “‘Not before Either Known or Dreamt of’: Francesco Patrizi and the Power of Wonder in Renaissance Poetics.” This excellent article gives us a much-needed connection between Longinus and Renaissance thought. Longinus just wasn’t around much during the Renaissance, particularly not in England. Platt’s discussion of Patrizi shows us that Longinus did indeed lurk on the margins, especially in discussions of wonder.

Platt argues that Patrizi’s main influence in his aesthetic theory was Longinus, working against the grain of the hegemony of Aristotleian admiration. Platt cites Patrizi’s discussion of wonder in poetry: “there must be incredible things if the marvelous is to be known from them, because the credible cannot bring about the marvelous…all poetry must have as its object the incredible because this is the true foundation of of the marvelous, which must in such wise be the principal object of every poem.” So the basis of all poetry, according to Patrizi, must be wonder. This wonder is “neither reason, nor emotion, but separate from them both and in the business of communicating between them both; and that, placed on the boundary between the two, it is able to spread and flow, through its movement, swiftly up to the regions of reason and down to those of emotion…the power of wonder is almost an Euripos [violent current]…,the tide running back and forth from reason to emotion.”

This very exciting description of wonder builds upon the Longinian sublime, which is described as a lightning bolt scattering everything; here, wonder is an electric current running between opposite poles. This demonstrates the liminality, contingency, and force of wonder. While this description tells us little about wonder is, it usefully describes for us what it is not: reason OR emotion. So, although I don’t get the answer to my question (What is wonder?), I am beginning to get a sense of how the sublime made its way into the Renaissance as wonder. Platt argues that Patrizi valorizes what Aristotelians feared: wonder as a force that can, and perhaps ought, to destabilize and diminish reason. While Patrizi is certainly in the minority, Platt demonstrates that his work did indeed have some impact, particularly on humanist thinking.

On a related note, it seems to me, and I want to discuss this further when I get to Shakespeare and even early modern poetry that with the exception of Patrizi and those he influenced, early modern practice was ahead of its aesthetic theory; the aesthetics of wonder prefigure the shift to or at least the tension between Longinian and Aristotleian theories of art.