Elizabeth D. Harvey and Timothy M. Harrison. John Donne’s Physics. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2024. vii + 242 pp. ISBN 9780226833514. $30.00 paperback.

While writing this review of Elizabeth D. Harvey and Timothy M. Harrison’s remarkable and deeply engaging new book, John Donne’s Physics, the New York Times ran an obituary detailing the life of one Dr. Peter Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist who specialized in near-death experiences and who, over the course of his career, collected thousands of accounts from people “who believed they had survived an encounter with death.” Dr. Fenwick’s theory that “consciousness existed beyond physical death,” was and remains a highly controversial one in the field of neuroscience, where the line between the brain and the mind, or consciousness tethered to or arising from the physical body, is being constantly contested, erased, and re-drawn, with subjective first-person accounts often crashing up against the boundaries of established scientific knowledge.¹ As Harvey and Harrison’s wide-ranging study explores, this debate has been raging for millennia, and one of the most original contributions to it must be John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.

The Devotions, a first-person prose work recounting the period of Donne’s near-fatal illness in November 1623, contains some of Donne’s best-known lines and images, and is constantly invoked as a key intertext in scholarship on Donne’s writing and thought. However, few studies have given the entire Devotions the rich and sustained attention that John Donne’s Physics does here. John Donne’s Physics offers a deeply researched and sensitive analysis of the Devotions’ discourses on the nature of consciousness, the intertwining of the material and spiritual self, Donne’s anxious desire to be “alive to his dying” (xvii), and the phenomenological discoveries made in his sickness. But even more, Harvey and Harrison work to reveal the mechanisms of Donne’s thinking in the Devotions. In particular, they focus on Donne’s technique of engaging with productively unstable medical, philosophical, literary, theological, and scientific discourses of early modern England to help carry his intellectual and imaginative investigations with him into and beyond the edge of death. In this way, John Donne’s Physics not only celebrates the literary richness and complexity of the Devotions as an exploration of textual embodiment and phenomenal revelation, but also makes a compelling case for the epistemological inventiveness of the experimental prose forms Donne builds in this text to think with and through his own sick and dying body.

Harvey and Harrison argue that the Devotions should be read, not as a theological treatise, nor a purely personal account of one man’s near-death experience, but as an imaginative literary text, which uses the same formal and generic techniques familiar to readers of Donne’s poetry: such a method serves to discover connections and raise contentions about the nature of the embodied self and that self’s positional relationship to both human communities and divine realities. Harvey and Harrison portray the Devotions as a “meditative net” (xix), in which Donne catches up all his infamously diverse intellectual appetites in the service of a series of profound engagements with his body, his soul, time, change, and God, as manifested in and through the period of his illness. In doing so, as Harvey and Harrison propose, Donne explores the intersections of the “physic” and “physick” pun on which the book’s title plays, engaging with how the physics of space, time, and motion are experienced and channeled through the subjective perceptions of a sick and suffering living body: a body being treated by physicians and interpreted through divergent and shifting medical, philosophical, and scientific discourses of embodiment, health, disease, and death.

Appropriately, given that one of Harvey and Harrison’s topics is the interwoven structure of the Devotions, their own book deliberately imitates the Devotions’ referential and recursive formal methods. While each chapter functions as a strong individual study of a particular aspect of their core text, the book’s fullest insights are most evident when reading the chapters progressively and retrospectively, enabling one to appreciate the dense webs of association and concordance drawn out of Donne’s Devotions and reflexively threaded throughout its own analysis. As Harvey and Harrison lay out in the book’s excellent Introduction, “Threshold Physics,” they have organized their book in accordance with the tripartite structure they see underpinning the Devotions. While Donne divided the text into twenty-three stations, with each station made of three parts (meditation, expostulation, prayer), Harrison and Harvey propose that this basic framework contains within it an additional structure made up of three distinguishable and intersecting axes. These are the temporal narrative of his illness (horizonal axis); the interaction between each station’s meditation, expostulation, and prayer (vertical axis); and, most originally, the structural “reflexive axis,” which sees the twelfth station as a pivot-point when the text “folds back on itself” and divides the stations of the Devotions into reflective halves of mirrored pairs.

This intricate plan is fully unpacked in the book’s own central pivot-point (chapter three), but first, chapters one and two establish the examination of the horizontal axis that is the foundation of the whole Devotions: Donne himself, a sick man, lying flat in his bed. Chapter one, “Donne’s Experience,” traces out how Donne attempts to capture, define, and analyze his own experience of illness, and his own theory of experience, by drawing on long-standing philosophical debates about the nature of time, perception, and memory, as well as on modern models of autobiography, in particular those of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais. Chapter two, “The Time of the Body,” continues to analyze Donne’s exploration of his embodied self, arguing that in the Devotions Donne attempts to represent “a first-person physics of time,” which Harvey and Harrison evocatively term “the time of the body” (55). Harvey and Harrison here argue that the Devotions draws on Donne’s linguistic techniques, more commonly associated with his lyric poetry, of manipulating spatial and temporal dimensionality in an attempt to represent the “felt time” of his illness in writing. Their account of how Donne rises to the all-but-impossible challenge of capturing and rendering successive in words the “phenomenal thickness of what, in the human body, seems instantaneous” (79) illuminates the Devotions’ formal dependence on the textual nuances that, through deixis and dilation, shape his and the reader’s experience of space and time. Such a focus prepares the way for chapter three’s more panoramic study of the text’s structural and generic experiments.

Like Donne himself, the third chapter, “Changing Genres,” refuses to be intimidated by formal complexity. Indeed, this chapter persuasively contends that the Devotions celebrates and emphasizes its own structural excesses to better articulate the “dialectical relationship between the endless flux of eternal change and the unchanging stability of […] God” (87). In order to “manage” this change, and make it legible in prose, Harrison and Harvey argue that Donne draws on a plethora of generic techniques that he has deployed in other works. As they demonstrate, these include the temporal immediacy and sensitivity of lyric and epistle forms as well as the “progress,” another time-centric structure explored in Donne’s Metempsychosis and the Anniversaries (poems that recur throughout the book as important intertexts for the Devotions). In this engrossing chapter, which reaches from the nuances of first-person pronouns to the sweeping progression of all of mutable creations, Harvey and Harrison consistently show Donne returning to his embodied experience of dying. He is seen anxiously attempting to probe, record, and understand the terrifying effects of time and change in and upon himself, day to day and hour to hour, striving to contextualize his singular experience of lying sick in bed through the kaleidoscopic discourses of multiple epistemological frameworks and human communities. In this way, chapter three works as John Donne’s Physics own reflexive anchor, successfully bridging the first and final sections of the book.

Having established this overarching framework, the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters demonstrate the capacity for intellectual and epistemological diversity that this insistently visible structure enables, while also reflexively returning to themes and topics established in the earlier sections. Chapter four, “The History of Words,” examines Donne’s use of technical diction from the many knowledge systems – ancient, new, evolving, and exploding – available to him in 1623 London. Rather than trying to determine Donne’s “actual” beliefs or intellectual commitments (if any) regarding these competing systems, Harrison and Harvey instead emphasize Donne’s instrumental approach to the metaphorical richness of their technical diction, and persuasively demonstrate how Donne appropriates epistemic discourses to provide fuel for his own poetic invention and imagination. Chapter five, “The Physician Calls,” provides an extended case in point for this argument, as it explores Donne’s relationship with the group of physicians who attended him in his illness, as well as the various medical systems and theories that these physicians drew on in their attempt to treat him. In this fascinating chapter, Harvey and Harrison explore the medical case history as another literary genre Donne draws on in Devotions, exploring the many concordances between Donne’s Devotions and both ancient and innovative medical theories under debate in 1623. In particular, they trace the influence of theories dealing with the heart, the soul, and the diagnostic tools of consultation and conference, all of which Donne engages with while still remaining resolutely “doctrinally promiscuous and medically heterodox” (150): a technique that preserves his imaginative prerogative to move between, experiment with, and link together disparate and even discordant epistemic systems.

Finally, chapter six, “Translating the Soul,” returns to a core theme of the whole book: Donne’s obsession with how his soul and body is knit together to form his self, and what passages of will, choice, and surrender he must undertake to untie those knots as he prepares to move from dying to death. Harrison and Harvey trace out the various aspects of Donne’s meditations on this topic through the poignant intersections of voluntary and involuntary gesture, bodily posture, the material text, and God, exploring in particular the process through which the figure of parentheses in Devotions becomes “the celestial hands that cradle Donne in his sickness” (185). Drawing on Donne’s textual exploitation of the “semiotics of gesture” (185), this chapter contains a beautifully alert and evocative analysis of the liminalities that govern the Devotions – the thresholds and edge spaces of sickness (between life and death), insomnia (between sleep and wakefulness), and the suspension between body and soul, as the dying reach out, and turn away from, the final gap between themselves and God. In the “Coda,” Harvey and Harrison turn from Donne imagining himself dying to Donne imagining his death, examining Donne’s marble effigy – a monument that he famously posed for and helped to design before his death – as one more gesture of connection between his material and textual afterlife, and the generations of humanity that live on after him.

In their joint Acknowledgements section, Harvey and Harrison write that they have been working on this project for over fourteen years, and this investment in time, thinking, and collaborative discovery shines throughout in all the best possible ways. The brief outlines of the above chapters can only contain a fraction of the many insights and discoveries of this excellent book. One of Harvey and Harrison’s favorite descriptors of Donne’s language in Devotions is “generative,” in the sense that, on a textual and structural level, it is constantly growing and gesturing beyond its own boundaries towards the final frontiers of knowledge and being. John Donne’s Physics also possesses this dynamic generative quality. It is a book that encourages and inspires the same kind of imaginative daring and intellectual creativity that it reveals in Donne and contains within itself. All students of Donne will want to have it at hand when they return to Donne’s account of his near-death experience in November 1623, but I am confident that John Donne’s Physics will not only continue to reveal new aspects of the Devotions, but also show us new ways of reading and thinking with and through all of Donne’s work.

Claire Falck

Rowan University