‘Child of Time’: Bacon’s Uses of Self-representation

Abstract

In 1620 Francis Bacon published his Instauratio Magna or the Great Instauration (or Renewal). Bacon’s massive Latin text was to be one more — for him, the climax — of the series of ‘recoveries’ (the term with which the period viewed these phenomena) that had marked the English Renaissance from the time of Henry VIII — ‘recoveries’ that were, in point of fact, more often breaks with the past. What is strange is that, in the text of this ostensibly philosophical instauration. Bacon injects a series of self-revelations. More strangely, these subjective discourses may appear staged in the midst of scientific definitions and revolutionary proposals, but their dialectical presence defines, in fact, the narrative or the flow of argument Bacon is presenting. That is, Bacon’s objective text proceeds not from a supra-historical logic (whether Pythagorean or Stoic, Thomist or Calvinist) but from a self in the midst of its own terrifying history. As though to make this point as clear as possible for his reader. Bacon begins his text with the bold capitals and special printer’s type and setting that reveal an author or, more strictly speaking, a narrator almost unbelievably self-centred: ‘FRANCIS OF VERULAM / Reasoned Thus With Himself, / And Judged It To Be For The Interest Of The Present and Future Generations That They Should Be Made Acquainted With His Thoughts.’ Deliberately echoing Julius Caesar’s autobiographical Gallic histories, the Latin is even more solipsistic: ‘SIC COGITAVIT; / TALEMQUE APUD SE RATIONEM INSTITUIT / quam viventibus et posteris notam fieri ipsorum interesse putavit.’¹ What is Bacon doing here, taking on not only Julius Caesar’s third-person autobiography but the role of self-ordained prophet judging time?