Knowingness and Eros: Andrew Marvell’s ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’

This essay argues that Andrew Marvell's ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’ should be read as a critique and an evasion of knowingness – of the feeling of contented possession that stands in for knowledge and so renders thinking superfluous. The poem suggests that sexuality is a domain of human experience from which ideologies of self-evidence draw affective strength. Marvell holds up for comparison two ignominious experiences of knowing incuriosity: the conventionalized version of sexual pleasure in which desire is simply and conclusively gratified and the form of pseudo-understanding in which you seem to discover what in fact you presuppose. On the basis of Marvell's diagnosis and rejection of a culture of incuriosity, he casts a suspicious gaze on his own practice of political satire, which depends on thoughtless sexualization. Finally, Marvell seeks an escape from the realm of self-evidence in an experience of hyperbolic naïveté in which everything everyone assumes – about, in the first place, sexuality, but also about everything else – melts into air.