Wordsworth's Revolution in Poetic Language
by Keith Hanley
[Hanley, Keith. "Wordsworth's Revolution
in Poetic Language." Romanticism On the Net 9 (February 1998)
<http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/revolutionLB.html>]
My title intends to link the experimental project of Lyrical Ballads
, as advertised and commenced in 1798, with Julia
Kristeva's 1974 doctoral thesis, La Révolution du langage poétique,
(1) for two reasons: first because Wordsworth's theory
and practice, though ultimately very different, can nevertheless be
helpfully reviewed as historically prefigurative of the new
'signifying practice' that Kristeva argues was to be fully realised
by avant-garde writers in the course of the nineteenth century;
and second because Kristeva's engagement in the psychology of language
draws out and illuminates Wordsworth's own most
self-characterising preoccupation in attempting to invent a modern
literary discourse in which to accommodate the revolutionary
knowledge of his time.
As Michael Mason points out, 'Lyrical Ballads was not a single phenomenon
but a sequence of four editions spread over
seven years; its appearance in English literature was not a historical
moment but a sequence of moments -- 1798, 1800, 1802,
1805.' (2) Furthermore, instead of seeing Lyrical Ballads as generically
or otherwise distinct from Wordsworth's major
preoccupation of the same time--the invention of a new poetic language
for 'the first & finest philosophical poem', (3) The
Recluse or Views of Nature, Man, and Society (towards which he wrote
1,300 lines from November 1797 to the beginning
of March 1798 when most of his contributions for the volume were written)--I
view them as in important respects part of one
comprehensive project. In that way, it might be argued that Lyrical
Ballads, 1798, was in effect the first distraction
from/substitution for The Recluse project, and that the second edition
moved in what was to become the defining direction of
oeuvre for opus . (4) Accordingly I see the critical prefaces, 1798-1802,
as treating issues that increasingly extend beyond the
bounds of the successive volumes under the same title that were his
only book publications over those years, even to the point
of sometimes seeming misapplied to the volumes themselves, to address
core problems in Wordsworth's continuous writing. (5)
The more significant dates for the full articulation of a new theory
of poetic language I take to be 1800, by which date
Wordsworth had for certain become the main author and theoriser, and
1802, with the important evolutions of his thought in
substantial additions.
I end by examining some thematic intertextualities between Lyrical Ballads
and Joanna Baillie's A Series of Plays: in which it
is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind; each passion
being the subject of a tragedy and a comedy ,
1798: (6) in particular, between the 1798 Advertisement and 1800 Preface
and her Introductory Discourse, and between
'There was a boy' (the poem through which The Recluse project actually
entered the Lyrical Ballads volumes) and her tragedy
De Monfort , in which Wordsworth encountered a dramatisation of the
singular process of his own language-acquisition that I
argue controlled both his analysis and practice of poetic language.
-1-
Kristeva's proposition is that 'Literature has always been the most
explicit realization of the signifying subject's condition', but
that historically it was 'in the first half of the nineteenth century,
that the dialectical condition of the subject was made explicit,
beginning in France with the work of Nerval, but particularly with
Lautréamont and Mallarmé.' (RPL, 82) Her account of
French literary history is tied to a wider social history of discourse
in France that literature offered to unravel, but though
occasionally she suggests that similar characteristics of 'the plural,
heterogeneous, and contradictory process of signification
encompassing the flow of drives, material discontinuity, political
struggle, and the pulverization of language' have belonged to the
poetic language of other 'revolutionary periods' (RPL, 88), she alludes
only passingly to the effects of (the reactionary aftermath
of) the French Revolution:
. . . starting with the Renaissance and the
brief Romantic celebration of the sacrifices made in the French
Revolution, poetry became mere rhetoric, linguistic
formalism, a fetishization . . . The established bourgeois regime
had been consuming this kind of poetry since
the Restoration and especially during the Second Empire which
began in 1852, reducing it to a decorative
uselessness that challenged none of the subjects of its time.
The problem, then, was one of finding practices
of expenditure capable of confronting the machine, colonial
expansion, banks, science, parliament--those
positions of mastery that conceal their violence and pretend to be
mere neutral legality. (RPL, 83)
By the end of the century, she maintains, poetic language had changed
'precisely because it became a practice involving the
subject's dialectical state in language. As such, this transformation
inaugurates a new period in what has been called literature:
the end of poetry as delirium, which is contemporaneous with its inseparable
counterpart--literature as an attempted submission
to the logical order. In the experience of a Joyce or a Bataille, for
example, literature moves beyond madness and realism in a
leap that maintains both "delirium' and "logic".' (RPL, 82)
For Kristeva, the space in which the presymbolic maternal law obtains,
which she calls the 'semiotic chora' after the
unorganised signifying process of gesture, sound and rhythm (the 'semiotic'
itself) which takes place there, will continue to be
present as the irrepressible materiality, or signifying substance within
the Symbolic order. The revolution in poetic language
entailed the recovery of rudimentary operations of subjectivity that
had become distorted:
Recovering the subject's vehemence required
a descent into the most archaic stage of his positing, one
contemporaneous with the positing of social
order; it required a descent into the structural positing of the thetic
[the inaugural break] in language so that
violence, surging up through the phonetic, syntactic, and logical orders,
could reach the symbolic order and the technical
ideologies that had been built over this violence to ignore or
repress it. To penetrate the era, poetry had
to disturb the logic that dominated the social order and do so through
that logic itself, by assuming and unravelling
its position, its syntheses, and hence the ideologies it controls. (RPL,
83)
Semiotic drive, then, continues in dialectic with symbolic elements
of stasis in the Symbolic to produce signification, and it is the
untrammelled expression of maternal materiality inside the word of
the father, on the border between what is constructed as
nature and culture proper, that typifies the new language of poetry.
It is revolutionary not only in being new, but because it also
introduces a radical interrogation of ideological and discursive formations
on the basis of the constitution of language itself: 'In
confronting the world of discourse in its constitutive laws, poetry
ceased being poetry and opened a gap in every order where
the dialectical experience of the subject in the signifying process
might begin.' (RPL, 84) (7)
My own related argument here situates Wordsworth's expanding and intensifying
interest in the psychology of language from the
later 1790s in the context of linguistic revolution, in line with those
historians of the semiotics of the French Revolution who have
viewed it as a 'linguistic event', (8) maintaining that the crisis
of political representation formulated by Rousseau's 'social
contract' led to the generation of new symbols to replace the charisma
of kingship. In the process of transference of power, as
Lynn Hunt writes, 'charisma came most concretely to be located in words'.
(9) But, though language gains a new power of
replacement, it nevertheless carries an unavoidable sense of something
having been lost, and the sense of loss and gain in
language deepened. Wordsworth's linguistic self-consciousness became
restorative in this way, but besides, even more than the
effecting of a political substitution, he became absorbed by a more
radical consideration of the incapacity of language
adequately to account for itself:
Hard task to analyse a soul, in which,
Not only general habits and desires,
But each most obvious and particular thought,
Not in a mystical and idle sense,
But in the words of reason deeply weigh'd,
Hath no beginning. (10)
His writing fully participates in the modern conscious use and control
of language that was entailed in this shift and that made
language what Michel Foucault calls a 'philological object':
From the nineteenth century, language began
to fold upon itself, to acquire its own particular density, to deploy a
history, an objectivity, and laws of its own.
It became one object of knowledge among others, on the same level
as living beings, wealth and value, and the
history of events and men. (11)
Foucault's account of the contemporaneous emergence of 'literature'
as one compensation for the 'demotion' (OOT, 296) of
language to object status heralds Kristeva's version of poetic power:
'Literature is the contestation of philology . . . it leads
language back from grammar to the naked power of speech, and there
it encounters the untamed, imperious being of words.'
(OOT, 300) But while Foucault describes this opposing modality as engaged
in a similar reflexive preoccupation with its own
special way of being, his rendering of it proposes an immanent self-satisfaction
in '[re-apprehending] the essence of all literature'
that stops short of providing any account of Romantic alienation, its
fascination with self-origins and its specific probing of the
constitution of 'a writing subjectivity':
[Literature] breaks with the whole definition
of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and
becomes merely a manifestation of a language
which has no other law than that of affirming--in opposition to all
other forms of discourse--its own precipitous
existence; and so there is nothing for it to do but to curve back in a
perpetual curve upon itself, as if its discourse
could have no other content than the expression of its own form; it
addresses itself to itself as a writing subjectivity,
or seeks to re-apprehend the essence of all literature in the
movement that brought it into being; and thus
all its threads converge upon the finest of points--singular,
instantaneous, and yet absolutely universal--upon
the simple act of writing. (OOT, 300)
Susan Wolfson has demonstrated the importance of the interrogative mode
in Lyrical Ballads and its relevance to the origin of
autobiography in The Prelude . (12) Certainly the involution of much
English Romantic literature encompasses a questioning by
and of the 'writing subjectivity' which is most markedly registered
in the first words of the sequence that was to evolve into The
Prelude : 'was it for this [?]' (P, 487, 1), where, for want of an
antecedent, the demonstrative most radically refers to the act
and product of writing itself. Wordsworth's literary language is interested
in more than neutral extra-discursivity: like Kristeva's
theorised language it is interested in 'confronting the world of discourse
in its constitutive laws'. But unlike Kristeva's
revolutionary poetry which 'opened a gap in every order where the dialectical
experience of the subject in the signifying process
might begin', Wordsworth's practice works rather to abate that dialectic.
Influenced by the particular oedipal story that
Wordsworth relates throughout his poetry and by what may be inferred
from his individual signifying practice, I have
hypothesised elsewhere that the archaeology of Wordsworth's writing
subjectivity was induced by the personally intensified
insistence of what Jacques Lacan described as the function of 'the
mirror stage' during the process of his subjectivisation which
turns out to be the object of his insistent interrogation. (13) As
Wordsworth identified his highly individualised psychological
profile in the later 1790s, he tried to invent and define the poetic
language for his professional discourse that was governed by
the imaginary register through which the formation of the mirror stage
continued into the Symbolic.
This characterising preoccupation provides another way of approaching
those ballads which set riddles in reading whose
suggested solutions have never satisfied the wonderings they have provoked,
and at bottom never could. 'Anecdote for
Fathers', for example, becomes summed up by its ending and subtitle
as a lesson on 'how the art of lying may be taught', but
that foregrounding of a moral discourse only sustains one side of the
conversation, and simply fails to hear some of the different
language games that are being rehearsed in the boy's response to being
made to speak to order. An underlying impression
remains that the boy is after all attempting to represent his own truth--one
that is not finally available by the adult's rules--and
answers with a double tongue, that is at once deceptive and honest.
The evasive place-name he uses is outside and prior to the
urgent directing of his interrogator and the unrelenting assertion
of what Lacan calls the Phallus of language: '"At Kilve there was
no weather-cock/"And that's the reason why"' (LB, 135, 55-6, ). 'We
Are Seven' similarly means more than and something
other than what is said. Wordsworth writes that it was intended 'to
illustrate the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood
attend our notion of death, or rather our utter inability to admit
that notion' (LB, 63), yet the poem is more intrigued by the
grounding power of that incapacity than it ostensibly entertains, and
impressively repeats its resistance to the authoritarian logic
of the Symbolic order, from which it is scarcely possible (however
enviously) to recall the stage of non-division on which her
authority is founded: 'The little Maid would have her will,/And said,
"Nay, we are seven!"' (LB, 134, 68-9)
Wordsworth remained unusually attached to the relation to the mother
from which the unifying principle of the Imaginary derives
and becomes transposed throughout the identificatory web in which,
according to Lacan, the subject is caught. The
dependence on maternal reunion surfaces in several of the poems. In
'The Mad Mother', for example, the fantasy of the
identificatory gaze which the mother offers serves to relieve some
of the disturbing erotic displacements which the woman puts
on her relation to the suckling babe:
I waked, and saw my little Boy,
My little Boy of flesh and blood;
Oh joy for me that sight to see!
For he was here, and only he. (LB, 174, 27-30)
The idiot boy, in his poem, having been apparently endangered by carrying
a message into and through the world of adult
communication, comes back within the protective hold of his mother's
gaze: 'She's coming from among the trees,/And now all
full in view she sees/Him whom she loves, her Idiot Boy' (LB, 167,
374-6), and so returns with the alternative message that he
had never really left the thetic unity of his 'burring' (LB, 167, 387).
The 'beauteous heap, a Hill of moss' (LB, 120, 36) in 'The
Thorn' gathers a teasing ambiguity from its arrested intermediacy between
the natural and human ('As if by hand of lady fair/The
work had woven been' [LB, 121, 41-2]) and between the conscious and
unconscious ('So deep is their vermilion dye . . . like
an infant's grave in size' [LB, 121, 44, 52]). There is a variance
between the punitive communal gaze incited by the narrator's
innuendoes and Martha's own transference of her putative maternal attentions
to the 'Heap', an identificatory non-verbal other
that, with its attractive artistry, has become the innocent focus of
desire (the Lacanian objet petit a ) in the Imaginary ('Ah me!
what lovely tints are there!/Of olive green and scarlet bright,/In
spikes, in branches, and in stars,/Green, red, and pearly white.'
[LB, 121, 45-8). Though 'the mother' is stigmatised ('A Woman in a
scarlet cloak' 63) for what may be socially read as a sign
of two-fold shame, the poem never loses its respect for the worth of
an almost erased private relation that the mound still
manages to convey against what uneasily turns into the narrator's self-defeating
prurience. (14)
The mirror stage enables the move from identification with the mother
to that with the reflected other. As well as reproducing
the structure of maternal union, it introduces the first alienation
of the subject, and so for a time arrests the narrative of unity
passing into division and loss. The poetic language which is exceptionally
invested with the appropriate register, though it is
propelled like all language by the desire to re-attain the wholeness
that preceded subjectivisation, nonetheless conveys a
semiotic which is unusually regulated within the symbolic realm, as
when the soul
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not--retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, to which
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain they still
Have something to pursue. (P, 23, 365-71)
Listening to this 1798 fragment it is possible to hear in the 'growing
faculties' and 'faculties still growing' that 'still/Have
something to pursue' one of those characteristic Wordsworthian overflowings
of powerful feeling (compare 'And I have felt/A
presence that disturbs me with the joy/Of elevated thoughts; a sense
sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused' [LB,
212, 94-7]) that Kristeva describes as 'the power of the semiotic rhythms,
which convey an intense presence of meaning in a
presubject still incapable of signification.' (15) But the pulsion
never threatens rupture, and another kind of satisfaction, of
underlying importance for Wordsworth, produces an alternative pleasure
of self-fashioning from restraining the scission of the
semiotic and symbolic. Indeed, while the imaginary insistence cannot
prevent the loss process, it tries increasingly to mitigate its
outcome by pinning down meanings, repairing 'the break between signifier
and signified' (RPL, 489), one major expression of
which becomes Wordsworth's obsession with textual revision.
Accordingly, the revolutionary 1798 Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads
offers to play with linguistic effects ('experiments . . .
written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far . . . Readers . .
. will perhaps frequently have to struggle . . .'[LB, 34]), and part
of that play is the situating of the poems amid the general linguistic
shift and neologising that had bespoken political revolution,
when the 'most dreadful enemy' might after all turn out to be 'our
own pre-established codes of decision' (LB, 34). But the
aestheticised struggle can only go so far: so as not to become unpleasurable,
it must be scrupulously 'adapted to the purposes
of poetic pleasure' (LB, 34). The challenge must not finally become
upsetting or agitating, but its re-orientations are to be
organised by an increasing sense of 'purpose' (1800 preface, passim
). There really is no commotion: folklore submits to
pastoral, while the carnivalesque of spewing orifices and promiscuity
is conclusively deprecated as urban, forecasting the
confirmatory visit of September 1802 to St Bartholomew's Fair as he
describes it in Book VII of The Prelude, like 'one vast
mill . . . vomiting' (P, 264, 693-4). Some characteristic folk features
suggestive of liberating, democratic reversals do enliven
Lyrical Ballads , in poems like 'The Idiot Boy'--Wordsworth said 'I
wrote the poem with exceeding delight and pleasure' (LB,
52)--which is a burlesque exhibition of one of the commonest of all
carnival shows, an idiot riding horseback (especially
back-to-front): 'Perhaps he's turned himself about,/His face unto the
horse's tail' (LB, 166, 332-3). The boy's inversion of night
and day similarly presents the world upside-down: '"The cocks did crow
to-whoo, to-whoo,/And the sun did shine so cold!"'
(LB, 169, 460-1). But though the world of the folk ballad typically
revels in the subversion of authority symbols, creating for
example its own 'boy-bishops', when 'The Child is Father of the Man',
(16) Wordsworth's is the cold carnival of Grasmere
Fair, epitomising the customary community, whom 'all things serve'
(P, 270, 55).
Overall, Wordsworth's poetic language is revolutionary insofar as it
is aimed to accommodate a fundamental change that had
occurred in the relation between language and subjectivity which he
knew that the sclerotic diction of post-Miltonic poetry was
incapable of accounting for, precisely because it had served to exclude
the personal experimentalism and purposive control that
marked the modern feel for the pleasures of language. If Wordsworth
was increasingly to look back to the bloodless
constitution of 1688 as the acknowledged point of political origin
for his representations of English nationalism, it was only after
his chastened enthusiasm for the French Revolution had sought expression
in a series of radical discourses, notably Godwinian
philanthropism and the republicanism that derived from the English
Revolution of the 1640s, that he overtly discovered his
predominantingly self-reflexive political discourse of Burkean paternalism.
The discourses in which he looked for
self-recognition were ideologically inconsistent and meandered in their
political colourings since they were after all secondary to
his primary quest for imaginary resonance. Earlier along the trajectory
that was to lead to Kristeva's poetic revolution,
Wordsworth's own observation of the signifying practice of poetic language
in a distinctively British context of comparative and
continuing stability was to direct him, by a procedure of selection
and control, to the corroboration of mirroring discourses
(those that gave representation to the subject formed at the mirror
stage) of harmony and communal feeling, rather than the
explosion of inflexibly dominant ones. So effectively had the imaginary
formation become inscribed in his literary discourse that
his revolutionary knowledge seemed joyously to have come full circle,
figured scientifically in the Newtonian cosmos, '[rolling]
through all things' (LB, 212, 103). The protraction of infant subjectivity
into adulthood--Lucy--described a curving track that
constantly folded back on itself: 'Rolled round in earth's diurnal
course' (LB, 246, 7), and the 'revolution' was ripe for the
discursive reversal of Burke's 'harmony of the universe', effected
by 'the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers.' (17)
- 2 -
The emphasis on the psychology of language is not ultimately made at
the expense of the significant new claim for the cultural
effectivity of literature and its potential for social intervention
that Lyrical Ballads in particular historically registers. Radical
issues are sometimes explicitly to the fore, as, for example, in 'The
Female Vagrant'. But inasmuch as his specific political
messages and ideological and discursive differences can be intelligibly
said to be subsumed by a single comprehensive ideology,
that ideology was most radically identified by Wordsworth as in his
case peculiarly expressive of a personal psychological
profile. Patrick Parrinder argued long ago that
The romantic theory of poetry is a distinct
ideology, in conflict with those around it. Conceived by Wordsworth
and Coleridge as a substitute for their shattered
beliefs in republicanism and pantisocracy, it would later become a
powerful weapon against the assumptions of
utilitarians and nineteenth-century liberals. (18)
Contradictory ideological positions, he argues, are embraced in the
one founded in poetic language itself which Wordsworth
used
as a base from which to launch one of the many
competing ideologies of the revolutionary age. As an abstract and
total account of social relations, the theory
of poetry he put forward invites comparison with the other new
ideologies such as ultitarianism, republicanism
and Burkean conservatism. Naturally it shares some elements with
its rivals: the rationalistic frame of the
1800 Preface is taken from republicanism, while the lofty and dignified
role
that he assigns to 'pleasure' would align
Wordsworth with the utilitarians. But it would be a mistake to reduce his
theory to its political constituents and to
call it conservative, utilitarian or democratic. (AA, 45)
Certainly, the controlling power of Wordsworth's theory of poetry in
the Lyrical Ballads prefaces covers a range of
interpellations before it comes to settle on its defining role as a
professional discourse in the extended passage of 1802
beginning 'What is a Poet?' (LB, 70) in a manner which Coleridge noted
'contrasted . . . somewhat harshly with the general
style of the Poems' (G, II, 830).
The professionalisation of the poet symptomises the increasing conformity
with the rules and conventions of Foucauldian
'disciplining' which it helps mediate and distribute. The poet's calling
is seen in contractual terms ('an Author makes a formal
engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association'
[LB, 58]), and his particular duty (the poet should 'ascertain
what is his duty' [LB, 59]) as part of a comprehensive social organisation.
His reforms are far from engaging drives that parallel
those behind revolutionary forces of subversion and volatility in the
social domain, while the discourse of 'nature' is the
articulation of the normative--naturalisation--or the construction
of the common and the regular, 'the primary laws of our nature'
(LB, 60), in a language which 'arising out of repeated experience and
regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more
philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for
it by Poets' (LB, 61). Though behind the network of that
philosophical language of 'truth, not individual and local, but general,
and operative' (LB, 73) lies the imaginary visual relation to
natural objects: 'the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful
and permanent forms of nature' (LB, 60), it is
necessarily transposed into contemporaneous discursivities that congenially
replicate imaginary insistence in the social order.
Furthermore, there is an homology between Wordsworth's private insistence
and the historically dominant cultural register of
the imaginary in disciplinary training and panopticism that makes Wordsworth's
psychoanalytical profile topically loaded. The
stated purpose of the poems is precisely such organisation:
. . . by the repetition and continuance of
this act [contemplating the relation of the general representatives to
each
other], our feelings will be connected with
important subjects, till at length, if we be possessed of much sensibility,
such habits of mind will be produced, that,
by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we
shall describe objects, and utter sentiments
. . . that the understanding of the being to whom we address ourselves
. . . must necessarily be in some degree enlightened,
and his affections ameliorated. (LB, 62-3)
What authorises such habituation is that it remains expressive of its
base in self-reflexivity while 'a mechanical device of style'
(LB, 66) does not. Yet, once so legitimated, the programme unavoidably
takes on ideological colouring, as a middle class
language of regularisation effectively comes via selection and control
to occupy the site of rural experience:
The language, too, of these men is adopted
(purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all
lasting and rational causes of dislike or
disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from
which the best part of language is originally
derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and
narrow circle of their intercourse, being
less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and
notions in simple and unelaborated expressions.
(LB, 60-1)
Parrinder's neutral notion of the Romantic ideology, however, as simply
'one of the many competing ideologies of the
revolutionary age' does not privilege it in the potential way theorised
in post-Althusserian theory. Ernesto Laclau, for example,
influentially argued that within the later Marxist analysis ideological
and discursive interpellations surrogate for other than class
positions depending on how they are located in relation to some other
predominant ideology. (19) Even Jerome McGann's
famous attempt to establish the Romantic ideology presents it as one
kind of false consciousness which in its case specialises in
the concealment, as he describes it in his critique of Shelley's Prometheus
Unbound , of the heterogeneity of history and what
sounds like a Marxian claim for 'real knowledge':
Poetry's first obligation is to reveal the
contradictory forces which human beings at once generate and live through,
and its second is to provide the reader, both
contemporary and future alike, with the basis for a sympathetic and
critical assessment of those forces. (20)
McGann views the Romantic ideology grounding literary discourse as a
group response to the '"epistemological crisis"' that, in
producing 'a modern historical sense', had problematised the old 'transcendent'
and 'ideal' (RI, 67) stabilities which he sees
'High Romantic' (RI, 73) poetry as seeking to reconstruct. Though this
explication indicates the fundamental shifts with which
his Romantic ideology is inevitably engaged, it is treated specifically
as a wrong turning towards denial that poetry was 'obliged'
to have avoided.
The sufficiency of McGann's bold thesis has been much queried over the
years, and not only by latter-day 'High Romantic'
critics. Feminist critics like Anne Mellor have seen it as simply synonymous
with patriarchal ideology, and have consequently
urged the material differences informing plural Romantic ideologies;
(21) and other feminists who are interested in developing
alternative kinds of familial lineages in poetic tradition have felt
the need to look for them beyond the recuperation of
contemporaneous historical events. (22) In particular, it seems to
me that the conclusion (shared by Marjorie Levinson in her
energetic retrievals of excluded historical contexts in Wordsworth's
Great Period Poems: Four Essays , 1986) that the
construction of any knowledge other than that of material history is
simply ideological is a kind of closure that stops short of 'a
sympathetic and critical assessment' of the Romantic 'writing subjectivity'.
When McGann comments wittily in relation to
'Tintern Abbey' that 'Between 1793 and 1798 Wordsworth lost the world
merely to gain his own immortal soul' (RI, 88), and
claims that the 'Intimations Ode' 'resituates [its] conflicts out of
a socio-historical context and into an ideological one' (RI, 88),
he is in danger of missing what I regard as the less obvious but cardinal
realisation that not only is Wordsworth's version of the
Romantic ideology not necessarily tied to specific discourses outside
literature, but it is governed ('Not in entire forgetfulness'
[WW, 299, 62]) by its intimations of pre-ideologising subjectivity.
'Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting' (WW, 299, 58): while the
platonising 'authorizes' (WW, 714), as Wordsworth claims
in the Fenwick note, the representation of a pre-subject outside 'a
socio-historical context', it is only secondarily 'an ideological
one' in McGann's sense. The birth of ideology Wordsworth records in
the ode, as Lacan declares in commentating on the
phrase from the lyric that is pivotal to the ode's endeavour for seamless
inscriptions in ideological purposiveness--'The Child is
Father of the Man'--undoubtedly belongs to its specific time and place:
It is no accident that we discover it is that
period with its fresh, shattering, and even breathtaking quality, bursting
forth at the beginning of the nineteenth century
with the industrial revolution, in the country that was most advanced
in experiencing its effects, in England. (23)
But the 'special feature' of 'the value given to childhood memories'
which is generated by the psychological effects of the (fresh
and shattering) trauma nevertheless gives primacy thereafter to the
negotiation between the pre-Symbolic and the
socio-historical:
That reference to childhood, the idea of the
child in man, the idea that something demands that a child be
something other than a child, but that the
demands of the child as such are perpetually felt in him, all of that in
the
sphere of psychology can be historically situated.
(PR, 24, 25)
The loss (of wholeness) being mourned in the 'Intimations Ode' is one
more archaic than that occasioned by historical
disappointment, though revolutionary violence was the major cause of
reawakening the earlier trauma. Whereas the idealised
and universalising discourse of the revolution in France had 'appeared
to enthusiasts at its commencement' (as the 1809 extract
from The Prelude records [P, 397, 105-44; 1850 version]) to be entirely
self-reflexive of the particular disposition of
Wordsworth's subjectivity, it had mutated into a replay of oedipal
disruptions of the Imaginary that had originated with language
acquisition itself. Recovering this pre-history psychologises the inherent
ambiguities of the philosophical concept of ideology
itself, between act and object, thinking and thought: between the Kantian
thinking subject's establishing the conditions of the
'real' and Hegel's historical consciousness of the development of reason
according to individual and social conditions.
McGann's own exposition recurrently gestures towards deconstructing
the primacy of history, but discovers no grounding or
true content in the opposing term other than a form of class consciousness--as
when he writes of 'the famous process of
internalization which is at once the ode's central problem and its
final solution as well.' (RI, 88-9) Marx and Engels regarded
such ideologies, in a Platonic version of superstructural fading, as
merely reflexes or echoes of efficient material causation; but I
am also insisting on the poem's narrative throughout as in active relationship
with a psychologically functional moment of
exceptionally individualising import. Here again, McGann approaches
this larger scope when he writes that 'the greatness of
['Tintern Abbey'] lies in the clarity and candor with which it dramatizes
not merely this event, but the structure of this event' (RI,
88), where the word 'structure' might easily lend theoretical substance
to the idea of a pre-existing system being called upon by
the poet. More pointedly, he also describes the personal reflex, though
he treats it as being merely incidental:
What [Wordsworth] actually discovered was no
more than his own desperate need for a solution. The reality of
that need mirrored a cultural one that was
much greater and more widespread. (RI, 91)
One reason why the recuperation of the subject of language is more pressing
than that of history in Wordsworth's poetry is that
the subject of history was so magisterially pursued in Alan Liu's Wordsworth:
The Sense of History , (24) and because that
mammoth attempt 'to preempt modern subjectivity by subordinating it
to social history' (SOH, 303) so rigidly excluded the
subject of language. Almost Liu's only curiosity in that direction
is confined to a note on his own discussion of 'The description
of the 1790 tour in [The Prelude ] Book 6' as 'a sustained effort to
deny history by asserting nature as the separating mark
constitutive of the egotistical self. It may be helpful to think of
nature in its deflective capacity here as a mirror. The aim of Book
6 is to prevent the self from looking through nature to underlying
history. Nature must instead reflect the self' (SOH, 13). In his
note Liu rather superbly '[allows himself] to be influenced here by
Lacan' (SOH, 516, n.11). Liu's interpretation of the mirror
stage which follows this concession appropriates the moment of the
infant's misrecognition as one of pure alienation, rather than
as what it also entails for Lacan: the institution of a fictional agency
and an ideal ego structure that, and most particularly in
Wordsworth's case, will continue to control his insertions into discursive
subjectivity in the Symbolic. Liu writes:
The specular, external 'self,' in other words,
is not known to be merely a signifier and so subordinate to a
collective convention of signification, to
history. By contrast, the symbolic . . . is the realm in which acceptance
of
a collective (named the Father, or Law) demonstrates
to the subject standing before the mirror that his external
image is indeed a signifier like all other
social selves, enrolled in a system over which individuals have little
control.
The self sees itself in history, and knows
that the 'I' it enacts 'out there' is alienated by convention from the
true
subject that does the enacting. In Book 6
it is not so much that Wordsworth has not yet glimpsed the collective
authority of history as that he denies it,
represses it behind an 'imaginary mirror'/mother of nature, a one-way
mark, veil, or boundary.' (SOH, 516, n.11)
Liu has no realisation that the imaginary normatively continues within
the symbolic domain, and this reduction to a nature/history
opposition is an especially significant distortion for the further
understanding of Wordsworth's poetic language, since in
Wordsworth's case the Imaginary remains an unusually determinative
register on those discourses which become selected for
self-representation. (25)
Yet for all the manifest subjectivism in Wordworth's preoccupation with
playing down the trauma of self-division in language, he
remains anxious to share 'the world/Of all of us' (P, 398, 726), and
he defines his imaginative restoration after the revolutionary
interlude as the reaffirmation of the correspondence between private
and public histories, when his mind had become disposed
To seek in Man, and in the frame of life,
Social and individual, what there is
Desirable, affecting, good or fair
Of kindred permanence (P, 440, 39).
The achievement brought together what seem discrepant conditionalities:
Through no disturbance of my soul,
Or strong compunction in me wrought,
I supplicate for thy control;
. . .
Yet not the less would I thought
Still act according to the voice
Of my own wish ('Ode to Duty', WW, 296, 33-5,
41-3)
In this same way, though he was completely aware that the lyrical ballads
would produce 'feelings of strangeness and
awkwardness' , he is he is keen 'to ascertain what is his duty' (LB,
59) as an author, and finds it to lie in entering into common
standards with his readers by clearly delimiting those 'certain known
habits of association' (LB, 58) which they can expect from
his poetry. Crucially, he represents the poet's idiosyncrasy as dependent
'on nothing differing in kind from other men, but only in
degree.' (LB, 78)
Wordsworth's claim for representativeness is rooted in imaginary intersubjectivity
which in his case is keyed to an exceptional
negotiation of a collective prehistory. The appropriate historical
term that addresses precisely the enquiry into both a priori
sensibility and the media that can give it objective expression is
the aesthetic. Reminding us that Foucault points out that 'the
critical philosophy, and the concept of ideology, are born at the same
historical moment,' (26) Terry Eagleton reviews Kant's
'Transcendental Aesthetic' by focusing on some issues from the first
part of the Critique of Judgement , 1790, the 'Critique of
Aesthetic Judgement', and particularly on Kant's 'reflective judgement'
which Eagleton rechristens the 'Kantian Imaginary'. In
order to accommodate the perception of difference and continuity between
the sensible and the rational, the logical framework
of Kant's definitions of the 'aesthetic' shifts over the two editions
of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787) to emerge in
the later Critique as no longer part of an account of determinant theoretical
judgement (which 'possesses its concept and faces
the difficulty of applying it properly to the multiplicity of spatio-temporal
appearances'), but as exemplifying the alternative
'reflective judgement' (which 'is in search of its concept through
this multiplicity'), and which
obeys a peculiar principle--related to the
feeling of pleasure and displeasure--which enables it to act as a bridge
between the theoretical judgements of the
'faculty of knowing' analyzed in the first and the practical judgements
of
the 'faculty of desire' analyzed in the second
critique. (27)
Eagleton describes the multiple subjectivism involved in '[tracing]
within the very texture of the subject's experience that which
points beyond it to the reality of the material world.' (IA, 72) The
'pseudo-knowledge' that the aesthetic offers operates on the
level of shared intuition, still in some way unalienated in its mode
of representation, because
It is a delightful lucky chance that certain
pheneomena should seem to display a purposive unity, where such unity
is not in fact deducible as necessary from
logical premises. The occurrence seems fortuitous, contingent and so not
subsumable under a concept of the understanding;
but it nevertheless appears as if it could somehow be brought
under such a concept, as if it conforms spontaneously
to some law, even though we are quite unable to say what
that law might be. (IA, 84)
The Kantian aesthetic specialises in a kind of pleasure that 'arises
from a quick sense of the world's delightful conformity to our
capacities: instead of pressing ahead to subsume to some concept the
sensuous manifold we confront, we just reap enjoyment
from the general formal possibility of doing so' (IA, 85). Just such
an aesthetic sense informs the great principle of pleasure in
Wordsworth's 1800 Preface, where the poet is said '[to consider] man
and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the
mind of men as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting
qualities of nature.' (LB, 76) This coming together in
'hallowed and pure motions of the sense' brings about
that calm delight
Which, if I err not, surely must belong
To those first-born affinities that fit
Our new existence to existing things,
And, in our dawn of being, constitute
The bond of union betwixt life and joy. (P,
11, 383 and 385-90)
Jonathan Bate has argued that the ideology that proceeds from such prescience is best described as ecological:
I propose that the Romantic Ideology is not,
as Jerome McGann has it, a theory of imagination and symbol
embodied in such self-consciously idealist
and elitist texts as Coleridge's Statesman's Manual , but a theory of
ecosystems and unalienated labour embodied
in such self-consciously pragmatic and populist texts as Ruskin's
Fors Clavigera. (28)
Besides making Wordsworth feel at home at Grasmere, and indeed in the
world, this sense of radical correspondence is also
for him the basis for artistic productivity, and the pre-sexual/social
rationale of The Recluse ;
Speaking of nothing more than what we are--
How exquisitely the individual Mind
. . .
. . . to the external world
Is fitted:--and how exquisitely too--
. . .
The external world is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended
might
Accomplish ('Home at Grasmere', WW, 198, 1005-6,
1008-9, 1011-14).
Whatever different ideological positionings strive to discover their
own reflections in the social content of Wordsworth's version
of the Romantic ideology, the fundamental realisation is to be registered
that he in particular is primarily interested in reaping
pleasure from what Eagleton phrases 'the general formal possibility'
of subsuming the sensible to the rational. His repeated
stress on the 'primary' announces an intuitive aspiration in the direction
of a metaphysical grounding of knowledge, while the fact
that he registers that 'a multitude of causes, unknown to former times,
are now acting with a combined force to blunt the
discriminating powers of the mind' (LB, 64) and that he is attempting
'to counteract . . . the general evil' (LB, 65) shows his
parallel awareness of the provisionality of objectivity that can be
attributed even to shared standards in his contemporaneous
society. His ideological positioning is accordingly discontinuous in
that, though it is based on 'a deep impression of certain
inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise
of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that
act upon it, which are equally inherent and indestructible' (LB, 65),
it nonetheless can only strive for normativisation in the social
and cultural domain. This determined doubling of subjectivities confirms
the supplementarity of both McGann's historical
Romantic ideology and of Bate's ecological ideology.
Wordsworth's overriding concern to sustain that principle of correspondence
leads him constantly into a preoccupation with the
metalinguistic potential of language itself to recover the originary
structure of imaginary subjectivity. Occasionally, natural
objects mirror that formation effortlessly and appear to answer his
aesthetic sense without exertion, producing that
characteristic mild ecstasy of self-recognition when 'the clouds are
split/Asunder' ('[A Night-Piece'], WW, 44-5, 8-9), and the
unlooked-for representation of a former and unexerted subjectivity
is simply presented. Eagleton's 'delightful lucky chance that
certain phenomena should seem to display a purposive unity', however,
is not entirely dependent on serendipity, though the
structure involved will evidently be reinforced by all happy coincidences.
As well as being 'a man pleased with his own passions
and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of
life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions
and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe', he is
also 'habitually impelled to create them where he does not
find them.' (LB, 71) This poet, as described in 1802, compared with
other men 'has acquired a greater readiness and power in
expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts
and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure
of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.'
(LB, 71-2) And this greater power of expression comes
from the greater meaning that the structure carries for him --to record,
celebrate, and seek out.
The revelation following the ascent of Snowdon in Book XIII of The Prelude
is culminating in its reflecting more than the given,
static correspondence of the sensible and the rational in 'The perfect
image of a mighty mind' (P, 460, 69): 'That domination
which she oftentimes/Exerts upon the outward face of things' (P, 462,
77-8) becomes 'a genuine counterpart' (P, 462, 88) of
the process of 'higher minds'' (P, 462, 90) pseudo-agency of self-reflection:
They from their native selves can send abroad
Like transformation, for themselves create
A like existence, and, when'er it is
Created for them, catch it by an instinct.
(P, 462, 93-6)
This 'endless occupation for the soul,/Whether discursive or intuitive'
(P, 464, 112-13) becomes 'Most worthy then of trust
when most intense' (P, 464, 116). What is most absorbing about this
description is the way in which the creative activity
envisaged occurs within the doubled duality of the imaginary relationship.
Not only does the natural scene sometimes mirror the
mind's operative power, but both manoeuvrings (natural and intellectual)
are seen to work towards and issue in a scheme that
narrates the insistence of the function of the mirror stage within
the separated order of the outer world. Nothing is ever changed
on a fundamental level by this kind of creativity, simply re-arranged
by a process of selectivity that is impelled by the specialised
desire for self-reflection. Once that is attained, the attention is
arrested by an intensification of the focusing involved as the
recession of imaginary subjectivity opens up an abyss that is both
bottomless and structured: 'and the vault/Built round by those
white clouds, enormous clouds,/Still deepens its interminable depth'
(['A Night-Piece'], WW, 45, 17-19). On Snowdon, the
superstructural ordering of the 'still ocean' (P, 460, 46) of the clouds
is seen to correspond with an immense process of
coordination from within an anterior phase, from which it has emerged.
The extra dimension reveals the intensifying
doubling--usually hidden precisely because its structure is identical--that
inheres in the object of Wordsworth's 'reflexive
judgement', and that in his case orchestrates a kind of imaginary univocalism:
'the roar of waters, torrents, streams/Innumerable,
roaring with one voice.' (P, 460, 58-9) But here Wordsworth furthermore
identifies the working of his imaginative system as
conditioned, in Kristevan terms, by the particular conformation of
his own thetic break into the Symbolic, when drive discharge,
or jouissance, is regulated to impart a logic in the semiotic that
will be taken over by the symbolic after the entry into language.
For Wordsworth, 'a fracture in the vapour' (P, 460, 56) is 'That dark,
deep thoroughfare' which figures ''The soul, the
imagination of the whole.' (P, 460, 64-5)
The inner workings of Wordsworth's literary imagination had long before
been paradigmatically described in the juvenile 'The
Dog-An Idyllium', where his process of composition was seen as putting
the pleasure of deepened self-recognition into words,
so that the impulsion to self-expression seemed given inasmuch as it
was indeed preformulated:
. . . while I gaz'd to Nature blind,
In the calm Ocean of my mind
Some new-created image rose
In full-blown beauty at its birth
Lovely as Venus from the sea. (29)
The agency involved consequently takes place within the creative process,
bringing expression into correspondence with
imaginary insistence. The upshot, however, is finally both representative
and eccentric, in that, while it brings into representation
a normative moment of psychological history and an integral register
of communal communication, it also privately requires the
augmentation of a distinct stylistic and discursive representation
of order and control with formal and ideological tendencies.
The operation of duplication rather than dialogical multiplicity has
to be seen as characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, despite
Don Bialostosky's masterful argument in Wordsworth, Dialogics, and
the Practice of Criticism , 1992. Even for those critics
who can be persuaded of the possibility of dialogics ever breaking
out of the circle of pluralism, the superpowerful axis forged
of a Russian theory and a comprehensive but exclusive retinue of leading
North American theorists admits surprisingly few
noises off. Too enormous an argument has been opened up by that important
study for me to do justice to it here, but I can
briefly indicate the relative angling of the position I am arguing,
and that I hope by this stage will appear only deceptively well
pre-established. While I can wholeheartedly accept the endeavour of
recuperating dialogic difference and interaction between
multiple voices in Wordsworth's poetry, no less than in all language
use, it seems to me perverse not to acknowledge the
peculiar resistance by the tendency of Wordsworth's particular poetic
language. When all is said and done, no plausible account
of Wordsworth's poetic language can go very much against the grain
of Coleridge's account of Wordsworth's stylistic signature
which eludes his power of definition but which is diversely instanced
in Chapter 20 of Biographia Literaria and which
expresses what has been the dominant response of the majority of Wordsworth's
different readers:
To me it will always remain a singular and
noticeable fact; that a theory which would establish this lingua
communis , not only as the best, but as the
only commendable style, should have proceeded from a poet, whose
diction, next to that of Shakespeare and Milton,
appears to me of all others the most individualized and
characteristic.
. . . whenever he speaks in his own person;
or whenever, though under a feigned name, it is clear that he himself is
still speaking, as in the different dramatis
personae of the 'RECLUSE'. Even in the other poems in which he
purposes to be most dramatic, there are few
in which it does not occasionally burst forth. (30)
It is, as Wordsworth writes, 'nothing differing in kind from other men,
but only in degree.' (LB, 78) His own relation to language
is both eccentric and commonplace, and his readers have often found
it either bizarre, or just as often banal. In a profound
way, it is both at once. Again and again, Wordsworth suddenly discovers
that certain words or phrases have a special
significance for him, but, however fascinated, he never can (even when
he pretends to) explain just why. In order to locate the
nature of his engagement, I suggest that the Wordsworthian conception
of the Naming of Places (the title of the 1800 group of
poems in which linguistic expression is thematic) might alternatively
be looked at as the placing of names : how names
themselves fit, or can be made to fit, with what Wordsworth wants them
to say to, and for, him. Such an emphasis on the
placing of names tends to put the whole problematical business of negotiating
particular meanings for given language first: it has
to be made to happen within the operations of language, along chains
of words, and assumes priority over geophysical locale ,
so that it delineates not so much locodescriptive as logodescriptive
poetry.
There are certain kinds of words that somehow or other fit with Wordsworth's
controlling imaginary function so that they seem
to precede or ground others. The words and phrases that particularly
arrested Wordsworth's attention seem to have articulated
for him a first coming into being and to stand in for a position on
the brink of silence, both in and out of language. He is
absorbed in 'silent language' ('The Excursion', PW, v, 159, 189) and
'inarticulate language' (PW, v, 148, 1207) that, oddly, for
him hardly seems paradoxical, and he remains unabashed by frequently
speaking of the ineffable or pre-verbal: 'Not of
outward things . . . -- words, signs,/Symbols or actions--but of my
own heart/Have I been speaking' (P, 100, 174-7), and by
his offer to communicate 'incommunicable powers', 'far hidden from
the reach of words' (P, 100, 188 and 185).
From his own viewpoint, he was searching for the origin of language
which already was an enigma of the Lockian mind model
that had become embedded in his own language through Hartleian associationism,
and that derived all discursive thought from
sense impressions:
And I doubt not, but if we could trace them
to their Sources, we should find, in all Languages, the Names, which
stand for Things that fall not under our Senses,
to have had their first rise from sensible Ideas. (31)
The structure of knowledge in the 1799 'spots of time' depends on oedipal
resolutions figured in terms of this mind-model, as
when Wordsworth describes himself 'repairing' to the 'spectacles and
sounds' associated with his father's death:
And I do not doubt
That in this later time, when storm and rain
Beat on my roof at midnight, or by day
When I am in the woods, unknown to me
The workings of my spirit thence are brought.
(I, 368-74; P, 11)
Etymology was the major branch of the 'new philology' that resulted
from that philosophical system in England, and, as Hans
Aarsleff has demonstrated, John Horne Tooke in his The Diversions of
Purley , 1786, was the chief proponent of its
materialist conclusion: all thought comes from language, and all language
can be traced to the names of sensible objects. The
etymological method of tracing--or rather constituting--origins is
an immanent paradigm for the kind of story within words that
characterises Wordsworth's puzzling over their genesis to arrive at
a not forgotten self-recognition, but leading to the point at
which the human trace peters out, like Lucy Gray's footprints, while
her 'solitary song' (LB, 258, 63) disintegrates into (and yet
survives in) material sound, the whistling wind.
In searching for--or constructing--the roots and sources of one's (linguistic)
being, the desired end becomes either the
presentation of a pre-existent expression that answers to the configuration
of one's subjectivity ('What, you are stepping
westward? ''--'Yea.' [PW , III, 76, 1]); or the bringing it into such
a configuration ('Yes, you really have crossed the Alps!'
--something like what the Swiss peasant may be presumed to have actually
said to Wordsworth and Jones on their journey in
1790, but which only became acceptably self-expressive in the process
of composing Book VI of The Prelude in 1804-5); or
the opposite: the regulating of one's subjectivity in conformity with
the given expression ('Duty'--'Yet not the less would I
throughout/Still act according to the voice/Of my own wish; and feel
past doubt/That my submissiveness was choice' (WW,
296, 41-4)). There is yet another mode, however, that is also the foundation
on which the other kinds of self-expression
manoeuvre themselves, when Wordsworth is neither wrestling nor submitting
but hesitantly looking for self-reflection in words;
when he isn't so sure ('Will no one tell me what she sings?' ('The
Solitary Reaper', WW, 319, 17)), wondering whether this or
that language does speak for him. The inaugural question of the autobiographical
Prelude --'was it for this[?]' -- might in this
way be heard as seeking for self-representation: an interrogation of
the identity represented by the poet's own name,
'Wordsworth', or the recuperation inwords of what he elsewhere in the
poem he describes as 'The calm existence that is mine
when I/Am worthy of myself.' (P, 46, 360-1). Finally, there is no difference
in the realisation of self-representation in words that
is attained, but the manner of producing reflexivity--as something
given, or actively shaped either without or within--represent
secondary considerations of agency. Over time, the more or less involuntary
struggle for self-definition slipped into a more
coercive demand for compliance, but the contrast, on which the story
of Wordsworth's 'great failure' (32) is based, was
occluded for Wordsworth himself because both modes were attempting,
though in opposing ways, the same equation between
an originary subject-formation and pre-existent language.
But Wordsworth was not, after all, a postmodernist. He wasn't prepared
to '[yield] up moral questions in despair' (P, 406,
900), nor, having witnessed the relation between scepticism and terrorism
that he explored in The Borderers , did he want to
become stranded in the condition described by the Solitary in which
his 'intellectual power, through words and things,/Went
sounding on, a dim and perilous way!' (PW, v, 100, 700-1) Rather than
be baffled by 'some hollow thought' (P, 42, 261),
'Like a false steward who hath much received/And renders nothing back'
(P, 42, 270-1), he wanted to participate in social and
cultural exchange at the same time as ensuring self-representation
in powerful acts of naming. In short, he needed to find
utterance for a highly individualised subjectivity in the otherness
of language: 'unto me I feel/That an internal brightness is
vouchsafed/That must not die, that must not pass away./ . . . /Something
within which yet is shared by none,/Not even the
nearest to me and most dear,/Something which power and effort may impart'
(WW, 195, 885-7 and 898-901).
What exactly, for example, is being named in the group of Poems on the
Naming of Places? They repeatedly articulate a strong
bond that had been established between a significant topographical
feature and a family member, after whom the feature is
renamed. The attachment, as Wordsworth writes in his advertisement
to the group, 'will have given to such places a private and
peculiar interest' (LB, 323), but it is a privacy and peculiarity that
after all Wordsworth's poems propose may be widely
shared. Indeed, for a time it was agreed that Coleridge was to provide
some of them also. What does individualise, and so
label the places, is the mirroring appropriateness of the tie between
subject and object, so that those specific scenes are read
as signs that couple material markers and the kind of subjectivity
they signify. The whole series of different markers so
named--'Emma's Dell', 'Joanna's Rock', and 'Mary's Nook'--put into
general currency a kind of relation (between person and
place, subject and object) that, though it may reflect one that Wordsworth
himself finds intensely gratifying, is nevertheless one
that those positionings have made common between himself and the various
persons cited, so that what is shared is in one way
anonymous , in that it does not ultimately belong solely to the named
individuals, but rather has come to represent a sort of
self-representation in which, he believes, all who wish to take their
self-expression as seriously s he does will take pleasure in
participating. The genitival connection functions interestingly, in
that the person becomes a name for the place where this
congruence occurs, or where their quasi-essential identity is epitomised:
where intimate naming gets placed. A kind of
connection, that Wordsworth sees as deeply constitutive of his private
subjectivity even though it has been alienated in
belonging also to others, is in this way perceived as both peculiar
and in collective circulation. It is this situating that is the base
of Wordsworth's singular claim to representativeness.
- 3 -
The different levels of Wordsworth's interest in language in Lyrical
Ballads may be illustrated from a variety of intertextualities
between that book and texts from Joanna Baillie's A Series of Plays:
in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger
passions of the mind, each passion being the subject of a tragedy and
a comedy, published in 1798. Jonathan
Wordsworth has established that a copy of Baillie's Plays , which 'appeared
in, or most probably before, April 1798 . . . was
available at Alfoxden at the height of the Lyrical Ballads period.'
(33) Both writers make explicit the new class focus. In her
Introductory Discourse, Baillie writes that 'those works which most
strongly characterise human nature in the middling and
lower classes of society, where it is to be discovered by stronger
and more unequivocal marks, will ever be the most popular'
(B, 5-6); and Wordsworth was to allege in his Advertisement of the
same year a sociological basis for choosing 'the language
of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society' (LB, 34),
though by 1802 this became changed to: 'a selection of the
language really spoken by men . . . will entirely separate the composition
from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life' (LB,
69-70).
Baillie's theories on language and subject matter are 'revolutionary'.
Like Wordsworth, she is keen to eschew fable and fantasy
for 'the very world which is the world/Of all of us' (P, 398, 725-6):
The fair field of what is properly called poetry,
is enriched with so many beauties, that in it we are often tempted
to forget what we really are, and what kind
of beings we belong to. Who, in the enchanted regions of simile,
metaphor, allegory and description, can remember
the plain order of things in this every-day world? (B, 6)
She declares the same primacy of genuine human feeling:
I will venture, however, to say, that amidst
all this decoration and ornament, all this loftiness and refinement, let
one simple trait of the human heart, one expression
of passion, genuine and true to nature, be introduced, and it
will stand forth alone in the boldness of
reality, whilst the false and unnatural around it fade away upon every
side,
like the rising exhalations of the morning.
(B, 6)
Her democratic vision similarly seeks to channel common experience into
social organisation by controlling the emotional
appeal of popular genres:
It was the saying of a sagacious Scotchman,
'Let who will make the laws of a nation, if I have the writing of its
ballads.' Something similar to this may be
said in regard to the drama. Its lessons reach not, indeed, to the lowest
classes of the labouring people, who are the
broad foundation of society, which can never be moved without
endangering everything that is constructed
upon it, and who are our potent and formidable ballad-readers; but
they reach to the classes next in order to
them, and who will always have over them no inconsiderable influence.
(B, 14)
Baillie's enterprise throughout is one of control: by selection, arrangement,
and finally by instruction. More even than with
Wordsworth, the experimental self-consciousness behind her extensive
theorisings--'it is distrust and not confidence that has led
me, at this early stage of the undertaking, to bring it before the
public' (B, 17)--is eager to demonstrate that apparent
idiosyncrasy is necessary to reveal essential human characteristics.
Her most detailed innovations relate to her elaborate project
of supplying plays according to a classification of the passions, and
to her techniques for representing them. Wordsworth also
was attempting, as he phrases it in his note to 'The Thorn', to arrive
at a 'history or science of feelings' because 'Poetry is
passion' (LB, 38), though for his 'purpose', democratic forms of expression
and less individualising passions come more
obviously together in converging on 'the fluxes and refluxes of the
mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our
nature', and he categorises a series of the poems according to the
particular 'feelings and ideas' that they illustrate being
'associated in a state of excitement': the 'maternal passion' in 'The
Idiot Boy' and the 'The Mad Mother'; 'the last struggles of a
human being' in 'Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman; 'the perplexity
and obscurity which in childhood attend our notion of
death' in 'We Are Seven'; 'fraternal, or . . . moral attachment when
early associated with the great and beautiful objects of
nature' in 'The Brothers'; providing a more than usual 'salutary impression'
from 'ordinary moral sensations' in 'Simon Lee'. (LB,
63) He adds a list of poems that 'sketch characters under the influence
of less impassioned feelings': 'The Two April Mornings',
'The Fountain', 'Old Man Travelling', and 'The Two Thieves', and stresses
one feature that, particularly evidenced by 'Poor
Susan' and 'The Childless Father', more generally distinguishes his
from 'the popular Poetry of the day': 'that the feeling therein
developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the
action and situation to the feeling.' (LB, 64)
Baillie shows a similar interest in the autogenesis of deep and common
passion, whether in comedy: 'It stands but little in need
of busy plot, extraordinary incidents, witty repartee, or studied sentiments'
(B, 13), or tragedy: 'The strong passions that, with
small assistance from outward circumstances, work their way in the
heart till they become the tyrannical masters of it, carry on a
similar operation in the breast of the monarch and the man of low degree'
(B, 11); but her theory of tragedy is attached to the
meticulous observation of what gradually becomes ungovernable passion:
But above all, to her [Tragedy], and to her
only it belongs, to unveil to us the human mind under the dominion of
those strong and fixed passions, which, seemingly
unprovoked by outward circumstances, will, from small
beginnings. brood within the breast, till
all the better dispositions, all the fair gifts of nature, are borne down
before
them; those passions which conceal themselves
from the observation of men; which cannot unbosom themselves
even to the dearest friend; and can, oftentimes,
only give their fullness vent in the lonely desert, or in the darkness
of midnight. (B, 8)
This intensive and systematic concentration on character, on 'all that
timidity, irresolution, distrust, and a thousand delicate traits,
which make the infancy of every great passion more interesting, perhaps,
than its full-blown strength' (B, 10), must have
addressed Wordsworth's wider preoccupations with literary language
during the time when Lyrical Ballads was gestating.
Indeed the production of that book was delayed partly by Wordsworth's
revising his own play, The Borderers , with an eye to
having it performed in London, and Coleridge's own urgent interest
in drama is represented by the presence of two extracts
from his tragedy, Osorio --'The Foster-Mother's Tale' and 'The Dungeon'--in
the original volume. In particular, Wordsworth
could not have failed to be impressed by an analysis of tragic character
that so closely resembled his own practice in The
Borderers and the expository essay on the psychology of the chief character
that he had prefixed to it in 1797.
Jonathan Wordsworth has discovered a further series of pre-echoes of
Wordsworth's poetry in Baillie's Poems , 1790,
including one from her lyric, 'Lamentation', which recalls the aftermath
of the Waiting for the Horses episode in Book XI of The
Prelude :
At every wailing of the midnight wind
The lowly dwelling comes into my mind,
When rain beats on my roof, wild storms abroad,
I think upon thy bare and beaten sod . . .
(B, 787). (34)
The Wordsworthian resonances are with the oedipal account of hatred
for his father, who seemed to have betrayed and
belittled him by not sending the agreed transport home (though unknown
to Wordsworth his father actually lay dying at that
very time), and its 'chastisement' (P, 434, 369). The '[correction]'
of his 'desires' (P, 436, 374) from that 'day/Stormy, and
rough, and wild', when 'on the grass/[He] sate half sheltered by a
naked wall' (P, 434, 355-7), took the alternatively
empowering form of an internalised control associated with 'all the
business of the elements,/The single sheep and the one
blasted tree' (P, 436, 376-7):
All these were spectacles and sounds to which
I often would repair, and thence would drink
As at a fountain. And I do not doubt
That in this later time, when storm and rain
Beat on my roof at midnight, or by day
When I am in the woods, unknown to me
The workings of my spirit thence are brought.
(P, 436, 382-8)
The effects of Baillie's surveillance of tragic passion offer precisely
this kind of discipline, returning to those past moments when
the fated accumulation took its rise:
To hold up for our example those peculiarities
in disposition and modes of thinking which nature has fixed upon
us, or which long and early habit has incorporated
with our original selves, is almost desiring us to remove the lofty
mountains, to take away the native land-marks
of the soul; but representing the passions, brings before us the
operation of a tempest that rages out its
time and passes away. We cannot, it is true, amidst its wild uproar, listen
to the voice of reason, and save ourselves
from destruction; but we can foresee its coming, we can mark its rising
signs, we can know the situations that will
most expose us to its rage, and we can shelter our heads from the
coming blast . . . in checking and subduing
those visitations of the soul, whose causes and effects we are aware of,
every one may make considerable progress,
if he proves not entirely successful. Above all, looking back to the
first rise, and tracing the progress of passion,
points out to us those stages in the approach of the enemy, when he
might have been combatted most successfully;
and where the suffering him to pass may be considered the
occasioning all the misery that ensues. (B,
11)
By far the most successful and influential play in Baillie's collection,
and indeed of all her dramatic works, was De Monfort , a
sustained examination of hatred whose central character resembles the
anti-hero of Wordsworth's play in several important
respects. In his prefatory essay Wordsworth writes of Rivers that 'His
master passions are pride and the love of distinction',
(35) 'his pride . . . borders on madness' (TB, 67); he notes that 'It
will scarcely be denied that such a mind by very slight
external motives may be led to the commission of the greatest enormities'
(TB, 66); and he describes the main transaction
between Rivers and Mortimer in terms that could equally apply to that
between De Monfort and the object of his hate,
Rezenvelt: 'I have introduced him deliberately prosecuting the destruction
of an amiable young man by the most atrocious means
and with a pertinacity as it should seem not to be accounted for but
on the supposition of the most malignant injuries. No such
injuries, however, appear to have been sustained . . . his malevolent
feelings are excited and he hates the more deeply because
he feels he ought not to hate.' (TB, 66) But Wordsworth surely saw
more in Baillie's play than comparisons with his own. Since
The Borderers had amounted to a staging and partial resolution of the
inner conflicts involved in the course of his own
revolutionary education, Wordsworth must have recognised a further
reflection of his own history in De Monfort . If at bottom
that history is one of a peculiar psychology that is played out within
language, then Lyrical Ballads is no less invested in the
same extended scheme to tease out the process and effects of Wordsworth's
deflection of the hatred of Rivers/De Monfort
within his poetic language. In De Monfort , Baillie's influence on
and elaboration of Wordsworth's ideas on language, however,
did not stop at this analysis of his psycholinguistic history: it also
provided him with a paradigmatic enactment of the
self-reflexive intertextuality that served to confirm the imaginary
disposition of his poetic language--the kind of literary textuality
that was itself the Wordsworthian resolution of that analysis.
The story of Wordsworth's control of his oedipal history inflected within
imaginary intertextuality is told in 'There was a boy',
the fragment that Wordsworth composed in October 1798 and that was
to become part of The Prelude Book V, but that was
first published in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads , thereby
admitting the Recluse project materially into the history of the
other work. Jonathan Wordsworth has briefly discussed the discovery
first made by John Kerrigan that the boy who hooted at
owls in Wordsworth's poem was originally De Monfort's hated other,
Rezenvelt, who on the point of death soliloquises:
Ha! does the night-bird greet me on my way?
How much his hooting is in harmony
With such a scene as this! I like it well.
Oft when a boy, at the still twilight hour,
I've leant my back against some knotted oak,
And loudly mimick'd him, till to my call
He answer would return, and, through the gloom,
We friendly converse held. (B, 95)
Wordsworth's boy also 'would . . . stand alone/beneath the trees or
by the glimmering lake,/And there . . . /Blew mimic
hootings to the silent owls/That they might answer him.' (P, 172, 393-9)
Jonathan Wordsworth comments that 'It comes as a
shock to think of There was a boy , of all poems, as having a literary
source', (36) but I am suggesting that as Wordsworth
'hung/Listening' (P, 172, 406-7) over the text of De Monfort the 'gentle
shock of mild surprize' (P. 172, 407) that he heard
came precisely from the language there provided for him. (37) Its being
presented to him invested it with his private insistence
to articulate in his own poetry the return of the imaginary that began
echoing within the boy's activity: the 'long halloos, and
screams, and echoes loud,/Redoubled and redoubled' (P, 172, 402-3),
and between that and Wordsworth's own past:
And when it chanced
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,
Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake. (P, 172,
404-13)
The grave but deep emotion of pleasure held is the distinctive semiotic
of Wordsworth's achieved self-reflexivity, as Coleridge
acknowledged in selecting these lines as among those most characteristic
of their author in Chapter 20 of Biographia Literaria
, and again when he wrote elsewhere: 'That "Uncertain heaven received/Into
the bosom of the steady lake," I should have
recognized anywhere; and had I met these lines running wild in the
deserts of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out
"Wordsworth!"' (G, I, 452-3) Coleridge was probably thinking of this
intensified kind of duplication with its moving
apprehension of stability when he also claimed that Wordsworth's poetry
was inimitable:
But WORDSWORTH, where he is indeed Wordsworth,
may be mimicked by Copyists, he may be plundered by
Plagiarists; but he cannot be imitated, except
by those who are not born to be imitators. For without his depth of
feeling and his imaginative power his Sense
would want its vital warmth and peculiarity (BL, 277).
There were in fact four boys who played principal parts in Wordsworth's
imaginary intertextuality. Besides the schoolboy
Wordsworth himself and John Tyson, the twelve-year old whose actual
grave is referred to, (38) there were the rivalrous boy
doubles, Rezenvelt and De Monfort. In Wordsworth's personal recollection,
John Tyson is dead and 'taken from his mates' (P,
174, 414), though he remains more present than the other boys to represent
an unresolved transitivist dilemma that is both
precious and dangerous. The personal anecdote plays around the cusp
of (a partly denied) language-acquisition, and
acknowledges, even while it helps to reconcile, the conflicted relationship
of competing subjectivities in the development of
Wordsworth the poet. In the plot of De Monfort , Wordsworth read the
terms of the antagonism he had to resolve within his
own revision of Enlightenment bildung , seeing his own fate reflected
in the characters of both murderer and victim, whom the
poet needed both to do away with and yet somehow preserve in order
to achieve his singular cultural passage to poethood.
De Monfort's fixed hatred dates from boyhood:
E'en in our early sports, like two young whelps
Of hostile breed, instinctively reverse,
Each 'gainst the other pitch'd his ready pledge,
And frown'd defiance. (B, 86)
Rezenvelt endorses this picture of competitive envy that could hardly
be farther removed from the spirit of the Hawkshead
schoolboy troop that Wordsworth depicts:
For e'en in boyish sports I still oppos'd
His proud pretentions to pre-eminence;
Nor would I to his ripen'd greatness give
That fulsome adulation of applause
A senseless crowd bestow'd. (B, 91)
De Monfort's aversion stems from the other's failure to acknowledge
the kind of singular distinction that has painfully deprived
him of the sociability he also desires. He envies his rival's gregarious
bonhomie, which, as they 'pass'd/From youth to man's
estate' (B, 86), has given the latter a social prestige that De Monfort
suspects to have been at the expense of what he himself
stands for. In short, De Monfort feels that 'He will not let me be
the man I would' (B, 85), and hates him for representing what
by definition he himself can never become.
Wordsworth himself knew intimately the dangers of emulation. At Hawkshead
he claimed only once to have experienced envy:
'It was when my brother was nearly certain of success in a foot race
with me. I tripped up his heels. This must have been envy.'
(39) At Cambridge he owned to another isolated example:
This 'once' was in the study of Italian, which
. . . I entered on at College along with -- . . . . I was his superior
in
many departments of mind, but he was the better
Italian scholar, and I envied him. The annoyance this gave me
made me feel that emulation was dangerous
for me , and it made me very thankful that as a boy I never
experienced it. I felt very early the force
of the words, 'Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect'
(Pr,
456)
Vying to acquire a foreign tongue, in a struggle that associates with
sibling competition, Wordsworth characteristically turns to
oedipal reconciliation with an absent father which was conceived as
being exemplary because beyond contention. Violence is
avoided by substituting a more fulfilling self-realisation in submission
to religious discourse that calls for its denial.
This was the way Wordsworth customarily achieved discursive self-empowerment
by converting potential antagonism between
individualistic attainment and collective solidarity into languages
of passive or pacificatory authority. In the triangulation of
relationships between Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Dorothy from 1797-8,
for example, that is refracted in those between
Rezenvelt, De Monfort and his sister, Jane, in Baillie's play, it was
Coleridge's provision of languages for an undivided and
seemingly non-competitive subject position (principally associationism
and pantheism at the time) that transformed him from
being viewed as a rival into an agent of reflexivity helping to articulate
in the Symbolic Dorothy's duplication of Wordsworth's
own founding imaginary relation with nature. It is De Monfort's tragedy
not to be similarly capable of resolving his related
dilemma. Sounding by turns like Milton's Satan and Iago, he knows that
'[His] nature is of temp'rature too cold' (B, 90) and
suffers from social foreclosure rather than achieving what Wordsworth
was in the process of recognising as his own
compromise formation of an individually overdetermined mode of cultural
representation.
Radically, Wordsworth recognized in De Monfort's case the personal dangers
of a tragic impasse to symbolic fulfilment which
his own poetic language needs to circumvent. Jane's appeal for her
brother to return to the symbiotic position that preceded the
knowledge of conflict and alienation cannot be simply translated into
the social order because the Symbolic has become
unmoored from a sufficiently powerful imaginary insistence. His uncontrollable
urge to self-empowerment has meaning finally for
no-one else: his subjectivity deprives him of social being, as he is
drawn back to the structure that he most needs but is
compelled to destroy:
Jane . (Shaking her head .) I cannot speak
to thee.
De Mon . I have kill'd thee. (B, 86)
Because he can neither relinquish that former bond nor take it forward
into cultural representation it becomes the object of
jealous possession from which he must exclude the realisation of otherness.
Rezenvelt, on the other hand, demonstrates the
effortless passage into oedipal resolution that De Monfort cannot effect,
but without the specialised self-discipline that the latter
vainly wishes to articulate as the added significance of that commonplace
acquisition.
Rezenvelt represents the operation of a cliché, language circulating
without personal authorisation, whereas De Monfort aspires
distinctively to re-empower and control the dominating discourses of
his society. When his mind becomes infected with the false
suspicion of an intended liaison between Rezenvelt and his sister,
Hamlet- and Othello- like, he agonises over what he feels
would be a betrayal of his exceptional and for him crucial relationship,
though it would need to pass through the same process
into differentiation in order to find the expression in the social
order that he craves. He questions himself in what in MS. JJ of
October-November 1798, in the manuscript with the first draft of 'There
was a boy', would become Wordsworthian terms for
finding a poetic language in which to begin writing The Prelude : 'was
it for this/That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved/To blend
his murmurs with my nurse's song,/And sent . . . a voice/To intertwine
my dreams?' (P, 487, 1ff) Their shared quandary is as to
how a founding subjectivity may gain entry into self-knowledge (which
of course entails the consciousness of sexual division)
and still avoid the extinction of what 'came before':
Where am I now? 'midst all the cursed thoughts
That on my soul like stinging scorpions prey'd,
This never came before--Oh, if it be!
The thought will drive me mad.--Was it for
this
She urged her warm request on bended knee?
Alas! I wept, and thought of sister's love,
No damned love like this . . .
. . . I'll not believe it.
I must have proof clear as the noon-day sun
For such foul change as this! (B, 93; my italics)
The climactic murderous episode is filled with 'horrid cries' and 'distant
screams' (B, 96), as De Monfort's contemplated deed
evokes the guilty apprehension expressed in one of Wordsworth's early
'spots of time' ('I heard . . . steps/Almost as silent as
the turf they trod' [P, 46, 329 and 331-2]), where consciousness of
(oedipal) violence and theft is commemorated as the
foundation of that linguistic subjectivity which was later (in the
writing of the poem) urgently required, however feared: 'methinks
it sounds/As though some heavy footsteps follow'd me'. (B, 95) As in
Wordsworth's founding moments, 'the earth around/Did
utter secret things.' (B, 95)
In the play, the victim of De Monfort's guilty violence turns out to
have provoked a rivalry that is so difficult to locate precisely
because Rezenvelt exemplifies nothing other than an entirely normative
passage into the social order. The boy who hooted at
owls in De Monfort does not so much recall both John Tyson and the
poet's past self--a lingering reminder of Wordsworth's
once undifferentiated boyhood fellowship that has to be discarded for
cultural maturity--as introduce a further hidden contest
for the singular command within and of that past. For Wordsworth, it
rouses an awareness that the subsequently individuated
poet he had become had entered into an obscure competition with the
other survivors of that once unbroken society over the
degree to which their former common history still peculiarly mattered
for his own professional empowerment.
What engaged Wordsworth so deeply in the play was its acting out the
duality of his compromise formation in the added
significance of making poetry out of common languages. In the upshot,
the doubles lie dead side by side, though it is De
Monfort, 'a wounded spirit' (B, 103), who is more mourned: 'This is
the murder'd corpse/ . . . /But see, I pray!/Here lies the
murderer/ . . . /Think'st thou, less painful than the murd'rers' knife/Was
such a death as this?' (B, 102) All along, the
responsibility for De Monfort's own failure to find social representation
for his kind of distinction has been wrong-headedly
attributed to Rezenvelt:
it is hate! black, lasting, deadly hate;
Which thus hath driv'n me forth from kindred
peace,
From social pleasure, from my native home,
To be a sullen wand'rer on the earth,
Avoiding all men, cursing and accurs'd. (B,
85)
Wordsworth had already arrived at a similar impasse in The Borderers,
where Mortimer had been implicated in an analogous
crime of self-knowledge that ultimately could find no resolution in
a restored regime. De Monfort ends by courting the social
annihilation he had always feared, with 'no name' (B, 100):
I now am nothing,
I am a man, of holy claims bereft;
Out of the pale of social kindred cast;
Nameless and horrible. (B, 99)
Accordingly, a 'nameless tomb' (B, 104) is raised to him. Because the
(rational) violence by which social empowerment had
been offered him was too traumatic to disassociate itself from that
origin, Wordsworth's tragic figure had succumbed, like
Baillie's, to symbolic foreclosure:
I will go forth a wanderer on the earth,
A shadowy thing, and as I wander on
No human ear shall ever hear my voice,
No human dwelling ever give me food
Or sleep or rest, and all the uncertain way
Shall be as darkness to me, as a waste
Unnamed by man! (TB, 294, 265-71)
Wordsworth's later poem, however, has begun to convert the retention
of the imaginary within the social order into the
discourse of moral education. If the specialist in language had inevitably
consigned the fixatedness of his earlier function to an
early grave, he was nonetheless peculiarly impelled to bring it to
expression within the Symbolic order: he needed to 'build [his]
house upon this grave' ('A Poet's Epitaph'; PW, IV, 67, 60). On mature
reflection, social Law demanded that with time an
undeveloped kind of subjectivity had to go quietly, but it needed also
to be memorialised as the common antecedent not only of
those surviving wranglers-to-be who would complete their education
in the purchase of 'Knowledge . . . [without] the loss of
power' (P, 174, 449)--school-mates, for example, like Wordsworth's
younger brother, Christopher, who became Master of
Trinity College, Cambridge, and Robert Greenwood, who was elected a
Fellow of Trinity in 1792 (WH, 79)--but also even
more significantly of the poet Wordsworth, who may not have taken his
degree, but who had after all attained a higher degree
of imaginary education that enabled him pre-eminently to echo John
Tyson's absolute silence--in poetic language: 'A full
half-hour together I have stood/Mute, looking at the grave in which
he lies.' (P, 174, 421-2)
Notes
(1) All references in the text are to the translation by Margaret Waller,
Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia
UP, 1984): RPL in the text. (back)
(2) Lyrical Ballads , ed. Michael Mason (London: Longman 1992) 1. All
references in the text to material from or related to
Lyrical Ballads are from this edition based on the 1805 versions: LB
in the text. (back)
(3) Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge , ed. Earl Leslie Griggs,
6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1956-71), II, 1034:
G in the text. (back)
(4) The particular relevance of pastoral in the second edition to the
grand plan is discussed in the Introduction to Lyrical
Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797-1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992) 26. (back)
(5) This expands on a hint from Kenneth Johnston about the connection
between Wordsworth's problem with proceeding with
The Recluse and the discrepancies between different kinds of poetry
in Lyrical Ballads. He makes the point that 'the great
preface of 1800 may be seen as constituting a prose version of the
"Prospectus" to The Recluse at least as meaningfully as it
forms an introduction to that collection of smaller poems, where the
discrepancy between its grand claims and the simplicity of
many of those poems has been an endless source of readerly bewilderment
and critical controversy.' (Wordsworth and The
Recluse [New Haven: Yale UP, 1984] xxii). (back)
(6) All references are to The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna
Baillie (1851) , Anglistica and Americana 177
(Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms, 1976) 5-6: B in the text. (back)
(7) A lucid account of Kristeva's ideas on this topic is given by Kelly
Oliver in the chapter 'Revolutionary Language Rendered
Speechless', to which I am indebted, from her Reading Kristeva: Unravelling
the Double-bind (Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1993) 91-113: O in the text. (back)
(8) See Stephen Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language: The French
Revolution as Linguistic Event (Hanover,
N.H.: Published for Brown UP for New England UP, 1988) 85. (back)
(9) Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (London: Methuen,
1984) 26. See my extended discussion of
Wordsworth's relation to this version of the revolution in '"A Poet's
History": Wordsworth and Revolutionary Discourse' in
Wordsworth in Context , ed. Pauline Fletcher and John Murphy (Lewisburg:
Bucknell UP, 1992). (back)
(10) The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850 , ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams,
and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979)
76, 232-6. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to The Prelude
and related materials are to the 1805 version in this
edition: P in the text. (back)
(11) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New
York: Pantheon, 1971) 297, 296: OOT in the
text. (back)
(12) See her The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative
Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca
and London: Cornell UP, 1986). (back)
(13) For example, in 'Crossings Out: the Problem of Textual Passage
in The Prelude ', Romantic Revisions , ed. Robert
Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 105-8: CO
below. (back)
(14) Compare James M. Mellard's analysis of Hester Prynne's identificatory
others in 'Inscriptions of the Subject: The Scarlet
Letter ' in his Using Lacan: Reading Fiction (Urbana and Chicago: Illinois
UP, 1991) 82-3. (back)
(15) In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (New York: Columbia UP, 1987) 62. (back)
(16) William Wordsworth , ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984) 246, 7: WW in the text. (back)
(17) Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988) 122. (back)
(18) Authors and Authority: A Study of English Literary Criticism and
Its Relation to Culture 1750-1900 (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977) 45: AA in the text. (back)
(19) See his Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory , NLB 1977; excerpted
in 'Class Interpellations and
Popular-Democratic Interpellations' in Politics and Ideology , ed.
J. Donald and S. Hall (Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1986)
27-32, where this issue is taken up in other contributions. (back)
(20) The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1983) 121. RI in the text. (back)
(21) See 'Gender in Masculine Romanticism', in her Romanticism and Gender (London: Routledge, 1993) 17-29. (back)
(22) For example, in the move described passim by Jane Gallop in 'History
Is Like Mother', in The New Historicism Reader ,
ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1994). (back)
(23) 'Pleasure and Reality', The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960:
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan , ed. Jacques-Allain
Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992) 24: PR in the
text. (back)
(24) (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989): SOH in the text. (back)
(25) For a detailed elaboration of this argument, see CO above. (back)
(26) The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) 98: IA in the text. (back)
(27) These definitions are quoted from Howard Caygill's A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) 54. (back)
(28) Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991) 10. (back)
(29) The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth , ed. Ernest de Selincourt,
rev. Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1952-9) I, 264, 18-22: PW in the text. (back)
(30) Ed. Nigel Leask (London: Dent, 1997) 244-5: BL in the text. (back)
(31) John Locke, Essay on Human Understanding , quoted in Hans Aarsleff,
The Study of Language in England
1780-1860 (Minneapolis and London: Minneapolis UP, 1983) 32. (back)
(32) The title and thesis of William Minto's influential elaboration
of the Arnoldian argument about Wordsworth's self-alienation
in philosophical language: Nineteenth Century 26, September 1889, 435-51.
(back)
(33) Ancestral Voices: Fifty Books from the Romantic Period (London: Woodstock, 1991) 97. (back)
(34) The Bright Work Grows: Women Writers of the Romantic Age (Poole: Woodstock, 1997) 62. (back)
(35) [On the Character of Rivers], The Borderers , ed. Robert Osborn (London: Cornell UP, 1982) 62: TB in the text. (back)
(36) Ancestral Voices: Fifty Books from the Romantic Period (London: Woodstock, 1991) 96. (back)
(37) My argument here is engaged in a revision of Geoffrey Hartman's
treatment of the grounding of what he describes as
'quotation' in his essay 'Wordsworth, Wish, Worth' as printed in The
Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987).
In my alternative reading, the founding moment of reflexivity at the
mirror stage is the organising structure of Wordsworth's
intertextuality. (back)
(38) Wordsworth made the identification to his cousin, Dorothy (Benson
Harrison); see T.W. Thompson, Wordsworth's
Hawkshead (London: OUP, 1970) 56: WH in the text. (back)
(39) 'Reminiscences of Mrs Davy', The Prose Works of William Wordsworth
, ed. A.B. Grosart, 3 vols. (London: Moxon,
1876), III, 456: Pr in the text. (back)
Keith Hanley
Lancaster University
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