Between Memory and History: Wordsworth's Excursion
by Lisa Hirschfield
[Hirschfield, Lisa. "Between Memory and History: Wordsworth's
Excursion." Romanticism On the Net 16 (November
1999) [Date of access]. <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/memory.html>]
Despite – or perhaps, because of – its own mixed reception history,
The Excursion (1814) remains an interesting
comment on the process of historical and cultural change. Like The
Prelude (1850), the poem addresses the status of the self,
the passage of time, and memory – issues that have revived critical
interest in the poem over the last two decades. (1) As the
arguments of critics like William H. Galperin and David Simpson have
implied, The Excursion engages with these issues by
“displacing” them as symptoms or “anxieties.” The poem seems to indicate
Wordsworth's revision, or at least his questioning, of
assumptions about self, imagination, and memory on which The Prelude
operated. (2) Instead of undertaking a further
interrogation of the poem's "anxieties" in this essay, I want to suggest
another way of reading them – a reading that also suggests
a schema for re-reading critical and editorial interventions that seek
to determine any poem's meaning.
"The history of …memory is the history of its transmission." (3)
While considerations of Wordsworth and memory are nothing new, such
readings have usually sought to interpret or critique
Wordsworth's own relationship to memory, with regard to language, landscape,
or an apriori concept of historical "truth." But
these investigations do not, usually, read Wordsworth as memory – that
is, as a mode of knowledge, that responds to, draws
from, and narrates historical events, but has no necessary allegiance
to history. All narrative genres, whether documentary or
fictional, create "typical patterns in which we experience and interpret
events" (Fentress and Wickham, 73). As we know, these
patterns always operate in terms of a particular discourse; comprising
a grammar of conceptualized images and figures, all
narratives are purely rhetorical at some level. Impure Conceits, Alison
Hickey's recent book-length study of The Excursion,
provides an in-depth examination of such rhetorical figures, and how
they structure meaning in the poem. (4) These rhetorical
figures also structure memory; and this suggests that memory is less
a corollary to history than a system of meaning unto itself,
albeit one that draws its material from history. But Hickey's reading
is important to my discussion for another reason: she
focuses her attention on the failure of tropes in The Excursion. It
is this failure – a failure of memory, in a sense – that leaves
the poem caught between memory and history, and ultimately questions
the power of memory to sustain and nourish the
modern imagination.
Hickey notes that The Prelude's unified force of memory – the narrative
authority of an "imperial self" – is almost entirely
absent in The Excursion (15). Instead, The Excursion presents us with
far more uncertain "gaps and strayings...plots of
deviation and deferral, usurpations and broken lineages, and unfulfilled
promises" (14). What The Excursion demonstrates is
not a memory that recreates or in some way reenacts the past, but a
memory that can only represent, by signs and figures, the
broken narratives of a past that is and always was irretrievable. In
many ways, the poem revises Wordsworth's former, more
hopeful view of memory as a redemptive, restorative, and absolute power
– a view that informs The Prelude and poems like
Tintern Abbey.
"Memory has never known more than two forms of legitimacy: historical
and literary," writes the historian Pierre Nora. (5)
Nora, who recently published his decade-long collaborative historical
study, Les Lieux de Mémoire, or "Realms of Memory,"
is concerned with the way in which cultural or collective memory is
"in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of
remembering and forgetting. . . vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation,
susceptible to being long dormant and periodically
revived" (8). Echoing Nora, Hickey's focus on The Excursion's "gaps
and strayings" would support a claim that this poem is
remarkable for its very problematic relationship to memory, and for
the way it sketches out the boundaries between memory
and history.
"The ages live in history through their anachronisms"
Oscar Wilde
Nora writes that memory and history, "far from being synonymous, appear
now to be in fundamental opposition" (8). The
Excursion was written during a process of cultural change; demonstrating
the beginnings of this opposition, the forces of
memory and history struggle within the text like conjoined twins. Contemporary
critics' persistent and well-intentioned efforts to
reclaim or reallocate memory - to wrest the displaced "truth" from
historical or literary narrative - suggests that Nora's theory of
a once-organic relationship between memory and history is correct.
Such critical trends also attest to our difficulty, now, in
comprehending such a relationship. Moreover, it demonstrates that the
formerly recreative act of memory Nora postulates has
mostly survived as an object: a product, itself, of history. It is
not surprising then, that one of "the costs of the historical
metamorphosis of memory has been a wholesale preoccupation with the
individual psychology of remembering," creating a new
"economy of the identity of the self, the mechanics of memory, and
the relevance of the past" (15). His argument entails the very
conditions which appear, now, to have shaped Wordsworth's poetry, and
by which we generally characterize the poet himself.
The Excursion strikes me as a text under extreme historical pressure.
Whereas The Prelude attempts to trace the
development of a consciousness in the grip of, but not entirely "besieged"
by history, The Excursion repeatedly, and
defensively, invokes the name of memory against history. It attempts
to stave off what is perceived as time's destructive nature,
by establishing memorial sites and appealing to an apparently immanent
desire for their preservation. In this sense, The
Excursion strives to be not a witness to change, nor an occasion for
historical speculation, but a book-length elegy. An elegy
for what? For memory itself.
Nora's introduction to Realms, republished in the Spring 1989 issue
of Representations, has already found its way outside of
the historical field, (6) perhaps because the essay establishes a useful
critical schema for examining the familiar binary of
"memory vs. history." (7) For this reason I think it successfully illuminates
a text like The Excursion. Like Fentress and
Wickham, Nora treats memory not as an alternative to history, but as
an affective and unpredictable mode of truth in itself, one
which "only accommodates those facts that suit it" (p.8). Above all,
memory is always in movement; it is a process that
"nourishes recollections that may be out of focus, or telescopic, global
or detached, particular or symbolic — responsive...to
every censorship or projection" (p.8). Likewise, his definition of
history implies an equally selective (or defective) function:
History, even as idea, is "the reconstruction, always problematic and
incomplete, of what is no longer . . . [It is] a
representation of the past" (p.8, my emphasis).
While some historicist criticism – especially of Romantic literature
– has called attention to memory's telescoping, projecting and
censoring functions, it has tended to posit a very deterministic relationship
between literature and the historical record. (8) Even
the title of David Simpson's book, Wordsworth's Historical Imagination:
The Poetry of Displacement, implies a kind of
literary text that could be entirely "in place." (9) Yet this concept
of displacement invokes the very terms by which memory
operates. And like literature, history is also a text, with its own
uncertain gaps and strayings, its own rhetoric, and its own
memory. In this light, I would argue that what appear to be historical
"truths" breaking through the surface of a literary text are
more often than not "memorial" truths. However, if we choose not to
hold texts responsible to history, neither can we make
them answer to the fugitive authority of memory. Perhaps we can read
any historically conscious text as a means of mapping
out a realm between them.
Whereas historical narrative is, generally speaking, "bound strictly
to temporal continuities, to progression and relations between
things," the narrative recreated by memory "takes root in the concrete,
in spaces, gestures, images and objects" (Nora, 8-9).
Realms, or sites of memory, "are created by a play of memory and history,
an interaction of the two factors that result in their
reciprocal overdetermination. To begin with, there must be a will to
remember" (p. 19, my emphasis). As this “will to
remember” increases under the pressure of an historical consciousness
(a will to write history, in a sense), it produces sites of
memory — narratives, monuments, and cultural artifacts. These sites
begin to constitute one's experience of the past, until it is
reduced ultimately to a history of ideas, and the scars or traces left
by those ideas upon a culture and the landscape it inhabits.
Nora argues that, with the "acceleration of history" in the industrial
era, temporal continuity in traditional societies experienced a
division - between memory, "social and unviolated," and history, "which
is how our hopelessly forgotten modern societies,
propelled by change, organize the past" (p.8).
The Excursion "opens onto profound societal shifts in whose midst it
is located" (Hickey, 8); the poem is also notable for the
way it addresses the problems of individual versus collective memory,
natural process versus historical change, and nature
versus culture. Reading The Excursion with these issues in mind, the
poem demonstrates a change in Wordsworth's
relationship to memory, and perhaps narrates the process of a larger
cultural change - more or less contemporaneous with the
poem - from a tradition or ritual practice of memory, to a history
or narrative of such practice.
Each of The Excursion's narrative "clusters" attempts to make the processes
of time intelligible; each of its four principle
characters - the Wanderer, the Solitary, the Pastor, and the Poet -
engages the others in a "dialogue of perspectives" on
memory (Hickey, 45), and on its role in individual, communal, and national
consciousness. The Wanderer is the threatened
voice of tradition; he represents a (nearly outmoded) relationship
to nature and time which allows him to transcend the impulse
to memorialize. The Solitary is the Wanderer's antithesis - an example
of the alienated, "modern subject" - a figure for memory
that has become utterly transformed by history. The Pastor, appearing
in Book Six, is the producer and transmitter of a
community's memorial sites. The Poet, Wordsworth's ironically silent
narrator, is the ostensible author of The Excursion's
lengthy realm of memory. The Poet's "silence," and his deferral of
(narrative) authority to the Wanderer in Book First, already
indicates that Wordsworth was somewhat skeptical of memory's power.
As William Galperin argues, this deferral suggests that
the poetic stance is inadequate "to order nature in a secularized,
unorthodox way" (32). For poetry must draw on previous
models to fashion its "own" patterns of narrative and imagery. It must
defer to preexisting modes of social and intellectual order
to create its own rationale for ordering, conceptualizing, and remembering.
'I would enshrine the spirit of the past for future restoration"
In most of Wordsworth's writing, poetry and prose, a sense of the past
is embedded in and extended by landscape, which
becomes an analogue for memory or, as Christopher Salvesen described
it, "a kind of reservoir...of mystically diffused
memory." (10) Within The Excursion the interactive cycles of natural,
geologic time and the span of human lives reach a point
of crisis. Human memory, once bound in a symbiotic, metonymic relationship
to the land, now interferes with the memorial
landmarks it created, or is itself erased by natural and social processes.
This sense of crisis is evident, especially, in work from
the latter half of Wordsworth's career. In his essay "Description of
the Scenery of the Lakes" (1810), and pamphlet "Kendal
and Windermere Railway" (1845) Wordsworth complains bitterly about
technological and “picturesque” incursions of man on
his beloved, wild landscape. While a similar apprehension of crisis
operates throughout The Excursion, it transforms the poem
into something more than the historical portrait of a rural community,
or a protest of its inevitable modernization. In Hickey's
words, "The Excursion is a vast landscape of epitaphs...but such [literary]
objects, and the truths they yield to those who
invest their interpretive labor in them, are held in the balance as
the spread of industrialism changes the face of the signifying
landscape, raising the disturbing possibility that the entire epitaphic
poem itself may mark the demise of the actual landscape in
which epitaphs have borne meaning...An epitaph for epitaphs...[and
] for a way of life..."(103-4). To read the poem in this way
means to name it, for ourselves, as a site of memory.
As an epitaph serves to perpetuate a community's memory of an individual,
The Excursion attempts to re-order the "diffused"
memory of a landscape and community, thereby ensuring its futurity
for individuals (characters and readers alike). Hickey rightly
characterizes the poem as an epitaph – at once a "lament" for memory,
and for the very need to elegize the once-organic,
mytho-poeic practice of memory. In its lamentation, the poem calls
attention to the relationship between "signifying object and
plot" - the site and the story - "stressing the difficulty of interpretation
and the threat of error"(Hickey, 103). It lays bare the
hybrid function of a site, as well as the inherent problems of authority
that arise in the process of interpreting memorials. Yet the
poem-as-epitaph must also mourn "its own erasure, which has already
begun"(98).
The voices of memory that speak throughout The Excursion seem to anticipate
many of Nora's claims. In Book I ("The
Ruined Cottage"), The Wanderer explains to the poet that as lived experience
recedes in time, it is the self-conscious "will to
remember" that constitutes memory, effecting its transmission through
the ages, for
...we die, my Friend,
Nor we alone, but that which each man loved
And prized in his peculiar nook of earth
Dies with him, or is changed; and very soon
Even of the good is no memorial left. (I,
469-474) (11)
The Wanderer was a "pedlar" earlier in life — already an antiquated
occupation by the time he relates this story to the Poet.
Despite Francis Jeffrey's objections, it is this status which grants
the Wanderer authority to speak for the memory of an
agrarian, pre-industrial society. The story of Margaret's dilapidated
cottage seems to be a product of his spontaneous memory,
that is, not produced by specific pressures of history. While war and
economic instability are primary catalysts in this narrative,
such events are related as "history sought in the continuity of memory,"
rather than as "memory cast in the discontinuity of
history" (Nora, 17). As his narrative progresses, the Wanderer builds
an argument for the relinquishment of "the will to
remember," showing how the monuments or ruins by which memory can transcend
individual lives cannot themselves escape
effacement by nature and "natural time." Yet the cottage, even in its
gradual disappearance, has become the Wanderer's site of
memory, a way to generate narrative and tap into a stream of remembrance.
A site of memory exists between "living memory" - spontaneous, repetitive
- and historical memory: "that which has already
happened." As a sign or relic of the Wanderer's past, the ruined cottage
consolidates his relationship with Margaret, her
tragedy, and the years he spent as a pedlar in a world that has since
changed. But as it is also a place of natural process — of
death and reintegration — the physical site itself is analogous to
the Wanderer's relationship to the past. Rather than struggle
against the forces of nature and time to erect a more permanent and
artificial monument — to consciously fix this memory — he
puts his faith in the life cycles of weeds and spear-grass, themselves
fragile and subject to weather, growth and decay.
Throughout The Excursion, the Wanderer reminds his companions that,
inevitably, it is the natural process that endures,
vanquishing all memorial effort:
So fails, so languishes, grows dim, and dies...
All that this World is proud of. From their
spheres
The stars of human glory are cast down;...
Their virtue, service, happiness, and state
Expire; and nature's pleasant robe of green
Humanity's appointed shroud, enwraps
Their monuments and their memory. (VII, 986-1009)
The Wanderer's stance toward time approaches what Christopher Salvesen
called, in Wordsworth's terms, a "wise
passiveness." It indicates a disposition content with the dialectic
of remembering and forgetting — free from nostalgia or the
desire to fix, stabilize, or preserve consciousness — beyond time,
in a sense. This mode of "removal, tranquil though severe,"
affords a "Fresh power to commune with the invisible world...inaudible
/ To the vast multitude." (IX, 82-90) A character of
both moral and memorial stability, the Wanderer sustains the possibility
of memory's redemption, but only by its relinquishment
to nature and a higher spiritual consciousness. This "higher power"
is, in terms of my argument, a faith in the continuity of
memory, its ultimate capability to withstand the disruptions of history,
by virtue of the dialectics of remembering and forgetting.
Because the Wanderer's relationship to memory is itself representative,
because this figure functions as a conceptualization of a
disappearing mode of memory, he – unlike the other characters – is
somewhat of a "site" in his own right. Conversely, the
Solitary is more representative of Wordsworth's own problematic relationship
to memory. "His life story is a generalized version
of Wordsworth's, fleshed out with historical and literary analogs"
(Johnston, 264). Perhaps it is more accurate to characterize
the Solitary as representative of Wordsworth's skepticism, embodying
his doubt of memory's redemptive power. Even before
his appearance, the Solitary enters the poem as a memory. When the
Wanderer and the Poet first believe him to be dead, the
Wanderer recounts his friend's life in a rambling epitaph. Not coincidentally,
the Solitary exhibits the most "memorial"
consciousness in the poem, one in which the function of memory, under
the extreme pressure of history, has overwhelmed all
else. In this sense, the Solitary is most clearly a negative figure
for Wordsworth himself — - portraying a sensitive imagination
caught in the time-lapse between experience and remembrance, between
feeling and articulation, unable to make the cognitive
leap of faith which will grant him the privilege of "recollection in
tranquillity." Instead, the Solitary seeks solace in the sublimity of
mountains and storms, which exceed imagination, memory, and everything
subject to failure.
The poem begins its "meta-dialogue" on the power of memory, when the
Wanderer attempts to reassure the Solitary that nature
can redeem human life, even as it overwhelms and transcends it:
...living things, and things inanimate,
Do speak, at Heaven's command, to eye and
ear,
And speak to social reason's inner sense,
With inarticulate language...
And further, by contemplating these Forms
In the relations which they bear to man,
He shall discern, how, through the various
means
Which silently they yield, are multiplied
The spiritual presences of absent things.
(IV, 1212-43)
Yet the Solitary remains mistrustful of "social reason," which has betrayed
him. Ghostlike himself, his life is haunted by the
presences of absent things — failed ideals, a dead family — and he
is trapped in the narrative of his own history. His apartment
is littered with cultural detritus, "sites of memory" in parvo – a
telescope, fishing rod, scraps of poetry, musical instruments.
Likewise, his memory is littered with lasting images he'd prefer to
avoid, while transient figures of light and shadow in the vale
still allow some respite for his imagination. When he denounces his
companions' habits of conscious introspection and
recollection, it is because such pursuits, for him, are occasions for
remembered pain (V, l. 225). He sees little value in the
memory's redemptive possibilities.
"Et in Arcadia Ego"
Despite the Solitary's apparent resistance, he too participates in the
processes of individual rememoration, and his skepticism
inscribes a new mode of cultural memory on the larger landscape of
the poem. The Excursion's landscape figures for both
cultural and individual memory on several levels. It is continually
described in terms of gravesites or Arcadian recesses: a ruined
cottage, the Solitary's little "urn-like vale," the children's abandoned
play garden, an altar-like formation of rocks and
vegetation, a series of marked and unmarked graves and monuments. These
"spots" as Hickey calls them, are not spots of time,
but sites that are both "radical and radically ambivalent." The positioning
of each "emphasizes the opening of the image for
double interpretation" (49-9). The urn-like vale is, for instance,
envisioned as a place of death for the old pensioner, a sign for
death (the urn), and a refuge for the Solitary from his own memory.
This resistance to fixed, allegorical meanings confounds
efforts on the part of characters, or critics, to name any place as
a definitive memorial site, to delineate and assign to it a stable
and unambiguous meaning.
Each of these locations generates a story: personal narrative, community
history, or local legend. Midday rest at the ruined
cottage was the occasion for the Wanderer's story of Margaret; the
primeval nook to which the Solitary leads his friends in
Book Three is the location for life story. It is also the scene of
an extended conversation that chronicles a "history" of the world.
In the graveyard, the Pastor recites his "oral histories" in order
to persevere in the (already eroded) tradition of local memory in
his village – to "bring to life" his community for the visitors. Throughout
the poem, elegy and genesis often blend, suggesting that
such narratives are analogous in The Excursion's system of memory.
Origins beseech remembrance, as do departures.
Inviting his companions to rest upon "a slope of mossy turf," the Solitary
begins his tale — primarily a history of crisis, for "times
of quiet and unbroken peace. . .give back faint echoes from the historian's
page" (606-8). While his most sensational
experiences are circumscribed by historically-relevant events or institutions
such as the French Revolution and the Church, the
"faint echoes" he refers to are traces of a more vulnerable, spontaneous
memory, one that is inscribed in the landscape and that
continues, for awhile, to reside there. Such is the recollection of
the "low cottage" where the Solitary lived with his wife,
On Devon's leafy shores; — a sheltered hold...
See, rooted in the earth, her kindly bed,
The unendangered myrtle, decked with flowers,
Before the threshold stands to welcome us!...
—Wild were the walks on those lonely downs,
Track leading into track; how marked, how
worn
Into the bright verdure, between fern and
gorse
Winding away its never ending line...
...there, lay open to our daily haunt,
A range of unappropriated earth... (522-47)
The "unendangered myrtle," mentioned twice in this tale, is a simple
but telling metaphor. In light of her subsequent death, it can
be read as an ironic figure for the Solitary's wife. It also serves
for a homespun "tree of life," and this passage is undeniably
pastoral and Edenic in its associations. Indeed, the Solitary describes
the Devonshire landscape as a biblical Eden; both locale
and witness. This particular landscape functions as a site of memory
in several ways. The tracks that the Solitary and his wife
made together are their life-story written into the ground. This inscription,
on a figurative level, allows the Solitary to draw a
"never ending line" of memory recycled in time. However, the Solitary's
idealization of this landscape also suggests the utter
irretrievability of the memory it records. What he has is the track,
the mark on the land - only a representation. The Solitary's
ideal life is no longer available to him as a re-livable experience
in memory. Nor for that matter, is it possible to reanimate any
of the portraits of ideal community in The Excursion, as David Simpson
notes (195, 205).
This passage also introduces, quite subtly, the process of land enclosure,
as the couple wandered across what was notably "a
range of unappropriated earth." By the time Wordsworth was writing
The Excursion, "the enclosure of arable and pasture" had
affected England's southern and Midland regions, but "did not apply
to ... [the Lake District] region of partially self-contained
farms." (12) Here, the Solitary recalls enclosure as a condition of
his youth, and it exists wholly within the "continuity" of his
memory. However, the enclosure of common grazing lands "did affect
these great open mountain wastes of the Lake District,
though not seriously until the middle years of the nineteenth century"
(MacLean, 92-93). I point this out because these later
results of enclosure, as well as of subsequent economic developments
that changed the face of the landscape, appear
throughout The Excursion as both subject and subtext. Such man-made,
physical, and long-lasting changes begin to put a new
pressure on the memory—landscape relationship so fundamental to the
poem's constructions of memory, and its
historically-produced sites.
‘Oh! that memory should survive to speak the word'
Frances Ferguson writes that "there is no tomb which does not awaken
the memory of the community from which the deceased
sprang." (13) Situated in a churchyard, the second half of The Excursion
concerns members of the surrounding community,
both living and dead. In the early passages of Book Five, Wordsworth
also took the opportunity to include a detailed
description of the church for, "As chanced, the portals of the sacred
Pile / Stood open." This pile is conjectured by William
Knight, the editor of the 1884 Paterson edition I used for this essay,
to be St. Oswald's — "the Church at Grasmere" (p. 207).
The church's monuments, "sepulchral stones" and "foot-worn epitaphs"
enumerated in this section are objects of the
community's history. Such a history provides the context, the historical
"pressure," for the Pastor's ensuing tales.
Cemeteries and sanctuaries are the obvious sites of communal memory,
places of "spontaneous devotion" and unconscious
tradition — funeral rites, for example (Nora, p. 23). In Book Second,
the Wanderer, spying the small funeral procession which
bears the body of the old shepherd from The Solitary's steep valley
home, observes that already, "Many precious rites / And
customs of our rural ancestry / Are gone." As these customs disappear
— such as the carrying of the dead past the doors of
the living before burial — so does a community's means of integrating
its tradition of memory into daily life. This preoccupation
with tradition — which is as integral to the identity of a culture
as personal memory is to an individual — seems to have infected
the editor William Knight. He notes that "The custom of mourners kneeling
around the coffin was, till quite lately, in common
use. It is still observed in some churches in Cumberland and Westmoreland,
but is generally passing away" (90). I mention
these editorial notes because they indicate the editor's present concerns,
add an extra-textual layer of historical pressure to the
poem, and affirm its status as a site of memory.
The shift to the churchyard in Book Fifth is more than a change of locale.
The Pastor's retelling of his parishioners' lives "shapes
these lives within the institutional context he represents" (Johnston,
292-3). His pastoral authority as a transmitter of community
memory is what brings these lives into narrative, and as Johnston notes,
just "telling the story of a life is not sufficient to give it
meaning" (292-3). In Book Fifth, there is a noticeable shift in emphasis
from storytelling that appeals to a more traditional or
organic model of rememoration, to a memory narrative that exists only
for its social and institutional usefulness as memory.
Possessing only a mental "map" of the churchyard, the Pastor guides
his visitors around it, eulogizing the dead. It is important to
note that these graves are unmarked, and it is the Pastor who "marks"
them, representing them as sites of memory by which
ideal virtues and communal values are defined.. The Wanderer enjoins
him to
Epitomise the life; pronounce, you can
Authentic epitaphs of some of these
Who, from their lowly mansions hither brought,
Beneath this turf lie mouldering at our feet...
(659-62)
True indeed it is
That they whom death has hidden from our sight
Are worthiest of the mind's regard; with these
The future cannot contradict the past... (670-73)
So begins the Pastor's narrative, one that moves back and forth between the
...heaving surface, almost wholly free
From interruption of sepulchral stones,
And mantled o'er with aboriginal turf
And everlasting flowers... (VI, 613-15)
to the undulating, aboriginal mountain landscape which surrounds them.
Moreover, these histories in the poem incorporate the
local oral history.
Ferguson makes the claim that such ‘authentic epitaphs' serve to "recapture...past
experience...uniting the present with the past,
and the human with the natural" (244). Hickey goes further, proposing
that epitaphs become "a link in the metonymical chain,
pointing to past and future but enclosing neither"(73). In light of
Nora's discussion, however, I'd argue that these epitaphs are
sites. They are already representations, divorced from any unconscious
"living" tradition, and therefore make impossible any
true reunion of past and present. Such "representations of truth in
biographical form," as Kenneth Johnston terms them, are
conceptualizations, narrative images made to serve a purpose. As such,
they mark a reversal of the "spots of time,"
Wordsworth's celebrated mode of memory. "Instead of arresting visionary
moments expanding into lifetime significance, these
stories represent whole lifetimes compressed into a single summary
account" (Johnston, 297).
As Nora explains, sites are evidence of a society's nostalgia for itself,
for "if what they defended were not threatened, there
would be no need to build them"(12). Moreover, enclaves of memory –
such as modern cemeteries – "originate with the sense
that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create
archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations,
pronounce eulogies … because such activities no longer occur naturally"
(12). These sites act metonymically as functional
reminders or "translations" of past experience, but they cannot effect
an unbroken continuum between past and present. The
Pastor's invention of epitaphic narratives that order and preserve
local memory admits that such memory is already "besieged
by history." This is true, at least, for the wandering threesome; being
foreign, they are not participants in local memory, and
request short epitomes in its place - representations. In other words,
a truly "authentic" tradition of memory is somewhat
proprietary, and therefore not available to these outsiders. This circumstance
also suggests that, soon, such authenticity won't
be available to anyone, and only increases the pressure of nostalgia,
the "will to remember."
As the Wanderer's words suggests, epitaphs are brief, stylized representations
of memory, not necessarily "links" to the
memory itself. In his second Essay on Epitaphs, Wordsworth acknowledges
the purely abstract, representative nature of the
epitaph, as well as its "signifying" role, for
the writer of an epitaph is not an anatomist,
who dissects the internal frame of the mind; he is not even a painter,
who executes a portrait at leisure ...The
character of a deceased friend of beloved kinsman is not seen, no - nor
ought to be seen, otherwise than as a tree
through a tender haze or a luminous mist, that spiritualises and beautifies
it; that takes away, indeed, but only to the
end that parts which are not abstracted may appear more dignified and
lovely; may impress and affect the more. (14)
Rather than providing an authentic link to the past, an epitaph serves
to "impress and affect" a graveside visitor, referring to a
feeling or sense of memory which is not necessarily his own. Yet, Wordsworth
suggests in the Essay that survivors of a
deceased friend or beloved kinsman may trust the abstraction of the
epitaph, for it is authentic if it is " truth hallowed by love -
the joint offspring of the worth of the dead and the affections of
the living!" (332-3). Only if performed in the tradition of elusive
and temporal "living memory," can epitaphs serve as links to the past.
As I suggested before, this section of The Excursion signifies an historical
threshold, at which the epitaph soon ceases to serve
such a tradition of memory. The Pastor's audience - and, we can assume,
his parishioners - do not question the historical
accuracy of what he has to say. His poetic epitaphs, they know, are
at one with "those precious rites and customs" of his
community. "These Dalesmen," observes the Poet, trust
The lingering gleam of their departed lives
To oral record, and the silent heart;
Depositories faithful and more kind
Than fondest [written] epitaph: for if these
fail,
What boots the sculptured tomb?... (616-25)
Yet, the Poet admits that "in less simple districts" where "stone lifts
its forehead emulous of stone," the ground "all paved with
commendations of departed worth," he finds security in more careful
efforts to enclose, preserve, and fix memory. The Pastor
is, in effect, the "author" of the community's sites of memory, in
that he determines how and why people and events are
remembered, and how memory itself is represented. His function in the
community illuminates the complex relationship of
memory and authority, demonstrating how sites of memory are manipulated
and controlled by dominant cultural forces or social
convention. Ironically, the Poet's "skepticism about the interpretation
of narrative signs"(Hickey, 42) suggests the absence,
already, of a reliable tradition of memory in his experience; he cannot
really understand it. Despite his assertion otherwise, I
suspect the Poet would not trust his own epitaph to a country preacher.
Like Margaret's cottage, the sculptured tomb must
eventually submit to weather and time, but its words are not so easily
revised as ‘oral record.' While the vulnerability of
community memory to revision and reinterpretation may not disturb the
dalesmen's confidence, the Poet speaks for those
divested of such "living" memory. He is a modern individual, already
besieged by a sense of history, and because he is not a
member of any particular community, he can only appreciate graves as
fixed sites, emblematic of the past and those who lived
in it. Moreover, the Poet's preoccupation with the preservation of
identity is an example of the "new economy and identity of
the self" Nora describes - a shift from a tradition of memory to a
history of memory.
These passages imply, as well, a nostalgia in the wake of history, for
even " as traditional memory disappears, we feel
obliged...to collect its remains, testimonies, documents, images, speeches,
any visible sign of what has been" (Nora, 13). What
is recovered serves to buttress identity and authority on both individual
and cultural levels, for "recorded feelings and attitudes
of people no longer living are remarkably effective in sanctioning
and confirming one's own ways of living." (15) This desire to
confirm, validate and reinforce former and present "ways of living"
against futurity is much of what drives The Excursion. In this
sense the poem is both producer and product of nostalgia : an act of
rememoration, more than a reenactment or "re-visioning"
of poetic tradition, despite Wordsworth's and Coleridge's grand plans
for the revolutionary philosophical poem called The
Recluse, which included both The Prelude and The Excursion.
A relationship to the past is informed by "a subtle play between its
intractability and its disappearance," and the emerging
"question of ... representation" [is] ... radically different from
the old ideal of resurrecting the past" (Nora, 17). In The
Excursion, this difference is most evident in the story of the "flaming
Jacobite" and "sullen Hanoverian" — enemies who, by
degrees, became friends and whose latter "days were spent in constant
fellowship" (Ex., p. 260).
There live who yet remember here to have seen
Their courtly figures, seated on the stump
Of an old yew...
They, with joint care, determined to erect,
Upon its site, a dial, that might stand
For public use preserved, and thus survive
As their own private monument. (VI, 486-504)
Knight notes that "of this ‘dial' ... there is no trace in Grasmere
churchyard." While the sundial in the poem serves as a "private
monument," it does not function as a monument to the past. It cannot
reanimate the yew, neither does it memorialize the men's
prior political relationship. Rather, it functions as an emblem of
their recent "revised" friendship, and as such, it publicly revises
and preserves both personal and community history (for only the Pastor
can relate the "true" history of the friends). The sundial
is, literally and figuratively, a means of ordering and controlling
time and futurity. As an example of extremely self-conscious
memorializing, it also traces a shift from a memory entrusted to natural
process to a memory produced by history, under the
"pressure" of forgetfulness and time's passage.
Just as each of The Excursion's main characters represents a particular
stance toward memory, the Pastor's epitaphs also
demonstrate various stances or relationships between memory and history.
His engagement with a more modern historical
consciousness in the previous narrative is countered in Book Seventh
with his "chivalric tale" of Sir Alfred Erthing. This sort of
shift is demonstrative of what Hickey calls "deviations" or "unfulfilled
promises" in The Excursion. It also suggests that the
poem is not structured by a single, stable paradigm of memory, but
illustrates the historical threshold at which memory stands.
In this "knight's tale," history is still recalled in the continuity
of memory, "if belief may rest / Upon unwritten story fondly traced /
From sire to son in this obscure retreat..." (VII, 952-54). The transformation,
over generations, of Sir Alfred Erthing's
mansion's ruins into dalesmen's cottages manifests the same process
by which living memory is transformed and ceaselessly
reinvented. Likewise, the memory of Sir Alfred Erthing is subject to
new interpretations. For the Wanderer, the knight is a
figure of identification: an emblem of virtue and endurance in a time
of political upheaval and social change, "conspicuous as our
own / For strife and ferment in the minds of men," and a symbol of
shifting cultural and economic realities, as his own "poor
calling," once esteemed, grows increasingly obsolete (VII, 1064-66).
Noting how these realities effect historical change and the technological
usurpation of the bond between man and nature, the
Wanderer observes that he has
...lived to mark
A new and unforeseen creation rise
From out the labours of a peaceful Land
Wielding her potent enginery to frame
And to produce, with appetite as keen
As that of war...
The foot-path faintly marked, the horse-track
wild,
And formidable plashy lane...
Have vanished — swallowed up by stately roads,
Easy and bold, that penetrate the gloom
Of Britain's farthest glens. (VIII, 90-112)
While nature provides the raw material for this new and unforeseen creation,
human endeavor is effacing the "slow rhythms of
the past," and the shape of the landscape itself is being transformed.
This is no integration of human and natural processes, but
rather the imposition of industrial culture upon a rural or agrarian
memory, diverting the streams of living tradition to power mills
and factories, so that remaining springs and rivulets must be consecrated
in memory's name. Moreover, when the Wanderer
complains that "whersoe'er the traveller turns his steps, / He sees
the barren wilderness erased, or disappearing" (VIII,
129-31), he invokes the concept of "barrenness" in positive terms.
The wilderness must remain wilderness — open and
undeveloped — if it is to sustain the particular, topographical, nature
- memory crucial to the survival of The Excursion's ideal
rural community. Hickey corroborates The Excursion's "green thought";
the poem depicts a world "that is rapidly being
overtaken by forces of industrialism and political and economic systematization
- and by an accompanying mental machinery -
that threaten to overwhelm the more modest process of cultivating the
landscape as the ground for local and personal meanings"
(69). This ambivalence toward human impact on the land, and its "accompanying
mental machinery," are symptomatic of a
worldview that has ceased, or is ceasing, to comprehend the acts of
human beings as natural. The physical effects of human
endeavor - such as the Solitary's "never ending line" eroded into the
landscape - are no longer folded into the concept of natural
process. Rather, such changes are here conceived of as antagonistic
to the landscape and its ground of "local and personal
meanings."
"Even of the good is no memorial left"
As with the knight's history, the epitaph of Oswald provides a site
of local memory that extends beyond the surrounding
fellsides and achieves a greater cultural significance, opposing the
social "erosion" coinciding with industrialization. The pairing of
Oswald's story with Sir Erthing's, which follows it, also demonstrates
the way memory narrative is generated in response to a
group's or community's needs, and therefore, often repeats itself in
different forms. Cultural memory does not exist to preserve
a sense of "what happened," but works as a means of social instruction.
Oswald, as a figure of cultural authority, appropriates
and represents the same values as Erthing, but in a more contemporary
form that would appeal to the young men of his own
time. Likened to a Pan or an Apollo "veiled in human form," this "Child
of Nature" - as he is described posthumously by the
Pastor - is a paragon of rustic virtue and fortitude. Or, perhaps he
is only such a paragon by virtue of his status as a site of
memory.
...through the impediment of rural acres
In him revealed a scholar's genius shone;
And so, not wholly hidden from men's sight,
In him the spirit of a hero walked
Our unpretending valley... (VII, 743-47)
An adept hunter, and veteran of the Napoleonic wars, Oswald is the ultimate
peasant-patriot, defender of "Albion's shores" and
the ancient, indigenous, and sacred memory there enclosed. So pronounces
the Pastor:
No braver Youth
Descended from Judean heights, to march
With righteous Joshua; nor appeared in arms
When grove was felled, and altar was cast
down
And Gideon blew the trumpet, soul-inflamed...
(819-23)
Moreover, Oswald, once a participant in communal and national life,
becomes via his epitaph, representative of everything that
is "worth" remembering:
The old domestic morals of the land,
Her simple manners, and the stable worth
That dignified a low estate...
...the character of peace,
Sobriety, and order, and chaste love,
And honest dealing, and untainted speech,
And pure good-will, and hospitable cheer,
That made the very thought of country-life
A thought of refuge... (VIII, 235-45)
Wordsworth not only articulates what, in his view, is disappearing,
but in doing so reifies an idealized notion of rural manners
and morals, "the very thought of country-life" which informs his imagination
and provides the foundation for his poetry. The
Excursion is a multidimensional poem, in that it performs different
"memorative" functions throughout its narrative. In this
passage and those that follow, Wordsworth makes an earnest appeal that
we not forget such values. The earnest panegyric on
rural virtue in Oswald's story is set against Book Eighth's diatribe
on the economic and social conditions that keep both the
urban and rural poor from achieving an imaginative connection to the
world — in short, that keep them from realizing their own
tradition of "living memory." Kenneth Johnston suggests that, for critics
and citizens alike, this sobering portrait of an
industrializing England really did serve a social purpose in representing
the hardships of the poor (290). In this way, The
Excursion strives to be memory, to represent its chosen truths, rather
than question the act of memorial representation itself.
But the poem is too unstable, its irony makes a purely historical reading
difficult. Such irony is most clearly expressed in the
figure of an old logger. In the pursuit of his traditional occupation,
he nevertheless participates in physical and social erosion.
This issue – the effacement of the land and its "organic" values, by
the very culture which depends upon them both – arises
toward the end of Book Seventh, when
A team of horses, with a ponderous freight
Pressing behind, adown a rugged slope...
Came at that moment ringing noisily.
"Here," said the Pastor, "do we muse, and
mourn
The waste of death; and lo! the giant oak
Stretched on its bier — that massy timber
wain;
Nor fail to note the man who guides the team."
(VII, 547-54)
The Pastor, with no little hint of contempt, describes how this "peasant
of the lowest class" has already outlived his life's
"ordinary bounds" by ten years — and each year decreases the standing
population of ancient oaks in the region. The Pastor
admits his "motion of despite" toward this hardy old man,
...whose bold contrivances and skill...
bear such conspicuous part
In works of havoc; taking from these vales
One after one, their proudest ornaments. (596-99)
Although he describes the logger in positive and vegetal terms — "green
in age and lusty" — this indicates a deeper anxiety for
the Pastor, who cannot reconcile this man's own simple manners and
otherwise virtuous conduct with his repeated violations of
nature, for which he reaps reward. Indeed, this logger makes his small
living selling timber, and with the slow but "undaunted
enterprise" of men such as he comes also the "acceleration of history."
Many a ship
Launched into Morecamb-bay to him hath owed
Her strong knee-timbers, and the mast that
bears
The loftiest of her pendants; He, from park
Or forest, fetched the enormous axle-tree
That whirls (how slow itself!) ten thousand
spindles:
And the vast engine laboring in the mine,
Content with meaner prowess, must have lacked
The trunk and body of its marvelous strength,
If his undaunted enterprise had failed
Among the mountain coves. (607-17)
Even in his tottering old age, the logger represents to the Pastor the
ambition-driven, individualistic, modern man. Divorced
from agrarian and communal ideals, this modern figure has begun make
drastic changes in the landscape, interfering with natural
cycles of time and threatening the cultural memory invested in those
cycles. The Pastor even offers brief eulogies for some of
the trees sacrificed to "progress." And, he argues, if one old tree
is like the next, what is to stop the logger from felling "The
Joyful Tree" (a site of community ritual) or "The Lord's Oak"?
"A Will to Remember"
Throughout The Excursion, and in much of his prose and shorter poetry,
Wordsworth acknowledges the effects of a
modernizing society and increasing industrialization on the landscape
of the Lake District and those who lived there. The
Excursion now functions as an important site of memory in several ways.
It is the poetic "record" of an individual attempting to
come to terms with the visible, surface transformation of landscape
- with the recognition that what was once perceived as
permanent is nearly as vulnerable as human memory. It also documents
a traditional way of life in the Lake District and
chronicles a communal, living memory under siege. Like many of Wordsworth's
other editors, William Knight included prolific
textual notes to the Paterson edition, seventy years after the poem's
initial publication - revealing his own interest in establishing
and preserving an historical, stable context within and without the
poem. But what emerges via these acts of recording is a
sense of memory enshrined "under the sign of that which has already
happened" (Nora, 7).
The Excursion's preoccupation with the past and its catalogue of "new
and unforeseen creation" in the present imply a
condition of discontinuity fast approaching, if not already present.
In addition to its contrasting of rural and industrial economies,
the poem emphasizes a struggle " between opposed economies of the imagination,"
and opposed modes of memory (Hickey,
70). This conflict is played out differently in the poem's various
narratives. The story of Oswald, for example, is a site of "local
memory" within the plot of poem, but stresses particularly memorable
social values for readers of the poem as well. Other
narratives, such as the story of little Margaret Green (VII), are "unmomentous"
- recollections of unrepresentative lives that do
not appear to formally signify anything but themselves (Hickey, 70).
This sort of retelling is more illustrative of spontaneous
"rememoration" than of conscious memorialization. It is an act that
invokes a community's living, changing system of interrelated
histories, and it speaks to a dying mode of social memory. The Solitary's
skepticism interrogates both modes of memory. His
inquiry, in Book Sixth, "into all the many lives that are never memorialized"
is "generalized to the doubtful usefulness of all stories
and myths" (Johnston, 301).
This disturbing question, "what is the use of memory?" haunts The Excursion;
it undermines Wordsworth's entire project, even
as he seeks to answer it. Thus, the poem stakes out a critical territory
in literary history, dramatizing the divorce of memory
from history, and simultaneously seeking to intervene in this process.
Once memory is "besieged" by history, according to
Nora's argument, we can only seek to decipher our experience in terms
of what we can no longer experience. And The
Excursion - both text and notes - demonstrates just this act of decipherment,
emerging from, and thereby defining, the remains
of ancestral, customary traditions of rural English life and Lake District
communities. While The Excursion's concerted "will to
remember" confirms that a shift from memory to history is irrevocable,
before the poem begins, this has already happened.
Can literature ever be a legitimate form of memory, as Nora claims,
or can it only function as a "site"? Wordsworth provides
one answer in Book Ninth, in a dialogue between the Poet and the Pastor's
wife. When the two spy a white ram, mirrored in a
pool at sunset, the Pastor's wife exclaims
Ah! what a pity were it to...disperse,
Or to disturb, so fair a spectacle,
And yet a breath can do it! (IX, 454-56)
The Poet responds:
Ah! that such beauty, varying in the light
Of living nature, cannot be portrayed
By words, nor by the pencil's silent skill;
But is the property of him alone
Who hath beheld it, noted it with care,
And in his mind recorded it with love! (IX,
514-19)
This suggests that such visions, kept "alive" in the imaginations of
living people, are vulnerable in the larger, social realm of
representation. According to the Poet, art is inadequate to incorporate
certain experiences, which might only survive as private,
internal recollections. Like the twofold reflection, memory and narrative
representation are joined, and yet remain "antipodes."
Perhaps all modern literature is created under historical pressure,
produced by a fear of memory's erasure. Wordsworth's
changing relationship to memory is demonstrated by what Kenneth Johnston
terms the "apocalyptic discontinuity and the
naturalistic continuities," of his poetry – the "fundamental poles
of Wordsworth's imagination" (294). Such a dialectic marks The
Excursion as well as The Prelude's Book Fifth. In that famous passage,
the Poet dreamed of a deluge that threatened poetry,
a natural process that would, by extension, overwhelm memory. (16)
In The Prelude this fear remains a terrible fantasy; The
Excursion suggests it is already reality. And in the wake of the flood,
we are left with a will to remember.
Notes
I am indebted to Professor Laurence Lockridge for his critique of an early draft of this essay.
(1) For recent criticism, see especially: William H. Galperin, Revision
and Authority in Wordsworth, and" ‘ Then the Voice
was Silent': ‘The Wanderer' vs. The Ruined Cottage," ELH 51; Kenneth
Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse; Alan Liu,
Wordsworth: The Sense of History; Susan E. Meisenhelder, Wordsworth's
Informed Reader; Sharon Setzer,
"Wordsworth's Wanderer, the Epitaph, and the Uncanny," Genre XXIV;
David Simpson, Wordsworth's Historical
Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement. Most of these arguments read
The Excursion in and against the historical milieu
of its composition or reception; while they are extremely useful for
any comprehensive historicist treatment of the poem, my
purpose is to suggest a memory-oriented, rather than historically-oriented,
reading. Therefore, I have chosen not to engage
specific historicist arguments. (back)
(2) William H. Galperin, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth. (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).
(back)
(3) James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992). (back)
(4) Alison Hickey, Impure Conceits: Rhetoric and Ideology in Wordsworth's
Excursion. (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997). (back)
(5) Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, under the direction
of Pierre Nora, edited and with a foreword by
Lawrence D. Kritzman, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996). This collaboration
comprises a series of critical examinations of French "sites" or loci
of memory, and how these sites contribute to historical
constructions of cultural identity and authority. (back)
(6) History and Memory in African American Culture. Genevieve Fabre
and Robert O'Meally, editors. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994). This volume of essays grows out of Nora's
introductory article in Representations (26: 7-24), which
is reprinted as the conclusion of the book. The project re-examines
several African American art forms, adapting his
conceptualizations of memory and history to a specifically American
context. (back)
(7) Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,"
trans. by Marx Roudebush, Representations 26:
7-24. All citations are taken from this article. (back)
(8) See, for example, Paul H. Fry, "History, Existence, and ‘To Autumn,'"
which reads Keats's poem against the Peterloo
Massacre; and Kenneth Johnston, "The Politics of Tintern Abbey," which
reads that poem as a deliberate, defensive
fictionalization of the Wordsworths' tour along the Wye in the summer
of 1798. In "Keats and the Historical Method," Jerome
McGann asserts what seems to be history's epistemological supremacy
over memory, as well as its sole claim to truth: "The
explicit character of …[a poem's subject matter] only reveals itself
to an historical analysis, since analysis alone can overcome
the loss of memory which necessarily occurs over a period of time…a
lapsed memory of the past." All three essays are
reprinted in Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism, edited
by Karl Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff. (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1993). (back)
(9) David Simpson, Wordsworth's Historical Imagination: The Poetry of
Displacement. (New York and London:
Methuen, 1987). (back)
(10) Christopher Salvesen, The Landscape of Memory, (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1965) p. 123. (back)
(11) William Wordsworth, The Excursion, in Poetical Works, Volume 5.
edited by William Knight, L.L.D. (Edinburgh:
William Paterson, 1884). All citations taken from this edition. (back)
(12) Kenneth MacLean, Agrarian Age; A Background for Wordsworth. (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1950) pp.
92-3. (back)
(13) Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit. (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1977) p. 157.
(back)
(14) William Wordsworth, Selected Prose, edited by John O. Hayden. (New York: Penguin Books, 1988) p. 332. (back)
(15) .W. Harding, "A Note on Nostalgia," in Determinations: Critical
Essays, F.R. Leavis, ed. (London: Chatto and Windus,
1934) p. 63. (back)
(16) William Wordsworth, The Prelude, in Poetical Works, New Edition,
Ernest de Selincourt and Thomas Hutchinson,
editors. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936) pp. 522-524. (back)
Lisa Hirschfield
New York University
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