by Simon Malpas

 [Malpas, Simon. "'I cried "Come, tell me how you live!" / And thumped him on the head': Wordsworth, Carroll and the 'Aged,
         Aged Man'." Romanticism On the Net 5 (February 1997) <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/aged.html>]
 
 

The question that lies behind this essay couldn't be simpler: what happens when a self meets or encounters an other? Its a
simple, almost banal, question, but one that has important and far-reaching implications. It is the crucial question posed in
Emmanuel Levinas's ethics; a theory of ethics which has, in turn, influenced thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida
and Jean-Francois Lyotard. I don't want to engage in an abstract argument here - that's not the point of this essay - but I will
point to one key premise underlying my question. For Levinas, the self-other relationship is based on a fundamental and violent
disequilibrium: the self experiences, thinks, comprehends and represents the other - it is active; the other is experienced,
thought, comprehended, represented - passive. This is unavoidable: if the other were to remain wholly other to the self -
unknown, unrepresented - no encounter could take place and knowledge would be impossible. The ethical implications
concern the way in which this inevitable process of representation is performed and seeks to recognise and to think the violence
that it entails.

So, what happens when a self meets an other? I want to contrast two versions of the same, quite simple, event: a meeting that
happens and is subsequently reported, represented, by a narrator. I'll start with the second, revisionary, version of the
encounter, the "report" of which begins:

     I'll tell thee everything I can:
     There's little to relate.
     I saw an aged aged man
     A-sitting on a gate.
     "Who are you, aged man?" I said.
     "And how is it you live?"
     And his answer trickled through my head,
     Like water through a sieve. (2)

The encounter depicted in this passage is, of course, already familiar from Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence"; and
yet, everything seems to have changed. The "White Knight's Song" from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass parodies
the meeting between the narrator and the Leech-Gatherer that occurs in the second half of Wordsworth's poem, a meeting that
strives to resolve the conflict which sets that poem in motion.

A very brief precis of the conflict to refresh memories... As I'm sure you recall, "Resolution and Independence" opens with the
narrator out for a stroll, feeling "as happy as a boy" because "The pleasant season did my heart employ: / My old
remembrances went from me wholly; / And all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy". (3) When suddenly, and apparently
inexplicably, he undergoes a violent mood-swing: "As high as we have mounted in delight / In our dejection do we sink so low;
/ To me that morning did it happen so;". It is at this stage that the meeting occurs: the narrator is greeted by the sight of an old
man beside a pond whom he engages in conversation; and it is the recognition of this old man's cheerful demeanour that finally
inspires the narrator to prayer: "'God,' said I, 'be my help and stay secure; / I'll think of the Leech-Gatherer on the lonely
moor!'".

While critical accounts of "Resolution and Independence" often differ quite widely in their opinions about the poem's precise
meaning, a consensus seems to have emerged about its general tenor. This consensus places Wordsworth's poem at the centre
of, what we might call, the liberal humanist tradition: through perceiving, and identifying with, the old man's perseverance, the
narrator learns the value of resolution and independence in the face of suffering and adversity. The self is healed through an
empathy with the suffering of the other - an old and familiar story.

Recently, Richard Bourke, in a comprehensive review of approaches to this poem, has cited Albert Gerard's and Jane
Worthington's accounts as paradigmatic readings of the text, whose conclusions recur with little substantial alteration in a great
deal of recent criticism. Gerard's argument is that through "identification with the leech-gatherer' ... the poet is released from
'puzzled recognition' and led to a 'mature acceptance of the position and value of suffering'"; and Worthington's earlier idea is
that the poem presents a "stoic precept" that "warns against the anxious anticipation of misfortunes". (4) So, from this, we have
"Resolution and Independence" as a quintessentially humanist text charting the individual's progress towards enlightenment
through a recognition of the value of stoicism in the face of suffering. In terms of the self-other problem however, it seems that
this reading of the poem can secure its closure only at the cost of reducing the other, suppressing its otherness by converting it
into a mere instrument in the self's process of maturation.

Lewis Carroll's poem will have nothing to do with this process; in fact, it is the violent reduction of the other by humanism that
appears to be the main target of his satire. His parodic re-writing of Wordsworth refuses any notion of an "ennobling
recognition of misfortune" by excluding any explanatory framing narrative and thereby presenting the meeting as a naked fact.
Thus, what occurs in the encounter between the narrator and the old man expands to occupy the entire poem: there is no
thematic introduction that sets the scene for the meeting and smoothes the relation between self and other by setting up a
context in which the focus of all attention can become the self and its reactions.

Of course, other changes have also taken place: the Leech-Gatherer who teaches the fortitude of resolution and independence
to the narrator of Wordsworth's poem is replaced with a half-crazed "Aged Aged Man" whose explanations of the bizarre
schemes by which he earns his living are utterly ignored by a narrator who has his own, equally outrageous, plans to consider. I
suspect Carroll's version of the encounter is familiar, but I'll cite a short section of it to refresh memories:

     "Who are you, aged man?" I said.
     "And how is it you live?"
     And his answer trickled through my head,
     Like water through a sieve.

     He said "I look for butterflies
     That sleep among the wheat:
     I make them into mutton pies,
     And sell them in the street.
     I sell them unto men," he said,
     "Who sail on stormy seas;
     And that's the way I get my bread -
     A trifle, if you please."

     But I was thinking of a plan
     To dye one's whiskers green,
     And always use so large a fan
     That they could not be seen.
     So, having no reply to give
     To what the old man said,
     I cried "Come, tell me how you live!"
     And thumped him on the head.

And so it continues... In Carroll's poem, the violence of the encounter comes straight to the fore. The Aged Man is forced to
repeat his story under the duress of ever increasing physical abuse - in the Looking-Glass version he is "thumped on the head",
shaken "well from side to side / Until his face was blue" and, in an earlier version of the poem intended for the less delicate taste
of Carroll's fellow Oxford dons, he is "kicked", "pinched", his ears are boxed, his "grey and reverend locks" are "tweaked" and
he is generally "put into pain". (5) And, after all of this, all that the Aged Man manages to communicate to the narrator is that he
is willing to "drink" his "noble health". The conclusions the narrator draws from his encounter, conclusions that clearly echo
Wordsworth's, illustrate - through their wholly arbitrary relation to what has gone before - the problematic status of the closure
of resolution discovered by the humanist reading of "Resolution and Independence" and the work of suppression undertaken by
such an approach to the poem.

As I have already said, things are quite different in the later poem: the ludicrous schemes and the physical violence of Carroll's
poem have an exuberance that is utterly foreign to Wordsworth's original. And yet, as a parodic rendering of the encounter that
takes place in Wordsworth it also seems to be extremely apt. One is left with the impression that Carroll has discovered, has
uncovered, a violent subtext that cannot - and perhaps should not - be wholly excised from a reading of the poem. Carroll's
reading presents an injunction, a demand to the reader of "Resolution and Independence": "you must recognise the violence to
which the other, the old man, is subjected".

What Carroll has picked up on and exposed quite mercilessly is the inattention of the narrator of Wordsworth's poem to the
Leech-Gatherer's tale. The narrator's relationship with the Leech-Gatherer is characterised by what Steven Knapp identifies as
"the speaker's well-known but still mysterious inability to concentrate on what he himself wants to interpret as a providential
answer to his needs". (6) This loss of attention within Wordsworth's poem - as contact with the old man gives way to internal
musings about the self - seems to indicate what materialist critics have over the past few years identified as Romantic poetry's
way of dealing with its objects.

Perhaps the most influential, and certainly the most well known, reading of this type is that offered by Jerome McGann in his
book, The Romantic Ideology . (7) McGann's general thesis is this: Romantic aesthetics indulges in political quietism by
escaping from material reality to questions of self-reflection and self-consciousness - it is engaged in what McGann refers to as
a "self-regarding spiritual economy" - and the modern critic must beware of identifying with the writers to the extent that his or
her own account falls prey to this "Romantic ideology".

Now, as I have just said, this also seems to be the thrust of Carroll's parody. In fact, that this is so is even clearer in the earlier
version of the poem which begins: "I met an aged, aged man / Upon the lonely moor: / I knew I was a gentleman, / And he was
but a boor. / So I stopped and roughly questioned him... " Here, the explicit cultural reference to gentility is what allows
Carroll's narrator to bully the aged man and thereby frames the nonsense verse with distinct social bounds. In Carroll's version
of the meeting, there is no possibility of the development of a "spiritual economy", but simply the representation of the material
reality of a violent class relation.

Yet, once one begins to take notice of the differences between Wordsworth's and Carroll's poems, questions emerge about the
sort of reading that a materialist might propose. The thrust of McGann's critique is that Romanticism submits to an ideology of
"spiritual