The Insistence of History: Revolution in
Burke, Wordsworth, Keats and Baudelaire. By GERALDINE FRIEDMAN. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press. 1996. xii 270 pp. 30 [pounds sterling].
Since the 1960s American studies of
English Romantic writing have been dominated by theoretical questions about the
relationship of literature to nature. Geoffrey Hartman's Wordsworth's Poetry
1787-1814 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1964), introduced
a Heideggerean poet for whom nature was brought into being only by the poetic
word. Hartman's Wordsworth uncovered an abyss of groundlessness in the
object-world, and heroically filled it with his imaginative words. For Paul de
Man, Romanticism could be understood as writers' encounter with a linguistic
sublime. Wordsworth and Coleridge were writing out of the condition of finding
their own rhetoric overwhelmed by the rhetoricity of language, by the
endlessness of the differance in which it enmeshed them.
The 1980s saw a turn against criticism
that, like Hartman's and de Man's, took its terms from phenomenology and
deconstruction. Jerome J. McGann criticized Hartman for accepting at face value
Romanticism's flight from the object-world. According to McGann, Hartman was
complicit with the Romantic ideology, an ideology in which evasion of the
political issues presented by history was disguised as a spiritual
transcendence that only poetry could offer. For Marjorie Levinson too, Wordsworth
denied the visible effects of political injustice so that he could create an
aesthetic in which the poet's imaginative contemplation of himself was
presented as a supreme achievement of art. Romanticism masked its own origin in
and relationship with the political, and it was criticism's task to tear the
mask away. Only thus would critics escape their complicity with Romantic
ideology and expose the bad faith of the canonical poets. In the process, the
aesthetic vocabulary that literary criticism had inherited from Romanticism, a
vocabulary in which imagination and genius were key words, would also be
subjected to question.
If New Historicism (as McGann's and
Levinson's work came to be termed) challenged some of the central assumptions
of previous American critics, it nevertheless largely accepted their reading of
Romanticism. McGann blamed Wordsworth for the very process for which Hartman
had praised him: the flight from history and nature to worship of imagination.
Geraldine Friedman, who acknowledges both Hartman and prominent New
Historicists as her mentors, sees that same process to be at work in the
writing of Wordsworth and Burke. Like McGann, she is more inclined to blame
than praise them for it, and like McGann she never seriously questions whether
it is as fundamental to their work as Hartman and others have claimed. The
Insistence of History, it follows, contains little original historical research
directed towards questioning or even complicating what has become the orthodox
indictment of Romanticism for evading history. Nevertheless, that indictment is
complicated by Friedman's argument, because her indebtedness to the terms of
deconstruction effectively undermines the concept of authorial agency. In
Friedman's version of the literature/history relationship, texts inevitably
reveal the very implication of writing in history that their authors try to
exclude from them. They reveal this implication through what the critic
discovers to be significant absences and telling aporias: 'In the texts under
consideration historical occurrence is struck by a strange absence at the
moment it is most intensely engaged' (p. 2).
Like the New Historicism of Alan Liu, from
which it derives, Friedman's view of Romanticism is open to the objection that
it ignores the plethora of Romantic texts in which historical occurrences are
engaged directly and forcefully. This is particularly noticeable in the
chapters on Burke and Wordsworth, which largely confine themselves to
oft-examined passages from Reflections on the Revolution in France and The
Prelude. Its is also true however of the treatment of Keats, which lacks the
detailed understanding of the London radical circles within which he wrote that
has recently been provided by Nicholas Roe (John Keats and the Culture of
Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)).
Friedman's position is also open to
theoretical objections. Her view of authorial agency is inconsistent: the
writer is credited with the ability to exclude and evade historical issues, but
when those issues are discovered in his texts in silences, tensions, and
contradictions, it is assumed that they are present despite his efforts. This
assumption enhances the critic's power, for it enables her to become both
priest and detective, making texts confess the suppressed guilt of their writer
by her investigative efforts.
What is lost in criticism of Friedman's
kind is the possibility of a historicist criticism that appreciates that the
languages through which political issues were addressed in the Romantic period
were too varied, subtle, and oblique for concepts of denial and evasion to
comprehend. Such an appreciation, however, requires a different methodology
from that used in The Insistence of History, a methodology that would prefer a
detailed investigation of such discourses as broadside ballads, political
journalism, and parliamentary speeches to the satisfaction of preaching to the
past.
Academic year 2009/2010
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Natalia Quintana Morán
naquinmo@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press
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