IRONY AND AUTHORITY IN ROMANTIC POETRY

IRONY AND AUTHORITY IN ROMANTIC POETRY

Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry David Simpson

David Simpson I 979 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1979 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1979 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos Melbourne New York Singapore Tokyo British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Simpson, David Irony and authority in Romantic poetry I. English poetry - I 9th century - History and Criticism 2. Romanticism I. Title 82I'.7'09 PR590 ISBN 978-1-349-04417-7 ISBN 978-1-349-04415-3 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-04415-3 This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement

For Charles, Christiane, and Richard Simpson

Contents Priface IX I The Urn Overwrought I 2 Kindling the Torch 24 3 Language Within Language 57 4 Intimate Voices 97 5 Metaphor I 38 6 Romantic Irony I66 Notes Bibliography 20I 24I Index 263 Vll

Illustrations The illustrations 'The Little Boy Lost' and 'The Little Boy Found' on pp. 50 and 5 I are reproduced from the W copy of Songs of Innocence and Experience with the permission of the Provost and Fellows of King's College, Cambridge. Vlll

Preface This book is about Romantic poetry, and in particular those features of it which relate to what we have come to call 'hermeneutics'. I hope that those already familiar with the arguments around this term will permit me to say something about my sense of its place here; such readers, in fact, might well prefer to read my final chapter first, reversing a sequence of presentation which they may recognise as pseudo-inductive. For the 'hermeneutic circle' operates on the paradox of past and present, part and whole, whereby each is seen only through the other. We 'read' a text, it suggests-and this 'text' can be an event in history-but the order which that text will compose is already latent within us as some kind of preconception. Because we only see this order as it is experienced, we can never see it from a critical distance, never comment upon it as an 'object'; thus we cannot ever achieve a theoretical command over its 'origins', which are posited simultaneously in past and present. The very idea of an origin, it must be noted, implies investment in the model of cause and effect (i.e. a historical sequence), a model which can only be applied to the experience of simultaneity by disrupting it with a conscious imposition of priorities. There is a very important modem critical argument around this issue, but my purpose here is, paradoxically, to try to demonstrate its own 'origins', or at least presence, within Romantic aesthetics. I believe that the Romantics were aware of exactly the problems we now discuss under the heading of 'hermeneutics' and that they used the paradoxes implicit in them to fashion a discourse based on transference, repetition, and the 'double bind'. Romanticism, according to this argument, conceived and exploited and perhaps suffered the radical instability of the 'self, the fragility of the autonomous ego; and this instability seems both to have been inherited as a philosophical proposition and at the same time to have been presented as an ethical imperative, part of the polemic against authority, over self as over others. Causality is replaced by simultaneity as 'history' is threatened by hermeneutics; IX

X PREFACE and this simultaneity ultimately, I believe, came to be extended from author to reader as a demand for moral self-determination. For causality is ultimately a myth of authority, as Blake well knew; and to adhere to a myth of causality at the same time as admitting that its depths are impossible to fathom is a myth of despair. But simultaneity had problems of its own, both at the level of experience and at the level of talking about experience. If it is known as and only as it is acted or performed, how do we relate it to other parts and aspects of experience which give it a context? And, as a problem for poetic communication, how do we talk 'about' it, given that there seems to be no privileged language in which to do so? These are the problems which I shall spend most of my time talking about, and it will doubtless seem that I am presenting a rather negative version of Romanticism. In fact, positive and negative are inseparable, and often present themselves as movements about a 'zero' point of synthesis which is only ever tentatively occupied. Kant introduced the necessity of the synthesis of concept and intuition largely to combat materialism, and Hegel found that he had to move the balance back again to rescue empirical experience from the contempt of the idealists. I think that the 'negative' side of the Romantic equation has not had its fair share of recognition. We may be missing something of importance if we move straight to the epiphanies which it may yet provide without the working through of that negativity. Blake is preoccupied with the imagery of pain, for there is no coming together without taking apart. This preoccupation with the 'hermeneutic' aspects of Romantic aesthetics generates, of course, a peculiar paradox. How can I make a case for the historical origins or presence of this syndrome without falling into the traps which the syndrome itself sets up for me? How can I 'discover' the historical incidence of a problem within which, if we take it in good faith, I must still be trapped? There is no logical answer to this problem; as far as I can see, it is a true paradox. But there is some prospect of relief from it in the evidence itself, the 'words' which the poets wrote down. Of course, I may be preselecting them in certain motivated ways as I decide what does and does not constitute 'evidence'. But if the problem stands, then it stands for us all, and it will be up to every reader to test out his suspicions of (or agreement with) this pre-selection against his own 'readings'. This can only be done by the act of reading; and this itself is the moment of transference, in finer tones or otherwise, which the poets also employ.

PREFACE E. D. Hirsch Jnr., most recently in The Aims of Interpretation, has argued forcefully against what he sees as the alternatives of despair and anarchistic joyance which result from a complete and literal acceptance of the paradox of the 'hermeneutic circle'. He believes that such an acceptance threatens the whole foundation of humanistic culture, education, and institutional life. But these three things need not go together. It seems to me, for example, that the Romantics were very concerned with the first two, in their own ways, and very suspicious of the third. We can have culture and education based on continually asking fundamental questions, and some kinds of institutional forms can be seen to inhibit this kind of questioning by pretending to have found the answers already. Thus, when Hirsch asks us to break the circle by having faith in the possibility of reconstructing 'authorial meaning' (p. 8), I can only answer that that is exactly what I think I am doing. I think that I am respecting the 'original meanings' of these poets when I find them to be discouraging or qualifying this very quest. Instead, we are urgently pressured to find meaning for ourselves, in a region where we can perhaps perform or experience a conviction of shared intention but can never 'describe' it. An extreme version of this isolation is the relationship of the Kierkegaardian believer to his God; another version is the relationship oflove as it appears in Blake. Romanticism does not always deny the social contract, although it always questions it; and it always re-establishes what it accepts. The argument is, then, that Romantic poetry is organised to make us confront the question of authority, especially as it pertains to the contract between author and reader. This must simultaneously question what critics have tended to rely on as the 'historical' method, just as it questions my own claim to be historical. How, for example, is the reader of I 798 to be distinguished from the reader of I 978? The answer is another question: 'which reader of I 798, and for which reader of I978?' I think that this is a serious question. We cannot assume that in passively receiving and speaking forth a historical past we are doing something more secure than simply reifying it. The message I receive from these poets is that they were very uneasy about the availability of this very habit; a habit which may look like selfeffacement but which cannot properly be so until it has passed through self-recognition. Again, we are back to a moment of choice. But perhaps this is a tedious way of explaining why I have not given carefully constructed accounts of the reaction to the French Revolution, or a properly documented consideration of the reviews xi

xu PREFACE and the reviewers. Let me stress that I do not think these things unimportant; it is simply that one can only write one book at a time. It may well be, for example, that the rather esoteric explorations of self-focussing revolutions which these writers offer have much to do with the repressive legislation and draconian censorship introduced during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The ethical reservations which they project about their own tendencies towards authority, combined with the high sense of urgency about passing on those reservations, may after all be part of a sophisticated selfprotection, producing a version of 'revolution' which is permissible precisely because personal, because unorganised in the social sense. In this context we would wish to examine the peculiar concept of immanent and gradually ameliorating 'truth' as it is presented in Godwin and Schiller. I hope that what follows may stimulate others to explore this and other such questions. I must, however, explain briefly what I mean by 'irony' in what follows. I do not mean that if a writer says 'X' we are to understand that he means 'Y'; this would be the stable notion of irony, irony as definitive statement, which does not seem to me to have much place in Romanticism. The situation as I see it is that, if a writer says 'X', then we question the meaning of what he says both as we receive it into our own codes and canons of significance and as it relates to the context of the rest of his utterances, their moods and voices. This double focus is likely to produce a paradox of the hermeneutic sort; how are we to be sure where one begins and the other ends? This is Romantic irony. The question of influences is not one to be taken lightly by any student of the Romantics, and if I am able to assert that there are no conscious plagiarisms in what follows, then I must at the same time admit to the conviction that there are a great many assimilations from what Shelley called the 'spirit of the age'. I sense much common interest between my own work and that of Geoffrey Hartman and Paul de Man, though this was largely discovered in retrospect. From Harold Bloom I have borrowed the term 'misprision' and have given it, as if in homage to his own theory as expressed in Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (pp. 1-2 7), a new twist of meaning, attributing it not to the poet in his tradition but to one side of the W ordsworthian mind in the act of perception itself, and in its relation to a prior creation. For I believe that Wordsworth still had an investment in the idea of the 'noumenal' core of phenomena, in 'things in themselves', and that this generated an anxiety about

PREFACE misrepresentation. Thus, when I describe the Romantic idea of perception as fundamentally 'phenomenalist', I mean to include the qualification suggested by Michael G. Cooke, The Romantic Will (p. 234 n. 1), that the world may include 'a distinct and perhaps definitive organization in every sense precedent to man, and strictly tending to co-opt him'. This does to my mind speak for an anxiety felt by Wordsworth, and it points to an explanation for the necessity of interference (to preclude passivity) as well as of the guilt which tended to follow such interference (now seen as over-activity). There will undoubtedly be those who do not care for this version of Wordsworth, and such readers could not do better than to consult Albert 0. Wlecke, Wordsworth and the Sublime, a book which I discovered after finishing my own, and which offers conclusions exactly opposite to mine. Wlecke argues that the 'sublime' represents for Wordsworth a transcendental fusion of the intentional act and the intended object, producing a positive state of selflessness in which all ethical discomfort is redundant. My own perspective, for the poems which I discuss, is that Wordsworth always retains a lingering faith in the 'ego' he would thus be losing, and in its corollary the 'pure' object; that he is committed to dualism even as he celebrates coadunation. I think that this was Blake's reading of Wordsworth. I have preserved misspellings and oddities of punctuation in all passages quoted; most obviously so in Keats's prose. Because I have cited and referred to rather a large number of sources, I have in general used only short titles for citations. Full details are given in the bibliography. Further, I have sometimes noted the work of other critics where it has only a peripheral or even antithetical bearing on my own, in order that those readers who might wish to follow up a point or a debate can do so. Documentation of certain parts of what follows might be thought to be too full; again, this is because I imagine that different readers will want to follow up different things, and I have tried to assist this process as fully as possible. Finally there are debts to be acknowledged. Arthur Sale's articulate disbelief and friendly opposition was an invaluable stimulus for thinking about Keats. Donald Mackinnon gave me much encouragement at an early stage of research, along with a good deal of his time; and John Beer has responded patiently, carefully, and generously to a host of small inquiries along the way. Robert Gleckner was kind enough to send me an offprint of one of his papers, and the editor of Studies in Romanticism has allowed me to re-employ in revised form parts of an earlier paper on Keats. Dan Brown and Frank Kermode Xlll

xiv PREFACE lent me a room to write in at an important time. I must also thank Mr and Mrs Eugene Power and the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge, for a very important year spent at the University of Michigan. Theodore Redpath, William Walsh, and the anonymous reader for the Macmillan Press have all made valuable suggestions for amendment and inclusion; and Margaret Clayton read a specimen chapter and provided further ideas and advice. Peter Croft has been extremely helpful in allowing access to the Blake material in the library of King's College, and in organising photography. John Barrell, who saw this work through its doctoral career, proved to be a model of'authority' in offering no interference and demanding no attendance, at the same time as being scrupulously attentive and responsive when I have needed his help. I would have been much slower in coming to an understanding of the Romantics had not john Wright refused to answer certain questions; this is one of the greatest debts of all. Finally, friends have given more than they can know, or would accept any credit for; Kathy Wheeler, Bruce Keeling, Maureen Corcoran, Irma Liberty, David Kohn, Brian Davis, and many others. See you in Jerusalem. D.E.S. King's College Cambridge May 1978