Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism 0823271056, 9780823271054

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CONSTELLATIONS OF A CONTEMPORARY ROMANTICISM

Sara Guyer and Brian McGrath, series editors Lit Z embraces models of criticism uncontained by conventional notions of history, periodicity, and culture, and committed to the work of reading. Books in the series may seem untimely, anachronistic, or out of touch with contemporary trends because they have arrived too early or too late. Lit Z creates a space for books that exceed and challenge the tendencies of our field and in doing so reflect on the concerns of literary studies here and abroad. At least since Friedrich Schlegel, thinking that affirms literature’s own untimeliness has been named romanticism. Recalling this history, Lit Z exemplifies the survival of romanticism as a mode of contemporary criticism, as well as forms of contemporary criticism that demonstrate the unfulfilled possibilities of romanticism. Whether or not they focus on the romantic period, books in this series epitomize romanticism as a way of thinking that compels another relation to the present. Lit Z is the first book series to take seriously this capacious sense of romanticism. In 1977, Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, two scholars of romanticism, team- taught a course called Literature Z that aimed to make an intervention into the fundamentals of literary study. Hartman and de Man invited students to read a series of increasingly difficult texts and through attention to language and rhetoric compelled them to encounter “the bewildering variety of ways such texts could be read.” The series’ conceptual resonances with that class register the importance of recollection, reinvention, and reading to contemporary criticism. Its books explore the creative potential of reading’s untimeliness and history’s enigmatic force.

CONSTELLATIONS OF A CONTEMPORARY ROMANTICISM

Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle, Editors

Fordham University Press New York

2016

Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third- party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Khalip, Jacques, 1975– editor. | Pyle, Forest, 1958– editor Title: Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism / Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle, editors. Description: New York : Fordham University Press, 2016. | Series: Lit Z | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015045243 (print) | LCCN 2016012666 (ebook) | ISBN 9780823271030 (hardback) | ISBN 9780823271047 (paper) | ISBN 9780823271054 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Romanticism. | Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / General. | ART / History / General. | PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics. Classification: LCC B836.5 .C66 2016 (print) | LCC B836.5 (ebook) | DDC 141/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2015045243 Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

Contents

Introduction: The Present Darkness of Romanticism

1

Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle

The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday

17

William Galperin

The Pathology of the Future, or the Endless Triumphs of Life

35

Lee Edelman

Painting Theory: Mark Tansey’s Derrida Queries de Man

47

Marc Redfield

Here There Is No After (Richter’s History)

70

Sara Guyer

Goya’s Scarcity

86

David L. Clark

The Tone of Praise

122

Peter de Bolla

Endymion: The Text of Undersong

142

Simon Jarvis

Dancing in the Dark with Shelley

167

Joel Faflak

The Pastoral Stain: Twombly under the Trees

186

Mary Jacobus

The Walter Scott Experience: Living American History after Waverley

219

Mike Goode

Free Indirect Filmmaking: Jane Austen and the Renditions (On Emma among Its Others) Ian Balfour

248

vi

Contents

Population Aesthetics in Romantic and Post- Romantic Literature

267

Robert Mitchell

Technomagism, Coleridge’s Mariner, and the Sentence Image

290

Orrin N. C. Wang

Willing Suspension of Disbelief, Here, Now

309

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Acknowledgments List of Contributors Index

323 325 329

CONSTELLATIONS OF A CONTEMPORARY ROMANTICISM

Introduction The Present Darkness of Romanticism Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle

In his theses “On the Concept of History,” the final text he bequeathed to the future, Walter Benjamin proposed a model of historical thought quite different from a historicism that tells “the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary.”1 More kairological than chronological, Benjamin’s understanding of history postulates that “the past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.” According to Benjamin, any “document of culture” from any historical epoch may be redeemed in the constellations that crystallize between past and present. “There is,” writes Benjamin, “a secret agreement between past generations and the present one” (390). The task of the critic, according to Benjamin, is to make good on the terms of that agreement and, in the process, to conjure something mutually illuminating in the two- way street of past and present. This collection of essays takes its title and its point of departure from Benjamin’s concept of the constellation, a concept that puts both historical terms, “contemporary” and “romanticism,” in play as period designations, critical dispositions, and aesthetic practices. Indeed, there are as many “romanticisms” as there are “Romanticisms,” and one small but telling index of this multiplicity is the variation in lower- and uppercase deployments of the term. Like the “a” in différance, the r/R is read but not heard, unnamable (and uncontainable) even as it is named.2 Despite the diversity of methodological orientations on display in the book, each of the chapters realizes and explores, in various modes and cumulatively across a wide range of texts, a central tenet of Benjamin’s conception of history, “the constellation” that our “own era has formed with a definite earlier one” (397), in this case the era we designate as Romantic. For Benjamin, the constellation as image served less as the temporal measure of the difference between the past and the present (and, as a consequence, of their inextricable relationship) and more as a structure for interpreting the “now” as the event of a seizure, a grasping

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of the past as if for an emergent thought: “the past can only be seized as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again” (390). Benjamin implicitly conceives such a now in terms of strange adjacencies, arrays, and possible connections that strike one as outside the rules of causality, or in terms of a historicism whose interpretations depend on the present as the revelatory instance of past occurrences. If one were to forecast such occurrences, one might say they are analogous in the register of cultural history to the meteorological phenomenon of reverse lightning. Percy Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry is, among other things, also a poetics of history, one that anticipates Benjamin’s metaleptic conception. According to Shelley, a poet “not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.”3 At once early and late, “germ” and “fruit of latest time,” a poet’s thought “discovers” the “ought” that is absent from the present and “beholds” as an image the future inscribed in the now. This account of the poet’s anachronicity appears in the fourth paragraph of the essay, where Shelley turns from poetry “in a more restricted sense” toward an understanding of poetry as a mode of “imagining” and “expression” that includes not only “the authors of language and of music” but also those of the dance and architecture and statuary and painting” (SPP, 512). In this regard, Shelley conceives of poetry as a mode of historical “imagining” and “expression” that opens its eyes to the metaleptic forms of emergent intelligibility: “Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action are all the instrument and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonime of the cause” (SPP, 513). When in the final paragraph of the Defence Shelley invokes “the most celebrated writers of the present day,” he stresses that it is “impossible to read” their “compositions” “without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words.” This is the moment in the essay when Shelley, defending the “contemporary merit” of his own “memorable age in intellectual achievements,” invokes the agency of his age’s “spirit.” Shelley’s spirit is neither dominant nor representative of its age but, as Jerrold Hogle aptly characterizes it, “the oft- hidden but emergent force of an ‘electric life’ of subversive counter- poetry,” an invisible charge or force conducted to and from another era that animates the present, if only at night.4 Anachronism has long been an operative concept in Romantic- period studies—a “measurable form of dislocation,” as James Chandler has glossed it.5 In his essay, “What Is the Contemporary?,” Giorgio Agamben extends the anachronism for our purposes into a particular force that invokes “con-

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temporariness [as], then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it, through a disjunction and an anachronism. Those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it.”6 The contemporary is time understood through detachment and mediation; it requires a jostling of edges or propinquities that, in their arrangements, underscore a thinking of time through an image that can only be gazed at by means of a disinterested frame. As a detachment or “disjunction” from that structure itself, contemporariness marks a relation to a sameness that can be intimately known through its estrangement. The contemporary is the person who perceives the darkness of his time as something that concerns him, as something that never ceases to engage him. Darkness is something that—more than any light—turns directly and singularly toward him. The contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time. (45)

Agamben describes this straining toward the darkness as “not a form of inertia or of passivity . . . but an activity and a singular ability . . . a neutralization of the lights that come from the epoch” but not a separation of the darkness from those lights themselves (45). Put otherwise, enlightenment is continuous with the unlit as its nonbeheld potentiality, the obscurity that beckons us to make an “appointment that one cannot but miss” since one cannot ever coincide with its time (46). Agamben favors a kairological construal of time that, like Benjamin’s constellation, detects in the contemporary an urgency that “fractures” or unsettles chronological time into different relays. As tropes, light and darkness undo readings that would yoke past, present, and future into a homogeneous environment that barely holds us as its inhabitants. This distancing effect also figures in Agamben’s use of the archaic when he references the contemporary; here, the archaic is thought in close proximity to the arkhe, or origin, as the place where the origin is not: “It is contemporary with historical becoming and does not cease to operate within it, just as the embryo continues to be active in the tissues of the mature organism, and the child in the psychic life of the adult” (50). As a place of (non)origination that pulses in the present and hints at multiple becomings always at odds with themselves, the contemporary works with the archaic by accessing its unlivable durations, or “that part within the present that we are absolutely incapable of living. What remains unlived therefore is incessantly sucked back toward the origin,

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without ever being able to reach it. The present is nothing other than this unlived element in everything that is lived” (51). Provocative as it is, Agamben’s limning of the archaic remains problematic: vaguely immemorial and primitive, the archaic also seems underwritten by a reproductive futurism implied in the image of the embryo, which beckons us to see a potentializing logic inherent in life itself.7 It might appear to echo the child as the father of man, but it doesn’t quite speak to the queerly inoperative and radical status of nonproductivity, ruination, and inertia that permeate romanticism through and through and cannot be expunged. And yet the emphasis on the unlived marks a distinct kind of argument for the force of a romanticism that cannot be reduced to its contextual or historical parameters insofar as the latter are precisely the errors of life itself, lived in the name of the human and entirely for us. A romanticism speaks to a singularity that is indefinite and impersonal: like Deleuze’s notion of the pure immanence of “A LIFE, and nothing else,” it relies less on a transcendental outside than to claims and durations immanent to itself.8 It is an event that is different from the sociological and materialist determinants and narratives that would seek to contextualize it always as a matter of history. Context draws and spaces the possibilities for a thinking that is referential for humanity, and in this way, it necessarily englobes the human within a world that is probably for it, that is lived, and nonarchaic. The present or contemporary darkness of romanticism, however, is the movement within the indiscernible spaces of the lived and unlived, the inhuman territories of reference and thinking that undo what is presumed to come to light whenever one thinks of the present as something that extends only from our own subjective claims, and anthropomorphizes relations so as to ignore the unlived that we have with each other. Briefly put: if historicism is a humanism that presumes to redeem the archaic, then it does so at the expense of its own deeply inhuman formations. The constellations we address are those that consider romanticism as a thought experiment: What is the unlived of a contemporary romanticism? What appointments must it miss? If the archaic marks a way of returning “to that part within the present that we are absolutely incapable of living” (51), then the romanticism we theorize in these pages is marked by a similar structure of (in)capacity, one whose involutions rearrange the neat historical and temporal passages through which we have come to understand what romantic thought and culture have been and might be. In a way, Agamben’s reflections partly evoke the archaic as the ruinous unconsciousness of psychoanalysis, or that which cannot be claimed but still powerfully cuts the present into infinite sediments of psychic experience. Yet the strange inanimacy of the archaic—akin in

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many ways to the Freudian death drive’s striving for inorganic life—seems to speak to something that resists articulation and, through such resistance, produces intensities that displace human life as the funnel for these very intensities in the first place. For us, the unlived is precisely the present darkness that must be seen apart from any designated sense of there, then, and now—a dramatic difference from readings of the past, defined by their traumatic otherness. In this way, darkness is less the gloomy ground out of which something new might emerge and more a trope for a framing and mediation that troubles the subject—not a privation of sight and light but a perception immanent to itself, and one that does not depend on enlightened reflection. Such a perception, moreover, disassembles the dynamic of subject and object in favor of an immersion in thoughts and affects that beckon without clarity; they evoke an appointment with something, however nebulous it may be. For example, consider these lines from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit- tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast- fading violets cover’d up in leaves; And mid- May’s eldest child, The coming musk- rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death . . .9

The rhetorical modesty of not seeing the flowers at the speaker’s feet marks Keats’s shift away from visualizing those flowers to an almost proprioceptive interest in what is there in its shadows as opposed to something that emerges out of its negation or utter deletion. In “embalmed darkness,” the unlit or romantic archaism of Keats’s lyric scene is at once preserved as such and preserving of the “singular ability” to read as if through a guessing, a hazarding or promise of things not simply as they might occur but as they already are as figures. The lines are revelatory in their quotidian radicalism: to think what is imperceptibly there through the non- knowledge of tropes as the nightingale tolls back the archaic so as never to grasp it. In this way, the now- time of the speaker’s dark guesswork never perfectly coincides with what is heard

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in the absence of anything palpable: “Darkling I listen. . . .” This is a kind of anachronistic thinking that recalls Shelley’s poet, who not only “beholds” the future in the present but has his own thoughts backlit as “the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.” Such thoughts create a spacing within thought: as a dynamic that splits now and then, thought welcomes the delay as something at once yet to be and unmade or unworked. It also describes the form of that thinking itself in terms of the immeasurable spacings of retreat and movement, construction and decreation that turn romanticism constantly back on itself, archaically. If anachronism spells a dissonant convergence of temporal and spatial categories with the attending effect of troubling their connections, developments, and progress, our sense of the contemporary in this volume emphasizes the implicit power of the constellation as a function of the present darkness. As a trope, romanticism allows us to read what is and is not there, the difference being, as it is for Keats, the urgency of figure to force an experience out of what might passively be relegated to the closed- off archives of historical time. If historicism continues to dominate Romantic studies, then its currency, paradoxically, depends on just this foreclosure of the contemporary insofar as it cannot account for the possibility of thought that does not anticipate itself as anything but the reflection of a retrospective claim. Put another way, the constellations of the now are neither exclusively revelatory of a thinking- to- come nor remnants of an unclaimed knowledge but are a kind of romantic cognition that operates in the elusive incomprehensibility of before and after. Romanticism is in part a problem of reading, one that engages with, but always finds itself in retreat from, the darkness that first compelled that attention. The contemporary would be a strangely nonproductive kind of historical knowledge, one that does not invade the present tense with meaning but rather tarries with what cannot be read, anticipated, or known by anything that preceded it. And as a consequence, its “futurity” is the trace of an unfolding that it can never possibly realize except in the form of “latest time.” In Keats’s confrontation with the nightingale, listening enables a moment of withdrawn realization that is open to that which it cannot see, evoking the delay between eye and ear as that which dissipates poetry in the unseen bird’s song. That song, moreover, is the material effect of an encounter that could not have been conceived prior to its (non)articulation in the bird. It evokes the now as contemporary insofar as it tolls an archaic past that crumbles the longed- for immediacy of the speaker’s aesthetic apprehensions. Keats’s sense of the contemporary is just this: the beholding of a moment that is not itself, that comes like an afterimage, sensuously available yet failing to coincide with those claims that would seek to ripen and reveal it.

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Arguments over romanticism’s persistence are nothing new; they are as old as Romanticism itself and are exemplary forms of that persistence, whether celebrated or deplored. In recent decades in the Anglo- American context, these arguments have occasioned highly productive if often contentious discussions of such pertinent topics as subjectivity and its dispossession, the effectivity and rhetoricity of poetic language, affective states of excitation or modes of worldly being, the aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime, vitality and the forms of life, the origins and iterations of the avant- garde, the relationship between art and ideology, and so on. In fact, the ongoing philosophical dispute between Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, two of the most important surviving figures of the French theoretical revolution, is (among other things) a disagreement over romanticism: not over its persistence, for both are in agreement that romanticism remains in effect, but regarding its value. What Rancière identifies as the “aesthetic regime of art” and its “radical emancipatory” potential arises with or even from what we call romanticism. For Badiou, on the other hand, philosophy’s “return to itself ” and its liberatory mission of truth “can be formulated in terms of the question which weighs upon and threatens to exhaust us: can we be delivered, finally delivered, from our subjection to Romanticism?”10 But the contemporaneity of romanticism explored or addressed in the following chapters is not predicated on its historical or conceptual persistence. When in 1993 Cynthia Chase introduced her Longman critical reader to Romanticism, she opened her introduction with the subtitle “Romanticism Our Contemporary.”11 Few dates in the recent history of romantic studies seem more burdened by timeliness than 1993, when the fault line between deconstruction and the new historicism seemed as intractable as it was acrimonious. The ten essays Chase assembled for the Longman reader—one of which is Mary Jacobus’s decisive essay on the force of sexual difference in The Prelude—are all significant enough to exceed their timeliness to those debates in Romantic studies. And Chase’s introduction to the collection is as important a critical intervention as it is an assessment of the field. More than two decades later, it is evident how much the questions of persistence and timeliness asserted themselves in the fractious field that Chase was surveying for her Longman introduction. But by characterizing romanticism as “our contemporary,” Chase posits a historical relationship between romanticism and its various or possible future anteriors that is no longer tethered to persistence or pertinence. To make this point, Chase turns, not surprisingly, to Paul de Man. However, the enigmatic passage from de Man that Chase cites as evidence for romanticism’s contemporaneity does not appear in “Time and History in Wordsworth,” the

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lecture Chase included in the volume, but in “Wordsworth and Hölderlin,” an article de Man published in German in 1966 on some of the same Wordsworth material that would appear in the later essay. Chase’s introduction to the excerpt is as timely to its institutional context as the de Man quotation is untimely: “In the history of ‘literature’ (a Romantic institution) as in the history of politics, Romanticism is our past: ‘we carry it within ourselves as the experience of an act in which, up to a certain point, we ourselves have participated.’ ”12 Chase invokes de Man to address a pertinent if restricted conception of literature and politics, circa 1993. But the passage she quotes does not belong to this particular institutional moment, and not only because it was written more than two decades earlier. What is ours is marked by a delay. A more expansive quotation from this paragraph in “Wordsworth and Hölderlin” crystallizes the kind of productive temporal dislocation we are interested in: “To interpret romanticism means quite literally to interpret the past as such, our past precisely to the extent that we are beings who want to be defined and, as such, interpreted in relation to a totality of experiences that slip into the past.”13 In other words, “to interpret romanticism means quite literally” to experience the reverse temporal dislocation through which “the past as such” becomes “our past,” not as its persistence but as the marking of a contemporaneity, a “now time” projected from this contemporary romantic past. This untimely model of romantic contemporaneity is not something that Chase’s immediate editorial assignment and perhaps the pressures of her disciplinary moment permitted her to develop in detail; indeed, the assault of an ascendant historicism seems to have elicited from Chase an appreciable defensiveness that also forecloses the contemporary at the very moment she names it. We believe, more than twenty years later in the continuing study of romanticism, that the constellation of essays collected in this volume reopens the possibility of romanticism’s contemporaneity or, to return to Benjamin’s idiom, illuminates in their present darkness the various “temporal indices” by which romanticism “is referred to redemption.” Though Benjamin uses the theologically charged Erlösung rather than the more prosaic Einlösung (the redemption of deposits or vouchers) for his notion of historical redemption, we are drawn to Werner Hamacher’s characterization of Benjaminian redemption as the claim of “the unactualized possibilities” of “the unfinished, the failed, the thwarted.” “If the concept of redemption points towards a theology,” Hamacher writes, “then this is not a straightforwardly Judeo- Christian theology, but rather a theology of the missed or distorted—hunchbacked—possibilities, a theology of missed, distorted or hunchbacked time.”14

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Accordingly, this “redemption value” can only be considered as one that is less a source of revelatory promise than the delineation of a certain fantasy of revelation and promise, and in this way, standing in the darkness marks a slanted perspective toward that now time—a perspective that has us revisit the necessity of romanticism as a turn and return to that very temporality itself, to its detonating effects. When de Man writes that “we carry it within ourselves as the experience of an act in which, up to a certain point, we ourselves have participated,”15 the emphasis on an experience of an action rather than its performance is decisive: one thinks one is implicated in the act of romanticism when in fact such an action has already occurred. In fact, we are its interpretative symptoms. The ideological power of such experience, moreover, is what forever holds romanticism conceptually at bay and always on the side of a “now- time” detonation. One cannot help but think of a similar move in John Ashbery’s “Wet Casements”: “. . . someone . . ./ Overheard [your name] and carried that name around in his wallet / For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in / And out of it. I want that information very much today,/ Can’t have it, and this makes me angry.”16 The feeling of an appointment or engagement with someone’s name put away and crumbling in the wallet might be said about “romanticism” itself as the name that signifies something, but remains deposited and unspoken. Its persistence underwrites experiences that have not all been undergone and lived, acts that have been thwarted or failed, even as they remain in a half- life with us, at once felt and put away, archived, archaic, and disappearing. To address some of these concerns about the contemporaneity of romanticism, we begin the volume with William Galperin’s “The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday.” Galperin’s project of reconstituting the everyday as neither transcending nor celebratory opens up a rich conceptual possibility: as the emergence of missed opportunity, romanticism is mined by Galperin as a kind of second sight or retrospective turn that allows for possibility to emerge in the interstices of past, present, and future. In this way, romanticism uniquely serves “as text and context, where the ‘world’ onto which literature opens now is so embedded, so barely understood, that it is enough just to mark it.” Lee Edelman’s “The Pathology of the Future, or the Endless Triumphs of Life” revisits a different kind of life, one that is entangled in questions and narratives that have pursued Shelley’s poem throughout the critical literature. At once engaging de Man and revealing the ambivalent moves between futurity and nondevelopment that saturate that famous reading, Edelman uncovers in Shelley a historical pathologization of the turn to life, and its attending complications. In a subtle critique of recent theoretical valuations of life in both

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romanticism and biopolitics, Edelman argues for a figural dismantling of the necessity of “life”: shorn of the future- bound elements of those discussions, life is considered otherwise in terms of a darker movement that cannot be lived and yet at the same time is inextricable from what we think normative “life” might be. De Man’s deconstruction—and its institutionally intimate and intractable relationship with Derrida—is the critical subject and visual object of Marc Redfield’s “Painting Theory: Mark Tansey’s Derrida Queries de Man.” Redfield examines Tansey’s iconic “theory paintings,” in particular the famous picture that depicts Derrida and de Man poised together in an “ambiguous dance- struggle” on a precarious precipice above an abyss that invokes visual representations of the Romantic sublime. As Redfield puts it, “The space- time of Derrida and de Man’s impossible encounter is that of a difficult, ambivalently agonistic act of reading.” Redfield demonstrates that Tansey’s painting is something much more than a “sign of the times,” not merely a hyperrealistic representation of “theory in America” circa 1990. To read the painting as Redfield does is to discern the crystallization of a web of textual references and visual allusions: contemporary theory and the Romantic sublime, to be sure, but also Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and a Sidney Paget illustration. Like Redfield, Sara Guyer approaches the question of a contemporary romanticism in terms of visual culture. And also like Redfield, Guyer addresses the questions of timeliness and temporality that are the legacy of deconstruction. In “Here There Is No After (Richter’s History),” Guyer examines Gerhard Richter’s painterly debts to romanticism in general and to Friedrich in particular as a means of exploring the traumatic representations of history and the historical representations of trauma. Guyer zeroes in on Richter’s “history” paintings, specifically the October 18, 1977 series, based on photographs of the Baader Meinhof Group. For Guyer, rather than “bearing witness” to these figures and events, Richter’s paintings “blur,” and this act of blurring produces another crisis for the painting of history, one that is simultaneously “a form of survival . . . that has everything to do with the time of romanticism.” Goya’s The Disasters of War are the topic of David L. Clark’s “Goya’s Scarcity,” a meditation on the Spanish artist’s “unsparing vision of the degradation of humanity.” Clark not only revisits the images of humiliation, torture, and horror that are engraved in this series of aquatints, he asks what it means to think with and through Goya today, a Goya who “imagines the worst and dwells with it.” Like Redfield and Guyer, Clark not only looks at the artist’s images but reads them, including the simple but arresting caption about seeing that Goya affixes to the engravings: “I saw it” (Yo lo vi). Clark’s Goya

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is the artist who not only confronts us with a horror to behold but demands that we tarry uncomfortably but immersively with the images and with the act of beholding. Peter de Bolla’s “The Tone of Praise” turns our attention to the different voices of romanticism, with special reference to one of romantic studies’ strongest adjacent thinkers, Stanley Cavell. De Bolla’s linking of Cavell and Wordsworth stages a reflection on the elemental problems of skepticism, and how a change in orientation to the acceptance—or refusal—of the world marks an important poetic and philosophical program of refashioning oneself for such a receptivity. Simon Jarvis’s “Endymion: The Text of Undersong” similarly wrestles with the material tones, voices, and sounds of the poem in order to bring back a work whose import, Jarvis writes, has been critically ignored. Jarvis explores, or, more precisely, “stumbles across,” the “deep thicket of new verse rhythms, textures, sentences, techniques” of a “masterpiece” of “simultaneous archaism and innovation.” As a “slap in the face” of contemporary “public taste,” Keats announced with Endymion a “poetics [that] remains to be written.” Indeed, the craft of the poem might be a measure of its contemporaneity in that it opens onto possibilities of the “now” that are not reducible to its historical values. Joel Faflak’s “Dancing in the Dark with Shelley” explores a different kind of orientation toward such contemporaneity: through meditations on the film musical, Faflak powerfully traces the emergent rhetoric of virtuality and subjugation that the genre performs by way of a harnessing of the visual. Borrowing in part from terms familiar in Debord, as well as using Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd and Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, Faflak demonstrates how Shelley’s The Triumph of Life stages decisive, historical encounters with the spectacles of culture that mark a particular turn away from romantic unknowing and inspire a post- Enlightenment culture of assimilation and foreclosure. Taking Adorno’s study of the romantic lyric as her critical point of departure, Mary Jacobus’s “The Pastoral Stain: Twombly under the Trees” also moves between centuries, but where Faflak discovers a shutting down of possibility, Jacobus examines an opening onto futurity that emerges out of Cy Twombly’s works. Drawing attention to the artist’s interest in literary citation, particularly a tradition of lyric thought running from the pastoral to romantic and postromantic poetry, Jacobus presents us with a Twombly who is writing a theory of poetics from within the visual, but not reducible to visualization. In Twombly’s dense figurations, the lyric describes the capacity to think through “painting’s and poetry’s silent invocation of alteration, within and beyond lyric time,” emphasizing movement and transition.

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Mike Goode and Ian Balfour both turn to two novelists, Walter Scott and Jane Austen, whose relationships to romanticism are distinctive and oblique. Goode and Balfour take up the legacy of these “romantic” writers in two disparate modes of contemporary popular culture. In “The Walter Scott Experience: Living American History after Waverley,” Goode explores how Scott’s “potent historical fiction,” its “historically resigned but elegiac narrative of the Jacobite rebellions,” is deployed by Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy, to make sense of the “lost cause” of the American Civil War. For Goode, Scott’s own narrative revivification is best understood as an “ontological project of historical reenactment,” one that not only found resonance with apologists of the vanquished Confederacy but is literalized in the long- running fantasy spectacle of the “living history museum” at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. In “Free Indirect Filmmaking: Jane Austen and the Renditions,” Balfour takes the contemporary popular obsession with Austen as the point of departure for his consideration of the challenges of rendering “her genial use of free indirect discourse” in the cinematic adaptations of her novels. Balfour examines how Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, “arguably the best adaptation of an Austen novel for the silver screen,” comes closest formally to revivifying cinematically the “temporary uncertainty” of Austen’s signature stylistic innovation, the blending of “third- person and first- person perspectives in a single sentence, improbably conjoining objective and subjective elements in one and the same ‘utterance.’ ” Goode and Balfour explore the cultural legacies of Scott and Austen, novelists who—for reasons that have their own institutional histories—have become “outliers” from their romantic contemporaries. In “Population Aesthetics in Romantic and Post- Romantic Literature,” Robert Mitchell turns to Frankenstein, the novel whose afterlife has become most institutionally entwined with romanticism and its auto- critique. As Mitchell notes, Scott described Frankenstein “as a novel, or more properly a romantic fiction, of a nature so peculiar, that we ought to describe the species before attempting any account of the individual production.” Individuals, species, populations: Mitchell’s essay explores the modes in which the machinations of the Godwin- Malthus debate illuminate Shelley’s novel, and it attends to the ways in which the “uncanny resurrection” of that debate has made its own unlikely U- turn in the two- way street of contemporary popular political discourse. In “Technomagism, Coleridge’s Mariner, and the Sentence Image,” Orrin N. C. Wang introduces the term “technomagism” to explore the twinned logics of techné and magic that emerge from the romantic moment and address our own contemporary relationship with the quasi- magical forms of technology. Wang shows how Coleridge’s poem makes “something out

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of nothing,” a conjuring trick that is the aesthetic fiat exemplifying romanticism’s own “technomagism.” Wang’s argument pivots on his reading of the decisive passage in the poem where the albatross inexplicably falls from the Mariner’s neck. Wang’s account of Coleridge’s poem—as paradigmatic hermeneutical challenge or elaborate put- on—morphs into a reading of Jacques Rancière’s notion of the “sentence- image,” the “little theatrical machine” or textual “app” that turns an event into a meaningful sequence and generates the “mystery” of symbolic relations. We conclude the volume with “Willing Suspension of Disbelief, Here, Now,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s reflections on the itinerary of her own relationship to romanticism’s contemporaneity, reflections prompted by Coleridge’s field- defining formulation of the transference that “constitutes poetic faith.” “Willing Suspension” is, among many other things, the revisiting of a principal figure and phrase of the British Romanticism that constituted Spivak’s own critical point of departure. “Folded together with (com- plicit), not just face- to- face with, Samuel Taylor Coleridge”: Spivak reviews this constitutive romantic complicity, the interpolated “heres” and “nows” of a critical trajectory stretching from Calcutta to Columbia. “Under the sign of the hurricane lantern,” Spivak follows the expedited route in Coleridge from “the willing suspension of disbelief ” to “poetic faith,” one only made “com- plicit in dreams.” The status of visuality in the legacies of the “romantic image” for contemporary culture is a recurrent motif in the volume, and not only for the authors who explicitly address painting or film but for the lanterned shadow play of light and dark that flickers in and out of so many of the essays, romantic pulses from the past. For the image that adorns the book’s cover, we have turned to Darren Waterston. His paintings are characterized by floating images that defy horizons, represented figures of organic material alongside sheer abstractions, tufts and roots of plants, shadow birds that rise and fall, impossible sources of illumination, secretions and excretions, delicate and even decorative renderings of bursts of light and traces of wispy lines suspended in smeared fields—romantic images and their remnants. Elsewhere Khalip has described Waterston’s painterly practice as an act of “tearing, rending, and dividing the self and scattering it in a world where it is a node or point of convergence for new aesthetic receptions.”17 Waterston’s His Universe is particularly relevant to our volume for its projection of a constellation, one with multiple sparkling but indefinite points of illumination. While the painting is the universe of another, it is also with us without any claim—it is his, ours, and no one’s. Its “elsewhere” is between destruction and creation, or a world vanished only to be restored. But it isn’t clear from the image what

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is emerging out of the milky nodules that may or may not be in circulation. Forestalling a developed life, Waterston illuminates the interstitial moments implied by the motions of paint that draw inward, outward, laterally, and centrally. Without plotted relationships, His Universe gives a queer universe that is nowhere to be found, and yet is still here. Stellar constellations are only visible at night, often only partially, and always only under certain conditions. If the essays gathered in this volume light a constellation of their own, they do so by exploring the various modes and conditions of romanticism’s present darkness: blurred images, pastoral stains, undersongs and undertones, foreclosed futures, horrors seen and unseen, lost causes, reading and even dancing in the dark. By the halting light of the “hurricane lamp,” we propose this collection as a sky map of contemporary romanticism, one that “flashes up” yesterday and tonight, and always under the threat of disappearance. Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 397. Subsequent citations in the text are to this edition by page number. 2. Thanks to David Clark for this point. 3. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 513 (cited hereafter in the text as SPP). 4. Jerrold E. Hogle, “Shelley’s Texts and the Premises of Criticism,” Keats-Shelley Journal 42 (1993): 68. 5. James Chandler, English in 1819:The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 107. See also Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 6. Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?,” in What Is An Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 41. Subsequent citations in the text are to this edition by page number. 7. “Reproductive futurism” is Lee Edelman’s term in his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 2. Also see his contribution to this volume. 8. Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 27. 9. The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (New York: Longman, 1970), 528–29. 10. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics:The Distribution of The Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 72; Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 24. 11. Cynthia Chase, ed., Romanticism (London: Longman, 1993), 1.

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12. Ibid., 1. 13. Paul de Man, “Wordsworth and Hölderlin,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 50. 14. Werner Hamacher, “‘Now’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time,” trans. N. Rosenthal, in Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Continuum, 2005), 40. 15. De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 50. 16. John Ashbery, “Wet Casements,” in Three Books: Houseboat Days, Shadow Train, A Wave (New York: Penguin, 1993), 28. 17. Jacques Khalip, “Infinite Care: Darren Waterston’s Split the Lark,” in Darren Waterston: Split the Lark (New York: D. C. Moore Gallery, 2014), 17.

The History of Missed Opportunities British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday William Galperin

The everyday is what we never see a first time, but only see again. —Maurice Blanchot1

1 The subtitle of this chapter—“British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday”—could easily be reversed because, quaint as it sounds, this is an essay about periodization and the hot chronology in British literary and cultural production that we continue to call “romantic.” Specifically, it is about a category of experience—the everyday—that comes to light during this interval as a history of missed opportunities, where what the “everyday” might suffice to name or to describe emerges both as something “uncounted” and as a missed opportunity for historical accounting, where what has “happened,” as Walter Benjamin notes, is generally “lost.”2 Anticipating the formulations of Martin Heidegger and Henri Lefebvre, for whom the everyday is environmental, integrative, and, by turns, liberatory, what is “seen again” for the “first time” during the romantic period is a stratum that, by condition of its emergence, is a site as well of “possibility.”3 But equally at issue is the conceptual void that marks the everyday’s emergence as such. For the sense of the everyday that arises at the turn of the eighteenth century is always a history in place of theory, where a “retrospect of what might have been” (to quote Jane Austen) figures something neither lost nor purely speculative. Instead, the parallel or possible world that history focalizes in this formulation moves in a number of directions insofar as this “retrospect” involves not only “what might have been” but a stratum (again) whose very possibility promises its emancipation from the past as well. It registers the “shock of recognition” that takes place when, as Raymond Williams outlines, “an area of experience” that “lies beyond” is finally “articulat[ed],”4 and a sense of possibility, even hope, where something here and there, something

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past but potentially present or passing, is grasped in advance of being understood and categorized. As a discovery registered through the literary or the aesthetic, the everyday might appear to comport with a philosophical dimension to romantic- period discourse that has been explored under the rubrics of the “literary absolute” and “metaromanticism,” if only in that it is later marshaled by philosophy (Heidegger) and by social theory (Lefebvre) in dismantling a phenomenological project that had reached its high- water mark in romantic aesthetic practice.5 But what I am describing, again, is something very different. For insofar as the aesthetic is linked here to a retrospective procedure, rather than to an incorporation of what Paul Hamilton describes as romanticism’s “own critical reflection,” any convergence with the theoretical is delayed in the writing I explore by thinking that is distinctly compromised and that, in continually confusing theory and practice, proves a counter to the peculiar knowingness that typically characterizes romantic discourse. As a result, such writing tells us something about the period that neither the standard account, in which romanticism names an interval of succession and opposition, nor the more reflexive or historicist accounts fully grasp. Instead, as a markable development in time and in the chronology that we call romanticism, the history that doubles for the everyday in romantic- period discourse—where the everyday is misrecognized as something overlooked (as Blanchot and Stanley Cavell have subsequently described it)6—opens onto a durée that is “historic” in Benjamin’s sense in that it can be parsed or subtracted into a series of presents. In contrast, then, to the historical status that the everyday occupies in the agrarian or precapitalist model, where it is the habitus of total, nonalienated man,7 the anteriority that doubles for the everyday at the moment of its emergence is fundamentally (and paradoxically) synchronic: a “now- time” in which “hope” and the “past” are condensed and the usual temporalities linked to change are displaced.8 In regarding this development as primarily a question of periodization, then, I am making a claim about the everyday that is straightforward to the point of seeming naïve (especially as a defining feature of the period) and sufficiently distended or oblique to have no immediate bearing on romanticism and on the ways we construe it, save that it is of the literature and the moment. Even as there are ways to map the everyday onto familiar cartographies and taxonomies, beginning with empirical thought and its investment in the probable, from which the everyday—as a “now” possible if precedented world—is a departure, the everyday’s emergence, beyond the still critical matter of its contemporaneity, is random and surprisingly freestanding. None of the contexts that we typically apply to British romanticism, in other words,

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from the “philosophic” one outlined by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria and later by M. H. Abrams,9 where phenomena do an end- run around things in themselves (and around the skepticism posed by noumena), to the various historicisms that have transformed romanticism into what looks increasingly like a burned- over interval, are especially useful. Nor, for that matter, is the institution of British romanticism as a division of academic or critical knowledge particularly useful. From its early function as a counter to hermetic formalism to its more recent incorporation to the “long centuries” it straddles, “romanticism”—that is, the study of romanticism—has been increasingly impatient with the aspects of period- based writing that I’m tracking, which are not only better appreciated up close and with a much tighter focus but are reminders as well—and here’s where it gets tricky—that romantic- period writing in Britain involves literary and cultural production that is specific and necessarily separable. Lodged in a largely contingent relationship of means and ends, or between certain retrospective procedures and their potential yield, the everyday’s emergence speaks to romantic literature’s unique role as text and context, where the “world” onto which literature opens now is so embedded, so barely understood, that it is enough just to mark it. Thus, even as the anti- empirical hypothesis has continued to have bearing as a defining feature of the romantic period from Coleridge on, where the “English idealism”10 giving rise to skepticism issues finally in what Coleridge and Wordsworth variously render as a “marriage” of mind and nature, its usefulness involves neither an epochal break of canonical proportion nor a more modest parsing of idealisms. The payoff comes in a new category of experience that, while seemingly cognate, is fundamentally distinct from what empiricists like Hume term the probable. A brief look at the OED indicates that the everyday (as opposed to the “ordinary,” which was primarily a class designation) developed into a necessary descriptor sometime in the mid- eighteenth century, eventually achieving a conceptual apotheosis in the notion of “everydayness” in the 1840s. But what this means too is that the particulars of this development toward conceptualization, especially in the new century, require a special kind of attention. As a category in process, the everyday registers a series of distinctions, or, better, separations, that are often minimal and easy to overlook, whether in works such as Wordsworth’s, where the recovery leading to the everyday’s emergence is inadvertent and separable (again) from other practices of recollection, or in writings like Jane Austen’s, where an apparent subscription to probability, and to the custom and stability with which it is coextensive, is mitigated by a distinctly possible world that is both the hallmark of Austen’s plotless and detail- laden style and sufficiently lost to time (from Austen’s perspective) to be recoverable

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as a condition of becoming present. Thus, regardless of how differently it performs as a pathway to discovery, what the history leading to the everyday calls for is surprisingly the same for the various writers and texts at issue. Requiring critical protocols that no longer square either with the romantic idealism that supersedes empiricism or with the various historical methods— materialist, empirical, subterranean11—to which period- based studies have had recourse in the last thirty- five years, the “event” to which the everyday is tantamount as something missed but recoverable, and that the fragment poem, for example, discloses by a process of interruption, is more properly a “constellation” (in Benjamin’s famous term) “wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now” (emphasis added) as a condition of becoming representable.12

2 Probability is central to the empirical project, the result of an inductive method in which, as Hume noted, “what we have found to be most usual is always most probable”13 and of the growing stability and predictability of life in Britain and in Europe beginning in the seventeenth century, when such deductions became increasingly measurable rather than mere guesswork.14 Still, when Annabella Milbanke (the future Lady Byron) signed off on this development in describing Pride and Prejudice as “the most probable fiction I have ever read,” her elaboration concerning Austen’s rejection of the “common” and sensationalistic “resources of novel writers” missed the larger point of her hyperbole, which draws a bright line between probability per se and something else that the novel registers.15 In the novel’s famous first sentence both the marital imperative and its formal correlative, the marriage plot, are presented not simply as stipulations that are by definition limited but as the constituents of a probabilistic bounding line that is begging to be breached: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” We customarily read this inaugural statement as signifying a cheerful or, at the most, stoical detachment from the human comedy. But there is a conceptual distinction being negotiated as well in the way the sentence pivots on “must” in underscoring something customary along with its palpable and exasperating origins in female vulnerability and desire. Simply by conceding what is business as usual, Austen allows that same business, along with the concession it exacts, both to define and complicate the trajectory it maps, where the procession to marital closure, and the imbalance it harbors at every stage, is limited to the probabilism that this “most probable” novel is already superseding.

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Although lost on Lady Byron, this aspect of the novel was not lost on her contemporaries, many of whom joined with the first sentence in regarding the marital trajectory as more of an accompaniment to Pride and Prejudice than a defining feature. To these readers, as I’ve shown previously, the abundance of minute detail here and elsewhere in Austen invariably took precedence over the novels’ plots, prompting no less a reader than Maria Edgeworth to describe Emma as having “no story in it except that . . . smooth, thin water-gruel is according to Emma’s father’s opinion a very good thing & it is very difficult to make a cook understand what you mean by smooth thin water gruel.”16 A twentieth- century reader like Roland Barthes finds a seamless and sinister continuity between a novel’s ideological work (read plot) and the naturalizing or “reality effect” of such circumstantial detail.17 However, during the period when Austen’s novels first appeared, their oftnoted naturalness—or realism, for that matter—was more a synonym for what was distracting and disarticulated than for something obfuscatory and absorptive. One contemporary tartly described Mansfield Park as “not much of a novel,” “more the history of [a] family party in the country,”18 and another, Edgeworth’s friend Ann Romilly, made a nearly identical claim in noting how “real natural every day life” in Mansfield Park took precedence over that novel’s “story vein of principle.”19 These observations point to more than just a blurring of diegesis and mimesis attributable to the novel’s—and realism’s—instability at the juncture where Austen was supposedly codifying the genre. They mark an abiding conflict between what Walter Scott termed the “narrative” of Austen’s novels and what he called their “prosing,” which, like Edgeworth, he listed “among the [author’s] faults.” This prosing does more than distract from the ideological shape of Austen’s narratives as they track the progress of a heroine “turned wise by precept, example, and experience.”20 It links that function to the conservatism of probability or universal “truth,” which counts similarly on “experience,” or on precepts based on precedent, in prosecuting its claims and conclusions. Such tension, in other words, juxtaposes two modes of history: one that uses the past, and in empiricism’s case an aggregated past, as a template for generalizing about human life and nature as well as a predictive apparatus or model for the future (including that of women desperate to marry), and one in which the prior is sufficiently striking that its reproducibility in any form apart from a stubborn reality is largely undermined. The world and milieu that Austen engaged, reengaged, and made the defining feature of her practice as a writer during the nearly two decades in which her first published novels underwent continued revision, becoming in the process “realistic,”21 was not

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static or immediately transhistorical; it was a world in the welter of time or what, in the “advertisement” to Northanger Abbey, Austen explicitly calls “considerable changes.” We generally restrict these “changes” to those “in books,” especially the gothic novel, which had long ceased to be an enthusiasm and a satirical object in the interval separating Northanger Abbey’s composition from what turned out to be its posthumous publication. But the allusions to change in the advertisement, chiefly those in “manners” and “opinions,” take in considerably more. They take in a style first and foremost where details, specifically of a world seen as if for the first time, prove more significant than the exercise of narrative authority in mitigating both the sensationalism that Lady Byron complained about and, just as important, the probabilism according to which unmarried gentrywomen are forever in search of single rich men. That’s because the unprecedented representation of everydayness that impressed Austen’s contemporaries (for better or for worse), and that Scott was only partly right in calling prosaic, would have been impossible were it not also what one Austen character terms a “retrospect of what might have been,”22 which is to say a history where the real and the possible were suddenly linked. The Literary Gazette was surely being nostalgic when in 1833 it singled out Austen’s “absolute historical pictures” of “country dances” and the “delights of tea- table” for special praise.23 But what the Gazette also marked, however superficially, was the “literary absolute” for which the “historical” was a placeholder. It marked not a past but a present, or a “thickened present” (to borrow Husserl’s notion),24 that was representable thanks to narratives that had become archives, where everything deducible from experience on Scott’s empirical model was ancillary to what was insufficiently appreciated on first pass to count as both a possible world and a missed opportunity. This opportunity, this possibility, symptomatically involves heroines who for a good portion of their narratives resist their disposability to the formal or disciplinary imperatives outlined in Pride and Prejudice’s inaugural sentence. And their resistance is symptomatic because the counterplot that abides in the rich and relatively static present of Austen’s novels—I’m thinking especially of Mansfield Park—harks back to a moment when prospects for women were clearly less restricted than they were by the time of the novels’ publication between 1811 and 1817 and by the “considerable changes”— notably the entrenchment of domestic ideology and its doctrine of separate spheres—that had transpired during the crucial period of revision, beginning in the mid- 1790s. The “historical” status of an intransigent Elizabeth Bennet or an Emma Woodhouse or a Catherine Morland or even a Mary Crawford is more than just a precondition for compliance with the imperatives of either plot or heteronormative desire. It is part of an enduring anteriority,

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whose afterlife or transposition to the present is additionally guaranteed by the temporal or linear progress whereby a woman’s life and world “before” marriage—or what is increasingly prior as the narrative moves forward— remains, along with other aspects of the “real,” strikingly different. Limning a world where “the quiet power of the possible” (as Heidegger later phrased it)25 is tantalizingly close at hand, Austen’s “retrospect of what might have been” looks in two directions, then: to a past whose (re)discovery and dimensionality propel the everyday—or what was everyday—into a fathomable and appreciable state, and to a present whose peculiar and prosaic eventfulness is a transit back to the future. Like trauma, then, which is also an “experience . . . not fully assimilated as it occurs,”26 the history that impresses, precipitating a stratum of life that the everyday might suffice to name, is analogous to the train wreck “from which a person walks away . . . only to suffer the symptoms of shock weeks later,”27 but at a level that amalgamates concept and experience rather than being confounding. It bears affinities with trauma not as a wound whose registry is delayed but as a “disquiet” (to use Harry Harootunian’s term)28 in which “history” “arise[s] where immediate understanding”—in this case, of the everyday as such—“may not.”29

3 Austen is an especially fortuitous example, both in her reluctant subscription to probability and in her representation of everydayness, as noted by her earliest readers. But what she shares with her more recognizably romantic- period contemporaries, specifically Wordsworth and Byron, is a “retrospection” that, in the formulation of hers that I’ve cited twice already, transforms “what might have been” from a possibility that can be neither denied nor confirmed into one that counts on historical distance in becoming what Ernst Bloch terms “real possibility.”30 In Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” there is not just an idealized past whose disappearance is mitigated through the joint agency of memory and imagination; there is also a more immediate or micro history running throughout in which an alternative world peers through in contrast to the palliatives of either vision or what increasingly seems like special pleading. Readers will remember the probabilistic course of human existence that the “Ode” outlines in place of what elsewhere in Wordsworth is a more clearly defined developmental trajectory involving a “paradise regained” through the interaction of mind and nature. The “Ode” is more qualified. After a four- stanza beginning in which the barely remembered plenitude of childhood is juxtaposed with a present marked by disenchantment, the poem proceeds haphazardly to answer the question on

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which its inaugural stanzas and, not coincidentally, its initial phase of composition came to an abrupt halt: “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? /Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” (ll. 56–57).31 It is tempting to view the two years during which Wordsworth fashioned an answer to these questions—or the answer that he produced during that interval—as homologous with Austen’s revisions of her first novels and with the renewed sense of the world and of the everyday onto which they opened. But there is a critical difference, even as the questions gesture toward a similar discovery in implying that the glory and the dream are potentially quite proximate (“Where is it now. . . ?”). The difference is that where Austen had an archive to revisit in her own cursive writing, the “Ode” ’s past, what stands as history in the initial stanzas, is sharply dissociated not only from the present, where the glories of the past are presumably nonexistent, but also from anything that might have been a present at some point. If the two years that Wordsworth took to complete the poem were passed in some kind of retrospection on his part, therefore, it was less “a retrospect of what might have been—but what never can be now” (to quote Austen’s statement in full) than a retrospect of what might have been because it “is” or “can be now,” having essentially just happened. But how exactly does one fashion such a history? The answer is very quickly, or as rapidly as it takes for there to be an interval to create historical distance. The central example would be the ordinary or “meanest flower” in the final lines, the one that famously gives “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” (ll. 204–05). This is the same flower glimpsed early on: first as a personification and, in virtually the same instant, as something less mystified: —But there’s a Tree, of many one, A single Field which I have looked upon, Both of them speak of something that is gone: The Pansy at my feet Doth the same tale repeat: Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream? (ll. 51–57)

Without belaboring the difference between a declarative statement of loss and a question that bears the promise, at least rhetorically, of some recovery in the present, I note that the pansy does not simply repeat the tale “spoken” by either the tree or the field. It alters that tale in quickly segueing from a debased or fallen present to something equally present if indeterminate. Out of nowhere, or so it seems, the prosopopoeia is inverted in deference

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to the flower, whose pressure as a thing versus a pensée (in Wordsworth’s pun) is registered in an interrogative that turns on “it.” And it happens with a suddenness best captured by a phrase from Austen’s Emma spoken by the memorable character Miss Bates, who, in a rare moment of economy, states flatly, “What is before me, I see.”32 “Before” is more than just a spatial or environmental designation; it indicates something that, as Miss Bates routinely reminds us, is independent of the self and demands deference. It points, symptomatically in Austen, to something prior and present.33 The characteristic move in Wordsworth is from the material to the internalized. However, just as the second look of revision manages to retrieve the everyday from a strictly probabilistic or narrative framework in Austen, so the double take serves a cognate purpose in replacing the primary look in Wordsworth with something less personalized (or aestheticized) and removed accordingly from the pathetic fallacies where the “personal” finds expression. “It,” on which a lot depends “now,” identifies the initial take both as a mistake and just as suddenly (or so it seems) as a supervention on what “remains behind” (emphasis added), whose priority as a source of “strength” (as the speaker eventually argues [l. 180]) is bound increasingly to its priority as something residual. In a poem in which memory, particularly of childhood, is ostensibly enlarged and privileged as a form of vision, this maneuver is far from selfevident. And so for the duration of the “Ode,” as in so much of Austen, the history of missed opportunities remains a counterpart, and a mostly silent one, to a probabilistic account involving the inevitable transit from the “simple creed” of childhood to the “earthly freight” of “custom” or experience (ll. 129–30). In Austen, this transit is from woman to wife and is linked to truths that, simply by being “universally acknowledged,” are just as openly contestable. But in Wordsworth, or at least in this Wordsworth, probability is a placeholder of sorts that, far from subscribing to an empirical worldview, is highly aestheticized and, like the pathetic fallacies that precede it, something of a performance. This becomes especially obvious at the poem’s close, when the speaker turns from the “human condition” he has been elaborating to talk exclusively about himself, and about the separate peace or compensation he has secured. Most readings follow the mythologizing here, attributing this compensation to a heroic, highly individualized act of recovery through imagination and memory. But the concluding turn, and the seemingly subjective valuation of nature on which it rests, are perhaps better understood as turning from this “Wordsworthian” stance as well. That stance, as Coleridge later recalled, was “to give the charm of novelty to things of every day . . . by awakening the mind’s attention from the

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lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”34 While there is no reason to dispute this anti- empirical claim, particularly as a basis for collaboration, virtually everything that Coleridge describes was frequently exposed to a second look, as a consequence of which “the charm of novelty” disappears and “things,” or something like them, suddenly reemerge. In the “Ode,” for example, the “one delight” Wordsworth claims to have relinquished—namely, “to live beneath [the] . . . habitual sway” of “Fountains, Meadows, Hills and Groves” (ll. 194, 190)—moves processually from an immersion that is prehistoric and idealized to opportunities in time that have been missed and then realized: in the “Brooks,” the “new- born Day,” in “Clouds that gather round the setting sun” (ll. 195–99), and, last and most important, in “the meanest flower that blows,” all of which are “seen again” for the “first time.” And so the gyrations leading to the everyday’s emergence in the romantic period as something missed, recovered, and writable as a result, are reparative in also underwriting a sense of enchantment, or hope, that is neither intentional nor teleological so much as a prevailing afterwardness. For beyond presupposing something that was and can accordingly “be,” the synchronic practices of retrospection such as I’ve described, in the course of which history is largely dissociated from memory, make the possibilities of the world and the world of possibility period- bound in two different if interrelated ways: in the “event,” first and foremost, to which the world is tantamount by this development, and in the particular plenitude that the lingering event opens onto. The historical distance from which the “meanest flower” peers forth, and from which the vibrancy of domestic life becomes visible and valuable on reflection, is not only necessary for these elements to (re)emerge in ways that are “surprising” and seemingly unprecedented; it is also necessary because this distance is collapsible and the guarantee (again) of “real possibility.”

4 Byron’s poetry is equally illustrative here, thanks to a history that is initially a matter of conjecture before becoming fact, and to the specific event that comes in either case to count as a missed opportunity. The event is the Byron marriage, from which much of Byron’s poetry devolves, beginning with the “Oriental” or Turkish Tales, written during his courtship of Miss Milbanke, and culminating in Don Juan, which turns out to be not only about

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marriage but a work as well whose shapeless intimacy amounts to a marriage between a speaker and an interlocutor whom, only partly as a critical thought experiment, I’m calling Lady Byron. Byron’s preoccupation with marriage owes obviously to the separation scandal and to the separation from England that the break with Lady Byron precipitated. My interest, however, is with the way this marriage is linked—before and after—to a sense of everydayness: to a mode of relation, at once habitual and renewable, whereby separation, far from existential or a synonym for divorce, is also a term for temporal or historical distance. We can thank Stanley Cavell for this general insight regarding what Eric Walker has more recently described as a “furtive, contingent model” of marriage that should be “called remarriage” or “remarriage day after day.”35 But regardless, the linkage of the everyday and (re)marriage, particularly as they may be dissociated from probability, domestic ideology, and the “marriage plot” in all senses, joins with other aspects of the everyday in romantic- period discourse in allowing a retrospective procedure to open onto something past and present that Byron, in a slight modification, would eventually call the “feeling of a former world and future.” This feeling or “sensation,” which remains the essence of “poetry” for Byron (and poetry was at that moment Don Juan), describes what in this same journal entry he insistently calls “Hope.” And not just any hope but one that, as he works through it, is located less in “memory,” where it is forever “baffled,” than in a “former world and future” (again) that the “Present,” whose “where[abouts]” are uncertain, might very well describe.36 Cavell, who has written extensively on ordinariness, and on marriage as its sine qua non, regards marriage as an inscrutable order of experience that transcends genre and accordingly as an experience that emerges on “the day after” narrative ends. But this is just part of the equation. If marriage remains ordinary in its constitutive elusiveness, it also figures as a stay against skepticism, particularly the inability to know another’s mind. “Stay” may be too strong a word. Cavell’s project is not to dispose of skepticism but to chart a way in which the prospect of knowing someone is subordinated to the “ordinary” and to the alternative possibilities that everyday conjugality produces. “Marriage,” he writes, is . . . an estate meant not as a distraction from the pain of constructing happiness from a helpless, absent world, but as the scene in which the chance for happiness is shown as the mutual acknowledgment of separateness, in which the prospect is not for the passing of years (until death parts us) but for the willing repetition of days, willingness for the everyday (until our true minds become unreadable to one another).37

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The opportunities associated with the “everyday” in this description are obviously muted. But fathomable, even here, is the surprising plenitude linked to the everyday’s discovery in marriage- as- separation or, following the “history” allied with its emergence, its recovery in marriage so constituted. Far from farce, in other words, the repetition of history that Cavell calls marriage is more an aperture onto the present the day after, which may explain why marriage assumes an alternately privileged and belated (or privileged because belated) status in at least three of the four Turkish Tales that Byron was writing as he was courting his future wife. For the version of marriage that counts as a missed opportunity in these earlier poems and in contemporaneous letters and journal entries is linked to a complex dynamic where marriage remains a missed opportunity before the fact—preempting “memory” while preserving the historical distance, the separation, that casts the repetition of days into defamiliarizing relief. Thus, even as he clearly married Annabella Milbanke “for money” (as Elizabeth Cady Stanton put it bluntly),38 the “value” that Byron attaches to marriage, especially in the foresight that it would not succeed, is far from strictly monetary. It comes from a retrospection, however contrived, in which the everyday is allied with the repetition of days and where the fantasy of separateness (and eventual separation) issues from a “willingness” for what can then be repeated that, if not yet based on what Cavell describes, is structurally homologous with its basis in marriage. Thus, if it seems too much to claim that Byron could only will himself to marry in the first place by valuing his future union from the other side, when what Heidegger calls the “not- yet” was already “what might have been,” it is the case that, in the various texts he was writing as he was contemplating marriage, marriage routinely gains prestige, both as a missed opportunity and as an alternative to Byronic business as usual. This sense of something missed is especially striking in the Turkish Tales, beginning with The Giaour, where a triangulated story of sex and violence ends with a surprising paean to monogamy that is possible in retrospect, or only in retrospect, with marriage as a missed opportunity. And it continues in The Corsair and Lara, which value marriage as belonging to “a former world,” whose defining counterpart is not just the “future,” much less Byronism so called, but that elusive, everyday thing called the “Present,” to which Byron is continually directed in the letter exchange that was the courtship. Lasting longer than the marriage itself, this epistolary conversation routinely opens onto a horizon of friendship and domesticity whose very (im)possibility was not only behind whatever “willingness” or nostalgia brought Byron, however reluctantly, to the altar but also the germ, both in theory and in aftermath, of a “willingness” for

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marriage and for the “former world” it figured, which Don Juan ultimately inscribes and formalizes. And the opportunity persists—one might even say reemerges—in the welter of interpretation and misunderstanding that continued to inflect the Byron marriage even after both principals were deceased. The positions on the Byron marriage taken first by the poet’s friend Thomas Moore and later, and more notoriously, by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her two “vindications” of Lady Byron do more than register the codified, largely probable, positions associated with the Byrons respectively (the Lady an apogee of domesticity and the Lord the quintessential solitary genius); they allow the Byrons collectively—and the repetition of days on which their collective verged—to reemerge as a real possibility in a virtual imitation of the everyday’s emergence generally.39 With the Byron marriage forever in the background, then, Don Juan may be reckoned a do- over directed not only to someone virtually present but also to someone to whom Byron was always more comfortable writing. Thus the convergence of content (marriage) and form (marriage) in the poem involves a third convergence—the Cavellian one of marriage and remarriage, or remarriage day after day—which is additionally highlighted in a period- based intuition to which the poem’s fragmentary form attests. In addition to its striking interlocution, along with the repetition of days that it mimes as an endless conversation, Don Juan is broadly representative in formalizing the everyday, both as a retrospect of what might have been (the Byron marriage) and as a continuum of which the fragment, no matter its size, is always a synecdoche. I have already noted a similar development in the way Austen’s detailism amounts to a history writing that is more properly the stuff of history as opposed to a more conventional history writing in fictional form.40 The fragmentary disposition of Don Juan is equally representative in aspiring to historical status or eventfulness rather than in giving shape and meaning to something either prior or invented. Like the history to which revision provides access in Austen, the history that substitutes for memory, Don Juan is also a “retrospect of what might have been”: a history of missed opportunities that takes the form not so much of retrospection, with its implicit claim to loss or even comprehension, but of “what might have been.” Don Juan registers the gain, the willingness for the everyday, that marriage produces in practice and, in this case, poetic practice and in the repetition of days to which poetry, like the endlessly digressive world of Emma’s Miss Bates, palpably conforms. Whether this accounts for the fragment’s remarkable prevalence during this moment in literary production is another question entirely, given the many different fragments that were written both in Britain and abroad. But

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Don Juan’s constitution as a history of something missed bears connection to other contemporary fragments in English, notably those of Coleridge and Shelley, and just as crucially to the related tendency in Keats’s Odes to focalize a “present” that typically goes undocumented. The dynamic is a little different in these instances. Rather than tracking the particular historiography by which the everyday comes into view, these poems suggest a history or anteriority internal to form. Or, following Norman Bryson’s take on still life painting (“looking at the overlooked”), these texts, as forms of historical content, engage an everyday that is quite literally a “residual deposit” (in Lefebvre’s phrase) even as it is present and, in the timescape from which the real- time lyric is extracted, ongoing.41 Without discounting the circumstances surrounding the production of a given fragment, then, whether in a surprise visit from someone from Porlock (“Kubla Khan”) or in the actual death of the author (“The Triumph of Life” and Don Juan), the fragments by British romantic writers ultimately resemble Keats’s Odes in recurring to the overlooked, both as a condition of becoming fragments and as a goad to fragmentation regardless of cause. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Christabel and Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life” do not on the face of it seem especially motivated by the indissolubility of form and content that makes the fragment the form par excellence for representing everydayness. But each opens onto a scene of the ordinary that marks a departure from poetic business as usual. The Coleridge poems begin in sublime and allegorical modes, respectively, which are superseded by distinctly ordinary scenarios that, beyond bringing each to suspension or cessation, are reminders of what the law of genre interdicts. The outsized struggle between imperial decree and “romantic” or revolutionary irruption in “Kubla Khan” devolves into a wish- fulfilling fantasy (“Could I revive within me her symphony and song”) introduced by a word where, as one critic noted many years ago, the “emphasis is slight . . . like ‘Could you make it Wednesday instead of Thursday, it would be easier for me.’” Such casualness bespeaks confidence for this critic and points to “the very possibility of creative achievement.”42 But what Coleridge’s ordinary language reflects in the fragment it helps precipitate is a fantasy from the other side in effect, where creative achievement and fame are daydreams in contrast to “possibilities” that are close at hand and comparatively endless. Similarly, the Manichean narrative that is Christabel comes to abrupt closure in a scene of domesticity that, in contrast to the resolution that a Christian allegory demands, is necessarily without end. Even The Triumph of Life, whose fragmentary status was, like Don Juan’s, sealed by the death of the author, finds its gravity (for want of a better term) in a sense of the ordinary marked by chronic

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fragmentation. For embedded in the text that Shelley could not finish is another fragment—something nonteleological and dynamic called “life”—that is largely overlooked despite a style, a “life- style” of repeated enjambment, that does not subtend the poem’s infernal vision of judgment so much as vitiate it. And last but hardly least there are Keats’s Odes. Arguably the most finished, least fragmentary works of the period, the Odes adhere to the fragment’s formal logic not only in their representations of everyday phenomenology or musing but also in the way the real- time lyrics preserve something typical, even banal, that closure simply interrupts. This is especially true in “To Autumn,” which closes on a quite ordinary moment that the poem clings to as long as the speaker has eyes to see and ears to listen. As a result, the famous close—a lights- out moment—does not resolve matters but stops them arbitrarily, transforming this formal tour de force into a fragment whose disposition, like that of Shelley’s poem, is guaranteed only partly by the death of the author. For what the speaker’s figurative demise registers—as life interrupted—is “a willingness for the everyday,” whereby a moment typically written out of history is written into history in honor of the opportunities that art recovers in at least partial imitation of life. It has long been a commonplace that the history of missed opportunities to which much writing of the period refers is the “age of revolution,” the renovated world in time that seemed possible at one point. I am concerned here with another kind of history and another kind of possibility, where “what might have been” turns out to be less a matter of conjecture or fantasy than of a historical distance collapsible at all times. This collapse produces a previously unappreciated or inconceivable stratum of experience and a way of thinking about romanticism in Britain as the moment when what was—and is—the “Present” was a resource for what Byron provocatively calls “Hope.” Notes 1. Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 14. 2. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 390. My interest bears obvious affinities with Anne- Lise François’s exploration of the “literature of uncounted experience” in her recent study, Open Secrets (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), which treats romantic- period texts, chiefly those by Austen and Wordsworth, among others. But apart from the transhistorical sweep of François’s interests, which takes her beyond and before romanticism, what differentiates our positions on the way literature accounts for what is typically missed boils

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down to a distinction between what François calls recessive experience—a finely grained reckoning onto which a passive or meditative disposition effectively opens—and what for my part is an experience or event that, thrown suddenly into historical relief, focalizes a possible world that, far from recessive, is forever close at hand and hiding in plain sight. 3. Lefebvre, for example, speaks of how the “true critique of everyday life,” by which the modern everyday gives way to an antecedent or agrarian paradigm, “will have as its primary objective the separation between the human (real and possible) and bourgeois decadence, and will imply a rehabilitation of everyday life” (Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. John Moore [London: Verso, 1991], 127). And Heidegger, in discussing “everyday modes of being,” speaks of the “possibility of distraction” and the “possibilities of abandoning [one]self to the world” (Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [New York: Harper and Row, 1962], 216–17). 4. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters (London: New Left Books, 1979), 164–65. 5. Phillipe Lacoue- Labarthe and Jean- Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988); Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 11, 21. See also Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Jarvis invokes what he calls “poetical thinking,” both to reexamine the “truth” onto which Wordsworth’s poems open in surprising and fundamental ways and, like Hamilton, to give the poet a hand in understanding and superseding the materialisms by which he is often either explained or found wanting. In “metaromantic” fashion, Wordsworth’s writing “provides resources for truer apprehensions of some of the problems” that historicist critique has routinely turned up, which, far from period specific or a question of context, are matters (“need, desire and pleasure”) that “extend back through centuries . . . rather than decades” (5–6). For Heidegger’s conception of everydayness, see chiefly Being and Time. 6. Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 10–11; Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 12–20. 7. See also Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Thomas Dumm, A Politics of the Ordinary (New York: New York University Press, 1999). See also, of course, Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore and Gregory Elliott, 3 vols. (London: Verso, 2008). 8. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 397, 391. 9. See especially M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), which follows Coleridge’s effort in the Biographia both within and as establishing its own critical- theoretical tradition. 10. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 239. 11. I am referring here to J. G. A. Pocock’s notion of “tunnel history,” where instead of “telling all there is to tell” about a given writer or moment, historical recovery focuses on a “single theme” in a number of disparate texts and authors, “pushing it through until it emerges in the daylight of a new country” (“Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers,” in Wealth and Virtue, ed. Istvan Hunt and Michael Ignatieff [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 286).

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12. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 462–63. 13. David Hume, “Of Miracles,” in An Inquiry concerning Human Understanding (New York: Bobbs- Merrill, 1955), 124. 14. Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 15. Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron’s Wife (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962), 159. For a full discussion of the early response to Austen, see my essay, “Austen’s Earliest Readers and the Rise of the Janeites,” in Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees, ed. Deidre Lynch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 87–114. 16. Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1971), 46. 17. Roland Barthes, “L’Effet de réel,” Communications 11 (1968): 84–89. 18. The Journal of Mary Frampton, ed. Harriot Mundy (London: Sampson, Low, 1885), 226. 19. Romilly-Edgeworth Letters, 1813–1818, ed. Samuel Henry Romilly (London: John Murray, 1936), 92. 20. B. C. Southam, ed., Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968–87), 1:65–68. 21. For a fuller discussion of the implications of Austen’s revisions, particularly in the movement from epistolarity to free indirect discourse, see my book, The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 109–37. See also B. C. Southam, “Lady Susan and the Lost Originals, 1795–1800,” in Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 45–62. 22. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. R. W. Chapman, rev. Mary Lascelles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965–66), 455. 23. Literary Gazette, March 30, 1833, 199. 24. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, trans. John Barnett Bough, ed. Rudolf Bernet (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 37. 25. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1977), 196. 26. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience:Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 5. 27. Ibid., 6. 28. Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Focusing primarily on Japan, Harootunian is concerned (as Heidegger was) with the residual disposition of everyday practice in a culture seemingly in the throes of modernization. 29. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11 30. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 194–222. 31. References are to the text of the “Ode” in William Wordsworth:The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 297–302. 32. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 138. 33. This becomes especially apparent when, in Miss Bates’s company, both the protagonist and the narrative pegged to her viewpoint must acknowledge an always present

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but otherwise unnoticed world of other people and other things of which Miss Bates is always mindful. 34. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:7. 35. Eric C. Walker, Marriage, Writing and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen after War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 10, 69. 36. Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 248–49. 37. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 178. 38. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Moral of the Byron Case,” in Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 174. 39. For a fuller discussion of the Byron controversy, see my essay, “Lord Byron, Lady Byron, and Mrs. Stowe,” in The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, ed. Meredith L. McGill (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 125–38. 40. For the relationship between historiographic practice and narrative practice, particularly along a realistic axis, see Hayden White, The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); and Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–85). For more period- specific treatments of the same issue, with a focus on the force of empiricism in historical representation, see Mark Saber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Mark Saber Phillips, “‘If Mrs Mure be not sorry for poor King Charles’: History, the Novel, and the Sentimental Reader,” History Workshop Journal 43 (1997): 111–31. See also Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, “Mary Stuart’s ‘Fatal Box’: Sentimental History and the Revival of the Casket Letters Controversy,” in The Age of Johnson, vol. 7, ed. Paul J. Korshin (New York: AMS, 1996), 427–73; and Everett Zimmerman, The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 41. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion, 1990). See also Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 2:64. In alluding to the form of historical content I’m purposely inverting the title of Hayden White’s investigation of historical practice (see note 40) in which the possibilities for historical recovery remain linked to form, notably narrative form, as “the mode of discourse in which a successful understanding of matters historical is represented” (60). 42. Humphry House, Coleridge: The Clark Lectures 1951–52 (London: Rupert HartDavis, 1967), 115.

The Pathology of the Future, or the Endless Triumphs of Life Lee Edelman

Though my title could be read as referring to the emergence of a pathology in the future, it intends, on the contrary, to mark as pathological our relation to the future as such. Naming, that is, not a pathology to come but the pathology that determines our investment in the promise of something that is always “to come,” something, to borrow Wordsworth’s phrase, “evermore about to be,” this pathology of the future informs our contemporary versions of romanticism. For our sense of the contemporary as designating what’s happening now, what’s up- to- date (a sense the OED traces only to the middle of the nineteenth century), commits us to the fantasy of coinciding with an ever- vanishing moment and so to a logic of futurism assuring continuity by way of movement, survival by way of change, the authenticity of realized presence by way of the flux that defines what’s “current.” Intimately bound to the dominance of historicist and historicizing thought, deeply embedded in what we might call the romance of temporality, the continuity at stake in such futurism rests on what Lacan, in a different context, evokes as the “point of view of the Last Judgment,” a perspective within which the temporal chain is imagined from the vantage point of its impossible totalization.1 Such a vision involves the spatialization of time through imaginary closure; it coordinates local occurrences into the unity of an all- encompassing sequence as seen from an atemporal position offering a glimpse of what would otherwise exceed our apprehension, like the “woods decaying never to be decayed” in Wordsworth’s phrase. With this, as Paul de Man asserts in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” the human manages to borrow “the temporal stability that it lacks from nature,” by which he means from the spatialized image of nature as “eternity in motion” escaping, through imaginary totalization, the “unimaginable touch of time.”2 The future, in this sense, exists only insofar as it is foreseen—but foreseen in the form of the supplement that serves, like the Lacanian objet a, to represent in the guise of desire our bondage to the repetitions of the drive.

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But this could be put another way: that life conceived sub specie aeternitatis (through the putative survival of the species) sublimates, through the “endurance” of nature itself, the limits on individual life. Such a doubleness condensed in the notion of life, so crucial in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud introduces the death drive, was already at issue in 1802 for Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus when he first named the study of life “biology.” For Treviranus, who divided biological phenomena into those specific to the individual and those pertaining to the preservation of the species, all vital phenomena, to quote Raoul Mourgue’s analysis in the Journal of Comparative Neurology, “manifest a certain constancy even though subjected to ceaselessly changing external influences, as long as that variability does not exceed certain limits” (manifestent une certaine constance quoique soumis à des influences extérieures sans cesse changeantes, à condition que cette variabilité ne dépasse pas certaines limites).3 Just as changes in the organism’s external conditions are stabilized for Treviranus by the “vital force,” so the transience of individual lives is stabilized by the survival of the species; life thus consists in the sublimation of its tendency toward self- limitation so that change on one level paves the way for constancy on another. If the death and resurrection of Christ anticipate Hegelian dialectic, they also sustain the biological faith in the subordination of the individual to the greater logic of what I’ve elsewhere described as reproductive futurism. Life’s constitutive negativity, by means of which life from the outset takes shape, informs not only Treviranus’s pre- Freudian discussion of the constancy principle but also Shelley’s roughly contemporary speculations in his essay “On Life.” Thirteen years after the appearance, in 1802, of the first volume of Treviranus’s Biology, which asked the question, “What is life?,” Shelley’s essay posed that question again, anticipating its return in The Triumph of Life, a 548- line poem composed in 1822, the year the sixth and last volume of Treviranus’s Biology was published. Nor is the fact of this question’s repetition a contingent aspect of the question itself. For Shelley, as for Treviranus, the mystery of life inheres in the relation between repetition and undoing, constancy and rupture, ongoing movement and punctual persistence. “This is the character of all life and being,” writes Shelley in his essay “On Life”: “Each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all things are referred, and the line in which all things are contained.”4 Such a line, at once linguistic and genetic (the two being brought together through their common relation to the unfolding of a signifying chain), may contain “all things,” in Shelley’s view, but only insofar as “all things” refer to a point that is always beyond them. Recalling his vision of poetry in A Defence— “It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which

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comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred” (503)—Shelley’s essay views life as self- transcending but also, it follows, as self- negating. Like poetry, life undoes the distinction between inside and outside, between material sign and transcendent source, insofar as the vital agency consists of its own unceasing renewal through a futural movement that repeatedly proclaims itself an origin. As Shelley writes in A Defence: “Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food” (488). The vitalizing presence—here poetry, later life—procures the new by filling the “intervals and interstices whose void” bespeaks the connection between negation and renewal. Though “On Life” explicitly assimilates life to the spirit within us described as forever “at enmity with nothingness and dissolution” (476), that spirit simultaneously requires dissolution as the food on which it thrives. Thus Shelley, at the outset of the essay, though insistent that “life . . . is an astonishing thing” (474), doesn’t decry the “mist of familiarity” (474) that, as he tells us in Wordsworthian fashion, inhibits our wonder at the fact of our being. Instead, he maintains the necessity of life’s resistance to apprehension: “It is well that we are thus shielded by the familiarity of what is at once so certain and so unfathomable from an astonishment which would otherwise absorb and overawe the functions of that which is [its] object” (475). Life, in other words, poses a constant threat to life itself. Against that threat a carapace of forgetfulness, habit, and conceptual limitation protects us by deadening our minds to the astonishment that must otherwise short- circuit us. It is to preclude such an overload and preserve the economy of the organism that “in living on we lose the apprehension of life” (475). With that loss we survive “what would otherwise absorb” us and, by virtue of that absorption, deny us access to the collective reality that Lacan will call the Symbolic. In this sense “Life” impels us toward a loss of the self invested in the “solid universe of external things” (476), a universe whose insubstantiality Shelley remarks by citing Shakespeare and portraying it as “such stuff as dreams are made of [sic]” (476). Those few who hold on to the capacity for absorptive amazement in their view of life, and who thus succeed in stripping the “painted curtain from this scene of things” (476), do so by preserving the intense sensations that Shelley ascribes to children. Less prone to distinguish between themselves and the experience of things they see or feel, such persons retain an “unusually intense and vivid apprehension of life” (477). But these apprehensions are preceded, accompanied, or followed by a sense of

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being “dissolved into the surrounding universe” (477), of being separated from the self that is subject to the temporality of “transience and decay.” To that extent, life removes us from the moment in which we live, from the experience of the present as the locus of the contemporary, and makes us instead contemporary with “the future and the past.” If this, for Shelley, lifts us above mere “transience and decay” (476), affirming the unity of time in its passage and assuring the human of “being, not what he is, but what he has been, and shall be” (476), then the contemporary becomes synonymous with a form of constellation in which seemingly separate moments “constitute one mass” (477), even as those absorbed by life are “conscious of no distinction” (477) from it, merging instead with “the line in which all things are contained” (476). This constellation affirms, for Shelley, the essence of the “spirit within” us as perpetually “at enmity with nothingness and dissolution” (476). He identifies this enmity, moreover, as “the character of all life and being” (476). But the life he describes as warring with “nothingness and dissolution” occasions, for those allowed an “unusually . . . vivid apprehension” of it, a feeling “as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe” (477). Shelley names this condition “freedom” (477), specifically the freedom afforded by philosophy as it clears “the overgrowth of ages” by “destroy[ing] error, and the roots of error” (477). In its negative movement, however, philosophy opens onto “freedom” as “a vacancy” (477)—as the uprooting of errors that spring from “the misuse of words and signs” (477). Anticipating Lacan’s account of the Symbolic as the frame in which reality appears, Shelley sees “almost all familiar objects” as “signs, standing, not for themselves, but for others, in their capacity of suggesting one thought which then shall lead to a train of thoughts” (477). Wandering, which is also to say erring, in this world of signs taken for things, we mistake life for the sequence of events we live, for the temporal current of “a train of thoughts” imbued with illusory substance, until “our whole life is . . . an education of error” (477). At war though it may be with “dissolution,” life when intensely apprehended nonetheless induces a sensation as if one’s “nature were dissolved”; opposed to “annihilation” and “nothingness,” it impels us to negative gestures that offer us freedom by leaving “a vacancy.” Its vital activity, like that of the imagination as described in Shelley’s Defence (“Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food”), expresses itself as nothing less than the constant opening and repletion of this “vacancy” or “void.” As Jacques Khalip astutely

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notes, “the scene of annihilation or ‘nothingness’ that subjectivity aspires to deny or evade is in fact constitutive of subjectivity’s dialectical relation to the very aporia that underwrites it, pulling it into the projected voids of ‘the future and the past.’ ”5 But this dialectic itself, I want to suggest, may emerge as yet another way of denying or evading “annihilation,” of clinging to the promise of enlarging the “circumference of the imagination” by opening up “new intervals,” new “voids” for the subject to fill. As romanticism’s privileged epistemological corollary, dialectic, in other words, participates in the temporal economy whereby, as Paul de Man pronounces in “Shelley Disfigured,” “the interpretive labor associated with romanticism . . . coincides with the use of history as a way to new beginnings.”6 Now, a “new beginning” is not so much a redundancy as an oxymoron; the adjective “new,” which insists on recalling the anteriority of the past, situates the beginning it modifies as no beginning, strictly speaking, at all. This paradox at the core of every attempt to be contemporary with one’s own moment underlies de Man’s speculations in “Literary History and Literary Modernity.” Describing writing as at once “an act and an interpretative process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide,” de Man sees evidence of the “temptation to destroy . . . [this] temporal distance,” the recurrent distance that Shelley designates as “new intervals and interstices,” in “the obsession with tabula rasa, with new beginnings.”7 For de Man, in his engagement with Nietzsche, the indissociability of destruction from the fantasy of modernity, which is the fantasy of “new beginnings,” constitutes, as much as for Shelley and Treviranus, an essential quality of life. “Considered as a principle of life,” he observes, “modernity becomes a principle of origination and turns at once into a generative power that is itself historical” (150). This dialectical subsumption of the voiding, forgetting, or destruction of the past into the generativity of history as the medium of “new beginnings” aspires, de Man argues, and precisely “in the name of a concern for the future” (150), to annul the distance that precludes our experience of the moment in its immediacy. It aspires, that is, to affirm itself as the “principle of life” (150) by overcoming, forgetting, or erasing life’s resistance to itself, a resistance ideologically recuperated only by imagining life as a totalized system as seen at once from within and beyond it, from the center and the circumference, in the form of both a point and a line. I want to think about romanticism’s dialectical pursuit of contemporaneity by seeing its dialectic in the framework of what I’ve called reproductive futurism, the investment in heterosexuality as guarantee of social survival through a temporal fantasy of reproduction, of continuously “new beginnings,” that aims, like desire, to arrive at a unity, a contemporaneity with itself,

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deferred by the temporal medium intended to overcome such deferrals. By turning back to The Triumph of Life and de Man’s reading of it in “Shelley Disfigured,” I want to consider how turning back, a movement of repetition and regression, gets projected onto a class of persons I’ve been calling “sinthomosexuals,” those persons made to embody a radical impediment to futurism by figuring the persistence of jouissance in their drivelike enactment of the “sinthome.”8 As materializations of the negativity Forest Pyle dubs “radical aestheticism” and locates persuasively in romantic literature’s figures of kindle and ash, “sinthomosexuals” resist the sublimation demanded by futurism and dialectic, a sublimation that takes place, to appropriate Pyle’s words in a somewhat different context, “in the name of the aesthetic—as redemptive, restorative, liberating, compensatory, humanizing, healing—claims which are . . . an irreducible aspect of the legacy of romanticism.”9 Naming the way each subject takes shape as a distinctive knotting together of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, the sinthome defines the subject, in the “substance” of its being, as the self- constituting fixation that determines its particular access to jouissance—a determination that is singular, irreducible, and beyond interpretation. That’s why Roberto Harari describes the sinthome as “outside any sequence,” and goes on to observe that “it answers to no integration, no context, no history, no full or anticipated meaning.”10 The insistence of such refusals aligns it with the force of the death drive instead, and so with a repetition that gets construed as a regression. Thus, even though all subjects are merely symptoms of their sinthomes, only some, sinthomosexuals, bear the burden of identification with the drive’s undoing of meaning, progress, sociality, or futurity, and of standing, therefore, for whatever is wasteful, meaningless, conducive to death. As its nonce formation attempts to suggest, sinthomosexuality absorbs those qualities a particular historical regime ascribes to the category of the homosexual (narcissism, nonreproduction, compulsive behavior, useless jouissance), so that homosexuals appear, at least within the context of that regime, as quintessential instances of a general sinthomosexuality: as relentless opponents of a futurism whose image is the Child. But they also emerge—and this is the point at which Shelley and de Man take the stage—as nodes of resistance to the unquestioned assumption of life or viability as value, and hence to the value of dialectic or “history as a way to new beginnings.” De Man concludes “Shelley Disfigured” by declaring that even the “negative assurance” (121) at which Shelley’s poem arrives succumbs to allegorization, thus translating the negativity the text performs into a knowledge of negativity. In this way it calls us back to the perpetual “challenge of understanding” (84), the labor of interpretation, against which The Triumph

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of Life directs its negativity in the first place. Aware that his essay too must conform to the shape of interpretive allegory—where allegory, for de Man, is always, necessarily, an allegory of understanding, and thus the performance of what imposes itself, dialectically, as a “new beginning”—he writes that Shelley’s poem “warns us” that every “deed, word, thought, or text” occurs only “as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence. It also warns us why and how these events then have to be reintegrated in a historical and aesthetic system of recuperation that repeats itself regardless of the exposure of its fallacy” (122). The linguistic strain that appears in de Man’s odd usage, “warns us why and how,” may signal the pressure of a disavowed wish to bring the performative and the epistemological dimensions of Shelley’s text together, to make warning and knowing coincide, to make deed and interpretation one; but it also condenses de Man’s own warning against the lure of such understanding, against the desire for the sort of assurance, however negative that assurance may be, that might once and for all “expose” the fallacy of “historical and aesthetic . . . recuperation” (122) by shedding on it a light that wouldn’t fail or fade away. By virtue of its recurrent interruptions, The Triumph of Life, in de Man’s account, resists the monumentalization that would follow the accomplishment of such a reading, refusing the imperative of totalization and seeming rather, as de Man describes it, “to be shaped by the undoing of shapes” (107). But by allegorizing the “negative assurance” at which the poem arrives, indeed, precisely by arriving at this assurance of negativity, the poem reproduces the historicism from which de Man, throughout his essay, seeks to dissociate it and himself. Referring to Donald H. Reiman’s gloss on an earlier draft of the poem as “typical of the readings generally given of The Triumph of Life,” de Man describes that gloss as complicit with what he calls the “genetic . . . metaphor” that determines the dialectics of romanticism: “It is a clear example of the recuperation of a failing energy by means of an increased awareness: Rousseau lacked power, but because he can consciously articulate the causes of his weakness in words, the energy is preserved and recovered in the following generation. And this reconversion extends back to its originators, since the elders, at first condemned, are now reinstated in the name of their negative but exemplary knowledge. The child is father of the man, just as Wordsworth lucidly said, both humbling and saving himself in the eyes of his followers. This simple motion can take on considerable dialectical intricacy without altering its fundamental scheme. The entire debate as to whether The Triumph of Life represents or heralds a movement of growth or of degradation is part of this same genetic and historical metaphor” (96). Though trying to resist ensnarement in this braiding of genetic and historical

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metaphors, which is also to say of generational and dialectical figurations, de Man, at the end of his essay, acknowledges that negativity will always be recuperated within “a historical and aesthetic system” (122) and so within a system that recurs to the fantasy of reproductive futurism, conflating the temporality of generation with the epistemological movement of dialectic. And de Man himself is compelled to enact that dialectical recuperation even when he praises The Triumph of Life for “arrest[ing] the process of understanding” (98) through its series of unanswered questions. In declaring that “the movement of effacing and forgetting becomes prominent in the text and dispels any illusion of dialectical progress or regress” (98), isn’t he identifying the poem’s negativity, and, correlatively, his own, precisely as the “dispel[ling of an] illusion,” as the translation of undoing into “increased awareness” (96) that itself, as de Man has already made clear, defines the dialectic whose illusions are supposedly being dispelled? Hence just as the denial of piety, for de Man, will be piety’s ultimate form, so the dispelling of dialectical illusion becomes the triumph of dialectic. But if “Shelley Disfigured” shows us Shelley and de Man making negativity into a value that affirms dialectic in the process of negating it, then the figures of a negativity that refuse recuperation, that resist being put to use, can be put to use by virtue of their very refusal of sublimation, their refusal to increase awareness or generate enlightenment, becoming thereby potent figures for the negativity dialectic negates. Figures of “nothingness and dissolution,” they suffer abjection as the negation of value and the nontranscendence of illusion, whether that illusion involves belief in “new figures on [a] false and fragile glass” (l. 247) or in the dialectic that purports to allows us to expose the fallacy of such figures. And here, of course, in that place of abjection, the sinthomosexual appears. Now, all whom Shelley depicts in his poem as chained to or following the Chariot of Life embody sinthomosexuality insofar as they figure the death drive’s undoings, its nondialectical dissolutions. Those caught in the “maniac dance” (l. 110) around the car, like the “captive multitude” (l. 119) behind it, evince an erotic compulsion toward what the poet describes as “new bright destruction” (l. 154). Moved by this nonproductive eros, “like moths by light attracted and repelled” (l. 153), they expend their spirit in a waste of shame that leaves no “other trace” (l. 162) but “as of foam after the Ocean’s wrath // Is spent upon the desert shore” (ll. 163–64). Expressing the meaningless machinery of the drive responsible for producing the “action and the shape without the grace / Of life” (ll. 522–23), they show their antifutural force most fully in the following lines describing the crowd: “in the eyes where once hope shone / Desire like a lioness bereft / Of its last cub, glared ere it died” (ll. 524–26). Though likening the desire that displaces hope

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to the intensity of a mother’s longing when her last surviving offspring dies, the replacement of hope by desire seems here responsible for that loss. The ambiguity condensed in “ere it died”(where “it,” while referring to desire, gets simultaneously linked with the cub through its similar subjugation by death) makes the substitution of desire for hope both cause and effect of the last cub’s death—a death that effectively annihilates hope for the transcendence of death through futurity. Small wonder, then, that this “ribald crowd” (l. 136) whose desire strips life of grace and hope calls forth the narrator’s final, anguished question, “Then, what is Life?” (l. 544). What is life, that is, in the absence of hope? What is life if the desire that animates it yields no survival, affords no reserve, and not merely for the individual but even for the last cub, or, as Mary Shelley suggests, the Last Man? Though these questions respond to the frenzy of all those enslaved and subdued by Life, two amid the ribald crowd attain a certain distinction: Rousseau, the surrogate Virgil to the would- be Dante of the Triumph, and Plato, whose place in the poem seems small but whose importance to its logic is not. Only they are described by Shelley as having been vanquished by love. Shelley’s Rousseau declares, “I was overcome / By my own heart alone; which neither age // Nor tears, nor infamy nor now the tomb / Could temper to its object” (ll. 240–43). Deploying a similar phrasing, Rousseau, discussing Plato, declares that life “Conquered the heart by love which gold or pain / Or age or sloth or slavery could subdue not” (ll. 258–59). Rousseau, whom the poem evokes in terms of narcissistic indulgence, is subordinated to life by the untempered, intemperate passions of his own heart, while Plato is chained to the Chariot because love for another conquered his. Surely the Dantesque pattern of the poem makes us wonder how to square this fact with the poem’s rendition of what Dante returned from Paradise to tell: “how all things are transfigured, except Love” (l. 476). But Plato’s love, or Plato’s kind of love, is marked as the glaring exception here to love’s exceptionality; it turns love into one more figure on life’s “false and fragile glass” and chains Plato to the car of Life to expiate “the joy and woe” (l. 255) of his love for the boy named Aster. Rousseau’s self- love may be linked in the poem to his words that were “seeds of misery” (l. 280), “seeds” that become, as de Man points out, the equivalent of destructive “deeds,” but the destructiveness to which Plato is linked involves the wasting of seed in a sexual practice that Plato, in the Laws, condemns for “destroying the seeds of human increase.”11 Narcissism and same- sex love thus mirror each other as nonproductive and, in consequence, as modes of desire that destroy all hope for ultimate value insofar as the ultimate value is hope. Perhaps that explains the formal distinction that attaches to the lines about Plato. For these are the

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only lines in the poem where the terza rima end- word recurs identically three times, as if driven by mechanical compulsion. And the choice of that insistent end- word is, in this context, clearly significant: ‘All that is mortal of great Plato there Expiates the joy and woe his master knew not; The star that ruled his doom was far too fair— ‘And Life, where long that flower of Heaven grew not, Conquered that heart by love, which gold or pain, Or age or sloth or slavery could subdue not— (ll. 254–59)

Despite the various semantic contexts in which “not” is situated here, its repetition links Plato’s fateful desire to repetition and negation at once. In this, then, The Triumph of Life could be read as a moment in the pathologization of the soon to be constituted homosexual as the stigmatized embodiment of sinthomosexuality—a moment, that is, in the construction of homosexuality as a future pathology, one itself fatal to the future, that emerges from romanticism’s temporal dialectic, its own pathology of futurism in the pursuit of illumination, understanding, transcendence through dialectic as sublimation. The hope of that sublimation commands our allegiance to futurity as the eventual site of negativity’s negation in a totalized vision of Life. Now de Man, as it happens, appears to misread Shelley’s condemnation of Plato. Though The Triumph of Life differentiates Plato from Socrates by evoking the disaster of Plato’s turning away from the abstemiousness of his “master” toward the erotic allure of young “Aster,” de Man nonetheless proposes that “the reference to the apocryphal story of Aster makes clear that ‘heart’ here means more than mere affectivity; Plato’s heart was conquered by ‘love’ and, in this context, love is like the intellectual eros that links Socrates to his pupils” (103). To make Plato’s love platonic, which means, in this context, making it Socratic, de Man must seriously distort the poem in which Plato is chained to the Chariot of Life while Socrates escapes it. Paradoxically, however, with this very distortion, with this forgetting or erasing of the nonintellectual eros of same- sex desire, de Man reproduces the poem’s conflation of homosexuality and radical negativity—a conflation de Man evinces in a footnote when he writes, “On Shelley’s Platonism, see James A. Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, . . . which abundantly documents Shelley’s extensive involvement with the Platonic tradition, but fails to throw light on the most difficult passages of The Triumph of Life. The ambivalent treatment of Plato in The Triumph is read by Notopoulos as a denunciation of homosexuality”

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(300n8). Given the metonymic relation these sentences necessarily produce, we are invited to view Notopoulos’s suggestion that Shelley denounces homosexuality as a self- evident example of Notopolous “fail[ing] to throw light” on the The Triumph of Life, even though de Man’s alternative account misreads the text by negating any homosexual overlay at all. But doesn’t the figure de Man deploys in rejecting the homosexual implication make clear the particular logic that necessitates that rejection? If the reference to homosexuality “fails to throw light,” don’t we find ourselves back in the value system at issue in Shelley’s poem, where lights, like Aster as the “flower of heaven,” yield to the force of greater lights, enacting the dialectic of illusion’s dispelling as the illusion we can never dispel? The failure to throw light can only be redeemed by the movement, the dialectical progress, toward a form of “increased awareness.” And if that movement, like the dimming of what fails to shed light in comparison with a brighter illumination, recapitulates the progress of the Triumphal Car in Shelley’s poem itself, then we might recall that “Shelley Disfigured” ends with de Man, who set out to undo the monumentalization of romantic dialectic, urging us not to “regress from the rigor exhibited by Shelley” (123). Regression, like repetition or failure, like dimming or nondialectical dissolution, here names for de Man, despite himself, a threat to his own investment in the allegorical imperative of romantic futurism, to the Chariot of which, like the sinthomosexual, we, no less than his text, are bound by the pathology of the future. For the forward- looking imperative not to “regress” from Shelley’s “rigor” installs the future as the site where life’s triumph is inseparable from rigor mortis. Notes 1. Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII:The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques Alain- Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1986), 313. 2. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Romanticism, 2nd ed., rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 197. 3. Raoul Mourgue, “La Conception de la Biologie chez Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (1776–1837),” Journal of Comparative Neurology 56, no. 2 (December 1932): 505. 4. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “On Life,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 476. All references to Shelley are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 5. Jacques Khalip, Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 116. 6. Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 94. Page numbers for subsequent references to this essay are given parenthetically in the text.

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7. Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Romanticism, 2nd ed., rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 152. Page numbers for subsequent references to this essay are given parenthetically in the text. 8. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 9. Forest Pyle, “Kindling and Ash: Radical Aestheticism in Keats and Shelley,” Studies in Romanticism 42 (Winter 2003): 432. 10. Roberto Harari, How Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan, trans. Luke Thurston (New York: Other Press, 2002), 125–26. 11. Plato, Laws, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Dialogues of Plato: Great Books of the Western World, vol. 7, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), § 838.

Painting Theory Mark Tansey’s Derrida Queries de Man Marc Redfield

If it recedes one day, leaving behind its works and signs on the shores of our civilization, the structuralist invasion might become a question for the historian of ideas, or perhaps even an object. But the historian would be deceived if he came to this pass: by the very act of considering the structuralist invasion as an object he would forget its meaning and forget that what is at stake, first of all, is an adventure of vision, a conversion of the way of putting questions to any object posed before us, to historical objects—his own—in particular. And, unexpectedly among these, the literary object. —Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification”1

The spectral debut of “literary theory” in elite sectors of the public sphere in the United States and Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s is a historical and cultural phenomenon that still awaits nonsuperficial historical and cultural analysis.2 Perhaps it will always be awaiting it—Jacques Derrida suggests as much in the well- known opening paragraph, reproduced in the epigraph to this chapter, of “Force and Signification” (1963). Derrida’s subsequent paragraph speaks with even sharper prescience to the polemics of subsequent decades: By way of analogy: the fact that universal thought, in all its domains, by all its path- ways and despite all its differences, should be receiving a formidable impulse from an anxiety about language—which can only be an anxiety of language, within language itself—is a strangely concerted development: and it is the nature of a development not to be able to display itself in its entirety as a spectacle for the historian, if, by chance, he were to attempt to recognize in it the sign of an epoch, the fashion of a season, or the symptom of a crisis. Whatever the poverty of our knowledge in this respect, it is certain that the question of the sign is itself more or less, or in any event something other, than the sign of the times. To dream of reducing it to the sign of the times is to dream of violence.3

Imagining a historian from the future, Derrida forwards us from the past an analysis of a displaced repetition of “the structuralist invasion” that was to

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manifest itself two decades later, in another country, as a minor but remarkably visible media event. An “anxiety” about and of “language,” triggered by a “development” that never yields entirely to “spectacle,” that cannot become spectacle except spectrally—this was indeed the genetic thumbprint of the “theory” scandal as it unfolded during the 1970s: a scandal that was to be denounced over ensuing decades, and through to the present day—for we have no secure distance from this history—as “the fashion of a season,” “the symptom of a crisis,” “the sign of the times.” To call theory’s spectacle spectral is to stress, among other things, the central role of phantasmatic personification in its staging. Theory became “theory,” the media event, by way of a theatrical production process in which the epitome of theory became “deconstruction” and the embodiment of theory- as- deconstruction became the dyad Paul- de- Man- and- JacquesDerrida.4 The personification relays a “dream of violence,” certainly. It is fundamentally indifferent to complexities of content and reception; its rationale is fiercely apotropaic. It is not simply random, however. It responds to a challenge inscribed in texts signed by these authors, to ways in which that challenge interacted with the social and institutional text that received it as a challenge. Any adequate history of theory (as “theory”) will need to account for the phantasmatic, as well as for the conventionally intellectual role played by the texts, teachings, and personae of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. And since de Man and Derrida, each in his own way, affirm that “the question of the sign is itself more or less, or in any event something other, than the sign of the times,” the intellectual and phantasmatic dimensions of their legacy cannot be kept cleanly apart in any case. This chapter does not attempt a historical narrative.5 I focus instead here on the much more manageable job of reading closely a well- known painting that forms part of the broader reception of—and commentary on the reception of—Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida as personifications of theory. In a roughly two- year span around 1990, Mark Tansey painted a sequence of what one could call “theory” paintings—high- conceptual, photorealistic canvases that incorporate into their “landscape” silkscreened text either from pages 146–47 of de Man’s Blindness and Insight or from pages 112–13 of Gayatri Spivak’s translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology. One of these paintings, Under Erasure, featuring a waterfall partly “erasing” the Of Grammatology pages, became widely familiar as the cover art for the first edition (2001) of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (for its second, 2009 edition, the publisher substituted a fiery abstract by Cy Twombly: good cover art, no question, but one suspects that part of the motive for getting rid of the Tansey painting was to ward off the symptomatic link between theory

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and deconstruction).6 The painting Derrida Queries de Man (1990), which I take as my text here, is possibly the best known of the sequence. Refiguring Sidney Paget’s famous illustration in the Strand Magazine for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Final Problem” (1893), Tansey’s painting sets its totemic theory- figures in a landscape reminiscent of monumental Romantic sublime painting, save that its cliffs and chasm feature only partly legible silkscreen reproductions of pages of de Man’s text. A close look at this painting uncovers a knowing reflection on and ironic staging of the phantasmatic phenomenon of “theory in America.” It’s Mr Sherlock Holmes the theorist. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Sign of Four”

Let us begin with a first look, which of course will never be innocent. The two struggling or dancing figures are not so dwarfed by the chasm as to prevent an informed viewer from experiencing a shock of recognition (Figure 1). Hyperrealistically rendered, Paul de Man faces away from us, toward Jacques Derrida and the abyss. He appears to be leading: his weight is forward, and his right hand, now clasping Derrida’s left hand, may soon be insinuating itself around his partner’s waist. Derrida’s body slants elegantly but precariously into the dance and toward the void; he seems to be standing on one foot. He will probably fall first—unless his yielding is a ruse. “He rushed at me and threw his long arms around me,” Sherlock Holmes tells Watson in “The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903): We tottered together upon the brink of the fall. I have some knowledge, however, of baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me. I slipped through his grip, and he with a horrible scream kicked madly for a few seconds and clawed the air with his hands. But for all his efforts he could not get his balance, and over he went.7

The dance dissolved after all; the coupling was a feint, and only Holmes’s double, the evil Professor Moriarty, fell. But Tansey’s painting weaves a complex web of allusions. Watson had told a different tale ten years previously, when Arthur Conan Doyle was killing off Holmes in “The Final Problem,” at the end of which Watson sees “two lines of footmarks” leading to the edge of the falls, and imagines detective and villain “reeling over, locked in each other’s arms” (555). Sidney Paget’s illustration for that story picks up on that phrase: he has Holmes grasping Moriarty rather than “slipp[ing] through his grip,” and ready to be the first one to go over the edge (Figure 2). Tansey quotes extensively from Paget, but changes the arrangement of the bodies

Figure 1. Derrida Queries de Man (1990) by Mark Tansey. Oil on canvas, 8¼ × 55 in. (212.7 × 139.7 cm). Collection of Mike and Penny Winton. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. © Mark Tansey.

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Figure 2. Sydney Paget’s 1893 illustration of Holmes grasping Moriarty in “The Final Problem.”

so that a violent struggle becomes an ambiguous dance, in which the near figure, de Man, acquires a shadowy version of Holmes’s devastating grip, while the far figure, Derrida, slips off- balance, like Moriarty. Will there be a winner, or will both lose? Or is such a question itself a slip- up? Tempering the painting’s neorealism is its monochromatic palette: an icy cyan. Monochrome suggests conceptual rather than representational space: a space able to support, as Tansey comments, “temporal disparities,” and “impossible encounters and reconciliations.”8 The space- time of Derrida and de

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Man’s impossible encounter is that of a difficult, ambivalently agonistic act of reading. The words “Blindness and Insight” leap out at us along the left edge of the chasm, extending the line of the dancer- wrestlers’ bodies down the cliff. These words compose a hyperrecognizable phrase and title—the proper name of one of the theory canon’s most famous books, a book so famous that its title has taken on a life of its own as a shibboleth of “theory.” This title is also an image. Tansey has reproduced here the running head at the top of even- numbered pages of Blindness and Insight. To theoretically oriented reader- viewers who have pored over their copies of this book over the years, these characters will be almost as recognizable by their typeface as by the words they compose or the meanings they trigger—almost as recognizable as the photorealistically rendered authorial figures above them. We “see” such signs the way we see faces: with such seeming immediacy that we forget, in the little pleasurable shock of the revelatory moment, that our seeing is always also an act of reading, a making sense of iterable marks. The ironies multiply: we’re taking pleasure here in the phenomenal dimension of mechanically reproduced signs that, in their original context, would have faded into the background to the point of being hard to see at all. When we pick up and reread Blindness and Insight, we once again start becoming blind to these iconic yet emptily and mechanically produced words—for who attends to a running head?9 The edge of Tansey’s cliff is a cut that blurs the difference between seeing and reading, perception and blindness, image and sign, singularity and iterability. Elsewhere the texture of the cliffs is similarly textual, consisting of blurred lines of print silkscreened onto the canvas. Despite the smears, the Blindness and Insight typeface remains naggingly recognizable. Here and there an obsessive viewer can pick out words from page 146 of de Man’s text, which, as noted, Tansey uses as background in several paintings from this period.10 In the painting’s upper left- hand quadrant, for instance, one can trace a vertical swath of legible words: “of th”/“past”/“[Man] wonders”/“to forget”: these are fragments of the left margin of the middle of page 146, where de Man is introducing a block quotation with a paraphrase of Nietzsche (“The restlessness of human society, in contrast to the placid state of nature of the animal herd, is diagnosed as man’s inability to forget the past”), and then block quoting from Nietzsche’s On the Use and Abuse of History (“[Man] wonders about himself, about his inability to forget”).11 On the right- hand cliff another fragment, “We saw,” peeps out: these are the opening words of another of de Man’s block quotations from Nietzsche on page 146 (“We saw that the animal”). The path leading up to the struggling figures seems to feature text from a different source (the typeface resembles that of Blindness and Insight, but the words legible on the path do not seem to come from any particular

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page in the book).12 Otherwise these abyssal cliffs seem to be stamped throughout with the inky traces of this particular page of this particular text. Only in one place does a clearly different typeface announce itself—in the lower right corner, where the painting’s own title (or, undecidably, its citation of its own title), “Derrida Queries de Man,” overrides the blurry line of what is presumably a silkscreened print line from Blindness and Insight.13 We must beware the temptation to reduce this texture- text to a message— the temptation, that is, of imagining that if we consult Blindness and Insight, or, more specifically, “Literary History and Literary Modernity” (the chapter within which page 146 appears), we will access the hidden meaning of this painting. The painting has posted danger signals to slow us down and remind us that we will not be dealing with a key or code, or a stable allegorical structure in which a legend explains an image. As noted above, a different page (possibly from a different text) has left its traces on the text- path to the struggling or dancing figures. And there are other warning signs. Most of the print lines are too blurred to be readable; my presumption above that all of the ink smears on the cliffs derive from Blindness and Insight could be wrong. On a representational or dramatic level, the reader- surrogate in the composition, “Derrida,” is risking his life and not necessarily getting anywhere. On a symbolic level, the text to be read—qui n’en est pas un, whatever its nominal identity—is doubled, split across the two cliff faces, reiterating in sublime fashion the vexed doubleness of the Derrida–de Man reader- text pairing. Yet just because a text is unreadable doesn’t mean that we can stop trying to read it—or that we can simply interpret it arbitrarily. Any effective interpretation of Tansey’s painting must take account of the fact that de Man’s text signs the landscape (or at least much of the landscape); that “de Man,” according to the embedded title, names the text to be queried; and that page 146 of Blindness and Insight, even though it fails to provide the path toward these dancer- fighters, has been made our entry point into this daunting hermeneutic thicket. So we may take a short, cautious excursus through a few paragraphs of “Literary History and Literary Modernity.” As the fragmentary bits of it quoted above may have recalled, page 146 forms part of the first movement of the essay, where de Man is reading Nietzsche’s meditations on “life” as a “dynamic concept of modernity . . . opposed to history”: “‘Life’ is conceived not just in biological but in temporal terms as the ability to forget whatever precedes a present situation” (BI, 146). The ability to forget—to forget one’s historical indebtedness and embeddedness—constitutes the ability to act historically.14 Forgetting thus names “the radical impulse that stands behind any genuine modernity” (147). Yet, de Man goes on to argue, this forgetting, however necessary and constitutive,

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is also impossible. Nietzsche’s text uncovers a deeper historicity that “implies the necessary experience of any present as a passing experience that makes the past irrevocable and unforgettable, because it is inseparable from any present or future” (148–49, de Man’s italics). This unforgettable, authentic historicity is generated out of the rupturing act of modernity, which makes things happen; but modernity’s blind impulse in no way constitutes an instance of self- presence, and instead reiterates the difference it disavows. Mark Tansey’s painting echoes and illustrates this paradox brilliantly. Archive fever fuels its inventiveness. Gesture and meaning, act and interpretation, singularity and iterability, forgetting and remembering splice into each other. De Man’s text signs that theme, as do so many other texts by other authors, all in their own singular fashion (in keeping with the drama before us, I have spliced some Derridean terminology into the last few sentences). And Tansey recollects, reproduces, and effaces de Man’s text as part of a painterly act that has a certain proximity to the powerful kind of writing that de Man calls literary (“both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide” [BI, 152]). Why does a text by de Man—and by extension a dramatization of “de Man” as oeuvre, historical figure, phantasm, and question—at least appear to orient this painting? My brief summary of portions of “Literary History and Literary Modernity” reminds us that Tansey could have reproduced other texts—texts by Derrida, most obviously—to capture broadly similar themes (e.g., the tension between knowing and doing, reading and seeing, structure and event, cognition and performance, to offer only a few of many pairings, each with its particular lines of force, that have played a role in the elaboration of deconstructive thought). For reasons having to do both with Tansey’s general aesthetic project and with this specific painting, it is understandable that he might find particularly congenial de Man’s privileged terms in “Literary History and Literary Modernity” (history, modernity; memory, forgetting), and I shall say a little more about that later. But it is important never to let go entirely of the point we stressed at the outset: smeared and broken and split as it is, no source text, not even the one we can read fragments of, can provide stable thematic content for this painting. To read it, we are going to have to both remember and forget “Literary History and Literary Modernity.” Yet that paradox causes us to step back and ask the blanker, more abstract question: Why a text by de Man at all? And why is Derrida the one doing the querying? Of course, we have only the authority of the painting’s title to go on here, and the painting makes its own title queryable. There is nothing in the disposition of these two struggling/dancing figures to establish that

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only one of them—or, for that matter, that either of them—is querying the other. Furthermore, the title, as part of the text- striated cliff face, forms part of the painterly text to be read. It would behoove us not to trust that title blindly.Yet the fact that it forms part of the painting also means that we are not relieved of our question. The choice of title rhymes with the choice of a de Man text for the background. We may have every reason to feel we’re teetering on the edge of an abyss, but we nonetheless have to persist with our query: Why is Derrida the querying reader; why is de Man the enveloping text? (Didn’t de Man merely “domesticate” Derrida, according to a tenacious discourse- of- theory leitmotiv of the 1970s and 1980s? Wasn’t it de Man who learned from Derrida by querying and quarrying him, rather than the other way around?)15 On this point, I submit, Tansey’s painting knows perfectly well what it is doing. Derrida queries de Man (at least according to that suspiciously overassertive title) on the edge of a de Manian abyss not just because by 1990 de Man had been dead for seven years, the “de Man affair” had occurred, and Derrida had published several of the intense, mournful struggles with de Man’s texts that made up a salient part of his huge oeuvre during the last two decades of his life. Those empirical and biographical facts are certainly part of the story, but I think there is another, more overarching reason why Derrida is querying de Man so precariously in this fantastic landscape. He does so because Tansey’s painting is addressing itself to “theory” as “deconstruction,” “in America.” In the discourse of theory- in- America- in- 1990, de Man is the spectral embodiment of theory’s charms and discontents. He is the theorist of the warped necessity and radical instability of personification—of, that is, the minimal sort of personification that he called prosopopoeia:, the catachretic positional force through which signs are taken as signs; through which the possibility of signification is imposed so as to be presupposed. De Man as figure provides the face and the name of the possibility that faces and names might turn illegible. I return shortly to this allegory of figure and landscape in Tansey’s painting. But first let me loop back to consider the Sherlock Holmes intertext, which, by way of Paget’s illustration, has provided the painting with its major figural reference points. Sherlock Holmes, as Tansey’s painting wittily reminds us, plays a small, tangential, but interesting role in the prehistory of “theory”’ in the AngloAmerican cultural archive. Officially, to be sure, Holmes, though the keenest and closest of readers, is the opposite of the “theorist.”16 He is the hero of hermeneutic closure: his mission is to discern a stable truth behind false appearances, and he inhabits a genre, the detective story, that orders the world into a tidy plot and thereby underwrites its protagonist’s success.

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Close reading, performed by the master interpreter within this sheltered narrative space, is supposed to lead to revelation, not ambiguity or blockage. Holmes’s theorizing aspires to the counterintuitive yet rational movement of scientific thought (Holmes speaks of “the scientific use of the imagination” [804, Hound]), and thus aspires to greater referential power than any naïve empiricism could command. The flat- footed officials of Scotland Yard, whose reliance on unimaginative common sense causes them to “twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts” (179, “A Scandal in Bohemia”), ritually and comically reconfirm the referential force of Holmes’s scientific theorizing. Still, the fact that his various dramatic foils repeatedly call Holmes a theorist, in the peculiarly negative sense of the word that became available in the wake of the political polemics of the 1790s (“It’s Mr. Sherlock Holmes the theorist” [120, “The Sign of Four”]), suggests lingering complications.17 We do not need to take up here in any direct way the question of the logical structure of Holmesian “observation” and “deduction,” with its large admixture of intuition, imagination, and guesswork.18 It suffices to note that the Holmes stories, which never fail to back up their hero’s wildest interpretations, presuppose a universe “ruled by a sort of complicity between the author [and] his characters,” as Umberto Eco has put it.19 A theatrical and necromantic aura therefore clings to Holmes, and the stories register this (“theoretical”) excess—this half- hidden, willful fictionality—in various ways, perhaps most tellingly by granting Holmes the characteristics of a fin de siècle aesthete and decadent. The purple dressing gown, the Stradivarius, the cocaine addiction, the alternately bachelor- solitary or same- sex ménage, the love of theatrics and disguise, the not infrequent references to Continental literature—this Wildean world has at its dramatic center Holmes’s willingness to link his “scientific use of the imagination” to high aestheticism.20 He compares his art to Flaubert’s in the closing words of the short story “The Red Headed League” (“‘L’homme c’est rien—l’oeuvre c’est tout,’ as Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand” [212]); Watson names the first adventure “a study in scarlet” because Holmes tells him to (“Why shouldn’t we use a little art jargon” [28]). According to the raciobiological logic that often flickers into view in these texts, Holmes has come by his aestheticist and all too French leanings honestly: he tells Watson that he had “a grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms” (502, “The Greek Interpreter”). We reencounter here, from a rather unexpected angle, the overlap between theoretical excess and “Frenchness” that has played such a long- standing role in Anglo- American chauvinism.

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And though a Holmesian detective story is officially all about enlightenment, law enforcement, and effective policing (of causality and meaning, but also, quite concretely, of social and racial hierarchies, and of the borders of empire and nation), the genre, like its main character, has a deviant side.21 In this urban gothic, fog- and tobacco smoke–blurred world, signs and identities become at once hyperlegible and mobile.22 The eagle- eyed protagonist splits and doubles: into a stolid foil (Watson), a super- brilliant double (Holmes’s older brother, Mycroft), and an evil double (Professor Moriarty).23 The Holmes- Watson- Moriarty sequence mirrors a pattern laid down by Edgar Allan Poe in the Dupin stories, and the Poe stories themselves, as is well known, form an echo chamber of allusions and repetitions.24 This vigorous splitting and redoubling—a fundamental gothic motif, as Eve Sedgwick and others have shown—shades into the redoubling, replication, and identification effects of mass media.25 Holmes’s addiction to cocaine or even to tobacco pales in comparison to his addiction to news. Holmes reads newspapers obsessively, learns about cases from them, occasionally cracks cases by putting manipulative ads in them (“The Press, Watson, is a most valuable institution, if you only know how to use it” [688, “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons”]), and advances his reputation by having his exploits mentioned in them.26 The famous Baker Street fog and smoke has newsprint in the spectrum of its particulates—sometimes almost literally, as when Watson, incapacitated by his war wound on a rainy day, surrounds himself “with a cloud of newspapers, until at last, saturated with the news of the day, I tossed them all aside and lay listless” (327, “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor”). Watson’s chronicling of Holmes’s adventures, meanwhile, makes Holmes an ever more public figure, brings him more clients, and generates all sorts of unpredictable mediatic side effects—not least the creation of fan organizations dedicated to pretending that Holmes and Watson are, or were, real.27 My point here is not to provide a full- scale reading, of course, either of the Holmes stories or of Sherlock Holmes as a cultural phenomenon, though it is certainly relevant for our purposes that Holmes rivals in recognizability, if not in overt monstrosity, those other master avatars of mass culture and mechanical reproducibility, Frankenstein and Dracula. Like them, he is a thoroughly original and deeply derivative invention. My only purpose here is to suggest reasons why an artist keen- eyed enough to discern the shape of the discourse of theory in 1990 might have turned his thoughts to Sherlock Holmes. Holmes, with his heart of steel (“so many regard him as a machine rather than a man” [475, “The Crooked Man”]) has many of the qualities that the discourse of theory requires of its personifications. Holmes is the theorist as hyperrational, hyperaesthetic superreader, quivering on the edge

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of “Frenchness,” and bound up with the potentially uncanny workings of mass media. An artist like Tansey, interested in the phantasmatic reduction of theory to its two- headed avatar de Man/Derrida, and alert to the ways in which the discourse of theory becomes a “querying of de Man” at its moments of greatest intensity, can be counted on to read the archive with similar care. The specific visual intertext, of course, is Sidney Paget’s famous frontispiece illustrating Holmes’s last struggle in “The Final Problem,” and Tansey’s choice of this image forms part of his deconstruction of Holmesian certitude. This Paget drawing illustrates the conflict that Watson never sees. At the end of “The Final Problem,” Watson and some “experts” who, in Holmesian fashion, have studied the signs, can only imagine this scene based on a textual landscape of footprints and marks and literal text (Holmes has left Watson a letter on a nearby boulder).28 Paget, offering a visual equivalent of the Holmesian “scientific use of the imagination,” grants visibility to what was not seen—to an event that has had to be reconstructed through signs. Tansey redraws and resituates Paget’s image so as to strip away the illusion of referential reliability. Tansey’s scene can only be “seen”—hallucinated, imagined, read off from canvas, paint, and ink.29 Derrida is querying a dead de Man, at the edge of a text- cliff reached by a text- path that has been pulled out of scalable perspective as it drops toward us in the painting’s lower left corner. (Paget’s path also has a dizzying drop; Tansey accentuates it.) Uncertain to what extent we are seeing or reading, we recognize figures that are just that—figures, in and of a landscape that simultaneously encourages and destroys representational conventions. Within the representational convention, Derrida dances with and queries his dead other: querying him, he listens for a voice from beyond the grave—a little like Watson at the Reichenbach Falls, “listening to the half- human shout which came booming up with the spray out of the abyss” (552).30 We might ourselves begin to hear echoing in this scene a famous, darkly sublime de Manian comment about reading as querying: “to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat—that is to say, the endless prosopopeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn. No degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words.”31 The dead voice of de Man continues its broadcast, thanks to its technical extension in print media, and the message it sends—which is that “voice,” always already mediatized, is originary only as trope—could be called the very motto of “theory.” There is a sublime thrill to that message, and Tansey, building on Paget’s illustration, appropriately intensifies Paget’s romantic- alpine imagery to the

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point of precipitating it into the idiom of sublime landscape painting.32 These dancers are so framed by falling, by the great sweep of the rift that scores six and a half feet of canvas, that they and their embrace seem just one more thing that the indifferent abyss will devour. Yet there they are nonetheless: fixed figures with whom we can identify; to whom we can grant faces, voices, vices; around whom minimal plot elements can form.33 This sublime economy of threat and consolation is further complicated by the painting’s disruption of its representational codes, as well as by its nagging absurdity. Its monochrome field, its textual smears, and its comically fantastic scenario combine to urge us to consider how difficult it can be to decide whether we’re being taught a lesson or told a joke, and whether we’re seeing a mark, or reading a sign, or imagining a world. In Conan Doyle’s story, Holmes and Moriarty do not “query” each other. They rush into battle without a word, pushing the vexed question of reading back as far as it will go, straight into the mirrored face of the other (“I read an inexorable purpose in his grey eyes,” [562]). Tansey delivers us from that clenched Gothic agon, but only to enmesh us in a dance- struggle that, however often we remind ourselves of its irreality, or of its ambiguity (which is it: dance or struggle?), keeps us teetering around a circle of dancing, struggling, questioning. The question, “What does the painting mean?” spirals into the absurd yet unavoidable question, “What is Derrida asking de Man?” This question of the question receives two exemplary, if inevitably unsatisfactory, answers in the commentaries on this painting in the two books from the early 1990s that collect and survey Tansey’s art. Rather ingeniously, Arthur C. Danto proposes that Tansey’s two figures are “locked in eternal combat over the meaning de Man gave to the meaning that Derrida gave to Rousseau.”34 This is intelligent imagining: Danto has his eye on the intellectual, biographical, and textual history that joins and separates the oeuvres of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. The only drawback of this suggestion—apart, of course, from the mad gratuitousness that accompanies it or any other “answer” in this context—is that it does not really address itself to the question of the question as delivered to us by the statement of the title (why is only Derrida doing the querying, then?). Judi Freeman accounts for Derrida’s role, though her prose takes an odd, symptomatic turn as she points us toward the most obvious, reductive, and inevitable interpretation of all. “The scene,” she tells us, . . . illustrate[s] the debate raging over the posthumous revelation in 1987 that de Man had ties to fascists in his native Belgium during World War II. . . . So why is Derrida now wrestling de Man? Because his defense, though impassioned,

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was often problematic, involving a selective marshalling of events and documents in support of de Man’s integrity. No doubt he was “querying” the de Man he thought he knew as well as the one he did not know at all.35

“No doubt” is indeed the mantra here: the critic’s apparent absence of doubt generates first a cascade of strenuously simplistic assertions and then, in a more surprising development, carries her final sentence off into the historical past tense. A little like Sherlock Holmes fans getting caught up in their reimaginings of Baker Street, Freeman drifts briefly into the rhetorical equivalent of a referential fantasy—as though Derrida had once really stood there querying de Man in that Tansey painting. The more violently one demands answers in such contexts, the more vigorously one has to invest in personifications capable of providing them. But Freeman is right to at least this extent: the “de Man affair” forms part of the landscape of theory that is this painting’s subject. Freeman’s answer is scripted in advance, wired into the painting’s aesthetic program—not as an answer, of course, but as part of the question of the question. Tansey’s foregrounding of a page of Blindness and Insight that cites Nietzsche on memory and forgetting may be adduced as, among other things, a discreet tracking device, oriented toward the media storm that marks the culminating point of the phantasmatics of theory in America. The painting leaves us with the question of the question—of the uncertain rhetorical mode of questioning itself. Some of Derrida’s most sustained writing in this difficult area occurs in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1987), a text that appeared in its original French edition just before the “Heidegger” and “de Man” affairs erupted in Europe and the United States.36 Working his way toward a discussion of promising in relation to questioning, Derrida invokes de Man again; in the four years between de Man’s death in 1983 and the publication of this text Derrida has invoked, read, questioned de Man repeatedly. Derrida turns to de Man just as the running noose of his argument is tightening. He is about to affirm that the promise ontologically precedes the question, and at this point he recalls de Man’s mock- Heideggerian pun in Allegories of Reading, “Die Sprache verspricht (sich)” (“language promises,” but, with the addition of the reflexive pronoun, “language misspeaks”). Here is de Man’s complete sentence: “Die Sprache verspricht (sich): to the extent that it is necessarily misleading, language just as necessarily conveys the promise of its own truth.”37 Derrida elaborates: “language or speech promises, promises itself, but also goes back on its word, becomes undone or unhinged, derails or becomes delirious, deteriorates. . . . Language always, before any question, and in the very question, comes down

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to [revient à] the promise.”38 Does Derrida’s deployment of the de Man citation promise a dance or a struggle? As one might expect at this point, a question about Derrida on de Man on the question of the question is not going to generate a satisfying answer. But let us attempt a reading that respects the friendship between these two readers, and then leave them there, at least for now, teetering on the cliff, to work things out. The promise that lies (in all senses) before any question, Derrida tells us, performs what he goes on to call “a yes before all opposition of yes and no” (94): a dissymetrical affirmation that cannot be brought into the cognitive order of yes/no, inside/outside, figurative/literal. Prior to the formation of any question, language is already there: promising itself, going back on itself, ex- posing itself. This thesis, I suggest—for Derrida, who has his own preferred idiom, certainly does not put it this way—overlaps with de Man’s radicalization of the problem of figurative language. Derrida could have quoted from earlier in Allegories of Reading if he had been inclined to question de Man on the question more frontally, hands firmly around his friend’s waist (searching, perhaps, for a “baritsu” hold).39 He would have turned in that case to the famous opening essay “Semiology and Rhetoric,” where de Man submits the so- called rhetorical question to rhetorical intensification, to the point that the question becomes unsure of its own identity, without ceasing to have to question (itself ). Once again the punch line is a pun—the most awful and baroque pun in de Man’s oeuvre, and one that gathers Derrida into its serious joke: As long as we are talking about bowling shoes, the consequences are relatively trivial; Archie Bunker . . . muddles along in a world where literal and figurative meanings get in each other’s way, though not without discomforts. But suppose that it is a de- bunker rather than a “Bunker,” and a de- bunker of the arche (or origin), an archie Debunker such as Nietzsche or Jacques Derrida for instance, who asks the question “What is the Difference”—and we cannot even tell from his grammar whether he “really” wants to know “what” difference is or is just telling us that we shouldn’t even try to find out. Confronted with the difference between grammar and rhetoric, grammar allows us to ask the question, but the sentence by means of which we ask it may deny the very possibility of asking. For what is the use of asking, I ask, when we cannot even authoritatively decide whether a question asks or doesn’t ask? (AR, 9–10)

It can be tempting to grant idealizing humanist or negative- theological content to Derrida’s affirmation of affirmation, and de Man’s scene of skewed repetition (“what is the use of asking, I ask”) can serve as a useful counterirritant. The Derridean “yes” that precedes the question is an exposure

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to futurity: futurity as the incalculable “à venir,” as Derrida frequently puts it. De Man’s tone is at once darker and more manic, and the language of temporality has been replaced by a rhetorical idiom, but his seriocomic staging of a compulsive inability to stop questioning enacts an instability that ontologically “precedes” the question. De Man calls that instability “reading.” Reading, the inability (and necessity) to decide between literal and figural meaning, is what language “performs”: such is its “yes.” De Man famously plots self- disarticulating reading itineraries devoted to the renunciation of all satisfactions, including those of renunciation. When de Man offers bivouac points, they sound like bleak, exposed places (“No degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words”). Yet in Derridean terms—perhaps, perhaps at least at certain points in the intimate and ambiguous Derrida–de Man encounter—that de Manian rhetorical mood may be called affirmative. Such, I think, is the impulse of this keen- reading painting of Mark Tansey’s, as it affirms the stubborn persistence of its own unguaranteeable title, Derrida Queries de Man. The sublime energies channeled by these twinned, split figures consume any vantage point from which a simply answerable question could be asked. Their ambiguous dance- struggle scores a counterbeat for the history that, as viewers, we are being called on to write even as we view and read and enter into this painting. It is the history of “theory in America”: impossible, sublime, romantic as only a dance over an abyss can be, yet never quite resolvable into the story that it promises, or into the question that at first it seems to ask. Notes This piece is drawn from the final chapter of my Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 1. Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 1. 2. Superficial diagnoses are legion, of course; they make up the resistance to theory that forms part of the event and history of “theory” in the sense being discussed here. A recent contribution to this voluminous literature is François Cussot, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co.Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Cussot’s title itself advertises its author’s rather distant acquaintance with the cultural and institutional complexities of the “intellectual life of the United States,” which is perhaps to be expected, but the book arguably simplifies the French academic- institutional context nearly as egregiously. I am in sympathy with Greg Lambert’s negative review of this book in “French Theory: The Movie,” symploké 18, nos. 1–2 (2010): 293–303, but would object that Lambert (who begins his review, as I do my essay here, by quoting from Derrida’s “Force and Signification”)

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grants too much credence to Cussot’s minimization of, for instance (but it is the exemplary instance), Derrida’s role in the French academy. The drive to simplify and polemicize has historically been very strong in such contexts; that is part of what would need to be addressed by any genuine history of (French) theory. 3. Derrida, “Force and Signification,” 1–2. 4. I offer an extensive account of Derrida and de Man—particularly de Man—as personifications of theory in Theory at Yale. See also my The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1–42, 95–124, and my introduction to the collection Legacies of Paul de Man, ed. Marc Redfield (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 1–14. 5. It is possible, I believe, to reflect meaningfully—that is, with only a relatively modest degree of interpretive violence—on aspects of the social and intellectual context that allowed “theory” to become an “event” of sorts in an American context. I attempt to do so in the longer project from which the present pages are drawn. One important contextual framework, as I see it, is the structure of the American university and the century- long tradition in American high journalism of representing the humanities as in crisis: for discussion, see chapter 1 of Theory at Yale. John Guillory’s chapter on de Man in Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) remains, in my opinion, two decades later, the one serious attempt at a sociological analysis of (de Manian) theory; in the end I disagree with crucial aspects of this analysis, but I admire it: see chapter 5 of Theory at Yale. 6. I discuss Tansey’s choice of the de Man pages, though not the Derrida pages, later in this chapter. Most of the paintings from this period use the de Man (see note 10 below for a list). Under Erasure and John the Baptist Discarding His Clothes in the Wilderness (after Domenico Veneziano), both from 1990, are the only two paintings in the “theory” sequence that use Derrida as their silkscreened background. Although in these two paintings Tansey does not include visible page numbers, in Under Erasure he gives prominence to the running head “The Violence of the Letter” and offers enough legible fragments of text that one can reconstruct the background as—or at least as dominated by—the page spread 112–13 of Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). The bottom of page 112 of this text is also identifiable as the text striating the bottom triangle of “foreground” in John the Baptist. Readings of these paintings, therefore, would want (carefully) to take their initial cue from this section of Of Grammatology, in which Derrida offers his famous critique of Claude Lévi- Strauss’s pages on “A Writing Lesson” in Tristes Tropiques. 7. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Empty House,” in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1953), 563. Further citations of the Holmes stories and novels refer to this edition. Since the two volumes are continuously paginated, only page numbers will be given in parenthetical references in what follows, though I also give the name of the story for ease of reference. 8. Mark Tansey, in Arthur C. Danto, Mark Tansey:Visions and Revisions, ed. Christopher Sweet, notes and comments by Mark Tansey (New York: Abrams, 1992), 128. 9. We can be reasonably sure that Tansey has captured the running head of page 146 here, since below it one can make out words (“and jointly fall”) from the first print line of that page. See Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary

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Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 146. (Pagination is the same in the original and the revised editions of Blindness and Insight.) 10. In addition to Derrida Queries de Man, the paintings Close Reading, Bridge over the Cartesian Gap, Incursion, a, and Reader, all from 1990, use either page 146 or 147 or the two- page spread 146–47 from Blindness and Insight as “texture” in this way. So does the painting Archive, from 1991. (The painting Constructing the Grand Canyon, which I discuss in a longer version of the present essay, uses confetti strips of text, with no particular text being easily identifiable.) Although some of these paintings (including Derrida Queries de Man) may include lines of print from other pages of Blindness and Insight or from pages of other texts altogether (the degree of blur makes it impossible to be sure), one can at least say that the 146–47 page spread from “Literary History and Literary Modernity” dominates and marks—in a sense signs—these text- paintings. (Only the painting a has clearly incorporated other texts: the female figure who is drawing the graffiti figure stands on ground striated with text printed in a font different from that of Blindness and Insight. The wall, however, on which she draws is once again page 147 from “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” which therefore remains the dominant textual marker.) 11. De Man offers his own translation of Nietzsche’s texts in Blindness and Insight; the edition that de Man references is Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” in Unzeitgemäßige Betrachtung II, in Werke I, ed. Karl Schlecta (Munich, 1954). 12. I believe I am able to read the following fragments on the path: “plane”—or possibly “plan”—“gr,” “that,” “in this context.” I have searched the text of Blindness and Insight (thanks to Abigail De Kosnik for helping me with an electronic search) and have found the phrase “in this context” on only two pages of the book, and neither works as a source (in one case the initial letter is capitalized, in the other the phrase rides over a line break). The typeface does resemble that of Blindness and Insight, though: a version of Times typeface with distinctively long ascenders and descenders. (I thank Todd Sample of Oxford University Press for researching the typeface of Blindness and Insight for me. In case anyone besides me is interested, the display type is Palatino and the text type is Times.) The path toward these figures remains a mystery. 13. My word “typeface” is potentially misleading here, to the extent that it suggests a fully automated printing process. It looks to me as though Tansey has lettered the title of the painting with a Leroy lettering machine or some equivalent. 14. De Man’s existential vocabulary here, which opposes biology to ontology, prevents him from dwelling on one of Nietzsche’s salient paradoxes, which is that human historical action has something fundamental in common with its conceptual opposite, animal life. On the one hand, as de Man puts it, the “restlessness of human society, in contrast to the placid state of nature of the animal herd, is diagnosed as man’s inability to forget the past” (146); on the other hand, when man is able to forget the past, he accedes to his true humanity, even though at such moments he seems to coincide with the unhistoricity of the animal. “Moments of genuine humanity thus are moments at which all anteriority vanishes, annihilated by the power of an absolute forgetting,” as de Man sums up this side of Nietzsche’s argument (147). 15. For a discussion of this leitmotiv, see chapter 1 of Theory at Yale. 16. Holmes’s interpretive activity is frequently described as reading. Sometimes he interprets literal texts (“Have you read anything else in this message, Mr. Holmes?” [803,

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Hound of the Baskervilles]), though more typically his text is the world and its fungible signs (“If only I had been there! . . . That gravel page upon which I might have read so much has been long ere this smudged by the rain and defaced by the clogs of curious peasants” [795, Hound]). 17. To my knowledge, the first negative- polemical employment of the word “theory” in English is in Edmund Burke’s counterrevolutionary writings of the 1790s. I have a brief discussion of this in my The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 84ff, and a fuller account in chapter 1 of Theory at Yale. See also David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 18. Holmes’s method has been studied with particular care by semiologists: see Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, eds., The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). Most of the contributors reflect on similarities between Holmes’s practice of logical inference and what Charles Sanders Peirce calls abduction. For a particularly interesting discussion, see Eco’s contribution, “Horns, Hooves, Insteps: Some Hypotheses on Three Types of Abduction” (198–220). 19. Eco, “Horns, Hooves, Insteps,” 216; I have corrected what appears to be a typo by substituting “and” for “of.” Eco is discussing one of Holmes’s most extravagant feats: his reading of Watson’s mind in “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box” based on Watson’s facial expressions and eye movements. (Because this story ran into publishing difficulties, Conan Doyle later moved its mind- reading scene to another story, “The Resident Patient,” so it appears twice in the collected works: see 488–89, 1044–46.) Holmes creates a narrative for Watson’s train of thoughts that, as Eco points out, in the real world would soon enter an astronomically low probability zone, since it would require choosing at every point among numerous alternative paths that Watson’s thoughts could plausibly have taken. 20. In honor of Wilde, we may note that the Holmes- Watson relationship is granted a late, fleeting bloom in “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs” when Watson is shot in the thigh and Holmes embraces him and cries out in anxiety. Watson comments: “It was worth a wound—it was worth many wounds—to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single- minded service culminated then in that moment of revelation” (1241). Holmes then “rip[s] open [Watson’s] trousers with his pocket- knife.” 21. The Holmes stories feature a near- obsessive attention to the reflux of empire. Watson enters the narrative bearing wounds from the Anglo- Afghan war of 1878–80, and a large number of his subsequent adventures with Holmes feature threats stemming from far- flung reaches of the British Empire, particularly from India and Australia, as might be expected, though the lost colony in North America contributes a steady stream of murderous Mormons, gangsters from Chicago, daughters of gold miners, and so on. Any full reading of the late Victorian gothic texture of these stories would need to examine such motifs. Though not focused on Conan Doyle, a relevant study is Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). For a study that locates the Holmes stories within a context of late nineteenth- century technologies of identification and surveillance, see Carlo

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Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” in Eco and Sebeok, The Sign of Three, 81–118. The Holmes stories police hierarchies of race, class, and gender in ways familiar to students of late Victorian literature (for a glimpse of the stories at their most racist, see “The Adventure of the Three Gables”). Though Holmes makes a point of working only for the work’s own sake, his clients tend to belong almost entirely to the upper and middle classes, and Watson frequently alludes to the great number of aristocratic and politically powerful clients whom Holmes has helped. The intimacy between Holmes and the governing apparatus of the nation grows more striking as the canon evolves, and in some of the late stories he becomes quite explicitly an agent of the British state (see, e.g., “The Adventure of the Bruce- Partington Plans,” in which Holmes is assured that “the whole force of the State is at your back if you should need it” [1088]). A few of the later stories feature German villains, and in “His Last Bow” Conan Doyle has an elderly Holmes come out of retirement on the eve of World War I to become a deep- cover counterintelligence agent for Britain. 22. I am about to discuss briefly the gothic motif of the split or double character. In passing we may note that the world of Sherlock Holmes is saturated with signs far more fantastic than the scuffed trouser leg or smear of mud that we tend to associate with Holmesian decoding. The face, a traditional gothic text, plays a significant role. Holmes reads Watson’s mind in several stories based on his facial expressions (see my earlier note, and compare, e.g., “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” 593–94). Faces often convey guilt (“Look at their faces!,” Holmes cries as part of his proof in “The Reigate Puzzle” [468]; in one quite weak late story, “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” an evildoer’s facial expression constitutes essentially all of Holmes’s proof ). They record innate depravity (“an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face, all seamed and scored with vile passions” [849, Hound]). (Amazingly, this is the face of the wayward brother of a respectable, ordinary- looking character: in this particularly lurid example, a life of crime seems able to mark a face racially by turning it “yellow,” presumably as part of the descent back to the “animal.”) In such a universe, a sufficiently horrible facial expression can possess medusoid power (the victim in “The Crooked Man” dies with such a chilling facial expression that “more than one person fainted at the mere sight of him, so terrible was the effect” [479]). An agreeable pitch of comic absurdity is reached when Holmes deduces that a client is a piano teacher rather than a typist because “there is a spirituality about the face . . . which the typewriter does not generate” (613, “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist”). Many more examples of hypersignificant faces and facial signifiers in the Holmes stories could be cited here. My point is that these hyperlegible signs, inherited from melodrama and the gothic tradition, are in tension with the process of fission that produces a Moriarty out of a Holmes (or vice versa)—an ambiguity that also forms part of the texture of gothic narrative. They are also in tension with the thespian gift that allows Holmes repeatedly to don disguises that fool everyone, including Watson. And now and then in the stories, the hyperlegibility of the face turns into something stranger. “The Yellow Face” is a particulary interesting example, since this story puts pressure on the presumed hyperlegibility of race as well as the face, and is one of the very few cases in which Holmes fails to read the plot’s riddle correctly. The plot involves an American woman who has married an Englishman and, unbeknownst to him, has brought over to

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England her mixed- race child by her deceased African American first husband. She keeps the child secreted in a neighboring house and has it wear a mask whenever it looks out a window; her new husband, jealous of her secret visits to this house, consults Holmes, who suspects that a former husband has returned, and is as surprised as the husband and Watson are when the secret is revealed. The story has an atypically sweet ending, with the new husband accepting the child. The plot mechanism itself is simplistic, but the figuration of the “face” is striking. Despite the title, no literal “yellow face” appears in the story. The mask worn by the child is “of a livid chalky white” (406–7) and “of the strangest livid tint” (414); when the mask is removed, she stands revealed as “a little coal- black negress” (414). An odd mobility or figurative excess marks the stereotyped signs of race in this text. No wonder Holmes has trouble reading it. 23. And before we manage to learn anything of Professor Moriarty, in “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” he has already generated a brother, Colonel James Moriarty, who doubles Watson in struggling for public control of the story of Holmes and Moriarty. 24. Conan Doyle borrows major motifs from Poe, of course: Dupin and his narrator and Holmes and Watson are close relatives (the brilliant aesthete- detective and the first- person narrator- foil, inhabiting a smoke- saturated room, etc.). The Holmes- Moriarty double repeats, in a somewhat more violent register, Dupin’s specular face- off with the cunning Minister D— in “The Purloined Letter.” And there are other significant gestures of homage: at one point Conan Doyle has Holmes echo Dupin’s account, in “The Purloined Letter,” of the play of identification in the even- odd guessing game: “You know my methods in such cases, Watson. I put myself in the man’s place, and having first gauged his intelligence, I try to imagine how I should myself have proceeded under the same circumstances” (455, “Musgrave Ritual”). On the abyssal doublings and archival echoings in the Dupin stories (and their relation to high theory), see Barbara Johnson’s classic essay, “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida,” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 457–505. A convenient anthology collecting Poe’s story and texts by Lacan, Derrida, Johnson, and other critics is John P. Mueller, The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 25. Eve Sedgwick’s work on the gothic deserves (and has often received) an essay unto itself. Probably the most illuminating reading for anyone wanting to analyze the Holmes- Watson bachelor snuggery in relation to the specular, violent Holmes- Moriarty agon would be the two Dickens chapters in Sedgwick’s classic Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 26. The newspapers usually only present fragments of a case, of course, and usually wrongly give credit to Scotland Yard. Only Watson can reliably transform Holmes’s cases into public narratives. There is one curious partial exception, “The Stock- Broker’s Clerk,” in which the solution is revealed at the end of the story by a newspaper. 27. Holmes appears to have other publicity engines at work besides Watson. “You see me now,” he tells Watson in “The Musgrave Ritual,” “when my name has become known far and wide, and when I am recognized both by the public and by the official force as being a final court of appeal in doubtful cases. Even when you knew me first, at the time of the affair which you have commemorated in ‘A Study in Scarlet’, I had already established a considerable, though not a very lucrative, connection.You can hardly realize, then, how difficult I found it at first, and how long I had to wait before I succeeded in making

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any headway” (446). Holmes grows more famous as the stories progress: by the time of “The Reigate Puzzle,” “Europe was ringing with his name” and “his room was literally ankle- deep with congratulatory telegrams” (458). In the late stories he and Watson have literally become media figures (to the point that an admiring police inspector, in the late novel The Valley of Fear, remarks, “Come along, Dr. Watson, and when the time comes we’ll all hope for a place in your book” [925]). 28. “An examination by experts leaves little doubt that a personal contest between the two men ended, as it could hardly fail to end in such a situation, in their reeling over, locked in each other’s arms” (555). This unexplained replication and multiplication of Holmes into an anonymous collective of “experts” on the final page of “The Final Problem” is one of the odder twists in the Holmes canon but rhymes with the stories’ persistent emphasis on doubling, mechanical reproducibility, newspapers, and the like. As regards the landscape: Holmes leaves his final marks on the finest text- receptive surface that the Earth can provide: “The blackish soil is kept forever soft by the incessant drift of spray, and a bird would leave its tread on it” (554). Holmes has left his letter weighted down with his cigarette case on a rock (ibid.). The landscape is already nearly as textstriated as Tansey’s painting. 29. Paget’s illustration, however, is rich with intriguing detail, and a close reading of it might well reveal that it too is recording the phantasmatic cast of the scene it represents. Coffin- shaped protuberances bulge out of the cliff face. Moriarty’s arm thrusts skyward with mysterious rigidity and force. Most striking, there is the hat—the famous deerstalker that Paget is often credited with giving Holmes—falling ahead of the two combatants, looking rather like a breast, and floating just to the right of where their two groins are pressed together—offering itself to psychoanalytically inclined readers as an irresistible objet petit a. (As regards that hat: Holmes wears a top hat in the city, and Conan Doyle never uses the word “deerstalker,” but Molly Ierulli has pointed out to me that, headed for the country, Holmes wears an “ear- flapped traveling cap”—essentially a deerstalker—in the story “Silver Blaze” [383], so the hat is not entirely Paget’s intellectual property.) Tansey’s painting plays complexly with the similarities and differences between itself and its archival quasi- double. The differences are dramatic, of course: Tansey’s painting is a high- art large- scale canvas, nearly seven feet in height, whereas Paget’s pen- and- ink wash drawing for the Strand Magazine is scaled to its purpose (it is 10.5 inches by 6.75 inches), which is to “illustrate” a mechanically reproduced text. Paget’s originals, however, have in our day become expensive commodities on the art market, so any full analysis of the allusive gesture linking Tansey’s painting to Paget’s drawing would need to avoid translating that relationship into a complacent binary opposition. Paget’s illustration is the first to include his signature and the first to be used as a frontispiece in the Strand Magazine. 30. When Watson, who has been decoyed away, returns to find Holmes vanished, he shouts back: “It was in vain that I shouted. My only answer was my own voice reverberating in a rolling echo from the cliffs around me . . . I shouted; but only that same halfhuman cry of the fall was borne back to my ears” (553–54). The pattern continued ten real- time years later: when Doyle finally gave in and brought Holmes out of the waterfall in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” he had Holmes tell Watson, “I am not a fanciful person, but I give you my word that I seemed to hear Moriarty’s voice screaming at me out of the abyss” (564).

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31. Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Pres, 1984), 122. 32. I would suggest that Tansey thereby also accentuates his allegory of theory- in America: the institutional overlap between theory- as- deconstruction and romantic studies is unique to the Anglo- American academy. This partly has to do with the allegorical role that Paul de Man played in the history of theory in the United States and partly to do with the exaggerated aesthetic claims that went into the making of a “Romantic” canon in Britain and the United States in the early to mid- twentieth century. I offer a more extensive analysis in “Aesthetics, Theory, and the Profession of Literature.” 33. See Neil Hertz, “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime,” in The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 40–60. 34. Arthur C. Danto, “Mark Tansey: The Picture within the Picture,” in Danto, Mark Tansey, 7–29, here 29. Danto’s desire to pinpoint this painting’s fundamental agon and to name it “Rousseau” may have contributed to his having misidentified the de Man text that Tansey silkscreens into the background of Close Reading, a painting that Danto discusses in close proximity to Derrida Queries de Man. As noted in an earlier footnote, Close Reading, like most of Tansey’s 1990 “literary theory” paintings, draws on pages 146–47 of “Literary History and Literary Modernity”; Danto mistakenly identifies the silkscreened text as stemming from another essay in Blindness and Insight, “The Rhetoric of Blindness”—de Man’s famous essay on Derrida (see Danto, “Mark Tansey,” 28–29). One might indeed have expected Tansey to draw on that essay for his textualized landscapes, especially for Derrida Queries de Man, but if he did at any point in these paintings, the source has been blurred out of recognizability, at least for this viewer. 35. Judi Freeman, “Metaphor and Inquiry in Mark Tansey’s ‘Chain of Solutions,’ ” in Mark Tansey / Judi Freeman: With Essays by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Mark Tansey, ed. Judi Freeman, Exhibition Catalogue, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993), 13–68, here 42. 36. It would take a very long footnote to situate the “affair” that was created first in the French and then in the broader European and Anglo- American media, nominally in the wake of Victor Farias’s sensationalizing study, Heidegger et le nazisme (Paris: Editions Verdier, 1987). The “de Man affair” was primarily an Anglo- American phenomenon but registered in a few European media centers. 37. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Rilke, Nietzsche and Proust (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1979), 277. 38. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989 [1987]), 93–94). The italicized phrase “before any question” spurs a huge footnote that a full consideration of Derrida’s framing of the “question of the question” would need to read very carefully: see Of Spirit, 129–36. 39. It seems clear that Conan Doyle intended to refer to baritsu, a martial art that had a brief moment of popularity at the end of the nineteenth century.

Here There Is No After (Richter’s History) Sara Guyer

I think we just haven’t surpassed Romanticism . . . Romanticism is far from being a closed book. Just like fascism. —Gerhard Richter, interview with Irmeline Lebeer, 19721

What is contemporary romanticism? What is its time? Its date? These questions—of aesthetics, periodization, legacy, and continuity—are bound up with another question: what does it mean to come after? In some sense the question is one we understand: A comes after B, October follows September. But in some other sense, it is utterly enigmatic, especially when we are talking about something other than a clearly marked point—a place in the alphabet, a calendar—but rather an event whose effects and aftereffects are neither fully known nor fully understood even after we say that it has come to an end. And even more than this, when we are talking about an event whose meaning—not its actuality, but its conditions and explanation— remains unsettled. This is how critics, psychoanalysts, and survivors describe trauma, an event experienced and realized only in its absence and as absence, that is, after the fact. But this understanding of trauma as belated experience means not only that something keeps happening and keeps being felt but also that something that was not felt or experienced in the moment when it is understood to have taken place occurs belatedly, as if for the first time. And trauma so conceived turns notions of before and after into a tailspin. This is true not only of a particular historical event but of experience itself. The challenge to chronology posed by the temporal extension of the event informs how we think about periodization and historical evidence, and also how we understand the relation between aesthetic events. In other words, it is this understanding that registers the fact of contemporary romanticism, and it is this condition that contemporary romanticism reveals. Romanticism is at once an instance of this structure and a name for it. Thus, when the contemporary painter Gerhard Richter sets out to describe the place of history

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in his work, and more specifically the relation of his work to its predecessors, whether that relation is conceived as an aesthetic or a political event, he does so by reference to romanticism. Moreover, in Richter’s work the problem posed by painting after romanticism and the problem posed by painting terrorism have in common an engagement with the question of the past. Both in his paintings and in his discussion of his paintings, Richter has regularly referred to romanticism. Drawing on these references, curators and critics in Europe and the United States have sought to make sense of this legacy, leading to exhibitions that, like the 1994 The Romantic Spirit in German Art 1790–1990 at the Hayward Gallery in London, locate Richter as the inheritor of German Romanticism. These references to romanticism reach back more than forty years. In her 1972 interview with Richter, published in Chroniques de l’art vivant, Irmeline Lebeer engages the artist on the question of romanticism—and his romanticism. The interview turns to romanticism when Lebeer focuses on Richter’s landscapes, many of which use the artist’s signature softening or blurring of lines to create an almost mystical or auratic sense of place, even as the paintings’ sources are not the natural world itself but its representation in photography.2 Lebeer assumes that Richter would be averse to romanticism, but he rejects this assumption, explaining (as he also does in a letter to Jean- Christophe Ammann, director of the Lucerne State Museum) that romanticism cannot merely be surpassed. Lebeer: Your landscapes are not only beautiful; most of the time they are also incredibly romantic. Is this romanticism—which can also be seen in certain canvases from the early part of your career—something you might try to avoid at other times? Richter: By no means. For me, there’s an authentic historical reference to Romanticism. It’s what distinguishes me from the hyperrealists who represent all the elements of our contemporary world—cars, highways, etc. I paint historical paintings. L: Is the Romantic period closer to you than our own? R: No. I think we just haven’t surpassed Romanticism. The paintings of that period are still part of our sensibility. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t look at them any more. Romanticism is far from being a closed book. Just like fascism. L: There is nonetheless quite a difference between your paintings and those of the Romantic era. R: What I’m lacking is the spiritual foundation that supported Romantic painting. We have lost the feeling of “God’s omnipresence in nature.” For us, everything is empty. And yet, those paintings are still there; they speak to us. We continue to love them, use them, and need them.3

Here Richter insists that an attachment to romanticism is not a form of nostalgia but a form of belonging, even of being. For Richter, romanticism as

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a style or mode of thought and representation is both the occasion through which he, and his critics, reflect on the possibility and impossibility of coming after, of futurity, and of history, leading Richter to insist here on the fact that he “paints historical paintings.” More recently, Mary Jacobus has described the pastoral in Richter (as in Seamus Heaney and W. G. Sebald) as “a specific form of historical knowledge that emerges in the wake of destruction.” 4 Hubertus Butin has devoted several essays to examining Richter’s romanticism, and Robert Storr, Richter’s most astute and sympathetic reader, also has sought to make sense of Richter’s statements about romanticism—as well as his performance of it. The questions raised by Richter’s relation to romanticism are questions of relation itself—the relation of contemporary art to its past and the relation of art to history. It is the possibility, as Storr has described it, of a nonredemptive or nongrandiose mode of history painting. These readings reveal how in Richter’s painting the problems and possibilities of historical representation are intertwined with the meaning of an aesthetic inheritance. This is both his relation to romanticism and, as I will suggest, what romanticism names. As a landscape painter, Richter introduces the place of history not only by refusing to represent a landscape untouched by modernity but also by dealing with the landscape through the mediation of photography, that is, by painting photographs. The landscapes emerge as impure but no less alluring, even magical, as a result. As a history painter, after Hitler, Stalin, and the fall of the Twin Towers, Richter also exposes the past as a source of sorrow, doubt, ambivalence, and uncertainty. The historical events—characterized by violence, atrocity, and terror—that appear in the history paintings remain unsettled, and reveal the unsettled meaning of human acts, even tragic, reprehensible, and violent ones, rather than the triumph of the militarized state, on the one hand, or unilateral criticism of the actors and terrorists on the other. The history paintings repeat in another key the question of the painter’s relationship to romanticism. These are two overlapping modes of thinking history, and they give way to a form whose questions and modes are inextricable from the questions and modes through which romanticism belongs to the present. Building on this acknowledgment to consider one instance of Richter’s history paintings, I want to suggest that romanticism marks an exemplary place in Richter’s thinking about and practice of history. This is not because it is a way of talking about his relationship to Casper David Friedrich or to aesthetic ideology or even to the absolute and its dismantling. Rather, it is because romanticism is both the referent and the name for a fraught contemporaneity, for untimeliness understood not as anachronism or nostalgia but as the very problem of history in this time. In

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other words, a proposition: for Gerhard Richter, the question of succession and continuation—of painting and living after an event, whether aesthetic or political—is inevitably bound up with the place and possibility of contemporary romanticism. More than this, when Richter turns to romanticism, he shows how the question of succession and survival—of coming after—is a question of, and named by, romanticism. If we begin by following the discussions of romanticism in writing about Richter’s painting, and in Richter’s own account of his paintings, as in the interview with Lebeer, we begin to grasp that romanticism functions both as the name for a particular set of apparently exhausted representational strategies in painting and as the name for a formative, though yet to be exceeded, predecessor. In the 1973 letter to Ammann, in which Richter evokes the many styles of his work to date—the photo paintings, the minimalist transparency of 4 Panes of Glass, and the landscapes—he concludes by evoking Friedrich in an account that has informed virtually every discussion of his relation to romanticism. He writes, “A painting by Caspar David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted: specific ideologies, for example. Beyond that, if it is any ‘good,’ it concerns us—transcending ideology—as art that we consider worth the trouble of defending (perceiving, showing, making). It is therefore quite possible to paint like Caspar David Friedrich ‘today.’ ”5 Here Richter distinguishes between untimely work—work that matters beyond its referent—and the context or circumstances to which it belonged, and which are its condition of possibility. One particularly resonant and complex version of this romanticism and its relation to history appears in Hal Foster’s 2003 essay, “Semblance According to Gerhard Richter.” Foster sets out to describe Richter’s “desublimation” of painting. He acknowledges that “Richter shows contradictory allegiances to divergent traditions of art, both historical and avant- garde, with echoes of the romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich as well as the conceptual provocations of Marcel Duchamp, of the color field abstractions of Barnett Newman as well as the murky media images of Andy Warhol.”6 Foster then moves from a discussion of the contribution of Richter’s paintings to speculation about their critical source: “It is as though Richter wanted to run these diverse strands of practice together, to put the exalted pictorial formats of the ‘Northern romantic tradition’ from Friedrich to Newman through the antiaesthetic paces of the Duchampian (neo)avant- garde, the found image above all—to test the ideal of ‘beautiful semblance’ foregrounded in the romantic line with the fact of commodification underscored by the (neo)avant- garde line.”7 In Foster’s account then, Richter undertakes to “run together”—that

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is, not resolve but rather interweave, or perhaps stage a collision between— two “strands of practice” and two versions of untimeliness. On the one hand, this refers to the sublime tradition leading from romanticism to abstraction, which Jean- François Lyotard associates with the “here and now,” or the event, and the absence of any referent or message, as a version of the untimely.8 On the other hand, it suggests the avant- garde, and with it, a form of untimeliness whereby a photograph or found object (the newspaper clipping, the archive) becomes the referent and leads to a scene not of absent reference but of hyper- or exaggerated referentiality that is emptied out and projected into indifference. For Foster, the answer to this question ultimately stands in Richter’s blur.9 Foster reenacts such a scene of reference—and blurring— when he phrases Richter’s project through a fictional question. In doing so, Foster at once evokes Theodor W. Adorno’s account of the barbarism of lyric poetry after Auschwitz and displaces it. He writes, “It is as though Richter wanted to pose the question, ‘Can there be lyric painting not only after Auschwitz but after Warhol as well?’ ”10 In this revision of Adorno, Foster substitutes painting for poetry as another expression of lyricism. Warhol becomes a name for the postlyrical and postsubjective condition of experience (what Paul de Man called prosaic). It is a response to and a way of living within contemporary conditions that is not, or at least not directly, a response to the Holocaust. In revising Adorno’s account of the barbarism of lyric, however, Foster simultaneously relies on a fictional utterance—a lyric speech act—to ask about the possibility of survival, and torques Adorno’s implicit understanding of periodization after Auschwitz. Here, the event of Auschwitz (a version of which Foster elsewhere, after Lacan, would associate with the trauma of the real) is succeeded and displaced by an aesthetic event that turns painting into a vehicle for repetition and renders its subject not as an individual (the purported subject of the lyric) but as a mass. This notion of the mass is a central aspect of Warhol’s project, manifested not only in the repetition of the objects of mass culture (soup cans, newspapers) but also in what Foster calls the mass subject, the unrepresentable, absent or anonymous figure that he finds in the 1976 Skulls series. This version of the mass, not as thoroughly known and knowable in its popular ubiquity but as permanently absent and unrecognizable, does in the end resonate with Adorno’s account of Auschwitz as depriving individuals of death, of turning death from the condition of the radically singular into the mass impersonality evident in unmarked graves and ashen remains. So, “after Warhol,” in this sense, does not change the meaning of “after Auschwitz” but only reiterates it, a form of iteration that exceeds the referent. Foster’s account and enactment of Richter’s blur as a question of succession can be understood to ask whether

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there can be a form of painting that exceeds the two scenes of impossible witnessing that he perceives Richter to engage, that of Auschwitz and that of commodification. He asks whether death looks otherwise, whether it can not be individual, without falling prey to barbarism.11 And can Foster’s own strange ventriloquism of Richter, that is, his latent lyricism, provide some insight here? To trace these questions, I turn more specifically to Richter’s effort to paint through violence. In the interview with Lebeer, Richter acknowledges that fascism, like romanticism, endures, and in doing so he combines political and aesthetic legacies in an implicit analogy that evokes the aesthetic mode of fascism and the political assumptions of romanticism. In October 18, 1977, a series of paintings from 1988, Richter returns to thinking about the legacies of fascism and the possibilities of history. Here the date does not refer to a moment of composition or completion, which is to say the time of painting, but rather to the day that three members of the German activist- terrorist Baader Meinhof Group—Andreas Baader, Gudrun Enslin, and Jan- Carl Raspe—were discovered dead in their prison cells. The cause of death, whether it was a group suicide or murder, remains unknown. The series is composed of fifteen distinct black, white, and gray paintings, all based on photographs, several of which appeared in the newspapers. Each of the paintings bears a separate title: Youth Portrait; Arrest 1, 2; Confrontation 1, 2, 3; Hanged; Cell; Record Player; Man Shot Down 1, 2; Dead (unnumbered, although there are three images that bear this title, all nearly identical images of Ulrike Meinhof, one of the coleaders of the group and the subject of Youth Portrait, but in different sizes and showing the figures at slightly different angles), and finally Funeral. The sizes range from just over a foot to more than six feet by ten feet. All share, in varying degrees, the blur or softening that has become Richter’s signature. In Youth Portrait and Confrontation, the smallest of the paintings, the blur appears as just a minor hazing that makes the pictures appear slightly out of focus (a characteristic that becomes more acutely visible when one sees the painting alongside the photographs from which they are drawn). In Arrest, Cell, and Funeral, the blurring is more extreme, rendering the images as abstract as they are figurative, and making soft lines (vertical in Cell, horizontal in Arrest 1 and Funeral) the most distinctive gesture in the paintings (Figure 1). Despite the title, few of the paintings refer to events that took place on the date that the series bears, October 18, 1977. Arrest 1 and 2 are images of the 1972 arrest of Baader and Raspe together with another member of the group, Holger Meins (who later starved himself to death as part of a prison hunger strike), outside of a garage where they had stored bomb- making materials; the Youth Portrait, based on a 1970 image, and all three images titled Dead, based

Figure 1. Installation view of Gerhard Richter’s drawings from the series October 18, 1977, Museum of Modern Art, 1988: Confrontation 1, 2, and 3, Hanged, and Cell (Zelle).

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on a photograph that appeared in Der Stern on June 16, 1976, are of Ulrike Meinhof, who was hanged on May 9, 1976 (the funeral did not occur that day but on October 27); and the three Confrontation images are based on photographs taken in 1972, when Enslin was on the way to a police line- up, in which she would be identified by a witness.12 By turning to a series in which there is at once an unequivocal date and equivocation about its reference, specifically, the uncertain circumstances that led to the three deaths whose date the series bears, several questions about painting’s relationship to history emerge. The history that this series sets out to remember is synonymous neither with Auschwitz nor with Warhol, and yet it is bound up in various ways with both, with what one member of the group called, unsettlingly, “the Auschwitz generation,” those Germans who belong to Auschwitz, who bear it as their point of reference, yet who are witnesses and survivors only at a remove. In light of these equivocations and multiplications—the simultaneous expansion and uncertainty of its referent— what does the date in the series mean, and what does it do? How does it speak to and reflect on the series of paintings in which the instant of death, arrest, or capture by a photographer’s lens is at issue? How does it reflect the doubling of that instant, first in a photograph and then in a painting? And how does it characterize those images that seem to have no particular instant, including the photographs of Baader’s cell and of the record player, which seem to reflect the everyday temporalities of life in prison but do so in a way that immediately raises questions of evidence (the record player is suspected to have stored a gun), of reading (there are nearly a thousand books in the image of Baader’s cell), and of the nature of the prisoners’ treatment, which was an ongoing source of complaint and the reason why Meins initiated the hunger strike from which he died? Moreover, how does the date refer to this event, that is, to a terrorism about which Richter harbors enduring ambivalence, and whose meaning remains a source of pervasive uncertainty and unrest? If these images are forms of witness, they engage in a temporality that, to recall Foster’s frame, neither Auschwitz nor Warhol adequately describes. The paintings in this series represent an effort to get close to the instant of death when the death is that of a terrorist, a moment of almost Medusa- like violence.Yet the problem of seeing here, a problem that I suggest is marked rather than resolved by the date of the series, is not simply one of abstract or logical impossibility but one of ideology and affect. It is a problem of seeing these persons—these bodies and faces—without seeing them as heroes or criminals, as victims or terrorists. For Richter, the problem is not the opposition registered by the binarism of hero or criminal but rather the discomfort brought on by his inability to either inhabit or reject either of these possibilities. Richter considers how to dwell with the unrest brought on

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by seeing an image of the dead, and of these dead, of these events as terror—in an image that is simultaneously shocking and sad—without reducing the viewer’s position to one of recognition or ventriloquism. Richter’s work acknowledges not simply the fiction or failure of representation (especially photographic) but also the failed effort at overcoming this fiction, at seeing or knowing what took place, and how to make sense of it through history painting. It acknowledges the work of coming after. Others have suggested that the aim of the series is to represent the failure of the RAF rather than to laud the prisoners as heroes.Yet if this series provides an image of political failure, the culmination of action and political responsibility in terror and suicide, as registered in the arrest and subsequent deaths and funerals of the group, it is exponentially more complex. For the paintings register the failure of law, for example, to protect individuals from the militarized violence of the state. And this sense of failure reflects on and refers to painting itself, to its ineptitude before the task of historical representation and its failure to fail entirely, which could be another way of affirming its survival, as Richter acknowledges when he describes his goal (at least when he turned to abstraction in the early 1970s) as merely “to make paintings.”13 Is this the failure of a genre (as Benjamin Buchloh will argue, the failure of painting before history), or is it the failure of painting to do more than reflect its survival without heroism or strength, thus opening onto a new era of history painting? One way of approaching these questions is to look at two of the sets of paintings in the series. Why are there three versions—like three shots—of the single image Dead? Doesn’t a painting of a photograph already announce the mediation that this repetition suggests? What does this slowing down, this undoing of the mechanical gaze, this repetition (and repetition of repetition), whether compulsive or not, achieve? These images reflect the stunning studio portrait of Ulrike Meinhof when she was alive, an image that seems to give no indication of activism or terrorism and that, although the subject directly faces the camera/viewer, seems to exemplify various theories of photography (like those of Roland Barthes that align the photograph with death).Yet this alignment, the frozen time of portraiture, the shot, reflects uncomfortably on the other images of Meinhof ’s actual death, her supine corpse and neck marked by strangulation, as if the four images, thought together, do not merely affirm the deathly theories of photography but also render them banal, immobilized by the force of the questions of representation, mechanical and manual reproduction, and witnessing that October 18 bears. This is far from a triumph of painting in a heroic sense but is an index of painting that strives, that gets caught up with and is reflected in the event it bears.

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Another way of thinking about the time of these paintings is to consider the other triptych in the series, paintings of the 1972 photographs of Gertrud Enslin, and then the fourth image that completes or undoes the triptych, the image of Enslin hanging. This suite works opposite to the images of Meinhof. In the Confrontation paintings, Enslin appears gawky, youthful, informal, almost silly, and very much alive. In two of the paintings she looks directly at the camera and hence the viewer, although her face is blurred (and Richter’s paintings crop out her body) (Figures 2 and 3). In the third she appears in a downward- facing profile (Figure 4). The fourth, much larger and showing her entire body floating, depicts her hanging (Figure 5). Here the repetition of images evokes the question of their relation and, more than this, of their meaning, both the meaning of the images and the meaning of the life and death represented in them. If death—Enslin’s hanging—might seem to expose the truth of these images and establish their meaning within a narrative, it does anything but this. Enslin’s death, far from an event with any meaning or explanatory power, remains uncertain; the circumstances of her death remain contested. She was found on October 18, but what was the cause of her death? Viewed from within the logic of the series, Hanged, which continues to keep the image of the lively girl in the world, has the effect of shock or an interruption that resists retrospective narration or redemption into meaning. It becomes another image of this woman, another repetition of the other images, one that does and does not break from or break up the series. It is just as strange, just as unsettling, as the others. These paintings evoke questions of succession and surpassing, of coming after an event while still remaining uncertain of what this event is, what it means, to whom it belongs, and, implicitly, where it begins and ends. These paintings suggest that there is not one temporality of the event: there is the gun possibly hidden in all of its potentiality within a record player, but we do not see it; we see only the silent disc (which we later learn from the enlarged photograph is Eric Clapton). There are the books lining the shelves of Baader’s cell, the image of which reflects the time of reading. There is the funeral, the accidental shot, the showdown. These are testamentary images, evidentiary images, contextualizing images, and they break open the enigmatic instant. They belong to a date that is not theirs, a date that is, if it signifies anything in this context, the failure of a movement, a failure that is not simply the end to terrorism but rather a failure shot through with tragedy, a failure without redemption. If there is one place where this failure—the uncertainty of meaning, the equivocation, the time of painting rather than photography—is registered, it is in the blur itself, the blur that is not specific to this series but is a signature that aligns the work of art with the question of its time.

Figure 2. Confrontation 1 (Gegenüberstallung 1), Richter’s blurred and cropped painting of Gudrun Enslin from a studio photograph, part of the October 18, 1977 series. 1988. Oil on canvas. 44 × 40¼ in.

Figure 3. Confrontation 2 (Gegenüberstallung 2). 1988. Oil on canvas. 44 × 40¼ in.

Figure 4. Confrontation 3 (Gegenüberstallung 1). 1988. Oil on canvas. 44 × 40¼ in.

Figure 5. Hanged (Erhängte). 1988. Oil on canvas. 6 ft 7 1/8 in. × 55 1/8 in.

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When Robert Storr reflects on the way in which this series fits into the history of history painting in a comprehensive catalogue on the BaaderMeinhof cycle, a catalogue produced to accompany the installation of the images on their controversial acquisition by the Museum of Modern Art in 2000, he suggests that it is not merely a moment of failure. In Storr’s account, October 18 does not demonstrate that “the genre [of history painting] can no longer be practiced, but as was true for Manet, only that it no longer can be practiced as it was before.”14 To explicate this point, Storr links Richter’s paintings of these events (paintings of the conjunction of activism and terror, paintings of the survival and suicide of the Auschwitz generation) to Richter’s landscape paintings, impossibly beautiful, untimely, and austere. Storr recalls Richter’s own reflections on those landscapes, and the discussions of them from the 1970s. He writes, “As Richter said of Romantic landscape painting, another genre he has revived and transformed to the consternation of critics wedded to mid- twentieth century modernist ideas about what painting must do and what it should never do again: ‘A painting by Caspar David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted. It is therefore quite possible to paint like Caspar David Friedrich today.’ ” Storr continues, “The Baader- Meinhof cycle is not painted like anything by anyone else, and it was not painted for reasons other than Richter’s own, but the problems it poses arise out of a tradition, and they manifest that tradition’s struggle to adopt to new circumstances.”15 Using an almost evolutionary account of forms (“traditions struggle to adopt to new circumstances”), Storr crafts an analogy between genres and their viability in the present, but an analogy that also relies on two versions of repetition. More than this, Storr ties this series to Richter’s own thinking about romanticism (which here is also a name for history or tradition) and its survival. Two years later, Storr explains further his understanding of Richter’s comments on romanticism: “The Romantic influence goes deeper than surface resemblances between Friedrich’s scenic views and Richter’s. The differences have less to do with how the paintings look than with what we are encouraged to read or discouraged from reading into them.”16 Storr continues: “When Richter says ‘A painting by Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted . . . it is therefore quite possible to paint like Caspar Friedrich today’ he is simultaneously defending his right to paint as he sees fit and preparing the way for a fundamental reinterpretation of the type of painting he has seemingly resuscitated.”17 Storr understands Richter here to be making a claim about romanticism untethered from “surface resemblances”—indeed, to be making a claim about

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romanticism as a problem of reading rather than of appearance, a matter of the invisible rather than the visible (“The differences have less to do with how the paintings look than with what we are encouraged to read or discouraged from reading into them”). Further, he suggests that Richter’s paintings—and Richter’s claim about Caspar David Friedrich—not only frame an approach to Richter’s own work but also invite us to reread and reinterpret romantic painting itself and to see that relation as an image of painting’s survival. Others, like Jacobus, in her considerations of Richter’s “Apple Tree” paintings, and Hubertus Butin return to this passage.Yet when Storr quotes it, he also leaves out (once with ellipses, once unmarked) a crucial point of explication. Richter does not just say that it is the set of circumstances, not the work, that is a thing of the past; he goes on to elucidate what he means by these circumstances, that is, what cannot merely be repeated in the present, what does not survive. He explains: “What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted: specific ideologies, for example. Beyond that, if it is ‘good’ it concerns us—transcending ideology—as art that we ostentatiously defend (perceive, show, make). Therefore, ‘today,’ we can paint as Casper David Friedrich did.”18 This is a familiar line of argument, but it nevertheless leaves us thinking about Richter’s romanticism and the temporal problems it describes. Is the Baader- Meinhof series the kind of painting that can be good outside its circumstances, good apart from ideology and intentionality, good insofar as it continues to hold our attention, like a ghost? Or is it good precisely because it is so utterly mired in ideology, not because it represents a single ideology (in fact, it is painting about the failures of ideological attachments) but good because of its relation to a complexity it cannot transcend? If this is how the cycle works, and if it is what Storr says, by his elision of Richter’s comments on ideology when he cites him, this failed transcendence, this obsession with the event, with shock, with the instant, suggests that what Richter comes to reflect is not transcendence, but neither is it an end. And it is with this point that we return to the possibility of a contemporary romanticism and to Richter as its painter. The untimeliness that Richter reveals is not one in which art becomes—or remains—a transcendental form but rather one in which art’s untimeliness, whether it belongs to Friedrich’s inverted figures or Richter’s, whether it represents a form of sublime isolation or bitter disappointment, reveals meaning, context, and reference as a site of equivocation. For Richter, this equivocation is bound up with a form of displacement that makes living in the world a source of enormous discomfort and painting a form of survival. It is a form of survival that, I suggest, and I believe Richter suggests, has everything to do with the time of romanticism. And this is what it means to come after when there is no after.

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Notes 1. Gerhard Richter, Writings 1961–2007 (New York: D.A.P., 2009), 82. 2. For a discussion of Richter’s romantic landscapes, see Hubertus Butin, “Romantic Landscapes as ‘Cuckoo’s Eggs,’ ” in Gerhard Richter, Landscapes, ed. Dietmar Elger (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), 121–29; and Hubertus Butin, “The Un- Romantic Romanticism of Gerhard Richter,” in The Romantic Spirit in German Art, 1790–1990 (Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 1994), 461–63. Butin explains that Richter’s paintings are “not based on nature studies or a kind of formally aesthetic, highly organized pictorial composition. Primarily, he sees nature through photography, a medium for mechanical reproduction. . . . Richter’s own photographs—most of which resemble snapshots—form the basis for his paintings” (125). Robert Storr does not dispute the fundamental role that photography plays in Richter’s painting; however, he understands this as not merely a matter of “mechanical reproduction” (Landscapes) or “a highly un- romantic chemical and physical process” but as resulting from a focus on the picture and the pictorial through depictions of pictures that, Storr explains, “narrow the gap between the abstract and the representational.” Robert Storr, September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter, video, 2009, 19:21, https://www.gerhard- richter.com/en/videos/ works/september- 38. 3. Richter, Writings, 82. 4. Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 60. 5. Richter, Writings, 72. 6. Hal Foster, “Semblance According to Gerhard Richter (2003),” in Gerhard Richter, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 114–15. 7. Ibid., 115. 8. Jean- François Lyotard, The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 9. See, for example, Foster’s evocation of Richter in his 2001 essay on Andy Warhol’s “Death in America” series. Foster writes, “Just as the punctum in Gerhard Richter lies less in the details than in the pervasive blurring of the image, so the punctum in Warhol lies less in the details than in this repetitive ‘popping’ of the image.” Hal Foster, “Death in America,” October 75 (Winter 1996): 43. 10. Foster, “Semblance,” 115. 11. As we will see later, this is also the question that Richter’s painting of the fall of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, raises when it avoids painting some of the most arresting photographs of the towers, those that captured individuals falling to their inevitable but unrepresented deaths. See Robert Storr, September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter (London: Tate Publishing, 2010), 16–17. 12. For a detailed description of the location of the original photographs, their often complex origins and afterlives, and a suggestive reminder about the inaccessibility of images that are assumed to be thoroughly public, see Catharina Manchanda, “A Note on Richter’s Photographic Models for October 18, 1977,” included in the MOMA catalogue. See Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, ed. Robert Storr (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 149.

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13. Richter, Writings, 80. 14. Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000), 130. 15. Ibid., 130–31. 16. Ibid., 66. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 174.

Goya’s Scarcity David L. Clark

The war and the constellation it brought with it has led me to set down certain thoughts about which I can say that I have held them safe with myself for almost twenty years, yes, even from myself. —Walter Benjamin to Gretel Adorno, April 19401

Recent discussions of the Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes’s series or, better, assemblage of influential prints that came posthumously to be known as The Disasters of War (c. 1810–1820; published 1863) locate the artist’s unsparing vision of wartime degradation in a necropolitical context in which proliferating sovereign power fuses indistinctly with the unrestrained destruction of others and otherness.2 The genesis of the assemblage lies in the singular circumstances in which Spain found itself in 1808. As Gonzalo Anes describes it: The king, queen, and heirs were in captivity. There was no government. The people, abandoned by the royal family when they left the court to meet Napoleon in Bayonne, claimed sovereignty for themselves. . . . There was no constitutional authority that could assume responsibility to “arrojar a la nación a una lucha tan desigual” [hurl a nation into such an unequal fight]; there was no organized army, weapons, or money.3

A year later, the poet Manuel Jose Quintana noted that “the fatherland” faced nothing less than a “holocaust” (en holocausto).4 Much worse was to come. But what could be worse than a holocaust? In this world—if it is in fact a world, and not the annunciation of the end of the world and of the end of the very concept of a world—targets of opportunity abound without limit: soldiers, insurgents, and civilians; men, women, and children; humans and nonhumans, not to mention the environments, both built and natural, that these fragile creatures inhabit or occupy. A frenzy of violence, shown to be at once unregulated and highly targeted, threatens to obliterate histories, knowledges, obligations, solidarities, futures, and perhaps thinking itself. Art

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too is destroyed, including work by Goya,5 whose vividly realized scenes of combat, starvation, torture, humiliation, menace, execution, and dismemberment can be hard to look at and harder to understand. And yet, despite—or perhaps because of—their difficulty, Goya’s works have remained impossible to ignore since they were published, long after the artist’s death. Goya’s focus is prephotographically tight. Jettisoning the convention of depicting the battlefield from a panoptic distance, his images zero in on the toll of war on individual bodies and small groups of bodies whose agonies and indignities fill and overfill his pages. Some men are castrated; another is impaled on the trunk of a tree. Women join the fight, but they are also hunted down and sexually assaulted. Goya was the first artist to depict the rape of women not as a battlefield aberration, much less as an aesthetically pleasing scene of passionate struggle, but as a weapon of war.6 The gendered brutality of combat hangs like a pall over the battlefield whose boundaries are no longer visible. Even corpses—as well as living bodies that are treated as already dead—are subjected to desecration that is beyond killing, beyond the point at which violence is imagined to exhaust and resolve itself in fatality, as Steven Miller has recently argued.7 In the artist’s disjointed images we observe pervasive war suffering and war deaths, and then something even more appalling, namely, “war after death.”8 How then to draw bounding lines and etch images of war whose contours have dissolved into excess and whose authorized self- descriptions no longer apply? What does the human form look like when war extinguishes that form? Perhaps no scene in the Disasters captures the bleak unruliness of war more vividly than plate 39 (Figure 1), Great deeds! With the dead! (Grande hazanˇa! Con muertos!), which I treat in this essay as concentrating in one ghastly place many of the problems, questions, and possibilities with which Goya’s assemblage thrums. Three mutilated corpses are hung in a tree and displayed like trophies or presented as triumphs. Two of the men—perhaps three—have been castrated and hung upside down. One of the men has been beheaded and has had his arms severed just below the shoulder. Those arms are bound together at the hands and strung from a branch, the same branch upon which the decapitated head is mounted. The staged nature of the scene puts to us that there are perpetrators for whom violence must not only be done but seen to be done, an imperative that, of course, complexly implicates Goya’s decision to engrave the scene. Cataloguing the wounds and locating the bodies and the disposition of the body parts, we find ourselves shadowing the artist to whose hand and eye the scene was a horror but also a formal puzzle, a question of arrangement, orientation, spacing, shading, and so forth. We come to see that looking at what Goya unabashedly calls “the

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Figure 1. Plate 39: Grande hazanˇa! Con muertos! (Great deeds! With the dead!). Courtesy of the Pomona College Museum of Art, Gift of Norton Simon.

worst”9 and working closely with formal questions are not mutually exclusive practices and indeed that the form of the engraving, which deliberately invites us to go over it, “part by part, limb by limb,”10 is the particular way that Goya caches the worst. The tree on which these horrors are hung provides an occasion for the remains to be brought together and presented, to be sure, but it is also Goya’s way of reminding us that what we are seeing is the result not of an extraterrestrially malevolent will but of something proximate and imaginable. The fact that the tree to which mutilations are fastened is verdant, showing a stylized sprig of life amid these unnatural deaths, serves as the punctum of a deeply sobering knowledge: the desecration that Goya pictures may be fantastically grim, but it happened, it is happening, in a place on earth.11 In this image we see that there are fates worse than death, and part of what makes scenes like this an example of the worst is not that they are sublimely unimaginable but that they are, in fact, all too available to be executed, observed, remembered, imagined, engraved, and thus in some sense both taken in and lived with. What we see is not sublime, unless there is a sublimity of radical desublimation, the dispiriting solidification of the human form into its insensate segments and volumes. (In the Critique of Judgment,

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Immanuel Kant claims that lawless warfare spoils the possibility of sublimity.)12 To borrow an important phrase from Georges Didi- Huberman, these are “images in spite of all,” images that frankly “address the unimaginable and refute it.”13 Images malgré tout describes the Disasters for at least two reasons. First, because Goya toils over them in the full knowledge that no single image, or assemblage of images, can capture the worst in its entirety. By an accident of history, we have eighty- two or so images to consider, but the lack of any persuasive overall narrative in the series, including the total number of prints making up the assemblage,14 suggests both that the series comes to an end but does not conclude and that many more images could well have been created. As Didi- Huberman notes, Goya is among a special group of artists who “know . . . that disasters are multipliable to infinity.”15 Amid this open- endedness, Goya registers the importance of making and captioning pictures even and especially if that work is without end. And second, images malgré tout applies because whatever the number of prints or the shape of the assemblage, by creating the Disasters in the first place the artist rejects the claim that the worst cannot or should not be made into images, even and especially if we lack the “ability to know how to look at them today.”16 What is centrally important to Goya is the insolent fact that dismembering and displaying the corpses of the enemy dead “was thought; it was therefore thinkable,”17 just as “all- out- war”—where, as Susan Sontag observes, “expenditure is all- out, un- prudent, war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive”18—was executable, and it was executed. Goya is quickened by the need to think this executability and to say it in the form of images whose very existence repudiates the desire to look away or not to look or to look and not to see or to look and be told that there is nothing to see or that it happened somewhere else, during a “war,” for example, when anything can happen, or that it happened, yes, but not in my experience, not to me or in front of me, or that it struck me in a traumatizing manner that I am not willing or able to imagine or experience. Goya makes “the inability to know how to look at [the worst]” a central part of the agon of looking at the images of the worst, an agon, I want to argue, that leaves indelible if subtle traces in the images themselves. The Disasters are not so much the aesthetic site where we imagine Goya to be overcome by the worst or to be working through the worst as they are the occasion for him to put the aesthetic into the service of thinking the worst, and, importantly, courageously, of affirming that the worst can be thought, in the name of ensuring that there is a place in which its iniquity and enormity can pool or eddy amid the grotesque torrent of violence that is wartime Spain: images in spite of all. As we shall see, these are also images in spite of all because Goya needed to make them, and

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Figure 2. Plate 69: Nada. Ello lo dice (Nothing. That is what it says). Courtesy of the Pomona College Museum of Art, Gift of Norton Simon.

to tarry with them in his studio, without necessarily seeking a participatory relationship with spectators. Goya’s assemblage is a fiercely self- contesting text, roiling with difficulties, obscurities, and sudden shifts in visual styles. The refusal of the Disasters to align unproblematically with any of the belligerents that they depict contributes to a dystopian picture of ambient violence in which, as Ian Baucom argues, “there is no party innocent of the most horrific violence, no revolution whose coming . . . betokens the possibility of progress.”19 Nada. Ello lo dice (Nothing. That is what it says), one of Goya’s most memorable captions announces, an unadorned and guttural assertion, as much a catch in the throat as it is a phrase, evoking both the waste of war and the strange void to which the labor of watching war is consigned when even loss appears to be lost. If Goya grieves, he grieves that grief that can teach him nothing, nada, which, far from a condition of emptiness or vacancy, is what survival or living- on looks like without the prospect of flourishing or transformation (Figure 2).20 —The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. By preserving the Disasters in their unpublished state, the artist makes nothing happen. But as Tilottama Rajan says with regard to Romantic poetry, this is “not a sign of

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its difference from a history where things happen.” “For poetry makes ‘nothing’ happen,” Rajan argues, by “disclosing a negativity that is in history as much as in poetry.”21 After Stephen Whicher’s remarks about Emerson, we can say that the grief that the Disasters cannot grieve is the form that grief takes.22 Goya grieved the unfathomable losses of the war, of that I have little doubt. But his text also touches on grief, demonstrating by example that there are relationships or perhaps adjacencies to ruination that are sorrowful but irreducible to grieving. And so it is that Goya finds himself in a placeless place in which it is neither possible nor advisable to determine with any confidence whether history is changing or time is passing. The Disasters are a creature of this ambiguous impasse, in which, as Rei Terada observes of Keats’s Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion (poems that are contemporaneous with the creation of Goya’s engravings), “the open- ended intolerability of the present is as impossible not to see as it is to assimilate.”23 Not not to see and not to assimilate: this is the condition of creative refusal that characterizes Goya’s relationship with the worst, beginning with what he did and did not do with the assemblage once he had brought it to the threshold of publication—or rather to the threshold of a conventional understanding of publication. What I want to emphasize is this: Goya did not publish the Disasters during his lifetime. He bequeathed a single set of proofs to his friend, the artist and collector Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, and otherwise withheld them from publication (assuming publication was indeed ever Goya’s interest or intent and thus the desideratum from which the Disasters then could be said to have been withheld). Indeed, the assemblage would not be published until 1863, some thirty- five years after Goya’s death and half a century later than the gruesome events that inspired them. As Mary Favret notes, that hiatus means that the Disasters “would have competed with photography,” emerging at the same time as Mathew Brady was staging his groundbreaking photographic exhibit of Civil War battlefields, The Dead of Antietam, in his New York gallery.24 To bring engravings to the proof stage and then to halt the process of publication of which the printing of proofs is conventionally the penultimate move is provocative to consider, especially if we treat the interruption as the dynamic culmination rather than the regrettable qualification of the work. I say “dynamic” because for Goya to have set the assemblage aside for thirty- five years meant he did so not once, around 1820, after the wars were said to have ended, but continually, repeatedly deciding or returning to the decision—across shifting circumstances, both biographical and historical—to shelter and affirm their studio rather than social state, even after leaving the proofs and plates for the Disasters behind when he moved to France in 1824.25 Over the course of Goya’s life, and then for some time

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afterward, the publication of the Disasters is interrupted without interruption. To create proofs, hand them to a trusted friend, but not publish the Disasters, and not publish them forever, is itself an artistic practice and irreducibly a part of what the assemblage is and does. It means to publish the Disasters without publishing them, or perhaps to publish them without circulating them, a publication without publicity—this, as a way to demonstrate that publication is irreducible to publicity. What if we were to treat the setting aside of the Disasters in its own right, making the assemblage generically closer to a Romantic fragment and an example of what Balachandra Rajan calls “the form of the unfinished”?26 As Rajan argues, the Romantic fragment distinguishes itself by no longer being answerable to a normative idea of completion: “It contributes to a whole which is neither beginning nor end but only history,” Rajan writes. “The unfinished, in such a view, carried with it no natural citizenship, no whole from which it was disinherited, or from which its incompleteness has been made to proceed.”27 Goya’s abstention from publication remains mysterious to everyone except the historicists, who say that he feared the displeasure of the Spanish monarchy, his long-time patrons.28 Since Goya otherwise could sometimes show little concern for the sensibilities of the Bourbons, whose benumbed insensibility he didn’t hesitate to capture in a famous portrait of the royal family, the reason for his decision not to print the engravings probably lies there, but elsewhere too.29 With the Disasters, Goya makes himself scarce, certainly not the only time his practice as an art took such a turn.30 My wager is to treat Goya’s desistance not as merely politically evasive or professionally shrewd but “positively,” as intrinsic to the Disasters themselves and as part of their otherwise often forgotten perlocutionary materiality and force. Not doing something with the Disasters is also a way of doing something, traces of which are legible in the composition, content, and captions of the images, as well as in their materiality as images. The fact that the engravings remained uncirculated and without meaning- to- be- circulated during Goya’s lifetime threads together life and work, wartime and the aesthetic, in ambiguous but mortalizing ways, and puts to us that, for a time, for the decade that they took to engrave, and for the remainder of his life, the inventor and then the keeper of the Disasters lived disastrously; that is, he tarried with the worst in a condition of complex asociality, schooling himself, but always also in the company of others (for Goya went on to produce many other works that were prepared for spectators other than the artist to see), to live alone in the void of catastrophe, now, forever, without the ameliorative props that his public persona as fashionable portraitist and principal royal painter had furnished. Goya’s redaction, the lifelong scarcity of the relation of his engravings to public view, attests not only

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to the intolerability of the war world they depict but also to the intolerability of the violent—because politically frozen—postwar world in which they were finally set aside, the difficulty that Goya discerns in discovering a consequential space in which to see war and to be seen to see war. So Goya releases his images by refusing them a “refuge in visibility”31 and in the visibly social. One could almost say that, under these conditions, when one’s eyes fail, Goya chooses to see the disaster by touching it, feeling its unmistakable force, with all the grimy physicality that comes from laboring with acid and ink, paper and copper, hand and burin. This tact or recessiveness, this unusability about the Disasters, reminds us that the political and the historical are irreducible to the publically declarative. But this negation and abstention is otherwise difficult to discern if your optic is calibrated to the legible and the social, the same optic, as it happens, through which sovereign power arbitrarily parses the difference between who lives, whose lives are worthy of protection and preservation, and those who are made to die—which is to say between those who remain discernible to the law and those who are deemed to be unworthy of discernibility.32 In their queerly inoperative status, designed for publication but unpublished, powerfully executed but cached in a place of nonpower, the series might then be treated, after the work of Donald Winnicott, as a kind of transitional object:33 that is, as something Goya cherished, loved, even; in any case, something he worked on yet avoided working through, an object that he could and in fact needed to put or hold away from public consideration and consumption, shielding it not only from what Jan Mieszkowski calls “the spectacle logic of war”34 but also from being taken up by the reception histories into which his authorship was immersed and dispersed. The unusually ferocious use and abuse of the Disasters in recent years—perhaps most famously defaced and “rectified” by the British avant- garde artists Dinos and Jake Chapman35 —suggests that the engravings have become a transitional object for others as well, passionately attached to in the mode of being revisioned and knocked about, but always with the unwavering expectation that they cannot disappear, that they can somehow bear this treatment, and that it is in their nature to do so. We need to develop a better vocabulary to describe the curious animacy of these objects, these perdurable not- nothings that make nothing happen, whose living on seems less or more than biopolitical in nature—unless, of course, that vocabulary is precisely what criticism is. So Goya pauses, and although he went on painting and engraving after the war, with the Disasters he also pauses forever, takes a step in the form of engraving the series that is also not taking a step, his persona as court painter and satirist of the foibles of the literate class also overwritten by different

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impulses, for which he struggles to find words in the form of handwritten captions whose tone is hard to pin down and that often read like fragments of subtitles to an absolutely foreign film, or perhaps like words muttered uselessly at images that remain insentient and wordless—“silent,” as de Man says so evocatively about figures, “mute as pictures are mute.”36 This is the worst; There was nothing to be done and he died; Why?; There is no one to help them; This is what you were born for; I saw it. These and dozens of other declamations, ranging in tone from head- shaking disbelief to helplessness, resignation, bitterness, and dark humor, come across to contemporary ears like hashtags for the end of the world. They follow one another and sometimes communicate laterally with each other, but they track no sustained progress, no phenomenology of spirit. Their pointedly legible—if laconic and agonistic—“voice” ensures that Goya becomes an active figure in his own composite text, at once engraver and inaugural “reader” of the engravings. Their almost strangled brevity, as if Goya were caught between being at a loss for words and compulsively unable to hold his tongue, embodies the crisis that overtakes the artist and that, in effect, becomes his subject matter, namely, the unwillingness to look away coupled with the inability to know how to look at what he is seeing. The captions are often pronounced as if Goya were referring to someone else’s images, the estranging effect being not unlike speaking of himself in the third person. Whether the captions are a gloss that activates, schools, or even preempts viewers or whether they are there to demonstrate a certain selfsufficiency about the assemblage and thus a reticence about the participatory role of spectatorship is not entirely clear. Goya may well be “reading” his images, and “reading” them in such a strong way, in order to signal his ambivalence about the supplement of spectatorial seeing, and doing so at the precise point where—momentarily—we are struck blind to the images because we are reading words. What is evident is how passionately Goya—or the ardent persona who writes in the artist’s unmistakable hand—is in dialogue with his own engravings, his often exclamatory words, in striking contrast to the unerringly steady hand of his silent engravings.Yet we might well ask: for whom were the captions written during the long latency period when Goya lived with the unpublished Disasters in his studio, not to mention the more difficult to describe state in which the assemblage found itself after his death and before their publication? It is hard to shake the impression that the captions form one- half of a conversation that Goya is having with himself. The captions generate a dialogue with the images that we do not necessarily “hear” as participants who are presumed to be the primary subjects of the engravings’ visual and verbal address but “overhear” as always belated arrivals. In other words the captions aren’t so much confidential as a means by which

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to reshape our understanding of the meaning of a public’s participation with art and of art. In them we observe how the Disasters exhibit a care of the self rather than giving itself entirely over to a presumed spectatorship. Goya’s Disasters are not privative in the sense of being occult and unrecognizably idiomatic, but they were nonpublic until the historical accident of their being printed and circulated more than three decades after his death. That unexpectant delay ensures that spectatorship and the giving- to- be- seen of images are not givens but questions worthy of consideration. The interaction between the captions and the images, which is between them as much as it is with us, reproduces elements of the relationship that Goya forges with the Disasters while they remained in his custody. That dialogue ensures that when they were eventually published, they remained haunted by their lifelong condition of having- been- set- aside. Goya is hardly alone in this experiment. Rajan describes an analogous practice in the work of British Romantic poets who sheltered texts in various generative ways: written but never completed, completed but sutured into new poems, or completed but never published, as was the case with Goya’s assemblage. British poets early in the nineteenth century experiment with what Rajan calls the “textual abject,” the publically uncirculated text that is not inert or abandoned but the scene of dynamic recreation. As she suggests, the abject “protects . . . a space for another self to emerge.”37 But in Goya’s case, what are the qualities of this “self ”? And what is the nature of this “space”? The captions brim with a by turns scornful, exhausted, and sorrowful wit that can be so piercing and acerbic as to constitute a kind of attack on the images that they caption. Great deeds! With the dead! is a case in point. Goya’s exclamation cannot help but form a taunting gibe about the extraordinary feat of his own engraving and, by extension, the project of which it is such a memorable part, as if he were castigating himself for voyeuristically harnessing the worst to the visible or for treating the worst as something that is meant to be seen in a shared place and indeed to contribute to the orderly formation and management of such a place. Perhaps that is what makes seeing the Disasters in a gallery or paging through them in a classroom so compelling and strange; these contemplative experiences, which of course are not without enormous merit, also help reproduce the two imbricated illusions with which the Disasters have a deeply agonistic relationship: that the worst is elsewhere, and that here and elsewhere are separate spaces in a larger but ultimately continuous “world.” To look at the Disasters and to think with them is to feel the assemblage pushing back against being put to this worlding work, even as it uncontrollably contributes to it in the act of being taking up as published. Creating an image of bodies that are both mutilated and displayed aligns the designs of the artist

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with that of the torturers and art with pleasures that are desecrating. The dangerous intimacy of violence and the aesthetic says something important about their complicity, but it is also a way that Goya marshals the aesthetic to work with but not through the worst, that is, to be maximally proximate to the disasters of war, indeed, in some sense, mixing promiscuously with them, without either forfeiting the aesthetic or treating the aesthetic as a means to metabolize the worst or to achieve clarity about the worst, including clarity about the capacity of the artist to endure it.38 When Goya imagines the worst and dwells with it, this is what he can see: a view of humiliation and torture, dismembered bodies strewn about a battlefield, heaped in piles but also hung up, arranged like trophies to be observed, as if in a macabre tableau vivant. We are reminded that war is always already its reenactments, a stagy repetition that Goya’s images mimic uncontrollably. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? In what world could these losses be economized? For now, forever, time feels frozen, at a standstill. The presumed scopic pleasure taken by the torturers mixes uncomfortably with the horror or dismay that we are asked to feel. It is tempting to say that the image captures the outer limits of sovereign power over life and death, except Goya’s point would appear to be to register the effects of the complete derangement of the political, not its maximum projection; the desecrated body and the will to sport “playfully” with its remains marks the point at which the political enemy morphs into the enemy of the political, the phantasm who is no longer an adversary against whom one might fight in a “world” or for a “world” but a thing or a thinglike animal (and isn’t one of the barely submerged discomforting features of Goya’s bodies and body parts that they are hung like carcasses in an abattoir?) with which and to which anything is permitted and against which no harm, strictly speaking, can be done. The artist draws attention to the ensuing chaos, and the negatively creative power that flourishes in that pandemonium, where killing becomes overkilling, and when fury is brought to bear on bodies “whose death is no longer what needs to be assured.”39 Because this is the work of the bone collectors, we can be sure that there will be more of it, since it is in the nature of collecting not to be able to stop. Beyond the murder of human beings lies the demolition of the human form and the becoming- animal or becoming- thing of the enemy. Spinoza’s question, “What can a body do?,” is overwritten by its cruel correlative, “What can be done to a body?” Where the Dutch philosopher expressed wonder at the anonymous capacities of life, irreducible to volition, the Spanish artist looks on the fate of anonymous dead who are utterly exposed in death, as the dead always are, to another’s volition. Amid the waste of war, Goya’s exclamation of “Great deeds! With the dead!” all but

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drowns out Spinoza’s cry. The stillness of Goya’s macabre still life puts to us that war destroys not only bodies but also futures, all that a body might have done, all that makes a particular body particular. “We never know how we’re organized and how modes of existence are enveloped in somebody,” Gilles Deleuze argues. For those bent on defiling corpses, not knowing and having no prospect of knowing these particularities, which are extinguished in death, is the source of a murderous rage. Goya depicts an overgoing violence that is driven by a mad desire to tear the secret of embodiment from the body, dead or alive.40 The Spanish resistance against the French is also a ferocious civil war, and Great deeds! With the dead! may well depict the unrestricted violence that the insurgency inflicts on itself, the extrajudicial killings that swept the countryside as suspected collaborators and Enlighteners were executed and dismembered in the field. In the attempt to preserve the sanctity of a national “life,” no horror is too much because there can be no end to the work of embodying the invisible enemy for the purposes of its annihilation. A lesson about the arbitrary, belligerent, and foundationless foundation of the political is here to be had, but how is that possible when the educability of human beings is counted among the war dead? Never has a classroom been less promising or had fewer measurable outcomes. And yet Goya looks at what is left of academicism, retracing its shapely contours with his living hand, contemplating bodies and parts of bodies that cite without necessarily jettisoning the aesthetic education of man. The artist positions corpses that have been routed through adjacent and competing aesthetic frames, including classical statuary (about which I have more to say) and still life (a form with which Goya had experimented, always painting pictures of dead things, anatomist drawings [especially Vesalius’s dissected torsos, some of them depicted in natural settings], and the conventions governing medieval and early modern portrayals of the martyrdom of the saints).41 In Goya’s hands, aesthetic frames are shown to be among the frames of war. Observing the survival or living- on of aesthetic forms in this desolate space, it is hard not to recall Maurice Blanchot, who, reading Robert Antelme, remarks that “man is indestructible and that he can nonetheless be destroyed,”42 meaning not that some essence of humanity survives its demolition but, quite to the contrary, what is indestructible is the destructibility of the human, and that the human is irreducible to its destructibility, that there is a destructibility out of which, as it were, the human form, and all the biopolitical worlds of meaning that are dependent on it, contingently emerge and fade. We cannot know in advance what the human form will take, and wartime makes that contingency, which might otherwise be the source of enormous creativity, horrifically evident.

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Goya’s mutilated corpses put to us that even the dead will not be safe if the enemy prevails.43 Or is the more radically sobering point of engraving images of men doing awful things to corpses to demonstrate that custody of the dead always lies entirely and uncontrollably with those who come after, whether for good or for ill, whether to inspire faith or fear? Does the source of the plate’s uncanny power lie in making luridly visible the work of the living others in whose shaping hands the dead find themselves delivered, and delivered not contingently, according to this or that circumstance, but essentially, as if commanded by an irrevocable law that commands the living to follow the dead and to take up the dead without necessarily knowing what this going before the living and this inexistent relation means or knowing ahead of time what form it will take? But who is the enemy when the objective of warfare is not simply to defeat others who are said to be belligerents but, as Jean- François Lyotard says, “to kill their dead”?44 Goya denies us the opportunity to determine whether we are looking specifically at a Spanish or a French atrocity, one of several ways in which the image refuses spectatorial desires as well as captivates them. His point is that the nationality of the corpses doesn’t matter anymore, not only because the dead are indifferent to such distinctions but also because, through a macabre form of wartime chiasmus, the living now prove to be insensate to the dignity of the dead. The plate’s bitter caption, Great deeds! With the Dead!, is shouted into a void where the dismemberment of corpses does not invert heroism, replacing courageous acts with cowardly ones, but, more radically, demolishes the benumbed emptiness of narratives that resort to understanding war in such moralizing terms. In the place where slaughter becomes an end in itself, there is no why.45 Among other things, the caption expresses the self- cancelling futility of feeling outrage at the demise of outrage. Great deeds! With the Dead! is, in effect, the aesthetic form that that futility takes. The most terrifically torn body, armless and headless, frankly recalls the form of the Belvedere Torso, the classical statuary representing the serene body of Hercules after his death and apotheosis (Figure 3). Looking at Goya’s abandoned and mutilated corpse, we are asked to trace the lineaments of the antique precursor that is also nude and posthumous. The contrast between the two bodies does not so much obscure their generative points of contact as dynamically hold a place for them to be explored. Goya had done drawing studies of the statuary during a visit to Rome much earlier in his life.46 Traces of the Torso also inform plate 37, in which a dismembered man is impaled on a tree branch, his broad and muscular back not “curved in lofty contemplation,” as Johann Joachim Winckelmann says of the Belvedere Torso, but speared with a bladelike branch and displayed for others

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Figure 3. Francesco Faraone Aquila, Two Views of the Belvedere Torso, from Domenico de Rossi and Paolo Alessandro Maffei, Raccolta di statue antiche e moderne (Verlagsort: Rome, 1704), plate 9. Reproduced with the permission of Elisabeth Legge.

to contemplate . . . or ignore, as a reclined soldier nearby is at liberty to do.47 Goya’s caption for that plate is This is worse, as if to challenge Winckelmann, who, in his acclaimed History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), had made the most powerful case yet for treating the Torso as an image of what was best about the art of ancient Greece. We could say that what is beautiful in art can be horrifying in actuality, but that is to assume either that what we are looking at when we look at an engraving or a sculpture is not also an actuality or that art is an abstention from actuality.48 These are assumptions that Goya tests, and tests at the exact point that images of the beautiful shadow images of the worst. Alex Potts explains that Winckelmann consolidates the view that the statuary represented “the fullest surviving embodiment of the Greek ideal” by exemplifying the “becalmed beautiful body.”49 Beautiful it may be, but perhaps not quite becalmed enough, since Winckelmann, who otherwise insists on the

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luminous self- sufficiency of the fragment, cannot resist dreaming of a reconstituted body that is still in the possession of a noggin. As he says, had Hercules’s skull survived, his “upwardly turned head . . . would have been occupied with a joyful review of the great deeds he had accomplished.”50 Goya’s plate engages Winckelmann’s Torso in very close quarters, through both image and caption. The art historian haunts the Torso with the equivalent of a phantom limb, which is imagined to feel and think where there is no flesh to feel and no mind to think. Resorting to a kind of prosopopoeia, he attributes sensate life to the blank insensibility that characterizes the marble sculpture in its dismembered entirety. Winckelmann’s need to supplement the headless body of Hercules with a mind joyfully contemplating his great deeds suggests that the torso’s ruined state, “abused and mutilated to the extreme, deprived of its head, arms, and legs,” as he concedes in the opening words of his account, troubles his claim that the Greek hero really has “purified himself . . . of the slag of humanity.”51 Den Schlacken der Menschheit: like a curse word, the phrase jumps out of Winckelmann’s otherwise elegant remarks, the intensity of his language remembering the cinders of an uneconomized remainder that his aesthetics would rather disavow.52 Winckelmann fantasizes piecing together an intact body, while Goya gathers the sheared parts, or rather some of the parts—head, arms, torso . . . no genitals—into an assemblage that is decidedly not a body and not something en route to becoming a body. When we look at that clustering, whose segments Goya makes proximate but inertly unrelated, it is hard not to think that we are looking at a visual figure for the disintegrated seriality of the Disasters themselves. Goya’s plate does not renounce the Belvedere Torso as anachronistic, naïve, or escapist but works archeologically with it, returning the antique body to the maximally “abused and mutilated” condition that Winckelmann concedes it is in. Goya invites us to trace the contours of that torso as a body in pieces rather than a piece of the body. Winckelmann can find it difficult to maintain the difference, veering between, on the one hand, feeling his way through the torso’s individually captivating elements and, on the other hand, observing the body’s remains in their splendid autonomy. This is an ambivalence that Goya exploits in order to do memorable things with the dead. Both plate 39 and the Belvedere Torso represent the aftermath of “great deeds,” one Herculean and recollected in tranquility, the other perverse and following a frenzy of desecration. The Spanish artist takes Winckelmann at his word, showing us what “humanity” actually looks like if it is treated as mere “slag”: bodies get strewn and dismembered rather than consecrated and buried when men and women are no longer considered combatants but waste to be burned or sloughed off. But Winckelmann’s Torso already

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communicates this negative knowledge about the remains of history, and this appears to be one of the principal reasons why Goya borrows features from it. The “great deeds” that Hercules “would” have been observed contemplating had his commemorative statue not lost its head brim, after all, with killing violence and with the blood that must be shed so that the hero can be elevated to a condition of bloodless serenity. The history of that violence is written in stone, as it were, hidden in plain sight in the shape of the torso’s celebrated disfigurement. Hercules’s labors are deeds that repeatedly and remorselessly deal death to others and that culminate in his own death, but the greatest deed with the dead may be by Winckelmann, who wills the inanimate torso—and its disastrous history—into a beautiful form. And yet Winckelmann puts his entire “description,” as he says, under the heading of “the mutilated Hercules,” an aegis whose frank acknowledgment of the Torso’s marred appearance and history doesn’t overwrite its claim to beauty but helps bend it toward something new and strange. What constitutes beauty for Winckelmann turns out to be quite variegated, which accounts for the fact that the relationship between the Belvedere Torso and the headless and limbless corpse in plate 39 is nothing if not complicated. Goya hangs his version of the torso upside down, perhaps as a sign of disrespect for the nostalgic pieties of Romantic Hellenism that Winckelmann’s work spawned. (To hang a flag upside down can be either a sign of grave distress or a desecration; Goya’s torso embodies both gestures.) Winckelmann speaks of the Belvedere Torso’s “virile maturity,”53 whereas Goya castrates his man— indeed, all three men. Goya may also marshal afterimages of the beautiful to disrupt the dangerous inclination to imagine war as both sublime and manly, a double temptation to which even Kant succumbed before the grotesqueries of the Revolutionary Wars and the prospect of still worse wars brought him to his senses.54 In remembering the Torso as a mutilated corpse, and thus, in a sense, more faithfully recalling its actual form, Goya commits himself not to the beautiful but to the powers of the aesthetic and does so not to flee from history but to archive its “slag” or remains. Goya is in an agonistic dialogue with history but his citations of the antique body of academicism remind us that he saw a way to explore the presence of the remainders of history in art through engaging the history of art. And the discursive practice of that history, after all, begins with Winckelmann’s text. The allusions to the Torso serve to remind us that although the devastating scene that Goya depicts no doubt took place, and indeed, repeatedly took place, the mutilated bodies also came into existence with the image in which we see them. Winckelmann treats the body’s mutilation not as a lack but as a sign of a certain plenitude, albeit, as we shall see, a plenitude that differentiates itself

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from wholeness in ways that unexpectedly connect his antique statuary to Goya’s mutilated figure. In the Torso, we are assured, we encounter a state of absolute calm that is no longer troubled by doing or thinking, having to work one’s limbs or use one’s head.55 But of course this is a logic whose oddness could hardly have been illegible to Goya, perhaps especially after headless and limbless bodies became part of what war was bringing to sight.56 Blake had unmasked the premises of this sort of thinking as delusory and dangerous in “The Chimney Sweeper,” where an older child- slave pacifies a younger one’s objections to being mutilated: “Hush, Tom! never mind it,” he says, “for when your head’s bare, / You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.”57 Without hair to be ruined, the little boy is made to feel magically unruined, just as Hercules can be characterized as having transcended the rapacious desires of the world by being deprived of his head and limbs. Why not then cut away his genitals? Goya appears to ask this very question, before doing just that. Seen through Goya’s version, the Torso’s beautiful lack is haunted by sterility and death, just as Blake’s happy but hairless waif resembles the blackened corpse that he is doomed by others to become. Like Kant, the Spanish artist may well have objected to the suffocatingly constrained circumstances in which the sole alternative to a warring life of ferocious acquisition and accumulation by dispossession (epitomized by enslaving children or collecting corpses for the purpose of display) were angels with bright keys and the peace of the grave, so- called. As Kant suggests in the opening move of Toward Perpetual Peace, the hospitable invitation to blissful inaction can point you to a cemetery.58 Under the sign of the aesthetic, beauty and cadaverous immobility share a relationship that is finer than one of contrast. After remarks by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Rancière notes that by embracing the Belvedere Torso, Winckelmann specifically disavows affirming beauty in conventional terms as the expression of the interplay of harmonious proportion and expression. It is the Torso’s commitment to inarticulacy and its indifference to agreeable symmetry that finally makes it so generative for those who possess a certain “penetration of vision,” as Benjamin says of Winckelmann.59 The mutilated torso forms the extraordinary occasion to think of the human form differently, which is to say not as a singular form, and perhaps not even as human, but instead as a depthless surface that is always already “ruined,” a topography on which the artist and viewer trace the undulations of appearances and disappearances, attending to the localized pulses of slackening and tension, the articulation of mounds and folds, and the plasticity of belly, chest, back, thighs, veins, bone, muscle, and “fatty skin,” all without being compelled immediately to zoom out to take in a broader

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picture since, strictly speaking, there is no broader picture, just more torso, more not- wholeness, more not “all image”60 to observe and parse and feel. As Winckelmann says, “The artist will admire in the contours of this body the ever- changing flow of one form into another and the gliding features that rise and fall like waves and are engulfed in another.”61 In the anonymous unfurling of those surging and receding “waves,” Rancière glimpses “new potentials of the body for the art of tomorrow: potentials that are freed when expressive codes and the will to express are revoked, when the opposition between an active or passive body . . . are revoked.”62 That may well be the case in Winckelmann, but by the time Goya takes up the Belvedere Torso, the future is foreclosed by the advent of the worst. What Rancière reads positively in Winckelmann’s Torso, Goya reads negatively, repurposing a nascent aesthetic of fragmentation for a mutilated age. If there is an “art of tomorrow,” it is disastrous in kind, which helps explain why Goya kept his assemblage unpublished—that is, in a state in which aesthetic practice is sheltered in the shape of that which is always coming. In other words, by giving the Disasters a studio rather than a public articulacy, Goya safeguards an “art of tomorrow” from the predations of a totalizing present. As Benjamin notes, Winckelmann’s unusual attention to the sensuousness of the body’s fluidity, using his eyes to feel his way over its mobile reticulated surface, “part by part, limb by limb,” makes the classicist’s “vision” counterintuitively “un- classical.” “It is no accident that the subject is a torso,” Benjamin notes, for it makes perfect sense that a body that starts to fragment under a certain kind of aesthetic gaze should itself be a fragment.63 It is no accident either that when Goya envisions the dismembered corpses displayed on the Spanish battlefield, a battlefield that is now coextensive with Spain itself, he engraves them partly after Winckelmann’s Torso, complexly honoring a fragment in an assemblage that is also a kind of torso, abandoning the long view and eschewing wholeness, seamlessness, or proportionality. When the art historian takes the Belvedere Torso well beyond the already ruined character of the marble body, he evokes a threshold on the other side of which form may no longer be legible as a body and a body no longer legible as form. The body politic of Spain could be said to have suffered an analogous catastrophe, leaving Goya not to try to pick up the pieces, which would suggest his art was salvific in nature, like Isis gathering together the mangled limbs of Osiris, but to harbor an aesthetic space for this detritus as detritus and for the granular memory of the violence that sunders the world and the very idea of a world. With the Disasters, maneuvering through repeated waves of the worst is the order of the day, a lesson he may well have learned by seeing Winckelmann’s Torso the way that Benjamin or Rancière sees it—more or less as the poets do.64

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To negotiate with the serial compendium of mutilated settings making up the Disasters, without guidance from narrative cues or an overarching frame, we too must proceed in the thick of it, “part by part, limb by limb.” In the absence of any convincing shapeliness much less organic form, the Disasters unfold (but is “unfold” even the right term here, for doesn’t such a figure do violence to violence, compelling discontinuity to be continuous?) through multiple adjacencies, one print stacked abruptly against the next, just as bodies in individual plates are sometimes left in piles or hung unrelatedly in trees. In Ronald Paulson’s memorable description, in the Disasters “one crime simply follows another,” meaning that the assemblage is arranged minimally as a serial succession of image- events, and little else.65 (After Winckelmann’s phrasing, we could say that in Goya, “one crime wave follows another.”) The images and the captions rise and fall like waves and are engulfed in one another. The Disasters is thus not unlike Blake’s Lambeth prophecies, texts in which, as Tilottama Rajan argues, history is “not teleological but governed by power.”66 No deep structure organizes the events that we are given to see, meaning that the assemblage threatens at any point to fall apart into its discrete pieces, plates whose individual details often make more sense than their totality. Indeed, one could argue that since their publication, the Disasters have mostly been taken up in pieces, plate by plate, rather than as an unstable assemblage whose interior organizing energies are only ever fleetingly legible and in any case unconvincing in the face of the disaster of one thing implacably succeeding another. To what world does the assemblage of Disasters belong if it does so much to abstain from belonging to itself? As Didi- Huberman says of Callot, Goya, and Picasso, “The historical world, in their work, becomes a haunting memory, a scourge of imagining, a proliferation of figures—of resemblances and differences—around the same vortex of time.”67 Great deeds! With the dead! condenses into a single plate featuring the evacuation of an identifiable world into whose vacuum trickles desultory ghosts of the human form and the remnants of the aesthetic education of man. Unnamed individuals with indeterminate allegiances are butchered out in the open, but in an unidentifiable place and by unseen killers. This anonymization and scarcity, which act to take the scene at hand out of time, lay bare the sheer projection of force and the becoming- force of history in which the artist finds himself immured. The Disasters come to resemble a text like Blake’s The [First] Book of Urizen, in which, as Rajan observes, “history is depicted in terms of ‘unseen conflictions’ and ‘abrupt’ changes . . . that are the archaeological symptoms of its structuring by an arbitrarily (im)positional power that makes the inscription of any individual event in a sequential narrative virtually impossible.”68 The

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disoriented stillness of the mutilated corpses, which are arguably the purest expression of arbitrary power, the limit case of insult to injury, is broken only by the exclamatory agitation of Goya’s caption, which discharges certain affective intensities but without furthering a narrative, securing an omniscient vantage point, plotting an escape, offering an alternative, or marking a safe distance from the worst. 69 Almost all of the captions in the assemblage could be similarly characterized. Some of the subsequent printings of the Disasters are without the captions, suggesting a certain detachability about them. We cannot even be sure whose words these are (although, of course, it is almost impossible not to attribute them to “Goya” or to a “Goya” imagined to be a “voice” and nothing more), further contributing to the sense that what we are reading is an irruption of feeling and a burst of thought as much as words emanating from an identifiable psychic depth. —Fourth- person narration, let us call it, at once passionate, depersonalized, worldly, and terse. Goya gives his images over to his own adjacent readings without attempting to fit the captions into a larger whole or trying to make his assemblage speak with one voice. Looking at Great deeds! With the dead!, the viewer needs a kind of double vision to see what is shown: the bodies are massed together, occupying the same pictorial space, but they are otherwise dumbly unconnected to each other. The areas between the corpses and body parts are as much a part of the total composition of this image as the bodies themselves, but these are spaces of separation whose uncoupled inertness makes their physical proximity into insurmountable gulfs that reproduce the slack incommensurability that each body has with itself. Goya mostly fills in the spaces with darkly shaded vegetation that feels like so much visual nonsense, as if making up for the stupor of disconnection that ensures that the plate will always be less than the sum of its parts. That the leafy branches look contrived, inserted into the frame like so much decoration, puts to us that Goya knows it is nonsense too. The specter of vacuous betweenness summons deep- seated desires to make or recreate connections, and perhaps never more insistently so than in the presence of the aesthetic object. In the case of Great deeds! With the dead! and, indeed, with the Disasters generally, we are invited not to make up for an interconnectedness that is not there but rather to respond to the strange form of connectedness that is: namely, the condition of a shared and shearing division that Jean- Luc Nancy evocatively describes as partage.70 Winckelmann’s Torso is a fascinating precursor because it forms such an important part in schooling viewers in such desires, while also paradoxically tarrying with the assembly of what remains irreducibly apart. As Rancière says, that is what makes Winckelman’s Torso an augury of the “art of tomorrow.” When Keats’s Apollo gazes into the face of Moneta, he is confronted with just

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such a future: “Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions,/ Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,/ Creations and destroyings,”71 an accumulation not only of detritus through which to sift “part by part, limb by limb,” but also the sheer side- by- sideness of the detritus, the “dead spots” of meaningless contiguities and the inscriptions of difference for which the brute seriality of one thing following another is but a trope.72 We could say that “the inexistent relationality”73 among the dead and between the living and the dead that we see in Goya’s plate provides a literal expression to a pell- mell existence in which “one crime follows another,” except, of course, there is nothing literal about what we observe, only lurid figures that call attention to themselves as figures by citing authoritative classical representations of the human body in a wartime setting in which that authority no longer means anything. Looking into the Disasters, we are faced with the prospect of assembling the disconnected parts, much as viewers seem almost irresistibly drawn to the formal puzzle of trying to match the arms and head with the torso of the dismembered man, a kind of ghastly equivalent to the game of counting fingers and toes. But to what avail, for a man is always more than the sum of his parts, and in any case he cannot be a man when one part, the seat of hominizing wholeness and virility, remains missing, swapped out by Goya for a dark and ragged wound. What gets gathered and yet separated out matters, yet so does how it is gathered. Among the “Creations and destroyings” is the classical statuary and the aesthetic education of man with which it was closely associated, whose remains Goya treats as remains, not dismissively but with “lucid despair,”74 to use Thomas Pfau’s honed phrase for “excessively emblematic”75 thinkers “around 1819”76 who are awash in what he calls “a thoroughly over- determined world in which all objects, identities, and possible forms of action appear owned and exhausted a priori.”77 Of the settings of the Disasters Robert Hughes remarks that “this is a landscape without resources,” but this without- ness is not a vacancy but, quite to the contrary, haunted by the history of the present and the scarcity of the future.78 What is perhaps scarcest is the artist’s faith in the power of demarcating “a body through a boundary, the form by which it is bound,” as Judith Butler puts, of which the classically aestheticized body is the paradigmatic instance.79 Goya shows no trace of nostalgia for the loss of that faith, and why would he when the immunologic of war,80 which is predicated on setting life against life, life against life deemed unworthy of life, has resulted in such devastation? We begin to see that Goya uses the antique body to mutilate the aesthetic that, as Marc Redfield well puts it, defines “art as the sign of the human, the human as producer of itself, and history as the ongoing work that is humanity.”81 The fact that Goya unworks this labor in the form of art reminds us that

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the object is not to abandon the aesthetic, much less to mark the place of its destruction, but, rather, to practice its disastrous survival. Even worse . . .This is worse . . .The worst is to beg . . .This is the worst! With this desperate chain of captions, Goya evokes the impossibility of taking measure of the disasters at hand or of judging them proportionally. Instead, the artist experiences them as intensifying both inexhaustibly and repeatedly. We are here denied the minimal consolation that the worst has taken place because Goya’s captions make it feel as though worsening and the worst are doomed to occur without end and in the absence of any organizing narrative or clarifying perspective. By deciding against publication, Goya refused to let the Disasters form part of that perspective, and thus from becoming a vantage point from which one could say, the disasters were then but this is now. The ad nauseam repetition—worse and worst—marks the brute passage of potentially endless wartime in which, to recall Paulson’s remarks, “one crime simply follows another,”82 except even to say this is to miss the stranger thing, the more difficult thing to think, namely, that “one (worst) crime follows another.” There must be more worsts out there, we imagine, waiting to be seen and unable not to be looked at. With no world, no outside- the- disaster or other- than- the- disaster from which to determine or rank degrees of suffering and cruelty with any confidence, the disasters worsen, and the worst happens in the way that nothing happens in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, namely, more than once.83 Somehow we find ourselves observing the brute seriality of the most atrocious. Goya thereby uses his captions to signal a willingness to tarry with the disasters, but in a fashion that frankly embraces a certain inoperativity of thought.—And spectatorship. For what are we looking at if what we are said to see is, recurrently, the worst? If there is no “exterior,” then where do the engravings position themselves vis- à- vis the disasters? As Jan Mieszkowski elegantly argues, the “Napoleonic dilemma of how to tell a war story when there was no longer an outside to the war grew even more vexing as it ceased to be clear whether one could speak of an ‘inside’ to the participants.”84 We could say that the disasters worst Goya, but they do so without blinding or destroying him and, conspicuously, without provoking any attempt to better them or to inscribe them into a recognizable war narrative—except, perhaps, one that turns on itself and is the site of its own disaster. The disasters are the phenomena to whose maximal atrocity Goya is returned again, meaning that the worst is not a singular event that he takes in psychically but, rather, a pandemonium for which he provides accommodation in the form of his unpublished engravings. The insistence on the worst reverses the expectation, perhaps more powerfully felt today than in Goya’s day,85 that the psyche’s elemental relationship with disaster

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is to protect itself and to diminish violence, not allow for it more fully as humanly possible, a position that includes thinking beyond the human, and in ways that do not take the form of the human as a given. The Disasters are like a Tardis box of horror, composed of an unfurling “interior” space that must make itself much more expansive than should be the case. Although he is speaking of the drawings from Goya’s Album D, T. J. Clark precisely captures this curious quality characterizing the artist’s images: “There is never a feeling of the trauma being dwelled on in order to be mastered. There is not even the feeling that the horror is a trauma, or that drawing it necessarily lessens it. Maybe the opposite. It isolated it; it specifies it; it gives it the blank of the page to live in.”86 We could say that Goya does not put the worst in its place but puts it in a place. The “blank of the page” forms the equivalent of a “holding environment” for the worst, soliticious of the disasters but also unconfirming, a milieu that assents to the imagination of horror and to bearing the weight of its extraordinary cruelty without either being used up or seeking to neutralize or economize its hurtfulness.87 The worst is entrusted to the assemblage, but, like all acts of faith, this task is undertaken and can only be undertaken without the expectation of return or reciprocity, without making the worst answerable to the aesthetic or the aesthetic answerable to the worst. The Disasters demonstrate a kind of asymmetrically resilient openness to the remains of history, and frankly declare that sometimes nothing more is demanded, required, or possible. Goya is not absent to the experience of the disaster but time and again presents himself to its utter ruinousness, as if compelled to look persistently at that which, strictly speaking, can be seen but once, and then only because that vision is framed by the capacity to look away or to have seen otherwise or to have seen less. The Disasters in their entirety constitute an act of looking not in spite but precisely because of what Didi- Huberman calls “our inability to know how to look at them today.”88 To look but not necessarily to know how to look means observing the worst without apprehending ahead of time or in the aftermath what the worst summons from us specifically as observers. Goya says “This is the worst,” but, strictly speaking, he cannot mean what he says because there is always worse and more of the worst in a milieu of worldlessness that lacks redemption, orientation, or even the hint of relief that might come with the slackening of atrocity leading up to and falling away from the worst. The whole idea of a regressive worsening and the advent of the worst starts to disintegrate before our eyes, and yet Goya hangs on to it, reproducing the conceit of responding to the disasters in a measured and measuring way, as if art could metabolize or comprehend the horror by

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putting it into pictures, while also creating images whose captions remind us that we can do nothing to lessen the worsening and the worst—except to cede a “page” to it, one of many, without end. With “the worst,” Goya does not gesture to the end of the disaster, nor does he try to mark its extreme outer limit. For the artist, the worst is that the worst that arrives afresh as if he were to unable and unwilling to do anything but acknowledge its arrival and look at its hideousness. The worst is that he has survived the worst and that he is living with the worst in the moment when he says, “This is the worst,” while knowing that he will need to say this again. The worst is to see the worst more than once and to see it each time as if for the first time and for the last time. “For it is not in the name of a better and truer world that thought captures the intolerable in this world,” Gilles Deleuze argues, “but, on the contrary, it is because this world is intolerable that it can no longer think a world or think itself.”89 What does no longer being able to “think a world” look like? Plate 69 (Figure 2) of the Disasters may offer a clue because of its commitment to tarrying with a disaster that is so complete and so completely absorbing that nothing appears to escape its gravitational pull. Nada, as we have seen, is in fact the title Goya gave the print, as if to bring the viewer into the closest possible proximity with nihilation while also preempting the thought of “a better or truer world.” Nada would appear to name the design or desire that the print thoughtlessly has on us, putting us at the scene of the crime, so to speak, but without offering the means or hope that we might make much or for that matter make anything of it. The caption invites us to dwell with the disaster and do nothing more, an almost impossible task, to be sure, but one worth experimenting with in a way analogous to Kant’s notion of an aesthetic judgment that sees as the poets do, that is, attentively wide- eyed but without a thought of assimilation or comprehension. Nothing is what thinking the worst feels like. Nada. Ello lo dice, Goya’s caption reads: “Nothing. It says as much” (or “Nothing. It says [nothing]” or “Nothing. That’s what it says”). The mysterious engraving for which this “nothing” is both the caption and a word scrawled into an otherwise blank page in the body of the image calls strenuously for an understanding that it also bluntly refuses. That the handwriting and the writing hand are the same once again makes Goya into a figure in his own text. Without any confidence in the concept of a world, and thus bereft of the assurance that “the world is given as this world for us,” to recall Claire Colebrook’s phrasing,90 Goya abandons his image to the questionable provenance of a nihilating stutter. A morass of shadings and hatchings dominate the top half of the engraving, some yielding barely discernible if surreally incongruous shapes, including a floating scale and a

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cluster of faces that fade into uncertain scratchings from which faces might or might not be made. Shapes that were not there at some imagined outset now are there, or scarcely there. Below, a skinned and skeletalized figure, its monstrous features contorted in effort, appears at first either to be sinking into or struggling from an inky grave . . . until we realize that it is the planar surface of the engraving itself in which the figure’s bare shape is most palpably immured. Against a chaotic background we observe fragments of human forms—bodiless heads, half a body stripped of its flesh—trapped between the birth and death of their own emergence as forms. The effect is profoundly estranging, as if the print were flickering between the illusion of a dark depth and the depthlessness of the print as such, as between pictorialism and the materiality of the picture. In this way, plate 69 self- referentially gives us what Goya’s caption says it gives us, nada, the strange substanceless thing that the print elementally is: “a spectral quasi- object suspended in nothingness, an inconsistent bunch of squiggles that cannot ever know itself as such,”91 as Timothy Morton might say. Nada thus functions as a kind of interdiction, emanating from both within and without the picture frame, pointing in words to what the image has already accomplished, that is, refusing unequivocally to be an image of something other than itself. The nothingness of the nonrepresentational ground of the image stops us in our tracks, as it were, commanding us to stay with the inscriptive surface where we may be less likely to believe that the aesthetic can apprehend the disasters of war, or embody the sublimely negative knowledge that that disastrousness cannot be comprehended. Goya’s assemblage does not appear to have comprehension or appropriation of any sort as its goal. Quite to the contrary, it is more a question of letting rather than making the worst matter, assuming that such a distinction could be imagined, and of staying close to its grim unfurling without necessarily attempting to metabolize its hurtfulness or to create sense out of its senselessness. “Not, then, to idealize or incorporate the other’s world into my own, not to make of that world a world,” as Michael Naas puts it, reading Derrida. But strictly speaking, “to live with the . . . end of the world” would mean living with the end of a world of life, by which I mean a common world normatively given over to the living, to the principles of preservation, progress, and productivity, and thus to the immuno- logic of war. Central to that logic is the sanctification of life that forms an alibi for a homicidal power so hyperbolically enormous that it can seek to kill the dead by mutilating their remains.92 To live with the end of the world means bearing lifelessness and worldlessness—what I have called “scarcity”— but eschewing, for a moment, the consolations of mourning and the economization or putting- to- work of loss. In Derrida’s words, recalling Celan, “ ‘the

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world is far, the world has gone, in the absence or distance of the world, I must, I owe it to myself to carry you, without world, without the foundation or grounding of anything in the world.’” This taking- on, he adds importantly, occurs “even before carrying the other in oneself in mourning.” In other words, prior to there being “me” and “you” and the picturable world or worlds that we imagine inhabiting, there is a worldless portage.93 Perhaps to create proofs but abstain forever from publication is a way of acknowledging that before shouldering a burden one has already carried a weight which is nothing less than the weight of the world. Or, to be more precise, a carrying, a giving- over of a blank page, and little else, is the anarchically worldless space in which the burdened subject materializes and finds itself compelled to form and reform a world. Of the preliminary drawing for The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Johannes Grave argues that “viewers encounter strokes, lines, and flourishes about which it is impossible to determine whether they function merely as hatching or are already the first suggestion of the emerging contour of a representational form.”94 The drawing, Grave notes, “does not just depict the imagination’s independent activity during sleeping and dreaming, but is also the place where it is carried out.”95 But what is significant is that plate 69 of the Disasters is not a preparatory sketch en route to becoming a finished print—The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is arguably among the most famous of Goya’s prints—but the state of the engraving when Goya brought his work to a halt in the form of the Disasters. The queer indistinction of the image, which is all but overcome by its nonrepresentational ground, is exactly where Goya left matters, as if making its precarity as an image permanent. What we are seeing resists being recuperated as a picture of the artist’s imagination at work, for this would be to phenomenalize the chaotic inscriptive differences that lie just beyond the human eye. The drawing of something—a desiccated corpse, for example, or, after Grave, an image that captures the “imagination” at work—obscures a troubling indeterminacy, a nonphenomenal minimality on the brink of appearance but little else. We find ourselves peering into what Lucretius calls the Metakosmia (or intermundia), the void—the “studio,” as it were, of the nature of things—where worlds have not formed and may never form.96 The uncertain play of emerging and submerging forms across an invisible threshold makes it possible to consider all the shapes that Goya might have drawn, but did not. The wisdom of Jean- Luc Godard’s remark rings true: in the absence of the just image, there is just an image.97 Among the strangest captions that Goya added to the engravings is perhaps the most ordinary one: I saw it (Yo lo vi) (Figure 4). Appending the phrase “I

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Figure 4. Plate 44: Yo lo vi (I saw it). Courtesy of the Pomona College Museum of Art, Gift of Norton Simon.

saw it” was in Goya’s time a banally familiar convention in poetry and engraving, meaning not “I saw this with my own eyes” (Goya appears not actually to have seen most of the horrors that he depicts) but instead functioning as a promise of two things: first, this happened, this event really took place, and second, I am a “war spectator,” the one who can “create the illusion of being there when dreadful things happen.”98 Mieszkowski would describe this as an example of “Napoleonic war imaginary,”99 but to do so would perhaps understate the curious rhetorical substitution by which Goya’s signature is underwritten. For “I saw it” is a kind of conjuring, the routing of authorship through its citation, and the invention of a seeing and imagining artistic subject that is imposed on the blank anonymity—the “it happened”—of the disastrous event, an event, moreover, that that fictional “I” hails as the spectral ground of its own authority. Put simply, “I saw it” is made to stand as a proxy for that which I did not see, except figuratively, day for night. “I saw it” posits a world available to sight and knowledge, but draws attention to itself as a positing and little more. The insentient operation of rhetoric suggests that Goya is leaving traces of being present to the disaster in ways that are in excess of the imaginary and the phenomenological. Hidden in plain sight, Goya’s citation repurposes an otherwise tired convention to register something new and very hard to say, namely, the permeation of the artist by the worst—which is not quite the same thing as seeing it imaginatively as a

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spectator or testifying to it as a witness, although Goya was also caught up in the terrible labor of both those practices. In its self- arresting brevity or inhibition, “I saw it” instead recalls something Michael Herr says about the experience of another disastrous war, that is, the disaster before Iraq and Afghanistan, before Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. “A lot of it never made it in at all,” Herr writes. “It just stayed stored there in your eyes,” his stressed syllables slowing time down, as if one could have the experience of “it,” an unnamed catastrophe in Southeast Asia, and not so much miss the meaning, as in the case of trauma, as be stuck with it or stuck to it, visually. 100 —To experience or imagine not much more than that, not much more than that happened and “I saw it” . . . and for now, forever, to hold those two things in one place, eyes wide shut. In its bareness or scarcity, “I saw it” is a declaration of adequation and just- enoughness, of a moment of sheer commensurateness with the worst, whatever this coming together might mean or come to mean. “I saw it” thus withholds itself, abstaining from moving too quickly to what we are schooled normatively into wanting to think, namely, “I saw this, but I wish that I saw something else, something better.” When, near the end of his life, Goya left behind the plates and proofs for the Disasters and moved to France, perhaps he acknowledged something that had always been the case, including all the years in which he lived with them in his studio—namely, that the worst remains stuck to the assemblage, and the assemblage stuck to it—with or without the supplement of the “I” who sees. Nada. That’s what it says (Ello lo dice): Goya’s caption tries to give the engraving over to a kind of anonymous stammering, “it says what it says,” as if it were a nothing forever on the brink of something. Not for nothing did subsequent editors of Goya’s engravings mutilate this inscription most of all, revising it to Nada.We shall see or It will say (Ello dirá), the expectation of future meaning, uninsurable as it is, being so much more preferable to the scarcity of the predicament of sheer expectation. That this significant recuperative change in the caption’s meaning could be made by only slightly doctoring the caption’s characters returns us to the materiality of the letter and to the nonphenomenal vision that fragments language into its meaningless parts. What would it mean then to say “I saw it,” and leave it at that, to experiment with the very idea of living that letting be among all the other ways that one lives with others? The indeterminacy of the referent “it” redounds back upon the “I” who is posited as seeing, for it is possible that the pronoun refers to the engraving itself, and so functions as a prosopopoeia, an animating projection on the engraving that “sees” without ever knowing what it sees. What would it mean to see as the engraver or perhaps as the engraving sees, to store the worst for now, forever, to dwell with disaster but

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in an unknown because asocial, unproductive, untimely, and nondeclarative way? In giving itself to be read rather than seen (writing perhaps being the most vivid instance of a nonmimetic image), “I see it” reminds us that in their mimetic aspect, Goya’s images call for a moral judgment while also allowing for another form of judgment, if judgment is what it is, something closer to a “blank opening onto futurity,” to remember a fine phrase from Tres Pyle.101 It goes without saying that that futurity includes us, contemplating scenes engraved by Goya’s hands but not sent to us or meant for us, scenes without an addressee and scenes that, were it not for an accident of history, we could just as easily have not seen. What then can it mean to tarry with an image, to see and not to understand, to engrave and not to be printed, taken up, and consumed? One answer to that impossible question comes unbidden from a not entirely unexpected place, that is, from another artist who lives amid perpetual war brimming with the inimicalization of life that the Peninsular Wars modeled, god help us. I am reminded of the novelist David Grossman, who wonders aloud about what it means to occupy the catastrophe of the war between Israel and the Palestinians, the war that saw his son, Uri, killed by an antitank rocket in Lebanon in 2006. Grossman stands still, and that is the unknown way in which he still stands, now, forever: “I touch on grief and loss like one touching electricity with bare hands,” he says, “yet I do not die. I do not understand how this miracle works.”102 Notes Let me take this opportunity to warmly thank Jacques Khalip, with whom I have an ongoing discussion about the limits and possibilities of the image once it is released from the concept of the representational. 1. Cited by David S. Ferris in The Cambridge Introduction to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 130–31. Benjamin is referring to the manuscript of “The Concept of History.” 2. See Ian Baucom’s groundbreaking essay, “The Disasters of War: On Inimical Life,” Polygraph 18 (2006): 166–90; and Steven Miller’s discussion of Goya in War after Death: On Violence and Its Limits (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 84–115. Both studies have had a tremendous impact on my thinking here. 3. Gonzalo Anes, “Freedom in Goya’s Age: Ideas and Aspirations,” in Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, ed. Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and Eleanor A. Sayre (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1989), xxxv. 4. Cited by Jesusa Vega in “Goya’s View of The Fatal Consequences of War,” in Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, ed. Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and Eleanor A. Sayre (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1989), 185. 5. Three large altar paintings for the San Fernando de Monte Torrero church in Zaragoza were either destroyed or lost during the sieges of the city. See the “Description” for the

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“Apparition of Saint Isodoro to Saint King Fernando in front of the walls of Seville” (Aparición de San Isidoro al Rey Fernando el Santo ante los muros), National Museum of Fine Arts of Argentina, http://www.mnba.gob.ar/en/the- collection- highlights/2563 [accessed June 19, 2015]). I thank Reva Wolf for graciously helping me track down the fate of these altar paintings. Amid wartime shortages that included a dearth of materials the artist needed to pursue his work, Goya gave up fine canvas for bandages that were badly needed by the townsfolk defending Aragón, his birthplace. That gift is made aslant the wartime economy that otherwise harvested the clothes of the battlefield dead to produce paper. See, respectively, Robert Hughes, Goya (New York: Knopf, 2003), 283, and William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 178. Mary Favret drew my attention to the use of the clothes of the war dead in her book, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 47–48. 6. For a discussion of the question of Goya, war, and sexual violence, see Sharon Sliwinski’s Human Rights in Camera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 50–53, and her “Sexuality in the Time of War: Or, How Rape Became a Crime against Humanity,” in The Flood of Rights, ed. Thomas Keenan, Suhail Malik, and Tirdad Zolghadr (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015). 7. See esp. Miller, War after Death, 1–50. 8. Ibid. 9. The caption for plate 55 is “The worst is to beg” (Lo peor es pedir). As we shall see, Goya’s captions repeatedly return to what is “worse” and “the worst.” 10. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998), 176. 11. I am recalling Leon Wieseltier, who speaks of the effect of viewing color—rather than black- and- white—images associated with the Holocaust: “You realize, almost as you never realized it before, that the Jews were murdered in a place on earth.” See Leon Wieseltier, “Shoah,” in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays, ed. Stuart Liebman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 90. 12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 146. 13. Georges Didi- Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Images from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), i. 14. Goya appends three etchings depicting the torture of prisoners as an appendix to the volume of proofs for the Disasters, thereby complicating the idea that the assemblage comes to a definitive end at plate 82, “This is the truth” (Esto es lo verdadero). For a brief discussion of the prisoner images, see Sánchez and Sayre, Goya, 210–11. 15. Didi- Huberman, Images, 124. 16. Ibid., i. 17. Ibid., Images, 25. In this passage Didi- Huberman, citing the French historian Pierre Vidal- Naquet, notes that “[the genocide] was thought, it was therefore thinkable.” 18. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 1989), 99. 19. Baucom, “Disasters,” 182–83. 20. I recall Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation, in the wake of his son’s death, that “I grieve that grief that can teach me nothing.” See Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 472.

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21. Tilottama Rajan, “Keats, Poetry, and ‘The Absence of Work,’ ” Modern Philology 95, no. 3 (1998): 335. 22. Stephen Whicher writes, “The grief that he cannot grieve is for Emerson the form grief takes.” See Whicher, ed., Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, 491. 23. Rei Terada, “Looking at the Stars Forever,” Studies in Romanticism 50 (Summer 2011): 280. 24. Favret, War at a Distance, 194. To look at these images—photographs and engravings—side- by- side is to experience a strange temporal dislocation: Goya’s prints do not so much feel anachronistic next to the modernity of Brady’s photographs as much as Brady’s photographs, for all their unmistakable novelty, seem unexpectedly belated. 25. See Pierre Gassier and Juliet Wilson, The Life and Complete Work of Francisco Goya (New York: Reynal, 1971), 220. I use “state” as William Blake does, that is, as a condition through which to pass rather than an identity that is already there to assume. And I do not say “studio rather than social life” because it strikes me as important to describe the Disasters as an example of what Claire Colebrook provocatively calls “the unlived,” emphasizing the phenomenon— from acts to objects to concepts—for which productivity, potentiality, or vitality don’t easily apply. The Disasters do not “reach their potential” on their publication, nor are they “latent,” awaiting their public “manifestation,” while they were uncirculated. And yet it is almost impossible not to speak of them in these sorts of terms, which says less about the Disasters and more about the pervasiveness of the biopolitical in criticism, the naturalization of “the natural” in how we speak about the aesthetic. See Claire Colebrook, “Earth Felt the Wound: The Affective Divide,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture 8, no. 1 (2011): 12. 26. See Balachandra Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished: English Poetics from Spenser to Pound (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 27. Rajan, The Unfinished, 249. 28. Hughes, Goya, 303; Gassier and Wilson, Francisco Goya, 218. 29. The nineteenth- century poet and critic Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier described the members of the royal family in Goya’s portrait as looking like “the corner baker and his wife after they won the lottery.” As Fred Licht notes, “Even if one takes into consideration the fact that Spanish portraiture is often realistic to the point of eccentricity, Goya’s portrait still remains unique in its drastic description of human bankruptcy.” Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier is cited by Fred Licht in “Goya’s Portrait of the Royal Family,” Art Bulletin 49, no. 2 (1967): 127–28. 30. We have the extraordinary example of the “many important works which Goya painted for himself and kept in his house,” as Pierre Gassier and Juliet Wilson put it. Sometimes Goya treated his work as a mode of interrogating and fashioning himself as an other rather than as an artist who painted for others. See Gassier and Wilson, Francisco Goya, 214. 31. The phrase is from Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 14. 32. For an elegant and powerful critique of hermeneutical frameworks that value publicity over recessiveness, see Anne- Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 33. See Donald W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Collected Papers: Through Pediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (London: Tavistock Press, 1958), 229–42.

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34. Jan Mieszkowski, Watching War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 154. 35. Insult to Injury is the title that Dinos and Jake Chapman gave to their 2003 “rectification” of a pristine copy of the Disasters of War. “So we’ve gone very systematically through the entire 80 etchings,” Dinos Chapman said, “and changed all the visible victims’ heads to clowns’ heads and puppies’ heads.” See Jonathan Jones, “Look What We Did,” The Guardian March 31, 2003, http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/mar/31/artsfeatures.turnerprize2003 (accessed June 19, 2015); and Jake Chapman and Dinos Chapman, Insult to Injury (Göttingen: Steidl MACK, 2003). 36. Paul de Man, “Autobiography As De- Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 80. 37. Tilottama Rajan, “Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Textual Abject,” South Atlantic Quarterly 95, no. 3 (1996): 814. 38. The accomplishment of Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion, a poem whose creation is exactly contemporaneous with Goya’s Disasters, comes to mind. Keats’s poem was recovered from his manuscripts more than thirty years after his death. Although it soaked up a great deal of the artist’s precious remaining labors in post- Waterloo Britain, The Fall of Hyperion was probably not meant to be read. But its incompletion and public inoperativity is not a regrettable biographical detail but central to the achievement of what Balachandra Rajan calls “the form of the unfinished” (see Rajan, The Unfinished). The parallel with the Disasters is more than a matter of their delayed publication histories. Frankly cast as a dream vision, The Fall of Hyperion brings a critical eye to bear on the question of whether history is part of the aesthetic or whether it is apart from the aesthetic. As Walter Jackson Bate argues, “the closest possible wrestle with the subject is promised, and one that will involve form itself ” (see Bate, John Keats [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963], 610). So too with Goya. Perhaps the Disasters’ call for an engagement to be lived otherwise than visually public, making Goya’s engravings, as images, curiously self- consuming artifacts. 39. François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder, Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Violence, and Horror in World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2012), 122. 40. I am recalling Gilles Delueze’s extraordinary remarks about Spinoza: “The point of view of an ethics is: of what are you capable, what can you do? Hence a return to this sort of cry of Spinoza’s: what can a body do? We never know in advance what a body can do. We never know how we’re organized and how the modes of existence are enveloped in somebody.” See Gilles Delueze, “On Spinoza,” Lectures by Gilles Deleuze, http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.ca/2007/02/on- spinoza.html (accessed June 19, 2015). 41. Art historians may not have heard the contorted but unmistakable echo of St. Augustine in Goya’s caption. Toward the end of The City of God, the Bishop of Hippo contemplates the miraculous powers of the bodies of the martyrs, asking a rhetorical question that is in fact an exhortation: “Why can the dead do such great things?” (I cite Robert Bartlett’s translation of St. Augustine’s phrasing. See Why Can The Dead Do Such Great Things: Saints and Worshippers From the Martyrs to the Reformation [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013], 3. As Bartlett points out, “why can the dead do such great things” is a “literal translation of ‘cur et mortui tanta possunt,’ ” personal correspondence, June 3, 2015.) See Oeuvres de Saint Augustin, Bibliotheque Augustinienne, vol. 37, ed. Berhard Dombart and A. Kalb (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1960), 552. I thank Howard

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Jones, Travis Kroeker, Robert Bartlett, and James J. O’Donnell for their gracious assistance parsing the Augustine. Space prevents me from exploring the significance of the revered remains of the martyred dead for Goya, and why it matters to Goya’s Disasters that, as Bartlett observes, “of all religions, Christianity is the one most concerned with dead bodies.” 42. Robert Antelme, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 130. For an illuminating discussion of Blanchot and Antelme, see Sara Guyer, Romanticism after Auschwitz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 104–140. 43. I am of course recalling Walter Benjamin’s remark that “The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.” But in the Disasters there would not appear to be any “spark of hope” once the victorious have brought force to bear on the dead. See Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 391. 44. Jean- François Lyotard, “Europe, the Jews and the Book,” in Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 160. 45. As a prisoner in Auschwitz, Primo Levi recalls reaching for an icicle to quench his thirst before it is knocked out of his hand by a Nazi guard. “Warum?” (Why?), asks Levi. “Hier ist kein warum” (Here there is no why), the guard replies. See Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Wolf (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 29. 46. For images of Goya’s sketches (1771–88), see “Comprativa,” Goya en el Prado, https:// www.museodelprado.es/goya- en- el- prado/obras/comparativa/goya/torso- del- belvedere - vista- dorsal/?tx_gbgonline_pi1[goitemcompareuid]=1674. (accessed June 19, 2015) 47. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006), 323. 48. Of the bodies in Great deeds! With the dead!, Robert Hughes remarks that “if only they had been marble and the work of their destruction had been done by time rather than sabres, neo- classicists like Menges [a protégé of Winckelmann] would have been in aesthetic raptures over them.” See Hughes, Goya, 295. 49. Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1994), 180. 50. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, 323. Emphasis mine. 51. Ibid., 323. 52. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (Wien: Im Akademischen Verlag, 1776), 742. 53. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, 323. 54. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 146. 55. See Jacques Ranciére, “The Politics of the Spider,” trans. Emily Rohrbach and Emily Sun, Studies in Romanticism 50 (Summer 2011): 241–42. 56. In a remarkable scene in AMC’s series, The Walking Dead, the character Michonne, who loves art, including sculpture, first appears dragging two shackled zombies— respectively her former brother and lover—whose mouths and arms she has cut away in order to deny the creatures their ravenous appetites. 57. William Blake, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), 10.

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58. Kant begins his text referring to an innkeeper’s sign that has the same name as the philosopher’s text but depicts a graveyard. 59. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 176. 60. I recall Didi- Huberman’s name for the regulatory ideal of an image that takes its subject in entirely. See Didi- Huberman, Images, 124. 61. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, 323 62. Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Verso, 2013), 20. 63. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 176. 64. I am recalling Paul de Man’s discussion of “formal materialism” in Kant (with reference to Winckelmann, among others): “We must, in short, consider our limbs, hands, toes, breasts, or what Montaigne so cheerfully referred to as ‘Monsieur ma partie,’ in themselves, severed from the organic unity of the body, the way the poets look at the oceans severed from their geographical place on earth. We must, in other words, disarticulate, mutilate the body in a way that is much closer to Kleist than to Winckelmann, though close enough to the violent end that happened to befall both of them.” See Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 88. 65. Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 337. 66. Tilottama Rajan, “(Dis)figuring the System: Vision, History, and Trauma in Blake’s Lambeth Books,” Huntington Quarterly 58, nos. 3–4 (1995): 395. 67. Didi- Huberman, Images, 125. 68. Rajan, “(Dis)figuring the System,” 395. 69. I recall Rajan’s remarks about what she calls, citing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the “nomad text:” “Because it is a ‘body without organs’ converging with the reader’s body, it causes ‘asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate,’ and can thus discharge revolutionary intensity without narrating the achievement of revolution. Indeed, narrative is unnecessary to the nomad text, since ‘the rhizome connects any point to any other point.’ ” See Rajan, “(Dis)figuring the System,” 395, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 70. J. Hillis Miller describes Nancy’s partage “as a sharing as well as a shearing, a parting of the ways and a taking part.” See J. Hillis Miller, For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 325. Nancy first explores the question of partage in Les Partage des voix (Paris: Galilée, 1982). Perhaps the most generative discussion of the term is to be found in John Paul Ricco, The Decision between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), esp. chap. 5, “Neutral Mourning.” 71. John Keats, “Hyperion,” in Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 275. 72. I borrow Kevin McLaughlin’s term from his discussion of Baudelaire’s “technique of amalgamation.” See Kevin McLaughlin, Poetic Force: Poetry after Kant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 66. 73. I cite Lauren Berlant’s term, describing a phenomenon toward which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick gestures. See Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 37.

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74. Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 338. 75. Ibid, 326. 76. Ibid, 338. 77. Ibid, 326. 78. Hughes, Goya, 295. 79. Judith Butler, Frames of War:When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2006), 53. 80. I borrow the phrase “immunologic of war” from Bishnupriya Ghosh, who uses it in her forthcoming book, The Virus Touch: Living with Epidemics. 81. Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 11. 82. Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 337. 83. I am recalling Vivian Mercer’s often cited remark about Waiting for Godot as a play in which “nothing happens, twice.” See Vivian Mercer, “The Uneventful Event,” Irish Times, February 18, 1956, 6. 84. Mieszkowski, Watching War, 152. 85. What is the history and the historicity of the relationship between the psyche and violence? Are there periods in which trauma is more likely to be naturalized as the psyche’s experience of the worst, that is, the experience of nonexperience? What other modalities of tarrying with the worst, or, for that matter, memory and experience, are otherwise screened out by the emphasis on trauma? Are there relationships with the worst that are not, strictly speaking, mournful or melancholic, relationships which are not on the side of work but worklessness? For an extraordinary exploration of these questions, see Rei Terada, “Living a Ruined Life: De Quincey beyond the Worst,” European Romantic Review 20, no. 2 (April 2009): 177–86. 86. T. J. Clark, “At the Courtauld: Goya’s Witches,” London Review of Books, April 9, 2015, 33. 87. For an illuminating discussion of holding environments in Romantic literature, see Nancy Yousef, “Romanticism, Psychoanalysis and the Interpretation of Silence,” European Romantic Review 21, no. 5 (2010): 653–72. See also Adam Phillips, Winnicott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), and Lisa Farley, “Squiggle Evidence: The Child, the Canvas, and the ‘Negative Labour’ of History,” History and Memory 23, no. 2 (2011): 5–39. Of course, the “holding environment” in Winnicott and his followers, including Michael Balint and Christopher Bollas, is characterized by a nurturing neutrality regarding the developing psyche. My suggestion is that there are “holding environments” that are less about psychic development and more about the opening of spaces of bare resilience, irreducible to the psyche, in which history’s remains might be pooled or cached. Is the wartime aesthetic such a space? It is intriguing to consider that Phillips developed his theory of the “holding environment” and the “good- enough mother” in the midst of the conditions of total war. 88. Didi- Huberman, Images, i. 89. Cited by Terada, “Looking at the Stars Forever,” 290. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema Two:The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 169. 90. Claire Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, vol.1 (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2014), 135.

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91. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 198. 92. Michael Naas, Derrida from Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 233. 93. Jacques Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 105. 94. Johannes Grave, “Uncanny Images: The ‘Night Sides’ of the Visual Arts around 1800,” in Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst, ed. Felix Krämer (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2013), 34. 95. Grave, “Uncanny Images,” 33. 96. See Vinzenz Buchheit, “Epicurus’ Triumph of Mind,” in Oxford Readings in Lucretius, ed. Monica R. Gale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 110. I am grateful to Jacques Khalip for pointing me to this concept in Lucretius. 97. Cited by Yosefa Loshitky, The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 28. 98. Hughes, Goya, 272. 99. Mieszkowski, Watching War, 5–6. 100. Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Vintage, 1991), 20. 101. Forest Pyle, Art’s Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 47. 102. David Grossman, Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics, trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Macmillan, 2008), n.p.

The Tone of Praise Peter de Bolla

This essay is prompted by a set of remarks the American philosopher Stanley Cavell makes in the introduction to his 2005 collection of essays titled Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. As my title indicates, I shall be mostly concerned to think with what is, at least to me, the extremely fecund and surprising notion that praise and its voiced or sounded manifestations might constitute an acknowledgment not only that the world is but also that its being is open. In the first section I take some time to explore the ways in which Cavell introduces—even stumbles across—and then works with this idea. In the second my aim is to read the central episode in Wordsworth’s greatest and most philosophically risky poem as a resource for resisting the egotistical sublime, and for acknowledging the strange and unsettling conviction that the world might accept our praise. Although I do not explicitly address the question of romanticism, I intend these remarks to cast a light on any putative “contemporary romanticism” in the following sense: whatever we may want from romanticism at the present time (and however we may wish to distinguish its lineaments and filiations from other terms, say, Enlightenment or rationalism), we must take care to discern its differences of voice. This is because—as the following tries to demonstrate—the thinking that romanticism achieves is routed through the tones of voice it adopts. My contribution to the larger topic of this volume, then, is to suggest that there may be more to be heard in, even learned from, the particular voices that are romanticism’s ways of opening (to) the world. This is doubtless already too much and too little. It makes assumptions— about the particular shape or focus to romanticism, about its exploration of ways of opening (to) the world, and, most glaringly, about the representative nature of my selected example of romantic writing and the signal position this implies for its author, William Wordsworth—that are bound to hamper its getting started on a solid or uncontentious footing. But in place of a

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patient and careful setup, I am going to risk plunging into the thick of my exposition, or, to put that another way, I am going to set up my two figures, sounding boards to and for each other, without due consideration for their connection to any putative romanticism.1 Let it just stand that if one cannot grant to both Wordsworth and Cavell their speaking in, to, or for a voice that is specifically romantic, one is unlikely to get very far in understanding romanticism’s continuing challenges. One of those challenges, the target of this essay’s argument, is the solution romanticism proposes to a philosophical problem that is as old as philosophy itself. In shorthand, that solution, if indeed it is one, is signaled in my title: the tone of praise. I make no claim to originality in this observation; indeed, it seems unlikely that one would identify the issue I am going to address at some length below had not Cavell put such consistent effort into the elaboration of romanticism’s engagement with this problem. Here I borrow, not for the last time in this essay, his words: I continue . . . to be guided by the thought of romanticism as working out a crisis of knowledge, a crisis I have taken to be (interpretable as) a response at once to the threat of skepticism and to a disappointment with philosophy’s answer to this threat, particularly as embodied in the achievement of Kant’s philosophy—a disappointment most particularly with the way Kant balances the claims of knowledge of the world to be what you may call subjective or objective, or, say, the claims of knowledge to be dependent on or independent of the specific endowments—sensuous and intellectual—of the human being.2

And in closing this thought, Cavell reaches to a formulation that will be central to my argument: “Romanticism’s work,” he notes, interprets itself “as the task of bringing the world back, as to life.”3 He goes on to characterize two distinct paths, as it were, in romanticism’s working out of this task, one exemplified in the work of Blake and Shelley, which seeks to move away from the ordinary and toward a “new inhabitation,” and the other exhibited in the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, whom Cavell sees as engaged in a “quest for a return to the ordinary, or of it, a new creation of our habitat.”4 As a contribution to a putative contemporary romanticism, I see the following as a call to, or a recalling of, the second of these paths: in essence, I mean to suggest that we have yet fully to hear a tone in Wordsworth’s poetry, or if not hear its specific registers we have yet to exhaust the resources it offers for confronting the threat of skepticism. Before I turn to the remarks that are the immediate prompt for the following explorations, one further introductory observation might help locate this essay in the larger collection. Insofar as a contemporary romanticism might draw on or follow the guidance of a historical romanticism, the issue of the

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relations between these temporally distinct romanticisms would need to be addressed. To some extent I have already queered the pitch of such relations in casting them in something like a hierarchy whereby the chronologically first romanticism is said to provide guidance for any subsequent one. Here, I think, it might be helpful to raise one of, if not perhaps the, most distinctive sounds in Cavell. I am thinking of a locution to which he has recourse on many occasions, in which he speaks of “inheriting” a tradition. In using this locution, which is of course far from simply a manner of speech,5 he is most times explicit in his invocation of a tradition of philosophizing, although it can be said that some of his inhospitable readers point out that it is a tradition he has at least in part confected (and therefore is merely a tradition to him). Be that as it may, it seems to me that any putative contemporary romanticism will need to ask how it might go about inheriting a historical romanticism. And this, following Cavell, I suggest must involve the discovery or invention of a particular tone of voice. Something further can be said about Cavell’s self- advertised “inheritance” since it also bears on romanticism. As any reader of his work must glean, he sees his mode or manner of philosophizing as having two very strong touchstones: on the one hand the American transcendentalists, especially Thoreau and Emerson, and on the other the ordinary language philosophy of Austin and Wittgenstein.6 In the case of the first pair, the connection between them and romanticism has long been remarked (in some cases the connection is deemed to be antagonistic, as in Transcendentalism’s attack on Unitarianism), whereas in the case of the second the connection is most commonly understood as a reaction or even an antidote to a purported idealism that sits at the heart of romanticism. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Cavell’s philosophical journey has been his refusal to see things this way as he constructs rather more complex interactions between philosophical and poetic traditions, stitching together skepticism and romanticism through the conceptual clarity of Kant and the ludic philosophizing of Nietzsche.7 Thus, taking a leaf from Cavell, the bridge between my first and second section seeks to establish a common ground for understanding both Wordsworth’s poetic project, his thinking in and through verse, and what Cavell identifies as the project of ordinary language philosophy, the bringing of words back to their everyday uses.8

1 The approach I propose earns its hospitality in some remarks Cavell makes while introducing the essays collected in Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. In some passages that essentially lay out the framework or set the relevant

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coordinates for guiding the reader through the essays that follow, Cavell explains that he was himself taken by surprise at the turn in his own thought. It is with that sense of surprise, of coming across a pathway in thinking that had not been foreseen, I mean to begin. Cavell writes: The companion essay of the opening pair is a plenary address invited for the 1996 Shakespeare World Congress. I had imagined that my response would concentrate on the connection I had been following for decades between Shakespearean tragedy and philosophical skepticism, and it took me rather by surprise that the heart of the eventual text turned out to concern difficulties—internal and external— entangled in the praise of Shakespeare.

And then, in what to my mind is an excellent example of how candor is a mode of philosophizing in Cavell, he lets this thought exfoliate according to its own lights: The idea remembers that the ability to praise guards against the threat of skepticism—as in religion the acceptance of God may be attested less in the reciting of creeds than in the singing of psalms. And if, as I allow myself to speculate, Shakespeare’s Sonnets are the discovery of the problem of the existence of the other in the English- speaking tradition of secular thinking (in philosophy from Descartes through Kant, the skeptical problem had been focused on our knowledge of the physical, not the psychical, world), and if we take in the fact that the obsessive issue of that series of sonnets is praise and its vicissitudes, then again what? How can praise be the answer to skepticism, since praise is itself in question? We might rather ask: what is it about praise that it should emerge as an essential topic of the examination of our acknowledgment of the existence of others? 9

This surprising turn—and it seems to me that its noetic structure of surprise is not only its distinctive feature but also its philosophical manner— leads me to speculate that Cavell’s entire oeuvre might be usefully understood as a lengthy meditation on the form or forms of praise that are (or could plausibly make a case to be) adequate—if that is the right word—to the everyday. And that, as will become evident below, simultaneously asks whether such forms of praise are acceptable to the everyday. This, of course, sets in motion a putative reciprocity between the acceptance of praise and the tone one might locate or adopt for sounding it. The problem, as we shall see, is not only one of fit, of tone or warranted exultation, but also one of authenticity. This appears in Cavell’s work under the sign of the child’s acknowledgment that the world is capable of accepting praise. The issue of authenticity is connected to something that has been remarked by others: the requirement that we give particular attention to the

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mode or register in which Cavell’s philosophizing takes place, and to the specific attitude or stance he takes toward the materials that build his thinking.10 Put bluntly, we have to decide whether or not to take his distinctive sound at face value. For some, perhaps many, professional philosophers in the predominantly analytical Anglo- American tradition his sound is too self- regarding, too arch: basically, it lacks conviction, and is taken to be fake.11 It has also been remarked that those materials not only have a fairly narrow formal repertoire, they also focus on a limited set of problems or issues. As such, they might be thought of as touchstones, the resonant places within the philosophical tradition that provide refuge for Cavell’s pretty continuous strategic exposure of the burden entailed in the recognition of skepticism. In putting these Cavellian signatures in the context of a discussion of the tone of praise, I hope to leave behind these commonly expressed cavils and expose something heretofore unremarked. Not that the repetitive—even obsessive—engagement with a small roster of texts, writers, and even quotations has gone without comment. I take these touchstones—one might think of them as shelters or, to borrow a Wordsworthian formulation, as “hiding places” within which philosophy takes refuge—to be something like resolutes, distillates of philosophical thinking that can be combined and recombined into more complex forms in order to provide an architecture, call it even a house, for thinking. Or, to turn back to the topic of this essay, in order to think in a particular key. What I have in mind here is the almost mantralike rehearsal of phrases or sentences that peppers a book such as Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. One example is Cavell’s riffing on the comment Wittgenstein makes in his Philosophical Investigations to the effect that “what we do”—Wittgenstein is here speaking on behalf of philosophy—“is to lead words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”12 These moments might be understood as motifs or themes as Cavell seeks to make audible the rhyming that occurs when we hear one philosophical thought find harmony with another. This way of beginning asks us to consider how one might prepare for this philosophical work. I consider it significant that precisely the same question stands at the entry to any attempted encounter with a work of art.13 At issue, then, is the training required for the ear so that it might better pick up the distinctive tone of a philosophical inquiry. This, it seems to me, is something like learning to listen in the right key. In the second part of this essay, when I turn to some lines from Wordsworth, this learning to listen might be placed in the more general context of the volume’s topic, contemporary romanticism, to suggest that we have yet to fully hear the tone of praise adopted by the work of historical romanticism. With respect to Cavell’s work in

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philosophy a more specific question arises: Does this learning to listen in the right key imply that philosophy is most at home in music? Does it suggest that music is most likely to provide hospitality for our attempts at training the ear to hear the modulations in key that underpin both philosophical and poetic thinking? I understand this to be a Cavellian question through and through, so it is curious with respect to this speculation that Cavell has only infrequently addressed music head on. Of course, there are some exceptions to this observation—one might call to mind the early essay entitled “Music Discomposed,” in his first book, Must We Mean What We Say?,14 or the later essays on opera and film, most especially “Opera and the Voice,” collected in A Pitch of Philosophy—but the most common register in which music appears is autobiographical as opposed to musicophilosophical.15 One might qualify this further by noting that music’s function in the story Cavell tells about his calling to philosophy is to carry the weight of an oedipal recognition scene. Notwithstanding this family romance, there are passages in the later writings where the sense of a vocation for music is beautifully conveyed—I think here of the striking moment in the essay “Philosophy and the Arrogation of Voice,” in which Cavell describes an experience of music generated by his undergraduate participation in Ernest Bloch’s music theory class. After some of those classes, he notes that he would “sometimes find myself having trouble breathing,”16 It is not insignificant, of course, that in telling the story of one’s sense of a vocation—here unfulfilled or transposed—a particular sensitivity to the tone of voice is likely to be decisive with respect to the issue of authenticity. Here vocalization and vocation keep time to both preserve and uncover the tone required. Another way of putting that would be to note that the travel between music and philosophy sets in play a fulcrum around which the two vocations find a balance, and that such a balance echoes or inhabits what lies at the midpoint between speaking and singing. The identification of the tone of praise in this scenario enables one to grasp a kind of alternative, if that is a possibility, to the singing of psalms. It strikes me that in many ways there could be no more telling observation with respect to Wordsworth’s career in poetry, which consistently seeks a mode of speech that might carry the conviction of song. Can Cavell’s stance or self- location within the terrain of professional philosophy be understood in terms of this notion of praise? Is this another way of tracking what he pretty frequently characterizes in his work as a mode of inheritance? If it is, one needs to ask whether the embrace of another’s articulation of philosophical questions—if that indeed is what it is to inherit a philosophical tradition—would at the very least require some moment of reflection as to whether or not that inheritance might be aided or even

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compromised by the attitude of praise. This, following the remarks Cavell presents in the extraordinary essay titled “Fred Astaire Asserts the Right to Praise,” collected in Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, would not entail the necessity of testing or assessing whether the praise is sufficient or accurate in respect of its object but whether it is earned or acceptable.17 Doing philosophy on this account must always require the negotiation of such assessments. This is why Cavell takes pains to indicate that when he asks us to take seriously the thought that a Hollywood film or a song- and- dance man might both be engaged in the work of philosophy, he is aware of the negotiation he asks us to undertake. It will be useful for me later when in the presence of the most loadbearing lines in Wordsworth’s poetry to recall that for Cavell, this mode of inheritance often comes wrapped in the somatic blanket of breath. In opening out what he sees as his own distinctive way of reading a text (the text on this occasion is Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations), which here I take to be a mode of inheritance, he self- consciously comments on his “manner” or tone: What was I banking on in reading to such effect?—knowing the hard feelings it may cause, feeling sometimes that I would be glad to be free of the manner if I could. I know it has something to do with what I want of philosophy, or what I take philosophy to demand, in the first place to be inherited, mine to bequeath. Sometimes this drive of reading will present itself as taking away an author’s breath, not taking away the right to speak, but following the inspiration otherwise than we find it followed; the author may or may not be glad.18

On other occasions the emphasis is perhaps more commonly directed to language: If writing philosophy is for me finding a language in which I understand philosophy to be inherited, which means telling my autobiography in such as way as to find the conditions of that language.19

Be it manner, tone, or language, the emphasis throughout his career is unmistakable: voice.20 By “inheritance,” then, he means to foreground the negotiations that are necessary and unavoidable in speaking (as) philosophy. It is, of course, not only his project: That is the charter Austin and the later Wittgenstein assume in confronting their reader with their arrogation of voice, in all its ungrounded and in a sense ungroundable arrogance—to establish their sense that voice has become lost in thought. It has become lost methodically, in philosophy’s chronic distrust of

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ordinary language, arriving at some final crisis in analytical philosophy’s unfavorable (in Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein calls it normative) comparison of ordinary language with logical construction; and lost theoretically, in the conclusion of modern skepticism, whose advent begins (scenically in Descartes and in Hume) by taking the individual voice, or breath, away.21

And he has explicitly acknowledged the fact that his own career in philosophy began only once he had recognized that ordinary language philosophy gave him permission to speak in his own voice.22 In the oedipal scene Cavell constructs, Austin (and to a lesser extent the later Wittgenstein) becomes an adopted or transgressive father figure who gives him permission to create the distinctive sound of his philosophy’s aye babbling brook. I think that something very similar happens in Wordsworth’s adoption of the tone of praise with respect to the natural or everyday world; this at least will construct one of the bridges that will lead me into my second section. Before getting there I want to dwell a moment longer on the issue of voice as it arises in Cavell. It is clear from the late autobiographical writing that Cavell had an extremely complicated relationship with his father.23 In opening that relationship to public scrutiny Cavell has certainly risked a great deal, but he has also given perhaps unusual access to a profound philosophical issue that might also be considered to be romanticism’s central insight. This insight is perhaps frequently unremarked because of its widespread diffusion, or, to put that more accurately, because the ubiquity of the phrase that might be called romanticism’s legacy, “the child is father to the man,” smothers the insight from which it is derived. In Wordsworth certainly (and no less perhaps in Shelley and Keats, although in both cases the shape or envelope of the insight takes on different features), as I seek to demonstrate in the next section, this insight would have been unintelligible had it not been voiced in a particular way. Which is to say, had the central insight not been the very issue of the tone of voice. As indicated above, the life story Cavell tells of his becoming a professional philosopher turns on the discovery or adoption of a voice that he could recognize as his own. Yet at the same time, just as he decided to change his family name, the adoption or production of that voice was precisely a turn away from or erasure of the voice he was given.24 In a typical move that uses Wittgenstein’s own autobiographical reflections to cast light on himself, Cavell quotes a passage from the Philosophical Investigations that sets this task in a very distinctive light: I was carrying around Wittgenstein’s exchange with himself: “Do I not see and hear myself then?—That can be said. . . . My own relation to my words [that is,

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to my utterances] is wholly different from other people’s” (Investigations, p. 191). It might have played a premature role either in dissuading me from listening for a metaphysical voice or in prompting me to ask: If not via the obvious sense organs, then what is my relation to my voice?25

If, as Cavell admits, he began to see Austin as a father figure who gave him permission to speak, did this effectively render his real father incapable of hearing his newly adopted voice? Moreover, did the permission to speak come with a negative affect, transferred from his relationship with his real to his adopted father, Austin? It is significant for the present argument that this issue is focused by Cavell precisely through the question of praise. Thus, in noting Austin’s response to what he describes as his “first philosophical essay,” a defense of Austin’s peculiar (and to some unphilosophical) project, as in effect silence on Austin’s part, Cavell is prompted to make explicit his difficulty with the acceptance of praise. He writes: I interpreted the silence, painfully, as Austin’s disapproval. . . . The aftermath of this struggle lasted for some years, only reliably diminishing as I began to learn that Austin had recommended and assigned my paper when he returned to Oxford. . . . Then it dawned on me that a more obvious interpretation of Austin’s silence was that he was establishing a private and sincere moment of acceptance of the work I had done. Perhaps I found this behavior too foreign, too formal or hidden, to take in at a glance but I seem to have found it also too familiar to take kindly, since my reaction on hearing of his praise was anger: Just like my father, I told myself; public praise and private denial; somebody is crazy.26

In answer to the first question raised above, this suggests that Cavell’s father was unlikely to have been able to hear his son’s voice, just as his son was unable to accept his father’s praise.Yet Cavell insists that at the very least, there must have been a sense of where or how the child’s voice found its origin: Yet I find that I do not believe that a father can fail to know the origin of his son’s voice, however at variance their accents. How can I doubt it when I might summarize my life in philosophy as directed to discovering the child’s voice—unless this itself attests to my knowledge that it is denied, shall I say unacknowledged?27

I mean to extract from these moments in Cavell’s autobiographical exercises a tone—somewhere between the surprise I highlighted in my first excerpt from the introduction to Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow and the sense of candor or self- revelation that characterizes these extracts from A Pitch of Philosophy—that provides the support or the prompt (in fact both) for recognizing or acknowledging that praise, for it to be praise, must be accepted.

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Thus, although not yet the tone of praise, it is a tone that might be taken to be a preparation for the acceptance of praise, and thus a tone that Cavell might be said to be searching for throughout his philosophy. This, anyway, is how I take Cavell’s announcement that his life in philosophy has been dedicated to the discovery of the child’s voice, that is, as an acknowledgment of his continuing attempts at finding acceptance in the tone of praise.28 There is another aspect to this tone that also bears some scrutiny. It is signaled by Cavell’s use of an epigraph from Gershom Scholem’s “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” an extract from which heads the third essay in A Pitch of Philosophy. Commenting on this, he writes: For example, the epigraph to the third chapter relates a legend that Benjamin tells more than once of the creation of angels as of existences meant to sing one note of praise to God and then vanish. It may well be taken as an emblem of the ephemerality and eternality of voice, so as picturing certain dimensions of something that I say about the voice in opera, in its imitation of, or doubling of, the conditions of the voice in speech. But that epigraph could equally go in front of the first chapter because of the idea of the true name, that of the secret self, being hidden.29

Taken all together, these observations are intended to provide a context for understanding the burden of skepticism, that is, the requirement that one either find a language, manner, or tone that might reasonably be able to counter its logic or one must accept its unassailability. In Cavell’s terms, praise offers a strategy in this task since it “an essential topic of the examination of our acknowledgment of the existence of others.”30 It should also be said that praising someone or something is not only a matter of adopting a particular tone of voice, or not sufficiently determined by such an attitude. And this in part is to be understood on account of the risk that is run by adopting an attitude that declares something or some person is praiseworthy: the risk of being rebuked for making such a declaration, for making it openly. The next section explores the ways in which Wordsworth’s poetic project takes this risk.

2 In my introductory remarks I suggested that it goes without saying, as it were, that Wordsworth’s poetry addresses the romantic voice. Or, more pointedly, it speaks in, to, or for that voice. While I do not want to retreat from that view, it nevertheless requires further elaboration, since “voice” itself in Wordsworth is a far from simple matter. I do not mean to take this up to any great extent,

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nor do I intend to limn the ways in which one might begin to sketch the distances and differences between a putative romantic voice and the voice Wordsworth spends an entire career in poetry interrogating. But by rehearsing some of the most prominent conceptual nodes that animate Wordsworth’s thinking in poetry, the connections between my Cavellian opening and the following attempts at hearing the modulations in tone that pervade the central episode of The Prelude ought to be easily made. In a kind of semaphore those punctual and punctuating moments of questioning can be conveyed in the following list: authenticity, origin, adequacy, propriety, property. Although much could be said here with regard to the ways in which a voluminous critical literature has examined these terms, I will leave this to one side. All I need to orient the particular insertion I am going to make is to note that each of these terms invokes or demands a particular sensitivity to thinking about the topic and topos of voice. This is not all, of course, since my point is that the voice also has differences of timbre and tone. I indicated in my introductory remarks that the common terrain between the two sections of this essay is something like an originary, or at least a very long- standing, question in the Western philosophical tradition, one that I characterized, following Cavell, as the response to skepticism. Put simply, such a response needs to confront the following question: on what basis do I recognize or acknowledge others or the world as having something like what I can find within myself to be adequately (or at least an approach to being adequately) conveyed in the term “being”? Cavell suggests—and it seems to me to be an extraordinarily productive suggestion—that romanticism might be considered to be a “response to the threat of skepticism” and, at the same time, a mark of its disappointment with the most powerful answer the philosophical tradition has come up with, namely, the Kantian “solution,” which characterizes claims of knowledge of the world to be what you may call subjective or objective, or, say, the claims of knowledge to be dependent on or independent of the specific endowments—sensuous and intellectual—of the human being.31

Given romanticism’s unease with this “solution,” other strategies need to be attempted. Historically I shall suggest that Wordsworth’s interrogation of the tone of voice, and his insight that praise might be a tone to adopt in service of our bringing the world back (once again I borrow a Cavellian locution) through the soundings and re- soundings of the voice, represents a significant departure from the Kantian route. And if one were to inflect this historical observation through our contemporary moment, and hence turn toward the intervention any putative contemporary romanticism might

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make, the so- called new vitalism might be seen as a recent and ongoing attempt to find a solution to the same problem, and therefore as another reaction to the threat of skepticism. It seems to me that allies or echoes, rhymes or collaborators in this task might come forward—here, perhaps the most obvious name that springs to mind is Heidegger. This, at any rate, is the name that occurs to Cavell in his essay “Opera and Lease of Voice.” It is significant, I think, that at the point where Cavell invokes Kant’s notion of a “universal voice” with respect to claims made in aesthetic judgement, claims that are subjective and at the same time universal according to Kant, he is taken to a moment in Heidegger where the proximity of listening (in) to being is invoked. And it is also noteworthy that the envelope Cavell gives this moment—explicitly leaving it “without comment”—takes on particular force as it introduces a voice so far unvoiced in his text, leaving it bare and unadorned by critical exposition. Here is the moment in Cavell: (As a marker for those with a taste for such paths, I note, without comment, a signature moment in Heidegger, from his “Letter on Humanism,” in which thoughts of thinking and of what thinking is of, or belongs to—a beyond or other of our present dispensation—are thought together with the idea of listening [taking it that in the German, gehören, belonging, and hearing belong, or are to be heard, together], hence within earshot of the voice, call it the hum of things: “Thinking is of Being inasmuch as thinking, coming to pass from Being, belongs to Being. At the same time thinking is of being insofar as thinking, belonging to Being, listens to Being.”)32

I want this to stand at the entry to the following explorations of the central passage of the long poem we know as The Prelude because it holds in tension a number of terms that are going to resonate: voice, hearing, listening, the sound of things and of thinking. In turning to these lines I mean them to stand for an entire poetic project that I regard as coextensive with the philosophical tradition Cavell identifies as seeking an answer to the threat of skepticism. Although in its modalities of voice and ear it is distinctively Wordsworthian, it might also be seen to share features with a more general romantic intervention in the history of our confrontation with the inexorability of skepticism, of hearing it that way. For the most part I want to direct attention to lines 556–73 of Book VI:33 a typically Wordsworthian period, a single poetic sentence whose meandering, wandering syntax on first encounter risks slipping into paratactic incoherence. These lines, of course, come immediately after the climacteric some thirty lines previous when the band of travelers realizes “that we had

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cross’d the Alps” (l. 523). This moment, the signal moment in the entire poem, has not wanted critical attention. Be that as it may, I am going to risk having my own say since I think that the shape and texture of the lines, the rhythm of thought and modulations of tone have not been fully appreciated for what they are: a strategy for opening (to) the world in its everydayness. Immediately following the realization that the peak had gone by unremarked, the lines move into hyperdrive with the justly renowned hymn to the imagination. It seems almost redundant to note that these lines celebrating the human power of imaginative activity cannot but be heard in the key of exultant, almost exaggerated praise. But I think we also need to hear in them at least the beginnings of a modulation, a sound of concern or quizzical uncertainty that worries at their potential for hyperbole. One can sense this in the lines that immediately follow on from the exhilaration of proclaiming “our destiny” in the continuous futurity of “something ever more about to be” (l. 542). As a kind of corrective, the verse slams into reverse, noting that the mind “seeks for no trophies, struggles for no spoils / That may attest its prowess” (ll. 544–45). It is also worth remarking that this hymn to the imagination is rather brief, a mere twelve lines of praise that dangerously approach bombast and self- aggrandizement. And then they collapse. From celebration and immoderate self praise—to the imagination, no less!—the lines sink in a deflation described as a “dull and heavy slackening” (l. 549), a fall from the sublime heights in which a recognition or revelation has occurred: praise may not only be misdirected (here to the egotistical power of imagination) but also unearned. Yes, the summit has gone past unremarked, and yes, the human power of imagination rushes in to fill the void left gaping by the unexperience or inexperience of failing to note the summit. But is this defeated expectation and its subsequent troping into a hymn to the human capacity for imagining otherwise really warranted? Is this man soaring too close to the sun? This certainly seems to be implied by the more patient construction of a tone whose authenticity appears more secure in the following lines: The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decay’d, The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And mid the labyrinth of the hollow rent Winds thwarting winds, bewilder’d and oppresst, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that mutter’d close upon our ears, With dull reverberation never ceasing, Black drizzling crags that spake by the way- side

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As if a voice were in them, the sick sight And giddy prospect of the raving stream, And ever as we halted, or crept on Huge fragments of primeval mountains spread In powerless ruin, blocks as huge aloft Impending, nor permitted tey to fall, The sacred Death- cross, monument forlorn Though frequent of the perish’d Traveller, The unfetter’d clouds, and region of the heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light Were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree, Characters of the great Apocalyps, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first and last, and midst, and without end. (VI, ll. 556–73)

Unlike the giddy rapture of the hymn to the imagination that instantly rushes in following the defeated expectation, these lines more patiently build the foundations that might support a more authentic and certainly warranted tone of praise. Although still uncertain of finding an antidote to the threat of skepticism, they are more confident in manner, and even more willing to countenance that it might be possible to bring the world back, as to life. In order to grasp this we need to hear the careful and complex modulations in tone that occur. These shifts in tonality are most emphatic at those points where the voice has an uncertain location, where it wanders between an object in the world and an agent who speaks for itself. Are these positions in conflict, the one dependent on our giving voice to mute objects of potential (and perhaps unwanted) praise, the other speaking over or for those objects? These moments of unstable tone are generated by the slightly off- key movements between description (“woods decaying”) and evaluative comment (“never to be decayed”). They can also be heard when the point of view shifts so evidently from a neutral omniscient position to an interested narrator- poet who colors the world he sees and hears. Such an instability occurs at line 564, with the “sick sight” of the “raving stream,” and at line 560, where the winds are said to be “bewilder’d and oppress.” This shifting point of view, a kind of transferrable agency, causes tension, at one moment celebrating the pervasive energies of nature at its rawest—“torrents shooting,” “unfetter’d clouds,” “tumult”—and at another holding the natural world at arm’s length, merely recording what transpires. The defining moment of

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this poetic ventriloquism, about halfway through its meandering syntactic performance, occurs when the inanimate world is given its own voice: the rocks “mutter” and the crags “speak.” But no sooner have they done so than the lines pull back from so complete a transfer of agency into the als ob of speculative philosophy: “as if a voice were in them.” What is the tone here? Is the poet- narrator being respectful or improper? Does he strike a tone of correction or of awe? On whose say does this voice assign the sounds of the world to the realm of the metaphysical, relegating them to ghostly mutterings? And, perhaps most pressing, can we be certain that the voice said to emanate from the rocks and crags is the only voice being referred to? Here the “as if ” would not only propose the hypothesis that rocks might mutter and crags might speak but also that a more elemental voice might be contained within these objects, the voice of being tout court. The tone, then, uncertain as it is, allows something else to be heard, which Heidegger casts as “listening to being.” It will take another one hundred and fifty lines to fully work out that insight and to appreciate how the adoption of a warranted and accepted tone is a resource for the acknowledgment of being in the world. And here another age- old philosophical question rings out its challenge as we hear the sound of things: how comes it that there is something rather than nothing? I now want to make another approach to these lines because they ask something perhaps yet more fundamental of us, which also bears on the sound of things and of thinking. How does one breathe (with) these lines? Of course, any period of length raises this question, but I am not claiming that these lines are unique in this regard. To answer this question we need to attend to how the lines suspend or delay the completion of the thought to which they give a body and substance. That delay, of course, is generated by the sequence of appositional clauses, twenty lines in all, that hold off the verb. They ask us to hear and feel what it might be like to comprehend all, all this, in a single moment, a single thought, a single breath.34 They say: all this, the rocks, waterfalls, winds, crags, clouds, heavens, torrents, the sky, darkness and light, everything here is like the workings of one mind. But there it is again, the als ob, the “as if ”: is like the workings of one mind, a sense that is reinforced by the repetition of “were”—“as if a voice were in them” and they “were all like workings of one mind.” Who would one be, or what would one be, if one were able to make this observation? This is to ask: who speaks the als ob? Once again I take this to be primarily a matter of tone: is it awestruck or quizzical? In a sense, we do not have to settle the issue—the uncertainty or speculative nature of the observation is comfortable with a certain travel between the two—because the lines are working toward a trajectory where the sounds and

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registers of the voice will be more accommodated to praise. It is notable that this trajectory coincides with the fullest reach of the somatic index to being: breath. Thus, as breath runs out, like the dying of the light and the fading of the power and agency of the narrator- poet, the lines arrive at first and last things, the “types and symbols of Eternity.” Here, right at the extreme point of exhalation, breath is troped into its “evermore about to be”: “Of first and last, and midst, and without end.” And now not only is the tone of praise more authentically sounded in its quiet inclusiveness—“and,” “and,” “and”—it is also more likely accepted. To have come this far is to have learned to listen in a particular key, to hear the low whispering of thinking as it encounters the shock of mild surprise that there is, and that is may return our attention. The passage continues with a brief description of a night spent in “an Alpine House” before a second and now more explicit hymn to the natural world, an even more overt offer of praise, is sounded: —Locarno, spreading out in width like Heaven, And Como, thou, a treasure by the earth Kept to itself, a darling bosom’d up In Abyssinian privacy, I spake Of thee, thy chestnut woods, and garden plots Of Indian corn tended by dark- eyed Maids, Thy lofty steeps, and pathways roof ’d with vines Winding from house to house, from town to town, Sole link that binds them to each other, walks League after league, and cloistral avenues Where silence is, if music be not there: While yet a Youth, undisciplin’d in Verse, Through fond ambition of my heart, I told Your praises; nor can I approach you now Ungreeted by a more melodious Song, Where tones of learned Art and Nature mix’d May frame enduring language. (VI, ll. 589–605)

If the voicing of praise is a secular form of the singing of psalms this passage, in its explicit recognition that the poet- narrator had as a boy “undisciplin’d in verse” “told” praises, begins by sounding its address in the tones of reverence: “I spake of thee,” “thy chestnut woods,” “thy lofty steeps.” Reverence here is certainly close to unbounded praise, but something troubles the performance, detectable, I think, in the choice of the verb “told”: “I told your praises” is preferred to the more common “I sang your praises.” The latter

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commits the speaker and the praisee, here the natural world and by extension its creator, to a very legible relationship in which the agent who sings gives obeisance or shows respect to the object of praise. “I sang your praises” places the singer, the voice, in the subordinate role. In contrast, “I told your praises” unsettles this relation. It suggests that without the voice of the agent those praises would remain mute; furthermore, the didactic or explanatory vector in “tell” cannot easily be silenced. Are we to conclude that the poet- narrator had ideas above his station? Perhaps that is part of the lesson of maturity, of learning or acknowledging the complexity of the child being father to the man. But it might also indicate another, even more fundamental lesson in regard to the issue of tone: it makes the distinction between speaking and singing tell. Here one might recall that in another place, at another time the narrator- poet is going to find both frustration and enlightenment when listening to the sounds of a solitary reaper: “will no one tell me what she sings?” In the sublime landscape of the Alps the poet is attempting to hear or listen to the sound of the world the better to find the right tone for telling the praises of the creator. It does not affect things at all that such a tone is only heard inwardly: When God, the giver of all joy, is thank’d Religiously, in silent blessedness, Sweet as this last herself; for such it is. (VI, ll. 614–16)

But the desire to encompass it all, all creation, to allow breath to extend as far as its agglutinative syntactic “and” will allow, keeps the verse moving on. It is as if “all this” must be yet further specified: not only the torrents and light and darkness but also the mountains and streams and Como’s banks. And then it stops. As the poet- narrator writes, “But here I must break off, and quit at once” ( VI, l. 658). Why does this “spousal verse,” in which the poet- narrator describes and enacts a state of opening (to) the world, run up short? The answer comes in the lines that follow: Let this alone Be mention’d as a parting word, that not In hollow exultation, dealing forth Hyperboles of praise comparative, Not rich one moment to be poor for ever, Not prostrate, overborn, as if the mind Itself were nothing, a mean pensioner

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On outward forms, did we in presence stand Of that magnificent region. (VI, ll. 661–69)

Here, then, the verse stumbles and corrects its tone: these lines, mere “hyperboles of praise,” the kind of praise that, Cavell notes, “is not so much false as vain,”35 have outrun the verse. There is a sudden realization that authenticity is not only hard- won, it has yet to be won. All that has preceded runs the risk of being taken as unwarranted, as adopting a tone that has not been earned or is not acceptable to its addressee. So it pulls back from the ever- escalating sound of exultant praise in order to allow something else to happen, for a “different worship” to be offered up. And what follows then is an account of being accommodated within the ebb and flow of the world itself. Here the egotistical suturing of praiser and praise gives way to a listening in and of the world, a bringing of the world back, as to life: A Stripling, scarcely of the household then Of social life, I look’d upon these things As from a distance, heard, and saw, and felt, Was touch’d, but with no intimate concern; I seem’d to move among them as a bird Moves through the air, or as a fish pursues Its business, in its proper element. (VI, ll. 693–699)

There is a distinctive Wordsworthian quality to this tone—perhaps best thought of as a sound the other side of praise, where praise has been accepted by its addressee and returned in the tongue of angels—but it might also be characterized more generally as a “romantic” sound, the tone one needs to adopt if one is to fully understand what it might be to open (to) the world. I take this to be a deeply philosophical embrace of the challenge skepticism presents. It eschews the easier path by which one might attempt to resist its inexorable logic, accepting its unassailability, in order to find a tone in which one might both speak and listen elsewhere. Cavell’s philosophical project indicates it can take a life to do that, and mostly a life is not time enough. The tone of praise and our encouragement of the conditions under which it might be earned and accepted, then, may be the best resource we have. Notes 1. It would be possible to start elsewhere, either with Cavell’s explicit engagement with romantic writers, notably Wordsworth and Coleridge, or with romanticism more

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generally. These engagements can be found scattered in, among other works, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Alberquerque, NM: Living Batch Press, 1989), and, of course, substantially in In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 2. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 52. 3. Ibid., 52–53. 4. Ibid., 53. 5. The terms in which it might be described—accent, tone, delivery—are all subject to self- analysis in Cavell’s autobiographical late writings. 6. Although these figures remain pretty constant throughout, the later work uses some different voices to animate Cavell’s advertised aim of making the analytical tradition of philosophy (which in its most severe professional guise has been all but indifferent, if not hostile, to Cavell’s way of thinking) resonate with the European tradition. Relatively late, then, the names of Heidegger and Freud join the feast, although careful inspection of the early work indicates that these two figures are more present at its beginning than one might at first imagine. 7. See Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 57: “The connection between romanticism and scepticism takes one of its ways from Kant, who for example would have helped Nietzsche to his problem of overcoming the human, since Kant pictures human reason as endlessly desiring to transcend, transgress, the limits of its human conditions.” 8. This formulation is, of course, Wittgensteinian. Cavell remarks that Wittgenstein might take this to mean that “bringing words back” represents thinking, an observation I mean to find a rhyme for in Wordsworth’s poetic periods. See Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome:The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 21. 9. Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 3. 10. M. Fischer, Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 144. 11. Stephen Mulhall gives a good sense of what many find irritating in “Cavell’s mannerly, idiosyncratic, intensely personal, and endlessly reflexive prose.” See his Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), vi. 12. See Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, 11, and also 15, 66, 194, 198, 230, 234. 13. See Peter de Bolla, Art Matters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 14. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 180–212. 15. It might be said that as the most recent published work has increasingly turned toward an ever more autobiographical tone—exemplified best perhaps by the “autobiographical exercises” of A Pitch of Philosophy and the later, more descriptively autobiographical Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010)—the importance of music to Cavell’s Bildung has become very evident. Cavell wonders aloud in the essay “Philosophy and the Arrogation of Voice”: “if philosophy occurs for me as some form of compensation for, or perhaps continuation of, the life of music.” See Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, 11.

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16. Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 49. 17. Cavell writes, “Now the instance in Astaire I bring into consideration takes up a different aspect of praise, not so much whether it is sufficient or accurate as where it is earned or acceptable, risking not so much idolatry as blasphemy; this praise is not so much false as vain.” See Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, 66. 18. Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy, 16. 19. Ibid., 38. 20. As he has noted with respect to The Claim of Reason: he sees its “reason for existing” as “to help the human voice back into philosophy.” See A Pitch of Philosophy, 58. 21. Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy, 58–59. 22. He writes: “In practice, however, the moment I felt that something about ordinary language philosophy was giving me a voice in philosophy, I knew that the something was the idea of a return of voice to philosophy.” A Pitch of Philosophy, 69. 23. The entry for July 8, 2003, in the autobiography starts: “This is the moment I described as dating my knowledge that my father wanted me dead, or rather wanted me not to exist.” See Little Did I Know, 18. 24. The tone of confession as Cavell announces this is surely one of the most clear- cut examples of his interrogation of the tone of philosophical thinking. See A Pitch of Philosophy, 23 and following. 25. Ibid., 116. 26. Ibid., 56–57. 27. Ibid., 38 28. As he notes, “I think I may have come to conclude from this mismatch alone between my parents’ economies of praise that it is quite impossible for me to be realistic about the degree to which any work I do can be known.” A Pitch of Philosophy, 57. 29. Ibid., xii–xiii. 30. Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, 3. 31. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 52. 32. Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy, 149–50. 33. Quotations are from William Wordsworth, The Thirteen Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 34. In contrast to Cavell’s sense of taking something away from a text, this reading exposes what we need to supply: breath. 35. See Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, 66.

Endymion The Text of Undersong Simon Jarvis

The gone dead are beamish —Stephen Rodefer

A thing of beauty is a joy forever, but it is not always easy to know where to put it in your perhaps quite ugly house. Trying to interpret Keats’s Endymion is not unlike finding yourself (supposing you, for the moment, to be, for example, a brain- sick shepherd- prince wandering somewhere in early nineteenth- century Arcady or Hampstead) catching sight of a butterfly on whose wings there appears to be inscribed some sort of singular text. You wish to decipher the text; you follow the butterfly through paths, glens, clefts, woods, and so on, until it alights, say, on a fountain near a cavern’s mouth; or, rather, until it appears about to alight, when instead it disappears, to be replaced by a water- nymph, who at once delivers herself of a curious speech in which she does not scorn to rhyme “fish” with “purplish,” and who then herself, like the butterfly, disappears, leaving you, still wishing to read the script on the butterfly’s wings, to brood over the water where both butterfly and nymph vanished, to soliloquize, and, at last, to start asking for help from the Moon, an appeal answered only by an unlocatable voice telling you to go down into the bowels of the Earth. Should you follow this advice—and you are, in truth, to a voluptuous degree passively suggestible—you will find yourself in an impressive, yet largely disagreeable, place. It is one faint eternal eventide of gems, with marble galleries and mimic temples and hardly a living thing to be seen anywhere. Be patient, however. Just at the point where you have had enough, and are ready to say, once more, to Diana: “Lift me, oh lift me, from this horrid deep!”1—or, on second thought, since you would wish to address the goddess in an adequately elevated manner, “Deliver me from this rapacious deep!”2— you notice something:

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Thus ending loudly, as he would o’er leap His destiny, alert he stood: but when Obstinate silence came heavily again, Feeling about for its old couch of space And airy cradle, lowly bow’d his face, Desponding, o’er the marble floor’s cold thrill. But ’twas not long; for sweeter than the rill To its cool channel, or a swollen tide To margin sallows, were the Leaves he ’spied And flowers, and Wreaths, and ready myrtle crowns Upheaping through the slab: refreshment drowns Itself, and strives its own delights to hide: Nor in one spot alone; the floral pride In a long whispering birth enchanted grew Before his footsteps; as when heav’d anew Old ocean rolls a lengthened wave to the shore, Down whose green back the short- liv’d foam, all hoar, Bursts gradual, With a wayward indolence.3 (Morgan, 119–21; Ketchum, 193–94)

Now do you have the answer to your question; now do you know what was written on the butterfly’s wings? No. If “Endymion’s personal journey” really “reflects a wider journey from ignorance to knowledge as Keats follows the hypothetical development model of the French and Scottish Enlightenments,” it is certainly going the scenic route; 4 if it is his “earliest and most literal embodiment” of a basic structure of “some kind of union between a mortal and the nonmortal ideal by means of a dream . . . and then a gradual or sudden end to the union as the dreamer awakens to reality,”5 then there do seem to be rather a lot of other things going on at the same time. The poem’s narrative, as Nicholas Roe puts it, “proceeds on a tantalising principle of delay.”6 But, if you do not have the code cracked, you have something better: the stony gallery of cultural monuments, bathed in the “unread oblivion”7 of deference by default, interrupted and even broken wide open by the living foliage “Upheaping” through it. Reading Endymion is like this episode from the poem in that, as we pitch forward in our (perhaps futile) hermeneutic lepidoptery, we are ensnared by flowers, and fall on grass. We tumble, in other words, into that deep thicket of new verse rhythms, textures, sentences, techniques of which this masterpiece of simultaneous archaism and innovation allows for the proliferation in a scarcely credible or bearable profusion.8

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Endymion’s timeliness resides just in those difficulties which have been experienced in assimilating and monumentalizing it. It is still in advance of the public’s capacity for relishing it. As we recover from the long decades in which poems written in the early nineteenth century were blamed for being unable to bear the weight of the heroic statuary previously placed on them, we may also be in a position to discover their countenances: the worked achievement, at once virtuosic and painstaking, of novel verse fabrics intimately answering to the whole history of verse practice leading up to them. In this chapter I want to explore in more depth that often noticed quality of the poem by force of which it appears to be a slap in the face of public taste. A four- thousand- line slap could hardly be anything other than unwelcome. Keats’s poem instead is deeply schooled in and responsive to that very taste whose constraints it wishes not to dissolve, but to reconfigure. The poem in certain respects represents a path not taken; its poetics remains to be written, and its voice can today be heard in unexpected parts of the forest. What follows is an essay in historical poetics, as I understand the meaning of that term.9 Historical poetics does not have to contain big events, a chronology of important dates, or a series of hastily sketched patterns of cultural- political affiliation. Such a poetics attends instead, at least in the first place, to a particular microhistory, the history of a verse practice the meaning of whose gestures is always related to the previous repertoire on which it draws. This chapter attempts partially to make good on the proposals put forward by an earlier promissory note:10 to suspend the default priority of hermeneutics over poetics in the interpretation and evaluation of works of verse art; to contest the notion that “historical” poetics of verse can become “historical” only by attending to the ways in which verse is mediated, and not by attention to verse practice itself; to offer a detailed account of some aspects of the verse handling and texture of a major poem as a specimen of what can be done and as central to the historical achievement represented by that poem.11 At the same time, it builds on and develops the questions announced in my article “For a Poetics of Verse” by extending them to the way in which the texts on which we work have been arrived at. It suggests that the routine priority of hermeneutics over poetics has not merely governed the way in which we understand the history of verse art but may actually have shaped the default primary material itself. This is because so many of the verse texts from which we work are still those edited according to a (long- contested) rationale that distinguished “substantive” from “accidental” variants. Because the latter are held to include, for example, all variants in punctuation that do not affect syntax or semantics, the many ways in which such variants affect something so crucial to verse as the rhythmic texture of its lines have been

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consigned to the realm of “accident,” however understood. The very faces of our poems—a way of thinking about the matter that I borrow from my colleague Anne Stillman—may turn out to have been prehermeneuticized: to have been scored, discolored, and even disfigured by the jobs we want to make them do.

1 Even as printed, there is no doubt that the text of Endymion still hums with that “undersong of disrespect to the Public” that Keats mentioned as audible beneath the first, rejected preface to the poem.12 The difference between the two prefaces is instructive. Both, despite Keats’s brave declaration to Reynolds that he had “not the slightest feel of humility towards the Public” (Letters, 1:266), are at first sight marked by extreme self- deprecation. But something critical to the first is missing from the second: a teasing, halfYorickian relationship to the reader that always stops just short of mockery, before turning into self- mockery. The rejected preface begins by calling into question the point of writing a preface at all. “In a great nation, the work of an individual is of so little importance; his pleadings and excuses are so uninteresting; his ‘way of life’ such a nothing; that a preface seems a sort of impertinent bow to Strangers who care nothing about it.”13 “An impertinent bow” well characterizes, in fact, the inconsequence, informality, and brevity of this rejected preface, which immediately goes on to imply that a preface is to communicate its message to readers too indolent actually to read it: “A preface however should be down in so many words; and such a one that by an eye glance over the type, the Reader may catch an idea of the Author’s modesty, and non opinion of himself ” (Poems, 738–39). The document is studiedly casual, to the point, for all its modesty, of effrontery: “In case of a London drizzle or a scotch Mist, the following quotation from Marston may perhaps stead me as an umbrella for an hour or so: ‘let it be the Curtesy of my peruser rather to pity my self hindering labours than to malice me’ ” (Poems, 739). The apparent plea for pity made through Marston is at the very same time withdrawn by the transparency with which this quotation is admitted to be a mere expedient, like putting up an umbrella during a brief period of rain. The possible critics of Keats’s work are figured as a bit of a shower— even in the gesture by which he offers to take cover from them. The preface that appears in the first printed text replaces teasing selfdeprecation with what reads more like earnest self- denunciation and selfdiagnosis. In particular, as has often been noticed, it self- destructively provides a cue to the many receptions of Endymion as an immature or adolescent work.

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Noting that he wishes “to conciliate men who are competent to look, and who do look with a zealous eye, to the honour of English literature,” Keats explains that “the imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick- sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages” (Poems, 102–3). The changed preface offers a quite different set of prompts to readers. Few readers would keenly wish to be thought of as London drizzle or Scotch mist. In the revised preface, however, the reward implicitly offered for attending carefully to the poem’s faults is to be recognized as a man of taste overcoming the unhealthy imagination of the adolescent, a reward that was repeatedly claimed in the century following Keats.14 The teasing or tickling relationship to taste implied in the first preface is changed in the second to a guilty consciousness of having merely lapsed from it. The characteristic excellence of Endymion is inseparable from the complexity of its relationship to taste. From one point of view the poem represents a systematic assault on taste. The poem “still retains the capacity to make modern readers feel queasy.”15 If there be a governing unity to the poem, it lies in its willed and designed overcoming of the absolute preeminence of bathos as a criterion of poetical failure. The overcoming of this criterion is indeed in some part explicitly the plot of Endymion and the progress of Endymion. Its story is a had and eaten cake,16 in which the Indian maid turns out to be the lunar goddess. Its hero is borne up, down, and around, with never an injured foot. His descents are never painful losses of dignity but delicious enrichments. To cloudborne Jove he bowed and there crost Towards him a large eagle: ’twixt whose wings Without one impious word himself he flings, Committed to the darkness and the gloom, Down, down uncertain to what pleasant doom Swift as a fathoming plummet down he fell Through unknown things: till exhaled asphodel And Rose, with spicy fannings interbreath’d, Came swelling forth where little Caves were wreath’d So thick with leaves and Mosses, that they seem’d Large honey combs of green, and freshly teem’d With airs delicious. In the greenest nook The Eagle landed him and farewel took. (ii. 659–71; Morgan, 148–49; Ketchum, 213–14)

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“Down, down uncertain to what pleasant doom” could be Endymion’s motto. He is not uncertain whether his doom will be (half oxymoronically) pleasant, only which particular kind of pleasantness it will offer him. His long plummet through a long verse sentence—a sentence that, just as we should expect, is much more lightly punctuated in the fair copy than in the first printed text—is then comically terminated in a light and brief one; the grand plunge ends in a little nook. Endymion’s radical passivity is essential to the poem’s poetic. It is one of the many respects in which the poem is attended by that possibility of mock- heroic which it continuously eludes. In verse so hypersaturated with work on language, mock necessarily haunts the hero, because he is so much less the center of attention than the bowers, tendrils, leaves, and flowers of the verbal forest in which he is abandoned. When Keats first drafted this passage, Endymion was shown grasping hold of an anonymously sponsored “silken cord” instead of hopping aboard a passing eagle: To cloudborne Jove he bent: and there was tost Into his grasping hands a silken cord At which without a single impious word He swung upon it off into the gloom. Down, down uncertain to what pleasant doom . . . (Woodhouse, 183)

The continuous provision of divine or random bailouts and exits to Endymion at every point, as well as the apparent exclusion of the possibility of serious physical pain or hardship, marks the poem as a protracted succession of fantasies. What the little nook that has been provided for play makes possible, however, is Keats’s ceaseless work on verse language, the invention of a verse repertoire every bit as consequential for nineteenth- century English poetry as Wordsworth’s. Its audacious steps in every department of verse composition— diction, syntax, the relation between line and sentence, caesura, instrumentation, the relation of incident to whole and of digression to principal plot in narrative structure—demand as their condition of possibility the refusal to accept that certain historically emergent criteria of merit for English rhyming couplets are in any way natural or absolute. These criteria are denaturalized by recourse to much older repertoires of verse technique, if “recourse” did not feel like the wrong word for Keats’s ability to become the element he writes in.Yet at the same time, this archaism is innovation. It is never, in fact, the mere reproduction of a superseded mode because Keats’s verse manners also bear the mark of those constraints that they are seeking to undo and to supersede. The redisposition of taste that is undertaken in Endymion is possible, in other words, only as the work of one who knows inside out the slab through which he is to upheap.

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If we are still sufficiently in thrall to the second preface of Endymion to think that Keats did not know what he was doing when he composed his masterpiece, it is instructive to consider one of the many passages of explicit poetics that the poem contains (poetics whose explicitness is in no wise taken off by their happening to be expounded in verse). After the explosion of spitting and hissing satirical fireworks, worthy of Oldham, at the beginning of the third book, Keats turns to an explicit revision of the poetics of the sublime. This starts from the critique of false sublimity in public life which the poet has just offered. The “tiptop nothings” of political bombast characterize verse loftiness too, to the point at which the poet asks: Are then regalities all gilded Masks? No there are throned seats unscalable But by a patient wing, a constant spell, Or by ethereal things that, unconfin’d, Can make a ladder of the eternal wind, And poise about in cloudy thunder- tents To watch the abysm birth of elements. (iii. 22–28; Morgan, 183–85; Ketchum, 239)

The passage finely brings off its own desiderata. Keats’s poetics here is subtle. The wish to be freed from a hierarchy of registers that has become an empty default does not mean anything so shallow as a rejection of the very idea of grandeur, as though the poem were simply to declare, “Off with its head!” It’s just that we can’t be told how to get up there by some ready gradus. Real loftiness is indeed deeply desirable, no mere chimera, but it cannot any longer be imagined that there is some set diction, syntax, and metrical design that is guaranteed to secure it. If there is a “ladder” to “regalities,” it’s unpicturable to the point of catachresis, made “of the eternal wind.” Access to the throned seats requires “poise,” or rather, in an at once hilarious and beautiful demonstration of what it is he is talking about, Keats says that it requires us to “poise about in cloudy thunder- tents.” This is “might half slumbering on its own right arm” (“Sleep and Poetry,” l. 237; Poems, 74), a way with the classic that makes a small but marked series of self- differentiations from Leigh Hunt’s cheerfulness. It is a way that has its own grandeur, even its own para- aristocratic generous negligence, and that looks forward to Picasso’s Vollard Suite or to Frank O’Hara’s “Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day,” as well as back to Shakespeare and George Chapman. A new verse repertoire is not made merely by wishing to tease, tickle, or slap the public or by boldly resolving to subvert poetical order, even though these impulses may be important prompts to get working. One reason, I

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suggest, why Keats’s words about writing Endymion had to be so scandalously quantitative—to think that one “must make 4000 Lines of one bare circumstance and fill them with Poetry” (Letters, 1:170) carries a peculiar suggestion that the lines might somehow exist before the “Poetry” that comes to fill them up—is that Keats knew that quantity had consequences for quality, that his poem had to be sufficiently long to permit a really thoroughgoing series of reinventions of the medium by and in which it was to be constituted. Here it is instructive to turn to the relationship between Keats’s draft, as recorded for books 2, 3, and 4 by the annotations Richard Woodhouse made in his copy of 1818, and his later fair copy. What we can see in these reworkings is a quite deliberate process of loading every rift of the verse texture with ore. The verse of the draft already represented a deliberate and deeply worked break with that verse manner that had made it possible: the manner of Hunt’s The Story of Rimini,17 which had provided the home base for Keats’s own early efforts at couplets in “I stood tiptoe” and “Sleep and Poetry.” In the transition from the draft to the fair copy we can see Keats pushing that break further. It is a move from a poetic in which “they shall be accounted poet kings /Who simply tell the most heart- easing things” (“Sleep and Poetry,” ll. 267–68; Poems, 75) to one in which poetical royalty may not be so cheaply purchased. Here is Endymion just before the moment at which we found him when we began, just before he catches sight of that possibly text- bearing butterfly that he will follow to the ends of the verse wilderness: E’en now he’s sitting by a shady spring, And elbow- deep with feverous fingering Stems the upbursting cold: a wild rose tree Bends lightly over him, and he doth see A Bud which takes his fancy: lo! but now He plucks it, dips its stalk in the Water: how!18 Now he is sitting by a shady spring, And elbow- deep with feverous fingering Stems the upbursting cold: a wild rose tree Pavilions him in bloom, and he doth see A Bud which snares his fancy: lo! but now He plucks it, dips its stalk in the Water: how! (ii. 54–59; Morgan, 97; Ketchum, 176)

The first line of the fair copy replaces “E’en now he’s sitting” with “Now he is sitting.” This small change is part of a campaign in the fair copy greatly

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to diminish the number of enclitic versions of auxiliary verbs merged with their pronominal hosts. “The mighty ones who’ve shone athwart the day” becomes, in the fair copy, “The mighty ones who have made eternal day” (ii. 254;Woodhouse, 144; Morgan, 113); “That there he’ll seize on trickling honeycombs” becomes “That he will seize on trickling honey- combs” (ii. 151; Woodhouse, 134; Morgan, 103); “I’ve a new ditty for my hollow cell” becomes “I have a ditty for my hollow cell” (ii. 131; Woodhouse, 132; Morgan, 103). There are many other instances, although not all enclitics are removed, and those that remain become more striking for their rarity (e.g., “Young Stranger,/ I’ve been a ranger”: iv. 275–76; Morgan, 309). This series of changes is connected to a greater elevation, formalization, and specification of diction that occurs throughout the transition from draft to fair copy. In the draft the wild rose tree “Bends lightly over” Endymion, and implicitly joins the series of various tender females who are watching out for his welfare through much of the poem. In the fair copy, the now more impersonal rose tree instead splendidly “Pavilions him in bloom,” and does not merely “take” but “snares” his fancy with one of its buds. The rose tree of the draft is only perhaps “wild”; it is certainly friendly and sociable in the manner of one of Leigh Hunt’s forest- plants. The fair copy’s rose tree is Shakespearean and even heroic, joining those loyal subjects of Henry V whose hearts may be said to “lye pauillion’d in the fields of France” (I. ii. 129).19 All these smaller and larger changes cooperate significantly to modify the poem’s manner. Just as Keats’s own verse statement of poetics at the beginning of book 3 might lead us to expect, it is not, like his earlier couplet pieces, an exercise in putting aside the lofty for something more heart- easing but the development of a mode distinctively capable of embracing the sublime and the lofty together with the domestic, the sentimental, the erotic, and the comical. These modes can appear in swift succession or even simultaneously; they are not arranged in a hierarchical framework but are continuously available as various manners of verse thinking. The poet whom we here find energetically enriching his style is the same one who famously insisted, against advice, that his dolphins should “bob” their noses through the brine, not “push” or “raise” them, and who, in the fair copy, compared the slight widening of his hero’s eyelids to a moment “when Zephyr bids / A little Puff to creep between the fans / Of careless butterflies” (Morgan, 69). “Puff ” was altered to “Breath” by Taylor in the fair copy; it was replaced by “breeze” in 1818. It would be wrong to imply that the whole advance on Hunt’s manner takes place in the transition from the draft to the fair copy of Endymion. Rather, those modifications underline Keats’s determination to make a break

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that is already well under way in the poem’s draft. It is a break, of course, not with something that is merely to be opposed or rejected but with something that has been essential to the poet’s work to date, and without which Endymion itself could never have been written. Keats’s verse repertoire could not have come into existence without the looser, more informal kind of couplet writing Hunt had developed, and which is still evident inside Endymion’s much more elaborate matrix. It is time to set Endymion side by side with Hunt’s The Story of Rimini. Here is Francesca in the forest on the way to Rimini, having married the wrong brother: But entering more and more, they quit the sand At once, and strike upon a grassy land, From which the trees, as from a carpet, rise In knolls and clumps, with rich varieties. A moment’s trouble find the knights to rein Their horses in, which, feeling turf again, Thrill, and curvet, and long to be at large To scour the space and give the winds a charge, Or pulling tight the bridles, as they pass, Dip their warm mouths into the freshening grass. But soon in easy rank, from glade to glade, Proceed they, coasting underneath the shade, Some baring to the cool their placid brows, Some looking upward through the glimmering boughs, Or peering grave through inward- opening places, And half prepared for glimpse of shadowy faces. Various the trees and passing foliage here,— Wild pear, and oak, and dusky juniper, With briony between in trails of white. And ivy, and the suckle’s streaky light, And moss, warm gleaming with a sudden mark, Like flings of sunshine left upon the bark, And still the pine, long- haired, and dark, and tall. In lordly right, predominant o’er all. (Hunt, 35–36)

The passage is little more relevant to the poem’s (transparent) plot than many an episode in Endymion. It is an opportunity for Hunt to sketch some lush Italian verdure of the kind that is clearly one of the sources for Keats’s sylvan entanglements. Hunt’s disposition of his elements is studiedly informal. It

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proceeds in a familiar mode, of variety signaled by alternative. The horses thrill and curvet, or they dip their warm mouths in the grass. Some horses did this, others did that. Crucial to the verse’s easy, open texture is the relation between the line and its generally additive, polysyndetonic, paratactic syntax. A good number of Hunt’s lines begin “And.” This relation between line and clause is not rigid: clauses can be disposed across lines in a way that Pope would less often have permitted: “rise / In knolls,” “rein / Their horses in.” These enjambments between a verb and its direct or indirect object are hardly violent, however, and when one adds the equally easy “long to be at large / To scour the space,” one has exhausted the few run- ons in the passage. All other lines are end- stopped, usually by a comma. The verse sentences amble through the plant catalogue (“Wild pear, and oak, and dusky juniper”) like a loosely unified herd of ruminants. The diction, too, is familiar and easy, devoid of pomp and allowing for real vividness of description, as where the horses “Dip their warm mouths into the freshening grass.” It is marked by some of Hunt’s striking mannerisms: the verbal substantive “flings” in “flings of sunshine,” and the marked preference for adjectives with a -y suffix: grassy, easy, shadowy, dusky, streaky. To compare this passage with one from Endymion, of course, is by no means to conduct a controlled experiment. The variables are too numerous for that. But the passage offered is comparably botanical. A look at Keats’s list of plants, toward its end, will show how far his verse manner has already come from Hunt’s: In midst of all, there lay a sleeping youth Of fondest beauty; fonder, in fair sooth, Than sighs could fathom, or contentment reach: And Coverlids gold- tinted like the peach, Or ripe October’s faded Marigolds, Fell sleek about him in a thousand folds: Not hiding up an appollonian curve Of neck and shoulder; nor the tenting swerve Of Knee from Knee; nor ankles pointing light: But rather, gave them to the filled sight Officiously. Sideway his face reposed On one white arm and tenderly unclos’d, By tenderest pressure, a faint damask mouth To slumbery pout: just as the morning south Disparts a dew- lipp’d rose. Above his head

mellow draperies lady peas entwined with

gazer’s reclined Upon his kissing hands and arms entwined his

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Four lilly stalks did their white honors wed To make a coronal, and round him grew coronet All tendril green, of every bloom and hue, pleasant lush Together intertwin’d and trammel’d fresh. The vine of glossy sprout; the ivy mesh purply Shading its ethiop berries; and Woodbine darkling Of velvet leaves and bugle- blooms divine; With all its honey bugle tufts Convolvulus in streaked vases flush; The Creeper mellowing for an autumn blush, blushing deep at Autumn’s And virgin’s bower trailing airily With others of the Sisterhood. (ii. 394–419; Morgan, 125–27; Ketchum, 198–99; italicized variants are those recorded by Woodhouse, 158–60)

The diction in the closing list of flora deliberately mixes the simple with the complex and the Saxon with the latinate. “Bugle- blooms” lead on to “Convolvulus”; the “vine” has “ethiop” berries. Whereas Hunt’s lines are relatively free from intensively worked assonance and alliteration, moreover, Keats’s are loaded with richnesses of what the “Russian specifiers”20 called “instrumentation.” “Convolvulus” puts its v’s and l’s frankly on display, and then each finds an echo in the rest of the line: “vases,” “flush.” “Disparts a dew- lipp’d rose” has no equivalent, in its lip play, anywhere in Hunt. If we compare this text from the fair copy with the readings Woodhouse recorded as standing in the draft, we can see that Keats has worked to intensify just those features that separate his verse texture from Hunt’s. “With all its honey bugle tufts divine” is replaced, in the fair copy, with a line that very conspicuously pollinates the convolvulus: “Of velvet leaves and bugle-blooms divine.” Darkling berries are changed to ethiop ones: both epithets are Shakespearean, but the new one heightens the contrast sought by Keats here in the sources of his lexicon. An adjective Huntianly advertising its -y suffix, “purply”—which, after all, could perfectly well have been “purple,” and therefore sports a -y suffix for, as it were, the sheer fun of it—is toned down into the more restrained “glossy”; a Huntian keyword, “pleasant,” is excluded; the amorously personified foliage of the draft, with its “lady peas,” remains erotic in the fair copy, but more subtly so. All these marked differences from Hunt are within the frame of the most structurally significant difference, the quite distinctive relation between meter and syntax operative in Keats. Line intersects clause over and over again. Keats takes care to vary the cement sticking his long verse sentences together, in a way we scarcely find in Hunt. From this emerge lines of an elasticity unavailable to the elder poet. Even

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where Hunt offers a line with no medial punctuation, it is rarely hard to see where a pause might fall. Keats, by contrast, swings lines of indivisible momentum across his extended syntax. There is no necessary “caesura” in “Not hiding up an apollonian curve” or in “Four lilly stalks did their white honors wed.” (You could put one in, but only if you were determined, in each case, to destroy the line.) Because of this intensively worked variety, contrast, and complexity, Keats can then in fact risk effects that out- Hunt Hunt in their cheeky informality: “a faint damask mouth /To slumbery pout”! “Slumbery pout,” for some readers, might be the point at which they simply must part company with the Keats of Endymion. If I thrill to it, I feel that I have license do so because it is a moment earned by the many ways in which the rest of this passage works, and works backward and forward through the history of English verse art, archaizing to innovate, innovating to archaize: refusing, lip and tooth, the familiar Whig- and- Tory storyline of irreversible belatedness.

2 Let us return to our butterfly hunter. There is a small textual question to settle. Is the living foliage “Up heaping” through the slab, or is it “Upheaping” through it? In the fair copy from which the first printed text of 1818 was set up,21 no gap is discernible between “Up” and “heaping,” but in that text and in others that take it for “copy- text,” preposition is separated from verb either by a space (1818, 60; Poems, 142) or by a hyphen: “Up- heaping.”22 Keats’s friend Richard Woodhouse, who made a record of the differences between an earlier draft of books 2–4 of the poem and the later fair copy, records that the draft reading was “Upswelling,” also with no gap between preposition and verb (Woodhouse, 152). A little later in the poem there is a comparable set of divergences among fair copy and princeps. After the goddess Venus has addressed a fortifying speech to the young shepherd- prince, she departs thus: At these words upflew The impatient doves, uprose the floating Car, Upwent the hum celestial. (Morgan, 141; Ketchum, 208) At these words up flew The impatient doves, up rose the floating car, Up went the hum celestial. (1818, 80)

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In each of these four cases—upheaping, upflew, uprose, upwent—the fair copy in Keats’s hand shows an apparently clear preference to represent these as compound verbs, while the first printed text and its successors offer verbs with accompanying prepositions. The question for editors, roughly speaking—a question that cannot be settled here—has been whether Keats would have preferred to keep these readings as written in the fair copy but was overruled by a later view of the publisher John Taylor’s or of the printer’s, or whether, conversely, he saw and approved these changes, or (more probably) might have expected Taylor or the printer to see to this kind of small change for him.23 Stillinger’s edition, the text most widely accepted, takes the latter line (Poems, 574–75);24 Margaret Ketchum’s edition, in an unpublished doctoral dissertation completed shortly after Stillinger’s edition appeared, adopts the former approach (Ketchum, 10–37). In his introduction to a facsimile of the fair copy, Stillinger, citing an article by Ketchum (now Powell) published in The Library,25 but not her edition of Endymion, makes this partial concession: One theory of textual editing, championed by Fredson Bowers and quite influential in the 1960s and early 1970s, holds that a holograph fair copy, especially a fair copy meant to be used by the printer, is the best representative of the author’s intention in accidentals and should therefore be preferred over any printed edition as the basis (the “copy- text”) for an authoritative text. This theory, as I attempted to explain in my introduction of 1978, is not well suited to Keats’s situation, where the printed texts are the results of a cooperative effort that the poet very much depended on. But a case could be made for adopting more of Keats’s accidentals from the Endymion fair copy, and in any event the details of the manuscript text certainly deserve minute study as clues to the working of Keats’s mind and sensibility. (Woodhouse, xii)

Stillinger does not say what criteria might be used for deciding which “accidentals” might be adopted from the fair copy and which not. But the question readers may well by now be asking themselves is not “Who is right, Stillinger or Ketchum?” but “Who cares? The sense is the same, isn’t it, whatever we read; isn’t that the whole point of the distinction between ‘substantives’ and ‘accidentals’? So why does it matter?” Central to the argument I am making here is that these sorts of differences, between “uprose” and “up rose,” and so on, are indifferent to the essential expression of a work of verse art only if one starts out from a procedural framework in which poetics is the handmaiden of hermeneutics. My wider approach is to contest the idea that a historical poetics of verse technique can be justified only by being put into the service of the illustration or exemplification of a “reading” of a poem. It is my contention that the very way in

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which the distinction between “substantives” and “accidentals” is framed not only presupposes the hierarchical subordination of poetics to hermeneutics but that it damagingly scores that presupposition into the very face of our printed texts of verse. In many of our “definitive” or “authoritative” texts of verse, that is, a matter which is absolutely essential to verse composition and to verse reading, the metric- rhythmic texture of individual lines—a matter, that is, which is no more “accidental” to them than is the particular blue of a Tiepolo sky to that artist’s larger design—has been subordinated to the criterion of paraphrasable sense.26 The distinction of which Stillinger is making use here originates in an influential essay of 1950 by W. W. Greg, “The Rationale of Copy- Text.”27 Greg suggested that we “draw a distinction between the significant, or as I shall call them ‘substantive’, readings of the text, those namely that affect the author’s meaning or the essence of his expression, and others, such in general as spelling, punctuation, word- division, and the like, affecting mainly its formal presentation, which may be regarded as the accidents, or as I shall call them ‘accidentals’, of the text” (21). In a footnote Greg immediately conceded that “punctuation may very seriously ‘affect’ an author’s meaning; still it remains properly a matter of presentation, as spelling does in spite of its use in distinguishing homonyms. The distinction I am trying to draw is practical, not philosophic” (21n4). What is remarkable here is that, although Greg envisages cases in which differences in punctuation might qualify as “substantive” rather than “accidental,” the only case in which they might do so is that in which “an author’s meaning” is affected. With this, an absolutely central and essential aspect of the substance of works of verse art is at a stroke treated as not in fact belonging to the “essence” of their “expression.” Differences in the punctuation of written or printed verse are almost always differences in something essential to verse, in something, indeed, which makes verse verse, in its metric- rhythmic texture. If one believes, as I do, that the central achievement of Keats’s Endymion is that it, more than any other, was the poem in which the poet’s astonishing new repertoire of verse lines, sentences and manners was invented, one will not be inclined to accept the description of such features as “accidental,” however many protestations might be inserted between that term and its ultimate origin in Aristotelian metaphysics. How accidental are “accidentals”? The impatient doves, up rose the floating car,

is a quite different line from The impatient doves, uprose the floating Car.

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In the former, there must be a stress of some kind on “up” to indicate that it is a separate word; in the latter, the syllable “up- ” must not be at all stressed, precisely so as to indicate that it is part of this unusual compound verb. But when we stress “up,” the whole rhythmic and instrumentational texture of the line changes. The rhythmic texture changes because there is now a sequence of three consecutive stresses in the middle of the line, even if “up” is certainly a weaker stress than “doves” and “rose”; the line is packed, as though emphasizing just how much effort it takes to get something like Venus’s car into the air, rather than how swiftly it might move once airborne. The instrumentational texture changes because assonance arises only when the same vowels occur in two stressed syllables, so that the discompounding of “up rose” has the effect, foreseen or otherwise, of loading the line with an extra one. “The impatient doves, uprose the floating Car” is a line with a single assonance elegantly connecting this strange verb, “uprose,” and “floating”; “The impatient doves, up rose the floating car” has two, adding a marked chime between the two adjacent syllables, “doves” and “up.” What is more, the separation of these rare compounds into their constituent parts has an important effect on a consideration for which we have largely lost the ear, but to which Keats himself is likely to have been sensitive: the relationship between polysyllables and monosyllables. As printed in 1818, the first line here in full reads: “ ‘Here must we leave thee.’ —At these words up flew.” It consists wholly of monosyllables. It runs the risk, that is, of being one of those occasions on which ten low words oft creep in one dull line, and runs it the more because the metrical values of these particular monosyllables are so ambiguous. That Keats was consciously seeking to break out of what he regarded as a decayed sub- Popean prosody (“Sleep and Poetry,” ll. 181–206; Poems, 73–74) by no means entails indifference on his part to questions of this kind. When Keats at one point emends a line which in his draft reads “While I speak to thee—trust me it is true” (iv. 78; Woodhouse, 332) to “And thou old forest, hold ye this for true” (Morgan, 291) in the fair copy, one important consideration is likely precisely to have been to avoid low creep, which by no means prevents Keats, any more than it did Pope, from deploying purely monosyllabic lines with expert nonchalance: “Therefore for her these vesper- carols are./ Our friends will all be there from nigh and far” (Morgan, 359; Ketchum, 354; 1818, 199 [iv. 843–44]). Last but not least, the passage as it stands in the fair copy displays the very marked inclusion of three rare and arresting verbs. If the paraphrasable sense of “up flew,” “up rose,” “Up went” does not differ from that of “upflew,” “uprose,” and “Upwent,” their effect, in this poem which makes such virtuosic play with its ability to transit from the rarest and most difficult to the commonest and easiest language, does very conspicuously differ.

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At these words upflew The impatient doves, uprose the floating Car, Upwent the hum celestial.

All is lightness, rapidity, and mystery; the long speech closes with a sudden and dizzying ascent; the three main verbs, very visibly connected by their unusual morphology, echo and hasten each other upward. In the princeps, though, the chariot struggles to get off the ground. This is a special case, of course. Not many “accidental” variants concern the difference between a compound and a verb with a preposition. But there are very many other ways in which variants called “accidental,” on the grounds that they do not affect the sense, are intimately woven into the verse texture, in such a way that they cannot be removed without tearing the coat. One of the most pervasive of these concerns commas. They are everywhere in 1818, marking with tireless care the divisions between clause and clause and the hierarchies of clause over clause. They are more sparingly sown in the fair copy, allowing for the emergence of many more lines suspended without punctuation between predecessor and successor. The case is nothing so crude as that the presiding genius or geniuses of the first printed text cared only for grammar, those of the fair copy only for prosody. Both cared about both criteria, and both were clearly thinking about the collision between them. But the punctuation of the princeps prioritizes grammatical clarity and subordination of clauses; the punctuation of the fair copy, elasticity and continuity of line. This, as it happens, does not alter the fact that, on one or two occasions, the punctuations of the person or persons immediately responsible for 1818 seem to have mistaken rather than to have clarified the meaning. Consider, for example, the passage from the second book that introduces Endymion’s descent into the depths: Dark nor light, The Region; nor bright nor sombre wholly, But mingled up; a gleaming Melancholy: A dusky empire and its Diadems: One faint eternal eventide of gems. (Morgan, 111; Ketchum, 186) Dark, nor light, The region; nor bright, nor sombre wholly, But mingled up; a gleaming melancholy; A dusky empire and its diadems; One faint eternal eventide of gems. (ii. 222–26; 1818, 63–64)

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In 1818 a comma is introduced between “Dark” and “nor light,” as though to clarify. Instead it introduces a tautology absent from Keats’s fair copy. In 1818 the poem’s narrator is made to say that the region was dark, and, what’s more, it wasn’t light, either. “Dark nor light” means something different. It means that the region was neither dark nor light, as the following two half- lines indicate: “nor bright, nor sombre wholly.” The punctuator of 1818 has become accustomed to thinking that Keats’s sentences require more pointing, but here this default betrays him into error.Yet equally important are the effects of repointing on what is nonparaphrasable here, and what therefore would ordinarily count as “accidental”: on the verse movement of the passage and the traffic signals set up to control its flow. In 1818 we are given a number of ways of characterizing the dusky region into which Endymion has descended. Each is separated from the next by a semicolon, of which there are in total four. But in the fair copy something different happens. Only the first two characterizations end in semicolons. The last two conclude with colons. The two semicolons appear midline, the two colons at line end. The effect is significant: a colon produces a stronger sense of propulsion and expectation than a semicolon, and two in a row accumulate this sense of expectation, so that, in the fair copy, the final, remarkable, line, “One faint eternal eventide of gems,” comes as the culmination of an anticipation built up over a series of lines. In 1818 that line is just the last item on a list. The 1818 edition, in fact, consistently takes a much more austerely grammaticalist view of the function of the colon than Keats did when he was writing out the fair copy. It tends to reserve colons for instances in which the second clause is logically entailed by or in some way explains or amplifies the first. In the fair copy, Keats often instead uses the colon to mark a pause, but a pause that encourages us to crane forward rather than hang back. This is significant because Keats’s long verse sentences, with their often remarked unwillingness to be enclosed within lines and couplets, exist within a field governed by two antagonistic forces: a diffusive force, in which the proliferation of clauses and subclauses allows the verse sentence to meander and to disperse its energies, and a propulsive force, in which syntax, punctuation, and meter drive the sentence powerfully on through these rills and dells. Both forces are necessary to Endymion’s verse sentence. Colons tend to drive forward; semicolons are more inclined to hang back. In the final climactic stanza of the first book’s hymn to Pan, the pointing of 1818 produces a dwindling toward a close, where that of the fair copy had proposed a gathering acclamation: Be still the unimaginable Lodge For solitary thinkings, such as dodge

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Conception to the very bourn of heaven, Then leave the naked brain: be still the leven, That spreading in this dull and clodded earth Gives it a touch ethereal—a new birth: Be still a symbol of immensity: A Firmament reflected in a Sea: An element filling the space between: An unknown—but no more; . . . (Morgan, 33; Ketchum, 120–21) Be still the unimaginable lodge For solitary thinkings; such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave the naked brain: be still the leaven, That spreading in this dull and clodded earth Gives it a touch ethereal—a new birth: Be still a symbol of immensity; A firmament reflected in a sea; An element filling the space between; An unknown—but no more. (i. 293–302; 1818: 17)

One strangeness of this last stanza of this interpolated lyric is that it ardently instructs Pan, with presumptive redundancy, just to carry on being (“Be still”) a number of things that the lyric already asserts him to be—an instance of that “romantic fiat” to which Eric Lindstrom has recently drawn our attention.28 The fair copy’s pointing exacerbates this strangeness, where that of the princeps has almost the air of apologizing for it. The semicolons of 1818 seem to acknowledge defeat before Pan’s immensity, offering an episodic sequence of possible characterizations before giving up; the colons, by contrast, allow for a sense of the lyric’s attempt to outbid itself in its excitable formulations, each striving to outdo the last. In 1818, “no more” sounds like an admission of failure; in the fair copy, it sounds like a recoil from energetic combat. At this point it is necessary to return to our commas. Glaucus’s narrative of his encounter with Circe in the middle of the poem’s third book is stuffed with the properties of gothic and sub- Spenserian witchery: And all around her shapes, wizard and brute, Laughing, and wailing, groveling, serpenting Shewing tooth, tusk, and venom- bag, and sting. O such deformities! Old Charon’s self

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Should he give up awhile his penny pelf And take a dream ’mong rushes stygian It could not be so phantasied. Fierce, wan And tyrannizing was the Lady’s look As over them a knarled Staff she shook. (Morgan, 229–31; Ketchum, 268–69) And all around her shapes, wizard and brute, Laughing, and wailing, groveling, serpenting, Shewing tooth, tusk, and venom- bag, and sting! O such deformities! Old Charon’s self, Should he give up awhile his penny pelf, And take a dream ’mong rushes Stygian, It could not be so phantasied. Fierce, wan, And tyrannizing was the lady’s look, As over them a gnarled staff she shook. (iii. 503–11; 1818, 129)

The first three lines of the passage are saved from horridness of a merely automatic kind by some of the strange things done to words and to verse. Keats deploys a rare intransitive verb, “to serpent,” and then permits an imperfect rhyme of this verb’s gerund with “sting.” Still more conspicuous in the fair copy, though, is the hairpin turn it executes between two different styles of pointing. The first three lines are in both texts comma- pocked, as enumerating the separate items in the collection of vile properties and actions fitting to Circe’s companions. But in the fair copy this chopped- up texture is succeeded by a verse sentence that swings across three lines without any pointing whatsoever. The textural contrast is crucial to Keats’s verse virtuosity here, but in the first printed text it simply disappears, as each of the lines is obligingly provided with an end- stopping final comma. The 1818 gives priority to the structure of clauses in the sentence, separating them out line by line. The fair copy hurries past these analytical distinctions, even at the cost of a certain grammatical incoherence: for the sentence strictly to work, the pronoun “It” ought to be separated by a comma from what it stands for, “Old Charon’s self.” The verse unit, in fact, is promoted to an implicitly syntactical role. Line end is permitted to stand in for a punctuation that would be much more acutely missed were the lines to be transcribed as prose. Throughout the poem the first printed text again and again marks a line end with punctuation of some kind, where the fair copy omits any. The punctuation work carried out on 1818 was by no means sufficient to satisfy many of the poem’s first critics, for whom its failure to make verse

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and syntactical units coincide was a glaring fault.Yet the fair copy was much more determined even than this objectionable printed text to refuse that coincidence. It foregrounds its poetic of run- on and of unpunctuated line end. This difference affects not only the relations of lines to sentences but the interior texture of lines themselves. One instance may suffice: Endymion, with quick hand, the charm applied: The Nymph arose: he left them to their joy And onward went upon his high employ— Showering those powerful fragments on the dead. And as he pass’d each lifted up its head As doth a flower at apollo’s touch. (Morgan, 257; Ketchum, 285–86) Endymion, with quick hand, the charm applied— The nymph arose: he left them to their joy, And onward went upon his high employ, Showering those powerful fragments on the dead. And, as he pass’d, each lifted up its head, As doth a flower at Apollo’s touch. (iii. 786–91; 1818, 184)

Only to a machinery accustomed to process the very substance of works of verse art as a superfluous surface could “And as he pass’d each lifted up its head” seem different in its accidentals from “And, as he pass’d, each lifted up its head.” The two lines are rhythmically quite distinct from each other. The two lines are, rhythmically, quite distinct from each other. In 1818, “And” must be given a stress in order to show that “as he pass’d” is an interpolated clause, and the words “as he” are then necessarily scurried through to the next stress. The same consideration leads to this being a line with two pauses in it, one, conventionally enough, at four, but another, more startlingly, after the first syllable. As printed in 1818, the line moves with great deliberation, as though Endymion were to pause over each separate resuscitation for a moment and to admire his own surprising efficacity. As written in the fair copy, the line demands a delivery sufficiently elastic to concede the clause “as he pass’d” without collapsing the rhythm of the line for it. “As,” in this pointing, must take stress, and “he” can at will do so too, whereas neither word may (barring a very mannered delivery) do so in the first printed text. Instead of pausing to notice himself, in the fair copy Endymion strides past. The fair copy produces a line animated with tensions between rhythmic possibilities and syntactical requirements. The first printed text binds rhythm down to its job of pointing at the syntactical structure.

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Endymion stands at the beginning of what we might think of as a partial countertradition for a central line of English verse, a line that might proceed not so much through the works of the neglected or disparaged poets but through the mildly subordinated works of the most celebrated poets. As Karen Swann puts it, “The ‘Cockney’ poem and its scandalized responses produced the Keats that even cool modernism came to love”;29 and perhaps this Keats also was already that Keats, the one who leads anywhere other than to William Watson (“Crumbles the gorgeous year”), because the poem’s simultaneous care for and negligence of taste is so much more finely and delicately calibrated than has usually been admitted. This is a line which would pass directly through Sordello—a poem whose most fundamental donnée is the verse sentence invented in Endymion and which Browning then in his own poem severely torments, corrugates, and exacerbates—to Wallace Stevens’s “The Comedian As the Letter C”—a poem whose strong flavor of mock (“He pondered this”) and whose poising about in cloudy thunder- tents is decisively mediated by Endymion, the poem by Keats most often mentioned in Stevens’s early letters—and which might, perhaps, after that long and steep plummet, land in this pleasant nook: “I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? they’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.”30 What Frank O’Hara tells us he is not saying here is as important as what he tells us he is, and it sends us on after this to our contemporaries Steven Rodefer and Lisa Robertson, poets who know all about letting might slumber on its own right arm.31 The line of lofty ideas given up only at the last and right moment, when they have become lofty enough: the line of reviled virtuosity and of dandyism in deadly earnest, “Muffling to death the pathos with [its] wings” (1818, 73; ii. 422). Perhaps the last thing today’s literary professional might be likely to do when facing the question of a Romantic poet’s relation to the contemporary is to think of a contemporary poem. We should be likely instead to think of almost anything else first. To unseal this poem’s force for us now, though, demands not its quick assimilation to some meme or motif momentarily fresh but, instead, the most pedantic attention to the historically unique filaments of its making—and this just insofar as we ourselves stand at a moment when the false partition dividing technique from thinking, craft from art, stands more than ever in need of a little push. Not so as to make all thinking a matter of mere technique, but so as to allow all the intensive wishing, fearing, thinking, knowing that is going on in the making, the “feverous fingering” (ii. 55) of these lines, pauses, commas, colons, blanks—now grand, now light; now erotic, now heroic; now idealizing,

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now specifying; now in mists, now in sharp outline—to come back to us. Home through the gloomy wood in wonderment.

Notes 1. John Keats, Endymion (1818), A Facsimile of Richard Woodhouse’s Annotated Copy in the Berg Collection, in The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: John Keats, Volume 3, ed. Donald H. Reiman (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), 151. Further citations are given parenthetically in the text and annotated as “Woodhouse.” 2. John Keats, Endymion: A Facsimile of the Revised Holograph Manuscript, in The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: John Keats, Volume 2, ed. Donald H. Reiman (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), 119. Further citations are given parenthetically in the text and annotated as “Morgan.” 3. I’m deeply indebted to Michael Hansen of the University of Chicago for drawing my attention to Margaret Ketchum’s (now Margaret Ketchum Powell’s) edition of Endymion (“An Edition of Keats’s ‘Endymion,’ ” PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1980 [hereafter cited in the text as “Ketchum”]) and for enabling me to consult a copy of it. I thank Anne Stillman for reading and thinking about Endymion, Frank O’Hara, and Stephen Rodefer aloud with me. My use of Ketchum’s text need not imply that I think it superior to Stillinger’s or to others taking the 1818 text ( John Keats, Endymion: A Poetic Romance [London: Taylor and Hessey, 1818], hereafter annotated in the text as “1818”) for copy—that is a question left open here—but that, for reasons indicated below, Ketchum’s more often preserves certain features of Keats’s versification that were undeniably written down by Keats at at least one moment in the composition of Endymion, and are therefore important to my argument. 4. Porsha Fermanis, John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 56. 5. Jack Stillinger, Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 8. 6. Nicholas Roe, John Keats: A New Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 179. 7. R. S. White, John Keats: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 80. 8. I do not suggest that the poem is wholly inaccessible to interpretation, or that such an activity is unimportant, but wish to redress a balance here, while intending to return to the poem on a future occasion. 9. See Simon Jarvis, “What Is Historical Poetics?,” in Theory Aside, ed. Daniel Stout and Jason Potts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 10. Simon Jarvis, “For a Poetics of Verse,” PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010): 931–35. 11. For these reasons I deliberately pass up the many opportunities my topic affords me to quote the early reception of Keats’s verse, not because I do not consider this reception important to thinking about Keats’s style but because this material has de facto become more canonical and more closely attended to than the actual texture of Keats’s writing. An early symptom of this is Marjorie Levinson’s Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), in which “the social and ideological vulgarity of Keats’s

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poetry” (30) is taken as read, and in which claims about this vulgarity early and late are frequently quoted, but in which Endymion does not appear in the index, even though it is occasionally mentioned (e.g., 175). The present essay attempts to follow Levinson’s directive that “we must work very hard to recover the intonation of this verse” (35–36) more closely than she herself does. 12. The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:267. Further citations are annotated parenthetically in the text as Letters. 13. The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Heinemann, 1978), 738. Further citations are annotated parenthetically in the text as Poems. 14. See James Najarian, Victorian Keats: Manliness, Sexuality, Desire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 2002. 15. Tim Milnes, The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 86–87. 16. White, John Keats, 80. 17. J. M. Leigh Hunt, The Story of Rimini: A Poem (London: John Murray, 1816). 18. The text in this column is my reconstruction of the text as it would have stood in Keats’s draft, following the record of that document made by Woodhouse, 126–27. 19. Charlton Hinman, ed., The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile (New York: Norton, 1996), 425. For Helen Vendler, it is “after 1818” that “Shakespeare moves into the ascendant” (Coming of Age As a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003], 43), but I follow Douglas Bush (“Keats and Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare: Aspects of Influence, ed. G. B. Evans [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976], 73), and Beth Lau (“John Keats,” in Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats: Great Shakespeareans IV, ed. Adrian Poole [London, Continuum, 2010], 109–59) in thinking that 1817 was the year in which that happened; see also White, John Keats, 81–83. 20. Boris Eichenbaum,“Concerning the Question of the ‘Formalists’: A Survey and a Reply,” in The Futurists, the Formalists, and the Marxist Critique, trans. Christopher Pike and Joe Andrew, ed. Chrisopher Pike (London: Links, 1979), 49–62, 61–62. 21. Stillinger, ed., The Poems of John Keats, 574. 22. The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), 177; John Barnard, John Keats:The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 2003), 142. 23. The difficulty is that there is, suspending for a moment the wider question of the validity of “the rationale of copy- text,” evidence for both cases. Ketchum is able to show that Keats did, contrary to what is sometimes believed, in some instances show himself intimately concerned with details of punctuation, elision, and so on, and to mount a persuasive case that it would be at least incautious to take Keats’s eventual expressions of satisfaction with the text as printed at face value (Ketchum, 10–15). On the other hand, it seems unlikely that we can safely take every single “accidental” of the fair copy now in the Morgan Library as Keats’s vision of what the printed text ought to have looked like, since (for example) many proper names and proper adjectives are there not capitalized: did Keats really want to insist on “stygian,” not “Stygian,” and on “apollonian,” not “Apollonian”? In the end, however, the problem lies with this very question: which document should be taken for copy- text, the first printed edition or Keats’s fair copy? The concept of a copy- text is metaphysical in a way which there is no space to demonstrate here, except

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by pointing out that the expression “copy- text” means “the text which is to be followed by the editor, except where it is not to be followed.” Behind this concept, the whole mass of Keats’s conjecturable wishes, regrets, plans, fantasies, hopes, and wishes is to be coerced into a schematic sub- phenomenology of “intention” which is claimed to correspond to mental events in the life of an individual, but for which the corresponding human being is perfectly unimaginable. This essay not only is not (not itself being an edition) obliged to answer the question mentioned above, but additionally contends that it is unanswerable. With this, it at the same time gives up any idea of blaming or triumphing over or congratulating hard- working editors for the choices they have found it necessary to make, yet does, for itself, renounce the idea of finding one instant in Keats’s mental history more “authoritative” than another, and attempts to measure the extent of the possible losses to the poetics of verse incurred by so doing. 24. See also Jack Stillinger, The Texts of Keats’s Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). 25. Margaret Ketchum Powell, “Keats and His Editor: The Manuscript of Endymion,” The Library 6, no. 2 (1984): 139–52. 26. For a valuable reminder, meanwhile, of the level of complexity of the criterion of “paraphrasable sense” and of the high interest to which “mere paraphrase” can attain in the mind of a gifted critic such as William Empson, see Helen Thaventhiran’s brilliant essay, “Empson and the Orthodoxy of Paraphrase” (Essays in Criticism 61, no. 4 [2011]: 382–404). 27. W. W. Greg, “The Rationale of Copy- Text,” Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950): 19–36. Page numbers are hereafter cited in the text. 28. Eric Reid Lindstrom, Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 29. Karen Swann, “Endymion’s Beautiful Dreamers,” in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 20–36, 21. 30. Frank O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto,” in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 498–99, 498. For previous identifications of a possible link between Keats and O’Hara, see, for example, Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Keats and the Historical Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1985), 31, and Drew Milne, “Flaming Robes: Keats, Shelley and the Metrical Clothes of Class Struggle” (Textual Practice 15, no. 1: [2001]: 101–22), esp. 117–20: the need to give a fuller account of Keats’s drafting and technique leaves that question merely pointed at here. The account of Endymion I offer wishes to distinguish it a little from that early verse which Milne takes, rather in Levinson’s manner, as offering a “louche, arriviste metrical liberation, whose youthful insouciance debunks some of the ‘high’ seriousness of poetic tradition, while developing a sensual and antimartial sociability of tone” (“Flaming Robes,” 117–18). 31. For example, Lisa Robertson, Debbie: An Epic ( Vancouver: New Star Books, 1997); Stephen Rodefer, Answer to Dr. Agathon (Cambridge: Equipage, 1996); idem, Call It Thought: Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008); and especially Stephen Rodefer and Benjamin Friedlander, Oriflamme Day (San Francisco: Phraseology, 1987).

Dancing in the Dark with Shelley Joel Faflak

But still. Still. Bless me anyway. I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do. —Angels in America: Perestroika1

1 This chapter entertains film musicals as what Jacques Khalip calls “the romantic remains of a modernity that defines itself in the claims it cannot reflect, and which it cannot also bury.”2 John Ridpath wonders, “If films were once likened to the theatre, perhaps the modern movie is closer to the musical.” Video and digital media have turned cinema’s “immobile, attentive, disciplined, receptive” public into a “distracted audience” engaged in “boundless activity.” This shift transforms cinema’s private catharsis into democratic exchange at the same time that it broadcasts desire as pleasure’s same dull round. For J. Hoberman, this “‘cyborg cinema’” turns “Bazin’s dream” into the “nightmare . . . of a virtual cyber existence: Total Cinema as a total dissociation from reality.”3 By making a spectacle of their manufactured technology, musicals celebrate both film’s simulative potential and its promise of liberated subjectivity. They put film to work to produce a line of musical commodities that give their happy consumers more bang for the film’s buck.4 Yet musicals’ late logic of capitalism’s ceaseless promise also reflects an earlier nervous reaction to the visual’s “suspension of perception.”5 As Bell Calvert says in James Hogg’s 1823 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, a novel in which reason confronts faith to produce a post- Humean crisis of testimony, “We have nothing on earth but our senses to depend upon: if these deceive us, what are we to do?”6 The traumatic delay between vision and reality feeds our ineluctable capacity to confuse belief with deception.7 But if Coleridge’s poetic faith suspends disbelief in the autonomous cognition of the mind’s vision- ary powers, the “triumph” of Percy Shelley’s final, unfinished poem stages the visual’s more problematic transformation

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of the public sphere. In a post- Lockean context, sight commandeers the other senses, as if to make visible the common sense and sensibility of enlightenment itself. On the eve of a Second Empire, however, David Brewster calls the visual “supernatural,”8 an overweening creative power in need of discipline. Written after the empire’s first tryout gets bad reviews, as Regency culture renegotiates post- 1790s politics, The Triumph of Life reflects a society of the spectacle still in visual flux. But it predicts a history fascinated by the production of images that body forth life, then compromise any return to life itself. No wonder, then, that the poem is vitally cinematic. As Shelley sets the scene, the “Sun” didn’t just rise; it “sprang forth,” “Swift as a spirit hastening to its task”: “before me fled /The night; behind me rose the day; the Deep /Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head.”9 The Apennines are alive with “Sweet talk in music” (39) shared by all the players: the “mountain snows” that “Flamed above crimson clouds” (5–6); the “birds” that “tempered their matin lay” to “the Ocean’s orison” (8, 7); the “flowers in the field” that “unclose /Their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day” (9–10). Under the Sun’s direction, “Continent, / Isle, Ocean, and all things that in them wear /The form and character of mortal mould / Rise as the Sun their father rose, to bear /Their portion of the toil” (15–19). This is a proto- Victorian world desperate to get its show back on the road. All members of nature’s cast labor together, and Shelley as narrator, like director Julian Marsh in the ur- backstage musical 42nd Street (1933), works like hell to bring the world prosopopoeically to life to make sure everyone does the best damn job she can. His show of the narrator’s show of nature’s show unfolds a further show, the narrator’s dream vision (44ff ), which in turn enfolds Rousseau’s vision (308ff ) of a “shape all light” (352). And here we arrive as if at the refulgent source of cinema’s illumination: she “with one hand did fling / Dew on the earth, as if she were the Dawn /Whose invisible rain forever seemed to sing / A silver music on the mossy lawn,” before which “Iris” casts the technicolor rainbow of “her many coloured scarf ” “on the dusky grass” (353–57). But the shape’s vitality is more pharmakon than panacea. In her other hand she holds a “chrystal glass / Mantling with bright Nepenthe,” whose “fierce splendor” acts as an antidepressant to help Rousseau forget rather than transform things as they are (358–59). Her feet, moving “ever to the ceaseless song” of nature, stamp out the relentless choreography of their own “sweet tune,” whose purpose, like the Neuralyzer in Men in Black, is “to blot /The thoughts of him who gazed on them” (375, 382–84). “All that was seemed as if it had been not,/ As if the gazer’s mind was strewn beneath / Her feet

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like embers, and she, thought by thought,/Trampled its fires into the dust of death,” just as daylight “Treads out the lamps of night” and turns night into a “dream” (385–88, 390, 393). Her “vital alchemy” makes “sweet command” (402, 403) to drink the Nepenthe, after which “suddenly [his] brain became as sand” (405) and “on [his] sight / Burst a new vision never seen before” (410–11), which now moves “With savage” and “stunning music” (435). Like the photographic image, “the shape” freeze- frames the vitality of time, captures and bodies forth the temporal delay of the past and thus death itself.10 Yet the poem does not stop time; rather, to paraphrase Laura Mulvey, revisiting cinema’s “history” after the advent of digital media, the “shape” works “by means of an illusion that animates the inanimate frames of its origin,” suspending the narrator between “stillness and movement, continuity and discontinuity.”11 And she animates this theater’s seductive desire: “darkness” is a “breath” that “reillumines even the least / Of heaven’s living eyes” (390–92), suspending Rousseau “between desire and shame” in a “valley of perpetual dream” (394, 397). The shape’s two hands figure both what and how she figures: on the one hand, life, or the “sweet” illusion thereof; on the other, the “savage” and “stunning” way in which illusion makes itself felt, seen, and thus known as life’s inexorable companion. Mulvey argues that “cinema combines, perhaps more perfectly than any other medium, two human fascinations: one with the boundary between life and death and the other with the mechanical animation of the inanimate, particularly the human, figure.”12 It is thus key that Shelley’s vision unfolds through music and the ceaseless choreography of human figures, as if to reflect back from the future the moment when the addition of sound to cinema itself brought the technology of human imagination and the real sublimely, perilously close to one another.13 Forest Pyle calls Shelley’s terza rima “spectacular,” which spotlights the “shape all light” as the unnatural product of a natural process; it “erupts from the fire and the Sun and . . . yet belongs to no natural or sensory optical system.” Pyle continues, “The cascading . . . terza rima . . . makes it difficult to cite the instance of the shape’s appearance, [which] seems precisely the point.”14 That is to say, appearance is the point: we understand the shape’s ontogenesis by how it looks. The shape doesn’t see; it is seeing constituted at the site of its visual production, a protean technology that shapes what it visualizes—it is that shape as the technology of its own visualization, less the collapse of dancer and dance than the drive of dancing, of sheer movement. The shape figures the “savage” figurality of visual semiosis itself.15 This “stunning” suspension produces knowledge as a “virtual” inability to comprehend origins or identities. When Rousseau says he “knew” that the light’s “severe excess”

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“Moved . . ./ More dimly than a day appearing dream,/The ghost of a forgotten form of sleep,” which “Glimmers, forever sought, forever lost” (424, 426–28, 431), he illuminates nature darkly as the magic lantern of things as they are, what Caleb Williams calls a “theatre of calamity.”16 Suspended between Wille and Darstellung, Rousseau knows only the moment of his constitution by witnessing this origin as a fantasy predicated on the nothingness of its own making. The “shew” within a “shew” within a “shew” . . . “shews” Rousseau, as Shelley “shews” us, that however one might want the show to end, as if to avoid the discomfort we feel when a film breaks into song and dance, it must go on and on . . . and on. If Adonais mourns how culture exploits frustrated desire as perpetual yearning, Triumph stages this abuse as the catastrophe of history that fuels the spectacle of culture.17 The Enlightenment hope Shelley longed to enshrine becomes the Regency injunction to pursue happiness as an ideological rather than ethical end.18 Film musicals exploit this quest by restaging the fantasy of an endlessly promised, endlessly deferred better life as capitalism’s ur- plot. The mise- en- scène of The Triumph of Life encrypts within this fantasy its constitutive primal scene: a broader population accustomed to endless deficit. Coming early within Tom Gunning’s “cinema of attractions,”19 Triumph suggests not only how mass cultural forms serve society’s fascination with technological advance but also how culture is already imbricated as and by the technology of its own form. In this way musicals are overdetermined by their simplicity. Structured around a rift between narrative reality and musical fantasy they must be shown to elide, if not repair, musicals make deprivation their constitutive possibility. One might say the genre gets invented to account for this trauma. After taking up film musical history and diegesis in the wake of Shelley’s text, I address Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd (2007) and, especially, Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000), late genre entries that explore the dark utopianism of history fed by the technology of its own idealisms.20 Witnesses to life as if beyond the grave, Burton’s Sweeney or von Trier’s Selma are siblings to “what was once Rousseau” (204): they see life as the epiphenomenon of the death drive. As if “sick of this perpetual flow” (298), unable to “from spectator turn / Actor . . . in this wretchedness,” and so remaining the “victim” (305–6) of its hope- inducing fantasy, Selma, like Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, is tired of making a show of things. It remains to be seen if her désœuvrement is no future or the end of things. The Triumph of Life makes Adonais a mere tryout—despite that poem’s necrophiliac muse, poet as St. Sebastian, and Spielberg finish as the “white radiance of Eternity” (463) smashes the “dome of many- coloured glass” (462). Now the “fire for which all thirst” (485) has burned through the screen

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to reveal the fatal moment of ideological capture, as at the end of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2007). Shelley awakens us to the performance of history itself, in which we “pant,” “sink,” “tremble,” and “expire” on a daily basis (Epipsychidion, 591). Each morning in Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979), director Joe Gideon, torn between art and entertainment, showers, puts a drop of Visine in each eye, swallows a tab of Dexedrine, and repeats the vaudeville mantra, “It’s showtime, folks!” A film whose big finish is a series of musical numbers that stage its director’s death takes to disaster like a duck to water. But disaster looms large in Shelley’s last poem, in which the collision of skepticism and idealism is as much Byronic as Shelleyan.21 Byron having broken hope’s prophylactic, Shelley was forced to enter within an unsafe future the empty center of the plague of fantasies. To ask “why God made irreconcilable / Good and the means of good” (230–31) is to miss the point. As Tony Kushner asks in Angels in America, what does it mean to “live past hope,” when that’s the “best [we] can do,” which is “so much not enough”—a gorgeous Shelleyan phrase that both annuls and affirms “more life.”22 To ask, “Then, what is life?” begs more life; but should one bother “to hope, till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates” (Triumph, 545; Prometheus Unbound, 4.573–74)?

2 A hyperactive Hegelian Geist propels the text’s opening. “Rejoicing in his [own] splendour,” the sun causes the “mask / Of darkness [to fall] from the awakened Earth” (1–4). Enlightenment seems vital, transformational, animating a progressive revelation that unbinds history’s narrative to release the visionary lyric splendor of absolute knowledge. The receding darkness allows Earth and its history to move forward.Yet the narrator’s dream vision unmasks progress and enlightenment to reveal the dangers of an awakened Earth. History advances by alteration, involution, recession, driven by the release of what lies buried, damaged, or ruined within, as when Rousseau emerges from the “old root which grew /To strange distortion” (182–83) from the narrator’s dreamscape. Unfolding through the operations of the narrator’s mind as “thoughts which must remain untold” (21; my emphasis), the text is fashioned by self- contemplation as both arbiter of what it chooses to show and the autonomous exhibition of what lies beyond its purview. It thus summons us and the narrator, as it has summoned Rousseau, to history shaped by the blind side of insight. In A Defence of Poetry Shelley calls this a failure to “imagine that which we know” and a lack of the “generous impulse to act that which we imagine,” which leaves us “want[ing] the poetry of life”

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(530). In Triumph the (in)ability to see things as they are figures history as a move back to the future of illusions. The text figures this uncanny drive as the “Janus- visaged Shadow” of a charioteer whose four- sided projection of history into the space/time “Of all that is, has been, or will be done” proceeds with “banded eyes” (94, 104, 103). Thought’s ability to “see” is unavoidably bound up with and by a future production that perpetually delays its liberty. If interrogating history releases the narrator and Rousseau into a measure of agency, its reflexive nature reinterpellates them within the Symbolic form history will have taken. By using no quotation marks to separate the narrator from Rousseau, Shelley’s manuscript further suggests how being and knowing are the products of their own visualization.23 This shifts the text’s scene of instruction from “telling”—as when the narrator ask Rousseau, “Whence camest though and whither goest thou? / How did thy course begin . . . and why?” (296–97)—to “shewing” history, as when Rousseau asks the “shape all light” to “Shew whence I came, and where I am, and why” (383). Without quotation marks to identify the speech, what is shown displaces who is telling, transmogrifying the narrator’s lyric utterance into a montage of virtual identities whose protean drive is figured by the “shape” itself. By the time of Rousseau’s penultimate vision, just before the text disappears into “the fold / Of ” itself (547–48), vision has become a series of “shadows” (528) or “busy phantoms” (534) that the “great crowd sent forth incessantly” (527), which “Each, like himself and like each other were,/ At first, but soon distorted seemed to be / Obscure clouds moulded by the casual air” or “As the sun shapes the clouds” (530–32, 535). As Pyle suggests, the text’s mobile tableau of atmospheric phenomena simulates nature as preternatural desiring machine, a “sensational” nature that enacts its own sensate nature. Life acquires “natural” being via a production of distinct images whose unfolding spectacle postpones distinction indefinitely. The narrator and Rousseau access “life” only through this filmic stratum, what Frederic Jameson calls “materialized subjectivity.”24 W. J. T. Mitchell calls film images “vital signs,” “not merely signs for living things but signs as living things.”25 Images “mortify and resurrect in the same gesture”26 to make the visualization of the real vitally traumatic. In this way the film evokes the haunting quality of nature and human nature as a more real staging of reality itself. Despite our enlightened modernity, we exist with a “‘double consciousness’ toward images, pictures, and representations . . . , vacillating between magical beliefs and skeptical doubts, naïve animism and hardheaded materialism, mystical and critical attitudes.”27 Invoking Lacanian notions of the Real and desire, Mitchell argues that “what the picture awakens our desire to see . . . is exactly what it cannot show.”28 As “that which resists

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symbolization absolutely,”29 the Real awakens illusion’s desire to reify the real, what Slavoj Žižek calls the “Real of the illusion itself.”30 For Žižek the Real is “a certain GRIMACE of reality, a certain imperceptible, unfathomable, ultimately illusory feature”31 that marks our irrevocable distance from reality. Illusion exists as illusion to hide “the remainder of [our] authenticity,” the place where we are but can never be or know in its fullness but “whose traces we can discern in an imperfect mechanical reproduction.”32 The Real both necessitates and guarantees illusion by not calling attention to it as illusion, which gives our imaginary nature “consistency and thickness” precisely by ignoring that it lacks this integrity. Neither potent nor impotent, images instead project back to us what our imagination “wants.” Žižek argues that “desire emerges when drive gets caught in the cobweb of Law/prohibition.”33 This trap is our fantasy that the other has immediate access to a desire we don’t; in short, we desire the other’s desire. And this circuit catches us in the other’s gaze, in the visual fantasy of being “seen” by the other; we thus imagine the other “sees” or has “traversed” our fantasy of him. What we don’t see is how this fantasy plagues both ways: “All we have to do is experience how there is nothing ‘behind’ [the fantasy], and how [it] masks precisely this ‘nothing.’”34 Put another way, desire masks its cruisy, ceaselessly repetitive movement as drive. Jameson argues that the “visual is essentially pornographic” and “has its end in rapt, mindless fascination.”35 “Law/prohibition” produces desire by harnessing drive lest its autonomous, “mindless” perversity (perverse because autonomous and “mindless”) threaten the Symbolic’s phantasmatic consistency. To paraphrase Lee Edelman, desire urges toward a reproductive future that offers the promise and the lure of progress.36 Drive (hence the death drive, for Freud) works toward no future; it thus both constitutes and short- circuits fantasy as desire’s forward momentum. Desire is full frontal, recircuiting libido toward its properly reproductive goal to satisfy the aims of Law/prohibition. Drive mounts a rearguard action to generate the aimlessly productive/productively aimless dilations of a pleasure without end within reproduction. For Lacan, drive most resembles a montage “having neither head nor tail,” as in a “surrealist collage,”37 an emergent history blind to either the cause or goal of its unfolding, which aptly describes the “shape all light.” That drive can only be encountered as montage thus makes different sense of Rousseau’s injunction to the narrator—“Now listen” (308)—which arrests attention in order to suspend us in vision’s warp and woof, to make us actors or victims as spectators. The text’s scene of instruction still reanimates history to make it felt on the pulses, but within a spectacle that makes sense

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hauntingly performative, less about the possession of knowledge than about its autonomous manufacture as sense memory. Like the attempt to isolate the objective reality of Mont Blanc from the mind gazing on its own operations, cognition becomes, even as it unfolds, “Figures ever new” that “Rise on the bubble, paint them how [we] may” (248–49). This dizzying series of stages, like Shelley’s “Dizzy Ravine” (“Mont Blanc,” 34), recalls Hume’s oscillating mental theater, which for Anthony Kubiak has a terrorizing quality. Kubiak argues that a primal state of theater precedes, conditions, and haunts the subject’s entry into the Symbolic,38 recalling the infant’s social formation out of the warring imagoes of self and other in the Lacanian mirror stage. This gothic drama produces an empty subject constituted by the mise-en- scène of gazing on his unfolding performance as subject. It also animates the specters of spectatorship, in which the other’s gaze gains its specular power from the self ’s desire for surveillance, to be witnessed and thus to be made real, yet in turn yielding autonomy to the coercion of how we are seen. If the “shape all light” projects drive as an autonomous scene of animation, Rousseau’s ensuing vision stages this scene as the primal theater of history whose appeal we cannot resist because we are always already suspended within and by it. It is to this uncanny moment of visual arrest that film musicals speak as strangely autonomous and self- reflexive cultural forms whose excessive appeal to their audience at once entertains and critiques spectacle itself. Hybrids of opera, operetta, music hall, vaudeville, minstrel shows, and Broadway, film musicals shadow the rise of talkies and American mid- century ascendancy and decline. They briefly flourished with The Jazz Singer (1927) and Broadway Melody (1929), but revived at Warner Brothers in three 1933 films: 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, and Goldiggers of 1933. These evolve the “show within a show,” “let’s put on a show” plot of the “backstage musical,” which laid bare the economics, aesthetics, and collaborative labor of film diegesis, in turn applauding the visual technology and culture of studio production. Self- referentiality epitomizes the genre’s endless self- fashioning: musicals are flagrantly incestuous cultural products.39 This reproductive drive grasps the essence of film semiosis by at once encrypting and celebrating a cinematic history and experience that it mirrors back to a yearning public. Indeed, musicals’ can- do ideology helped to materialize the end of the Great Depression by literally showing people how to get back to work and thus make a better show of things. As the country got happier, the musicals’ capital continued to rise with the sunnier Astaire/Rogers films at RKO and especially at MGM, from roughly The Wizard of Oz (1939) to Gigi (1958). But this period’s more challenging films—The Pirate (1948), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), The Bandwagon (1953), West Side Story (1961)—also work overtime

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to cure the time’s dissociated sensibilities. This creative fever coincides with post–World War II American optimism meeting its paranoiac doubles in the Cold War and McCarthyism. Not unlike Regency politics, the times required getting people into the habit of believing in hope by making a spectacle of society’s desire for happiness. That the genre “died” after the mega- success of The Sound of Music (1966) cuts two ways: post- 1960s films such as Cabaret (1972), All That Jazz (1979), Dancer in the Dark (2000), Moulin Rouge! (2002), and Sweeney Todd (2007) finally out the genre’s closeted dark interpretation; or the political technology of hope invented by the film musical had sufficiently retooled public desire such that the genre’s lesson in the national classroom was over. If musicals are no longer officially “needed,” then, I wonder if they persist, as they always have, precisely to irritate and make us anxious about their suspension of perception, whatever their outcome. Richard Dyer argues that film musicals are collaboratively produced entertainments whose mode of “‘escape’ or ‘wish fulfillment’ point[s] to [their] central thrust, namely, utopianism.” This utopianism is “contained in the feelings it embodies,”40 especially through the film’s nonrepresentational elements such as “color, texture, movement, rhythm, melody, camerawork”—as distinct from representational elements such as stars, characters, or setting. Musical numbers materialize utopian feelings by intensifying cinematic experience. For Dyer, this manufactured happiness turns the otherwise improbable break between narrative and number into a constitutive negotiation between social reality and utopian longing. By revitalizing the entropies of everyday life, musical numbers correct quotidian deficiencies through an intensified cinematic experience that literally materializes utopia by visualizing how it looks, sounds, and thus feels.41 But if numbers transform narrative, they also insist on their estranging distance, as if to fetishize an impossible metamorphosis. Kristin Thompson reads this freakish compensation as the excess of cinema, generated when a film’s “unifying structures” (e.g., the heterosexual romance or backstage musical plots) clash with a film’s aural and visual “materiality,” which defamiliarizes these normalizing strategies in order to “intrigue us by [film’s] strangeness.”42 This lure materializes what Edgar Morin calls the “astonishing phenomenon where the illusion of reality is inseparable from the awareness that it is really an illusion, without, however, this awareness killing the feeling of reality.” Hence, “the real emerges into reality only when it is woven with the imaginary, which solidifies it, gives it consistency and thickness—in other words, reifies it.”43 To recall the above discussion of the Real as “a certain GRIMACE of reality, a certain imperceptible, unfathomable, ultimately illusory feature” that binds fantasy, we can say that utopia is this feature of reality. Perhaps

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this is why musical numbers make us either/both giddy or/and uneasy: by so palpably staging our illusions as illusions they threaten to expose our frail grasp on reality, in turn making reality itself all too real.

3 Two recent films address this impossible transformation as the film musical’s structuring possibility. Released in the Bush twilight, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd films Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 Broadway musical, produced at Reagan’s dawn. Sweeney echoes within the political unconscious of Victorian melodrama the grisly spirit of Grand Guignol, which exploits post- Revolutionary French excess, and the terror of Terror in spectacles of English Romantic theater. Todd, “the Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” has returned from the colonies, to which he was unjustly transported, to avenge the subsequent kidnapping and rape of his wife by Judge Turpin. The musical joins Fleet Street and West End, epicenters of London’s information and entertainment matrix, as if to address the imperial ambition of industrial and cultural production. Adopted from the land of George III by artists of the empire he lost, Sweeney thus also addresses how American globalism remains haunted by empire’s failure. Burton stages this primal scene of political and technological advance in the metropole’s sewers: a gigantic meat grinder and a single oven for Todd’s victims.Yet this also stages the rapacity of cultural production as a cannibalistic spectacle mediated by the production and consumption of its images. A gothic genealogy links modernity’s early atrocities in Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, or The Triumph of Life to the parasitic intertextuality of film musicals to a culture industry whose liberatory imagination, as Adorno and Horkheimer warned, ends up functioning by and looking like the same brutal politics its inventors escaped by coming to the New World.44 Through Sweeney Todd’s zombielike lust to murder the “winners” of history’s “triumph,” Sweeney Todd stages the parasitic vitality of the world as a series of what Jerrold Hogle calls gothic counterfeits.45 But even Todd succumbs. The film’s last shot, after Todd shoves Mrs. Lovitt into the oven, demonically inverts the Pieta: neck slit, Todd, having claimed his wife as his penultimate (and tragically, accidental) victim, cradles her as blood pours from and over both of them. Todd’s psychosis clears the psychotic ideological haze to expose bare life itself. For Giorgio Agamben, between zoeˉ, bare life as the “simple fact of living,” and bios as its political mediation, “post- democratic spectacular societies” have produced Homo sacer: the uncanny figure of a life that can be taken (as in a sovereign’s power of life and death), but shouldn’t be sacrificed.46 Like Shelley’s final poem, Sweeney Todd stages this mediation as a spectacle that

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feeds on life itself. This parasitic relationship recalls within the ontogenesis of film musical utopianism the suture between the death drive of narrative and the pleasure principle of musical numbers. Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark stages this suture as a zone between two deaths deferred by musical “life”: desire’s end when life ceases, and the endless consumption that is required to achieve this first end through the ceaseless detours or “ends” of life itself. As if to evoke the ground zero of film musical utopianism, the film’s overture, riffing off Robert Wise’s opening credits for West Side Story, plays over an impressionist canvas of shifting colors. This seamless montage visualizes Shelley’s dome of many- colored glass as Iris’s technicolored scarf at the same time that it prefigures the film’s devastating rupture between blindness and insight. In the opening scene, Selma Ježková (Bjork), a Czech immigrant, rehearses her part as Maria singing “My Favorite Things” in an amateur production of The Sound of Music. In the number, Maria’s use of music to calm the von Trapp children during a storm prepares them to escape fascism in the New World that defeated Hitler (with the help of its culture industry, ironically). Having left the Cold War behind, Selma lives in Washington State with her son, Gene, in a trailer she rents on the property of policeman Bill and his wife, Linda. Working in a stamping factory making kitchen sinks in 1964, the year after Camelot falls, Selma is surviving rather less well than the von Trapps managed to in Stowe, Vermont. Here is Peter Matthews’s pithy outline of the rest of the plot: One day, Bill [David Morse] confesses to [Selma] that the bank will soon repossess his house; Selma reveals she is going blind from a hereditary condition and saving for an operation to rescue Gene’s sight. After Selma refuses to loan him money, Bill discovers where she hides her savings. Helped by her friend Kathy [Catherine Deneuve], Selma begins working the night shift, but gets sacked when she breaks the machinery. Selma discovers she has been robbed. Bill admits the crime, only to tell Linda that Selma was attempting to steal his money [and seduce him in turn]. When Selma tries to take back her savings, Bill pulls a gun and is mortally wounded in the ensuing struggle; he begs Selma to finish the job, and she batters him to death with a strong box [which held his father’s inheritance, now squandered to keep Linda in her illusion of middle- class existence]. Selma then visits the doctor to pay for Gene’s operation. Soon after, the police arrest her. On trial, Selma claims to have sent the money to her father Oldrˇich Nový [ Joel Grey], a musical star in Czechoslovakia. Nový arrives and refutes this. Selma is found guilty and sentenced to death. Her friend Jeff [whose overtures of romance and domestic happiness she repeatedly rejects throughout the film], finds out about Gene’s operation and gets the case

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re- opened. But Selma refuses to use the money to pay for the lawyer [she wants Gene to be able to “see his grandchildren”]. In the execution room, Selma sings a song and is hanged.47

Matthews’s synopsis is meant to convey how von Trier’s melodrama toys with our incredulity, just as Romantic verse left many neoclassicists, Victorians, and modernists alike asking, “Really?” But the film reflects how cinematic excess displaces our uneasiness about reality, as if to assault us with film spectacle’s encrypted trauma.48 For Selma, coming to a new land of democracy over the rainbow does not mean a better life; working hard does not bring happiness, cannot even buy happiness; just being alive extracts a price impossible to pay.49 In the film’s opening number, “Cvalda,”50 Selma choreographs the factory’s dronelike noises into a song- and- dance soundstage. Staging how musicals redeem the everyday, however, the number’s pause from the ordinary literally “breaks” reality: Selma is wrenched from her fantasy to find that she’s wrecked the machine at her workstation, her dream factory bringing capitalism to a screeching halt. As extensions of Selma’s psychic and emotional state, all the film’s numbers elide liberation and dissociation in this manner, whether in the manic “Cvalda” and “In the Musicals,” in which she turns her trial into a musical number led by Nový,51 or in the depressive “I’ve Seen It All,” “Scatterheart,” and “107 Steps.” Together they form a dissonant tableau of traumatic spots of time whose tragedy deepens with the shift to a more intense chromatic, aural, and visual register. Their fantasy allows Selma to access a desire she cannot otherwise afford, even as they deny this access agency. Earlier in the film, Selma tells Bill and Linda their home looks a movie set. Somewhat later, her friend Jeff wonders why people break into song and dance in a musical, which doesn’t make sense to him because he never does this. Selma quietly replies, “No, you don’t, Jeff ”—as if to suggest that making sense has nothing to do with it. In both scenes Selma’s willing ability to suspend disbelief about capitalism is tinged by a Nietzschean tragic awareness of its utopianism, as if she sees from within Rousseau’s vision how history progresses by feeding on frustrated expectations. Selma knows that she can’t know what she knows too well: that perceiving reality generates a bewilderment that necessitates perpetually making sense, a trauma that drives the musical as a commentary on the spectacle of representation. Von Trier’s original plan was to mount “100 cameras” to capture the verisimilitude of each number as performed in real time rather than through multiple takes, as if to multiply and unbind Shelley’s “Janus- visaged Shadow.” To thus situate us in the spectacle’s matrix—to feel and see Selma’s euphoria and suffering

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from all perspectives—would be to simulate our suspension within reality itself.52 The problem then became how to manufacture from hundreds of hours of footage a montage that would simulate the immersive sensory experience that is the mind’s perception of reality at any given moment. Partly this approach makes Freud’s point in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that sensory overload would fry the mind without its ability to repress its own cognitive vitality. The ideal seems nothing less than idealism itself: the promise that the perceiving subject can capture all of reality as it happens, strip it naked, to paraphrase Jameson’s point about the pornographic nature of the visual.53 Instead, von Trier confronts the film image’s fragmented empiricism, which makes visible to the spectator the traumatic absence of a fully embodied reality that makes our experience of reality all too real. Put another way: to survive reality is, at some level, to kill it off. Selma resists the spectacle’s visual (and hence ideological) productivity by transforming reality into numbers in her head. The movies she goes to with Kathy are, ironically, the 1930s Warner Brothers urtexts of the musical form. Kathy describes the dance steps to Selma by tapping them out, like Braille, on her hand. Like Selma’s awkward, pathetic rehearsals as Maria, this clumsy negotiation disrupts the seamless, utopic shift from narrative to number, reality to fantasy. Yet such scenes are also touchingly, even powerfully revisionary, subverting the dull round of generic capitalist production to produce other meanings and pleasures, however painful. The film’s most moving number is “I’ve Seen It All,” performed after Jeff saves Selma from being killed by an oncoming train she hears but can’t see. He asks why she hasn’t told anyone or done anything about her blindness, to which she responds in song: “I’ve seen what I was—I know what I’ll be / I’ve seen it all—there is no more to see.” She finishes with, “I’ve seen it all, I’ve seen the dark / I’ve seen the brightness in one little spark./ I’ve seen what I choose and I’ve seen what I need,/ And that is enough, to want more would be greed.” The moment is heartbreaking. But it also rejects a perceptual acquisitiveness that victimizes spectators. Selma says that toward the end of a musical’s big finish, just before the camera ascends as if to break through the theater ceiling, she leaves the theater, as if to encrypt utopianism rather than face its impossibility. But this resists the insatiability that leaves musical audiences wanting more. Like Mathilda’s refusal to get caught in Woodville’s melodrama of her in Mary Shelley’s novel, Selma appropriates melancholic longing on her own terms. If the musical numbers are a musical’s most valuable asset, by retaining all the commodities as fantasy states of mind Selma is the pure distillation of commodity fetishism in a way capitalism hadn’t quite expected: she buys their sheer promise without paying a thing for it. She appropriates the utopianism’s

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unusable negativity to ensure its perpetual production, yet without being economized by its machinery. It’s a precarious agency with no future that seems to work. To a point. If the film’s numbers orchestrate the mise- en- scène of Selma’s desire in order to transform her world as fantasy, the death drive sustaining this fantasy wins the day. The film’s post- Chaplinesque sentimentality becomes a perverse commentary on how the spectacle of history, by so nakedly exposing its effects, remains ferociously blind to its subjects. In the final number, “101 Steps,” history orchestrates itself as the spectacle of autonomous power, not unlike the opening torture in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Frozen by panic about walking to her execution, Selma explains to her prison guard Brenda that she imagines herself in musicals because there nothing terrible happens. Brenda asks Selma to imagine the bare sound of her footsteps as choreography, a measure of (and a way to measure) sanity. Right to the moment she sings her final song (again, “My Favorite Things”), waiting for the floor to drop beneath her, one doesn’t know whether musicals save or kill her (as she sings in “In the Musicals,” they are always there to “catch me when I fall”). Von Trier mirrors this suspense in the faces of Selma’s friends, discovered when a curtain is drawn back to expose them as audience to her death. This mise- en- scène situates us all in the execution chamber as a cinema with lights turned up to reveal Selma as Homo sacer (a different form of how cinema kills than Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds). Executioners strap her body, which has gone limp from terror, to a plywood board so that she can literally stand for her own hanging. When she screams to have her hood removed because she can’t breathe (no matter that her blindness to her executioners makes the hood a moot point), she momentarily halts this choreography, as if Jupiter’s mask has fallen, but only to prolong the spectacle’s terror. Ultimately, Selma’s post- Brechtian daydreams turn Yentl’s conceit of the interiorized monologue as a way of imagining a better life into a vast Juvenilian hoax.54 Dancer makes a spectacle of Selma’s life by “showing” how it is fed by the musical’s capitalist economy. Selma’s life has meaning only in the way it “means” for the visual economy by which it is imagined. As Jean Baudrillard wrote of 9/11, “the spectacle of terrorism forces upon us the terror of the spectacle,” which is why the tragedy staged “the clash of triumphant globalization at war with itself.”55 A similar self- consumption informs the dance of history in von Trier’s film, which, like Sweeney Todd, exposes the musical’s gothic and melancholic nature by staging how the form feeds on its own production. As psychologically and emotionally numbing spectacle, the film turns Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle into Baudrillard’s dance of

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the fossils: everything dies but nothing is dead. Culture’s vast positing power choreographs its own pathos as the subject’s last exit from reality wrought at the most excruciating place, where the pleasure principle meets its death drive: utopianism as trauma itself. It is to Shelley’s triumph that we can look to unearth “the romantic remains” of this “modernity.” Orrin Wang’s account of the force of Romantic verse as a “coming attraction” suggests within the myth of film as liberatory desiring machine the paratactic drive of history itself. Shelley’s “spectacular” terza rima visualizes this drive as relentless advance, like Aleksandr Sokurov’s march through Russian history as a single camera take through the curatorial space of the Hermitage Museum in The Russian Ark (2002). Shelley’s spectacle rematerializes history’s specters as real political and social effects precisely by dematerializing these effects as specters. Like Benjamin’s Angel, which reterrorizes our senses and sense itself with what history forgets, and thus with a sense of how history proceeds by what it obliterates, the “perpetual flow” of Shelley’s dreamwork yokes together vision and reality precisely by staging the extimate and uncanny distance between them as the vitally debilitating breaks that make historical advance possible.56 Each shift in vision unleashes a “wilder,” “madder” transformation of what comes before, bringing our desire perilously closer to the sheer vitality of drive’s mindless devastation of things as they are. Suspended in the warp and woof of the “shape all light” that (de)forms the history of life/life as history, Shelley’s final spectacle parallels von Trier’s vision of a film musical utopianism violently wagering the stakes of the subject dreamed by its phantasmatic afflatus. Perhaps this vision is most spectacularly staged in Shelley’s manuscript, which leaves us to dream a “completion” that comes, as de Man reminds us, by inscribing Shelley’s dead and decaying corpse at the end of its last page. Like von Trier’s one hundred cameras, it leaves us subjects of a suspended animation, opening how we might see things onto an indeterminate, incomprehensible, and interminable future that may or may not come. Between Romanticism and the American film musical one senses how idealism and utopianism happily traumatize our cultural sensibilities by revealing how they are always already constituted by destitution and trauma. The visual leaves us “still born and still to be born.”57 But still . . . still it leaves us wanting, and wanting for, more life.

Notes I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Western University for funding the research and writing of this chapter. I also thank Allan Pero for his incisive response to an earlier version

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delivered as a paper in 2010 at Western University’s Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. Finally, for their invitation and patience, I thank Jacques Khalip and Tres Pyle. 1. Tony Kushner, Perestroika, part 2 of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, rev. ed. (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996), 135. 2. Jacques Khalip, Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 185. 3. Quoted in John Ridpath, “A New Kind of Cine- Love,” Times Literary Supplement 5749 ( June 7, 2013): 24. Ridpath is reviewing Gabriele Pedullà’s In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators after the Cinema (New York: Verso, 2013) and J. Hoberman’s Film after Film; or,What Became of 21st-Century Cinema? (New York: Verso, 2013). 4. Musicals celebrate technology to make it transparent as the extension of a creative but systematic corporate structure, as in Singin’ in the Rain (1952).Yet I also mean “technology” in the Foucauldian sense of a “virtual” instrumentalization of desires, subjectivities, and identities, of which a “material” technology is one facet. 5. See Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). Crary argues that the mode of attention that exemplifies the liberatory, imaginative experience of the modern subject at the same time made possible a technological advance that disciplines this attention as a suspension of perception. 6. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 80. 7. Orrin Wang argues that Romantic verse offers the “chance to see desire in nothing, the invisible in the image, the always social self in projected, kinetic form.” Romanticism anticipates how we “experience culture, both high and low, as constituted by different degrees of virtuality” (“Coming Attractions: Lamia and Cinematic Sensations,” Studies in Romanticism 42, no. 4 [2003]: 500). Of criticism on Romantic visuality since Wang’s essay, see Sophie Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 2008), and Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 8. David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (London: John Murray, 1832). 9. Percy Shelley, The Triumph of Life, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2nd ed., ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), ll. 1–2, 25–28. References to Shelley, unless otherwise noted, are to this edition, with line numbers cited parenthetically. 10. This is to make one of the general points of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). As Laura Mulvey notes, “The photography’s freezing of reality, truth in Godard’s definition, marks a transition from the animate to the inanimate, from life to death” (Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image [New York: Reaktion Books, 2006], 15). 11. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 13, 15. 12. Ibid., 11. 13. The first talking picture was a musical, The Jazz Singer (1927), as was the first movie to win a Best Picture Oscar, Broadway Melody of 1929, ironically just as the stock market crashed. 14. Forest Pyle, “Kindling and Ash: Radical Aestheticism in Keats and Shelley,” Studies in Romanticism 42, no. 4 (2003): 437, 456.

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15. Paul de Man calls the “shape all light” a figure for the “figurality of all signification” (“Shelley Disfigured,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], 116). The shape’s “positing power of language” is “both entirely arbitrary, in having a strength that cannot be reduced to necessity, and entirely inexorable in that there is no alternative to it” (116). 16. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. 17. This is to follow Lacan’s point, after Freud’s Totem and Taboo, that removing the prohibition against jouissance induces greater prohibition, a renewed appeal to the superego to restrain our otherwise limitless access to enjoyment. I thank Allan Pero for this insight. 18. Vivavsan Soni argues that Enlightenment moral and political philosophy, seeing the breakdown of happiness but unable to accept the tragic nature of its pursuit, encrypts this failure as a melancholic disposition toward well- being that defines a “sentimentalized conception of happiness” in the nineteenth century and beyond. See his Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Happiness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 20–21. I take up Soni’s point in “Get Happy! The American Film Musical and the Psychopathology of Hope,” in The Public Intellectual and the Culture of Hope, ed. Joel Faflak and Jason Haslam (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 135–59, in which I link Romantic psychiatry to the musical’s injunction, as Judy sings in Summer Stock (1950), to “get happy!” 19. See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant- Garde,” Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elseasser and Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1990). Wang argues that “early cinema is . . . an extension of pre- cinema,” one “whose power lies more in technological wonderment over this new medium of the visual than in any glimpse of the future movie- going pleasures of narration and character identification associated with classical cinema.” This “cinema of attractions is more properly an appeal to the senses; film is a form of sensation, that, as a part of the mass entertainment of the nineteenth- century public, is sensational, and sensationalized” (Wang, “Coming Attractions,” 462). 20. Dancer in the Dark, directed by Lars von Trier (Fine Line Cinema, 2000). 21. Byron’s Cain, a “revelation never before communicated to man,” was a shock to Shelley’s system: “I have lived too long near Lord Byron & the sun has extinguished the glowworm” (The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964], 2:376, 2:243). 22. Kushner, Perestroika, 133. 23. I take up this point at greater length in “The Difficult Education of Shelley’s The Triumph of Life,” Keats-Shelley Journal 58 (2009): 53–78. 24. Frederic Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1990), 3. 25. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 6. 26. Ibid., 53. One of the earliest examples of animation was Winsor McCay’s reanimation of extinct life by bringing dinosaur fossils back to life. 27. Ibid., 7. 28. Ibid., 39. 29. Jacques Lacan, Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1991), 66.

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30. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (New York: Routledge, 2001), 81. Žižek calls this the “hard kernel of the Real”: “When we awaken into reality after a dream, we usually say to ourselves ‘it was just a dream,’ thereby blinding ourselves to the fact that in our everyday, wakening reality we are nothing but a consciousness of this dream. It was only in the dream that we approached the fantasy- framework which determines our activity, our mode of acting in reality itself ” (Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology [New York: Verso, 1989], 47). 31. Žižek, On Belief, 80. 32. Ibid., 45. 33. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), 43. 34. Žižek, Sublime Object, 126. 35. Jameson, Signatures, 1. 36. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 37. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 169. 38. See Anthony Kubiak, Stages of Terror:Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theater History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1–25, esp. 11–13. 39. Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge (2001) exults in this intertextuality, but only to exaggerate how musicals self- reference their implicitly self- manufactured nature from their post- talkie evolution at Warner Brothers onward. 40. Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 18. 41. For instance, that Busby Berkeley numbers from the 1930s shift abruptly from reality to fantasy suggests overwhelming social problems, whereas in On the Town (1949), that sailors start to dance on the streets of New York marks a smaller rift between real and ideal in optimistic post–World War II America. 42. Kristin Thompson, “The Concept of Cinematic Excess,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 514, 524. 43. Edgar Morin, The Cinema; or, The Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Mortimer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 225, 227. 44. I refer here to Simcha Jacobovici’s 1998 documentary, Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies, and the American Dream (Associated Productions, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Toronto, Ontario, 1998), which reads Hollywood as the wish fulfillment of its five major studio heads: Carl Laemmle (Universal), Adolph Zukor (Paramount), the Warner brothers, Louis B. Mayer (Metro- Goldwyn- Mayer), and William Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck, and Joseph M. Schenk (Twentieth–Century Fox). All were Jewish emigrants who brought with them the trauma of the pogroms. At the end of World War II, various Hollywood executives, many studio heads among them, made a government- organized visit to the liberated death camps. No record exists of what these men felt about what they saw, as if to closet forever an ethnic and cultural otherness whose repression kept alive the American dream they had very much invented as a perfect land “somewhere over the rainbow.” 45. Jerrold Hogle, The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux’s Novel and Its Progeny (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

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46. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz:The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller- Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 10. Agamben quotes Holocaust survivor Robert Antelme: “What the camps taught those who lived there was precisely that ‘calling into question the quality of man provokes an almost biological assertion of belonging to the human race’ ” (10). 47. Peter Matthews, “Dancer in the Dark,” Sight and Sound 10, no. 10 (2000): 41. 48. José Arroyo calls the film a “musical about alienation” that revels in its intertextuality with other musicals at the same time that it uses these elements counterproductively to frustrate audience “expectations of the traditional pleasures of the musical or the melodrama” (“How Do You Solve a Problem like Von Trier?,” Sight and Sound 10, no. 9 [2000]: 15, 16). 49. Selma’s point that communism wasn’t all that bad is later used as Red bait during her trial. 50. This is Kathy’s pet name for Selma, a Czech word meaning “chubby.” 51. That Nový (1899–1983) is a real character gives the film’s and Selma’s blurring of fantasy and reality an added pathos. 52. In commentary included with the film’s original video release, von Trier says that ideally he would have used ten thousand cameras. 53. Jameson adds, “Pornographic films are thus only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body” (Signatures, 1). Thinking back to Mulvey’s point about cinema’s (re)animation, we might wonder if this body is alive or dead. Interestingly, Shelley anthropomorphizes the “shape all light” as “she,” but by looking right through her, as if to the drive of an anatomy without consistency, which is how Selma ends up. 54. In his 2002 film of Bob Fosse’s Chicago, Rob Marshall makes a similar commentary on how film musicals spectacularize trauma by staging the film’s numbers as Roxie Hart’s way of dealing with reality while awaiting trial on death row. 55. Jean Baudrillard, “L’Esprit du terrorisme,” trans. Donovan Hohn, Harper’s Magazine, February 2002, 18, 14. 56. Pyle reads in Shelley’s “radical aestheticism” the “experience of a sheer and repeated negation.” This “searing” of “narrative hope” or “humanizing potential” works against our desperation for “the aesthetic to heal and to comfort” (458). Rather than seal us from history, this aesthetics locates us at “the scene of the aesthetic [as] the very place where the question of the event itself is being radicalized” (434–35): the kindling and ash of a Benjaminian “state of emergency” in which we view “a limit of culture” (458–59) in the midst of which experience we are unavoidably suspended. 57. Tilottama Rajan, “Dis- Figuring Reproduction: Natural History, Community, and the 1790s Novel,” New Centennial Review 2, no. 3 (2002): 231.

The Pastoral Stain Twombly under the Trees Mary Jacobus

To say that the concept of lyric poetry that is in some sense second nature to us is a completely modern one is only to express this insight into the social nature of the lyric in another form. —Theodor W. Adorno1

Adorno—whose account of the lyric owes much to its German Romantic origins—offers a point of entry into the convergence of past and present in a series of pastoral works by the twentieth- century American artist Cy Twombly.2 A resident in Rome since the late 1950s, Twombly is best known for his scribbled, written- on canvases and a poetic lexicon that includes Greek bucolic poetry, English Romanticism, and the modernist European lyric. In 1976, he painted and drew a series of pastoral works on paper: Untitled (Thyrsis’ Lament for Daphnis) (1976), Idilli (inscribed with the words, “I am Thyrsis of Aetna blessed with a tuneful voice”) (1976), and a third, enigmatic two- part Untitled (1976).3 Each recapitulates a Theocritan Idyll, either a triptych or a diptych consisting of roughly pasted, taped, and collaged pages, sometimes smeared with paint and accompanied by handwritten quotations. In addition to this group, a three- part painting on canvas, Thyrsis (1977), consolidates the Theocritan motif in Twombly’s work.4 Taken together, they reference two main sources. The first is Anthony Holden’s then recent translation of Theocritus’s Idylls in the Penguin edition of Greek Pastoral Poetry (1974).5 The second is Twombly’s own contemporaneous portfolio of eight leaf prints, Natural History, Part II: Some Trees of Italy (1975–76).6 How should we view Twombly’s turn to pastoral? As nostalgic, or as completely modern (“second nature to us”), in the sense of Adorno’s concept of lyric poetry—“the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism”?7 This question goes to the nub of Twombly’s painterly appropriation of the past, in this case a pastoral convention already marked as both literary and belated. My contention is that these works are infused with a form of elegy specifically associated both with artistic modernity and

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with Adorno’s “subjective expression of social antagonism.” I propose that they are intimately associated with Twombly’s self- identification with the lyric poet, from Theocritus to Rilke, as well as with his complex relation to the public dimensions of his seemingly idiosyncratic art. As Seamus Heaney observed, it is impossible to write pastoral without self- consciousness—or without fitting it to one’s own concerns and contemporaneity.8 The modernizing impulse is already part of the pastoral convention. Twombly’s pastoral paintings, although apparently lacking topical reference, implicate modernity through the connections they forge between and among lyric poetry, language, and subjectivity, along with what Adorno defines as the particular tension in the modern artist’s simultaneous linkage to and alienation from society. While they allude to the conventions of lyric song, Twombly’s pastoral works also transform the pastoral strain into a pastoral “stain”: he is a painter; but more than that, paint in his work is associated with the body. His use of color references the prominent role of physical mark- making, smearing, and sexuality. That staining is the property of paint makes it possible to read pastoral as a kind of shorthand for his chosen medium. Hence “the pastoral stain” of my title, which is also a human stain—if not a version of American pastoral, given the clamorous sexual politics of the 1970s. I want to start by untangling the connection between Holden’s translations of Theocritus and Twombly’s taxonomy of trees, or rather, his “sylvae.” The term sylvae refers to the trees and forests of a particular region, in this case the wooded hills of Lazio, north of Rome, where Twombly restored a house in the early 1970s, using it as a summer retreat and studio. His bucolic surroundings deeply affected his drawing and painting during the next decade.9 “Sylvae” (a title used for a number of Twombly’s works on paper) is also the title of a work by John Dryden, Sylvae: or the Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies (1685)—a collection of miscellaneous translations that includes Theocritus’s Idylls and Virgil’s Georgics.10 Twombly’s attraction to natural history and his interest in “plants, trees, botany and things” were linked in his own mind with poetry: “you can’t be a poet without knowing any botany or plants and things like that.”11 In the plates of Natural History Part II: Some Trees of Italy, leaves stand metonymically for trees. Their loosely drawn leaf shapes are variations on the polymorphous, almond- shaped pictographs that appear elsewhere in Twombly’s work as petals, flames, or female genital signs (Figure 1).12 Besides providing a literal taxonomy of the trees surrounding Bassano, Twombly’s leaves are associated with the classical past. Virgil’s encomium to the trees of Italy at the opening of Book II of the Georgics begins by

Figure 1. Cy Twombly, Fagus sylvatica, from Natural History, Part II: Some Trees of Italy (1975–76). Lithograph, granolithograph, two collotype runs, [cream- white and light green]. Printed in nine colors. 30 × 221⁄5 in. (76 × 56.5 cm). Private Collection, Germany. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photograph by Dennys Hill.

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invoking Bacchus—“Now thee, Bacchus, will I sing, and with thee the forest saplings”—before turning to the practicalities of Roman dendroculture.13 Twombly’s leaves are traditionally associated with classical divinities (the beech with Jupiter, the laurel with Apollo, the fig with Dionysus, and so on). A beech tree provides the shady haunt where Tityrus sings in Virgil’s first Eclogue; the laurel or bay belongs to Apollo and the Muses. 14 In Twombly’s collage Muses (1979), a reproduction of a heart- shaped ivy leaf (the poet’s crown, dedicated to Bacchus) is placed above a photograph of the tree- covered hillside and ruined castle of Bassano in Teverino—the view from Twombly’s summer studio window. His inscription invokes the three Boeotian Muses originally worshipped on Mount Helicon: “THIS GROVE (άλσος) IS DEDICATED TO THE MUSES: MELETE [Muse of meditation], MNEME [Muse of memory], and AOEDE [Muse of song].” By way of gloss, Twombly adds the scribbled words “Song,” “Memory,” and “Meditation” (Figure 2).15 Twombly’s Theocritan diptych, Untitled (1976), repurposes a page from Some Trees of Italy (the same leaf print of the European beech tree, Fagus silvatica, also appears in the 1976 three- part collage, Idilli). At the top of this sheet, the name “Thyrsis” seems to have been painted out. The first part, with the “Fagus silvatica” plate, also bears the title “The mowER AgAinst the garden,” above two lines of poetry: “O singer of Persephone / Dost thou remember SICILY.”16 The second part of the diptych consists of what looks like an unfolded paper mount; the cutout is empty, as if framing a missing portrait or landscape. The lower part simply bears the smudged, enigmatic word “WIND” (Figure 3). How are we to understand this seemingly random collocation of image and text? Holden’s anthology provides a clue. Greek Pastoral Poetry is introduced by Holden’s own short history of the decline of pastoral poetry since Theocritus. Alluding to “The Mower against Gardens” as a turn to artifice (“Marvell distills the point at which pastoral loses its own nature”), Holden invokes Oscar Wilde’s elegiac villanelle “Theocritus” as “the death- knell of classic pastoral form amid the attitudes of his age.” His introduction quotes the final lines, appropriated by Twombly for his diptych: “O singer of Persephone! / Dost thou remember SICILY?”17 Yes—but Wilde, writes Holden, “discerns the twentieth century’s forthcoming rejection of all pastoral values.”18 Presumably this includes the fluid sexualities of the Theocritan Idyll. Holden’s introduction singles out “the homosexual love lyrics,” calling them “finely in tune with . . . the pastoral ethic.”19 The last of these, “For Another Boy” (Idyll 30), voices the complaint of an older man tormented by desire: “Ah, the pain of this cursed disease!” His complaint ends abruptly when the boy- lover blows in: “With a single

Figure 2. Cy Twombly, Muses. 1979, Bassano in Teverina. Collage: drawing, colored crayon on proof of print, reproduction of a photograph showing a view of the village of Bassano. Numerous annotations. 39¼ × 273⁄8 in. (100 × 70 cm). Private Collection, Germany. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photograph by Dennys Hill.

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Figure 3. Cy Twombly, Untitled (diptych). 1976. Left: Oil, graphite, wax/oil crayon, printed reproduction, and transparent tape on paper. 58¾ × 51¼ in. (149.2 × 130.2 cm). Right: Oil, charcoal, wax/oil crayon, graphite, and transparent tape on two sheets of paper. 297⁄8 × 22¼ in. (75.6 × 56.5 cm). Private Collection. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo courtesy Dia Art Foundation.

breath / he picks me up, then carries me off,/ like a leaf that lives on the wind one short day.”20 Could it be that this breathtaking last line gave rise to Twombly’s single word “WIND”—and with it, the swirl of white paint that sets it in dialogue with the leaves of the Fagus silvatica print from Twombly’s Some Trees of Italy?21 This collage of citations and self- quotations evokes both the intertwining of Twombly’s Theocritan works with the woods and their improvised appearance. Handwritten inscriptions and rough paper construction, staining and smearing, evoke the physicality of Theocritus’s bucolic setting. Twombly’s eloquent and obscurely elegiac collages allude to an old story retold by pastoral—love that blows the singer away like a leaf, making no distinction between heterosexual and homosexual love-objects; sexual consummation attained or forgone, linked to loss and death; Theocritan shepherds piping and shagging under the trees and the the twentieth- century artist scribbling and smearing among the wooded hills north of Rome.

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Both shepherd and artist stand in a mediated and alienated relation not only to nature but also to sociality—a domain defined by its aestheticizing of pastoral and by pastoral’s intertwining with ideology. Overlaid on the paradigmatic Theocritan mise en abyme of grief (shepherds whose songs rehearse the lament of a dead pastoral singer) is the Virgilian literary landscape of social and political exile, with its calm yet piercing regret for lost fields and homeland and its melding of agricultural and cultural worlds. Like Virgil’s Tityrus, Twombly inhabits the pastoral landscape as a displaced urban intellectual who has put distance between himself and the city. Virgilian pastoral broaches themes of exile and expropriation, along with love and death. But because pastoral is above all a literary genre—one that involves literary memory—it also tells a story about poetry. For Adorno, that story necessarily involves the loss of lyric “aura” and its fade to gray under the Italian trees (“sub umbra”).

Impossibility The “I” whose voice is heard in the lyric is an “I” that defines and expresses itself as something opposed to the collective, to objectivity; it is not immediately at one with the nature to which its expression refers. It has lost it, as it were, and attempts to restore it . . . through immersion in the “I” itself. Theodor W. Adorno22

Pastoral allows Twombly to articulate a subjective and Romantic lyric “I” along with modernity, through his personification of the shepherd- singer. His immersion in “the ‘I itself ’” can be read as the record of the paradoxical discontinuity that Adorno sees as marking a break with nature: “our conception of lyric poetry has a moment of discontinuity in it—all the more so, the more pure it claims to be.”23 The loss of an idyllic or utopian relation to nature is the hallmark of modernity; lyric carries within it the history of the subject’s simultaneous opposition to, and division from, the collective (along with nature), as well as the inextricable connection to the social that is forged and maintained by language itself. This discontinuity (which is also a hinge) arguably inflects Twombly’s adoption of the voice of the pastoral singer: “I am Thyrsis of Etna.” For Adorno, the moment of self- forgetting is a moment of vocalization and self- presence: “language itself speaks only when it speaks not as something alien to the subject but as the subject’s own voice. When the ‘I’ becomes oblivious to itself in language it is fully present nevertheless.”24 Twombly, that is, announces himself most completely when he adopts the language of Theocritus’s shepherd- singer. His written gesture (“I am Thyrsis of Aetna”)

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Figure 4. Cy Twombly, Untitled (Thyrsis’ Lament for Daphnis) (triptych). 1976. Left: Oil, wax/oil crayon, graphite, graph paper and transparent tape on two sheets of paper. 585⁄8 × 51½ in. (148.9×130.8 cm). Center: Graphite on paper. 39¼ × 27¾ in. (99.7 × 70.5 cm). Right: Wax/oil crayon and graphite on paper. 315⁄8 × 23¼ in. (80.3 × 59 cm). Private Collection © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photograph by Mimmo Capone.

repeats Daphnis’s own epitaph in Idyll 1 (“I am Daphnis, I’m the herdsman”), while echoing the epigram by which Theocritus identifies himself as the author of his collection of pastoral poems: “I am Theocritus of Syracuse. . . . I am the author of these pastorals. It is no alien Muse I have espoused.”25 Like Theocritus declaring his authorship, Twombly’s “I am Thyrsis” amounts to a kind of self- signing. He becomes most himself when he is most immersed in his Theocritan persona. Twombly’s Untitled (Thyrsis’ Lament for Daphnis) links three sheets, the largest left- hand sheet bearing another, with the caption “THYRSIS’ LAMENT FOR DAPHNIS” handwritten above a rough scrawl of paint and crayon whose dark sepia is the color of cuttlefish ink—anciently used for writing, but also associated with mourning.26 Roughly covered with a semitransparent sheet in the lower half of the image, the stain of mourning is veiled. The smaller right- hand sheet contains another dark scribble, which may or may not conceal the letters of a name. On the middle sheet, carefully transcribed in Twombly’s elegant scrawl, are the lines of fantastical lament that form the penultimate stanza of Thyrsis’s song in Theocritus’s Idyll 1, with its serial refrains, “Sing beloved Muses” and “Cease Muses” (Figure 4). I want to linger on the passage Twombly isolates on his central panel. Why did Twombly choose these lines? Here is his transcription—approximately transcribed, with his own capitals adding emphasis:

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Cease MUSES, Cease my Country SONG, “MAY violets grow on thistles, May they grow on thorns! May narcissus grow on Juniper! The world must change. DAPhnis dies! Pears grow on pine trees! Now the deer must chase the hounds & the screech owl’s Song sound sweeter Than the nightingales!”27

The name for this rhetorical figure, with its disjointed inventory of a topsyturvy natural world, is adynaton, or “impossibility.” Daphnis calls on nature to turn itself upside down in response to his death, unyoking the conventional elements of the shepherd’s plaint in lines at once touching, harsh, and absurd—a dystopian string of impossibilities rather than a return to the lost Golden Age when nature cooperated with the shepherd.28 In Idyll 1, the shepherd Thyrsis repeats a song he had sung before, making him a successor to the earlier shepherd- singer (Daphnis) whose death he mourns. Framed by the rustic dialogue between Thyrsis and Goatherd, his reenactment posits the legendary death of Daphnis—whose refusal of love led to his drowning—as the founding trope of pastoral poetry. The Goatherd offers Thyrsis a milk- white cheese if he will sing the song again. So Thyrsis begins, with his refrain: “Sing, beloved Muses, sing my country song./ I am Thyrsis of Etna, blessed with a tuneful voice.” His lament includes a cacophonous scene of grieving in which wild beasts howl and domestic animals moan. The god Pan is summoned to Sicily by the shepherd- singer, Daphnis, who insists that all nature will become a spectacle of contraries and discord when he dies: “May violets grow on thistles.” Thyrsis ends by recapitulating the tragic circumstances of Daphnis’s death. His song done, he asks for goat’s milk to slake his thirst and make his libation to the Muses. The first of the Idylls already contains its own short history of pastoral poetry. Reframing its vision of disordered nature, Twombly puts Theocritus’s lines in double quotation marks. The effect is that of seriocomic clowning—in the sense that shepherds are “clowns” (peasants or rustics), despite—or because of—their use of extravagant rhetorical figures. Announcing a golden age of translation, Dryden’s “Preface” to Sylvae praises Theocritus for disguising his learning: “he shows his art and learning by disguising both. . . . Even his Doric dialect has an incomparable sweetness in its clownishness.” Like Tasso, who “mai esce del bosco” (never departed from the woods), Theocritus never allows his shepherds to “rise above their country

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education in their complaints of love.”29 So says Dryden. But the figure of adynaton constitutes a striking literary embellishment, at once recognizably Theocritan (subsequently imitated in Virgil’s Eclogues) and one that has been thought to interpose a “mechanism of alienation” between character and listener.30 In Twombly’s other triptych, Idilli (1976), a dark green scrawl of paint announces the pastoral theme, followed by the Fagus silvatica print from Trees of Italy, and a third page bearing the opening lines of Thyrsis’s song: “THYRSIS. / Sing beloved Muses, sing my country song./ I am Thyrsis of Etna blessed with a tuneful voice” (Figure 5).31 Twombly appropriates Theocritan artifice—not just the shepherd’s tunefulness but also the rhetorical extravagance of his complaint—for a version of pastoral in which landscape, leaf prints, and written text reprise past and present performance, at once in and out of their place. The impersonation is rehearsed, as in Theocritus’s own bucolic poetry. In Twombly’s later oil- on- canvas triptych, Thyrsis (1977), the first canvas lists by name the paired dramatis personae of the Idylls: THYRSIS and GOATHERD, BATTUS and CORYDON, COMATAS and LACON, and so on.32 Theocritus’s shepherds and rustics take part in robust exchanges of invective and grievances, song contests and comic dialogue. Each serves as a frame for the more idealized version of pastoral “song” that the paired singers rehearse (as it were) within invisible quotation marks. Twombly’s second canvas bears the now familiar inscription, “I AM THYRSIS OF ETNA blessed with a tuneful voice,” above a dark scribble of dripping paint from which a faint pink aura of sexuality emanates. The third, with its steplike sequence of tumbling black scrawls, includes within a ruled cartouche the smudged lines of the Goatherd’s invitation at the close of Theocritus’s Idyll 1: “Sweeten your sweet mouth with honey, /Thyrsis, and with honey comb. Eat your fill / of Aegilus’ finest figs, for your voice / outsings the cricket’s. Here is the cup:/ smell, friend, its sharp freshness—.”33 Twombly signs off with copious references to the sensory register (mouthing, eating, singing, smelling) that connect song’s orality to a mouthful of bucolic life: past-orality (Figure 6). Who is the “I” here? Thyrsis? Theocritus? Twombly? The implication is that putting someone else’s words in one’s own mouth is at once a mode of impersonation and a form of personification. The construction of pastoral identity takes place within the frame of linguistic performance and rhetorical artifice. A generalized bucolic location or locus amoenas (Bassano, a modern village north of Rome, fancifully sacred to the Boetian Muses of Greece) becomes, literally, an on- paper construction—Twombly’s roughly pieced- together collage; the “leaves” or sylvae that invoke an ancient or remembered landscape; his distinctive handwriting with its scrawled quotations

Figure 5. Cy Twombly, Idilli (I am Thyrsis of Etna blessed with a tuneful voice) (triptych). 1976. Left: Oil, wax/oil crayon, graphite and transparent tape on two sheets of paper. 58¾ × 515⁄8 in. (150 × 133 cm). Center: Oil and wax/oil crayon on printed paper. 297⁄8 × 22¼ in (78 × 60 cm). Right: Gaphite on paper. 297⁄8 × 223⁄8 in. (78 × 60 cm). Private Collection. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photograph courtesy Menil Collection. Photo Douglas M. Parker.

Figure 6. Cy Twombly, Thyrsis (triptych). 1977. Bassano in Teverina. Part 1. Lead pencil, charcoal on primed canvas, 1181⁄8 × 78 in. (300 × 198 cm). Part 2. Oil paint, lead pencil, wax crayon on primed canvas. 1181⁄8 × 162¼ in. (300 × 412 cm). Part 3. Oil paint, lead pencil, charcoal on primed canvas. 1181⁄8 × 78 in. (300 × 198 cm). Marx Collection, Berlin. © Cy Twombly Foundation. BPK Photo Agency.

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from Theocritus. The empty frame of the mount in Untitled refers to a window on the world, whether the artist’s perspective or his picture; the mount frames a missing landscape, or else a portrait left to the viewer’s imagination. William Empson’s view of pastoral as a genre that works to naturalize social and class inequality is less relevant (as Holden argues) than Adorno’s compelling argument for the conceptual embedding of lyric in an increasingly reified society. Claiming that the social conditions of the age reveal themselves most clearly in even the most seemingly subjective lyric, Adorno writes: “The material proper to [linguistic works of art], concepts, does not exhaust itself in mere contemplation. In order to be susceptible of aesthetic contemplation, works of art must always be thought through as well, and once thought has been called into play by the poem it does not let itself be stopped at the poem’s behest.”34 Pastoral poetry invites aesthetic contemplation; once initiated, thought leads to immanent critique and the location of contradictions. How far is the work of art subject to society, and to what extent can it transcend its own subjection—or subjectification? That thought, for Adorno, frames the twentieth- century artist’s alienation from society and the corresponding threat to a subjectivity necessarily intertwined with the social. Twombly’s invocation of the Muses of meditation, memory, and song in Muses (1979) already opens onto a lost landscape. Adorno calls the word muse “one of the most overused in German classicism,” noting that it gleams for the last time only “in the process of disappearing.”35 Yet poetry and society are hinged through the double capacity of language to produce both subjectivity and concepts: The paradox specific to the lyric work, a subjectivity that turns into objectivity, is tied to the priority of linguistic form in the lyric. . . . For language is itself something double. Through its configurations it assimilates itself completely into subjective impulses; one would almost think it had produced them. But at the same time language remains . . . that which establishes an inescapable relationship to the universal and to society.36

Lyric poetry does not stand apart from society; partaking of it, the lyric marks subjectivity as both universal and social. Every subjective utterance implicates sociality; every poetic thought strains to negate the reification imposed on the poet or artist by modern society.37 For Adorno, what is most “second nature” in lyric paradoxically announces the extent of modernity’s denaturing effects and the historical process by which they are produced. In contrast to the sepia of mourning or the green of a wooded landscape, rosy pink signals erotic love.38 As Richard Leeman comments, “A patch of red . . . in the purest pastoral tradition, is the symbol of those . . . who were

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Figure 7. Cy Twombly, Untitled (Sappho). 1976, Rome. Oil, wax crayon on drawing cardboard. 59 × 53¼ in. (150 × 135.2 cm). Private Collection. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Courtesy Archives Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio.

loved and lost.” Listing Twombly’s dramatis personae—Hyacinthus, Narcissus, Adonis, Daphnis, Orpheus—Leeman identifies the artist as “the subject of his own oeuvre.”39 Twombly’s “I am” is at once an assumed pastoral identity and an act of self- identification. The artist, according to Leeman, “ceaselessly mourn[s] the loss of a loved one in the red stain of the blood that is reborn in a flower.”40 In Twombly’s beautiful painting, Untitled (Sappho) (1976), purple (the color of blood) signifies both consummation and death: “Like a Hyacinth in / the Mountains, Trampled / by Shepherds until / only a purple STAIN / REMains on the ground” (Figure 7).41 Sappho’s brief epithalamium

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alludes to the death of Hyacinth (the beautiful boy beloved by Apollo, and also by the West Wind, Zephyr): Hyacinthus’s blood, spilled when the jealous wind- god sends Apollo’s discus awry, morphs into a trampled flower. In Untitled (Sappho), the pastoral strain becomes pastoral stain—a smear of purple on paper, as if paint marked the site of a spillage of bodily fluid. The juxtaposition of stain and lyric poetry signals a double relation: simultaneously the artist’s refusal of his isolation and the impossibility of functioning seamlessly either within or outside the social order: “In the lyric poem the subject, through its identification with language, negates both its opposition to society . . . and its mere functioning within a wholly socialized society,” as Adorno writes.42 The stain calls socialization in question, making the internalized tension visible in the artwork. Twombly’s Theocritan idylls critique a social organization that enforces the subjectification of private emotion along with the regime of compulsory heterosexuality associated with it. The “I” of the singer sets the artist’s claim to subjectivity at odds with the reification of modern culture even as it partakes of its linguistic forms. Twombly’s pastoral stain signifies the untold story of his modernity: not rusticity but impossibility, not nature but the aesthetic mediation of bodily experience.

Absence In a Twombly picture, a certain touch of color at first appears to me hurried, botched, inconsistent: I don’t understand it. But this touch of color work in me, unknown to myself; after I have left the painting, it comes back, becomes a memory, and a tenacious one; everything has changed, the picture makes me happy retrospectively. In fact, what I consume with pleasure is absence. Roland Barthes43

Twombly inscribed the title Bucolic on a work on paper subtitled Aristaeus Mourning the loss of his Bees (1973). The words are written above a translucent blur of pale glassy green and creamy white, obscuring a dark scribble beneath (Figure 8).44 Color overlays a textual palimpsest that is already at work in Twombly’s Virgilian source. Aristaeus, a farmer and beekeeper, son of Apollo and the water nymph Cyrene, was the quasi- divine ruler of Arcadia. The immediate reference is to the beautiful Vale of Tempe in Thessaly (haunt of Apollo and the Muses), where Aristaeus makes his complaint to his mother at the source of the river Peneius after his swarm of bees has died. The underlying reference is to the primal pastoral poet, Orpheus. The episode is recounted at the end of the fourth and final book of Virgil’s Georgics, dealing with the subject of bees and beekeeping. Its closing

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Figure 8. Cy Twombly, Aristaeus Mourning the Death of his Bees. 1973. Paint, pencil on paper. 27½ × 39½ in. (70 × 100.5 cm). Private Collection. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photograph courtesy Cy Twombly Foundation.

section consists of an epyllion (a miniature epic poem), or myth within a myth, occasioned by the unscientific but widely held belief that the swarm could be regenerated by sacrificing the carcass of a dead bullock (begonia). The myth of Aristaeus occupies a key position at the culmination of Virgil’s poem. Warning against literalism, Richard Leeman suggests that Twombly chose his title “not as a reference to the myth itself or to Virgil’s fourth Georgic, but because it recalls the theme of pastoral lamentation, of which Twombly has been a long- time devotee.”45 It is worth recalling that for anyone familiar with the Georgics (as Twombly undoubtedly was), the lament of Aristaeus anticipates Virgil’s account of Orpheus’s lament for the dead Eurydice. Aristaeus is already a figure for the poet in Book IV of the Georgics. What he gains in the course of losing his bees is not just an agricultural invention but initiation into the relation between his world—the world of nature, death, and regeneration—and the world of poetry. The myth of Aristaeus emphasizes the interpenetration of nature and culture, while framing Virgil’s virtuoso retelling of the tragic story of Orpheus and Eurydice.46 The color of Twombly’s Bucolic refers to a prominent feature in Virgil’s narrative: water. Cyrene responds to her son’s wailing for his bees by inviting him into her

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crystalline underwater bower, parting the waves so that he can enter the caverns and groves where her nymphs spin fleeces “dyed with rich glassy hue” (hyali saturo fucata colore; iv. 335).47 Virgil’s elaborate description of this submerged realm, with its glass- green waters and confluence of subterranean rivers, includes the oceanic cave of the sea- green, shape- changing Proteus, whom his mother instructs Aristaeus to bind. Once subdued, Proteus retells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice: it is Orpheus, raging over the loss of his wife Eurydice, who has roused the gods against Aristaeus; the death of his bees is a punishment. Aristaeus has indirectly caused the death of Eurydice by pursuing her to the riverbank, where she was fatally bitten by a water serpent (a detail invented by Virgil), intending to rape her. Now, according to Proteus, he must make a sacrifice of cattle to atone for the effects of his pursuit. This sacrifice will miraculously give birth to a new swarm of bees. In Virgil’s artfully balanced narrative, Aristaeus’s underwater descent to recover his bees parallels Orpheus’s descent into the underworld to recover Eurydice, just as Aristaeus’s passionate complaint to his mother recalls Orpheus’s grief for the loss of Eurydice. But in Virgil’s mediation of the Orpheus myth, Aristaeus is nurtured by forgiving deities who foster and improve agricultural life, whereas the inconsolable Orpheus is torn apart by the bacchanals of an archaic world.48 As in Theocritus’s retelling of the death of the shepherd- singer Daphnis in his Idyll 1, Virgil’s retelling of the Orpheus story at the end of the Georgics resituates the primal story of the first poet’s love, grief, and tragic death within a bucolic world in which order has been restored and life goes on. One loss, one lament, frames and qualifies another; death gives way to regeneration; culture and agriculture are politically reconciled under the rule of the godlike Emperor Octavian, who promises his subjects a return of the Golden Age as foretold by his poet, Virgil. Orpheus’s singing head floats down the river, whose banks echo to his cries, giving rise to pastoral elegy: Aristaeus’s sacrifice of his cattle breeds new bees, giving rise to Virgil’s narrative of the imperium as cultural and agricultural triumph. The sole example of an apostrophe to the Muses in Virgil’s Georgics is the one that announces the invention of bugonia in Book IV, as explained by the myth of Aristaeus: “What god, ye Muses, forged for us this device? Whence did man’s strange adventuring take its rise?” (Quis deus hanc, Musae, quis nobis extudit artem? / unde nova ingressus hominum experientia cepit?; iv. 315–16).49 The myth of Aristaeus has everything to do with artifice—not simply an agricultural invention (reconstituting the dead swarm from the decomposing bodies of cattle) but Virgil’s own poetic invention, reinvention, and repurposing of the founding myth of poetry in his epyllion. Appearing directly in a

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closing sphragis or signature, Virgil ends the Georgics by describing his task in a moment of retrospect that situates the entire poem in the bucolic tradition: “Thus I sang of the care of fields, of cattle, and of trees” (Haec super arvorum cultu pecorumque canebam / et super arboribus; iv. 559–60).50 Contrasting his labors to those of the youthful Emperor Octavian as he defends the borders of empire by the Euphrates, Virgil summarizes his pastoral role in the earlier Eclogues and recalls the opening lines of Eclogue 1 in the closing lines of the Georgics: “—I who dallied with shepherds’ songs, and, in youth’s boldness, sang, Tityrus, of thee under thy spreading beech’s covert” (carmina qui lusi pastorum audaxque iuventa,/Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi; iv. 565–6).51 Virgil’s introduction of the literary persona of the Eclogues—and the beech tree beneath which he sings—marks his “bucolic” poem as both literary and overdetermined; the Georgics are in but not of the country (like the poet himself ). The bucolic world has been restored under the aegis of Octavian’s program of reformation. Virgil co- opts the Muses in support of this modernizing project. In the same year as Bucolic, Twombly also painted (on paper that is almost identical in size) a pale work called Virgil (1973), one of a series of four belonging to this year, in which crayoned letters spelling the name “VIRGIL” loom indistinctly through a cloudy atmosphere of off- white and gray paint (Figure 9).52 In “The Wisdom of Art,” written for Twombly’s Whitney retrospective in 1979, Roland Barthes says: “By writing Virgil on his canvas, it is as if Twombly was condensing in his hand the very immensity of Virgil’s world, all the references of which his name is the receptacle.”53 He compares the act of naming to an Arabian Night’s jar: “If you open or break the jar, the genie comes out, rises, expands like smoke and fills up the air: break the title and the whole canvas escapes.”54 For Barthes, Twombly’s work is secretive and retrospective: “This is an art with a secret, which in general is not that of spreading the substance (charcoal, ink, oils), but of letting it trail behind.”55 The verb “traîner” means both to drag and to trail behind. Barthes is referring to the lack of pressure as Twombly’s pencil or crayon moves across the paper—to his lightness of touch. But he captures the implication of belatedness in Twombly’s multiple Virgil paintings and drawings. The “macula” or stain that Barthes sees as Twombly’s characteristic mode of mark- making is also a textual residue. Meditating on color, Barthes writes that it “becomes a memory . . . what I consume with pleasure is absence.”56 Color is redefined as what is not there—as the pleasurable consumption of memory. It was Panofsky who famously suggested that Virgil “discovered” the evening, in the closing lines of the first Eclogue: “Even now the house- tops yonder are smoking and longer

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Figure 9. Cy Twombly, Virgil. 1973. Paint and pencil on paper. 27½ × 39 in. (70 × 99.2 cm). Private Collection. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photograph courtesy Cy Twombly Foundation.

shadows fall from the mountain- heights” (et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant / maioreque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae; i. 82–83).57 Panofsky sees as the distinctive mood of Virgil’s poetry the mix of sadness and tranquility with which it responds to the dissonance between human suffering and superhumanly perfect surroundings: “that vespertinal mixture of sadness and tranquility which is perhaps Virgil’s most personal contribution to poetry. With only slight exaggeration one might say that he ‘discovered’ the evening.”58 Discovered—or invented? Traces of this cultural “discovery” or invention can be seen in the crystalline stillness and perfection of Poussin’s landscapes, where shepherds live in the shade of the immanent dissonance of mourning and death. Twombly’s Virgil is emptied of everything but atmosphere—the smokelike genie that expands to fill the air. It provides a compelling instance of the peculiar form of written event (“nominalization”) identified in Barthes’s essay: “written events, Names. They too are facts. They stand on the stage, without sets or props: Virgil (nothing but the name . . .).”59 For all the clumsy irregularity of his capital letters, Barthes asserts, “Twombly knows that the Name has an absolute (and sufficient) power of evocation.”60 The name means

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both power and cultural invention. Barthes suggests that Twombly’s Virgil paintings and drawings constitute an entire commentary on the poetry of Virgil—the first great modernizer of pastoral, and the inventor of modern literature.61 Or rather, as Barthes points out, Twombly’s Virgil works constitute a special kind of performative, in Austin’s sense, namely, the act of dedicating: “Their meaning merges with the very act of enouncing them: ‘I dedicate’ has no other meaning than the actual gesture by which I present what I have done (my work) to someone I love or admire.” Twombly’s paintings are gifts: “Since it bears only the inscription of the dedication, the canvas so to speak disappears, and only the act of giving remains.”62 Like the burnt offering that smokes for the absent Daphnis in Virgil’s eighth Eclogue, Twombly’s naming of Virgil memorializes an absent poet while attempting to bring his memory back to life; the same applies to Virgil’s literary stance in relation to Theocritus. The name VIRGIL hangs numinously on canvas or paper, the letters blurred and faint, their background the colorless gray of absence and evening.63 I will hazard a guess that for Twombly, at least in the early 1970s, the name Virgil meant not so much the melancholy incompletion of the Aeneid—founding myth of the imperium—as the mingling of tranquility and memoria that colors critical retrospect on the Virgilian pastoral.64 In the opening lines of his first Eclogue, Virgil announces himself as meditating on his Muse—literally, tuning his woodland musings on his flute, “wooing the woodland Muse on slender reed” (silvestrem tenui musam meditaris avena; i. 2).65 One might go so far as to say that literary memory is the extended meaning of the Eclogues. Although Virgil references the political upheavals of his own times, melding pastoral with Golden Age prophecy, he means his readers to have Theocritan pastoral in mind, even as Theocritus’s poetry is artfully “recomposed” (in a sense that includes the Eclogues’ distillation of sad “composure”) as his own version of pastoral.66 This form of literary transmission can be traced indirectly throughout the Eclogues— surfacing, for instance, in the apotheosis of Daphnis in the fifth Eclogue. It also emerges at a rhetorical level, in the symptomatic aftereffects of the Theocritan adynaton and its Virgilian transformation. The adynaton is a negative version of the Golden Age that Virgil’s fourth Eclogue imagines as an agricultural rebirth, looking forward to the future rather than backward.67 In his first Eclogue, Virgil refers to the trope of memory in the same lines that remember Daphnis’s extravagant lament in Theocritus’s first Idyll. Tityrus (a figure for the poet) adapts the Theocritan adynaton to—what else?—the unforgettable memory of the young Emperor

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Octavian, whose face will not fade until nature itself is turned upside down and exiled nations wander far from their homelands: “Sooner, then, shall the nimble stag graze in air, and the seas leave their fish bare on the strand— sooner, each wandering over the other’s frontiers, shall the Parthian in exile drink the Arar, and Germany the Tigris, than that look of his shall fade from my heart.”68 The list of extravagant Theocritan “impossibilities” becomes an affirmation of Virgil’s dedication to Octavian—empire builder, peace- bringer, and patron, thanks to whom he continues to possess and enjoy his own farm. The eighth Eclogue again remembers the Theocritan adynaton, this time with resonances of Virgil’s recurrent theme, poetry. Virgil’s imitation of Daphnis’s dying song simultaneously invokes and repurposes the Greek pastoral legacy. Borrowing Theocritus’s most recognizable rhetorical figure, his own lines include a pointed reference to the Orphic tradition. Tityrus (Virgil himself, or a humble poet- shepherd) is placed in unequal competition with Orpheus: “Now let the wolf even flee before the sheep, let rugged oaks bear golden apples. Let the alder bloom with narcissus, let tamarisks distil rich amber from their bark, let owls, too, vie with swans, let Tityrus be an Orpheus—an Orpheus in the woods, an Arion among the dolphins.”69 One historian of Theocritus’s lyric legacy has gone so far as to speculate that the rhetorical figure of adynaton already “has something to do with the pastoral desire for distance and self- deprecation.”70 With these lines, Virgilian self- deprecation is adroitly transferred to the shepherd- singer of the Eclogues. The moment of Daphnis’s death in Theocritus’s Idyll 1—marked by Theocritus’s most hyperbolic and alienating rhetoric—now comes to include the poet’s impossible (yet flattering) self- comparison to “Orpheus in the woods” (Orpheus in silvis).71 The transmission of grief is linked both to literary memory and to the outsinging of the primal shepherd- singer. The figure of adynaton, elsewhere threatening to reverse the order of nature, here signals the poet’s absorption, not into the whelming sea (this is Daphnis’s tragic fate) but into the buoyant element of poetry. The poet finds himself carried like Arion across the ocean on the back of the dolphin he has charmed, borne up by his inherited Theocritan rhetorical trope. In his essay on Friedrich Hölderlin’s use of parataxis—another form of the rhetorical inventory, or list—Adorno reflects, “The more completely the artist’s intention is taken up into what he makes and disappears in it without a trace, the more successful the work is.”72 Poets’ absorption into their poems, according to Adorno, reveals “how little what is most their own belongs to them, how much they are under the compulsion of the work itself.”73

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Attacking Heidegger for privileging “authenticity” and neglecting the aesthetic element in Hölderlin’s late poetry, Adorno produces two powerful antidotes: distance and form. Distance, because the frugal customs and bucolic conditions of the past are irretrievably estranged; Adorno invokes “the color of colorlessness” (Hölderlin’s asceticism), along with his refusal to romanticize the restoration of simplicity.74 Form, because the formal features of language in themselves heighten the effect of remoteness. Adorno compares Hölderlin’s use of parataxis to Beethoven’s late style: “What is lined up in sequence, unconnected, is as harsh as it is flowing.”75 This harshly antisynthetic use of parataxis—comparable to the harshness of the Theocritan adynaton—substitutes a disruptive and discordant seriality for integration into the existing order: “the poetic movement unsettles the category of meaning . . . for meaning is constituted through the linguistic expression of synthetic unity.”76 Virgilian pastoral arguably reverses this discordant movement in order to achieve its vision of a social order harmonized and transformed under Octavian’s benign rule. The idealized synthesis of Sicilian past and imperial present allows Virgil’s Eclogues to translate Theocritan adynaton as the survival of memory and poetry—of poetry as memory. Exile and expropriation, although poignantly rendered in the Eclogues, can be subsumed into continuity and the restoration of the Golden Age. Echoing Theocritus’s invocations, the departed Sicilian Muses are reappropriated for political patronage, even though the dispossessed farmer now must plant for others in the wake of civil war. Virgil lays claim to Theocritus’s muse the better to define his own local terroir— the contrasting dignity of his Eclogues and his woods: “Sicilian Muse, let us sing a somewhat loftier strain./ Not all do the orchards please and the lowly tamarisks. If our song is of the woodland, let the woodland be worthy of a consul” (. . . si canimus silvas, silvae sint consule dignae; iv. 3).77 The numinous spaces of Twombly’s Virgil hint at Virgilian loftiness, tinged with evening. Passion, loss, and death—the kernel of pastoral lament—are distanced and subsumed into the perspective of a Daphnis elevated to the heavens: “Daphnis, in radiant beauty, marvels at Heaven’s unfamiliar threshold, and beneath his feet beholds the clouds and the stars” (Candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi / sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis; v. 56–57).78 The shepherd- singer is not drowned but deified; the very rocks and trees call out: “A God! He is a God!” (deus, deus ille; v. 64). Daphnis hangs sublimely in the sky, out of reach, like the shadowy letters that spell the poet’s name in Twombly’s Virgil paintings. This is what Twombly’s naming of Virgil understands: when Virgil invokes the Muses, poetry is reinvented and sublimed, along with the woods.

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Alteration Pealing, from Jove, to Natur’s Bar, bold Alteration pleades Large Evidence: but Nature soone her righteous Doome areads. Edmund Spenser79

Twombly titled one of his works of the mid- 1970s Epithalamion III (1976), perhaps in tribute to the most beautiful of Spenser’s pastoral “songs” and its refrain: “The woods shall to me answer and my Echo ring.” 80 Above a pinkly erotic arc of color, Twombly has placed a small reproduction of Edwin Church’s Rainy Season in the Tropics (1866), its double rainbow arch spanning a dramatic scene of mountain, chasm, and palm trees.81 Underneath, he inscribes two lines from Spenser’s Mutabilitie cantos: “To whom, thus Mutability: The things /Which we see not how they are mov’d and sway’d . . .” (vii. 49) (Figure 10).82 The quotation comes from the speech in which Mutability pleads her case before Nature, attempting to prove that she and Change rule over all things—not just the sublunary world, but the celestial universe too. Bent on countering Jove’s argument that Time itself is controlled by the gods, Mutability continues: “But what we see not, who shall us persuade?” (vii. 49). If we are to believe her, seeing is believing. Leeman reads the quotation in Twombly’s Epithalium as an expression of romantic melancholy, evidenced by the “atmospheric evocation of a rainy season associated with human mutability” (i.e., Church’s Rainy Season in the Tropics).83 For Spenser, however, Mutablity’s ambitious claim had broached metaphysical rather than romantic questions about transience and change. The “Titanesse,” whose genealogy includes Earth, Chaos, and the deposed race of Titans, has perverted everything on Earth and established death in place of life. Openly envious of the unchanging splendor of Cynthia’s palace, she aims at sovereignty over the night as a preliminary to total upper- world domination. Spenser’s cantos form part of the philosophical argument between the powers of entropy or alteration, represented by Mutability, and Jove’s regime of fixed laws; “great dame Nature” herself is wheeled on to settle the dispute. The “argument” to Canto 7 sums up the action: “Pealing, from Jove, to Natur’s Bar,/ bold Alteration pleades.” These lines are inscribed on Twombly’s collage Untitled (1976), along with the time, date, and place: “5:45, Captiva (out the window), 1976.” Lightly written at the top are the words “(Studio of R.R.).”84 Green, partially whited- out scribbles on two small panels of squared paper suggest the changing colors of Florida vegetation seen in the early morning light

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Figure 10. Cy Twombly, Epithalamion III (diptych). 1976. Collage: drawing paper, tracing paper, postcard, transparent tape, watercolor, wax crayon on paper. Left: 60½ × 43 in. (153.7 × 109.2 cm). Right: 30 × 22½ in. (76.2 × 56.2 cm). Private Collection. © Cy Twombly Foundation.

(Figure 11). Mutability’s argument that all things show alteration—“within this wide great Universe / Nothing doth firme and permanent appeare” (7. 56)—is decisively rejected by Nature. The world, she argues, is not governed by change but by the paradox of “dilation” and self- perfection: all things steadfastnes doe hate And changed be: yet being rightly wayd They are not changed from their first estate; But by their change their being doe dilate: And turning to themselves at length againe, Doe worke their own perfection so by fate. (vii. 58)85

What was Twombly thinking about at daybreak on the island of Captiva in Robert Rauschenberg’s studio? Was he looking back over a life in which

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Figure 11. Cy Twombly, Untitled. 1976. Graphite on paper, oil, wax/oil crayon, graphite, glassine paper, and transparent tape on two sheets of paper. 54½ × 43¼ in. (137.8 × 109.8 cm). Private Collection. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photograph courtesy Dia Art Foundation.

alteration had brought its inevitable growth and decline, or a middle age that wrought its own perfection of the work? Was he simply observing the change in the light as day dawned? We cannot know. In the Mutabilitie cantos, an exquisitely realized allegorical procession of seasons, months, hours, day and night, life and death—witnesses called by Nature, ostensibly to allow Mutability to make her case—permits a virtuoso display of Spenser’s

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own allegorical art. As Benjamin might say, an aesthetic spectacle inhabits the ruins of time: “The word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of nature- history . . . is present in reality in the form of the ruin.” He continues, “In this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. . . . Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.”86 The ruins of allegory show Nature’s undoing by historical change. Twombly was not of the Frankfurt School, although Spenser may have been of Mutabilitie’s party without knowing it. Musing on Nature’s phrase, “all things stedfastnes doe hate / And changed be” (vii. 58), the Spenserian scholar Gordon Teskey writes: “The things of which nature speaks are traitors to themselves, opening themselves to time, dilating and flowing promiscuously.”87 The body decays along with history, things lose their identities in the flow of time. In a double negation, Nature alludes prophetically to the Christian doctrine on which her final verdict is insecurely propped: “time shall come, that all shall changed bee,/And from thenceforth, none no more change shall see” (vii. 59).88 Yet for Spenser, the end- stopped fixity of transcendent time co- exists with the unpredictability of human time: “Nothing doth firme and permanent appeare,/ But all things tost and turned by transverse” (vii. 56).89 Nothing is static. As in a Theocritan adynaton, things can go awry (“transverse”). Twombly’s own temporal medium is the paint whose promiscuous flow also “doth mutation love” (vii. 55).90 For Shelley, attuned to elegy, Mutability meant both natural and human transience: “Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;/ Nought may endure but Mutability.”91 But Shelleyan mutability also holds open the potential for historical and revolutionary change, just as the motion of clouds and winds in his lyric poetry heralded the possibility of universal transformation. Romantic misprision along Shelleyan lines argues for a similar misreading of the Mutabilitie cantos on Twombly’s part.92 It is hard to imagine him coming down on the side of Olympian fixity as opposed to Heraclitan flow, or, for that matter, the liquidity of paint, especially given his lifelong fascination with the sea and moving water. In Spenser’s words, “th’ Ocean moveth stil, from place to place;/ And every River still doth ebbe and flowe” (vii. 20).93 Twombly’s pastoral works on paper—leaves blown in the wind, evanescent marks, extemporized allusions—form a concerted argument for a postromantic reading that opens onto the future: painting’s and poetry’s silent invocation of alteration, within and beyond lyric time, where “the word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience.”94 The post–abstract impressionist, neoromantic thought underlying Twombly’s pastorals might be summed up as “go with the flow.”

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Notes 1. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:40. 2. Twombly’s self- situating within the pastoral tradition is captured in a 1968 portrait of the artist as a shepherd- poet, leaning against a tree and surrounded by sheep; see Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, vol. 2, 1961–1965, ed. Heiner Bastian (Munich: Schirmer / Mosel, 1993), frontispiece. 3. These works on paper are reproduced in Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné des oeuvres sur papier, vol. 6, 1973–76, ed. Yvon Lambert (Milan: Multhipla Edizioni, 1979), 183, no. 200; 181, no. 197; 184, no. 203. For related works, see also Idilli (1976), ibid., 180, no. 196, and two other versions, Idilli (I am Thyrsis of Etna blessed with a tuneful voice) (1976), ibid., 182, no. 198, no. 199, as well as Untitled (1976), ibid., 184, no. 202, and the related Death of Adonis (1976), ibid., 183, no. 201 (quoting from Bion’s “Lament for Adonis”). The three works on paper I discuss in detail are reproduced in color in Cy Twombly (Houston: Menil Foundation and Houston Fine Arts Press, 1990), nos. 23, 24, 25. Untitled (1976), inscribed “I am THYRSIS of Etna blessed with a Tuneful Voice,” is also illustrated in Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954–1977 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979), 67; see also Lambert, ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, 6:182, no. 198. 4. Thyrsis (A painting in Three Parts) (1977); the middle canvas is inscribed “I AM THYRSIS OF ETNA blessed with a tuneful voice”; see Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Vol. 4, 1972–1995, ed. Heiner Bastian (Munich: Schirmer / Mosel, 1995), 56–59, no. 8. 5. Greek Pastoral Poetry: Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, The Pattern Poems, trans. Anthony Holden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). For an extended discussion of the European pastoral tradition originating in Theocritus, see, for instance, Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet:Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 6. See Cy Twombly:The Printed Graphic Work 1953–1983, ed. Heiner Bastian (New York: Edition Schellmann / New York University Press, 1985), 78–83, nos. 52–59. 7. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, 1:45. For a reading of Adorno’s essay in relation to Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, see Robert Kaufman, “Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 354–57. 8. See Seamus Heaney, “Eclogues in extremis: On the Staying Power of Pastoral,” in Vergil’s Eclogues, ed. Katharina Volk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 245–60: “What keeps a literary kind visible is its ability to measure up to the challenges offered by new historical circumstances” (247). For a wide- ranging account of the political and ideological legacy of Virgil’s Eclogues from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, see Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology:Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 9. For the role of the Bassano landscape in Twombly’s work from the early 1970s, see Kirk Varnadoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” in Cy Twombly: A Retrospective (New York:

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Museum of Modern Art, 1995), 44: “[Twombly] has always had what he calls a pastoral streak in his temperament . . . life at Bassano reinforced this. The land around the house and the (then depopulated) village was thoroughly rustic, and shepherds would come with tinkling bells on their flocks to play music on the hillside directly below the studio windows” (46)—perhaps an embellished account of Arcadia, even in the depopulated 1970s. 10. See The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 5 vols. (London: Longman, 1995–2005), 2:236–67. For the original contents of the miscellany, see 2:434–36, and for Dryden’s prefatory essay on translation, see 2:236–57. Dryden’s contributions included extracts from Virgil’s Aeneid, Lucretius, Theocritus, and Horace; the first collection, Miscellany Poems (1684), also included translations of Virgil’s Eclogues. Dryden’s title gave its name to a number of drawings by Twombly in the early 1980s; see Cy Twombly: Catalogue raisonné des oeuvres sur papier, vol. 7, 1977–1982, ed. Yvon Lambert (Milan: Multhipla Edizioni, 1991), 126–27, nos. 129–31, 134. 11. “A lot of people aren’t particularly attracted to nature. A lot of people have no knowledge of plants, trees, botany and things. I knew a poet who was totally ignorant about botany. And I said: you can’t be a poet without knowing any botany or plants and things like that; it’s impossible, that’s the first thing you should know”; see David Sylvester, “Cy Twombly” (2000), in Interviews with American Artists (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 173. 12. For the almond- shaped laurel leaf motif in Twombly’s work during the 1970s, and for the polymorphously phallic and feminine as well as Dionysian associations of the fig leaf, see Richard Leeman, Cy Twombly (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 214–15. 13. Vergil, Georgics: “. . . nunc te, Bacche, canam, nec non silvestria tecum / virgulta . . .” (ii. 2–3); see Virgil, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Edition, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 1:117. 14. As Leeman points out, “the beech tree unfailingly evokes the one beneath whose shade Tityrus lounges in the first line of Virgil’s Eclogues” (Cy Twombly, 215). 15. See Lambert, Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, 7:61, no. 43. Twombly uses the Greek word for “grove.” 16. Lambert, Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, 6:184, no. 203. 17. See Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 35, 38–39. Wilde’s villanelle begins: “O Singer of Persephone! / In the dim meadows desolate / Dost thou remember Sicily?” (ll. 1–3); Holden also quotes from Wilde’s double villanelle, “Pan”: “O goat- footed God of Arcady! / Ah, what remains to us of thee?” (39); see The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1:67–68, 141, 142. 18. Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 39. Holden’s end- point is Empson’s suppression of Theocritus in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935): “The distance between pastoral’s founding father and the position in which his tradition now finds itself is aptly witness in the work of Mr William Empson on the subject, in which he argues the case of pastoral as proletarian literature” (39). 19. Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 18, 39 (Idylls 12, 23, 29, and 30). Holden’s 12 is “The Beloved Boy” (“You are come, dear boy; two nights and days,/ and you are come . . .”); 23 is the vengeful fantasy, “The Lover,” whose heartless beloved was often translated as female (“A lover once pined for a heartless youth /Whose looks were charming, but whose ways

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not so”); in 29, “For a Boy,” another older man enjoins constancy (“In vino veritas, they say, my boy,/ so we too in our cups must speak the truth”); 90,128, 151. 20. Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 153. 21. In another work on paper belonging to the same Theocritan series, Untitled (1976), Twombly quotes Theocritus’s Idyll 5 (“The Goatherd versus the Shepherd”), citing the poetic contest between Lacon and Comatas: “LACON: ‘And acorn-husk falls short / of wild apple’s taste;/ the one is sour, the other honey-sweet’” (Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 68); see Lambert, Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, 6:184, no. 202. This collaged single sheet features another leaf print from Some Trees of Italy (“Laurus Nobilis”); see Leeman, Cy Twombly, 215. 22. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, ed. Tiedemann, 1:41. 23. Ibid., 1:40–41. 24. Ibid., 1:44. 25. Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 163; for a later attribution, see ibid., 219n2. 26. See Lambert, Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, 6:183, no. 200. 27. See Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 50. 28. For the pastoral figure of adynaton, see Rosenmeyer, Green Cabinet, 264–67: “Inventory is put at the service of disorder; the turbulence of the passion and the enormity of the prospects mock the composure of serial sequence” (265). 29. “Preface” to Sylvae, in Hammond, Poems of John Dryden, 2:252–53. 30. See, for instance, Rosenmeyer, Green Cabinet, 267. 31. See Lambert, Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, 6:181, no.197; compare Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 47. Another green diptych version of Idilli (I am Thyrsis of Etna blessed with a tuneful voice) (1976) is illustrated by Leeman, in Cy Twombly, 238, nos. 211, 212 (compare Lambert, ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, 6:182, no. 199). 32. Bastian, ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, 4:56–9, no. 8, pts. 1, 2, 3. 33. See the reproduction in Leeman, Cy Twombly, [228–31], nos. 202–4, and no. 205 (detail), where the lines can be clearly seen, although partially smudged; the missing words are supplied from Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 51. 34. Theodor W. Adorno, “Lyric and Society,” in Notes to Literature, 2:38. 35. Ibid., 2:48; Adorno is referring to a poem by Eduard Mörike. 36. Ibid., 2:43. 37. “In the lyric poem the subject, through its identification with language, negates both its opposition to society . . . and its mere functioning within a wholly socialized society”; ibid., 2:44. 38. See Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin, 120–21, no. 17, and the pink of Twombly’s Epithalamion III (1976), in Lambert, ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, 6:168, no. 182. 39. Leeman, Cy Twombly, 239. 40. Ibid., 239. 41. Lambert, ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, 6:180, no.195 (and see also no. 194). Untitled (Sappho) is reproduced in color in Cy Twombly: States of Mind: Painting, Scupture, Photography ed. Achim Hochdörfer (Munich: Schirmer / Mosel, 2009), no. 116. Twombly’s text is that of Sappho’s “Lament for Virginity” from one of the two editions in his library, Mary Barnard, Sappho: A New Translation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 34: “Like a hyacinth in / the mountains, trampled / by shepherds until / only a purple stain /

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remains on the ground.” Leeman quotes the Dryden translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis (see Cy Twombly, 234); the story is told in Metamorphoses, 10. 162–219. 42. Adorno, “Lyric and Society,”44. 43. Roland Barthes, “The Wisdom of Art” (1979), in Whitney, ed., Cy Twombly, 20–21; see also Writings on Cy Twombly, ed. Nicola del Roscio (Munich: Schirmer / Mosel, 2003), 112 (hereafter cited as WCT). 44. See Lambert, ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, 6:75, no.50; reproduced in Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin, 98–9, no.7. As Cullinan puts it, “The bucolic atmosphere of Bassano . . . chimed with Twombly’s love of the rustic and pastoral genre of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics” (Twombly and Poussin, 98). 45. Leeman, Cy Twombly, 91. 46. For a detailed analysis of the parallel Aristaeus and Orpheus narratives, see Michael  J. C.  Putnam, Virgil’s Poem of the Earth: Studies in the Georgics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 276–323; Putnam calls Aristaeus “the georgic artist in the process of learning”—a version of Virgil himself, whose Epyllion contains a patchwork of previous poetry (ibid., 276); see also M. Owen Lee, Virgil as Orpheus: A Study of the Georgics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), esp. 101–26. 47. Virgil, trans. Fairclough, 1:221. Twombly’s Everyman edition of The Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, trans. T. F. Royds (London: J. M. Dent, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1965 printing), has the nymphs “Spinning fine fleeces, full- hued, glassy green” (ibid., 1:169, l. 399). Twombly also possessed a 1698 edition of Dryden’s The Works of Virgil: Containing his Pastorals, Georgics, and Aeneis.Translated in to English Verse (London: Jacob Tonson, 1697), purchased at a later date; Dryden calls the nymphs “sea- green sisters . . . their distaffs full / With carded locks of blue Milesian wool” (ibid., 230). For Roman glass—a new and highly specialized technology during the imperial period—see Donald B. Harden, Glass of the Caesars (Milan: Olivetti, 1987). Glass would have been greenish blue, like water, although much Roman glass of this period was also highly decorated. 48. See Putnam, Virgil’s Poem of the Earth, 315–21, for Aristaeus’s education through (and in contrast to) the fate of Orpheus; although Aristaeus remains a type of Orpheus, he avoids the death by passion that results from Orpheus’s undying love for Eurydice. For a brief discussion of the links between the Aristaeus story and Orpheus in Virgil’s Epyllion, see also L. P. Wilkinson, The Georgics of Virgil: A Critical Survey (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 108–20. 49. Virgil, trans. Fairclough, 1:219; in Twombly’s Everyman edition, “What god, ye Muses, forged for us this art? / Whence sprung its venturous trial?” (Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, trans. Royds, 168, ll. 374–75). For Virgil’s apostrophe, see Putnam, Virgil’s Poem of the Earth, 276. 50. Virgil, trans. Fairclough, 1:235. 51. Ibid., 1:237. 52. See Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, ed. Lambert, 7. 79, no. 54; reproduced in color in Whitney, Cy Twombly, no. 99. For others in the series, see Lambert, ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, ed. Lambert, 6. 76–81, nos. 51–81; see also Virgil I–IV (1973), in Cy Twombly: Serien auf Papier 1957–1987 (Bonn: Städlisches Kunstmuseum Bonn, 1987), 91–94, and see the earlier work on canvas, Virgil (1972), Bastian, ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, 4, 50–1, no. 4.

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53. Barthes, “The Wisdom of Art” (1979), in Whitney, ed., Cy Twombly, 11 (WCT, 104). 54. Ibid., 11 (WCT, 104). 55. Ibid., 9–10 (WCT, 102–3). 56. Ibid., 21 (WCT, 112). 57. Virgil, trans. Fairclough, 1. 9. 58. Cited by Paul Alpers, The Singer of The Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 67; see Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1955), 300. The traditional association of Virgil with calm, pathos, and consolation is reinforced by the introduction to Twombly’s Everyman edition of The Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, trans. Royds, which opens with a quotation from J. W. Mackail referring to Virgil’s “note of all but intolerable pathos” and Dante’s ventriloquization of his voice (“My son, here may be agony, but not death; remember, remember!”), and concludes with a sonnet by J. B. B. Nichols invoking “That high- rapt calm so far remote from us /Yet not too steadfastly felicitous / Nor too divinely alien to console” (ibid., ix–x, xvii). 59. Barthes, “The Wisdom of Art,” 11 (WCT, 104). 60. Ibid. 61. See Alpers, Singer of the Eclogues, 248, citing Reuben Brower on the contrast between preliterate Homer and Virgil’s role in the Western literary tradition. 62. Barthes, “The Wisdom of Art,” 12 (WCT, 104). 63. Alpers identifies suspension as both a mood (uncertainty or doubt) and a grammatical and rhetorical feature of Virgil’s poetry (ibid., 97–98); his perception is apposite to Twombly’s artistic practice: “Suspension seems to me the best word to use for such moments, because it suggests a poised and secure contemplation of things disparate or ironically related, and yet at the same time does not imply that disparities or conflicts are fully resolved” (103). 64. The melancholy associated with the reception of Virgil’s Aeneid is best represented by Matthew Arnold’s account, cited by Alpers (ibid., 346): “over the whole Aeneid, there rests an ineffable melancholy: not a rigid, a moody gloom, . . . no, a sweet, a touching sadness, but still a sadness; a melancholy which is at once a source of charm in the poem, and a testimony to its incompleteness” (“On the Modern Element in Literature,” in On the Classical Tradition, ed. R. H. Super [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966], 35). 65. Virgil, trans. Fairclough, 1:3. 66. I borrow the play on the term from Alpers, Singer of the Eclogues, 214: “Here again, composing Theocritus’ effect involves composing in the literary sense.” 67. See the golden age prophecy of Eclogue 4: “slowly shall the plain yellow with the waving corn, on wild brambles shall hang the purple grape, and the stubborn oak shall distil dewy honey” (molli paulatim flavescet campus arista,/ incultisque rubens pendebit sentibus uva / et durae quercus sudabunt roscida mella; iv. 28–30); Virgil, trans Fairclough, 1:31. In Eclogue 5, Mopsus complains of the invasion of once flowering and fertile fields by weeds since the death of Daphnis (ibid., 1:37); for a comparison of Theocritus, Idyll 1, and Virgil, Eclogue 5, see Alpers, Singer of the Eclogues, 212–14. 68. Virgil, trans Fairclough, 1:7: “Ante leves ergo pascentur in aethere cervi,/ et freta destituent nudos in litore piscis, / ante pererratis amborum finibus exsul / aut Ararim Parthus bibet aut Germania Tigrim,/ quam nostro illius labatur pectore voltus” (i. 59–63).

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69. Ibid. 1: 59: “nunc et ovis ultro fugiat lupus, aurea durae / mala ferant quercus, narcisso floreat alnus,/ pinguia corticibus sudent electra myricae,/ certent et cycnis ululae, sit Tityrus Orpheus,/ Orpheus in silvis, inter delphinas Arion” (viii. 52–56). 70. Rosenmeyer, Green Cabinet, 266. 71. But see, on the other hand, the bold comparison to Orpheus in Eclogue 4: “Not Thacian Orpheus, not Linus shall vanquish me in song,” Virgil, trans. Fairclough, 1:33 (non me carminibus vincet nec Thracius Orpheus,/ nec Linus; iv. 55–56). For Virgil’s construction of a poetic genealogy that includes Orpheus, see David O. Ross, Jr., “The Sixth Eclogue: Virgil’s Poetic Genealogy,” in Volk, ed., Vergil’s Eclogues, 189–215. 72. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Parataxis in Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” in Tiedeman, ed., Notes to Literature, 2:110. 73. Ibid., 2:110. 74. Ibid., 2:126. 75. Ibid., 2:133. 76. Ibid., 2:136. Commenting on what he calls Hölderlin’s “dissociation into names,” Adorno identifies it as “the innermost tendency of Hölderlin’s parataxis”; for him “the name alone has power over the amorphousness he feared” (ibid., 2:140, 139). 77. Virgil, trans. Fairclough, 1: 29 (Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus./ non omnis arbusta iuvant humilesque myricae; si canimus silvas, sivlae sint consule dignae, iv. 1–3). As Putnam points out, this is Virgil’s first personal invocation of the Muses in the Eclogues, and not at all self- deprecating in its implication that he and the Sicilian Muses are singing in chorus; see Michael J. C. Putnam, Virgil’s Pastoral Art: Studies in the Eclogues (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 136. 78. Virgil, trans. Fairclough, 1:39; see Alpers, Singer of the Eclogues, 199–200, who argues that Daphnis, although deified—“a god is he, a god” (“deus, deus ille”; v. 64)—nonetheless remains firmly within the pastoral frame. 79. Edmund Spenser, “Argument” to Canto VII, in The Selected Poetry of Spenser, ed. A. C. Hamilton (New York: New American Library, 1966), 528. Twombly’s collection included this edition, its contents page and specific passages marked up; see also Leeman, Cy Twombly, 312n5. 80. See Lambert, ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, 6:168, no.182; reproduced in Whitney, Cy Twombly, 65. 81. See Leeman, Cy Twombly, 274, for a detailed description; the painting by Church, the nineteen- century Hudson River School landscape painter, is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where Twombly would have known it from his early art school studies. 82. See Hamilton, ed., Selected Poetry of Spenser, 544; the passage is marked up in Twombly’s copy. 83. Leeman, Cy Twombly, 274; another version quotes the same lines and uses the same reproduction (Lambert, ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné, 6:167, no.180). 84. See ibid., 6:166, no. 179. “R.R.” is Robert Rauschenberg, whom Twombly visited during March 1976 on Captiva Island. 85. Hamilton, ed., Selected Poetry of Spenser, 546, 547. 86. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 177–78.

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87. Gordon Teskey, “Night Thoughts on Mutability,” in Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos, ed. Jane Grogan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 30. See also the illuminating discussion of the Mutabilitie cantos in Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 168–88, and his excellent overall guide, “Two Cantos of Mutablitiie (1609),” in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 333–48. 88. Hamilton, ed., Selected Poetry of Spenser, 547. 89. Ibid., 546. 90. Ibid., 546. 91. Shelley, “Mutability,” ll. 15–16. 92. For the revisionary character of Romantic Spenserianism, see Michelle O’Callaghan, “Spenser’s Literary Influence,” in McCabe, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, 664–83, esp. 672–75; the Romantic- period reception of Spenser spanned both political and visionary aspects (Shelley) and sensuous indolence (Keats). For Shelley’s complex relation to Spenser’s poetry, see also Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 243–345; and for the Mutabilitie Cantos, see esp. ibid., 260–62, 276–78, 313–14. 93. Hamilton, ed., Selected Poetry of Spenser, 534. 94. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 177–78.

The Walter Scott Experience Living American History after Waverley Mike Goode

In July 1869, Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederate States of America, traveled to Scotland on a tour of sites associated with Walter Scott and Scottish history. Davis’s ambitious itinerary took in Edinburgh, Abbotsford (Scott’s estate), Dryburgh Abbey (the site of Scott’s tomb), the Trossachs (including Rob Roy’s grave), Glasgow, Oban, the Isle of Mull, Fort William, and, finally, Inverness and Culloden. Davis had been an ardent reader of Scott since his boyhood, and much of the tour amounted to a pilgrimage to honor the most beloved author among the planter class in the antebellum American South.1 But the trip had symbolic historical importance too, especially the decision to end at Culloden, the battlefield where Charles Stuart and his Jacobite followers were decisively routed in 1746 after they rebelled, for the last time, in support of the Stuart claim to the English crown. In the decades before and during the American Civil War, a taste for Scott’s trio of novels about the Jacobite rebellions (Waverley, Rob Roy, Redgauntlet) led some white southerners to imagine their grievances with the North in part through the lens of the Jacobite cause.2 In fact, because many Scots, including Jacobites dispossessed by their defeat, had emigrated to the Carolinas in the eighteenth century, various antebellum southern American political commentators claimed Scotland’s rebellious heritage for themselves, citing it as evidence of the South’s cultural distinction from the more puritanical, and supposedly more English, North. After the war, the South’s defeat only deepened the sense of resonance between the two now failed rebel causes: it was not lost on many southerners that Culloden had pitted peoples from the north and south of Britain against one another in what could reasonably be construed as the last battle of the English Civil War.3 Certainly Davis had this supposed parallel in mind when he visited Culloden in 1869. As early as the day after Confederate forces surrendered in 1865, Horace Greeley, the prominent New York newspaper editor, had compared

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Davis’s political and legal position to the defeated Charles Stuart’s.4 Over the next decade, Davis began to foster his own comparisons between the Jacobites and the Confederates as a way to advance the “Lost Cause” narrative of the South’s road to secession. According to this potent historical fiction, first put forth by historian Edward A. Pollard in The Lost Cause (1866) but more fully developed by Davis himself in The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881), the American Civil War had been fought over sovereignty rights rather than human ones: specifically, the South had gone to war with the imperialist North in defense of states’ rights, the letter of constitutional law, and the spirit of freedom, and not because of its political adherence to a freedom- depriving system of slave labor. As such, southerners could hold their heads high in defeat, knowing that they had fought nobly in defense of honorable principles (or so the argument went).5 In a lecture Davis delivered in Memphis in 1875, later widely circulated in pamphlet form under the title Scotland and the Scottish People, he put forth this revisionist narrative by eulogizing post- Jacobite Scotland and mapping the case of the defeated American South onto it. In the lecture, he commends the Scottish people for always having “mingled” a conservative tendency to “preserve their old traditions” with a more radical—occasionally, “revolutionary”—“spirit of free inquiry and bold assertion of whatever is believed to be true.”6 He then connects this legacy to the secessionist South, celebrating the Scots descent of Confederate heroes like General Stonewall Jackson and the pro- slavery politician John C. Calhoun before adding the applause line, “The Scoto- Irish, then, have a right to be proud of their career in this country, and we have a right to be thankful to them.”7 Recalling his 1869 visit to Culloden, Davis approvingly notes the historical stance that modern Scots take toward Culloden and toward the Jacobite rebellions generally: “There is no shame in their sorrow,” he states, “It is a glorious record, and one not to be forfeited even for a victory.”8 The clear suggestion is that if his audience shares with the conservative Scots a tendency to rebel boldly for causes in which they believe, then they might learn something from the Scots, too, about how to find dignity now that their cause has been lost. More to the point, the suggestion is that his audience might learn something from Scott about how to find dignity now that their cause has been lost. For in comments like these, which propose that a mixture of historical pride and resignation ought to be the legacy of honorable defeats, Davis exposes how much his narrative of lost rebel causes in general owes its basic form and affective content to his reading of Scott. In the Waverley Novels, Scott had adapted to fiction the Scottish Enlightenment’s stadialist narrative of how cultures develop over time, as well as become outmoded through

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uneven development, and had applied this narrative to everything from the defeat of the Jacobites to the subjugation of the Saxons. To the extent that the novels side with the forces of progress while finding nobility (and exoticism) in the cultures left behind, they foster acceptance of history’s course even as they stoke sympathy for, and encourage the drawing of analogies between, defeated causes. Davis had opened his 1875 lecture by proposing that any visitor to Scotland necessarily experienced the place through the Waverley Novels insofar as the novels effectively created the country to which they now served as the best guides. Thus, when he brought up his own trip to Culloden, his audience could only assume he had gone there with Waverley’s historically resigned but elegiac narrative of the Jacobite rebellions in mind, and that it was really Scott’s novel that he was offering them as a model for how to have “no shame in their sorrow” over their own failed rebellion. Yet as tempting as it is to speculate about what narratives might have shaped Davis’s historical imagination when he visited Culloden in 1869, his letters and journals from the visit reveal little. Certainly, his entire tour was “historical”: the itinerary was built around historical sites; his letters to his wife, Varina, stress that Scotland was shrouded in “historical association” for him; and his traveling companion would later recall of him that he was “familiar with the history and traditions of every place they came to.”9 But whatever sense of history shines through in Davis’s writings from the trip does not reduce easily to the epistemological and associated affective hold of historical narratives linking past and present: that is, he gives few signals that he wishes to know the Scottish past in order to secure a felt stance toward or relationship to it, let alone to translate his own story into it. Instead, he registers something more like what F. R. Ankersmit has characterized as an ontological sense of history—a sense of being there, of being where history once “happened,” and even, occasionally, a sense of experiencing it as it once happened.10 We encounter this in a weak form when Davis writes home about how Scott’s descriptions of various history- laden landscapes prove mimetically accurate (“wonderfully true to nature”) but experientially inadequate (“the beauty and grandeur of the scenery can only be realized by visiting it”).11 We see it more clearly when the former Confederate avoids an elegiac narrative stance in his letters and journals when writing about sites whose Jacobite heritage we expect would demand one from him: “We had a delightful trip through the Highlands” (no mournful reference to the still ongoing “clearances”?), or “we saw the grave of Rob Roy and there I gathered . . . little wild flowers” (no self- reflection on the historical fate of defeated rebels who outlive the causes for which they fought?).12 At Culloden, Davis gives something more proximate to a narrative and an affective stance

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bound up with it (“What fools the Highlanders were to fight the English at such a place as this,” he told Charles Mackay, his traveling companion), but even here his narrative imagination is limited to that of the battlefield historian who makes judgments about tactics and refuses to dwell on the broader meanings of the war.13 Indeed, the few specifics Davis offers about his visit to Culloden contain fewer traces of the Lost Cause pilgrim, fewer signs of the sympathetic reader of Scott’s Scottish Enlightenment–derived narratives about the necessity of historical resignation, than of the battlefield reenactor. Davis later related that he spent much of his time surveying the scene and pacing around the field trying to determine exactly “where the clans were posted, where they fought and fell.”14 If he was trying to revive the past at Culloden, he seems to have been doing so because he wished to see what it was like more than because he hoped it might rise again. We might credit Scott, then, with having a different kind of influence over Davis, a recognizably “romantic” historical one that does not always square with Scott’s Scottish Enlightenment–derived reflective project of trying to understand historical cases through one another. This essay takes off from the position that Scott was invested in reenactment as a representational problem and ideal for the historian, and that this investment creates tension with his narrative project of positioning the reader epistemologically and affectively in relation to history’s course. Specifically, I propose that the Waverley Novels struggled to realize the ontological project of historical reenactment within the necessarily epistemological form of narrative, or rather struggled to offer an experiential, immediate sense of life in the past that would not always reduce to understanding, or at least to understanding through the distance- creating logics of plot and causality. In the American South, where the Waverley Novels found particularly fertile ground right from their initial publication, this tension between narrative and reenactment, present as we have just seen in Davis’s historical sense, continues to show up in fascinating and often unexpected ways, though largely without acknowledging its romantic provenance. In what follows, I offer a preliminary analysis of the tension in Scott’s novels. Then, in light of this analysis, I look at the living history project of Colonial Williamsburg, an important public memory site in the American South that not only unmistakably registers the novels’ narrative influence but also, through its own incoherence over time, has registered the power of reenactment to pose a critique of narrative as a mode of historical sense- making. Some readers may already be objecting that any distinction between narrative and reenactment is artificial, and indeed it is insofar as the two can overlap as modes of relating to the past. After all, it is a narrative of history or a

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stance toward the past that usually first brings the amateur historian out onto a particular historical field to reenact; and the actual sequence of events of a battlefield reenactment, the most popular type of historical reenactment, is driven by and productive of a narrative sense of how the battle unfolded. For their own part, professional historians, as R. G. Collingwood has argued, often strive to reenact the modes of thought and structures of feeling of the past in their own person as they craft narratives about it (even those who would resist the notion that they are crafting narratives).15 Indeed, typically historians who have embraced the “narrative” label, especially in the nineteenth century, have made it their stated goal to render the past with a degree of immediacy that literally re- presents it. But I will be developing the claim that despite the narrative pull that can accompany reenacting, and despite the reenactive push that often attends historical narration, the two have been irreducible to one another as modes of relating to the past, both because they tend to be invested in capturing different temporalities and because they tend to do so toward different philosophical ends. Scott undoubtedly was the most influential romantic theorist of this irreducibility, to the point that the irreducibility might productively be thought of as one of the constitutive tensions of romantic historicism in general. In turn, a historical representation descended from the Waverley Novels, like Colonial Williamsburg, which has always struggled to reconcile its project of immersing visitors in the past with its desire to tell them stories about it, challenges us to think again about what romantic historicism does and what more it could still do. Scott called for historical writing to be “vivid,” and in the “Dedicatory Epistle” to Ivanhoe (1819), his most sustained statement on historical composition, he even claimed it should try to “revive.” The proper “task” of the historical novel, he wrote, is one of “embodying and reviving” the national past. In turn, the successful historical novelist might best be described as a magical, battlefield tourist: like “Lucan’s witch,” he roams around scenes of bloody civil conflict looking to resurrect “a body whose limbs had recently quivered with existence, and whose throat had but just uttered the last note of agony.”16 Admittedly, the anonymous “Author of Waverley” ironically distanced himself from this grotesque description by introducing it not in propia persona but as part of a dialogue between two of his authorial avatars. But the notion that Scott strove to bring the dead back to life in the Waverley Novels does square with statements he made elsewhere about the novels and certainly reflects the terms in which his contemporaries commonly described and judged them.17 Praise of Scott’s capacity to enliven the past can be found in his readers’ letters and throughout early reviews. As a writer for the Quarterly Review put it in 1827, “We feel at once that we are in the power and at

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the will of a master [when we read him]. Tradition and history give up the dead from their burial- places at his bidding, and they pass before us on the stage ‘in the habit that they lived,’ and surrounded by the same scenery and customs.”18 For vividness, these and many similar remarks perhaps never rival Scott’s own graphic figuration of historical resuscitation in the “Dedicatory Epistle.” But they still offer abundant evidence of how, for many of Scott’s contemporaries, the force of a historical representation lay in its power to conjure up a sense of proximity to a vivid and vital past—its power to make history live. That Scott, like much of the rest of his generation of historical writers, endeavored to bring the dead to life for readers is hardly a controversial claim. Scholars have long emphasized that romantic historians placed tremendous stock in engaging their audiences’ feelings, that they turned to novels and paintings for models of how to do so, and that early nineteenth- century historical novels carried some authority as histories in their own right. In Britain, not until the mid- century rise of so- called “scientific” history did historians actively cultivate a stance of anaesthetized detachment from their materials in the name of an ideal of objective truth, thus distancing themselves from forms of representation that might open them up to charges of partiality or fiction- making. Whereas romantic historians and historical novelists conceived of themselves as roaming through fields in order to revive corpses, Victorian scientific historians embraced the image of the historian as an unfeeling and all- seeing eye, disembodied, timeless, and placeless. 19 But if scholars have long appreciated that history transformed over the course of the nineteenth century from an art into a social science, with the effect of diminishing historical novels’ epistemological authority, they have not sufficiently recognized how the very terms of this narrative remain beholden to scientific history’s conception of historical inquiry as an essentially epistemological and explanatory enterprise, one wherein the chief philosophical “problem” is how to know and understand the past. What demands more attention, in other words, is how romantic historians’ and historical novelists’ emphasis on reviving the dead rendered the essential “problems” of history less epistemological and explanatory than ontological and experiential—that is, less problems of how to know and understand the past than of how to realize and reenact the experience of being there. To be clear, I do not mean to claim that Scott’s desire to revive past experience is not at all an epistemological investment or not at all interested in understanding. As he contends elsewhere in the “Dedicatory Epistle,” knowing and understanding the past require experiencing its difference, and this in turn is more easily achieved if readers can draw on their own

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experience with, and vivid sense memory of, different places that amount to different times. He cites the example of the Englishman who has toured the Scottish Highlands, “eating bad dinners, sleeping on truckle beds, stalking from desolation to desolation.” Such a man, he proposes, is “much [more] disposed to acquiesce” to the difference of the past than the man who never leaves “his own snug parlour,” where he is “surrounded by all the comforts” of familiarity and home.20 The implication is that a representation’s ability to bring the past to life hinges in part on its reader’s capacity to reenact this past imaginatively within himself, a capacity that in turn depends as much on the breadth of his anthropological experience as on the vividness of the representation. For Scott, in other words, experience is not just historical understanding’s preferred object but also its medium. Indeed, it is Scott’s epistemological confidence in experience that leads him to remark a few sentences later that even when confronted with the “formidable difficulty” of the “scantiness of materials,” the skillful novelist can still hope to produce something “like a true picture” of the past.21 Here, Scott registers the influence of his training in “conjectural” history, wherein the supposed continuity of experience constitutes sufficient epistemological ground for speculating in the face of gaps or apparent confusion in the historical record.22 As the philosopher Dugald Stewart, Scott’s professor at the University of Edinburgh, explained approvingly, the conjectural historian assumes that “when we are unable to ascertain how men have conducted themselves on particular occasions,” we can still consult our own experience in order to conjecture authoritatively “in what manner they are likely to have proceeded” given “the principles of their nature, and the circumstances of their external situation.”23 Stewart had in mind Adam Smith’s claim in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) that our ability to understand and identify with the feelings of another person, living or dead, lies not in the authority of the person’s testimony but in our power of imaginative projection into the person’s historical place. Drawing on our experience, Smith had proposed, we feel fellowship with another by grasping his or her situation and imaginatively reenacting in our own person how we might think and feel under like conditions.24 Yet the fact that Scott privileged experience as a medium and object of understanding does not mean that he conceived of experience as necessarily producing, or as always concerning itself with, understanding. His desire to reenact past experience reflected an interest in an immersive or ontological mode of access to history that does not reduce easily or entirely to an effort to understand. In the case of the Waverley Novels, the privileging of immersive experience over mere understanding registers itself most clearly as a

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disconnection between the ideal of bringing the past to life and the formal demand of reducing it to a plot. It is no doubt true, as Hayden White has argued, that all histories produce, and that historical understanding often depends on, a sense of plot.25 More to the point, recent scholarship on the Waverley Novels has done much to unpack the ideological significance of their plots and the historical explanations they implicitly tender. But such scholarship has also risked being too dismissive of the novels’ reception history, for the fact is that Scott and his early reviewers alike tended to regard his plots as of only secondary importance to his historical project. In the “Advertisement” to The Antiquary (1816), Scott had stated that he was “more solicitous to describe manners minutely” in a historical novel “than to arrange in any case an artificial and combined narrative.”26 He would rework these remarks in various forms throughout the years, such as at the start of The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), where, after acknowledging the failings of his plots, he states a preference for a “narrative” that is more painterly and “descriptive” than “dramatic,” and again in Peveril of the Peak (1823), where he announces that he intends not to reproduce a story he has heard but to draw on it as a “slight sketch” for a “lively fictitious picture.”27 As James Hillhouse first documented, Scott’s readers generally shared the same assessment of the Waverley Novels and the priority they placed on “animated” or enlivening pictorial description. Especially when reviewers praised the novels for successfully bringing the dead to life, it was not because they found their plots convincing but because they found Scott’s depictions of historical characters, settings, and manners to be vivid, a vividness they attributed in turn to how well the depictions squared with their “experience.”28 In fact, it is Scott’s privileging of enlivening description over plot that finally led some critics—most influentially, Thomas Carlyle—to suggest that his greatest failing was that he had no “message,” that his novels offered a mere experience of pastness that refused the more useful, instructive and political work of explanation.29 The disconnect for Scott between the representational ideal of bringing the past to life and the epistemological demand of reducing it to a plot also registers itself in the gaps his novels expose between the temporalities of lived experience and plot. When, in The Bride of Lammermoor, Scott explains what he means by preferring a painterly mode of narrative that is “rather descriptive than dramatic,” he articulates a desire to recapture a sense of past experience that can be held apart from the anticipatory temporality of plot.30 As opposed to forms of representation that will “lift the veil of futurity” to a scene, or at least reveal the possible “happy and expressive combinations” that could follow from it, painterly description tends, he proposes, to offer

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a “peep” at “flesh and blood” characters without necessarily prompting our concern with their “future fortunes.”31 That said, any writer looking to recapture past experience necessarily faces the challenge of how to counteract readers’ knowledge of certain future fortunes—that is, how to recreate in readers the experience of narrative uncertainty and even the experience of not reaching after any narrative, given that the reader already knows the future to the past being represented. Scott addresses this challenge in part by building his novels’ plots around the maturation of fictional everyman figures who achieve little historically significant themselves but who come into contact with the various factions and real- life personages associated with particular historical turning points. While the fate of the national- historical events a given novel depicts may be well known, the fate of the everyman hero in relation to the events is not. To the extent that the novel vicariously interests the reader in the everyman’s fate, it thus injects, by a kind of sleight of hand, a sense of narrative uncertainty into the reader’s reliving of past experience. To make this claim is not to slight the validity of Georg Lukács’s important insight that the Waverley Novels’ everyman figures, or “mediocre heroes,” as he calls them, are also a key vehicle of explanation and understanding in the novels insofar as through their roles as historical survivors and go- betweens, they come to stand in for the “middle way” of national history between party extremes.32 Indeed, I have argued in another context that, at least in a first- person novel like Scott’s Rob Roy, the mediocre hero comes to understand his survival and later financial success retrospectively as just such a stand- in for the “middle way” the nation took between warring extremes, such that survival and success seem to depend on the development of the narrative- based understanding of history that the novel itself embodies.33 But at the same time, if we take a desire to recapture historical experience to be a major investment of the Waverley Novels, such arguments can easily be turned around. One effect of the mediocre hero’s consistent failure up until the end of a novel to understand and at times care about the “historical” events unfolding around him—his failure to seek out the best narrative genre to make sense of the history he is living—is to give the reader a sense of access to past experience prior to its emplotment through understanding. While this sense of access tends to be undercut by readers’ ironic distance from the mediocre hero (for readers often already have the sense of historical plot that the character lacks or fails to seek), even the ability to note the distance at all helps underscore that something is lost from past experience through the effort to reduce it strictly to an experience of plot. If, as Lukács also argues, the Waverley Novels advance a vision of history wherein named

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historical figures can only shape events to the extent that they stand at the head of a mass of anonymous people who make their plots possible, then they also remind readers that these named actors are the ones with the clearest plot expectations for the future and that the rank- and- file experience of history tends not to reduce so easily to an experience of or desire for plot. I have been arguing that the Waverley Novels enact a desire to bring the dead to life and that this desire registers itself through their privileging of description over plot and of relived experience over explanation or understanding. My point in doing so has not been to deny the power of Scott’s plots to influence how his readers explain and understand national history. After all, we have already seen in the case of Davis just how effective and also just how portable across historical contexts his plots could be for helping people make sense of cataclysmic national events. But by registering how the Waverley Novels also try to recapture historical experience in ways that do not necessarily reduce to emplotting, explaining, and understanding it, we recognize something new about their influence, too. Namely, as the novels stoked an unprecedented interest in national history on the part of the reading public, they instilled not just a set of narrative expectations for how to tell and understand a nation’s story but also a demand for, and even a fantasy of, other modes of access to the past that would not always be narrative and not necessarily or even primarily be invested in understanding. Conceived in these terms, the true bequest of the Waverley Novels is less a particular narrative formula for making sense of history than a set of competing desires in relation to the past—to understand, to emplot, and to experience it— whose philosophical tensions with one another become palpable precisely because part of the novels’ formula is to remind us that no narrative could ever meet all three demands at once. It would also follow, then, that the forms of historical mediation to which we ought to look the hardest for the novels’ legacy, because we stand to gain the most theoretical insights from them, are not likely to be especially narrative or singularly textual. They are far more likely to be multimedia or, rather, metamedia public memory sites that, however susceptible to easy epistemological critique, fuel the desire for and even purport to deliver immediate access to historical experience, even as they also tell us stories about the past. In a contemporary American context, the living history museum is among the more influential public memory sites where we can trace the Waverley Novels’ legacy. At Colonial Williamsburg, the largest and most ambitious such museum, this legacy manifests itself most clearly in certain narratives the museum generates but also, more subtly, in its struggles through the years to make

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its narrative and experiential aspects cohere. Admittedly, the museum—or “the restoration,” as its officials call it—has largely deserved the political and epistemological critiques scholars have offered of its historical narratives and knowledge claims. These critiques have focused on its problematic representations of slavery, the erasures and displacements that result from the priority it places on creating material “authenticity” over conveying complex political and social history, the ideological import of its implication in tourism and the broader enterprise of marketing “heritage,” and the impossibility of the kinds of unmediated knowledge it sometimes claims to deliver.34 But the restoration becomes a much more interesting object of study—even a place to learn from—as soon as we register the extent to which its incoherence as history has given it its own powers of critique. For its Scott- influenced narratives coexist, I hold, as in Scott’s novels themselves, alongside and in productive dialogue with the desires it stokes for experiential access to the past. While the desire to step back in time may be epistemologically naïve in the sense that it is impossible to realize, it still carries the power, through the striving for it, to point up the gaps between living in history and making sense of it through stories and explanations. Since its founding in 1926, Colonial Williamsburg has pursued a romantic commitment to resurrecting and reviving the colonial past, to making history “live.” An enormous museum, archeological site, and architectural restoration in Virginia, the project was launched by the Reverend Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in an effort to preserve and reconstruct, as a “national shrine,” the buildings from Williamsburg’s days as an influential colonial capital whose leading political figures helped bring about the American Revolution.35 The initial intent of the restoration was always, as Kenneth Chorley, its early president, remarked, to deliver a historical “education chiefly through experience—through a direct encounter with another environment,” such that the visitor heard “not a dusty message, but a living voice.”36 Goodwin had dreamed up the project when, while walking among the city’s colonial buildings, he “felt the presence and companionship of the people who used to live [there] in the long gone years,” and this brought to mind the “the things they did and the things they stood for.”37 In Rockefeller, he found a kindred spirit who proved capable of bankrolling and overseeing the initial phases of the project’s implementation. Rockefeller was particularly keen “that the city should be experienced by the visitor and allowed to speak to the living in its own way” and that narrative interpretation therefore be kept to a minimum.38 The earliest programming at Colonial Williamsburg reflected Rockefeller’s preferences. In 1932 the restoration stationed “hostesses” in its major buildings to serve as guides, but their charge was to “make that thing [building]

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alive” more than it was to provide any agreed- upon historical narrative.39 Soon they were outfitted in reproduction eighteenth- century dress to try to enhance the sense of historical atmosphere. Elizabeth Lee Henderson, who worked as a hostess in those early years, recalled that while some initially felt concerned that the costumes would inject a dubious “theatrical touch,” they “did exactly the opposite,” making “visitors feel that they [were] really stepping back, not on a stage, but back two hundred years in spirit.”40 By 1937, visitors were encouraged in this feeling by official guidebooks. Relatively light on contextual narrative about national events, the guides were designed to help visitors experience the restoration as “primarily architectural”—that is, as a recreation of a space at what amounted to a particularly historical time.41 Letters to museum officials in those years suggest that such minimalist interpretive gestures often produced the desired effect. They commended the site for successfully “preserving the air” and capturing “the atmosphere of history,” for enabling the “experience” of “stepping back 150 years,” and for making the past “vivid.” As one appreciative visitor opined, “The wonder of Williamsburg is that it is not a museum, but an experience in living and feeling and enjoying.”42 This is not to say that Colonial Williamsburg did not generate narratives in its early years or that its visitors’ desire to experience a past coded to them as “colonial,” “American,” and “Revolutionary” could ever have been unalloyed with some sense of narrative. Indeed, the thinking behind the project’s experiential emphasis was always that it would imbue visitors with a sense of historical direction. Rockefeller and Goodwin envisioned the restoration as a patriotic enterprise that could unite Americans through a common heritage.43 At a time when they saw socialism on the rise, capitalists putting profits ahead of civic- mindedness, and the government expanding federal powers, they hoped architectural time travel to one of the Revolution’s birthplaces might produce a nationalistic spiritual renewal. If the restoration strove to offer its visitors a historical “experience,” its point was to leave them feeling more American and, moreover, to identify being American with dutifully conserving a political tradition that held that freedom and equality are best safeguarded by promoting individual liberties and democracy.44 By 1950, when John D. Rockefeller III became chairman of the restoration, the ideological investment in delivering this version of America’s story briefly threatened to do away with the kind of immersive experience his father had seen as the site’s raison d’être. Among other things, he established an armed forces training program designed to indoctrinate visiting soldiers in the view that “the men of 18th Century Williamsburg had a positive conviction and a burning faith as to what they believed in and what they were working for”

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and that Americans’ duty during the Cold War was to keep “this conviction, this faith” alive.45 It has always been difficult, however, for Colonial Williamsburg to ensure that its visitors leave with a particular narrative—even with any narrative at all—let alone with a coherent one. This difficulty has stemmed not only from multiple narratives operating in the restoration at any given time but also from the tensions inherent in museum officials’ dual commitment to delivering historical narratives while also maintaining the site’s immersive and experiential qualities. Certainly, as the restoration’s priorities have shifted through the years, its intended narratives have changed significantly, as have its approaches to presenting them. But such changes also amount to a recurring admission of the site’s capacity at any time to generate multiple narratives, including inadvertent ones; to layer them on top of one another, often incoherently; and inadvertently to pose a critique of historical narrative- making per se through its own experiential charge. That said, while narrative incoherence has been treated to date as a problem by Colonial Williamsburg’s directors, it is also the product—and, I contend, the promise—of the project’s derivation from the philosophical incoherence of Scott’s romantic historicism. Right from the start, another potent historical narrative operative at Williamsburg, a more or less intentional one, has resulted from the power of the site’s architectural immersion—its ability, in the style of the Waverley Novels, to code a spatial immersion as a temporal one—to induce an aesthetic response. One of Rockefeller’s priorities in founding the restoration was to highlight the style and taste of the founding fathers. Skilled craftsmen have worked on- site ever since, using eighteenth- century production and building techniques, and often the items they make to assist the restoration are available for purchase. This particular experiential aspect of the site thus contributes to a historical narrative that the colonial era was a beautiful time marked by good taste. Visitors’ letters express such sentiments each year, and the volume of sales in the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s shops through the years has told much the same story. In fact, architectural historians generally credit Colonial Williamsburg with having solidified the Colonial Revival in domestic architecture in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century.46 The restoration’s historical narratives about the struggle for liberty and the aesthetic beauties of colonial life have always existed alongside another powerful narrative, too, at times competing with it and at times reinforcing it. For Rockefeller, Williamsburg’s more recent history was less important than the fact that the city’s surviving colonial buildings represented a unique opportunity for recreating the historical setting in which Americans forged

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an identity through collective struggle to preserve individual liberties and social equality. The project simply would not have been possible in key northern colonial centers like Boston and New York, which had been so physically transformed by industrialism and urbanization. But for Goodwin and many other Virginians, the desire to renew a sense of common national heritage stemmed at least as much from the legacy of the so- called “Second” American Revolution, the Civil War. At a time when the sectionalism of the late nineteenth century had given way to various national pageants of reconciliation and forgiveness, the restoration gave the South a platform to highlight its part in the American Revolution proudly and even to claim the lead role historically of national unifier. A tourist guidebook that Goodwin’s son, Rutherford, wrote in 1935 and an article Goodwin himself wrote in 1937 for National Geographic stress that though “Virginia and Massachusetts Bay were, beyond question, the Leaders [of the Revolution]; and though an Effort to distinguish the relative Importance of these two can be considered an invidious thing, Virginia may be held with some truth to have carried the more weight.”47 This was because Williamsburg’s House of Burgesses had created Committees of Correspondence in 1773 to share intelligence about the British and thus, in the elder Goodwin’s view, had taken “the first steps [toward] the union of the Colonies.”48 Of the former colonial capital’s history during the Civil War, Rutherford’s guidebook mentions only military events and not political causes; of Reconstruction, it says still less, and what it does say honors the planter class’s perseverance more than it celebrates emancipation: “The Story of the Days of Reconstruction in the South is a familiar one. . . . The Slaves (happily) were gone; but the pleasant and symmetrical gardens that they had tended now fell to Weeds and Ruin. Yet, Fish and Game might yet be taken, and some Corn would spring from a Soil exhausted by the Culture of Tobacco; so that the same genteel families lived on at Williamsburg.”49 Colonial Williamsburg’s founders were not consciously trying to tap into Lost Cause fantasies of plantation life, even if they did contribute to them by fostering an immersive experience of the late eighteenth- century South as at once a refuge from modern life and a place where good taste, social grace, and high political ideals were once cultivated along with the tobacco. Given that Pollard had opened The Lost Cause by citing the House of Burgesses’ actions in the 1770s as evidence that the Revolution was fought to establish states’ rights, the Reverend Goodwin’s early focus on the same events may even have been a conscious attempt to reclaim Williamsburg’s significance from Civil War revisionists.50 Still, Goodwin and Rockefeller were guilty of a no less problematic erasure of slavery and the Civil War, one symbolically

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enacted when they moved the city’s Confederate memorial off- site to make way for their museum and, later, when Rockefeller rejected Goodwin’s suggestion that they reconstruct slave quarters. In fact, although more than half of Williamsburg’s colonial residents had been black, the restoration initially did more than just fail to represent this population, the institution of slavery, and the founding fathers’ compromised support for equality. The mass relocation of residents in the 1920s from the future “historic area” actually contributed to the city’s segregation by destroying an integrated neighborhood.51 Then, throughout the 1940s, the restoration promoted itself almost exclusively to whites and offered no housing to blacks, discriminatory practices whose legacy still shows up in the relative paucity of African American visitors to the site today.52 David  W. Blight has made a powerful case that the cause of national reunion after the Civil War, especially in the early twentieth century, entailed deflecting attention from the war’s racial causes. Commemorations instead promoted a glorified “narrative” of the shared military bravery and hardships of soldiers from both sides, thus undermining Americans’ understanding of the war’s significance and unfinished potential for the cause of racial equality.53 In this sense, Colonial Williamsburg, though unique as a site devoted to the Revolution, was a typical early twentieth- century Civil War site: only, rather than highlighting a shared military struggle in the nineteenth century, its focus was the shared political struggle of North and South to conserve individual rights (never mind the inequalities) during what amounted to a golden—or, really, whitewashed—antebellum era. It is little wonder that, after visiting the site in 1936, one visitor felt inspired to draft a public resolution calling on Virginians and West Virginians to meet in the restored House of Burgesses “to consider the reunion of the State of Virginia to its former boundaries, with Williamsburg as the official capital.” As he explained it, the reunion would destroy “the only evidence now remaining of the War between the States which can be erased or eliminated.”54 By the mid- 1950s, Colonial Williamsburg’s directors were as concerned as ever about what they perceived as the failure of the museum’s narrative and experiential components to cohere in and of themselves and with each other. The foundation board’s charter at this time distinguished, as if to acknowledge the disconnect between, its charge to restore the past (“to re- create accurately the environment of the men and women of eighteenth- century Williamsburg”) and its responsibility to narrate and explain it (“to bring about such an understanding of their lives and times that present and future generations may more vividly appreciate the contribution of these early Americans to the ideals and culture of our country”).55 But the desire for

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these aims to reinforce one another more effectively had been building for years. In 1948, the restoration had hired a consulting firm to figure out what visitors were actually getting out of the site. The report highlighted the heterogeneity of their experiences and understanding and called for the creation of a more powerful master narrative to help the site cohere.56 Though Williamsburg had developed more programming in response, it remained apparent, as Chorley told the board in 1951, that the restoration spoke “to different people in different tongues,” and he backed a proposal to build an information center, “through which the 20th- century mind may pass and be better prepared to hear the message of this 18th- century capital city of Virginia.”57 When the center finally opened six years later, he touted its clear interpretive frame as finally helping to “solv[e] all the problems of helping the great variety of Americans . . . approach the restored city with more adequate understanding of its contributions to the American dream.”58 Dominating the restoration’s new interpretive frame was a frame narrative, a lavish, Hollywood- made dramatic film titled Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot (1957), which played twice an hour, in staggered showings, in two theaters built just to enhance the experience of viewing it.59 It is now the longest continuously running film in the history of American cinema, having played to tens of millions of visitors. The film presents the southern gentry as uniting the future states of America by being level- headed and deliberative in their decision to come to the aid of a more politically hot- headed North. As a narrative frame for visitors’ subsequent encounters with the restored capital, the film presents Williamsburg as a place where a series of momentous legislative decisions were made in the 1770s—to oppose British punishment of Boston for the Tea Party, to call for a continental congress, and to ratify a declaration of rights—that paved the way for the American Revolution by reconstituting the colonies as sovereign states united in their resistance to British tyranny. The Story also unmistakably grafts the general plot, generic formula, and narrative historical vision of the Waverley Novels onto Virginia’s role in America’s declaration of independence. The film recounts the story of the fictional John Fry, a plantation owner and newly elected delegate to Virginia’s colonial legislature, whose political sympathies waver at the hands of his loyalist planter- class friends, the persuasive rhetoric of republican orators and thinkers like Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, a sense of obligation to his dead father, who valued his British identity, and the revolutionary sentiments of his beloved eldest son. Like the Waverley Novels, the film thus represents the significance of its historical events by registering their impact

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on a Lukácsian mediocre hero from a fictional, politically divided family. Also like the Waverley Novels, it offers this hero’s and his family’s fates as symbolic stand- ins for history’s course, as affective proxies for the range of feelings and judgments available toward this course as it was experienced, and as substitutes for the present audience’s retrospective feelings and judgments toward this course. Though the likelihood is never in doubt in the film that the colonial legislature will vote in such a way that revolution will be the final outcome, the probability that Fry will vote with the majority is, thereby rendering his fateful decision to vote with them at the end of the film less significant for the course of national history than for the coincidence of his family’s fortunes with it. What remains in doubt, one could say, is whether or not Fry will become a founding father both for the nation and for his family’s footing in it. On the one hand, Colonial Williamsburg did not consciously set out to create a Waverley Novel as its frame narrative. In 1954, when museum officials decided to make a film the centerpiece of their new Information Center, they did not express fixed ideas about the kind of story they might be after. Instead, they called for a writer who would not be “conditioned too much by any of our preconceptions,” “a first- rate idea man” who, through direct experience of the site, might “develop a personal understanding of the Williamsburg environment and the average visitor.”60 Indeed, as such comments already suggest, museum officials’ sense of the intractability of the problem of narrative coherence at first manifested itself less as a desire for narrative at all than as a hope that the site’s immersive, experiential “formula” might coalesce organically into a narrative form that a talented screenwriter might capture and transform into a film that would in turn assist with the immersion. In the early stages of the project’s development, they wrote to one another far less about possible narratives than about the experience they wanted the film to afford. This correspondence established not only that the film would be shot in the widest feasible aspect ratio, employ the latest color technology, and use unknown actors whose lack of star texts could not disrupt viewers’ suture with the film, but also that the new screening facility would push the technological capabilities of cinema, featuring curved, edgeless screens, ambient sound, atmospheric lighting, and seating designed to disguise the presence of other audience members. There was even talk (later abandoned) of piping ambient smells into the theater during screenings. What officials wanted was not so much a narrative as a cinematic experience that, like the site itself, would “involve the participant so emotionally with the scene before his eyes that he literally lives in the eighteenth century,” as John Goodbody, the director of project planning, characterized their aim: “We want them to believe they are participating in the film action insofar

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as possible, rather than sitting placidly in the twentieth century watching a costume drama unfold through a rectangular window.”61 Arthur L. Smith, the restoration’s audiovisual director, instructed his colleagues that their main task thus would be “to design a near perfect audience involvement in the film.”62 On the other hand, the Waverley- esque film that still plays in the Visitor Center today assumed the generic form and advanced the historical narrative it did because museum officials ultimately asserted creative control over its story. The first treatment for the film, written by James Agee just before his death, bears only a slight resemblance to the final shooting script. A portrait of a cross section of colonial types, none of them real- life figures, who fall into a political discussion in a Williamsburg tavern one day in the 1770s, Agee’s treatment stresses the sociopolitical complexity of colonial society as a way of making the Revolution seem less than historically inevitable. Through references to slavery, his treatment also foregrounds the ideological contradictions of the planter class, with the effect of making the tavern discussion prefigure the Civil War almost as much as it does the Revolution.63 Though museum officials responded positively overall to Agee’s focus on everyman figures in an everyday scene (fewer found his treatment of slavery desirable), they had to turn elsewhere for a screenwriter when he died in 1955.64 They settled on Emmet Lavery, who had written a number of films for MGM and whose politics they had “no uneasy feeling whatever” about.65 Lavery took Agee’s chance meeting between everymen in a tavern and transformed it into a traditional history film, focusing on the political struggles that known historical figures—Washington, Jefferson, and Henry—went through to get Virginia to declare independence. Rather than highlighting the political contradictions of the planter class, as Agee had, Lavery referenced slavery mainly by including a scene showing Jefferson assisting an enslaved mulatto in his legal bid for freedom. Museum staff had mixed reactions to the new treatment, with Smith suggesting they start over.66 The compromise was to hire Lavery but also to assert more active creative control over the story. Though Lavery would be credited as The Story of a Patriot’s writer, his treatments and drafts were subjected to such heavy revision by restoration officials that the writing amounted ultimately to a collaborative effort. Among other things, restoration officials were responsible for refocusing the story away from world- historical figures.67 By the final draft of the script, they also had cut the scene involving the enslaved mulatto, thus paring down the film’s references to slavery to just the occasional ambient presence of slaves onscreen. There is little evidence that the creative team behind The Story of a Patriot was familiar with the Waverley Novels.68 That the film they made bears the

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clear imprint of the novels’ narrative influence more likely attests to the de facto hold Scott still had by mid- century over the story forms of American national- historical memory, especially in the South. Throughout the long nineteenth century, southern novelists, historians, and (as we saw in Jefferson Davis’s case) politicians repeatedly translated American history into the Waverley Novels’ conservative historical vision and generic formula.69 The Story of a Patriot has a clear precedent, for example, in the novels of William Gilmore Simms, the most influential southern historian and historical novelist of the nineteenth century. Simms, whose massive output included eight novels about the Revolution written in imitation of Scott, held that the course of American history constituted a middle way between extremes—that America was a conservative nation founded, and engaged in perpetual civil struggle, to preserve inherited English liberties and rights of self- governance from being encroached on by the forces of progress and reaction alike. In novels like The Partisan (1835), he also fostered the idea—so central later on to the myth of the Lost Cause—that this conservative middle way found its best guarantee in the chivalric members of the southern planter class, whose commitment to liberty was such that they would always come to its rescue, and thus the nation’s rescue, even when doing so ran counter to their families’ economic interest.70 By the first decades of the twentieth century, other Scott- influenced texts would develop the racism of this basic plot form and vision more blatantly. Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots (1902), a white supremacist novel written in imitation of Scott, celebrated the counter- Reconstruction and consequent national reconciliation supposedly enacted by the dispossessed planter class after the Civil War, just as D. W. Griffith would later do in The Birth of a Nation (1915), his epic film adaption of Dixon’s The Clansman (1904).71 Though a film like The Story of a Patriot pushed the issues of racial inequality and injustice further into the background, it still told much the same American story. Many other scholars have discussed Colonial Williamsburg’s early racism, and still more have studied the Waverley Novels’ influence over racist forms of American historical memory. Almost all of this work, however, especially on Scott, has focused on the politics of narrative and genre, with only passing attention to how Scott’s novels and Colonial Williamsburg stoke desires to experience the past in ways that do not reduce easily to desires for narrative or their embedded politics. Though I have been emphasizing the derivation of The Story of a Patriot’s narrative from the Waverley Novels, what I really want to stress is that the film bore traces of Scott’s influence even before it ever had a narrative. Restoration officials ended up using a Scott- derived narrative to try to meet a desire for a firsthand experience of the past whose

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genealogy can also be traced back through Scott, and they did so with an eye toward giving coherence to the narratives and purported firsthand experiences of the past that the restoration already offered. In other words, The Story of a Patriot did not really bring Walter Scott into Colonial Williamsburg so much as point up how he had always been there. Moreover, as we shall see, the film has only contributed over time to the tensions within and between the restoration’s narrative and its experiential investments in the past, tensions that, I have been arguing, are the hallmarks of Scott’s fundamentally romantic brand of historicism. Today, The Story of a Patriot is not just the most conspicuous evidence of Scott’s presence at Colonial Williamsburg; it is also the museum’s most enduring narrative. But at this point, its continued prominence means that it generates more narrative discord than cohesion in relation to the rest of the site it ostensibly introduces. Since the 1970s, the restoration has dedicated itself to telling a more inclusive story about the cultural and social background to, and the ideological contradictions that developed out of, the political events of the 1770s. Much of the attention in this vein has been devoted to incorporating various narratives about slavery into the “historic area,” which has occurred through specialized tours, new programming, and the development of various slave labor settings.72 The more general trend has been to introduce a larger cast of typical characters into the site to foreground the complexity of the practices and inequalities of everyday life in the colonial city. Not unlike Agee’s unused screen treatment for The Story, the master narrative tying these “storylines” and “subplots” together has been that different groups experienced the political events unfolding in the colonial capital differently since these events meant different things to their own lives and liberties.73 This, at least, has been the idea, for the new narrative has plagued museum staff through the years with various worries about its cohesion too. Its current version, Becoming Americans: Our Struggle to Be Both Free and Equal, which debuted in 1983, underwent revision in 1998 largely on the grounds that cohesion among its subplots had been proving elusive. Acknowledging as much, Cary Carson, vice president of the Research Division, hailed the revision as finally joining “the separate strands of social history, the history of ideas, and a dynamic account of Virginia’s early institutions into one unified narrative.”74 Since The Story of a Patriot’s 1957 release, however, the problem of narrative cohesion at Colonial Williamsburg has not just been the problem of how to make narratives cohere. It has remained the more intractable romantic historicist dilemma of how to make the demand for narrative cohere with the desire for forms of access to the past that tend to expose gaps between

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experiencing history and learning a story. The Story of a Patriot was not the first project restoration officials devised to try to heighten the site’s immersive experience of history, nor has it been the last. As the restoration has shifted its master narrative since the 1960s, it has also experimented with different modes of sensory presentation intended to help visitors “experience historical environment,” as E. P. Alexander, the director of interpretation, put it in 1971.75 Hewing to Alexander’s tenet that “actual objects properly used make history come to life,” more emphasis has been given since the 1970s to buildings and demonstrations devoted to the various craftspeople on- site who make products using 1770s tools and methods, even allowing visitors to participate in these activities in certain contexts (e.g., making shingles, cutting bricks).76 At the same time, the range of “period” dining opportunities has been expanded throughout the historic area, and more attention has been given to recreating what Alexander called “everyday life in the eighteenth century,” especially in domestic spaces.77 Certainly, Williamsburg’s most conspicuous new initiative designed to foster historical immersion has been its use of first- person interpretation, or reenacting. In 1979, the restoration pioneered what it called “theatrical living history,” with costumed characters playing scenes around the site at scheduled times.78 These included a planter doing some shopping, a recruiting officer conscripting volunteers, a slave working to learn a craft, a freed black offering services as a day laborer, a tavern keeper hawking accommodations, a slave preaching, a grave tender telling colorful anecdotes about townspeople, and a man enduring humiliation in the stocks. Though first- person interpretation’s use has waxed and waned through the years, as well as become more and less improvisational under different directors, it has been a standard part of the Colonial Williamsburg experience ever since. Today, a few craftspeople on- site do their work in character, not breaking scene when they talk to visitors; various historical personages wander about the site in character, often making scripted remarks; and, at scheduled times, entire scenes play out in the city streets involving many costumed actors, some of whom are involved directly and others of whom react to the events from among the crowd of twenty- first- century onlookers. In at least one of these scenes in 2012, “A Court of Tar and Feathers,” audience members were also conscripted into action to make decisions about the scene’s outcome. All of these immersive, “experiential” modes of presentation, of course, create their own narratives, and I do not mean to imply otherwise. My point is that, as a romantic historicist site, Colonial Williamsburg has always obeyed two different charges: to produce narratives to explain the past and help visitors relate to it, and, more impossibly, to recreate the sense of an

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eighteenth- century place so that visitors might experience the past directly. In turn, the site’s incoherence as a history through the years has stemmed at least as much from the power of these charges to undo one another as from the fact that the site produces so many different narratives. It may be hard to watch slaves building a house using eighteenth- century tools and methods and connect their stories meaningfully to John Fry’s indecision in the colonial legislature or to a costumed innkeeper talking to you about the backwardness of New Amsterdam as you eat dinner in a reconstructed tavern. But this hardly captures the qualitative nature of Colonial Williamsburg’s incoherence, for at least during my own visits there I always find that “narrative” fails entirely to characterize the visitor’s overall experience of the museum. Narrative implies a temporal sequence to which an audience can ascribe a logic, along with everything attendant on the logic, such as genre expectations, dynamic affective experiences of character and narrative unfolding, and feelings toward genre itself. Yet Colonial Williamsburg and other experiential history museums like it are spatial sites where visitors develop a sense of sequence by physically moving about the space and making encounters. They may not offer visitors an entirely non- narrative experience of “living” history, but they at least afford an experience that more closely approximates the disconnected and improvisational practices of everyday life than the heavily plotted wavering of one of the Waverley Novels’ mediocre heroes. Colonial Williamsburg cannot be credited with successfully producing an authentic sense of what it was like to live in the past any more than it can be credited with producing a coherent sense of narrative connection between past and present. But the incoherence that the museum’s directors, not to mention scholars, traditionally have regarded as a problem can also be recast as the site’s most powerful asset. For through the incoherence of its narratives, and through the conflict between its narrative and experiential modes of presentation, the museum is an able legatee of the Waverley Novels in pointing up the asymmetry between the practices of everyday living and the acts of plotting through which individuals, in their more reflective moments, make sense of their lives and their places in history. After a few hours at Colonial Williamsburg one can begin to feel the inadequacy of the term “narrative” to capture the experience of everyday living in history. Almost despite itself, the site does sometimes succeed at producing, through the manifold incoherence of its historical narratives, a feeling of immersion in a historically specific and unique pastness that is irreducible to an experience of stance or narrative movement. To the extent that visitors register this, they can walk away not with a demand simply for a better story but rather with a sense that any story imposes order, sequence, control, or trajectory on

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experiences that, for many, or at many times, lacked such things. To put the point a bit differently, what sites like Colonial Williamsburg have the potential to remind us of is much the same as the awareness that Scott’s novels inculcated in their early fans—namely, that history is as much about experiencing as about explaining.79 However inadequate the experiential aspects of Colonial Williamsburg and the Waverley Novels may be in epistemological terms to teach us something about a specific past, they still can function successfully as critiques of explanation- centric visions of history and, as such, allow us to reconnect with, or at least aspire to the condition of, experiencing something as “past” without a narrative sense or even a reaching after one. Such is the ongoing intellectual promise of romantic historicism. Proponents of living history and reenactment often characterize their forms of historical representation as positivist empiricist correctives to an academic historiography that has grown too sterile and unfeeling to get the past right. But they would do far better to bill themselves as theoretical correctives, or at least as tools of theoretical critique. The Waverley Novels’ ability to reenact the past in the persons of their readers depended in part on opening up the disconnects between possible futures available in past situations and the particular future that was realized, only so that they could close these disconnects and have that realized future feel different. A multifaceted reenactment site like Colonial Williamsburg opens up the same disconnects to such a degree, and at the same time, in opposition to its own Scott- derived cinematic frame narrative, places such an emphasis on activities designed more to produce an ontological sense of immersion in the past than to generate a reflective narrative connection to it, that the museum carries less potential to help visitors understand history than to theorize the problem of historical understanding. Through the visitor’s experience of disconnect between reenacting and narrative as tools that both produce feelings tied to the past, sites like Colonial Williamsburg can help bring to mind how different kinds of reenacting fail, no less than historical emplotments fail, as means of solving the problem of recapturing and understanding what living in the past felt like. More radically, such sites can challenge us to realize how relating to the past, and indeed living in any historical moment, involves far more than just trying to know and understand.

Notes 1. On Scott’s popularity and influence in the antebellum South, see Elizabeth FoxGenovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 134–36,

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777–78; Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 106–26; William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 35; Emily  B. Todd, “Establishing Routes for Fiction in the United States: Walter Scott’s Novels and the Early Nineteenth- Century American Publishing Industry,” Book History 12 (2009): 100–28; and “Walter Scott and the Nineteenth- Century American Literary Marketplace: Antebellum Richmond Readers and the Collected Editions of the Waverley Novels,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 93 (1999): 495–513. 2. See Bruce Levine, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 25–26; Celeste Ray, Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 18–9; and Fox- Genovese and Genovese, Mind of the Master Class, 665. On Davis’s youthful reading of Scott, see Felicity Allen, Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 103. 3. See, for example, William Gilmore Simms, “South Carolina in the Revolution. A Lecture,” in The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, ed. Mary Oliphant et al., 6 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1954), 3:525. On postwar southern identification with the Jacobites, see Thomas Lawrence Connelly and Barbara L. Bellows, God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 2–8. So strong was the South’s identification with a rebellious Scottish heritage that the Scottish flag became the basis for the battle standard of the Army of Northern Virginia, the banner better known to most Americans today as the Confederate flag. Traces of the Jacobite influence in the Carolinas and Georgia still persist in place names, such as the city of Culloden, Georgia. 4. See Horace Greeley, “Magnanimity in Triumph,” New York Tribune, April 10, 1865. A month after the Battle of Appomattox, comparisons between Davis and Charles Edward Stuart had enough cultural currency that they likely contributed to the false rumors that when Davis was seized fleeing arrest for treason, he was disguised in maid’s clothing, as the Stuart Prince had been after escaping from Culloden. 5. Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause; A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (New York: E. B. Treat, 1866); Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (New York: D. Appleton, 1881). 6. Jefferson Davis, Scotland and the Scottish People: An Address Delivered in the City of Memphis,Tennessee, on St. Andrew’s-Day, 1875 (Glasgow: Anderson & Mackay, 1875), 26. 7. Ibid., 26. 8. Ibid., 27. 9. Davis to Varina Howell Davis, July 26, 1869, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, 12 vols., ed. Lynda Laswell Crist et al. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 12:364; Charles Mackay, “The Scotch in America,” Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness 3 (1875): 6. 10. F. R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 197–239. 11. Davis to Varina Howell Davis, August 9, 1869, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, 12:372. 12. Davis to John Blackwood, August 26, 1869, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, 12:379; Davis to Varina Howell Davis, August 9, 1869, ibid., 12:372.

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13. Mackay, “The Scotch in America,” 6. 14. Davis, Scotland and the Scottish People, 27. 15. R. G. Collingwood. “History as Re- enactment of Past Experience,” in The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 282–302. 16. Walter Scott, Ivanhoe: A Romance, ed. Graham Tulloch, Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 7. 17. See, for example, Walter Scott and William Erskine, “Art. VIII. Tales of My Landlord,” Quarterly Review 16 (1817): 467. 18. J. A. Heraud, “Historical Romance,” Quarterly Review 35 (1827): 521 19. Some good accounts of history’s shift from a Romantic art to a Victorian science include Rosemary Jann, The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985); Phillipa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians, and Archeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men,Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 20. Scott, Ivanhoe, 7. 21. Ibid., 8. 22. On conjectural history, see Simon Evnine, “Hume, Conjectural History, and the Uniformity of Human Nature,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 31 (1993): 589–606. 23. Dugald Stewart, “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith,” in Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. E. G. Wakefield (London: Charles Knight & Co, 1873), lv. 24. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 9ff. 25. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 51–134. 26. Walter Scott, The Antiquary (Edinburgh, 1816), vii. 27. Walter Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor (Edinburgh, 1819), 36; and idem, Peveril of the Peak (Edinburgh, 1823), xiv. See also Scott and Erskine, “Art. VII: Tales of My Landlord,” 431. 28. James T. Hillhouse, The Waverley Novels and Their Critics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1936), 40–90, esp. 40, 45. On the visual quality of the Waverley Novels and their ready availability to remediation in non- narrative forms, see Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 2000); and Rigney, Afterlives of Walter Scott, 55–103. 29. Thomas Carlyle, “Sir Walter Scott” (1838), in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Henry Duff Traill, 5 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899), 4:22–87. See also Hillhouse, Waverley Novels, 103. 30. Scott, Bride of Lammermoor, 36. 31. Ibid., 32–33. 32. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (1937), trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 33. 33. Mike Goode, Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 119–46. 34. See, for example, Anders Greenspan, Creating Colonial Williamsburg:The Restoration of Virginia’s Eighteenth-Century Capital (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

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2009); and Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 35. The phrase “national shrine” was in currency at the site in the 1930s, at least according to the evidence of visitors’ letters; for example, Letters of Commendation, David Barbour to Mr. Kenneth Chorley, November 4, 1935, General Correspondence, 1968–77, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Archives, Williamsburg, VA (hereafter CWFA). 36. Kenneth Chorley, Colonial Williamsburg: The First Twenty-Five Years: A Report by the President as of December 31, 1951 (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 1952), 10. 37. Quoted by E. P. Alexander from a letter Goodwin wrote to a high school student in 1926, in The Interpretation Program of Colonial Williamsburg (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 1971), 7. 38. Kenneth Chorley, Report by the President for the Year 1957, Colonial Williamsburg, Inc. (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 1957), 14. 39. Hostesses—Training, “First Meeting of the Committee on Education,” January 12, 1934, 2 (appended to “A Suggested Outline Prepared for the Consideration of the Committee on Education in Connection with the Problem of Training Hostesses for the Major Exhibition Buildings of the Williamsburg Restoration”), General Correspondence, 1927–36, CWFA. 40. Elizabeth Lee Henderson, “The Reminiscences of Elizabeth Lee Henderson,” transcript of interview, 1956, pp. 28, 29, Oral History Collection, CWFA. 41. A Guide Book for Williamsburg, Virginia (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, Inc., 1937), 21. 42. Letters of Commendation, “Charles Andrews to Mr. Kenneth Chorley,” June 17, 1932; “H. J. Eckenrode to Dr. W. A. R. Goodwin,” January 25, 1933; “H. K. Clarke to Colonial Williamsburg, Inc.,” July 13, 1936; “Henry Breckinridge to Dr. Goodwin,” September 28, 1932; and “Alice O. Kay to Mr. Rockefeller,” May 27, 1937, General Correspondence, 1968–77, CWFA. Even the rare complaints in these letters still underscore how successfully the restoration stoked a longing to experience the past. They single out those aspects of the site that interfered with the willing suspension of disbelief in its pastness—for example, the use of hostesses in what, in colonial times, would have been strictly masculine public spaces, such as the Capitol and Raleigh Tavern, where “men in knee breeches would strike a truer note” (Letters of Commendation, “Dorothy P. Moyer to the President of the Williamsburg Restoration,” n.d. [October 1939], General Correspondence, 1968–77, CWFA). 43. In 1937, Goodwin predicted that “the restoration of this colonial city, by making America more conscious of its heritage, will help to develop a more highly educated and consequently a more devoted spirit of patriotism”; Dr. W. A. R. Goodwin, “The Restoration of Colonial Williamsburg,” National Geographic 71 (1937): 402. For more on Goodwin’s and Rockefeller’s ideological investments in the project, see Greenspan, Creating Colonial Williamsburg, 7–12. 44. This is evident, among other places, in Rockefeller’s response to a letter of commendation written to him from soldier who had recently visited the restoration. After mentioning that he had “spent the past fifteen years in trying to bring back the past in that unique community [Williamsburg],” Rockefeller writes, “You have felt the inspiration of the great men who walked the streets of the Williamsburg of old and frequented its buildings. They have helped you to realize what freedom means and how worth fighting

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for it is.” The letter also speaks of the need to “preserve [liberty] for those who may come after us.” John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to R. Friedberg, August 18, 1942, box 145, folder 1275, record group 2, Cultural Interests Series, Rockefeller Family Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY (hereafter RAC). 45. John D. Rockefeller III to the Chief of Naval Personnel, Bureau of Naval Personnel, April 21, 1951, box 145, folder 1275, record group 2, Cultural Interests Series, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC. 46. See, for example, David Gebhard, “The American Colonial Revival in the 1930s,” Winterthur Portfolio 22 (1987): 109–48; and William B. Rhoads, “The Colonial Revival and American Nationalism,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 35 (1976): 239–54. 47. Rutherford Goodwin, A Brief and True Report for the Traveler Concerning Williamsburg in Virginia (Richmond, VA: August Dietz and Son, 1935), 73. 48. Goodwin, “The Restoration,” 414. 49. Goodwin, Brief and True Report, 122. 50. See Pollard, Lost Cause, 35. 51. Greenspan, Creating Colonial Williamsburg, 24. 52. The issue of housing for blacks shows up several times in visitor correspondence to the foundation in the 1930s and 1940s. On the history of Colonial Williamsburg’s struggles to represent race and to attract visitors of color, see Rex Ellis, “A Decade of Change: Black History at Colonial Williamsburg,” Colonial Williamsburg:The Journal of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Spring 1990, 14–23; Greenspan, Creating Colonial Williamsburg; and Handler and Gable, New History, 68–69, 78–79, 84–92, 102–24. 53. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion:The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 4ff. 54. Letters of Commendation, “M. E. Bristow to Hon. Channing Hall,” April 15, 1936, General Correspondence, 1968–77, CWFA. 55. The charter, from 1946, is quoted in Chorley, Report by the President, 4. 56. “A Report to Williamsburg Restoration, Inc., from the office of Walter Dorwin Teague,” 1948, box 143, folder 1253, record group 2, Cultural Interests Series, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC. 57. Chorley, Williamsburg:The First Twenty-Five Years, 32. 58. Chorley, Report by the President, 19. 59. Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot, directed by George Seaton, written by Emmet Lavery (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1957). 60. John Goodbody, “Production of Film for New Reception Center,” November 8, 1954, Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot Production Books, 1.3, Motion Picture Archives, Colonial Williamsburg, VA (hereafter MPACW). 61. John Goodbody to Wilder and Smith, March 7, 1955, Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot Production Books, 1.3, MPACW; and Goodbody to Files, “NICA Film,” memo, January 16, 1956, Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot Production Books, 1.3, MPACW. 62. Arthur Smith, “New Information Center Program,” memo, November 8, 1954, Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot Production Books, 1.3, MPACW; Goodbody to Wilder and Smith, March 7, 1955, Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot Production Books, 1.3, MPACW.

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63. James Agee, “Some Notes on the Williamsburg Film,” attached to John Goodbody, “Treatment for New Information Center Film,” memo, June 13, 1955, Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot Production Books, 2.7, MPACW. 64. For museum officials’ reaction to Agee’s suggested treatment of slavery, see, for example, Kendrew to Humelsine, “Treatment for New Information Center Film,” June 15, 1955, Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot Production Books, 2.A, MPACW. 65. John Goodbody to Kenneth Chorley, August 22, 1955, Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot Production Books, 1.6, MPACW. 66. Smith to Goodbody, January 24, 1956, Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot Production Books, 1.3, MPACW. For other negative reactions, see Croner to Goodbody, January 26, 1956, and Wilder to Goodbody, January 30, 1956, Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot Production Books, 1.3, MPACW. 67. See “Notes on Story Conference,” December 14, 1955, Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot Production Books, 2.1, MPACW. Lavery appended a “Comment” to this memo in which he expresses his reservations about the change: “Isn’t there some danger of shrinking the full significance of the story—if we merely sprinkle the general background with a few famous names—if we reduce Washington, Jefferson, Henry to the status of mere walk- ons?” he writes, “Is any fictional character an adequate substitute for the direct personal impact of men like Washington, Jefferson, Henry?” The initial idea for using an outsider figure to produce a kind of anthropological gaze on the divided political landscape in the 1770s seems to have come from Smith; see Arthur Smith to Goodbody, Wilder, Meade, and Alexander, “Story Idea for New Information Center Film,” April 11, 1955, Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot Production Books, 1.3, MPACW. 68. Lavery’s son recalled his father as an “avid reader” who read Cooper when he was a kid, but he could not recall any more direct link between Lavery and Scott. He suggested that Lavery’s sense of narrative genre for telling national history more likely came from his period doing anonymous hack work for MGM, a studio known for its historical films (they would release Ivanhoe in 1952); Emmet G. Lavery, Jr., telephone interview with the author, October 3, 2012. 69. Studies of Scott’s influence over southern writing and historical thought are too numerous to list. Two classics not mentioned elsewhere in the chapter are Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1949), 8–23, 41–53; and George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 70. On Simms’s view of the Revolution and his influence by Scott, see Clarence Hugh Holman, The Immoderate Past (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 13–37; and Masahiro Nakamura, Visions of Order in William Gilmore Simms (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 53–96 passim. The popularity of Simms’s Revolutionary War novels among proponents of the Lost Cause myth led to the novels’ reissue in the 1880s. Simms’s influence on Davis’s understanding of the American Revolution can be seen in Davis, Rise and Fall, 47–53 passim. 71. On the influence of the Waverley Novels’ historical vision and plot form on Dixon and Griffith, see James Chandler, “The Historical Novel Goes to Hollywood: Scott, Griffith, and Film Epic Today,” in The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 237–73; and

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Rigney, Afterlives of Walter Scott, 124–25. Dixon’s and Griffith’s texts were no doubt the most familiar version of “the story” that Rutherford Goodwin had in mind when, in his 1935 guidebook to Colonial Williamsburg, he stated that “the Story of the Days of Reconstruction is a familiar one” and then proceeded to present the restoration as coming to the rescue of Williamsburg’s “genteel families.” 72. For an early account of these changes, see Ellis, “A Decade of Change,” 14–23. Ellis notes that in 1971, Zora Martin, assistant director of the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, D.C., noted of The Story of a Patriot that it “created the stage for the plantation- like setting with blacks in their ‘traditional’ roles” and that this only paved the way for the absence of black docents and the “stereotyped and demeaning roles of blacks employed in Williamsburg proper” (ibid., 17). 73. Teaching History at Colonial Williamsburg: Proposals for New Research and Interpretation at Colonial Williamsburg (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 1985), the guide that first laid out the new “Becoming Americans” theme for the interpretation program, uses the terms “storylines” and “subplots” throughout to refer to the site’s new micro- narratives. 74. Cary Carson, ed., Becoming Americans: Our Struggle to Be Both Free and Equal, Teaching History at Colonial Williamsburg (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1998), 10. 75. Alexander, Interpretation Program, 11. 76. E. P. Alexander, “Bringing History to Life,” article, 1961, 4, CWFA. 77. Alexander, Interpretation Program, 18. 78. The phrase “theatrical living history” had currency at Colonial Williamsburg by 1980; see Theatrical History, in 16- 1A- G- 1b, Brown to Credle, “Summer Programs— Theatrical Living History,” May 9, 1980, CWFA. 79. Ankersmit’s recent theoretical work has proven enormously helpful to me for thinking through these issues in Scott and at Colonial Williamsburg. See especially Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, and Historical Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 123–48).

Free Indirect Filmmaking Jane Austen and the Renditions (On Emma among Its Others) Ian Balfour

Jane Austen was and is a phenom. One might like to have said Jane Austen’s writing was and is that phenom, but in some respects her writing—so brilliant, so exacting—has been displaced in the popular cultural imagination by the proper name that stands in for or is associated with all the writing, the films, the made- for- TV renditions of her novels, spinoffs of many sorts, all of which are caught up in the huge network of more or less institutionalized devotion to her, from “societies” to websites to blogs to conferences where amateurs (in the original and latter- day senses) rub shoulders with scholars, and vice versa. Not many other authors, much less ones from centuries ago, have board games created in their name or for their individual works.1 Austen’s devotees are tellingly known as Janeites, an indication of the first- name basis on which so many of her admirers wish or pathologically imagine they were.2 One can’t quite imagine Shakespeareans being identified or identifying themselves as “Willies” or something along those lines. Why consider Austen in a context such as this, a multipronged analysis of Romanticism and culture roughly contemporary with us around the end of twentieth century and the start of the twenty- first? It was not so long ago that, in institutions of higher learning, Austen would rarely have been grouped among the Romantics for purposes of teaching literature of the period.3 Instead, she would more likely have been tacked on to the itinerary of the eighteenth- century novel, despite coming squarely in the nineteenth, or introduced to inaugurate a different trajectory for the nineteenth century, though she scarcely fit the dominant mode of realism that would follow in her train. The academic study and especially the teaching of Romanticism was so thoroughly dominated by a half- dozen male poets (the “Big Six”) that Austen was usually the odd woman out, despite being born the same year as Charles Lamb and coming halfway between Coleridge and Hazlitt, as exact a contemporary of some Romantic- era writers as could be.4 That Austen

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wrote some of the best novels of the period—and of all time—was somehow not enough for those (for a long time, men, overwhelmingly) committed to an ethos of more or less politically progressive, male lyric poetry and an idea of Romanticism that so pervasively informed and organized the teaching of literature from the period. Moreover, when periodized, Austen was and still is usually classed as a Regency writer, even though it would make just as much sense to describe Byron, in chronological- historical terms, as just that. This chapter is undertaken with the understanding that Romanticism is an appropriately neutral rubric for literary and cultural production between roughly 1790 and 1830 in Britain (and, unevenly, beyond) and should be applicable to all genres, both sexes, and all political tendencies, even if one might well follow Raymond Williams in deeming some things dominant, residual, or emergent, according to his suggestive scheme. Though the grand lines and some smaller protocols of Austen’s novels bear affinities with a good many predecessors in the somewhat chaotic tradition of the British novel from Defoe through Richardson to Burney, in other ways she wrote like no one else.5 The term “unique” is tossed around too readily, but the word seems apt for Austen. She develops a signature style: one should be able to recognize the mature forms of it from a considerable distance, even if one is not a computer, much less a well- equipped literary lab.6 The most distinctive aspect of that style is her complicated and sometimes hard- to- pin- down use of free indirect discourse, a mode of writing that keeps the reader precariously on her or his toes. It is perhaps the most permanently provocative vein of her work and one that the film versions of her novels seem hard- pressed to render in even vaguely corresponding fashion.Yet once in a while they come close to doing so or else fail in interesting, revelatory ways, with the results telling us something about the possibilities and pitfalls of adaptation and medium specificity. And, perhaps to boot, we recognize something about the relation of a thoroughly modern medium to an apparently not so modern one. I would contend that the principal interest of Austen and the principal difficulty posed for film renditions lies at the level of the sentences (or phrases or words), not at the level of plot or character, the dynamics of which may all, of course, be altered for the worse by the general reduction in adaptation of almost everything, given the familiar constraints of time for feature films or even lengthy, multipart adaptations for TV. Some of Austen’s detractors, it seems, can’t even see those trees—the sentences— for the forest of content, chiefly the morals, manners, and machinations of what’s come to be known as “the marriage plot.” Though Austen has enjoyed enormous, widespread critical and popular acclaim, she is

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not without her detractors, and they can be extreme: purveyors of all- ornothing choices, not least when they miss what I take to be essential to the texture of Austen’s work. As one blogger on the Huffington Post opined not long ago: After about two decades of being a voracious reader—the kind that consumes books more than merely reads them—I’m still at a loss as to why so many people have elevated Jane Austen to the level of literary hero. To put it bluntly, I just don’t understand the seemingly female- gender- wide obsession with Ms. Austen.7

The author of the post is able to draw on a considerable and usually venerable authority, no less than Emerson (not, we note, of the female gender), to bolster her claim and prove she’s in good company. She continues: “Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best in his scathing review of Austen’s literary portfolio,” and proceeds to quote the transcendentalist sage thus: I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. . . . All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? . . . Suicide is more respectable.

She finishes her piece with a flourish that reduces Austen’s possible interest being for people bent on or fascinated by getting married. But anyone can write a novel that revolves around whether the heroine gets married. For the Huffington Post blogger, it’s as if Austen’s novels were somehow, impossibly, all content—and bad—hackneyed, trivial—content at that.8 Very few people can write on the order of or at the level of Jane Austen, much less sustain such achievements over hundreds of pages, again and again. This would include her mastery of relations of plot and character, on the successful articulation of which so much in the nineteenth- century novel depends. But it has mainly to do, I think, with her formidable wielding of language, from the smallest units to larger ones: with nuances, precise observations, fine discriminations, and modulations of tone and idiom; with different styles of speaking for different characters; with layerings of thought and sentiment—indeed, even a complexity of thinking worthy in its way of a Hegel or an Adorno—and all of it rendered in commensurate phrasing. Such language- based complexities and nuances of mind are rather hard to film. And yet. . . . Hollywood and to a lesser extent Bollywood and the occasional indie studio have been gaga about Austen, directly and indirectly,9 for the past few decades, finding a lot in Austen to mine other than sentences (some of which,

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of course, are preserved in filmic dialogue and even occasionally in narration of some sort). No other British writer of the Romantic period has garnered so much retroactive attention in the domain of film, television, and popular culture more generally. There’s no glut of film renderings of the novels of Sir Walter Scott (there was a little flurry in the 1950s), and none for Radcliffe; and there are not many major pop- cultural engagements with any one of the Big Six male poets to speak of.10 One might be startled and pleased to hear Ian Curtis, in a film rendition of the career of Joy Division, recite a Wordsworth lyric from memory, but such direct invocations or reworkings of Romantic- period writers in works that reach large audiences are relatively few and far between.11 The reasons for Austenmania are many and various, and not all of them are necessarily good. Is it not a little suspicious that certain moviegoing audiences (American and worldwide, mainly Anglophone) clamor to steep themselves for a few hours in visions of grand country houses filled with exclusively white people who, by and large, don’t have to work for a living?12 Of course, a good many of the novels are broadly comic, in tone and even more in structure (an unrealistic strain that coexists in powerful fashion with a certain realism), and a comic modality lifts a little of the burden for a fiction to be representational and plausible. There can be no absolute demand that a work of fiction, even a serious one, should reproduce a version of a population that is statistically accurate in its display of ethnic and racial diversity, though Hollywood will often run far in the opposite direction from that representational ideal. There are no people of color in The Wizard of Oz (some green- faced ones aside) or in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but Hollywood more or less got away (and still gets away, though less absolutely) with such outrageous if unsurprising things.13 In the case of representations of Austen’s era, the statistically miniscule percentage of people of color in (especially nonurban) Regency or Romantic- era England “relieves” any such latter- day fiction of the task of presenting and representing a variegated society, but it is suspicious that such representations seem to many so comforting, so easily embraced. The strongest intervention against this strain—the complacency of white- on- whiteness—is to be found in Patricia Rozema’s rendition of Mansfield Park (1999), which breaks the politic, well- wrought veil of decorum pervading Austen’s fiction by forcing a subtext to the surface, thematically and visually: first, by having the opening scene feature Fanny Price getting a glimpse of a slave ship, peopled, she’s told, with “darkies,” and second, by conjuring up drawings of brutal antislave activity in Antigua, the colonial enterprise so often invoked in Austen’s novel without being explored in anything approaching graphic detail. Rozema’s point, however one feels about

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it, is to lay bare the politically repressed existence and modalities of slavery as the driver of the colonial power’s wealth, a simple fact of Regency (and Romantic) England, even as Rozema’s violent representation of violence underscores it as an intervention of “our” time in relation to Austen’s.14 It’s perhaps the most extreme version of the “presentism” of a good many of the adaptations, one tendency of which is to pump up the proto- feminism of the novels and their heroines (Anne Elliott, Fancy Price, Emma) at the risk or price of some anachronism.15 That Austen’s writing, in its film renderings, has been taken up also in the traditions of “heritage” and period “classics” (a word smartly deployed in Clueless)16 and as forerunners of “rom- com” and “chick lit” is, in itself, not all that lamentable: aspects of these traditions do touch base with things in Austen that are real and powerful.Yet so many of these films flatten what is crucial in her writing—language, sentences—that they almost constitute nonengagements with the originals, or decidedly partial ones. What’s often left, on one construal of the surface, is the scaffolding, the outlines of the plot, and some approximation of the imagined world. To be sure, a fair bit of dialogue survives, which many adaptors are inclined to repeat, either out of a sense to fidelity to Austen or simply from a recognition that Austen is indeed very good at such sentences. It would be insane not to draw on the latter when possible. The most distinctive hallmark of Austen’s style is surely her genial use of free indirect discourse, and that, on the face of it, has to be one of the hardest, probably the hardest, thing to render on film. It’s the general tendency of filmic adaptation to turn the narrative elements of the source into drama: as a rule, very little narration survives as such. Hollywood also tends to shy away from much voice- over, except in the now almost extinct or once- in- a- blue- moon- revived genre of film noir, rehearsed more often in the mode of quotation or echo rather than as the thing itself. The odd Austen adaptation—and more so of late—has a narrator, usually in voice- over mode, issuing a more or less precise repetition of words from the text. It is meaningful and charged when an adaptation of an Austen novel does so, as in Douglas McGrath’s Emma, Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park, and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless. Each of these adaptations adopts the striking strategy of having the protagonist become a part- time narrator.17 This gesture constitutes, in the first instance, a swerve from Austen’s texts since the narrator of the novels is not a character in the fiction, even if she, he, or it sometimes sounds like a person.18 But the filmic invention of having the protagonist become, among other things, an off- screen narrator, or sometimes even an on- screen narrator, touches Austen’s storytelling procedures at least

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at one point: where the narrator is sometimes complicit, literally, with the protagonist.19 It’s by now a familiar paradox that Clueless is arguably the best adaptation of an Austen novel for the silver screen.20 Aside from its general excellence as a film, it would be chary of anyone, given the transposition of the time and place of Emma from Regency England to ’90s L.A., to fault Clueless for not rendering this or that aspect of the novel in its radically altered format. So Clueless can’t really fail at the task of adaptation the way BBC or A&E renditions can, since the latter are expected to respect at least the surface texture of the originals. Yet Clueless is widely held to capture a good deal of the spirit of Emma in restaging so many of the essential dynamics and in mimicking its tonalities, even capturing something of its complexities. Moreover, it’s remarkable that, as far as I can tell, Heckerling’s Clueless is the Austen adaptation that comes closest to providing a plausible analogue for Austenian free indirect discourse, which blends, spectacularly or inconspicuously, third- person and first- person perspectives in a single sentence, improbably conjoining more or less objective and more or less subjective elements in one and the same “utterance.”21 A simple example from Emma comes from the episode in which the titular heroine is trying to make a match between her protégé or “project.” Harriet, and the eligible Mr. Elton. The narrator informs us, at the start of a paragraph (and thus with no immediate introduction): “The lovers were standing together at one of the windows.”22 In light of the overwhelming tendency in reading narrative to trust the veracity of a third- person sentence unless its authority has somehow been undermined or qualified, the reader can be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Elton and Harriet are the lovers the text or narrator has proclaimed them to be (“lovers” understood in the oldfashioned, old- school sense.) But it is not long before we learn that it is only in Emma’s wishful thinking that the two in question are lovers: no one else on the planet would have described them as such, not even Harriet at this point, under the sway of Emma’s meddling. “Lovers” turns out to be a misleading error, a subjective, “first- person” fantasy embedded in a third- person pronouncement that has, at first, all the appearance of truth. It is a sentence that we are implicitly forced to reread in retrospect with the knowledge gained after the fact of its first appearance.23 Such temporary uncertainty pervades all kinds of Austen’s sentences, nor is it done away with the longer we read, though extended reading helps.24 The unusual renderings of subjectivity that come with free indirect discourse are only superficially in tension with the well- testified sense of Austen’s impersonal narration, so finely characterized by D. A. Miller. Here Miller

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recounts a kind of postulated shared reading/fantasy on discovering, early in life, the almost otherworldly character of Austen’s narrator: Here was a truly out- of- body voice, so stirringly free of what it abhorred as “particularity” or “singularity” that it seemed to come from no enunciator at all. It scanted person even in the linguistic sense, rarely acknowledging, by saying I, its origination in an authoring self, or, by saying you, its reception by any other. We rapt, admiring readers might feel we were only eavesdropping on delightful productions intended for nobody in particular. And in the other constituents of person—not just body, but psyche, history, social position—the voice was also deficient, so much so that its overall impersonality determined a narrative authority and a beauty of expression without equal.25

Miller concludes: “It was Style itself.” This rapturous account of an early experience of Austen is supplemented by a later, somewhat more standard literary-critical sense that the Austenian narrative force “splits into two mutually exclusive and definitive, states of being: (godlike) narration and (all- toohuman) character” (42). All of this points to aspects of Austen potentially hard to register on film: the two, copresent or oscillating registers of impersonality and “personality” in narration. It may be, however, that the medium of film is not entirely disadvantaged when taking on the task of adapting novels along these lines, including the most complex ones of Austen. Most camerawork comes across, from moment to moment, as “objective”: it displays what is the case, what is before the camera, what is actually—in the fiction—happening. It registers things from one point and one perspective at any given time. If not somehow indicated as identifiable as given from a particular person’s point of view, what is seen is understood to be objective or virtually so. Handheld camerawork consistent with the position of a person in the scene or an over- the- shoulder view aligned with one person’s line of sight constitute important exceptions, crucial to the presentation of subjectivities. Yet films, or perhaps rather film audiences, effectively demand a rather rapid alteration of shots and in effect points of view, with the result that the camera’s perspective can hardly be identified with that of a human being, much less of a single one. Some camerawork can be more “humanized” than others, as, say, in Howard Hawks’s predilection for the eye- level shot and the fairly strict avoidance of low- or high- angled ones. In general, the BBC versions adopt this sort of “everyman” or “bourgeois” camerawork, eschewing high angles and low, except for some particular purposes, some instances of which we shall see shortly. As one version of the layering or commingling of third and first person, objective and subjective, as presented on the screen, we need only consider

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this brief sequence from Clueless: around the ten- minute mark of the film, the camera, together with Cher’s voice- over, introduces us to her school and some of the cast of characters, principally the teachers. Early in the multipart sequence we see Cher arguing with her teacher, Mr. Hall, about a grade, and we hear her, within that scene, speaking about it, with what amounts to about one- third of the total volume. At the same time, we hear a different voice of one and the same Cher (but is it the same?) in voice- over, talking from the outside the visual, diegetic space about the incident that we are witnessing and faintly hearing. Cher’s voice- over accounts for about the other two- thirds of the decibel level, and so her narration dominates what is being acted out and spoken in the scene. Cher is a split subject, or better a subject- object, with two voices and one visible body. (Cher and Cher alike, as it were.) The discussion in which she argues with Mr. Hall about her grades gives way to a thumbnail sketch of her teacher: “Here’s the 411 on Mr. Hall: he’s. . . .” In this Cher is about as close to a novelistic narrator as can be, giving a little “characterization” of a character in the manner of exposition, and in seemingly objective fashion. With the camera rock steady, Mr. Hall is viewed in a long shot through the rectangular frame of a window, echoed within by the framing of symmetrical trees on either side, as he approaches the school. That short take is followed by Cher visiting, in disembodied fashion, the teachers’ lounge/cafeteria, where she proceeds to describe in a phrase or two various of the teachers. The camera, soon to be identified with Cher’s eye, suddenly gets shaky and thus counts as “handheld”—held by Cher’s hand—even though Cher could not possibly be physically present in the scene. (The teachers a few feet away from Cher’s camera are oblivious to its presence and so she cannot be understood to be physically present.) As she points out the “evil troll” math teachers who are married (and of the same sex), the camera swerves brusquely on noticing a Snickers bar on the table, and we hear Cher blurt out, “Ooh! Snickers!” Then she resumes her account of the teaching staff. It could hardly be more of an ultrapersonal moment, as she abandons in a flash her appointed narratorial task of introducing us to the teachers in the lounge and focuses instead on the candy (eye candy, as it were) appealing to her. Thus, in this one sequence of only several minutes, Cher as subject and object, viewing and viewed, is alternately and repeatedly posed as an objective narrator and a subjective judge of the goings- on at her school. When chastised about her grades by Mr. Hall in a little intervening scene of frustration, Cher laments that she feels “impotent” and “not in control,” for which the remedy will be mall shopping. But she is remarkably in control of things in the surrounding sequence, fully in command of the voice- over, the narration,

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and sometimes the camera. In the larger sequence she is partly the “omniscient narrator” and partly the subject who is Cher acting out her life.26 As both character and narrator, Cher’s split subject- object persona ( personae, really) has an affinity with the odd constellation proposed by Austen’s intermittent use of free indirect discourse, with its frequent complicity, its folding in, of narrator and protagonist. Does the situation in Clueless sketched here not come close to a good deal of what is at work in Austen’s fiction, as summarized expertly by Thomas Keymer: “By merging the idiolect of a character with a narrator’s syntax, by darting from viewpoint to viewpoint in adjacent sentences, and by studding passages of objective description with clause- length fragments of FID [free indirect discourse], Austen constantly problematizes the origin and authority of her narrative statements”?27 The analogue of free indirect discourse, as I’ve charted it in these scenes from Clueless, tends to be somewhat more distended or extended than the prototypical instances in Austen’s sentences, where subjective and objective can be separated by just a word or two or commingled even in a single one. The simultaneous configuration of one Cher on screen and another, narrating Cher speaking off- camera comes close to the Austenian paradigm, even if it lacks the sometime inscrutability of the novelistic instances. But if one takes together the conjunction of all the configurations in even just a sequence of three or four minutes of Clueless, then something of the Austenian complexity is reproduced, about as far as is possible in the medium, including in a specifically visual way, or more precisely, a fashion that deftly articulates the verbal and visual.28 Moreover, the less crafty, less subtle adaptations also can manage fainter approximations of this effect, even just by the de rigueur alteration of perspective brought about by the perceived audience demand for variation of shots, though one understands well Kathryn Sutherland’s rather typical assessment that the great majority of Austen adaptations also leave something to be desired on this and related scores.29 Austen’s “invention” of free indirect discourse—not really an invention but an intensification and multiplication of its possibilities broached by some immediate predecessors—occurs at not just any point in the history of modern Western discourse. Gary Kelley goes so far as to understand it specifically as a formation pertinent to and made possible by the era of the French Revolution, without simply claiming it as a revolutionary gesture. Whereas the link to the French Revolution proper could well seem a stretch, we can see the affinities of Austen’s hybrid formations of first and third persons, subject and object, in a single sentence with any number of the grand philosophical projects that tried to articulate, and in most cases balance, in this age of the ascendant bourgeoisie—Marx thought of it as “heroic”—the

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competing claims of subject and object, or simply to give a good account of their interrelations. Here I do not mean just the thoroughgoing systematics of Kant and the post- Kantians (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Vischer) but also philosophical programs closer to Austen’s home, as, say, in Adam Smith or Jeremy Bentham or William Godwin, even if the political thinking of these philosophers would have been at odds with what we imagine Austen’s to be.30 The conjunction of subject and object remains, in Austen, intact, even if trembling, thanks not least to the precarity of free indirect discourse. The “subjective” terms seem at least partly interpellated or infused somehow with something not entirely subjective, much as the putatively “objective” (universal) seems to be, because it must contain so many not- quite- identical subjectivities, as well as the occasional puncturing of the artifice of omniscience, exposing it as less than fully objective. The subjective- objective totality is best understood as a posited rather an actual one, a grand fiction, even if one with ramifications in the world writ small and large. It is, after all, worlds—for all of Jane Austen’s notorious verbal painting on and in miniatures—that the novels conjure up. We can, of course, think of adaptations as trying to render not texts as such (to the extent that were possible) but what the texts are trying to represent: worlds, and something of what is in them and what happens in them. Whereas usually in considering adaptations we focus on what films cannot do in reproducing the texture of texts, we might remind ourselves of the limits of novelistic discourse, that novels can aspire to represent scenes, indeed, any number of visual things or configurations, that defy or are at odds with their means of representation. Hence Tolstoy’s supposed envy of early film’s ability to do things with image sequences for which words and sentences would fail him or any other novelist.31 The opening sequence of Douglas McGrath’s plays with the trope of the novelist’s and the filmmaker’s “world” as the opening credits feature homespun painted versions of characters and settings, all of which are set, from a distance, spinning, as if on a planet revolving at high speed, and this little fictitious globe then resolves into an actual tiny hand- painted globe created by Emma and presented as a little wedding gift. This is one of many gestures in the adaptations that points back to the novel’s implicit characterization of Emma as a kind of writer. I mean not the few instances in which Emma actually is known to be writing or have written something but in her capacity as plotter, matchmaker, and even painter. As a painter, she is shown producing the likeness of a person in art, which is rather close to one of the main functions of a novelist: making up people. She is also conspicuous for plotting out what others are to do, by themselves and in relation to each other, exactly what novelists in general do and—as far the marriage plot is

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concerned—what Austen herself, at a certain level of abstraction, does. Thus the adaptations, in sometimes linking the protagonist with an Austen- figure, if not with Austen herself, an author rather than just a narrator, are not necessarily making an elementary literary critical mistake but are responding to an allegorical strain in the novel itself. But back to the world. The Austen films revel in presenting the highly circumscribed social formations and their concomitant dynamics. If in Persuasion the Musgrove girls are “wild for dancing,”32 the studios and the cinematographers filming Austen’s novels are equally if not more so. The scopophilic camera can display movements, interpersonal relations, actions and reactions, in very short order. Reactions such as smiles, frowns, displays of indifference—visual emoticons—can all be shown in an instant and, crucially, the camera can show two or more characters at once in a way that literature can scarcely rival. Body language can speak more quickly, more economically than language proper. And some bodies speak very quickly indeed. In this light, let us consider the celebrated Box Hill episode from Emma as adapted variously for film and television.33 The specifically cinematic potential of the scene is considerable. There is a lot at stake in the group psychology and analysis of egos, with Emma at the center of a party that includes the grandstanding Frank Churchill, Miss Bates, Knightley, Jane Fairfax, Harriet, the Westons, and the Eltons. (Austen’s narrator stresses at the outset the tendency of the picnickers to separate into pairings and even “parties,” at the same time as she explicitly draws attention to the lack of “union.”)34 The episode is the crux of the novel, a moment in which Emma makes a serious moral error, very different from her mistakes in trying to match Harriet with this, that, or the other person or in blocking her union with Robert Martin. However much damage she had done, one could construe her earlier actions as well- meaning. It’s curious that Clueless, in so many ways a rigorous adaptation of Emma, omits an extended scene analogous to Box Hill, though there is admittedly no character in Clueless who corresponds to Miss Bates. Heckerling’s film contents itself with a brief gesture along the lines of the Box Hill debacle when Cher chastises her family’s house servant (shades of the nineteenth- century bourgeoisie and genteel classes) for no good reason, and then sounds borderline racist or just obtuse in not knowing that a woman from El Salvador would not speak “Mexican,” as if that were even a language. The absence in Clueless is still a little strange, especially given the manifold possibilities for group shaming built into high school cliques. No other adaptation, no matter how short, forgoes this scene.

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The episode, as laid out in volume 3, chapter 7, of Emma, is strikingly about language and judgment long before the narrator chooses to record any words, though there has indeed been some talking: When they all sat down it was better; to her taste a great deal better, for Frank Churchill grew talkative and gay, making her his first object. Every distinguishing attention that could be paid, was paid to her. To amuse her, and be agreeable in her eyes, seemed all that he cared for—and Emma, glad to be enlivened, not sorry to be flattered, was gay and easy too, and gave him all the friendly encouragement, the admission to be gallant, which she had ever given in the first and most animating period of their acquaintance; but which now, in her own estimation, meant nothing, though in the judgment of most people looking on it must have had such an appearance as no English word but flirtation could very well describe. “Mr. Frank Churchill and Miss Woodhouse flirted together excessively.” They were laying themselves open to that very phrase—and to having it sent off in a letter to Maple Grove by one lady, to Ireland by another. (400)

The very action of the scene solicits language from those merely looking on. The narrator is precise as to what the only proper English word would and should be used to describe it. The scene prompts an almost universally speakable sentence that is nonetheless not spoken (as far as we know) by anyone: “Mr. Frank Churchill and Miss Woodhouse flirted together excessively.” Virtually everyone should be able to make this judgment, say this sentence, and in principle be able to send it off in the post. It has something of the structure of the Kantian “as if ” (a phrase strategically invoked by Cher in Clueless), a singular judgment that is imputed to everyone as if it were a universal (logical, objective) judgment. The whole scene, focusing first on the public relations of Frank Churchill and Emma, is framed as one of judgment before we know of any of the participants’ actual judgments of this or that in particular. It is a charged instance of the novel’s preoccupation with what “every body” should think, feel, or do.35 It seems in keeping with this key scene as one of judgments by and of a group and some of its members that almost every film and made- for- TV rendition of the Box Hill episode features an establishing shot from on high, sometimes from a well- nigh Olympian height. The BBC version from 1972 takes the most extreme tack, with the camera (after the climb of the picnicgoers to the top of the hill) set at a remote distance and very high up. The party in the distance is miniscule, with the figures so tiny as scarcely to be identifiable except as being people. The camera position is, in visual terms, about as close as you can get to one (clichéd) version or position of the Austenian narrator: omniscient, objective, and potentially ironic.36 The McGrath

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version too has a similar establishing shot from on high that frames a scene about to unfold, rife with dramatic ironies. Only the 2009 BBC version of Emma eschews the dramatically high shot, but it has the camera creep up on the party from below the crest of a hill to meet it and then offers a vista of the vast valley beyond the party, making any problems the group might have seem rather small and possibly first-world ones. Boredom, too, solicits language, as if one could not tolerate “dead air.” Silence, in this party of divided parties, is awkward. To get people talking, Frank Churchill falsely conveys a “command” by Emma that she “desires to know what you are all thinking of ” (401). The command is rebuffed and quickly passed over, but it is telling that the demand should have assumed just this content, for the discrepancy between what people are thinking and what people say is a hugely important preoccupation of the novel. So much depends on people not saying what they are thinking, not least about the secret engagement of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, which must have been on their minds more or less constantly while in public. And the climactic moment of the novel entails Emma’s saying something—her perhaps unthinking insult to Miss Bates, that she would be limited to saying only three very dull things—that would have far better been left as an unspoken thought. The films and TV versions all present a number of reactions, with attention to the faces of the picnicgoers, much as one would expect, though the text passes over any and all such reactions, waiting instead for Mr. Knightley’s reproach to Emma in the aftermath of the festivities. In the final section of Kant’s Anthropology the philosopher (but here in his guise as observer of human history, as anthropologist) muses about a planet where “there might be rational beings who could not think in any other way but aloud; that is, they could not have any thoughts that they did not at the same time utter, whether awake or dreaming, in the company of other or alone.”37 Kant, being a genius, realizes that a society couldn’t very well function this way, which leads him to the conclusion: “So it already belongs to the original composition of a human creature and the concept of his species to explore the thoughts of others but to withhold one’s own; a neat quality which then does not fail to progress gradually from dissimulation to intentional deception and finally to lying” (428). This is only the penultimate note of Kant’s Anthropology, a few lines before the more upbeat peroration of a vision of species “cosmopolitically united” (429). Still, it is a grim realization that the definition of the species lies in the possibility and even tendency to lie.38 It is just this tendency that makes humans human and allows for the plausibly smooth functioning of societies. The subsequent revelation of Frank (a person who is decidedly not “frank”) Churchill’s secret engagement to Jane Fairfax shows him to have been living

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a lie, to have flirted in bad faith, if one can phrase it that way. It’s ironic that it is Frank who dreams up and enunciates the command that everyone was to say what was on her or his mind. No one but Emma does. And all hell breaks loose, or what counts as all hell in Emma’s and Austen’s world: Knightley will reproach Emma for her behavior. Integral to the meaning of the action of the picnic is the coda of Knightley’s confrontation of Emma, chastising her for the cruel rebuke of Miss Bates. Among the adaptations, McGrath’s rendition of this mini- scene offers the most economical but in some ways the most compelling of the versions. As a feature film, McGrath’s rendition is far more constrained by time than the televisual series, and perhaps as a genial result McGrath opts, unlike the often clunky shot- reverse- shot mode that dominates most other versions, for a two- shot format. First, after Knightley ascertains they are alone, they face each other in profile. Then, as Emma feels ashamed, she walks away, her face turned from Knightley as he follows. Thus we almost always see both faces at once, even as Emma can’t “face” Knightley. There is considerable variety of movement as Knightley tries to get Emma to listen to him, first close up, then backing away and looking forward to some future when Emma will deserve more his faith in her. McGrath takes full advantage of displaying Emma and Knightley simultaneously in a way that no novelist, no matter how great a genius, could possibly do. McGrath’s solution of the two- shot, I think we can say, is in the elusive “spirit” of the novel’s scene, despite the structural differences.39 In the coda, Emma’s first line of defense against Knightley’s accusation for her unfeeling rebuke of Miss Bates, exacerbated by her position of class privilege, as Knightley makes clear, is, after blushing and feeling sorry, to invoke her necessary participation in a posited universal reaction: “Nay, how could I help saying what I did?—Nobody could have helped it.” “Nobody” is the flip side of “everybody,” but Emma is once again alone in the singularity of her shame, and she was alone in speaking her mind at a party where no one else would. It is not the big lie that holds society together but the innumerable small ones. Austen’s novel can demonstrate that, but so can in general the film adaptations of Emma, through supplementing Austen’s dialogue with a display of action and reaction not always spelled out as such in the novel. Beginning with the signature mechanism of free indirect discourse we saw a definitive aspect of Austen’s novelistic practice that, on the face of it, should have proved difficult to register or reproduce on film. After all, it was a matter of a complex narrative sentences not usually reproduced in Austen adaptations, which tend to rehearse her dialogue, consigning the work of what in novels is narrative to camerawork and mise- en- scène. But

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the unusual commingling of third- person and first- person perspectives in single sentences found a somewhat improbably good host in the medium of film, whose protocols dictate rapid shifting of perspectives not identifiable with a single person or even a person at all, and thus are strangely hospitable to Austen’s narratorial machine, which oscillates between inhuman impersonality and its opinionated opposite. Indeed, even humdrum adaptations are not so badly poised to reproduce a medium- specific analogue for Austen’s signature practice. And in the best of the adaptations, as in Clueless, one witnesses a complexity and subtlety worthy of Austen on a good day. Free indirect discourse might seem merely a formal mechanism, but it in fact performs the articulation of subjects with forces above and beyond the subject, what Galperin has called “the adjustment of self and society,”40 moving from “some body” to, at the extreme, “every body,” with the individual shadowed by a world that exceeds him or her, even or especially a world of judgments. This movement from language to world is all the more pronounced in the Austen adaptations’ predilection for the presentation of group scenes, which respond to charged events (a picnic can be “huge”) in the fictional worlds with the added visual resources that film affords. The adaptations exceed the letter of Austen’s texts in various ways but often, with or even without the best intentions, in a way that does what the text can be thought to have aspired to. Once one gets past the familiar, and somewhat understandable, complaints that the adaptations can’t come close to the splendors of the Austen originals, one can see that some of them nonetheless produce and reproduce something of the power and complexity of her writing, forming perhaps the most pronounced shadow of the Romantic period in our time.

Notes 1. The ne plus ultra of this devotion is perhaps the rose- flavored “Jane Austen” toothpaste. 2. The term originates with Rudyard Kipling and is not honorific, but it does get at the texture of some relations to Austen. Readers interested in the range of interest in Austen, from devotion to fanaticism, are fortunate to be able to learn from several fine studies, especially Deirdre Lynch’s edited collection, Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), and Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 3. For an illuminating analysis of the changing ways of periodizing Austen, see Mary D. Favret. “Jane Austen’s Periods,” in A Jane Austen Companion, ed. Claudia Johnson and Clara Tuite (Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell, 2009), 402–12. 4. One index of the change, which took a long time to take hold, was an issue of The Wordsworth Circle, vol. 7, no. 4 (1976). It now all but goes without saying that one can address Austen in any configuration of Romanticism that is not hopelessly narrow.

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5. In her survey of secondary literature devoted to the Restoration and the eighteenth century for the year 2013, Frances Ferguson notes the tendency of recent criticism to highlight the multiplicity of novelistic modes in the long century, as well as their place alongside a panoply of prose forms (satire, etc.) that are not simply distinct from the novel. See her “Recent Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth Century,” SEL (Studies in English Literature) 1500–1900 54, no. 3 (2014): 717–58. 6. Austen is not the outright “inventor” of free indirect discourse or style: Burney precedes her, and there are important instances of it in Godwin.Yet Austen’s use of it is distinctive and complex, and there seems to be more at stake (for the reader) in her use of it than, say, in Burney’s. Among the many good discussions of free indirect discourse, I am indebted to Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (Boston: Routledge, 1982); D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Casey Finch and Peter Bowen, “‘The Tittle- Tattle of Highbury’: Gossip and the Free Indirect Style in Emma,” Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 1–18; Louise Flavin, Free Indirect Discourse and the Clever Heroine of Emma,” Persuasions 13 (1991): 50–57; Daniel P. Gunn, “Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in Emma,” Narrative 12, no. 1 (2004): 35–54; and Kathy Mezei, “Who Is Speaking Here? Free Indirect Discourse, Gender, and Authority in Emma, Howard’s End, and Mrs. Dalloway,” in Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, ed. Kathy Mezei (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 66–92. 7. See the website http://www.huffingtonpost.com/abby- rogers/why- i- hate- janeausten_b_2526492.html (accessed March 25, 2013). 8. One might say that Austen dramatizes or allegorizes in advance the difficulty of separating form from content. In Emma, a good deal of the confusion in Emma’s plot to match Harriet with Mr. Elton turns on the difficulty of knowing whether Elton’s praise of Emma’s portrait of Harriet refers in the first instance to the attraction of the subject matter (Harriet) or the painter of the portrait (Emma). On the force of form in the novel, see the valuable essay by Frances Ferguson, “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form,” Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 157–80. 9. Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990) would be an instance of an indirect adaptation. 10. Patti Smith’s homages to and rewritings of Blake constitute a remarkable exception. There are a good many not so popular (in terms of reception, understood numerically) reworkings and invocations of the major poets but nothing constituting anything like the success of any of the major Austen films or likely even any of the BBC versions of the novels. For a fine collection addressing latter- day creative responses to and transpositions of Blake’s work, see Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music, and Culture, ed. Jason Whittaker, Tristanne Connolly, and Steven Clark (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 11. The present volume, however, calls our attention to an array of any number of the most compelling ones. 12. The houses, as William Galperin and others have noted, tend to be rather grander in the films than in the novels. Historical accuracy, in this respect, largely goes out the window.

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13. So unbearably white was the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz that it prompted a counterversion in the form of the all- black The Wiz. 14. Many analyses have drawn attention to Rozema’s having done her homework in reading Edward Said, Claudia Johnson, and a good many other critics attentive to the ideological forces at work in the production of Austen’s discursive world. It is a selfconsciously modernizing work, though trying to get at what was unspoken in the decorous world Austen conjures up. 15. The BBC versions by and large avoid this temptation. For what I take is the best analysis of the matter of feminism in Austen and the adaptations, see Devoney Looser, “Feminist Implications of the Silver Screen Austen,” in Jane Austen in Hollywood, ed. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 159–76. 16. On the implicit and explicit historical vision of Clueless, see the rich, perspicacious essay by Deidre Lynch, “Clueless: About History,” in Jane Austen and Co.: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture, ed. Suzanne R. Pucci and James Thompson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 71–92. Lynch has also provided the best synthetic account of the various film, television, and Internet versions of Emma in “Screen Adaptations,” in The Cambridge Companion to Emma, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). See also the helpful general account by David Monahan, “Emma and the Art of Adaptation,” in Jane Austen on Screen, ed. Gina Macdonald and Andrew Macdonald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 197–227. 17. For a very fine discussion of this in Douglas McGrath’s film of Emma, see Hilary Schor, “Emma Interrupted,” in Jane Austen on Screen, ed. Gina MacDonald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 144–74. On related matters in the novel proper, see John Wiltshire, The Hidden Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 123–46. 18. See D. A. Miller on impersonality, quoted below. The elusive Austen narrators in fact occupy quite a number of different positions across a spectrum from impersonal to personal, including one and the same narrator being in the course of a novel variously impersonal, personal, neutral, or something hard to fix between those positions. Patricia Rozema’s provocative choice to have Fanny Price read from Austen’s letters and journals as if they were her own is startling, and one might react almost viscerally to her bold identification of character and author.Yet it does point to a sense that is hard to avoid, that there is very likely some intermittent identification between the author, real or especially imagined, and her protagonist. Moreover, Rozema by no means portrays the identification as total or ongoing. 19. It is hard to provide a summary judgment of the relation of narrator and protagonist in Emma since it is not constant or stable, but I think we should resist a formulation like this in an otherwise sensible essay by Suzanne Ferris: “While written in the third person, the novel is told from Emma’s point of view.” See her “Emma Becomes Clueless,” in Jane Austen and Co.: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture, 123. One might argue that this is not true from the opening sentence of the novel, even though Emma is overwhelmingly the most privileged consciousness and character in the novel, and even a “center of consciousness.” 20. And this is the case for many critics, despite the complete absence of verbatim dialogue from the novel. For a good case made for the general paradox, see William

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Galperin, “Adapting Jane Austen: The Surprising Fidelity of Clueless,” Wordsworth Circle 42, no. 3 (2011): 187–93. 21. Ann Banfield famously characterizes such sentences as “unspeakable” because, unlike the almost universal sorts of more familiar and common sentences, these cannot be understood to issue from a single speaker, whether in speech or in writing. (Group or communal writing exists, of course, but it too is generally thought of as unified in or by a group agent, not internally divided or layered.) Although virtually everyone agrees on the structure of free indirect discourse, critics vary considerably in promoting one aspect or another as the paradigm or model of it function (the expression of interiority, etc.). 22. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 96. All further references to Emma are given by page number in the body of the text. 23. On the peculiar imperative for rereading in and of Emma (commented on by numerous critics from Reginald Farrer on), see William Galperin’s nuanced account of this aspect of the novel in The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), esp. 182–89. 24. Most passages exhibited as exemplary of free indirect discourse highlight a word or phrase registering a feeling of a character embedded in a third- person, “objective” utterance. My chosen example here is representative of how even sentences purporting in the first instance to be states of affairs in the world (they are lovers or they are not) can be rendered in free indirect discourse style (though feelings too could be construed as state of affairs). 25. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, 1. The following sentence comes from p. 2. 26. Jonathan Culler has written about as definitive a debunking of the notion of the omniscient narrator as can be, an argument to which I subscribe completely. I invoke it here, deliberately in scare quotes, because it corresponds to a common way of describing such a formation. See Jonathan D. Culler, “Omniscience,” Narrative 12, no. 1 (2004): 22–34. 27. Thomas Keymer, “Narrative,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 14. 28. Gilles Deleuze follows Jean Mitry’s notion of the “semi- subjective image” but even more Pasolini’s proposal of free indirect discourse as a model for certain filmic modalities, though I find Deleuze’s pages on the topic (Cinema 1, 72–76) move rather quickly away from a neutral description of its structure to a rather fanciful sense of how it functions. For a more illuminating discussion, one that also goes back to Pasolini, see Louis- George Schwartz, “Typewriter: Free Indirect Discourse in Deleuze’s Cinema,” SubStance 34, no. 3 (2005): 107–35. 29. See her excellent summary account of how “a film is unlike a[n Austen] novel” in Jane Austen’s Textual Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 341 and surrounding passages. 30. It is not always so easy to decipher the politics of a writer of fiction from her or his fiction. 31. For the perhaps apocryphal story of Tolstoy’s (understandable) interest in film, see Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of Russian and Soviet Film, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 410. 32. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Janet Todd and Antje Blank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 51. (The passage is from volume 1, chapter 6.)

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33. Here I provide only a partial reading of the episode, with an eye to the adaptations. For a first- rate collection of essays focused on the scene in and for the novel, see “ReReading Box Hill: Reading the Practice of Reading Everyday Life,” ed. William Galperin, Romantic Circles, Special Issue, April 2000 (http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/boxhill/index .html). It includes essays by Galperin, George Levine, Michael Gamer, Deidre Lynch, Susan Wolfson, Adam Potkay, and William Walling. 34. This is one thing that prompts Deidre Lynch’s provocative reading of a scene as a kind of national allegory. See her essay “Social Theory at Box Hill: Acts of Union,” in the issue of Romantic Circles cited in the previous note. 35. Adela Pinch helpfully highlights this strain of the novel in the introduction to the Oxford edition of the novel. She offers numerous examples of rather different invocations of “every body,” which is itself on one end of a spectrum with “any body” and with “no body” on the other and “some body” in between. See her introduction to Emma, by Jane Austen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. xvff. Karen Valihora’s Austen’s Oughts (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010) offers a subtle, extended reading of the spectrum of judgments, mainly moral and aesthetic, in Austen’s fiction, considered in the frame of a tradition of British thinking on epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. 36. Each of these predicates names possibilities of the narrator’s position: no narrator of Austen’s is all of these consistently. Most interestingly, narrators in given novels sound omniscient for a good deal—almost all—of the time and then suddenly come as across as not, thus retroactively casting the former omniscience in doubt. 37. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Robert Louden, trans. Robert Louden and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 427–28. Further references are by page number in the body of the text. 38. For a searching analysis of Kant’s remarks on the extraterrestrials and the manifold related matters (nothing less than the definition of the human), see David L. Clark, “Kant’s Aliens: The Anthropology and Its Others,” New Centennial Review 1, no. 2 (2001): 201–89. Of interest too is the short, incisive book by Peter Szendy, Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials, trans. Will Bishop (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 39. The letter versus spirit distinction is a (discontinuous) preoccupation of adaptation studies, prominent at first, say from André Bazin to Jean Mitry, then falling out of favor, and now apparently back in again, not least in the impressive collection, True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity, ed. Colin McCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The distinction can’t really go away, owing to the difference in media and the simple ontological and historical status of the films as films of literary works. The point is to negotiate it with some care and attention to medium specificity, as well as other pertinent factors (e.g., genre; historical, geographic, and linguistic differences). I discuss the general problem of adaptation in a forum devoted to the future study of literature in “Adapting to the Image and Resisting It: One Future for Literary Studies,” Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) 125, no. 4 (2010): 968–79. 40. William Galperin, The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 181.

Population Aesthetics in Romantic and Post - Romantic Literature Robert Mitchell

Government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind. —Tea Party bumper sticker, quoting William Godwin, Of Political Justice, 4081

Though the Romantic- era debate between William Godwin and Thomas Malthus seemed to have concluded in the 1820s in something of a stalemate, this conversation has been recently been revived, though with a rather peculiar twist. The Romantic- era version of this debate pitted Godwin’s principle of perfectibility against Malthus’s principle of population, with Godwin arguing that social relations could be slowly perfected to the extent that legal and political “institutions” were eliminated and Malthus countering that a key determinant of collective behavior was located in the biological register of “population.” Malthus contended that the register of population was inaccessible to human control or intervention, and thus he concluded that strong social institutions were, pace Godwin’s claims, necessary to reduce human suffering. Malthus’s appeal to the concept of population kindled the fury of Romantic- era authors—Percy Shelley wrote that he would “rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon, than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus”—and helped established a stark division, one that would persist almost until the end of twentieth century, between progressives on the left, who argued for a malleable social subject capable of self- improvement, and those on the right, who argued for biological limits on perfectibility.2 Yet beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the present, the political valences associated with the Godwin- Malthus debate have undergone an extraordinary reversal. Ecologically oriented left- leaning groups discovered in the principle of population a resource for critiquing the institutions of capital: the famous 1972 Club of Rome’s “World Futures” report, The Limits to Growth, for example, argued on Malthusian grounds that the dominant

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Fordist model of manufacture was producing ecological and social crises.3 This leftist neo- Malthusian emphasis on the natural limits of economic growth encouraged neoliberal economists and journalists to promote “the market” as a mechanism capable of overcoming all apparent limits, and— perhaps counterintuitively—to appropriate this vision of infinite economic expansion to Godwin’s claims about the possibility of perpetual social improvement.4 The right has also embraced a neo- Godwinian form of institutional critique in order to cut the purse strings of (for example) public funding for the natural sciences, arguing that academic science is simply one more self- interested institution that ought to be opened up to the market.5 A left that grounds its program for human improvement in the biological register of population and a right that appropriates the English Jacobin William Godwin and the tools of institutional critique: if, as seems to be the case, we find ourselves living in a neo- Romantic era, it is a strange, uncanny one indeed. This uncanny resurrection and reconfiguration of the debate between Godwin and Malthus presents us with an opportunity to reconsider and reconfigure the role of literary theory. One of the key developments in literary theory in the 1970s was the reevaluation of the institutional status of “Literature”: where earlier humanist critics had presented literature as an institution that provided readers with eternal truths, positive normative models, or occasions for the healthy exercise of the powers of reason and feeling, critics inspired more by Freud, Marx, or Foucault saw instead a technology of normativity that socialized readers by encouraging them to adopt social norms that served ideological rather than rational ends. These new forms of institutional critique were invariably aligned with the rejection of all appeals to a fixed biological nature, neo- Malthusian or otherwise; for these neoGodwinians, the reader- subject was primarily a malleable surface on which the institution of Literature inscribed ideological contents.6 However, in a period in which neoliberals have added their voices to the chorus of critics of the institutions of literature and the humanities, it is the perfect time to revisit the other pole of the Godwin- Malthus debate—namely, the concept of population—in search of tools that could help us understand better the nature, and redeem the critical potentials, of creative literature. This chapter pursues this task in six parts, which, were we to cast the structure of my argument as a narrative of rivalries and romances, tell the story of two hidden trysts and their multiple monstrous offspring. In part 1, I suggest that Malthus’s and Godwin’s public antagonism masked a hidden and much more fundamental compatibility with one another, for both believed that to explain social phenomena, one must assume that individuals are, for

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all intents and purposes, alike. For both Godwin and Malthus, this meant assuming that population- level analyses could disregard individual differences; for Godwin, it also meant assuming that a social institution produced the same effect in many individuals. In part 2, I note that the true rivals of the Malthus- Godwin couple were those of their contemporaries who premised the concept of population on the principle that the individuals who made up a population differed from one another in innumerable ways. Part 3 emphasizes the implications of these hidden Romantic- era marriages and rivalries for our understanding of the lineage of twentieth- century literary interpretation, suggesting that accounts of Literature as a technology for encouraging normative behavior are direct descendants of the Malthus- Godwin pair. Parts 4 and 5 then consider another hidden but even more unconventional coupling, one that brought into intimate proximity the Malthus- Godwin pair and their populationist rivals. The site of this tryst was Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, which I read as a novel intent on helping its readers see the world in terms of the differential aspect of populations. Seeing the world in terms of the differential aspects of populations could mean searching for biological explanations of social relations, but it could also mean looking for cultural phenomena in which unlikely and improbable events or behaviors were as important as those closer to the normative center. As I note in part 5, some of Shelley’s first readers—namely, critics of her novel who wrote for periodicals—demonstrated that this view of the world could be spread even in the form of criticisms of it, and I conclude by noting that as the logic of populations has increasingly moved to the center of our own modes of cultural production, understanding this logic and its implications for aesthetics is an even more urgent task for us than it was for those living in the Romantic era.

Society and Population in the Romantic Era The political philosophy Godwin developed in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793, 1796, 1798) in one sense simply pursued to its logical conclusion the Enlightenment project of locating and criticizing those social structures that had cast long dark shadows of illusion and error. Earlier eighteenth- century Enlightenment authors had focused their critique on specific institutions, usually those of bad government and false or overreaching religion (a pairing captured in Enlightenment attacks on “kings and priests”). Godwin went further, arguing that the real impediments to enlightenment were not simply specific institutions but the very institution of institution itself. By their nature, Godwin argued, institutions encouraged or

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even forced individuals to adopt the opinions of others, rather than allowing each individual to employ his or her own reason. Godwin saw this process of taking on the opinion of another as the real obstacle to enlightenment and social perfectibility, and he thus opposed all institutions, including those of politics and religion but also those of economy (e.g., property) and private life (e.g., marriage). However, because he understood himself to be living in an era in which institutions did most of the individual’s thinking for him or her, he did not support the immediate overthrow of institutions; such a step would lead to chaos as people sought to grasp the new situation by means of habits of thinking formed not by reason but by now- absent institutions. He instead advocated for the gradual elimination of institutions, a process that would slowly and safely increase the occasions for the exercise of individual reason. What is perhaps most significant about Malthus’s critique of Godwin—and the reason why Malthus is, in every sense, a post- Enlightenment thinker—is that his “principle of population” is intended to trump Godwin’s principle of perfectibility not by denying Godwin’s claims about institutions but rather by locating a noninstitutional register of darkness—namely, the dynamics of population—that was inaccessible to the enlightening exercise of reason. Malthus’s concept of population thus also emphasized the relative sterility of Godwin’s version of materialism. Though Political Justice is premised on the claim that human beings and their social relations are simply complicated constellations of the same matter and movement that make up the rest of the universe and can be described by the laws of physics, this kind of materialism focused on a register of reality so far below that of individual decision making or institutional dynamics that discussions of matter and movement could occupy very limited space in Godwin’s long text. Malthus, by contrast, presented a more complex kind of materialism, one that focused not, as Godwin did, on the physics of material bodies but rather on an intermediate realm that lay between Godwin’s realms of bare matter and movement, on the one hand, and individual and institutional dynamics on the other, namely, the realm of population. Human reason could illuminate facts about the dynamics of a population, such as its rate and causes of increase or decrease. However, these were not properly “human” dynamics, for they applied to all living beings, and as a consequence, they were largely inaccessible to human control. Thus, though the facts of population were indeed the collective result of individual decisions about when and where to reproduce, Malthus emphasized that one could make sense of these facts of population only by abstracting from individual decisions. In place of Godwin’s version of materialism, on which little in Political Justice depended, Malthus introduced

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a much more complex materialism that bore directly on human affairs and institutions. Significantly, though, Malthus’s introduction of this intermediate realm into post- Enlightenment philosophy depended on a variant of a pre- Romantic sense of population, one that was being displaced at the time A Principle of Population was published. As Michel Foucault has noted, seventeenth- and early eighteenth- century authors had used the term “population” as the opposite of “depopulation”: for these earlier authors, “population” referred to the processes by which a “deserted territory was repopulated after a great disaster, be it an epidemic, war, or food shortage.”7 Since populousness was associated with the strength and health of a polity, population was invariably understood as good. Malthus’s two innovations were, first, to supply a mathematical model for determining the limits of possible population growth, and second—and arguably much more significant—to reverse the valence of increasing population from positive to negative; as Frances Ferguson notes, where earlier authors saw increasing population as intrinsically good, Malthus saw it as a threat.8 By the mid- to late eighteenth century, though, “population” was also beginning to denote something quite different: namely, a conceptual framework for discovering new facts about subgroups of large collections of people, facts that were in turn used to determine where, when, and how to apply state measures such as disease inoculation or fiscal policies. For the French Physiocrats, and for physicians and mathematicians in Britain and France interested in questions of disease management, population— along with related terms such as “generation” ( génération) and the “human species” ( genre humain)—denoted not a homogeneous mass of individuals that increased or decreased in size but rather a heterogeneous collection of individuals, subgroups of which differed in key respects from one another and which thus grew or shrank differently from other subgroups. Given a population (or “generation”) of 13,000 infants, for example, a certain percentage, or subgroup, would contract smallpox; a certain percentage of that subgroup would recover and a certain percentage would die—and each of these numbers could be changed by means of inoculation.9 “Population” in this sense denoted a heterogeneous object of analysis that changed in accordance with its own natural logic (i.e., it changed largely of its own accord, and whether or not laws and institutions forbade these changes) but could be nudged in certain directions provided that one located the proper pressure points and thresholds. One could, for example, justify inoculation policies by calculating and comparing the percentage of deaths that occurred in a population both with and without smallpox inoculation.10 A population was thus for many late eighteenth- century authors

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a set of elements that, on one side, are immersed within the general regime of living beings and that, on another side, offer a surface on which authoritarian, but reflected and calculated transformations can get a hold.11

Determining where, precisely, authoritarian state measures could gain purchase was a matter of determining the “constants and regularities even in accidents” and the “modifiable variables” on which these constants and regularities of the population depended.12 From this perspective, the debate between Malthus and Godwin begins to look less like a conflict between modern principles of socialization and population and more like a conflict between a modern principle of socialization and a premodern approach to population. Though Malthus, like his contemporaries, emphasized a biological register of reality amenable to quantification, his approach to this register was extraordinarily coarse—the only number about a population that interested Malthus was its rate of increase. His approach was, moreover, necessarily coarse, for he focused attention on this biological register primarily to produce fear about an enlarging population. His approach thus stands in stark contrast to those of his contemporaries who deployed the concept of population as a means for generating new facts, facts that were invariably intended to assist in the transformation of the biological realities of populations (by, e.g., suggesting measures that would “push” the normal curve of smallpox mortality in a specific population toward the “better” normal curve of smallpox mortality in another population). Unfortunately, Godwin did not stress these points in Of Population (1820), but rather implicitly accepted Malthus’s concept of population, while at the same claiming that the biological register of population did not have the significance that Malthus had attributed to it. Like Malthus, Godwin was interested only in the rate of population increase, but contended that Malthus’s claim that populations tend to increase exponentially unless otherwise checked bore no correspondence to the actual facts of population increase and decline.13 Though this line of argument may seem to grant the importance of determining correctly facts about populations, in fact it brackets progressive materialism from questions of social amelioration: insofar as Godwin and Malthus agreed that there was only one fact of interest about populations, Godwin implied that one could simply disregard the entire problematic of population if its rate of increase did not threaten in the way that Malthus had suggested. Godwin’s response in this sense helped solidify what eventually came to seem like an unbridgeable and politically inflected methodological division between “conservatives,” who sought to ground their arguments in the purportedly fixed biological characteristics of populations, and “progressives,”

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who placed their bets on the malleable and perfectible socialization technologies of society.

The Metaphysics of Population Not only did Malthus’s approach to the concept of population differ from that of his contemporaries, so did his goals: where Malthus sought to ground normative claims about social institutions in biological invariants, his contemporaries employed the concept to relativize norms. Foucault stressed that the new approach to population was not disciplinary, if by discipline one understood a socialization technique of the sort that Godwin criticized. As Foucault notes, [in] the disciplines one started from a norm, and it was in relation to that training carried out with reference to the norm that the normal could be distinguished from the abnormal. Here [i.e., the new sciences of population], instead we have a plotting of the normal and the abnormal, of different curves of normality, and the operation of normalization consists in establishing an interplay between these different distributions of normality and [in] acting to bring the most unfavorable in line with the more favorable.14

To return to the example of inoculation, eighteenth- century authors tracked many different “normal” curves of smallpox, parsed by age, region, town, and occupation; they then sought, by means of decisions about which kinds of people to inoculate, to nudge some of these normal curves toward other normal curves that were judged to be more favorable. This was thus not a matter of seeking to socialize or discipline each individual into a proper behavior but rather an effort to identify and intervene at only those points that would enable one to shift one curve toward another. Foucault’s account helps us to think further about what we might call the metaphysical assumptions of the modern concept of population. A “population” in the modern (i.e., non- Malthusian) sense was premised on the existence of (1) a source of constant variation; (2) a plastic plane within which those variations can be embedded and held for some period of time; (3) forces of selection that traverse the plane and destroy some, but not all, of those variations. The source of variations can be anything from “nature” to “chance”—or, in the case of cultural phenomena, “desire” or “preferences.” However, whatever

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the source, it must produce many different variations (which an observer can then group into different frequencies of occurrence). In addition to the source of variations, there must be something that holds these variations and maintains their continued existence; this is what I have called a plastic plane, or what Foucault refers to as the “surface” that can be modified by authoritarian measures. Without this plane to hold them, variations would disappear as soon as they came into existence; without its plasticity, distributions of variations could not move in relationship to one another over time. Finally, forces of selection are responsible for changes in distributions of variations over time. To return to the example of smallpox, late eighteenth- century observers were aware that of those adults who contracted the disease, roughly one person in eight would die, while the other seven would live.15 We can think of the collection of individual living bodies in a given geographic region as the plastic plane that holds variations—that is, the corporeal tendency of each body to succumb or not to succumb to the smallpox virus— and the smallpox virus itself as a force of selection that destroys some of those variations (by killing some of these individual bodies) and leaving others unaffected. This particular example, of course, identifies only two variations—mortal susceptibility or resistance to smallpox—which may in turn suggest that most members of a population are “the same” as all the others. However, the key to the modern concept of a population is that one can locate in the same population constants and regularities that bear on many different qualities—responses to other diseases; suicide rates; height distributions; and so on—and each additional survey of the same population renders each individual increasingly unique. Thus, I am like roughly 90 percent of the adult population with respect to my response to the smallpox virus but like only 40 percent of the adult population with respect to both my response to the smallpox virus and my response to disease B; like only 20 percent of the population with respect to my response to the smallpox virus, disease B, and my eye color; and so on. The deep premise of the concept of population, in other words, is that each individual is a unique collection of variations. The twentieth- century geneticist Ernst Mayr captured this point in a contrast that he drew between “typological” and “population” thinking: The assumptions of population thinking are diametrically opposed to those of the typologist. The populationist stresses the uniqueness of everything in the organic world. . . . All organisms and organic phenomena are composed of unique features and can be described collectively only in statistical terms. Individuals, or any kind of organic entities, form populations of which we can determine the

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arithmetic mean and the statistics of variation. Averages are merely statistical abstractions; only the individuals of which the populations are composed have reality. The ultimate conclusions of the population thinker and the typologist are precisely the opposite. For the typologist, the type (eidos) is real and the variation an illusion, while for the populationist the type (average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real. No two ways of looking at nature could be more different.16

It is open question, of course, whether Romantic- era authors would have accepted Mayr’s claims, stated as such, about the implications of the concept of population for the location of what is real, and there is little doubt that much of the history of nineteenth- and early twentieth- century statistics, as well as all eugenicist thought, was premised on the reality and primacy of what Mayr described as mere “abstractions.”17 Yet the late eighteenthand nineteenth- century discursive explosion of facts about populations was predicated, in practice if not necessarily in theory, on assumptions more or less identical to those later articulated by Mayr. This new approach to population also implied, in ways that the Malthusian model decidedly did not, that unusual, anomalous variations could serve as the motor of qualitative population transformation. For all its pressure and dynamics, the Malthusian population did not actually change qualitatively: the only thing that changed about a Malthusian population was its size. The new sciences of population, by contrast, were premised on the notion that the distribution of qualities and potentials in a population could change over time, and that—equally important—anomalous, even “bad,” qualities were the means by which such changes occurred. What Foucault called “authoritarian measures” were dependent on the premise that the distribution of qualities in a population could change, and that change might be toward an unusual trait: in the smallpox example above, for instance, a small population with unusually high resistance to smallpox could serve as the “norm” that policymakers aspired to replicate in the more general population. Romantic- era interest in the transformative potential of anomalies was not restricted to the effects of government intervention: as Denise Gigante has noted, Romantic- era authors reconceived the very category of “monstrosity” by seeing in it no longer a falling away from proper form but rather a vital excess that was immanent to life and that brought new species and forms of life into being.18 This dynamic potential of unusual variations for the population as a whole was only fully theorized in the twentieth century by evolutionary researchers such as Sewall Wright, who suggested that is precisely because a population contains individuals who are not normal—that is, not as “fit” as others under current conditions—that it can respond over time to changes in environmental

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conditions, for those who are less fit under current conditions nevertheless serve as a reservoir of variations, some of which then subsequently emerge as the new norm of fitness when environmental conditions change.19

Society, Normalization, and Literature The metaphysics of populations may seem rather distant from the concerns of literary criticism, and indeed, literary critics of essentially every stripe have followed Godwin’s lead by assuming that the register of population has no significance for our understanding of institutions, literary or otherwise. Formalist literary methodologies are, of course, no more interested in populations than in any other extratextual entities, institutions, or concerns. However, even methodological approaches that explicitly theorize the effects of the world on literary texts (and vice versa) focus more or less exclusively on the ways in which literature serves the institutional function of inculcating normative behaviors. We may consider, for example, Franco Moretti’s account of the way in which the nineteenth- century Bildungsroman sought to resolve the task of socialization that previously had been assured by religious rituals. Moretti contends that traditional societies divide social life into “two parts that have nothing in common,” and that the purpose of an initiation ritual is to “die” in one social role (e.g., “boy”) so as to become reborn into another (e.g., “man”).20 The initiation ritual itself is thus a period of suspension between two distinct and discontinuous social roles. The Bildungsroman, by contrast, was committed to convincing its readers that each moment in life was continuous with everything that preceded it and followed it. In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, for example, there is “no irreversible moment in which everything, in one fell swoop, is decided”; the lesson of the early Bildungsroman for its readers was, rather, precisely that there are no such irreversible moments, and one must instead “be able to dispose of one’s energies at every moment and to employ them for the countless occasions or opportunities that life, little by little, takes upon itself to offer.”21 In this way, Moretti suggests, the early Bildungsroman reflects and reveals the dilemma of modern socialization: in place of those institutions of ritual by means of which traditional societies collectively enable transitions between discontinuous social roles, modern culture encourages subjects to engage in perpetual, continuous, and apparently self- directed processes of language- oriented “socialization” (and its corollary, “normativity”). The Bildungsroman—as well as literature more generally—thus becomes, in Moretti’s account, an attempt to resolve symbolically “a dilemma conterminous with modern bourgeois civilization:

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the conflict between the ideal of self-determination and the equally imperious demands of socialization.”22 As an explanation of the assumptions that underwrite the specific genre of the Bildungsroman, Moretti’s account is compelling, as are his illuminations of the logical and affective double binds that traverse the modern project of socialization. It is worth stressing, though, how emphatically his account brackets not only the fact of biological variation but variation more generally. Given his role as a literary critic, Moretti is perhaps justifiably uninterested in questions of biological variation (e.g., the degree of genetic variability that would be necessary for either a traditional or a contemporary society to persist in time). However, this disinterest in variation recurs at the level of culture. For Moretti, the “problem” of cultural reproduction is entirely that of reproducing the same: whether in the form of traditional rituals that assign the same role (e.g., “man”) to all who successfully endure its trials or in the form of those modern socialization rituals by means of which individuals engage in normative self- determination, what is at stake is how the many become the same. Moretti’s approach to variation is not, of course, an anomaly within literary criticism but rather expresses in especially clear and compelling fashion an understanding of literature as a technology of normativity that underwrites most important accounts of the modern novel. Whether in the form of the “monitory image” that Ian Watt suggests a novel such as Robinson Crusoe established for modern society; the symbolic acts, ideologemes, and assumptions about genre that, according to Frederic Jameson, establish the limits of our utopian “collective thinking and our collective fantasies about history and reality”; the proleptic semiotic construction of “the ordered space we now recognize as the household,” which Nancy Armstrong describes as serving as “the context for representing normal behavior”; or the disciplinary “spiritual exercise[s]” that D. A. Miller suggests were provided by the Victorian novel, the real effects of the novel are seen by all of these critics as the inculcation of normative beliefs and practices.23 Though these literary critics employ several quite different theoretical methods, they nevertheless agree that the novel functions as a modern institution that produces sameness out of difference, and does so by naturalizing normative beliefs and behaviors.

Frankenstein’s Populations Without contesting that the novel has indeed played this role, we can nevertheless ask what it might mean to return to early nineteenth- century literature and see in it not only a socialization technology but also a technology

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that emerged in tandem with the new, non- Malthusian premises of the sciences of population. If socialization techniques are premised on an essential malleability of individuals—a malleability that allows many individuals to internalize the same common norms—and population technologies are premised on the importance of individual differences, what are the implications of this latter premise for our understanding of the role of creative literature? Though it is an open question whether all nineteenth- century novels will reward attempts to read them through the lens of population, there is at least one obvious “outlier” candidate for such a reading, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.24 Population is not a term that Shelley employs explicitly in Frankenstein, but the topic is nevertheless, as Maureen N. McLane has established, central to the novel’s plot.25 McLane notes that population comes to the fore in both of Victor’s two key experiments, namely, his initial creation of a creature and his subsequent partial creation, then destruction, of a mate for his creature. McLane reads Victor’s first experiment not as “an experiment to create a human being but rather an experiment in speciation”—that is, an attempt to create a new population.26 McLane also positions Victor as ultimately a sort of closeted Malthusian, one who shows his true colors only when the creature he has created demands that Victor allow this experiment in speciation to continue. At this point, Victor shows his Malthusian hand and gropes his way toward the principle of population, a principle through which he finally excuses his frenzied dismemberment of the half- finished female ‘thing’. . . .What the monster proposes as a solution—a species companion—becomes in Victor’s prospectus the route to a further and more horrifying problem, that of species competition [i.e., between humans and what Victor fears would be a new “race of devils”].

Tearing up the would- be mate of his creature, Victor “shows himself to be an adept not of Paracelsus nor even of Humphry Davy but rather of Malthus, who wrote, regarding progress in human society, that ‘in reasoning upon this subject, it is evident that we ought to consider chiefly the mass of mankind and not individual instances.’”27 Counterposing Victor’s commitment to Malthusianism to the creature’s commitment to Bildung—that is, the creature’s belief that internalizing proper social norms through literature will enable him to be accepted by a human community—McLane concludes that the novel reveals the failure of Bildung when it comes into conflict with the discourse of population. McLane makes a compelling case that the topic of population is essential to Frankenstein, and reminds us as well of the ways in which appeals to nature are often used by conservative commentators to trump progressive

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appeals to the power of nurture.Yet is Malthusianism really the extent of, or even the key to, the role of population in Frankenstein? To describe Victor as a Malthusian is to describe him as someone who sees a population as a homogeneous mass characterized by only one fact, its reproductive rate. If we look more carefully at Victor’s two experiments, we find two quite different conceptions of population, neither of which is precisely Malthusian. In both cases, population plays the role of a sort of virtual character that exerts pressure on Victor, pressure that he senses and that guides his actions. As McLane notes, Victor begins investigating the principle of life in part so that he can create a “new species.” Victor sees a new species as a means for creating a claim on “gratitude”: “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.”28 Like Malthus, Victor understands this virtual population primarily as a homogeneous aggregate; however, pace Malthus, Victor sees its increase as good, for he presumes that the many individuals of this new species will each act the same way, each being happy and excellent and feeling gratitude toward him. At this point in the novel, Victor’s understanding of population is more or less identical to what Foucault describes as early eighteenth- century approaches to population: that is, as something under the control of a sovereign authority, and that serves as a means for increasing to its maximum some desired good (in this case, gratitude). Victor’s subsequent decision not to create another creature is also made in response to a virtual population, and his fear is, as McLane points out, based on the link between reproduction and population growth. However, Victor now fears the effects of reproduction precisely because he no longer understands a population as a homogeneous aggregate but rather as an aggregate of variations. Thus, though the creature himself promises to “quit the neighbourhood of man” with his newly created mate, journeying “to the vast wilds of South America” in order to live a life that is “peaceful and human,” Victor concludes that even were the creature (and presumably also his mate) to honor their word, “one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.”29 In this scenario, progeny function not, as in Victor’s initial approach to population, as additional sources of the same homogeneous emotion (gratitude) but rather as sources of variation and difference: no matter what the creature and his mate might promise, his children are likely to act differently. Thus, though both Malthus and Victor link populations to reproduction and both fear that population growth will

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lead to violent competition, they nevertheless understand the nature of population quite differently: for Malthus, the reproduction of population brings simply more of the same, while for Victor the reproduction of population is ultimately understood as necessarily a source of difference. Since the narrative of Frankenstein describes the unhappy consequences of Victor’s shift from one model of population to another, it is tempting to conclude that the novel “criticizes” one or both of these models. We might conclude, for example, that had Victor only realized from the start that populations are aggregates of variations that cannot be controlled, he would never have sought to create a new kind of population, and he would thus have spared his family (and their servant Justine) much suffering. From this perspective, Frankenstein would indeed function as a technology of socialization, one that valorizes normative beliefs and practices by treating its readers to lessons that reveal the horrifying consequences of improper beliefs and norms. Tempting as it is to understand Frankenstein as providing either a direct or an indirect lesson, such lessons tend to become extraordinarily complicated when they bear on the topic of population. For example, had Victor realized from the start that populations are aggregates of variations that cannot be controlled, he would then also presumably have realized that, since he himself was a member of an existing population, he could not protect himself and his family from the uncontrollable effects of populations simply by choosing or not choosing to create a new population. He might even have concluded that his anomalous wish to create a new population was an instance of those infrequent but nevertheless predictable “outlier” behaviors that one expects in a large population that lives in a society that allows mobility and selfdirected education; as a consequence, even if he had destroyed his materials before creating the first creature, another Victor- like autodidact interested in creating life would inevitably emerge somewhere else. And the only solution to that kind of problem, it seems, would be rigid, authoritarian, and disciplinary structures that locate and destroy those far- from- normal instances of individuality that Victor represents. However, before we arrive at the counterintuitive conclusion that Frankenstein endorses, through negative example, authoritarian and conservative social norms, it might make more sense to read the novel’s task less as a matter of valorizing one understanding of population over another and more as a matter of helping its readers with a more primary task, that of learning to see the world in terms of populations. Looking at the world in terms of populations means looking for those collective bodies capable of holding variations and receiving the action of selective forces; it also means locating points at which

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these dynamic relations between plastic plane and selective forces might be slowly altered. This could mean, for example, making assumptions about hidden aspects of human biology in order to explain social trends or regularities (e.g., disease mortality; suicide rates). However, it could also mean looking for variations, plastic planes, and selective forces in “cultural” phenomena (e.g., choices people make about work, consumption, or pleasure). From this perspective, Frankenstein provides its readers not with a didactic lesson but rather with the means for identifying aspects of the world that can be understood in terms of populations. The novel provides these tools in the form of two population models (population as a homogeneous aggregate, population as a heterogeneous aggregate) and a series of dramatic schemata, such as Robert’s and Victor’s desires for glory, the creature’s search for sympathy, Justine’s legal troubles, and so on. These dramatic schemas not only focus attention on those points in the social field at which thinking in terms of populations can have effects but also seek to identify the nature of the variations—such as a desire for glory or sympathy, or a willingness to break laws—that make a difference. Readers committed to an understanding of literature as a technology of socialization may object that the distinction between “didactic lesson” and “tools” is not entirely unconvincing—couldn’t one simply redescribe every normative lesson as a kind of tool?—and that it also ignores the fact that providing readers with population models necessarily meant socializing readers into a particular normative way of seeing the world, namely, as “naturally” divided into populations. Both these points are valid, but only in a very limited sense. One is already in vexing territory when a purportedly normative way of seeing the world is, as in the case of the modern concept of population, one that itself emphasizes the relativity of norms. Moreover, Frankenstein provides its readers with two competing models of population, which emphasizes that facts about populations are always dependent on both what is “out there” independent of the model and the specific model of population that is employed. Moreover, as I will outline in a moment, even if populations have to be understood as “natural,” they are by no means bound to a biological register, for such models could also be used to locate planes that hold variations and forces of selection in those kinds of cultural phenomena to which Robert’s and Victor’s desire for glory pointed.

Species and Composition: Reviewing Frankenstein The hypothesis that Frankenstein encouraged its readers to see the world in terms of populations receives tentative confirmation from the responses of

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some of Mary Shelley’s first readers, namely, those who published reviews of her book shortly after its initial publication in 1818. Though it had been commonplace since at least Samuel Richardson to describe novels as a particular “species of composition,” Frankenstein’s explicit emphasis on the creation of a new (biological) species allowed reviewers to reframe this literary cliché by considering both the populations that occurred within the general species of the novel and the dynamics of and among novelistic species.30 Walter Scott, for example, noted in his anonymous review of Frankenstein that “this is a novel, or more properly a romantic fiction, of a nature so peculiar, that we ought to describe the species before attempting any account of the individual production.”31 Thinking of the novel not simply as a species of composition but rather as a metaspecies—that is, a collective corpus made up of species— helped reviewers (and presumably readers) in several ways.32 First, it helped reviewers and readers identify and assess the criteria that ought to guide a reading and assessment of a particular novel. Many reviewers understood Frankenstein as at least in principle an example of the “Godwinian” species of novel established by Mary Shelley’s father.33 Second, the assumption that the novel contained many subspecies helped reviewers and readers make sense of novels that seemed to offer new kinds of reading experiences. Scott suggested that Frankenstein was a new species of novel, one that “excites new reflections and untried sources of emotion” and thus “enlarge[s] the sphere” of the “fascinating enjoyment” of reading novels.34 Understanding the novel as a plastic plane made up of species also allowed reviewers to speculate on the forces that encouraged some kinds of variations and discouraged others. Some reviewers understood the departure of Frankenstein from the Godwinian norm in terms of monstrosity, attributing the peculiarity of this novel to a more general contemporary tendency toward exaggeration. The reviewer for the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, for example, claimed that Frankenstein represented “one of the productions of the modern school in its highest style of caricature and exaggeration,” and sought to identify those elements of the social milieu that encouraged these variations, describing the central premise of the novel as one of “those monstrous conceptions” produced by “the wild and irregular theories of the age.”35 The critical tone of these latter comments underscores the fact that reviewers did not seek simply to provide objective taxonomic descriptions of literary productions but also sought to locate those points that would allow them to intervene in these dynamics. The reviewer for the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany sought through the genre of the review essay to discourage interest in the genre of “theory.” The form of the review itself, moreover, was intended to encourage or discourage book sales, and

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in this way to have an indirect effect on an author’s ability to continue to publish. This latter goal was also pursued by means of the acid wit of many nineteenth- century reviewers, which exploited that desire for glory—and corresponding fear of shame—that Shelley had emphasized as motivating both Robert’s and Victor’s endeavors, and that certainly motivated many Romantic- era authors.36

Post- Romantic Population Aesthetics To see the world through the lens of population, to understand “population” not simply as a given biological reality but as the referent of a model (of which there were multiple and competing examples), and to find in all this, if not necessarily beauty, at any rate a source of “new reflections and untried sources of emotion”: this was the achievement of Frankenstein and its development of what we might call population aesthetics. How many other nineteenth- century novels took up the task of developing this population aesthetics in the form pursued by Frankenstein is admittedly still an open question. For at least the first half of the nineteenth century, the logic of population was developed in relatively few realms of cultural practice, and even in those realms in which it was deployed, such as health statistics and criminology, it tended to be confused with a belief in the real existence of “average men” and “types.” This search for averages and types bled seamlessly into eugenics, which in turn not only tended to discourage interest in the productive power of variations but also tended to encourage, as Nancy Armstrong has documented, novelists’ interest in imagistic types rather than in individual variations.37 In a rather peculiar twist, though, one of the key legacies of the collapse of explicitly eugenicist programs after World War II was the proliferation of population logic. As I noted in passing above, eugenics and population thinking are, strictly speaking, intrinsically opposed to one another, for eugenics is a typological approach that can, for this reason, only partially embrace the logic of populations. As a consequence, the delegitimation of eugenics after World War II had the effect of helping to refine population logic by revealing the assumptions that prevent one from locating real variations or forces of selection, and the post–World War II period has seen the implementation of population logic in an ever- increasing number of fields and cultural areas.38 In the realm of health care, for example, the key postwar concept of “risk factors” for disease depends on population models, as does the more recent concept of “personalized medicine.”39 In the realm of scientific research, the interwar and postwar development of large private and public granting agencies, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Institutes of

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Health, was premised on the principle that scientific progress depends on soliciting grant proposals from a population of thousands of scientists, funding some percentage of these applications, and accepting the fact that only a few of even those funded projects will bear fruit.40 In the realm of higher education in the United States, the massive expansion—first through the postwar GI Bill and then through the creation of new public universities in the 1960s—of the number and kinds of people in which universities locate prospective students is predicated on the belief that those who will succeed at the university (and thus advance its goals, however defined) are not necessarily restricted to postadolescents from relatively wealthy backgrounds but will also be found in a much broader population of background and ages.41 The neoliberal conceptualization of “the market” is arguably one of the most significant contemporary sites in which population logic has been deployed; it is also, as I hinted at the start of this chapter, a point at which a neo- Godwinianism has been sutured to a modern concept of population. The neoliberal concept of the market departs from both its early nineteenth- century liberal and its late nineteenth- and twentieth- century neoclassical predecessors in that it is neither intended to explain how goods are distributed in society nor is a heuristic for understanding how individual consumers’ judgments of the “utility” of goods relate to one another. It is, much more fundamentally, intended to account for how new goods come into being. To explain this, neoliberals posit the market as a means for preserving, and exposing to selectional forces, a plurality of individual variations that take the form of ideas that spontaneously occur to people about how to make object A better, produce a new service B, and so forth. The market preserves these ideas in the form of inventions, which it then exposes to forces of selection in the form of consumer desire, resulting in never- ending technological “progress.” Significantly, the neoliberal market is understood by its advocates as a kind of metaplane, that is, as a plastic plane that can, in principle, contain all other plastic planes. Hence the neoliberal tendency to treat other institutions that hold and select intellectual contents, such as those of scientific research or education, as examples of “marketplaces of ideas,” with the clear implication that since they are already de facto marketplaces, it would be more efficient to treat them as such de jure. This claim is seductive because it relies on the fact that the neoliberal concept of the market and contemporary scientific and humanities knowledge production indeed employ population approaches. Yet the concept of a marketplace of ideas confuses structural similarity with identity: what links the neoliberal concept of the market with the structure of knowledge production in the sciences and humanities is the logic of populations rather than the logic of the market.

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It is thus vital, in the context of this contemporary revision of the MalthusGodwin debate, that we neither reject the logic of populations, nor limit it to the register of biology (and especially not to the coarse and singular Malthusian axis of “reproduction”), nor confuse the logic of population with that of the market. Instead, we ought to follow the lead of Mary Shelley and her critics by employing creative literature and literary criticism as means of both modeling the emotional and social effects of population models and locating new plastic planes. Given the much greater contemporary reach of population logic that I outlined above, this logic plays a more important role in both the form and content of contemporary literature than it did in the Romantic era. This logic is prominent in the neo- Romantic mode of “noir,” and especially in novels and films that embed the sciences of statistics in the register of plot, whether in the form of narratives that revolve around health and life insurance (e.g., James M. Cain’s novel Double Indemnity) or forensic and therapeutic genetic databases (e.g., Andrew Niccol’s film Gattaca). The logic of population also underwrites other, non- noir novelistic modes that revolve around risk assessments (e.g., Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections); it even plays a role in older, apparently formalist experiments, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses.42 A literary criticism sensitive to population logic and aesthetics aims not simply to detect instances of this relationship in novels but to employ these literary deployments of population logic as models for engaging the logic of population otherwise than in terms of the market. This in turn requires that we maintain, but at the same time go beyond, the liberal Godwinian image of the subject as malleable and threatened by institutional inscription and the Malthusian image of the subject as unalterably fixed in its biological nature; the subject of population is, in addition, one that relates to a collectivity through its individual differences.43 This also means understanding both Romantic and post- Romantic literature not solely as institutions that create and enforce norms but as occasions for the invention of new methods of locating and experiencing non- normative variations, variations that can then serve as the catalysts for new forms of transformative population rituals. Notes 1. See the website http://www.zazzle.com/government_an_evil_usurpation_bumper_ sticker- 128678877475618014. 2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 135. Karl Marx’s claim in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. B. Fowkes (New York: Vintage House, 1977), 767, that “the great sensation of [Malthus’s] pamphlet . . . was due solely to the fact that it corresponded to the interests of a particular party” also encouraged the left to see

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any appeal to purportedly biological “facts” as hindrances to efforts to improve social relations. 3. Melinda Cooper, Life As Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 15–18. 4. See, for example, David Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery (New York: Norton, 2006), esp. 50–51, 202. 5. See Phillip Mirowski, Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. G. Elliott (New York: Verso, 2005); and Bruno Latour “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48. 6. This dynamic is not restricted to literary criticism; for a compelling account of the ways in which feminism has since the 1970s often established its “smartness” by rejecting biology, see Elizabeth Wilson, “Underbelly,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21, no. 1 (2010): 194–208. 7. Michel Foucault, Security,Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, trans. G. Burchell, ed. M. Senellart (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 67. 8. Frances Ferguson, “Malthus, Godwin, Wordsworth, and the Spirit of Solitude,” in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), esp. 106–11. 9. See, for example, Daniel Bernoulli, “Essau d’une nouvelle analyse de la mortalité causée par la petite Vérole,” Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences (Paris: De l’Imprimerie royale, 1766), 2–45. On the importance of the concept of population for the Physiocrats, see Foucault, Security,Territory, Population, 70–79, and Joseph J. Spengler, French Predecessors of Malthus: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Wage and Population Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1942). 10. See Foucault, Security,Territory, Population, 62–63. 11. Ibid., 75. 12. Ibid., 74. 13. William Godwin, On Population: An Enquiry concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1820). 14. Foucault, Security,Territory, Population, 63. 15. Ibid., 58. 16. Ernst Mayr, “Darwin and the Evolutionary Theory in Biology,” in Evolution and Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal, ed. B. J. Meggers (Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1959), 2. 17. Examples of this tendency in the nineteenth and early twentieth century range from the belief that statistical regularities pointed to the existence of a real type (e.g., Adolphe Quetelet’s “average man”) to the mistake of picking what were in fact compound variables and then assuming that the presence of statistical regularities meant the existence of a “law” that caused those regularities; see Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, trans. C. Naish (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 67–146, and Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 105–14. Eugenicism combined these two mistakes with the further assumptions that populations produce “best types,” and that legislative and practical measures could encourage these best types and cull the rest.

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18. Denise Gigante, “The Monster in the Rainbow: Keats and the Science of Life,” PMLA 117 (2002): 433–48; see also Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life:Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Balimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 144–89. 19. See, for example, Sewall Wright, “The Roles of Mutation, Inbreeding, Crossbreeding and Selection in Evolution,” in Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Genetics, Brooklyn, NY, 1932, ed. D. F. Jones, 2 vols. (Austin, TX: Genetics Society of America, 1932), 356–66. It is this same basic idea that motivates contemporary critiques of corporations such as Monsanto for their efforts to reduce genetic diversity among various populations of plants. 20. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World:The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 44. Similar comparisons of primitive and modern technologies of socialization play an important if often understated role in other Marxist accounts of the institution of literature—see, for example, Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 69–70, 77–79—and in Friedrich Kittler’s “Über die Sozialisation Wilhelm Meisters,” in Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel: Studien zu Goethe und Gottfried Keller, ed. G. Kaiser and F. Kittler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1978), 13–124. 21. Moretti, The Way of the World, 45. 22. Ibid., 15. 23. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 92; Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 34 (and more generally 17–102); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 23–24; D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), x. 24. I focus here only on the novel, but other forms of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury creative literature also engaged the logic of populations. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” for example, is both evidence of, and itself encouraged, the desire for the development of plastic planes capable of identifying and enabling voice in those “mute inglorious Milton[s]” who, in the absence of such planes, disappeared without leaving a trace. 25. Maureen N. McLane, Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 26. Ibid., 87. 27. Ibid., 103–4. 28. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. D. L. Macdonald and K. D. Scherf, 2nd ed. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999), 82. 29. Ibid., 171, 170, 190. 30. On Richardson’s claim to have invented a new “species,” see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 410. 31. Walter Scott, “Remarks on Frankenstein”; originally published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the review is partially reprinted in appendix D in Shelley, Frankenstein, 300. 32. A search in the database British Periodicals (http://www.proquest.com/en- US/ catalogs/databases/detail/british_periodicals.shtml) for articles that appeared between 1790 and 1822 and contained both the words “novel” and “species” suggests that it was

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only between 1818 and 1820 that it became commonplace to refer to (sub)species within the more general species of the “novel.” 33. See, for example, Scott’s review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, as well as the anonymous review in the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany 2 (1818): 249–53 (partially reprinted in appendix D in Shelley, Frankenstein, 306–8); the anonymous review in Literary Panorama and National Register 8 (1818): 411–41; and (arguably) the anonymous review in Belle Assemblée; or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine 17 (March 1818): 139–42. All reviews are available on “The Mary Wollstonecraft Chronology and Resource Site,” Romantic Circles, https://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/chronologies/mschronology/reviews.html. 34. Scott, review of Frankenstein, 306. 35. Citation from Shelley, Frankenstein, 306, 308. 36. An extreme example of this awareness of the effects of reviews on authorial production was Shelley’s claim that the reviewers of the Quarterly Review had effectively killed John Keats with bad reviews; see Shelley’s Adonais: A Critical Edition, ed. A. D. Knerr (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 5–6. 37. Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Franco Moretti’s recent work on the “evolutionary” dynamics of the huge volume of novels published in the nineteenth century may seem both to be close in spirit to my emphasis on populations and to provide means for determining the extent and spread of population aesthetics; see his “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 207–27, and Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (New York: Verso, 2005). However, it is worth stressing that Moretti’s method focuses only on (typological) differences between “species” of novels—such as differences between Bildungsroman and the “religious novel”—rather than considering each species of novel as itself a population that is characterized by differences (see Moretti, Graphs, Maps,Trees, 17–20). 38. Though one might have hoped that the professed interest in evolutionary theory on the part of recent “literary Darwinists” would have entailed interest in the variability of human responses to literature, precisely the opposite has been the case. Rather than understanding responses to literature through the diffracting lens of population, literary Darwinists have instead sought to ground accounts of “normal” responses to literary texts in evolutionarily adaptive functions. In this sense, literary Darwinists remain much closer in spirit to the concerns of nineteenth- century eugenicists than to twenty- first- century evolutionary science. 39. For the history of the concept of health risk factors, see William G. Rothstein, Public Health and the Risk Factor: A History of an Uneven Medical Revolution (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003); on more general implications of the modern concept of risk, see Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. M. Ritter (London: Sage Publications, 1992). On the dependence of personalized medicine on population- level data, see Robert Mitchell and Catherine Waldby, “National Biobanks: Clinical Labour, Risk Production, and the Creation of Biovalue,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 35, no. 3 (2010): 330–55, and Robert Mitchell, “U.S. Biobanking Strategies and Biomedical Immaterial Labor,” Biosocieties 7, no. 3 (2012): 224–44. 40. On postwar efforts to direct the progress of science via large grant agencies, see Phillip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge:

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Cambridge University Press, 2002); for recent changes in that regime, see Mirowski, Science-Mart. It is worth noting that those disciplines grouped under the rubric of “the humanities” employ a similar structure, though the lower cost of doing work in these fields means that this logic is elaborated less through the plastic plane of grants and more primarily through the plastic plane of a tiered system of journals, which is structured to solicit many submissions but capture (and rank) only the “worthwhile” variations. 41. On the twentieth- century history of higher education, including discussion of the GI Bill and the creation of new public universities in the 1960s, see Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University:The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). As Andrew Delbanco astutely notes in “MOOCs of Hazard” (New Republic, March 31, 2013), recent excitement by university administrators about “massive open online courses” (MOOCs) is premised on the hope that such courses could function as “detection tool[s]” for locating “prodigies,” who might then be encouraged to enroll in person. 42. On Ulysses, see Sam Alexander, “Joyce’s Census: Character, Demography and the Problem of Population in Ulysses,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45, no. 3 (2012): 433–54. 43. Though employing a slightly different concept of population from that which I outline here, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse come to similar conclusions in “The Problem of Population and the Form of the American Novel,” American Literary History 20, no. 4 (2008): 667–85.

Technomagism, Coleridge’s Mariner, and the Sentence Image Orrin N. C. Wang

This chapter gathers some thoughts I’ve had on the relation of Romanticism to something I’m calling technomagism. My intent is first to give an overview of what I mean by that term and its connection to Romanticism, and then move on to the particular example of a moment of technomagism in a passage from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The chapter concludes with a speculation on what a Romanticism built on technomagism might mean for our own present collective moment of global environmental precarity. As one might readily guess, technomagism has to do with the relationship between technology, or techné, and magic. Heidegger and others have written quite a bit on the question of techné, and literary studies as a whole are at the moment quite caught up with a term intimately linked to technology, science. There’s also a storied line of interesting writing that has to do with the relation between science and magic. (For those of us who study Romanticism, our own particular literary point of reference might be Victor Frankenstein’s education, which involves both the natural science of electricity and the occult thought of Cornelius Agrippa and others.) So let me sharpen the focus of my own approach by saying what I mean by technomagism, which has to do with two basic concepts: first, the distinction between a user, or operator, and a technician, and second, the proposal of making something out of nothing. My basic thesis is that both these concepts say a lot about what we’re doing right now in the world we live in, and they also have a lot to do with the tropes and strategies that characterize Romanticism. The first idea, the distinction between a user and a technician, is one that I resort to all the time to understand my own predicament as the editor of the electronic Romantic Circles Praxis Series, where I’m definitely an operator of digital media, someone who knows a little about the procedures by which I can make my computer do things, while I’m most certainly surrounded by

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technicians, people on our ace production crew who understand how computers work. Confounding, if not quite dishonoring, the previous Wang generation of Asian American chemical engineers, I treat digital media like appliances and my production editors treat them like machines. A post–World War II, post- Fordist analogy might be that I’m in marketing and they’re in development. As the digital media scholar Matthew G. Kirschenbaum might say, I know what’s on the screen and they know what’s in the box.1 So, my relationship with computer technology or techné definitely becomes at some point magical. I can talk semi- intelligently about my computer and I can do things with it, but my relation to it is as a semicompetent driver, not as a mechanic. This situation can certainly be understood in generational terms, though I suspect a number of users who have grown up with social media and apps would still readily admit to being simply drivers instead of mechanics; at any rate, I’m not a Luddite (though I’ve had my moments of techno- rage), but I’m also not someone who can confidently explain how or why my computer works, even though I might at times be able to navigate it very well—I (and I don’t think I’m the only one) exist in a gray zone where my knowledge as a user, my techné knowledge, exists beside a keen sense of my non- knowledge of how things work. Technomagism in this sense functions a bit like a catachresis at the heart of my technical knowledge, the magic moment of opacity or non- knowing that actually underwrites my user intelligence, and perhaps, even more hyperbolically, my relation to the world. The ambition of that formulation points to what I want to explore some more, how this gray zone of knowing and not knowing might actually say something about the nature of knowledge or thought itself, or at least various forms of knowledge that we as literary critics confront all the time. In that sense, with all due respect to my ace production crew at Praxis, I want to consider the degree to which, with regard to techné, we’re all in some basic way simply drivers or users in this world. This is a claim, moreover, that goes beyond medium specificity; it’s an interrogation that drives toward the heart of the concept of media itself. It’s the suggestion that we are all in some sense the Nambikwara Amazon Indian chief famously described in Claude LéviStrauss’s memoir, Tristes Tropiques, who confidently scrawls designs in the dirt, believing he has mastered the technology, the magic, of writing. LéviStrauss’s point is, of course, that he has not.2 My counterintuitive interest lies in considering whether in some way he has, or perhaps more exactly, whether the distinction between his nonmastery and our mastery is more friable, and more volatile, than we might wish. I hope that the invocation of the Nambikwara Indian chief will help us with two differing critiques of the term technomagism: that, on the one

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hand, such magism implies the auratic power of a divine event, and on the other, that the same word is associated with the demystifying action of a sleight- of- hand.3 For my spin on Lévi- Strauss’s story is one in which those two senses are invariably mixed, in much the same way that W. J. T. Mitchell uses Bruno Latour to get at our premodern, unenlightened experience of the image.4 With technomagism, techné loses it auratic quality, but in a way that doesn’t allow for the critical distance that would allow any simple progressive telos toward demystification to occur, insofar as demystification shares with the aura it attacks the same constative certitude that the knowing/ not knowing of technomagism undermines. Technomagism does have an epistemological register, but that event is an encounter not with the truth but with, quite literally, nothing at all. The difficulty of that proposition informs the rest of this chapter’s arc. Lévi- Strauss’s study comes to most of us, of course, embedded in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, whose own multi- and metamedia study of writing and the deconstruction of speech rehearses in its own way much of what I’m discussing here. And, more to the point, both Derrida and Lévi- Strauss are braided together by the figure of Rousseau, Derrida through his explicit reading of the French writer in Of Grammatology and Lévi- Strauss more implicitly by the origins of modern anthropology (French and otherwise) in Rousseau and other eighteenth- century thinkers concerned with the interstices of language, nature, and culture—a point of intellectual reference also very much in play in Derrida’s book.5 The present discussion isn’t specifically about Rousseau, but I trust my suggestion is clear, namely, that the issues I’m dealing with inevitably lead to a consideration of the intellectual and literary topos of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to, in a word, that period, event, or identity we call Romanticism. Some might hear in this claim an approach that bears at least a familial resemblance to the polemic developed in Clifford Siskin and Bill Warner’s collection, This Is Enlightenment, that the Enlightenment is indeed the historical moment when (new) media take over our lives and configure our new episteˉmeˉ.6 My approach is not as assuredly historical as theirs, however, in the sense that while I’m trying to identify something that certainly has to do with Romanticism, what that is might not be simply beholden or defined by the procedures of a historicist argument. Indeed, a historicist argument might be beholden to it. This possibility can be more readily accessed by the second trait I associate with technomagism, the question of making something out of nothing. One can think of this issue historically as one way to understand modernity, especially in its relation to Romanticism, as the problem, burden,

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or opportunity, of making something out of nothing. Certainly the secular modernity of M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism can be approached this way, as can a number of other Romantic, or Romanticist, plots that revolve around the attempt of the Romantic imagination to revivify or make anew a world increasingly characterized by a corrosion of the legitimating institutions and authorities of the past. These plots might seem charmingly dated, though Charles Taylor has arguably been reworking them; part of my interest is to return to them also, not to reinstall them but to think about them specifically through the idea of technomagism to see if they’re truly exhausted. A more relevant way to consider this, perhaps, is to observe the intimate relation between Romanticism and the dialectic, the procedure in Romanticism by which something is made out of nothing, as Shelley so stunningly put it in Prometheus Unbound: “To hope, till Hope creates / From its own wreck what it contemplates.”7 In our own twenty- first- century moment the dialectic is making a noticeable comeback, with thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou in their different ways using the dialectic to make something out of nothing, with the stakes being quite high—the making of a prospect, of a future, for instance. If we phrase it that way, it doesn’t become difficult to see Žižek and Badiou as the heirs of one basic Romantic genealogy committed to the dialectic as the project of making something out of nothing. And it is here that the historical context of these formulations becomes more vexed, or at the very least more complicated, since one thing dialectical thought attempts to make out of nothing is history itself. In this chapter, however, my engagement with this issue occurs in an oblique manner, insofar as I am more interested in a related matter, another implicit complication that Romanticism brings to the table: that there might also be an uncompromising dimension to Romanticism that stages the making of something out of nothing in a way not immediately or not fundamentally about the dialectic. To ask this in a different way, to what degree is the making of something out of nothing, dialectical or otherwise, a question of technomagism, a moment of magic structuring a technology of instantiation, ultimately and radically nonhuman, insofar as it is always, finally, beyond our explanation, reach, or control?8 We can make some headway with this question by looking at a Romantic text famous for its instructional format as a technology of reading, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I refer especially to the poem’s gloss, highlighted by its addition by Coleridge to the 1817 version of the work, a seemingly literal tool for the unlocking of the hermeneutic riddles of the poem. How and what we read is thus famously thematized through the formal structure of Coleridge’s text, a move further enhanced, as Jerome McGann

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has argued, by a recognition of the tradition of eighteenth- century biblical and secular hermeneutics to which the Mariner immediately refers.9 Of course, Coleridge’s poem also thematizes the question of interpretation through its content, through the work’s status as one of the best- known shaggy dog stories in Romantic literature, a view not lost on many of Coleridge’s contemporaries, from Southey to Barbauld, who famously, according to Coleridge, wondered in front of him what the moral of the poem was. Coleridge, of course, tartly replied that the poem had too much of a moral and, if anything, needed to be less apodictic. However, that the most obvious candidate for the moral of the Mariner’s story, “He prayeth best who lovest best / All things both great and small,” has been found by many to be trite and unsatisfying merely underscores the predicament of reading that the poem presents. The genealogy of Mariner criticism in many ways revolves around this fact. Interestingly, as Anne- Lise François has suggested, in our own age of unprecedented ecological catastrophe, one strikingly anticipated by the dead zone of sea that the Mariner’s ship inhabits, that moral might not seem so trivial after all. Timothy Morton has also recognized the relevance of the Mariner for ecological issues today, identifying in the poem a “kitsch” relationship with the nonhuman world. Morton’s characterization has to do with what he approvingly argues is the poem’s improper, compulsive attraction to an oleaginous materiality, but his use of the term “kitsch” also points to the long tradition of wondering how much of the poem is, to put it gently, a put- on.10 Arguably, this hermeneutic uncertainty haunts all our attempts to unlock Coleridge’s text, including the very able and in many ways convincing historicist arguments that link the poem to the French Revolution, the slave trade, and (going all the way back to William Empson and then forward to David Simpson) European colonialist expansion.11 Within the Mariner’s account, the issue of interpretation is certainly relevant to his poor crewmates, who desperately switch among their interpretations of the albatross’s functionalist meaning as either curse, or omen, or blessing, or, as Empson suggests as a possibility, food to replace the sailors’ worm- ridden sea biscuits.12 (As Frances Ferguson notes, whether the reader can successfully determine the consequence of the crew’s changing hermeneutic is another matter entirely.)13 Outside the Mariner’s narrative framework, the question of a put- on is even more of an issue for the poor Wedding Guest, who might wake up “sadder and wiser” precisely because he’s realized that the hypnotic power of the Mariner’s narrative comes from the hallucination of a homeless man, a quintessential example of Foucault’s Renaissance mad person roaming the countryside before the classical age’s Great Confinement.14 And in that

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same vein, it’s also an issue for the Mariner himself, who within his own recollection interprets the Hermit’s question, “What manner of man art thou?,” to be the instructions of a severe Christian universe describing his form of penance, while what he might have done is simply internalize a question anyone might ask when confronted by the Mariner, even someone blessing him, and externalized it as the authoritative injunction of Žižek’s Big Other. For the Mariner, the Hermit’s words are performative, commanding him as penance to tell his story over and over again throughout the land. But for the Wedding Guest and the poem’s readers, the Hermit’s question might be simply that, a query transformed through the Mariner’s madness of interpretation into the external command, felt internally, of a moral universe demanding reparation: “For with this frame of mine was wrenched /With a woeful agony, /Which forced me to begin my tale” (ll. 578–80).15 The scene between the Hermit and the Mariner becomes a mordant comedy of misrecognition, at once instantiating the moral universe and catalyzing the Mariner’s punishment by it and the Hermit as the subject supposed to know. Such scenarios reproduce the question of Coleridge’s unreliability and various inconsistencies of the text within the very figure of the Mariner himself. If skeptical readings of Coleridge’s poem don’t always grapple with this especially radical conclusion, if we don’t dismiss outright the story that the Mariner tells, one could say that, at least for modern readings of the poem, the gloss is largely responsible for keeping such views at bay. Channeling Foucault once more, we could in fact view the gloss as the way in which the Mariner’s madness is confined, delimited, or interred. For the gloss does seem to take the Mariner’s story seriously, as an intelligible constative event. Of course, as Ferguson emphatically demonstrated in her well- known essay on the Mariner, aptly titled “Coleridge and the Deluded Reader,” the gloss creates as many problems as solutions for someone looking for guidance when reading Coleridge’s text; it doesn’t so much resolve interpretation as incite it: “The Gloss, in assuming that things must be significant and interpretable, finds significance and interpretability, but only by reading ahead of—or beyond—the main text.”16 The gloss then, is a technical aid, an app, literally applied to the rest of the poem; a model for or a technique of reading that fails as much as it succeeds, or succeeds despite failing. As Ferguson’s title warns, anyone confident about the success of her reading practice who bases her assuredness on something like the gloss, or who thinks that the point of her reading practice is to emulate or become a gloss, is acting like LéviStrauss’s Nambikwara Indian chief, especially if, like the chief, we confidently risk all our cultural capital, if not our tribal standing, on the success of our reading attempt.

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Ferguson’s argument already signals the concerns I address: “Reading as a techné and morals as techniques of behavior thus becomes suspect for Coleridge because they imply that experiences—and one’s interpretation of it—are both stable and repetitive—that one can learn what one needs to know.”17 Let me then formulate a more fine- grained sense of the technomagism that I see specifically operating in the gloss and the rest of Coleridge’s poem, in order to advance our present analysis. My thesis is that something is indeed made from nothing in Coleridge’s poem—let’s call it meaning—and that it can be seen in the relationship between gloss and poem, but that that connection is itself an allegory of what happens inside the poem, at sentence level or between sentences, where disparate semes are juxtaposed together to become, seemingly, sequential narrative meaning. Thematized in the formal use of the gloss is how much the interpretive wages of the Mariner, its social or ethical relevance, for example, depend on achieving this basic sequencing act. A parataxis, or discontinuity, that resolves itself into the hypotaxis of linear intelligibility: ever since Sergei Eisenstein’s 1944 study of Charles Dickens we have understood this technique not simply in terms of linguistic grammar but more readily in terms of the more dynamic imagist vocabulary of cinematic montage.18 Recently, however, Jacques Rancière’s The Future of the Image has taken the idea of the montage and reunited it with the grammatical functioning of the sentence through his concept of the sentence image, with the word “sentence” in that phrase now more capaciously referring to any relational modality, either sequential or simultaneous, a “new common term of measurement” or “rhythm” whose paradoxical point of departure is precisely the “law of the great parataxis,” the recognition that there is no real universal measurement for art today, only chaos.19 For Rancière the sentence image, operating either in pictorial, or cinematic, or print form, seems both to acknowledge and dispute that fact. One might go further and say that the sentence image, in line with Rancière’s political vision, asserts an overcoming of parataxis without the subordinate relations that structure the hypotactic clause. (It is, of course, the very fact of the “great parataxis” that enables Rancière to argue that anything might be connected to anything today.) Hence Rancière’s interest in montage. As my references to Eisenstein and Dickens indicate, we have for some time creatively mixed the critical language by which we approach images and texts, and we can say that that theoretical strategy is precisely what Rancière opportunistically exploits, in order to describe as acutely as possible the regime of visibility that he elsewhere claims we’ve inhabited since Schiller.20 In what follows I’ll be reworking the formal apparatus of Rancière’s sentence image to stress different features of it than he does (though it should be recognized that the sentence image is

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already a highly versatile concept, replete with a number of different meanings, in Rancière’s formidable hands). In doing so I’ll be making an argument about Coleridge, and by extension Romanticism, though one that doesn’t necessarily choose between the historical and the transhistorical, insofar as its main focus will be on trying to see whether something like the sentence image structures the technomagism of reading in the Mariner in a way that exceeds, or at least problematizes, the assurances of dialectical thought. While Rancière in The Future of the Image does not champion the dialectic quite as explicitly or polemically as the theories of Žižek and Badiou do, it’s difficult not to experience the knotty, elegant precision of his writings as anything other than the operation of an able dialectical thinker. The cinematic montage, with its juxtaposition of seemingly disparate visual elements, would appear ready- made for the kind of dialectical investigation that Rancière employs. Indeed, Rancière actually refers to two kinds of montage in his thoughts about the sentence image, the “dialectical montage” and the “symbolic montage.” However, the dialectical montage is arguably the less interesting of the two, as it describes a predictable though highly effective use of montage whereby, as in the example of Martha Rosler’s photomontages, social meaning, the “secret of the world,” is revealed in the explicit clash of a set of contrasting figures, images of the Vietnam War and “adverts for American domestic bliss.” In comparison, the symbolic montage gets at a much more uncanny, more difficult sense of montage, and the dialectic, in large part because it delves into a relational structure made up of heterogeneous elements that establishes a “familiarity, an occasional analogy, attesting to a more fundamental relationship of co- belonging. . . . If the dialectical way aims, through the clash of different elements, at the secret of an heterogeneous order, the symbolist way assembles elements in the form of a mystery.”21 The symbolic montage, then, emphasizes the “sentence” in the sentence image: if, as Rancière puts it, the image “separates,” the sentence strives for “continuous phrasing,” the “ ‘dark fold that restrains the infinite.’ ”22 The critical effect is an extraordinary one of the most nimble dialectical balance whereby the sentence as linguistic meaning is paradoxically distilled into a nonsemantic, formal shaping of the nonlinguistic, paratactic quality of the image, which is only able to be recognized or organized by the phrasing or rhythm of the sentence; hence the ineffable quality—the “mystery”—of the symbolic montage’s ability to parse familiarity, the “fraternity of a new metaphor,” out of discontinuous elements.23 The symbolic montage is thus very much in line with Rancière’s sense of the French symbolist tradition, where the “mystery” of the montage connections, its testimony to a fundamental “co- belonging,” does “not mean enigma or mysticism. Mystery is an

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aesthetic category, developed by Mallarmé and later explicitly adopted by Godard. The mystery is a little theatrical machine that manufactures analogy,” one that Rancière finds operating equally in the video art of Bill Viola and the North American pop art of Ken Lum.24 The aesthetic mystery of how montage connects is thus itself an app for Rancière’s ultimate argument about the potentially “neo- symbolist and neo- humanist tendency of contemporary art.”25 We might, however, ask, how exactly does mystery as a “little theatrical machine . . . manufactur[e] analogy?” How does the symbolic montage connect? The answer is, precisely: it’s a mystery. As an app, mystery could function as a catachresis; it would do so, moreover, for what is in effect a catachresis or imposed action, the connection between the “continuous phrasing” of heterogeneous elements—of images that, if we take Rancière’s description of them seriously, as entities that counter the meaning or shape of a sentence, also function like the punctum in Roland Barthes’s photograph, like catachreses.26 The symbolic montage would then be the filmic stutter of a catachresis that describes the catachresis between two catachreses, or, in Paul de Man’s terms, the allegory of montage. The “little theatrical machine” would signal an automaticity not immediately recoverable as a functioning app for a “neohumanist art.” What might occur, then, if we apply this more volatile sense of montage to the sequencing of elements in a passage from the Mariner—a passage, moreover, that seems to function in a much more smooth, prosaic, and obvious way than the symbolic montage in Rancière? And what might be the consequences of nevertheless discovering in that passage this more radically problematic sense of connection or shape that Rancière’s symbolic montage identifies but does not quite resolve? The passage in Coleridge that I want to look at is the famous one with the sea snakes, and the Mariner’s blessing of them: Their beauty and their happiness. He blesseth them in his heart. The spell begins to break.

O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare. A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware. The self- same moment I could pray: And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea. (ll. 282–91)

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Claims for the intelligibility of what the Mariner wants to say may vary in terms of their ethical, psychological, and religious register, but most if not all depend on assuming that this particular passage transparently links together its different elements in a montage of specifically cause- and- effect relationships, so much so that Robert Penn Warren in 1946 could begin his famous essay by taking as a given that the Mariner, “upon recognizing the beauty of the foul sea snakes, experiences a gush of love for them and is able to pray.”27 Within those terms we really haven’t advanced much past Warren, who arguably still has one of the most sophisticated interpretations of a cause- and- effect sequence, locating that structure within a change in the Mariner’s interiority, brought on by his blessing of the snakes, that is a genetic moment of the Romantic imagination, “the case of a man who saves his own soul by composing a poem.”28 Let me offer my own boilerplate summary of what happens to the Mariner here, one that also reads the passage beside our own contemporary ecological concerns. Up to the point of the blessing, the relation of the Mariner and his shipmates to the natural world has been instrumental. The interpretation of the albatross, whether it was a good or an evil sign, for example, depended on the crew’s perception of how that reading affected the fate of their ship. The Mariner, however, blesses the water snakes “unaware”; he does so not out of any self- interest or for any recognizable end; he sees the water snakes as creatures of value in and for themselves, not because of their relation to or signification for his human reality.29 (In perhaps more rarefied, Kantian terms, he sees them as pure beauty, an action not so distant from Robert Penn Warren’s description.) Neither iconoclastic aggression nor submissive idolatry informs his response, as it did with the crew’s reaction to the albatross. (One might think of W. T. J. Mitchell here, who would argue that the crew’s problem with the bird is that they didn’t treat the albatross like a totem, or “friend.”)30 And precisely because the Mariner’s encounter with the water snakes is not built on self- interest, the cosmos rewards him: in that “self- same moment” the albatross falls from his neck and, as the gloss says, the “spell begins to break,” with the poem’s narrative coming out of its stasis, gathering the momentum that will eventually lead the Mariner back to the shore and away from the sea, to spread the word about loving all creatures great and small. Of course, given the often noted repetition compulsion that comes to organize the Mariner’s life on land, not to mention the dire quality of the life he eventually lives for having blessed the snakes “unaware,” we might wonder how lasting or crucial a change has really occurred. More to the point, we might wonder whether change, as an intelligible event of cause and

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effect, has really occurred at all. For the language of the poem makes no literal reference to the reward I inferred from my reading: the Mariner blesses the snake, and then the albatross falls from his neck, but the main text does not explicitly connect those two events, aside from noting their immediacy, their inhabitation of the “self- same moment.” What makes that moment same to itself, however, is not explained. It could be cause and effect (blessing causes the albatross to fall off ), or it could be something else: the contingency or sign of Rancière’s great parataxis, the arbitrary discontinuity rather than causal connection between events, a motif figured in many other places in Coleridge’s poem, from the game of chance, dice, played between Death and Life- In- Death to the choice of the Wedding Guest as the recipient of the Mariner’s tale, a seemingly determinate moment (of the this- tale- isonly- for- thee type) that, however, could just as easily be an emblem of the arbitrary way that any text might be waiting for any reader in this world. (We feel that a book has chosen us, but anyone with a certain amount of cultural capital could just as well have read that book.) Indeed, as Empson cheekily considers, the albatross should be the “smaller darker” breed “mentioned in Shelvock” rather than the “huge white” kind, since the smaller bird would be a tastier alternative to the worm- ridden sea biscuits.31 But more rides on this choice, since a “huge white albatross,” while suggesting the self- parodying, Monty Pythonesque dimensions of Coleridge’s tale, would make its falling off the Mariner’s neck a more likely result of heavy weight, salt spray, sun, and gravity than of the divine intervention of a moral universe. Alexander Calder’s drawing of the Mariner, one that accompanied Warren’s 1946 essay in the Kenyon Review (Figure 1), certainly plays up this sense of the albatross as an ungainly, heavy weight.32 The water snakes scene, in other words, might be a montage in a more problematic sense, insofar as it can quite easily be read seamlessly, when it might in fact be composed of two elements—the act of blessing unaware and the albatross falling off the neck—that are radically incommensurate. Grammatically, these two statements, read on the page, separated by a stanza break, are connected by nothing except a “self- same moment” that might actually be the sameness of discontinuity. That we measure them together as a sentence image would be an act of technomagism, of making something out of nothing. This predicament is personified in these lines in the figure of the “kind saint” who the Mariner believes takes pity on him, and who we might believe overcomes the gap between blessing and falling albatross—who hears the Mariner’s blessing, takes pity on him, and makes the albatross fall off his neck. But that belief is itself a moment of technomagism, as that connection doesn’t appear in any literal way in the text: the kind saint pities the Mariner,

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Figure 1. Alexander Calder’s drawing of the Mariner, which accompanied Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 essay in the Kenyon Review. © 2015 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society, New York.

and does nothing more. Figuratively, the kind saint might be the sign of a connection between blessing and falling bird, but that is simply another way of admitting him to be the animating figure of an imposition, a personification of an action that isn’t there. Instead of overcoming the problem of the gap between blessing and albatross the saint simply reproduces it, becoming yet another relay among a set of elements—blessing, saint, falling bird—whose grammatical connection is far from clear. That the saint’s pity could also be

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instead what enables the mariner to bless the snakes simply enforces the sense of this “self- same moment” as a montage of radical incommensurability rather than a set of clearly identifiable causes and effects. Of course, one might respond that neither the saint nor we have to do anything since we have the app of the gloss, which does the connecting. So perhaps this scene can’t be read so seamlessly; or perhaps that’s at least what the version with the gloss is admitting or telling us, that we need the app to make the connection for us. (Teaching this poem to students, I’ve certainly found this passage to be more difficult and less transparent than I had assumed it to be.) More problematic and more interesting, however, is that the gloss itself doesn’t quite solve or do away with the predicament of discontinuity. One can indeed argue the opposite, that the gloss repeats it, since the gloss does not go into any involved interpretation of what’s happening with the Mariner but instead again gives us two denotative statements—“He blesseth them in his heart” and “The spell begins to break”—that might or might not be tied together as a moment of cause and effect. The two statements form their own montage sequence, which means that, extending but also complicating Rancière’s sense of the sentence image, their relation together could just as much be built on their discontinuity as on any intrinsic connection, or, more precisely, that the intrinsic quality of that connection is a “mystery,” of a kind imposed, catachresic in nature, unmoored from any representational intelligibility, like the causal consequence of a moral act. Indeed, if we are able to use the gloss to help us make sense of what’s happening to the Mariner, that moment would occur through the echoing relation between the rope around the Mariner’s neck implicitly snapping and the spell beginning to break. From that echo we might conclude that the albatross’s falling off “so free” indeed marks the breaking of a spell, that there was a spell occurring in the main text in the first place. But of course, that echo doesn’t have to be metaphoric—in what way is a spell breaking exactly like a rope snapping? It could indeed much more persuasively be metonymic, a pair of snaps or breaks happening arbitrarily in the same vicinity, much like blessing water snakes unaware and albatrosses suddenly falling into the sea. In that sense, the spell being broken could very well be the end of our delusion as readers or competent users, technomagers who would read cause and effect, narrative coherence, and ethical intelligibility into the disparate elements of this scene, with or without the gloss. But that end would not be a real end in the teleological sense but instead just one more punctuation, one more snap, fall, or break, one more repetition of the rime of the Ancient Mariner, the rime or rhythm that makes up the Mariner, that involves something else besides the generic conventions of the

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ballad, which the Mariner’s own repetition compulsion on land as a constituted narratable subject simply repeats. In the passage we’ve looked at there are a number of other structural repetitions taking place, from the “gush[ing]” of love “spring[ing]” from the Mariner’s heart to the double “blessing” to the rapid sinking of the bird into the sea after it falls from the Mariner’s neck; these metonymically extend throughout the poem, including a moment much later when the spell actually, or one might argue arbitrarily, becomes “snapt,” an achievement less beholden to any overarching continuity of guilt and redemption than to a combinatory automaticity more akin to Life- InDeath and Death’s game of dice. (What were the chances?) Such punctuations function much like the punctum of Barthes’s photograph, a wound or difference, something made out of nothing, gathered into a sequence of parataxis, the common measure of the sentence image, or “self- same moment” that marks a regime absent a common measure. Reversing Barthes’s formulation for the photograph (a “message without a code”), we could call this sequence a code without a message, the multiple gushings or springings of an imposition instead of a meaning.33 And, in the case of Romanticism, this condition might be a subtending dimension to any narrative we might conjure, as opposed to simply the symptom of one relatable historical récit. Put another way, the rime, or rhythm, of such metonymic punctuations, of such mechanical breaks, does not cohere into a sequence of dialectical progress or relationality but instead accentuates a conceptual stutter. (One might include here, contrary to Warren, the self- same repetition of loving best and praying best.) This aphasia suggests that the significance of Romanticism might lie not only in its association with the technomagism of the dialectic but also in its relation to a technomagism operating around catachresis and imposition, as well as the open question of the relation between these two forms of magic. As Rancière’s own dating of his regime of visibility to Schiller indicates, Romanticism does seem to be a crucial place where these options and contestations emerge.34 This is also true for an understanding of the idea of montage itself, and especially for its cinematic form. Ever since David Bordwell’s seminal 1974 essay, film studies have worked to understand the specific genealogies behind the relationship of Eisenstein, one of the avatars of cinematic montage, and this filmic technique. Bordwell suggested understanding Eisenstein’s relationship in two parts: an early stage based on a Pavlovian constructivism and a later Romantic stage consisting of both associationist British empiricism and German idealism. Since then, film scholars, including Bordwell himself, have complicated this formulation, suggesting, for example, a more synchronic relationship in Eisenstein’s oeuvre between these

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two phases. 35 Luka Arsenjuk has most recently suggested how this first phase or tendency of Pavlovian constructivism more accurately traces its empirical genealogy to British associationism, whereby the split in Eisenstein between British associationism and the second phase or tendency of German idealism presents two contrasting views of montage, the former underwritten by an empiricist tradition that can only a posteriori construct relationships among the features of a montage (cause and effect, e.g.) and the latter subtended by a German idealist philosophy that assumes an a priori connection among all those elements.36 A struggle over understanding cause and effect as a metaphysical given or as a retroactive projection (or, as we might put it here, an interpretation), underwritten by two contending philosophical traditions; a question of how to narrativize the relation between these specific traditions, between British associationism and German idealism, as the coherent intellectual biography of an individual figure—that these récits not only in many ways set the terms for this essay’s handling of the Mariner but, more important, should sound strikingly familiar to any working Romanticist of the last half century speaks emphatically to montage and the great parataxis as constituting a problem not only distinctly Romantic but also quintessentially Coleridgean in scope.37 And this is perhaps where we can turn to the question of environmental precarity anticipated in Coleridge’s poem, to the various ecological catastrophes that increasingly come to define our relation to this world, a world that might well end because of its constant, oppressive transformation into “something” for the human species. For one way to understand the relationship of nothing made into something in the dialectic is that of identity and its determinate negation, or nonidentity. However, within the other form of technomagism I’ve outlined here there’s something more obdurate, more difficult about the nothing that recognizes the imposition of catachresis, something nonrecuperative about its relation to the something made out of it. If, as in Rancière’s sentence image, the stress seems to be on how something can come out of nothing, how a common measure can paradoxically straddle the great parataxis, in the montage of Coleridge’s gloss we instead confront an app that inevitably turns back toward its encounter with nothing, toward the attempt to express such an encounter without the strategy, or prospect, of an identity coming out of nonidentity. To put this another way: in a poem so wrought with the question of hospitality and the inhospitable, what might it mean to respond to that dilemma of host and guest without giving up on the fact that we, the Mariner, and the albatross inhabit not simply Rancière’s mystery but, even more emphatically, nothing? Another name for that attempt might be a Romanticism that a number of

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scholars are intent on exploring today. It is a poetics, and it might very well be a politics and an ethics, even an ecopolitics or eco- ethics, or simply an allegory of reading. It is with us, at any rate—with all of us at the “self- same moment” here at sea, Coleridge’s dead zone repeating Kant’s sublime ocean, the nonrelatable point or punctuation of our nonhuman, inhuman, nonhome. Notes 1. See Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). In many ways this distinction can be understood as one between software and hardware, with Kirschenbaum persuasively making the case that issues such as hard drive storage are essential to understanding new media. For my purposes this distinction is more mobile, insofar as it already exists on this side of the software divide, between those who might know, say, some commands on their laptop and those who know code. For one recent discussion of the commonly wished- for trope of the computer as appliance, see Farhad Manjoo, “Computers Should Be More Like Toasters,” Slate.com, January 25, 2010; that the confusion some of us might have with our smartphones complicates Manjoo’s own example of the first computer as appliance, the iPhone, speaks to the mobility of the distinction that I’m exploring here. 2. Claude Lévi- Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 294–304. 3. I thank Forest Pyle and Sonia Hofkosh for pointing out each of these critiques to me. 4. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 25–26. Referring specifically to the animistic nature of new media, Mitchell writes, “Computers, as we know, are nothing but calculating machines. They are also (as we know equally well) mysterious new organisms, maddeningly complex life- forms that come complete with parasites, viruses, and a social network of their own” (26). Interestingly, Latour has recently described a state of technological knowing/not knowing similar to technomagism, one that he associates with the modern and thus one that he believes, unlike me, we can supersede; see his An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 207–32. 5. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 101–141. 6. Clifford Siskin and Bill Warner, eds., This Is Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); see esp. their introduction, 1–33. 7. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 286. 8. For one edifying response to this question, see Andrzej Warminski’s detailed reading of how in the Phenomenology of Spirit consciousness doesn’t come out of life through the dialectical movement of a determinate negation but through the catachresic intervention of the word “to point” (verwissen) in his “Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life,” in Hegel after Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (New York: Routledge, 1998), 171–93.

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9. Jerome J. McGann, “The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 35–67. 10. Anne- Lise François, “ ‘Things violently destroyed or silently gone out of mind’: Slow Death and Naturalist Time Keeping,” unpublished manuscript; Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 150–58. Arguably, for Morton, the Mariner is kitsch—and not camp— precisely to the degree that its embrace of the slimy real is not a put- on. 11. William Empson, introduction to Coleridge’s Verse: A Selection, ed. William Empson and David Pirie (New York: Schocken, 1973), 28–31; David Simpson, “How Marxism Reads ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ ” in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ed. Paul H. Fry (Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 148–67. See also Peter Kitson, “Coleridge, the French Revolution, and ‘The Ancient Mariner’: Collective Guilt and Individual Salvation,” Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989): 197–207; and Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 47–65. 12. Empson, introduction to Coleridge’s Verse, 35–36. 13. Frances Ferguson, “Coleridge and the Deluded Reader: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ ” in Poststructuralist Readings of English Poetry, ed. Richard Machin and Christopher Norris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 257. 14. Michel Foucault, The History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), 3–77. 15. All quotations from Coleridge’s poem are from Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 46–65. 16. Ferguson, “Coleridge and the Deluded Reader,” 253. See also Steven E. Jones’s comments on the gloss in his “ ‘Supernatural or at Least Romantic’: The Ancient Mariner and Parody,” Romanticism and the Net 15 (1999). 17. Ferguson, “Coleridge and the Deluded Reader,” 256. For Ferguson, Coleridge is specifically targeting Barbauld’s belief that moral experience can be realized as a technology of moral instruction (ibid., 254–56). 18. Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leda (New York: Harcourt, 1979), 195–255. 19. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), 44–45. 20. Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,” New Left Review 14 (2002): 133–51; see also his Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009). 21. Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution,” 56–57 passim. 22. Ibid., 58–59. 23. Ibid., 57 24. Ibid., 57. 25. Ibid., 67. 26. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 26–27. 27. Robert Penn Warren, “A Poem of Pure Imagination,” Kenyon Review 8 (1946): 392. Conversely, the overarching problem of cause and effect in the Mariner is a staple in many readings of the work. See, for example, not only Ferguson but also Jonathan Livingston

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Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1927), 275—Warren is in fact responding to Lowes’s impatience with the poem. Perhaps the reading most anticipating my own is Anne Williams’s Kristevan argument about how Coleridge’s poem dislodges any easy assumption of a masculine symbolic epitomized by the clarity of cause and effect, in her Art of Darkness: A Poetics of the Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 182–99. While Williams doesn’t focus on this particular passage the way I do, a perhaps more pertinent divergence can be seen in how her use of the Lacanian real has been here reoriented around an encounter with nothing instead. 28. Warren, “A Poem of Pure Imagination,” 422. 29. Both Morton and Williams key off the slimy corporeality of the snakes, though Morton does so in the service of his argument about the kitsch quality of the poem, where the Mariner’s blessing moves away in a positive manner from abjecting the snakes (157–58), while for Williams the blessing of the snakes functions more as a repression of the material abject, where the Mariner “escapes into the Symbolic” (194). 30. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 184. 31. Empson, introduction to Coleridge’s Verse, 35. 32. Much more can obviously be said about Calder’s image, one of a set of drawings that appears with Warren’s essay and that, if not self- parodying, defamliarizes the relationship between the ludic and the serious in consistent fashion. For our purposes I would especially note the Mariner’s eyes, which seem to constitute less the hypnotic “glittering” stare that captivates the Wedding Guest at the beginning of the poem (l. 13) and more the hypnotized gaze of an individual caught in his own interpretative madness. The Mariner has the strained look of someone compulsively overreading. 33. Roland Barthes, Image/Music/Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 19. 34. Specifically, Schiller marks for Rancière a break in Romanticism from the “representational” to the “aesthetic” regime of art (Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution,” 135). 35. See David Bordwell, “Eisenstein’s Epistemological Shift,” Screen 15 (1974–75): 29– 46, and idem, “Eisenstein’s Epistemology: A Response,” Screen 16 (1975): 142–43. See also David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (New York: Routledge, 2005), and François Albera, “Eisenstein’s Theory of the Photogram,” in Eisenstein Rediscovered, ed. Ian Christie and Richard Taylor (New York: Routledge, 1993), 206. I am indebted to Luka Arsenjuk for bringing this debate to my attention. 36. Luka Arsenjuk, “The Subject of Montage,” unpublished manuscript. 37. For the most extensive treatment of the deconstructive qualities of Coleridge’s encounter with David Hartley and associationism, see Jerome Christensen, Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); for an argument about the ontological change in movement brought on by cinema that includes an indepth analysis of the various schools of cinematic montage, including Eisenstein’s Soviet school, and that seemingly in many ways sets up Rancière’s conception of the sentence image, see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) 29–55; for the most complete historical argument about montage’s relation to the literary techniques of eighteenth- century and Romantic writings, see James K. Chandler, An Archaeology of

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Sympathy:The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). For Deleuze, cinematic movement doesn’t simply occur through the moving camera or moving objects in a shot but, crucially, through the assemblage of shots—through montage (Cinema 1, 24–55). We could thus counterpose our reading to one that sees the montage effects of lines 282–91 as allegorizing the successful generation of movement itself, emblematized by the start of the ship’s own unearthly, speedy transit and the crew’s reanimation in the next part of the poem (“The ship moved on” [l. 335]). We might then ask what would be the montage affect of this juxtaposition of movement and aphasic rhyme—movement or aphasic rhyme?

Willing Suspension of Disbelief, Here, Now Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

To transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria1 In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will. —Karl Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy2

Two pieces of practical advice. Like Aristotle in the Poetics, Coleridge is giving advice on how to sell poetry. And Marx cautions against basing all analysis on people’s sense of things; rather one should investigate what worldly factors produce that sense. One is talking about producing a certain willingness in the readership. The other is saying that willingness is produced by material conditions bigger than the personal will. For Coleridge, the determinant is spiritual. For Marx, social. Let us call this these remote presuppositions of my argument. Nimai Lohar is an illiterate man in his mid- fifties. He sang a song from which I have quoted the concluding semi-refrain a number of times. He understands the gist of the song well, partly because the vicious rural education system has not ruined his natural intelligence. I can relate it to Kant’s inauguration of modernity. After the talk “Margins and Marginal Communities,” where Nimai was the final example leading toward an imaginative training for epistemological performance in well- placed academic humanities persons like myself, a brilliant former student of mine, now a tenured professor at a great university, kindly remarked to me, in response to my regretful statement that I did not have time to read books anymore, that the fact that I had produced the talk in one sleepless night, for that very lack of time, made him think I was “selfgenerating” these days. That is of course an absurd remark. It did, however,

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make me realize that my lack of scholarship, like Nimai’s lack of literacy, has kept intact a certain ability to think connectively on the spot. I speak in selfpraise, but I intend to use this as yet another example of how my attempts to learn from those who have been cognitively damaged by my own class and caste have taught me many things about myself and the world. This also brings redress for my inability to undertake a specific piece of writing—the one you are reading—for another brilliant former student, for some time now a tenured professor at a great university. I had wanted to make myself a Coleridge expert for him. This was taking forever as I prepared myself in the nooks and crannies of a busy life. The conversation reported here made me say to myself, “Why, write it as you think it; you will never be a Coleridge scholar.” Ankhi Mukherjee has recently described Henry Vivian Derozio in “Postcolonial Responses to the Western Canon.”3 Derozio is an icon of the college where I was trained in English literature. On the first day of classes, our brilliant professor Tarak Nath Sen instructed the handful of English Honors students in the great history of the study of English literature at our college, Presidency College, now Presidency University. Derozio, student and chair and an inspiration to many of the young students of the newly emerging middle class, was himself a Eurasian claiming India, and teaching Byron as a “contemporary,” a “freedom fighter.” In 1957, we thought of ourselves as the holders of that tradition, and it was into British Romanticism that we stepped, inspired. My initial response to Coleridge, therefore, was as uncritical as such a legacy would suggest. Yet that very uncritical response could lead the immediately postcolonial intelligentsia to claim at once and also a version of what we would today call global citizenship (a fiction, of course). By contrast, by the time it was possible to write a history of postcolonial critique, postcolonial theory had acquired a proper name, and the legitimate liberal goal could indeed be described as follows: “Postcolonial responses to the canon signify a historical becoming, the third person of dialogue becoming first and second person.”4 The cusp generation of English Honors students in Calcutta, by my stereotype of my biographical past, escaped this bilaterality and today limps toward a diversified globality through the British Romantics as originary conditioning of the unconditional. I am folded together with (com- plicit), not just face- to- face with, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Donna Landry’s book made me contextualize them some, as all the usual Euro- British to and fro about the Romantic imagination, Romantic irony, and the like had not.5 In the meantime, I had moved to the United States, and my adviser, Paul de Man, had said, in a class discussion, that one literalized

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the metaphor to use it in politics. This is perhaps not the most theoretically astute remark, but as a maxim, it has stuck with me since the early sixties. This essay may, perhaps, be an example of that hardy perennial. My earlier dealings with teaching the Romantics is recorded in “The Double Bind Starts to Kick In.”6 I can now relate this account to that trajectory. In the initial phase of that teaching, by way of the “strong imagination” as the mochlos of the ethicopolitical, I was perhaps on the way to “literalizing the metaphor.”7 Earlier I had tried to save the emergence of the “esemplastic imagination” as the symbolic disclosing the subject Coleridge’s relationship to the imaginary.8 Today, as I work closely with the subaltern, the double bind of the imperial, conditioning the unconditional, has become intolerable. Its mark is left in the longest “unread” quotation in my Aesthetic Education,9 a passage from the second edition of Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads, with which Coleridge had been troubled for reasons that can be linked to mine, and indeed to Jacques Derrida’s reasons for criticizing Michel Foucault’s madness.10 In a recent issue of the PMLA, Forest Pyle described my method in Aesthetic Education as “concentrated itinerancy.” I was wondering as I wrote this chapter in this necessarily erratic way, if the piece could literally be an example of what Pyle saw when he marked the unread Wordsworth text. In that same issue, Benjamin Conisbee Baer refers to the “hurricane lantern.” It is indeed by the light of a hurricane lantern that I write these words. My text begins to resemble Coleridge’s as the ridiculous resembles the sublime. The only book I carry with me is the Norton Critical Edition of Coleridge.11 I will speed- read the Biographia extracts because my essay is past press deadline. I will read “a willing suspension of disbelief ” as an open bit of method- description in the general socius. Derrida had suggested in Glas that, when a passage is cut from the text and launched alone, the cut, as wound, bleeds. History has healed the wounds of this particular venerable passage. I work in the politics of culture, an elitist partially made over by the subaltern. Call this fieldwork. We never paid any attention to the fact that Coleridge thought of himself as representative of cultured humanity. Of course, everyone is obliged to do it, and some are punished for it. The imperialists did it and negated the possibility that subject peoples could, although the latter did so in a restricted space away from the colonized bourgeoisie.12 I now understand that this is why I so insist that learning to read the literary text is practice for the ethical. We extended to the texts of British literature the unconditional hospitality of the ethical, saying yes to the enemy. That we did not theorize it this way means nothing, of course.

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Yet what I must also notice today is that Coleridge’s assumption of the autobiographical subject as representative is nothing if not historicized. The fact that it is in the structure of an excuse of a special kind, a defensive excuse against unjust critics, both conditions the unconditioned voice of the representative man of letters and rehearses the excuse at each time of reading. This is the frame, remembering what we had not noticed as good Bengali students, immediately postcolonial, of British Romanticism, at an elite college, within which I read the message in a bottle, now authorless. If I cannot be scholarly, I can give a reality check. I am not Auerbach in Turkey. My current department has not had a Romanticism specialist for some time. Postcolonial is on the decline. All is global. The major periods are Renaissance (politically correct name, “early modern”) and Victorian. The colleagues are tremendous. But, excellent learning and personalities apart, this distribution spells globalized Eurocentrism. I wanted to teach the undergraduate methods class this year. I was, with great tact, eased out. Kicked upstairs. At my time of life, it is okay to be a global keynote specialist. But I cannot be allowed to introduce the new generation to the useful moral dilemma of the greatest period in the history of the modern world in its production of what has been diagnosed as imagined communities, dominance without hegemony: British Romanticism, comparable in its effects only to the effects of French literature on the great practitioners of negritude, Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire. Biographia Literaria ends on the invocation of what I will call primary faith, and that is where I will begin: “where the eye of Reason has reached its own Horizon; and that Faith is then but its continuation . . . the upraised Eye views only the starry Heaven which manifests itself alone,”13 Kant’s example of what some of us call planetarity:14 “The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates as it were my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe).” It is interesting that Coleridge does not refer to the unconditional moral law, which would give Kant the comfort of being human.15 It is possible to read this omission as part of the many signals in the text of the Biographia that it will undermine the unexamined confidence of the representative man, of which “The Letter As Cutting Edge” was already aware. The last moment of the literary biography invokes a faith that travels where the human is in planetary proportion. By contrast, specifically “poetic” faith seems to use the version of the self- conscious will of the everyday in a reading public, which has a less than secondary relationship to the grand will, containing the individual will, which Coleridge describes, again and again, in

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words like the following: “This principium commune essendi et cognoscendi, as subsisting in a WILL, or primary act of self- duplication, is the mediate or indirect principle of every science; but it is the immediate and direct principle of the ultimate science alone, i.e. of transcendental philosophy alone” (477–78). Since this will in the readership clearly involves a choice to suspend, one may even suggest that Coleridge is going toward the will related to Kant’s “mere reason”: Willkür: “the faculty of choice (Germanice, Willkühr)” (480). I would like to suggest that today, to save the text without excusing it or its historical symptomaticity, we can turn it around here and substitute the fact that this final passage is, indeed, disarming; no self- duplicating here. (This will be a transactional reading, for, as the use of similar images of the eye upraised toward faith suggests—see, for example, “Religious Musings” [1794], lines 80 and following—the planetary, in Coleridge the almost- cleric, can often be tamed into the supernatural.) “Willing suspension of disbelief ” is a description of the kind of superior tolerance practiced in the colonial period to produce Weltliteratur and today practiced in the name of metropolitan multiculturalism in the face of dragon festivals and the hijab. And if we suspend disbelief controlled by this small group, it is not what poetry deserves or calls forth by Coleridge’s own account—“a rationalized dream dealing out to manifold Forms our own Feelings, that never perhaps were attached by us consciously to our own personal Selves” (605). In other words, I am trying hard to learn to read Coleridge from Coleridge—by noticing that he restores to Wordsworth the real meaning of the word “real,” as Wordsworth speaks of using the real language of men. It is in that spirit of restoration that I focus on “faith,” and on “belief ” as a suspension of disbelief. Coleridge was deeply competitive with Wordsworth. His efforts at restoring specifically Wordsworth’s discourse does not, of course, offer a way out of ideology. In other words, it does not stop him from giving the customary “Brahmin” superstition about the world being held up by the tortoise, etc.: “We might as rationally chant the Brahmin creed of the tortoise that supported the bear, that supported the elephant, that supported the world, to the tune of ‘This is the house that Jack built,’” just as education into tolerance does not stop Coleridge’s twenty- first- century Norton edition editors from explaining this absurdity simply as an undocumented “Hindu legend” (438). Even as we are in a peculiar competition with Coleridge, can we use the restorative technique we learn from him? What if we, like Mary Prince with the abolitionists, used, as we did so long ago, the best of Coleridge’s convictions about faith and read the actual text of the Satapatha Brahmana, where the double shell of the living tortoise is invoked as a metaphor holding the two absolute horizons of the created universe—explained thus in the

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body of the scriptural text of 600 B.C. giving ritual detail, translated by Max Müller, himself an adroit practitioner of withholding the willing suspension of disbelief when he moved, as it were, from fetish to Eucharist?16 It is a small moment, a footnote, quite unimportant—and that I think is how one looks at the unwitting marginal moments that betray ideology. (No use bringing a complaint of underdemonstration. A single moment gives the lie.) We note this and find, in the major text, means to neutralize historical autoimmunity, neither accusing nor excusing, entering the protocols as painstakingly as we had, there at Presidency College, then in the immediately postcolonial fifties. It helps us confront our specific predicament here, now: the fragile morality of a certain class that does not today understand that legalized secularism, at best based on the convictions of a class specific to a certain civil society, is slipping away because ensconced, again at best, in dominance without hegemony. The model of developing means of redress, by no means guaranteed of success, is to say yes to the enemy and trump the charge. Under the sign of the hurricane lantern, yet nurtured by the British Romantics, I have proposed the birth of a subdiscipline in Readings: I began with borders in my childhood and youth, and continue with them in my present as Indian. Partition, the McMahon Line. I move into the performative contradictions of an Indian Comparative Literature, relating it to the performative contradictions of global capital: a borderlessness that must preserve borders—the tradition of English- in- India being put to work for regional languages. I propose a supplementary relationship between the two, “the literary” introducing the dangerous element of the incalculable. I offered a reading of Yeats within the narrative of Byzantium [as here Coleridge within German Orientalism], relating it again to the current Turkey- Greece minuet [as here the loss of secularism upon the faith- belief shuttle]. Throughout, I insisted that a training of the imagination for literary reading produces a flexible epistemology, which can, perhaps, keep saving our world.17

The disbelief that can be willingly suspended is the colonial ticket to world literature. What we are dealing with here is belief that comes in to usurp center stage of fragile reason, untrained in imaginative activism, in the difficult task of shifting desires to reconstruct objects of knowledge. Medicine and/or poison, poetry and/or violence. “Faith,” forever irreducibly imbricated with its Nebengeschäft, cannot be used as a weapon.18 It is then that we can begin to notice further signals in the text: most prominently, that the subject’s representative humanity, philosophically unconditional, is not only conditioned by a porous history but also dependent on iteration, legitimate and illegitimate: “While I in part translate the following observations from a contemporary writer of the Continent, let me

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be permitted to premise, that I might have transcribed the substance from memoranda of my own, which were written many years before his pamphlet was given to the world; and that I prefer another’s words to my own, partly as a tribute due to priority of publication; but still more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where coincidence only was possible”(442). Colonial knowledge occupies a special corner there, descriptive of all knowledge; determined by iteration, rather more complicated than mimicry. This is the task of the teaching of the British Romantics today, the gifted first- generation ideologues trying to find a way out of capitalism and the bad future even as the earlier group—not all, of course, but our focus is Coleridge—opposed the Jacobins’ attempt to demolish feudalism and the bad past. The turning of mere reasonable belief into faith is a malaise shared by both sides today. (Let us keep in mind that we are not translating the Anglo- Saxon word “faith” into the many languages where something like that word faith, politically mobilized, can unleash its havoc.) The legitimation of that turn is operated by any globally sanctioned organization—in a chain of displacement from the colonizers’ “civilizing mission”—that recommends “faith- based” solutions to global violence and greed. In an altogether less ironized register, they operate the same loosening of the bind of Kant’s practical reason that Coleridge elaborates in his version of the big will, by calling it an “a priori principle, the will, or practical reason” (480). Here we see Coleridge himself as a productive misreader, historically symptomatic, of Kant’s critique, distinct from Schiller. If Schiller had turned the asymmetrical human interest of critique, committed to mistake, into chiasmus and balance, Coleridge, also going for balance, chooses not the figurative but the scientific, not chiasmus but equally opposed forces mediated by a third thing, thus linking it with what he perceives as the Newtonian description of the real as material: “It will then remain for us to elevate the Thesis from notional to actual, by contemplating intuitively this one power with its two inherent indestructible yet counteracting forces, and the results or generations to which inter- penetration gives existence, in the living principle and the process of our own self- consciousness”(485). Where the obligation to assign freedom and cause determined Kant’s practical reason as part of the programmed Anlage of the impossibility of the subject’s access to pure reason, itself perhaps a “mistaken” view, and so on indefinitely, in Coleridge the big will “supposedly” accesses freedom and cause, not only not as an underived mistake but not even transcendentally deduced, simply on into the transcendent; it is this scenario that is productively transgressed for us in the last metaphor of the Biographia. The task of the reader, in a certain sense starting within English departments, is to perform the transgression.

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It is here that Coleridge’s securing, in book 1 of the Biographia, of his voice- consciousness as that of the representative man, necessarily defined by the representative culture of Europe, by way of a consistent stream of iteration, described as such, even using the word “plagiarism”: In this instance, as in the dramatic lectures of Schlegel to which I have before alluded, from the same motive of self- defence against the charge of plagiarism, many of the most striking resemblances, indeed all the main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind before I had ever seen a single page of the German Philosopher; and I might indeed affirm with truth, before the more important works of Schelling had been written, or at least made public. (447) For readers in general, let whatever shall be found in this or any future work of mine, that resembles, or coincides with, the doctrines of my German predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly attributed to him: provided, that the absence of distinct references to his books, which I could not at all times make with truth as designating citations or thoughts actually derived from him; and which, I trust, would, after this general acknowledgment be superfluous; be not charged on me as an ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism. (448)

Such passages and more can be studied and used by the scholarly student not only as an account of a fault to be reprimanded with no embarrassment, for genius can have license, but also as a performative model for the conditioning of unconditional learning as knowledge. I have made clear that I never was and never can hope to be, in my declining years, anything like a scholarly student. As a reality check of literary criticism today, I am reading “willing suspension of disbelief ” or “poetic faith” as a dry run for a scholar to enrich, to show in detail what balances the claim to representativeness, indeed to genius, so that future readers can turn the text around more proficiently, again and again, and make it useful in many contexts: future Freuds productively misreading Sophocles. When the words “belief ” and “faith” are tied together in ways that Coleridge’s mere description, message in a bottle, a survivor’s message, would guarantee to be “poetic,” poetry is demoted from its superior place in the rest of his discourse. A mere contrast between “sciental reasoning” and faith—“sacrificing the life of faith to the cold mechanism of a worthless because compulsory assent,” whereas “a good heart so naturally begets the belief ”—can lead to a backfiring of a willing suspension: The extreme difficulty, and often the impossibility, of finding words for the simplest moral and intellectual processes in the language of uncivilized tribes has proved perhaps the weightiest obstacle to the progress of our most zealous and

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adroit missionaries.Yet these tribes are surrounded by the same nature. (Biographia Literaria, 2:54)19

Kant did indeed inaugurate modernity by binding free will, rewriting fatalism by a rearrangement of the desire for philosophy, which desired the danger of the entire mistake, declaring free will by determined necessity, leaving fatalism unguarded in the longue durée of history.20 That counterintuitive mark of the modern largely misfired. What took its place was the race- and class- determined binary opposition of free will and fatalism that runs our world today, with the so- called abstract workings of capital running a deconstruction. For the rest, the task is for the readers of the future. Forest Pyle pointed out that I had not read the long Wordsworth passage in Aesthetic Education. I hope, by these reading notes, with nothing but memory and the Norton Critical Edition, I have done a bit of reading for him and just slipped in under the extended press deadline. There is no room here to expand the unimportant moment of the reference to the woman’s obligation not to step out into the public domain— with the representative cultural reference to Boccaccio—too incidental, unimportant to the edifice.21 Nothing much to be done here but monumentalize, and, of course, acknowledge that, like many good men of his period and later, Coleridge can feel a specific wrath against class- marked female misery. The ideological framework is too haphazard, the results of critical analysis too predictable. Our feminist work is with the subaltern and cannot enter these enclosures. Pradeep Bhargava, the director of the G. B. Pant Institute for Social Science Institute at the University of Allahabad, could not understand last week how I could be working on the British Romantics while I was so engaged in coping with ungeneralizable subalternity in western West Bengal. Reader, inhabit the fracture, and know that it is deepest and least accessible in gender! Let an unfamiliar belief flood you as the first step in productive imaginative unease! Whatever you can willingly suspend will not protect you, or only protect you, against the organic obsessions of globality. (I had offered to write on willing suspension of disbelief long before a copy of the PMLA article in which Pyle pointed out the unread Wordsworth passage appeared in my email inbox. As I move toward the final steps of this piece, I realize that it is becoming a response to a refusal to read, indicated by a former student, whom I think I had taught already when he was a brilliant sophomore, and one of the things that we codiscovered was indeed the unblemished and strong Romantics. What I am about to report will be even more Coleridge- like. The good bishop of Calcutta died delirious at fifty- three.22

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Sometime in the late nineties I woke in the pitch darkness of the coffinlike bedroom at Jonara hamlet in Purulia district, with a sentence in English ringing in my head: “Human rights are predicated on the failure of both state and revolution.” I was able to use this at a conference at Princeton (unnoted on my CV) closely following this event, but thought nothing of the coincidence. Over the years, the subaltern work began to approach the elite work. The first such public intervention was “Righting Wrongs.” It took me some time to understand that that piece was based on false evidence because I had been taken in by the anthropologistic feudalism of the local benevolent landowner and the complicit metropolitan writer. Directives for producing writing came more and more between sleeping and waking. I thought this happened to everyone—perhaps it does—and also put it down to the lighter sleep of an aging person, until, a little before I was slated to speak at the Poulantzas Institute in Athens, an invitation that made me feel terrifyingly responsible, a full- fledged solution came to me between sleeping and waking, to the extent that, when I woke up, I wrote it down and gave it the file name “Poulantzas Dream Take.” Dream intervention of the sort has increased, and comes most of the time when I am in Calcutta or in the villages, but not invariably. Interestingly, there is now an occasional continuity between the same dream, broken but carried on through the night—sometimes even later. Just a couple of weeks ago, because I was taking good care to put my elite house in order before I hit my subaltern house, I could get only two hours of sleep, between three and five in morning. The next afternoon, trying desperately to keep awake after having supervised two school sessions, as I gave additional training to the teachers and supervisors from both schools, suddenly a dream phrase intervened, “a box of cards,” which made absolutely no sense in the context of what I was saying to my class. I explained the dream- phenomenon and, always remembering that Freud had suggested that we produce daydreams to interpret, said that this perhaps had something to do with the nature of the gamble in attempting to learn how to train people my own caste and class had cognitively damaged millennially. Now that I am ready to go through the notes I made on rereading the extracts from the Biographia included in the Norton Critical Edition, I had a night full of the repetition of the “same” dream. I wrestled all night with the task of explaining the willing suspension of disbelief to a presumed audience, which could only approach it through a Hindi film song. I am not quite sure of the title of the film, since I had first seen famous Hindi films only at Lincoln Center and after the rewriting of Hindi cinema as “Bollywood,” comparable to the cultural upgrading of marijuana in my adolescence. We were not allowed to watch Hindi cinema in the ’40s and ’50s since we were educated in “good

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literature” (and a bit of “good” cinema, Bengali and English), which for me was English poetry, for all of us siblings Rabindranath Tagore’s music and poetry— mostly music—and songs for Kali, and the inevitable “classical music”—North Indian vocal performance. The interesting thing was that the song, repeatedly remembered in dreams and half- dreams that night, came from the Lincoln Center experience of Bollywood—metropolitan postcolonialism, if you like— and ran, sung in the film by a female voice and addressed to a future lover in the second person intimate voice, “I know what you said and I also know what I heard.” In other words, by someone who has solved the colonial exploitation of provoking momentary poetic faith—the willing suspension of disbelief. No, I know the difference between my understanding and your statement. This, then, was music that I had heard only a couple of years ago at Lincoln Center, in Hindi, the national language, not my first. But behind it is its Bengali translation, sung by a well- known male singer in the first person singular, a favorite of my parents, a song that I have known since those darkened afternoons in Calcutta when my father was alive—listening to a weekend music- by- request program on the radio. This song, which I was not remembering in the dream but which followed the same tune, goes, “My beloved did not give me his/her heart [and mind—the Bengali word is mono], but only took it.” Another description of “the willing suspension of disbelief,” extracted as the unconditional ethical, with no entry into the powerful and giving mind- set: dominance without hegemony. The teacher’s refusal to read was caught between two unevenly distributed translations of the tune, not the sentiment, literally no more than Bestimmung—tuning. I began to understand with what anguish Derrida had insisted in Rogues that no redress for the global malaise would come from Kant, for whom both self and world were “as if ”s. A new Enlightenment must be devised, and its holders must learn how to “translate.”23 So, no, I will not be taken in by a poetic ruse “willingly to suspend disbelief.” And, I must also say, I will not be taken in by the promise of a “historical materialism,” a formulaic description of the relationship between will and social production. I will attend upon the new task, com- plicit in dreams, which has already broken the outlines of an acceptable essay on Coleridge.)

Notes 1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:6. 2. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ed. Maurice Dobb, trans. S. W. Ryanzanskaya (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), 20.

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3. Ankhi Mukherjee, “Postcolonial Responses to the Western Canon,” in The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Critique, ed. Atto Quayson, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 2:771–801. 4. Ibid., 2:774. 5. Donna Landry, The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature 1671–1831(New York: Palgrave, 2001): “Not production, but consumption and pleasure, recreation and retreat, were the goods associated with the countryside” (2). 6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Double Bind Starts to Kick In,” in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 97–118. 7. Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos,” in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 83–112. 8. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Letter As Cutting Edge,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in the Politics of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2012), 3–19. The Lacan reference is generally to the so- called “Discourse of Rome,” or “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 197–268. 9. Spivak, An Aesthetic Education, 6. 10. Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 31–63. 11. Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano (New York: Norton, 2004). This is the edition cited subsequently in the text by page number. 12. This is perhaps what Ranajit Guha leaves unspoken in Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 13. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2:247. 14. For more on planetarity, see Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin, translation ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 1223. 15. “The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination not restricted to conditions and limits of this life, but reaching into the infinite” (Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 133). 16. The Sacred Books of the East, trans. Julius Eggeling, vol. 41, Satapatha Brahmana (Delhi: Motilal Banarasidas, 2005), 389. I could not get to the Sanskrit text as I was rushing from Calcutta to Lucknow. My thanks to Moinak Biswas and Shibaji Bandyopadhyay for tracing the translation. 17. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Readings (Kolkata: Seagull, 2014), 23. 18. Nebengeschäft is translated as “secondary occupation.” From Kant’s examples, it is clear that he means the reduction of faith to bargaining for salvation. Kant, from within his faith, keeps primary faith separate from these secondary occupations, in a colonial world; Derrida considers them irreducibly imbricated ( Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, trans. Gil Anidjar [New York: Routledge, 2002]).

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19. Coleridge speaks fulsomely of his senior contemporary at Christ’s Hospital, Thomas Fanshaw Middleton, who became the first bishop of Calcutta and whose “episcopacy was . . . the first establishment of Protestant episcopacy in India” (Charles Webb Le Bas, The Life of the Right Reverend Thomas Fanshaw Middleton, D.D., Late Bishop of Calcutta [London: Rivington, 1831], vol. 1, p. vi, hereafter cited as CWLB, with page reference following; Coleridge reference at 383–84). Middleton came to love Calcutta in his own way, calling it “the most surprising place in the world” (CWLB 468) and was focused on the idea that an English education rather than conversion was more appropriate for the Indian “natives,” who were regularly treated differently from the “natives” of Africa. (This diversification of imperial policy was already accessible to W. E. B. Du Bois, as evidenced in his “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” in The New Negro:Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Alain Locke [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992], 385–414.) His reasons, however, were the natives’ “mental infancy,” “the incapacity of the native mind, in its present state, for extracting the rudiments of true religion from the rudiments of the mere perusal of the Scriptures” (CWLB 154). In other words, there was no “willing suspension of disbelief,” or a superficial “poetic faith,” that would have to be manipulated by the natives themselves, according to Coleridge’s model, available when the question was a “faith” with a proper name, as today: “We pray for truly Christian politicians today. But we especially pray for the society from which our politicians come, and for the church. We pray that the church will teach the truth of God’s word, namely the gospel of Jesus Christ which is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes (Romans 1:16). Changed behaviour does not come from the outside. Wilberforce knew that it is changed hearts that lead to changed lives,” a recent online post (http://www.pceasydney.org.au/ Sermons/Ministers_Message_0612.pdf ) by the Reverend Dr. Dennis K. Muldoon, in praise of William Wilberforce’s fight against slavery—subject of a recent film—and ignoring his opposition to Eurasians preaching in native languages. I am reminded of Frederick Douglass’s ambivalence toward John Brown. The “natives’” religious tolerance was dismissed as “imbecilic,” “a gigantic superstition . . . which admitted that various modes of faith might be acceptable to the Almighty; and which, therefore, was perpetually undermining our allegiance to the sole majesty of the everlasting Gospel” (CWLB 171). In 1817, Middleton was supportive of the opening of Hindu College (later to become Presidency College, now Presidency University, where our introduction to English Honors by way of Henry Vivian Derozio is described earlier in the chapter). However, his comments on the seeming lack of opposition to the college were as follows: “They cannot comprehend what is the use of knowledge which is not lucrative and as for public spirit, it is a thing foreign to their constitution. Indeed, if they had anything of that sense about them, we should not be the lords of India. . . . Their utmost efforts of wisdom are but a short- sighted cunning. . . . The teaching of English is the best thing that can be done” (CWLB 475). How, then, are we to negotiate this double bind between Derozio and Murray’s Grammar (CWLB 474)? Indeed, my primary and secondary education, under the extraordinary genius of subaltern converts, which I have often acknowledged as formative—including, in “Many Voices,” in my Kyoto Prize acceptance speech, in 2012—followed from Bishop Middleton’s diocesan initiative: “The native Christian is a necessary link between European and Pagan” (CWLB 2:19). I do not think this leads to the mistaken conclusion of an essential prehuman psychology shared by all “natives,” as I have urged in my review of Vivek Chibber’s book,

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where the author mistakenly assumes that this was also the assumption of the Subaltern Studies historians (Spivak, “A Penny for the Old Guy,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, forthcoming). It is rather the danger that I discuss in the body of my essay, of the possibility of political mobilization when belief and faith are established as either allies of a race- and class- fixed reasonableness or placed in a binary opposition with reason. It is only in that way that we can explain the current controversy in India over censoring Wendy Doniger’s book: “Penguin Books India has said this week that it will destroy all available copies of the 2009 book by the Indologist Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History, as part of a court settlement” with “the Hindu group Shiksha Bachao Andolan (Save Education Campaign). . . . Batra, who filed the suit, is . . . the head of the Vidya Bharati Akhil Bharatiya Shiksha Sansthan, the educational arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the brains of the Hindu right. The spokesman of the Hindu right’s cultural wing, Prakash Sharma, called him a ‘senior and revered figure, who has always fought against elements that pollute the minds of our youth.’ The party of the Hindu right, BJP, believes that it will win the national elections this year, with its Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi leading it to victory. Alongside the court cases of people such as Batra has been a chilling breeze through the media as owners have begun to cull editors who have been critical of Modi” ( Vijay Prashad in the Guardian, February 12, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/12/wendy- doniger- bookhinduism- penguin- hindus), even as, on February 13, 2014, the U.S. India Political Action Committee (USINPAC), the leading advocacy organization, representing over three million Indian Americans in the United States, appreciated the meeting between U.S. ambassador to India Nancy Powell and BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. I draw your attention to Vinay Dharwadker, “Censoring the Ramayana” (PMLA 127, no. 3 [May 2012]), where it is, after all, one of the English- educated Indians residing abroad who is able to take a stand against this sort of Hindu fundamentalist violence, finally quoting a poet writing in Hindi, Kunwar Narayan. I believe the “problem,” complicit here with the “solution,” is the hospitality lodged within the very definition of democracy, which is forever open to unmarked views, as Dharwadker himself notes: “Hindu fundamentalists coexist with us, as they take advantage of a modernity that they can neither ingest nor disgorge and thrive in the institutions of a secular democracy without which they would not exist but that they hate sufficiently to destroy” (“Censoring the Ramayana,” 445). The solution is a persistently educated electorate, not simply the right to information—we are back to Bishop Middleton and the task of saying yes to the enemy—imperialist and fundamentalist—the move toward unconditional ethics where I began. 20. Foucault hailed Kant as the inaugurator of modernity for a somewhat different reason (Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow [New York: Pantheon, 1984], 32–50). 21. The passage from Boccaccio on Dante, quoted and approved by Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:229n1, refers to woman as a “suspicious animal” and counsels philosophers against marrying. Given Coleridge’s personality and circumstances, let us just put it down to experience being counted as representative, and leave it at that. 22. CWLB 2:368. 23. Jacques Derrida, Rogues:Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale- Anne Brault and Michale Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

Acknowledgments

We are deeply indebted to our contributors for their work, and for the enthusiasm and patience they have brought to our volume. Thank you in particular to Sara Guyer and Brian McGrath for the opportunity to be included in their exemplary “Lit Z” series. This book would have been something quite different without Tom Lay’s brilliant support, guidance, and insight. Needless to say, we are immensely grateful to him. Eric Newman also expertly—and smoothly—led us through the production process.We are also grateful for the insights of our two extraordinary readers,Theresa Kelley and Charles Mahoney. Additionally, we want to thank and acknowledge Darren Waterston for giving us permission to use his painting, His Universe, for our cover, and for inspiring our reflection on its own romantic constellations. The volume was made possible by funds generously awarded by the Faculty Development Fund at Brown University and by the University of Oregon Humanities Center.

Contributors

Ian Balfour, Professor of English at York University, is the author of Northrop Frye and The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. He edited, with the filmmaker Atom Egoyan, Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film (MIT Press, 2004), with Eduardo Cadava a double issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on human rights, and was sole editor of Late Derrida for SAQ. He has taught at Cornell as the M. H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor of English and has held visiting professorships at Williams College, Rice, and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, among others. He is currently finishing a book on the sublime. David L. Clark is Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies and Associate Member of the Health Studies Program in the Department of Health, Aging and Society at McMaster University, where he teaches courses in critical theory, critical animal studies, and Romantic literature and culture. In 2012 he was George Whalley Visiting Professor in Romanticism at Queen’s University, and in 2013 he was Lansdowne Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria. He has published essays in Diacritics, Yale French Studies, Studies in Romanticism, New Centennial Review, Literature and Medicine, and World Picture, among other journals, and has written on a wide range of topics, from Kant to Derrida and from the testamentary animal to the question of philosophy in wartime. He is completing a monograph titled Bodies and Pleasures in Late Kant. Peter de Bolla is Professor of Cultural History and Aesthetics and Director of the Cambridge Concept Lab. His most recent book is The Architecture of Concepts:The Historical Formation of Human Rights (Fordham University Press, 2013). Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. He has published widely in the areas of film, literature, and theory and is the author of Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (1987), Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), and, with Lauren Berlant, Sex, or the Unbearable (2014). He is currently completing Bad Education: Why Queerness Is No Good.

326

Contributors

Joel Faflak is Professor of English and Theory in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University, where he is Director of the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities. He is author of Romantic Psychoanalysis (2008), co- author of Revelation and Knowledge (2011), editor of De Quincey’s Confessions (2009), and editor or co- editor of eight volumes, including The Handbook to Romanticism Studies (2012), The Public Intellectual and the Culture of Hope (2013), and Romanticism and the Emotions (2014). He has won the Polanyi Prize for Literature (2002) and the Governor General’s Gold Medal for Research Excellence (1999). He is currently working on two books, “Romantic Psychiatry: The Psychopathology of Happiness” and “Get Happy! Utopianism and the American Film Musical.” William Galperin is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author most recently of The Historical Austen (2003) and is completing a study, “The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday,” from which his essay here is excerpted. Mike Goode is Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University and the author of Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1789–1890 (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is completing a book- length manuscript titled “Participatory Romanticism,” on the formal afterlives of literary texts by Scott, Austen, and Blake. Sara Guyer is the author of Romanticism after Auschwitz and Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (Fordham University Press, 2015). She is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she directs the Center for the Humanities. Mary Jacobus is Professor Emerita of English, University of Cambridge, and Professor Emerita, Cornell University. She has written widely on Wordsworth, Romanticism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and art. Her most recent book is Romantic Things: A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud (University of Chicago Press, 2012). Her book on the artist Cy Twombly, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2016. Simon Jarvis teaches English at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, as well as of many essays on the poetics of verse and on philosophical aesthetics.

Contributors

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Jacques Khalip is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Brown University. He is the author of Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (2009) and the co- editor of Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media (2011). He is currently completing a book- length manuscript titled “The Last of Romanticism,” a study of romantic and postromantic reflections on extinction and wasted life through literature, photography, and film. Robert Mitchell is the Marcello Lotti Professor of English and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory at Duke University. He is the author of three monographs, including Bioart and the Vitality of Media (University of Washington Press, 2010) and Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), and co- author of Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2006) and the DVD Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). He is also co- editor of several essay collections, including Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge, 2003) and Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media (Stanford University Press, 2011), and co- editor of the book series In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science (University of Washington Press). Forest Pyle is Professor of English at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Art’s Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism (Fordham University Press, 2013), The Ideology of Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 1996) and other essays in romantic and postromantic literature, culture, and theory. He is currently working on a book- length manuscript, “ ‘The True Image of the Past’: Romanticism Yesterday and Tonight.” Marc Redfield is Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His publications include Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (1996); The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (2003); The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (2009); and Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (Fordham University Press, 2015). He has co- edited High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction (2002), edited Legacies of Paul de Man (2007), and guest- edited special issues of the journals Diacritics, Romantic Praxis, and The Wordsworth Circle.

328

Contributors

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor and Founder of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Her most recent book is Readings (2014). She holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Toronto, London, Rovira I Virgili, Rabindra Bharati, San Martín, St. Andrews, Vincennes à Saint- Denis, Yale, Ghana- Legon, Presidency University, and Oberlin College. She is involved in international women’s movements and issues surrounding ecological agriculture. She has been deeply engaged in rural education in West Bengal for nearly three decades. Orrin N. C. Wang is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is the author of Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (2011), which was awarded the Jean- Pierre Barricelli Prize, and Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory (1996). He is also the Series Editor of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series. His current project investigates the historical and transhistorical dimensions of Romantic media.

Index

Abrams, M. H., 19, 253 Adorno, Gretel, 86 Adorno, Theodor, 11, 74, 176, 186–87, 192, 198, 200, 206–7, 250 aesthetics, 88–89, 96, 108–10, 133, 198 Agamben, Giorgio, 2–4, 176 Alexander, E.P., 239 Anes, Gonzalo, 86 Ankersmit, F. R., 221 Antelme, Robert, 97 Aquila, Francesco Faraone, 99; “Two Views of the Belvedere Torso,” 99, 99–102 Aristotle, 309 Armstrong, Nancy, 227, 283 Arsenjuk, Luka, 304 Ashbery, John, 9 Auerbach, Erich, 312 Austen, Jane, 12, 17, 19–25, 248–62; Emma, 21, 253, 258–62; Mansfield Park, 21, 22; Northanger Abbey, 22; Persuasion, 258; Pride and Prejudice, 20–21, 22 Austen, J. L., 130 avant-garde, 73–74 Badiou, Alain, 7, 293, 297 Baer, Benjamin, 311 Barthes, Roland, 21, 78, 200, 203–5, 298, 303 Baucom, Ian, 90 Baudrillard, Jean, 190 Beckett, Samuel, 107; Waiting for Godot, 107 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 207 Benjamin, Walter, 1–3, 8, 17–18, 20, 86, 102–3, 131, 181, 211 Bhargava, Pradeep, 317

biopolitics, 10, 93, 97 Blake, William, 102, 104, 123; The Book of Urizen, 104; “The Chimney Sweeper,” 102 Blanchot, Maurice, 17, 18, 97 Blight, David, 233 Bloch, Ernst, 23 Bordwell, David, 303 Brady, Mathew, 91; The Dead of Antietam, 91 Brewster, David, 168 Browning, Robert, 163; Sordello, 163 Bryson, Norman, 30 Buchloch, Benjamin, 78 Burton, Tim, 11, 170, 176; Sweeney Todd, 170, 176, 180 Butin, Hubertus, 72, 83 Butler, Judith, 106 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 23, 26–31, 171, 310; Don Juan, 26–30 Cain, James M., 285; Double Indemnity, 285 Calder, Alexander, 301 Carlyle, Thomas, 226 Cavell, Stanley, 11, 18, 27–29, 122–33, 139 Celan, Paul, 110–11 Cesaire, Aime, 312 Chandler, James, 2 Chapman, Jake and Dinos, 93 Chase, Cynthia, 7–8 Church, Edwin, 208; Rainy Season in the Tropics, 208 cinema, 167–81, 251–52, 254–62, 296–98 Clark, T. J., 108

330

Index

Colebrook, Claire, 109 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 12–13, 18, 18, 19, 25–26, 30, 123, 167, 293–305, 309–19; Biographia Literaria, 309, 312–13, 315–18; Christabel, 30; “Kubla Khan,” 30; “Religious Musings,” 313; Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 12, 290, 293–305 Collingwood, R. G., 223 constellation, 1–2, 4, 6, 8, 13–14, 20, 38 contemporary, 2–4, 6–9, 11, 13–14, 39, 70, 72–73, 83, 122–24, 126, 132, 248, 310 Dante, 43 Danto, Arthur C., 59 Davis, Jefferson, 219–22, 228; The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, 220; Scotland and the Scottish People, 220–22 Debord, Guy, 11, 180 Defoe, Daniel, 277; Robinson Crusoe, 277 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 97, 109 de Man, Paul, 7–10, 35, 39–45, 47–55, 58–62, 74, 94, 181, 298, 310–11 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 47–55, 58–62, 110–11, 292, 311, 319 Dickens, Charles, 296 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 89, 104, 108 Dixon, Thomas, 237; The Clansman, 237; The Leopard’s Spots, 237 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 10, 49; “The Adventure of the Empty House,” 49; “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor,” 57; “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” 57; “The Crooked Man,” 57; “The Final Problem,” 49, 57; “The Greek Interpreter,” 56; “A Scandal in Bohemia,” 56; “The Sign of Four,” 49, 56 Dracula (Stoker), 57 Dryden, John, 187, 194–95; Sylvae, 187, 194–95 Duchamp, Marcel, 73 Dyer, Richard, 175

Eco, Umberto, 56 Edelman, Lee, 173 Eisenstein, Sergei, 296, 303–4 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 124, 250 Empson, William, 198, 294, 300 everyday, 17–31, 125–26, 134 Favret, Mary, 91 Ferguson, Frances, 271, 294–95 Flaubert, Gustave, 56 Fosse, Bob, 171; All That Jazz, 171 Foster, Hal, 73–75 Foucault, Michel, 180, 268, 271, 273, 275, 295, 311 François, Anne-Lise, 294 Franzen, Jonathan, 285; The Corrections, 285 Freeman, Judi, 59–60 Freud, Sigmund, 36, 179, 268 Friedrich, Caspar David, 72–73, 82–83 Galperin, William, 262 Gigante, Denise, 275 Godard, Jean-Luc, 298 Godwin, William, 170, 267–273, 276, 282, 285; Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 267–71; Of Political Justice, 267; Of Population, 272 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 276; Wilheim Meister, 276 Goodwin, Rutherford, 232 Goodwin, W. A. D., 229–30 Goya (Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes), 10, 86–114; Grande hazana! Con muertos! (Great deeds! With the dead!), 87–88, 88, 95–98, 104–5; Nada. Ello lo dice. (Nothing.That is what it says.), 90, 109–10;The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 111, 113; Yo lo vi. (I saw it.), 111–14, 112 Grave, Johannes, 117 Greg, W. W., 156 Griffith, D. W., 237; The Birth of a Nation, 237

Index

Grossman, David, 114 Gunning, Tom, 170 Hamacher, Werner, 8 Hamilton, Paul, 18 Harari, Roberto, 40 Harootunian, Harry, 23 Heaney, Seamus, 72, 187 Heckerling, Amy, 12, 252; Clueless, 255–56, 258–59, 262 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 250 Heidegger, Martin, 17, 23, 60, 133, 136, 207 Herr, Michael, 113 Hillhouse, James, 226 historicism, 6–7, 18, 92, 241 Hoberman, J., 167 Hogg, James, 167; The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 167 Hogle, Jerrold, 2, 176 Holden, Anthony, 186, 189, 198 Holderlin, Friedrich, 206–7 Horkheimer, Max, 176 Hughes, Robert, 106 Hume, David, 19–20 Hunt, Leigh, 148–54; The Story of Rimini, 149, 151–53 Husserl, Edmund, 22 Jacobus, Mary, 7, 72, 83 Jameson, Fredric, 172–73, 179, 277 Joyce, James, 285; Ulysses, 285 Joy Division, 251 Kant, Immanuel, 88–89, 101–2, 109, 123–24, 132, 259–60, 299, 305, 309, 312–313, 315, 317, 319; Anthropology, 260; Critique of Judgment, 88–89; Toward Perpetual Peace, 102 Keats, John, 5–6, 11, 30–31, 91, 105–6, 129, 142–64; Endymion, 11, 142–64; The Fall of Hyperion, 91; Hyperion, 91, 105–6; “Ode to a Nightingale,” 5–6; Sleep and Poetry, 148–49; “To Autumn,” 31

331

Ketchum, Margaret, 155 Keymar, Thomas, 256 Khalip, Jacques, 167 Kirschenbaum, Matthew G., 291 Kubiak, Anthony, 174 Kushner, Tony, 171; Angels in America, 171 Lacan, Jacques, 35–39, 74, 173–74 Landry, Donna, 310 Latour, Bruno, 292 Lebeer, Irmeline, 70–71, 75 Leeman, Richard, 198–99, 208 Lefebvre, Henri, 17 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 291–92, 295 Lewis, Matthew, 176 life, 4, 36–45, 53, 110–11, 171–72, 176 Lindstrom, Eric, 160 Lohar, Nimai, 309–10 Lucretius, 111 Lukács, Georg, 227 Lum, Ken, 298 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 74, 98 lyric, 11, 74, 186–87, 192, 198, 211 Mallarmé, Stephane, 298 Malthus, Thomas, 267–273, 275, 277–280, 285; A Principle of Population, 271 Matthews, Peter, 177–78 Marx, Karl, 268, 309 Mayr, Ernst, 274–75 McGann, Jerome, 293–94 McGrath, Douglas, 252, 257 McLane, Maureen N., 278–79 Mieszkowski, Jan, 93, 107, 112 Milbanke, Anne (Lady Byron), 20–22, 26 Miller, D. A., 277 Miller, J. Hillis, 254–55 Miller, Steven, 87 Mitchell, W. J. T., 172–73, 292, 299 Moretti, Franco, 276–77 Morin, Edgar, 175 Morton, Timothy, 110, 294

332

Index

Mukherjee, Ankhi, 310 Müller, Max, 314 Mulvey, Laura, 169 Naas, Michael, 110 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 105 Newman, Barnett, 73 Nieed, Andrew, 285; Gattaca, 285 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 39, 52–54, 50, 124, 178 Notopoulos, James, 44–45 O’Hara, Frank, 148, 163 Paget, Sidney, 49, 55, 58 Panovsky, Erwin, 203–4 pastoral, 72, 186–200, 205–11 Paulson, Ronald, 104, 107 Pfau, Thomas, 106 Picasso, Pablo, 148 Plato, 43–44 Poe, Edgar Allen, 57 Pollard, Edward, 220, 232 Pope, Alexander, 157 Potts, Alex, 99 Poussin, Nicolas, 204 Prince, Mary, 313 Pyle, Forest (Tres), 114, 169, 172, 311, 317 Rajan, Balachandra, 92 Rajan, Tilottama, 90–91, 95, 104 Rancière, Jacques, 7, 13, 102–3, 105, 296–304 Rauschenberg, Robert, 209 redemption, 8–9, 29 Redfield, Marc, 106 Reiman, Donald, 4 Richardson, Samuel, 282 Richter, Gerhard, 10, 70–83; 4 Panes of Glass, 73; Cell, 75–76, 76; Confrontation 1 ,2, and 3, 75–79, 76, 80; Dead, 78; Hanged, 76, 79–81, 81; October 18, 1977, 75–82, 76 Ridpath, John, 167 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 187

Robertson, Lisa, 163 Rodefer, Steven, 142, 163 Roe, Nicholas, 143 Rossler, Martha, 297 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 43, 168, 170–71, 174, 178, 292 Rozema, Patricia, 251–52 Sappho, 199–200 Schelling, F. W. J., 316 Schiller, Friedrich, 296, 303, 315 Schlegel, Friedrich, 316 Scholem, Gershom, 131 Scott, Walter, 12, 21–22, 219–29, 231, 234–37, 251, 282; The Antiquary, 226; The Bride of Lammermoor, 226; Ivanhoe, 223; Peveril of the Peak, 226; Redgauntlett, 219; Rob Roy, 219, 227; Waverly, 219, 221 Sebald, W. G., 72 Sedgewick, Eve, 57 Senghor, Leopold, 312 Shakespeare, William, 125, 148 Shelley, Mary, 12, 43, 170, 176, 179, 269, 278–85; Frankenstein, 12, 57, 269, 277–84 Shelley, Percy, 2, 6, 9, 30–31, 36–38, 40–45, 123, 129, 167–68, 170–72, 174, 176, 178, 181, 211, 267; Adonais, 170; A Defense of Poetry, 2, 6, 36–37, 171–72; Epipsychidion, 171; “Mont Blanc,” 174; “Mutability,” 211; Prometheus Unbound, 171, 293; The Triumph of Life, 9, 11, 30, 40–45, 168–81 Simms, William Gilmore, 237 Simpson, David, 294 Siskin, Clifford, 292 Smith, Adam, 225 Sokurov, Aleksander, 181; The Russian Ark, 181 Sontag, Susan, 89 Spenser, Edmund, 208–11; Mutabilitie, 208–11 Spinoza, Baruch, 96–97

Index

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 48 Stevens, Wallace, 163 Stewart, Dugald, 225 Stillinger, Jack, 155–56 Stillman, Anne, 145 Storr, Robert, 72, 82 sublime, 58–59, 88–89, 134, 138, 148, 305 Sutherland, Kathryn, 256 Swann, Karen, 163 Symbolic (Lacan), 172–74 Tansey, Mark, 10, 47–55, 58–62 Tagore, Rabindranath, 319 Tarantino, Quentin, 171, 180; Inglorious Basterds, 180 Tasso, 194 Taylor, Charles, 293 Taylor, John, 155 Terada, Rei, 91 Teskey, Gordon, 211 Theocritus, 187, 191–95, 202, 205–6, 211; Idylls, 187, 193–95, 202, 206 Thompson, Kristin, 175 Thoreau, Henry David, 124 trauma, 70, 74, 167, 178, 181 Treviranus, 36, 39 Trier, Lars von, 11, 170, 177–81; Dancer in the Dark, 11, 170, 177–81 Twombly, Cy, 11, 48, 186–211; Aristaeus Mourning the Loss of Bees (1973), 200–2, 201; Epithalamion III (1976), 208, 209; Fagus sylvatica, from Natural History Part II: Some Trees of Italy (1975–76), 186, 187, 191; Idilli (I am Thyrsis of Etna blessed with a tuneful

333

voice) (1976), 186, 195, 196; Muses (1979), 189, 190, 198; Thyrsis (triptych) (1976), 195, 197; Untitled (1976), 186, 189, 208, 210; Untitled (diptych) (1976), 189, 191; Untitled (Sappho) (1976), 199, 199–200; Untitled (Thyrsis’ Lament for Daphnis) (1976), 186, 192–93, 193; Virgil (1973), 203–5, 204, 207 Viola, Bill, 298 Virgil, 43, 187, 191–92, 200–6; Georgics, 191–92, 200–6 Vesalius, Andreas, 97 visuality, 10–11, 13, 92–95, 112–13 Walker, Eric, 27 Waterston, Darren, 13–14 Wang, Orrin N. C., 181 Warhol, Andy, 73–74, 77 Warner, Bill, 292 Warren, Robert Penn, 299–300, 303 Watt, Ian, 277 Whicher, Stephen, 91 White, Hayden, 226 Wilde, Oscar, 56, 189 Williams, Raymond, 17, 249 Winckelman, Johann Joachim, 98–105 Winnicott, Donald, 93 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 124, 126, 128–30 Woodhouse, Richard, 154 Wordsworth, William, 19, 23–25, 35–41, 122–24, 126, 129, 131–39, 251, 311, 313, 317 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj, 173, 293, 295, 297

Sara Guyer and Brian McGrath, series editors Sara Guyer, Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism. Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe, Ending and Unending Agony: On Maurice Blanchot. Translated by Hannes Opelz. Emily Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation. Marc Redfield, Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America. Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle (eds.), Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism.