Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin 9781623563462, 9781623561116, 9781628926934, 9781623568092

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Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin

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Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin Walter L. Reed

N E W YOR K • LON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Walter L. Reed, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reed, Walter L., author. Romantic literature in light of Bakhtin / Walter L. Reed. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62356-346-2 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-62356-111-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), 1895-1975. 2. Romanticism — History and criticism. I. Title. PG2947.B3R44 2014 809’.9145--dc23 2013045209 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6346-2 PB: 978-1-6235-6111-6 ePDF: 978-1-6235-6809-2 ePub: 978-1-6235-6404-9 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Stephen Winsor Reed, 1912–1966

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Contents Acknowledgments Foreword: Romanticism in Light of Bakhtin

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1 Architectonics: Articulating a Period Imagination 2 Personalism: Reckoning Voices 3 Chronotopes: Coordinating Representative Genres Afterword: Bakhtin in Light of Romanticism

1 41 77 139

Appendix: Diagrams Notes Index

147 149 171

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Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank Mikhail Epstein for continual encouragement of this project, specific advice about turns of the argument, and generous collaboration over Bakhtin and many other matters during our years of friendship. I am no less grateful to Michael Holquist for half a century of friendship, collegiality and dialogic inspiration, as well as for insisting that I read Bakhtin as he began his work on The Dialogic Imagination. I thank Vern McGee for many insights into the problems of translating from Bakhtin’s Russian, from the writing of his dissertation that became Speech Genres and Other Late Essays to the present. I owe a debt to the late Maximilian Aue for a better understanding of the heights and depths of German Romanticism, to the late Louis Mackey for a better grasp of the ancient and ongoing quarrel between literature and philosophy, and to Marshall Duke for a better understanding of fictional personality, in literature and in life. Cathy Caruth, John Sitter and William Gruber offered constructive advice about an earlier draft of the manuscript; thoughtful commentary by Michael Gamer and Jonathan Roberts helped me reshape the book as it now stands. Bree Beal provided valuable research and editing assistance in the last stages of revision. None of them, of course, is responsible for any questionable assertions, inaccuracies of reference or infelicities of expression that may remain. I thank Dean Steven Sanderson and Dean Robert Paul of Emory College for approving the sabbatical leaves in which much of the book was conceived and written. A version of Chapter 2, part III appeared in “Author and Hero in Frankenstein’s Aesthetic Activity,” Dialog/Carnival/Chronotope 2, No. 42 (2009), 7–27; a version of Chapter 3, part V appeared in “London Calling: The Urban Chronotope of Romanticism,” Non-site, Dec. 28, 2011 . Permission to use this material has been granted by both these journals. An earlier version of Chapter 3, part IV appeared in ix

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Acknowledgments

“Soul-Making: Art, Therapy and Theology in Keats, Hillman and Bakhtin,” reprint permission granted by the University of Notre Dame, Religion & Literature, Issue 29.1 (Spring, 1997). I am grateful to the editors of all three journals. Haaris Naqvi, Senior Commissioning Editor at Bloomsbury Publishing, gave the manuscript a courteous, prompt and supportive reception, for which I am most grateful. I remain aware of other colleagues and students (not to mention teachers) beyond those mentioned here who have contributed, wittingly or unwittingly, to the illumination that this study tries to provide. I hope my failure to mention them by name here will not be taken as a lack of appreciation. Last but not least, I am grateful to my wife, the Rev. Loree Reed, for reminding me, every so often, that there are stages on life’s way beyond the aesthetic and institutions other than the academic.

Foreword

Romanticism in Light of Bakhtin

Latin literary language was created in the light of Greek literary language. Bakhtin “What would Bakhtin say?” This hypothetical question, the subtitle of an essay by Mikhail Epstein, is pertinent to ask about a thinker, the implication of whose methods and concepts far exceeded the subject area, broad though it was, of his accomplished research.i In the last half-century, as Bakhtin’s all-but-forgotten writings from the 1920s through the 1950s began to be recovered and rehabilitated in thenSoviet Russia and translated into English and other Western European languages, this question has informed a wide range of studies, literary and otherwise. Now-familiar concepts like “dialogue,” “carnival,” and even “heteroglossia” began to be applied to all kinds of cultural artifacts and activities, especially as Bakhtin’s American translators and editors made his original and provocative thinking about language, literature and human communication in general available to a wide audience of scholars and students across the academic disciplines. Academic understanding of the genre of the novel in particular, one of Bakhtin’s major concerns throughout his long career, underwent a transformation as existing histories and theories of the novel struggled to come to terms with sweeping and penetrating essays like “Epic and Novel,” “Discourse in the Novel” and “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” The more traditional literary genres of poetry and drama were also subjected to Bakhtinian scrutiny, even though they had received less extensive and less sympathetic treatment than novels and “novelness” xi

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from the author himself in his books and essays. Even with the Bible, to which for political as well as intellectual reasons, Bakhtin made only occasional reference in his writings, Bakhtinian concepts and methods found fruitful application. And this is to say nothing about fields such as art history, psychology, film studies, education, anthropology and linguistics, even architecture, all of which have been enriched from Bakhtinian perspectives.ii The present study undertakes to introduce a few of the less widely appropriated (also less well understood) concepts and terms from Bakhtin’s creative thinking about the nature of language, the phenomenon of genres, and the vicissitudes of history and apply them to a period of literary and cultural history in the West, the era of Romanticism. The study comes out of many years—more than four decades—of my teaching Romantic literature to undergraduate and graduate students in several American universities. And it comes from my discovering, during much this same time, the remarkable relevance and applicability of Bakhtin’s writings, as they came forth from gifted translators and adventurous academic presses, to all sorts and conditions of cultural expression. Bakhtin’s thinking was focused for the most part on other periods, genres and canonical authors than those of Romanticism, especially when it came to the British Romantic literature that is the main focus of this study. But as my own teaching and research pursued what originally seemed to be two quite separate paths, I found them converging, again and again. As I tried to understand and explain the remarkable verbal creativity, the complex presentations of self and the larger structures of thought shared among Romantic writers, I came to see the surprising way in which Bakhtin’s thinking—about the dynamic coherence provided by genres of speech and writing, the radically interpersonal character of human communication, the historically shifting systems of culture— was more than simply applicable or relevant to Romantic literature. I discovered what Sergei Averintsev, Russian philologist and polymath and one of his editors, wrote of Bakhtin some twenty years after his death: “His works are not a depository of ready scholarly results that

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can be mechanically ‘applied’, but something other and greater: a source of mental energy.”iii The main concern of the present book is to provide an energetic Bakhtinian illumination of the general structures and particular textures of Romantic literature. But it also will suggest, along the way and in a short Afterword, how Romantic literature also sheds light on the writing, a good century later, of Bakhtin himself. And according to Bakhtin’s seminal idea of the pervasively dialogic character of all human communication in language, this is as it should be. According to Bakhtin, especially in the sphere of what he calls “aesthetic activity,” discursive writing and imaginative writing speak to one another with commensurate though different kinds of authority, from the privilege, as he put it, of their mutual “outsideness” to one another. “In the realm of culture,” he writes in his late essay “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff,” outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding. It is only through the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly [. . .] A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning. They engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures [. . .] Such a dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in their merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched.iv

In this way also the bearing of Bakhtin’s twentieth-century Russian philosophy and literary theory on the literary production of British and other European writers from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century may be understood. The light of Bakhtin comes from outside the historical period and its canonical authors, outside its particular configuration of thought. And in this way students, teachers and scholars of Romanticism (in my experience, not easily distinguishable from one another) may find that their own outsideness to both sides of this particular dialogic encounter leads to enrichment as well. For it is

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not as a predictable application of previously formulated “theory” to a set of “primary texts” that this book is conceived; rather it is conceived as a conversation between two sets of “works” or “activities” that share common intellectual and linguistic ground even as they stand apart from one another. It is offered not as a hermeneutics of suspicion, as this form of interpretation has been called, where the foundational discourse of one particular philosophical school of thought (Marxian, Freudian, Foucauldian, Derridean) is invoked to reveal, in X-ray fashion, what is really being communicated in the inchoate or mystified articulations of art or aesthetic activity. Rather this book is offered as a poetics of respect, in which two complementary forms of discourse (or sets of utterances, in Bakhtin’s preferred term), are brought to bear upon one another in a demonstration of their mutual illumination, their reciprocal persuasiveness, coherence and integrity. Such a balance is not easy to achieve or maintain. But its goal is to show that, in Bakhtin’s writing as well as in Romantic literature, the analytic and the creative modes of expression are not separate and distinct from one another. Rather they are overlapping discourses, interpenetrating types of utterance—as in the case of the genre, meta-genre or super-genre of the novel to which Bakhtin ended up devoting so much of his attention throughout his career. It aims to present, to use a favorite formulation of Coleridge’s that points to the foundation of the cultural project of Romanticism itself, a non-reductive confrontation of creative imagination and critical reason. But most of all, I want to show how understanding Romantic literature in light of Bakhtin is to bring the “mental energy” of his thinking and writing to bear on the imaginative activity of other thinkers and writers, collectively as well as individually. As those familiar with the shifting emphases of Bakhtin’s writing will recognize, Bakhtin’s own remarks on Romanticism are not entirely positive. Especially in his book on Rabelais and the social and cultural tradition of carnival, Bakhtin argued that Romantic literature narrowed the broad, inclusive laughter of carnival as it had been more capaciously dramatized in the period of the Renaissance (in Shakespeare and Cervantes as well as in Rabelais). In placing Rabelais at the high point

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in “the history of laughter” and sketching the related history of the grotesque in literature, Bakhtin argued that Romanticism turned the grotesque inward, exchanging its public square in the Renaissance for “a private ‘chamber’ [which] became, as it were, an individual carnival, marked by a vivid sense of isolation . . . transposed into a subjective, idealistic philosophy.” The festive laughter of the Renaissance “was cut down to cold humor, irony, sarcasm. It ceased to be a joyful, triumphant hilarity.”v Nevertheless, even in the midst of this negative analysis of Romantic negativity, Bakhtin was capable of stepping back from such an invidious comparative judgment and taking a more comprehensive and nuanced view of Romanticism itself. In a footnote he added to his characterization of the “false concept of the role and limitations of subjective consciousness among the Romantics,” Bakhtin admits, “We do not pose the problem of Romanticism in all its complexity. We are merely concerned with the factors that permitted this movement to discover and understand (in part) Rabelais and the grotesque.”vi As Michael Gardiner points out, Bakhtin has more positive things to say about the literature of this period when discussing, in another, earlier essay, the Romanticism of Goethe. “Bakhtin’s fairly disparaging account of Romanticism [. . .] can be subjected to re-envisioning and potential enrichment,” Gardiner argues, by comparing it to the similarly ambivalent attitude of the French social thinker Henri Lefebvre toward “the intellectual and cultural legacy of Romanticism.”vii In any case, it is not the legacy of Romanticism that I am most concerned with in this book. Rather I am concerned with its initial expression in Western history and the way the “problem of Romanticism in all its complexity,” left unaddressed by Bakhtin directly, looks in the relatively distant mirror provided by some of his key concepts.

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Architectonics: Articulating a Period Imagination

It’s equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two. Friedrich Schlegel

I The editor of the English translation of Bakhtin’s earliest writings, most of them unfinished and unpublished in his lifetime, entitles his introduction to the volume “The Architectonics of Answerability.” Michael Holquist offers the phrase as a working title for an ambitious project Bakhtin undertook in the early 1920s, a systematic treatise that was to have included sections on ethics, aesthetics, politics, and religion. Although he offered no title of his own, Bakhtin gave a brief description of this magnum opus in what seems to be part of the first section, translated by Vadim Liapunov as Toward a Philosophy of the Act: The first part of our inquiry will be devoted to an examination of these fundamental moments in the architectonic of the actual world of the performed deed—the world actually experienced, and not the merely thinkable world. The second part will be devoted to aesthetic activity as an actually performed act or deed, both from within its product and from the standpoint of the author as answerable participant [. . .] The third part will be devoted to the ethics of politics, and the fourth and final part to religion. The 1

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architectonic of that world is reminiscent of the architectonic of Dante’s world and of the world of medieval mystery plays.1

The term “architectonic” or, more usually in English, the plural “architectonics,” refers literally to architecture and the construction of buildings, but metaphorically it refers to a comprehensive system of thought, a systematic arrangement of knowledge. Architectonics articulates the foundational structure of any systematic philosophy. The concept and ambition go back to Aristotle (the term is used in his Nicomachean Ethics, for example), and the idea of architectonics was given new currency and prestige in Kant’s magisterial critiques, The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason and The Critique of Judgement. (Kant claimed that reason itself is architectonic in nature.) An architectonics was part and parcel of any number of nineteenth-century philosophies, neo-Kantian or Idealist, and it was from his early attraction to the neo-Kantian philosophy of the Marburg School in Germany, led by Hermann Cohen, that Bakhtin seems to have fastened on the project as well as the term.2 Bakhtin’s architectonics is distinctive, however, and not just because only part of his projected manuscript seems to have been written. His is a distinctively provisional and uniquely self-revising structure of thought; it offers an “open totality,” to use one of his formulations cited in the Foreword. It is a holistic schema marked by “unfinalizability,” to use another of his favorite terms, even in its conception. Such a paradoxical attitude toward systematic thought has its roots in Romanticism. It can be found in the aphorism of Friedrich Schlegel in the epigraph to this chapter, as well as in the declaration in Blake’s Jerusalem, “I must create a system or be enslav’d by another Man’s/ I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.”3 Most other philosophical architectonics, of which Kant’s is the supreme example for Bakhtin as for post-Kantian philosophy in general, are closed and finalized (or at least finalizable in principle, in the case of Hegel’s dialectic) in comparison. They aim for stability of separate and distinct categories. In Bakhtin’s thought, however, conceptual categories actively

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contest one another, struggling for dominance and control. Or, in another characteristic tendency of his thinking, they delineate a gradual transition from one category to the other. In some cases, the opposing categories are even said to overlap with one another. Another way of putting it is to say that Bakhtin’s architectonics is dynamic and creative, systematic thinking revealed in the process of laying and rearranging its own foundations. It is in the context of such a flexible philosophical scheme that the extended essay “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” the largest surviving section of Bakhtin’s projected four-fold architectonic and an important early articulation of better-known ideas and methods he developed later in his career, can be best understood. For it is here, in the architectonics of aesthetic activity, that the peculiar, shifting structure of Bakhtin’s discursive categories is first noticeable. While the four major parts of the projected treatise are presented as categorically different from one another, describing radically different types of value or “axiologies,” in the Kantian term, they also turn out to overlap. One realm or sphere of activity turns out to “interpenetrate” or to “permeate” another, as Bakhtin puts it. What are presented initially as hard and fast boundaries become more open, quite crossable borders; these borders, in turn, become thresholds, inviting conceptual trespass across them. Such transformations of a strong binary opposition into a graduated continuum occur unpredictably and without logical inconsistency on Bakhtin’s part, largely it seems because it is always an individual person who is envisioned as acting—as taking meaningful and valid steps, as the Russian word postupok favored by Bakhtin connotes—across as well as within the categories. Furthermore, and this emphasis is crucial to all three chapters of this book, Bakhtin’s schema is founded on the architectonic relations of the individual person as this person sees them: I-for-myself, the-other-for-me, and (less prominent in Bakhtin’s analysis but important nonetheless) I-for-the-other. The concrete individual person does not disappear from philosophical view in this analysis. But she or he only has meaning—only makes meaning and receives meaning—in relationship with other people, others who

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themselves are only meaningful—aesthetically, ethically, politically, and religiously—as dialogically constituted partners or antagonists. Thus toward the end of the surviving “ethical” section of Bakhtin’s philosophical treatise, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, the exposition suddenly turns to aesthetic evidence in an example from literature. “In order to give a preliminary idea of the possibility of such a concrete, value-governed architectonic,” Bakhtin explains, “we shall analyze here the world of aesthetic seeing—the world of art.”4 What this means is that the discussion of ethical answerability will focus on a literary hero, since the work of art is organized, according to Bakhtin, around the human being as the embodiment of aesthetic value. The hero is the center of human value not because he is good in any moral sense or powerful socially or politically, but simply because he or she is the focus of the interested—and for Bakhtin, the loving and sustaining—attention of the author. As in English, the Russian geroi, means “protagonist” or “main character” as much it does as “heroic character or personality.” As Bakhtin develops the distinctively Russian idea of the author’s aesthetic affection for his hero, he turns to the Russian national poet Pushkin for a concrete example. The last ten pages of what has been for sixty pages a treatise on ethics turn into a close reading of Pushkin’s lyric poem “Parting.” In this short poem there turn out to be two heroes (the speaker-hero or “objectified author” and the beloved, the woman he is addressing), an “author-artist” (situated behind the poem and not to be confused with the first-person speaker), and a “contemplator,” a reader. The reader, situated before the text, is not completely distinguishable from the author-artist but is not identical with him either. Thus instead of the ethical unity of one person acting responsibly before others, we are suddenly presented with an aesthetic plurality of four persons, four possible, hypothetical or potential persons in intimate relationship with one another within a work of art, a work formed by the creative activity of one of them, the author-artist who, as artist, is not simply reducible to the historical being who once existed. Significantly, the very same poem by Pushkin becomes the focus of attention at the beginning of “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,”

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the much longer but still incomplete aesthetic part of Bakhtin’s early magnum opus. (These opening pages are placed in a “Supplementary Section” at the end of the text by the editors of the 1990 English translation, due to the fact that the section exists only in a fragmentary form in the surviving manuscript.) Though the terms and concepts in the aesthetic analysis here are somewhat different from those of the ethical analysis of the poem in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, it is the presence of a human being, a concrete though imagined person who functions as a center of value in and of himself, that establishes the domain of art and provides the foundation for aesthetic activity within the literary process and product. “There is no aesthetic vision and there are no works of art without a hero,” Bakhtin asserts. “The only thing we must do,” he says, “is distinguish between an actual expressed hero and a potential hero who strives to break through the shell, as it were, of a given object of aesthetic vision.”5 On the other hand, he acknowledges, there is no hero—only an undeveloped potential of a human being—if there is no author, no creator behind the work. Yet in the very next paragraph Bakhtin acknowledges the instability of this distinction, allowing that in some cases “a given human being and a determinate hero do, in fact, gravitate toward each other and often pass into each other without any mediation” (229). As in his philosophy more generally, Bakhtin’s aesthetics here is internally transgressive. It establishes a polarity, a logical opposition of categories, only to render relative and graduated their distinction from one another. Dualisms become dialogic, complementary instead of oppositional. The last paragraph of the fragmentary opening section of this aesthetic system with interpenetrating parts gives an uncharacteristically fablelike explanation of how, in literature proper, the single or singular person who is the focus of ethical activity becomes more than one aesthetically: Author and hero meet in life; they enter into cognitive-ethical, lived-life relations with each other, contend with each other (even if they meet in one human being). And this event, the event of their

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life, the event of their intensely serious relations and contention, crystallizes in an artistic whole into an architectonically stable yet dynamically living relationship between author and hero which is essential for understanding the life of the work.6

There are five sections of “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” that follow this preliminary discussion: “The Problem of the Author’s Relationship to the Hero,”“The Spatial Form of the Hero,”“The Temporal Whole of the Hero (The Problem of the Inner Man—the Soul),” “The Whole of the Hero as a Whole of Meaning,” and “The Problem of the Author.” Within all of these analytical elaborations, Bakhtin’s own distinctive version of the literary person interpersonally articulated remains central. Once we understand its interpersonal as well as intrapersonal character, its focus on an individuality which is also a sociality, I am claiming here, the modes of personhood elaborated in this early and unpublished essay can provide a compelling scheme for the interpretation of literary texts of all kinds, especially the literary texts of Romanticism. For the creative individual, however problematic he or she may be, is the central (though by no means the exclusive) concern of Romanticism. The creative individual, in fact, is the cornerstone of an architectonics of otherness, as I am calling it, the implicit scheme of relations that organizes the conceptualized world of this distinctive period of European and American cultural history.

II One distinct advantage of the Bakhtinian architectonics of Romanticism that I am offering here is that it mediates a long-standing debate among scholars of this period as to whether Romanticism or the Romantic period actually exists, whether these terms have any definite meaning, given the variety of things they have been used to refer to. “On re-reading this book ten years after I wrote it, I find its chief faults to be those which I myself least easily forgive in the books of

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other men: needless obscurity, and an uncharitable temper,” C. S. Lewis wrote in a preface to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress in 1943. One of the causes of obscurity, he thought, was the way he had used the word “Romanticism”: “I would not now use this word to describe the experience which is central to this book. I would not, indeed, use it to describe anything, for I now believe it to be a word of such varying senses that it has become useless and should be banished from our vocabulary.”7 It is possible that Lewis was remembering the famous essay by Arthur O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” published in 1924, which advocates a similar procedure. Lovejoy specifies three distinct senses of “what is called Romanticism,” two of which he furthermore finds internally contradictory, and concludes “that any attempt at a general appraisal of even of a single chronologically determinate Romanticism—still more, of ‘Romanticism’ as a whole–is a fatuity.” Such a perception of many incompatible Romanticisms eventually yielded to the synthetic, unitarian view proposed by René Wellek, “On the Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History,” which appeared in 1949 and began to enlist a long series of concurring opinions from Western scholars.8 As late as 1972, in his survey “Trends of Recent Research on West European Romanticism,” Henry H. H. Remak affirmed Wellek’s 1963 reaffirmation of a “central creed of the great romantic poets in England, Germany, and France,” namely that “all see the implication of the imagination, symbol, myth, and organic nature, and see it as a part of the great endeavor to overcome the split between subject and object, the self and world, the conscious and unconscious.”9 Admitting that this consensus had been reached and retained “miraculously,” Remak did anticipate, however, that such agreement among scholars might not last for long. He was right. The influential erosion of a unified historical theory of Romanticism in the work of Paul de Man was actually well under way by then, from the essay “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” written and published in French in 1960, to the “Introduction” to the special issue of Studies in Romanticism on the “Rhetoric of

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Romanticism” published in 1979. And it was soon to be taken up, from another theoretical quarter, by Jerome McGann, in a series of essays from the later 1970s, eventually collected in The Beauty of Inflections (1985), and in his influential polemic The Romantic Ideology.10 De Man confessed to feeling a certain “bad conscience,” regretting that the close rhetorical analysis of texts he pioneered had made it impossible to talk meaningfully about periods of literary history like Romanticism, except as “rather crude metaphors for figural patterns rather than historical events or acts.” And McGann distinguished between the great variety of literary works produced in the historical period called Romantic and the anti-historical “ideology of Romanticism” that informs many of the works most highly regarded by literary critics like Wellek, M. H. Abrams, Northrop Frye and others, advocates of what he calls the “unified field theory” of Romanticism.11 But the idea of a unified or even coherent Romanticism has been continually questioned in the last forty years of studies devoted to the period or movement, challenged in the name of historical or linguistic particularities beyond the aesthetic. “The convenient labels by which critics sought to untrouble the roiling waters of actuality have grown more and more irrelevant to the true historical situation,” another distinguished American Romanticist noted in 1993, “or (which is to say much the same thing) they have seemed rather a falsification than an explanation of the nature of the age.”12 The concept of architectonics developed in the early theoretical writings of Bakhtin, however, allows us to see first of all that these opposed ideas about Romanticism are not contradictory alternatives but complementary ones. Indeed, they can be seen as representing two dialogical tendencies, systematic and unifying on the one hand, antisystematic and diversifying on the other, in any cultural construct or verbal utterance. For Bakhtin, it is not the ideological content of particular utterances that determines their unity or diversity—that is, that determines the unity or diversity of a cultural phenomenon, whether a whole historical period or a single verbal text. Rather, it is the way all utterances, large-scale and small, embody and express “two embattled tendencies in the life of language.” “Every utterance

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participates in the ‘unitary language’ (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces),” he argues in “Discourse in the Novel.” “Such is the fleeting language of a day, of an epoch, a social group, a genre, a school and so forth. It is possible to give a concrete and detailed analysis of any utterance, once having exposed it as a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language.”13 This key passage in Bakhtin’s writings has been invoked in support of the emphases in literary scholarship of the West over the past several decades on ethnic diversity and cultural variety, on the particulars of historical materialism and the materials of history, or on the idiosyncrasies of figurative language, the various turnings of tropes, especially in the inevitably figurative language of literature, away from literal meaning and straightforward reference. That is to say, Bakhtin’s formulation of these two tendencies in human communication is usually invoked on the side of the centrifugal, decentralizing or dispersive tendency of literature, without adequate acknowledgement of the centripetal, centralizing or unifying tendency which always stands over against it, in practice as well as theory. Bakhtin himself is partly responsible for this one-sided emphasis. As we have noted in the first part of this chapter, his descriptive elaboration of opposing categories slides, as often as not, into a prescriptive championing of one over the other, in this case into a celebration of the triumph of liberating plurality or “heteroglossia” over restrictively unitary “monoglossia.” But within the larger systematics and anti-systematics of Bakhtin’s thinking, the idea of an overall balance between the two tendencies needs to be restored. As Schlegel puts it, the mind must have a system, implicit or explicit, as well as having no system at all. As Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson observe in their explanation of what they call his “prosaics”: Bakhtin does not mean that mere hostility to authority is a mark of maturity. Nor does he mean to condemn agreement with authority

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as a mark of immaturity or irresponsibility. On the contrary, agreement [. . .] is a truly dialogic relation, and to agree with a discourse is already to have tested it, deprived it of unconditional allegiance, and integrated it into one’s own framework [. . .] To take on responsibility with respect to a discourse, or any kind of authority, it is necessary not to dislike it, but to enter into dialogue with it [. . .]14

It is from this perspective, where the dialogic manifestation of language is understood to be engaged in relationship with its monologic manifestation, as Bakhtin also calls these fundamental configurations of human communication, that we can elaborate the architectonics of otherness in Romanticism. The architectonics of otherness is a collective, dynamically coherent world view operative in this period of literary and cultural history. This is not the systematic description of a phenomenological “first philosophy” here, of the kind Bakhtin himself initially undertook in his unfinished magnum opus known as “The Architectonics of Answerability.” Rather, it is an interpretation of a secondary order, sketched out by Bakhtin in a subsection of this treatise entitled “The Whole of the Hero as the Whole of Meaning.” (As we shall see in Chapter 2, this takes the form of a rudimentary poetics of author-hero relationships in a set of related genres of writing.) The architectonics of otherness in Romanticism as I am describing it may also be identified with what Harry Berger has called an “ecology of mind” or “period imagination” in cultural history: not the historical period itself in its “heterogeneous cultural mix” (as in Curran’s “roiling waters of actuality”), but a holistic construct, “homogeneous in the sense that all its scattered characteristics may be deduced from a few primary ecological and cultural conditions.”15 From the perspective of the deconstruction of literature or program of “rhetorical reading” developed by de Man and his followers, as well as the perspective of the various forms of a new historicism advocated by McGann and critics in solidarity with his social and political critique of literature, such an approach may be seen as regressively ideological, as another form of the false consciousness that de Man calls “the aesthetic

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ideology” and McGann “the Romantic ideology,” even as their definitions of what lies beyond such ideology are sharply divergent. But in the usage of Bakhtin, “ideology” is a less prejudicial term. As Holquist and Emerson explain in their gloss on the word in The Dialogic Imagination, “ideology” as Bakhtin uses it “is not to be confused with its politically oriented English cognate. ‘Ideology’ in Russian is simply an idea-system. But it is semiotic in the sense that it involves the concrete exchange of signs in society and history. Every word/ discourse betrays the ideology of its speaker.”16 I prefer the less ambiguous term “architectonics,” itself a constellation of ideologies in this neutral, Russian sense, a dynamic disposition of thought within a cultural system, including but by no means limited to its systematic organization of literature. An architectonics should be distinguished from a hermeneutics. A hermeneutics promises a rigorous, quasi-scientific method of interpretation aimed at uncovering some truth or reality beyond, behind or beneath the cultural system of signs, however much it lingers on the rhetorical complications or complex materiality of cultural expression. Deconstruction, deManian or Derridian, is in effect a negative hermeneutics, an elaboration of a Nietzschean hermeneutics of suspicion based on the idea that language itself is radically constitutive of the world, at least the world as perceived by human beings. Historical materialism, as redefined by McGann or Fredric Jameson, is a more positive hermeneutics, one in which the totality of history remains an article of faith and is treated as a reality to which men and women can approximate their perceptions, but it still depends on a hermeneutic suspicion vis-à-vis art originally derived from Marx and Engels. What Bakhtin offers instead of these interpretive suspicions, widespread in contemporary literary criticism, might be called a poetics of trust: a poetics based on the assumption (though not, of course, the certainty) of responsible, “answerable” aesthetic activity carried out in and through literary creation. Art qua art is neither delusional nor conspiratorial but hypothetical and provisional, valid in its internal or intrinsic coherence and plausibility rather than in its mimetic correspondence to a world outside its sphere of activity. Artistic creations have validity, both

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productive and receptive, in their own sphere, even though they are not, as philosophers say, veridical, necessarily coinciding with fact or reality. As I have suggested, Bakhtin’s theoretical position develops in part from ideas and systems of ideas first elaborated within the cultural system of Romanticism, in particular the simultaneous attraction to and aversion from systematic thought itself. Such a recognition of intellectual genealogy might, in fact, be invoked to discount the philosophical or historical truth-claims of the argument that follows; it might be used as grounds for dismissing them as simply “the Romantic Ideology” or “the aesthetic ideology” in a new key. But in a tradition of poetics going back much further—back, indeed, to Aristotle—literature may also be situated in a conceptual space between different scientific systems of discourse.17 As the traditional argument goes, literature is more philosophical than history, which is limited to the representation of what actually happened, while it is also more historical than philosophy, which is constrained to report what ought to be the case if the veils of epistemological or ontological illusion are taken away. Such artistic mediation or aesthetic middle ground is always situated precariously between competing claims of transcendental truth and immanent reality. It can never be cleanly or clearly separated from them, even though these distinctions have been described and delimited in numerous “defenses of poetry” over the centuries. But at no time have the claims for literary art been more vigorously promoted and defended than in the Romantic era, and at no time has this defense been more vigorously and intelligently challenged than in the literary criticism and theory of the present.18 What Bakhtin’s concept of architectonics offers is not an “intervention” in this debate, a term sometimes used by those intent on exposing ideological false consciousness in literary texts, but rather a “mediation,” a process in which an experienced and purportedly disinterested outsider is invited to join and redirect an intransigent and embattled exchange of views. As Bakhtin himself wrote in response to a question from the Soviet journal Novy Mir about the then-current state of literary scholarship in the period of his rehabilitation as a thinker

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and writer in Russia, “Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture.” He goes on, in terms that recall his work of almost fifty years earlier, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” “For one cannot even really see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space and because they are others.”19 Bakhtin’s thought belongs to its own, twentieth-century time and Russian place, but it can also help us see into the way in which the age-defining phenomenon of Romanticism was conceptually and perceptually configured a century earlier.

III The architectonics of Romanticism is organized around the perceptual and conceptual disposition of otherness. In the cultural system of Early Modernity, traditionally known as the Renaissance and Reformation in European cultural history, the individual self had assumed a new centrality and autonomy, even as the transcendent, authoritative otherness of the Christian God was being reaffirmed. The architectonics of Early Modernity is an architectonics of analogy, an expression of the doctrine of humankind created in the image of God; humanity was created and could also create in the likeness of divinity. Thus the movement back and forth between macrocosm and microcosm, as Michel Foucault describes it in The Order of Things, or the perception of the created resemblances between one level of the cosmos and another as (with different philosophical assumptions) A. O. Lovejoy describes it in The Great Chain of Being, is understood to belong to the reality of a universe created and sustained by a transcendent God. In the succeeding cultural system of the Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason

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and the Scientific Revolution) this architectonics, constructed on the basis of analogous levels of being, is replaced by an architectonics constructed on the basis of sameness or identity. Under the aegis of nature and reason, which displace or reduce the transcendent otherness of the personal deity (the “three person’d God,” in Donne’s more traditional phrasing) of older Christian theology, the architectonics of sameness declares the relative independence of the natural and human worlds from the earlier orders of the creation and redemption. God’s absolute transcendence and special sovereignty over his creation and creatures is no longer taken for granted. The divine being petitioned in Donne’s lyrics, represented in Milton’s epics and presumed in Shakespeare’s plays, loses his immediate authority over nature, over the “Great Chain of Being” as Lovejoy’s classic study of the surviving medieval cosmology described it. God also lost his authority over human affairs in the public realm of history, at least in the literary and cultural productions that were most influential (or seem so to us) in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The preeminently secular sense of identity, envisioned as a universal and rational “selfsameness” in nature and history, as it might be called, was, of course, rarely absolute. New forms of religious expression arose—in the cultivation of spiritual inwardness in German Pietism, in the lower-class and rural revivals of religion in English Methodism and the North American Great Awakening, and in the Hasidic movement within Eastern European Judaism, for example. But all these forms of faith tended to resituate the authority of the divine within the sphere of personal experience, as a “religion of the heart,” even as other forms of religious expression— Deism,“natural religion,” Unitarianism and pantheism—accommodated the older sacred otherness of God to the ideals of human reason and a nature freed from the superintendence or interference of the supernatural. This sketch of general historical change in Western tradition is familiar to twentieth-century understanding, whether such change is represented as progress (i.e. Enlightenment liberation from oppressive superstition), as decline and fall (as a “dissociation of sensibility,” in

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T. S. Eliot’s phrase), or as a shifting series of different economies of power, a structural succession of “epistemes,” as described by Foucault in The Order of Things. Such a model is subject to endless correction, complication, and objection, but in its broad outlines it indicates what Wellek called, in his defense of the use of terms like “Renaissance,” “Enlightenment” and “Romanticism” as meaningful historical periods, “systems of norms which dominate literature at a specific time of the historical process.”20 In such a system of dominant norms Romanticism can be seen as a partial revival of the divine and transcendent otherness of the Renaissance that had been displaced by the authority of human and immanent selfsameness—of the universality of human reason and natural design—in the Enlightenment. But it is a more relative and more differentiated economy of otherness. In place of the orders of divine creation and divine redemption, as Calvin had called them, the architectonics of analogical levels of being, Romanticism offered mythic or symbolic creativity on the one hand and ironic or allegorical criticism on the other, both finally and fundamentally human in origin and human in their power to liberate people from false consciousness and unjust subjugation. In the Romantic architectonics, otherness is less absolute than in the Early Modern period, more widely distributed into different domains and sites, as I am calling them. The orders of creation and redemption had been succeeded by the Enlightenment’s foundation of nature and reason. The area of nature could be logically distinguished into realms of the natural and the supernatural, on the one hand, and into realms of the personal and the social on the other. But the ethos of sameness—the belief that all of these realms were identifiable or at least in harmony with one another—was the underlying assumption or shared conviction in the larger architectonics of Enlightenment. Thus the separate realms belonged to what I call converging areas of sameness. (See Appendix, Diagram I for a schematic representation.) Again, it is not that such architectonic descriptions of these periods are closed to reconfiguration or readjustment, as in the sophisticated,

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mediating concept of a “pre-Romanticism” in the eighteenth century or Marshall Brown’s idea of Romanticism as “the fulfillment and awakening of Enlightenment,” rather than as a sharp cultural break between one period and another.21 (The debate over evolutionary or revolutionary change in this history can be seen as another inflection of Bakhtin’s “two embattled tendencies,” centripetal and centrifugal, within and among utterances.) But even in the eyes of many writers in the Romantic period and certainly in the eyes of many critics in the modern era, such a generalized distinction between Romantic and Enlightenment norms has been generally quite clear, even if the particular points or moments of transformation are not. As Berger explains in presenting his concept of period imagination, “the method here illustrated 1) does not pretend to induce a general picture from the historical facts, 2) does not demand any dialectical necessity from cultural change beyond that of irreversibility, and 3) does not attempt to explain (away) the novelties of period style and imagination by typological classification.”22 Isaiah Berlin has described the underlying historical-cultural difference between Enlightenment and Romanticism in synoptic fashion. (His book, The Roots of Romanticism, was delivered as a series of lectures in 1965, at a time when the coherence of Romanticism was generally accepted, but it was only published in 1999, at a time when the incoherence of the period had come to seem more compelling.) In spite of challenges by Rousseau, Montesquieu and Hume, Berlin argues, the Enlightenment was governed by “the general proposition according to which the universe was a rational whole, each part of which was necessary—because it was necessitated by other parts of it—and the whole thing was made beautiful and rational by the fact that none of the things in it could be otherwise than they were.” Against this system of norms, Romanticism asserted that there was no external, objective, publically agreed-upon “structure of things.” There was only “the indomitable will” of the individual. An objective “knowledge of values” was not possible, only “their creation” by human endeavor.23 In other words, the received self-identity or selfsameness at the heart of the Enlightenment world view was systematically called into

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question. It was succeeded, as a dominant system of norms, by the authorized and authorizing otherness of Romanticism. The unitary and transcendent otherness of the Renaissance and Reformation reemerged in a variety of immanent or descendental othernesses, domains or sites of otherness that reconstituted the older orders of divine activity in newly formed categories of human and more-than-human reality. They did so not from the reference point of God, a wholly other, but from the reference point of creativity and critical reflection preeminent in aesthetic activity. The critical creativity of the Romantic artist, imaging, reenacting or reflecting the deity in its creative powers, might be called the “variously and somewhat other.” To appeal to Berlin again, before elaborating this claim: “the whole movement [of Romanticism], indeed, is an attempt to impose an aesthetic model upon reality, which is to say that everything should obey the rules of art.”24 There was thus a certain privilege and priority given to the newly discovered and denominated category of the aesthetic. But aesthetic activity as a whole takes place in the contrasting modes of the creative and the critical, positive and negative, in a dialogic, interdependent relation to one another. Both of these modalities are conceived on the basis of an authorizing otherness: an otherness that gave a new authority to human perceptions—stories and images—of reality and, at the same time, an otherness that was authorized by human perceptions that could be critically distinguished from the literal understanding of such stories and images. As in the case of the older theological cosmology and anthropology, the foundation of Romanticism was therefore paradoxical. But in Bakhtin’s terms, where the older cultural system had been predominantly monologic, deriving from a monotheistic deity, the new one was radically dialogic. Its humanistic center of gravity lay in its attraction to things beyond its periphery.25 To rehearse the ideal, heuristic structure in its several dimensions: the architectonics of Romanticism that I am describing here, following theoretical principles of Bakhtin, displays itself on several levels, descending from the older architectonics of Early Modernism down through the architectonics of the Enlightenment. (Again, see Appendix,

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Diagram I for a schematic synopsis.) At the top of the scheme, belonging to an older and no longer general, official world view, is the transcendent religious activity of God, taking place in creation (initial and ongoing, as it was traditionally conceived) and in redemption (preparatory in the history of Israel, decisive in the Incarnation of Jesus, the Christ, and eschatological in Christ’s Second Coming). Succeeding these is the Enlightenment transposition of religious activity into cognitive activity, governing and governed by nature and reason, areas common to human and more-than-human being, which may be distinguished into four general realms: the natural and the supernatural within the area of the more-than-human, the social and the personal in the area of the human. At this level we are still describing the fundamental intellectual structure of the Enlightenment, a radical secularization of the older, still essentially sacred order of the Renaissance that had come down from the Middle Ages. On the level below the realms of the Enlightenment, we come to the distinctive domains and sites, as I have called them, of Romanticism. They are eight in number, though the number is less important than the principle that they further divide the Enlightenment realms of the natural and the supernatural and the social and the personal, transforming relatively homogeneous realms into divided and contested territories. The conceptually unified realm of the social, as it was constituted in the Enlightenment, is now divided by temporal otherness. The social present is seen in the light of the historical past which has given rise to it—has authored and authorized it. Or it is seen in the light of a revolutionary future, a transformed society, the signs or seeds of which are contained in the imperfect present social order. In the conceptually selfsame realm of the personal, the identity of the Enlightenment self is relatively unproblematic even if, as in Rousseau’s Confessions, it has become exemplary in its individuality and natural in its opposition to social artifice. This realm is divided in Romanticism into the hyper-individualism of the Romantic artist, the “egotistical sublime,” as Keats called the creative self-projection of Milton and Wordsworth, on the one hand, and a “negative capability,” as Keats had

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termed the recessive authorial identity of Shakespeare, a “poetical character” which can create fictive selves but has no distinct identity of its own. (The multiple relations among authorial personas and literary characters that express these types of literary personhood will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter.) The area of the more-than-human reality of the Enlightenment was constituted by a continuous if highly various universe of nature, distantly dependent on supernatural causes and a supernatural conclusion, as it was for its godlike explicator Newton, as Pope famously described him. It was phenomenally though not ultimately knowable by human beings through the powers of perception and reason; Kant’s critiques are the ultimate expression of this epistemological treaty. Within this area, the natural and the supernatural stood in complementary relationship. But these two realms of being were no longer so easily identified or conflated with one another as in the Early Modern concept of the creation and were further divided when they were reconfigured in the Romantic architectonic of otherness. Thus the Enlightenment realm of the natural in Romanticism was divided into the competing domain of the organic, with its appeal to ecological wholeness and interdependence, and the site of the sublime, where incommensurability and fragmentation were dominant—for example, in “the characters of the great Apocalypse,” as Wordsworth perceived the peaks of the Alps he had unwittingly crossed in Book VI of The Prelude, when his anticipation of their beautiful harmony with one another was suddenly torn away. There were various attempts to supernaturalize the natural or to naturalize the supernatural, as Coleridge argued in describing the scheme of Lyrical Ballads in Chapter  14 of his Biographia Literaria, as Carlyle coined the phrase in Sartor Resartus and as M. H. Abrams observed at length in Natural Supernaturalism, arguably the high point of synthetic studies of Romanticism in the twentieth century. This synthetic term might seem to hearken back to an Enlightenment entente cordiale between two realms. But the dialogics of the relationship was quite unstable; the conflict between the “sublime of the Bible,” as Blake called it, and what

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used to be called the Book of Nature was much more pronounced within the period imagination of Romanticism. The Enlightenment realm of the supernatural itself was equally at odds with itself in Romanticism. Some Romantics embraced a progressive and humanizing Protestantism, others a reactionary and authoritarian Catholicism. Authorizing otherness gave rise to the comparative study of religion and to religious syncretism. The most striking example of this comparative religious sensibility among the English Romantic poets can be found in Percy Shelley, but other instances occur in the pervasive mythopoeic vision of other, less heterodox poets like Keats as well. Authorizing otherness within the supernatural also found expression in confessional orthodox Catholicism, as in Joseph de Maistre or the later Friedrich Schlegel, or the confessed Anglicanism of the later Coleridge and Wordsworth, which strongly influenced the neo-orthodoxy of the later Oxford movement in England.26 Although it is often asserted that writers like Schlegel and Coleridge ceased to be Romantic when they embraced a traditional orthodox form of religion, the deeply aesthetic character of their religious reflections argues otherwise. Finally, on the foundational level of what Bakhtin would call Romanticism’s aesthetic activity (even if he did find the historically Romantic exercise of it overly narrow and overwrought), this architectonics of Romanticism gives a place of prominence to the creativity of the artist—the poet (poet, painter and prophet, in the case of Blake) or author (since the generic differences among poetry, drama and prose were often conflated in Romantic aesthetic discourse). As I indicated above, this foundational aesthetic activity was divided into the creative power, in which Romantic myth-making and symbolgenerating predominate, and the critical power, where irony (virtually absolute in the theory and practice of Friedrich Schlegel) and allegory (denigrated by Coleridge but resurrected for Romanticism by Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man), hold sway. The important thing to emphasize here is that Romantic creativity and Romantic criticism are not simply distinguished by different genres, like the essay or preface and the lyric poem or Gothic novel. Poems, prefaces, novels and essays

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continue to combine, counter-pose and provisionally rearticulate these two modalities of literature, just as the two figures in British Romanticism who seem to represent them most essentially, Wordsworth and Coleridge, continue to speak in both creative and critical voices throughout their oeuvres, beneath the levels of genre and of medium, poetry or prose. Creativity and criticism are modes of thought and writing in dialogic tension with one another, whether this tension is explicit or implicit.27 What needs emphasizing in this spare schematic account is the vital presence of otherness in Romanticism, whether it is seen as an alienating agency or an unassimilated transgredience, as Bakhtin might put it in his use of neo-Kantian terminology. This is an unstable otherness, since its alterity is not as marked as the Early Modern period’s divine transcendence. It is an otherness that everywhere challenges and unsettles selfsameness or self-identity, an otherness at once within and outside sameness, “withoutside” rational identity, to use a neologism of Blake. In the cultural spaces that I have designated as domains, the otherness is less overt, less alien or estranged. In the historical past, the egotistical sublime, organic nature and the confessionally orthodox supernatural, the centripetal or unifying tendency predominates. As in the aesthetic work of myth-making and symbolic creativity, what ultimately governs these domains is the estranged and estranging power of otherness, assimilated to a greater or lesser extent into the circumscribed coherence of the cultural construct. In the domains, otherness displays itself as a relatively holistic organization or provisional unity. But in the cultural spaces I am designating as sites, governed by the aesthetic activity of criticism, the basic non-identity of constituent parts reveals an absence of totality, a mere illusion of wholeness fragmented by irony and displaced by allegory. The power of the centrifugal is ascendant; marginality eclipses centrality. Identities become non-identical, transected by otherness from within. In the revolutionary future, the negatively capable personality, the natural sublime and syncretistic religion, things are more clearly coming apart, escaping the control of any putative centers of their own. The constituent

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elements are still in relationship, but the differences are dialogically foregrounded, metonymically juxtaposed with one another rather than metaphorically consolidated, at least to the extent that these elements have not separated themselves out into new cultural spaces and assumed new monologic identities of their own. In the discussion that follows, I will describe in more detail this architectonics of Romanticism within one of the realms that was taken over, transposed and reconfigured, from the Enlightenment. The realm of the natural in Romanticism is divided, as we have seen, divided though never completely separated, into organic nature, with its vital interdependences, and the natural sublime, with its dynamic intimations of original chaos and ultimate apocalypse. The idea of Romanticism as “nature poetry” is an old one; it was given new respectability by René Wellek’s claim that Romanticism was unified (in part) by relying on “nature for [its] view of the world” and by M. H. Abrams’s emphasis on the elaborate organic metaphors that governed Romantic theories of literature. The view was rejected out of hand by Harold Bloom, who preferred to locate the unity of Romanticism in its preoccupation with “consciousness,” transformed by Geoffrey Hartman, who argued for the pervasive concern with “anti-self-consciousness” among Romantic writers, and discredited by de Man, who emphasized the ungrounded, non-participatory character of Romantic “nature imagery.” It is currently being revived, however, in the movement, within studies of Romanticism and beyond, known as environmental, ecological or eco-criticism.28 This is a welcome development. But according to the architectonics sketched above, all these arguments about what unifies or fails to unify Romanticism simply privilege one conceptual space over others within the larger system. Whatever the site or domain on which we choose to focus our attention, an authorizing otherness informs the cultural system as a whole. In the architectonics of the Enlightenment, the realm of the natural is unified and, in theory, at least, self-consistent. But in the architectonics of Romanticism it breaks apart into centripetal and centrifugal modalities: organic nature and natural sublimity. The authority of

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organic nature can be seen throughout the poetry of Wordsworth and in much of the writing of Goethe. Although organicism is often challenged within both writers’ works by powers of destruction that seem to belong to the natural world as well, its recuperative potential still receives strong emphasis. The authority of the natural sublime can be seen especially clearly in Shelley, as in his agonistic struggle with the apocalyptic power in “Mont Blanc” and in Friedrich Schlegel, who privileges the “chaos” of the natural order over its cosmos. Neither writer, however, goes as far as Blake in his denunciation of Wordsworth’s poetry of nature: “Natural Objects always did & now do Weaken deaden & obliterate Imagination in Me.”29 For in the domain of organic nature as well as at the site of the natural sublime, it is not natural objects per se but natural objects as signs of the creative energy and destructive power of nature as an agent, an agent other than human and other than divine, that are at issue. Coleridge might domesticate this otherness for the benefit of his infant son in “Frost at Midnight,” projecting it as “The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible/ Of that eternal language, which thy God/ Utters.” But he finds that it keeps returning as a language of the demonic and the dangerous, as in the “scream/ Of agony by torture lengthen’d out” which he hears in seventh stanza of “Dejection: An Ode.”30 Although the organic and the sublime versions of Romantic nature are influenced by aesthetic ideas and ideals—and influence these ideas and ideals in their turn—this domain and this site of otherness in Romanticism are by no means confined to literary expression. They directly inform the representation of landscape in painting. It is common to contrast the holistic harmonies of a landscape by Constable, where human figures, laboring or at leisure, and the structures built by human hands, are visually integrated with the vegetation and the inorganic forms of water and clouds, with the fragmentation of forms and ambiguity of perception in the landscapes of Turner. The contrast can be seen, for example, in a comparison of Constable’s The Cornfield or his Dedham Vale with Turner’s The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons or his Steamer in a Snowstorm. Similar contrasts can be drawn between

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the landscapes of John Crome (for example, Poringland Oak) and Caspar David Friedrich (Sea of Ice, recently reproduced on the cover of the Norton Critical edition of Frankenstein). The organic and sublime constructions of nature also inform the emerging natural science of geology, as illustrated in the debate between the Neptunists and the Vulcanists over the importance of gradual versus catastrophic change in the formation of the earth’s surface. Organic nature is supported in nascent science of biology, only named as such, “the science of life,” in 1802, and in the growing perception of the dynamic interdependencies of plant and animal species later known as ecology. Philosophical constructions of nature can be seen in the Naturphilosophie of Schelling and the cultural organicism of Herder. The otherness of the organic is primarily seen in the outer world. Perceived as an organism, the concrete, specific, vital singularity of a natural region or a species or an individual stands over against the abstracted, generalized equivalences of the lifeless mechanical totality of a category or classification. It is an otherness of nature with an intrinsic autonomy— hence an authoritative alterity of its own. The otherness of the sublime, however, is most vividly revealed in the destruction or confusion of the outward world, which drives the mind back in upon itself. The chaos of a mountain peak towering above the lowlands, visiting ruin, through its glaciers and avalanches, on human habitations and cultivations below, or of a ship at sea almost obscured by waves and weather, are the visually dramatic instances of a site of nature divided against itself, where the power that creatively generates the formal coherence of the organic (represented in aesthetic terms as “beautiful” or “picturesque”) turns destructive and leaves incoherence and unrepresentability in its wake. The natural sublime is the otherness of nature raised to a higher power. Both these modes of otherness underwrite the numerous apostrophes personifying Nature in general (as in Wordsworth’s Prelude) or significant features of a natural landscape (Coleridge’s River Otter to Shelley’s Mont Blanc, organic and sublime respectively). The term “landscape” itself could refer to the “state or condition” of a part of

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the natural environment, to the visual perception of such a part, or to an artistic representation of both of these, objectively or subjectively inflected to emphasize the scene viewed or the viewer. Various optical devices such as the “Claude glass” were used in the Romantic period to provide a mechanical framing or artistic atmosphere of natural “scenery” for any or all of these aspects of a landscape. William Gilpin recommended using the Claude glass in his writings on the “picturesque,” an aesthetic term which sought to mediate between the serenely beautiful and the frightening sublime. The divisions and subdivisions of the natural could be many, but in Romanticism they were all expressions of its otherness, its challenge to human comprehension and control. More extensive discussion would be necessary to characterize in such a synoptic fashion the authorizing otherness of the realm of the supernatural (divided into confessional orthodoxy and religious syncretism), the realm of the social (divided as the historical or primitive past and the futurity of revolution and reform) and the realm of the personal (polarized between the egotistical sublime and negative capability). But since these centripetal domains and centrifugal sites represent established topics, even commonplaces, in the study of Romanticism over many decades, I will leave it to interested readers to work them out (or simply call them to mind) in greater detail for themselves.31 I will turn here instead to more subtle and supple articulations of the forms of otherness, the specific and concrete invocations, orchestrations, and significant absences of the major modes of this architectonics, within two individual poetic works of the period. As Berger says of his architectonic scheme of historical period imaginations, the larger abstractions should be judged “to the extent that they prove operationally useful to interpretation.”32 This ultimate concern with individual works or texts and their authors can be seen throughout Bakhtin’s writings as well, I would note. It is manifest in the close reading of Pushkin’s lyric “Parting” in his earliest philosophical manuscripts, in the detailed analysis of the novels of Dostoevsky in his epochal book on the polyphonic novel and his focus on Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel in his theory of carnival. The usefulness of

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such an architectonics to the interpretation of particular texts is my abiding concern, in all three chapters of this study.

IV It should come as no surprise that the subtlest articulations of all these arenas of otherness in Romanticism are expressed in individual works of art, especially in works of literature. In the last section of this chapter on the architectonics of Romanticism, I will focus on two particular expressions of aesthetic activity, as Bakhtin would call them: Coleridge’s fragmentary lyric poem “Kubla Khan” and Blake’s oppositional “song of experience” “The Tyger.” In the light of the Bakhtinian architectonics set forth in this chapter, each of these poems reveals itself as a distinctive dialogic nexus of different modalities of Romantic otherness. Each can be seen—can be “contemplated” and aesthetically “consummated” by the reader, in Bakhtin’s terms—as a coherent expression of the sites and domains of the Romantic period imagination or world hypothesis. This is not to say that either poem is a perfect unity of form and theme or that either poem exists apart from its historical cultural context; quite the contrary. But it is to claim that each is a dialogic microcosm of the larger field of forces in the collective imagination of the period. The choice of “Kubla Khan” is not entirely random, it must be admitted, since the poem has seemed to many commentators, from John Livingston Lowes to the present, to be a poem about creativity, the “Imagination Creatrix,” as Lowes entitles the last chapter of The Road to Xanadu and which Berlin sees as the distinctive focus of the “activity” of Romanticism, just as cognitive activity (the exercise of reason) can be said to be the cardinal activity of the period of Enlightenment that precedes it.33 There are several creative acts described in this poem, resulting in the production of three different works of art: the imperial dome-building decreed by Kubla Khan, the singing of the damsel with the dulcimer and the inspired poetry of the poet-speaker. The memory of the young woman’s “symphony and song” is proposed as a catalyst for

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the poet-speaker to recreate the pleasure dome of the emperor; all three works, in different artistic media, suggest that poetry can recapitulate the divine power of creation that produced the “Paradise” of the first book of the Bible. However, “Kubla Khan” has also been shown more recently to be a poem of “textual instability,” with different expressions of authorship and self-conscious critical framings put forward in the several different versions of the text. In Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (New York: Oxford UP, 1994), Jack Stillinger has distinguished five extant versions of “Kubla Khan” from Coleridge’s lifetime, the major variants being a manuscript fair copy in two stanzas, with an explanatory note of one sentence at the end, dated 1797, and the first published version of 1816, with a much expanded version of the note prefacing four verse paragraphs. Criticism predominates in the prose headnote added in 1816, where the personal circumstances of the poem’s composition are recounted in a matter of fact way that undermines the authority of the verses. The poem is here presented as a “psychological curiosity” rather than “on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.” It is attributed variously to the influence of “a slight indisposition,” a pharmaceutical “anodyne,” a prose sentence of a book read before falling asleep, a dream-state induced by the drug and the reading, and finally to the fatal interruption of “a person on business from Porlock,” an interruption which has reduced the larger “vision in a dream,” reportedly of a highly imaginative and originally coherent poem of no less than “two or three hundred lines,” into a “fragment” or series of fragments, “some eight or ten scattered lines and images.” This account is itself undoubtedly a fictional redaction of personal experience, a part of the work as a whole in its 1816 state, but it is a fiction in the mode of irony and allegory, challenging the fiction in the mode of myth and symbol that it precedes.34 Thus in terms of the foundational categories of the Romantic architectonics of otherness, purposeful creativity and accidental irony are brought together in dialogic relationship. A visionary potency and a revisionary skepticism about this potential coexist in this poetic and

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prosaic text. Furthermore, the articulation of each of these modes of aesthetic activity is itself shot through with alterity within, introducing different versions of creativity and different versions of criticism. The mode of criticism traces creative expression back to a reader’s memory of a prior text in prose, to the author’s abnormal psychological states, to his dreams and to the utterly prosaic imposition of materialistic “business” upon his strangely materialized vision, in which “all the images rose up before him as things.” The mode of creativity starts off with the massive building project of an ancient Mongol ruler, a male ruler with absolute political power. It shifts, briefly and unaccountably, to an Abyssinian musician playing a traditional stringed instrument, a young woman or “maid” singing about a mountain of ambiguous significance. It then reflects back, after only four lines concerned with this second figure, on the two widely disparate, indeed virtually oppositional, instances of aesthetic activity. Creation is displaced, in other words, from the arena of legendary public history in the distant past to the private memory of a mental vision reported from an immediate and personal life experience. It is then further displaced into a hypothetical realm of possibility in still another artistic medium, poetry. (It is worth noting that the verse of the poem itself is marked by alterity throughout, shifting back and forth between terse, ballad-like tetrameter and trimeter lines with alternating rhyme, and more extended pentameter lines, many of them in rhymed couplets with a more elevated literary valence than ballad meter.) The hypothetical nature of this last scene of the poem, expressing a future achievement devoutly desired (“I would build that dome in air”) and a public recognition not yet received (“And all should cry, Beware! Beware!/ His flashing eyes, his floating hair”) has seemed to most readers to signal a weakening or dissipation of the creative act in this last display of its supposed power. The difference between the explicit verbal command of Kubla Khan and the wishful thinking of the poetspeaker, the latter a project that depends on the poet-speaker’s ability to remember a song (alternately a “symphony”) seen (and presumably heard) in a vision, seems to tip creative affirmation over into ironic

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doubt. In Bakhtin’s terminology of author and hero, a hero’s effective assertion to others turns into an author’s uncertain hope for himself. Analysis of this shifting display of otherness on the foundational level of the architectonics of Romanticism may be taken to a higher level of architectonics, to the elaborated articulation of Romanticism’s division between domains and sites, derived from the more unitary realms of the natural, the supernatural, the social, and the personal in the Enlightenment. Both the centripetal,“somewhat other” domains (organic nature, confessional orthodoxy, the traditional past of historicism, and the heroics of the egotistical sublime) and the centrifugal, “radically other,” sites (the natural sublime, religious syncretism, the revolutionary future, and negative capability) find expression or allusion in the internal complications of “Kubla Khan.” (Again, see Appendix, Diagram I for a schematic register of these terms and their architectonic relationships.) All of these competing arenas of context, meaning and value give to Coleridge’s poem what Bakhtin would call its “special answerability.” As far as the domain of organic nature is concerned, Kubla’s decree (in effect, “Let there be a pleasure dome”) gives rise to a circumscribed enclosure of “fertile ground,” “gardens bright,” “sinuous rills” of water and “many an incense-bearing tree” complete with blossoms. There are more imposing “forests as ancient as the hills,” but these are described as “Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.” The pleasant and harmonious relationships of this built environment are predominant in the first eleven-line section of the poem. In the next verse paragraph, however, the natural sublime takes over, threatening the composure of the landscape. The “caverns measureless to man” and subterranean “sunless sea” mentioned in the fourth and fifth lines break forth in “that deep romantic chasm,” introduced by the contrastive exclamation “But oh!” The unfathomable sublimity of this feature of the natural scene (not easily located in relation to the pleasure dome or the surrounding walls and towers) is contained momentarily with mention of a “green hill” and a “cedarn cover,” but the sublimity is given a boost by it being described or evoked as “A savage place!” and being compared to a site with a “woman wailing for her demon-lover.” Overtones of the Gothic,

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reminiscent of “Christabel,” shift the domain of organic nature further in the direction of the natural sublime, an emphasis which is continued in the fountain throwing up not water but “huge fragments” of rock. And yet this dangerous and destructive natural activity is somewhat tamed by the similes of “rebounding hail” and “chaffy grains” as well as by the personification of the earth “breathing” in “fast thick pants.” Thus the organic and the sublime aspects of the essential otherness of the natural world work in a kind of oppositional counterpoint with one another, a back-and-forth that culminates in line 36, at the end of the second section, in the oxymoron of “a miracle of rare device” and the paradox of “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice.” As with the “shadow” of the dome which appears to float on the waves of the meandering river, the exact topographical relation of the dome to (“with”) the ice caves is ambiguous. The elements covered or contained by the dome seem continually escaping from its containment. The description in Purchas, his Pilgrimage, identified by Coleridge in his prose preface as a source of the imagined scene, describes the house of pleasure as a tent-like canopy which may be moved from place to place within the park enclosed by the walls. But, for reasons shortly to be considered, Coleridge has changed the canopy into the more substantial and less easily visualized “dome.” This conflicted natural setting, both mastered and refusing human mastery, disappears for the most part in the rest of the poem. Mention of “Mount Abora” in line 41 is an exception, but since this is a locale that some critics take as an allusion to the mention of Mount Amara in Paradise Lost as a false site, not the genuine one, of the biblical Eden, the otherness evoked in “Kubla Khan” shifts from the natural to the supernatural. (Leslie Brisman suggests that “Mount Abora” plays on the word “aboriginal.”)35 In fact, the arena of the supernatural finds expression throughout the poem with the mention of “ALPH, the sacred river” in the third line and with the invocation of “holy dread,” “honeydew” and “the milk of Paradise” in the last three lines. In this category, the site of religious syncretism is dominant; there is little sign of any orthodoxy, confessional or otherwise, in these invocations of ancient

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and analogous places of sacred origin. It could be argued that the poem “Pains of Sleep,” which Coleridge says he “annexed [as] a fragment of a very different character” to “Kubla Khan” in the 1816 publication, gives some expression to the otherness of confessional orthodoxy in its description of the poet praying aloud in his agony and finally composing his tormented spirit “with reverential resignation.” But as E. S. Shaffer has shown in exhaustive comparative-religious detail, “Coleridge’s syncretism [in “Kubla Khan”] gave him a range and depth and sympathy hardly to be found in any orthodoxy.”36 The final supernatural scene of “Kubla Khan” invokes in a curiously ambiguous fashion the characterization of the figure of the poet that Socrates offers to the philosophically naïve rhapsode in Plato’s Ion. The image of an inspired, ecstatic poet is presented by Socrates in a series of metaphors—a magnet that imparts its power of attraction through a chain of iron rings attached to it; Bacchic maidens who, under the influence of the god Dionysus, draw milk and honey from the rivers; bees who fly from flower to flower gathering pollen. In the context of the dialogue, these images are ironic: poetry is shown to be not skillful artistic creation on the part of humans but unmediated, trance-like communication from the gods. Probably inspired by neo-Platonic commentaries on the Ion like those of Proclus, however, Coleridge re-mythologizes Plato’s disparaging philosophical critique. Instead of being an unthinking instrument of communication from the gods above, his projected poet-self has “flashing eyes” and “floating hair” and becomes a figure of holy awe or sacred dread. The religious syncretism of “Kubla Khan” includes elements of a re-mythologized philosophy as well as elements of religions beyond orthodox Christianity. The realm of the social is less evident in “Kubla Khan.” The otherness of the historical past is of course given expression in the figure of the late thirteenth-century Mongol emperor, but also in the compendium of exotic and legendary stories of “Ages and Places Discovered” recounted by the early seventeenth-century English writer Samuel Purchas, here drawing directly on earlier travel narratives by Marco Polo, who apparently visited Xanadu or Chandu in person. There is also

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a passing invocation of both a traditional past and a revolutionary future in the “Ancestral voices prophesying war” that Kubla hears in the midst of the sublime “tumult” of the dancing rocks thrown up from below by a fountain. Recent New Historical criticism has reaffirmed suspicion that the imperial rule of Kubla Khan is a political allegory for the imperial ambitions of Napoleon, for whose political and military power Coleridge, like other Romantic writers, felt grudging admiration as well as indignant opposition.37 Such historical criticism also notes that all the learning and lore about “oriental” religions and mythologies alluded to in the religious syncretism of the poem had significant implications for the increasing eastward expansion of British imperialism and its mission of commercial exploitation as well as the imposition of Christian faith. From the perspective of this architectonics of otherness, such historicist interpretations can be accepted as valid without discrediting others of a more traditional, less historicized nature. Different domains and sites of otherness are by no means mutually exclusive in the way they figure in Romantic literary texts. They manifest themselves in dynamic as well as dialogic fashion. It is in the last divided realm, the realm of the personal, that “Kubla Khan” achieves its most nuanced Bakhtinian articulation. As mentioned earlier and as we shall see in more specific detail in the next chapter, a distinctively dialogic and interpersonal understanding of personhood informs Bakhtin’s writings, early and late. The figure of Kubla himself is a prime example of what we have called egotistical sublimity, the mode of creation in which the personality of the creator dominates whatever and whomever he creates. The Great Khan builds as he rules, by fiat or decree; godlike, his creativity echoes the creative verbal commands of the Creator God in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis. Yet as a hero, he is also presented from the outside perspective of an author, a speaker who recounts, in an admiring and exclamatory manner, what the hero’s words of command accomplish. The speaker, an image of the author as Bakhtin would characterize him, describes as well the features of the larger, natural Creation that the hero’s commands are unable to subdue or contain. And in the last six lines of this first poetic

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scene, a balladic quatrain followed by a heroic couplet, the author’s attention shifts from the person of Kubla to a more impersonal description of the landscape, natural and artificial. The “shadow” of the pleasure dome is reflected on the surface of the water. The “mingled measure” akin to music “was heard” here as well, by whom we are not told. The “miracle of rare device” combines what Kubla has built with what has been there from the distant geologic past. The synthesis is in the eye of the beholder. In the second human figure or hero presented in the poem, we see less of the egotistical sublime and more negative capability. For one thing, the damsel with a dulcimer gets a mere five lines to Kubla’s more than thirty. For another, this hero is a young woman of uncertain power. Unlike her dominant male counterpart, she does not impose architectural structures on the natural landscape; rather she sings about a mountain, quite possibly distant from her in time and space, evoking this natural imposing feature or formation through music. She performs an aesthetic piece with delicate forms of its own, weaving, it would seem, verbal and instrumental lines in an art which is temporal and transitory rather than spatial and enduring. We are not even sure that the song is of her own composition. And here in this short section of a poem titled after the first hero, the figure or image of the author is more clearly asserted. The author speaks for the first time in the first person, revealing himself as either the personal generator or the personal recipient of the medium, “a vision,” in which this lesser, relatively unassuming hero (also a creator in an extended sense) herself initially appeared. In the final scene of the poem, not separated typographically from the vision of the damsel or maid, the author or poet-speaker conjures up an egotistical sublimity of his own. By recalling and thus appropriating the music of the young woman in his vision, the author imagines himself as subsuming the dominant legendary male hero of the first, longer section. He himself will “build that dome,” this time “in air” rather than on earth, and it will include the “caves of ice” for which Kubla Khan was not himself responsible. He even imagines an awestruck

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audience for this heroic projection of himself. In effect, he entertains the possibility of a more radical egotistical sublimity, one in which he has assimilated both of the preceding heroes of the poem and has become author and hero rolled into one. But alas, this occurs only in his imagination. The end of the poetic text sends the reader back to the apologetic opening preface or headnote in prose, in which the author is estranged from all these poetic figurations of personhood, dominant and recessive. Dialogic personality here assumes the form of autobiography—and yet this purportedly autobiographical anecdote is presented only in the third, not the first, person. “The Author,” who never signs his name to the poem, has only published this unfinished “fragment” or “vision in a dream,” he tells us, at the urging of another poet of much more substantial reputation, “a poet of great and deserved celebrity,” whom editors agree is Lord Byron. The interdependent relationship between the domain of the egotistical sublime and the site of negative capability, expressed in the selfdeprecating contrast between Byron’s “great and deserved celebrity” and Coleridge’s supposed obscurity, infiltrates the critical preface as well as the creative body of “Kubla Khan.” This interpretive inventory, as it might be called, of the architectonics of otherness in this now canonical work of Romantic literature suggests how “Kubla Khan” has been able to sustain a notable variety of readings over its reception history. One of the earliest of these readings was Mary Robinson’s ode “To the Poet Coleridge,” written well before the poem’s publication in 1816, in which she makes Coleridge himself the heroic creator, putting him in the place of Kubla Khan, who is never mentioned, and addressing him directly as “spirit divine.” In Robinson’s poem, the manifold otherness of Coleridge’s poem—in an earlier manuscript version he had sent her—is given a new and somewhat simpler configuration. Her transposition may stand as an example of the myriad critical projections of “Kubla Khan” that have succeeded it over the last two centuries, whether or not these partial interpretations have recognized the other modes of otherness to which the poem gives expression, however elliptical.

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An inventory of another familiar work of Romantic literature will further demonstrate the practical interpretive value of the architectonics of Romanticism we have been considering, and it will bring this chapter to a close. The relevance of the various contexts of otherness, the set of centripetal domains and centrifugal sites in which otherness is perceived and interrogated in a literary text, a relevance that could be discerned in tension or conflict with one another in “Kubla Khan,” can be demonstrated in a briefer consideration of Blake’s “The Tyger,” a poem only known by a small group of readers in Blake’s lifetime but now, it has been calculated, the single most anthologized poem in the English language. As with “Kubla Khan,” these contexts of otherness often manifest themselves in tension or conflict with one another in “The Tyger,” and as with “Kubla Khan” it is the mythic expression of creativity along with an ironic critique of that creativity with which “The Tyger” is most concerned. The poem begins with the speaker’s apostrophe to an exotic and proverbially dangerous creature that immediately entails a question about its creator. “What immortal hand or eye,/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”38 The metonymic doubling of “hand or eye” contains an ambiguity about the kind of creation at issue. Is it the hand, the strength or force, of a higher than human power that the speaker is trying to imagine or is it the contemplation of the accomplished act (for example, in the repeated assertion in the first creation account in Genesis that “God saw that it was good”)? This uncertainty about such creativity is further reflected in the fact that the poem and the beast that it invokes exist in two different media. Like all of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, “The Tyger” is both verbal text and visual design, modalities that are, particularly in this instance, at odds with one another. The “fearful symmetry” and all the “dread” features of the tiger evoked by the voice of the speaker are belied, at least in a large majority of the extant illuminated printings, by the rather stolid, even placid, creature who stands not in “the forests of the night” but beside a large leafless tree, fully illuminated. The sublimely unimaginable creator and his sublimely terrifying creature are, in fact, “framed” by the hand and eye of the

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engraver and the eye of the viewer as well. In other words, the creative power conjured up in words is implicitly undermined by the created design which delivers the creature with no apparent stress or strain.39 A similar tension is also evident in the realm of nature as represented in the poem. Words like “burning,” “dread hand” and “deadly terrors” are classic indicators of the natural sublime, as is the attempt to track an animal not to its lair but to its cosmogonic origins—a tracking that also looks ahead, ambiguously, to the apocalyptic end of the world “when the stars threw down their spears” (an allusion to the biblical apocalypses of the prophet Daniel and the Book of Revelation). Of course, this concern with cosmic beginnings and endings pertains to the realm of the supernatural as well. Among the Romantic poets, Blake is famous for his antipathy to natural scenery, to Wordsworthian “rocks and stones and trees.” Thus one might say simply that the arena of nature, contested between organic nature and the natural sublime, figures less prominently in this poem than the arena, the domain and the site, of supernatural. And yet the implicit harmony of an organic view of nature can be glimpsed in the noun “symmetry” at the end of the first stanza, a term that belongs to an aesthetic of rational beauty rather than emotional sublimity. It can also be discerned in the curious replication of the shape of the tiger, with massive chest, four legs and a tail running left to right at the bottom of the design and the shape of the tree, massive trunk and five extending branches running bottom to top on the left. These branches extending toward the left side of the design themselves provide an interesting organic framing, as it were, of the written stanzas of the verse, dividing the printed text into single stanzas (the first and the last, top to bottom) with pairs of stanzas (second and third, fourth and fifth) in between. These suggestions of an organic nature in the design of the poem undercut the exclamations of natural sublimity in the verbal text. As far as the more obvious evocations of the supernatural are concerned, the mixing of biblical allusions with a series of allusions to gods from classical mythology shows that the centrifugal otherness of religious syncretism predominates throughout the poem. The

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presentation of the tiger as a challenge to orthodox piety recalls the beasts behemoth and leviathan described by the voice from the whirlwind at the end of the Book of Job. However, where Job is struck silent by this invocation of God’s creative power, the speaker of “The Tyger” imagines a series of technical steps borrowed from the Greek myths of Prometheus, Daedalus, and Hephaestus through which the tiger must have been constructed. In asking questions about who seized the fire of its eyes, who twisted the sinews of its heart, and who forged its brain we find the speaker imagining the supposedly unimaginable, rehearsing a polytheistic technology rather than acknowledging a monotheistic creation ex nihilo “too wonderful for me, which I did not know,” as Job puts it in his reply to God’s interrogation of him. And in alluding to an apocalyptic war in heaven from the Old and New Testaments, the speaker boldly moves an event from the end times back to the beginning of the heavens and the earth. He also implies some sort of surrender and repentance on the part of the rebellious angels: “When the stars threw down their spears/ And water’d heaven with their tears.” Such a change of heart occurs neither in the Bible nor in that great mediation of the Bible for all the Romantic poets, Milton’s Paradise Lost. This last invention on Blake’s part might be considered a gesture toward religious orthodoxy, prefiguring the character Milton’s repentance for his cruel and false mortal selfhood in Blake’s later epic poem Milton. But it is more accurate to say that confessional orthodoxy is conspicuous by its absence in “The Tyger.” Also conspicuously absent is any expression of the otherness of the social, unless one accepts the suggestion, based on popular iconography of the time, that the tiger makes reference to the French Revolution, a political event of recent history which Blake celebrated in other works from this period. As with the identification of Kubla Khan as Napoleon, this political allegory seems plausible as a secondary frame of reference among other modes of otherness, rather than as the primary context of meaning and value of the poem. It is also perhaps relevant that the contrasting Song of Innocence to “The Tyger” of Experience, “The Lamb” shows the creature and his human interrogator in front of a

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closely packed flock of sheep. One could say that the centripetal and more coherent domains of the architectonics of otherness, organic nature and confessional orthodoxy (though not the historical past), are conspicuously present in “The Lamb.” In “The Tyger,” which dramatizes a “contrary” spiritual attitude, as the subtitle of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, “Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul,” suggests, they are conspicuously absent. The subtitle makes clear the pervasive dialogic relationship of many of the poems in the double volume. In fact, a recent study of Blake that makes generous use of Bakhtin’s theory of communication argues that the encounters between creature and questioner in “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” can be fruitfully seen as dialogic and monologic, respectively. The boy who catechizes the lamb provides the answer to his own questions (“Little Lamb I’ll tell thee”), but there seems to be more dialogic vitality in his series of questions and answers than in the series of questions put to the tiger by his antagonistic interrogator, who seems to expect neither comprehension nor response on the animal’s part.40 There is also a livelier sense of interpersonal personhood in the song of innocence, not only between the boy and the lamb, but also between both of these creatures and their creator, who “calls himself a Lamb,” than there is in the impersonal, even reifying, series of rhetorical questions in the contrasting song of experience, where the tiger is imaginatively reassembled in the middle stanzas, part by part. If my admittedly unorthodox reading of “The Tyger” is plausible, the speaker is not himself actually overcome with fear. Rather he is increasingly confident in the irony he is demonstrating: that in spite of the rhetoric of terror he deploys, conventional before the supposed sublimity of his subject, his own visionary, artistic creation of the tiger, accomplished with his own hand and eye (as well as the hand and eye of the painter and poet he represents), is quite sufficient and subliminally impressive in its own right. That such human creativity and the human imagination are properly considered “immortal” is amply argued elsewhere in Blake’s oeuvre, for example, in the surprising ease of its access to “infinity” and “eternity” in his “Auguries of

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Innocence”: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an hour.”41 It’s as simple as that. In the terms of the otherness of the personal as represented in the architectonics I have been elaborating in this chapter, there is certainly an egotistical sublimity on the part of the speaker and engraver, dramatizing a similar disposition on the part of the poet and painter, William Blake. In the final analysis, it is the artist responsible for the illuminated work who “dares” to frame this fearsome creature. Such sublime creativity is shown to be a matter of courageous choice, not a matter of speculative possibility the way “could frame” in last line of the first stanza suggests. Such egotistical sublimity may also be attributed to the feline “hero” in the poem and—perhaps most significantly—to the supposedly unimaginable creator of the tiger himself who is so directly challenged in the poem. The personal domain of negative capability, on the other hand, where the author withdraws from self-assertion, seems to find its expression only in the contrary poem “The Lamb,” even though this designation is open to skeptical critique, as John H. Jones acknowledges.42 Such concern with the otherness of the personal and its expression in a radically intrapersonal as well as interpersonal set of relationships between self and other in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin is the more particular topic and focus of the next chapter.

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Personalism: Reckoning Voices

In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Melville

I A cornerstone of Bakhtin’s foundational concept of “architectonics,” one that he dwelt on throughout his long career, was a kind of thinking he called “personalism.” Bakhtin used other, more abstract and technical terms besides “person” to refer to the complex, concrete and unique phenomenon of an individual human being in the world, from the technical Kantian term “subiectum” in Toward a Philosophy of the Act to the more common generic “man.” In between these extremes, he often spoke of the “self,” the “individual,” “consciousness,” and “the subject.” But it is in his conception of a “personalism of meaning” that the full import of personal experience in Bakhtin’s thinking becomes clear. This latter phrase occurs at the end of a series of notes published after his death as “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences.” The passage begins with his objection to the impersonal character of structural linguistics: My attitude toward structuralism. [I’m] against closure in the text. Mechanical categories: “opposition,” “alternation” of codes [. . .]. Consistent formalization and depersonalization: all relationships are given a logical (in the broadest sense of the word) character. But I hear voices in all things and the dialogical relationships between them [. . .] In structuralism there is only one subject – the subject of the researcher himself. Things themselves are transformed into 41

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concepts (of various degrees of abstraction); a subject can never become a concept (the subject itself speaks and answers). Meaning is personalistic: in meaning there is always question, address, and the anticipation of an answer, in meaning there are always two subjects (as a minimum for dialogue). This is not psychological personalism, but personalism of meaning.1

While “personalism of meaning” might suggest meaning belonging to a single person, we have seen that such is definitely not the case with Bakhtin. His personalism is radically interpersonal, an event occurring between persons—in other words, dialogic. In his early aesthetic treatise, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” he defines personhood as being composed of three distinct but intrinsically interrelated dispositions: “I-for-myself,” “the-other-for-me” and “I-for-the-other.” In this early work he also defines “character” not as an individual, according to common usage, but as “the name we give to that form of the authorhero relationship which actualizes the task of producing the whole of a hero as a determinate personality [. . .] [T]he hero is given us from the very outset, as a determinate whole, and the author’s self-activity proceeds, from the very outset, along the essential boundaries of the hero.”2 In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, elaborating on Dostoevsky’s “artistic thinking,” Bakhtin asserts, “A man never coincides with himself [. . .] The genuine life of the personality is made available only through a dialogic penetration of that personality, during which it freely and reciprocally reveals itself.”3 This insistence on the “personeity” of meaning, to use a term coined by Coleridge to describe the capacity for personality (for him, personality in the Godhead as well as in human beings)4 leads Bakhtin beyond what can be taken as an ethical existentialism to the understanding, best exemplified for him in aesthetic experience, that thinking of a person while thinking as a person is not simply an ideal to be lived up to; nor is it simply a given in human awareness. Rather it is a way of thinking about the life of meaning in the world. Bakhtin notes in this same piece the difference between “the process of reification and the process of personalization,” but warns that “personalization is never

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subjectivization. The limit here is not I but I in interrelationship with other personalities, that is I and other, I and thou.” He continues, turning what begins as a stark opposition of values into a sliding scale of cognitive dispositions with limits at each end. Our thought and our practice, not technical but moral (that is, our responsible deeds) are accomplished between two limits: attitudes toward the thing and attitudes toward the personality. Reification and personification. Some of our acts (cognitive and moral) strive toward the limit of reification, but never reach it; other acts strive toward the limit of personification, and never reach it completely.5

It is the otherness in the realm of the personal in Romanticism’s architectonics, the radical alterity at the heart of Romantic literature, that has been the most influential and, at the same time, the most contested in the twentieth century. In the various forms of poststructuralism that emerged from structuralism, the impersonality Bakhtin complained about was only intensified, as Barbara Johnson wryly observes at the beginning of her brilliant study Persons and Things. Johnson realized early on, she writes, that “deconstruction gravitated toward the inanimate: Paul de Man was happiest when proving that what we take as human nature is an illusion produced by mechanical means. Jacques Derrida’s first seminar at Yale was called The Thing, and I have been thinking about it ever since.”6 While recognizing the legitimacy of subjects thinking objectively and abstractly about a world of things—in other words, the validity of the natural and social sciences—Bakhtin insisted on making generous room for recognizing the validity of subjects thinking about other subjects and their creating meaning together in the process. Such meaning is always revised and renewed in each act of utterance, which cannot “be invoked ‘in general’. It must be of someone for someone about someone,” as Michael Holquist insists. “It is ineluctably tied to someone who is in a situation.”7 Indeed, Bakhtin remained committed over the course of his long career to finding new ways of showing that meaning itself depended on the particular living human context in

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which communication takes place. He was also committed to showing that such a context is ultimately personalistic. In an early essay published under the name of (or together with) Voloshinov, “Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art,” Bakhtin went as far as to call the object or topic referred to in any utterance, not just in literary texts, a “hero” or protagonist, a “third living participant” in even the most ordinary verbal communication.8 In effect, he was capable of personifying meaning itself. Such a personalistic orientation is, as we have seen, an important dimension of the literature of Romanticism, a cardinal category within its architectonics of otherness as well. Coleridge insisted in his prose on “the sacred distinction between things and persons,” even though he did as much as anyone to complicate this distinction in his poetry.9 Personification and its rhetorical expression in apostrophe or verbal address to non-human objects—whether phenomena or concepts (e.g. the West Wind, a nightingale, Intellectual Beauty, Mont Blanc, Liberty, the River Otter)—are pervasive in Romantic poetry, even though Wordsworth objected to the artificial allegorical personifications of neo-classical “poetic diction” in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” There are also the distinctive, prolific and polymorphous personifications of Blake, which deserve particular attention here. By the time he came to write his apocalyptic epic poem Milton: A Poem in 2 Books, Blake had long experience of taking the neoclassical device of personification, ignoring the attacks by other Romantic poets on the device for the way it mechanically and superficially endowed abstract ideas with the illusion of human agency (if indeed he knew of these attacks), and using the device in a distinctly Bakhtinian fashion, for his own creative purposes. He had already realized (in visual as well as verbal form) a large population, idiosyncratic and syncretist in nature, of imagined beings, a heterogeneous cast of heroes and villains, victims and oppressors, Zoas with their Shadows and Emanations, in whom ideas and emotions, male and female genders, “States” and “Individuals,” are conflated with one another and yet also are distinguished from one another.

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Personhood is problematic—both important and contested—in all of Blake’s poetry and prose, and in his visual art as well. In Milton the problem of knowing who’s who at any given moment is particularly fraught. At one point the hero of the poem, Milton, enters the left foot of the narrator, the pronominal “I” or image of the author, who is distinct from “the Bard” whose song moves Milton to his heroic descent from heaven. This is only the most striking example of the peculiar interpersonal and intrapersonal convergences that make up the poem’s epic, apocalyptic and lyrical plot. In effect, what Blake the historical author does is take an earlier historical author, Milton, and make him the hero, the epic protagonist, in a work of his own creation. He sends a posthumous Milton, “unhappy tho in heav’n” (E 96), down from his privileged position in the afterlife, back through a terrifying cosmos (the “Mundane Egg,” visually diagramed on Plate 33 [E 133]), down to earth, to a fictionalized village of Felpham, a place where the historical William Blake and his wife Catherine lived for three years under the condescending patronage of William Hayley.10 (Hayley’s own biography of Milton supplemented Blake’s understanding of the character of his hero.) Milton’s journey of kenotic “Self-annihilation” (E 142) allows him to renounce his former authority as author (according to Blake, wrongly exercised in attitudes of misogyny and cruelly rational theology in his major works, particularly Paradise Lost). In this act of renouncing a false and domineering selfhood, an expression of personality Bakhtin would undoubtedly identify as “monologic” (and that Keats would see as a prime example of “the egotistical sublime”), Blake’s Milton becomes a self-transcending hero, not simply by establishing his independence from his new author in this mythographic make-over but by redeeming and reclaiming a number of other, previously abjected possibilities of personhood. These alternate selves are collectively represented by Blake as “Ololon” a proliferating female figure with whom Milton is united— or reunited, since she is identified at several points as his “Emanation”— in the apocalyptic conclusion to the poem. This, at least, is a quick sketch of Blake’s remarkable visionary narrative in light of Bakhtin’s philosophy of personalism. Blake’s Milton

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is an idiosyncratic work rich with possibilities for Bakhtinian interpretation.11 A series of authoritarian figures—fearful, seductive, jealous and self-serving—are revealed to be usurpers, having falsely assumed the identities of others, comrades or kin, through envy and ungenerosity. Through various strategies of reification, Satan, Urizen, the Shadowy Female, Rahab, and other personifications of psychic negativity challenge the hero’s struggle toward genuine personhood, in which vigorous “contrariety”—for Blake, distinct from simple negation—plays an important role. These blocking figures try to undermine the creatively dialogic activity of this re-personification, this restoration of personhood to Milton, as it might be called. And not just to Milton alone, but through him, in an explicit imitatio Christi modeled on the kenosis hymn of Philippians 2: 6–11, to all of humanity. The opposing figures are either defeated or redeemed by the hero Milton, whose exemplary courage consists in his willingness to leave the company of heaven, “the Family Divine,” behind and descend “to Eternal Death.” But lest this heroism come to seem monologic and selfaggrandizing in its own right, Blake sends the female and manypersoned Ololon down toward earth at the same time as well: “Let us descend also,” she says to her collective self (E 116). This manifold female being, once part of Milton’s now divided personality, flees into the depths of Milton’s Shadow, then descends to “Felpham’s Vale” as a “Moony Ark [. . .] In clouds of blood,” finally appearing as a garment folded around the limbs of “One Man Jesus the Saviour” (E 143).

II As noted in the last chapter, the realm of the personal in Romanticism is essentially a matter of human personality. In the period imagination of the Renaissance and Reformation, the human person was ultimately conceived as analogous to the person or persons of God. Human persons were understood to be made in the image of God, a resemblance that was regarded as still vital and effectual in Erasmian and Neoplatonic

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Christian traditions and which, though utterly corrupted by original sin, was still recoverable through the unmerited mediation of Christ, the second Adam, in Calvinist and Puritan modes of thought. Donne calls upon the “three person’d God” to remake his personality in his “Holy Sonnets,” and Milton presents Adam and Eve in relation to God in two persons, the Father and the Son in Paradise Lost, divine beings in relationship that provide the model of their own and their offspring’s recovery from the delusion of independent selfhood they have been offered by Satan. In an account of the theology of the early Church Fathers that is relevant both to Early Modern constructions of the person and to Bakhtin’s later twentieth-century model of interpersonality, Kallistos Ware writes that “human personhood, like the personhood of God, is exchange, self-giving, reciprocity. As a person, I am what I am only in relation to other persons. My human being is a relational being [. . .] ‘I’ need ‘you’ in order to be myself.”12 The most oblique but also the most powerful Early Modern representations of human personality against the background of the divine can be seen in Shakespeare. Indeed, in the neo-Romantic literary criticism of Harold Bloom, Shakespeare is credited with the invention of personality itself, at least in its modern sense, and while Bloom is not inclined to grant Christian doctrine a major role in this great invention, he does follow Leeds Barroll in observing that “Renaissance ideals, whether Christian or philosophical or occult, tended to emphasize our need to join something personal that was yet larger than ourselves, God or a spirit. A certain strain or anxiety ensued, and Shakespeare became the greatest master at exploiting the void between persons and the personal ideal.”13 Against this two-story idea of personhood, as it might be called, may be set the single-story conception of the person in the Enlightenment, organized around the ideals of disengaged rationality and sympathetic natural sentiment, under the aegis of an ultimately homogeneous humanity. Whether the person was identified primarily with the instrumental power of reason, as in the philosophy of Locke, or with

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the sympathetic sentiment of benevolence, as in Shaftsbury and Hutcheson, the realm of the personal in the Enlightenment was not clearly separated from the realm of the social, and both of these could be easily correlated, at least in theory, with a world of “nature.” And as Charles Taylor has demonstrated, the realm of the supernatural was not so much denied or rejected in the many forms of natural religion in the Enlightenment, at least not until the rise of atheistic naturalism in France—rather it was seen as continuous with nature (human as well as other-than-human), as part of the “interlocking design” of the Enlightenment world view.14 Pope’s Essay on Man describes “the World’s great harmony, that springs/ From Order, Union, full Consent of things,” and it also proclaims that God and Nature have ordered that “Self-love and Social be the same.” Even in Rousseau, who like Voltaire raised strong objections to this happy resolution of all conflicts among the natural order, the social order and the individual, the voice of the singular self is essentially the voice of an exemplary universal nature, a nature which also provides the ideal basis of the social order that has been corrupted by an excessively artificial civilization. Although he is often regarded as the father of Romanticism (and more recently, by Derrida and de Man, as a godfather of deconstruction), it is more accurate, within the context of the architectonics of Romanticism, to situate Rousseau’s sense of a personal self within the period imagination of the Enlightenment. His Confessions begins with the famous declaration of independence “I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.” But even here, the paradigmatic nature of his singularity is based on a sense of its identity with the larger-hearted humanity of his potential readers, over against the narrow-minded inhumanity of his enemies and detractors. As Isaiah Berlin argues, “The actual substance of what Rousseau said was not so very different from the official enlightened doctrine of the eighteenth century. What was different was the manner; what was different was the temperament.”15

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In Romanticism, the sentimental self and the rational self, both of which are based in the Enlightenment on a sense of the essential sameness of persons with one another and with the world around them, are reconfigured according to the authority of otherness, an otherness that gives them authority even in their estrangement from self-identity. The phrase “authorizing otherness,” as I am calling it, is deliberately equivocal. On the one hand, the individual person, no longer selfidentical, authors or authorizes otherness outside him- or herself, grants a personeity if not a personality, to this otherness. A form of semiautonomous, potentially independent identity and agency that resists being assimilated back into the original identity or economy of the self comes into being. The personhood of this “other” is perceived and validated, however fleetingly, as lying beyond the control, even beyond the comprehension, of the self. On the other hand, sometimes simultaneously, the self-identical person can find him- or herself authorized by a personeity which is other to his or her identity, by an otherness which cannot be controlled or contained within the rational or emotional framework of the self. This power may indeed refuse to relinquish control or respect the boundaries of the supposedly selfcontained, self-identical person. The literary representations of this doubling of the Romantic person are many and various. The device of the Doppelgänger in the German novel is perhaps the most obvious. The term as well as the form, in which a person meets a usurping identical version of himself, a pretender to his own character, was coined by Jean Paul Richter but it was used by later authors from James Hogg to Dostoevsky. Less dramatic but still symptomatic is the division opened up within a person’s autobiographical consciousness such as that perceived by Wordsworth: so wide appears The vacancy between me and those days Which yet have such self-presence in my mind That, sometimes, when I think of them, I seem Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself And of some other Being.16

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In still another representation, such inner alterity is famously proclaimed by Goethe’s Faust—“Two souls dwell, alas, within my breast”—just before the figure of Mephistopheles appears in the drama to assume the role of Faust’s antagonist and alter ego. There is also the vicarious vision of Coleridge’s conversation poems, where the poet-speaker finds escape from solipsism by suddenly envisioning the surrounding scene through the eyes of an intimate other, a spouse or friend or child. And, in another generic mode, there is the haunting of one version of self by another in Coleridge’s supernatural poems like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or “Christabel,” where the comforting mediation of heavenly spirits becomes a recurrent nightmare of alienation and possession, a reanimation of the archaic or folkloric realm of “popular superstitions,” as Collins called them, that found expression in medievalizing ballads and Gothic novels throughout the Romantic era and beyond. As I have suggested earlier, the authority of this otherness is most prolifically expressed in the prophetic epics of Blake, with their quasi-allegorical personages, specters and emanations, corporate persons, unincorporated personifications, and “individuals” who pass through spiritual “states” but are nevertheless radically divided and estranged from themselves and one another. Here the Romantic otherness of personhood finds its most complex and idiosyncratic expression. More widespread and characteristic of Romanticism is the estranged and estranging personhood of the Romantic hero, embodied (and disembodied) most notably by Byron in various forms of resistant outsiderhood. Here we may re-engage Bakhtin’s preoccupation with the dialogic otherness of author and hero in his early writing noted throughout our discussion. Without claiming that all representations of otherness in the Romantic person can be seen as a matter of interaction between author and hero, I would like to dwell on the way the authorizing of Romantic otherness is often involved with questions of authorship itself. As Berlin notes, Romantic writers tend to look at the world through the lens of art. In a well-known passage in the opening of the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (before the fourth canto, in which he announces

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that he is abandoning the distinction between “the author and the pilgrim”), Byron offers his own version of the author-hero relationship. He addresses the hero of the first two cantos, published four years earlier: ’Tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense, that we endow With form our fancy, gaining as we give The life we imagine, even as I do now. What am I? Nothing; but not so art thou, Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth, Invisible but gazing, as I glow Mix’d with thy spirit, blended with thy birth, And feeling still with thee in my crush’d feelings’ dearth.17

For Bakhtin, this passage (if not the whole poem) would be a classic case of one particular form of author-hero relationship, one he called the “lyrical hero and author,” where the author dominates or threatens to take possession of the main character. But it also can be seen, more generally, as Byron’s Romantic recognition that the literary person of the author and the person of the literary character are deeply interdependent. The author represents himself as “nothing,” a being whose emotional life is empty but who is capable of creating another being, in whose vitality the author can participate. Even if the selfabnegation of the author is not completely convincing here, given the pathos of Byron’s opening autobiographical appeal to his daughter Augusta in previous stanzas and his general abandonment of the hero Childe Harold in the following canto, the idea of the Romantic person as authoring otherness is treated in a way that is typical of the period’s dominant concerns. The creating self recedes so that a created self may step forward. Especially within the category of the aesthetic, the realm of the person is both self-divided and interdependent. The most explicit literary form of this intrapersonal as well as interpersonal otherness is a narrative structure I have called, in an earlier study, the “meditation on the hero.” This is a narrative, often in

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prose, where an unassuming and other-directed narrator reflects on the powerful, mysterious and inner-directed selfhood of a hero whom he has either witnessed in life or resurrected from legend. The fullest realization of this form is Melville’s Moby-Dick, where the convivial but evasive narrator Ishmael meditates on the latter-day Shakespearian hero Ahab, recounting his own speculative pursuits of the whale in general even as he focuses on Ahab’s tragic quest for vengeance on the particular whale named Moby-Dick.18 As the epigraph to this chapter, a defiant speech by this hero, suggests, Ahab is struggling to maintain his personality under the threat of reification, a dubiously “personified impersonal.” But this explicit narrative structure also informs a good deal of literary creation and literary criticism in the period, as the widespread fascination with Shakespeare, particularly with his vivid characters as contrasted with his strangely elusive authorial personality, his “negative capability,” as Keats called it, attests. It was Coleridge who popularized the contrast between the “negative capability” of Shakespeare and the “egotistical sublime” of Milton, in the second volume of his Biographia Literaria, even though he did not use these terms himself. At the end of Chapter 15, analyzing “the specific symptoms of poetic power” in Shakespeare, Coleridge identifies Milton as “his compeer not rival” and goes on to distinguish them as follows. While the former [Shakespeare] darts himself forth, and passes into all forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other [Milton] attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own IDEAL. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of MILTON; while SHAKESPEARE becomes all things, yet forever remaining himself.19

This contrast of actual authors and ideal authorial types is elaborated by Hazlitt, using contemporary examples along with the Renaissance archetypes (Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Scott). It is also rehearsed, more informally but more famously, by Keats in his letters.

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It does seem strange, at least to English readers, that Bakhtin does not mention Shakespeare as a particularly dialogic or “polyphonic” author in relation to the heroes and heroines of his plays. In his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, the original version of which was written several years after “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” was abandoned, Bakhtin sees Dostoevsky as the originator of supreme authorial outsideness, while in the still later treatise “Discourse in the Novel,” he finds the novel, not drama, to be the genre with the greatest potential for representing the essentially dialogic nature of language and utterance. Nevertheless, Bakhtin does reproduce something of the earlier Romantic contrast between the author of great creative power with “no identity of his own” and the author whose poetry “has a palpable design on us,” as Keats put it, in his extended analysis of a supremely dialogic or “polyphonic” Dostoevsky and his briefer remarks on an essentially monologic—“monolithically monologic”—Tolstoy, following a characteristic Russian opposition of two types of literary genius.20 This is not to say that Bakhtin’s Russian Modernist categories are identical to the English Romantic ones. Nor is it to say that the complications and paradoxes of the relation of an author to his or her characters were not recognized and thematized well before the Romantic era. The endlessly shifting relations of author, editor, Moorish translator and infidel historian to the hero of Don Quixote, whose own identity is mediated by the heroes of the chivalric romances he has too credulously identified with as an “idle reader,” show that writers in the Early Modern period had capitalized on the perception of such differential or transgredient relationships, to use Bakhtin’s term, between authors and heroes. The same could be said of the unstable textual antics of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in the period of the Enlightenment. But within the divided otherness of the Romantic person, authorized as well as authorizing, the idea that a personality is potentially the creator or re-creator of other selves while at the same time potentially the creation or creature of others becomes deeply rooted in Western culture. For a less obvious but still more influential example, we can turn to the novels of Jane Austen.

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Although her technical innovations in the art of fiction have not always been recognized by English and American critics, European critics in the 1920s began noticing that the formal device of “free indirect style,” initially thought to have been invented by Flaubert, was already well developed in the novels of Austen. European novels of the eighteenth century had cultivated three basic forms of fiction: the pseudo-autobiographical form, originally developed in the Spanish picaresque and given new vitality by Le Sage and Defoe, where the author speaks as the hero; the epistolary form pioneered by Aphra Behn, popularized by Richardson and given wider currency in France and Germany, where various characters articulate their thoughts as authors in their own right; and the narrative reflexivity established for the novel by Cervantes and imitated by Fielding and Sterne, among others, where the author continually speaks ironically to the reader over the heads of the characters. Austen did experiment with the epistolary novel in an early version of Sense and Sensibility, and she adopted, here and there in Northanger Abbey, a narrative self-consciousness in the manner of Cervantes. But in her published novels a narrative mode emerges that combines the style, point of view and voice of an author with the style, point of view and voice of the character or social group whose story the author is relating. Although Austen has only been interpreted within the context of Romanticism in recent decades, I want to argue that her use of free indirect discourse is yet another expression of authorizing otherness, of the estrangement of identity, within the realm of the personal. As recent studies of Bakhtin’s contribution to this critical analysis argue, the choice of terms to describe this phenomenon, which eventually became widespread in European novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is critical. If it is seen as a matter of style, as in most linguistic analyses of the device, it seems plausible to credit Flaubert, the highly self-conscious stylist, with the innovation. If it is seen as a question of “point of view,” in a widely used visual metaphor, then Henry James is the exemplary novelist and critic (James, who, as David Lodge has pointed out, denied the formal significance of Austen’s

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fiction even as he built his own house of fiction on the foundation she had laid).21 And if it is seen as a matter of voice, as it became for Bakhtin in his polemic against the narrowly stylistic analysis of the novel, then the radical innovation may be held to come with Dostoevsky. What I propose here, using the early Bakhtin to temper the claims of the later Bakhtin, is that “free indirect discourse” (the term of art in recent analysis of the phenomenon) is best seen as a uniquely dialogic relationship of author and hero, as an originally and peculiarly Romantic rendering of the authorizing and authorized otherness of the person.22 Thus when Austen writes in Emma, “Emma’s very good opinion of Frank Churchill was a little shaken on the following day, by hearing that he had gone off to London merely to have his hair cut,” or in Northanger Abbey, “An abbey!—yes, it was delightful to be really in an abbey!—but she doubted, as she looked around the room, whether anything within her observation, would have given her the consciousness,” we find the author speaking from outside her hero but with “emotional-volitional accents,” as Bakhtin puts it in “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” that are more appropriate to, or that seem derived from, the character herself. The author is not reporting the speech of the character in direct dialogue, nor is she reporting the thoughts of the character in language and concepts that come only from outside or only from inside the character’s consciousness. The commonly used term “omniscient author” is quite misleading, since the author’s knowledge of what is going on in the minds or hearts of her characters is represented only selectively, sporadically and obliquely. The contemporary psychological term “Theory of Mind,” used in recent literary cognitive criticism, seems more appropriate, with the proviso that the mind-reading abilities of an author as rendered in the free indirect style go far beyond those of actual people observing other actual people.23 In the case of our first quotation, it is only the modifiers—“very,” “a little,” “merely”—that seem to come from Emma’s zone of perception and articulation, as Emma herself is trying to find the right balance of censure and sympathy for still another character, Frank Churchill. In the second case, we are aware of literary stereotypes derived from the

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novels of Ann Radcliffe, as Catherine Moreland repeats the titular noun “abbey” in fragmented exclamatory syntax. But we also note an abstract, Latinate phrasing, more attributable to the author than the heroine, a discourse that effectively counters these preconceived notions as Catherine registers her more immediate and more syntactically incomplete “observation” of her surroundings. The author in effect delegates a certain degree of her authorial discourse to the character she is describing. She cedes a certain but never predictable portion of her narrative authority, her author’s proper utterance, to the presumed utterance of the character who is the focus of her attention. We are thus presented with a doubling of aesthetic activity, symptomatic of the otherness within the sameness of persons. We are asked to contemplate a protagonist who is not the author and yet who cannot be absolutely separated and/or entirely distinguished from the perspective or listening-post of author. As Flaubert said, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” In Austen’s otherwise firm authorial guidance, this doubling may lead to little or no ethical confusion in the long run, to little or none of the “confusion of distance” that Wayne Booth deplored in the more ambiguous and ambivalent narratives of Modernism. But it initiates an aesthetic interpenetration of personalities, constructing and constructed, in Romanticism that shows no signs of disappearing from the novel or resolving itself into any clarity of didactic intention two centuries later, even though it can and has been subject to various critiques, according to different sets of literary norms in the succeeding movements of Realism, Modernism and Postmodernism. Free indirect discourse is a narrative structure so common in prose fiction that it has come to seem, to most readers most of the time, perfectly natural. Even as Romantic creativity produced a wide variety of these “othered” and “othering” literary persons, Romantic criticism produced diverse accounts of their nature. In a larger sense, the presence of reflective criticism within the aesthetic activity of Romanticism is a symptom of the putative otherness of literary art itself, its estrangement from and within its own discourse. The idea that entertaining, imaginative literature requires constant, even simultaneous critical

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explanation is another revolutionary innovation within Romanticism that has come to seem perfectly normal, at least to academic readers. Romantic theories of literature themselves are often less dialogic in their own right, however, less directly expressive of the otherness within the self or the selfness within the other, than the narrative, dramatic and poetic texts of the period. Theoretical accounts of the various forms of Romantic personhood tend to focus on the imaginative genius of the author alone or on the imagined autonomy of the character or hero in isolation more than they reflect on the relationship, properly dialogic in light of Bakhtin, between the two. Thus in Richter’s School for Aesthetics, Courses II and III treat the different degrees of imagination in authors (at the lowest level, in readers as well) and the characteristics of the highest degree, genius. It is only in Course X, “On Characters,” that the other form of literary person is considered. But it is treated separately. Shelley’s Defence of Poetry tends to be monologic in the extreme, as when the critic asserts that “A Poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons and the distinction of place are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry.”24 In contrast, the abstract convertibility of persons one to another is just what Bakhtin says is impossible. Other theoretical expressions of Romanticism, however, which might be called, after Bakhtin, aestheticized philosophy rather than philosophical aesthetics, deal directly with the dialogic or paradoxically non-identical nature of human selfhood. In fragments called his “Fichte Studies,” Novalis pushed Fichte’s subjective idealism to its contradictory conclusion. As Elizabeth Mitman and Mary R. Strand explain in Theory as Practice, Novalis begins his critique of Fichte with an articulation of the central roles that signification and otherness play in the construction of identity. With this he criticizes the part that sameness plays in Fichte’s idealist notion of identity. For Fichte, the self is fundamentally a unity, a self-identical or selfsame whole. By suggesting that

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otherness is central to subjectivity, that the subject is always already split into self and other, Novalis problematizes Fichte’s idealist notion of the unity or sameness of the subject.

Thus where Fichte would make the self the absolute author of reality, Novalis argues that it can only do so in relation to an otherness that resists its authority. A similar “literary absolute,” which is nevertheless informed by a fundamental ambiguity of categories or “equivocity” of concepts has been analyzed by Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in the philosophical writings of Friedrich Schlegel and his Atheneum associates. As Schlegel (or his character Andrea) puts it in his Dialogue on Poetry, “Philosophy and poetry, the two most sublime powers in man, which even in Athens in the period of their highest fruition were effective only in isolation, now intermingle in perpetual interaction in order to stimulate and develop each other.”25 In articulating the personalism of Romanticism, I would like to suggest a way of framing these various constructions of alterity that appear within the realm of the personal, divided as it is between the egotistical sublime and the negatively capable expression of authorial authority. As I have already suggested in the analysis of “Kubla Khan” and “The Tyger” in the previous chapter, these two forms of personal otherness, the one tending toward a strong, centralizing concept of identity, the other toward a non-assertive, recessive or centrifugal concept, may be seen in literary characters as well as in the authorial voices that present them. Egotistical sublimity asserts itself in Romantic heroes like Faust and Manfred as well as in Romantic authors like Wordsworth and Byron. And negative capability—the ability to observe strong forms of personhood in others from a position of relative obscurity and detachment—expresses itself in distinctly unheroic characters like Fanny Price in Austen’s Mansfield Park, a protagonist who patiently observes the more theatrical waywardness of other characters in the novel and unobtrusively guides the different members of the Bertram family in realizing, for better or worse, their true identities. A kind of negative capability can also be seen in the young hero Wilhelm Meister in Goethe’s eponymous Bildungsroman, whose

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inchoate social identity is presented in the process of its ongoing “emergence” rather than its decisive completion, as Bakhtin observes of this novel in a later essay.26 It is interesting that in the midst of Wilhelm’s aesthetic education in a troupe of actors, Wilhelm takes part in extended critical discussion about the supposed negative capability of Shakespeare’s hesitant hero (as Goethe and other Romantic commentators saw him) Hamlet, a conversation that considers Hamlet to be a hero more appropriate to the novel than to the drama. In light of the exemplary Romantic contrast between Shakespeare and Milton, it seems clear that for many Romantic critics, the recessive or impersonal authorial identity of Shakespeare is instrumental in creating the dominating personalities of the heroes of his tragedies (and villains and saintly heroines as well as, Keats notes, citing Iago and Imogen as examples). Conversely, the dominating authorial identity of Milton, overtly personal, produces the relatively unformed characters of Adam and Eve, who require a great deal of initial instruction and subsequent correction as our “grand parents.” They receive this divine counsel both before and after they succumb to the falsely heroic character of Satan, a figure who is initially presented as a classical hero in the manner of Achilles but is progressively diminished in the course of Paradise Lost, until he ends up as the serpent he has impersonated in tempting Eve. (This diminishment of Milton’s Satan was one that Blake, Byron, and Shelley all took exception to and “corrected” in their own writings.) Milton’s dominant author also produces the outwardly passive and unheroic servant heroism of Christ in Paradise Regained. The pattern of strong authors producing ostensibly weak characters holds for the creative personhood of Wordsworth and the created pathos of most of the characters in his poems (including his earlier childhood self), as well as for the negatively capable Keats (as he sometimes, though not always, represents himself) in the presence of such characters as the heroic Hyperion and Apollo in his Hyperion poems. But among the Romantics, it can also be argued, there are selfassertive authors who create strong heroes—Shelley and his unbound

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Prometheus, for example, or Byron (representative of the egotistical sublime for Hazlitt) and his hyper-heroic Manfred, resolutely defiant of any and all supernatural agents, even resisting the plot that he has had assigned to him. Conversely, it can be argued that there are weak authors—that is, authors prone to self-deprecating or recessive presentations of self—who enter into a relationship with weak or relatively unformed characters: the worldly ironist narrator and the persistently naïve hero of Don Juan (the contrast with the ByronManfred relationship indicates we are dealing with presentations of an authorial persona rather than with an actual author’s psychological temperament) and, in a further complication of the representational values of biography, Jane Austen’s narrator vis-à-vis Fanny Price or Goethe’s vis-à-vis Wilhelm Meister.27 In elaboration of the author-hero relationship in Mansfield Park, Austen’s most overtly Romantic novel, the following interpersonal “personalism of meaning” may be noted. The self-effacing hero Fanny Price is introduced as painfully unsure of herself, even abject, in the context of the highly respectable and wealthy Bertram family she is sent to live with as a young girl. In the course of the novel, with its romantic and erotic intrigues among the young cousins and their friends the Crawfords, Fanny emerges as an ethical presence, a standard by which the reader learns to judge the other characters, who are more dedicated to aesthetic self-indulgence and self-display. For characters like Edmund Bertram, the aspiring clergyman, and for his more worldly Bertram siblings, and Henry and Mary Crawford, Fanny becomes, in effect, a representative of the author. She is the character in the novel whose emerging moral consciousness most reliably reflects back to these others, and thence to the reader, their potentially better and worse selves. As these other characters make the decisions that determine their ultimate fate in Austen’s moral universe, they even solicit, with varying degrees of sincerity, Fanny’s advice and good opinion. It is only Edmund who finally lives up to or into the high ethical “character” she has held up to him, an ideal figure he himself has helped to create in her view of him.

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For most of the novel, in other words, Fanny is negatively capable in the sense of Keats’s characterization of the “poetical character,” having virtually no identity of her own, even as she chastens the aesthetic exuberance of the marriageable others as they attempt, in various ways, to take possession of social roles that the estate of the title seems to hold out to them. The recessive nature of Fanny’s personality, for example, enables her to transform the socially inappropriate theatrical performance of Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows during Sir Thomas’s absence into a novelistic narrative of the vows that she guides Edmund, the least prodigal of Sir Thomas Bertram’s offspring, to make: vows clerical, filial and, finally, vows of marriage. The awkwardness of the ending of the novel—in which the actual author has to “entreat” her readers “to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself may desire”— reflects the need of the novel to relieve Fanny of her negatively capable authorial duties and have her join the ranks of the characters to whom she has shown herself morally superior throughout.28 This moral superiority, carefully represented by Austen as recessive rather than dominant, has turned many readers and critics of Mansfield Park against its author and its hero, but it may be defended on the aesthetic grounds of Fanny’s unwitting impersonation of the author, as it might be called, engineered by Austen herself. Still other relations of creating and created persons are suggested by this architectonic scheme. Romantic authors often recreate the personalities of other Romantic authors, and they tend to do so either from the site of negative capability, as Coleridge does with the figure of Wordsworth in his poem of creative despair and abjection “To William Wordsworth” and in his critically self-deprecating apologia Biographia Literaria, or from the domain of egotistical sublimity, as Blake does with Milton, having him renounce his Satanic selfhood in a new attitude of humility in the poem Milton, or as Shelley does with the figure of Keats, presented as the victim of hostile reviewers in Adonais. It might be objected that in all these works, with the possible exception of the

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Biographia, the “authors” in question are simply creating heroes based on the biographical record or their personal knowledge of the other author, rather than out of whole cloth. But the imaginative representation of historical figures, literary, political, or military is a well-recognized genre throughout the history of literature. The emergence of marginalia as a Romantic genre in its own right shows that many less overtly literary examples could be adduced as well: Blake’s apoplectic marginalia on Reynold’s Discourses, for example, or Coleridge’s insinuating and invasive commentary in his Aids to Reflection inserted into Archbishop Leighton’s seventeenth-century Works.29 Romantic authors often define themselves over against other authors, symbiotically or parasitically, in opposition, celebration, or attitudes oscillating between these extremes. Finally, in a suggestion that may seem to take a page from Don Quixote, I will go as far as to claim that Romantic characters themselves may, in a meaningful sense, create other characters, from positions of strength but also from positions of weakness. This is yet another instance of the personalism of meaning in Romantic literature. For examples of strong characters creating weak ones, casting them in supporting roles of their own construction, consider Faust’s impact on the Gretchen of the First Part of the Tragedy. It is not simply that Faust dominates and destroys Gretchen as an object of his passion and excessive desire for experience. Rather he actively resists the cynical, libertine reading of the relationship proposed by Mephistopheles and transforms the simple girl into a sentimental and ultimately tragic heroine, one who turns out to be capable of interceding for his soul against the claims of Mephistopheles, with apparent success, at the end of the Second Part. In a comic vein, the same kind of creative relationship occurs between Austen’s Emma and Emma’s protégée Harriet Martin. Emma produces Harriet as a character on the stage of the local marriage market, however naïve her matchmaking turns out to be, and only repents of this dubious aesthetic activity when her own future as a marriageable heroine with Mr. Knightley is threatened by Harriet’s own untoward improvisation. As we learn at the end of the novel, Mr. Knightley himself has been playing a similar, though more indirect,

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authorial role with Emma herself from behind the scenes, from a recessive site of negative capability. To adduce the possibility of weak characters creating strong ones, we need only think of the numerous stories of doubles or Doppelgänger. Poe’s hero William Wilson, a late and unusually literal instance of those “people who see themselves,” as Richter defined the term, certainly collaborates in the production of his mirror image and namesake as his own better self, even if he ends by murdering the “other” William Wilson who has continually tried to correct and reform him.30 Less literal examples of persons creating evil or destructive doubles or significant others of themselves can be found in Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, various tales by Hoffmann and Dostoevsky’s late Romantic novella The Double, which is insightfully interpreted by Bakhtin in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. In this genre, the author delegates to a weak or unstable character within the work some portion of his or her creative responsibility, so that another, more powerful character might be brought to life—for better or, more usually, for worse for the character conjuring up, however mysteriously, his alternate self. Extending the concept of the double, it could even be argued that the negative and negating figure of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust (“the spirit who denies”) is a character who creates, through psychological manipulation as well as supernatural power, an endlessly striving Romantic hero out of the frustrated Reformation student of unhallowed arts. For a schematic rendering of these dialogic relationships, see Diagram II, “Romantic Relations of Author and Hero,” in the Appendix. As readers of Mary Shelley will guess, I use this last phrase to suggest a family resemblance between Faust and Frankenstein—or between Faust and Frankenstein’s “creature,” as his creator calls him in his more dispassionate moments. In the last section of this chapter, I would like to consider this exemplary novel of Romanticism at greater length, both within the context of the architectonics of otherness developed in the previous chapter and in light of Bakhtin’s personalism which has guided the discussion in this one. The otherness of the Romantic person,

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creative and created, and the personalism of meaning that emerges from this aberrant creativity, are central—and quite literal—concerns of this endlessly interpretable Romantic novel.

III In a set of notes entitled “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book” and only published in 1976, after his death, Bakhtin elaborated on the “problem of polyphony,” as he had called it: A completely new structure for the image of a human being—a full-blooded and fully signifying other consciousness which is not inserted into the finalizing frame of reality, which is not finalized by anything (not even death), for its meaning cannot be resolved or abolished by reality (to kill does not mean to refute). This other consciousness is not inserted into the frame of authorial consciousness, it is revealed from within as something that stands outside and alongside and with which the author can enter into dialogic relations. The author, like Prometheus, creates (or rather recreates) living beings who are independent of himself and with whom he is on equal terms. He cannot finalize them, for he has discovered what distinguishes personality from all that is not personality.31

Bakhtin is thinking primarily of Dostoevsky here (though he does mention Mauriac, Graham Greene, and Thomas Mann in the preceding paragraphs as well). Yet his remarks have a peculiar applicability to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—not only to her own strategies as a firsttime author, but also to the project of her hero, Victor Frankenstein, “the Modern Prometheus,” as he anticipates his project of creating new life from dead bodies. “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me,” her hero recalls thinking.32 Of course, his own performance as “author” (a word that he applies to himself from time to time) is far from polyphonic, in Bakhtin’s terms. He resists being “on equal terms” with

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his creation or creature and seems quite unaware of “what distinguishes personality from all that is not personality” in this other living being. From the moment the creature looks back at him with his “dull yellow” eyes (34), Victor Frankenstein shows himself to be a monologic creator par excellence. He is less like Bakhtin’s Prometheus than he is like the “worldly-wise Hermes” whom Jean Paul Richter describes and disparages in his chapter “On Characters” in his School for Aesthetics: Like the writer, every literary life—how much more so the brightest, spiritual life—is born, not made. All worldly and human knowledge cannot by itself create a character which would continue to live. The worldly-wise Hermes frequently conjures up Christian skeletons, skeletal angels, and skeletal devils. He who selects and links together a skeletal character for himself from the bones lying in the various churchyards of his experience and disguises and covers them rather than give them a body, torments himself and others with a pseudo-life, whose movement he must provide through marionette strings, instead of muscles.33

Of course the problem that the novel dramatizes is that the Victor Frankenstein’s creation of a life is neither literary nor mythological. The pale student of unhallowed arts has chosen scientific rather than aesthetic activity, in a literal and thoroughly physical realization of the Romantic metaphor of the artist. And in doing so, he ends up imitating not so much Prometheus, whose making of mankind out of mud is secondary in most versions of the myth to his stealing of fire from the gods on behalf of these already miserable and oppressed creatures, nor even Hermes, who guides the souls of the dead to the underworld. Rather he imitates the God of the Enlightenment philosophers, the Deist deity who creates but then withdraws from his creation, a creation whose clockwork operation needs neither his ongoing providential support nor his redemptive intervention. Frankenstein lacks the emotional power to sustain and nurture his new species, even when the creature (following the example of Adam in Paradise Lost that he has encountered in his autodidact’s education), asks for an Eve to make

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such a species possible. He also lacks the imagination to see what most readers feel once the creature has told him his own story in the hut on the Alpine mountain: that Frankenstein has unwittingly made the creature, whom he addresses at this primal encounter as “Devil” and “monster” (65), in his own human image. It is a particular cruelty that when the creature discovers Frankenstein’s laboratory journal in the pocket of the coat he has been wearing, he concludes from that horrified narrative of his origins that he is not “beautiful and alluring,” as God made Adam when he made him “after his own image,” but is rather a “filthy type” of his creator’s humanity, “more horrid even from the very resemblance” (88). I do not mean to suggest that this unusual novel is a theological or aesthetic allegory, although such interpretations would be no less plausible, it seems to me, than some of the ingenious readings it has attracted in the last fifty years or so during which it has become a canonical text in Romantic studies. Rather I mean to invoke the authorhero/creator-creature analogy, widely used in Romanticism, to focus attention on the distinctive way that Mary Shelley presents the otherness of personality in this work. Whether they are measured ethically, aesthetically, or religiously, the deficiencies of the hero Victor Frankenstein (proclaimed as such by the title) are finally less interesting than the variations on the author-hero relationship that the novel conjures up, quite self-consciously, out of the disjecta membra of Western literary tradition. As Garret Stewart puts it, “like the Creature made rather than born, demonically cobbled together, the novelistic mode is pieced out before our eyes, born of epistolary directness, midwifed by a framing structure that remains vectored beyond the plot’s own closure.” To which may be added the observation of Michael Holquist, “Frankenstein’s monster springs from the library as much as he does from the charnel house and laboratory: he is made up not only of other bodies from the past, but like Mary Shelley’s novel, from other books from the past.” And to which I would only add that her aesthetic activity is successful, in Bakhtin’s terms, where Victor Frankenstein’s is not, because she has discovered what distinguishes personality from all

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that is not personality, at least as far as the authorizing otherness of Romantic personality is concerned.34 This is how I interpret the many allusions to Rousseau in Mary Shelley’s novel. Victor Frankenstein is a representative man of the Enlightenment, and like his fellow Genevan Rousseau, whose doctrines virtually haunt the novel, his idea of the harmony of human nature, the natural world, and the ideal social order is based on the belief that nature is the work of a virtuous and reasonable deity.35 As Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had argued, still within the Enlightenment paradigm of self-consistent reason, Rousseau’s novel of and on education, Emile, had left half the human race out of consideration in setting forth the ideal development of this faculty in younger members of the species. Less overtly, Mary Shelley demonstrates how the ideal of authentic, self-identical personhood dramatized in Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie and in his autobiographical Confessions is unable to imagine, creatively or sympathetically, the depths of otherness that had been opened up in the sphere of the personal by the aesthetic activity of Romanticism. Interestingly, her father, William Godwin, had undergone a similar aesthetic conversion in his Gothic political and psychological novel Caleb Williams, upon which, along with many other precursor texts, it is clear that Mary Shelley drew. Frankenstein was dedicated to him, “the Author of Political Justice, Caleb Williams, &c.” (4). In the narrative of Frankenstein, there are characters who are both authors and heroes, narrators of one story and main characters within another story, characters who turn out to be radically interdependent with one another in these roles. The novel is constructed in concentric circles of storytelling, storytelling that turns from the presentation of self to the presentation of another. At the center sits Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory journal, accidentally preserved and coincidentally read by his creature, a coincidence that confirms for the creature his identity as a monster. This is a story which remains untold; it is simply alluded to, not reproduced. Framing this story is the creature’s own narrative, reproduced verbatim, as the quotation marks at the beginning of every

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paragraph assure us, in six of the nine chapters of the second volume. Framing the creature’s autobiography is the story of Victor Frankenstein and his creation, as told by himself, which runs from the first chapter of the first volume to the interrupted seventh chapter of the third volume. And framing this self-portrait of the maker as a young man is the first-person narrative of Robert Walton, the aspiring polar explorer, which begins with four letters to his sister in the first volume and ends with five letters (or five dated entries in a single letter) that conclude the novel. Although they appear in traditional fictional forms—the journal, the interpolated tale and the familiar letter—each of these incorporated narratives begins as an autobiography (the autobiographical form of author-hero relationship, in Bakhtin’s terminology) which is then transformed into the story of a Romantic hero, heroic and/or villainous in his otherness, (something like what Bakhtin calls the lyric form of author and hero). In each case, a tale of an I-for-myself turns into a tale of the other-for-me. Walton abandons the story of his own adventure, prospective and retrospective, to become the worshipful author and faithful amanuensis of Frankenstein’s heroic personality. Frankenstein leaves the account of his own Lehrjahre to become the horrified witness to his creature’s career as a monster—perhaps because he has not been able to bring such witness into court, either to save the falsely accused servant Justine or to enlist the law in bringing his friend Clerval’s murderer to justice. The creature begins with the story of his own coming to consciousness and social awareness but ends with the story of his plotting of revenge against his creator, after he has discovered Frankenstein’s existence. At this point, in the middle of the novel, the direction of these author-hero relations is thus reversed. The monster becomes the author of a different representation of Frankenstein as hero. He transforms the modern Prometheus of the subtitle into a latter-day Zeus, “the Oppressor of mankind,” as Percy Shelley called him in his own remaking of the Greek myth, rather than the “Champion” of a new species, as he has presented himself. “You are my creator, but I am your master;—obey!” the creature/monster now tells his miscreant

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creator (116). It is not that the creature controls Victor’s actions—Victor has at this point just destroyed the female of the species he had been laboring over in conflicted response to the monster’s demand for her. It is rather that he controls Victor’s social identity, denying him first the vital friendship of Clerval, then his long-deferred marriage to Elizabeth. Even more important, he controls the reader’s image of Victor, a rhetorical mastery that has led many critics to perceive Frankenstein as the villain of the story and the monster as his victim, treating the novel as the form of author-hero relationship Bakhtin calls “Sentimental character” in “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” Frankenstein rings the changes on Bakhtin’s phenomenological account of this defining artistic relationship. The reversal of creative polarity extends to the author-hero relationship between Walton and Frankenstein as well. When Walton’s sailors try to extract from him a promise to abandon their desperate polar quest, the ever-eloquent Frankenstein rouses them not to lose faith in their noble captain and their “glorious expedition” (149). His appeal is obviously self-interested, and it is finally unsuccessful, since after Frankenstein dies, Walton announces that he is returning to England as the novel ends. But it is the last of many indications that the relationship between an author of a story and the characters within the story is reversible. “I agree with you,” Frankenstein tells Walton at the beginning of the novel, ironically, as it turns out, when Walton confesses his longing for a friend and “a more intimate sympathy with a fellow mind than had ever fallen to my lot.” “We are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves— such a friend ought to be—do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures,” Frankenstein says.36 The character of the other— intimate but also alien, friend but also enemy, other but also self—looms large within each of the initially first-person narratives that make up the novel. The other as hero exerts an unexpected and powerful influence, generally for the worse it turns out, on the self as author who assumes responsibility for presenting his hero to the world. In Mary Shelley’s version of it, the authorizing otherness of Romantic personality

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takes the form of a revenger’s tragedy. The sublime otherness of nature, seen among the mountains of the Alps and amidst the ice of the Arctic, is simply the stage-set for this drama. In light of Bakhtin’s poetics of author and hero, however, derived as it is from the Romantic poetics of authors and characters both dominant and recessive, we can appreciate that the aesthetic whole of Frankenstein is more than the sum of its parts. It is neither an artistic failure, as earlier generations of Romanticists tended to assume, nor simply a success of an ethical or political nature, a righteous critique of some unrighteous ideology, past or present, in which content merits more attention than form. Frankenstein is an aesthetic success, a valid and imaginatively coherent work of art, because it proceeds from the aesthetic activity of an author behind the scenes, an author who is not herself creating, from within the domain of the egotistical sublime, a hero confined to the site of negative capability, as is the case with the relationship between Victor Frankenstein and his creature. Or, when the positions of strength and weakness are reversed, with the relationship between the dominating monster (now self-identified with a rebellious but sympathetic Satan of Paradise Lost) and the abject scientist (given to long periods of enervated passivity) who admits he has become this monster’s “slave” (105). Nor is she an author like the negatively capable Robert Walton, who has been inspired to seek a polar paradise, he confesses, by that most abject of unheroic author-heroes in Romantic literature, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, and who remains to the end an uncritical hero-worshipper of the “godlike” Frankenstein, as he persists in calling him (147). Rather, this author behind the authors, realized by the aesthetic activity of Mary Shelley, assumes a position of charitable outsideness toward all her would-be authors and would-be heroes, a position not unlike that described by Bakhtin in his analysis of the form of author-hero relationship that he calls “character.” As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Bakhtin uses the term “character” not to describe a single literary personage or person but to describe a particular relationship of author and hero:

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Character is the name we give to that form of author-hero interrelationship which actualizes the task of producing the whole of a hero as a determinate personality, where, moreover, this task constitutes the fundamental task: the hero is given us, from the very outset, as a determinate whole, and the author’s self activity proceeds, from the very outset, along the essential boundaries of the hero. Everything is perceived here as a constituent in the characterization of the hero, i.e., fulfills a characterological function; everything reduces to and serves the answer to the question: who is he?37

“Character” is essentially the form of author-hero relationship that Bakhtin will later call “polyphonic” and will find most fully realized (or, as he puts it more prescriptively, realized for the first time) in the fiction of Dostoevsky. It is a form of author-hero relationship where, as noted above, the consciousness of the hero “is revealed from within as something that stands outside and alongside and with which the author can enter into dialogic relations.”38 Such a claim for the first literary effort of a nineteen-year-old, daughter of two rather indifferent novelists and protégée of a poet with little interest in prose fiction, may seem exaggerated. I have no intention of claiming that with Frankenstein Mary Shelley proved herself as accomplished a novelist as Dostoevsky—or Flaubert or Austen, for that matter. Rather I mean to specify the way that her rendering of the author-hero/creator-creature/self-other complex of Romantic thinking about human persons and personality anticipates the poetics of author and hero relations at the heart of Bakhtin’s literary theory, a theory in which, in spite of its many permutations over five decades, a peculiar form of personhood is all-important. It is not just that Frankenstein fits Bakhtin’s theory of the novel or illustrates Bakhtin’s philosophy of dialogism, although as Michael Holquist has shown, both assertions can be effectively supported.39 More specifically, Mary Shelley’s novel realizes, in a distinctive way, the interdependence of persons on which, for Bakhtin, the singularity of personhood is based and for which, as he found in the course of writing “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,”

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the history of literature provided him with such rich and varied examples. This greater “outsideness” of the author beyond the authors dramatized in the novel, as Bakhtin would put it, comes initially from the simple fact that, on the plane of events in the novel, each author is presenting a hero who is supposedly actual, who has an extra-aesthetic existence and existential autonomy outside and alongside the autobiographical narrator, a relationship that makes godlike transgredience impossible. In this respect, it is relatively easy for Shelley as author of the novel to keep her creative focus (and the reader’s contemplative focus, as Bakhtin would have it) not on one character or another but on the author-hero relationship itself. Thus none of the three authors who present first themselves and then others as heroes (only to become the protagonists of another’s authorship) becomes a “determinate personality,” a free-thinking and freely acting person or personage in whom the spiritual form of the hero approaches autonomy, as Bakhtin will argue is the case with the heroes of Dostoevsky. Victor Frankenstein is no Ivan Karamazov; the creature is no Prince Myshkin; Robert Walton is no Underground Man. But all three of them embody the vital but precarious alterity of persons “but half made up,” as Frankenstein puts it, as they pursue projects, creative and destructive, of remarkable single-mindedness. They are all characters of “the idea,” as Bakhtin puts it, which he says is another discovery of the artist who is able to create polyphonic or dialogic narrative. “The second discovery is the depiction (or rather the re-creation) of the self-developing idea (inseparable from personality). The idea becomes the object of artistic depiction and is revealed not at the level of a system (philosophical or scientific), but on the level of the event.” None of these ideas in Frankenstein is a particularly good idea, we can easily see, but neither was Raskolnikov’s idea of the superman a good idea in Crime and Punishment. Walton’s idea of polar exploration and exploits, Frankenstein’s idea of discovering the principle of biological life, and the creature’s idea of symmetrical revenge on his creator are all ethically, politically, and cognitively flawed, to say nothing of their dubious

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religious value. But each idea, however madly pursued, is inseparable from the separate person whom it brings together, both in friendship and in bondage, with the others. None of these persons can be understood as a full or self-sufficient personality apart from the others with whom it has involved and incorporated itself, but none can be understood simply as an emblematic projection of part of a single personality, as a personage in some kind of psychic allegory, either. In an odd way, Mary Shelley has created an image of human personality in three persons, a secular version or parody of the triune personhood of God in classic Christianity rather than the one-personed or impersonalized deity of the Enlightenment philosophers, created, as Voltaire would have it, in man’s own image. In this imagining, she anticipates the aesthetic personality that is also a social commonality that was envisioned by Bakhtin. “The artist’s third discovery is dialogicality as a special form of interaction among autonomous and equally signifying consciousnesses,” Bakhtin writes in “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book.” Such aesthetic transformation opposes “monologism,” which represents for Bakhtin “a denial of the equal rights of consciousness vis-à-vis truth (understood abstractly and systematically).”40 What is striking about Mary Shelley’s version of this discovery avant la lettre is that she was able to add still another level of such interaction in her “Author’s Introduction” to the third edition of Frankenstein published more than ten years later. Where the authorial commentary that Coleridge added to “Kubla Khan” in the prose headnote of 1816 served to collapse the dialogic relations of the poem, as we saw in Chapter 1, rewriting the lyric in the form of autobiography and framing the heroic visions of the poem in a social encounter leading to individual artistic failure, the commentary added by Mary Shelley in 1831 expands the dialogic interactions of her novel to include the author—an autobiographical representation or image of the author—herself. For Shelley, the story of a domestic social encounter inspires individual artistic vision instead of obliterating it. Shelley recreates the storytelling circle of friends during the summer on the shores of Lake

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Geneva when the novel was begun. This story-behind-the-story becomes still another frame-tale of intimate and alienated relationships. On the one hand, she is included in the ghost-story-writing collective with the “illustrious poets” Byron and Percy Shelley as well as “poor Polidori.” On the other hand, when she is asked each morning “Have you thought of a story?” she is “forced to reply with a mortifying negative” (171). The modifier is figurative, of course, but in the context of the novel it shows her solidarity with the work that she goes on to call her “hideous progeny” (173). Her reaction to her creation is thus markedly different from Victor Frankenstein’s. She does not now, as she did not in the aesthetic activity of its earlier composition, turn away in revulsion and abdication of a creator’s responsibility for her work. Rather she acknowledges her maternity, revealing the conception of the novel in a nighttime reverie of unusual vividness, when her imagination was “gifting” her with images of the subject discussed earlier in the evening by “Lord Byron” and “Shelley,” with herself a “devout but nearly silent listener,” the generation of life according to scientific principles (171–72). It is significant that the catalytic image or inspiring “idea” is not the “horrid thing” it- or himself (the monster). Nor is it the “artist” who created it or him (Victor Frankenstein) by himself. It is rather the vision of the once inanimate thing looking back with dawning personal consciousness at the person who has brought it, brought him, into being: “looking at him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes” (172). The phrase “but speculative” is crucial. The vision of the creature reflecting on his creator is an emblem of the “dialogicality” that Bakhtin claims for the artist who has grasped “the problem of polyphony.” It is also an emblem of the otherness of the Romantic person, authorized by the formerly self-identical self and authorizing a now alien or other self in return. In thus exercising the Romantic activity of criticism in concert with her previous act of creation, Mary Shelley effectively counters the “Preface” of 1818, authored by Percy Shelley, which speaks condescendingly of the “enervating effects of the novels of the present day” and of the “humble novelist” from the vantage point of “the highest

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specimens of poetry” to be found in the works of Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton (5). Percy had published two Gothic novels of his own, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, in 1810 at the beginning of his career. But his own literary career lay in poetry, poetry of the highest order, to be sure. In fact, he himself was to go on and re-imagine Mary’s modern Prometheus (as well as Aeschylus’ ancient hero of the same name) in the form of poetic drama in his Prometheus Unbound, which he began several months after the publication of Frankenstein in 1818. Percy Shelley’s drama stages an enemy brotherhood between Prometheus and Jupiter, from which Prometheus must free himself, emotionally and spiritually. His play also creates a loving partnership between Prometheus and Asia, which can only come to fruition after Prometheus “unsays” his self-destructive curse against Jupiter. When this curse is given back to him by Jupiter’s ghostly double, one can see a kind of “Frankenstein Unbound” unfolding. Among other things, the later work imagines a more active role for the marginalized female character of the novel, Frankenstein’s adoptive sister and intended bride, Elizabeth Lavenza. While Prometheus is still in chains on a “precipice” of the Caucausus, his own beloved, Asia, undertakes a heroic journey that will engage the awful Demogorgon in the plot and bring about the fall of Jupiter and the freeing of Prometheus. However, these “beautiful idealisms of moral excellence,” as Percy called them, meant to appeal to “the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers,” have proved much less compelling to later audiences (film viewers as well as novel readers) than the monstrous realism of Mary’s interrelated persons. This preference is probably due in part to the complexity of self-other/creator-creature relations in Percy’s reworking of the Greek play and the Romantic novel, to which the redoubling of doppelgänger relations through Demogorgon, a kind of author-god beyond the hero-gods, might be added.41 Bakhtin notes the phenomenon of the “novelization” of traditional poetic genres, taking place in literary history as the less respectable form of the novel gained canonical influence and authority in the course of the nineteenth century.42 But it is clear that in the period of

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Romanticism there was also a poeticizing or “lyricization” of novelistic and dramatic genres going on as lyric poetry asserted its own preeminence. Percy Shelley’s re-imagining of Mary’s “modern Prometheus” is only one instance of the interplay of genre and countergenre. In the following chapter, I will examine more closely the role of genres, general and specific, in the authorizing otherness and in the personality of meaning in Romantic literature. And I will do so in light of Bakhtin’s pervasive concern with genre as a vital element in all human communication.

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Chronotopes: Coordinating Representative Genres

The night before, two doubtful words had halted him at the beginning of the Poetics. These words were tragedy and comedy. He had encountered them years before in the third book of the Rhetoric; no one in the whole world of Islam could conjecture what they meant. Borges

I In a notebook he kept in 1970 and early 1971, before his wife’s death in the winter of that second year, Bakhtin wrote again about the figure of the author, though in a broader and more inclusive fashion than he had in the early 1920s. “The speaking person,” the stenographic notes of the passage begin. “As whom and how (i.e. in what situation) the speaking person appears. Various forms of speech authorship, from the simplest everyday utterances to large literary genres. It is customary to speak about the authorial mask. But in which utterances (speech acts) is there a face and not a mask, that is, no authorship? The form of authorship depends on the genre of the utterance.”1 In this reference to the genres, of literature and of everyday speech, lies an aspect of Bakhtin’s thought that is an important corollary of the philosophical personalism we considered in the second chapter. Insisting on the creative freedom of individuals possible in creative art (as well as other endeavors), Bakhtin nevertheless gives considerable

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attention throughout his writings to the social and cultural stabilizations of the creative act afforded by the inherited genres or conventions of utterance that speakers and authors avail themselves of in verbal communication—they must avail themselves of if they are to be understood. The analysis of an individual writer or work, Bakhtin insists, must take place within an awareness of the generic forms within which every utterance situates itself, consciously or not. These are forms that range from the simple, primary forms of everyday speech to the complex, secondary forms of literary works. Earlier in these same notes to himself (which he would have recognized as belonging to the Romantic genre of the fragment), Bakhtin turns to the highest of literary examples, the great Romantic verse novel of Pushkin. The main lines of the development of literature that have prepared one writer or another, one work or another, throughout the centuries (and in various nations). But we know only the writer, his world view and his times. Eugene Onegin was created during the course of seven years. But the way was being prepared for it and it was becoming possible throughout hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of years. Such great realities of literature as genres are completely underestimated.2

This insistence on the importance of genre is not just a theme that comes late in Bakhtin’s writings. In his early treatise “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” descriptions of author-hero relationships in typical literary forms are presented in a section entitled “The Whole of the Hero as the Whole of Meaning.” In his subsequent writings, better known for their analysis of the super-generic categories of “the novel,” “menippea” and “carnival,” Bakhtin also expands on more particular generic forms of literature, especially in “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)” and the long essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics.” Both of these studies were mostly written in the late 1930s, the Bildungsroman essay a

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surviving section of a much longer book lost in the war with Germany. And in 1952–53, he wrote the essay “The Problem of Speech Genres,” which carries the idea of such socially constituted forms of aesthetic activity, “relatively stable types,” as he called them, well beyond the traditional categories of literature and the arts into the area of everyday verbal utterances: Like Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain who, when speaking in prose, had no idea what he was doing, we speak in diverse genres without suspecting that they exist. Even in the most free, the most unconstrained conversation, we cast our speech in definite generic forms, sometimes rigid and trite ones, sometimes more flexible, plastic, and creative ones (everyday communication also has creative genres at its disposal).3

The importance of genre in the literature of Romanticism was for a long time underestimated. The official aesthetics in the Enlightenment, part and parcel of the authority of rational and universal identity in the culture of the period, was neoclassical, an aesthetics in which literary models from ancient Greece and Rome were thought to provide a natural and reasonable system for ordering the arts in modern European societies. “Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem,” Pope could write; “To copy Nature is to copy Them.”4 This epigrammatic formulation is only one of many assertions and counter-assertions in the ongoing quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns as it was known, the “Battle of the Books,” as Swift called it, that had been going on since the Renaissance, when newly discovered classical treatises such as Aristotle’s Poetics were invoked to discredit newly produced and broadly popular vernacular works like Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. This controversy between the authority of literary tradition and the power of literary innovation led, among other things, to the creation of the modern European genre of the novel in Cervantes’ Don Quixote.5 But Pope’s formulation, like the whole of his Essay on Criticism, did represent a dominant way of thinking about literature, intensified in the eighteenth century, in which older, preeminently poetic genres from ancient

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Greece and Rome, were seen as authoritative, as norms of literary production against which, with allowance for various creative twists and turns and elaborations, modern European literature was to be judged. In the emphasis on creativity that became a focal point in Romanticism, however, there was a general reaction against Enlightenment norms; the whole idea of genre became suspect. Fixed or inherited genres were widely regarded as symptoms of the older rationalizing and universalizing order that the authorizing otherness of the new order of things aimed to overthrow. Seen from another perspective, however, it was simply the case that literary genres were re-conceived, re-established on new, Romantic foundations, most notably on the basis of individual psychology or consciousness on the one hand and collective or communal social relations on the other. In the critical analysis of this literary culture by scholars in the twentieth century, the generic “realities of literature,” as Bakhtin calls them, have often been regarded as irrelevant, or at most of secondary significance. Greater emphasis has been given to the realities of human consciousness, political power, or figurative language, particularly in the last half century of critical interpretation. More recently, however, corrective attention has been given to the significance of genre and genre theory in Romantic literature, not only in the study of specific genres like the ode, the ballad, the literary fragment, autobiography, the Gothic novel, and the historical novel, all of them preeminently Romantic, but also in the way considerations of genre and critical debates over its importance defined generally the literary creativity and criticism of the period. Stuart Curran’s Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1986), one of the first of such corrective studies, treats the persistence, revival, and transformation of poetic forms and genres, particularly the sonnet, the hymn and the ode, pastoral poetry, romance narrative and epic. Curran concurs with the general Romantic and Romanticist view that the codification of genres in eighteenth-century neo-classicism had become rigid and superficial in many instances, but he argues that there was a “second Renaissance” in the Romantic period, particularly in England, whose

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first Renaissance had been so rich both in its recovery and revitalization of classical genres and its creation of new vernacular ones. Michael Gamer concentrates more specifically on the conflicts and convergences between the high literary genres of poetry and the low, popular forms of Gothic romance in Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon Formation (New York: Cambridge UP, 2000). Most recent and most comprehensive in its scope, David Duff ’s Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009) correlates the emphasis on the theory of genres among German Romantics with attention to the history of genres in British Romanticism. Duff describes “the relationship—hierarchical, competitive, combinatory—between genres” and observes that “what defines the ‘Romantic’ attitude toward genre is not one position or another, but the co-existence of opposed theories”— often, he observes, in the writing of the same author. In the light of Bakhtin’s understanding of the dialogic nature of all verbal utterance, such a situation is only a special case of the general condition of all human communication. Without at least a tacit sense of available genres and alternative or counter-genres, communication among people cannot take place. There are two distinctive features of Bakhtin’s particular conception of genre to be noted, however. The first is his understanding that an individual genre makes little sense all by itself. The full significance of a genre rather comes from the fact that it belongs to a larger, coordinated system of genres, traditionally known as a poetics, whether this poetics is written or unwritten, explicit or implicit, in the period in question. It is true, as Emerson and Morson argue, that Bakhtin sometimes inveighed against a particularly monological conception of poetics put forward by the Russian Formalists, in which a sharp distinction is drawn between literary style and the supposedly unstylized nature of everyday speech. But it is also true, as Michael Holquist explains, that Bakhtin himself conceived of a dialogical poetics, a historical poetics in which the forms of literature are not forever fixed (tragedy as described by Aristotle, for example) nor are they arranged in a hierarchy once and for all (poetry held to have greater aesthetic value than prose). Rather,

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the value and validity of genres are constantly and essentially contested, both in the process of historical change and in the idiosyncracy of individual artistic intention.6 The other distinctive feature of Bakhtin’s understanding of genre, his most original contribution to this long tradition of literary theory, in fact, is his conception of the “chronotope,” a formal matrix of representations of time and space that underlies both literary genres and sociocultural expectations and awareness. As we will see at the end of this chapter, chronotopes can also be seen as an expression of the larger cultural architectonics or period imagination of a particular historical time and place. Several of these dimensions of the concept are indicated in the title and subtitle of Bakhtin’s long essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics.” In this essay, Bakhtin announces that “we will give the name chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature [. . .] In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out concrete whole.” He goes on to observe the “intrinsic generic significance” of this formalization.7 “It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time” (85). Thus, apparently, the curious doubling of the temporal terms in his title: “of time and of the chronotope.” But this temporality and its coordinate spatial axis are also inseparable from the image of human personality in literature. “The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic” (85). Thus this essay on generic form is connected with the “personalism” of Bakhtin’s earlier and later writings. Although the interpersonal relationship of author and hero is not here the primary focus of attention, the spatial and temporal coordinates of literary narrative map the interactions of characters and the narrators who present them. Bakhtin describes a historical sequence of such chronotopes that emerge in the history of the novel, beginning

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in the classical literatures of Greece and Rome (sixth to second centuries BCE) and continuing, since old genres are never completely dead and gone in the long historical continuity he calls “great time,” into the European Enlightenment and beyond. The nine generic formations he characterizes are the following: (1) the time and space of adventure in the Greek novel or “adventure novel of ordeal”; (2) the “adventure novel of everyday life”, whose examples include early Christian hagiographies as well as Roman satiric narratives like the Satyricon; (3) “ancient biography and autobiography”; (4) “the folkloric chronotope” of an ideal past or utopian future that provides generic material for the ancient novel; (5) the chivalric romance and its related religious “visions”; (6) a chronotope organized around the figures of the clown, the fool and the rogue in the Middle Ages and beyond; (7) a special “Rabelesian chronotope,” which has its own representations of time and space (and which is treated more extensively under the aspect of “carnival” and the “carnivalistic” in his separate study Rabelais and His World); (8) certain “folkloric bases” of the Rabelaisian chronotope, which include ancient forms of comedy as well; and (9) the chronotope of the idyll, an ancient genre which continues to inform novels of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and even the Modernist period. As this simplified account of the scheme of Bakhtin’s essay indicates, the historical poetics of the novel offered here is not an exhaustive or symmetrically coordinated system of genres. Nor is it a strictly chronological account of their appearance, since the folkloric bases of the Rabelaisian chronotope look back to earlier pre-historical foundations, and the idyll, the final genre category, appears in classical as well as modern times. There is also a perceptible shift in levels of generality among the categories, moving from specific genres to a collective “folkloric base” of generic formation, then to a genre defined by a single author and a single work, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, and finally to “a complex that has influenced the modern novel” (236), as he calls the chronotope of the idyll. In its widespread influence on later European fiction, the idyll seems more like what Claudio Guillén calls a “mode” than a genre per se.8 It is not clear how enduring

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a historical presence any chronotope maintains in Bakhtin’s scheme. One form of novel is often transformed and recombined with other forms in this literary species, ultimately dedicated to innovation and to representation of the present. The unstable, dynamically shifting nature of Bakhtin’s categories, noted at the beginning of Chapter 1, is evident here, as is their characteristically encyclopedic scope. Nevertheless, this innovative and wide-ranging poetics of the novel, a poetics of a genre (primarily but not exclusively prose) that was identified by Friedrich Schlegel and others as quintessentially Romantic, can point us in the direction of a more specific and limited consideration of literary genres—poetic as well as novelistic—in the literature of Romanticism.

II As pointed out by Claudio Guillén, whose analyses of literary genre are some of the most penetrating and comprehensive in the last halfcentury of literary history and theory, a problem critics face in making use of this concept in literary criticism is a lack of agreed-upon distinctions between levels of generality and specificity in the various generic categories.9 In addition to specific genres or “genres proper” (like the pastoral elegy, the poetic ode, and the folktale), there are highly generalized or universal genres (like the lyric and the drama), more specific but still historically and geographically widespread genres (like epic and novel, often defined in relationship to one another, from German Romantic treatises to Bakhtin’s own essay “Epic and Novel”), genres which are expanded into “modes” (which might include satire, irony or romance, as in the archetypal genre criticism of Northrop Frye), and more purely formal forms (like the sonnet, the villanelle, or the heroic couplet), forms which lack any particular thematic definition, even though they entail certain expectations of subject matter or authorial attitude as they are used in particular periods of history. Furthermore, the possibility of parodic or ironic uses of genre, where

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form and content explicitly counter or conflict with one another, introduces a whole range of relationships between a particular work and the genre or genres to which it may be said to belong. How seriously (or exclusively), for example, are we to take Byron’s assertion, late in Canto I of Don Juan, “My poem’s epic, and is meant to be/ Divided in twelve books”?10 Nevertheless, with a general awareness of the range of aesthetic phenomena that may be considered as matters of literary genre, some general observations about the place of genre in Romantic literature may be elaborated. In reacting against the system of intellectual norms of the Enlightenment and the aesthetics of neo-classism, where Pope could say, on behalf of Virgil, that nature and Homer were the same (or, one might say more skeptically, nature and Boileau), writers we now call Romantic claimed to see great differences between kinds of human experience in the present European age and forms of literature preserved and imitated from ancient Greece and Rome. As it entered the Enlightenment, realms of the personal and the social, the authorizing otherness fundamental to Romantic thought, heightened awareness of the “pastness” of the past and the artificiality, rather than the naturalness (nature itself having become other than human), of the rules and regulations of individual classical genres and hierarchies of genre. Rather than rejecting these models wholesale, which of course had been both accepted and contested in various European literary traditions for centuries, Romantic literary theory found a way of reestablishing them on its own architectonic foundations. One such reconstruction of the cultural rules for aesthetic activity turned them inward upon the self, the mind, consciousness, the passions, or some other essential constituent of the human person. Such mental conditions came to be seen as symptoms of the newly important faculty of mind known as imagination. The various genres of poetry were part of this shift of focus, and the apparent inwardness and privacy of shorter forms known collectively as “lyric” were privileged. Even the negatively capable Shakespeare, divinely inscrutable as author in the characters and plots of his plays, was presumed by Wordsworth

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to have revealed himself as a person of passion in his sonnets. “With this Key/ Shakespeare unlocked his heart,” he proclaimed in one of his own sonnets, reflecting on this lyric genre which had a new importance in Romanticism. Genre is thus understood as an expression of inner consciousness, heightened and intensified. Such a conception gives rise to the more flexible form of the “greater Romantic lyric,” as M. H. Abrams has called it. In this widely shared perspective, the genre of epic has been dethroned from its traditional preeminence, while the genre of lyric is seen as the highest or the purest—that is, the least imitative and artificial and the most original—of literary kinds. Thus the gratitude expressed by E. S. Shaffer, noted in Chapter  1, that Coleridge left us his fragmentary lyric “Kubla Khan” instead of his aborted epic “The Fall of Jerusalem.” “Romanticism is an age of lyric in that the hierarchy of genres was, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, lyricized; that is, what we have come to identify historically as lyric features and their effects, such as the turn to the reader and spontaneity, were incorporated with increasing frequency in an increasing number of forms,” observes Clifford Siskin, rehearsing a story familiar to Romanticists. It is a story that he himself challenges from a Foucauldian perspective, which tends to regard literary forms as politics by other means.11 Our Bakhtinian approach, however, is less suspicious of aesthetic experience per se; indeed, it is dedicated to the proposition that there is such a thing as aesthetic experience, as well as aesthetic activity, that is not simply a disguise for some other ideological intention or manifestation of political power. In the illumination provided by Bakhtin’s concepts of chronotope and genre, we may understand this inward turn toward a psychological or philosophical account of lyric poetry as a way in which traditional literary forms were given new credibility, even as they were being challenged on other grounds and in other contexts. Bakhtin also enables us to recognize that this purging of neo-classical artifice (which needs to be distinguished from re-appropriation of classical originality, as it was perceived, for example, in Romantic Hellenism) and the new focus on the psychological

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inwardness of lyric poetry was not the only strategy used by Romantic critics and theorists to place the idea of literary genre on a new conceptual foundation. There was also the contrasting strategy that Bakhtin himself called “novelization.” In his essay “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” written in 1941, Bakhtin draws a series of sharp distinctions between the epic and the novel. In unspoken but evident reaction to Lukács’s earlier Theory of the Novel, Hegelian rather than Marxist at this point in Lukàcs’s career as a critic of literature, Bakhtin offers no dialectical scheme accounting for continuity between the classical genre of epic, which he describes as quintessentially monologic and closed to time, and the modern genre or counter-genre of the novel, which he describes as radically dialogic and open to the present. But he does acknowledge, in a characteristic transformation of a conceptual boundary to a conceptual threshold, that the novel exerts a strong influence on other, more fixed genres. Once it came into being, it could never be merely one genre among others, and it could not erect rules for interrelating with others in peaceful and harmonious co-existence. In the presence of the novel, all other genres somehow have a different resonance. A lengthy battle for the novelization of other genres began, a battle to drag them into a zone of contact with reality. The course of this battle has been complex and tortuous.12

This is an argument that is both diagnostic and symptomatic of the literary politics, as it may be called, of Romanticism. The lyricization of literary genres was often formulated in a reaction against the rise and spread of the novel as a literary alternative to poetry, especially the lyric. Thus in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth singles out “frantic novels” as one of the “multitude of causes unknown to former times [. . .] now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.”13 Coleridge expressed similar disapproval of the “common modern novel, in which there is no

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imagination, but a miserable struggle to excite and gratify mere curiosity.”14 I have already noted Percy Shelley’s poetic condescension to “the humble novelist” in the “Preface” he contributed to the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But the high philosophical ground occupied by theories of the lyric as the purest form of poetry, hence of literature in general, hence of human consciousness, could also be occupied by arguments for the supremacy, especially in the modern era, of the novel. In this case, the argument for the novel’s transcendence of older artificial and more specific genres was effected by the claim that the novel included many of the traditional genres or forms of literature within itself. Schlegel’s articulation of this strategy is the most explicit: The idea of a novel, as it is established by Boccaccio and Cervantes, is the idea of a romantic book, a romantic composition, where all forms and all genres are mixed and interwoven. In the novel, the principal mass is furnished by prose, more diverse than any genre set by the Ancients. There are historical parts, rhetorical parts, parts in dialogue; all these styles alternate, they are interwoven and related in the most ingenious and the most artificial way. Poems in all genres, lyrical, epic didactic, as well as romances, are scattered throughout the whole and embellish it in a varied and exuberant profusion and diversity in the richest and most brilliant fashion.15

This definition of the novel (which is more persuasive in the German with the noun Roman and its related adjective romantische) is expansive and inclusive, moving in the opposite direction from the excluding inwardness of the Romantic definition of the lyric. Like The Decameron and Don Quixote to which Schlegel alludes, the novelization of literature turns outward and includes a variety of forms, high and low, classical and vernacular, realistic and fantastic, within its meta-generic or supergeneric boundaries. In other German Romantic formulations, examples of the “novel” include the poems of Dante and the plays of Shakespeare, thus clearly moving the conception of this literary form or “new species

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of writing,” as it was called in the eighteenth century, beyond the formal criteria of most subsequent historical accounts. But not beyond the historical accounts of the novel offered by Bakhtin. As Tzvetan Todorov notes, some of Bakhtin’s descriptions of the novel are strikingly similar to general theoretical accounts of the typology of genres offered by the Schlegels, Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel, which set forth dialectical successions of supposedly universal genres like epic, lyric and drama, naive and sentimental poetry, or Classical art and Romantic art. This does not mean that “what he described under this name [the novel] is not a genre” and is thus not a truly historical phenomenon, as Todorov asserts. Rather it means that Bakhtin is engaged in the Romantic (or neo-romantic) pursuit of a philosophy of genre which also contains a philosophy of history.16 In essays like “Discourse in the Novel” and “Epic and Novel,” Bakhtin is more concerned with a conceptual essence of literary form that might better be called “novelness,” as a recent collection of essays on his work puts it, than with “the novel” as a genre with distinct kinds of form, content, and material presentation. But he is also concerned to ground this conceptual essence in historically distinct traditions, such as “the First and Second Stylistic lines” of the novel that he treats at length in “Discourse in the Novel.” These are forms of prose fiction which resemble the traditional Romantic distinction between “romance” and “novel” but which trace the two types of novel, one less dialogic, the other more dialogic in Bakhtin’s view, back to origins in classical times and new beginnings in the Renaissance. Bakhtin is unwilling to arrange these subcategories in any grand dialectical scheme. He charges, against Hegel and other philosophers, Idealist and materialist, that dialectic is simply a schematic oversimplification of dialogue, dialogue with the human life taken out of it. He claims that the novel is the literary genre most open—perennially open—to the future, which is to say, to the forms of life that have been excluded from literary tradition in any historical period and the “unrealized surplus of humanness,” the individuality of personhood that “cannot be completely incarnated in the flesh of existing socio-historical categories.”17

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Lyricization makes literary genre into a private affair, a personalistic form of subjectivity or consciousness in which readers are privileged to share as they follow the unfolding of psychological process in an individual person. Novelization treats genre as a public matter, as a collective expression of a people, a people represented by individual characters, for the most part, with whom the reader is invited to identify by virtue of their being singled out for his or her attention as typical of their region and/or class and/or gender. And in these narratives, one group of people is often shown to be in competition and conflict with another group. However, in moving down from this higher philosophical level of genre theory to the more specific criticism of the genres and generic affiliations of particular works of Romantic literature, we should quickly note that there are novels that enact the lyricizing turn inward upon the person—the mind and moods of the individual in his or her relations with a world of other individuals and material objects—as well as poems that enact the novelizing turn outward toward the people—toward the public, the nation, a regional population, or a social class. As far as lyricization is concerned, there are elegiac sonnets, like Charlotte Smith’s, that lament the passing of a beloved other or a beloved earlier self, but there are also novels of sensibility like The Sorrows of Young Werther that chronicle the disintegration of the self in emotional agony over a beloved who is domestically out of reach. (One of Smith’s sonnets, in fact, is presented as having been written by the hero of Werther.) There are historical novels, like those of Scott, that show the conflict of peoples and regions within the emerging nation, but there are also political satires, like Byron’s The Vision of Judgment, that dramatize the conflict of parties within the state in a public sphere—in Byron’s way of conceiving it, a public sphere that reaches beyond the grave. And although Romantic achievements in the literary form of drama have been underrepresented and underrated in twentieth-century accounts of the period, it can be argued that there are dramatic works which reflect both super-generic imperatives: take the lyrical retreat within heroic selfhood in Byron’s closet drama Manfred, where the mind is indeed its own place and the claims of other worlds

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and after-lives upon it are to be resisted, or the novelistic advance into public history in Schiller’s nation-building trilogy Wallenstein, where individual heroism must contend with the forces of politics, imperial and provincial. Furthermore, the shift of attention from fixed and finished generic forms to ongoing processes of genre formation and reformation in Romanticism means that lyricizing and novelizing tendencies are often present within the same works, perhaps at their highest pitch or greatest extreme in radically mixed, encyclopedic achievements like Goethe’s Faust, Parts I and II, and Byron’s Don Juan, sixteen cantos and still evolving with no end in sight. But such mixing is also present on the level of specific genres, in “lyrical ballads,” as Wordsworth and Coleridge formulated this mixed lyric collection that combined songs of the self with voices of the folk, or in the Gothic novel (also known as the Gothic romance), which registers political protest as well as psychological distress in its rendering of seduction and incarceration, perpetrators and victims, villainy and virtue.18 However, applying the genre theory of Bakhtin in the context of the personalism in which it found expression in his earliest writings, we may turn our attention from the higher, generalized level of the genre-reforming processes of lyricization and novelization to the lower level of specific genres, genres as models for literary production by authors and literary consumption by readers. We may ask what are the most salient generic forms in which persons—the interpersonal personhood of authors and heroes so important to aesthetic activity and aesthetic experience in Romantic literature—are represented? It seems to me that Bakhtin’s categories of author-hero relationships as described in “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” have a special relevance to the literature of Romanticism, not least because they are in part derived from Romantic literary theory. In the following I propose a correlation between the written poetics of Modernism set forth by Bakhtin at the beginning of his literary and philosophical career and the largely unwritten poetics elaborated in the course of the Romantic era.

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III In “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” Bakhtin describes six basic forms of relationship between an author, the creative person responsible for the literary work, and a hero, the created person situated within it. Some of these forms are given traditional generic names, but they are selected as well as described in peculiar ways. The forms—“abstractideal forms or utmost limits toward which the concrete moments of a work tend,” as Bakhtin calls them (186)—are the following: confessional self-accounting, autobiography/biography, the lyric hero, character, the type, and the saint’s life. As a spectrum of author-hero relationships, with varying balances of authority in the dialogic relation of author and hero, they move between two border genres that are properly religious and not aesthetic, as Bakhtin acknowledges. In confessional selfaccounting, there is a minimal realization of the hero or protagonist as distinct from the creative and creating person or author. In the saint’s life, also known as hagiography, there is a maximal realization of the hero, whose life is miraculously governed (so the genre asserts) from above and lies beyond any human author’s control. In genuine confession, made by a believer, the author of the utterance is accountable to God and dependent on him. In the genuine saint’s life, also a genre by and for the believer, it is the hero who occupies this position of accountability and dependence, witnessed by the author from the outside rather than expressed from within his own creative initiative. In between these contrasting religious genres, the primary genres of literary art are situated. In the genres of literary Romanticism in particular, the considerable aesthetic space between these religious book ends (which in this historical period have lost their former cultural authority, in any case) can be described in greater literary-critical detail. In fact, we can say that both confessional self-accounting and the life story of the sanctified person become themselves more literary than religious in the Romantic period. Distinctions among many varieties of confession, autobiography, and biographical studies of a life and many critical assessments of the

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opinions and works from such a life are not easy to make, as evidenced in works like Wordsworth’s Prelude, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria or Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. There is an even greater diversity in the kinds of lyric poems, not to mention other genres which are incorporated into the lyric in the Romantic period. The type of author-hero relationship that Bakhtin calls “character,” most fully developed in the form of the novel, is already subdivided by Bakhtin into classical and romantic forms, with the romantic form subject to further “disintegration” into the sentimental and the realistic. This suggests a more promising correlation with the main genres of prose fiction in the Romantic period, including the Gothic novel, the historical novel, the Bildungsroman or novel of education, and the domestic novel of courtship, not to mention the older genres of novel catalogued by Bakhtin in his essay on the chronotope. Here as well, individual works have divided generic allegiances, as in the case of Peacock’s satiric version of the Gothic novel Nightmare Abbey, which belongs to the author-hero form Bakhtin calls “the type,” with its generalization of personalities, at least as much to the form he calls “character.” And under the rubric of the type, “the passive position of a collective personality,” as Bakhtin puts it, a whole array of genres of satire, from neo-Augustan poems like Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers to proto-poststructuralist novels like Schlegel’s Lucinde, offer themselves for inclusion. The only Bakhtinian category that seems under-populated in the Romantic period is the saint’s life, though along with Carlyle’s On Heroes, it could be argued, Southey’s funeral celebration of George III, “A Vision of Judgment,” and his Life of Wesley aspire to this generic condition, even though few readers have been convinced that these were lives of which God and God alone was the author and finisher. In an effort to align Bakhtin’s largely phenomenological poetics and the historical poetics, written and unwritten, of Romanticism, I propose the following dialogic accommodation. Confession and autobiography seem formally closer to one another in Romanticism than autobiography and biography, so these two categories may be

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combined as “autobiography and confession.” Biography in this period seems to belong to the emerging non-literary discourse of history rather than to literature—biographies become literature when they are no longer completely reliable as history—so as a genre in its own right it can be passed over in this poetics. Lyric, the lyrical form of the authorhero relationship, would benefit greatly from the kind of subdivisions Bakhtin allows in the form he calls character, and on this level of specific genre (rather than universal genre-making), it might be called simply “lyric poetry.” Character would be more useful as a category if it were simply called “the novel” or the novelistic form of author-hero relations. As I noted in Chapter  1, the novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the genre within which characters relatively independent of their authors most commonly occur. The form that Bakhtin calls “type,” as I noted earlier, seems to be another term for the kind of author-hero relations common in satire. If this category becomes “satire and irony,” the peculiar Romantic transformations of these related genres will reveal their family resemblances as well as their individual variations. The category of the saint’s life, properly religious as Bakhtin himself admits, may then be secularized as “romance” or, more specifically, “heroic romance,” following the poetics of Northrop Frye which is more attuned to Romanticism than the poetics of Bakhtin.19 What I am proposing here is both a more formal and a more historically specific redaction of Bakhtin’s aesthetic phenomenology. It may be objected that Bakhtin was sharply critical of the Russian Formalism of his own era, but the main expression of this negative assessment is the book published under the name of Pavel Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, a book whose authorship is in dispute among Bakhtin scholars. Either it was influenced but not truly authored by Bakhtin, or it was written by him with a different authorial mask.20 Furthermore, the legacy of Russian Formalism as a whole and in its later incarnations further to the west proved to be much richer than Bakhtin or Medvedev could have anticipated in the late 1920s—or could have acknowledged in the increasingly repressive political context in Russia, when Stalin’s power was becoming virtually

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absolute and writers who voiced politically incorrect opinions or even discussed proscribed topics faced exile or death. The legacy of literary formalism seems especially rich, I have been suggesting throughout this book, when it is compared with more recent “impoverishing theories,” as Bakhtin would call them, theories proclaiming that this legacy is of no enduring value to literary scholarship—or at least of no enduring interest to post-literary scholarship, as it might indeed be called, in the West. This legacy is richest, paradoxically, in the transformation of formalism—its humanization and personalization—that takes place in Bakhtin’s own writings. In any case the value of this correlation of author-hero relations depends on the particular insights, general and specific, that it offers into Romantic literature. (Diagram III in the Appendix offers a schematic rendering of the analysis that follows.) I begin by acknowledging that this redacted poetics, constructed for the purpose of describing in greater detail the forms of personhood and interpersonality as expressed in representative genres of Romantic literature, leaves out a great deal of the variety of Romantic writing. Biography, of course, is deliberately excluded but also, inadvertently, historical drama (important early on in Germany and later in France) and melodrama, genres of the critical essay, the epic (alive if not exactly well among the less canonical British poets of the period, as Curran observes), the short fictional form of the tale, and the forms of journalism, political pamphlets, travel and guidebook literature, not to mention all the speech genres, including the public lecture, that found their way into print in this period of rapidly expanding literacy. All these genres belong to a comprehensive and detailed poetics of Romantic writing. However, in the more generalized Bakhtinian poetics of representative or exemplary literary forms of this period I am offering here, abstracted from the rich diversity of particular works by particular authors on which any concept of genre ultimately depends, I will focus on specific subdivisions of lyric and novel, coordinated with the relative dominance of author and character in them. As noted earlier, Bakhtin insists that genres or chronotopes reflect images of human personality as well as the space and temporality in which people live and move.

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Genre criticism in general allows for a judicious expansion of the Romantic canon, beyond the earlier canon of British Romanticism, for example, which in practice if not in theory was limited to the best that had been known and thought by six poets (all male and from the middling or upper classes) represented in works written within the space of thirty-five years, between 1789 and 1824. Genre criticism also provides a more reasonable basis for democratic representation of authors than a simple additive expansion of the canon on the basis of a neglected author’s gender, class, or race, a process which introduces a form of identity politics into the republic of letters and makes for increasingly massive anthologies. Additionally, since genres cross boundaries of language and nationality more easily than authors, works, or historical events, attention to genre reminds critics of the international character of the Romantic movement, a phenomenon with which both Curran and Guillén, though with different degrees of emphasis, are also concerned. Finally, there is the question of literary history. There is currently a confusion between literary history itself and the historical relationship of literature to other institutionalized discourses of the same era, the same cultural time and place, when the term “history” is invoked in literary studies. If this confusion is ever resolved, if literary criticism is ever to become both historical and literary at the same time, it will probably be with some kind of renewal of the study of genres. In any case, in the light that Bakhtin sheds on Romanticism, the illumination this particular study is concerned to provide, a focus on genre is only one of several approaches aimed at clarifying the dynamic nature of literary achievement in this period. In autobiography and confession, the author creates a hero who is a version of him- or herself. Where Bakhtin claims in “Author and Hero” that confession has no real author or hero—that confession does not have a fully developed aesthetic form—we may say, on the contrary, that in Romantic literature the secular form of autobiography has developed strategies for representing the first person as an other and that these strategies extend to the increasingly secularized form of confession— boldly secularized by the example of Rousseau’s autobiographical work

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with its appropriation of the title of Augustine’s classic religious self-accounting. Romantic autobiography is not simply the outpouring of the “spirit” of the author with no “soul” of a hero in sight. Rather it presents a version of the author—a persona or mask of the I-formyself—as he or she recreates, through the present act of writing, the more or less consummated character of the author as an other-for-me at an earlier stage of development. The hero of Romantic autobiography is always younger, often more naïve, but also frequently more possessed of visionary vitality and creative potential than the authorial persona who describes him or her. The hero’s innocence is subject to disillusionment, her immediacy of being is subject to reflective alienation, but the person who begins at this earlier stage or “state of the soul” (in Blake’s formulation) is also capable of recovery or re-enchantment. Thus Wordsworth can say of the crisis his earlier self-as-hero undergoes, where he lost the “visitings of imaginative power” he had known earlier in his life: I shook the habit off Entirely and for ever, and again In Nature’s presence stood, as I stand now, A sensitive, and a creative Soul.21

The continuity of the past self-as-character with the present self-asauthor is asserted here, but they remain aesthetically differentiated throughout the poem, posthumously titled The Prelude, with the selfas-character periodically rising to heights of creative vision greater than self-as-author is willing to claim for his present person but also framed within the less passionate but more comprehensive understanding of the self-as-author. In confession, with its generically religious sense of ‘confession of sin and faith’ carried over from Augustine’s foundational work, the person of the past is not simply represented in the process of becoming the person of the present but is rather shown in a process of vocational formation. Thus Wordsworth’s Prelude is subtitled “Growth of a Poet’s Mind.” De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater plays

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ironically on this vocational frame for the hero’s life story, but in spite of its irony, it selects the events and encounters from the autobiographical archive to develop a portrait of the author as an adept in this public, if also antisocial, calling. Thoreau’s Walden eschews the confessional content and the long retrospective view of most confessions, and his public calling is paradoxically private, but his “Life in the Woods” retains the exemplary nature of the experience it relates that is fundamental to confession as a literary form. Romantic confession rings the changes on privacy and publicity in the relations of author and hero; the hero is typically revealed in an authentic privacy, while the author is typically implicated in a public, professional role—that of the famous poet or man of letters. Romantic autobiography, as Bakhtin argues for the genre more generally, rings the changes on the adventurous-heroic life and the domestic-quotidian one. Since both sets of terms, confession and autobiography, apply to The Prelude, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Walden, the distinction between these two forms or sub-genres of personal narrative may seem immaterial. M. H. Abrams has coined the term “crisis autobiography” to suggest a synthesis.22 But autobiography may be distinguished from confession in its lack of a particular institutional or doctrinal framing of the self whose progress is the focus of narrative attention. Autobiography gives us a tale or song of the self situated within foreign nature and culture, a setting of exotic space and adventurous travel through it, as in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative or Percy and Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Week’s Tour. Or it chronicles the self within a familiar and familial domesticity, as in Dorothy Wordsworth’s posthumously published journals that served as a source for some of her brother’s poems. The hero of autobiography may be dominant or recessive, and there may be a secondary hero or significant other in the narrative as well, as in the case of the biographical and poetic Wordsworth in Coleridge’s autobiographical and critical Biographia Literaria or the erotic and romantic Sarah Walker in Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris. In developing the relationship of the self-as-character to other characters (which can figure to a lesser extent in confession as

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well), autobiography gives the hero a social context as well as a physical environment which the self-as-author, writing from behind the temporal scenery, generally lacks. In Goethe’s autobiographical Dichtung und Wahrheit, the involvement of the developing self with the natural and historical locale around him is particularly rich. But this involvement in “the fullness of time [in] graphic, visible completeness,” as Bakhtin describes this characteristic in Goethe’s writing, represents a tendency to read the hero from the outside in, a tendency that distinguishes autobiography from confession, a genre which for Goethe simply made the self “lamentable” in its inwardness and isolation.23 Nevertheless, the close biographical relation of author and hero in autobiography—their psychological identity with one another outside the aesthetic form of the work—make the authorial outsideness of the author less defined and more unstable than in the other literary genres of Romanticism. Lyric forms of personhood and interpersonality achieve a greater differentiation of author and hero than autobiography and confession do. Bakhtin’s crucial insight here is that the author in lyric poetry speaks “from within a chorus” rather than in individual isolation.24 The lyrical “I,” by virtue of the metrical formalization of its speech (in blank verse as well as in rhymed couplets and stanzas), is an implicit first-person plural. The voice of the poet comes through an authorial mask that individualizes many voices in unison. “In a lyrical work, I am still wholly within a chorus and speak from within a chorus,” Bakhtin claims, a virtual or “possible chorus,” as he also puts it. Within the specific forms of lyric poetry given new definition in the Romantic period, we can note different degrees of singularity or individualization, of hero as well as of author. At the risk of over-simplification, we can distinguish a representative set of lyric genres, arranging them in a continuum. At the end where the personal voice predominates is the effusion, traditionally considered as an “outpouring” of the author’s feelings, genius, etc., as the Oxford English Dictionary defines the literary sense of the word in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the other end, where the voice of the people is most fully realized, is the literary ballad, which

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gives new currency to an oral form where both authorship and heroic personhood are ascribed not to an individual but to the folk. Between these two extremes, to focus on genres distinctively Romantic, we may situate the conversation poem, where the author-as-speaker addresses an intimate other; the ode, where the speaker addresses a personification, abstract or concrete, or a public personage; the hymn, addressed by a less individualized speaker to a more personalized deity; and the song, where the speaker is dramatized him- or herself, serving as a representative voice of a community or regional population. As Bakhtin says of the representative forms in “Author and Hero,” these genres are abstracted from individual works by particular authors and are not perfectly embodied in any of them. But they are recognizable to authors and readers as part of the contract, the “promise which by the act of writing in verse an Author in the present day makes to his Reader” that Wordsworth acknowledges in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” and that a poet makes in writing poetry.25 “Effusion” is a term for a poem of personal feeling that Coleridge rehabilitated briefly for his early poems. (Thirty-six lyrics in his first published volume of poetry, four of them by Charles Lamb, were given this generic designation.) It was and still may be applied to various traditional forms—to sonnets like the Elegiac Sonnets of Charlotte Smith, for example, loco-descriptive blank verse like Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches or “imitations” of earlier poets like Spenser and Ossian by Coleridge—where the emotions of the poet as speaker are the primary focus. The effusion is a genre where the speaker is the main character or hero and his or her sensibility, as it responds to suffering through expression of some kind of passion of its own, is the subject of the poem. The term may also be applied to the stylized “lyric of sensibility,” as it has been called, which imitates this delicate emotionality in a more detached and ironic fashion, as in the lyrics of Byron, which Jerome McGann has called (along with Charlotte Smith’s sonnets) “perverse” and “pitiless.”26 (Bakhtin observes such “voices outside the chorus” in the poems of Heine and Baudelaire, which express “the distinctly lyrical state of being ashamed of oneself, ashamed of lyric

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exaltation.”) The lyric present tense blurs the distinction between private speech and published writing (many effusions are “composed upon” a circumstantial event in the life of the author), and the frequent use of apostrophe provides a rudimentary sense of dialogue within the speech of a single voice (many effusions are addressed “to” some feature of the landscape or affective state evoked in the speaker). But whether the effusion is formally addressed to another person (Coleridge’s “To an Infant”), composed on a personal occasion (Byron’s “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year”), or uttered in the person of a fictional character (Smith’s “Sonnet XXI. Supposed to be Written by Werter”), the personality of the author-as-speaker is the dominant form of hero and the emotional immediacy and intensity of the author-as-hero’s experience is paramount. The “conversation poem” grows out of the effusion, quite literally in the oeuvre of Coleridge. His poem published as “Effusion XXXV. Composed August 20th, 1795, at Clevedon, Somersetshire” in 1796 was eventually revised as “The Eolian Harp,” after Coleridge had published “The Nightingale, a Conversational Poem” in Lyrical Ballads in 1798.27 In the conversation poem, which can be seen as a Romantic transformation of the much older genre of the verse epistle, an intimate, a friend or family member is directly addressed. This intimate other assumes a more independent personhood, serving as redemptive alterego to the first-person speaker, an other-for-me who corrects or reforms the speaker’s self-centered emotions, as they are discovered to be. Coleridge is the master of this form as well as the namer of it, but it was used by many Romantic poets with varying degrees of success in dramatizing the otherness of the interlocutor. Wordsworth turns to it when he evokes his sister at the end of his otherwise introspective “Tintern Abbey” and invokes it periodically in the course of The Prelude which he sometimes called “the poem to Coleridge.” The “mild reproof ” caught by the freely speculating speaker from the eye of his young wife at the end of “The Eolian Harp” was present in the earlier “Effusion XXXV,” but it became an essential feature of the new genre, which includes “The Nightingale,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “Frost at

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Midnight,” and “To William Wordsworth.” Keats brought it closer to its roots in the verse epistle in his several familiar letters in rhymed couplets to George Felton Mathew, Charles Cowden Clarke, John Hamilton Reynolds, and his brother George, while Shelley cast it in the form of a philosophical dialogue between himself and Byron in “Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation.” The conversation poem is carried over into the most widely cultivated form of the Romantic lyric poem, the ode, in the address to an intimate other, variously identified in the different versions, in Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode.” In its classic form, however, the speaker-hero of the conversation poem undergoes a change of heart or conversion through the influence of an alter-hero, even though the personality of the speaker remains primary. In the ode, to elaborate on Bakhtin’s suggestion, the voice of the speaker is more choral than monodic, less privately personal or circumstantially individual than in the conversation poem. But the hero or person addressed and celebrated is also more generalized and generic than the intimate other in that lyric genre. In the ode we encounter most immediately the widely debated phenomenon of “personification,” which the Romantic poets inherited from their neo-classical precursors with considerable ambivalence. The mideighteenth-century fashion for odes addressed to such personified abstractions as “Fancy,” “Memory,” “Pity,” “Fear,” and “Liberty” by poets like Akenside, Shenstone, and Collins is carried on in odes to (or on) “Dejection,” “Duty,” “Liberty,” “Melancholy,” and “Indolence” by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. These personifications may be concrete rather than abstract: Gray’s “distant prospect of Eton College,” Shelley’s west wind and skylark, Keats’s nightingale and Grecian urn, Hölderlin’s “source of the Danube” and Rhein. As we shall see in the more detailed reading of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that follows this section of the third chapter, a general remark of Bakhtin’s is particularly apposite for this genre, whose personalization of the impersonal is more sustained than the currently favored rhetorical terms “apostrophe” and “prosopopoeia” allow. “In every act of aesthetic perception there slumbers, as it were, a determinate image of a human

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being, as in a block of marble for the sculptor.”28 For the ode in particular, we may extend this insight with a complementary figure of speech: in every lyrically addressed abstraction there lies, faintly delineated, the form of a person waiting to be given solidity through color and shadow. What characterizes the interpersonality of the ode is a shift in the balance of aesthetic authority, away from the author (or authorial persona) and toward the hero or putative personality of the being who is named or addressed in the poem. Unlike the conversation poem, where the other is subordinate to the self, the ode presents the self as aspiring to the condition of the other. The poet struggles to “share/ The impulse of thy strength,” as Shelley says in his “Ode to the West Wind,” to participate in the larger life of the personal being he addresses. In the ode we find the beginnings of an aesthetic paradox that becomes stronger and less paradoxical in the hymn. In the ode, the author looks for his own salvation to the figure he has personified as a hero. The distinction between the ode and the hymn is often unclear in the case of individual poems, in the same way that the line between conversation poem and ode is often crossed in particular Romantic lyrics, for example, in “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” which, though he modeled it on Coleridge’s conversation poems, Wordsworth nevertheless hoped would show the same “principle requisites of that species of composition,” the ode.29 Generically ambiguous odes or hymns like Byron’s “Prometheus,” Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc,” and the late hymns of Hölderlin are cases in point, capable of being interpreted convincingly within either generic frame. But since Kurt Schlüter’s study of the English ode and its “development under the influence of the classical hymn,” it has been generally agreed that there is a different ethos in the two forms. The speaker or singer of the hymn loses his individuality in a congregation of worshipers, whereas the poet of the ode embodies the authority of a chorus yet individualizes this authority as the chief celebrant of the personage evoked.30 At the same time, the personage addressed or described in the hymn is more godlike, more numinous or transcendent in his or her otherness. As Curran observes, the lyric

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genre of the hymn in English Romanticism is strongly influenced by the flood of hymnody coming from Christian writers in the eighteenth century—Isaac Watts, Charles and John Wesley, and others less prolific and accomplished in rendering biblical story and theological doctrine in metrical verse for congregational singing. But the form does not depend on theological orthodoxy, as William Jones’s hymns to Hindu deities (which he also calls odes) attest. Even in staunchly atheistic hymns like Shelley’s, the authority of the being addressed is greater than that of the person addressing this higher power. Syncretism is also permitted, as when Bryon alludes to the redemptive sacrifice of Christ in telling the suffering Prometheus, “Thy Godlike crime was to be kind” to humanity.31 Keats’s “Ode to Apollo” is an ode and not a hymn precisely because its attention is focused on the great poets whom Apollo has inspired through the ages rather than on the “great God of Bards” in his own right. His poem “To Autumn,” on the other hand, crosses over from ode to hymn in its suppression of the lyric first person (in favor of a chorus of natural sounds in the third stanza) and its personification of the season as the immanent agent of natural processes. In the case of Hölderlin’s late poems, his own rubric of “hymn” seems justified by the radically transcendent otherness of their subjects, epitomized in the opening lines of “Patmos”: Near and Hard to grasp, the god. Yet where danger lies, Grows that which saves.32

The interpersonality of the song, the next genre of lyric in the spectrum of lyric author-hero relations, is rendered differently. Here the singer or speaker is given a clearer definition apart from the general lyric chorus. Whether the singer of the song is given a proper name (as in Mary Robinson’s “Marie Antoinette’s Lamentation, in Her Prison in the Temple”), a diagnosis (Blake’s “Mad Song”), a more general psychic or spiritual “state” (Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience), a nationality (Moore’s Irish Melodies), or even a religious tradition (Byron

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and Nathan’s Hebrew Melodies), the authorial mask is more clearly differentiated from the compositional person of the author. The poet-speaker stands as a separate character, a hero with his or her own personality or set of attitudes. Some songs are accompanied by music; matching his own words with traditional Scottish tunes or airs became a major concern of Robert Burns. But even if musical accompaniment is not specified, the idea of musical performance, reinforced by the typically stanzaic form of the lyric, aids in the sense of an objectified or projected lyric voice, and in the composite art of the German lieder, a musical setting of the song often followed upon the literary text. Most Romantic songs dramatize emotions or passions, which may include the emotion of tranquility, but they represent affective states in a particular other-for-me, at a distance from the author’s compositional personality. There is a tendency toward impersonation on the author’s part, toward playing the part of a person from a different class, regional dialect, or gender. The folk song, scrupulously collected from oral sources, creatively translated, plagiaristically attributed, or overtly imitated in printed literary form, is one of the most pervasive lyric genres of Romanticism and the most various in its formalization. But it blends with the art song in the music of the Romantic period, which also appears in the larger musical form of opera, embraced with great enthusiasm in Romanticism. As a form of lyric poetry, the song can appear as an interlude in the midst of a longer, narrative work, as in Byron’s “The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece” interpolated into Canto III of Don Juan or in the dozen songs sung by characters in Scott’s first novel Waverley. As in the ode, the personhood of the singerspeaker in the song is often spare and stylized, but such elusiveness is an essential feature of the genre, as Wordsworth observes in “The Solitary Reaper,” his tribute to the singer of a folk song in Gaelic, a language he cannot understand. The last of the genres of Romantic lyric poetry that I would single out for its distinctive representation of creative interpersonality is the ballad. As in the song, the uncertain distinction between ancient examples from oral cultures and modern literary imitations, along with

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the distinction between tradition and individual talent, is constitutive of the genre. Scott wrote an essay on this issue, in tribute to the value of Scottish border ballads, singling out for praise the “extreme simplicity with which the narrative moves forward [. . .] to the grand object of enforcing on the hearer a striking and effective catastrophe” while objecting to “the similes, reflections and suggestions of the poet [that] are, in fact, too intrusive and too well said to suffer the reader to feel the full taste of the tragic tale.” Scott also pays tribute to the catalytic effect of Burger’s literary ballad “Lenore” on his own career as a poet and the way such imitations as “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” aim “powerfully to excite the imagination, without pretending to satisfy it.”33 As these remarks suggest, the poet-speaker of the ballad is impersonal and anonymous while the personality of the hero is strongly shaped by his or her fate, usually tragic. Utterances by the main characters appear with no identification of the speaker; questions and answers give a dramatic cast to the narrative, which builds suspense and provides resolution in a way that emphasizes the reciprocity of words and deeds. The historical otherness of the genre enables the “willing suspension of disbelief ” that a modern consciousness requires to accept the supernatural events as psychologically plausible, as Coleridge puts it, though as his Ancient Mariner and Keats’s Knight-at-arms in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” show, the supernatural events may suspend the resolution of the action instead of bringing it to a satisfying conclusion. The human characters in the ballad are susceptible to the control of somewhat less plausible supernatural agents, but the superstitions of the folk, rural or ancient, are often vindicated over against urban or modern rationality by the way events turn out. The vision of the child in “The Erl-King,” written by Goethe and translated by Scott, is vindicated by the visionary child’s death in his more rational and reasoning father’s arms. This trial of credulity holds even in the countergenre, as it has been called, of the lyrical ballad developed by Wordsworth—in “We Are Seven,” for example, where the young girl’s belief in the abiding presence of her dead siblings confounds the more conventional sense of personhood maintained by the narrator.34

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The relative otherness of the hero in the ballad, as well as the interaction of the hero (male or female) with other characters in the story that gives the figure his or her defining form, brings us from lyric poetry, where authors are more dominant, to the novel where heroes of various kinds begin to assert their own authority. Here it seems useful to distinguish four representative sub-genres and to understand them as alternatives or counter-genres to one another. In the Romantic period, the novel focuses on individual persons in the genres of Bildungsroman and the Gothic novel. In the domestic novel and the historical novel, it focuses on families and peoples, even as these larger groups are usually represented by representative individuals. In all these sub-genres of the novel, the hero of the work enters into significant relations with other characters, relations that can be as constitutive of his or her personality as the relations between hero and author. The relations among characters are important in the novel, as I suggested in the previous chapter, not simply because they show ethical relations among persons on the same representational plane, but also because they are often presented as versions of the transgredient relationship, as Bakhtin calls it, between author and hero. Characters in Romantic novels frequently assume a creative authority over other characters within the work, whether this authority is exposed as a delusion on the part of the character affected or confirmed as a psychologically credible, if not socially beneficial, influence on him or her. This is the other side of the aesthetic of the Golden Rule, as it has been called in Bakhtin, where the greatest act of authorship is to grant a character something approaching the autonomy of spirit or responsibility for meaning that the author enjoys in his or her own creative agency. In the form of the novel, a literary character is capable of making another character over into his or her own image, deliberately or inadvertently, constructively or destructively. Frankenstein is only an extreme case of this phenomenon. In the Bildungsroman, the shaping of the hero by the author, and by other characters exercising their authorial prerogative, is the focus of narrative. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, as its title was rendered in

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English by Carlyle, is the paradigmatic instance of a genre whose membership has been subject to particular debate in recent decades, precisely because it foregrounds the category of aesthetic experience.35 The novel of education, more broadly defined, was developed in the period of the Enlightenment, as were the fictions of pedagogy more narrowly and didactically conceived, but the German term Bildungsroman specifies a form of the novel developed in the Romantic era, a novel in which the hero (usually male in this period) undergoes a process of cultural formation in which various forms of art are central. The hero may not be destined to be an artist—Wilhelm Meister’s long involvement with a theatrical company and with Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a stage of his development, not his ultimate calling—but aesthetic experience is important to the hero. Furthermore, the acknowledgment of the author’s own aesthetic activity in telling his story—a certain artistic self-consciousness on his part—is common on the part of the authorial persona. The hero encounters mentor or tutor figures within the novel, often unofficial or unacknowledged as such for much of the narrative, and he finds himself attracted and instructed by his love for characters of the opposite sex, who reveal him to himself in more intimate ways than his instructors. The aesthetic and erotic education undergone by Wilhelm Meister is largely positive, but more negative or problematic versions of the ideal of harmonious development of the individual person for service to the larger society can be seen in early German examples of the genre such as Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Jean Paul’s Flegeljahre, and Moritz’s Anton Reiser. Even in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the end of the novel is only the beginning of such personal “mastery” of the challenges of social life. The later incorporations of the Bildungsroman in England— Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (which caused Bulwer-Lytton to revise Pelham by re-opening his Goethe, as Carlyle’s narrator had advised)—are even less balanced and holistic, and the earliest French examples—Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir and Balzac’s Illusions perdues—are more negative and ironic still— “Antibildungsromane,” in the phrase of one scholar of the genre.36 But in

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all these examples, the hero is peculiarly passive, unheroic, unaware of his real desires, and given to error in his choices as a young man. It is in the person of the author, either as narrator or as the older and wiser personality behind the first-person expressions of the hero, that the vision of maturity, tempered by some form of resignation and acceptance, achieves its more elusive embodiment. The hero is in the process of becoming an author, so to speak, becoming capable of the aesthetic activity of creating a hero rather than simply being one, but even in sequels like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, it is understood that he will not reach this level of disinterested creativity and that the vision of such maturity will remain ironically elusive to the reader as well. At the same time, the relative independence and autonomy of the hero avoids the generic imperatives of autobiography, even though many of the hero’s experiences can be traced to events in the historical author’s life. The sub-genre of the Gothic novel, the other type focused on individuals, remains low and popular within the hierarchy of genres, rather than aspiring to a higher aesthetic status like the Bildungsroman. It develops most richly in England in the Romantic period, and continues most vitally, as a popular and canonical form, it might be argued, in the persisting Romanticism of American literature.37 Where the protagonist of the Bildungsroman is typically a young man undergoing gradual development, the protagonist of the Gothic novel is typically a young woman subjected to traumatic assault, though a comprehensive survey of the hundreds of such novels produced from the 1760s to the 1820s notes that there are plenty of “villain-centered” versions as well as “maiden-centered” ones.38 These contrasting versions of the central character have been termed “male Gothic” and “female Gothic,” but the two types of protagonist are clearly interdependent. The hero-as-victim typically undergoes a series of assaults on her liberty, her virtue and her reason that are launched by the hero-asperpetrator or his agents. (The roles of villain and victim, as well as author and hero, are generally less subject to reversal than in Frankenstein, though in Lewis’s The Monk one of the young women

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threatened by the villain Ambrosio’s lust is revealed to be a demon disguised as a woman, a fiend who has been tempting him to his destruction.) In effect, the one character aspires to a godlike power over the other, which of course becomes a diabolical power. This ordeal in turn reveals the personal integrity of the victim, her ability to act in achieving her physical liberation, her ability to resist sexual seduction and assault, and her ability, in the case of the rational explanation of the supernatural common in Radcliffe’s novels, to understand rationally events that she had at first regarded with superstitious credulity. In addition to this fatal pairing of good and evil persons (which extends to the helpers on both sides, human and sometimes supernatural), there is the tendency toward personification of the architectural setting, the castle or monastery. “Gothic architecture is imbued with the character and will of its former owners,” Frederick Frank observes. “Place becomes personality, as every corner and dark recess of the Gothic castle exudes a remorseless aliveness and often a vile intelligence.”39 This psychic allegory is nowhere more evident than in Poe’s Gothic tale, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” On the other hand, in contrast again to the Bildungsroman, the author of the Gothic novel is typically remote and ineffectual in his or her relation to the principal characters. Instead of a hero growing up toward the personality of the author who presents his story, we are given an author in a position similar to the reader’s, a narrator who is sympathetically drawn into the emotions of the hero in his or her ordeal. Typical in Gothic novels are the devices of “mediated narration”: the found manuscript (Reeve’s The Old English Baron, Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest), the tale within the tale (Frankenstein, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer), the account pieced together by an editor from traditional sources (Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner).40 Radcliffe theorized this sacrifice of authorial authority or outsideness, as Bakhtin would call it, as being in the service of increased affect in the reader: either “terror,” which “expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life,” or “horror,” which “contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them.”41 In spite of such opposite effects on the reader, both

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these responses are appropriate to the sublime, an aesthetic in which the subject becomes traumatically aware of the contrast between the weakness of the human person and the power of a being or force more than human. In the Gothic novel, these defining emotions are both represented as a matter of the reader’s response rather than the author’s initiative. However, as we have seen with Mary Shelley’s presentation of authorial self at the threshold of Frankenstein, the explicit abjection of creativity in a hero’s fear can be a strategy in support of the implicit consummation of the work in an author’s affectionate aesthetic attention. The domestic novel is not a distinctively Romantic genre—it can be traced back to Aphra Behn and Richardson in British literature—but as a number of commentators have noted, it is often conceived, throughout the Romantic period and beyond, as a counter-genre to the Gothic.42 In Austen’s Northanger Abbey the heroine misreads her suitor’s family and estate after the example of novels by Ann Radcliffe but then has to undergo a more realistic version of the Gothic ordeal in the blocking of her suitor’s courtship by his authoritarian father. This novel is an explicit case of this contestation of genres. Looking further ahead but not beyond Romantic forms of the novel, one can see in both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, a similar conflict of Gothic and domestic chronotopes; in both of the Brontës’ narratives the domestic novel eventually socializes the recalcitrant individualism of the heroine and her domineering male counterpart, even if, as in Wuthering Heights, it takes another generation to complete the process. Less common though equally suggestive in its shift of emphasis from the person to her people is the contest between the domestic novel and the Bildungsroman, as seen in Goethe’s Elective Affinities and the female Bildungsromane, as they have been called, in Germany. Where the Gothic novel situates the hero, if she is female, in a position where her individual person is threatened, the domestic novel places her in a position where her intimate relations with others—her relatives as well as her prospects for marriage and rivals in the process—are an essential part of her literary identity. The female hero’s relationship with her relatives, rather than

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her separate selfhood, is the focus of the narrative, as she is involved, enthusiastically or reluctantly, in the process of extending her family through a new alliance, the prospect of new offspring and the hope of a new home. In the case of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, which may be taken as a Romantic domestic novel of the first order, the new alliance reunites two separated branches of Lady Bertram’s family through the marriage of first cousins (acceptable in England at that time as a means of preserving the emotional as well as the financial economy of family life) and promises not a new dwelling but a moral and aesthetic “improvement” of the existing property.43 Courtship leading to marriage is a characteristic feature of the plot in the domestic novel, a plot in which the female hero negotiates between her dependent relationship as a daughter and her dependent relationship as a wife. But infidelity before and after marriage is possible, as with the parallel character of Maria Bertram, Fanny Price’s cousin in Mansfield Park, or Eduard, the husband of Charlotte in Elective Affinities, a more liberal domestic novel where the woman is not the only one who pays. Courtship leading to marriage is common in the domestic novels of Romanticism, especially in the immediately more popular though later less canonical fiction of the period, with adultery becoming the focus of the domestic novels of Realism later in the century in Britain, though much earlier in France with its tradition of libertine fiction. The main character of the domestic novel is less autonomous in her individual personhood than the main character in the Bildungsroman or the Gothic novel, but she is more substantial in her interpersonality, her relations with members of the family, the household and the neighborhood. To claim a hegemonic political function for the genre, as Nancy Armstrong does in Desire and Domestic Fiction, is to overstate the social scope or political significance of interpersonal relations in this type of novel, at least from a Bakhtinian perspective. It is plausible to observe, as both Gary Kelly and Todd Kontje do, that the affairs of family and home, as foregrounded in the domestic novel, are often presented as having a bearing on the fate of the nation as a whole.44 But as far as genre is concerned, it is significant that the nexus of relationships

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of the hero and her “relations,” as family members began to be called at the end of the seventeenth century, constitutes a smaller and more intimate community than the public sphere of the nation—as well as a larger and more social set of relationships than the private sphere of the individual so important in other genres of Romanticism. The focus on the interpersonal relations of the characters, who are often presented as a complex set of alternate selves to the heroine and her eventual match, is reinforced by the interpersonality of author and characters. Alex Woloch’s concept of a “character system” that includes secondary characters as well as primary ones is a useful supplement to Bakhtin’s typical focus on a single protagonist or hero here.45 The author of the domestic novel typically assumes the role of someone who is part of the larger “set” or “society” to which the hero and her family belong. The device of free indirect style (which has been traced back to Elective Affinities as well as to Austen’s novels) conveys the phenomenon of social literacy, a complex “of manners, sentiment and emulation,” as Kelly glosses the adjective “domestic” in the more common term for the genre.46 Nuances of conduct and conversation are presented for the most part without direct narrative comment, and these nuances are observed within the inner speech of characters, which in Bakhtin’s view of language is to say the social dimensions of individual consciousness. The socialization of the younger, less socially literate characters becomes the exemplary re-socialization of the reader as well. Yet the matching of the young person with her people, of the “sentiments” of the hero with the “manners” of her friends and relations, involves a continual balancing of desires and needs, of the liberations and constraints of “emulation,” as it was sometimes called, on both sides. The last form of the novel to be considered, the historical novel, situates the hero and the other characters in the context of the nation, the developed or developing “people” that has emerged as an “imagined community” from the warring “peoples” of earlier periods.47 The author is formally distanced in time—by two generations, as in Scott’s Waverley, or ’Tis Sixty Years Since, or by two centuries, as in Vigny’s Cinq-Mars. Thus he is aware of the comprehensive nation-state that is to come out

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of the conflicts between regions and/or “estates” in the historical past of the narrative. Behind the scenes, the author assumes the role of editorhistorian, often supplying historical background in prefaces, notes, appendices, or digressions; within the novel he is the “tour-guide,” as James Kerr calls the author of the Waverley novels, conveying “a sense of a comfortable distance” from the persons, places, and events of the narrative.48 The hero of the historical novel has received the most attention from critics, most notably from Lukács in The Historical Novel, written and published in Russia in the same period as Bakhtin’s essays on the novel collected in The Dialogic Imagination. The typical protagonist of the historical novels of Scott, and of Cooper (Scott’s “one worthy follower in the English language,” according to Lukács), Alexis, Manzoni, Pushkin, and Gogol (worthy followers in other European languages) is undistinguished in personality, “a ‘middling’, merely correct and never ‘heroic’ hero,” Lukács observes.49 In particular, the hero of the historical novel is not the Great Man of history proper, the “world historical individual” of Hegel’s philosophy of history. This latter figure is a heroic hero, and he can only appear on the periphery of the narrative if the novel is to perform its socially and politically representative function. (Vigny’s hero Cinq-Mars is a reactionary exception to the rule, according to Lukács.) The passive hero registers the conflicting values of the warring factions instead of acting with real initiative in his own person. Thus he realizes, dialectically, the values of one group and another. He—or she, since Jeannie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian is a variation on the type—suffers the conflicts within himself or herself without making the fatal choices that the other principal characters are prone to, choices which often lead to death or exile. The hero moves among different peoples and through different regions. As Philip Fisher observes of the figure of Natty Bumppo, the European protagonist with many Indian names in the historical novels of Cooper, the unobtrusive hero also opens a representational space within the novel where the reader can observe a “composite social will” emerging from the various “individual moral choice[s] between alternatives” made by other characters.50 The unheroic hero is thus an

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observer as much as someone to be observed. As in the domestic novel but on a larger and more public stage, a representative set of supporting characters act on behalf of the different factions that must be reconciled (usually through violence) if the nation is to move in the direction of its future, more settled or more cohesive, condition. The passive hero of the historical novel resembles the undeveloped hero of the Bildungsroman, a resemblance noted by Alexander Welsh in his interpretation of Scott’s exemplary character-type, but it is his function as an “ideal member of society” rather than as someone of superior cultural formation in his own person that is important in this genre.51 Compared to the hero of the other novelistic genres, the hero of the historical novel is the most developed in his interpersonality. He personifies the historical detachment of the author as he witnesses the representative struggles of other characters, many of them more actively heroic in the traditional literary sense than he is. But he is also personally involved with these characters, attracted as well as repelled by their examples. Beyond the novel in its representative sub-genres of Bildungsroman, Gothic, domestic, and historical novels lies the fourth of our major generic forms of personhood and interpersonality: irony and satire. There are differences between satire and irony worth noting, but as I did with the category of autobiography and confession, I will argue that within the historical poetics of Romanticism the generic distinction between them tends to be collapsed by the reconfiguration of earlier generic models, in this case neo-classical ones, that tended to treat them as distinct from one another. Irony was understood as a figure or device of rhetoric, a trope by which an author says one thing literally while figuratively signifying another. Satire was understood as a genre of honest indignation, where the author exposes characters directly in their pretensions and venality. But in the theory and practice of German Romanticism, irony becomes a philosophical category, a “divine breath” and a “transcendental buffoonery,” in the famous aphorism of Friedrich Schlegel,52 while in the satire of English Romantics like Blake’s Book of Urizen and Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy, the genre identified in the

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Enlightenment with neo-classical humanism becomes a form of prophetic or apocalyptic vision. In Byron’s Don Juan, the irony of the narrator toward his subject and the ironic attitude of the author toward his chosen poetic form of ottava rima combine with the satire directed at the dominant and domineering forms of European society, leaving the hero Don Juan himself within the generic frame of the comic novel. It used to be argued that Romanticism was essentially positive and idealizing and that satire and irony—grudgingly acknowledged as “negative Romanticism”—were marginal by definition. Studies like those of Anne Mellor and David Simpson on irony and Martin Price, Alvin Kernan, and Steven Jones on satire have done much to expand this restrictive view, though there is still a tendency, as in Jones’s Satire and Romanticism, to see them as literary modes in opposition to one another.53 But to exclude major works of Tieck, Schlegel, Heine, Blake, Byron, Pushkin, Lermontov, and Stendhal from this genre of Romantic literature is unwarranted and unnecessary. Irony involves the attitude of an author toward his subject, as reflected in the ambiguity between what he says affirmatively about it and what he also seems to convey as a negative judgment. Satire involves the actions of characters as reflected in the disjunction between what they pretend to be and what they are. As ironic speakers, authors celebrate heroes they really (or probably, or possibly) mean to undercut, as in the various celebrations of the devils of biblical and poetic tradition in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell or the narrator’s praise of puppets, appropriated from his more daring interlocutor Herr C., in Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theater.” As figures of satire, heroes dramatize the disparity between the intelligence or virtue of their public images and the stupidity or viciousness of their private persons, like the scribbling poet-laureate Southey who appears before Saint Peter at the end of Byron’s The Vision of Judgment, or the “Cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant” Castlereagh who appears at the end of the “Dedication” to Don Juan. While the two forms often appear in the same work, complicating the interplay of masks and faces, they may be used (and may be described) separately. In all cases, however, irony and

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satire dramatize a breakdown in the mutually sustaining relationship of author and hero, a negative construction of the positive aesthetic activity on which, according to Bakhtin, this interpersonal relationship of creator and created depends. This is not at all to say that irony and satire are not capable of great aesthetic achievement, only that they deal primarily in forms of author-evasion and character-abasement. The “human form divine,” as Blake called it, anticipating Bakhtin’s insistence on the theologically inflected interpersonality of the person, is conspicuous here by its absence. Romantic irony and satire are fictions of degradations, negations of full personhood which deconstruct the interpersonality of author and hero in different ways. Irony maximizes the potentiality of the author or narrative voice, destroying forms as well as creating them, according to Schlegel, heightening the infinite possibilities of the authorial consciousness, of the I-for-myself in and for itself or the individual creative “spirit.” Satire diminishes the hero—in body, soul and spirit— leaving him (deliberately) objectified and flattened. Jones has pointed out how German Romantic theories of irony drew on the stock characters and caricatures of popular theatrical pantomime as models of character and action. But these character types also influence the forms of personality in English satire, Jones argues, insisting on “a ‘materialism’ that reveals the puppets’ strings and the puppeteer pulling them,” an influence Byron explicitly acknowledges with Don Juan: “We all have seen him in the pantomime/ Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time,” the narrator notes as he goes about choosing his hero in the first stanza of Canto I.54 The character of satire is a type, and the type is “the passive position of a collective personality,” according to Bakhtin in “Author and Hero.”55 He is many people abstracted, reduced to a single personage. The type is also the product of the process, noted above, that Bakhtin calls “reification” as opposed to “personification.” There are three types of relations, he argues in “From Notes Made in 1970–71”: relations between objects, relations between a subject and an object, and relations among subjects. It is the relations among subjects that the various forms

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of author-hero relationship are concerned with realizing and representing, relationships that lie at the heart of aesthetic activity, in his view. But Bakhtin notes that relations among subjects may become “de-personified” as well.56 Again, Bryon is quite explicit in this regard, referring to Castlereagh as “it” instead of “he,” turning him, in the course of four stanzas in the “Dedication” to Don Juan, from a person to a thing, a process of dehumanization Coleridge coined the term “be-thinging” to describe. It is the reifying process of de-personification, of treating living subjects as dead or ludicrously inanimate objects, that lies at the heart of satire in general and Romantic satire in particular. “To put it another way, the solid objects and characters which make up the satiric world are but testaments of dullness’ acts, its passing creations or ‘uncreations,’” Alvin Kernan writes in The Plot of Satire. The extreme of such uncreative activity can be found in Blake’s satiric deity Urizen as he abstracts, withdraws and materializes himself in the midst of the energetic and spiritual interpersonality of the “Eternals,” eventually dragging their representative Los down with him into the fallen material world. And it is the reduction of many individual persons to a single social type, along with a multiplication of such types in an inventory of offenders, that reinforces this sense of personhood lost in satire. “The ultimate rational method for summing up and understanding the totality of existence is statistics, and satire provides a statistical image of the world. It does not present a few characters and a few events, [. . .] but ranges over a vast number of persons, objects and events,” observes Kernan in his discussion of Don Juan. Thus the typecast Angels and Devils in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and thus the meta-critical “proverb of Hell,” “Bring out number, weight & measure in a year of dearth.”57 What Martin Price observes of Blake can be extended to Romantic satirists in general: “What primarily distinguishes Blake as a satirist from the Augustans is the shift from moral judgment to a standard of energy.”58 The moral opposition of good and evil becomes mechanical as it isolates itself from spiritual spontaneity, aesthetic or religious. Again, such fictions of negation, capable of brilliant and complex

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elaboration, should not be confused with bad art or a lack of charity, as they often were in later nineteenth-century criticism. They are best understood as a literary genre. The genre I am calling heroic romance stands the negativity of Romantic satire on its head. These are fictions of admiration rather than degradation. Standing as a secular version of the saint’s life in this adaptation of Bakhtin’s poetics, it idealizes the form and function of a single hero at the same time that it obscures the creative authority of the author, who is typically represented by an ordinary, unheroic narrator— for example, Ishmael in relation to Ahab in Moby-Dick. The proximity of heroic romance to satire in this Bakhtinian poetics reflects the way idealization and materialization of human personhood become reciprocal processes in this period, gravitating to one extreme or the other as Romanticism situates its center of gravity in otherness. Heroic romance, as I conceive of it here, is also the most formally various of these genres in its rendering of possible personhood and interpersonality. It can be poetic or novelistic; the hero may be presented in dramatic form as well as in poetry or prose.59 This diversity of formal presentation is symptomatic of a general tendency in Romanticism, noted earlier, to elevate character above plot and to translate external fate to a function of individual personality when older literary works, from Classical Antiquity through the Renaissance, are reimagined by Romantic poets and critics. The hero of heroic romance is not the unheroic hero of the historical novel. He is the world-historical individual himself, as in Byron’s “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte,” Hugo’s Cromwell, or Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. Or he is the worldmythological individual, as he might be called, in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and the Hyperion poems of Keats. He is not a paragon of personal morality or civic virtue; rather he is, in the words of the late Romantic hero-worshipper Nietzsche, “beyond good and evil.” The hero may be female, as in Southey’s Joan of Arc or the poems in Hemans’s Records of Woman. The hero may be part of a symbolic pair, male and female, as with Prometheus and Asia in Prometheus Unbound or Manfred and Astarte in Manfred. The heroic romance in Romanticism

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often takes the heroes of older established genres—tragic drama, chivalric romance, epic poetry and historical chronicle—and places them in a new generic framework, a setting where their extraordinary personalities are the center of aesthetic attention. The author of heroic romance stands in awe of his hero, wondering at the hero’s power and authority over others, meditating on his mysterious depths of personhood. It is to heroic romance, rather than lyric, I would argue, that Bakhtin’s characterization of the author seeking revelation from his hero instead of simply bringing him to life is most applicable. This apotheosis of heroic character is evident in Goethe’s Faust, but it is even more pronounced in Byron’s Faust-like dramatic poem Manfred. Manfred is a Faust turned in on himself and against everything outside himself. He conjures up the elemental spirits of the universe, but is only overpowered by the image of his alter-ego and incestuous beloved, Astarte. Where Faust makes a wager for his soul with Mephistopheles and enters a career of endless striving, creative and destructive, Manfred spurns all relationships, human and divine, striving only for reconciliation with the Spirit of Astarte, who shows her family resemblance to the hero by spurning him. Manfred rejects the Zoroastrian spirit of darkness, Arimanes (whom he has summoned up), by referring him to the more powerful Christian deity, “the Maker/ Who made him [Arimanes] not for worship.” But he goes on to reject both the divine forgiveness of this deity, offered by the Abbot, and eternal punishment of the Demons who come to get him as he approaches death. Echoing the rhetoric of Milton’s Satan defying the cosmic Hell which contains him in Paradise Lost, Manfred utters the credo of the romance hero of Romanticism: The mind which is immortal makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts— Is its own origin of ill and end— And its own place and time . . .60

Like Horatio in Hamlet, from which Bryon takes the epigraph (“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in

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your philosophy”), the Abbot offers the last admiring word: “He’s gone—his soul hath ta’en its earthless flight—/ Whither? I dread to think—but he’s gone.” Within the created literary world of Manfred, at least, there is no voice to contradict the hero in his splendid and selfcreated isolation, only voices that assent to his pronouncements in varying tones of respect and regret. It was the American Romantic Melville who best described the essence of the genre of heroic romance, in an ironical and elegiac passage in his last novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. Recalling, no doubt, the Byronic-Shakespearean-Miltonic hero Ahab of his own earlier heroic romance Moby-Dick, the now CervanteanFieldingesque image of the author in The Confidence-Man reflects on the colloquial phrase “quite an original.” He acknowledges its popular usage as applied to any character who is odd or eccentric, but he insists that the phrase should only be applied to those few characters who are truly and profoundly originary. Furthermore, if we consider, what is popularly held to entitle characters in fiction being deemed original, is but something personal—confined to itself. The character sheds not its characteristic on its surroundings, whereas, the original character, essentially such, is like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all round it—everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark how it is with Hamlet), so that, in certain minds, there follows upon the adequate conception of such a character, an effect, in its way, akin to that which in Genesis attends upon the beginning of things.61

Through the ironically equivocal syntax, we see the egotistical sublime being transferred from author to hero; besides Hamlet, the only other examples of the original character Melville offers are Don Quixote and Milton’s Satan. The hero need only be conceived (“in certain minds,” of course) for literary creation to arrange itself around him. To observe such a theory of heroic potency and spontaneous generation is to say nothing about the aesthetic value or artistic

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plausibility of this last literary genre. Satire and irony stand ready to deflate such expectations. Nor is it to say that a particular work in this genre is guaranteed either immediate acclaim or ultimate canonization. Fate in the person of Byron was not kind to Southey’s Vision of Judgment, his heroic poem on the death of George III. In the Bakhtinian perspective adopted here, heroic romance is only one of many forms of the shifting relationship of author and hero, a relationship, as I have been arguing, particularly important in Romantic literature. Where satire functions as a kind of negative aesthetics, a via negativa toward author and hero, heroic romance is a kind of aesthetic triumphalism, a positive affirmation of the relationship, even as it is all but collapsed into the hero alone. But such a genre is not representative of aesthetic activity in general. The hero of heroic romance, in Melville’s ironically hyperbolic theory or in Byron’s more realistically motivated practice, is not a direct or definitive transcription of the aesthetic activity of authorship as Bakhtin would have us conceive of it. Rather it is a particular formal realization of the relationship of possible persons, creating and created, on which all aesthetic activity is based; it is a “relative stabilization,” as Bakhtin puts it, of a dynamic dialogic situation. To the transcendental sources of the hero of heroic romance noted previously—the otherness of social history and the otherness of religious myth—we must add the higher power, as the Romantics conceived it, of imagination, a transcendental expression of otherness of the self. Like the would-be Romantic hero Jay Gatsby, who is said to have sprung from his Platonic conception of himself, Melville’s Ahab and Bryon’s Manfred are heroes who lay claim to being sublimely authorial in their own right, through a human faculty believed to lie beyond the “merely personal,” as Gatsby calls his rival Tom Buchanan’s love for Gatsby’s inamorata Daisy Buchanan. In the next section of this chapter, we will leave these heights of otherness and depths of inwardness to focus on the more measured and mediated relationship of author and hero in a particular example of the genre of the Romantic ode, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

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IV “Every act of aesthetic seeing includes within itself a tendency toward a hero, the potentiality of a hero,” Bakhtin asserts. “In every act of aesthetic perception there slumbers, as it were, a determinate image of a human being, as in a block of marble for the sculptor.” As I suggested earlier in this chapter, this article of poetic faith seems especially relevant to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where an imagined concrete art object, apparently made of marble and supposedly embodying an act of aesthetic perception in antiquity, is subjected to a fresh reflection by an author working in a different time and in a different artistic medium. What is at issue in this ode, as in many odes of the Romantic era, is the extent to which art is capable of personification, of bringing to imaginative life the possibility of personhood in or around a concrete object so that “the given object will become the hero of the event consummated around the hero.”62 (The same issue informs odes on abstract ideas or concepts, as we saw earlier, odes like Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” or “Ode on Indolence,” though it requires a different metaphor.) That a marble urn carved millennia earlier can be a “friend to man” with something significant to “say” to human beings in the early nineteenth century and beyond is the aesthetic hypothesis or thought experiment on which this ode is based. Such a hypothesis is not uncommon in the tradition of ekphrastic verse to which the poem belongs, though it is unlikely that Keats had a particular urn in mind.63 It is a hypothesis that must be tested, however, and in any particular instance—at any particular poetic moment—it may not be credible. It may prove to be, as the last stanza of Keats’s immediately preceding exercise in this genre, “Ode to a Nightingale,” puts it, a “cheat” of the fancy rather than a “truth” of the imagination. But hypotheses that are truly abandoned by a culture (such as the alchemical theories of Cornelius Agrippa disparaged by père Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel, for example) are no longer put to the test, at least not in the dominant institutions of that culture. For many Romantic poets, the ode was still thought to be a thought experiment worth making.

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According to Bakhtin, personification is a conceptual process that moves in the opposite direction from reification. It is a conception of the relationship between one subject and another subject, as distinct from the relationship between a subject and an object or between one object and another object. “Relations among subjects,” Bakhtin says, are “individual, personal relations: dialogic relations among utterances, ethical relations, and so forth. This also includes all kinds of personified semantic ties. Relations among consciousnesses, truths, mutual influences, apprenticeship, love, hate, falsehood, friendship, respect, reverence, trust, mistrust, and so forth.”64 But like all forms of mental and verbal activity, according to Bakhtin, personification is, like personhood itself, something assigned or achieved, not something given or guaranteed. And it is not something that can be achieved within the sphere of the single, subjective self, within the virtual infinity of the “I-for-myself ” as he calls such subjectivity in isolation. It is only achieved—and it can only be cut short, one might add—in a relationship among two or more beings understood as subjects.65 In the genre of the ode, as I argued in the previous section of this chapter, the author speaks with the intonations of a chorus, with the corporate voice of poetic tradition, rather than with the more private and personalized utterance of the conversation poem. But he speaks as the leader or spokesman of such a chorus, as one responsible for testing the strength and vitality of the tradition. Where the hymn is voiced in generalized congregational confidence—“Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God,” Coleridge’s speaker concludes in “Hymn Before Sun-Rise in the Vale of Chamouni”—the ode makes room for more specific questioning and individual anxiety. “My heart aches,” “Ode to a Nightingale” begins. The hero of the ode is elevated above ordinary human being (“all breathing human passion far above,” as the speaker says of the Grecian urn) but is not above ordinary human suspicion. Either directly or obliquely, his (or her or its) relationship to humanity is subject to interrogation. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” it seems to be the very inanimate, silent resistance of the urn to the poet’s creative interrogations that allows it to realize, eventually, “the potentiality of a

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hero” in this act of aesthetic perception, to discover the “determinate image of a human being” embodied in an artifact made from stone. Of course, the material of the urn has already been artistically crafted, plastically shaped by an unknown ancient human hand. But its personality must be reclaimed, in this self-consciously ekphrastic poem, in the more immediate and more time-bound medium of language in the present. The poem begins with the voice of the author, which is to say a voice speaking through the authorial mask of the choral spokesman, in the ascendency. The poet-speaker addresses the urn as “Thou,” in a measured and respectful manner.66 A series of epithets—“bride,”“fosterchild,” and “historian”—personify the urn as a whole, and a series of questions focus attention on the persons and activity represented upon it. As the speaker’s attention shifts from the urn as a personified whole to the personal figures carved in relief on its surface, the calm interrogation becomes excited: What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What Pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? ll. 8–10

By the end of the first stanza, the emotional excess of the author overwhelms the object, and the process of personification seems to stall. This movement from cool address to overheated harangue is repeated in the second and third stanzas as the speaker attempts to identify scenes of human passion on the urn. He turns from mythological scenes of erotic pursuit and ecstasy to pastoral scenes of youthful love, as if he himself were wooing the “bride of quietness” in a gentler vein. He accepts the superiority of the urn’s “unheard” melodies; he consoles the eternally frustrated young man who can never consummate the kiss with his beloved that he desires. But the over-insistent “happy” of the third stanza, coming six times in four lines, betrays the author’s returning frustration in the face of his hero’s more-than-human

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composure. He finds himself on a lower level than the cherished figure, left behind, like the speaker in the third stanza of the “Ode to A Nightingale,” in painful awareness of human mortality. The urn stands “above” the “breathing human passion” with which the speaker is all too familiar, a passion that depletes rather than fulfills and “leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,/ A burning forehead, and a parching tongue” (ll. 29–30). Then, in the fourth stanza, an emotional-volitional change, as Bakhtin would put it, takes place. The turn or transformation here is one of the more remarkable moments in Keats’s poetry. Right after acknowledging his failure to identify the urn with human experience and value, to personify the urn and identify with its preservation of human emotion at the peak of intensity, the speaker suddenly reaches a deeper awareness. The objectifying “what” of the questions in the first stanza yields to the personalizing “who” of l. 31: “Who are these coming to the sacrifice?” The potential personality of the urn as a whole becomes the mystery of the possible persons depicted on it and yet, at the same time, absent from it. The author discovers a deeper subjectivity in and around the object he has been importuning. It is important that this awareness comes as the author recognizes that the urn does indeed represent sacrifice and loss and not just the transcendence of mortality. The sculpture represents, in whole and in part, death and desolation, not just erotic anticipation and ecstasy. It is here, I would argue, that the urn most fully assumes, in the consciousness of the author, the kind of personal human form Bakhtin calls the hero. In such recognition of loss incarnate comes the constitution of the other’s human character. This dialogic breakthrough into a deeper otherness, created and perceived, is only temporary, however. The relationship of author and hero achieves a peak of personification in stanza four, but in the fifth and last stanza the intimate interpersonality of author and hero becomes more formal and distant. The making of the hero’s determinate “soul” by the author’s non-finalizable “spirit,” as Bakhtin appropriates these terms for aesthetic analysis, reaches an anticlimax. “O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede/ Of marble men and maidens overwrought”

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(l. 41), the speaker begins anew, looking again at the figured surface instead of seeing through the figures to a deeper figuration. This last movement or turn in the overall composition does yield an oracular word from the urn, in the mirroring rhetorical figure of a chiasmus: “’Beauty is truth, truth beauty’.” It is a dialogic response in the literal sense, but it seems aloof and detached, rhetorically monologic in spite of being presented as a general answer to the numerous specific questions that have come before. It proceeds from a single “Cold Pastoral” rather from the several more sympathetic human figures—the “mysterious priest,” the “little town,” and its “folk”—inquired of, one after another, in the previous stanza. And yet it comes as a surprise to hear an actual utterance from this hitherto silent work of art. For all its formality, even tautology, a final, answering word of the hero seems to emerge from the mysterious transaction of the previous stanza, from its deeper intuition of humanity in the form of eternal mourning for a loss of life in an act of sacrifice. The editorial question of where the quotation that opens in the secondto-last line is meant to close makes for a “loophole,” as Bakhtin would call it, in the formal closure of the ode’s end.67 In counter-dialogic form, the archaic second-person plural “Thou,” repeating the first word of the poem, reaches out from several possible speakers to several possible interlocutors: from the urn to “man” or humanity in general, from the poet to the figures on the urn, and/or from the poet himself to the “future generations” of his readers. This last possibility would rearticulate the classical subtext of stanza four: et in Arcadia ego, “even in Arcadia, I, Death, am here.” In each of these interpretations taken singly, however, as well as in the polyphony of them considered together, the person of a hero bestowed on (evoked from) the suffering urn of the fourth stanza becomes more impersonal. As he does at the end of all his major odes, Keats discovers that personification is never complete, even in the apparently consummated literary work of art on the subject of still more consummated work of sculpture. Keats had arrived at his own theory of personification, through a concept he called “soul-making,” in a letter he wrote in the winter and

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spring of 1819, at the time when he was working out the first of his great odes, “Ode to Psyche.” In this letter, written over several months to his brother and sister-in-law who had emigrated to America, Keats imagines a “system of salvation” in which the human soul only achieves a distinct identity when the unformed human “spirit” with which a person is born undergoes a kind of discipline through suffering. Life is not a “vale of tears,” Keats insists, but a “vale of Soul-making” in which generic consciousness achieves unique personhood. I have noted elsewhere the curious resemblance between Keats’s brief sketch of “spirit creation,” where “There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself,” and Bakhtin’s more extended treatise on artistic creativity, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” where the “spirit” of one person produces the “soul” of another.68 Here I would simply suggest that Keats’s speculation about the formation of human personality, worked out in the course of a familiar letter, as many of his aesthetic ideas were, makes a Bakhtinian reading of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” seem especially apt. Keats’s major odes, I would argue, were composed as exercises in soul-making. As such, they enact the process of personification in much the way that Bakhtin would later describe it.

V While genre and chronotope are closely related concepts in Bakhtin’s thinking, they are not identical. It remains to suggest how Bakhtin’s distinctive concept of the chronotope itself, with its varying configurations of time and space, might shed light on the literature of Romanticism. In addition to the poetics of Bakhtin’s personalism set forth in Section III of this chapter, I would like to offer, as a final example of the light Bakhtin can shed on Romantic literature, a specifically chronotopic analysis of a particular feature of the Romantic literary landscape. Here I will refocus the architectonics of otherness articulated in the first chapter, bringing this application of Bakhtin’s theoretical

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concepts to Romantic literature full circle. That feature is the city of London, an urban setting that initially seems incompatible with the otherness of nature that figures so prominently in the architectonics of Romanticism as a whole. But the otherness of nature and the otherness of the historical past both figure significantly in what I will call the urban chronotope of London, the nation’s—and indeed, at that time the world’s—capital city as represented in Romantic literature. As noted earlier, Bakhtin introduces his concept of the “chronotope,” in the following way: “We will give the name chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.” He goes on to say that the concept has “intrinsic generic significance.” He then discusses the features of different “time space” configurations in a series of genres from the history of the novel: the adventure novel of ordeal, the adventure novel of everyday life, ancient biography and autobiography, chivalric romance, folkloric comedy of various kinds, and forms of fiction like the idyll. This concept, I propose, offers an especially illuminating way of redacting the many Romantic representations of London, a historical reality in time and space that has given rise, over the ages, to many different representations. Such a chronotope is, of course, a great simplification of the buzzing, blooming complexity of the largest and most industrialized city in the Western world at the time, with a population close to one million in 1801 and well over six million by 1837. Nevertheless, in discerning a dominant time-space, an imaginative construction of “relative typological stability,” as Bakhtin describes it, in the literature of this period, we can see a literary mapping or imaginative positioning system that informs what initially seem quite different evocations of London—evocations in the works of Blake, William Godwin, Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Byron, De Quincy, Leigh Hunt, and other writers whom we still call— generically, I would point out—Romantic.69 Like the much older and more traditional concepts of literary genre, such formal and thematic characterizations of a literary period mediate between the minute particulars of an individual author, literary work or textual passage, and

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the more generalized agenda of intellectual concerns that these particulars, considered together, address. An exemplary instance of the urban Romantic chronotope can be found in Blake’s lyric poem or “Song of Experience” “London.” What characterizes the poem’s temporal and spatial features in its representation of the city is, in fact, their otherness—the way the time and space of the lyric present of the poem become estranged from contemporary immediacy, even as that immediacy is concretely evoked. As the repetition of the word “mark” in the first stanza conjures up the urban setting in the ninth chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, the London of “chartered streets” becomes a latter-day Jerusalem, a Jerusalem whose ruling class had itself been estranged through exile to a more powerful city, Babylon, from which Ezekiel is transported back in a vision. This contemporary London, figured as Jerusalem of the biblical past, is awaiting, like that Jerusalem, an imminent future of catastrophic destruction. This destruction is to be administered by Ezekiel’s “destroying” angels, and the only inhabitants who will be spared are those lamenting the holy city’s spiritual profanation, who are accordingly “marked” by the recording angel who accompanies them.70 In the third stanza of Blake’s poem, with its vision of blood running down “palace walls,” London is geographically displaced as well. Superimposed upon it is the Paris of the ongoing Revolution in France, where the blood of monarchs, not just the blood of impressed soldiers, is being spilled. The chronotope of London articulated here is thus defined by a disorienting alterity of temporal and geographical coordinates. The otherness of the city, its estrangement from itself in this “Song of Experience,” will be writ large in Blake’s later apocalyptic epic Jerusalem, with its much more elaborate vision of a “Spiritual Four-fold/ London.”71 Further markers of otherness in this powerful and disconcerting poem are easily enumerated: the estrangement from the verbal text of its visual design (an estrangement redoubled by the disconnected top and bottom images of human figures, young and old), the undirected “wandering” of the speaker-observer, the downtrodden otherness of the urban underclass whom the speaker “marks” and “hears,” the continual

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morphing of visual details into auditory ones (and vice versa), the paradoxical conflation of marriage and funeral rites in the final image of a “marriage hearse.” To this extensive evocation of the city in this poem by Blake, one can add similarly ominous markings and echoings of otherness in Romantic visions of London by other poets. Consider Wordsworth’s sonnet “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge” (composed as he was leaving London for France), where the wonders of a clear sky and “smokeless air” at dawn in the typically smoke-filled atmosphere of the city lead to an extravagant shift of the poet’s attention from this transitory urban scene to a perennial “first splendor” of the sun rising anywhere in nature, perhaps even in the first splendor of the Creation itself. But this transport of natural beauty turns to an intimation of mortality—of urban death, to be specific—in the perception in the last line of the poem that the city’s “mighty heart is lying still” rather than beating actively.72 Or, in a different emotional register, consider Don Juan’s entrance into London in the eleventh canto of Byron’s open-ended epic, our prospective view of the metropolis through the eyes of the hero, a cosmopolitan exile from Spain diplomatically representing imperial Russia (proceeding from the retrospective view of a cosmopolitan English exile writing in Italy). Here the abiding naïveté of the hero contrasts with the persistent ironic distance of the narrator. Or consider the sleight of hand at the very end of Mary Robinson’s lyric “London’s Summer Morning,” in many ways not unlike a satiric sketch of London in the rain by Swift a century earlier, but suddenly dissolving the realistic description of an outward scene, not into the refuse of a gutter, as in Swift’s poem, but into an interpolated inwardness of the imagination: “the poor poet wakes from busy dreams,/ To paint the summer morning,” the poem concludes.73 It is often against the background of a more substantive and appealing world of nature, far beyond the city’s precincts, that an unnatural London (referred to by Cobbett as a “great wen” disfiguring the countryside in his Tory radical Rural Rides) is frequently judged. It was not judged in this contrastive way by Blake, the Londoner who

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found rural Felpham oppressive (at least until Milton and Oololon descended from on high to redeem it), but it is certainly negatively perceived by Wordsworth, native son of the Lake District, as he describes his “Residence in London” in Book VII of The Prelude. In this configuration of the chronotope of urban otherness, the city is seen as an unnatural artifice—a chaotic, disconnected series of “spectacles,” observable in the popular but vulgar panoramas, pantomimes, and traditional fairs—sites where rootless (and, as far as Wordsworth is concerned, witless) citizens lose their moral moorings. His representation of London reaches north toward the nature of the Lake District throughout Book VII. For example, the poet weaves his account of a theatrical melodrama, The Maid of Buttermere, which he saw in London, into his memory of the wronged young woman on whose story the play was based, whom he has later seen, pure and demure, back in Cumbria. Most notable and often noted is the monitory blind beggar, with the “written paper” on his chest telling the public at large who he is, “a type,/ Or emblem” of city life that leads to the poet to feel he is being “admonished from another world.” “My mind did at that spectacle turn round/ As with the might of waters,” he reports. This is one of the many conversions from an outward here and now of perception to an inward elsewhere of imagination—provoked by the curiously spatialized arrests of temporality that Wordsworth later calls “spots of time.”74 Romantic London is alienated from itself in space by the opposition of its artificiality to the more genuine otherness of nature. But it can also be rendered alien or other by its deep historical past, a past still visible within it. This is a temporal dislocation rather than the geographical and ontological one that Wordsworth envisions in The Prelude. The distant vista opened up within London by relics of its history can be seen most clearly in Leigh Hunt’s essays of The Town, originally called “The Streets of London.” Hunt begins with an observation on a comment by Boswell about how different a place London was to people from different professions or walks of life. Even with Johnson’s help, however, Hunt ventures that Boswell “probably saw

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nothing in London of the days gone by” (3). Nevertheless, he asserts, to the trained eye the past is “nowhere so traceable” as in London, “nor is there a single spot in London in which the past is not visibly present to us, either in the shape of some old buildings, or at least in the names of the streets” (4). Hunt even imagines St. Paul’s Churchyard, to which he devotes two essays, containing “the final remains of ancient Britons and of the sea”—including the bones of “some unknown monster, mammoth or behemoth, [which] howled in the twilight over the ocean solitude now called London” (5–6). London’s past is visible, Hunt suggests, even from a time before the Flood. He deftly distinguishes Ancient British London, Roman London, Saxon London, and Norman London, and he goes on to describe the still visible changes in the character and appearance of the city from Norman times to the present.75 The displacement of attention from the commercial present to the antiquarian past can be found in other descriptions of the city, for example, in Washington Irving’s Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon: in his several Christmas essays, in “London Antiques” and especially in “Little Britain,” which begins, “In the centre of the great city of London lies a small neighborhood consisting of a cluster of narrow streets and courts, of very venerable and debilitated houses” (197). The call of London past can also be heard clearly in Laetitia Landon’s poems such as “Picadilly,” which begins, “The sun is on the crowded street,/ It kindles those old towers;/ Where England’s noblest memories meet,/ Of old historic hours” (243). The otherness of London’s history shows a more pathetic, human face in Charles Lamb’s essay, “A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis.” Even beggars aren’t what they used to be.76 Still another form of the time-space of estrangement in the city occurs in Godwin and De Quincey, a vision of urban otherness seen through the lens of psychic distress and disorientation. In the nightmarish London chapters of Godwin’s Caleb Williams, the hero finds the city “an inexhaustible reservoir of concealment” for others but also a source of paranoid isolation for himself, “a deserted, solitary wretch in the midst of my species” (254, 255). This extended description of the city as the site of arrest and imprisonment, incarceration

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threatened and realized, makes London a site of unjust removal from normal society, removal from a hopeful “things as they should be” to a desperate “things as they are,” as the subtitle has it. Of course this was not an unreasonable way for Godwin to imagine London during the increasingly harsh government repression in the 1790s. It is even echoed, I would argue, in the Miltonic word “pent,” used in passing by Keats as well as Coleridge to describe London as claustrophobic. “For I was raised/ In the great city, pent mid cloisters dim,” the poet tells his infant son in “Frost at Midnight” (88). The trope of the city as a prison, a place of institutional confinement, was not uncommon in this period.77 In the case of the London episodes in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, the trauma of the city is more individual, an agony, he calls it, compounded of financial destitution, social isolation, and desperate physical hunger. A young prostitute, “one of the female peripatetics who are technically called Street-walkers” (203), as he calls her with the benefit of more detached and ironic hindsight, becomes his closest friend—and a source of considerable grief when he loses contact with her. The ultimate psychic distortion of the urban scene, of course, comes to De Quincey via the drug of his title: “Opium: dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain” (217). The man who gives it to him is the “unconscious minister of celestial pleasures” and remains “the beatific vision of an immortal druggist, sent down to earth on a special mission to myself ” (218). Wordsworth’s spot of time, it seems, can be chemically induced; Blake’s fourfold vision can be purchased for a shilling. And yet London can also be the site of more mysterious affectional derangement, as in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s late Romantic tale “Wakefield,” where a husband walks out on his wife and lives for 20 years in the next street in London without her knowing what has become of him. “He had contrived, or rather he had happened, to dissever himself from the world—to vanish—to give up his place and privileges with living men, without being admitted among the dead,” we are told at the time of his inexplicable return to hearth and home.78

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The spatial and temporal disorientation of this Romantic chronotope is figured in Blake’s poem “London” in perhaps its most paradoxical and condensed form. In this evocation of the city, we are presented with unspecified “charter’d” streets, inhabitants under divine judgment as well as those under social oppression, a landscape transforming itself into a soundscape through highly condensed figurative language and an undirected “wandering.” The specific time-space of Blake’s London is richly representative of the time and space of the characteristic urban chronotope we have been considering. The city is estranged from itself, haunted by elements of the various arenas of otherness that organize the larger period imagination of Romanticism: biblical religion, rural nature, the historical past, the lower classes, the artifice of civilization and the prospect, exhilarating or alarming, of revolution. London is seen as otherwise and elsewhere, rendered other to itself most of all through the power of human imagination, that quintessential creative faculty that purports to “see into the life of things” but ends up here seeing through the fixities and densities of the immediate urban scene to a shifting set of alien, uncanny and otherworldly places. In appreciating this particular chronotope in Romantic representations of London, it is important to recognize that London had not always been seen this way in literature and that this did not continue to be the typical or dominant literary representation of London thereafter. Like all chronotopes, it belongs to a continually changing literary history. The indignantly departing character Thales of Samuel Johnson’s “London: A Poem in Imitation of Juvenal’s Third Satire,” unlike Blake’s poet-prophet, judges “these degenerate days” of the mid-eighteenth century against the imperial glories common to Rome and London in their golden ages.79 Johnson’s neo-classical or Enlightenment city gives a generalized representation of a paradigmatic world capital, a capital city here and now as well as back then. Rome is neither culturally other than nor historically distant from contemporary London. In their vices as well as their virtues, both cities are fundamentally—perennially—the same. The Enlightenment chronotope of London emphasizes a reassuring sameness across the

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ages rather than a disconcerting otherness. The sardonic perspective of Juvenal is still perspicuous for Johnson. Later on, in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, the “venerable Jew” Riah, unlike Blake’s wandering observer, is described as he “went into the fog, and was lost to the eyes of St. Mary Axe. But the eyes of this history can follow him westward, by Cornhill, Cheapside, Fleet Street, and the Strand, to Picadilly and the Albany.” Riah’s journey is purposeful, and its specifically named, mimetically orienting streets belong to the later chronotope of Victorian or Realist London. The unexpected, often sinister connectedness of its diverse inhabitants and far-flung neighborhoods is only gradually revealed through the reversals of fortune and lineage typical of Dickens’s novels.80 Still another, distinctively Modernist chronotope of London can be glimpsed in the “Unreal City” of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land,” a fragmented evocation of the urban landscape made up of tawdry, banal, and dispiriting images of the present city and mythologizing, spirtualizing allusions to literary and religious tradition, from the poetry of Baudelaire to the Upanishads. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” one of the many disembodied voices of the poem announces, a view of London also quite different from the report of Blake’s prophetic witness.81 Having offered instances of the typical Romantic representation of London’s urban time and space, “intrinsically connected” in the literature of the period as Bakhtin assures us they must be, I must return to Bakhtin’s formulation of the concept and acknowledge further that, even in the historical era when Romantic literature was at its height, the chronotope of urban otherness was not the only one available to writers. “Within the limits of a single work or within the total literary output of a single author we may notice a number of different chronotopes, and complex interactions among them,” Bakhtin cautions. “Chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another.”82 The chronotope sketched above is the most characteristic way that London was represented by writers in the several decades before and after 1800. But it is not the only way. In Mary Robinson’s “total literary output,” there is an essay entitled “The Present State of the Manners,

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Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England.” Here Robinson celebrates the cosmopolitan diversity and commercial progressiveness of London rather than its otherness. (I have already noted the similarity of her “London’s Summer Morning” to Swift’s earlier satirical “Description of a City Shower.”) And in Canto XI of Don Juan, it can be argued that Byron has “interwoven” the new Romantic chronotope of London together with the older neo-classical one operative in Johnson’s poem on London cited above. Byron was always more favorably disposed to the devices of eighteenth-century satire than his contemporaries. Within the literature of American responses to London, Washington Irving’s antiquarian vision may be contrasted with Joseph Ballard’s, which takes a pragmatic, republican view of the city’s architectural wonders. In his journal of 1815, Ballard records that he pointed out to his British guide that the grand, royal residences he is being shown are all very well, but they must have cost British taxpayers a great deal of money. Indeed one might even go further still and identify a Utilitarian chronotope of London, a Unitarian chronotope, a Working Class Radical chronotope and the like, all within the Romantic era, so-called. To develop such a taxonomy would extend the light of Bakhtin beyond Romantic literature itself, however. It could easily entail another book, beyond the present study. And even if such an analysis were fully developed, it would simply identify counter-genres, counter-chronotopes, as it were, beyond the dominant generic ensemble—alternative representations of the space and time of the “world city,” the “scattered city,” or the “metropolis of empire,” as London was also called at the time. To insist on the variety of such alternative time-space constructs in the same period or even in the same literary work that Bakhtin posits is to run the risk of multiplying this usefully generalizing generic concept out of conceptual existence. Indeed, it points to the perennial idiographic resistance of writers and thinkers, creative and critical, past and present, to the nomothetic attempt on the part of other writers and thinkers to sum up the city and conceptualize Romantic literature as a whole. It conjures up a subversion of genre theory as a whole such as offered by Benedetto Croce, the Italian idealist philosopher and aesthetician who

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claimed there are as many genres of literature as there are literary works, a view which is ultimately a subversion of literary history itself. What this section, this chapter and this book have tried to show in bringing the views of Mikhail Bakhtin to bear on the problems of literary history and aesthetic creation, is that the claims of the general and the norm can be balanced against the claims of the particular and the unique in an unusually dynamic fashion. Especially in the concepts of architectonics, personalism, chronotope, and genre he articulated and elaborated over his long career, Bakhtin enables us to see Romantic literature both as an ideal, holistic and coherent period of literary history and as an actual, particular and diversified collection of works, texts, passages and phrases. Each side of this balanced perception of Romantic literature has received its share of emphasis—some would say more than its share of emphasis—in the literary scholarship devoted to the cultural movement which has given the historical period its contested name. But they cannot be logically separated from one another. As Bakhtin asserts in “Discourse in the Novel”: Every utterance participates in the ‘unitary language’ (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces). Such is the fleeting language of a day, of an epoch, a social group, a genre, a school and so forth. It is possible to give a concrete and detailed analysis of any utterance, once having exposed it as a contradiction-ridden tension-filled unity of [these] two embattled tendencies in the life of language.83

Such a pervasively dialogic view of human communication, fully cognizant of the power and value of norms as well as the power and value of exceptions to these norms, points a way beyond current skepticisms and current dogmas about the relations between history and literature, points a way, this study has argued, toward a more genuinely literary and more fully historical literary history. In the final—which is to say, the unfinalizable—analysis, this is the clarifying light that the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin sheds on Romantic literature.

Afterword

Bakhtin in Light of Romanticism

Of course it’s him! So . . . Schelling . . . And of course, Schelling’s view: his somewhat religiously tinted famous “Philosophy of Revelation,” his aesthetic theory—all that was very close to my own heart. Bakhtin As the preceding chapters of this book have shown, there are significant affinities between the views of Mikhail Bakhtin, twentieth-century philosopher and philologist (not easily categorized in contemporary disciplinary categories) and Romantic literature, the verbal art and critical speculation of authors representative of this period or movement—also not easily defined. Romantic literature is perspicuous in light of Bakhtin, I suggested in the Foreword, not only by virtue of its historical and generic “outsideness” to his own perspective (to use his own counterintuitive term), but also by virtue of concerns Bakhtin’s thought shares with this earlier period and movement, for example, the paradox of the need for a system and for no system. In trying to explain “Romanticism” itself, the relatedness of the variously shared characteristics of the much-debated term, Michael Ferber invokes Wittgenstein’s conceptual metaphor of “family resemblances,” the shared but unevenly distributed traits visible among the members of a family.1 There are significant family resemblances between Romantic writers and Bakhtin as well, I would argue. There is an “insideness” as well as an “outsideness” in their relationship with one another. I will point out some of these resemblances here in a brief conclusion to this study. The epigraph above comes from a series of conversations with Bakhtin recorded by Viktor Duvakin toward the end of Bakhtin’s life. It 139

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comes after a poignant struggle by the aging Bakhtin to recall the name of the “great philosopher” whom he had read and discussed with great interest in his early years, especially concerning the aesthetics of music. “It’s, after all, almost my own name,” Bakhtin says with frustration, before Duvakin asks if it was Schelling. “Of course it’s him!” Bakhtin exclaims with relief.2 Unlike Hegel, Marx or Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling is no longer a name to conjure with in literary studies, but to many German Romantics (the Schlegels, Novalis and Hölderlin), and to Coleridge among the British, Schelling was an important thinker, both for The System of Transcendental Idealism, which Coleridge appropriated, plagiarized and paraphrased at length in his Biographia Literaria, and for The Philosophy of Art, which was particularly influenced, scholars argue, by Hölderlin’s earlier novel Hyperion.3 In a fragment of an early manifesto now believed to be jointly produced by Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel, the centrality of aesthetic experience to philosophy is declared: “the highest act of reason, by encompassing all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and [. . .] truth and goodness are only siblings in beauty. The philosopher must possess as much aesthetic power as the poet.”4 While Hölderlin later turned from philosophy to poetry and while Hegel later declared art superseded by philosophy in the self-development of Spirit, Schelling went on to present art as a model and a validation of the all-important “indifference” or identity of subject and object, otherwise invisible to human reason. The point here is not so much Schelling’s particular influence on Romantic literature (or its influence on him) and not even Schelling’s influence on Bakhtin. It is rather the importance of art—the history, theory and critical interpretation of art—in Schelling’s philosophical system and the light this importance sheds on the role of literature—its history, theory and critical interpretation—in the distinctive thought of Bakhtin. Much as Schelling turned in his exposition of a general philosophy of Idealism to a series of lectures on aesthetics and much as Coleridge turned, halfway through his Biographia Literaria, from a lofty exposition of transcendental philosophy to a concrete and particular discussion of the role of the imagination in the poetry of William

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Wordsworth (an exposition that became the primary focus of the whole second volume), Bakhtin turned from his early philosophical project of an architectonics of ethical, political, and religious activity to an extended account of aesthetic creation and experience, within that project. And Bakhtin pursued this thinking about and through literature in most of his writings thereafter, as he went on to analyze, at length and in detail, the literary works of particular writers (Dostoevsky, Goethe, and Rabelais) and particular literary genres (the novel and its specific chronotopes, carnival and mennipean satire, and the genres of everyday speech) on the general human condition. There are many reasons that can be adduced for this preeminent focus on literary art and artists by Bakhtin, not the least of which was the increasing threat of political persecution, to which Bakhtin was subjected shortly after the publication of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Art in 1929 and from which he narrowly escaped almost certain death in the hard-labor camps of Siberia only through the intervention of colleagues who were influential Party members. Philosophy other than Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy could be lethal to pursue in Stalin’s Russia, especially if it was “somewhat religiously tinted,” as Bakhtin’s in fact was. More positively, there was also what Valerii Tiupa calls “the revival within Russian culture of the philosophical traditions of the ‘Silver Age’, and in particular of philosophical aesthetics,” in which Schelling’s aesthetic philosophy was influential, as Bakhtin’s later recollection, quoted above, gives evidence. Mikhail Epstein elaborates: “Bakhtin’s thinking was formed by the philosophy and atmosphere of the Russian Silver Age (1895–1917) which was in fact a neo-Romantic epoch that witnessed the rise of Symbolism, Futurism, and other Decadent and Avant-gardist movements.”5 Lack of appreciation of this latter cultural context in particular leads, Tiupa and Epstein both suggest, to a tendency, even among those most sympathetic to Bakhtin, to dismiss aesthetics as an outmoded form of knowledge. The light of Romanticism, however, especially as reflected in the mirror of Schelling and “Schellingians” like Coleridge, goes a long way to explaining the importance of literary authors and literary works

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in Bakhtin’s wide-ranging reflections. It also helps to explain the difficulty Western readers have had in categorizing Bakhtin according to the more influential foundational discourses, as Foucault calls them—Nietzschean, Freudian, Marxist—that have dominated literary theory in the last half-century in the West, all of which adopt a hermeneutics of suspicion toward literary art and aesthetic experience per se. The light of Romanticism clarifies an intellectual context and tradition within which Bakhtin’s own poetics of trust, as I have called it—his presumption of the validity and significance of aesthetic activity and experience in their own right—seems perfectly reasonable and valid. To focus this retrospective illumination more specifically, I would like to hearken back to Romanticism’s architectonics of otherness set forth in the first chapter of this study, the domains and sites within which the authority of otherness, with varying degrees of emphasis, was articulated in Romantic literature. How does the writing of Bakhtin look from the perspective of this constellation of concerns? Is it any clearer in the light of these competing arenas of otherness, as I have termed them, than it is in some of the other intellectual reflections and refractions to which it has been subjected? Both unsurprisingly and surprisingly, the short answer is “yes.” Consider the arena of the personal. Bakhtin shows little interest in the domain of the egotistical sublime, apart from a few comments he makes on the Romantic form of character in “Author and in Aesthetic Activity,” where he notes the absence of dialogic relations. (“The author begins to expect revelations from the hero. There is an attempt to force an admission from within self-consciousness, which is possible only through the other; an attempt to do without God, without listeners, without an author.”)6 On the other hand, as we have seen in Chapter 2 especially, Bakhtin’s writings are deeply invested in the idea of the negative capability of the author. While he makes no reference to Keats’s phrase or to the British Romantic topos of the poet with no discernible identity of his own, Bakhtin develops the broader Romantic concern with the transcendental creativity of the author, above and beyond the

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personhood of his characters and their conflicts. He elaborates Romanticism’s “theological allegory,” as George Steiner calls it, where “the successful dramatist or story-teller or painter is ‘God’ in miniature,” even as he downplays the theological underpinnings of the conception.7 He does this most extensively in his ground-breaking book on Dostoevsky, but in earlier and later writings as well. In the arena of the supernatural, Bakhtin shows himself not particularly concerned with religious syncretism, aside from some early and late allusions to ancient classical mythology (for example, in “Author and Hero” and in “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences”). Yet he is noticeably drawn to confessional orthodoxy, to the doctrines of Greek and Russian Orthodox theology, in fact. These affiliations, usually obliquely expressed, have been analyzed and interpreted at length by a number of Bakhtin scholars, most notably in the volume Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith cited earlier in this study. It is important to specify the light this Romantic site casts on Bakhtin’s writing. It is not that Bakhtin himself makes a clear profession of Christian belief, but that he shows at many points in his writings on literary works what he describes in Dostoevsky: “Not faith (in the sense of a specific faith in orthodoxy, in progress, in man, in revolution, etc.) but a feeling for faith, that is, an integral attitude (by means of the whole person) toward a higher and ultimate value.”8 Caryl Emerson has offered the most comprehensive and nuanced assessment of “this quasisecularized domain” in Bakhtin’s thought in her “Afterword: Plenitude as a Form of Hope” in the above-mentioned collection.9 None of these assessments depends on the Romantic dimensions of Bakhtin’s writing, to be sure. But an awareness of the domain of confessional orthodoxy that informs many Romantic literary works helps clarify his intellectual inclinations in this area. The arena of the natural, the domain of organic nature and the site of the natural sublime, on the other hand, seems alien to Bakhtin’s thinking about and through literature and language—until, that is, one considers essays in which he dwells on the various constructions of space and time in the novelistic genre of the idyll (in “Forms of Time and of

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the Chronotope”) and in the history of realism (in the essay on the Bildungsroman). While cosmogony and apocalypse, the glory and the terror of the Creation and its dissolution that characterize the Romantic site of the natural sublime, are conspicuously absent from his literary typologies, an organic view of nature is evident in the varieties of natural landscape and their reflections of human character. These natural landscapes are described in considerable detail in “The Idyllic Chronotope in the Novel,” section IX of the larger chronotope essay. What Bakhtin emphasizes here is the special relationship that time has to space in the idyll: an organic fastening down, a grafting of life and events to a place, to a familiar territory with all its nooks and crannies, its familiar mountains, valleys, fields, rivers and forests, and one’s own home. Idyllic life and its events are inseparable from this concrete, spatial corner of the world where fathers and grandfathers lived and where one’s children and their children will live.

This infusion of historical time into natural space is something he insists on even more strongly in “the development of the realistic novel of emergence” in Goethe, who, Bakhtin insists, has the ability “to see time, to read time” in all his writings and who inherits this historicizing vision of the organic world of nature from the fiction of Rousseau and Scott.10 The sharpest illumination of Bakhin’s Romantic preoccupations comes from the domain of history itself, the historical and primitive past of social relations. The site of the revolutionary future is generally missing from his otherwise broad and searching consideration of representations of temporality. This is no doubt due in part to the doctrinaire utopian vision of the future in Marxism-Leninism which became the official discourse of the Soviet Union. But a Romantic conception of the historical and primitive past can be seen on several different levels throughout Bakhtin’s writings. First and most obvious is the extended historical range of his treatment of the novel, its development as a genre and the development of its specific chronotopes

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and sub-genres. Ancient Greek and Roman literature, medieval epic and chivalric romance, Renaissance and eighteenth-century European works claim the lion’s share of his critical attention, to the extent that Romantic and especially modern literature often seem to suffer from more cursory treatment. This gravitation toward the ancients at the expense of the moderns (along with a striking lack of concern with “modernity” as a historical concept) is all the more noticeable when Bakhtin’s writings on the novel and realism are compared with the masterpiece of his German contemporary Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, which proceeds in a much more methodical, step-by-step chronological sequence, from Homer’s Odyssey to Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse. In part, this avoidance of a triumphal march of history toward the present comes from Bakhtin’s persistent concern with his own version of Romantic primitivism, the underclass substratum of “the folkloric” and its periodic, persistent intrusion into the progression of history at a higher social and cultural level. In “Epic and Novel” he notes the importance of “that broadest and richest of realms, the common people’s creative culture of laughter” to the emergence of the novel in classical culture. In the “Chronotope” essay, the orderly procession of sub-genres is repeatedly interrupted by sections on “The Folkloric Chronotope,” on “The Functions of the Rogue, the Clown and the Fool” (“from the deep recesses of pre-class folklore up to the Renaissance”), and on “The Rabelaisian Chronotope.”11 And of course in Rabelais and His World, myriad forms of the culture of folk humor, derived according to Bakhtin from ritually “carnivalistic” images of the human body, are themselves presented as being gathered up in a kind of profane anatomy or summa in Gargantua and Pantagruel, after which they become more attenuated in the classicizing and narrowing literature of later periods, including, for Bakhtin, the period of Romanticism. Like laughter itself, such “primitive” or “low” literary forms lack a clearly defined history of their own. Rather they stand as a perennial source of renewal for individual genres, authors and works from official literary history. They certainly do not, in Bakhtin’s view, prefigure any proletarian literary revolution.

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The most profound version of this Romantic historicity in Bakhtin, it seems to me, is “the problem of great time,” as he calls it. Here the past comes to life in a hypothetical future as well as in the past and the present.“Great time” rises above the more specific and limited historicity of periods, centuries, even millennia. It is a conception of time approaching a secular eternity, a kind of saecula saeculorm of human communication. It is not a concept Bakhtin develops at any length, perhaps because it is by definition well beyond common historical measurement. That it is most easily comprehended when seen in the religiously inflected mode of Romantic historicism, with its celebration of a “fullness of time,” can be seen, I submit, in the final paragraph of the last essay in the English canon of Bakhtin’s writings, a paragraph which gives rise to a lyricism not common in his prose style. It is as good an instance as any of what Averintsev calls the remarkable “energy” of Bakhtin’s thinking and writing, an energy which has inspired and, I hope, informed this book on light shed by Bakhtin on, and received back from, Romantic literature: There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all)—they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue. At any moment in the development of the dialogue there are immense, boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of the dialogue’s subsequent development along the way they are recalled and invigorated in renewed form (in a new context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival. The problem of great time.12

Appendix: Diagrams The classification offered below is of course somewhat abstract in character. Bakhtin

Diagram I The Romantic Architectonics of Otherness

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Diagram II Romantic Relations of Author and Hero

Diagram III Representative Genres of Romantic Literature

Notes Foreword (pp. xi–xv) i

“The Unasked Question: What Would Bakhtin Say?” Common Knowledge 10 (2004), 42–60. ii For the most comprehensive catalogue of all such studies, in English and in other languages, see The Annotated Bakhtin Bibliography by Carol Adlam and David Shepherd (Leeds: Maney Publications, 2000) and the Analytic Database of the University of Sheffield’s Bakhtin Centre (http:www.sheffield.ac.uk/bakhtin/projects/dbase) that preceded and continues its work. iii Quoted by Caryl Emerson in The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), p. 274. iv Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1986), p. 7. v Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984), pp. 37, 38. vi Rabelais and His World, p. 125. vii “Post-Romantic Irony in Bakhtin and Lefebvre,” History of Human Sciences 25 (2012), 51. In the high value he puts on the work of Pushkin, Bakhtin tends to consider the great Russian poet less as a Romantic than as a realist, a general tendency among Russian writers and literary historians; see the article “Romanticism” by Lauren G. Leighton in the Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985), pp. 372–76.

Chapter 1 (pp. 1–40) 1 Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: U of Texas P, 1993), p. 54. 2 See Stephen R. Palmquist, “Architectonic Reasoning and Interpretation in Kant and the Yijing,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 38:4 (2011), 569–583

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4 5

6 7 8

9 10

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Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin for a fuller account of this term and its meaning in philosophy. On the importance of architectonics for Bakhtin, see Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 149–51. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 2nd edition, ed. David V. Erdman, commentary by Harold Bloom (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982), p. 153 (Chap. 1, pl. 10, ll. 20–21). Toward a Philosophy of the Act, p. 61. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, translation and notes by Vadim Liapunov, supplement translated by Keith Brostrom (Austin: U of Texas P, 1990), p. 228. Art and Answerability, p. 231. The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981), p. 200. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” PMLA 39 (1924), 229–53; Wellek, “On the Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History,” Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963). Lewis was generally acquainted with the work of Lovejoy, but I have found no specific mention by him of this particular essay. ‘Romantic’ and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word, ed. Hans Eichner (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1972), p. 490. See de Man’s posthumous collection, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984) for “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image” and for a more specific critique of historical approaches to the period in “Wordsworth and Hölderlin.” The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory was published by Oxford University Press, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation by the University of Chicago Press. DeMan, “Introduction,” Studies in Romanticism 18 (1979), 498 and “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism, p. 254; McGann, Romantic Ideology, p. 20. Stuart Curran, “Preface,” The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993). David Chandler has noted the difference between McGann’s critique of a Romantic ideology, which nevertheless continues to focus attention on traditional canonical authors and works, and the more positive call of critics like Curran and Marilyn Butler for criticism to take up

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uncanonical authors and texts which pursue other formal and thematic agendas (“ ‘One Consciousness’, Historical Criticism and the Romantic Canon,” Romanticism on the Net 17 [February 2000]). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist; trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981), p. 272. The “philosophical imagery” of centripetal and centrifugal forces may have been adopted by Bakhtin from Schelling, for whose writings he expressed an early and abiding fondness. In any case, it was popular among the German Romantics, as Marshall Brown has demonstrated in The Shape of German Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979), 142–60. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), p. 220. Cf. Bakhtin’s late essay “The Problem of the Text,” where he lists as possible “forms of dialogism” the following: “Confidence in another’s word, reverential reception (the authoritative word), apprenticeship, the search for and mandatory nature of deep meaning, argeement, its infinite gradations and shadings [. . .], the layering of meaning upon meaning, voice upon voice, strengthening through merging (but not identification), the combination of many voices (a corridor of voices) that augments understanding, [. . .] and so forth” (Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist [Austin: U of Texas P, 1986], p. 121). Berger, “The Ecology of Mind: The Concept of Period Imagination—An Outline Sketch,” The Centennial Review 8 (1964), 415. Although not presented as an architectonics per se, the essay makes use of this term (pp. 416, 421) and shares some of its characteristics. Dialogic Imagination, p. 429. For an excellent formal analysis of the highly tendentious Soviet ideology in this descriptive, non-tendentious Russian sense of the term, see Mikhail N. Epstein, “Relativistic Patterns in Totalitarian Thinking: The Linguistic Games of Soviet Ideology,” After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture, trans. Anesa Miller-Pogacar (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1995). Towards the end of his life, de Man took issue with Bahktin over the incompatibility, as he saw it, of poetics and hermeneutics; see his “Dialogue and Dialogism,” Poetics Today 4 (1983), p. 104. And in “Keats and the Historical Method” in The Beauty of Inflections, McGann claims

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to find inspiration in “the Bakhtin school,” but his perception of a vital Marxism in these writings comes primarily from works published under the names of Medvedev and Voloshinov, works that were either written by Bakhtin in their personas (a claim he and others who knew the principals made), or were written by them under the influence of Bakhtin’s basically non-Marxist ideas. The question of Bakhtin’s authorship of these deuterocanonical works continues to be hotly debated within Bakhtin scholarship, as does the question of Bakhtin’s affinities with Marxism. For a particularly suggestive attempt to resolve this debate, see Mikhail Epstein, “Hyperauthorship in Mikhail Bakhtin: The Primary Author and Conceptual Personae,” Russian Journal of Communication, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Summer, 2008), 80–90. 17 For an earlier version of this argument about the conceptual situating of literary criticism, see the “Afterword” to my book Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin (New York: Oxford UP, 1993). 18 My historical account in this first section corresponds to Orrin Wang’s narrative of constructions of Romanticism in the twentieth century according to “the demands of a postmodern historicism,” in the first chapter of his Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), pp. 4–11, even though I myself resist these demands. “The Devil’s account is that the Messiah fell, and formed a heaven of what he stole from the abyss,” as Blake put it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The “contradictory, double-edged concept” of the aesthetic considered as an ideology (in contrast to the one-sided negative view of it proposed by de Man and with a nod to the positive, supposedly Marxist views of Bakhtin), is argued at length by Terry Eagleton in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); see especially pp. 8–10 and 28. 19 “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff,” Speech Genres, p. 7. The response was first published in 1970. 20 “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History,” p. 129. This definition recalls the much earlier Russian Formalist characterization of literary history by Yury Tynyanov in “Literary Evolution” and “The Literary Fact”; see the summary of Tynyanov’s views by David Perkins in Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992): “The proper subject of literary history is not the succession of works but the succession of systems, for to describe the work without the system is

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meaningless. When an element of the system changes, or the function of an element, the whole system changes correlatively. Succession, therefore, is discontinuous; a system takes the place of a previous one” (p. 170). Pre-Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991); “Romanticism and Enlightenment,” The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. “The Ecology of Mind,” 429. The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton UP, 1999), pp. 33, 119. The lectures, the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, were delivered in 1965, but only published, posthumously from a transcription, in 1999. Roots of Romanticism, p. 145. An insightful comparison of Berlin and Bakhtin as thinkers has been made by Caryl Emerson in “Isaiah Berlin and Mikhail Bakhtin: Relativistic Affiliations,” Symploke 7 (1999), 139–64. See Stephen Prickett’s Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976). I elaborate this argument in my Introduction to a special issue of Texas Studies of Literature and Language, “Romanticism and Criticism,” 23 (1981). For an exhaustive analysis of the role that art criticism and “reflection” on literature play in the writings of Friedrich Schlegel on creativity in art, see Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” Selected Writings, I: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA, Belknap P, 1996). Eco-critical approaches can be found in Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000) and James McKusick, “Romanticism & Ecology: Introduction,” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (www.rc.umd.edu/ praxis/ecology/mckusick/mckusick_intro.html). The negative, “natural sublime” version of ecological theory can be seen in Timothy Morton’s Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Ecological Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007). Earlier references in this paragraph are to René Wellek, “The Concept of ‘Romanticism”’; M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford UP, 1953); Harold Bloom, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness (New York: Norton, 1970); Geoffrey Hartman, “Romanticism and Anti-SelfConsciousness,” Beyond Formalism: Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays

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1958–1970 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1970); Paul de Man, “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image.” 29 Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 665. 30 Poetical Works, ed, J. C. C. Mays, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 16 (Princeton, Princeton UP, 2001), I: 456; II: 701. 31 On otherness itself in Romanticism, see the special issue of European Romantic Review, “Romanticism and Its Others,” Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring, 1998); Neville Newman, “Romanticism and Its Others – A Special Issue of Romanticism on the Net” 16 (November 1999); and the “Introduction” and first chapter, “Friedrich Schlegel: Catechresis for Chaos” of J. Hillis Miller’s Others (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001). On organic nature, see H. A. M. Snelders, “Romanticism and Naturphilosophie and the Inorganic Natural Sciences 1797–1840: An Introductory Survey,” Studies in Romanticism 9 (1970) and James A. W. Heffernan, The Re-Creation of Landscape: A Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable and Turner (Hanover: UP of New England, 1984). On the natural sublime, see Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) and James B. Twitchell, Romantic Horizons: Aspects of the Sublime in English Poetry and Painting (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1983). On the historical past and cultural primitive as well as on the futurity of revolution and reform, see Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982) and Robert Sayre and Michael Lowy, “Figures of Romantic Anticapitalism,” Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods, ed. G. A. Rosso and Daniel P. Watkins (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP/ London: Associated University Presses, 1990). On confessional neo-orthodoxy, see J. Robert Barth, S. J., Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969), Prickett, Romantic Religion, and Chapter 2, “Blake’s Orthodoxy,” of Robert Ryan’s The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997). On religious syncretism, see Chapter 2, “The Key to All the Mythologies,” of Stuart Curran’s Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino, CA: Huntingdon Library, 1975). The interdependence of the modalities of criticism and creativity is addressed in “Romanticism and Criticism: The

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Coordinating Conjunction,” my introduction to a special issue of Texas Studies in Literature and Language on the topic (TSLL 23 [1981], 287–93); the primacy of the critical mode is argued in Gary J. Handwerk, Irony and Ethics in Narrative: From Schlegel to Lacan (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985), while the ultimacy of the creative is reasserted by Thomas McFarland in “Involute and Symbol in the Romantic Imagination,” Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination: Essays in Honor of Walter Jackson Bate, ed. J. Robert Barth, S. J. and John Mahoney (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1990). This is not to say, of course, that these authors would necessarily accept my architectonic scheme of Romanticism as a whole or my situating of their arguments within it. “Ecology of Mind,” p. 415. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), p. 426 ff. Quotations from “Kubla Khan” are from Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. I. Mays, 509–14. A review article by Russell Greer entitled, interestingly, “The Architectonics of Multiplicity: A Bakhtinian Critique of Three Books by Jack Stillinger” (Text 14 [2002], 293–304) faults Stillinger’s ground-breaking textual investigations of Coleridge’s and other poets’ poetry for not relating his account of textual variation to Bakhtin’s theories of the dialogic relationship of utterances to one another. Romantic Origins (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978), p. 26. ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975), p. 144. See Jalal Uddin Khan, “Coleridge’s Kubla Khan: a new historicist study,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 32 (2012), 78–100. Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 24; all further quotations from “The Tyger” (and later from “The Lamb”) are from this edition. For the full range of Blake’s illuminated printing of “The Tyger,” see the multiple versions in The Blake Archive: www.blakearchive.org/blake/. John H. Jones offers such a dialogic, Bakhtinian reading of the two poems on pp. 29–31 of his Blake on Language, Power, and Self-Annihilation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 490. Jones, pp. 30–31.

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Chapter 2 (pp. 41–76) 1 Quotation from the translation of the passage by Ann Shukman in her essay “M. M. Bakhtin: Notes on his Philosophy of Man,” Poetry, Prose and Public Opinion: Essays Presented in Memory of Dr. N. E. Andreyev (Letchworth: Avebury Publishing, 1984), p. 247. Vern McGee translates the last phrase in a less resonant way as “semantic” personalism in his Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: U of Texas P, 1986, p. 170). 2 Art and Answerability, p. 174. 3 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), p. 59. 4 The OED credits Coleridge with inventing the word and defining it. 5 Speech Genres, pp. 167–68. 6 Persons and Things (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008), p. 3; see also Sharon Cameron’s Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007), which locates a related critique of personality rooted in Emerson. An anti-personalist or impersonalizing analysis of character in eighteenthand early nineteenth-century literature is offered from a Foucauldian perspective by Deidre Shauna Lynch in The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998). The most polemical and imaginative formulation of this crisis of personality is the early essay by Borges, “The Nothingness of Personality,” contemporary with Bakhtin’s earliest writings, which presages a whole creative and critical oeuvre that undermines the assumptions of individual personhood; see Selected Non-Fictions, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger (New York, Viking, 1999). 7 Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 151. 8 “Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art (Concerning Sociological Poetics)” Appendix I in V. N. Voloshinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, trans. I. R. Titunik, ed. Neal H. Brujss (New York: Academic Press, 1976), pp. 107, 104. On the question of Bakhtin’s contested authorship of this and other books published under the name of Voloshinov and Medvedev, see Mikhail Epstein, “Hyperauthorship in Mikhail Bakhtin: The Primary Author and Conceptual Personae,” Russian Journal of Communication 1 (2008), 80–90.

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9 See Anya Taylor, “Coleridge on Persons and Things,” European Romantic Review 1 (1991), 163–80. 10 Quotations from Milton are from The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982) and provide page numbers from this edition in parentheses. 11 Affinities between Blake and Bakhtin have been explored by Blakeans and Bakhtinians alike. See, for example, John H. Jones, Blake on Language, Power, and Self-Annihilation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Graham Pechey, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World (London: Routledge, 2007). 12 “The Unity of the Human Person according to the Greek Fathers,” Persons and Personality: A Contemporary Inquiry, Ian Ramsey Centre Publication no. 1 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 206. Cf. Robert Spaemann: “Solipsism, then, is incompatible with the concept of the person. The idea of a single person existing in the world cannot be thought, for although the identity of any one person is unique, personhood as such arises only in plurality” (Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, trans. Oliver O’Donovan [Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006], p. 40.) Bakhtin’s debt to various forms of Christian theology is analyzed and elaborated in the collection of essays Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith, ed. Susan M. Felch and Paul J. Contino (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2001). 13 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), pp. 6–7. 14 Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989), passim. 15 Roots of Romanticism, p. 53; Pope, An Essay on Man, The Poems of Alexander Pope, III, I, ed. Maynard Mack (London: Methuen, 1950), pp. 122–23 [ll. 295–96], 126 [l. 318]; Rousseau, Confessions, trans. Anon., ed. P. N. Furbank (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 1. I would argue that Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, even as it criticizes the gender-exclusive universalism of Rousseau, remains within the Enlightenment configuration of the realm of the personal. 16 The Prelude, ed. DeSelincourt and Darbishire, II, 28–33. 17 Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, Vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1980), p. 78.

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18 See my Meditations on the Hero: The Romantic Hero in NineteenthCentury Fiction (New Haven: Yale UP, 1974), which considers this narrative form in Carlyle, Kierkegaard, Lermontov, and Emily Brontë as well. 19 Collected Works, vol. 7, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983), II: 19, 27–28. 20 Hazlitt’s use of the centripetal and centrifugal models of authorship can be found in the essays “On Shakespear and Milton,” “Mr Wordsworth,” “Mr Coleridge”; Keats’s phrases are from his letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818 and his letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, February 3, 1818. In some as yet untranslated notes on revisions he intended to make in his book on Rabelais, Bakhtin does deal with some of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, with the “iron logic of self-crowning” in Othello, Macbeth, and Lear, but he does not deal with the relations of author and hero in these remarks. On Bakhtin’s image of Tolstoy, see Ann Shukman, “Bakhtin’s Tolstoy Prefaces” and Caryl Emerson, “The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin” both in Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, ed. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1989). Bakhtin’s phrase appears on p. 56 of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. 21 “Composition, distribution arrangement: Form and structure in Jane Austen’s novels,” After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), 128. 22 See especially the valuable essay by Charles Lock, “Double Voicing, Sharing Words: Bakhtin’s Dialogism and the History of the Theory of Free Indirect Discourse,” The Novelness of Bakhtin: Perspectives and Possibilities, ed. Jorgen Bruhn and Jan Lundquist with preface by Michael Holquist (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press/University of Copenhagen). I am paraphrasing Lock’s account in this paragraph. Austen is identified as the “first extensive practitioner of the form” of free indirect discourse by Dorrit Cohn in Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978), p. 108. D. A. Miller analyzes Austen’s mature authorial voice and its remarkable combination of “impersonality” and “authority” in Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), but he slights the role of her protagonists or heroes in this achievement.

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23 See esp. Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus, Ohio State UP, 2006), pp. 63–65 and Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010), pp. 99–103. 24 Richter, The Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aesthetics, intro. and trans. Margaret Hale (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1973), p. 150; Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 483. 25 Mittman and Strand, “Introductory Essay: Representing Self and Other in Early German Romanticism,” Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, ed. Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), p. 50; Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State U of New York P, 1988); Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. and ed. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1968), p. 74. 26 See “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, esp. pp. 21ff. and 55, n. 4. 27 It is important, in trying to follow Bakhtin, that we distinguish what he calls “the image of the author” from the actuality of the writer whose aesthetic activity can never be embodied in an image but can only be apprehended in the totality of the literary work. See “From Notes Made in 1970–71,” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, pp. 148–49. 28 Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 319. 29 See Susan Murley, “The Use of Marginalia in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection: Collaboration as Supplementation” in “Romanticism and Its Others,” Special Issue of European Romantic Review 9 (1998), 243–52. 30 Siebenkäs, Werke (Munchen: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1959) II: 42. 31 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Appendix II, p. 284. 32 Frankenstein, ed. Paul Hunter (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 32; all further quotations are from this edition, based on the 1818 text. 33 Horn of Oberon, p. 150. It is interesting that, as reported by Anne K. Mellor, the term “author” was introduced by Percy Shelley into Mary’s manuscript (Norton Critical Edition, p. 162).

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34 Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), p. 117; Holquist, Dialogism, p. 97. 35 See especially Lawrence Lipking, “Frankenstein, the True Story; or, Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques,” Norton edition, pp. 313–31, which stresses the importance of Emile. Peter Brooks cites Rousseau’s Essay on the Origins of Language and other “Enlightenment debates on origins” as contexts for the monster’s Bildung in his otherwise largely Freudian and Lacanian reading of the novel in Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), 204–8. And Paul Cantor, in Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984) observes the many passages in the monster/creature’s narrative that recall Rousseau’s other writings. 36 This passage was added to the third edition, published in 1831; the quotation is from the Penguin Classics edition, ed. Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 73. In her autobiographical introduction to this third edition, as I go on to argue, Mary Shelley adds another layer of frame-tale to the novel itself; quotations from the 1831 “Author’s Introduction” will cite Hunter’s Norton Critical Edition, which includes it in the “Contexts” section of the volume. 37 Art and Answerability, p. 174. 38 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 284. 39 Dialogism, pp. 90–106. George Levine sees both Frankenstein and the novels of Jane Austen as precursors or “patterns” of the later realistic novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; see Chapter 2 of The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981). 40 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, pp. 284, 285. 41 “Preface,” Prometheus Unbound, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, p. 135. The best interpretation of the enigmatic Demogorgon and his “mighty law” (which is to say the one most consonant with my approach to the Shelleys and Romanticism in general) is offered by D. J. Hughes in “Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound,” Studies in Romanticism 2 (1963), 107–26, which is also reprinted in this volume. 42 “Epic and Novel,” Dialogic Imagination, pp. 5–7.

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Chapter 3 (pp. 77–138) 1 “From Notes Made in 1970–71,” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, p. 152. 2 Speech Genres, p. 140. 3 Speech Genres, p. 78. 4 Essay on Criticism, I, 139–40, Poems, p. 14. 5 See Alban K. Forcione, Cervantes, Artistotle and the Persiles (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970) and Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1961). My own view, argued in An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) was that the European novel was quite distinct from the classical romance and parodies of it. But I have since been won over to the Bakhtinian view, in part by R. Bracht Branham’s reassertion of it in “Inventing the Novel,” Bakhtin in Contexts across the Disciplines, ed. Amy Mandelker (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1995), that the novel, including Greek romances as well as Roman comic novels, is of classical origin, even if later literatures and periods have followed the Spanish Golden Age more closely in re-originating this perennially new species of writing. 6 See Creation of a Poetics, pp. 317–18, for example, and Dialogism, p. 108. 7 The Dialogic Imagination, p. 84; the italics are Bakhtin’s. Further citations give page numbers from this translation. 8 “[T]here are certain modes, often as ancient and enduring as genres, but whose characters are adjectival, partial, and not adequate to encompass the entire structure of a work. They are aspects of the work, qualities, principal slants, veins that traverse it” (The Challenge of Comparative Literature, trans. Cola Franzen [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993] p. 127). In his chapter on genres and “genology,” Guillén notes approvingly Bakhtin’s contributions to the topic but observes, “We are beginning to see that it is difficult to practice generic, stylistic and thematic criticism simultaneously, as Bakhtin did” (p. 136). 9 “On the Uses of Literary Genre,” Literature as System: Essays Toward a Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971).

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10 Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1980) I, p. 200. Curran treats Don Juan as an example of a “recreated epic mode” (175) in a chapter entitled “Composite Orders.” 11 The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford UP, 1988), p. 11. In Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982), John Sitter describes a “turning away from the social-historical world to which poetry traditionally belonged” in the cultivation of genres of personal feeling, a turn which anticipates the perceived inwardness of Romantic lyric (p. 86). 12 Dialogic Imagination, p. 39. 13 Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992), pp. 747, 746. 14 “The Education of Children,” The Portable Coleridge, ed. I. A. Richards (New York: Viking P, 1950), p. 402. Cf. Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic for an extended treatment of these antipathies and their corresponding attractions. 15 Quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), p. 86. 16 Todorov, p 91. In Hegel’s case, it would be more accurate to say a philosophy of history which contains a philosophy of genre. For a recent version and explanation of this kind of higher genre criticism, see Cyrus Hamlin, “The Hermeneutics of Form: Reading the Romantic Ode,” Boundary 2, 7:3 (1979), pp. 1–30, as well as Duff, pp. 46–57, on the “cognitive turn” in genre theory. 17 On the two stylistic lines of the novel, see Dialogic Imagination, pp. 366– 415; on dialogue and dialectics, see Speech Genres, p. 147. The quotations are from Dialogic Imagination, p. 37. 18 Two recent studies that emphasize the variety of the Gothic genre, both stressing the reader’s role in the process of genre formation, are Jacqueline Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1994) and Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000). David Duff describes the Romantic genre of Mischgedicht or genre-mixing in his chapter entitled “The Combinatorial Method,” pp. 160–200.

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19 Like “novel” in Bakhtin, “romance” in Frye is a term used on several different levels of generality, as a “mode,” as a “mythos” and as a “specific continuous form” of prose fiction. See Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957), passim. 20 Cf. Epstein, “Hyperauthorship in Mikhail Bakhtin.” 21 The Prelude, ed. Ernest DeSelincourt, rev. Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1959), XI (1805–6), pp. 254–57. 22 Natural Supernaturalism, pp. 71ff. “Crisis autobiography” includes Augustine’s Confessions and Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu as well as Wordsworth’s Prelude. Conversely, in Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson are able to distinguish “Fifty-two Genres of Life Narrative” (Appendix A, pp. 183–207). 23 Bakhtin, Speech Genres, p. 34; Goethe, quoted in Karl Joachim Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978), p. 345. 24 Art and Answerability, p. 171. 25 Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 742, 743. See Guillén, “On the Uses of Literary Genre,” Literature as System, for an account of genre which balances reader’s expectations with author’s intentions in a thoroughgoing historical fashion. 26 “Byron and the Lyric of Sensibility,” European Romantic Review 4 (1993), 71–83. 27 See Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability, pp. 27–43, on the successive versions of this poem. Paul Magnuson discusses the emergence of the genre itself in Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988), 139–76, observing that “In 1796 and 1797 it would have been difficult to have seen ‘Effusion XXXV’ as anything other than a set of private associations” (p. 145). 28 Art and Answerability, p. 228; on the rhetorical terms, see Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe,” The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981) and Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984). 29 William Wordsworth, The Oxford Authors, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), p. 692, n. 131.

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30 See Schlüter, Die englische Ode: Studien zu ihrer Entwicklung unter dem Einfluss der antiken Hymne (Bonn: Bouvier, 1964) and Paul Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale UP, 1980). See also Duff, pp. 201–9 for an extended analysis of the formal and sociological dynamics of the ode in this period. 31 Poetical Works, ed. McGann, IV, 31–33; Curran, 56–63. 32 Hymns and Fragments by Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984), p. 89. 33 “Essay on the Imitations of the Ancient Ballad” (1830) in Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ed. T. F. Henderson (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons), 1902), IV, pp. 36–37, 16. 34 “Counter-genre” is a term used by Claudio Guillén in an important article on the way literary genres come into being, “Genre and CounterGenre: The Discovery of the Picaresque,” in his Literature as System. 35 The best concise survey of this debate is the first chapter of Todd Kontje’s Private Lives in the Public Sphere: The German Bildungsroman as Metafiction (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1992). Michael Minden’s The German Bildungsroman: Incest and Inheritance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) gives a more sympathetic account of the way the genre and discussions of it brings the popular form of the novel “under the jurisdiction of the aesthetic” in post-Kantian philosophy (p. 10). 36 Gerhart Mayer, Der deutsche Bildungsroman: Von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1992). Kontje, p. 15, argues that this term is unnecessary, since even Wilhelm Meister is more negative than critics are willing to acknowledge. 37 Recent scholarship on the Gothic novel is voluminous—it threatens to replace the “greater Romantic lyric,” as Abrams called it, as the earlier genre of choice for Anglo-American studies in Romanticism. In addition to the books by Howard and Gamer, cited above, see Eve Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Arno P, 1980); Robert Miles, Gothic Writing, 1750–1820: A Genealogy, 2nd ed. (New York: Manchester UP, 2002); Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (New York: Routledge, 1995); Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995); and James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999). Gamer develops a tendency in Williams to see “gothic” as a

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39 40 41 42

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broadly popular literary mode extending beyond the novel into other literary forms, a mode officially opposed but surreptitiously absorbed by high literary “romanticism.” Howard focuses on the form of the novel per se, but considers the Gothic variety, drawing on Bakhtin’s philosophy of genre in “Discourse in the Novel” rather than “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” as open-ended and lacking specific definition, hence less as a particular genre than as a characteristic expression of the novel in general. Deidre Shauna Lynch, in her chapter “Gothic Fiction” in The Cambridge Companion to Romantic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008) sees the genre’s implicit concern with knowledge in general encoded in its specific conventions of character and plot. Frederick S. Frank, “The Gothic Romance 1762–1820,” Horror Literature: A Core Collection and Reference Guide, ed. Marshall B. Tymn (New York and London: R. R. Bowker, 1981), p. 6. Frank catalogues 422 examples of the genre in this period, of which he identifies 67 as “historically influential and artistically respectable” and “popular long after the Gothic tidal wave had subsided” (p. 10). Horror Literature, p. 14. See also Bakhtin on the “chronotope” of the castle (Dialogic Imagination, 245–46). See Howard, pp. 21–22. “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” New Monthly Magazine 7 (1826), 147; quoted in Horror Literature, p. 23. On the eighteenth-century domestic novel in British literature, see Christopher Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688–1798 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998); on the interplay of Gothic and domestic genres, see Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, & Lawrence (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980) and Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1989). For the changing legal, social and religious views on this contested issue, see Mary Jean Corbett, Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008). Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford UP, 1987); Kelly, Chapter 3, “1800–1814: Beyond ‘Tales of the Times’,” English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789–1830 (London: Longman, 1989); Kontje, Women, the Novel, and the German

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48 49 50 51

52

Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin Nation 1771–1871: Domestic Fiction in the Fatherland (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). See The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003). Roy Pascal describes the narrative technique of Goethe’s novel in The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and its Functioning in the Nineteenthcentury European Novel (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1977); Kelly uses the term both in English Fiction of the Romantic Period and in “The Limits of Genre and the Institution of Literature: Romanticism between Fact and Fiction,” Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston, Gilbert Chaitin, Karen Hanson, and Herbert Marks (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990). The concept of nationality as “imagined community” is elaborated by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991); see also E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) and the first chapter of Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998). Fiction Against History: Scott as Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), pp. 24, 14. The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 32, 70. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford UP, 1985), pp. 69. See The Hero of the Waverley Novels, with New Essays on Scott (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), pp. 21–22, 24. It is likely that Bakhtin was registering a dissent from Lukács’s thesis that the novel of realism came directly from the historical novel—that the realist novel in Balzac was simply the historical novel applied to the society of the present—when he wrote “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism.” The scholarly comparison of Lukács and Bakhtin in this period by Galin Tihanov, The Master and the Slave, is concerned with the similarity of their views on Goethe and the genre of the Bildungsroman and minimizes the differences between their larger conceptions of the novel. Dialogue on Poetry, p. 126.

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53 Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000); David Simpson, Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (Towata, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1979); Martin Price, To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden to Blake (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964); Alvin Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven: Yale UP, 1965); and Steven Jones, ed., The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 54 Satire and Romanticism (New York: St. Martin’s P, 2000), p. 191; Don Juan, I: 8 55 Art and Answerability, p. 183. 56 Speech Genres, p. 138. 57 The Plot of Satire, pp. 90, 200; Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 36. 58 To the Palace of Wisdom, p. 431. 59 I am expanding here on my description of the genre, which I limited to fictional prose, in Meditations on the Hero: The Romantic Hero in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New Haven: Yale UP, 1974). 60 III, 129–32. 61 The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Herschel Parker (New York: Norton, 1971) p. 205. 62 Art and Answerability, p. 66. 63 In Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1967), Ian Jack weighs the evidence and concludes that this ode “is eclectic in its inspiration” rather than based on a single surviving example of such an art object. He believes that Keats was likely imagining “one of the large neo-Attic urns made in Rome between c. 50 B.C. and c. A.D. 50” rather than any of “the black-figured and red-figured vases of the classical age”—in other words (as the poem itself makes clear in the last stanza) an urn made of marble rather than a vase made of clay (p. 217). 64 Speech Genres, p. 138. 65 Stephen Knapp’s Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1885) examines the ambivalence of Romantic literary criticism toward personification as it derives from Renaissance allegory and the aesthetics of the sublime. But it avoids dealing with the poetic practice of Coleridge (say in “Dejection: An Ode”) or the odes of Keats which dramatize the possible personhood of concrete things and

168

66 67

68

69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76

77

Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin abstract ideas in the radical and dialogic sense of personification envisioned by Bakhtin. Michael J. Sider offers a Bakhtinian reading of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in The Dialogic Keats: Time and History in the Major Poems (Washington, DC: Catholic U of America P, 1998), pp. 145–161, but primarily as the poem presents a “political theory of art.” Quotations are from Jack Stillinger, ed. The Poems of John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978), pp. 372–73. On the textual uncertainty of the quotation, see Stillinger, Poems, “Appendix III: Who Says What to Whom at the End of Ode on a Grecian Urn?”; on Bakhtin’s notion of the loophole, see Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 233. “Soul-Making: Art, Therapy and Theology in Keats, Hillman and Bakhtin,” Literature and Religion 29 (1997), 1–15. Quotations are from Selected Letters of John Keats, revised edition, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002), pp. 290–91. The quotations from Bakhtin are from Dialogic Imagination, pp. 84–85. The relevance of this biblical allusion (as opposed to other allusions to the “mark of the Beast” in Revelation or the “mark of Cain” in Genesis) is declared “superficial” in its political implications by E. P. Thompson in his Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: New Press, 1993). But Thompson acknowledges that it has been seen as a significant allusion by other critics from other points of view; see pp. 180–83. Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 203; the text of “London” is on pp. 26–27. Wordsworth, p. 285. The Works of Mary Robinson, Vol. 2, ed. Daniel Robinson (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), p. 118. Wordsworth, pp. 483, 565; my italics. The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events (London: Hutchinson, 1906), pp. 3–6. Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. ed. Haskell Springer (Boston: Twayne, 1978), p. 197; Landon, Selected Writings, ed. Jerome McGann and Daniel Reiss (Ontario, Broadview P, 1997), p. 243. Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (London: Oxford UP, 1970), pp. 254, 255; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985), p. 88.

Notes

169

78 The Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2, ed. Grevel Lindop (London: Pickering & Chatto, 200), pp. 203, 217, 218; Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 197. 79 The Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Nichol Smith and Edward L. McAdam, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1974), p. 69. 80 Our Mutual Friend (London: Oxford UP, 1970), pp. 420–21. For a detailed sociological mapping of Dickens’s London with particular attention to Our Mutual Friend see Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, pp. 115–34. Robert Alter devotes two chapters of Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005) to the figurative realism of Dickens’s late novels. 81 Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1952), p. 50. 82 Dialogic Imagination, p. 252. 83 Dialogic Imagination, p. 252.

Afterword (pp. 139–146) 1 Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010), p. 9. 2 I am grateful to Sergeiy Sandler for pointing out (and translating) this passage for me; see Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), p. 6, for an account of this interview from 1973. 3 On the Coleridge–Schelling connection, see especially Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1969) and Mark Kipperman, Beyond Enchantment: German Idealism and English Romantic Poetry (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1986). For Hölderlin’s influence on Schelling’s aesthetic theory, see Douglas W. Stott’s translation of The Philosophy of Art, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 58 (U of Minnesota P, 1989), pp. 293–94, n. 3. This translation, with a Foreword by David Simpson, along with Slavoj Žižek’s introductory essay to a translation of Schelling’s Die Weltalter in The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997), indicate that Schelling’s reputation may be undergoing a revival among literary critics. His concept of “potentiation” is developed suggestively by Mikhail Epstein in

170

4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin “The Philosophy of the Possible and the Possibilities of Philosophy,” Chapter 19 of his remarkable manifesto The Transformative Humanities, trans. and ed. Igor Kyunkanov (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012). “Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism,” Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), p. 186. Tiupa, “The Architectonics of Aesthetic Discourse,” The Contexts of Bakhtin: Philosophy, Authorship, Aesthetics, ed. David Shepherd (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1998), p. 95; Epstein, email communication, July 19, 2013. Art and Answerability, p. 181. Grammars of Creation (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), pp. 172, 173. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 294. Bakhtin and Religion, p. 177. Dialogic Imagination, p. 225; Speech Genres, p. 25. Dialogic Imagination, pp. 20, 165. Speech Genres, p. 170.

Index

Abrams, M. H. 8, 19, 22, 98 Adonais 61 aesthetic activity 17, 20, 26, 79, 85, 142 aesthetic experience 86, 108 aesthetic ideology 10–11, 12, 152n.18 aesthetic naturalism 48 aesthetic of the Golden Rule 107 aesthetic perception/seeing 123 aesthetic triumphalism, and satire 122 aesthetics 17, 141 “Afterword: Plenitude as a Form of Hope” 143 Age of Reason 13 Aids to Reflection 62 Alexis, Jacques Stephen, 114 alterity 58, 72 American literature 109, 114, 121, 134, 137 ancients and moderns, quarrel of 79 anti-self-consciousness 22 Anton Reiser 108 architectonics Bakhtin’s 2, 6, 12 concept of 8 of Early Modernity 13, 17, 147 of the Enlightenment 15, 17, 22, 147 ethical/political/religious activity 141 of otherness 6, 10, 27, 32, 34, 128, 142, 147 of otherness (diagram) 147 philosophical 2 of Romanticism 13, 17–18, 20, 29, 35, 147 of sameness 14, 147 term 2, 11 “Architectonics of Answerability, The” 1, 10

Ariosto, Ludovico 79 Aristotle 2, 12, 79 Armstrong, Nancy 112 art 11, 17, 77, 123, 140 art song 105 artistic creations, validity of 11–12 artists 17, 18, 20 Auerbach, Erich 145 Augustine 97 Austen, Jane 53–6, 58, 60, 61, 111, 158n.22 “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” 3, 4, 6, 13, 42, 53, 55, 69, 71, 78, 91, 92, 96, 100, 117, 128, 142, 143 author-artist 4 author, as speaking person 77 author-hero/creator-creature analogy 66 author-hero/creator-creature/ self-other complex 71 author-hero relationships 5–6 see also “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” author-as-hero 29, 101 autobiography and confession 96–7 ballad 99–100, 105–7 Bildungsroman 107–9 and Byron 51 categories of 91 character 70–2, 93, 94 diagram 148 dialogic otherness/relationship of 50, 55 domestic novels 111–13 Early Modernity 53 in Frankenstein 66, 67, 69, 70–2 Gothic novel 109–11

171

172 heroic romance 119–22 historical novels 113–15 irony 115–22 literary ballad 99–100 lyrical form of 94 novels 93, 107 odes 102–4, 126–7 and privacy/publicity 98 Romantic forms of (diagram) 148 satire 94, 115–22 six basic forms of 92 songs 104–5 types of 59–63 authorial authority 58 authorial discourse, delegating 56 authorial identity, personal/ impersonal 59 authorial mask 77 authority authorial 58 of the divine 14 hostility to 9–10 narrative 56 authorizing otherness 20, 49, 50, 54, 69, 80, 85 authors 55, 59–60 autobiography 93, 94, 96–7, 98, 99 Averintsev, Sergei xii–iii, 146 Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith 143 ballads 99–100, 105–7, 148 Ballard, Joseph 137 Balzac, Honoré de 108 Barroll, Leeds 47 Battle of the Books 79 Baudelaire, Charles 100 be-thinging 118 Beauty of Inflections, The 8 Behn, Aphra 54, 111 Benjamin, Walter 20 Berger, Harry 10, 16, 25 Berlin, Isaiah 16, 26, 48 biblical allusions 27, 30, 36, 37

Index Bildungsroman 58–9, 93, 107–9, 111, 112, 115, 148 “Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism, The” 78-9, 166n.51 Biographia Literaria 19, 52, 61, 62, 93, 98, 140 biographies, becoming literature 94 biography, in Romanticism 93 biology 24 Blake, William 2, 19, 23, 26, 35, 36, 38, 39, 44, 50, 61, 62, 104, 115, 116, 118, 130, 131–2, 134, 135, 152n.18 Bloom, Harold 22, 47 Boccaccio, Giovanni 88 Book of Ezekiel 130 Book of Job 37 Book of Nature 19–20 Book of Revalation 36 Book of Urizen 115 Booth, Wayne 56 Borges, Jorge Luis 77 Brisman, Leslie 30 Britain, domestic novels 112 see also England Brontë, Charlotte 111 Brontë, Emily 111 Brown, Marshall 16 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 108 Burger, Gottfried A. 106 Burns, Robert 105 Byron, Lord 34, 50, 51, 58, 60, 74, 85, 90, 91, 93, 100, 101, 103, 104–5, 105, 116, 117, 119, 120, 131, 137 Caleb Williams 63, 67, 133 Calvin, John 15 Carlyle, Thomas 93, 108, 119 carnival xiv–v, 25, 145 categories of the aesthetic 17 author-hero relationships 91 shifting nature of 84

Index Catholicism 20 Cervantes, Miguel de 54, 79, 88 chaos, of natural order 23 character author-hero relationships 70–2, 93, 94 character system 113 defined by Bakhtin 42, 94 of satire 117 term 70–1 characters strong creating weak 62 weak creating strong 63 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 50–1 “Christabel” 50 chronotopes 82–3, 84, 95, 128, 129, 136, 137 chronotopic analysis, of London 129–37 Cinq-Mars 113 Claude glass 25 Cohen, Hermann 2 Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems 27 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 30, 31, 32, 34, 42, 44, 50, 52, 61, 62, 73, 86, 87, 91, 93, 98, 101, 102–4, 106, 118, 124, 140 Collins, William 50, 102 communication Bakhtin’s theory of 38 dialogic view of 138 verbal/and creative acts 78 “Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis, A” 133 “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge” 131 confession author-hero relationships 92, 97–9 and autobiography 98, 99 in Romanticism 93 confessional orthodoxy 29

173

confessional self-accounting 92 Confessions 18, 48, 67 Confessions of a Justified Sinner 63 Confessions of an English Opium Eater 97–8, 134 Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, The 121 confusion of distance 56 consciousness 22, 80 Constable, John 23 contemplator 4 conversation poem 50, 100, 101–2, 103, 124, 148 Cooper, James Fenimore 114 Cornfield, The 23 counter-genre 164n.34 creating/created persons 61 creation 18, 19, 28, 35, 65, 74 creative acts Kubla Khan 26–7 and verbal communication 78 creative art 77 creative freedom 77 creative personhood 59 creative power 20 creative understanding 13 creativity 20–1, 27, 28, 56, 80, 142 Crime and Punishment 72 crisis autobiography 98 critical explanation 56–7 critical power 20 criticism genre 96 New Historical 32 Romantic 20–1, 56, 74 versions of 28 Critique of Judgement, The 2 Critique of Practical Reason, The 2 Critique of Pure Reason, The 2 Croce, Benedetto 137–8 Crome, John 24 Cromwell 119 cultural history, period imagination 10 cultural rules, aesthetic activity 85

174 cultural system(s) Enlightenment 13–14 monologic/dialogic 17 Romanticism 12 culture, literary 9, 80 Curran, Stuart 80, 96, 103 Dante 88 de Man, Paul 7, 8, 10–11, 20, 22, 43 de-personification, and satire 118 De Quincey, Thomas 97, 133, 134 Decameron, The 88 deconstruction of literature 10 as negative hermeneutics 11 Dedham Vale 23 Defence of Poetry 57 Defoe, Daniel 54 “Dejection: An Ode” 23, 102 Derrida, Jacques 43 Descriptive Sketches 100 Desire and Domestic Fiction 112 determinate personality 72 dialogic cultural system 17 dialogic genre, of novel 87–90 Dialogic Imagination, The 11, 114 dialogic manifestation, of language 10 dialogical poetics 81 dialogism, forms of 151n.14 Dialogue on Poetry 58 Dichtung und Wahrheit 99 Dickens, Charles 136 “Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art” 44 “Discourse in the Novel” 9, 53, 89, 138 Discourses on Art 62 discourse(s) foundational 142 free indirect 54, 55 scientific/literature situated between different 12 divine creation/redemption 15 divine transcendence 21

Index domains confessional orthodoxy 29 egotistical sublime 29 of historicism 29 of history 144 of imagination 26 negative capability 39 organic nature 19, 23, 29, 30, 143 of otherness 21, 32 of Romanticism 18–25, 29 “somewhat other” 29 domestic novels 107, 111–13, 148 Don Juan 60, 85, 91, 105, 116, 117, 118, 131, 137 Don Quixote 53, 79, 88 Donne, John 14, 47 Dopplegänger 49–52, 63, 75 Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. 25, 42, 49, 53, 55, 63, 64, 71, 72, 143 Double, The 63 doubling, of Romantic person 49–52, 63 Duff, David 81 Duvakin, Viktor 139 Early Modernity 13, 15, 17, 21, 47, 53 ecology 24 ecology of mind, cultural history 10 see also period imagination economy of the self 49 education, novels of 93, 108 effusion 99, 100, 101, 148 “Effusion XXXV” 101 egotistical sublime 18, 29, 45, 52, 58, 121, 142 egotistical sublimity 32, 33, 39, 58, 61 ekphrastic verse 123, 125 Elective Affinities 111, 112 Elegiac Sonnets 100 Eliot, T. S. 136 Emerson, Caryl 9, 11, 81, 143 Emile 67 Emma 55 emotional-volitional accents 55 Engels, Friedrich 11

Index England, Bildungsroman 108 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 93 English satire, personality in 117 Enlightenment, the architectonics of 15, 17, 22 cultural system of 13–14 and genre 85 and God 65, 73 intellectual structure of 18 more-than-human reality of 19 and nature/reason 15 neoclassical aesthetics 79 realm of the personal in 48 realms of 18–25 and Romanticism 16 and sameness 147 self-identity of 16–17 and universality of human reason/ natural design 15 environmental/ecological or ecocriticism 22 “Eolian Harp, The” 101 “Epic and Novel” 87, 89, 145 epics, and novels 87 epistolary fiction 54 Epstein, Mikhail xi, 141, 169n.3 Equiano, Olaudah 98 “Erl-King, The” 106 Essay on Criticism 79 Essay on Man 48 ethical existentialism 42 ethnic diversity, in literature 9 Eugene Onegin 78 European cultural history, individual self in 13 European fiction 83 existentialism, ethical 42 Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons, The 23 “Fall of Jerusalem, The” 86 “Fall of the House of Usher, The” 110 Faust 50, 62, 63, 91, 120 Ferber, Michael 139

175

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 57–8 “Fichte Studies” 57–8 fiction European 83 three forms of 54 Fielding, Henry 54 figurative language 9 Fisher, Philip 114 Flaubert, Gustave 54, 56 Flegeljahre 108 folk songs 105 folkloric, the 83, 145 Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, The 94 formalism, literary 94–5 “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics” 30, 78, 82, 129, 136 Foucault, Michel 13, 15 France aesthetic naturalism 48 Bildungsroman 108 domestic novels 112 epistolary form 54 Frank, Frederick 110 Frankenstein 63, 64–76, 88, 107, 109, 110, 111 free indirect discourse 54, 55 free indirect style 54 Friedrich, Caspar David 24 “From Notes Made in 1970–71” 117 “Frost at Midnight” 23, 101–2 Frye, Northrop 8, 84, 94 Gamer, Michael 81 Gargantua and Pantagruel 25, 83, 145 Gardiner, Michael xv general/norm, and particular/unique 138 genre(s) analyses of 84–91 and author-hero relationships 92–3

176

Index

Bakhtin’s theory of 81–2 the ballad 99–100, 105–7, 148 Bildungsroman 58–9, 93, 107–9, 111, 112, 115, 148 and chronotopes 128 codification of 80–1 conversation poem 50, 100, 101–2, 103, 124, 148 counter-genre 164n.34 criticism 96 domestic novels 107, 111–13, 148 effusion 99, 100, 101, 148 in the Enlightenment 85 of epic 87 fixed/inherited 80 genre theory 137–8 Gothic novel 91, 93, 106, 107, 109–11, 112, 148 heroic romance 119–22 historical novels 90, 93, 107, 113–15, 148 and human personality 95 hymns 100, 103, 124, 148 importance of 78, 79–81 influence of the novel on 87 lyric 83, 99–101, 103–4 and lyricization/novelization 90, 91 modern European novel 79 nine forms of 83 novels 87–90, 94 odes 100, 102–4, 123, 124, 126–7, 148 and personhood/interpersonality 95 philosophy of 89 poetic/Greece and Rome 79–80 of poetry 85 re-conceived 80 of Romantic literature 85–91, 148 of satire 93 the song 100, 104–5, 148 geology 24 German lieder 105

German Romanticism 81, 88, 115, 117 Germany epistolary form 54 Marburg School 2 geroi 4 Gilpin, William 25 God absolute transcendence/special sovereignty 14 classic Christianity 73 of the Enlightenment 65, 73 otherness of 13, 14, 17 personhood of 47 transcendent religious activity of 18 Godwin, William 63, 67, 133, 134 Goethe, Johann W. von 23, 50, 58, 63, 91, 99, 106, 109, 111, 120, 144 Gogol, Nikolai V. 114 Golden Rule, aesthetic of 107 Gothic architecture 110 Gothic novel 91, 93, 106, 107, 109–11, 112, 113, 148 Gothic romance 81 Great Awakening 14 Great Chain of Being, The 13, 14 great time 83, 145–6 greater Romantic lyric 86 Guillén, Claudio 83–4, 96 hagiography 92 Hamlet 108, 120 Hartman, Geoffrey 22 Hasidic movement 14 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 134 Hayley, William 45 Hazlitt, William 52, 98 Heart of Midlothian, The 114 Hebrew Melodies 105 Hegel, Georg W. F. 89, 140 Heine, Heinrich 100 Hemans, Felicia 119 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 24

Index hermeneutics 11 hermeneutics of suspicion, Nietzschean 11 hero(es) actual expressed/potential 5 and author relationship see author-hero relationships and Bakhtin 44 as center of human value 4 concrete objects as 123, 125, 126, 127 estranged/estranging personhood 50 of historical novels 115 speaker-hero/objectified author 4 strong 59–60 and works of art 5 heroic romance 119–22 heteroglossia 9 historical figures, imaginative representation of 62 historical materialism 9, 11 Historical Novel, The 114 historical novels 90, 93, 107, 113–15, 148 historical past, otherness of 31, 129 historical poetics 81, 83, 93 historicism, domain of 29 history domain of 144 literary 96, 152n.20 and literature 12, 138 philosophy of 89 term 96 History of a Six Week’s Tour 98 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 63 Hogg, James 49, 63, 110 Hölderlin, Johann C. F. 104, 108, 140 Holquist, Michael 1, 11, 43, 66, 71, 81 Hugo, Victor 119 human beings, undeveloped potential of 5 human consciousness, realities of 80 human personality see personality Hunt, Leigh 132–3

177

“Hymn Before Sun-Rise in the Vale of Chamouni” 124 “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” 103 hymns 100, 103–4, 124, 148 hyper-individualism, of Romantic artist 18 Hyperion 108 I-for-myself 3, 42, 68, 117, 124 I-for-the-other 3, 42 Idealism, philosophy of 140 idealism, subjective 57 idealization, and personhood 119 identity independent 49 personal/impersonal authorial 59 in realm of the personal 54 secular sense of 14 self-identity 16–17, 21 social 59 ideology aesthetic 10–11, 12, 152n.18 Romantic 11, 12 of Romanticism 8 term 11 “Idyllic Chronotope in the Novel, The” 144 Illusions perdues 108 imagery nature 22 philosophical 151n.13 imagination 26, 85 “Imagination Creatrix” 26 imaginative positioning system 129 imaginative representation, of historical figures 62 impersonal authorial identity 59 impersonality, and poststructuralism 43 indifference, and art 140 individual self, European cultural history 13 indomitable will 16 insideness/outsideness, of Romantic writers 139

178

Index

“Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image, The” 7 Interesting Narrative 98 interpersonal/intrapersonal character, literary texts 6 interpersonal personhood 38 interpersonality 95, 99, 103, 115, 119 Ion 31 Irish Melodies 104 irony 115–22 Irving, Washington 133, 137 James, Henry 54 Jameson, Fredric 11 Jane Eyre 111 Jean Paul see Richter, Jean Paul Jerusalem 2, 130 Joan of Arc 119 Johnson, Barbara 43 Johnson, Samuel 135 Jones, Steven 116, 117 Jones, William 104 Judaism 14 “Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation” 102 Julie 67 Kant, Immanuel 2, 19, 41 Keats, John 18, 20, 52, 53, 59, 61, 102, 104, 106, 123, 126, 128 Kelly, Gary 112, 113 Kernan, Alvin 116, 118 Kerr, James 114 Kleist, Heinrich von 116 Kontje, Todd 112 “Kubla Khan” 26–35, 58, 73, 86 “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” 106 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 58 Lamb, Charles 100, 133 Landon, Laetitia 133 landscape painting, otherness in 23–4 landscape, term 24–5

language see also communication dialogic/monologic manifestations of 10 figurative 9 Le rouge et le noir 108 Le Sage, Alain-René 54 Lefebvre, Henri xv Leighton, Archbishop Robert 62 “Lenore” 106 Lewis, C. S. 7, 109 Liapunov, Vadim 1 Liber Amoris 98 lieder 105 “Life in the Woods” 98 Life of Wesley 93 “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” 103 literary art, and Romantic era 12 literary ballad see ballads literary culture 9, 80 literary formalism 94–5 literary forms as politics 86 primitive/low 145 literary genre see genre(s) literary history 96, 152n.20 literary mapping system 129 literary person, the 6 literary theory 142 literature as aesthetic activity 26 and Bakhtin 139 balanced perspective of 138 deconstruction of 10 genres 85–91, 148 and history 12, 138 novelization of 88 and otherness 26 personalistic orientation of 44 personality in 82 and philosophy 12 role of 140 situated between scientific systems of discourse 12 “Little Britain” 133

Index Locke, John 47 Lodge, David 54 “London” 130, 135 “London: A Poem in Imitation of Juvenal’s Third Satire” 135 “London Antiques” 133 London, chronotopic analysis of 129–37 “London’s Summer Morning” 131 Lovejoy, Arthur O. 7, 13, 14 low forms of literature 145 Lowes, John Livingston 26 Lucinde 93 Lukács, György 87, 114 lyric forms of personhood/ interpersonality 99 genres 83, 99–101, 103–4 privileging of 85 of sensibility 100 lyric poetry 76, 86–7, 88, 94, 105 Lyrical Ballads 19, 44, 87, 91, 100, 101 lyricization, and literary genre 90, 91 “Mad Song” 104 Maid of Buttermere, The 132 Maistre, Joseph de 20 man image of 82 term 41 Man, Paul de see de Man, Paul Manfred 90–1, 119, 120, 121 Mansfield Park 58, 60, 61, 112 Manzoni, Alessandro F. T. 114 Marburg School 2 marginalia 62 “Marie Antoinette’s Lamentation, in Her Prison in the Temple” 104 Marriage of Heaven and Hell 116, 118, 152n.18 Marx, Karl 11 Marxism 152n.16 Mask of Anarchy 115 materialism, historical 9, 11 materialization, and personhood 119

179

Maturin, Charles R. 110 McGann, Jerome 8, 10, 11, 100 meaning creating 43–4 personalism of 41, 42, 60, 62, 82 personeity of 42 personifying 44 mediation, Bakhtin’s architectonics as 12 meditation on the hero 51 Medvedev, Pavel 94, 152n.16 Mellor, Anne 116 Melmoth the Wanderer 110 Melville, Herman 52, 121, 122 Methodism 14 Milton: A Poem in 2 Books 44, 45, 61 Milton, John 14, 18, 37, 45, 47, 52, 59, 61 Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature 145 Mitman, Elizabeth 57 Moby-Dick 52, 119, 121 modernity, Bakhtin’s lack of reference to 145 modes 54, 84, 161n.8 Molière 79 Monk, The 109–10 monoglossia 9 monologic creation 65 monologic cultural system 17 monologic manifestation, of language 10 monologic, personality as 45 monologism 73 “Mont Blanc” 23, 24, 103 Moore, Thomas 104 moral superiority 61 Moritz, Karl Philipp 108 Morson, Gary Saul 9, 81 myth-making 21 Nancy, Jean-Luc 58 narrative authority 56 narrative mode 54 narrative reflexivity, fiction 54

180

Index

narrative self-consciousness 54 narrative structure, otherness as 51–2 Nathan, Isaac 105 natural order, chaos of 23 natural, realm 18, 19, 22–3, 29, 36, 143–4 natural religion 48 natural sublime 22, 23, 24, 29, 30, 36, 143, 144 Natural Supernaturalism 19 nature constructions of 24 and the Enlightenment 15 imagery 22 organic nature 22, 36 otherness of 24, 30, 70, 129 personifying 24 “nature poetry”, Romanticism as 22 Naturphilosophie 24 negative aesthetics, and satire 122 negative capability 18, 29, 33, 39, 52, 58–9, 61, 142 negative Romanticism, satire/irony as 116 neo-classicism, codification of genres 80 neoclassical aesthetics, of the Enlightenment 79 Neptunists 24 New Historical criticism 32 Newton, Isaac 19 Nicomachean Ethics 2 Nietzsche, Friedrich W. 119 “Nightingale, a Conversational Poem, The” 101 Nightmare Abbey 93 Northanger Abbey 54, 55, 111 Novalis 57–8 novelization 75, 87, 88, 90, 91 novelness 89 novel(s) author-hero relationships 93, 107 see also author-hero relationships in classical culture 145

of courtship 93 defined 88 domestic 107, 111–13, 148 of education 93, 108 and epics 87 genre of 87–90, 94 Gothic 91, 93, 106, 107, 109–11, 112, 113, 148 historical 90, 93, 107, 113–15, 148 modern European genre of 79 polyphonic 25 of realism 112, 166n.51 and romance 89 objectified author 4 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 123, 124–7, 128, 167n.63 “Ode to a Nightingale” 123, 124, 126 “Ode to Apollo” 104 “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte” 119 “Ode to Psyche” 128 “Ode to the West Wind” 103 odes 100, 102–4, 123, 124, 126–7, 148 Old English Baron, The 110 omniscient author 55 On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History 93, 119 “On the Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History” 7 “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” 7 “On the Marionette Theater” 116 “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” 101 open totality 2 opera 105 Order of Things, The 13, 15 organic nature 22, 24, 36, 143-4 domain 19, 23, 29, 30, 143 organic, otherness of 24 organicism, and Wordsworth/Goethe 23 Orlando Furioso 79 other-for-me 68

Index otherness architectonics of 6, 10, 27, 32, 34, 128, 142 and architectonics of Romanticism 13–18 authority of 50 authorizing 20, 49, 50, 54, 69, 80, 85 in domains 21, 32 Early Modernity 15 forms of 25 of God 13, 14, 17 of historical past 31, 129 historical/the ballad 106 of the interlocutor 101 in landscape painting 23–4 and literature 26 in “London” 130-1, 135 as narrative structure 51–2 of nature 24, 30, 70, 129 of the organic 24 of other people 13 of the personal 39, 43, 58 of the personal deity 14 of personality 49, 66 personeity of 49 of personhood 50 of the Reformation 17 of the Renaissance 15, 17 Romantic literature 26 of Romantic urban chronotope 129-35 of Romanticism 17, 21, 23, 25, 147 and sites 21, 32 of the social 37 of the sublime 24 urban 133, 136 Our Mutual Friend 136 outsideness/insideness, of Romantic writers 139 Oxford movement 20 “Pains of Sleep” 31 Paradise Lost 30, 37, 45, 59, 120 particular/unique, and general/norm 138

181

“Parting” 4–5, 25 pastness, of past 85 “Patmos” 104 Peacock, Thomas L. 93 Pelham 108 period imagination 10, 16 see also ecology of mind personal otherness of the 39, 43, 58 realm of the 18, 25, 29, 32–4, 43, 46–8, 54, 58, 67, 85, 142–3 personal self 48 personalism 41, 42, 58, 91 personalism of meaning 41, 42, 60, 62, 82 personality capacity for 42 crisis of 156n.6 determinate, 72 in Early Modernity 47 in English satire 117 and genres/chronotopes 95 in literature 82 as monologic 45 otherness of 49, 66 place as 110 potential/of concrete object 126 in three persons 73 personalization, and subjectivization 42–3 personeity of meaning 42 of otherness 49 personhood and Bakhtin 32 and concrete objects 123, 167n.65 creative 59 defined 42 dominant/recessive 34 estranged/estranging 50 in genres 95 and heroic romance 119 human/of God 47 and idealization/materialization 119

182 interpersonal 38 and irony/satire 115 lyric forms of 99 modes of/and literary text 6 of the other 49 otherness of 50 problems with 45 restoration of 46 Romantic 57 self-identical 67 singularity of 71 triune 73 personification of architectural setting 110 and concrete objects 125, 126, 127 in the ode 102, 125 and reification 124 Romantic poetry 44–6 personified impersonal 52 Persons and Things 43 phenomenological poetics, and historical poetics 93 philosophical aesthetics 141 philosophical architectonics 2 philosophical imagery 151n.13 philosophy and architectonics 2 of genre/history 89 of Idealism 140 and literature 12 neo-Kantian 2 Stalin’s Russia 141 Philosophy of Art, The 140 “Picadilly” 133 picturesque, the 25 Pietism 14 Pilgrim’s Regress, The 7 place, as personality 110 Plato 31 Plot of Satire, The 118 Poe, Edgar Allan 63, 110 poetic diction 44 Poetic Form and British Romanticism 80

Index poetic genres ancient Greece/Rome 79–80 novelization 75 poetical character 19, 61 Poetics 79 poetics dialogical 81 historical 81, 83, 93 monological conception of 81 of the novel 84 phenomenological/historical poetics 93 of trust 11, 142 poetry defenses of 12 genres of 85 lyric 76, 86–7, 88, 94, 105 organic nature in 36 personification in 44 Polidori, John 74 political persecution, Bakhtin 141 political power, and aesthetic experience 86 political satires 90 political significance, of domestic novel 112 politics, literary forms as 86 polyphonic novels 25 polyphony author-hero relationship 71 problem of 64 Pope, Alexander 19, 48, 79, 85 popular superstitions 50 Poringland Oak 24 poststructuralism, and impersonality 43 power, critical/creative 20 pre-Romanticism 16 Prelude, The 19, 24, 93, 97, 98, 101, 132 “Present State of the Manners, Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England, The” 136–7 Price, Martin 116, 118 primitivism 145

Index Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, The 110 “Problem of Speech Genres, The” 79 “Problem of the Text, The” 151n.14 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Art 141 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 42, 53, 63 “Prometheus” 103 Prometheus Unbound 75, 119 prosaics, of Bakhtin 9 protagonists 4, 44 see also author-hero relationships; hero(es) Protestantism 20 pseudo-autobiographical form, fiction 54 public sphere 90 Purchas, his Pilgrimage 30 Pushkin, Alexander S. 4, 25, 78, 114, 149n.vii Rabelais and His World xiv–xv, 145 Rabelais, François xiv, 25, 83 Rabelaisian chronotope, folkloric bases of 83 Radcliffe, Ann 56, 110, 111 Raskolnikov 72 rational self 49 reader, and author-artist 4 realism, novels of 112, 166n.51 realities of literature 80 realms natural 18, 19, 22–3, 29, 36, 143–4 of the personal 18, 25, 29, 32–4, 43, 46–8, 54, 58, 67, 85, 142–3 social 18, 25, 29, 31–2, 48, 85 supernatural 18, 19, 20, 25, 29, 36–7, 48, 143 reason as architectonic 2 and the Enlightenment 15 Records of Woman 119 redemption 18 Reeves, Clara 110 Reformation, the 13, 17, 46–7, 147

183

reification 42, 43, 124 relations among subjects 124 three types of 117–18 relationship(s), author/hero see author-hero relationships relative stabilization 79, 122, 129 religion and Bakhtin 143 natural 48 “religion of the heart” 14 religious expression, new forms of 14 religious syncretism 20, 29, 30, 104, 143 Remak, Henry H. H. 7 Renaissance, second 80–1 Renaissance, the 13, 15, 17, 46–7, 147 “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff ” xiii, 12 revolutionary future 29 “Rhetoric of Romanticism” 7–8 Richardson, Samuel 54, 111 Richter, Jean Paul 49, 57, 63, 65, 108 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The” 50, 106 “River Otter, To the” 24 Road to Xanadu, The 26 Robinson, Mary 34, 104, 131, 136–7 romance and the novel 89 term 163n.19 Romance of the Forest, The 110 Romantic era, and literary art 12 Romantic historicity, in Bakhtin 145–6 Romantic ideology 11, 12 Romantic Ideology, The 8 Romantic literature see literature Romantic movement, international character of 96 Romantic period, does it exist? 6–13 Romantic poetry see poetry Romantic writers, relationships of 139

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Index

Romanticism as age of Lyric 86 architectonics of 13, 17–18, 20, 29, 35 Bakhtinian architectonics of 6 British/history of genres 81 and creativity 80 cultural system of 12 and the divine 15 does it exist? 6–13 domains/sites of 18–25, 29 and the Enlightenment 16 German 81, 88, 115, 117 ideology of 8 as “nature poetry” 22 opposed ideas of 8 otherness of 17, 21, 23, 25, 147 personalism of 58 and “structure of things”/“the indomitable will” 16 synthetic studies of 19 and systematic thought 2 theological allegory of 142–3 theoretical expressions of 57 Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon Formation 81 Romanticism and the Uses of Genre 81 Roots of Romanticism, The 16 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 18, 48, 67, 96 rules of art 17 Russia, Silver Age 141 Russian Formalism 81, 94–5 saint’s life 92, 93, 94, 119 sameness 14, 15, 147 Sartor Resartus 19, 108 satire 93, 94, 115–22, 137 Satire and Romanticism 116 Schelling, Friedrich W. J. 24, 139–40, 169n.3 Schiller, Friedrich 91 Schlegel, Friedrich 1, 2, 9, 20, 23, 58, 84, 88, 93, 115, 117, 140 Schlüter, Kurt 103

School for Aesthetics 57, 65 science of life 24 Scientific Revolution 14 Scott, Walter 90, 105, 106, 113, 114 Sea of Ice 24 self economy of 49 individual/European cultural history 13 and other 39 personal 48 rational 49 sentimental 49 self-annihilation 45 self-as-author 97 self-as-character 97, 98 self-assertive authors 59–60 self-developing idea, re-creation of 72 self-identical personhood 67 self-identity 16–17, 21 self-other/creator-creature relations 75 selfhood 47 selfsameness 14, 15, 16–17, 21 Sense and Sensibility 54 Sentimental character 69 sentimental self 49 Shaffer, E. S. 31, 86 Shakespeare, William 19, 47, 52, 59, 85–6, 88, 108 Shelley, Mary 63, 64, 66–7, 69, 71, 73–4, 76, 88, 98, 111 Shelley, Percy 20, 23, 24, 57, 59–60, 61, 68, 74, 75, 76, 88, 98, 102, 103, 115, 119 Silver Age 141 Simpson, David 116 Siskin, Clifford 86 sites of imagination 26 and otherness 21, 32 of religious syncretism 20, 29, 30 of Romanticism 18–25, 29 Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon 133 Smith, Charlotte 90, 100, 101

Index social otherness of the 37 realm 18, 25, 29, 31–2, 48, 85 social identity 59 social literacy 113 Socrates 31 solipsism, and the person 157n.12 “Solitary Reaper, The” 105 “Song of Experience” 130–1 songs 100, 104–5, 148 Songs of Innocence and of Experience 35, 38, 104 “Sonnet XXI. Supposed to be Written by Werter” 101 sonnets 100 Sorrows of Young Werther, The 90 soul-making 127–8 Southey, Robert 93, 119, 122 sovereignty, of God 14 speaker-hero 4 speaking person, author as 77 special answerability 29 speech authorship 77 spirit creation 128 St. Irvyne 75 Steamer in a Snowstorm 23 Steiner, George 142 Stendhal 108 stereotypes, literary 55 Sterne, Laurence 53, 54 Stewart, Garret 66 Stillinger, Jack 27 Strand, Mary R. 57 “Streets of London, The” 132 structural linguistics 41–2 structuralism 41–2 structure of things 16 Studies in Romanticism 7 subiectum 41 subjective idealism 57 subjectivization, and personalization 42–3 sublime nature 22, 23, 24 sublime of the Bible, and the Book of Nature 19–20

185

sublime, otherness of 24 supernatural, realm 18, 19, 20, 25, 29, 36–7, 48, 143 superstitions, popular 50 symbolic creativity 21 syncretism, religious 20, 29, 30, 104, 143 synthetic studies, of Romanticism 19 System of Transcendental Idealism, The 140 Taylor, Charles 48 textual instability, Kubla Khan 27 “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)” 78–9, 166n.51 “The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece” 105 the-other-for-me 3, 42 theological allegory, of Romanticism 142–3 Theory as Practice 57–8 theory of genres, German Romantics 81 Theory of Mind 55 Theory of the Novel 87 third living participant 44 “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” 101 Thoreau, Henry D. 98 time space configurations 129, 144 “Tintern Abbey” 101 Tiupa, Valerii 141 “To an Infant” 101 “To Autumn” 104 “To the Poet Coleridge” 34 “To William Wordsworth” 102 Todorov, Tzvetan 89 Tolstoy, Leo 53 “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences” 41, 143 Toward a Philosophy of the Act 1–2, 4, 5, 41

186 “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book” 64, 73 Town, The 132 “Trends of Recent Research on West European Romanticism” 7 Tristram Shandy 53 trust, poetics of 11, 142 Turner, J. M. W. 23 “two embattled tendencies” 16, 138 “Tyger, The” 26, 35–9, 58 type, the 93, 94 uncreations 118 understanding, creative 13 unfinalizability 2 unified field theory 8 universe of nature 19 “Unreal City” 136 urban, otherness 133, 136 verse epistle 101, 102 Vigny, Alfred de 113 Vision of Judgment, A (Southey) 93, 122 Vision of Judgment, The (Byron) 90, 116 Voloshinov, Valentin N. 44, 152n.16 Vulcanists 24

Index “Wakefield” 134 Walden 98 Wallenstein 91 Ware, Kallistos 47 “Waste Land, The” 136 Waverley 105, 113 “We Are Seven” 106 Wellek, René 7, 8, 15, 22 Welsh, Alexander 115 Western tradition, historical change in 13–14 “Whole of the Hero as the Whole of Meaning, The” 10, 78 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 107, 108 Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre 109 Wollstonecraft, Mary 67 Woloch, Alex 113 Wordsworth, Dorothy 98 Wordsworth, William 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 44, 49, 58, 59, 61, 85, 87, 91, 93, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 105, 106, 131, 134 works of art aesthetic evidence 4 and heroes 5 Wuthering Heights 111 Zastrozzi 75

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