Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment [Pilot project. eBook available to selected US libraries only] 9780674425101

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Utopia, Limited

UTOPIA, L I M I T E D Romanticism and Adjustment A NAHID NERSESSI A N

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2015

Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nersessian, Anahid, 1982– Utopia, limited : romanticism and adjustment / Anahid Neressian. pages cm Includes biblographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-43457-8 (alk. paper) 1. Utopias in literature. 2. Utopias—Philosophy. 3. Romanticism. PN56.U8N47 2015 809'.93372—dc23 2014028423

I. Title.

Contents

Prologue 1

1 Rcsm, an Introduction 14 2 Worldfeel from Kant to Wordsworth 43 3 Losing Ground in Shelley’s Revolt 75 4 Bad Taste, or Varieties of Empire and Anticolonialism 110 5 Hazlitt’s Disappointment 142 6 Narrating Capital, Reading Rcsm 172 Notes

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Acknowledgments 259 Index 261

Prologue “Paulò majora canamus.” —Vergil, Eclogue IV, quoted in William Wordsworth, “Ode (‘There was a time’),” 1807

past of Hesiod’s Golden Age to the futureanterior earths of science fiction, images of utopia—or the perfect world— both precede and postdate Romanticism. In fact Romanticism, being in Barbara Johnson’s words “postrevolutionary but preatomic,” seems rather to favor apocalypse over utopia.1 By the time Mary Shelley’s extinction novel The Last Man was published in 1826, it was greeted by the collective yawn of a reading public for whom contemplating the end of the world had become “absolutely common-place.”2 That said, while Shelley’s novel manifests a Romantic preoccupation with “the strange temporality of the end of man,” it would be equally fair to say that the novel joins in a more general Romantic-era fascination with eschatology not always marked by anguish or doom.3 The Unitarian minister Richard Price infuriated Edmund Burke by hailing the French Revolution in the exultant idiom of the Canticle of Simeon: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.” Another revolutionary, William Blake, wrote poems punctuated by catastrophes that, inevitably, herald the wondrous renovation of life as we know it.4 The conclusion of the Simplon Pass episode of William Wordsworth’s Prelude turns similarly on a redemptive reckoning of FROM THE MYTHOLOGIC AL

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the poet’s environment; “woods decaying, never to be decayed,/The stationary blasts of water-falls,” “winds thwarting winds,” “The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,/The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,” and so on are counted “Characters of the great Apocalypse,/The types and symbols of Eternity,/Of first and last, and midst, and without end.”5 While the world-ending cadences of The Last Man, of Lord Byron’s poem “Darkness,” or of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s unfinished, devastating The Triumph of Life are decidedly downbeat, the propulsive joy of Blake’s prophecies or Wordsworth at his most vivacious suggests that for some Romantic poets, the end of days often coincides with the nascence of an earthly paradise. We might say, then, that the term “Romanticism” designates a body of literature for which the relationship between the world’s destruction and its regeneration is noticeably intensified, so that as soon as a Romantic text “begin[s] speaking of the end” it has already launched itself toward a description of the beginning.6 That is not the argument of this book. From the literature of what has been called the Romantic Century, Utopia, Limited gleans elements of a political and aesthetic paradigm that fetishizes neither apocalyptic ruin nor its redemption.7 What it does do is reconstitute the perfect world as a place where grief, loss, suffering, and habits of self-denial—all far from the surfeit implied by the word “perfect”—become essential to the idea of utopia per se. Ranging from 1750 to 1850, the notion of the Romantic century enables this argument insofar as it allows Romanticism to tip forward into the Victorian period while reaching backward to the Enlightenment and its origins—for in order to understand how representations of bereavement, melancholy, or deprivation might come to have positive charges and sometimes even pleasurable effects for Romantic-era utopian discourse, we must take up a long view of history trained upon the emergence of industrial modernity and its post-industrial fate. Recent scholarship has shown Romanticism to coincide, almost too neatly, with the dawning of an era some scientists are calling the anthropocene, an era of nature’s end and of humankind’s hostile takeover of earth’s thermostat.8 This book does not take too much time corroborating a line of causation between ecological peril and Romantic literature, or between Romanticism and any particular cataclysmic event. Rather, the fact of industrialization and its risks grounds a more abstract meditation on what I describe as a Romantic attentiveness to precarity, specifically the precarity of physical environments and material resources. Such attentiveness, I argue, is the necessary precondition to elaborating the possibility of adjustment,

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defined throughout as a formal as well as an ethical operation that allows human beings to accommodate themselves to the world by minimizing the demands they place upon it. I should say that adjustment is defined here first as a formal and secondarily as an ethical operation, since it is from Romantic practices of poetic composition that this book’s proposal for a utopian doing-with-less is derived. Poiesis, the Greek word for making or shaping, entails loss, but not necessarily of a kind that begs to be rendered in pained or melodramatic terms. On the contrary, Romanticism teaches that the abdication of possibilities can furnish us with equanimity just as it can furnish us with art. A sonnet disciplines itself into fourteen lines; speech is wrestled into verse; at the end of Keats’s Hyperion, Apollo adapts to his new divinity as if “struggl[ing] at the gate of death,/Or liker still to one who should take leave/ Of pale immortal death,” that initial struggle dissolving into the gentle and genteel retirement of merely taking leave. If these transformations are to some degree traumatic, they also cast trauma as an understated event of accommodation to an external force that wounds but does not kill. This way of interpreting poiesis cuts against more familiar takes on Romanticism as a literature of extremes, whether those are pitched toward the nadir of Mary Shelley’s tragic lastness or the lofty confidence Price places in “salvation.” It also cuts, I think, against a lately dominant “critical mood” that informs and mirrors the “political pedagogy” of many contemporary left and radical social movements.9 Written in solidarity with the aims of such movements, and self-situated within a long tradition of Marxist literary criticism, Utopia, Limited finds in the Romantic period a counter to a rhetoric of political desire typified by Judith Butler’s recent injunction to “demand the impossible.”10 While this phrasing of the utopian imperative offers to disrupt the conventional wisdom of neoliberal modernity (namely, that late capitalism and its legion of harms should not, indeed cannot be resisted, let alone defeated) I suggest that both the heroic posture of “demand” and the stipulation of its object as “the impossible” are unintentionally underwritten by a hazardous metaphysical assumption: that, in Hegel’s words, “it is not the finite which is the real, but rather the infinite.”11 To be sure, Butler means to make her “impossible” ironic, going on partly to define “impossible demands” pragmatically as “the right to shelter, food and employment” and the requirement that those who profit from economic rapacity “redistribute their wealth and cease their greed.” Nonetheless, by reproducing impossibility

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as a metric of leftist hope and radical achievement, this formulation does not actually undo the calculus by which “demands for social equality and economic justice” are deemed unanswerable. More to the point, whatever the significance of Hegel’s “True Infinite” for philosophical speculation, it is not hard to see how the language of limitlessness, and the acquisitive model it licenses, have their ugly image in neoliberalism’s own fantasy of itself as a never-ending cycle of production and consumption, a cycle to which Jonathan Crary has assigned the shorthand “24/7.”12 Simply put, it is in the hope of finding alternative languages, models, and (for that matter) fantasies that this book looks to a Romanticism of adjustment whose ambitions are keyed to self-abnegation in the face of planetary fragility and the diminishing possibilities it entails.13 The ecological mandate shadowing this book necessarily prevents it from claiming infinitude or even plenitude as the ideal objects of utopian ambition. It likewise encourages us to rethink the more conventional understanding of utopia as “the transcendence of the conditions obtaining at a specific time and place” and to follow Hayden White in challenging one view of history as “the real”—and a concomitant view of utopia as caprice—for “its repression of the utopian moment in history’s own makeup and for casting it out of any properly historical reflection on history[.]”14 White begins his own discussion of utopia from the position that “in our time, utopian discourse, the discourse of ‘what might be’ and ‘what ought to be’—in contrast to the discourse of ‘what is,’ ‘what is the case,’ reality, the real, things as they are, etc.” is represented “not only [as] no longer desirable” but “from the standpoint of that instrumental reason which prevails in our social sciences, [no longer] even possible.” What we get instead is the dystopian inversion of this discourse “as dream, nightmare, reverie, delusion, sop for the necessary and unavoidable casualties of a modernity that is our fate, our destiny, our telos, end, aim and purpose in life, the condition to which we are indentured for ‘the time that remains[.]’”15 The question for White is “what has been lost in our understanding of that history that is supposed to be the ground and measure of a specifically modernist brand of realism which, against all reason, has brought us to the dystopian situation in which the earth itself is under threat by the very instruments of science, technology, and political economy that were supposed to save it for human use and enjoyment[?]”16 This book attempts to address White’s question, partially and provisionally, by arguing that what has been lost in the historical evaluation

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of Romanticism as a utopian literature is precisely loss itself, or rather the ability to receive loss as an ontologically positive entity integral to the material makeup of the world—to any world, including the better world called utopia. White finds utopia taking the shape of “history’s Other,” haunting or preoccupying it as “an expression of a memory of a repressed desire” not unlike the longing for superior futures Walter Benjamin finds lurking in the detritus of commodity culture.17 My own repositories for utopia and, specifically, for the recuperative figuration of loss as an engine of utopian achievement, are texts drawn from the Romantic century. Without treating these texts as the sublimated output of a repressive culture increasingly determined by capital, I use a primarily formalist and rhetorically-oriented reading practice to draw out the compositional procedures by which Romanticism shows the demise of plenitude to be a necessary step toward the realization of both aesthetic and politically transformative ends. This reading practice, which attends to the representation of things lost or, more often, in the process of disappearing, requires a move away from the conceptual regime of the all-or-nothing, the wholly privileged impossible or the wholly degraded probable. In making this move, I follow scholars attracted to an idiosyncratic interpretation of Romanticism as a discourse that, in Kevis Goodman’s words, refuses to be “reduced or betrayed” into a “totalizing representation” of its protocols.18 In Goodman’s excavation of georgic as a melancholy mode of historicism that is neither triumphant nor fully dejected, in William Galperin’s Heideggerian account of the “missed opportunity” as immanent to the world that itches to leave it behind, in Jacques Khalip’s reading of Romanticism as a literature of dispossession, and in Anne-Lise François’s defense of an ethics that “repudiates fulfillment and assaults instrumental reason and its corollary, the hope of completion or possession,” adjustment begins to find its fellows.19 I want also to record a debt to what is (for now) being called affect studies, a critical conversation about feeling that has been variously grouped with queer theory, critical race studies, ecocriticism, and a concatenation of engagements called cultural studies; to these we might add so-called new formalism, even though new formalism is so often and, as Marjorie Levinson says, “regrettabl[y]” opposed to those more overtly activist ways of reading by dint of its frequent if inconsistent hostility toward historical materialism.20 Recently, affect seems to have become the target of high-profile scholarly complaint and repudiation.21 I am not concerned with the particulars of the critique of affect, but

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I do want to note that such a critique tends to take its examples of work in that field from theorists who valorize feeling for what they view as its messy, extemporizing, unpredictable, and above all formless properties. This, too, is regrettable, for the concept of affect illumines the intersection of aesthetics and politics only insofar as it holds in mind the dialectical action by which “form [appears] as an aftereffect of affective patterns” at the same time as seemingly spontaneous rushes of feeling are always already blueprinted by extant cultural forms.22 Another way to put this would be to say that affect is generic, in two senses of that word: it participates in the physiological processes of a body inescapably if not absolutely determined by its biological inclusion in some genus, and it is often highly conventional. This much is made clear in those varieties of affect theory closely aligned with queer theory, most obviously in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It is equally apparent in figures as dissimilar from Sedgwick, and from one another, as Theodor Adorno and Northrop Frye.23 In Adorno’s reluctantly elegiac treatment of the question of aesthetic autonomy, or in Frye’s assertion that utopian existence is founded on a feeling of diminishment, this book locates continuity with the “pedagogy of positive bondage” Donna Haraway deems essential to “a serious, historically specific kind of freedom,” one that marries the generic to the improvisatory.24 Working with and through occasions of such positive bondage, whose paradigmatic instance is (as Adorno suggests) the work of art itself, my own discussion gathers up a vocabulary of restraint in an effort to describe and to salvage Romanticism’s own pedagogy of utopian limitation. Unlike The Last Man, limited utopias are neither science-fictional nor dystopian; arguably, they are not utopian in any regular sense. Here, they are drawn from an archive of Romantic writing that rarely if ever falls under popular or academic rubrics of utopian literature, which has been said to encompass “Platonism, classical mythology, golden ages both eastern and western, ideals of lost worlds, fantastic voyages, inhabited moons and planets, imaginary social and political experiments, nations, empires, and ideal commonwealths, and satires upon all of these,” along with works of speculative fiction generally.25 Unlike Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies or William Morris’s News from Nowhere, the works I have in mind do not present the reader with brightly-rendered visions of places where everyone is virtuous and no one is hungry. They do not retell historical attempts to build and maintain an intentional community, in the manner of

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Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Blithedale Romance, nor do they explore the difficulties of maintaining social orders characterized by the universalization of equality, as Ursula K. Le Guin does in The Dispossessed. They do not approach utopia as a concept by representing it negatively and pejoratively, like Gulliver’s Travels or 1984, or by representing it as nonappearance, as the name of an abandoned possibility or unremembered dream. In this book, limited utopias are found mainly in literary texts that deputize for political thought the collection of formal, rhetorical, and tropological maneuvers George Herbert, in his poem “Paradise,” calls to “prune and PARE.” Like “Paradise,” limited utopianism identifies the labor of pruning that which is already “fruitful” with the promise of becoming both “more fruitful” and yet differently so. Each stanza of Herbert’s poem famously lops off letters from the word that ends its first line in each line following, so that the readerly and didactic progress of “Paradise” unfolds to the beat of a dwindling rhythm. This reductive procedure turns out, however, to serve also as a system of discovery, one that excavates additional words from damaged and diminished ones: Inclose me still for fear I START. Be to me rather sharp and TART, Then let me want thy hand and ART. When thou dost greater judgments SPARE, And with thy knife but prune and PARE, Ev’n fruitful trees more fruitful ARE. Such sharpness shows the sweetest FREND: Such cuttings rather heal then REND: And such beginnings touch their END.26

Nonetheless, while the attritive rhyme scheme adopted by “Paradise” remains sincerely sacrificial—which is to say, it does not shallowly insinuate that loss may be redeemed as the progenitor of gain—the poem preserves a degree of self-certainty not easily retained by “a culture in which the concept of the earthly paradise is losing its enclosing wall.”27 That certainty is at once metrical (even when Herbert’s lines lose some letters, they keep all their feet), eschatological, and horticultural, predicated on the belief that no

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quantity or quality of destruction can terminally “blast” or “harm” God’s gardens.28 When it is compromised—variously, by the hybrid prosody of poetic “experiments”; by an emergent secularism; by the blasts and the harms of unrestrained industry—its absence is felt as an encounter with the unfamiliar edged with some residue of the conventional, the ordinary, or the already known.29 In the Romantic period, which takes shape just as the enclosing wall of Paradise becomes the “protecting wall” of enclosure, imagining utopia draws on multiple modes of conventionality in order to simulate the experience Adorno compares to “a child at the piano searching for a chord never previously heard.”30 Its exemplary texts tense, frozen in an impulse toward a world that flits in and out of reach, like the answer to a problem (Which chord? Which fingers? How many flats or sharps?) estranged from its customary formulation. In a departure from Adorno, however, these literary versions of utopian searching shun the view that “the end of art is implicit in the concept of utopia” and that utopia, if it “were fulfilled, would be art’s temporal end.”31 Rather, limited utopias uphold the practice of artmaking as a performance of non-fulfillment and the conscientious regard for earthly matter such a performance models and enacts. They undertake the mental and materialist labor of “defining the elusive/ visualizing the invisible/communicating the incommunicable” in order to acknowledge both “the finitude of human existence” and the fragility of the world that sponsors it.32 “A good author of good utopias,” writes Reinhart Kosselleck, “evidently has very little desire to be a utopian.” In its context the statement is flip, but it also suggests a resistance to the paradoxical domestication of utopias as “‘nowheres,’ spatial counterworlds” that lean heavily on early modern colonial fantasies in which “a traveler is driven onto a foreign, trans-European shore and discovers there all sorts of ideal states or prestate societies of the most varying orders.”33 The Romantic texts I focus on abstract this earlier, spatial mode of representation into a polemic concerning form, finding real potency in the instant utopia meets its limitation, when Adorno’s piano-playing child lets her hands drop to the chord for which she was searching with the wobble (“There! No, there!”) of a vigorously corrected error. These texts and their authors differ in the manifest content of their political beliefs, and admittedly those beliefs do not matter overmuch to my argument. I am interested, rather, in how the formal decorum of a specific poem, novel, or philosophical narrative forces a fit between what the

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text presents as a political goal and the resources needed to sustain it. Each chapter hinges its title on a word or phrase that condenses that decorum into single but multivalent concept. Together these words and phrases make up the native language of this book, the tools that serve for this particular discussion of the kindling and curtailment of utopian desire. What is on offer is not a series of comprehensive analyses of a selection of poems or prose works, but rather some exploratory investigations of the theoretical tropes of which those works make use. To use a different analogy from Adorno’s, this one drawn from Goethe’s Theory of Colours, if the notion of limited utopia is the light in the background that makes it possible for such tropes to emerge as objects of interest, the tropes themselves, like the variegated phenomena Goethe calls colors, operate as “active and passive modifications” of that originary idea.34 The first and perhaps most enigmatic of these is “Rcsm,” the topic around which my first, introductory chapter is organized. The four-letter word “Rcsm” is derived from Frye’s own abbreviation of “Romanticism,” an abbreviation this chapter decides to take on board as an analytical tool. Expanding Frye’s suggestive references to “low adjustment utopia,” which Frye sees as Rcsm’s essential contribution to the history of modern political philosophy, I try to substantiate his claim that adjustment allows for a variation on the genre of romance, the secret agent lodged at the etymological heart of Romanticism and fractionally preserved by the shorthand Rcsm. Beginning with a passage from Blake’s Descriptive Catalogue and ending with the first poem from his Songs of Innocence, this chapter identifies Rcsm as a counter-movement to two other kinds of political and aesthetic philosophy. The first of those philosophies is contemporary to Rcsm itself, and it has as its fulcrum what I term the form-phobia of Romantic conservatism, of the sort found in Wordsworth’s controversial poem The Excursion. Wordsworth is not the villain of this book, as may be obvious from the fact that his epigraph to the poem known as the Intimations Ode also serves as the epigraph to this preface. Nevertheless, in “Rcsm” he represents an instance of studied revulsion to form and formalism, a revulsion I also find in force in some of the most important and influential work in contemporary critical theory. This chapter thus concludes by suggesting that even the most sophisticated renditions of modern anti-formalism seem accidentally to reproduce the insistently acquisitive, boundless impulsions of the political economy they ostensibly reject.35

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My second chapter, on “Worldfeel,” has more to say about Wordsworth’s Prelude and the sonnets from his 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes. It begins by retranslating Kant’s Weltanschauung—usually glossed as “worldview”—to get at the embodied and proprioceptive qualities Kant associates with the apprehension of our physical environment. The term Weltanschauung allows Kant to describe the historical phenomenology of Europe in the midst of a secular Enlightenment, which Kant insists does not imply or require irreligiosity. I use Kant’s thinking about the phenomenology of the secular to tackle a handful of Romantic scenes in which skepticism about religious practice motivates a figuration of the ordinary as a space of metaphysical profundity and communal exuberance. That each of these scenes is set during the French Revolution or in its immediate aftermath implies that what Étienne Balibar has repeatedly characterized as the secularization of citizenship during the 1790s has consequences for the lived experience of Romantic contemporaneity and, more to the point, for the representation of that experience.36 Emphasizing the tropological over the historical dimensions of the secular, this chapter suggests that by making apocalyptic imperatives vulnerable to rhetorical procedures of erasure or evaporation—especially active in Wordsworth’s sonnets—Romanticism offers a worldfeel that binds human attention to the intractable matter of the everyday. “Losing Ground in Shelley’s Revolt” closely reads sections of Shelley’s longest poem, The Revolt of Islam. Scholars have hitherto tended to concentrate on two aspects of The Revolt: its uncritical orientalism on the one hand and, on the other, its decision to celebrate a failed revolution. My own reading of the poem hones in on its use of the simile as a surprisingly disjunctive trope that plays up the distance between the things it seems to liken to one another. Shelley’s similes, I argue, render loss an additive phenomenon, in particular when that loss is effected and sustained through sexual harm. In this, Shelley shows himself to be the indirect heir of Blake, whose prophecies routinely show violence to be a goad to poetic speech and political action. Nonetheless, Shelley also parts ways from Blake in his unsettling vision of utopia as a place where there are no people, or at the very least as a place from whence human life appears to be vanishing. The next two chapters make something of a pair, dividing between them two strands of what Ernst Bloch calls “militant optimism.”37 These experiments in adjustment take less straightforward, more ferocious as well as more satirical forms than those of previous chapters, but they represent key

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contributions to the idiom of bereaved yet still vigorous utopian thought cast in the truncated mold of “Rcsm.” The fourth chapter, “Bad Taste, or Varieties of Empire and Anticolonialism” gathers a wide-ranging, deliberately hodgepodge collection of colonial and anticolonial writings in the Irish Romantic tradition, itself heavily influenced by an ongoing cultural and diplomatic intimacy between Ireland and France. After tracing the rhetoric of imperial sentimentality from Rousseau to Benjamin Constant to Sydney Owenson and Thomas Moore, I turn to Moore’s own Memoirs of Captain Rock as a book that transforms the bad taste of sentiment into a decolonial aesthetic program, one that finds its real-world predicate in the agrarian terrorism of the Rockite Rebellion. “Hazlitt’s Disappointment,” the fifth chapter, follows William Hazlitt’s erratic dealings with a lyric Romanticism whose preferred genre is the fragment poem and a political Romanticism whose preferred mode is the elision of historical consciousness. I argue that Hazlitt’s most compelling expression of what he calls “the spirit of partisanship” appears in the experimental text Liber Amoris, a novel whose own poetic interpolations deepen the relation between the Romantic fragment and the Romantic failure. Hazlitt is thus seen to contribute to a specific presentation of limited—or, to use his word—partisan utopianism whose chief characteristic is that it refuses to abandon the category of the political as a locus of obsessive, self-destructive engagement. My final chapter produces a distinction between the kinds of renunciation I associate with limited utopia and the kinds of renunciation demanded by austerity. We have become increasingly acquainted with the language of austerity since so-called austerity measures have been put in place across the European Union and elsewhere. It is my claim that austerity understood in this most recent sense dates back to the end of the Romantic era, when Thomas Robert Malthus and Harriet Martineau reconceived “economy” as the science of a targeted reduction not simply of public benefits but of the public itself. Interestingly, in Malthus and Martineau’s attacks on population and its growth we find an insistence on marketing restraint (to the working classes) as a source of gratification, not suffering. This might seem to bring austerity in line with what I have been calling the positive pleasures of utopia limited; it is actually (or so I argue) one hallmark of a capitalist pseudo-utopianism that seeks not to reduce the demands human beings make on the world but to meet those demands unevenly. If a traditional understanding of utopia would place equality at the center of its political

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framework, limited utopia would add that this equality must entail an even distribution of restraint as well as an even distribution of depleted resources. Against the asymmetrical economy laid out by Martineau—and mimicked narratively through her highly original use of free indirect discourse—this chapter sets the low-impact aesthetics of John Clare and John Keats, whose celebrated “Ode to Psyche” and lesser-known “Think not of it, sweet one, so” provide a conclusion. Again, the tropology of limited utopia exists independently of the ideological content of the texts from which it is mined. Even when that content is liberal or quiescent, a specific deployment of literary and aesthetic techniques and elements—shape, structure, genre, rhetoric, meter, figure, and so on—is found to help constitute the artwork as what Adorno calls a “meditation” on political freedom as well as an extension “into the conception of [freedom’s] possible realization.”38 For Adorno, the meaning of such meditations may only be clarified by a serious formalism, an interpretive method that believes in the existence of a spontaneous, self-determining poiesis capable of rearranging some small part of the world, as both synecdoche and dry run of a more comprehensive transformation of reality’s dark materials. And yet, we might well ask what “self-determining” or “spontaneous” can mean for a species threatened by ecological disaster. Or, to adapt François’s forecast of the critique that might be launched at her own theory of “recessive action,” “why assume the deferral” or abbreviation of utopian longing “has any oppositional value in a culture of perpetually deferred satisfaction?”39 Faced with the foreshortening of planetary life, and with a global regime bent on appropriating oppositionality as such, Utopia, Limited rethinks deferral in reference to the desirability of constraint, whether ecosystemic, material, or affective. It reads the Romantic pursuit of limitation against the grain of a mass idealization of the unrestrained and inexhaustibly available, and as a hypothesis concerning the virtue of other, more productively exacting models of existence. Such models do not always advertise themselves as “positive” in the sense of confident, encouraging, or glad, let alone optimistic. If it is, however, an ecological certainty that “every species, not only the human species, is at every moment constructing and destroying the world it inhabits,” their active reorientation around the relative aptness or prestige of these processes—creation and destruction, multiplication and diminishment, self-extension and depletion—also warrants new temperamental and emotive patterns, and not

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only as regards the elaboration of “a sensible environmental politics.”40 As it turns out, Romantic scenes of adjustment are often saturated with good, even rapturous feeling; this provides a clue that limitation may be called utopian only if it is not treated as cognate to defeat, or as an abandonment of optimism rather than its reinvention. For Bloch, all optimism has to be militant lest it risk appearing, “in the face of the misery of the world, not merely wicked but feeble-minded.”41 Throughout this book I therefore oppose the pleasures of adjustment to the more robust pleasures that accompany what Leigh Hunt, in an attack on Shelley’s critics in his own review of The Revolt of Islam, calls the “confound[ing]” of “despondency with knowledge.”42 Hunt’s claim is based on his belief that the mainstream or (as it were) establishment literature of the early nineteenth century had become increasingly “dogmatic in [its] despair” and so keen to assert a mistaken identity between hopelessness and wisdom. Utopia, Limited tarries with another kind of Romanticism by insisting that divestment from regimes of absolute, comprehensive gratification may be a source of politically efficacious joy.43 Divestment, of course, is a genre of political act, one that entails the public and collective disbanding of economic attachments to states that sponsor injustice. Non-violent but not exactly non-punitive, divestment makes its point by withdrawing from the scene of moral crime. Although the performances of divestment I consider are largely allegorical—which is to say, they are fictional representations of fictional undertakings that invite themselves to be reproduced, sometimes in altered form, in real life—they too are committed to dismantling what is morally and materially unviable in this world. This program, which by definition proceeds through a partial removal or negation of that which is already present, is also an affirmation of that which is not yet fully tangible. Its purpose is to strengthen the bond to futures that refuse to be beyond imagining, in all their vulnerability. Paulò majora canamus—let us sing, says Wordsworth, via Vergil, of slightly greater things. Romanticism applies the lessons of art to consider how slightness might be optimized as a principled relation to imperiled life. It presents both for and ahead of its time a sincere response to environmental devastation that counters fictions of unlimited access and achievement by embracing the material constraints exemplified by aesthetic form. When it comes to the hard work of living limitedly, the Romantics have been here before us, at least in theory. What follows uses their insights to sketch a roadmap for our own restricted present.44

CHAPTER ONE

Rcsm, an Introduction “Minuteness is their whole Beauty[.]” —William Blake, Annotations to the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, c.1798–1809

has become synonymous with excess and extravagance, William Blake had a soft spot for the hard limit—in Susan Wolfson’s words, for “a complex formalist poetic” that marries a revolutionary’s impatience with rules for the sake of rules and an essentially “artistic” veneration of the line.1 In the Descriptive Catalogue, his guide to an exhibition of his watercolors and drawings held in 1809, Blake offers his best-known articulation of the theory of “the bounding line,” a compositional device that is at once pictorial, sculptural, architectural, and epigenetic: ALTHOUGH HIS NAME

The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling. Great inventors, in all ages knew this: Protogenes and Apelles knew each other by this line. Rafael and Michael Angelo, and Albert Durer, are known by this and this alone. The want of this determinate and bounding form evidences the want of idea in the artist’s mind and the pretense of the plagiary in all its branches. How do we distinguish the oak from the beech, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding line? How do we distinguish one face or countenance from another, but by the bounding

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line and its infinite inflexions and movements? What is it that builds a house and plants a garden, but the definite and determinate? What is it that distinguishes honesty from knavery, but the hard and wirey line of rectitude and certainty in the actions and intentions. Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be drawn out upon it before man and beast can exist.2

Like Blake himself, this brief manifesto sits uneasily within a literary movement that produced Wordsworth’s far more neat and ringing equation of poetry with “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”3 That version of Romanticism idealizes the free play of emotion while also brokering peace with the checks imposed upon it, as Coleridge says, “from without.”4 As the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads explains, the disciplinary effects of, say, meter are useful when it comes to “tempering the painful feeling, which will always be found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper passions”—a therapeutic alibi for meter as “the co-presence of something regular” that seems to demote order to an ancillary of sensuous aesthetic pleasure.5 Blake, by contrast, identifies art essentially as a labor of control, contingent upon a formal technology of detaining thought and matter within a set of boundaries that are fixed but elastic, subject to “inflexion” or modularity. Without lines, says the Catalogue, there would be no art; there would also be no species, no shelter, no orchards, vegetable plots or flower patches, no ethics, no actions, no “life itself.” Far from formless, life in Blake’s eyes is material honed by a “definite and determinate” application of external force until it is able to shift for or motivate itself. Thus what Wolfson calls Blake’s “poetic,” or particular way of shaping semantic elements into metaphoric expression, is also a world-making methodology that begins with the anti-entropic formalization of the abstract in and as the concrete, and that advances, as Steven Goldsmith puts it, through an exuberant experimental “process of delineation and re-lineation.”6 This book investigates and extols the positive perspective on form native to the long utopian tradition of Romantic literature. Although the Romanticism I focus on is primarily British, its utopian formalism finds its most loyal inheritors in the group of thinkers known collectively as the Frankfurt School, whose own focus is so often trained upon the German Romantic period. One such inheritor is Walter Benjamin, who finds in the two-handed campaign of contraction and expansion mounted by the dialectical image a

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glimmer of “utopia” dependent upon but stubbornly sovereign with respect to the commodity form.7 Another is Ernst Bloch, who insists on the existence of a “concrete Utopia” embedded within artifacts that draw attention to their own imperfect edges. Most central to this study is Theodor Adorno, whose lectures on negative dialectics seek a “utopia of cognition” made possible by the work of art as a material site that shows us, within its bounded frame, how to think about things we have no prior mental language for thinking about.8 All three of these writers contribute to a neo-Marxian formalism determined to emphasize the exemplary status of the artwork. That emphasis is crucial for my purposes, insofar as it prevents the “limited” part of “utopia, limited” from being received merely as a synonym for “failed,” “unfinished,” or even “good enough for now.” Blake’s conception of a poem, an oak, or a beech tree is not that they represent best-guess approximations of desirable but presently unachievable things, and limited utopia, on my account, is not a collection of “implicit images of the good society” yet to come.9 Rather, I argue, Romantic literature functions as utopian thought insofar as it takes its own formalism to mime a minimally harmful relationship between human beings and a world whose resources are decidedly finite. To be sure, that commitment, which we might call broadly ecological, is not especially perspicuous in the output of the Frankfurt School or its successors. Looking back to Romanticism helps us see how what Adorno describes as “the cost of severing” the artwork from its own materiality might be counted toward the accumulation of new ways of living the damaged and damaging life of industrial modernity, whose rise in the mid-eighteenth century coincides with the emergence of Romanticism as a cultural movement.10 Where Adorno is drawn to the “romanticism of disillusion”—on display, to take his example, in the Winterreise of Schubert—for the ways in which it places the renunciation of desire “at its centre,” the Romanticism in which this book deals yokes an aesthetic protocol to an ethical one, locating in the Blakean boundedness of the work of art a model for the positive attenuation of desire’s impacts on a material world under evermore impossible duress.11 In his multi-volume study of utopia, Bloch dates the practice of representing the perfect world back to antiquity, although, as he notes elsewhere, it took until the sixteenth century for Thomas More to coin a term for this “wishland” that permanently congealed its identity between the possible and the improbable: utopia, a compound of the Greek negatory prefix ou- and the word topos (place), means “the no-place” or the place that does

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not exist, but it also sounds, punningly, like it could be spelled eutopia, “the good place.”12 That pun and the tension it inscribes are not often raised to salience in this book, whose interest lies in a literary and philosophical undertaking—Romanticism—uniquely concerned with the realization that while the resources of the natural world are far from neverending, human desire is “infinite, eternal, and hence apocalyptic,” destructive to the degree that it yearns to uncover and to obtain that which has lain dormant.13 Such a Romanticism is therefore estranged from the wish that the world be made perfect in the usual sense, since the word “perfect” (to continue in this vein) effectively means “made all the way through.” A world perfected, presumably, is a world with all its reserves and their potential exhausted. Northrop Frye, who might seem to have little in common with Frankfurt-style formalism, captures this alternate allegiance of Romantic literature when he suggests that it sees itself as marking “the imaginative limit of desire,” tarrying in its own execution along the boundaries between what human beings want and what they can and cannot, should and should not have.14 Reading with Blake and forward to Adorno and Frye, we find an understanding of utopia that begins to peel away from perfection, and from perfection’s etymological commitment to ambition fully implemented. We also find a Romantic tradition that exceeds normative periodizations of “the Romantic,” breaking with the wishlands of earlier cultures to respond more directly to the pressures of an industrial and, later, post-industrial, context. Understood as a mode of visionary minimalism, this Romantic tradition is foreign to recent treatments of utopia, and some of those treatments are actively hostile to it. Long before he composed his magisterial Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson criticized Blake and Frye, despite the “collective and Utopian resonance” of their writings, for affirming the outcomes of boundedness. The “figural and political momentum” of Blake’s prophecies and Frye’s criticism is not merely slackened but, Jameson claims, “broken [by being] reprivatized in the . . . purely individual terms of the isolated body,” whether it is the body of Frye’s hero-archetype or of Blake’s vividly muscular renderings of the human form.15 But the containment of energy need not be tantamount to its reprivatization nor even its commodification, and one might not misleadingly characterize this book as a response to Jameson’s suspicion regarding utopian science fiction in particular and art in general: that to retrieve politically instructive content from the “purely individual” body of the artwork is to be seduced by the mere phantasm of resolution to

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class struggle projected formally by the artwork itself. My reaction to this forceful, highly influential critique of “immanent criticism” adopts Frye’s reliance on that aforementioned imaginative limit, a term Jameson (in his reading of Frye and elsewhere) often conflates with narrative and ideological “closure.”16 By interpreting form’s binding operation as a mode of “engaged withdrawal” from illusions of plenitude or infinite renewability, Romanticism holds that the art-object’s relation to its own totality is predicated on the curtailment of matter in space.17 This curtailment, I argue, allegorizes the proper orientation of human beings toward an existence motivated by appetite but capped by planetary exigence. I therefore call works of art goads to utopian thought when they do not posit the transcendence of material constraints as their ultimate goal, but rather ground their solicitation of a better world in forms whose effects are actively limited and limiting. Surprisingly, Romantic literature also presents such effects as enabling to the very extent that they are privative, and pleasurable to the extent that they resituate pleasure on a continuum with renunciation and loss. Frye, for his part, finds boundedness everywhere, including among the ranks of those spatial or topographical archetypes he identifies as “the city, the garden, the farm, the sheep-fold[.]”18 Students of British Romanticism will recognize these images as central to the body of texts that make up their field: “For I was reared/In the great city, pent ’mid cloisters dim”; “[A]nd now with treble soft/The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft”; “Yet many rural sounds and rural sights/Live in the village still about the farms”; “Near the tumultuous brook of Greenhead Ghyll,/In that deep valley, Michael had designed/To build a Sheepfold[.]”19 Sometimes these archetypes materialize specifically to be threatened by the onslaught of industry; sometimes they are there, like Coleridge’s great city, to do the threatening. In each case, they cross paths with processes of modernization fueled by capitalism’s signature ideology of untrammeled self-determination, while simultaneously offering to correct a fundamental fallacy concerning utopia: that for a world to be perfect, it must be unconditionally so. This is a Romanticism that defines utopianism as an investment in limitations, a definition derived from the basic claim that the ethico-political project of utopia is formally analogous to the project of art, but also from an early projection of Karl Marx’s late-Romantic critique of the way capitalism forces us to regard the concept of “rights,” especially the right to property. Riffing on Article 16 of the French revolutionary Constitution of 1793, which defines the right

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to property as the individual’s prerogative “to enjoy and dispose at will of his goods, his revenues[,] and the fruit of his work and industry,” Marx acidly concludes: “The right to private property is therefore the right to enjoy and dispose of one’s resources as one wills, without regard for other men and independently of society.” This “individual freedom” and its “application” make up “the foundation of [a] civil society” that wrongly leads “each man to see in other men not the realization but the limitation of his own freedom.”20 The full significance of Marx’s assessment is only clear once we realize its corollary is that regard for other men and dependence on society ought to function as caps on personal freedom, and that those caps are actually what enable freedom’s “realization.” This gorgeously rendered paradox represents the culmination of a certain strand of post-Enlightenment thought, a strand that ultimately upholds limitation as the prerequisite to a social existence able to reach its full potential only insofar as it abandons the imperative of its complete fulfillment, where fulfillment is catastrophically aligned with the unlimited use, deployment, and consumption of “resources,” whatever their provenance. Versions of this idea are worked out across the writings of the Romantics, not least in Marx’s beloved Shelley. In the texts I consider here, the materialist orientation central to Marx is displaced from the realm of philosophical and sociological analysis and onto the world of the literary object, whose own paradigmatic resources comprise form, rhetoric, figure, language, and language’s tonal effects. Blake has told us that without limits, a work of art is just a set of squiggles on the page, or a string of nonsensical letters and sounds, but it would be a mistake to praise the restrictive effects of formalization solely for their more generative, more gratifying properties. It is as a partially prohibitive, semi-disabling force that Romanticism promotes the limit as a sociopolitical as well as an aesthetic technology—on the grounds that, without limits, utopia is merely an extension of the world as we know it, blighted by the hunger for having it all. I propose, in short, that the Romantics think about utopia in the same way as they think about art, as a means of capturing and thereby emancipating an infinite human potential within a finite space. This emancipation is a partial or, better, a bounded one, in the same sense as mathematicians speak of bounded infinity and Blake speaks of his bounding line.21 In its literary instances, it follows the Romantic linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt in treating language as an “infinite employment of finite means” and the text as a crossroads where limited

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space meets a closed but polymorphic set of linguistic meanings.22 That said, although this book does focus on literature, theories of limited utopia are on offer across a variety of media, especially in cases where an enthusiasm for the discourse of form is used self-consciously at once to correct aesthetic ideals of spontaneous disorganized expression and political ideals of unlimited freedom. The philosopher Nelson Goodman, for one, holds that all artworks are necessarily limited, roping off some space in the physical world and re-ordering it syntactically, according to rules of lexical, visual, aural, and symbolic grammar that can be applied in a vast though not ungoverned variety of ways. “Any thickening or thinning of the line, its color, its contrast with the background, its size, even the qualities of the paper,” none of these “can be ignored” as a meaningful adaptation of those rules. However, the fact that there are rules—that there is, for example, an intelligible difference between “a diagram” and “a picture,” between the noises a baby makes and Wordsworth’s cocks crowing “to-whoo, to-whoo”—remains.23 The limited utopianism of Romantic literature presents this condition in order to engage actively with the regulatory properties of form and language, and also with their more elaborate composites. It is a mode of making and thinking whose horizon is abbreviated possibility, in particular the possibility that human energies might be directed not toward overcoming barriers to a wholly liberated future, but on making them objects of desire in their own right. At the heart of this argument about abbreviation lies a text that was never finished. This is Frye’s “Third Book” project, his plans for which are scattered across four recently published notebooks and a small handful of typed memos, and which Frye describes as “pure Blake”—adding, in a flourish of self-reflexive metacriticism, “I’ll never get out of that framework, I suppose[.]”24 The stated task of the Third Book was to prove a triangulated link between Romantic literature, the genre of romance, and utopian philosophy. A detective story told in fragments and allusive asides, the notebooks record a scholar’s mission to solve what Frye presents as the central enigma of Romanticism: is its idiosyncratic and revolutionary conception of aesthetics partnered by an idiosyncratic and revolutionary conception of politics? This may seem an atypical concern for Frye, whose better-known works— like the study of Blake in Fearful Symmetry or the programmatic Anatomy of Criticism—usually treat genre alone as the master key to all questions, whether literary, political, or existential. The notebooks, in all their messy and occasionally profane excitement, offer something different by engaging

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in multiple acts of utopian cognition, a series of stabs at the development of a new vocabulary for aesthetic experience and its apparent or ideal consequences. Leaving genre largely off to the side, the notebooks use the language of feeling, sense, mood, tone, atmosphere, and irony, arranging these terms into what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls a nonce taxonomy, a “making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of old and new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take to make up a world.”25 In this case, the world that interests Frye is one to which he gives the name “Rcsm.” This stenographer’s shorthand for Romanticism encloses contiguous sections of literary and political history, and is powered by a utopian drive at once timeless and rooted somewhere between 1789 and 1832. Rcsm, it turns out, is for Frye the missing vertex of a philosophical triangle mapping out three options for modernity: between the “political contract-utopia” of the Enlightenment and the sometimes curt, sometimes dreamy meliorism of “the nineteenth-century thought people” John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and William Morris, Rcsm offers itself as a theory of “low adjustment utopia,” a vision of a better world neither cleaved off nor materially distinct from our own (68).26 If “high adjustment,” according to Frye, names the philosophical impulse (exemplified, in the Third Book manuscripts, by Plato) to dissociate from, transcend, or break and remake the world as it is, low adjustment is characterized by “a sort of as you were feeling,” in which case we have to ask how an adjustment, a change, could also be a return to business as usual (89). Shakespeare’s comedies and romances famously restore order to a topsy-turvy world while contributing some added value, like a marriage or reconciliation between parent and child, but these are adjustments of plot, not sense, of diegesis, not aesthesis. One of the purposes of this introductory chapter will be to explore Frye’s baseline assumption that the discourse of Romanticism is partially sustained by an idiomatic shift in the meaning of “romance,” which formerly designated a type of storytelling but, around the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, begins to signify an affective state marked above all else by the longing for improvement upon the ordinary. Something about Rcsm’s interest in adjustment hinges on the transmutation of chivalric romance into “the romantic comedy,” which is less about people partnering off than about the emergence of a new sort of realism that renders “reality” as “a quantum, a certain charge or energy of perception” (287). Ultimately, the romance of low adjustment expressed by Rcsm has nothing to do with

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plot or even theme. It has to do with the imagination and representation of a world where the extraordinary is newly calibrated to the ordinary in such a way that everyday life crackles with that “certain charge” while remaining recognizably pedestrian, grounded by and upon the earth. Such calibrations are achieved through a mutual attunement of feeling and form, a controversial term that in its most basic sense signifies an ad-hoc device for bringing together non-identical things in what Wordsworth calls “an intertexture,” in this case a literary space where “ordinary feeling” is cross-hatched by unusual “excitement.”27 In the literature of Rcsm, a reflexive engagement with formal constraints acts out the experience of learning to manage with less. It is a literature that develops the paradigm of utopia limited by considering occasions when the human demand for a better world is matched by the recognition that the world can only take so much of human demands. Rcsm uses the winnowing properties of form to dramatize the possibility of managing this recognition and all that follows from it, a large task for which its own small name provides an elementary prototype. As Frye says of Blake’s images of “wriggling vines & snakes, flames & the like,” the formalism of Rcsm produces “a sense of arrested energy” that, in turn, seems to convey that “every object”—even a line on the page—“is an event,” most crucially the event of its own adaptation to being detained (14). Perhaps more controversial than the assertion that such an adaptation or, again, adjustment is a formal principle is the very idea of claiming it as a utopian one. Isn’t is possible, to invoke Mark Seltzer’s penetrating assessment, that a utopianism of “the scaled-down” risks confusing the “distinction between an alternative . . . and an acclimatization or adjustment” to the world as it is?28 The history of the Romantic period does not seem to offer much in the way of a defense: typically situated between the French Revolution and the passing of the First Reform Bill, Romanticism is caught up in a trajectory from revolution to reform, and it can easily look like a radical movement that morphs into a politically accommodationist or “acclimatizing” one. But what if we thought of Romanticism not as a passage from greater to lesser degrees of radicalism, but as a body of literature interested in reclaiming the value of less? If that value is not as obviously salient in the context of the enlargement of the political franchise, it gathers legitimacy in relation to the history of industrialization and its attendant harms: these include the growth of economic inequality in Europe and America and the metastasis of imperialism as much as they do enclosure, deforestation, and

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the extinction of innumerable species. While it is not as though these two histories are unrelated—John Clare’s 1821 poem “To a Fallen Elm” observes, almost off-handedly, that the modern concept of “the right of freedom” directly “injure[s]” the rights of nature and of the poor—letting industry serve as Romanticism’s most relevant background helps us read its key texts as expressions of a longing to minimize the impact of human beings on their physical world.29 What looks like reform through one lens might look like another kind of radicalism through another, specifically a radicalism that contests political economies underwritten by the injunction toward having it all. To borrow the poet Thom Gunn’s nicely turned phrase, this Romanticism is not drawn “into a Horatian acceptance of comfortable limitations,” nor does it follow Rousseau’s dictum that if we “never go beyond [our] rights . . . eventually they will be limitless.”30 On the contrary, it rejects the allure of limitlessness and even of comfort, modeling a renunciatory practice applied first, if not foremost, to the aesthetic artifact. * * * At first blush, limitation can seem like a repressive procedure ripe for satire, and indeed, this book takes its title from an eminently satirical 1893 operetta by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan.31 That Utopia, Limited tells the story of a group of British businessmen, soldiers, and politicians brought to a paradisiacal island in the South Seas by one Princess Zara, who is eager to reform the political economy of her kingdom on the British model. The island of Utopia is soon under the sway of its visitors, who encourage Zara to incorporate her kingdom as a limited liability company and, taking things even further, to do the same to each of Utopia’s natives: thanks to the enterprising Mr. Goldbury, a “company promoter” who becomes the Comptroller of Utopia, “every man, woman, and child” is remade as “a Company Limited with liability restricted to the amount of his declared Capital!” Meanwhile, the advances brought by colonialism are soon shown to have some unexpected drawbacks. Under the influence of Pax Britannica, the army is without work; the island is so hygienic that doctors are no longer needed; the reduction in crime puts lawyers out of a job. A solution is reached when Zara completes Utopia’s metamorphosis into a modern nation by changing her government to a two-party system, which ensures that every opportunity for progress will get caught in its gears. “No political measures will endure,” crows Zara, for “one Party will assuredly undo all that the other Party has done,” leaving

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the island in a state of unpleasant but reliable equilibrium with “sickness in plenty, endless lawsuits, crowded jails, interminable confusion in the Army and Navy, and, in short, general and unexampled prosperity!”32 Left at last not as a kingdom but a corporation, with an abused population of virtual stockholders, Zara’s Utopia appears very much as a late-Victorian laboratory for the disaster capitalism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.33 Its ideal circumstance is the boom and bust cycle of war, mass incarceration, and untreated epidemics each vying with the other to temper the economically insupportable condition of peace, while the actual “utopian potential of the nation” is curdled into an evaluation of “declared Capital.”34 Here, the principle of limitation acts as a synecdoche for “the union of colonialism and corporate capitalism,” and this union “is precisely what transforms ‘Utopia’ into ‘Utopia, Limited.’” It is also the target of Gilbert and Sullivan’s satire, which Carolyn Williams calls an “anti-capitalist” send up of the Victorian “attitudes involved in imperial domination,” including a fondness for the highly effective “alliance of capitalism and bureaucracy.”35 The Romantic period takes up a wholly different though, I think, equally anti-capitalist perspective on limitation, one that shies away from the opinion that true utopianism requires the absolute freedom of the individual from all and any constraints. Far from accommodating itself to the fantasies of perpetual availability and unregulated consumption that sponsor the disasters of capital, the special genre of Romantic writing I follow Frye in calling Rcsm strives for a gentling of our imaginative and appetitive powers, helping them discover finitude as a mode of utopian longing that can be tender and mild, but also elated, impassioned, even euphoric. With Rcsm, we are dealing with the art of what Frye calls the imagination’s “adapt[ion] . . . to the demands of [a] world” that is “separate from itself,” subject to all different sorts of physical and moral laws.36 The ostensible insolubility of these two projects, namely unlocking “utopian potential” and containing human excess, is overcome in Rcsm according to a principle of restraint by which a high-stakes fantasy of perfection is grounded in determinate compositional principles.Under the aegis of the Rscm set out by Frye, utopia becomes visible as a situation of maximum liability in which we confront the necessity of relinquishing what sustains us, including the inequitably distributed perversions of an unsustainable “prosperity.” Michael Dolzani, the editor of Frye’s posthumously published writings, observes that “the notebooks for [his] unfinished Third Book project . . .

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reveal a major mystery, perhaps the major mystery of the whole Frye corpus.”37 The mystery, again, involves the question of how to connect the category of utopia to the category of Romanticism. Whether Frye knew it or not, “Rcsm,” his notation for “Romanticism,” hints at a possible resolution to his literary-theoretical and literary-historical conundrum. Rcsm is, quite literally, the abbreviated form of Romanticism. It makes visible on the page the down-tuning of an aspirational form to its not-quite-barest minimum. Left with a handful of consonants, at least two more than a person might need to read over his notes and see that he’d meant “Romanticism,” we find that the scaffold of the Romantic idea, far from being miserly and prohibitive, invites us to fill in the blanks. Rcsm turns out to be the little abbreviation that could, an expansive category that actively contests the “crass . . . delusion” that “whatever bends a norm is politically radical,” and whatever upholds paradigms of restriction and constraint authoritarian or fascistic.38 Another thing about Rcsm is that it prunes its own “ism,” or its discursive bias. Jerome McGann might describe this elision as one of those “extreme forms of displacement and poetic conceptualization whereby the actual human issues with which [Romanticism] is concerned are resituated in a variety of idealized localities”—so idealized, in this instance, that the suffix pointing toward them has been almost entirely erased.39 But what if we see the four letters R-C-S-M as revealing, in their compact agility, something that is “actual” and concrete? What if the “human issue” encoded in Frye’s abbreviation is the necessity of reducing, contracting, abridging, cutting-back and paring-down not only to imagining but actually to making a world lightened of the burden of furnishing abundance? Frye himself struggled to separate the ideological attitude he calls “Liberal” from the aesthetic state he calls “Anticlimax,” both of which he associates, in various ways and at various times, with the Romantic utopia of low adjustment. Literary expressions of Rcsm, however, take another path, disentangling a counterrevolutionary liberalism from the renunciatory art of the diminuendo. It is from such expressions that a theoretical vocabulary of Romantic utopianism might be derived and, more to the point, used to renegotiate the rights of desire within a timeframe of accelerating loss. What about Romanticism’s own origins in romance, which remained a preoccupation of Frye’s throughout his career? How might those origins direct how Rcsm reshapes Romanticism? Like Modernism, Romanticism is a field that takes its name from a complex concept. If the “modern” in

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Modernism designates a perpetual newness, radiant both with excitement and apprehension, the “romance” in Romanticism seems to embrace anachronism even as it too promises to rupture the mainstream into which it charges. Harold Bloom famously explains Romanticism as “the internalization of quest-romance,” starring the poet as the hero who must find some lost or forgotten psychic object.40 This psychodramatic account of Romanticism has its roots in an actual historical and literary event, namely the chivalric revival of the mid to late-eighteenth century. Spearheaded by scholars like the antiquarian Richard Hurd, rhetoricians like Edmund Burke, and writers like Walter Scott, chivalric Romanticism is publicly conservative in temperament, but it also paves the way for what David Duff calls a “politically radical cult of chivalry, conceived in deliberate opposition to the dominant ideology of the chivalric revival.”41 Duff ’s cases in point are Shelley’s Queen Mab and The Revolt of Islam, poems that reclaim the symbolic oratory of romance from seminal texts like Scott’s 1808 poem Marmion, which begins by hailing William Pitt and Admiral Nelson alongside Spenser and Malory. Crucially, whether they are radical or reactionary in their politics, Duff ’s romances are consistently united by certain “motifs.”42 Thus when Shelley writes a poem in Spenserian stanzas, or Scott sets Ivanhoe in the aftermath of the Third Crusade, both writers activate a cultural inheritance that, in their own historical moment, is redistributed across a cluster of self-consciously archaic gestures capable of asserting a partisan relationship to the present as well as to the past. Meanwhile, when romance was not popping up in the shape of Scott’s chevaliers or Shelley’s fairy queens, conventional scholarly wisdom holds that the eighteenth century saw it evolve from what Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary calls “a tale of wild adventures” into the “smooth tale” of domestic concerns set within a probabilistic architecture—into, that is, the realist novel.43 In Jameson’s well-known account, the realist novel picks up where romance leaves off by substituting “new positivities” for older narrative regimes of cause and effect: psychology overtakes allegory, science overtakes the gods, economics overtakes providence, mathematics overtakes magic.44 Sometimes romance survives the novel’s ascension by cloaking itself in various kinds of disguise: often it lights out for the unsettled territory of genre fiction, where magic is tolerated by virtue of its transformation into fantasy. Other times even realist novels, as Jameson points out, take occasional detours in the world of romance, as Louisa Gradgrind does when she visits the circus in Hard Times: there, romance is a heterotopia, a space

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of difference and eccentricity eking out its existence on the margins of a hyper-regulated industrial society. As instructive as both motif-driven and narratological readings of romance are, they also consistently filter it through what Ellen Rooney calls “the reductive prism of theme,” an optic that ultimately enables “an evasion of form.” Additionally, even as it strives to identify particular signs or symbols as reflective of certain sectarian persuasions, “thematic reading” may end up performing a “depoliticization” of the formal dimensions of literature and, Rooney adds, of social life.45 It so happens, however, that the Romantics dependably read romance into Romanticism without recourse to theme. For Helen Maria Williams, appropriating romance to modernity depends on romance’s spontaneous abstraction from its own decorative elements. Letters from France, her multi-volume eyewitness account of the early years of the French Revolution, undertakes such an abstraction in pursuit of a feminist revolutionary historiography that joins in the archive of abbreviation collated by the veiled kinship of Rcsm and romance: [L]iving in France at present appears to me somewhat like living in a region of romance. Events the most astonishing and marvellous [sic] are here the occurrences of the day, and every newspaper is filled with articles of intelligence that will form a new era in the history of mankind. The sentiments of the people are also elevated far above the pitch of common life. All the motives which powerfully stimulate the mind in its ordinary state, seem repressed in consideration of the public good; and every selfish interest is sacrificed with fond alacrity on the altar of the country. For my part, while I contemplate these things, I sometimes think that the age of chivalry, instead of being past for ever, is just returned; not indeed in its erroneous notions of loyalty, honor, and gallantry, which are as little ‘a l’ordre du jour’ as its dwarfs, giants, and imprisoned damsels; but in its noble contempt of sordid cares, its spirit of unsullied generosity, and its heroic zeal for the happiness of others.46

From Williams’s high-spirited seesawing between iconography (“dwarfs, giants, and imprisoned damsels”) and inexact but no less vivid states of exhilaration, France emerges as an emotive “region” marked by an experience of disinterest that electrifies the historical present without subjecting it to apotheosis. By pluralizing the objects of political enthusiasm—by wresting it from narrow concepts like “loyalty, honor, and gallantry” and dispersing it across a wide range of beneficiaries—Williams redirects “the astonishing

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and marvellous” toward the less obviously compelling domain of “the public good.” It is this act of redirection, as well as its effects, that are in her sense romantic. Niklas Luhmann has thoroughly traced the philological changeover of “romance” into a synonym for romantic intimacy or, in a word, for love, but the Letters impart not a logic of exemplification by which a regard for “the concreteness and uniqueness of the individual [is] raised to the level of a universalistic principle” but rather a logic of revolutionary desire by which it becomes possible to develop ardent attachments to abstract entities, and in particular to a futurity anticipated as “a new era in the history of mankind.”47 Moreoever, although Williams aims revolutionary sentiment “above the pitch of common life,” that the cradle of this future is the ephemeral, quotidian entity of “every newspaper” suggests that the language of romance, once it unknits itself from generic specificity, furnishes Romanticism with a fit description for the Wordsworthian intertexture of ordinary and extraordinary feeling and circumstance. Williams’s “region of romance,” then, is as much rhetorical as it is spatial and affective. Applying a grammar of contrast that distances past from present from future while confounding them in the abrupt instant of the “just returned,” her Letters mime the adaptation of an outmoded “age of chivalry” to a contemporary “order” stripped of its emblems but alive with its singular sense of wonder. This is a grammar that repossesses romance and, to take a phrase from Wittgenstein, “direct[s] [it] not towards phenomena but, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena,” in this case the possibilities of a minor phenomenon called “the day,” and what awaits on its other side.48 Williams’s romance is a name for the syntactical form of a daily relation to the future, understood in Bloch’s terms as “the possible New.49 Meanwhile, if the romance in Romanticism participates at all in the emergence of a novel vocabulary of love, this love is the kind of philosophic tendre to which Stanley Cavell gives the title of “marriage”—whose quintessential “prospect” is, similarly, “the willing repetition of days.”50 Cavell’s marriage is not a patriarchal ritual or a legal custom but a habit of mind, one connoting fidelity to “the everyday” and “the ordinary” as well as to routines of self-diminishment as the mechanism through which such fidelity is upheld. It is a historical as well as epistemic posture that emerges, Cavell argues, as salve and rejoinder to the skeptical turn of the Enlightenment, and in particular to Hume’s inkling that skepticism, or doubt concerning the human capacity for positive knowledge regarding features of the world, “is a malady which can never be

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radically cured.”51 Following on the heels of the Enlightenment, what Cavell calls “Romanticism” distinguishes itself by its “resettlement of the everyday,” a process that takes place through and is made bearable by an acceptance of the pressures of “human intimacy, call it marriage, or domestication.”52 This intimacy might be conjugal or, as in Williams’s Letters, communal. Diagnosing the impulse that prompts Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner to shoot and kill a friendly albatross, Cavell sees the Mariner as “driven to deny [his] internal, or natural, connection with others, with the social as such” because he is primarily “driven to deny [his] agreement or attunement” to the world in its “finitude”; these two denials subtend a third, namely “that the consequences” of killing the albatross will “be the death of nature, this piece of nature.”53 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner also begins, of course, with the Mariner holding a “Wedding-Guest” back from a marriage feast, forcing his isolation on this innocent bystander “as a punishment” though isolation, rightly understood, is rather the bedrock of life on this, our only ground. Against this sublime antisocial brutality, Cavell asserts a special mode of truncated optimism—“call it” Rcsm—that shifts collective life around an “agreement or attunement” (or an adjustment) to the recalcitrance of other people and of “nature” itself, “hoop[ing]” them together in a “trivial, slight, humble” activity of “diurnal devotedness”: a submissive fidelity to “earth’s diurnal course” sought out with an intensity both staunch and, in the sublunary sense, doomed.54 We find a variation on Cavell’s unassuming but obdurate Rcsm in Germaine de Staël’s definition of the “romantique,” which de Staël represents as a literary movement with a strongly botanical character. In a chapter on classical and romantic literature in her landmark study, D’Allemagne, she makes the intricate assertion that “Romantic literature is the only kind susceptible yet to being perfected, for having its roots in our own soil, it is the only one that can grow and revivify itself.”55 The claim is nationalistic, but its own grammar of possibility is temporal and ecological, yoking cultural transformation to the pregnant near-pauses of seasonal change. This Romanticism conceives potential as susceptibility, as a weakness or (to recall an earlier discussion) as a liability concerning processes of “being perfected.” The idea that “la littérature romantique” has the power to revivify itself suggests not that this literature is somehow indestructible but that it localizes death as part and parcel of its maturation: as some of its tributaries are “adopted” and others “rejected,” Romanticism as a whole endures in

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pruned but resilient form.56 Unlike the Rousseauvian model of simple “perfectibilité,” which Rousseau pinpoints as “une qualité très spécifique qui distingue l’homme,” what we might call De Staël’s susceptibility thesis offers vegetable growth as a “poétique” analogue of the human condition, a deep-rooted articulation of improvement, evolution, in a word, of Bildung.57 For this eminently herbal Romanticism, remaining vulnerable with respect to perfection militates against the threat posed by perfection itself: to echo the warning issued by Friedrich von Schlegel, “the Romantic kind of poetry” should “never be perfected,” for perfection encodes the threat of surfeited life utterly beyond revivification, let alone sustainable maintenance.58 Schlegel also remarks, elsewhere, that the Romantic artist must pursue a dialectical composition that joins the explosive energy of “self-creation” to “the dignity of self-restriction,” but this idea is accompanied by the more conventional dictum that “whenever one does not restrict oneself, one is restricted by the world; and that makes one a slave.”59 De Staël’s more lateral metaphor pries Schlegel’s emphasis on restriction away from his anxiety about enslavement, recasting the necessarily bounded nature of earthly decay and regeneration as a blueprint for the unguarded organism or—as Percy Shelley might have it—the sensitive-plant of Romantic art. If this Romanticism too is (like Williams’s) “founded on the marvelous,” its own diurnal development is fired by a natural, in-born alchemy of augmentation and abridgement.60 De Staël, Schlegel, Williams and, for that matter, Cavell each bear out Hurd’s begrudging acknowledgment that if romance has survived the skeptical Age of the Enlightenment, it is thanks to those writers who have learned “to hide [their] fancies under the cover of moral allegory,” and to strip them of the less fungible markers of generic affiliation. Moral allegory, which (according to Hurd) draws heavily on the technologies of “simile and illustration,” amplifies the mutative possibilities of romance by making it at once less concrete and more strenuously intentional—allegory, after all, does seem to aspire to be real.61 As an optative representation, allegory corresponds “to the unveiling of an authentically temporal destiny,” of the sort de Staël has in mind when she ties the evolutionary liability of Romantic writing to the upkeep of soil-based life.62 Thomas Carlyle has it exactly right when, translating a review of de Staël’s essay in 1830, he insists that the word “Romantisch, ‘romantic,’ is used here in a scientific sense and has no concern with the writing or reading (or acting) of ‘romances.’”63 It is used, rather, as Friedrich Engels would use the word “scientific” when, half a century

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later, he writes of a “scientific socialism” defined by the specificity of its direction, its impulse toward knowledge, and its refusal to make premature claims to knowledge’s possession.64 The allegorical or figurative impetus of romance seems, surprisingly perhaps, to be its most scientific attribute, for as de Staël suggests it allows us to redefine romance itself as a plan for dealing with some imminent content, in this case the imminent content of a future whose matter and shape are yet unknown, but which will have to “grow and revivify” in this world—will have to assume an authentically temporal destiny—and no other. Romance, in short, saddles Romanticism with unfinished business, packing into its etymological heart the germ of a genetic capacity to improve with time without sanctioning the pursuit of exhaustive self-development. On the one hand, the romance lurking inside Romanticism exposes it to indeterminate but presumptively better futures. On the other, it reins in these visionary impulses by securing them to modes of ordinariness from the intimate to the calendrical, bonding convention to innovation in an effort to marry future to present tenses. The result might be, and has been, precipitously taken as evidence of “a striking contrast between the radicalism of the critique and the timidity of the solutions imagined”—a phrase as easily applied to the political heritage of the Enlightenment as to Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads which, as Coleridge would point out, is arguably more daring than the poems themselves.65 How then to account for Romanticism without making a negative example of its powerlessness to procure a world radically transformed, its problems en route to their “solutions”? The literature of the period suggests that we shift our attention to Rscm, which is to say to allegorical practices for envisioning utopia in the midst of an impoverished present, much like the one Lyrical Ballads describes. Perhaps Romanticism is not “timid” at all. Perhaps, as Rcsm, it becomes an occasion to dramatize how art works as a propositional grammar of the political imagination, a hypothesis about the organization of finite things (matter, shapes, bodies) in dwindling space. And perhaps Rcsm, finally, is in quest of the ordinary because the ordinary is a medium through which we contact the determinate and determining, learning how to dwell in embodied proximity to possible worlds no less rich for their simultaneous recession into and emergence from the mundane. As Cavell is careful to point out, such a quest entails “the creation of a new inhabitation,” a changed way of sharing “our habitat.” It succeeds as a “resettlement” only if the colonial reach of that

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word and that practice is sheared off in the name of a more literal settling, a coming to rest as lightly as possible in and with what is already underfoot.66 Throughout this book, we will see how the positive attenuation of romance into Rcsm is enabled by formal operations whose capacity to diminish and contain is welcomed as a respite from the injunction to experience life as abundance, or to imagine a better future as a condition without defect. I want to conclude this introduction to Rcsm by considering how a certain anxiety about form and formalism native to anti-utopian discourse in the Romantic period migrates, in striking and important ways, into contemporary expressions of utopian politics. Working with the distinguished example of Edmund Burke, David Simpson has detailed the emergence of a conservative “disposition against theory” and abstract thought in the eighteenth century as a sensibility violently opposed to the formalization of human and social life.67 I will take Wordsworth’s Burkean poem The Excursion as my own example of a text that recoils from abstraction as the methodological product of form both poetic and institutional. Part of what made Wordsworth’s conservative turn so appalling to some of his contemporaries was that it continued to privilege the younger Wordsworth’s investment in the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling while merging with a rigid (if also vaguely defined) loyalty to Church and King.68 In The Excursion, the Ancient Mariner-like figure known as the Solitary recounts his experience of the French Revolution as a kind of trauma by form, which thins out the intensity of his personal attachments while also holding him hostage to the Revolutionary project; in this, The Excursion reverses the rhetorical handiwork of Williams’ Letters, casting philanthropic disinterest as an hallucinatory attitude capable only of vitiating “the native grandeur of the human soul.”69 A hermit of sorts—he keeps a waterlogged copy of Candide in his cave—the Solitary explains his initial attraction to the Revolution as the byproduct of grief following his wife’s death. It was, he says, the news from France that allowed him, for a time, to be “reconverted to the world”: Society became my glittering bride, And airy hopes my children.—From the depths Of natural passion, seemingly escaped, My soul diffused itself in wide embrace Of institutions, and the forms of things; As they exist, in mutable array,

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Upon life’s surface. What, though in my veins There flowed no Gallic blood, nor had I breathed The air of France, not less than Gallic zeal Kindled and burned among the sapless twigs Of my exhausted heart. If busy men In sober conclave met, to weave a web Of amity, whose living threads should stretch Beyond the seas, and to the farthest pole, There did I sit, assisting. If, with noise And acclamation, crowds in open air Expressed the tumult of their minds, my voice There mingled, heard or not. (734–752)

At first, the Solitary’s account of himself as having no native relationship to France—he has no French blood, he has breathed no French air—reads as a cosmopolitan testament to his “not less than Gallic zeal.” It turns out, however, that what the poem seeks to indict as the slippery, superficial domain of the political holds itself together by dismantling a person’s relationship to his own sensorium, not to mention his soul. The enjambment of “veins” and, in the next line, “breathed” holds the Solitary’s circulatory pathways at a distance from what they live on, namely “blood” and “air.” Lungs and veins are thus to air and blood what “institutions” are to the soul: a vacancy inside of which things that truly matter get lost. The same goes for the “exhausted heart” incinerated by the Solitary’s impermanent “zeal” which, with that emphatically ironic litotes affixed to its front (“not less than”) hangs teetering at the end of Wordsworth’s line. “Diffused” across five lines—from “What, though in my veins” to “of my exhausted heart”—the Solitary’s body is divided into solitary body systems, floating ever apart and away from one another. The overall effect is one of sensation evacuating itself from structure or “the forms of things,” of experience being imagined only in the negative and anxiogenic terms of what it cannot touch. When the Solitary does manage to get his hands on something, the quality of his engagement with the Revolution remains flabby and uncertain. Even as his comrades plait together the bonds of friendship and fraternal love, the Solitary mopes upon a participle, awkwardly “assisting.” As it abuts the caesura that follows hard upon it, the feminine ending of that word drags the Solitary downward until it seems perfectly appropriate for his voice

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to be muted by the tumult of a crowd—not that it matters for, as the poem demurs, he might be “heard or not.” The formalism of governance weakens his metrical virility to the point of its disappearance, and while this passage may begin by promising the high drama of a religious experience (“Thus was I reconverted to the world”) it quickly peters out when faced with the abstract demands of political change. Verbs droop into nouns, the eye is exhausted by tortuous syntax, and multiple potholes of “not” and “no” stubble beyond recognition the social world that once held such “glittering” appeal. In sum, The Excursion treats the Solitary’s past in negatory terms, as what did not happen or else barely took place. Thinking back to Wittgenstein’s praise for the philosophical analysis of grammatical possibilities, we find in Wordsworth’s grammatical negations an attempt to forestall opportunities for partisanship at the level of the word, if not the level of the sentence. Even as the Solitary evokes the conflagration of his heart by Jacobin enthusiasm, and the mingling of his own voice with the noise of the crowd, he throws spanner after spanner into the work of this retelling, using a tragic grammar to elide retroactively the possibilities embedded in the hard data of this-happened. What his dour poetry finally achieves is what the Solitary himself can only fail to describe, namely the frustration of an attempt to express a collective democratic will deracinated from the lived experience of the lonely subject. I have followed Cavell in implying that Rcsm turns away from the sublime, which Burke famously identifies both as an experience in which we lose ourselves and as an adventure in self-recovery: in the midst of being battered by forces too large to comprehend we realize our mind survives the onslaught to make sense out of sensation, and order out of nature’s apparent chaos.70 Encountering the sublime is not enjoyable but it is rewarding, hence Burke and later Kant characterize it as a “negative” pleasure “incompatible with charms.”71 In The Excursion, the Solitary muffles his own nonpleasure in a repetitious language of nots, so that his youthful foray into the Revolution is salvaged as a vague but also less painful memory of blocked or thwarted sublimity, which is to say of blocked or thwarted negative enjoyment. The Romantic conservatism he represents is thus doubly anti-hedonic as well as anti-romantic in every sense of the word “romance”: it is aggressively suspicious of the possibility of change and aggressively repulsed by a love that takes the shape of a concrete affection for abstract things, like the public good or the crowd or the country. “Not that I rejoiced,” the Solitary stutters, “or even found pleasure, in such vagrant course” as led him to the

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diffusion of his rural roots across the urban plains of Revolutionary Paris (807–808). As Celeste Langan has shown, the classification of a “purely formal identity” as a kind of “vagrancy” is a powerful trope within Romanticism, but for Wordsworth in his Regency years the idea of being vagrant carries with it none of the associations with material lack and indigence correlated with the term.72 The earlier poems of Lyrical Ballads are painfully alert to the ways in which vagrancy, as an effect of “homelessness and poverty, [of ] economic development and redevelopment,” has “a life or afterlife of its own not always apparent in the philosophical register” of abstraction or systematicity.73 By contrast, The Excursion is less concerned with poverty per se than with the impoverishment of personal, local, and national identity in the face of an egalitarianism that redistributes the individual into the group, and the nation into the world “beyond the seas, and to the farthest pole.” To cast such redistribution as a threat is to dismiss the formal means by which it is achieved, whether those means are the institutions that enlarge the franchise of political personhood or the poetic operations that can make it possible to see what is remaindered by even the most well intentioned of progressive programs. Some (though not all) contemporary left critique similarly sets itself, almost by default, against the governing and guiding of desire by the constraints of form. Whether that desire announces its object as political or aesthetic, the critique I have in mind views the essentially poetic operations of form as a coercion of matter and its potential into stifling enclosures. Form goes by many names here—rule, law, restraint, regulation, limitation, convention, custom, habit, discipline—and its effects are consistently taken, as they are in Wordsworth, to abet a suspect politics. In Wordsworth’s case those politics are revolutionary, but more recently they have gone by the very different name of neoliberalism, whose evident and abusive inhibition of human and other forms of life seems to call out for a countering celebration of the disinhibited, the unleashed, the transgressive, or the out-of-control.74 The critique of form also takes us back, perhaps surprisingly, to love and to sexuality, social phenomena it views as uniquely able to overcome the repressions of form even though they are so often reined in by their solemnization as normativity.75 For Laura Kipnis, adultery is a utopian practice that stimulates our presentiments of happier futures, for “adultery, like cultural revolution, always risks shaking up habitual character structures.” Consequently, “in adultery, the most conventional people in the world suddenly

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experience emotional free fall: unbounded intimacy outside contracts, law, and property relations” and, more importantly, a sudden capacity to live, “even briefly, as if you had the conviction that discontent wasn’t a natural condition, that as-yet-unknown forms of gratification and fulfillment were possible, that the world might transform itself—even momentarily—to allow space for new forms to come into being.”76 Kipnis’s vision is seductive, though from the point of view of a Blakean Rcsm strikingly determined to see boundedness not as the site but the cellblock of intimate and utopian “free fall.” In 1799, the conservative novelist George Walker simply took for granted that the “political romances” of Romantic utopianism fastened “dreams of ideal felicity” to “a system of jurisprudence, a perfect republic, a body of political justice, or a catalogue of rights.”77 For Walker, to align oneself with the romantic-utopian possibilities of systems and catalogues is to commit “Practical Infidelity,” a wanton tango with the prosaic. As we move from Walker’s practical infidelity—a “regularity of design” that enables extravagant departures from the regular—to Kipnis’s enthusiasm for the impractical, meaningful change in either a person or a world has gone from being stimulated by rules to being steamrolled by them.78 “Rules” is actually not quite the right word; the best is “demand.” For Kipnis, “what matters” about the demand (don’t smoke in bed, don’t eat in bed, don’t forget to make the bed) that constitutes erotic intimacy is not its “content” but its “form,” which steers love’s energies into channels narrow enough to “maximize submission and minimize freedom.”79 A generalized recoil from the minimal nags this idyll of sexualized transgression as much as a craving for an “unfathered,” unmediated sublimity nagged Wordsworth.80 Its most salient expression happens precisely at the juncture where a political ideal of the as-yet-unknown is sutured to an erotic ideal of freedom cast as self-abandon. When Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri come to describe how “love” might be recuperated “for philosophy and politics,” the love that emerges from their discussion declares itself to be totally embodied, yet it remains completely independent of formal as well corporeal strictures.81 This love, to borrow from Jacques Rancière, is represented as the “power of a superabundant being identified with the essence of the community, [a being] which, by virtue of its superabundance, is endowed with the burden of blowing apart all barriers and accomplishing itself in the form of a perceptible community.”82 Rancière’s language justly mimics the impatient, even hostile disposition toward matter Hardt and Negri’s writing can assume. Even when

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these committed materialists praise love as “the living heart” inside of what would otherwise be the “lifeless heap” of their philosophical project, no love seems lost for material itself, for the abject heap animated only by the pulsation of human feeling (180). These severe divisions between philosophy, feeling, life, and the lifeless are also mapped onto another division, between “corrupt” love and its unpolluted prototype. The former is a love-of-thesame, a variety of those “populisms, nationalisms, fascisms, and various religious fundamentalisms” that aid and abet the persistence of inequality across the globe. The latter is the fuel that drives the vitalism of “becoming other, an uninterrupted process of collective self-transformation” (173). This process is open-ended and volatile, and it is bankrolled by the specific kind of love that human beings are invited to activate between one another tirelessly and without constraint. Some readers may flinch at this confounding of moral and political claims, among which is the negative characterization of bad love as “deeply ambivalent and susceptible to corruption” (182). They might ask, what if the problem is not ambivalence or corruption—a word that suggestively connotes vulnerability to decay—but a refusal to imagine impermanence as fundamental rather than antithetical to utopia? Such a refusal makes an ironic companion to Hardt and Negri’s attack on the eroticism that works on people as though they were “puzzle pieces, that now together make (or restore) a whole.” This may be a picture of love that “Hollywood sells every day,” but it is also a basic figure of formalization (183). To put pieces together is not necessarily to create a whole, nor is it to give form to something as a way of blocking its potential to become something else. Hardt and Negri, however, have a suspicion about poiesis that extends to literary texts themselves. In a fascinating turn, they conclude their chapter on love by comparing a scene of cross-species “wasp-orchid love” (the phrase is adapted from an epistolary exchange between Guattari and Deleuze) to Bernard Mandeville’s eighteenth-century Fable of the Bees, the bulk of which is made up of a poem called The Grumbling Hive. Although Mandeville’s poem is skeptical about an economic system that thrives on unchecked accumulation, Hardt and Negri are keen to tie this text to the rapaciousness of a now “bygone era of the hegemony of industrial production” (185). Against Mandeville’s bees they hold up the non-reproductive encounter of wasps and orchids as “a model of the production of subjectivity that animates the biopolitical economy” of the postmodern period. Both the content of the argument and its structure leave Mandeville’s poem something of a lifeless

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heap in its own right, while “the wasp-orchid machine” becomes an emblem for the living heart of our amorphously bodied present (187).83 As Rancière suggests, treating love in this manner as an “ontological event” privileges its metaphysical over its social, pragmatic, aesthetic, and “compositional” function (184). It suggests that freedom—as in the phrase “free love,” which punningly aligns political freedom and sexual liberty— exists only outside the capacity to make demands upon others and to have demands made upon oneself. It also hints at a love, and a politics, to which loss is completely foreign, because that love and that politics exist only as “continual metamorphos[e]s,” unable to hold, even for a moment, the rippling, “deeply ambivalent” shape that takes stock of what has been spent, squandered, misplaced, forgotten, made extinct, or what has simply passed away (188). This emphasis on metamorphosis recapitulates Wordsworth’s anti-formalism even in its ostensibly utopian gestures. It also might be said to tarry comfortably in “the empire of love” where, as Elizabeth Povinelli shrewdly notes, people are urged “to be open to the possibility that in recognizing each other in intimate love they will experience each other as different than they were before,” where “difference” is felt in the deformational impacts of “a break, a rupture from their prior selves.”84 Povinelli argues persuasively that we sustain the status quo by enjoining ourselves and others to this kind of love, but Rcsm inclines us to be less interested in the practical effects of the anti-formalist fantasy than in its imaginative lacunae, its refusal to consider fixity as anything other than an affront to and abuse of organismic potential. If this fantasy inadvertently stabilizes a sociability riven by racial and class-based exclusions—exclusions that the embrace of a processual, self-diffusing, and self-aware intimacy glosses over and might even perpetuate—it also shrugs off the philosophical and the material consequences of forgetting how to regulate desire in and for perpetuity. In Povinelli’s words, this ideal of “love leaves people as they were in the Garden of Eden,” though now devoted neither to God nor to Wordsworth and Cavell’s diurnal course but to a new “mystery” of unrelenting accumulation.85 But why should this matter to literary criticism? Politics, like form, is what Sanford Kwinter calls “an ordering action.” These two words, “politics” and “form,” limn the pressure that molds inclination into an intentional force, bringing bodies together in space, people together in public, wealth and other resources together for some performative, distributive, or redistributive purpose. As Kwinter puts it, “true formalism [offers] both a pragmatic

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description of historical emergence (why this object, institution, or configuration, in this place, at this time, and not that?), and the superseding of the tired and wooly metaphysics” that abjures form as somehow inferior to “being.”86 Such a metaphysics is also implicit in any treatment of love, or indeed of any high-intensity emotional phenomenon, as a theology of pure surrender unhinged from the gravitational pulls of matter and history, to say nothing of form’s ordering actions. This is just the sort of “wooliness” Blake satirizes in the first poem in his Songs of Innocence, a poem commonly anthologized as “Piping down the valleys wild” but actually titled “Introduction.” “Piping,” the poem, and piping, the deed, are wry parables of what Paul de Man calls “a naïve distinction between ‘writing’ and ‘reading,’” and like many poems in Innocence this introductory text offers a mock-elegaic meditation on language and graphesis.87 The piper and speaker begin by piping pure sound; then, at the behest of a cherubic child, he “pipe[s] a song about a Lamb.” Once more at the child’s command, he drops his pipe and sings. Finally, he sits down to write “in a book that all may read.” “I pluck’d,” he says, “a hollow reed[,]” And I made a rural pen, And I stained the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear.88

In the long wake of poststructuralism, a reading of this poem more or less writes itself. Over the course of his four stanzas, Blake actively weakens the “grounding of philosophy in ontology and in a metaphysics of presence,” the sort of sermonizing that “favors voice over writing, art over science, poetry over prose, music over literature, nature over culture, symbolical over conceptual language,” and so on.89 The piper, spirit of a seemingly immaterial and spontaneous music, shrinks from a writing that seems to discolor the natural world with its inky stain. “Introduction” stages a fall from grace, but like the other songs of Innocence it also sends up orthodox belief in pre- and postlapsarian conditions. Like de Man, Blake treats “poetry [as] the foreknowledge of criticism,” letting his verse turn around and reflect upon the naïveté it has cannily offered as the opening salvo to a book about naïve states of mind, and how they are cultivated by social and religious rites hellbent on preserving the distinction between fallen and Edenic consciousness.90

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Ending on the note of “hear,” the last of its many puns, “Introduction” doubles back upon the apparent devolution from music to writing by interjecting the mediate term of aurality. The suggestion is not that no change from sound to script has taken place in this mini-episode of art history, but rather than the senses will always get in the way of tidy narratives about the corrosive transition from naïve (innocent) to sentimental (experienced) poetry. Between an unselfconscious immersion of the self in nature and the detachment needed for recording that immersion is the reflexive act of hearing, of taking in and organizing experience into awareness. To hear, Blake implies, is to be here, in world tarred as fallen but whose liberatory potential we uncover simply by learning to recognize and affirm ambiguity—most obviously in the equivocal condition of knowing the world, in particular the world designated as nature, to be at once “stained” and made “clear” by imaginative expressions of what Blake, like Wordsworth, would call the soul. Poetry, or poetic language more generally, is one such expression, and in Blake’s “Introduction” it proves its own power through the generation of syntactical and semantic ambivalence. It is through the poem’s crafty and confusing arrangement of words, and the way it places puns to maximize their effect, that the hopscotch of significance from one site to another becomes visible as that clarifying stain, a smudge of contradictory resonances that cannot be disencumbered of one another. The technical term for a fracturing of the bond between a statement and its sense, and for the consequent production of uncertainty as a mode of philosophical insight, is irony. The poems of Innocence and those of Experience are united in their preoccupation with irony, which Frye, in a reference to processes of low adjustment, characterizes as arising from “the lack of correspondence” or fit “between a convention of literary form [and] the facts of experience.”91 Willing to tolerate and even to organize itself around the unease that slips out between the cracks of how things ought to happen versus how they do, low adjustment is constitutively attuned to the strange, vertiginous sensation such failures of alignment engender. It understands irony much in the same way as Schlegel when he speaks of the ironic effects yielded by the artist’s inadequate negotiation of self-restrictive and self-creative processes. Again, in distinction from Romanticism classically understood, Rcsm resists the pose of resisting the world so central to Schlegel’s poetic agonism. All the same, as an exercise in the formal paradigm of low adjustment, Rcsm preserves the lack of fit—the ironic distance—between the expectation of

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a fully realized ambition and its incomplete accomplishment. As the “Introduction” to Innocence hints, to decline the lesson of irony already being taught in the most primal scene of poetic production is to maintain a regressive investment in some prelapsarian state where appetite exists in an unbroken continuum with its satisfaction, and where expression is coincident with its impact. The negative appraisal of such an investment—the kind of appraisal offered by both Innocence and Experience—places itself firmly on the side of the arts, the songs, the pen, and the water stained clear. This is not to suggest that Rcsm holds art up to be superior to philosophy, policy, or moral principle. Nonetheless, legitimating Rcsm for utopianism does require a certain patience for the broad category of fictive or figurative representation. In Archaelogies of the Future, Jameson writes that “utopias are non-fictional, even though they are also non-existent”—which is to say, they “come to us as barely audible” but nonetheless perceptible “messages from a future that may never come into being.” For Jameson, the imminent future is accompanied by the hum of the counterfactual future whose ontology lies somewhere between the factual and the fantastic. If the counterfactual future cannot derail the steady approach of the imminent one, the former may nonetheless gift the latter with the beauty of the light emanating from its own dying star. The spatio-temporal orientation of Rcsm and its utopias is somewhat different, for these are located in a present whose wish for the future is that it be both better and more “bare.” Rcsm imagines a place where the prospect of freedom is no longer conflated with the prospect of absolute disinhibition, whether sexual (as in Kipnis’s adulterous utopia), biopolitical (as in Hardt and Negri’s anarcho-affective utopia), or legal (as in Rousseau’s prediction that a tenacious fidelity to one’s limited rights will eventually make one’s rights limitless). Rather, Rcsm embraces what Emerson calls “the attestation of faith by . . . abstinence,” a commitment made in the present to a future characterized by “want”—a good nineteenth-century word that means at once desire and lack, the vector of a yearning for something and the empty space where it does not yet belong.92 In search of an ascetic utopia, the literature of Rcsm embraces the “optative mood” Emerson identifies as the grammatical time and timbre of the Transcendentalists, themselves inheritors of mainline European Romanticism but with a dedication to the posture of “retirement” that tilts them toward Rcsm’s own austerity.93 One aspiration of this book is to claim for Rcsm the philosophical heft Cavell has championed for the Transcendentalists and

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particularly for Emerson, who constructs utopian routines predicated on habits of “mere waiting.”94 Such habits are at once “lonely” and compatible with an inherent sociability that is “joyous[,] susceptible, [and] affectionate,” and whose principled self-isolation from the market economy is not identical to a repudiation of the world or the people in it.95 That said, the examples of Romantic writing in this book regularly traffic in tropes of erasure, several of which treat the possibility of a world without people as an allegory for a state in which people are agents of less catastrophic harm. The effect of these tropes is thus both (as Emerson predicts) lonely and joyous, for it invokes a human susceptibility to being minimal as the key to utopian achievement. If any of the archaism of romance lingers in Rcsm, it takes the shape of a quest to contest, in a manner even more drastic than that undertaken by Emerson, the normative sense of transcendence as a supersession of the world and its limits—for where Emerson describes the Transcendental manner of living as a willingness to reside in an “Iceland of negations” as a preamble to the attainment of some “new infinitude,” Rcsm opts to preserve the inclement ice over the more spacious accommodations of infinity.96 It commits itself to a rereading of “negation” as, in Blake’s sense, a stain that does not disguise the injurious impact of human activity upon a world of what was once “water clear,” but it also finds in that stain a goad to evolving alternate possibilities latent in the here and now: “Because this is Iceland too. This sameness and the sameness that is about to change.”97

C H A P T E R T WO

Worldfeel from Kant to Wordsworth “What am I in relation to All? How can I face it, how can I stand in its midst?” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, 1821

tell it, the French Revolution mostly left him cold. As he sweeps through the “clamorous halls” of government and from one “Tavern, Brothel, Gaming-house, and Shop” to another, he admits to “affecting more emotion than [he] felt” at the impressive scenes before him.1 “I looked for something,” he confides, “which I could not find,” neither in Paris nor its suburbs (9.72). In the midst of history’s “hubbub wild”—an epithet suggestively borrowed from Milton’s description of Chaos in Paradise Lost—Wordsworth’s heart is quiet, his face telegraphing an excitement he cannot share (9.58).2 One sight alone moves him: Charles Le Brun’s painting Sainte Marie-Madeleine Repentante Renonce à Toutes les Vanités de la Vie, commonly known as The Repentant Magdalene, hanging in a French convent. This “single picture, merely, hunted out/Among other sights” stirs him with its “beauty exquisitely wrought,” its “fair face/And rueful” (9.77–80). The Repentant Magdalene is an outlier amid the Revolution’s “other sights,” an eccentric wrinkle in the fabric of current events. The painting seems to cordon off historical from sacred time, creating a pocket of sensuous, silent experience available only through a passive acceptance of their division. In the imperiled space of the convent where he finds his Magdalene, the fair TO HEAR WORDSWORTH

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face and its well-wrought beauty transmit themselves to Wordsworth as the memory of feeling not so much beyond as tucked into contemporaneity. It is no accident that Wordsworth is most struck by something that does not talk or drone or rattle or sing, that his imagination is captured by the mute correlative of a French Catholic culture under threat by the onset of Revolutionary-era secularism. What is most memorable about the Revolution is the thing that is the least like it: the muffled record of a way of life still tolerated by the present, a “loophole” of tranquility “useful for both communication with and fortification against” what Wordsworth calls “a noisier world,” one that defines political modernity for itself as an indiscriminate sonic pressure surrounding, if not yet infiltrating, the quieter places of old (9.122).3 This chapter recurs often to scenes of noise and its diminishment, in an effort to put together a theory of secular realism conversant across prosaic and poetic genres and apprehensible chiefly as ambiance—which is to say, as an indistinct atmospheric alloy of sound and sensation. First, however, it is worth addressing what is or seems to be at stake in the subject of the secular, a topic that has achieved a conspicuous prominence in the literary criticism of the early twenty-first century. The most obvious reason why this might be the case involves an escalated global conflict between nominally or officially secular states and those whose populations may disidentify with secularism on grounds as much political as theological. These circumstances focalize much recent work on secularism by scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, from Edward Said’s early and exemplary discussion of Daniel Deronda in his 1979 essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims” to Humberto Garcia’s recent Islam and the English Enlightenment, which offers a “counternarrative to the ‘clash of civilizations’ story that has framed post-9/11 accounts of Islam.”4 In a slightly different vein, Colin Jager turns to Romanticism to uncover the roots of another clash, this one between evolutionary science and its discontents; in Jager’s The Book of God, Romanticism appears as both a “period-specific writing and [a] normative worldview” defined by an intensifying antagonism between sacred and secular explanations of natural phenomena.5 I will tread lightly when at all around the histories of empire, Enlightenment, and counter-Enlightenment these and other important studies probe. My own aim is chiefly descriptive. It involves, first, examining how Romantic texts use figurative strategies to conjure a phenomenology of the secular on the page and, second, linking those strategies to what I (following Northrop Frye) have been calling

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adjustment, in an effort to uncover a realist utopianism defined, to paraphrase Sarah Tindal Kareem, “not by its opposition to, but by its integration with” the “marvelous.”6 I do not differentiate rigorously, as others have done, between “secularism” as a political doctrine and “secularization” as a tangle of socio-cultural processes by which a society is seen to be moving away from a centralized, organizing, or otherwise pervasive commitment to religious practice.7 As Jager’s own focus on the Romantic-era discourse of “design” suggests, art and literature move in the crosshairs of these sets of phenomena and exert their own stresses upon them. If this chapter allows secularism to bleed into secularization, that bleeding is likely the run-off of dealing with a poetic vernacular whose nature is to confuse terminological distinctions, no matter how useful and historically accurate they may be, and thereby to render each of these distinctions dependent on others, including their apparent opposites. The rhetorical focus of this chapter also prohibits an interpretation of secular realism as what Cornel West characterizes as the belief that “scientific explanations provide the best explanations” of “Reality.” For West, this species of secular realism—which we might also call naturalism—is the ideological variant of the drive “to predict and control phenomena,” a drive that, he says, defines “the aims and purposes” of the modern “scientific community.” Here West performs a popular humanist scrutiny of “science” taken, in an ahistorical register, to signify a collection of suspect practices including the mechanical rationalization of human and other forms of life (usually) under capitalism. This is a science put in league with corporate and political systems that evacuate “the best meaning and value [from] human lives” while also claiming special access to “value-neutral and theory-free notions of Reality as standards for philosophical arbitration.”8 Playing up the literary affiliations of the term realism, I leave both “science” and “Reality” to the side, and use the term secular realism to describe a representational technique for evoking a world on the edge of utopia in those cases where utopia is defined in relation to an orthodoxy in the process of being lost. For the purposes of this discussion, “religion” is understood as a set of practices oriented along a horizontal axis of social and cultural affinities, as opposed to a vertical axis oriented toward propositional beliefs concerning the existence of God, the afterlife, miracles, and so on. My claim is not that Romantic utopias perceive themselves to be contingent upon the eradication of religious practice or religious feeling, but rather that the imagination of secular modernity within

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Romanticism represents it as something that operates, in part, through the distillation of older ways of inhabiting the world and their reconstitution as tone. This is easier to see (or, as the case may be, to hear) if we are careful not to assume that either secularism or its philosophical analogue in naturalism are necessarily unfeeling or non-intuitive ways of encountering the world, especially not when we are dealing with worlds as they are given mediately through a painting or a poem. If naturalism denies that immaterial things, such as values, can be accommodated to what Akeel Bilgrami (elaborating some ideas of John McDowell’s) calls “realist terms,” Romanticism offers to supplement the basic principles of naturalism by arguing that literature itself is a special case whereby “evaluative concepts” that both describe properties of the world and “fall outside the purview of natural science” may be captured by a particularly undisciplined mode of realist representation.9 This realism is literary rather than philosophical; hence its comparative lack of discipline. It reweights the naturalist imperative in order to give utopia—an evaluative concept predicated on a hypothesis about how the world should be—mass, color, shape, texture, and timbre. Unlike the “natural supernaturalism” M. H. Abrams associates with “the secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking” via their projection onto rocks, and stones, and trees, secular realism concerns itself with the sensuous manifestation of bounded but evanescent experiences of historical change.10 This chapter offers a series of hypotheses concerning what secularism feels like, in particular what it feels like in those Romantic texts that experience it as a mode of resistance to apocalyptic narratives of revelation and as a countering policy of immersion within the everyday. For Abrams, Romanticism is essentially defined as the belief that there is a dialectical relationship between “man and the world, mind and nature, the ego and the non-ego, the self and the not-self, spirit and the other or (in the favorite antithesis of post-Kantian philosophers) subject and object.”11 God has either absconded from this relationship or been exiled from it, but it does not especially matter to Abrams’s thesis exactly how or why: the point is that, in Romanticism, the individual mind is assumed to be the primary creative force in the world, so that if the apocalypse is indeed coming there is a strong possibility that it will be delivered via “an imaginative act of creative perception.”12 What I call secular realism, by contrast, is not committed to asserting the mind’s autonomy with respect to sense experience, and even less committed to the individual as a galvanizing force or figure; still less is

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it interested in cataclysmic alterations of the material world. To recall my previous chapter, the view that sees Romanticism as Rcsm is trained on the depersonalized domains of rhetoric and of sensation understood as aesthesis. In this version of the Romantic tradition, sensation does not furnish the perceiving subject with coherence but rather gives us the feeling, as Keats says, “as though [we] were dissolving,” in the space between represented worlds as they surface, recede, and disappear.13 This chapter’s title comes from Immanuel Kant’s concept of Weltanschauung, usually translated (as in the quotation from Jager above) as “worldview.” Coined in Kant’s 1790 opus The Critique of Judgment, Weltanschauung is often used to mean a particular perspective on certain fundamental aspects of reality. Social behaviors flow from this perspective, so that when Homer’s Greeks and Trojans say they believe that the manner and time of each man’s death has been chosen for him, they mean they are convinced that “no man is going to hurl [them] to Hades, unless it is fated.”14 Likewise, in Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair a married woman’s Catholic faith leads her to break off a relationship with the man she loves after he narrowly avoids being killed in the Blitz; he has survived, she maintains, thanks to God’s intercession, and so she owes it to God to give up her lover and be faithful to her husband. A definition of Weltanschauung that unites sociological and psychological perspectives is helpful for describing why Hektor or Sarah Miles act the way they do. It does not, however, bear very much resemblance to what Kant actually says: But even to be able to think the given infinite without contradiction requires a faculty in the human mind that is itself supersensible. For it is only by means of this and its idea of a noumenon, which itself admits of no intuition though it is presupposed as the substratum of the intuition of the world as mere appearance [Weltanschauung], that the infinite of the sensible world is completely apprehended in the pure intellectual estimation under a concept, even though it can never be completely thought in the mathematical estimation of magnitude through numerical concepts. Even a faculty for being able to think the infinite of supersensible intuition as a given (in its intelligible substratum) surpasses any standard of sensibility, and is great beyond all comparison even with the faculty of mathematical estimation, not, of course, from a theoretical point of view, in behalf of the faculty of cognition, but still as an enlargement of the mind which feels itself empowered to overstep the limits of sensibility from another (practical) point of view.15

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Without splitting too many hairs over Kant’s characteristically hair-splitting account of rational thought, it seems that his use of Weltanschauung—“the intuition of the world as mere appearance”—means less a worldview than a worldfeel, an embodied perception of the world insofar as the world is available to the senses. Weltanschauung is a compound of the German words for world (Welt) and perception (Anschauung), specifically a perception that draws upon information grasped more or less subliminally. What Kant seems to have in mind is a looking that happens in each of the five senses and makes use of a sixth one, too. So much seems clear to Heidegger who, in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, explains that the original meaning of Weltanschauung is “world-intuition in the sense of contemplation of the world [as] given to the senses.” There is no word, he sniffs, comparable to the “specifically German” Weltanschauung: “this expression is not a translation from the Greek,” in which “[t]here is no such expression as kosmotheôria.” Noxious hints of nationalism aside, Heidegger’s rejection of his own Greek neologism underscores the insufficiency of taking Kant’s Weltanschauung as an abstract, extraterrestrial, or bird’s-eye “view” of things as they are. We feel the sensuous world in a swoon, a rush of feeling that is intellectual without being numerical, brainy without whittling lived experience down to an algorithm. “Worldfeel” handles “the mundus sensibilis—a beholding of the world as a simple apprehension of nature in the broadest sense,” which is to say nature as a catchall term for whatever there is, whether in front of your face or at the back of your mind.16 In The Prelude, Wordsworth’s worldfeel is diluted by the Revolution and enticed by religious spectacle, which aligns itself with the realm of silent sensation and against the “Hawkers and Haranguers,” the “hissing factionalists” of the public street (9.56–57). What is additionally compelling about how Wordsworth records his encounter with The Repentant Magdalene is that, in point of fact, the painting’s mise-en-scène was nowhere near as understated as the poem describes it. Le Brun’s painting hung in a Carmelite convent, and when visitors came to view the work they were apparently treated to a musical accompaniment of nuns singing in the background. Wordsworth leaves out the singing, and he also leaves out the fact that the painting was kept in a chapel devoted to Mary Magdalene, where it shared exhibition space with six other paintings illustrating the saint’s life.17 The experience of seeing this far from “single” painting was therefore powerfully synaesthetic, engaging the eye, the ear, and the haptic apprehension of being surrounded

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by multiple images of a single figure, as if in a hall of mirrors. At once picture gallery and funhouse, the chapel evokes what André Malraux describes as a museum’s tendency to give the impression that all its paintings are about exactly the same thing, and that they are debating one topic across cavernous halls and expansive walls.18 This really is the case for the little museum of the Magdalene chapel, since all its artifacts are about the fallen woman who rises and is redeemed, her story iterated seven times over. Each of these images, along with the chanting of the nuns and the chill of the stone floor, the other tourists and the undistant kinetic memory of having “hunted out” this sight among others is, as Kant would say, apprehended by Wordsworth and then condensed into a lonely icon of religious sentiment inseparable from a subtle but unrelenting political skepticism. If the paintings in a museum are indeed all gossiping about one topic, what could be the matter of the saints’ mute conversation? Perhaps it is the “official and pompous history” of French Catholicism, which refuses to recognize that the Revolution is about to make it obsolete. Perhaps, to the contrary, the Magdalenes are trying to safeguard a “secret, modest, nondeliberated, involuntary” archive of religious feeling, even as it is threatened by a program of state secularization.19 After all, France’s lawmakers did not waste much time legislating against the Church. In March of 1790, the National Assembly confiscated all ecclesiastical land holdings and placed a moratorium on the taking of monastic vows; in July, it ordered all religious orders to be disbanded; things only got worse after the Terror began in 1793. This story is well known, and it reaches its logical if late culmination in 1905, when France legally establishes the separation of church and state and codifies itself as “a republic [that is] indivisible, secular, democratic, and sociale,” which is to say supported by a national network of civic obligation. Here is where modern secularism, or laïcité, is said to begin. Are the Magdalenes Sibyls of this secular future, their seven voices suspended in the “ever-flowing tears” of Le Brun’s portrait (9.80)? Do the Carmelite nuns who guarded the painting, allegedly refusing to abandon their Magdalene even after they were ordered to leave their convent, anticipate more contemporary debates over, say, the wearing of veils or other religious coverings in French public schools? Is Le Brun’s Mary, the prostitute all but hidden behind layers upon layers of cloth, an objective correlative for a long, complicated history of secularism that knits together femininity, sexuality, and the ambiguous relationship between being independent and being for sale, a

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“feminine body [that] necessarily complies with the market paradigm” promoted alongside the bourgeois Revolution itself?20 Once again, I raise these questions to place them carefully aside. In keeping with this book’s intention to articulate a Romanticism whose core concepts are necessary to the imagination of an alternative utopianism, I restrict my own discussion of secularism to how it is intuited by Romantic literature rather than how it is prosecuted juridically. Using worldfeel as a way of talking about secularism in a manner specific to the demands of literature taps into Nelson Goodman’s dictum that works of art are also “ways of worldmaking.” They provide us with isolated, controlled occasions to sense things beyond appearance in our encounter with things we can see, hear, and touch, things which make heads buzz and hearts race—hence Goodman’s comparison of works of art with “psychological experiments, and types of machinery.”21 Such experiments, according to Goodman, can represent the co-existence of different worlds at the same time, while also positing a distinction between the sort of world that counts and the sort of world that counts less. In his words, “some relevant kinds of the one world, rather than being absent from the other, are present as irrelevant kinds; some differences among words are not so much in entities . . . as in emphasis or accent, and these differences are no less consequential.”22 Thus a poem, a bit of prose, a painting or a piece of music is able to frame the combat of secular and religious worlds as they parry for phenomenal dominance over the work’s own “accent”; arguably in the Romantic period there is nowhere a more striking example of the capacity to experience the world in entirely distinct ways that explicitly involve asserting the reality of one world over the alleged irreality of another. If we trust Charles Taylor’s influential thesis that secularism is best understood not as altering the relationship between this world and the proverbial next, but as a particular way of confronting the sensible world as “a field of forces” both natural and supernatural, secular realism emerges as one technique for focalizing our capacity to be aware of distinct worlds at the same time but not with the same degree of intensity.23 “Realism,” as Goodman says elsewhere, “is relative, determined by the system of representation standard for a given culture or person at a given time.”24 Art gives us the ability to perceive (in the Greek sense of aisthanesthai) both the “ordering” of culturally-specific perspectives on the world and the sensation of their difference as aesthetic processes.25 The question that will preoccupy the last part of this chapter is how a world abrogated into irrelevance becomes

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a resource for poetic figures, while the self-proclaimedly germane world annexes the upfront atmosphere of everyday life. It is this play between figure and atmosphere—in art-historical terms, figure and ground—that helps secular realism make tangible the creative affection of the senses by the world in a manner that does not quite keep with the notion that “a secular society” rests on “a disenchanted world . . . and a post-cosmic universe,” at least not in the domain of literary description.26 * * * In a provocative essay on child molestation, Ian Hacking uses Goodman’s “worldmaking” to evolve his own notion of “kind-making.” Kind-making is the establishment of scientific and legislative categories that make new types of behavior possible, while also casting those behaviors in a newly moralized light. If the first part of this claim is familiar—as Foucault tells us, there are no pedophiles until Victorian sexologists say there are—the second is more complex, and it involves an attempt to remake history, and not just people, in a labile image.27 “As Goodman would put it,” when novel notions come into being and rise to prominence, “then the past can occur in a new world.” This means that “events in a life can now be seen as events of a new kind, a kind that may not have been conceptualized when the event was experienced or the act performed.” Thus “what we experienced becomes recollected anew, and thought in terms that could not have been thought at the time. Experiences are not only redescribed; they are re-felt.”28 Though it has nothing whatsoever to do with sexology, Kant’s 1786 essay, “What Is Orientation in Thinking?” or, more literally, “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” acts out precisely the scene of re-feeling Hacking describes. In Kant’s case, the emergence of a new kind of personhood is tied directly to the condition he calls Enlightenment (Aufklärung). When we think of Enlightenment in casual terms, we tend to define it in much the same optimistic way as Kant did: as a historical period of intellectual glasnost adopted by educated persons as an ethical and a cognitive orientation, namely toward the free play of ideas and away from religious orthodoxy. Two years before Kant treated “orientation” explicitly, his short and celebrated piece “What Is Enlightenment?” praises the man “who is not afraid of shadows,” who welcomes public debate and an active, sprightly culture of arts and letters.29 Kant’s essay also assures readers that what Adorno and Horkheimer eventually dub the dialectic of Enlightenment will create a benign situation

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whereby the careful, controlled management of civic freedom at once stimulates the people and keeps them from running wild under the influence of newfangled ideas not yet time-tested. This vision of Enlightenment is also not afraid of shadows: it soothes even the most anxious clergyman or head of state with the assurance that as men learn things they become more and more capable of acting in accordance with their own best impulses, including the impulse to obey the law. Enlightenment may be a fresh way of seeing, but when it comes to the progress of Enlightenment within the public sphere there is, Kant promises, nothing to see here, nothing about which to be excessively concerned. Having engaged in a kind-making so prescient that it still grounds our contemporary conceptions of enlightenment and its enemies, Kant soon finds himself forced to re-experience the event of Aufklärung in new and considerably less mellow terms. The occasion for this about-face is a minor kerfuffle between Kant’s friend Moses Mendelssohn and the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Their disagreement turned on Mendelssohn’s interpretation of Spinoza, and it turned again, more explosively, on whether or not the late Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had been a pantheist. If this looks like a tempest in a teapot, it nonetheless causes Kant to re-evaluate his ideas about “the intuition of the world as mere appearance” so as to take into account the terror of trying to make sense of things we both do and do not see. For Kant, the argument between Mendelssohn and Jacobi exemplifies the sort of conflict only possible when people are not “living in an enlightened age” but “in an age of enlightenment,” or enlightenment-in-process.30 It concerns an apparently insoluble tension between empirical knowledge and religious faith, and between different interpretations of the world’s data. Herein lies a special problem for Kant, who wants to find philosophical proof for his hypothesis that different people really can and do reach the same conclusions about complicated questions, like the nature of beauty or moral action, because there is some ultimate, wholly non-contingent fact of the matter concerning those concepts. But if Enlightenment successfully disentangles religious belief from intellectual commitments, how are philosophers and persons of faith ever going to have the same response to such questions, or to any other of life’s most serious, pressing, intricate concerns? The answer, for Kant anyway, is to be found in the idea of orientation. Some things are always, obviously, and objectively true, and everyone will agree to sign onto them. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west; all

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bodies have a right side and a left side. These facts help orient us in the world for, as Kant puts it, “to orient oneself, in the proper sense of the word, means to use a given direction . . . in order to find the others, and in particular that of sunrise.”31 Sunrise is an especially useful point of orientation, but there are others. Moving through a series of analogical situations, Kant first describes the body’s geographical orientation in a place (outside at midday, gauging the sun’s position), then its “mathematical” orientation in space (a darkened room, without a sun, but where we still know left from right), and finally the mind’s orientation in thought, or “the field of supra-sensory objects” (no sky, no sun, no left, no right). In a tidy précis of the argument that will come to define his philosophical project, Kant concludes that rational belief—belief that cannot be verified by physical evidence—is “the signpost or compass by means of which the speculative thinker can orient himself on his . . . wanderings” (240). Kant’s paradigmatic instance of such a belief is the belief in God, and through the assertion of that paradigm he appears neatly to annul any meaningful conflict between religious and secular principles, at least in the domain of higher-order cognition. The situation becomes tricky, however, when the world is thrown into disarray by events of a new kind: “In the darkness,” Kant begins, “I can orientate myself in a familiar room so long as I can touch any one object whose position I remember. But it is obvious that the only thing which assists me here is an ability to define the position of the objects by means of a subjective distinction: for I cannot see the objects whose position I am supposed to find; and if, for a joke, someone had shifted all the objects round in such a way that their relative positions remained the same but what was previously on the right was now on the left, I would be quite unable to find my way about a room whose walls were in other respects identical” (239). This scenario reads a bit like a slapstick version of the thought experiment Andrew Ramsay, attempting to explain his father’s life’s work, poses to Lily Briscoe in To The Lighthouse: “Think of a kitchen table . . . when you’re not there.”32 In Kant’s anxiety-dream, he is there but the table is not. Even though Kant is quick to point out that, with little trouble, he can simply feel “the difference between [his] two sides,” right and left, and find his way out of this unexpected conundrum, the uneasiness charging this passage does not dissipate so easily. Is the experience of walking at night really like the experience of walking in the daytime, with the exception that one “cannot . . . distinguish the houses” that usually serve as our signposts and guides?

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What is it like, this moment where we reach out to touch the kitchen table to find it gone? While Woolf ’s Ramsay table pokes fun at the long line of tables stretching from Plato to Husserl—for whom the table-as-desk offers an example “nearest to hand for the sedentary philosopher”—Kant’s missing furniture proffers a more troubling allegory of phenomenological estrangement.33 Sometimes, Kant implies, we find ourselves re-feeling our way in circumstances we have felt our way through hundreds or thousands of times before, as we are suddenly caught between “a wholly chaotic and a wholly predictable world.”34 We are then forced to recollect anew what ought to be the spontaneous experience of proprioception, the feeling of the relative positions of our limbs in space. Brain and body experience a brief but terrifying hiatus in their ability to talk to one another; left and right go aphasic, unable to communicate to and thus reassure us that we are not crazy or dead, we have just been, like Kant’s hypothetical version of himself, pranked. Freud would call this stretch of time unheimlich, un-homelike or uncanny.35 Indeed, the scene is uncanny in quite a literal sense, for Kant is fantasizing about his home being made into something that is not his home, a familiar room defamiliarized. On the one hand, uncanniness is what happens when the comfortable is afflicted by disorder. On the other, as Freud makes clear, it is also a common effect of the psychopathology of everyday life, far from remarkable and therefore, in a sense, all too familiar. All sorts of things can create the feeling Kant describes: a sudden inability to remember a commonplace word, seeing the same stranger several times in one day, déja-vu. “What Is Orientation in Thinking?” for its part is the uncanny of “What Is Enlightenment?” It revisits and ruptures the drama of coming into the light and imagines it as a nightmare of total discombobulation. Given the structure of the essay, in which Kant begins by staring at the sun and ends with a sigh of relief that his mind-body nexus remains intact, we might even suggest that before he steps into that dark room he has been blinded by too much illumination; and in fact, the remainder of “Orientation” implies that the German state itself has been thrown into confusion by the Enlightenment, whose enthusiasm for free speech has created a public sphere in which quacks and libertines get the same amount of air-time as philosophers and scientists. Kant’s Enlightenment, in short, is uncanny. It forces us to live through the splitting of the world into pieces, each with their own epistemic and experiential claim on our judgment. In its proliferation of new kinds,

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Enlightenment may appear to be irresponsible, even cruel. It does not empathize with the terror of disorientation because Enlightenment, after all, is not a person but an abstraction. It does not have two sides with which to feel its way around, but then again it doesn’t have to fret about finding its way in the dark. Unexpectedly, Enlightenment names the fear “that we have lost our capacity to think, that we are stupefied,” at least for a moment or two. Cavell calls this condition “living our skepticism,” being unable to find peace in or to resign ourselves to ignorance.36 It is a condition that can be managed if not cured by literature, especially those works of literature that are really “philosophical essay[s]” suspended in the process of “turning into . . . fictional tale[s.]” Cavell has in mind a short story by Poe, but the description holds for “What Is Orientation In Thinking,” which “show[s] what it means to have concepts” that are made to “count”—to matter—through discriminate uses of language.37 That essay, again, starts out trying to give an account of the historical situation called Enlightenment and ends up narrating an uneasy dream about philosophical incompetence. If Kant’s Enlightenment accidentally shows itself as “a threat to the ordinary” it is also, in Freud’s sense, interior to and at home in ordinariness per se, and in particular to its “accounting and recounting” by imaginative representation.38 The literary moment of Kant’s essay reports on a scene of worldfeeling where the world itself must be freshly described and freshly felt. It maps out two sites of cognitive involvement—the tangible world of tables and houses and the field of supra-sensory objects—and shuttles unevenly between them. Goodman calls this phenomenon “weighting,” an aesthetic technique whereby different aspects of the same subject are accentuated, and not necessarily with an equatable hand. The virtue of Goodman’s terminology in this instance is that it cuts against the often default assumption that two things that appear to be non-identical, separate, or contradictory ought to be brought together in a theoretical whole. Whether we call this whole paradox, ambiguity, dialectic, or even différance, we lose sight of the steady imbalance of focus a text like “What Is Orientation in Thinking?” affords to the re-presentation of secular and non-secular contexts.39 Weighting, by contrast, allows us to speak in spatial and psychic terms of the feeling of being pressured by a work of art to look more closely at some things than others. It allows us, furthermore, to see how the relative insignificance or insubstantiality of one topic can propel our interest toward another topic, as steam propels the blades of a turbine. Goodman’s argument is that when

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an artwork invites its audience to feel anew some previous experience, it changes the road once taken by the audience’s attention. This is no less true if “previous experience” is simply life experience, whose own weight is redistributed by the aesthetic operations of form. As Goodman explains, “what counts as emphasis [ . . . ] is departure from the relative prominence accorded the several features in the current world of our everyday seeing,” for “with changing interests and new insights, the visual weighting of features of bulk or line or stance or light alters, and yesterday’s level world seems strangely perverted—yesterday’s realistic calendar landscape becomes a repulsive caricature.”40 Departure, change, insight, weight, alteration and perversion, a swerve in one direction and then a swerve in another. What else is weighting but an orientation or, rather, a re-orientation made possible by the labor of visual, rhetorical, metrical and other devices? Kant’s darkened, disheveled room is precisely a repulsive caricature of the room he walks through on a regular basis. His suspicion that someone, “for a joke,” has moved his furniture around suggests that some manufacturer of the unreal is responsible for the disruption of his own everyday seeing, just as Enlightenment is responsible for running interference on normative habits of thought. What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking? It means, apparently, asserting one’s own worldfeel over and against the facts on the ground; it means throwing one’s weight around in a situation that remains uncertain and occluded; it means litigating art and artifice until their attempt to pitch the world into disarray may be assimilated to the self-assuring regime of rational intuition. As for disorientation, that happens when a person cannot think his way out of an aesthetic situation, when the sensations of worldfeeling become so powerful that he forgets what anchors them. Coleridge, the great poet of disorientation, identifies the moment where embodied perception of the world somehow gets dislodged from rational thought as one of “dejection.” The word itself nicely tracks the sense of changing direction, of being cast down from a higher to lower state. A person of professed faith, Coleridge uses the experience of anhedonia to describe what it is like to forget how one is supposed to orient oneself away from this world and toward the next. For him, the grim condition of dejection may be diagnosed through the failure of orientation, a symptomatic inability to point ourselves the right way with the right amount of intensity or passion. In Kantian terms—which is precisely how Coleridge would read them twelve years later—the famous

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lines “I see, not feel, how beautiful” the evening sky is explain how “in great depression of spirits” we can experience “the intuition of . . . beauty” without “the feeling” that normally goes along with it.41 As the poem proceeds, the dejected speaker links his own anaesthetic condition to his failure to imagine a world beyond the present one. He knows but he does not deeply sense that “From the soul itself must issue forth/A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud” capable of “Enveloping the Earth” like a halo (53–55). The trouble is that this cloud has a very special stimulant behind it, and it is not a stimulant to which the poet has access: O pure of heart! thou need’st not ask of me What this strong music in the soul may be! What, and wherein it doth exist, This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, This beautiful and beauty-making power. Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower, A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud— Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud— We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colours a suffusion from that light. (62–75)

He can repeat the word “joy” all he wants, but the speaker still cannot project himself out of his state of uncomfortable numbness. The lines take on the quality of a malfunctioning spell, its anaphoric incantation conjuring only a sense of greater and greater disaster as the heart is heaved into the poem’s mouth to no curative avail. The lack of precision with which various synonyms and metaphors for joy are thrown into the mix—it is light, cloud, spirit, power, minister who weds us to Nature, sweet voice, font of pleasure—ought to entice our compassion for the poet who cannot come up with a decent figure, but his own rhetorical misfires work, I think, against the pathos they ought to provoke. The unfeelingness of “Dejection” produces a corresponding sense of alienation in us, we who have from the get-go been interpellated as the absent “Lady” the poet batters with his own self-pity.42 We too see but do not feel how unfortunate he is unless, of course, we

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detach ourselves from the position of auditor-reader and claim the poet’s achingly infirm situation as our own. In this case, however, we trespass upon the poem’s rhetorical and psychic borders, which insist on putting us in the Lady’s place to isolate us further from its lonely lyric “I.” Since the convention of lyric is to entice readers into a sympathetic identification with a poem’s speaker, what we have here is a dejected poet who sets himself up to be disappointed by his rejected audience, which cannot overcome the gulf forcibly stretched between its figurative and emotional location and his. The push/pull dynamic of “Dejection” is evident, too, in how the poet invokes joy as a velocity, or else as a kind of butterfly net which he hurls outward in an attempt to catch a world beyond the one that stifles him. Like Freud’s grandson’s game of “Fort/Da,” the poet uses “joy” like a “wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it”; he flings the word away and then he pulls it back, “hail[ing] its reappearance with a joyful ‘da,’” or “there!”43 As the reel becomes (for Freud) a symbol of the child’s mother, whose comings and goings, disappearances and reappearances the child is trying to face without rage or anxiety, so does “joy” become for Coleridge a point of access to the new, better world he cannot feel but which the word “joy” itself allows him to see, at least on the page. Imperfect access to an improved world is better than nothing, particularly when that access is afforded by what a poet presumably always has no matter how depleted he becomes: language. The rhetorical plenitude stuffed into “joy,” a tiny tenor compared to a ham-fisted handful of vehicles, becomes an ironic comment on the fact that the repetition of the word shows how the poet has been reduced to mere subsistence, of making do with the least he has. Like all forms of subsistence, the repetition expresses desire—the desire to live, certainly, but also in this case the desire to shift the weight of the world from off poem and poet and onto the sturdy frame of heaven’s imagined arc, as it broods over the “inanimate cold world” below (51). Coleridge, like Kant, makes vivid the extent to which disorientation depends upon a longing for orientation. Would we ever feel lost if we didn’t know what it was like to be sure of where we were going? In “Dejection,” the poet’s wish “to lift the smothering weight from off his breast” goes through the motions of self-orientation because that is both the very least and the absolute limit of what the depressive speaker can achieve (41). He cannot both feel and see, but he can see and do his best to feel. With its theologically charged yearning for what is to come, and its dissatisfaction with “Reality’s

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dark dream,” “Dejection” grieves the possibility of living comfortably in this world while waiting for the next. To call “Dejection” an ode to worldmaking would be going too far, since the poet never manages to construct fully an alternative to the life with which he is already laden, but it is perhaps an ode to worldfeeling, or rather an elegy to it. The poem mourns the speaker’s capacity to accord what Goodman calls weight or emphasis to anything but himself, so that even as he sees the possibility of a world beyond his own suffering he cannot prove it on his pulses.44 The poem, in short, seems to bear out the core “dread” of “real depression,” that we “may stop knowing/how to like and desire/the world around” the confines of our own mental space.45 Charles Taylor might characterize Coleridge’s dejection as a symptom of dwelling within “the immanent frame,” the aggregate of those “scientific, social, technological” structures that constitute “‘this-worldly’ [experience] . . . without reference to the ‘supernatural’ or ‘transcendent.’”46 The kinds of worldfeel afforded by these frames are deeply “impersonal,” and they are characterized by the anticipatory intuition of “the imminent loss of a world of beauty, meaning, warmth, as well as of the perspective of self-transformation beyond the everyday.” One could argue that this particular kind of loss is also a particular kind of generation, for whether we call it perspective, orientation, or (as in Coleridge’s poem) anaphora, the desire to situate oneself in proximity to something better establishes, if only aspirationally, the existence of a place elsewhere; however hypothetical that place may be, if we can feel it, even in the sensation of its impending disappearance, it materializes as a domain of equal or greater interest than the world around us. But this is not Taylor’s argument, which holds that a desacralized modernity affords a worldview but not a worldfeel—a logical deduction if you believe, with Kant, that worldfeel is something that only happens because there is a supernatural or transcendent agent who guarantees the truth of your sense experience. Taylor in fact suggests that people cannot survive psychically within purely secular structures to which “we join no feeling and attach no form.”47 That is why (he says) humans are desperate to find metaphysical significance in the embodied ecstasies of rock concerts and football games, or of any nominally secular event that encourages “fusions in common action/feeling, which take us out of the everyday, [and] often generate the powerful phenomenological sense that we are in contact with something greater.”48 In situations like these, “the state of mind of the participant is far removed from the disengaged, objectifying stance from which the alleged

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truth of the immanent, naturalistic worldview is supposed to be convincingly evident.” “The sense of something beyond [that is] inherent in these fusions,” Taylor concludes, cannot “be ultimately explained (away) in naturalistic categories,” despite what he characterizes as the ultimately anodyne efforts of “Freud, Durkheim, [and] Bataille.”49 Note the shift from “worldview” to “sense” that happens between these two consecutive sentences. The first is a “stance,” an orientation; we stand in a place, we see what we see, and we see nothing else. The second is an intuition, “a sense of something beyond” that could not be grasped by the senses unless they were supercharged with some deep, even visionary insight. One person occupies a stance, but a sense may be diffused among agents; a sudden desire to rush the stage or start a wave can happen to lots of people at once, and can discharge itself in a unified action or “fusion.” What is happening in Taylor’s prose is the weighting of one world against another and their ordering along a hierarchical line of value. A stance is immanent; it takes what it sees for granted and judges it in its own terms. A sense strains the limits of the empirical, pushing hard against the frames of naturalism and science. Taylor prefers senses to stances, and I suspect that is because to him, the idea of a stance suggests something elective, a thing that is self-consciously chosen. Because religious faith seems importantly not elected in this way—and, relatedly, because it is divorced from the fantasies of autonomy lurking behind a modern, consumerist vocabulary of choice— it has to be understood in these more ambient and preternatural terms. In Romantic philosophy, almost nothing about an orientation is elective except when and how one chooses to make use of it. Furthermore, and as Kant implies, the Romantic everyday is shot through with suprasensible elements, or at least with the possibility of the not-natural suddenly shaking things up. Secular realism, meanwhile, undertakes to show secularism having a suprasensibility all its own. It thus shares some notions with while contesting Taylor’s idea of the “something greater,” which it shows to be accessible through diffuse, non-punctual aesthetic experiences that do not gather themselves into the hard-edged shape of “events.” Such experiences might represent submersion in the everyday rather than propulsion beyond it, as an entanglement with ordinariness that, from the perspective of limited utopianism, might present itself as a social and political goal. These proposals concerning secular realism imply that it is possible to take what Taylor calls “a momentary sense of wow!” and sculpt it into something less phatic,

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call it atmosphere, ambiance, or tone.50 Even if or when these phenomena do not lend themselves to the ordering of existence according to spiritual practices, they nonetheless make it possible to tell other people, as Kant tells the readers of his “Orientation” essay, what it feels like to be enveloped in something new, at once sensuous and beyond grasping. Perhaps nowhere in Romantic poetry is the need to recuperate “something greater” within the ordinary made more explicit than in Wordsworth’s “Ode (‘There was a time’),” better known as the Intimations Ode. For its epigraph, the poem has Vergil’s paulò majora canamus, “let us sing of slightly greater things.” But greater than what? An eclogue is typically a subgenre of the pastoral poem, but Vergil’s eclogues take a turn into overt political commentary. Constantine I appears to have been the first person to read the fourth eclogue messianically, as a prediction of the birth of Christ from the Virgin (“virgo”) who appears in the poem’s sixth line, but the emperor’s interpretation has since become totally implanted in the reception history of this poem and of Vergil’s career. Whether Wordsworth knew it or not, the Constantinian analysis of the poem leans heavily on certain misreadings (which may or may not have been deliberate), including the interpretation of “paulò majora canamus” as “let us sing a great oracle.”51 From “slightly greater” to greatly oracular, the scale of the fourth eclogue is distended to accommodate non-secular events with eschatological implications. Wordsworth’s epigraph acknowledges the poem’s ex post facto prophetic career while working closely to restore and then to develop its original meaning. Like Coleridge’s “Dejection,” the Intimations Ode flails against the dying of a “celestial light” from the world around a speaker thrown into frantic disorientation: “Turn wheresoe’er I may,” Wordsworth writes, “The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”52 And, like “Dejection” the Intimations Ode uses deliberately inartful poetic language to make a show of not closing the gap between what the speaker used to feel and what he feels at present. In the second stanza, for example, the failure of familiar images to elicit the strong emotions they could once reliably provoke is figured as a kind of puerility, an impotence Wordsworth embeds in the simultaneously limp and rigidifying quality of the rhymed couplet “The Rainbow comes and goes,/And lovely is the Rose” (10–11). And finally, like “Dejection,” the poem has a way of throwing itself forward and then pulling itself back, as the speaker is comforted (“The sunshine is a glorious birth”), discomfited (“And yet

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I know . . . /That there hath passed away a glory from the earth”), and comforted once more (“And again I am strong”) by the sight and sound of birdsong, waterfalls, pansies, lambs, and gathering clouds (16–18, 24). Geoffrey Hartman calls this rocking motion the poem’s “conjunctivedisjunctive progression,” and indeed the therapeutic drive of the poem is toward manufacture and acceptance of what Keith DeRose calls an “abominable conjunction”: the sequential aggregation of two epistemically divergent statements, for example, “I have hands, but I don’t know that I have hands.”53 The task of the Ode is to reconcile Platonic anamnesis or “forgetting”—which, as Hartman says, “links experience to a point beyond experience and so, at once, qualifies and disqualifies the empirical memory”—with the world’s intimations to us of what we have forgotten and thus cannot be said to know, but also do know (58).54 It is in pursuit of this particular abominable conjunction that Wordsworth’s commitment to the slightly greater of earthly experience turns into a functioning formal principle. Consider the Ode’s last stanza, in which the speaker enjoins “ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves” to “Think not of any severing of our loves” (190–191). One might assume that the opposite of severing is joining, and indeed the first sense of the line is that the speaker’s attachment to the world will be mended, not threatened, by his melancholy recognition that this world is all there is. Replete with the visible and invisible artifacts of “human suffering,” absent “the radiance/ . . . now forever taken from [our] sight,” the earth is an imposing tragic figure that forbids us from “griev[ing]” for it (182). To believe in whatever is slightly greater than grief is to suture oneself to an existence that refuses to yearn to “bring back the hour/Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower,” or to look outward for the promise of suffering’s recompense in the afterlife (180–181). And yet we should also notice that the two lines that vow not to disjoin our desire from its earth-bound objects are themselves disjoined from one another: they don’t rhyme, at least not completely. The off-rhyme of “groves” and “loves” recalls and corrects the facile chime of “goes” and “Rose,” its awkwardly earnest near-match miming the forced fit between everything around us and everything we want it to be. In other words, the willful reconciliation of that elongated “ō” to the reduced vowel sound of “love” maps in miniature the reconciliation between affective and earthly life, between psychic longing and the material conditions of its satisfaction. The surprise of the poem is that it ultimately finds this partial and nearly negligible adjustment of sound to sound, self to

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world, to be the product of a song in praise of slightly greater things as they are treated by the formal labor of poetry and its oblique poiesis. Hartman writes that the poem’s impulse to find intimations of immortality in “border image[s]” and “boundary image[s]” anticipates psychoanalysis, in particular its conception of childhood development as predicated on the installation and policing of “binds and blinds”: where John Donne uses the language of sexual maturity to invite his three-personed God to break the knot of his profane loves, Wordsworth wishes his “days to be/ Bound each to each by natural piety” in a manner proper to lost and partially recovered innocence.55 The poem also looks backward from Freud, and from the nineteenth century, for an inherited theory about how hints of the invisible lodge within the concrete. Saint Augustine, for one, described God as “interior intimo meo”—more intimate to me than my innermost self or, in Wordsworth’s words, felt “in my heart of hearts” (192).56 Augustine is talking about God and Wordsworth is talking about nature, but both writers appeal to the structural principles conjoining the intimate to the intimated, the proximate to the “everywhere felt but nowhere seen,” which is either much or exactly like “God [in] his creation.”57 The category of the naturally supernatural, with its long and illustrious history within the Romantic tradition, externalizes Augustine’s dialectical figure into a condition of ordinary, extraordinary life. More crucially, the notion that something might be at once available to the senses and yet in excess of its own materiality is really an insight about metaphor, about the figurative translocation of what, in this case, are theological ideas into and upon nature. Modes of translocation have particular aesthetic effects, akin to what Hans Gumbrecht describes as “the Stimmung,” a German word that collects tone, atmosphere, mood, hum, and more under its umbrella. It is through contact with the Stimmung that we suspect the existence of those multiple worlds within a literary text; it is through our own “counterintuitions” that we let ourselves be swayed by the sort of imbalance that, as Goodman says, flags a split between one reality and another. “Often,” Gumbrecht suggests, “we are alerted to a potential mood in a text by the irritation and fascination provoked by a single word or small detail—the hint of a different tone or rhythm.” Gumbrecht’s “potential mood” and Goodman’s “weighting” are two sides of the same coin, synonyms for the object of our sneaking suspicion that something more is going on behind the words that darken the page. These notions of mood and weight treat that “more” in spatial terms—as a beveled edge carved

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lightly into a text, so that if we were to turn its corner we would be “making a step toward a phenomenon that remains unknown—one that has aroused our curiosity and, in the case of atmospheres or moods, often envelops or even enshrouds us.”58 Like the idea of utopia itself, the concept of an unevenly ballasted fictional world invites thought about places within places, beyond the horizon of the instantaneously knowable. These things are all both natural and immaterial, for even when they refuse to materialize in the bright colors of “the primary text” we feel their presence in a certain tug and undertow. They are not very different from Roland Barthes’s famous “reality effect,” which lodges inside the “single word or small detail” and helps generate the special effect Barthes calls realism. Realism, as Barthes makes clear, is genuinely weird, and for all its reputation as didactic and oppressive, or as the house style of capitalism, it is uniquely capable of figuring the desire for a utopia that is enriched but not overfull. This kind of realism lets the possibility of better worlds hover just above the present one, letting the former exert upon the latter an atmospheric pressure that touches the reader in the literally irritating form of the everywhere felt but nowhere seen. We could now revisit Helen Maria Williams’s Letters from France, from which Wordsworth would lift an anecdote wholesale and write into The Prelude as the chivalric romance of “Vaudracour and Julia.” Williams’s imagination of Revolutionary France as a “a region of romance” where “events the most astonishing and marvellous” are “the occurrences of the day” is, like Wordsworth’s meeting with the Magdalene, an instance of a secular realism.59 It too does peculiar things with what Taylor, quoting Friedrich Schiller, calls “die entgötterte Natur,” or nature evacuated of gods.60 Like the forests of Schiller’s ancient Greece, this secular and romantic realism is saturated and suffused by something sensuously immaterial, whose name is not God but the experience of living in a world tipped forward, and of riding shotgun on its glinting verge. Motivated, perhaps, by the recent laws allowing nuns to quit their orders, Williams attempts to take a tour of some local convents; unfortunately, even when she tries to pass herself off as a novitiate, she is repeatedly denied entrance, able only to glimpse dismal tableaux in which “religion, which was meant to be a source of happiness in this world, as well as the next, wears an aspect of the most gloomy horror” (2:117). She hears about nuns fasting, walking to “devotional exercises upon their knees,” sleeping in coffins and digging “a shovel-full of earth” for their graves (1:118); she sees a young

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nun talking to a young man from whom she is separated by an iron grate, a sight Williams says she finds far more disturbing than those Gothic scenes of self-mortification. Her cause is not all lost, however, for as she and her companions are on their way home, “meditating on the lot of a Carmelite,” they meet “in the street three nuns walking in the habit of their order.” “Upon enquiry,” Williams continues, “we were told that they had been forced by their parents to take the veil, and, since the decree of the National Assembly giving them liberty, they had obtained permission to pay a visit for three months to some friends who sympathized in their unhappiness, and were now on their journey” (1:119). What Williams or the nuns have in mind by either “the decree” or “liberty” is uncertain, as is the nature of the National Assembly, what exactly it does or how it works. The political becomes present to this scene by virtue of being under-described, in terms that, although they are preceded by definite articles, take on the loosely indexical quality of overheard speech. Williams has a number of words of this kind—France, the nation, the Constitution, the National Assembly, the judges, the law, the government—and each sketches politics as an immanent domain constituted by improvisational and aspirational uses of language. Into this domain are gathered “a Carmelite,” “three nuns,” “some friends,” the decree, and the Assembly, among whom or which there seems to be little ontological distinction. Each adds a bit of texture to a world where, in David Hume’s words, it becomes possible to imagine that “the sovereign” is “very close and intimate” to the concerns of his citizens precisely because those citizens seem of the same characterological order as the sovereign itself.61 Hume is speaking cynically but, nonetheless, in this passage a legal campaign of secularization hangs over the nuns and Williams’s group with a tender, salvational energy akin to something like grace.62 In Williams’s world, the political dwells inside the historical present in the same way as Augustine imagines God inhabiting the universe: as a body of water “infinite in every direction,” in the midst of which floats “a large but finite sponge . . . with all of its parts filled up by that immense sea.”63 Ambientem and penetrantem are the words Augustine uses to describe how the unlimited incorporeality of the divine surrounds and infiltrates the world—terms that chime, even at a considerable historical distance, with Gumbrecht’s remarks on the “ambient mood” and percolating whirr of the Stimmung.64 The distension of the material world by an immaterial cause intimates that there are things beyond ourselves that bend our awareness

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toward them. Augustine calls this cause God; for Williams, its shorthand is any one of those imprecise, vaguely bureaucratic names. Proper to revolution, or so Williams suggests, is a sense of moving forward toward these causes even as they remain importantly inaccessible, apprehensible chiefly as the temper and temperament of the historical present. All this said, the real miracle of Williams’s traveling-nuns passage lies in the fact that the Revolution itself seems to have made very little impact there. Why are those nuns still wearing their habits, if they’re not nuns anymore? Like Augustine’s sponge, they manage to hold their shape even as they are, in a word, rehabituated to the ordinary place called “the street.” Thus the “wow!” of Taylor’s something-greater is recast as the experience of Vergil and Wordsworth’s slightly-greater, fed in this instance by those processes of secularization that stretch but do not rupture all the cells of human life.65 The experience of secular modernity and immanent utopia described by Williams is an experience of letting oneself be folded into the newer part of a world splitting in two. As they leave the old world of the convent behind, the nuns undergo a phase change that sublimates them into the atmosphere of abstractions, of laws, liberties, legislative bodies, a non-traumatic diffusion—to quote Wordsworth’s Solitary for purposes opposite to his own—into “the wide embrace/Of institutions, and the forms of things.” Although Frances Ferguson (among others) has characterized realism as safeguarding the gap between private experience and the demand to give a public account of oneself, the coalescence of feminist and secular attitudes in Williams’s Letters produces an alternative realism, one that defies the sentimental program of interiority in favor of persons being turned inside out.66 For certain, this realism encourages people, and particularly female people, to decant their selfhood into conventional expressions, and to cherish those expressions as part of the idiom of modern citizenship. And yet it is not quite correct to say such a realism forces a tendentious linkage between “the notion of self-realization [and] individual autonomy.”67 As we have seen, it is in fact committed to representing the world as a collective projection of experiences and sensations, and to treating the secular itself as a worldfeel that “permeates and establishes the phenomenology of everyday life practices.”68 Despite the fact that secular culture is frequently accused of smothering flickers of transcendence, it turns out, at least in the domain described by Williams, to be perfectly capable of charging life with energies in excess of the normal. Sometimes those energies have names like politics, and at the very least they offer reassurance that life

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inside the immanent frame need not be existentially anemic. If the Wordsworthian commitment of the self to nature cannot promise life after death to the immortal soul, if Williams’s pedestrian nuns are not as captivating as Le Brun’s Magdalene, they nonetheless do offer themselves as the accessible objects of desire’s “habitual sway.”69 It is probably impossible to prove the existence of a causal connection between the rise of Romantic and post-Revolutionary secularism and what has been called the Romantic sonnet revival.70 In Wordsworth’s case, however, the boom in his own sonnet production after 1800 is suggestive given that so many of his sonnets make use of religious images to describe their own formalism. The most famous example is certainly the “Prefatory Sonnet” that introduces one section (the section on sonnets) of Poems, in Two Volumes, and that is now more often known by its first line, as “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.”71 The Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads had essentially been a meditation on the capacity of formal and rhetorical technologies—from “the general power of numbers” to the inherited architectures of the ballad and the brawny paragraphs of blank verse—to record and reproduce the fleeting and seemingly amorphous phenomena of human passion. This dialectical theory of composition, in which rigid structure and inchoate affect come together to create a unified poetic utterance, surfaces again in “Nuns fret not,” which compresses the meandering argument of the Preface into a neat, fourteen-line parable. “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room/And hermits are contented with their cells”; the predictable conclusion is that Wordsworth is happy “to be bound/Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground,” where he no longer has to “fe[el] the weight of too much liberty.”72 A strictly historical reading of this poem might suggest that Wordsworth, an apostate of the French Revolution, thinks he is turning against those “souls (for such there needs must be)” who have been crushed by excessive liberty (12). More suggestive, however, is that the central paradox the poem takes as its manifesto—freedom lies in self-restraint, creation happens within convention—involves equating nuns, hermits, and other emblems of semi-elective self-imprisonment with “the wild murmur of bees,” who “soar for bloom,/High as the highest peak of Furness Fells” (5–7). The double affects of unfretfulness and content, the only emotive states mentioned by the poem, are worked into the dull roar of nature’s own Stimmung, the feedback generated by being simultaneously held back and emancipated.

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This is the sound of the Romantic secular, the vaguely rendered hum of something all around anchored by allusions to recent history. In Wordsworth’s case, “the relations between the law of genre and the laws of the state” come together in a quintessentially lyric emphasis on being “law-abiding or rule-bound.”73 The sonnet now articulates the after-effects of a laïcité that bills itself as liberatory and unfettering and that, more to the point, offers itself as a means of projecting the laws of religion into the poem’s rhetorical space. Interestingly, the nuns are the only figures in Wordsworth’s sonnet accompanied by a negation: they fret not, but the hermits are content with the cells, as students are content in their ivory towers, as maids are content at their wheels and weavers at their looms (3–4). As this paraphrase may suggest, the nuns are also the only figures to whom the adjective “content” does not apply. In fact, one might also read that first line to mean “nuns don’t fret about their narrow rooms, but they may fret about something else” or, alternatively, “nuns are not presently fretting in convents, because it is 1807 and (in France) there are no more convents.” This historical context or, as it were, “content” is secondary, however, to the sonnet’s description of secularism—of the time of nuns not doing anything, the time of nuns’ negation—as “a concrete encounter” with some “physical environment.” As Gumbrecht suggests, references to sound in literature tend to invite reflections on the very nature of “moods and atmospheres,” to ask aloud just where a mood is located.74 In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge will describe Wordsworth’s great gift as one “of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations,” but the loaded reference to “the ideal world” sits uneasily within this otherwise astute evaluation.75 It is true that what happens in “Nuns fret not” is the use of a highly specific historical moment to create an atmosphere whose tone is a monophonic hum, but that hum is the embodied sound of earthly creatures (bees murmuring wildly) going about their business, not an echo from the “repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”76 These lay effects are also felt in “With how sad steps, O Moon thou climb’st the sky,” where the moon’s slow, melancholy movement is compared to that of “Unhappy nuns, whose common breath’s a sigh/Which they would stifle,” for they too move “at such a pace.”77 A rewriting of the thirty-first sonnet of Astrophil and Stella, Wordsworth’s “O Moon” preserves Sidney’s pagan machinery (had Wordsworth “the power of Merlin,” he would send the stars to

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keep the lunar “Goddess” company) but turns the expressly erotic Elizabethan poem into a hymn to Romantic pantheism.78 It also may deliberately misread the “heaven” in Sidney’s third line—“What, may it be that even in heav’nly place”—as a Christian one, even though Sidney goes on to wonder in a heathen vein if that “busy archer” Cupid has been shooting his arrows at the Moon herself. While Wordsworth copies Sidney’s first two lines verbatim, he introduces those “unhappy nuns” in the third: it is their “common breath” that provides the backdrop or landscape for a poem whose original setting is the night sky in the poet’s eye, and it is the nuns themselves who usher in only to be outshined by “Cynthia,” “Queen both for beauty and for majesty.”79 Other sonnets from Poems, in Two Volumes follow suit. In “Where lies the land to which yon ship must go,” ships become “like pilgrims” crossing dark waters toward unknown destinations.80 “These words were uttered in a pensive mood” and “The world is too much with us” outwardly contemplate temples and paganism, while “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1803” ends its urban naturalist hymn with a faintly sacrilegious oath. Almost all the sonnets eventually published in the 1807 volume play with images of veiling and unveiling, of habits turned into resources for simile and metaphor, as in “This city now doth like a garment wear/The beauty of the morning,” or “The grove, the sky-built temple, and the dome,/Though clad in colors beautiful and pure,/Find in the heart of man no natural home.”81 Such tendencies unite to consummate effect in “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,” a poem that meditates, in David Bromwich’s words, on the “loss effected by” political and cosmic “revolutions of the earth, from which the poet recovers a sense of persisting union”:82

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquility; The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea: Listen! the mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder—everlastingly. Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here, If thou appear untouched by solemn thought, Thy nature is not therefore less divine:

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Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year; And worship’st at the Temple’s inner shrine, God being with thee when we know it not.83

The formality of the sonnet’s blueprint creates a test case—or, to use Goodman’s synonym for art at large, a psychological experiment—in which it becomes possible to secularize the relationship between the intuited and the perceivable world. That process is, in this case, aligned with the conversion of image or symbol into figure. Explaining the diagrams in her magisterial book on Shakespeare’s sonnets, Helen Vendler points out that sonnets, which scholars are so keen to break into two or sometimes three parts—octave and sestet or else eight lines, four lines, and a couplet—in fact swing open on multiple hinges. A logical structure may divide fourteen lines into thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; a “pronomial” structure may take eight lines for the speaker to address himself and six to address his beloved; and “yet a third structure in the same sonnet” might subtend “a change from religious to secular diction,” dividing “the sonnet into entirely different” discursive and tropological parts.84 Structure and diction, form and figure are four specific ways of worldmaking, and they are in full force in Wordsworth’s poem. Like Williams’s Carmelites or the nuns who are “notted” by his paean to formalism, Wordsworth’s quiet Nun participates in the creation of a mood. She dissolves into the evening and makes it calm, free, as the sea’s “sound like thunder” fills the air exactly as the noise of the bees fills Furness Fells, in a monotonous crackle and drone. The traditional symbology of the sacred melts into the novel diction of the profane, swallowing the sonnet’s bifurcated structure as the poem itself spools open. The world of “God being with [us] when we know it not,” of the apparent retreat of the divine from the earth, doubles back from the final line and envelops the previous thirteen, just as the deafening quiet of the sea seems to gulp down the sun. I don’t dispute that this poem, written while Wordsworth was in France during the Peace of Amiens, is about a ceasefire, nor that the Nun makes the same gesture toward current events as her sisters do in those other sonnets. But once more, the poem cannot stop there, not if it is to speak, or sound, of Romanticism abbreviated as Rcsm. Another nun who frets not, this Nun is also the object of a negation. She is “Breathless,” which could mean either that she is breathing very fast or that she is not breathing at all. The latter interpretation is helped by the contrast between Nun and sea, whose

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inhalations and exhalations are the background noise of the “everlasting.” Where she seems to keep pace with time, with the movement of the sun, and perhaps also with the history whose recent past she partially represents, the sea is at once beyond history and yet part of the physical and temporal world. It is an impalpable thing that palpates the poet’s ear, where it utters a blessing for the child who cannot understand the significance of its hush. The poet knows the sea is announcing God’s withdrawal from human thought, but the child, who will grow up in a world where nuns are but the stuff that similes are made of, is “untouched” by these facts. She is, perhaps, more perfectly afloat upon the sea’s unfocused burr, her senses long since acclimated to hearing it as no more than a hiss. The sound of the secular is, here, the sound of white noise. As we know, sometimes white noise is a blessing: it is the sound of a ceasefire. For Wordsworth it is also the baited breath of a hope that nuns, God, Abraham, temples, and all the rest have faded into figures, becoming markers of a sense of the “beauteous.” That somewhat clunky, self-conscious adjective announces that this is a scene of the invention of a new idiom, where “Nun” is a word for evening and God is the racket over which white noise “broods” and glides, shushing up tiresome sermons about “Abraham’s bosom” and “the Temple’s inner shrine” by forcing the words themselves into gummy alliterative phrases lost in the wash of the sea. Alongside beauty, however, we have to add innocence. The child, so isolated from the past that she has no name (and gender only as a kind of afterthought), is a sprite from the future, a citizen of white noise whose own sense experience is marked by the evaporation of a world she will never have to know happened. Like Coleridge’s baby, who is promised a future where he “will wander like a breeze/By lakes and sandy shores,” shielded from the urban cacophony that marked his father’s childhood, this little girl will live as though the world had not been split in two, as though one of its parts had not been weighed and found wanting.85 What Wordsworth wishes for his child is not just a secular existence, but also a consciousness unmarked by a conflict between the sacred and the profane. It is this consciousness he models for her in the poem, which becomes a kind of talisman that reassuringly enacts the disappearance of the sun into the empire of the sea and the seen. Readers familiar with the academic discourse of secularism may notice that this chapter has steered more or less clear of the language of “disenchantment,” as in “the disenchantment of the world” by secular principles.

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That phrase is widely attributed to Max Weber, though it is in fact Weber’s quotation of the same poem by Schiller cited by Taylor above, specifically in reference to the notion of nature evacuated of gods, de-divinized though not, necessarily, demystified.86 The usual version of the disenchantment narrative goes something like this: secularism comes along and chases the supernatural out of its material home in the world, causing the world to become empty of a suprasensible sense of value, a respect for things whose existence cannot be either proved or disproved by scientific method. The popularity of the disenchantment hypothesis has provoked critics on the other side to offer secular alternatives of enchantment, alternatives whose very diversity suggests that the notion of disenchantment is far too overdetermined to provide a way of talking about the role of religious and secular interests in the public sphere, in everyday life, or in literature. Bracketing my own skepticism about disenchantment, I want briefly to note how common it has become for theorists of disenchantment to associate secularism with the desire to achieve mastery over nature.87 For Adorno and Horkheimer, the impulse to subdue nature begins with Francis Bacon, whose own “utopia” is founded on the injunction for man to command all the actions of nature and thus all its power. A chain of continuity is thereby established between utopianism, natural science, secularism, capitalism, and the environmental dystopia that ensues when nature’s subjugation is “fulfilled on a telluric scale.”88 When it migrates into literary criticism, this series of overlapping causes and effects joins up with a critique of realism, which, because it is interested in exposing things immanent to the world, gets yoked to a refusal to treat the earth as a place on which we ought to tread lightly. But consider this moment in the Confessions, when Augustine is desperate to determine wherein God resides: [T]here is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God—a light, voice, odor, food, embrace of my inner man, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is a sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God. And what is the object of my love? I asked the earth and it said: “It is not I.” I asked all that is in it; they made the same confession. I asked the sea, the deeps, the living creatures that creep, and they responded: “We are not your God, look

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beyond us.” I asked the breezes which blow and the entire air with its inhabitants said: “[ . . . ] I am not God.” I asked heaven, sun, moon and stars; they said: “Nor are we the God whom you seek.” And I said to all these things in my external environment: “Tell me of my God who you are not, tell me something about him.” And with a great voice they cried out: “He made us.” My question was the attention I gave them, and their response was their beauty.89

On the theological dimensions of this passage I am not prepared to comment, but as a reader I feel comfortable following Gumbrecht in calling Augustine’s God “atmosphere, tone, Stimmung,” mood, mode, vibration. God is the feel of Augustine’s world, not identical to his external environment but part of it as its efficient cause. I wonder, though, what Augustine means when he rephrases the entire passage with the remark that his question— “what is the object of my love?”—is not a question but a mode of attention, and that earth’s response is not an answer but their echoing-back to Augustine his own appreciation of the earth as beautiful. The beauty of the earth is not the same as the beauty of the divine, for, as the earth says, it is not God; nature and all its inhabitants seem perfectly tangible entities who can speak for themselves. There is, Augustine suggests, the beauty of something to which we can only respond with our bodies, and another kind of beauty, namely the beauty of things with which we may engage dialogically. The first kind of beauty is the object of love; the second is the object of attention. The first does manage to prove itself on our pulses; the second arises in response to a question raised in the mind and put differently into language. What nature seems to be telling Augustine is that, although it is not God—although God and what He makes are distinct—beauty is the hinge between them. What Vendler says of the Shakespearian sonnet is anticipated by Augustine’s earth and its inhabitants, namely that the world opens up along multiple axes, some of which we love, some to which we pay the dues of attention, but in response to all of which we might feel productively alienated from the imperative to pursue “satiety.” It is toward a critique of satiety that the next chapter moves, taking a cue from Augustine’s insistence on the importance of non-identity—for example, of Nature and God—to develop a mode of utopian thought predicated on dispossession. Like Augustine’s account of his attachment to God, this chapter also turns on an idea of love as “a bond of union” that thrives on being unfulfilled. In his Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne makes

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clear how the “scholarlike or clerical air” of the Blithedale utopians, who are in search of “Coleridge’s projected Pantisocracy,” is both an expression and a victim of their commitment to honoring the claims of intimate desire.90 Like Coleridge in “Dejection,” they repeat the name of love as though the name alone is enough to make it happen. The shallow optimism of this gesture becomes not just an allegory for but the cause of Blithedale’s failure. While my own discussion of love focuses on the poetry and philosophy of Percy Shelley, the drama of failure will feature prominently there as well. In exploring the wages of failure, harm, and helplessness, Shelley tries for a secular rehabilitation of eschatology and apocalypse, categories that necessarily challenge realist representation. A work of profound unordinariness, The Revolt of Islam considers how the conventional architecture of human affection might adjust to the horizon of a utopia that lies on the other side of human existence, the world that is made when people almost are no more.

CHAPTER THREE

Losing Ground in Shelley’s Revolt “But this I say, brethren, the time has been shortened, so that from now on those who have wives should be as though they had none; and those who weep, as though they did not weep; and those who rejoice, as though they did not rejoice; and those who buy, as though they did not possess; and those who use the world, as though they did not make full use of it; for the form of this world is passing away.” —1 Corinthians 7:29–31

longest poem, The Revolt of Islam, was first printed in December 1817 as Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City. The sequence of events that followed its publication is relatively well known though worth rehearsing. A strange allegorical adventure in Platonic philosophy, Zoroastrian symbolism, erotic love, socialist revolution, vegetarianism, and orientalist cliché, Laon and Cythna caught the disapproving eye of Buchanan McMillan, the man hired to print it, on two counts in particular: its anti-Christian sentiment and the depiction of a sexual relationship between the two protagonists, whom Shelley had originally made siblings. Shelley’s publisher, Charles Ollier, pulled the poem, which Shelley was then persuaded to revise. The Revolt of Islam appeared in January 1818, and while much has been made of the forty-nine differences between Laon and Cythna and The Revolt, these are less explosive than the frantic history of the poem’s censorship and re-publication might suggest. Some of Shelley’s alterations simply correct existing printer’s errors, while others finesse the poet’s remarks on Christianity into a more general critique of sectarianism and clerical hypocrisy. The most dramatic change to the poem is that, in its second version, Cythna is no longer Laon’s blood relative but PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY’S

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rather an orphan adopted by his parents. Their sexual relationship—which occurs outside the bounds of matrimony and is thus an example of what the Romantics would call free love—remains the same, as does the unusually explicit language Shelley uses to describe it. Modern critics have had a great deal to say about Shelley’s edits, but for his contemporary readers the more pressing, and more controversial, issue set out by the poem involves its optimistic attitude toward the prospects of political revolution. Conservative reviewers such as John Gibson Lockhart (writing anonymously in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine) focused their “general protest against the creed of the author,” a creed loosely defined as a “pernicious system of opinions concerning man and his moral government” but given some historical and pragmatic specificity through its association with the so-called “Cockney School” of urban progressive poets, most notably Leigh Hunt.1 Hunt, for his part, devoted a number of articles in his paper, the Examiner, to promoting Shelley’s poem for what he describes as its departure from the standard set by the elder poets of “the Lake School, as they are called,” of being “as dogmatic in their despair as they used to be in their hope.” This pointed criticism of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Robert Southey is countered by Hunt’s subtle and precise praise for Shelley who, Hunt says, has in The Revolt successfully disjoined his utopian principles from the objective of “perfection”: Mr. Shelley is of opinion with many others that the world is a very beautiful one externally, but wants a good deal of mending with respect to its minds and habits; and for this purpose he would quash as many cold and selfish passions as possible, and rouse up the general element of Love, till it set our earth rolling more harmoniously. The answer made to a writer, who sets out with endeavours like these, is that he is idly aiming at perfection; but Mr. Shelley has no such aim, neither have nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand of the persons who have ever been taunted with it. Such a charge, in truth, is only the first answer which egotism makes to any one who thinks he can go beyond its own ideas of the possible. If this however be done away, the next answer is, that you are attempting something wild and romantic,—that you will get disliked for it as well as lose your trouble,—and that you had better coquet, or rather play the prude, with things as they are.2

Hunt moves quickly, and it’s not immediately clear what he means when he accuses “egotism” of setting “its own ideas of the possible” above the ideas of

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others. In this passage not just the ego but its self-regard becomes a cognizing agent, one capable of discriminating between more and less plausible interpretations of plausibility in the domain of social reform. As for the suggestion that the would-be reformer winds up forced, by the pressures of public opinion, to “coquet, or rather play the prude,” Hunt’s alignment of centrism with a feminized strategy of erotic froideur situates this whole passage within its own version of a Blakean framework, in which the conservative mind is shown to mobilize sexual panic as a defense against the transformation of “things as they are.” Shelley, according to Hunt, is after something different. I would call this something adjustment, and Hunt is not far from the same idea when he calls it “mending,” an act of repair made with the intent to reuse. The Revolt, or so Hunt suggests, tailors its imaginative “endeavours” to the recovery of a world that will never be perfect, whose patches will always show. The poem’s own intentions concerning the possible stitch “perfection” together with frailty, so that if Shelley may be said to orient himself in any degree toward utopia, it is with an understanding that this goal is indivisible from its own impoverishment. In other words, to extend the reach of the possible involves acknowledging that possibility itself cannot be grasped outside the threat of its total depletion. That this acknowledgment courts the appellation of “romantic” suggests that for Hunt, as for de Staël in her D’Allemagne, to be romantic is to refuse the prospect of perfection in favor of a model of progress curiously determined by its own fragility, marked by fault lines that can be patched over but never fixed. Before moving onto a discussion of The Revolt of Islam, I want to return to Blake, whose own explorations of free love—and, following up on Hunt, the psychopathology of political life—are uncannily in tune with Shelley’s even though Blake is not someone whose work we might immediately associate with depletion. Even less does Blake come to mind in the context of putting a hold on the desire for perfection, progress, or even just on desire generally: “Those who restrain desire,” sneers The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”3 Consider Urizen, the Jehovah-like personage whom Blake uses to represent restraint (usually) as a technology of oppression. Urizen, whose name might be pronounced “your reason” or else to rhyme with “horizon,” often appears as the very model of an Enlightenment scientist. In Blake’s print Newton, for example, Urizen in his guise as the great physicist and mathematician is trying to sketch a perfect circle while gorgeously imprecise splotches of lichen bloom all around

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him; in the etching The Ancient of Days, he hoards the whole glorious sunburst of the cosmos for himself while pinching Planet Earth between the needles of his compass. Beauty abounds, but Urizen thinks he can do better, chiefly by imposing artificial controls on things spontaneously grown; alas, as a would-be artisan Urizen is hampered by his inability to embrace the natural principle of generation and its anarchic sensuality. As for Blake himself, his own contempt for what Hunt calls “play[ing] the prude, with things as they are” has won him a not undeserved reputation as a mystical hedonist, a proponent—in the words of Algernon Charles Swinburne—of “[s]acred natural love” and its presumptively undisciplined expression.4 Like most experiments in free love—from the Shelleys’ marriage to The Blithedale Romance—Blake’s treatment of the emancipatory power of sex poses difficult questions about the nature, value, and scope of freedom in general. Without fail, the diegetic argument of Blake’s poetry is that sex is ultimately a good, even when it is almost or entirely nonconsensual. I certainly agree that Blake, “in affirming the fundamental goodness and wholeness of the erotic impulse, and connecting sexual repression with the subjection of women,” belongs in a feminist “cultural revolutionary tradition.”5 Nonetheless, any defense of Blake’s unsettlingly recuperative treatment of sexual violence must account for the extent to which not only sex but also sexualized harm provide Blake with occasions to explore what I hesitate to call their overlying benefits. These benefits, it so happens, frequently and surprisingly take the form of bereavement or loss, but it is a loss that Blake’s verse registers as ontologically positive. Here, loss adds to the living beings that fall victim to it and is borne along with them, like a prosthetic limb—an analogy that seems bizarre and unwarranted unless we consider it alongside Marshall McLuhan’s claim that every prosthesis constitutes both an extension and an amputation of the potency of the subject to which it is attached.6 Blake’s oeuvre bears this idea out insofar as it presents loss affixed to characters in the form of an addendum, a figurative asterisk that, in a manner similar to Shelley’s “mending” utopianism, sutures the injured present to the injurious past. While it would not be exactly correct to call Blake a dialectician, he does use tropes of harm to encode the synchronic persistence of past events within the forward-hurtling present tense of progressive, productive movement. In the controversial “Preludium” to America, a Prophecy, Blake introduces “the shadowy daughter of Urthona,” a mute and faceless woman who guards

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her father’s captive, the revolutionary spirit “red Orc.”7 Like the Titan Prometheus, Orc has been locked in “tenfold chains” to prevent the energy of upheaval that lives inside him from spreading to humankind and giving them powers above their station (1.12). The shadowy daughter, for whom Orc lusts, is at first no more than a black hole, her ghostly body hidden beneath “a helmet & dark hair” and by the “clouds roll[ing] round her loins.” She is also “silent . . . as night,” but all this is about to change. One “dread day,” her prisoner bursts out of his chains: The hairy shoulders rend the links, free are the wrists of fire; Round the terrific loins he siez’d the panting struggling womb; It joy’d: she put aside her clouds & smiled her first-born smile; As when a black cloud shews its light’nings to the silent deep. Soon as she saw the terrible boy then burst the virgin cry. I know thee, I have found thee, & I will not let thee go[.] (2.2–7)

One could say that this is essentially a scene from an Ayn Rand novel put into verse: the mute and shapeless female progeny of some “father stern abhorr’d” is assaulted into speech by a male rebel’s titanic embrace, finding to her surprise that “the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted” (1.11).8 William Keach accordingly calls the “Preludium” “politically repellant,” while Swinburne to the contrary sounds downright Randian when he salutes Orc’s attack as a demonstration of the “fruitful violence of love.”9 Harold Bloom, meanwhile, explains in cool, deflationary terms that “[t]he silence of the shadowy female identifies her with nature, barren when not possessed by man,” adding simply: “Orc’s rape is meant to give her a voice, and succeeds.”10 Bloom’s reading strives to separate the poem’s allegorical content from its sexual politics, but the conjunction of eroticized harm with poiesis—the formational activity that Orc either performs on or provokes in the shadowy daughter—is critical not only to Blake’s ideas about revolutionary uses of force, but also to his figuration of loss as a thing with volume, mass, and magnitude. Take the daughter’s “virgin cry,” which she lets out at a point when the poem (if not the modern reader) almost certainly no longer considers her a virgin. Although we could suggest that “virgin” modifies “cry” in this, the daughter’s maiden voyage into speech, the adjective forcibly lures our eyes backward to the preceding lines: we look again to see if we’ve missed

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something, to see if perhaps the daughter has not been assaulted at all. She has, but the poem is not done yet. The vestigial use of “virgin” is rooted in the curious simile comparing the daughter to a black cloud, whose smile is like a flash of lightning across the darkness of her gloomy face. On this same plate, the daughter tells Orc that she is by his “lightnings rent,” and in the passage quoted above we learn she has “put aside her clouds”—so what gives? She puts aside her clouds to become like a cloud? She is torn apart by lightning but lightning is also what her smile is like? These fractured tautologies suspend the poem in a see-saw between past events and their enduring polyvalent effects. The simile itself (“As when a cloud. . . .”) gives shape to this curious temporality of sexual violence, whereby the undivided state of being not-“rent” operates as a drag, an undertow pulling on the present tense of what Blake describes as a fissuring “joy.” The rhythm of the simile is tidal, creating a sense of equilibrium splintered by a countervailing sense of vertigo, as though the poem is trying to put into words the impossibly elongated moment just before the surf dribbles back from the shore. In McLuhan’s terms, the prosthetic medium of metaphoric language nudges amputation and extension into alignment, establishing a vision of time and history in which the painful past throws its weight obliquely behind the here-and-now. Or, in other words—these from Saree Makdisi’s virtuosic analysis of Visions of the Daughter of Albion—what interests Blake here and elsewhere are the rhetorical as well as the ethical logics of “difference, rather than equivalence; donation, rather than return; sacrifice, rather than gain; loss, rather than compensation; a moment” with agonizing wonder dilated from within, “rather than a carefully regulated transaction in linear time.”11 I linger over the Preludium as a way into a discussion of Shelley’s poetic attempts to cast loss as a utopian form of impact without accretion. In this I take my cue from Makdisi as well as from Michel Serres, who identifies “dispossession” as an almost penitential practice of not simply minimizing but actively relinquishing our real and metaphysical stakes in the appropriation of the planetary environment. A human being, Serres argues, is a creature like other creatures: it makes the earth its home by polluting it. But humans are also unique in defining themselves in relation to their capacity to own, and in defining ownership as the total consumption or else the poisoning of a resource such that it cannot be used by others. From the “hard pollution” of fossil fuels and landfills to the “soft pollution” of billboards, strip-malls, and Muzak, “the waste of appropriation,” Serres writes, surrounds us. To

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“practice . . . the dispossession of the world” is to do less to the world and thus to efface our presence within it.12 The task of this chapter is to find out how dispossession might be registered as a negative profit. My own baseline claim is that Shelley, like Blake, is fascinated by figurative analogues of dispossession. As Carol Jacobs has argued, he makes particular, studied use of the simile as a device of contrast that surprisingly “divests” or empties out the possessive idiom of sameness or identity. While Jacobs, in a poststructuralist mode, reads these divestments as displacements that “everlastingly, evershiftingly” defer poetry’s capacity “to denominate an objective realm located” outside of the poem itself, I take Shelley’s dispossessive similes as keen to ionize loss as a building block of concrete political progress.13 There is, however, a catch when it comes to this matter of earthly improvement—for Shelley, despite all his considerable optimism about humanity, also represents the utopian world as a place from which people seem to have almost disappeared. The light-touch attitude toward the earth Serres calls “tenancy” or temporary dwelling is echoed by Shelley who, in a disorienting reversal of Bloom’s remarks on America, imagines a post-revolutionary situation that is at once barren and salvaged because “man” has nearly been absented from it.14 If Blake locates loss within his own similes’ “rigorous geometry of positive passions,” Shelley insists that the “sustainability” of better futures is predicated on the maintenance of impassioned negativity, in the figural as well as affective form of sorrow.15 That grief, too, rocks dizzyingly between love and harm. Plugged into the alternate but no less rigorous geometry of Shelley’s poetics, loving and harming are alike claimed as agents of loss conceived as the prerequisite to a salutary non-development of the human race. This chapter will approach Shelley’s poetry from a slightly indirect angle, moving first through a discussion of Romantic utilitarianism and its radical offshoot in the doctrine of free love. After a short discussion of utility’s own figurative techniques, I dwell for a time on Anna St. Ives, an epistolary novel by Thomas Holcroft and a clear influence on Shelley’s Revolt. A successful playwright, a well-known figure in radical circles, and a close friend of Shelley’s father-in-law William Godwin, Holcroft is a writer intensely interested in the connection between free love and agrarian socialism. More to the point, he is also aware of the readiness with which doctrines of sexual liberty may be misused to justify violence against women, as they may seem to do in Blake’s America.16 Through its heady blend of utilitarian philosophy, Romantic feminism, environmental critique, and investment in the prospect of

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collectively owned and collectively farmed land, Anna St. Ives evolves an idea of eroticized dispossession that furnishes Shelley with the heart of his own utopian program. That program is on full blast in The Revolt, to which I turn in the last part of this chapter. Here, I uncover from Shelley’s protracted Spenserian stanzas an idiom of renunciatory attachment, one that enables a loving disentanglement of human beings from one another, and from the world at large. * * * Shelley’s life does not make a good advertisement for free love. His first wife committed suicide after he left her for another woman; his second wife had a stepsister with whom he almost certainly had an affair, and perhaps a baby who died in foster care, exacerbating the already pronounced conflict between the two siblings; he wrote a poem (Epipsychidion) that accuses his wife Mary of frigidity before encouraging her to join him, her stepsister, and another young woman in a ménage à trois. In short, his biography all too easily fosters a conservative critique of utopianism as undergirded by “a sublime indifference” to real-world problems and the people suffering from them, a “profound moral irresponsibility” that alibis itself in poses of superior virtue.17 But Shelley’s erotic principles were (at least nominally) motivated by his commitment to utilitarian philosophy, which is as close as Romanticism gets to an official or, in Barthes’s sense, “paradigmatic” utopian discourse.18 It is perfectly logical that free love should follow from a belief in utilitarianism, which holds that a person should always act so as to increase the portion of happiness—measured in units of pleasure and unpleasure—among all persons. As Shelley puts it in the notes to Queen Mab, “the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce,” and since having a number of sexual partners will increase the amount of pleasurable sensation being had in the world, free love trumps monogamy by availing humankind of its maximum hedonic profit.19 Although its critics imagine the principle of utility as a distinctly unpoetical notion, even the most misleading characterizations of utilitarian thought rely on what Susan Wolfson calls “the derangements of poetic form.”20 At its most basic level, utilitarianism is engaged in the translation of real or hypothetical somatic experiences into stable metrics; it is, therefore, a specialized mode of figurative labor. Take William Hazlitt’s unsympathetic description

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of utility’s adherents as grave-robbers or “resurrection-men,” who look at “human bodies as containing so many bones and muscles, as so many moving anatomical preparations, and [think] that every pound of flesh, if it were dead, would be worth so much gold.” Hazlitt’s counterfactual syntax—“if x were the case, y would follow”—condemns by mimicking the ratiocinations of utility, whose felicific calculus proceeds by unwinding a “fearful train of ideas” until it determines how to rack up the greatest happiness for the greatest number.21 “The Late Murders” also anticipates Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading of Juliette, the Marquis de Sade’s pornographic study of the “enlightenment standard of calculability and utility,” a standard Sade applies assiduously in the very “breathing spaces” of existence as Hazlitt’s grave-robbers apply it post-mortem. The libertines of Juliette (or Justine, or Philosophie dans le boudoir) decide to act as though they live in a world of inexhaustible resources, where “no moment is unused, no body orifice neglected, no function left inactive.” They are not good recyclers making sure nothing goes to waste, but profiteers who live off other people’s time and, more crucially, other people’s matter. As Adorno and Horkheimer make clear, libertinism’s pornographic agenda absorbs the possibility of “utopia” into an unattractive inversion of Kant’s “purposiveness without a purpose,” with its implied pathway to the kingdom of ends razed by an aimless carnality for which not even death, as Sade’s many necrophiliac scenes demonstrate, marks a limit.22 When a pound of flesh becomes so much gold, the specificity of the fleshly measure vanishes into the fog of “so much,” a standard with no clear referent fastened behind it. Both “gold” and “flesh” are what are called mass or non-count nouns, which is to say they cannot be modified by numerals or pluralized: I can have ten glasses of water, but I cannot have ten golds or a flesh. This all changes in de Sade’s phantasmagoria, in which all flesh is broken down into its calculable pieces—as Adorno and Horkheimer put it, into moments, orifices, and functions. In their different ways, Hazlitt and the Frankfurt School critics have been drawn into a utilitarian grammar that trades countable for non-countable things and non-countable for countable things by subjecting them to an insatiable hedonic algorithm. How many numerable things equal one innumerable thing, like happiness? How can an innumerable thing, like sex, be divided and delegated among unconnected organs, persons, and operations?23 If, as Marjorie Levinson argues, the turn from countable to uncountable things performs a “shift from

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exemplarity to singularity,” utility might be said to play fast and loose with the difference between examples and entities, creating equivalence in unlikely contexts (how many pounds equal so much?).24 From its capacity to force comparison, utilitarianism derives not only its ethical and political but also its metaphoric purchase. Not merely a pocket ruler for deciding what to do and when, the felicific calculus first proposed by Bentham generates similes no longer flagged by “like” or “as,” but quietly naturalized, ground out into a world where the necessity of measure makes all things implicitly like or as anything(s) else.25 Exemplarity, which Levinson introduces in her discussion of count and non-count nouns in Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, has a crucial role to play in the partnership of figure and measure, a word with both numerical and poetic resonances. It is, in some sense, the conceptual heart of the utopian branch of utilitarianism that most influenced Shelley, namely the sexually radical utilitarianism of the 1790s. This particular vein of thought emerged from a tangle of eighteenth-century influences, among them the religious mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, the erotica of the Enlightenment, the Della Cruscan poets, and Bentham himself. Although Godwin’s comparatively square Enquiry Concerning Political Justice offered Shelley his most robust introduction to utility’s doctrines, this erotically charged heritage plays out far more vividly in his own poetry. It is not difficult, for example, to trace the roots of Queen Mab’s politics of pleasure to the writing of the Swedenborgian abolitionist Charles Wadström, for whom “[a] more perfect political Thermometer cannot be given, whereby to judge the happiness or unhappiness of any Community” than the aggregate sexual satisfaction of all the couples living in it.26 Where John Keats designed Endymion as a “pleasure thermometer” to mark out the “gradations of happiness” love makes available to individuals, pleasure, for Wadström, gauges a happiness that is not personal but collective, and that moves from the statistical count of individual couples to the uncountable noun of voluptuous fulfillment en masse.27 But Shelley’s most significant interlocutor on the subject of love’s utility is Thomas Holcroft, whose works Percy and Mary Shelley read frequently (according to Mary’s reading journals). Although Shelley was an enthusiastic admirer of the period’s most overt paean to polygamy, James Lawrence’s The Empire of the Nairs, it is Holcroft’s complex negotiation with the figurative dimensions of love as loss that The Revolt of Islam will come to press into the service of its deprivational ethics.28 To be specific, The Revolt borrows heavily

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from Holcroft’s 1792 epistolary novel, Anna St. Ives (as does Godwin’s Political Justice, whose appendix on “co-operation, co-habitation, and marriage” paraphrases long sections of his friend Holcroft’s earlier work). Anna St. Ives is a curious document: a utilitarian novel that, like the Revolt, tries to treat love as the discrete shape given to an unquantifiable absence. This is the kind of love that springs up between the titular Anna, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, and a young man named Frank Henley, the son of her father’s steward. Frank is planning an agrarian socialist community in America, on the order of Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana, and he wants Anna to join him. Anna, however, has decided to marry not for love, but according to her sense of moral duty. Calculating whose life she might most improve by becoming his wife, her eye falls on Coke Clifton, a dissolute aristocrat in the proto-Byronic, late-Lovelacian mold. The novel thus begins by setting up two competing interpretations of “the paths of utility.”29 The greater good must be done, but should it be done mimetically, by “setting mankind an example” to follow, or directly, by “the reformation of man or woman by projects of marriage” (332)? Holcroft leans heavily on the side of mimesis. In Anna St. Ives, the couple is a galvanic instrument charged with the energy of “love and reason . . . united” (50). Even when Anna tries to resist Frank, her love for him drags her along into his vision of political exemplarity, in which “the union of two people whose pure love, founded on an unerring conviction of mutual worth, . . . promise[s] the reality of that heaven of which the world delights to dream” (133). Using the same vocabulary of kindling and contagion that will run throughout The Revolt of Islam, Frank describes himself and Anna “burning with the same ardour to attain and to diffuse excellence”—whatever that means (134). I don’t mean to be dismissive, for Holcroft’s vagueness, his pairing of abstract verbs with abstract nouns, is as important to his optimistic exercise in utility as pretending to count the uncountable is to the negative assessments of Hazlitt, Horkheimer, and Adorno. Frank and Anna “mingle and act,” they “admire, animate, and emulate,” and “combine to one great end, the general good,” and “being desirous only to dispense blessings,” they cannot “fail to enjoy” them (134). In the dense tissue of exemplarity, which always involves a mutual layering or lamination of the general and the particular, the couple frames the world even as the world gives its vision of futurity over to the couple, who make it visible in the poetic or, in Shelley’s phrase, the “vitally metaphorical” form of their own alliance.30 In

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this instance, the vitality of love’s metaphor lies in an unsteady distinction between metaphoric similarity and metonymic contiguity. The figure of the couple is an “anticipation and imaginative expression” of human equality per se, but since that equality does not yet exist in the real world love serves as a mode of hypostatizing another world only partially available to the present one.31 In his movement between these variously metamorphic and metonymic registers, Frank fuses his utopian socialism with his more immediate ambition to marry Anna, thus abiding by Jameson’s dictum that if pleasure is to be “proper[ly] political,” it must be also properly “allegorical.” It must, in other words, “involve a dual focus, in which the local issue”—in this case, cross-class marriage—“is meaningful and desirable in and of itself, but is also at one and the same time taken as the figure for Utopia in general, and for the systemic revolutionary transformation of society as a whole.”32 In a discussion of Gerard Genette’s work on Proust, de Man writes derisively of Genette’s “reconciled system of metaphor and metonymy,” which he also calls respectively “‘liaison’ and ‘marriage.’”33 According to Genette, Proust will compare a sun to an eye because it takes an eye as well as an “I,” or subject of consciousness, to see it. But doesn’t this seem a bit absurd, asks de Man, since a sun is not at all like an eye? Isn’t it better to say that this image, drawn from the sixth volume of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, is in fact a “figure of the unreadability of figures and therefore no longer, strictly speaking, a figure”?34 Transposing de Man’s insight onto Anna St. Ives, we might say that even the most allegorical or portentous of couples is nothing like the universal community to which it is compared, or that the countable noun of Anna-and-Frank is nothing like the innumerable multitude which Frank says she and he must provide with a workable blueprint. Perhaps de Man is right, and Anna-and-Frank is a figure merely for the impossibility of moving efficaciously between exemplarity, or the liaison of metaphor, and singularity, or marital metonymy. Along these same lines we might also say that it is a figure for the impossibility of treating two people as (in Jameson’s sense) a “figure for Utopia in general,” not least because the frisson of Anna-and-Frank threatens to attenuate as soon as Frank and Anna become a happily married couple like any other, no longer the Romeo and Juliet of oppositional class politics. Perhaps there is at last, and as Jameson suspects, no relationship at all between things desirable in themselves and the political desires those things treat allegorically.

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Ultimately, however, Frank rescues Anna St. Ives from what de Man derides as an ideology of “reconciliation” by extending the philosophical purview of his own agrarian socialism. Even though Frank wants Anna to be his, he envisions his utopian community as one in which love is free, because free love is the rational accompaniment of a world where “personal property shall no longer exist,” “individual selfishness shall be unknown,” and “all shall labour for the good of all” (278). For the socialist, love, like property, must be defined negatively. More oddly, it must also be defined as an impoverishing reward, advantage, or gain. “I suggest,” writes Serres, that “we free ourselves from all these . . . constraints of appropriation,” from the “sexual and genital appropriation and subjection” of women to “the dirty bomb of property” (79). This is precisely what Frank means when he tells Anna, “To the end of time I shall persist in thinking you mine by right; but I will never trouble you more with an assertion of that right—Never!” (136). At once anchored by and unmoored from the concept of ownership, Frank’s “right” to Anna describes the condition of a love that is physically unrequited but emotionally returned, and that, like a debt, exists so long as it remains unpaid. While free love would seem to suggest a kind of giddy plenitude, an unlimited access to unlimited bodies, what it names here is a will toward intimacy predicated by absence, toward possession grounded in loss. In theory, then, free love allows love to operate as an agent of dispossession, to shirk the acquisitive and consummative idiom of monogamy and discover a new language of the common. This kind of love may only be figured as a privation; it is therefore well suited to underwriting an economic order in which each person agrees to have less so that everyone can have enough. As socialism’s recreational form, free love is a unique expression of utilitarian poiesis, dissolving the countable noun of the “individual” in the uncountable noun of “all,” not for the purpose of producing happiness but for the purpose of embracing insufficiency and, as Frank insists, non-assertion as the core and purpose of human social life. “A thing that desires desires something of which it is in need.” This is one of the more essential claims Socrates makes in Plato’s Symposium, which Shelley translated in the summer of 1818. It is predicated on the assumption that “at the time [a person] desires and loves something,” he cannot “actually have what he desires and loves at that time.”35 Frank, and the grammar of dispossession more generally, introduce an alternative

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understanding of eros into this Platonic scheme. To love something is to refuse to claim it as rightfully yours, if by “rightfully” we mean, as Frank does, according to a doctrine of positive liberty whereby every person has a claim to the resources he needs for his own self-support. Frank at once affirms this doctrine and declines to cash in on its implications, taking up a renunciatory position that is more complicated than the simple belief that he has no right to Anna at all whether she wants him or not, because no person is authorized to legitimate his right to or over another. On the contrary, says Frank, he has an impeccable right to Anna: he needs her, and the world needs them.36 But he also loves her, which means that he chooses to let her be, as Serres says, “dis-appropriated, relieved of [the] filth” of ownership but not the low-impact form of desire. This desire, moreover, has the lightness or buoyancy of a gently aspirated “wish,” as in Serres’s motto: “I wish for, and practice, the dispossession of the world.”37 Frank’s commitment to “persist” in his love for Anna is, surprisingly, cognate to Serres’s “practice” of dispossession: both comprise the enactment of a desire dictated by “a rental agreement,” a pledge to curtail harm to other things and persons primarily at one’s own expense. Frank’s right consists, in short, of “the right to have no rights,” to abdicate ownership without renouncing use, where use is defined in opposition to using-up—in opposition, that is, to the abuses of consumption.38 On Frank’s account, love is a paradigmatic instance of what the medieval Franciscans called “poor use,” a disposition toward material entities (including people) that strives to maintain or at least to approximate a purely “formal” and therefore minimally abusive relation to them.39 The novel is sympathetic to this principle, which it also articulates through a depiction of “the convergence of an old world mired . . . in the misuse of property with a new world” in which people like the budding socialist farmer Frank “strive to be better caretakers of public and private domains.”40 Holcroft’s preoccupation with “misuse” may be most vividly illustrated in his satirical treatment of Anna’s father, Sir Arthur, and Sir Arthur’s steward, Abimelech Henley, who is also Frank’s father. Together, they have re-designed the St. Ives estate— relocating villages and rerouting roads in the process—until “there are no grounds in all England as wooded and shut in as those of Wenbourne-Hill.” “After twenty years of cultivation,” boasts Sir Arthur, “we are surrounded by coppices, groves, espaliers, and plantations,” which protect Wenbourne-Hill from “every vulgar view of distant hills, intervening meadows, and extensive

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fields[,] with their insignificant green herbage, yellow lands, and the wearisome eternal waving of standing corn” (28). These vulgar features are, of course, the properties that sustain the population with fuel and food. They also offer an agricultural analogue to Frank’s love, which—as clumsy as the comparison may be—treats Anna herself like that eternally standing, eternally unharvested corn, unenclosed by the aesthetic avarice of the English manor garden and left to be merely “insignificant,” bereft of purpose as far as the accumulation of wealth, status, and even in some sense of beauty—the beauty of the hortus conclusus—are concerned. If connecting Anna to the cornfield seems to tread dangerously into the symbolic territory where woman is equivalent to a nature left to passivity but always threatened by reaping, Holcroft anticipates this critique by putting a misogynistic perversion of Frank’s argument against property in the mouth of his rival, Coke Clifton.41 After hearing Frank extol the virtues of socialism, Clifton wonders out loud whether, “among so disinterested” a society with no concept of ownership, servants can be said to belong to their masters (“there will be no servants,” says Frank), children can be said to belong to their parents (“they will be children of the state,” is Frank’s reply), or a wife can be said to belong to her husband, or if “a man [can] even say of a woman he loves—She is mine?” (279). The intermittently prim Frank has no answer to this, but Clifton seems to take his silence as a confirmation of his own belief that if no man owns any woman, than all men own all women. Finding Anna alone, Clifton attempts to rape her; his unintentionally comic rallying cry is “I claim justice from you,” though since Anna manages to escape she is spared this rough justice’s effects. Clifton’s strong misreading of free love closely follows an argument made in Sade’s Philosophie dans le Boudoir, which also takes the prohibition against ownership and turns it into carte-blanche for sexual violence. In the section “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans,” excerpted from the novel and circulated independently as a political pamphlet, the libertine Dolmance announces that no woman, for any reason, has a right to refuse to have sex with any man. How, we might ask, does this work? Dolmance explains: Never may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being; the exclusive possession of a woman is no less unjust than the possession of slaves; all men are born free, all have equal rights: never should we lose sight of those principles[,] according to which never may there be granted to one sex the

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legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands upon the other, and never may one of the sexes, or classes, arbitrarily possess the other. Similarly, a woman existing in the purity of Nature’s laws cannot allege, as a justification for refusing herself to someone who desires her, the love she bears another, because such a response is based upon exclusion, and no man may be excluded from the having of a woman as of the moment it is clear that she definitely belongs to all men. The act of possession can only be exercised upon a chattel or an animal, never upon an individual who resembles us, and all the ties which can bind a woman to a man are quite as unjust as illusory.42

This, again, is the proto-fascistic pseudo-utopia Adorno and Horkheimer associate with the Enlightenment. I also want to note, however, that the radical-utilitarian strain of Romanticism, which Holcroft helps invent and Shelley helps develop, is acutely conscious of the readiness with which anti-property politics may tip into legitimations of sexual violence. We have seen this already in the “Preludium” to America, we see it again in Anna St. Ives, and we see it in Sade, who satirizes Kant’s dream of a “no longer distorted humanity” by showing what might happen if people were taken, as it were, straight, as ends in themselves.43 The Revolt of Islam advances this linkage of socialist dispossession and interpersonal violence in the name of its own version of limited utopia. This long poem confronts limitation by elevating the utility of harm over the utility of pleasure, in an effort to claim what we might now call trauma as both a metaphor for and (more controversially) an essential component of revolutionary utopianism. An inheritor of those Platonic and neo-Platonic traditions that hold that every being “most of all desires its own perfection,” with the unfortunate consequence that next to that desire all others appear “defective,” Shelley proposes a utopia whose greatest asset would be its own deficiency, and utopians whose greatest achievement is their preservation of personal injury as a goad to the desire for collective renunciation.44 This chapter began with a discussion of the controversy surrounding The Revolt, but some of Shelley’s contemporaries, including his friend Byron, were less put off by the poem’s content than by its execution. In Byron’s words, the bad press accrued by Shelley’s racy epic most likely “sold an edition of The Revolt of Islam, which, otherwise, nobody would have thought of reading, and few who read can understand—I for one.”45 Byron has a point; the story is hard to follow and the poetry some of Shelley’s thorniest and least straightforward (which is saying something). After some dedicatory

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verses “To Mary”—that is, to Mary Shelley—The Revolt begins with an unnamed speaker seeing an eagle and a serpent fighting in the sky; the eagle wounds the serpent, who is rescued by a beautiful woman. The woman explains that the Eagle is Evil, the snake the Spirit of Good, and that the two are locked in a Manichean battle for the fate of mankind. She invites the poet to go with her by boat to a mysterious temple, where he is addressed by two spirits revealed to be Laon and Cythna. They in turn relate to him how they grew up together, fell in love, were separated, and how they found one another again. They also tell him about Cythna’s rape by the Sultan, as well as what may or may not have been her pregnancy and delivery of a baby who may or may not be the child the Sultan is later seen to keep by his side. The story reaches its climax as Laon and Cythna lead a revolt against the Sultan, a revolt that briefly succeeds and then catastrophically fails as plague and man-made famine strike the city. Laon and Cythna are burnt at the stake and the Sultan’s child falls down dead. In the last few moments of Canto 12, the pyre, “the Pestilence, the Tyrant, and the throng” all disappear.46 Laon and Cythna find themselves in the afterlife, where they are reunited with the Sultan’s child, now more or less explicitly identified as Cythna’s lost baby. The poem ends with the trio sailing a boat toward the same island where Laon and Cythna now sit talking to the poet.The Revolt never moves back outward from the interpolated narrative of the two lovers, concluding its story the minute it concludes theirs. We do not know if the poet stays on the island, or what he makes of Laon and Cythna’s strange tale. The dedication “To Mary” allows the reader to imagine that he leaves the island, writes the poem, and consecrates it to his wife, although nothing in the text clarifies that Shelley and the poet-speaker are the same person. The Revolt of Islam, then, is three stories in one, but only one of those stories finishes getting told, and even it ends abruptly with Laon and Cythna on their “charmed boat approach[ing]” their island haven (12.369). What seems like a series of nesting-doll narratives is in fact a backward or, better, an inward glance into the poem’s past. If Blake’s similes force the damaging past to obtrude into the unsettled present, The Revolt of Islam similarly sinks the present tense of the “Dedication” and the speaker’s journey in the unfinished business of the golden city’s revolution. The poem’s seemingly recessive movement has a very specific purpose, and it has to do with Shelley’s attempt to imagine progress in terms that are at once affective and rhetorical. While his famous characterization of his poem as a “beau ideal of the French Revolution” is

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well known, less so are the remarks he makes in that same context when, in a letter to a prospective publisher, he describes the work as proceeding by a logic of feeling that cuts across its diegesis: As “‘the plot thickens,’ and human passions are brought into more critical situations of development,” it becomes clear The Revolt is designed to illustrate “the common elementary emotions of the human heart, so that though it is a story of violence and revolution, it is relieved by milder pictures of friendship and love and natural affections.”47 And so the story of political and social progress, which seems as though it ought to proceed linearly, is bent into a spiral by an emotive pull that “thickens” what might otherwise be the cleaner lines of Shelley’s revolutionary polemic.This curious, corkscrew momentum is also aided by Shelley’s decision to write The Revolt in Spenserian stanzas, a formal and metrical choice often explained as an attempt to situate the poem within the “beau ideal” realms of romance. At the very least, the gesture flags the poem as “reinterpreting [romance’s] codes,” ostensibly in the service of “radical . . . politics”—a move Shelley, like his friends Hunt and Thomas Love Peacock, learned to make by inverting Edmund Burke’s own appropriations of romance in his writings against the French Revolution.48 As I have already suggested in my first chapter, however, there is more to romance and, in this case, the Spenserian stanza than a history of generic affiliations and their polemical significance. “The size, the possible variety, and the fixity of this unit,” writes William Empson, “give something of the blankness that comes from fixing your eyes on a bright spot.” Far from straightforward signifiers of one political dispensation or another, Spenser’s stanzas are constituted by a commitment to the “ambiguities of idea,” ambiguities so dense they swallow “whole civilizations” and make them “their elements.”49 This remark of Empson’s is itself rather ambiguous—how does a poem contain a civilization?—but it is precisely the sort of ambiguity that The Revolt exploits, loading its own stanzas with highly intricate, extended similes that dramatize the fate of “civilizations” as they are at once tied to and distinct from the fate of the loving couple. Early in the poem, Cythna offers Laon a picture of the revolution the two of them will lead, a revolution geared toward procuring an equality between men and the other “half of humankind”: Then, like the forests of some pathless mountain Which from remotest glens two warring winds Involve in fire which not the loosened fountain

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Of broadest floods might quench, shall all the kinds Of evil catch from our uniting minds The spark which must consume them:—Cythna then Will have cast off the impotence that binds Her childhood now, and through the paths of men Will pass, as the charmed bird that haunts the serpent’s den. (2.38–46)

What seems clear enough here is that Laon and Cythna are like “two warring winds” whose “uniting minds” are full of revolutionary ideas, which are to the world’s “evil” as a fire is to a forest: as those ideas spread across the earth, the earth’s evils are destroyed. Nonetheless, “the prolonged and diffused energies” of the Spenserian stanza give the simile time to turn suggestively in upon itself, muddling this initial reading.50 If the revolution plans to move “through the forests of some pathless mountain,” why does Cythna see herself passing “through the paths of men,” a phrase that connotes a civilized or at least inhabited world, not an undeveloped natural environment? The general atmosphere of paradox is carried over into the notion that warring winds are somehow like uniting minds; the participles don’t match, indeed seem hostile to one another, while the sly inversion of the “w” of “winds” so that it becomes the “m” of “minds” only draws attention, as does the two words’ off-rhyme, to the deep non-coincidence of a force of nature and conjoined human consciousnesses. There is also the matter of the second simile that swings in to close out Cythna’s speech and that compares her, and only her, to a bird haunting “the serpent’s den.” This is troublesome given that, in the poem’s preamble, the conflict between eagle and serpent is cast as a conflict between evil and good. Why should Cythna appear as the bird, “The Fiend, whose name was Legion: Death, Decay,/Earthquake and Blight, and Want, and Madness pale,” and not the snake who creeps benevolently “among the nations of mankind” (1.29)? In the vertiginous drop of Shelley’s Spenserian stanza, where one line falls headlong into the next only to crash into the caesura of the sixth line, the assertion of identity between minds and winds, serpent and woman, paths and pathlessness is easily but mistakenly swallowed. Empson describes the effect nicely when he notes that, in a poem like The Faerie Queene, “you have to yield yourself to it very completely to take in the variety of its movement, and, at the same time, there is no need to concentrate the elements of the situation into a judgment as if for action.”51 When it comes to an expressly political stanza in an

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expressly political poem, and to the direct articulation of a plan for starting a revolution, this elision of practical judgment is purposive. Cythna’s auditor—that is, Laon—is put in the same situation as the reader, compelled to surrender to Cythna’s scheme not through the precision of her argument but through the metrical maneuvers that disguise the ways in which that argument is utterly imprecise. The rush and heave of her words produces in him (and ostensibly in us) a mimetic surge of feeling that, in turn, enacts or is meant to enact the sort of conflagration and contagion Cythna is trying to describe. What Shelley calls “the common elementary emotions of the human heart,” including the impulse to listen to what you are told by someone you love, and to believe it, are reordered by a poetic language that is anything but common or elementary. Feeling becomes the glue that lets logistical incoherence pass unnoticed, or at least unremarked, helping to cement the fiction of sameness between things the poem itself says are only loosely alike. French has the perfect word for this effect: décalage, which translates roughly as gap, discrepancy, or lag. The notion of décalage disarticulates figures of likeness from figures of identity, inviting a specifically aesthetic analysis of the effects of positing unity rather than a more overtly political analysis of unity’s efficacy.52 The sensibility of décalage directs us to the tension built into Cythna’s program, a program that assumes, as Frank does in Anna St. Ives, that the exemplarity of her own union with Laon will translate through imitative extension into the union of all mankind. However, when we look more closely at Cythna’s expression of that optimistic algorithm, with its simile buttressing sameness in lieu of difference and discrepancy, the distance between the couple and all “men” is exposed—for here and throughout The Revolt Shelley uses rhetorical means to cast gaps, breaches, and breaks as “the phenomenon of presence in all its varieties,” especially “the distinctive presence of that which withdraws or has withdrawn.” Alva Noë describes this particular variety of presence as “a lively absence, not a dead one,” and he also characterizes it is available for use, like a “baseball glove,” a “hammer,” or, most suggestively, like “the view out the window.”53 Like those waving corn stalks in Anna St. Ives, Noë’s view out the window is frozen in the posture of inviting appropriation and, being so frozen, remains inaccessible, out of reach. I would also argue that the view is like Serres’s dispossessed world, and although Noë often seems to resist the notion that our experience of the world is, as it were, framed or composed, his choice of this particular image

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suggests that, on the contrary, “be[ing] in the flow” of “mental experience” is frequently contingent upon the inhibitions of form.54 Indeed, Shelley’s poetry explores withdrawn or withdrawing presence through the almost mechanical formal artifice of figuration, which, in The Revolt actively labors to dissolve and reassemble the familiar erotic trope of two-in-one as an emblem of each lover’s disappropriation of the other’s “lively absence.” As the poem progresses, it quickly detaches itself from the naïve notion of unified coupledom presented in its earlier cantos and begins to speculate on how the severing of all persons from one another might be the precondition for, and not a major hurdle to, organizing utopias of the dispossessed. This is nowhere more clear than in a scene that begins with Laon waking up from a seven-year coma under the care of a kindly hermit. Cythna has long since been kidnapped by the Sultan’s soldiers, and Laon assumes, reasonably enough, that she is now dead. And yet Laon, gazing into a mirror, discovers that although his looks are dramatically changed, the spark of something or someone familiar flickers across the surface of the glass: And though their lustre now was spent and faded, Yet in my hollow looks and withered mien The likeness of a shape for which was braided The brightest woof of genius still was seen— One who, methought, had gone from the world’s scene, And left it vacant—’twas her lover’s face— It might resemble her—it once had been The mirror of her thoughts, and still the grace Which her mind’s shadow cast left there a lingering trace. (4.22–30)

Looking at himself in the mirror, Laon finds Cythna present as a gleam behind the vacancy of his own face, whose very hollowness is recuperated as an architectural quality that lets her image echo through his. In this uniquely convoluted passage, the one who seems to “[have] gone” appears, at first, to be Cythna, the lover whose face flickers inside Laon’s, but this reading is overturned by the suggestion that the face “might resemble her.” Now the face seems to be Laon’s, but Laon as he was at the beginning of this story, before being “withered” or thinned out by pain and time. That said, if the face Laon sees in the mirror bears the likeness of his own, more youthful image, that image is still, as it once was, the mirror and the shadow of Cythna’s own

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thoughts: it is a replica of her mind that cites the original it copies. The lovers, then, share an ontological bond registered on the face as an immanent resemblance. This resemblance, in turn, signifies a condition of shared privation in spite of which they remain present to, and in, one another. Oscillating between a lost past and an injured present, the ambiguous figures pictured by phrases such as “the likeness of a shape” and “her lover’s face” record a copycat movement that suggests, as it does in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, a powerful synonymy between poetry and love: love, like poetry, is “the reflected image of [an original] impression,” a reshaping of the self through an internalization of some evasive otherness, as well as of the impossibility of its absolute or comprehensive possession.55 I borrow some language here from Jean-Luc Nancy, who writes of love as an experience of “the other’s alterity,” or of “alterity in the other together with the alteration in [the self ].”56 In this same vein, Laon’s recovery of the absent Cythna within the contours of his own face, from which he also feels estranged, dramatizes a phenomenal encounter that “cuts across [his] identity, [his] sexual property, that objectification by which [one is] a masculine or feminine subject” and so, as Serres might say, across all other categories covered by property’s bomb.57 “Asia!” cries the hero of Prometheus Unbound to his long-lost lover, “Asia! who when my being overflowed/Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine/ Which else had sank into the thirsty dust.”58 It is through love, Shelley insists, that individuals learn to undergo what Nancy calls “the syncope of the subject,” the hiccup of personal identity through which I seem to pass into you and you into me not in a loss of self but in a less final and more unsettling experience of self-interruption.59 A syncope is a going off-beat, a twitch, a spasm of tempo or phrase. In Prometheus Unbound, what cannot be contained within Prometheus (too much joy, too much pain) is conserved by attaching itself to his beloved Asia as an extra beat, an accent in the measure of her life. That beat paradoxically marks an absence, namely their difference from one another, even as it points towards presence, namely their inclination toward one another. A plastic sign and sound of the impossibility of possessing either other people or one’s own self fully, the syncope seems to give proof that love defies property because it is essentially expropriative. In Prometheus’s case, the titan is forced to relive graphically the loss of self that is not just a punishment for but also a testament to his selfless commitment to all “of suffering man”: the myth that furnishes Shelley with the background of his lyrical drama holds that every day, an eagle was sent

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to eat Prometheus’s liver out of his side, as he lay “nailed to [the] wall” of a mountain in the Caucasus, in “pain, pain ever, for ever!”60 In The Revolt of Islam, Nancy’s notion of the syncope is made audible when Cythna, who has become the leader of a women’s uprising, changes her name to Laone—the name, as Shelley writes, “her love had chosen,/For she was nameless” (5.19). This new alias nominates her as Laon’s own overflow, and genders it by the sign of the “e” affixed to the end of the masculine “Laon.” As the mark of Cythna’s femininity and of her biological difference from Laon, the “e” is also the sign of his presence in excess in her, a presence sounded by the extra syllable of the added letter and made legible by its appearance on the page. Meanwhile, just as the “e” in “Laone” marks Laon as what has been dropped, what is missing, from Cythna, Laon, by corollary, bears her presence with him negatively. His name seems now to lack the “e” that silently notes the place where her name slides into his. The unstressed syllable “-on” at the end of “Laon” becomes all the more recognizable as a feminine ending, falling down and stretching outward for the female whose lost shadow it casts. Laone’s “e” is the sonic and scriptural version of the likeness Laon sees when he looks in the mirror, a positive image Noë might trace to her presence “withdrawn.” It signifies, too, an elision by love of the objective designations of sex, and the theorization of sexual difference as a point of metaphysical contact capable of being rendered by the near negation of “contact” per se. When The Revolt begins, Laon and Cythna’s attachment is essentially reparative: it makes things better, it makes them feel less alone. Here, the discourse of love pivots into a minor key, as Shelley’s attempt to disentangle utility from pleasure as its only unit of value takes center stage. I have suggested that the exemplary rhetorical figure of The Revolt of Islam is the simile. In fact, the whole stanza detailing Laon’s reflection in the mirror is an “allegorization of rhetoric” in general and the simile in particular, and it invests the simile “with meanings and associations beyond those of a simple [descriptive] scheme.”61 In contrast to metaphor, which (to recall de Man) claims to have transferred characteristic properties successfully from one thing to another, a simile registers by suspending the intention of one thing toward something else. It puts into language the desire for two things to be identical, only to show that they might never be so. Thus Laon and Cythna/Laone are linked by fissuring similes, maneuvered into a position of syncopated décalage. Even when they make love, this “ming[ling]” is described as taking place under “a mist,” beneath “the sickness of a deep/And speechless swoon

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of joy, as might befall/Two disunited spirits when they leap/In union from this earth’s obscure and fading sleep” (6.34). Syncope is also the medical term for fainting, and it arrives on this scene in the disconcertingly diseased and joyful image of a swoon. The muddle of semi-conscious thought clings to the simile that compares Laon and Cythna to “two disunited spirits” mysteriously joined “in union” as they depart the earth, whether in life or death it is not clear. Here, the qualifying language of the phrase “as might befall” pulls apart the tenor from the vehicle even as the simile seems to be trying to drag them together. The same goes for Laon and Cythna themselves, who teeter painfully on the edge between unity and disunion as Blake’s shadowy daughter spans the gap between her virginity and its annihilation. Like the mysterious “virgin cry” that carries a lost innocence into a post-traumatic present, “disunited” lingers inside of “union” in the shape of a hairline fracture, while the ghost of the negatory prefix “dis-” bobs eerily in the empty air crossed over by the lovers’ “leap.” Finally, when we read these lines on the page, “disunited” and “union” line up almost perfectly on top of and below one another, their own compositional disjuncture making visible the chasm of one body fit tightly but incompletely against its companion. Shelley was not always so interested in the ethics and erotics of loss, and it is worth looking at another poem, namely Epipsychidion, to see how a more accretive—if still unconventional—version of love looks to the poet. Just as it becomes important to distinguish Coke Clifton and the Marquis de Sade’s idea of free love from Frank Henley’s or Blake’s, so is it necessary to see Shelley in hot pursuit of the proprietarian impulse within a purely liberatory, unrestrained sexual politics. The Norton edition of Shelley’s poetry and prose glosses the title of Epipsychidion as “‘On the Subject of the Soul’” and compares it to the Emperor Hadrian’s poem De animula, but the prefix “epi-” more often signifies an addition, a plus sign.62 This is fitting, since Epipsychidion is in fact a poem about accumulation. Here the speaker invites a young woman, Teresa Viviani, to make a fourth in the ménage a trois he is already conducting with his wife and his wife’s sister. The poem’s title thus suggests that free love augments and improves pre-existing attachments, a sentiment Shelley attributes to Viviani by quoting her in his epigraph: “The loving soul launches itself beyond the created, and creates in the infinite a world all for itself, different by far from this dark and terrible abyss.”63 In Shelley’s interpretation of these lines, what the loving soul creates is, simply, another soul, a soul that is an outgrowth and extension of itself. The soul

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is therefore an emblem of art, which always invents a new thing from what has already been “created.” It is also a figure for politics, which, for Shelley, is actually poetry, as are “architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture, philosophy, and [ . . . ] the forms of civil life.”64 A self-conscious example of the innovative capacity of language, the coinage of “epipsychidion” also allegorizes the neologistic process by which one soul makes another. The generation of soul from soul is not simply like but, Shelley suggests, identical to the generation of poetry from poetry, art from art, and civil life from civil life. No matter how ineffectual they may seem, poetry and its siblings are at all times improving upon the frightening condition of the world as we know it. From language, civilization makes the vocabulary of its own futurity, and poetry supplies the syntax. It has become commonplace to note that Epipsychidion, the poem of the soul’s self-enhancement, covers up the catastrophic personal history of the Shelley circle. Far more interesting, I think, is the poem’s unreflective fascination with plenitude and with the evasion of its consequences, at least when they are read against the altogether different attitudes presented in The Revolt. In Epipsychidion, there is no sense that love might be free and also have nothing. A risqué adventure in simple agglomeration, Epipsychidion wants love to fuse two souls that are already identical: We shall become the same, we shall be one Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two? One passion in twin-heart, which grows and grew, ’Til like two meteors of expanding flame, Those spheres instinct with it become the same[.]65

Frustrated by the paucity of a language that uses counting to divide rather than unite, to call two souls “two” instead of “one,” Shelley turns to simile, which allows “two frames” to be “like two meteors” but also distinct from them, as a single “twin-heart” is numerically distinct from two separate objects. Here, the simile is a convenient mechanism for forcing things together and occluding their difference. Together with its insistent and unsettlingly imperial language—Viviani is the “Sovereign,” Shelley her “slave,” and his verses his own “masters”; they make their home in an inaccessible tower on an impoverished Greek island—the poem’s use of rhetoric to amass and forcibly coalesce multiple relationships turns away from Laon and Cythna’s

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tropology of mutual disappearance.66 Though Shelley is not quite a Clifton or a Sade, his emphasis on the expansive, unbounded germination of that which “grows and grew” makes clear that what is on offer in Epipsychidion is not a utopia of privation, but a fantasy of private pleasure so exclusive it needs only its own “passion” to stay alive. The specter of private pleasure coaxes us back to The Revolt and toward its most unnerving aspects. A victim of the Sultan’s sexual “selfishness,” Cythna is taken to “his secret bower” and raped (7.47, 40). It is at this point that, as she explains to Laon, she becomes a political agent. In a stanza that closely echoes both Laon’s encounter with his reflection and Cythna’s earlier prophecy, her “madness” hones itself into “a beam of light, a power/which dawned thro’ the rent soul”: [ . . . ] and words it gave Gestures and looks, such as in whirlwinds bore Which might not be withstood, whence none could save All who approached their sphere, like some calm wave Vexed into whirlpools by the chasms beneath[.] (7.56–60)

Syntactically garbled and profoundly unsettling, Shelley’s argument is almost identical to the one Blake makes in America: that rape gifts women with the power of incendiary speech by doing damage to their very shape and structure. Like the shadowy daughter of Urthona, with her cloudy womb split open by Orc’s lightning, or for that matter like Yeats’s Crazy Jane, with her memorable remark that “nothing can be sole or whole/That has not been rent,” Cythna is a “rent soul” whose wounds are bullhorns for protest.67 What keeps the poem from expressing a “politics of injury” in which a hagiography of women’s sexual victimization makes “a shaping contribution” to gendered violence is the deformational effect of its own rhetoric.68 How to gloss that mysterious comparison of Cythna’s speech, animated by “madness” with “gestures and looks,” to something that appears “in whirlwinds bore”? Most readers assume that “bore” is merely the past tense of the verb “to bear,” but in the midst of all this rending and dawning-through it seems more likely that Shelley means to refer to the cylindrical hole that appears in the middle of a rotating (or whirling) column of air; he may even be thinking of a “blue bore,” which the OED defines as an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scots term signifying “an opening in

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the clouds showing the blue sky.”69 It is this opening “which might not be withstood,” and whose appearance in these lines strangely yokes the frenetic activity of Cythna’s words to the region of calm found in the proverbial eye of the storm, within the crack in the cloud that lets the light in. The same pattern of motion and stillness is evoked in the stanza’s second simile, where the women whose uprising Cythna leads are compared to whirlpools churned up by the empty spaces (chasms) beneath a body of water. And since a “bore” is also a tidal phenomenon that can generate whirlpools, and since the word “whirlwind” is almost sloppily close to the “whirlpool,” the stanza also builds in multiple redundancies that implicitly neutralize the sense of headlong motion Shelley’s lines describe. Here, the language of action is repeatedly subjected to the undertow of implication. Those whirlwinds are not withstood; none who approach their bores are saved but are instead sucked into the vortex that, paradoxically, is also a space of liberation, where “each attendant slave” becomes “Fearless and free” (7.61–62). Of course, “fearless” and “free” are also words negatively constituted, for to be fearless is to be divested of fear as to be free is to be divested of bondage. The stanza continues its labor of evacuation right down to the last line, where we learn what the rebels actually do: they “breathe/Deep curses, like the voice of flames far beneath,” and from this passive aspiration the Sultan is overthrown. Not a politics of injury per se, but a politics of resonate vacuity, of empty space that is also intractable maw. Such a politics exploits the cyclonic process of withdrawing to create a zone of force that is irresistible because force itself is absent. As the onset of a revolution that, as Shelley repeatedly insists, is completely non-violent, the women’s uprising not only reclaims injury as the cornerstone of collectivity, it also makes collectivity take the form of a vacancy, a place where there is no power and therefore no tyranny, but which is also supercharged with the energy of people who have nothing to lose. What is the end game of a revolution like this? Northrop Frye thought The Revolt painted utopia as “a place of sexual fulfillment, where there is no apocalyptic vision but simply a sense of arriving at the summit of experience in nature,” but this account ignores the extent to which the poem flirts openly with an apocalyptic conclusion.70 For Shelley, revolution seems to be a condition in which the detachment of human beings from power evolves into a benevolent near-vanishing of human beings from the world. In the brief interlude between the bloodless revolt and its sanguinary defeat,

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Cythna offers the people of Islam a vision of the kind of world they have brought into being. Dropping the Spenserian stanza for an idiosyncratic poetic mode, she hails Wisdom, Justice, and finally Equality, the mightiest and the most intimidating of this nascent utopia’s keywords. Presumably, the metrical shift is meant to convey the formal and even rhythmic difference that must obtain between the world of the poem’s main action and the better one Islam temporarily occupies, between the revolutionary present and the utopian future swimming, briefly, into view. Furthermore, Cythna’s six-part hymn also moves between temporal registers to highlight the principle of deprivation that underwrites this new state of affairs, from which humanity seems forever receding: Eldest of things, divine Equality! Wisdom and Love are but the slaves of thee, The Angels of thy sway, who pour around thee Treasures from all the cells of human thought, And from the Stars, and from the Ocean brought, And the last living heart whose beatings bound thee. The powerful and the wise had sought Thy coming, thou in light descending O’er the wide land which is thine own Like the spring whose breath is blending All blasts of fragrance into one, Comest upon the paths of men!— Earth bares her general bosom to thy ken, And all her children here in glory meet To feed upon thy smiles, and clasp thy sacred feet. My brethren we are free! the plains and mountains, The gray sea-shore, the forests and the fountains, Are haunts of happiest dwellers;—man and woman, Their common bondage burst, may freely borrow From lawless love a solace for their sorrow; For oft we still must weep, since we are human. A stormy night’s serenest morrow, Whose showers are pity’s gentle tears, Whose clouds are smiles of those that die Like infants without hopes or fears,

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And whose beams are joys that lie In blended hearts, now holds dominion; The dawn of mind, which, upwards on a pinion Borne, swift as sun-rise, far illumines space, And clasps this barren world in its own bright embrace! (5.493–522)

This “barren” place, if not utterly devoid of people, is at least strangely populated by figures of retirement and retreat. Equality comes upon “the paths of men” (a phrase that also appears in 2.45, above) but also seems to have sprung from some “last living heart.” Is it the death of the last living creature on earth that unleashes Equality from earth’s breast, as the head of Zeus unleashed Athena? Is Equality offered “treasures from all the cells of human thought” because those cells have been vacated by the consciousnesses that once guarded them? Although Cythna mentions earth’s “children” along with “man and woman,” the former category might mean anything and the latter is constrained by a hypothetical “may.” At best, humans are present to the hymn in residual form, as the dust that clings to the shape of things they have made. Though some evidence for human life is provided in the next stanza, it is scarcely more reassuring. A “haunt” can mean “an inhabited place” but it can also mean a place that is haunted—by ghosts. There is something spectral, too, in the abstract terms “man” and “woman” Cythna uses as synecdoches for people in general, and in those clouds made up of the “smiles of those that die” (another nod to the grammatically disembodied) “[l]ike infants without hopes or fears.” What Erwin Panofsky says of Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego paintings might be said of Cythna’s Equality, for like the figure of Death in Poussin Equality is both a “memento mori” and “the revelation of a metaphysical principle which connects the present and the future with the past and overthrows the limits of individuality.” Equality, too, emerges as “a preserver as well as a destroyer,” latching sorrow to the world as part of its redistributive mission until humanity, at the summit of its utopian achievement, persists in the world as little more than a feeling divested of a body.71 The disintegrative motion of divestment—of abnegation and withdrawal—is given conceptual as well as aural texture by the rhyme of “sorrow” with “borrow.” Spinoza, one of Shelley’s intellectual progenitors, holds that sorrow is an inferior passion to joy, for when sorrow contemplates an object it turns to hate, while joy under the same conditions turns to love.72 In the

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post-revolutionary interlude of The Revolt, however, sorrow has no object, so it is prevented from metastasizing into hatred; it simply borrows from love a solace that is given freely, without the expectation of recompense. The rhyme of the two words (sorrow and borrow) locks them together in a relay of non-accumulative exchange, in which solace is passed back and forth but never used up, perhaps never used at all. Like the doubly distended vowel sounds of their first and second syllables, sorrow and borrow hold themselves open, loitering in the sonic register of the poem as the affects and actions they name linger even in the utopia where they are least expected. We return then, by way of Shelley’s rhymes, to the notion of use elaborated in Anna St. Ives, where the proper employment of some resource becomes not just compatible but synonymous with its preservation. As Cythna’s vision, with its strange integration of the rhetoric of gains and losses, of presence and its disappearance implies, using something in utopia is always close to letting it go to waste—with, that is, not using it at all. To borrow thus names a relation of appropriately disappropriated use, much like the one expressed in this chapter’s epigraph from Corinthians 7:30–31, in which Paul exhorts “those who use the world” to act “as though they did not make full use of it.” Where “full” here implies that proper use always leaves a remainder, that it is cautious not to exhaust or deplete what it consumes, Shelley is perhaps more in line with Frank and the Franciscans in embracing borrowing as a radical form of poor use that does not use at all. To let things go to waste in this sense would be to do as Serres exhorts us, to dispossess the world in the same manner as sorrow agrees to maintain an anti-possessive relation to the thing it most needs to comfort it: “love.” Paul’s injunction to the Corinthians is placed in a context of temporal acceleration, of an eschatological pressure that frames the series of commands to do as though not-doing. “The time,” writes Paul, “has been shortened,” an ominous locution that also invites Paul’s audience to do as time has done, to abbreviate themselves by taking the propositional language of similes— the language of “as”—as a program for living or rather having differently, “as though they had none.”73 Cythna adopts Paul’s apocalyptic measure and converts it to the time of the present, in which as she says “we are [already] free.” Casting utopia in a secular tense, she elaborates an image of a world where there is no distinction between acting and acting as though, where figure collapses into description as part of a larger project of disburdening human activity of excess, including excess signification. On this view, utopia

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means nothing more than the end of misuse, from the exploitation of living things and of the earth to the poetic misapplication of language itself. It requires us to maintain an intimate, perhaps a custodial proximity to these things (life, land, language) that never crosses into consumption. Timothy Morton has rightly noted a less rarefied application of this principle in Laon and Cythna’s vegetarianism, to which they briefly convert their fellow freedom-fighters; for Morton, not eating animals “is not merely an emblem but an enactment of the changed relationship in/between society and nature” brought about by revolution.74 As significant as a vegetarian diet is to the poem, however, I suspect that its treatment of famine is more central, not least because it too reclaims the apocalyptic urgency of Paul’s message for the political urgency of the historical present. The famine importantly takes place after Cythna gives her account of the world of Equality, an account which thus serves not as correction of but prologue to the nightmare of mass starvation. Shelley’s critique of wealth runs on all eight cylinders here, for the poem goes out of its way to make absolutely explicit the fact that the famine is caused by the Sultan’s hoarding of food and his mismanagement of the kingdom’s natural resources. The famine, in other words, is manmade, but those responsible are protected from its ravages: There was no food, the corn was trampled down, The flocks and herds had perished; on the shore The dead and putrid fish were ever thrown; The deeps were foodless, and the winds no more Creaked with the weight of birds, but as before Those winged things sprang forth, were void of shade; The vines and orchards, Autumn’s golden store, Were burned;—so that the meanest food was weighed With gold, and avarice died before the god it made. (9.154–162)

These lines invert Ovid’s description of the Flood in the Metamorphoses, where the air is overstuffed with birds that cannot find a place to land, and where “the deeps” are teeming with mammals—lions, wolves, stags—sunk helplessly beneath the waves.75 There, the effects of flooding are as one might imagine: an excess and outpouring of living things stirred out of their natural habitats. Shelley’s description of famine, by contrast, is skillfully marked by a rhetoric of annulment, one that makes all too clear how a world

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without food is a world without much of anything at all. “There was no food” kicks off a short narrative of multiple absences: the bottomless “deeps” have bottomed out, fish-wise, the wind has reverted to a primevally empty state, and, in a sly muddying-together of past and past progressive tenses, the stores of harvested food “were burned.” Note, too, how the stanza begins by announcing that “there was no food” only to refer, in the penultimate line, to “the meanest food” becoming exponentially more valuable in this time of extreme shortage. The suggestion is that the inhabitants of Islam are getting blood from a stone, a figure of speech that takes on a sinister cast when, in the next stanza, we hear that they have turned to cannibalism—that “in the wide marketplace/All loathliest things, even human flesh, was sold; they weighed it in small scales” (9.163–165). A starved Islam is eerily similar to Cythna’s utopia, with this crucial difference: in the famished world, there is less to eat than there are people to eat it; in the better one, there are hardly people at all. The confluence of these two tableaux, one nightmarish and the other at once triumphant and elegiac, throws into relief another mode of dispossession, one that we might call “fasting.” It is through processes of rhetorical fasting and excision that Cythna whittles human beings down into the uninvasive shape of their own sorrow; it is by another, grimmer sort of poiesis that Shelley describes life vanishing from the fields and seas and skies. We might suggest, then, that Cythna’s utopia is utopian because there people choose to be less—there, they follow Serres’s injunction to “dis-appropriate” the world so that “it can no longer be appropriated.”76 Think again of Cythna’s remark that, in a better world, “ . . . man and woman,/Their common bondage burst, may freely borrow/From lawless love a solace for their sorrow[.]” People in utopia are placed at a distance from their own action. They need to wait upon the permission, the “yes, you may” of some unknown arbiter, and even then the best verb they can claim is a deferential “to borrow,” an action almost onomatopoeic in its moaning spondee. But so what? Better to exist as an attenuated agent then to dwell in an ever-enlarging emptiness, hyperbolically freighted, as Prometheus says, with “pain, pain ever, for ever.” For a book that began by stating that Romantic utopianism is not apocalyptic, this one, in following the tracks of Shelley’s Equality, seems to have gone quite far in the direction of doomsday. Without disavowing the severity of Cythna’s posthumanist vision, I would suggest that the unnerving correspondence between the world she imagines and the world of Islam’s

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famine offers the poem’s most daring deformation of the figure of likeness. Even after Equality comes upon the paths of men, the earth remains barren, nearly as denuded of life as Islam’s fields and seas. It seems a hostile environment for Equality as long as the principle of equivalence has an assumption of plenitude lurking in its background. In other words, if equality is imagined as everyone having the same satisfactory amount of something (food, money, happiness) equality then seems to rest on the unspoken assumption that there will be lots of that something to go around. But both Cythna’s vision and the scenes of famine that follow it work against such an assumption. They suggest, to the contrary, that a truly utopian definition of equality must be predicated upon the universalization of scarce resources, and that it must be able to encourage belief in a world that could be “bright” not simply in despite but because of its barrenness. As Cythna says, this belief is an act of mind, the product of a conscious effort to think beyond a notion of equality keyed to the idea that everyone should have enough, and to produce a new notion of utopia based in the idea that everyone should have the same amount of deprivation as everybody else. By inverting the conventional association of utopia with plenitude and aligning it instead with insufficiency, Shelley takes his experiments with the simile as a figure of near but imperfect likeness and abstracts from them a philosophical and political principle of evenly distributed suffering. By following on the heels of Cythna’s vision, the famine episode, for all its horrors, appears to contribute to rather than be corrected by the imagination of equality the vision itself advances. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film, Sacrifice, material and existential divestment are likewise put forth as a response, however overdue or insufficient, to planetary peril. Sacrifice tells the story of a man, Alexander, who finds out on his birthday that the world is about to end, presumably on account of a nuclear holocaust. Alexander promises God that he will give up everything he loves if only God lets the world go on. After a visit to one of his maids, who his friend assures him is a witch, he falls asleep only to wake up and find everything returned to normal: no more news broadcasts about impending annihilation, no more terrified family members. Determined to keep his bargain with God, Alexander sets fire to his house and all his belongings before being driven away in an ambulance. The film ends with his hitherto mute son, Little Man, lying under a tree and offering up the only line he has in the film: “In the beginning was the Word. Why is that, Papa?”77 This final scene “can be read as an example of a cinematic haiku,” the verse

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form Tarkovsky himself described as “cultivat[ing] its images in such a way that they mean nothing beyond themselves, and at the same time express so much that it is not possible to catch their final meaning.”78 It can also be read, in the terms of this chapter, as a simile detached from a conventional conjunctive syntax fastened by “like” or “as.” If Little Man, who stands in the place of the (also mute) audience, objects to the baffling metonymic logic of John’s first verse—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”—Tarkovsky tries to explain this mystery by offering the whole scene as a synaesthetic point of comparison to “the Word.” What is or was the Word?: it was something like this, a confluence of speech, image, grass, rocks, water, sky, and the son’s excruciating desire for his father (not for nothing is Little Man lying prone at the foot of a very cross-like tree). But of course, what the beginning was like or what the Word is are fundamentally unknowable, so Tarkovsky’s cinematic simile expresses only nescience, the non-knowledge that, as Georg Simmel has it, helps the individual “sustain himself in his being and in his potentialities” with “reference to God as well as [to] men.”79 It is only by assuming some partial similitude between our experience of the world and God’s intention for it that we learn to bear life—that seems, anyway, to be the theological thrust of Tarkovsky’s deeply theological film, which ends by leaving Little Man to reconcile his own experience of the world to his Father’s. Like The Revolt of Islam, Sacrifice flirts with the end of the world only to reboot it: just as Alexander bequeaths the film to his son, Laon and Cythna bequeath their utopian quest to the poet. These acts of dispossession, of giving-up and turning-over, lift the pall of terror that hangs over the moment when life itself is destined to be blasted out of existence, whether by World War Three or the titanic footsteps of divine Equality. In this sense, they could not be more unlike the genre of sacrifice Friedrich Schlegel feverishly describes as “the annihilation of the finite because it is finite.” Alexander, Laon, and Cythna sacrifice something finite—their possessions, their names, their lives—to preserve the world. In so doing, they renounce the acquisitive or proprietarian impulse fueled by a misplaced desire for “an eternal self-destination into the infinite,” into limitlessness. Far from upholding a sublime mysticism according to which “only in the midst of death does the lightning bolt of eternal life explode,” they are satisfied with the partial knowledge afforded by saying, simply, this world is as precious as it always was, even if we will never understand the nature of its initial,

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untouched incarnation.80 Their sacrifices are made in the name of helping to create an environment from which they choose to displace themselves, an estrangement that nonetheless holds out the promise of breathing room for less avaricious creatures. One need not believe that “man is the flower of the earth” to believe that “man can only sacrifice himself,” for reasons that might include letting other flowers bloom.81

CHAPTER FOUR

Bad Taste, or Varieties of Empire and Anticolonialism “Out of every corner of the woods and glynnes they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legges could not beare them; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eate the dead carrions, happy where they could finde them, yea, and one another soone after, insomuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and, if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewithal; that in short space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentifull countrey suddainely left voyde of man and beast; yet sure in all that warre, there perished not many by the sword, but all by the extremitie of famine, which they themselves had wrought.” —Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, 1596

most of this book’s parts are oriented conceptually, around a particular topic or theme as opposed to a particular author. This chapter goes perhaps the farthest in its deployment of a multitextual method, one that ranges across writers and centuries in a manner that may seem harried or confused. At the risk of seeming to defend as purposive what is really an accident of composition—or a by-product of poor organization—I want nonetheless to state that the variety of texts assembled here is intended to perform a transhistorical and transgeneric pastiche I associate with a specific strain of anticolonial writing, specifically within Irish Romanticism. It is a strain that, I argue, develops mimetically from a liberal-reformist tradition of writing that advocates for an amelioration of colonialism and imperialism, rather than their wholesale termination or resistance. Taken WITH SOME EXCEPTIONS,

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together, these texts comprise a mixed political genealogy that traffics in an aesthetics of bad taste, whether it is used in service of a sentimental quickening of cross-cultural feeling or the disruption of sentimentality through more direct and, in some cases, violent forms of anticolonial critique. In the context of a theorization of limited utopia, these two uses of bad taste emerge, respectively, as conciliatory and renunciatory modes of confronting what my last chapter calls “pseudo-utopia.” Here, pseudo-utopia is not (as it will be in what follows) an ideological formation proper to industrial capitalism, but a differently seductive offering of commercial liberalism. As this chapter moves from sermons of appeasement in Rousseau, Benjamin Constant, and Sydney Owenson toward the more combative tactics of Thomas Moore’s Memoirs of Captain Rock, it finds the gradual ascension of industry over commerce being met with pointed attacks on Britain’s imperial economies. These attacks borrow the vocabulary of organic growth, widely used to articulate the pastoral responsibilities of Britain in its colonies, to expose the real consequences of what Alfred Crosby calls “ecological imperialism”: most obviously, the many outbreaks of famine in Ireland during the long Romantic period and beyond.1 In the last ten or fifteen years, both Ireland and the political progress of sentimentalism have become increasingly central to academic writing about nineteenth-century empire and its contemporary inheritors. The “sentimental” in sentimentalism does not, in these instances, necessarily mean saccharine or cloying, but rather refers to a philosophy of social life heavily invested in the effects of feeling, in particular feeling exchanged between one person and another or, occasionally, between a person and a non-human animal, an inanimate object, or a work of literature.2 Both the sentimentalist culture of the late eighteenth century and present-day scholarly studies of it lean heavily on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, a work of moral philosophy once thought so unlike The Wealth of Nations that the disparity of the two works has given rise to the so-called “Adam Smith problem”: how could someone who insisted on the ethical necessity of empathy, of placing oneself imaginatively in the situation of another, write elsewhere in praise of economic self-interest?3 Some readers have responded that sentimentalism, which assigns abstract value to different kinds of affective transactions, merely apes the structure of capitalism, and so may as well be described as the commodity form of feeling. Others, including the economist Amartya Sen, have taken the opposite view, nominating The Wealth of Nations as a

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blueprint for a compassionate capitalism “deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might survive in an otherwise successful market economy.”4 Sen is the most visible of Smith’s recent recuperators, and it is worth noting that many of his arguments in favor of revisiting Smith touch upon the history of Ireland and of Irish hunger. An essay on cultural globalization (published in a volume of essays whose copyright is owned, intriguingly, by the World Bank) contrasts the position—which Sen attributes to Smith—that the wages of global economic growth should be shared more evenly than they are at present to the famine-producing policies of Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. But the problem is older than that, for as Sen writes it “the cultural roots of the Irish famines extend . . . at least as far back as Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” where we find both the view that “Irish poverty was . . . being caused by laziness, indifference, and ineptitude,” and the rhetoric of a civilizational mission used to alibi the depredations of empire.5 For Sen, Smith’s countervailing discourse of sentiment presents empathy as a great equalizer. It is through mutual concern, he suggests, that private and public persons come to engage in fair and mutually beneficial transactions with one another, in a manner capable of correcting earlier and more savage patterns of imperial propaganda. Romantic anticolonialism strikes out against this view, and against its incarnations in sentimental literature. It does so partly by exploiting the bathos that always threatens to overwhelm sentimental representation, which traffics in the motifs of tears, blushes, and sighs, and generally in the somatic pronouncement of inarticulable emotion. It also, and more to the point, shifts the terms of its critique from sentiment to bad taste, ultimately exposing the former as the latter. In the texts that focalize this chapter, bad taste functions, to use a familiar if anachronistic phrase, as a global positioning system: it describes a double-jointed orientation toward and away from empire experienced, in the Irish context, as occupation.6 These texts broadcast a purpose-driven vulgarity that works as an analogue for a colonial project whose ambitions they sometimes share and sometimes satirize. On the side of sharing, we have Rousseau and Constant; on the side of satire, the “terrorist discourse” of Captain Rock, which uses satirical indirection to reroute “the inherent violence which stems from the fact that no utterance is able directly to express” occupation’s “truth.”7 Inhabiting an awkward but exemplary place in the middle is Owenson, whose novels have been variously claimed and discredited as expressions of anticolonial feeling. These authors, along

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with others collected into a small, loosely gathered archive of coarse, crude, or otherwise discomfiting “utterance,” create scenarios of and in bad taste as part of an aesthetic response to the conditions of empire. In their work, bad taste comes to function as “the name of an encounter with difference,” specifically cultural difference perceived as a discriminatory measure of “the power of the subject and object,” the occupying power and the anonymous huddle Spenser (in this chapter’s epigraph) classifies as “they.”8 Moving away from the category of sentiment for a variation on the category Sianne Ngai calls “the cute,” I argue that bad taste confronts empire by generating literatures or literary scenarios “unusually responsive to and thus easily shaped or deformed by” the reader’s “feeling or attitude toward” them.9 Where Ngai counters what she diagnoses as a marginalization of the minor by offering sustained etiologies of its generic instances, I attempt a recuperative account of bad taste that finds, in the embarrassing arts of empire, the kernel of a non-intuitive decolonial aesthetics capable of being integrated into the obverse project of Romantic utopianism. Perhaps it is not hard to see how the arts of bad taste might add to a conversation about empire, since its cousins—camp, kitsch, the grotesque, the abject—have each in their time been allocated the potential for dissent. But where does bad taste fit into the logic of formal curtailment that structures limited utopia? After all, things in bad taste tend to be marked by their apparent lack of form, by (in a word) their liquidity: they are unctuous, effusive, sappy, syrupy, cheesy, mushy, drippy, and sometimes bloody, soaked in gore. In order to suggest a few ways in which bad taste might factor effectively into utopian formalism, I concentrate on texts that are especially attuned to empire’s spatial and atmospheric impacts, and to those moments of self-positioning whereby colonial and colonized meet each other on the unequal ground of affective expression and reception. If, as Michel Serres argues, the empires of capitalism appropriate the world by filling it with trash, the literature of bad taste might be used to elaborate a counter-rubric of trashiness. It might, in its formalization of excess, expose and outdo the refuse of empire by turning its unregulated gobbling and disgorging into a carefully calibrated aesthetic program.10 * * * Bad taste is political—or rather, politicizing. Take the first few paragraphs of Maude Gonne’s 1900 essay “The Famine Queen,” whose title invokes

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Spenser’s Faerie Queene very much minus the royalist sympathies. “‘The Queen’s visit to Ireland is in no way political,’ proclaims the Lord Lieutenant, and the English ministers,” and then “‘The Queen’s visit to Ireland has nothing at all to do with politics,’ cries the fishmonger, [Lord Mayor of Dublin Thomas] Pile,” followed by “‘Nothing political! Nothing political! Let us present an address to this virtuous lady,’ echo 30 town councillors.” “In truth,” writes Gonne, speaking last in her own person, “The visit of the Queen of England is a political action, and if we accord her a welcome we shall stand shamed before the nations.” Moreover, the capacity of bad taste to expose ideological content where some might want there to be none lies in its native tendency to scramble generic modes, bouncing wildly between polemical, satirical, surreal, Gothic, and blackly comic registers. In Vanity Fair, published half a century earlier, William Thackeray had presented the imaginary meeting of “an Irish member” of Parliament with Queen Victoria as part of a historical narrative whose “disarrangement and disorder [was] excusable and becoming,” as opposed to objectionable. Gonne views Victoria’s visit as a continuation of that same deranged set of circumstances, in this case with the Queen cast as supplicant.11 Gonne seems to be drawing on Spenser as much as she does in her title when she describes Victoria oozing westward “in the decrepitude of her eighty-one years . . . after an absence of half-a-century to revisit the country she hates, and whose inhabitants are the victims of the criminal policy of her reign.”12 Against the cant of public officials, and against the imperial sentimentality of the Queen herself—who comes to Ireland “with the Shamrock in her withered hand” to recruit soldiers for the Boer War—Gonne insists on making the event wholly political by rendering it luridly fantastic. This is especially apparent when she goes on to predict the downfall of Britain in some incipient future, in which England is long overdue to be invaded by the rising nations of Eurasia: “Today the giants of England are the giants of finance and of the Stock Exchange, who have risen to power on the backs of a great struggling mass of pale, exhausted slaves,” but “[t]he storm approaches” in the shape of “the covetousness of the world,” whipped into envy by the thought of all “the gold which the English have made out of the blood and tears of millions of human beings”: Who will aid the pirates to keep their spoils? In their terror they turn to Victoria, their Queen. . . . [T]rembling on the brink of the grave, she rises once more at their call. Soldiers are needed to protect the vampires. The Queen

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issues an appeal in England, the struggling mass of slaves cry ‘Hurrah’; but there is no blood in their veins, no strength in their arms. Soldiers must be found, so Victoria will go herself to fetch them; she will go over to Ireland— to this people who have despised gold, and who, in spite of persecutions and threats, have persisted in their dream of Freedom and idealism, and who, though reduced in numbers, have maintained all the beauty and strength and vitality of their race.13

The English are at once pirates and vampires, succubi who siphon off the “vitality” of the living Irish to keep themselves alive or, rather, undead.14 “Trembling on the brink of the grave,” the Queen is a vampiric figure as well, caught in a limbic state that wraps the disturbed history of empire’s ruinous present around its doomed future. The sensationalist temporality of the vampire also mirrors the less spectacular but no less distended lifetime of Ireland’s people, “the survivors of sixty years of organised famine.”15 Behind Gonne’s turn to the strange and supernatural stands a tragically banal history of policy, specifically of the many parliamentary constraints that pushed the potato to the center of Ireland’s economy. In other words, anchoring the polysemous rhetoric of “The Famine Queen” is the bland singular state of monoculture, the practice of growing one cash crop over a large area for several years. The crop in question was the potato, specifically the Lumper variety, and the writer Michael Pollan helpfully condenses an unwieldy wealth of agricultural history when he explains that potatoes, “like apples, are clones, which means that every Lumper was genetically identical to every other lumper, all of them descended from a single plant that just happened to have no resistance to Phytophthora infestans,” or blight; when blight came to Ireland, the period of mass starvation known as the Great Hunger (1845– 52) followed.16 No one knows exactly where blight came from, but chances are it was brought over from North America, where ships en route to Europe and the United Kingdom stocked themselves with potatoes to feed their passengers. Like the smallpox epidemic carried to the Americas by Spanish settlers in the sixteenth century, the potato blight is the local effect of a global cause, namely the spread of European imperialism along “the commercial arteries” of trade, travel, and migration that additionally become pathways of contagion.17 The Great Hunger thus throws into high relief the precarious web of a global empire that, faced with the disastrous coupling of commercially distributed disease with an agricultural policy designed to

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maximize profit, “convinced [itself ] that overly heroic exertions against implacable natural laws, whether of market prices or population growth” or plant genetics, “were worse than no effort at all.”18 The result, for Ireland, is a colonialism that succeeds vampirically, by almost wiping out a population and then nursing it back to subsistence conditions under which, as Gonne suggests, hunger is simply a way of protracted life. When Gonne begins her essay by ventriloquizing the ejection of politics from the Queen’s visit, she is also reproducing a middle-of-the-road nationalism that presents itself as a philosophy of cross-cultural and translocational attachment. This nationalism is not actually anticolonial: it imagines diplomacy, of the sort undertaken by the Queen, as an intimate exchange between the powerful petitioner and those whose only value lies in their life’s blood, and their willingness to have it spilled (in this case) somewhere far away. As Thackeray says in reference to his own fantasy of the Queen and the “Irish member,” it takes the pen of “the romancer” to rewrite the history of organized famine in the embodied, emotive idiom of sentimental love, as Gonne’s fishmonger Pile does when he cries, “Let us to our knees, and present the keys of the city to her Most Gracious Majesty, and compose an address in her honour.”19 Unlike the multivalent prose of “The Famine Queen,” which swings from pirates to policy in an effort to mimic the ways in which the Queen has failed to fulfill the promise of her own genre— failed, that is, to be consistent in the performance of her affection for her colonial subjects—the command to drop to one’s knees is an attempt to disperse historical and affective confusion. This way of dealing or imagining to deal with empire advances a conceptual idiom developed in Constant’s celebrated essay on “The Spirit of Conquest,” a piece of writing often and mistakenly labeled as anti-imperialist. Constant is a reformer and, like the functionaries Gonne attacks, all he really wants from empire is to see it take better, more reliable, and more loving care of the people under its aegis. One of the negative side effects of empire, writes Constant, is that it has cast human beings “like atoms upon [the world’s] vast and leveled plain” by turning the natives of occupied lands into “strangers in the place of their birth”— strangers, that is, because their land and their culture no longer belongs to them.20 It is the eradication of local culture that worries Constant most, for (or so he argues) if people forget how to maintain a connection with their regional customs and traditions, they will lose the more general capacity to invest emotionally in the idea of empire per se. Feeling local, in other words, is a virtual form of feeling imperial. Both proceed through an acclimatization

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of the conquered to their own occupied homelands, an activity rendered allegorically by Gonne’s picture of a bent knee on stolen ground. Like the culture of sentimentalism itself, imperial discourses of sentiment find their fount in the work of Rousseau, whom Elizabeth Rose Wingrove credits with the origination of a politics that rests on “a sentience made sentiment that can feel the paradoxical complementarity of coercion and consent.”21 In his little-known verse opera La Découverte du Nouveau Monde, Rousseau stages a drama of conciliation that draws heavily on the sensible impacts of music, specifically in its capacity to bypass semantics and tap into the animal power of “accents, cries, pleas.”22 What Saint-Preux, in La Nouvelle Héloïse, calls “the accents of melody applied to those of language” meets Wingrove’s model of a politics of sentience interpreted as sentiment, so that music—in particular the bright tones and tight rhythms of light opera—becomes a means of capturing personal passions and accommodating them to imperial interests.23 La Découverte du Nouveau Monde is set during the first Spanish expedition to the Americas, and it pairs a lovelorn cast of native characters with somewhat bemused groups of marauding conquistadores under the leadership of Christopher Columbus. Although Rousseau calls his opera a “tragedy in three acts,” it is not self-evidently a tragedy in anything except the way Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Cymbeline is a tragedy, for although both plays flirt with disaster they ultimately make “Pardon . . . the word to all.”24 The opera’s plot turns on the frustrated love of Carime, an “Indian princess,” for Le Cacique.25 Le Cacique has eyes only for his wife, Digizé, and so in revenge Carime betrays Le Cacique’s hiding place to the Spanish. The natives are enslaved, but Columbus is so moved by Le Cacique’s love for Digizé that he decides to let the chief stay on as the nominal head of his tribe, though he and it will remain totally under Spanish authority. In response, Le Cacique swears his fealty to Columbus: Tu me rends Digizé, tu m’as vainçu par elle. Tes armes n’avoient pu dompter mon cœur rebelle, Tu l’as soumis par tes bienfait. Sois sûr, dès ces instant, que tu n’auras jamais D’ami plus empressé, de sujet plus fidèle.26

In the tidy rhyme of “elle” (her) with “rebelle” (rebellious) and “fidèle” (faithful, true), the movement of the opera finds its aural synecdoche. Le Cacique’s love for his wife is a slingshot propelling him through and past his own

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defiance of Columbus into what is presented as a mutually sustaining relationship between conqueror and conquered. This love also mimics Columbus’s own affection for his queen, Isabella, to whom Columbus appeals when he responds rhymingly to Le Cacique’s speech with “Je te veux pour ami, sois sujet d’Isabelle” (“I want you as my friend: become a subject of Isabelle”; III. iv). From Le Cacique to Columbus, from Carime to Digizé, from Isabella to Spain, all characters bend under the dispositional power that arranges them into relative positions of subordination and mastery and persuades them to maintain fidelity to those positions. This is the topography of empire as Rousseau idealizes it, made up of lateral vectors of desire fueled by bustling emotional activity and vertical vectors of vanquishing, subduing, and laying low. Empire’s rhyme scheme works as the kinetic principle that puts into sound the rush of persons moving toward or mowing down one another, in a series of movements that appear as inevitable as the gravitational pull from one end-rhyme to the next. Lastly, rhyme creates the impression of equality or at least a baseline similitude, for like all good myths of political origin, the story Rousseau tells here—the story, that is, of the social contract—presents as equal all parties whose desires are consolidated under the sign of the general will. Written twenty years before Du Contrat Social, La Découverte du Nouveau Monde makes theater out of its constitutive syllogisms, using the history of European imperialism to set to music a version of how man’s chains first became “legitimate.”27 The opera ends, appropriately, with a dance and a chorus that animates Rousseau’s poetic principles of imperial motion, linked here to the civilizational powers of strong feeling: Il n’est point de cœur sauvage Pour l’amour; Et dès qu’on s’engage En ce séjour C’est sans partage. Point d’autres plaisirs Que de douces chaînes. (III.v)28

As for the pleasures derived from love’s chains, Rousseau does not say what they are or might be. However, at least one of love’s perks seems to be its cultivation of the apparently politically remedial subject and his removal from what is more or less a state of nature. I say “more or less” because, as

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the chorus suggests, where there is love there is already a lack of freedom, in the form of a semi-elective indenture to something outside ourselves. Rousseau’s opera wants us to see that if love is not exactly identical to the social contract, it does share its paradoxical structure. As Columbus says, when a person loses her liberty “without complaint” (sans murmure) she gains “a still more precious yoke” (un joug encore plus précieux; II.i)—he might as well say, “this means nothing other than that [s]he shall be forced to be free.”29 To wear a sweet chain is to commit to the heterogeneous pleasures of inequality, including the pleasure of being put in one’s place. In this case, those pleasures are figured as the lopsided intimacy between Le Cacique and Columbus, to whom the chief becomes a friend and—as his use of the familiar pronoun “tu” in speaking to Columbus implies—his grammatical compeer.30 This unexpected friendship is the fruit of Spain’s “good deeds” (bienfaits) as well as the occlusion of what they imply: that the narrative of Spain’s imaginary seduction of America gives the name of romance to the tragedy of empire.31 “The sentimental sorcery of Rousseau” sparks at the heart of The Wild Irish Girl, the main exhibit in an archive of bad taste that, like Rousseau’s opera, raises its ambiguous attitude toward colonial incursion to the level of an idiosyncratic aesthetic mode.32 Set just before 1800, The Wild Irish Girl is an epistolary novel about a young English aristocrat, Horatio, who is sent by his father to visit the family holdings in Ireland. When Horatio arrives he falls in with a self-proclaimed Irish king who lives in a castle owned by Horatio’s father, the Earl of M—. In disguise as an itinerant painter, he becomes infatuated with the king’s daughter, Glorvina O’Melville. After some Oedipal shenanigans, in which Glorvina is courted by a secret suitor who turns out to be Horatio’s father, Horatio and Glorvina marry with the Earl’s blessing. Their marriage is preceded by the death of Glorvina’s father, who dies of shock when he learns Horatio’s real identity. The story ends with an omniscient narratorial interlude, with the Earl describing his son’s marriage as a dress rehearsal for the Act of Union, an “event . . . devoutly to be wished by every liberal mind, every benevolent heart” (214). The Wild Irish Girl would give its name to one of the stock theatrical characters Yeats calls “the old rattletraps of the [Irish] stage.” Along with the Paddy and “the bowing Frenchman,” “the wild Irish girl,” says Yeats, has “the life of a string and a wire.”33 Contrary to what Yeats suggests, in Owenson’s novel this string-andwire existence proves to be a kind of puppet vivacity so far gone into artifice

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that, like the wooden dolls in Kleist’s “Theater of Marionettes,” it turns right around and becomes hyper-animate. Kleist, famously, is in search of the “logarithm” where affect and affectation collaborate to reveal the creepy germ of the inhuman lurking within our art forms.34 Owenson appears, at first, merely to want to tell a good story, and so on the surface it is not clear how two texts—The Wild Irish Girl and “Theater of Marionettes”—might be less alike. They do meet, however, on the ground of bad taste, where an enthusiasm for popular entertainment meets a haunting fixation on the thin line between human and inhuman existence. For Kleist, the inhuman is embodied in the marionette; for Owenson, it is embodied in the human frame. Forced to act a part in Owenson’s “allegory of union,” Glorvina is disarticulated until she no longer represents a person, but a mood that is “conventional and simultaneously slack.”35 Her excesses suggest not “the presence of an inside”—of interiority adduced by the suggestion that a literary character, like a person, “can make mistakes” and thus be in “bad form”—but an idea of character as an atmospheric phenomenon, something knowable only as it is dismantled from the outside outward and dissolved into the air.36 Febrile, pulsating, and wrapped in a thick fog of Keatsian participles (“beaming,” “panting,” “glowing,” “softly sighing,” “faintly breathing,” and so on), the quality called Glorvina is more than a structure of feeling, more than an experience of occupation “in solution.”37 She (or it) is also a covert, even unintentional comment on the tastelessness of a merely moody response to empire, a response whose inefficacy is tied to the tone-deafness of being little more than tone. It was precisely on this doubled ground of failed craftsmanship and questionable taste that The Wild Irish Girl was, in its own time, most frequently indicted. Writing to her sister Cassandra in 1809, Jane Austen dryly notes that Ida of Athens, the follow-up to The Wild Irish Girl, “must be very clever, because it was written as the Authoress says, in three months.” Although Owenson’s “Irish Girl does not make [her] expect much,” Austen adds that perhaps, “if the warmth of [Owenson’s] Language could affect the Body it might be worth reading in this weather.”38 The best thing one might expect from Owenson, then, is a novel that is merely the sum of its thermal effects, which kindle the sensibilities of readers able to discount the book’s content in favor of an unmediated enjoyment of its more basic properties. Among those properties Austen implicitly includes the flammable material of the book as a physical object, since her suggestion that it might provide

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“warmth” also hints at the possibility of throwing the whole thing into the fire. In a letter to Owenson herself, Richard Lovell Edgeworth offers a version of Austen’s critique to Owenson’s face. He was, he says, listening to his daughter Maria (that’s Maria Edgeworth, the novelist) read The Wild Irish Girl aloud and thinking how much better the book seemed to him than when he read it the first time. Just then he looks over Maria’s shoulder and discovers that she has been “omitt[ing] some superfluous epithets” as she goes along: so that explains it. “Dare she have done this if you had been by?” Lovell asks Owenson. “I think she would have dared; because your good taste and good sense would have been instantly her defenders.”39 Both Edgeworths take for granted the propriety of “good taste”—adjusted for standards of economy and precision—to a story like Owenson’s, which has the erotic life of empire as its theme. The style Maria Edgeworth is at pains to conceal is a disclosure of excess under stress, and she cannot countenance the idea that bad taste, in its performance of superfluity and diffusion, might in fact be an indirect way of giving shape to the amorphous, fractured circumstance of life during conquest. Bad taste, in this sense, would be an exercise in what Alexander Pope calls peri bathous, or the art of sinking. Owenson in fact invokes “Peri Bathous,” Pope’s essay of 1727, in one of Horatio’s letters to his friend J.D. “Can you recollect,” Horatio asks, “who was that rational moderate youth who exclaimed in a frenzy of passion, ‘O Gods! annihilate both time and space, and make two lovers happy’[?]”, before going on to claim the sentiment for himself. This line is in fact adapted from Pope’s example of a poor use of hyperbole, one of those “magnifying and diminishing figures” so essential to a bathetic aesthetics (bathetics?). In “Peri Bathous,” however, Pope gives “Ye Gods! annihilate but Space and Time,/ And make two Lovers happy,” a “modest request” that is clearly immodest and yet more restrained than Horatio’s misquotation, which leaves out the “but” that is the key to the couplet’s absurdity and replaces it with “both.” In Horatio’s hands, the bathetic hyperbole becomes at once more preposterous and less self-consciously so, for Horatio is not offering a commentary on the art of sinking, he is doing the sinking all by himself. Edgeworth senior may prefer The Wild Irish Girl trimmed of its fat, but he has lost sight of the haphazard volley between inflation and deflation that creates the novel’s two most interesting, interrelated features. The first of those is its lamination of literary history upon linear history, and consequent disruption of a normative ordering of “both time and space”; the second is its weaving of

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this offbeat picture of the historical record into another kind of temporality, namely, and as we shall see, the time of agricultural production. Cultivating literacy and food among the Irish seems, at first, to hold out benevolent political prospects of its own. Those prospects, however, are flooded and drowned out by the novel’s own bathetic effects, which—like the historical destruction of Irish culture and Irish crops—can be laid at the door of the British Empire. That Horatio, empire’s emissary, takes the breezy annihilation of physical reality as the precondition of his own union with Glorvina is merely one example of the novel’s perhaps unconscious satire of empire’s innately hyperbolic disposition. Although I am ultimately unsure of the extent to which Owenson’s bad taste is deliberately constituted, I read The Wild Irish Girl’s open flirtation with bathos as a unique mode of narrating history, whereby failures of taste are identical to failures of political purposiveness in an imperial era. Though set just before the Act of Union, the novel winks at the Act’s repercussions by inserting quotations from texts (like Chateaubriand’s Atila) that were published several years after its passing—a red flag for an epistolary novel whose characters are supposed to be living in the 1790s. Coupled with frequent allusions to the Union itself, these citational slip-ups establish a historical consciousness that is profoundly amnesiac. The novel, which comes across as ultimately pro-imperial, seems to figure progress as an egress from history, an escape made manifest by the novel’s own nonchalant erosion of linear time by narrative space. While Horatio’s cultural references set him rattling between centuries, Glorvina’s perennial state of “blushing confusion” suggests both her immobility within the present and her lack of clarity about what that present is like (93). More significantly, however, her insistent performance of cognitive dislocation is the way she takes pleasure in the world around her, in an endless display of tears, blushes, and swoons that displace onto gesture the oblique but ever-present juncture between intimate fantasies and imperial realities. Bad taste is not quite the same as kitsch, a post-industrial category that enlists the aid of mass production.40 The Wild Irish Girl is, in this sense, prekitsch. Nonetheless, and in light of the derivation of kitsch from the “obscure, colloquial [German] verb kitschen, which means to stroke, pet, smear, or lump together,” the novel is indeed tucked snugly inside “the semantic space not too distant from smarmy and unctuous.”41 Utterly enmeshed within the mawkish imperatives of a cross-cultural love story, Glorvina’s

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capacity to figure bathos is greased by her access to one commodity in particular: books. From the moment of his arrival at the castle of Innismore, Horatio begins loading Glorvina down with that aforementioned “sentimental sorcery of Rousseau” so that she may learn to “know herself, and the latent sensibility of her soul” (144). The purple haze of Owenson’s prose carries Glorvina’s “abstracted air, her delicious melancholy, her unusual softness,” and her sense of being “overwhelmed” outward to the reader; we too are invited into this pedagogy, but unlike Glorvina the object of our “recognition” is not our own emotional feverishness but rather the vulgarity of Horatio’s cheerfully exploitative and utterly conventional project of grooming himself a conquest. A young, hedonistic aristocrat meets a naïve girl whose family is beholden to his and decides to expose her to her own undeveloped sensuality: this is the general outline for almost every eighteenthand nineteenth-century story of “seduction,” from Clarissa to Northanger Abbey to The Mill on the Floss. The trope is so familiar that it doubles the sense of “irritation” to which Umberto Eco, in his essay on “The Structure of Bad Taste,” attributes our capacity to “recognize bad taste instantly.” “Confronted by an obvious lack of proportion, or by something that seems out of place,” we feel repulsion but also a sinister amusement, the sort Richardson inspires when he assures one of his female readers that “Clarissa has the greatest of triumphs . . . even in and after the outrage [i.e., her rape by Lovelace], and because of the outrage, that ever woman had.”42 In cases like these, writes Eco, “bad taste manifests itself as a lack of measure”—the greatest of triumphs that ever woman had!—where “measure” signifies not only a sense of perspective but a sense of cohesion. In encouraging Glorvina to go limp, to “abstract” herself into the very air, Horatio transmits his own tastelessness to her by turning her into a thing without shape. His bad taste is moral; hers is a matter of (poor) form. In a memorable scene between Glorvina, Horatio, and Glorvina’s tutor, the Jesuit Father John (Yeats’s “bowing Frenchman”), literature provides an occasion to circumvent rational thought and to open the body to its own liquefaction. Glorvina has been musing on how she likes to read the poetry of Ossian and William Collins while playing her harp among the roses. Horatio responds with the non-sequitur that “the conveyance of such profound, such ecstatic feelings” may transcend “cold verbal expression” and travel, as along an electric current, from bosom to bosom. “To an axiom,” says Horatio, “we grant our assent, but we lavish our most enthusiastic approbation when

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Rousseau tells us that, ‘Les ames humaines veulent être accomplies pour valoir toute leurs prix, et la force unie des ames comme celles des larmes d’un aimant artificial, est incomparablement plus grands que la somme de leurs force particulier.’” This misquotation—the original French text of La Nouvelle Héloïse reads “la force unie des amis,” the united force of intimate friends or lovers, not of souls (“[â]mes”)—sends “a crimson torrent” to Glorvina’s cheek, her blush convincing Horatio that (as he says) “she felt the full force of a sentiment so applicable to us both.” Horatio then repeats his misquotation before asking Glorvina, “in a low voice,” why “Rousseau [was] excluded from the sacred coalition with Ossian, Collins, your twilight harp, and winter rose?” Horatio’s account of the scene to J.D. has it that “Glorvina made no reply; but turned full on me her ‘eyes of dewy light’” while his own eyes “almost sunk beneath the melting ardor of their soul-beaming glance” (145–146). The scene thrives on the wildly overdetermined relay of cultural references and their mutual distortion. His prose bungled or at least remembered wrongly, Rousseau is hereby installed as the fourth term in an all-toostraightforward symbolic trinity that has Glorvina and her harp standing in for Ireland, Ossian for Scotland, and Collins for England. Both Ossian and Collins were known for their lugubrious poetics, and Ossian’s poems—attributed by their real author, James Macpherson, to an ancient bard of Celtic legend—are a kind of misquotation writ large, which is to say a hoax.43 Meanwhile, in The Sorrows of Young Werther, which Horatio lends to Glorvina, Werther reads Lotte his own translation of Ossian’s poems just before he botches his own suicide attempt and winds up lingering, between life and death, for hours afterwards; the presence of Werther and Ossian in Owenson’s novel cannot but conjure the woeful but also, in truth, darkly humorous uses to which the former text puts the latter, which becomes an objective correlative for Werther’s own sentimental self-deception.44 Finally, as for Glorvina’s harp, by the early nineteenth century the association between the Irish and harp-playing had become so standardized that Edgeworth appended a long sardonic footnote to Castle Rackrent on the use of the harp in Irish funerals. “The present Irish cry or howl,” the Editor writes, “cannot boast of much melody, nor is the funeral procession conducted with much dignity,” but features rather a crowd of a hundred moving from town to town and moaning ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Agh! Agh!’” All this is “a cheap proof of humanity,” frequently culminating in one mourner turning to another to ask “‘Arrah now, honey, who is it we’re crying for?’”45 Glorvina’s “sacred

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coalition” likewise forges a phantom connection to a culture misrecognized or misconstrued specifically for the purpose of attracting approbation without reflection. In this burgeoning fantasy of cultural exchange, distortion and decontextualization emerge as reading practices whose hope is to generate sentiment that can be shared by all people because it is evacuated of unassimilably indigenous content. Like the “sentiment” that becomes “so applicable to us both” because it has been misquoted to fit the moment, or like the question “Who is it we’re crying for?” the imperial milieu Owenson represents thrives on the pantomime of attachment to some original text or object. The novel makes neither a plea for nor a critique of authenticity, but rather suggests that both intimacy and literacy under empire are intensified by virtue of their overstatement or—to recall Pope—their hyperbole, which diminishes even as it magnifies the significance of its referent. Near the novel’s end, the story of The Wild Irish Girl suddenly lurches out of epistolarity and gives itself over to omniscient narration; it then concludes with another letter from the Earl of M—printed in full at the novel’s end. While it is possible that Owenson’s brief holiday in third-person narrative is just a matter of diegetic expediency, my own sense is that this loosely realist interlude registers a meaningful shift in the historical time of the novel. When we lose the train of Horatio’s thought, we lose the eighteenth century with it, since the Earl’s final letter—unlike every other letter in The Wild Irish Girl—has no date. It is as if the break in Horatio’s point of view provides an intermediate space in which the personal history of the letter gives way to the anonymous history of an untimed future. Written as a to-do list of sorts, the Earl’s letter advises Horatio on how to help turn Ireland’s fortunes around. Horatio is to “cherish . . . into renovating life” the Irish national virtues which “though so often blighted in the full luxuriance of their vigorous blow by the fatality of circumstances, have still been ever found vital at the root,” and need only the “nutritive beam of encouragement, the genial glow of confiding affection, and the refreshing dew of tender commiseration, to restore them to their pristine bloom and vigour.” The key to decoding this overstuffed letter, which seems at first to be written in a symbolic language of cultivation and care, is to take it literally—to dismiss, in other words, the metric of comparison or, as Eco says, “measure” required for reading figuratively. Squashing the distance between vehicles and tenors, the Earl puts forward a pseudo-progressive agenda for the future that merely replicates the last few centuries:

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[P]lace the standard of support within their sphere; and like the tender vine, which has been suffered by neglect to waste its treasures on the sterile earth, you will behold them naturally turning and gratefully twining round the fostering stem, which rescues them from a cheerless and groveling destiny; and when by justly and adequately rewarding the laborious exertions of that life devoted to your service, the source of their poverty shall be dried up, and the miseries that flowed from it shall be forgotten: when the warm hand of benevolence shall have wiped away the cold dew of despondency from their brow; when reiterated acts of tenderness and humanity shall have thawed the ice which chills the native flow of their ardent feelings; and when the light of instruction shall have dispelled the gloom of ignorance and prejudice from their neglected minds, and their lightened hearts shall again throb with the cheery pulse of national exility[.]—then, and not till then, will you behold the day-star of national virtue rising brightly over the horizon of their happy existence. (242)

The Earl, whose earlier letters often quote the writings of Edmund Burke, closely echoes Burke’s speech on the impeachment of Warren Hastings in representing the colony as a war zone after the war, filled with “oppressed princes, [with] undone women of the first rank, [with] desolated provinces, and . . . wasted kingdoms.”46 It is a place glutted with natives whose suffering is best remedied by somatic adjustments in the practice, and not the principle, of empire itself. Whatever the negative consequences of English rule, they have been placed at a syntactical regress from the natural history of “blight” described by the Earl. Irish suffering is the result of “the fatality of circumstances,” and so the letter avoids assigning grammatical agency either to empire or to its representatives. Like a bad frost or a rough wind, the English have nipped Ireland’s development in the bud but only by accident. Their real fault is the lack of imaginative investment that leaves a wild plant uncultivated so that it goes, undesirably, to “waste.” Hiding the sinister history of Irish agriculture in plain sight, the Earl turns the parasitic relationship between English landlords and Irish tenant farmers into a horticultural metaphor that is not really a metaphor. Thanks to the labor of the Irish peasantry, there is still land to farm even though the literal and proverbial fruits of their labor have been exported out of the country; the best recompense, then, for lives devoted to empire’s service is to let the Irish themselves be treated like plants.

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The future of Ireland turns on an anxiety about hunger articulated in the idiom of bad taste, with its nutritive beams, genial glows, warm hands, cold dews, throbbing, pulsing, and reverberating. The overall picture is one of sterility converted to fertility, as English hands chafe Irish earth and Irish hearts into the liquid light of photosynthetic processes.47 Improvement is defined as the resolution of a real problem—hunger—through allegorical means: the body (brow, heart, feelings) becomes the people and the people become the land, but the land never becomes recognizable as a nation. Confined to and by allegory, Irish land does not add up to “Ireland” but exists as a once-squandered and presently untapped resource for nourishment. Nourishment, meanwhile, becomes both baseline and endpoint for human flourishing, a necessity so critical that its claims plainly supersede any political claims. The Earl’s vision is thus a perfect expression of what Uday Mehta describes as the “temporizing” of liberal imperialism, which finds various ways to insist upon the necessity of its colonies “for the time being remaining imperial.” How can the British just pull up and go when they have the Irish to feed, tend, and foster? What will happen to all that land, how will it feed the people who live on it? By tying the progress of empire to the management of agriculture, the novel recasts empire itself as a “project [that] is infinitely patient” and that, perhaps, is “secretly counting on its own extended incompetence, [on] not getting there and hence permanently remaining in between.”48 That said, the Earl does not even bother to ascribe this incompetence to the British, refusing the gestures of “morally, politically, and rationally justified ambivalence” that would turn The Wild Irish Girl into a mode standard expression of liberal principles.49 It is this lack of elegaic uncertainty that allows the novel to maintain its maladroitness right up through its conclusion. This is not a liberalism that imagines “imperial power . . . [as an] instrument required to align a deviant and recalcitrant history with the appropriate future,” but rather a sentimental genre of nationalism that lacks the authority to be other than inappropriate, refusing the pathos of ambivalence that, at the very least, gives the liberalism of a Burke or a Mill its agility, solemnity, and enduring appeal.50 At the heart of the Earl’s vision lies a profound faith in the persistence of Irish agricultural failure to keep the “not” in the “not till then.” Countering the dream, and the purported moral integrity, of this non-allegorical allegory of temporized salvation is the very different treatment of the land

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in Moore’s The Memoirs of Captain Rock, another epistolary novel published anonymously in 1824. The last section of this chapters details Moore’s transition from a writer in the Owensonian sentimental tradition to the progenitor of an experimental aesthetics that articulates an anticolonialism literally grounded upon the metaphoric and material power of Ireland’s geology. This strand of anticolonial thought and writing takes its own bad taste to the extreme, for the protagonist of Captain Rock is a hilarious, well-educated terrorist who leads a campaign of violent and occasionally murderous resistance to British rule. If, “by the nineteenth century, virtually every liberal justification of empire is anchored in the patience needed to serve and realize a future,” Rock exposes this patience as an uneven distribution of suffering, one that may be countered only by turning the pain of occupation back towards what he descibes as its primary cause: the Anglo-Irish farms gradually encroaching upon Irish land.51 Moore is most famous for his Irish Melodies, which make a memorable cameo in Austen’s Emma. Frank Churchill, the prodigal son of Highbury, gifts his secret fiancée Jane Fairfax with “a new set of Irish melodies” to go along with the piano he sends anonymously to her home.52 The gift signals Frank’s enthusiasm for whatever is on trend—this is a man who travels thirty miles to London to have his hair cut—for this is not just any edition of the Melodies but one of the ten different “sets” Moore published between 1808 and 1834 (a “sumptuous, appallingly timed Longman edition” was also brought out in 1846).53 The Melodies, along with the edition of Byron’s letters and journals he prepared after his close friend’s death, made Moore’s literary reputation, but Moore (not unlike Joseph Conrad) was also an exemplary participant in the life of imperial expansion and governance in the Romantic period. In the early years of the nineteenth century, he served as an administrator for the British admiralty in Bermuda. When he moved back to Britain in 1804, he left in charge one of his deputies, who then embezzled from the British government some £6000 for which Moore was declared liable.54 On the lam in Paris, Moore became the downstairs neighbor of Constant and the sometime acquaintance of Maria Edgeworth, who did not care for Moore’s manners and reports that he was always drunk: Moore, she confides in her diaries, is a “fair, whithky-looking man” possessed (as that epithet suggests) of a lisp “strangely contrasting with the vehemence of his emphasis.”55 Edgeworth’s distaste for Moore was motivated at least partly by her doubts as to “the sincerity of his patriotism,” a skepticism based, as

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she put it, on his “satirical” personality. Biography aside, the work of this Romantic cosmopolitan tracks empire’s phenomenality across a percussive spectrum of vehement emphasis and lisping indirection. In a “Letter on Music” published in the third number of his Melodies, Moore characterizes his songs as intended chiefly for “the piano-fortes of the rich and the educated—of those who can afford to have their national zeal a little stimulated, without exciting much dread of the excesses into which it may hurry them.” The melodies’ self-professed task was to create “a better period in both Politics and Music,” at least within the confines of the literary salon.56 As a political project, the Melodies were to succeed through the sympathetic solicitation of a smile and a tear; as an artistic enterprise, they were designed at once to condense and to amplify Ireland’s tragic condition into a chromatic scale, one in which the perspicuous white-note tonality of historical narrative is inflected by the awkward and dissonant record of black-key feeling. “It has often been remarked,” writes Moore, “and oftener felt, that [Irish] music is the truest of all comments upon our history.” Here an audience may find “the tone of defiance, succeeded by the languor of despondency—a burst of turbulence dying away into softness—the sorrows of one moment lost in the levity of the next—and all that romantic mixture of mirth and sadness, which is naturally produced by the efforts of a lively temperament to shake off, or forget, the wrongs which lie upon it[.]” These are not just aesthetic effects but “the features of [Irish] history and character, which we find strongly and faithfully reflected in our music[.]” Moore goes on to observe that “there are even many airs, which it is difficult to listen to, without recalling some period or event to which their expression seems applicable.”57 “Sometimes, when the strain is open and spirited, yet shaded here and there by a mournful recollection,” the listener might imagine himself watching the Highland armies led by the Marquess of Montrose go to their doom at the hands of the Scottish Covenanters; the songs of Carolan, a blind harper of the neoclassical period, will remind the Irish of a time they “were driven to worship their God in caves”; or they might think of the cry of a bird leaving a nest “which human touch has violated,” and feel with new force the fact of their own internal exile. All these episodes are drawn from a history that is relatively recent, going back no further than the Battle of Carbisdale in 1650. That the short list includes an event (the defeat of Montrose) that takes place in Scotland simply suggests that Moore makes Scotland and Ireland a composite victim of Cromwell’s incursions, in which such a large

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number of Irish died from war, famine, and disease that some contemporary historians characterizes this period as one of genocide.58 Cromwell will return in a moment, but for now I want to suggest that Moore’s chromatic historical consciousness offers a way to read Irish Romanticism against the grain of its own sentimentality. Readers of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments will instantly recognize Moore’s musical figures of feeling as derived from its insistence that each of us must modulate the “pitch” of our passion “in order to reduce it to harmony and concord with the emotions of those who are about” us. A person who is suffering, for example, “must flatten . . . the sharpness of his natural tone” until it syncs up with that of his interlocutor. Smith does not say, however, whether the creation of affective “harmony and concord” desires to make our passions sound like those of other people or to be complementary to them.59 To harmonize is to generate different sounds that lock into one another, but Smith’s emphasis on reduction implies something more like a mimesis: when the members of my audience are not as agitated as I, I must make my passion more like theirs. By changing the scene of the sentimental encounter from a hypothetical case to the well-furnished space of the salon, Moore offers this pointed clarification: the expression of a passion may be as shrill, ugly, inconsonant, and cacophonous as the passion itself demands, as long as there is a marked social difference between the hearing subject and the person whose feeling is the object of his enjoyment. The playing of Irish airs at the drawing-rooms of the rich generates the half-smarmy, half-rageful music of affective inequality, a sound all the more jarring for being literally damped by the pedals of a piano-forte. What could be in worse taste than using the suffering of others in the service of recreational self-stimulation? The music is designed to serve precisely that purpose, dancing up and down the scales of major, minor, and mixed-up passions. The “better period in both Politics and Music” Moore claims for his melodic imperative refers, then, both to a historical time and a compositional effect. A period is a natural division of a melody, usually built of two contrasting phrases as Moore’s Irish history tends to articulate itself in exactly two contrasting emotions—defiance and despondency, commotion and languor, depression and levity, mirth and sadness. The Harvard Dictionary of Music also suggests that the musical term (period) “corresponds to the sentence (or period) in language,” insofar as it seems to imply a cadenced “arrival” at “some harmony that does not immediately require further

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resolution.”60 Although, in the moment of being played, Moore’s melodies create for their auditors the gratifying discomfort of complex, contradictory feelings, they actually aspire to a place beyond music, and beyond history. These two seemingly disparate categories (history and music) are united formally, as the linear progression of one event into another is first abstracted into a note or tone and then made to vanish altogether, like a ringing in the ear that gradually falls away.61 The imperative to seek the better period—the period beyond periods—yokes amelioration to stillness and inertia, not as synonyms for throwing in the towel but as markers of the silence that lies on the other side of the century’s imperial roar. Against all odds, the ingratiating commercial racket of the Melodies’ bad taste hushes an atrocious history and atrocious present, and presumes to solace their circumstances. An alternative mode of engagement with the rich and educated materializes in The Memoirs of Captain Rock. Captain Rock has a very specific target of attack, and that is the emotional tropology that structures the most popular literature of the Irish nationalist movement, whose principal objective in the Romantic period is not Irish independence but rather, and as we have seen, Irish rehabilitation. Against this state-sponsored policy of sentimental détente, Moore or, rather, the Captain sets his own program of agrarian terrorism. Agro-terrorism, as it is now called, is the attempt to destroy an agricultural industry, either wholly or in parts, or to otherwise interfere with the food supply of a population. The Year of the French, Thomas Flanagan’s novel about Ireland in the late 1790s, begins with an excerpt from the fictional Impartial Narrative of what Passed at Killala in the Summer of 1798, by one “Arthur Vincent Broome, M.A. (Oxon).” There Broome identifies the insurgency group known as the Whiteboys as “agrarian terrorists” “ravaging countrysides, murdering bailiffs, maiming or killing cattle, pulling down the fences which enclose pastures, [and] inflicting crude or loathsome punishment upon enemies and informers.”62 While it is not exactly clear when Whiteboyism began, it arose as a response to a series of legislative incursions made in the eighteenth century onto the rights of Irish farmers to use their land as they saw fit, usually for the purposes of their own subsistence. These laws and Whiteboyism are both part of the history of the Industrial Revolution, and specifically the history of enclosure, for which only two outcomes are possible: “famine or terror.”63 Broome revealingly refers to these possibilities as “remedies” for Ireland’s condition, a condition which (shades of Malthus) will only improve once lots of people die one way or another, from

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starvation or homicide. The opposition of famine to terror is misleading, however, especially when the terrorism in question applies itself to the demolition of agricultural resources and foodstuffs. For the Whiteboys, terror contributes militantly to the causes of famine—militantly, that is, insofar as the enhancement rather than reduction of hunger under the banner of anticolonialism makes the strong (and not uncontroversial) claim that it is better to starve at the hands of your own people, in the name of a concrete political objective, than to eke out a few more years of life at the hands of a marauding foreign power. Part history book, part memoir, and part political pamphlet, Captain Rock announces itself as having been edited by a Protestant missionary, into whose hands Captain Rock himself has put the manuscript. Rock’s name is taken from the radical agrarian movement known as Rockism, a successor to the Whiteboyism that materialized in the early 1820s and continued into 1824, when it devolved into isolated robberies or acts of vandalism. Fueled by crises like the harvest shortages of 1819 and the popularization of apocalyptic prophecies by the Catholic cleric Charles Walmsley (better known as Pastorini) the Rockite insurgency became a surprisingly diverse movement that reached across otherwise sedimented class divisions. As James Donnelly points out, the Rockites often disguised themselves in folk costumes that evoked a “communal identity” that might supersede distinctions of rank with a sense of local and national heritage.64 What the insurgents were best known for, however, was their use of extreme violence against their English or Protestant enemies. Victims of the Rockites were often brutally mutilated—in at least three separate instances, some had their heads removed from their bodies—and gang-rapes of soldiers’ wives are also recorded. In Moore’s novel, the memory of French state terrorisme in the 1790s is resurrected through an anticolonial insurgency whose primary target is Britain’s annexation of Irish agriculture. Here the Rockite movement appears as a mode of principled amateurism whose very informality counters Britain’s legislative and procedural seriousness. One of the more significant features of the Rockites’ tactical disorganization is the posture of anonymity it derives from Ireland’s own topography: as the name “Rock” implies, the movement is made up of individuals as indistinguishable from one another as rocks, united by a common and obdurate connection to their land. The pun potently weaves together the things from which the movement takes its strength, from the Rockites’ intimate knowledge of Ireland’s contours to the

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unexpected power of seemingly trivial wordplay, for each time the Captain refers to his group’s acts of violence as “fun and games” we find ourselves assaulted by a levity that, unlike Moore’s Melodies, is not in search of a sympathetic audience. If anonymity is one of those “modes of being that might forestall or simply abstain from the kinds of acts of self-appropriation that define the ethics of otherness in an age of Empire,” Captain Rock uses the threat of anonymous terrorism to rebut the mollified poses of otherness it associates with the virtuality of sentimental exchange, advancing in its place a stony challenge to occupation modeled by the land itself.65 “Rocks are ubiquitous in Romantic poetry” and they are also plain ubiquitous.66 By correlating themselves with a thing that is everywhere, a thing moreover devoid of sense or will, the Rockites abandon the fantasy of a single, virtuosic hero or leader in favor of being eerily low-key. Far removed from the atmospheric throb of The Wild Irish Girl, the mood of Captain Rock veers jarringly from coarse to polished, reproducing at the level of tone the disorienting sense of rocks and Rocks all around. The language of security or rather insecurity that runs through contemporary reviews of Captain Rock responds to these uncanny effects, and chiefly to the “feelings of vulnerability” they stimulate in the readers who declare that they no longer feel safe in their everyday lives.67 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine describes Captain Rock as “a work of which every page seems written in blood,” a source of “fear and trembling” especially when the reader pauses to contemplate the real “insecurity” of Anglo-Irish landowners and their families.68 “The first feeling excited by the book,” the review goes on, is “sorrow that any one could be found to jest with such a subject,” namely those “scenes of blood which for three years have desolated” the Irish countryside. The second feeling is one of “consolation” that the author of “this mischievious publication,” this “weak and very wicked book, is an Irishman” and not “a native of Scotland or England”—a turn of phrase that almost makes it sound as though the claim to indigeneity, or being “native,” is an inclusive property of those who live in places whose relationship to the Empire is not as actively contested as Ireland’s. The review also expresses disdain for Moore’s abuse of the intrinsic properties of fiction, in particular the pose of anonymity that “removes the danger of expressing coarse abuse, [but] also in part neutralizes its effect,” all of which give Captain Rock “the appearance of unmeaning, gratuitous, and unanswerable insult”; unmeaning, because the book offers “no general view of politics” nor any “plan for the removal of any one evil mentioned,” gratuitous in its lack of compassion for

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those who suffer at the Rockites’ hands, and unanswerable because no halfway measures can satisfy it.69 What seems not occur to Blackwood’s is that terrorism is designed precisely to be unmeaning, gratuitous, and unanswerable. It does not use anonymity to express freely what must otherwise be unspoken, but to heighten a population’s sense of constant exposure to danger. The real thrust of leaderless terror is that it reverberates as the possibility that anyone could be ready to burn a field, maim a cow, or drop a bomb. Its immediate purpose is exactly that of a “disruption of the patterns of everyday life,” including the rhythms of life and death now “unregulated by the nation-state.”70 In Captain Rock that disruption is conveyed through the unpredictable device of humor, whose jaunty cadences gleefully interrupt the forward march of empire’s progress. In its place, the Rockite attacks elaborate a partisan narrative that ties together colonialism and terrorism with an acrid humor that oxidizes the two-sided edifice of political sentimentality and moral revulsion. As for that sentimentality, its name in Captain Rock, as in La Découverte de Nouveau Monde and The Wild Irish Girl, is love. “Most stubborn, truly, and ungrateful must that people [that is, the Irish] be,” Rock observes dryly, “upon whom, up to the very hour in which I write, such a long and unvarying course of penal laws, confiscations, and Insurrection Acts has been tried, without making them, in the least degree, in love with their rulers!”71 And why should they be? “No romance can do justice to such a perverse absurdity” as the “confiscation” and settlement of Irish land, nor can the Irish people be expected to abide by what Rock, channeling Hamlet, calls “those ‘marriage vows, false as dicers’ oaths,’ which bind their country to England” (60, 63). The most striking of these minor screeds comes from Rock’s father, whose speech to his son on his deathbed reads like—and may be intended as—a parody of the fatherly letter which closes The Wild Irish Girl. The Rocks, for whom terror is a family business, thrive on the English failure to install “a wise and liberal administration” in Ireland. And so the elder Captain Rock comforts his children that English brutality and incompetence are “the usual course of nature,” and any “momentary aberrations” of the Empire “into justice” will be followed without a doubt by a “return to . . . iniquities” (119). After listing all the things that keep Ireland in a state of permanent distress—corruption, religious intolerance, a greedy aristocracy and equally avaricious clergy—he concludes:

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[S]uch are the principal ingredients, of which this happy country is composed at present, and such the materials of future discord, on which the dynasty of the ROCKS may confidently calculate, for the long continuance, if not perpetuation, of their reign. Away then, my child, with all this foolish romance, and prepare yourself, as becomes a son of old Captain ROCK, for that enlarged area of contention, into which the Government and Church will soon summon you. I have but a little longer to live in this world; but I should part from it without regret, if I thought I left a son behind me, who would follow worthily in the career of riot which I have marked out for him. (124)

Here as in The Wild Irish Girl, romance is the name given to a politics whose objects of desire are located squarely in an untimed imperial future. For the Captain, as for Gonne in her “Famine Queen,” the only pleasure to take in this idealized view of things lies in the recognition that the improvements such a politics promises will never come to fruition. Against the pipedream in which “aberrations into justice” are normalized as the way the state should and does run, the elder Captain Rock sets a promise of “discord,” “contention,” and “riot” without end. He calls this alternative future not only a desirable but a “happy” one—both for the Rock dynasty and for Ireland itself. To Rock, “romance” signifies the end of an Irish struggle for freedom, a struggle the novel conceives in simultaneously violent and ludic terms. The opposite of imperial romance is here not realism but resistance, the sustained antagonism to empire that strikes back at the lived seductions of an intimacy that makes coercion look like care and conquest like love. Resistance, to borrow a phrase from Édouard Glissant, “build[s] [its] language with rocks,” from matter primordially petrified into an impassive and unyielding intransigence.72 In the place of “liberal administration” Captain Rock posits an insurgency devoid (as Blackwood’s notes) of strongly voiced commitments, along with a family tradition of anarchic disruption whose past, present, and future are tied to Ireland’s own geological time. The double entendre linking the Rocks to the land they raid suggests that agriculture—the Rockites’ primary target—is secondary to the extremely long durée of simple land mass. This, anyway, is the presumption of the Rocks, who contrast the deep time of geology with the very different temporality of occupation. Describing the concept of “the natural enemy” and its uses during the 1790s, Lily Gurton-Wachter considers how “the force of the epithet ‘natural enemy’

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rests on [an] intersection of natural and national, as if a natural enemy signals an existential threat to the foundation of the nation itself.”73 Drawing agrarian terrorism into alignment with those “judgement[s] of insulted Nature upon [the] perverse and pernicious polic[ies]” that threaten Ireland’s native population, Captain Rock claims the image of stony, unarable land as the natural enemy of a colonial economy whose most lucrative businesses are agricultural (132). The novel’s own picture of “natural history” records a time before the standardization of food production, when “the dynasty of the ROCKS” originated in a pre-political genealogy rooted in the unyielding bulk of the planetary floor. Cloaked in the primeval authority of that which has been around forever, the reactive discourse of terrorism becomes antecedent to the circumstances to which it responds; it participates, in other words, in the once and future authority of what Wordsworth, also thinking about rocks, calls “something ever more about to be.”74 Counter to expectation, nature for Rock is not shorthand for the supersession of the political, but rather for the radicalization of “a vexed intersection of history, security, and vulnerability,” in which anticolonial resistance is at once a form of self-defense and an ancient practice synchronized with deep time of the earth.75 If the Rocks represent the monolithic dynasty of land mass, the rhythm of occupation is one of indefinitely extended endurance divided into two unequal parts: the patience of the Irish and the tenacity of empire taking its time. In one discussion of Cromwell’s invasion, the Captain explains how the Irish were driven off their lands “like herds of cattle . . . under the menace of a proclamation, that ‘all of them who, after that time, should be found in any other part of the kingdom, man, woman, or child, might be killed by any body who saw or met them[.]’” Such was Cromwell’s way of settling the affairs of Ireland—and if a nation is to be ruined, this method is, perhaps, as good as any. It is, at least, more humane than the slow lingering process of exclusion, disappointment, and degradation, by which their hearts are worn out under more specious forms of tyranny: and that talent of dispatch which Molière attributes to one of his physicians, is no ordinary merit in a practitioner like Cromwell: C’est un homme expéditif, expéditif, qui aime à dépêcher ses malades; et, quand on a à mourir, cela se fait avec lui le plus vite du monde [He’s speedy, speedy man, who likes to hustle his patients along; and, when one’s got to die, that he’ll take care of

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faster than anybody.] A certain military Duke, who complains that Ireland is but half-conquered, would, no doubt, upon an emergency, try his hand in the same line of practice, and like that ‘stern hero,’ Mirmillo, in the Dispensary, ‘While others meanly take whole months to slay Despatch [sic] the grateful patient in a day!’ (56)76

Following in the footsteps of Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Rock ironizes the relation between the putative brutality of the Irish who are “like cattle” and the actual brutality of the English who drive them off their lands. The implication, of course, is that it is the English who are inhuman as well as inhumane, and the Irish who are being butchered by invaders whose pastoral interest in them is anything but benign. The claim Rock makes here, too, is Swiftian in its concurrently wry and dead-serious suggestion that it is kinder to kill people outright than to compel them to a life of indigence and slow but steady starvation. The “reiterated acts of tenderness and humanity” celebrated by Owenson’s Earl become here a “lingering process of exclusion, disappointment, and degradation,” a means of extending empire into the future by characterizing it as a reparative and remedial necessity. Patience, for the Captain, is a medical condition, one whose symptomatic malingering is exemplified by the French word “malade.” To be patient is to suffer, and Molière’s malade or “sick person” is lucky to be under the care of a Cromwellian physician, whose efficiency does not express his compassion but whose compassion is the accidental issue of his efficiency. The Captain’s acerbic citation of Molière is typical of his relationship to a culture which, in his Memoirs, is typified not by Rousseau nor by vague references to “le besoin d’âme tender” but by the satirical tradition of the French Renaissance and Enlightenment. Rabelais, Voltaire, and Montaigne all make appearances, along with Molière, in the writings of Captain Rock, for whom they represent an anti-sentimental heritage of wit. Swift, however, is repeatedly characterized as a false idol, one “whose patriotism was little more than a graft of English faction upon an Irish stock” and who “seems to have cared little more than his own Gulliver would for the sufferings of so many disfranchised Yahoos” (69).77 Rock’s literary heroes are writers with little faith in the political process, whether its parameters are described by the constricted horizon of a liberal-nationalist gradualism or the sanguinary “talent of dispatch” demonstrated by Cromwell’s armies. Whenever they appear in the Memoirs, it is to offer an inimical perspective on human feeling as a

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burden or jinx. Their names signal the Captain’s affiliation with a skepticism that is both transnational and transhistorical, and that dissents from the optimism that meets “disfranchisement” with the hope of endurance past the breaking point. Modernity, according to Captain Rock, is an ailment that crosses space and time. The Irish are stuck in a land from which they have been exiled, and they are stuck there for the duration of an event that has no apparent end: the conversion of Western Europe to an economic superstate whose internal practices of degradation have been assimilated to a narrative of love and care. While it does not pretend to be a solution to the problems of imperial menace, the Captain’s satirical literacy offers to create what Rei Terada calls an “impasse,” or “a rudimentary division in what is otherwise a field of collapsed differences.”78 For Terada, Romanticism is impassive, in this sense, when it makes room for thinking past the historical erasure of distinctions between liberal and radical-democratic ideals; her chief examples are Keats’s Hyperion poems, which make a kink or a bubble in the deflated space of the political, improvising a formalist alternative to the idea that resistance to the way things are is shallow and futile. Captain Rock tells us that terrorism, too, is an impasse: a disruption (as Terada writes elsewhere) of “the mutually sustaining dialectic of recognition with repressive forces” awkwardly though no less potently venerated by Owenson.79 If we get none of the gory details of Rockite rebellion, this is because it is not the content of these acts that matter but their capacity to interfere with the shape and the solidity of empire’s ordinariness, in particular the everyday labor of regulating production in an agricultural economy. Thus as much as we are trained to admire purely imaginative refusals of the terms of modern politics—of the sort Terada finds at work in Keats—we should also acknowledge that Romantic impassivity or, as it were, rockiness also accommodates less philosophical, more ruthless practices of division and disjunction. Talal Asad suggests as much in an unexpected digression on Samson Agonistes folded into his well-known lectures on suicide bombing. Published as a companion piece to Paradise Regain’d, Samson Agonistes more than makes up for that poem’s notorious lack of verve with a dazzling necromantical transmutation of “the horror of a mass killing . . . into a story of redemption.”80 The movement from moral revulsion to “reverence” enacted by Samson seems to depend on the possibility of representing an act of terrorism—the destruction of the Philistines’ temple and all the people inside of it—as a

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work of art “or, at any rate, the aesthetic performance of an idea.”81 Because Samson obliges so many interpretations, some allegorical, some biographical, some theological, and others born of a secular ethics, the poem manages to evade accusations of promoting terrorism by endorsing an “aesthetic sensibility [that] . . . is multiple and not reducible to the singularity of mere pathology.”82 Furthermore, because it is a work of literature, it neatly sidesteps the issue of its own violence because that violence is “conveyed discursively,” not “directly experienced”: in other words, poems don’t kill people, people kill people.83 The aesthetic, Asad suggests, pleads a special case for terror, insisting on its own difference from the material impacts of mass murder-suicide or, in the case of Captain Rock, the ruination of food supply chains. When acts of terror violate the protocols of what Asad calls discursivity, when they are, in short, not artful enough, they lose even their potential to be described as political acts. As Moore seems well aware, to submit Captain Rock as a work of art which, nonetheless, plays fast and loose with its own status as an artifact is to draw a parallel between political non-conformity and aesthetic eccentricity. In contrast to the liquid light that haloes Owenson’s sentimental anti-utopia, the Rocks threaten a hard, dark, monolithic future where pleasure is to be found only in “the garden” of resistance itself (18). Like Seamus Heaney’s “Bogland,” Moore’s novel imagines an Ireland whose landscape thwarts the “pioneers” trying to profit from its unaccommodating topography: “They’ll never dig coal here,” Heaney says of the Irish bogs, “Only the waterlogged trunks/Of great firs, soft as pulp.”84 They will, however, dig potatoes. Rock himself is ambivalent about potatoes though not about potato tithes, one of the many factors that contributed to the recurring problem of famine. Rock knows tithes are good for business, because people who are forced to hand over the food they’ve grown themselves to the Protestant clergy are people who will be eager to support the Rockite program. “Speaking in my own person as CAPTAIN ROCK,” he says, “[I am] ready to try this, or any other strain of discord, which may be struck up for us by our state musicians, whose ideas of a concert, especially among themselves, seem to have been founded upon that famous charivari of Rousseau at Lausanne, in which no two instruments were ever upon the same scent” (163). The cacophony to which the Captain refers sounds off in the fourth book of Rousseau’s Confessions, in which, trying to impress a local lawyer and music lover, a young Rousseau arranges for one of his own compositions to be played at the man’s salon. In performance, the piece goes

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over like a lead balloon, and leaves both musicians and audience in tears of laughter. But Rousseau has prepared a second piece: intended chiefly as a gag, it is a minuet adapted from a bawdy street-ballad, with its racier lyrics suppressed. To Rousseau’s anguish and dismay, the audience loves the minuet, and congratulates him on his “pretty taste in songs.”85 Like the discordant future prophesied by Captain Rock, the episode at Lausanne bears witness to the triumph of bad taste over refinement, of parody over original genius, and of oral and popular culture over harmonies carefully crafted by an erudite ear. It is a revelation, too, of Rousseau’s own fraudulence. He is no composer, but an indifferent student of music who loves a good melody but does not know how to write one; his failure exposes both the vulgarity of his audience and his own arrogance in choosing not to know them better. Rousseau’s experiences in Lausanne offer an alternative iteration of the Samson story, one in which the temple of the Philistines stands unharmed. Returning to Asad’s description of Samson as a criminal who, under very specific conditions, is allowed to become a hero, we might suggest that Captain Rock is really a philistine—a person with and in bad taste—who reveals empire for the Samson figure it is: “the destructive character” who, as Benjamin puts it, knows “only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away.” Empire’s primary goal is to avoid creation while reducing everything “to rubble—not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.”86 It is therefore the natural enemy of both rocks and Rocks, who not only signify but simply are the immemorial reality of land that can never belong to the people who destroy it, only to the people who are destroyed alongside. And so it turns out that bad taste is really a form of “exorcism by misnomer.” When bad taste is, in Kenneth Burke’s words, “organized,” it creates a perceptual frame whereby perspective itself may be obtained through the deliberate positing of an incongruity between a thing and the word used to describe it. Thus a person “casts out devils by misnaming them,” usually through the rhetorical as well as musical flourish known as diminuendo, diminishment or de-escalation. To a child frightened by a coat in the corner, a parent, according to Burke, says, “Look, it is only an old coat,” as opposed to “Away, thou hideous monster—thou cackling demon of hell, away!” The parent thereby exorcises “demons by a vocabulary of conversion, by an incongruous naming, by calling them the very thing in the world they are not: old coats.”87 Captain Rock calls the men who ship him off to Botany Bay

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“state musicians”; Rousseau’s audience call his perjured and salacious minuet evidence of his genius. These acts of misnaming are bids for a perception strangely saturated with optimism: if only the empire were so easily reduced to the charivari of an orchestra playing a silly tune, if only Rousseau’s grandiosity could be punctured by the misguided praise of the Lausanniens. Against all odds, bad taste turns out to have a utopian impulse all its own. It reaches out toward a freedom that exists first in the sphere of the written word for, as Burke frequently implies, if humans have any kind of essential freedom at all it lies in their capacity to take liberties with language. Perhaps it takes another kind of bad taste to suggest that The Memoirs of Captain Rock uses terrorism chiefly as an allegory for the aesthetic and creative work of misnaming, which installs something new where empire’s destructive character would create only a mix of rubble and inedible crops. In the next chapter, bad taste gives over to bad form, and Burke’s vocabulary of conversion to a broken-down language of lyric incompetence. Here as in Captain Rock, love will lose its value as an alibi for the failures of modernity, but the aesthetic will not step in to compensate the lovelorn or the politically disabled for their disappointments; rather, all things artful, from poems to sketches to statues, will offer a version of a present that is also a state of permanent crisis. The condition of skeptical and melancholic immobility Terada describes makes itself known, in what follows, as a miscarriage of Romanticism itself, in the shape of a bad Romanticism whose taste lingers punishingly in the mouth.

CHAPTER FIVE

Hazlitt’s Disappointment “Our Walk ended in 34 Gloucester Street, Queen Square—not exactly so for we went up stairs into her sitting room—a very tasty sort of place with Books, Pictures a bronze statue of Buonoparte, Music, aeolian Harp; a Parrot, a Linnet—a Case of choice Liqueurs &c. &c. &c. She behaved in the kindest manner— made me take home a Grouse for Tom’s dinner—Asked for my address for the purpose of sending more game—As I had warmed with her before and kissed her—I thought it would be living backwards not to do so again—she had a better taste: she perceived how much a thing of course it was and shrunk from it— not in a prudish way but in as I say a good taste. She contrived to disappoint me in a way which made me feel more pleasure than a simple Kiss could do[.]” —John Keats, letter to George and Georgiana Keats, October 14–31, 1818

“Margaret Thatcher” never appears in Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 novel, The Line of Beauty, but the Iron Lady is everywhere. Protagonist Nick Guest lives with the Feddens, whose paterfamilias is a newly elected Tory MP. Nick’s lover, Wani, hails from a wealthy immigrant family that donates generously to right-wing campaigns. As for Nick himself, his knowledge of Thatcher is secondary, anecdotal. She is a blue-eyed Britomart to whom his powerful friends vainly extend invitations to dinner, weddings, rallies, but for the apolitical Nick she exists only in reverb—until, that is, Mr. and Mrs. Fedden’s twenty-fifth anniversary party brings her to their London home. For a while Nick watches Thatcher holding court on a sofa, the politicians abandoning their wives to “kneel . . . on the carpet” before her.1 He skulks upstairs to drink and take drugs, and when he returns the scene spins off in a surprising direction: THE NAME

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It was the simplest thing to do—Nick came forward and sat, half-kneeling, on the sofa’s edge like someone proposing in a play. He gazed delightedly at the Prime Minister’s face, at her whole head, beaked and crowned, which he saw was a fine if improbable fusion of the Vorticist and the Baroque. She smiled back with a certain animal quickness, a bright blue challenge. There was the soft glare of the flash—twice—three times—a gleaming sense of occasion, the gleam floating in the eye as a blot of shadow, his heart running fast with no particular need of courage as he grinned, and said, “Prime Minister, would you like to dance?” (335)

This is a love scene, a “sudden shifting of the centre of gravity, an effect” none of the guests “could have caused and none could resist” (336). It is also, as the descriptors “Vorticist” and “Baroque” suggest, a scene of aesthetic education that facilitates what Marx calls “attachment to the political” in its dodgiest incarnation.2 What else is “the gleam floating in the eye as a blot of shadow” but that old mote ideology, which wheedles us into acting against our better interests? Regardless of his class, nearly every character in The Line of Beauty is smitten with Thatcher and her carnivorously prissy persona, but it is not until this dance that the infatuation becomes, however briefly, requited. As Nick is seized by “a deeper liveliness, a sense he could caper all over the floor with the PM breathless in his grip,” the liveliness spreads to Thatcher, too—for in this alchemical area of mutual seduction, to the tune to the anti-establishment bop of the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off of My Cloud,” the pair of letters “PM” becomes a woman, inflated by sudden intimacy into a physical body capable of “getting down rather sexily” in someone’s arms (336). Hollinghurst’s novel borrows its title from the core principle of William Hogarth’s 1753 Analysis of Beauty, namely that some lines are more visually appealing than others and the most appealing of all is, logically, the line of beauty. The theory of the line of beauty “begins with a waving line, a line moving sinuously on two axes, then imagines that line wrapped around a cone so that it curves and winds in all three dimensions.”3 We find this second, “serpentine” iteration of the line everywhere in nature and everywhere in the house, in shells, flowers, table legs, and balustrades. It manifests most perfectly, however, along a woman’s spine, especially when the woman begins to dance, rotating her S-curve in space. There are lines everywhere in The Line of Beauty, too—the ogee curve that gives its name to the art

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magazine Nick and Wani start together, the “dip and swell” of Wani’s spine, the lines of cocaine the two men regularly snort, the twisting “common line and formula of politics”—but here as in Hogarth it is the woman dancing who realizes the line’s essence not “as a determinate form but as the physical incarnation of aesthetic desire” (176, 23).4 Bringing together a political “formula” “as available as the twelve-times table”—a formula of domination, subordination, and their temporary disavowal or suspension—with the improvisatory energy of corporeal delight, the dance is a crash course in the special pleasure of order annexing the kinesthetic territory of resistance and rebellion. In the Feddens’ parlor, 1965 (the year of the Stones single) fuses with 1987 (the year of Thatcher’s third term), creating a virtual history in which the sexed-up idyll of the late sixties makes peace with the cynical pomp and gloss of neoliberal governance. This history is also a kind of curve, bending Nick into the sinuous pose of suitor and gallant and giving him, the terminal outsider, a chance to play a role all the more precious for being utterly conventional. This penultimate chapter rewinds the artistic, erotic, and political history of The Line of Beauty back to an intermediate moment between Hogarth and Hollinghurst. That moment is the postwar period in Britain following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, a period usually described in terms of what didn’t happen in it, namely an English Revolution to complete the one begun in the seventeenth century, and to follow through on the promise of the one twenty years earlier in France. In my last chapter, I borrowed Rei Terada’s definition of the Romantic “impasse” as a form of resistance to hegemony, a way of forcing distinction between radical and reactionary politics in a context that seems increasingly depoliticized. For Terada, that context is proper to the post-Waterloo era, a time marked not so much by the consciousness of revolution’s failure but rather by the “more disturbing” suspicion that it had become “no longer desirable or even possible to tell revolution and restoration apart.”5 My argument about Moore’s Captain Rock is that it toys with claiming agrarian terrorism as a mode of segregating anticolonial sensibilities from official as well as intimate policies of imperial reconciliation. Here, I bring both Terada’s idea of the impasse and Moore’s satirical ferocity into conversation with William Hazlitt’s experimental work Liber Amoris, Or, The New Pygmalion, a book which, like The Line of Beauty, dramatizes an unrequited desire split between two objects: one personal and the other historical. Liber Amoris is often treated merely as a roman à clef

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that narrates, in embarrassing detail, the disastrous affair between Hazlitt and a young woman named Sarah Walker. My own view is that Liber Amoris ought to be read as a poetic remediation of Hazlitt’s journalism and in particular his essay “On the Spirit of Partisanship,” whose purpose is to advance a vocabulary for discriminating between a radicalism that politicizes everything, including literature, and a liberalism that politicizes nothing, least of all itself. Why begin with the line of beauty? If Liber Amoris is set in what might be called the 1980s of Romanticism—a period during which the revolutionary hopes of earlier decades were tailored into an advertisement for the nation-state as those of later decades would be used for the discourse of freedom as free trade—it also shares Hollinghurst’s fascination with the inflective indeterminacy of the serpentine line. Hazlitt, who had been a painter before becoming the great essayist of the age, was familiar with Hogarth’s Analysis; Hogarth, in fact, was one of his most beloved artists. Liber Amoris uses the S-curve as a figure for a vagrant eroticism to which a historical trend of depoliticization is (to use a mathematical metaphor) tangent. The book’s protagonist, H, is as unable to keep up with this trend as he is baffled by the coquetry of his inamorata, a woman known only, and suggestively, as S; this state of affairs is laid out straightaway in the book’s preface, whose first sentences group H’s “political animosities” and his “fatal attachment” to S under the shared heading of “disappointment.”6 Like H, this chapter takes disappointment as its organizing term, and it adds to H’s disappointment a third cause: the degradation of Romanticism during the postwar emergence of an “affirmative culture” whose “decisive characteristic is the assertion of a universally obligatory, eternally better and more valuable world.”7 In a decade where Romanticism’s core aesthetic principles of “failure, absence, loss, and crisis” were under “attack,” Hazlitt writes a book that recuperates some of its bereaved relationship to materiality by taking a shape that intermittently approximates that of the Romantic fragment poem.8 Loathed by Hazlitt’s critics and friends alike, Liber Amoris converts the limited utopianism that has been guiding this book, and that guided Hazlitt, into a deliberately awkward, disintegrative performance of its strategies. Alongside Shelley’s suggestion that the best possible world is one from which people have all but vanished, Hazlitt’s is perhaps the boldest expression of what this study calls Rcsm. Unlike The Revolt of Islam, however, Liber Amoris does not have a virtuosic poetics at its disposal. What it has is an equally hostile and

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desiring relationship toward the conventions of lyric form—a relationship interpreted by the irregular shape of the fragment in a manner that anticipates Carl Schmitt’s own definition of partisanship as a paramilitary mode of resistance, however hopeless, to “modern forms of organization,” whether poetic or political.9 As a structure of blocked feeling, disappointment is also an impasse. Laura Quinney calls it a state “in which the self is compromised to the extent that it has lost its resources of pride and defiance and is reduced to seeking comfort in pieties it does not really accept.”10 This characterization holds for Liber Amoris if we shift emphasis from disappointment’s psychological difficulties to its historical goads, and consider the pieties or conventions of lyric poetry as the panacea Hazlitt’s book seeks but cannot quite swallow. One-third dialogue, one-third epistolary novel, and one-third first-person narrative, Liber Amoris is a fragment poem in disguise, part of a pre-Modernist literary history of experimental writing that uses an “inappropriately alienating” compositional strategy to concatenate crises intimate, aesthetic, and political.11 This book of love is the tale of a one-sided love affair punctuated by H’s combined attempts to court S while simultaneously trying to put words to the depression precipitated by the defeat of his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte. These efforts eventually kill H, for in the book’s preface we learn he is already dead, a Wertherian man of feeling whose papers have been collated by an anonymous editor. H is a disaster and Hazlitt’s book, as many readers have remarked, is a disaster too, not least in its insistent performance of the assumption that the history of unrequited love scales to the history of unrequited democratic desire. Nonetheless, it is through its determination to force these two histories together that Liber Amoris achieves what Alan Liu calls a larger “sense of history” that is “deeply narrative” even as it seems to associate itself with a lyrical mode whose usual Romantic expression (in, say, the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge) may seem to mark “an émigré flight from narrative.”12 Through its multiple variations upon the genre of the Romantic fragment poem, Liber Amoris struggles to reclaim the formal as well as psychological partiality of the fragment for the discourse of the partisan. That the book casts this act of would-be appropriation as a failure only underscores the extent to which partisanship, in Hazlitt’s imagination as well as Schmitt’s, is a mode of radicalism founded upon and fueled by disappointment, and by disappointment’s refusal to settle into the more pellucid attitudes of grief.

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Jon Mee describes Liber Amoris as a “case study” in “the hazardous conjunction” of disparate objects of desire; the book’s reception history, it turns out, has likewise been a case study in the hazardous conjunction between real people and literary characters.13 To be fair, the story of Hazlitt’s real-life affair with Walker, the daughter of his landlords, is undeniably at play here. It is also true that the letters that make up the middle third of Liber Amoris are reconstructed from Hazlitt’s actual letters to his friends—Peter George Patmore (father of “Angel in the House” poet Coventry) and James Sheridan Knowles. Like Hazlitt, H travels to Edinburgh to expedite a divorce from his wife so that he can marry S, and like Hazlitt he returns to London only to discover that his beloved has another suitor, whom she prefers. Like Hazlitt, H has a son named William, a job as a journalist, a terrible temper, an encyclopedic knowledge of English literature, a love of Italian Renaissance art, a talent for drawing, and a small statue of Napoleon he keeps on his mantelpiece; this statue will play a prominent role in Liber Amoris, becoming over the course of the story an icon of disappointment substantively linked to the material disposition of the fragment. All these nodes of contiguity between Hazlitt and H have understandably led readers to flatten the degree of formal experimentation at work in the text, in order to make it wrap more smoothly around its autobiographical core. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine makes clear its stance on the matter when it pauses, early in a review of Liber Amoris, to announce “this is not a novel, but a history,” adding a remark that Hazlitt, who had already begun to repudiate the liberalism of his time, must have found infuriating—namely that the book is “a veritable transcript of the feelings and doings of an individual living LIBERAL.”14 As Duncan Wu’s own biographical take on Liber Amoris points out, it was actually Hazlitt’s dissent from a liberalism making its peace with conservatism in the postwar period that turned him into such a target for journals like Blackwood’s. That said, if Wu’s defense of Hazlitt turns on his politics, it also has the effect of confirming the hypothesis that “this is not a novel,” but a paraphrase of historical circumstances.15 Even Sonia Hofkosh’s powerful and illuminating analysis of Liber Amoris in light of accusations that Hazlitt assaulted a woman in a bar in 1803 ascribes to the book’s characters traits of psychological depth that, on my reading, the text is at pains to denature and even to elide.16 Liber Amoris, on my reading, is a book obsessed by a set of rarefied literary-critical premises, most obviously those that concern how the social properties of the word “character”—as a synonym for personal

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qualities of reputation, morality, and sexual ethics—mutate into a placeholder for intentional or agential states comparable to those of a human being. These concerns are, in a word, animated in the preface’s reference to “political animosities,” a choice of words that sets us up to query the ontological status of characters who are themselves the propulsions of political views. It was in fact during the Romantic period that the word “animus” came to mean something like “bad feeling” or, more specifically, a feeling about someone poised on the brink of turning into an action taken against her. “Animus” is derived from the Latin anima, meaning soul, spirit, or breath, as in the breath of life; this somatic notion of anima as responsible “both for voluntary, conscious activity and for involuntary, unconscious processes,” or as what Elizabeth Williams calls “a precise instrumentality,” migrates into the law through the legalism “quo animo.”17 The phrase “quo animo” (literally, “with a mind”) inquires into the motivational makeup of behavior, implicitly recasting a question about the body and how it moves as a question about persons and how they think or, rather, what they were thinking. It is therefore tightly keyed to the epistemic problem of disambiguating mental states and to the establishment of a clear relationship between what one has done and what one wanted to do. Intriguingly, the Oxford English Dictionary locates the first use of “animus” in this juridical sense in the records of a court case involving “scandalous words” uttered during a “private colloquium.”18 In the prosecutorial collection of indelicate and almost entirely private conversations recorded by Liber Amoris, animus is a background projection of the hostile feelings H experiences when he cannot clarify why S has behaved in such a way as to suggest she loves him if, in fact, she does not. If this notion, and that sentence, seem contorted, it is because they are describing a book made up of “a sort of confused memory of sounds, like the clashing of musical instruments,” and which thrives on mixing up memories with their interpretations.19 This particular mode of confusion helps screw the text’s notion of animosity to its ideal of erotic love in a way that both reproduces and satirizes literary realism’s noted dependence on accounts of sexual violence for its own cultural self-legitimation. Marilyn Butler lists Henry Fielding’s send-ups of Clarissa as a major influence on Liber Amoris, and it is certainly true that, like Fielding, Hazlitt seems to have honed in on the fancy formalist footwork with which “Richardson rewrites the rape story to create the psychological novel.”20 In the words of Frances Ferguson in her

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watershed essay on “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” Liber Amoris adapts and parodies “the spirit of Lovelacean stipulation that nonconsent can be consent” by having for its own Clarissa a character—S—who not only refuses “her retroactive consent to the act of rape” but, far more traumatically for H, refuses her retroactive consent to the quo animo of love.21 Building on Ferguson’s argument, Jonathan Kramnick writes that the realist fiction of the eighteenth century allows sexual consent to operate through an implicit association of actions and mental states: “I act as if I consent, and that is sufficient” for someone to assume I have consented.22 For H, love works much the same way. He remembers S acting toward him as though she loved him, and that is sufficient to determine that she did love and still loves him indefinitely. Why else would she sit on his lap, kiss him, or borrow his books? More importantly, why won’t she do it again? The answers lie in the vexed relationship Hazlitt’s book bears to literary and psychological realism for, much to H’s dismay, Liber Amoris persistently defends S from the robustly responsible constitution of character afforded by novelistic prose. Even H is forced to compare S to “a Greek statue that [seems] to smile, move, and speak,” a description that underscores the extent to which, as characters go, S is a mimicry and not a mimesis of a human person (136). In this sense Liber Amoris resembles Coleridge’s conversation poems, which Tilottama Rajan describes as using human figures as “narrative elements” rather than repositories of personality, consciousness, or soul.23 In the attenuation of character to the least designation of a letter—“S” or “H”—Hazlitt gives his conversationalists an anonymity that draws attention to the necessary and irrevocable cloaking of their animosities. Together they create a knot of intense ill-will coupled with ambiguous desire, whose manifestations in kissing and embracing are no more obviously the result of an act of consent than a reflexive jerk of the knee. S’s attitude to the state of her own thin characterology is especially indifferent, and the delight she takes in her own flatness seeps through the scaffolding of this “book of conversations” (52, 60): H. [ . . . ] You say your regard is merely friendship, and that you are sorry I have ever felt anything more for you. Yet the first time I ever asked you, you let me kiss you; the first time I ever saw you, as you went out of the room, you turned full round at the door, with that inimitable grace with which you do everything, and fixed your eyes full upon me, as much as to say, “Is he caught?”—that very

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week you sat upon my knee, twined your arms round me, caressed me with every mark of tenderness consistent with modesty; and I have not got much farther since. Now if you did all this with me, a perfect stranger to you, and without any particular liking to me, must I not conclude you do so as a matter of course with everyone?—Or, if you do not do so with others, it was because you took a liking to me for some reason or other. S. It was gratitude, Sir, for different obligations. H. If you mean by obligations the presents I made you, I had given you none the first day I came. You do not consider yourself OBLIGED to everyone who asks you for a kiss? S. No, Sir. H. I should not have thought anything of it in anyone but you. But you seemed so reserved and modest, so soft, so timid, you spoke so low, you looked so innocent—I thought it impossible you could deceive me. Whatever favors you granted must proceed from pure regard. [ . . . ] If your caresses are sincere, they shew fondness—if they are not, I must be more than indifferent to you. Indeed you once let some words drop, as if I were out of the question in such matters, and you could trifle with me with impunity. Yet you complain at other times that no one ever took such liberties with you as I have done. I remember once in particular your saying, as you went out at the door in anger—“I had an attachment before, but that person never attempted anything of the kind.” Good God! How did I dwell on that word BEFORE, thinking it implied an attachment to me also; but you have since disclaimed any such meaning. You say you have never professed more than esteem. Yet once, when you were sitting in your old place, on my knee, embracing and fondly embraced, and I asked you if you could not love, you made answer, “I could easily say so, whether I did or not— YOU SHOULD JUDGE BY MY ACTIONS!” And another time, when you were in the same posture, and I reproached you with indifference, you replied in these words, “Do I SEEM INDIFFERENT?” Was I to blame after this to indulge my passion for the loveliest of her sex? Or what can I think? S. I am no prude, Sir. (24–26)

The first third of Liber Amoris is written in this dialogic form, whose vitiated correspondence to fact or testimony represents the first of Hazlitt’s experiments in Romantic fragmentation. By 1813, the critic Francis Jeffrey is noticing a “Taste for Fragments” among the reading public, whose members would now “no more think of sitting down to a whole epic than to a whole Ox.”24 As this contrast of epic to fragment suggests, the turn to fragments is also a turn away from historical narrative, in particular the narratives of

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nation- and empire-building that had come to dominate the English epic poem before the Romantic period.25 This is the recent epic tradition against which Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and Shelley wrote their own long poems, but for Hazlitt the maddening impossibility of conjoining private erotic experience to a historical consciousness of Napoleonic magnitude is the preoccupation that holds Liber Amoris’s many pieces not quite together. Immediately after this scene, S reveals that her prior “attachment” was to a man who closely resembled H’s statue of Napoleon, adding another link to the prodigious chain of signifiers Hazlitt struggles to thread through his book. If S is a statue, and Napoleon is a statue, and her ex-lover is a statue, H is the “New Pygmalion” who cannot control the movement of these figures in and out of states of animation any more than he can control the past tense of whatever has taken place before the book begins—whether that “whatever” is the diffuse unintelligibility of a failed revolution followed by a failed Napoleonic coup, or the more ordinary but (for him) no less shattering crisis of intimate abandonment. In an effort to explain Emily Dickinson’s tendency to introduce complex terms into her poems and then to assign them “multiple meanings,” Sharon Cameron proposes that “equative names . . . simplify and fragment experience,” commenting upon its nature or content only insofar as they “remov[e] themselves from it.”26 Hazlitt’s own interest in fragmentation facilitates a similar withdrawal that is, however, far less deliberate in its methods. Through its excessive, often untraceable signification, the fragment turns out to be the only suitable metonym (or “equative name”) for a postwar condition that is impossible to represent polemically, as a clear and perspicuous call to action. If the tragicomic minor narrative of personal rejection manages (and it does) to dominate the book, it is because that story is already conventional to lyric and to the subgenre of the fragment poem, sliding easily between the cracks of its overdetermined idiom to make at least one clear statement: looked at the right way, many sorts of sadness sum to unrequited love. To begin with this broken piece of dialogue and so with the non-diegetic past of subjective “experience,” it is only through H’s rehearsals of his encounters with S that the backstory of Liber Amoris becomes available to contemplation, though at no point do we know for sure if any of the events to which H refers actually happened, to say nothing of if they happened the way he says they did. S’s almost monosyllabic commentary only adds to the mystery, since her responses to his pleas for co-narration are so indirect they

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are effectively non-sequiturs. Meanwhile, his account of the whole muddled affair is a series of accusations and inquiries out of which stable facts about the past are not likely to be extracted. This, of course, does not stop him from trying to sort “the ambiguity of [S’s] behavior” into a collection of meaningful data points (85). In some ways H is like the uptight student who, in Barthes’s description of the academic seminar, is always threatening to derail the seminar’s properly open-ended mission, to find instances where the teacher “has not explained to [him] why, how, etc.” H clings to the erotic promise of explanation, and when explanation is not forthcoming he “resort[s] to the formula of disappointment par excellence, the ‘not even’ which registers in a single phrase intellectual indignation and sexual fiasco.”27 As Barthes suggests, the project of obsessive love, like the project of being an “A” student, falls into a pedantic structure in which the desire for reward eliminates any tolerance for ambiguity. Its more ominous effect is that of organizing consent and the absence of resistance into a loose synonymy that retrospective inquiry or interrogation renders only less loose.28 S, however, is unfazed by her own debriefing. In response to H’s arias of insecurity and accusation, she says almost nothing, and when she does speak it is to throw the distinction between consent and “indifference” into disarray. When S announces herself to be “no prude,” the phrase works as a double-negative that cancels the suggestion of excessive restraint without invoking, acceding to, or even defining its opposite. These and other thin, gestural performances of non-disclosure gild the book’s many scenes of interrogation with a subtle sheen of resistance even as S never lays claim to positions of defiance or victimhood; nor, for that matter, does she hint at the existence of her own hidden depths. Her refusal to take part in H’s mythmaking ultimately appears as the function of her own pure or, better, unmixed formalism, which distributes itself around a single letter and thus maintains the barest of bare similarities to H’s more verbal and verbose mode of self-expression. With her name whittled down into one, sinuous initial, S turns any revelatory promise suggested by the idea of character inside out, fixing herself in a pose of detachment that “opens up a zone of indetermination or indiscernibility in which neither words nor characters can be distinguished.”29 S might prefer to kiss H but she might also prefer not to resist him, leaving H with the impossible task of recognizing that, when it comes to what S will and will not “profess,” indifference is as absent as intelligibility from her extensible habits of “YES and NO” (54).

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Lithe to the point that it nearly disappears, the S in “S” resurrects Hogarth’s line of beauty as a figure Hollinghurst describes as “two compulsions”—YES and NO, “no” and “prude”—“held in one unfolding movement” until they almost wipe each other out (176). In bringing Hogarth’s line to Liber Amoris, Hazlitt draws on one of the most memorable claims from The Analysis of Beauty, namely that a lovely thing is at its most enticing when it is moving away from you. As Hogarth puts it, just as dogs and cats delight in chasing their prey, so do human beings delight in “allegories and riddles,” in “follow[ing] the well-connected thread of a play or novel, which ever increases as the plot thickens, and ends most pleas’d, when that is most distinctly unravell’d[.]”30 This is the same “enjoyment” to be found “in winding walks, and serpentine rivers, and all sorts of objects, whose forms . . . are composed principally” of those “waving and serpentine lines” that lead “the eye [on] a wanton kind of chace.”31 For Hogarth, however, the perfect specimen of such enjoyment has been found in the sight of a special serpentine line or “ray” present at a “country-dance,” “particularly when [his] eye eagerly pursued a favourite dancer, through all the windings of the figure, who then was bewitching to the sight, as the imaginary ray . . . was dancing with her all the time.”32 This tortuous passage reproduces the experience of trying to follow with one’s eyes the line of a body as it moves through a series of turns in three dimensions. Although Hogarth does not say so precisely, when a dancer is moving, the S-curve of her head, shoulders, spine, and hips is partially hidden from view. It is the dancer’s “windings” that, over the course of Hogarth’s roundabout sentence, occlude not merely the gender but also the personhood of his “favourite dancer” only to reintroduce it at the sentence’s end: put into motion, the dancer turns into a “figure,” then into a shape that borrows its contours from “the imaginary ray” of its invisible partner, and then, at last, into a “her.” The sentence is unraveled and respooled in the manner of the serpentine line itself, its own compulsions toward abstraction and specificity, toward a shape and a she, changing direction in time to the movement of the spectator’s gaze. The story of Hogarth’s eye is the story of Liber Amoris, which is never quite sure whether S exists in one dimension or three because it can never see all the way around her. With S, H finds himself in the half-enraged, half-despairing mood Paul de Man ascribes to All in the Family’s Archie Bunker, whose epistemic anxiety is crystallized by the catchphrase “what’s the difference?” Like Archie’s tirades against African-Americans, Jews, and

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feminists, H’s frantic investigations into S’s moral and metaphysical status (angel or coquette, person or letter?) reveal “his despair when confronted with a structure of linguistic meaning”—in H’s case, the diagnostic discourses of sex—“he cannot control and that holds the discouraging prospect of an infinity of similar future confusions, all of them potentially catastrophic in their consequences.”33 Unlike Archie, however, H does not solicit our sympathy nor invite our condescension. We may find his extraordinary disgorgings of misogynist bile funny or horrifying, but since they are detached from familiar forms of novelistic personhood they are simply too stark to engage processes of empathic identification. We may sometimes care about literary characters, but what we feel for literary letters is another story altogether.34 What to think when a letter (H) declares that another letter (S) has “lips as common as the stairs,” or when H calls S “a lodging-house decoy, a kissing convenience,” or when he fantasizes about rape as a mode of “killing her with kindness”? For contemporary readers, the first section of Liber Amoris begins to seem like an especially sinister, adults-only episode of Sesame Street, brought to you by the letter H. Where Sesame Street’s educational “Brought to You by the Letter” skits poke fun at the ritual of genuflection public broadcasting must perform for its corporate sponsors, Liber Amoris mines its own dark comedy from the emptying-out of volumetric personhood, here doubly disembodied or, as it were, disincorporated. To be clear, Liber Amoris is not a book about rape, but a book that casts love as the failure to rape without turning away from the moral insufficiency of that opposition. In a moment to which I will return, H and S are behind a closed door while H shrieks and throws things around the room; mistaking H’s cries for those of her daughter, S’s mother begins to shout, “She’s in there! He has got her in there” out of fear that H is “offering her violence.” In what may be the most perfect and pathetic expression of the book’s critique of character, H replies, “Oh! no. . . . She’s in no danger from me; I am not the person.” The statement is true for two mutually exclusive reasons; H is no danger to S because he loves her and does not feel capable of hurting her, and H is not a person but a letter looking for recognition from another letter far more comfortable with the experimental aesthetics of the text they both inhabit, or in whose ink they both are printed. It is in their comparative assessment of the experimentalism of Liber Amoris that H and Hazlitt most obviously part ways, for if H is continually stymied by the flirtation with absent content represented by S, Hazlitt

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himself is more ambitious and, in a backhanded sense, more optimistic about the possibilities of literary experimentation—even if those possibilities are limited to rendering disappointment as a formal as well as emotive configuration capable of modeling the political stance Hazlitt calls partisanship. The second and most obvious magnification of the book’s fragmentary impulse occurs in the almost unrecognizable sonnet H composes about S, a sonnet that, in the context of Liber Amoris, underscores doubly the dictum that “the true ‘actors’ in lyric are words, not ‘dramatic persons.’”35 By shearing words into letters, Hazlitt draws his book toward a minimalist lyricism almost unrecognizable according to the conventions of Romantic poetry, which, for all its pronounced investment in the fragment, still likes its poems to announce themselves—metrically, typographically, structurally—as poems. Meanwhile, I have already argued that Wordsworth’s participation in the Romantic sonnet revival is characterized by a sustained attempt to record the present poetically as a diffusion of historical events into figurative conditions. H’s “Written in a Blank Leaf of Endymion” winds itself around this strand of the lyric tradition while also turning backward to the sonnet’s own development in Petrarch’s Canzoniere—“properly and authorially” as well as suggestively known as Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, fragments of common things—revivifying the amatory tropes Wordsworth excludes from his own experiments with the form36: WRITTEN IN A BLANK LEAF OF ENDYMION

I want a hand to guide me, an eye to cheer me, a bosom to repose on; all which I shall never have, but shall stagger into my grave, old before my time, unloved and unlovely, unless SL keeps her faith with me. ************ ***** —But by her dove’s eyes and serpentshape. I think she does not hate me; by her smooth forehead and crested hair, I own I love her; by her soft looks and queen-like grace (which men might fall down and worship), I swear to live and die for her! (34)

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This is more or less how these lines appear in the 1823 edition of Liber Amoris, where they are introduced in an anomalous Gothic font and herded into neat, rectangular shape on the center of the page. But how to recognize this tidy derangement of words as a poem, let alone a sonnet? Our first cue is that the title of the poem nods at a recognizably Romantic habit of claiming that the poem before our eyes has been set down in a book different from the one in our hands. Byron has a poem called “Written on a Blank Leaf of ‘The Pleasures of Memory’” by Samuel Rogers, Robert Burns has one “Inscribed on a Work of Hannah More,” and Wordsworth has his “Lines written on a Blank Leaf in a Copy of the Author’s Poem ‘The Excursion.’” Another poem by Wordsworth is “Written in a Blank Leaf of Macpherson’s Ossian,” about which Maureen McLane makes the helpful observation that titles like these “propose” that the present lines “be taken as a continuation of as well as a supplement to” the work in which they are meant to appear: “What has been left ‘blank’ by Macpherson’s Ossian will be written in and over” by the poetic sedimentation of the Wordsworthian line.37 But if H’s sonnet is a response to Keats’s Endymion, it is also a piece broken off from it, chopping its 4000 lines into a mere fourteen. Counting the number of clauses that follow upon the title, we see that there are fourteen short phrases split into two groups by the asterisks that burst between them. In fact, there are eight little lines above the split and six below, with the second section beginning with a moment of syntactical self-interruption—with a dash and a “but!” that turn away from the argument of the first eight lines. Into the margins of Keats’s poem, H has inserted the bare bones of a sonnet that approximates the Petrarchan form in prose, complete with an argumentative turn or volta between its octave and sestet. Metrically the piece is idiosyncratic, but there are moments (including the last clause) where H’s diction slips easily into iambic pentameter. Finally, the content of the passage participates in the sonnet tradition as well. After listing a lover’s most predictable fears and desires, H finds cold comfort in the belief that his lady “does not hate” him, a litotes dubiously guaranteed by that lady’s chimeric and unstable appearance as half-bird, half-snake. H seems to be alluding here both to Keats’s Lamia (“her head, was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!/She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete”) and to an episode in “Christabel,” the Romantic fragment poem Hazlitt lampooned in an anonymous review partly by reducing its characters to bored brushstrokes of their first initials: for example, “Lady C. is desirous of

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a little conversation on the way, but Lady G. will not indulge her Ladyship, saying, she is too much tired to speak.”38 In Coleridge’s poem, the witch Geraldine casts a spell on Christabel by looking at her with “a serpent’s eye,” which “blinks dull and shy” as it gazes on the innocent maiden “askance.” The spell has the uncanny effect of making Christabel so captivated by Geraldine’s literally serpentine looks that she starts to mimic them herself: The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone, She nothing sees—no sight but one! The maid, devoid of guile and sin, I know not how, in fearful wise, So deeply had she drunken in That look, those shrunken serpent eyes, That all her features were resigned To this sole image in her mind: And passively did imitate That look of dull and treacherous hate!39

Coleridge’s poem plays on the point symmetry of the letter “s” anchoring “serpent” to turn Christabel into Geraldine’s reflection.40 It is a process mirrored both aurally and textually, as the sibilant sound and two little snakes (“-ss-”) snuck into the adverb “passively” take root in Christabel’s features and reveal themselves in a relay between her face and the page. Something similar is happening in H’s poem, whose subject, of course, is S. Its formal and rhetorical curvature borrows its shape from the woman it describes, who is half-dove, half-serpent, half soft-hearted lady and half-queen just as H’s sonnet is half-poetry and half-prose, his feelings half-repugnance and half-longing. These hyphenated pairs seem as though they describe things which are not at all the same, but both the imagery and the notion of woman’s duplicity is so conventional that what should be the poem’s anguished vacillation registers as a kind of paralyzed certainty. Thus H’s own passive imitation of Petrarch seems bereft of the freshness and intensity that makes the older poet’s work a fit object for copying, its own ungainly use of the courtly pose of gallant, even tender misogyny impounding the coil of ambivalent energy twined about the woman split into human and reptilian parts. Where the serpentine line of beauty contracts and unfurls in perpetuity, in this poem its undulating shape holds the broken lines of verse in place

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as an ineradicable sign of H’s incompetence to the sonnet form. This is not, in other words, a good poem, nor is it meant to be. In case we lacked a solid point of comparison, Hazlitt prints on the page opposite to “Written on a Blank Leaf of Endymion” a thirteen-line speech from Troilus and Cressida, with a handful of minor but jarring substitutions (“if ” for “that,” “confronted” for “affronted”) of H’s words for Shakespeare’s. Even one line short of a sonnet, there no contest between H’s bungled imitation and this speech from a play Hazlitt elsewhere describes as one of Shakespeare’s “most loose and desultory,” spoken by a character (Troilus) who like H or S is “himself is no character.”41 That said, the most obvious signifier of H’s sonnet’s sense of itself as bad—clumsy, derivative, at once overwrought and deflated—is its title, and the kinship with Endymion it announces. Endymion is, of course, the poem whose reviews were so terrible that when Keats died Byron gleefully poeticized the urban legend that Keats’s mind, man’s most “fiery particle,” had “let itself be snuffed out by an article.”42 In his 1822 essay “On Effeminacy of Character,” Hazlitt, who had been friendly with Keats, wrote ruefully that “the fault of Mr. Keats’s poems was a deficiency in masculine energy of style,” singling out Endymion to demonstrate this tendency toward “exquisite” but shallow “fancy.”43 For Hazlitt, then, Endymion is the epitome of two different kinds of failure: one of poiesis and the other of a life-force or “energy.”44 The leaves on which H pens his own poem are “blank” in several senses, haunted by all the things Hazlitt’s essay claims they do not have: “action,” “character,” “strength,” “substance,” “hardy spirit,” “rigid form,” “bone,” “muscle,” “the fierceness of summer,” “the richness of autumn,” in short anything “marked or palpable.”45 As a badge of public affiliation, Endymion joins Keats to H in the brotherhood of poorly received, poorly reviewed, and almost unreadably poor poetry. The worst part of it all, however, is that H can only lay claim to a very small, very damaged piece of that virtuosic deficiency, and to none of the pathos Endymion amassed after Keats’s death. Perhaps when he sat down to write Liber Amoris, Hazlitt had some sense that Keats’s reputation would grow until, a few decades later, the belittled Cockney poet would “himself become . . . a precious broken fragment from the past.”46 Marjorie Levinson’s book on the Romantic fragment poem finds this tendency toward resolution and recovery to be native to fragment’s form, an implied synecdoche that will always produce for itself “a closural effect from the materials and principles at hand,” whether “in the poem, on the

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page, in the volume, in the canon, and in the life or legend.”47 Liber Amoris, which I consider a fragment poem in disguise, complicates things by making itself so big, enlarging itself until it looks more like a novel than it does a poem. As many fragments tucked into or rather disorganized into one, the book sutures together epistolary utterance, poems, quotations, epigraphs, and typographical quirks (think of those asterisks and the Gothic font of “Written on a Blank Leaf of Endymion”) that seem to resist closure merely by being too messy to wrap up. Far from presenting itself as the lone surviving relic of some lost or damaged past, Liber Amoris insists on preventing H from gathering into his three sad, tangled volumes whatever “materials or principles” might help it make sense, either to itself or to its readers. This suspicion that the text is somehow lacking in resources is apparent whether we read its relation to Keats and Endymion as one of similarity or difference, for if H is as bereft of energy, strength, bone, muscle, and substance as Keats’s own poetics, he is even less likely to wind up belonging to a canonical order already shifting to make room for “Mr. Keats.” It is even more apparent in the cheerless (if not unfunny) slapstick staged around H’s statue of Napoleon, the one S says looks like her former suitor, only “he was taller” (37, 51). H keeps this statue on his mantle, where it stands gracelessly for his refusal to abandon hope in the democratic project he, like Hazlitt, thinks Napoleon represents. In a moment of empathy for S, after she tells the story of her own abandonment by a Napoleon-lookalike, H lets her have the statue as a gift. “How odd,” he trills, “that the God of my idolatry should turn out to be like her Idol, [and] the same face which awed the world should conquer the sweetest creature in it!” (37). The statue, alas, goes literally to pieces when H decides he cannot take S’s indirection anymore. This transpires in the same scene in which S’s mother fears H has been “offering [her daughter] violence,” but it is the statue on which H finally lays his hands. “I could bear it no longer,” H writes, “I gave way to all the fury of disappointed hope and jealous passion. . . . [I] dashed the little Buonaparte to the ground and stamped upon it, as one of the instruments of her mockery” (141). S will have the statue mended, but the mockery will persist: even after he is glued back together, Napoleon is missing his sword (169).48 It is hard to deny that this little Bonaparte, even before it is dashed to the ground, joins “Written on a Blank Leaf of Endymion” and the generally cracked structure of Liber Amoris as another instance of the book’s preoccupation with the fragmentary mode. In a different discussion of Liber

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Amoris, Hofkosh describes the statue in just these terms, as a “fragment” whose characteristic feature is that it has “no fixed or singular referent” and so bears with it a certain “symbolic plenitude,” a capacity to signify abundance to those, like H, who feel themselves bereft; as a counterpoint to S, the pure alphabetical form whose reticence has an aggression all its own, the statue supplements her terrifying YES and NO with the surprisingly generous “detachment” of all-of-the-above.49 Like Levinson’s suggestion that the fragment always carries with it the conditions of its own amplified intelligibility or fleshing-out, Hofkosh’s account of the statue restores even its broken image to wholeness, even if that wholeness depends on its own denotation of nothing in particular. I wonder, however, if it is possible to treat this fragment, and the fragment of Liber Amoris, not as figures of maximum implied content but as figures of fidelity to an impossible future, tangible to the present only in the form of shattered matter. Such an attachment is evidently latched to the postwar moment of the book’s composition, a moment which demands the imagination of an alternative mode of maintaining and performing what Grant Farred nicely calls “fidelity to the political.”50 For Hazlitt, remaining faithful to Napoleon is identical to remaining faithful to the very practice of politicization, of insisting upon the real difference of radical democratic principles from their dilution into liberalism. In the face of an increasingly monologic public sphere, what Hazlit calls “the popular cause” responds by presenting itself as a commitment so stubborn, so intractable, that it clings even to its own disappointment as a mode of resistance to the conciliations of post-Waterloo modernity. There is, obviously, a parallel to be drawn between H’s refusal to detach himself from S and Hazlitt’s refusal to detach himself from Napoleon; the little Bonaparte makes it impossible to ignore. According to Hazlitt’s friend, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, Hazlitt greeted Waterloo by marrying what looks very much like a ritual of betrayal or brokenheartedness to a less focused response to world-historical disaster: “He seemed,” writes Haydon, “prostrated in mind and body,” walking “about unwashed, unshaven, hardly sober by day; and always intoxicated by night, literally, without exaggeration, for weeks.”51 As strange as it may seem in retrospect, and from the point of view that sees Napoleon as a tyrant who effectively put an end to the French Revolution and revived the French slave trade, Hazlitt remained throughout his life convinced that the emperor was Europe’s “last chance for a final recovery of truth and freedom.”52 In some ways Hazlitt’s perspective is not

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unlike the one Marx took on imperialism, namely that it was a stage subsidiary to the development of some larger project: in Marx’s case, the progress of capitalism leading to its necessary self-destruction, and in Hazlitt’s the ultimate installation of a global democratic order.53 In fact, Hazlitt’s growing distaste for Romantic liberalism, in particular as it incarnated in his former friend Leigh Hunt, has to do with its narrowminded readiness to accede to the presumption that since Napoleon was obviously a despot, he could never serve the cause of the people. In “Of the Spirit of Partisanship,” Hazlitt offers his most extensive and impassioned defense of Bonapartism not for its own virtues but in the name of what it promised to achieve, giving no quarter to those who “will not take their ready stand by him [Napoleon] who . . . could alone prop up a declining world, because for themselves they have some objection to the individual instrument.”54 Throughout this essay, Hazlitt “reorients[s] . . . the relationship between fidelity and rationality” by creating “a new series of relationships among fidelity, truth, and the calculus of the political.”55 As Farred suggests, the truth that demands the greatest degree of fidelity is “the truth of non-expectation,” or the fait accompli of political disappointment. Partisanship thus identifies itself as “ethical” because it is a practice of “commitment without expectation,” in which being faithful and being disappointed, rejected, bruised, battered, and left (to use Haydon’s word) prostrate at the altar of the popular cause are one and the same, for the latter condition—which is also the condition of the poetic fragment—honestly if inelegantly mimes the former.56 “Of the Spirit of Partisanship” was first published in the London Magazine in 1821. It is an essay written against “those who espouse a cause from liberal motives and with liberal views,” and as a description of “the obstacles so often found to relax their perseverance or impair their zeal.”57 Composed seven months after the death of Napoleon, it is also published almost a year after the death of former London Magazine editor John Scott, who was killed in a duel in February of that same year. Scott’s antagonist was Jonathan Christie, the literary agent of John Gibson Lockhart. The duel was fought over Lockhart’s long campaign of abuse against Hazlitt, Hunt, and John Keats, all of whom he excoriated in a series of articles on “The Cockney School of Poetry” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Two days before Scott died of his injuries, Hunt’s Examiner reported on the duel in a decidedly neutral, non-partisan item, which held that Christie, “according to one account, [had not] aimed [his gun] at Mr. Scott according to all.”58 (Incidentally, Scott’s

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second was the same Peter George Patmore whose correspondence with Hazlitt is turned into the letters between “CP” and H introduced piecemeal into Liber Amoris.) Scott’s death seems to have made clear to Hazlitt that Hunt’s pacific sociability, his emphasis on modeling a public attitude opposed to “violence in society and despondency in culture,” was in fact hostile to the more polemical narrative of the present Hazlitt was after in his own writing.59 “Of the Spirit of Partisanship” is at pains to make clear the urgency of historicizing its subject matter, including the tendency of an emergent liberal and humanistic public sphere to divorce its conception of culture from pressing political exigencies. In his 1828 memoir, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, Hunt would gently sneer at his old friend, “Mr. Hazlitt,” for always “lament[ing] . . . that the liberal side of politics piqued itself upon the greater degree of generosity with which it could afford to speak of its enemies, and do justice to what is thought meritorious in them.” This is the kind of noble “knight-errantry” on which Hunt consistently piques himself, and for whose flexible posture of “impartiality” Hazlitt has nothing but contempt.60 In “Of the Spirit of Partisanship,” he makes clear that liberalism’s pride in its political vacancies is a far greater enemy to the popular cause than the most reactionary of Tory conservatives, who themselves share none of the ideals Hunt and his polite society hold dear: They do not celebrate the triumphs of their enemies as their own: it is with them a more feeling disputation. They never give an inch of ground that they can keep; they keep all that they can get; they make no concessions that can redound to their own discredit; they assume all that makes for them; if they pause it is to gain time; if they offer terms it is to break them: they keep no faith with enemies: if you relax in your exertions, they persevere the more: if you make new efforts, they redouble theirs. While they give no quarter, you stand upon mere ceremony. While they are cutting your throat, or putting the gag in your mouth, you talk of nothing but liberality, freedom of inquiry, and douce humanité. Their object is to destroy you, your object is to spare them—to treat them according to your own fancied dignity. They have sense and spirit enough to take all advantages that will further their cause: you have pedantry and pusillanimity enough to undertake the defence of yours, in order to defeat it.61

These remarks anticipate Schmitt’s account of liberalism as a strategically elastic politics defined by its refusal to acknowledge that it is in any way

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political, which is to say—in Schmitt’s terms—that it is in any way constituted by an originary distinction between its friends and its enemies, between those who share and those who intend “to negate [its] way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve [its] own form of existence.”62 The fantasy of the public sphere articulated by Hunt is one in which all of its members are “fellow-men” and in which culture becomes a means by which modernity arrives at “an entire system of demilitarized and depoliticized concepts,” including the concept of culture.63 Hazlitt is at once more sympathetic to liberalism than Schmitt and more damning of its desire to perform impartiality at all times. As his syntax seesaws between the faults of Tories and the faults of liberals, it lays out in prose the diagram of a battlefield where one side is always in retreat even if it seems to be meeting the enemy head-on. Hazlitt loves to proliferate semicolons and colons across the page, and this passage is no exception. In this case, the punctuation maps those moments when Tories “pause to gain time,” each brief hiatus between clauses allowing the enemy to multiply his speed and strength. The battle of pens is shown to be as one-sided as the battle of swords, more a massacre in the making than an egalitarian collision of mind with mind. The situation is made no better by what Hazlitt describes as the cowardice and opportunism of liberals themselves who, he says, insist on neutrality simply to cover their own bases. Whether on account of “obligations to friends,” “vanity,” “the desire of . . . distinction,” or because of “an over-squeamish delicacy in regard to appearances, to fickleness of purpose, or to natural timidity and weakness of nerve,” liberals somehow manage to be “‘ever strong upon the stronger side,’” to survive even the punishing onslaught of Tory aggression by betraying the very principle of principle itself.64 Partisanship, which for Hazlitt is really a synonym for revolutionary radicalism, is by contrast characterized by holding its ground. It is “zeal and unshaken constancy” applied in relation to “an abstract cause” as intensely as it would be applied to “private animosities,” which is to say to specific objects of irrational interest; it rejects “the milk of human kindness” when what is at stake is “the existence or extinction of human rights”; it protects “the cause” of democracy “by defending it as it is attacked, tooth and nail, without exception and without remorse”; it turns away from “choice” and advocates instead for an embrace of “hard necessity,” along with a practice of “self-denial” in the service of “union and co-operation for a general purpose.”65 And yet, as much as partisanship is clearly an emotional disposition

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it is also a formal one, for if “the thorough partisan is a good hater,” it is also the case that “he hates only one side of the question, and that is outside.”66 In his “rooted attachment to a principle” so intensely felt and credited it becomes “part of himself,” the partisan becomes a sort of Moebius strip, a shape without exterior capable of deflecting blows on every front. Throughout the essay, Hazlitt repeatedly uses the language of war—of holding ground, of advancing and retreating, of refusing to “retir[e] from a sinking cause” even if it jeopardizes one’s “safety”—to counter the demilitarized politics both Hunt and Schmitt (for very different reasons) associate with liberalism. What is crucial to understand about partisanship is that, as a genre of militancy, it groups together everything under the sign of the political understood, like the partisan himself, to have no outside. This definition of partisanship also jibes with Schmitt’s in his own Theory of the Partisan, whose primal scene just so happens to be the struggles of Spanish guerrilleros—literally, little warriors—against Napoleon during the Peninsular War. “The partisan of the Spanish guerilla war of 1808 was,” according to Schmitt, “the first to fight irregularly against the first, modern regular army,” forcing Napoleon into “nearly 200 small regional wars in Asturias, Aragon, Catalonia, Navarra, Castile, etc., under the leadership of numerous fighters.”67 In other words, partisan warfare forces Napoleon’s armies to spread themselves so thin and to disperse themselves so widely that their imperial mass is effectively “regionalized” and their southwestern front divided. Once the front is compromised, the terminology of “the war” loses its grasp over the ability to segregate the inside from the outside of combat. If the Napoleonic Wars are often credited with the emergence of the theory and practice of total war, the guerillas, as Schmitt makes clear, offer a countermode of total politicization that evades even as it is made necessary by the wide reach of total war; if Romantic liberalism ducks politics by pretending it has no enemies, Romantic partisanship fights on even when it is “not yet able to tell exactly who the enemy is.”68 Both Hazlitt and Schmitt’s theories of partisanship return us to the idea of limitation this book has fixed as the axis along which Romanticism pivots between formal and political concerns. In contrasting the clear distinction between friend and enemy refused by liberalism to the all-inclusive hostility of the Spanish guerilla, Schmitt argues that the partisan’s “limitation of enmity follows from [his] telluric character,” from the fact that his self-designated purpose is to “defend . . . a piece of land with which he has

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an autochthonous relation.”69 Partisans fight not just for but on the land that they know, using the parameters imposed by the immediate environment against their opponents in a series of “skirmishes, ambushments, assaults, and stratagems” and all other genres of “domestic warfare.”70 Robert Southey, in his own book on the Peninsular War, describes the effects of the guerrilleros’ shoestring strategies in bracingly familiar terms when he writes that “no sooner” were the French “masters of the field” in Spain than they found themselves locked into a “wearing, wasting contest [by which] any military power, however great, must ultimately be consumed.”71 A letter from a French officer quoted in Southey’s book observes that the Spanish cause now “had so many partisans, that their sick and wounded were in all parts of the country, and yet it was impossible to detect them”; with “their perfect knowledge of every foot of the ground” and their considerable “experience . . . in their own mode of warfare,” the guerillas became seemingly unstoppable.72 Note that Southey’s description of partisans as so numerous “that their sick and wounded” were everywhere but undetectable fudges the distinction between fighters and civilians, between those who have fallen and those who conceal where the fallen are lying. Part of what makes the partisan “the Jesuit of war” is that his very presence converts others to “unconditional . . . political engagement.”73 The earthly borders that mark out regional identity also mark the inside of a politics to which there is, again, no outside. As Joan of Arc (quoted in Schmitt) puts it, “I do not know whether God loves or hates the English; I only know they must be driven out of France.”74 The Spanish resistance to Napoleon was not only “hopeless,” it was “the first typical case” that defined the partisan as “the cannon fodder of global political conflicts.”75 Like Joan of Arc’s unexpected discounting of God’s opinion from her ideas about what is to be done with the English, Schmitt’s use of the prosaic, slightly coarsened word “fodder” (in the original German text, Futter, as in Kanonenfutter) draws attention to the partisan’s antitranscendental disposition. Partisanship is “telluric” but it is also topographical and ecosystemic, driven into “the national soil” in a manner similar to Germaine de Staël’s “romantique” literature, which like the partisan is potentiated by its own consummate vulnerability.76 As Schmitt explains, the partisan offsets liberalism’s malleability with respect to political belief with his own mode of improvisation with respect to the earth, becoming “the last sentinel of the earth as a not yet completely destroyed element of world

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history.”77 Even the hopelessness connoted by the threat of his own “lastness” moors the partisan in a frenetic, unpredictable activity of marginal resistance that is continually affirming its own limitation—hence Hazlitt’s insistence that partisanship essentially means standing in only one place, with a determination that follows upon the understanding that “political, is like military warfare.” In both cases, “there are but two sides,” and “it will not do to stand in the midway, and say you like neither.”78 If “the midway” connotes a space of fluid borders and multiple options, the partisan girds himself to an earth that, as Schmitt says, is not yet but almost destroyed, his own tenuous position mirroring its as he hardens into a fanatical figure of life on the ground. Even if Liber Amoris did not involve the breaking and mending of a statue of Bonaparte, its doomed attempt to anatomize the roadblocks of personal desire as though they were identical to those of political feeling, or to match the intensity of “abstract” attachments to those of “private animosities,” would invite consideration in partisanship’s idiom. Perhaps the statuette is a symbol for H’s longing to be himself a guerrillero, a little warrior in the service of some cause recently and irreparably lost. Perhaps the anonymity of the partisan is inscribed into his one-letter name, just as S’s flexibly “Fabian way of making love and conquests” is inscribed into hers (56).79 Ultimately, however, Liber Amoris is best understood as a literary circumlocution around the theory and practice of partianship, and as a formalization of what the Russian poet and partisan leader Denis Davydov characterized, in 1821, as the “organized disorder” of guerrilla warfare.80 By removing partisanship from its historical context, and thereby bracketing the opposition between Napoleon’s armies and the resistance they met on both fronts of his empire, Hazlitt does precisely what he says Romantic liberalism cannot: detach a principle from “the individual instrument” in which it has been prominently embodied. The partisan perspective can see clearly how the righteousness of the popular cause survives Napoleon’s use of it as an alibi for his own imperial crimes; it can see how “military warfare,” regardless of the actual interests of its combatants, can serve as a model for the articulation of political difference. More controversially, it can also mistake the cause of unrequited love for the cause of unrequited democracy, and the harassment of another person as an intrepid if humiliating instance of holding one’s ground. I may be wrong, but I think that Liber Amoris is aware that it is a story about just this type of mistaken identity. In the organized disorder of the

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book’s own form, its fragmentation seems to mirror the impossibility of fusing the disparate domains of erotic and political determination, not least because the very idea of determination in the arena of intimate attachment is merely a euphemism for “offering violence,” which is itself a euphemism for assault. This moral fact is so obvious as to make impossible even the allegorical representation of private and public animosities promised at the book’s start. While it is sometimes right to read Romantic fragment poems as invitations to their own interpretive closure or completion, this Romantic fragment remains resolutely open, its multiple vectors of feeling and interest bouncing wildly off one another with a velocity that threatens the whole thing with disintegration. A flailing, fumbling mess of a book, Liber Amoris asks a version of Archie Bunker’s “What’s the difference?” and concludes that, when it comes to making the personal political, the difference is just too great to overcome. This recognition is a disappointing one, to be sure, but it is also by establishing disappointment as the primal affect (and effect) of Liber Amoris that Hazlitt is able to recuperate it as the germ of what Ernst Bloch calls “militant optimism.” According to Bloch, such optimism is utopian insofar as it stations itself, partisan-like, at “the frontline position” of “everything dawning in the world.”81 Bloch’s choice of words seems to imply that militant optimism is the unique prerogative of the avant-garde, a notoriously problematical term we can nonetheless take to signify a self-conscious tendency toward aesthetic experimentation. Using the fragment as the model for and locus of its own experiments in form, Liber Amoris allows disappointment to materialize on the page, as a collection of traces of democratic longing that lost its way, distracted by the more conventional but also the more visceral pleasures and pains of intimacy. In its own confused and unlikeable way, the book admits to this failure and also recuperates it, in the obtrusive form of a fragment that sticks like a thorn in the side of postwar contentment—or rather, of a postwar silencing of opposition, and the masquerade of silence as peace. For Hazlitt, disappointment is a promissory note that records all that politics, and poetry, once seemed to offer. It does not deny failure but embraces its intractability as an extension of the “telluric-terrestial character” of partisan struggle. With its splintered, snapped, but doggedly reassembled attachment to the world and the possibility of its transformation, disappointment is to H what unrequited love will become to another literary inheritor of his peculiar brand of mixed-up militancy—“a source of little visible delight, but

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necessary.”82 Interestingly, as Liber Amoris draws toward its climax, it begins to loosen its grip over S in a way that suggests an enlargement of H’s partisan feeling to include an embrace of necessity itself. In a post-Waterloo essay “On the Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity,” published in 1815, Hazlitt had attempted to redefine “freedom” as something irrevocably constrained by certain physical as well as moral laws; under this definition the term “agent” can longer signify “the beginner of action,” but must mean “one that contributes to an effect” already present in the world.83 This definition strikingly renders the thing called “action” anonymous with respect to its effects, which flow and disappear into a collection of contiguous impacts divorced from our intent to contribute to them. At the moment that might be called its turning point, Liber Amoris dramatizes this curious rendering of freedom and free activity in a way that slightly shifts the idea of partisanship-asharassment with which it has hitherto been working. Whereas the Romantics, and Schmitt after them, characterize partisanship in a military context as the elaboration of a fiercely embodied relationship to the land, the image of the partisan we get at the dramatic highpoint of Liber Amoris considers this relationship within the limits imposed by the city. H has gone looking for S, who is not at home. Her sister tells him she is visiting their aunt, so H runs into the street to look for her, heading up the wide thoroughfare of King’s Street that cuts through their neighborhood. “Ruminating on chance and change and old times,” he “passe[s] . . . a house where [he] had once lived” before stopping on a street corner. As he waits at the corner to cross, he catches a glimpse of S coming toward him: I felt a strange pang at the sight, but I thought her alone. Some people before me moved on, and I saw another person with her. The murder was out. It was a tall, rather well-looking young man, but I did not at first recollect him. We passed at the crossing of the street without speaking. Will you believe it, after all that has passed between us for two years, after what had passed in the last half-year, after what had passed that very morning, she went by me without even changing countenance[.] I turned and looked—they also turned and looked—and as if by mutual consent, we both retrod our steps and passed again, in the same way. I went home. (175–176)

The moment would not be possible if it did not take place in a densely populated area, where a crowd can gather on both sides of a street, wait at the

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crossing, and be so large as to conceal specific faces within its restless bulk. The pressures of the urban environment are magnified by H’s insistently recursive or, to use his word, “ruminating” prose, which folds competing senses of time over and over one another until all of London seems swaddled in its multiple tenses. There is the time of historical change, which comes to mind when H sees his old residence, and there is the change S fails to register in her expression when she sees H and knows H sees her. There is the time that passes, and there are people who have passed the time together for as long as “two years” or as briefly as “that very morning,” and who now pass each other on the street without speaking. And then there is the time of a retraced step, of the rewinding of the past in a gesture that seems to hold open the moment just before the future comes crashing down. This moment does not pause but thickens time, making fleetingly visible the confluence of temporal effects poorly described, in the end, by words like “past” and “future,” or “passed” and “changed.” Confronted with the ocular proof of S’s non-interest, H responds with an act of minimal but no less astonishing agency: he goes home. In the aftermath, he also lets S go, asking her “for a farewell kiss”—which he doesn’t get—and then willing “her image” into “the wastes of time . . . like a weed that the wave bears farther and farther” away (178, 192). As if cued by the short-lived experience of disappearing into a crowd, H finally abandons both himself and S to the passage of time, acknowledging as he does so that “no flower will ever bloom on earth to glad [his] heart again” (192). This final posture of bereavement marks the loss of S, of course, but also a more profound loss of the conviction that the world, and the people in it, will respond to our actions as they are designed to be responded to. The city, with its crush of persons known and unknown, its unidentified and its beloved buildings, is itself a compound figure for Hazlitt’s ideas about necessity, for here it is impossible to see “action” as anything more than “contribution,” a ripple in the oceanic body of histories large and small. And yet this recognition is also the book’s best expression of militant optimism, for it mines from the defeats of private agency an unsentimental, unheroic vision of collective and cohabitative will. In his lectures on the utopian project of “how to live together,” Barthes describes “the hopelessness of love (not being loved, being left, being broken up with, etc.)” as one of the many experiences that draw us closer and closer to “acedy,” the partial erasure of the self that enables us to commit to the “strong communal structure” of a utopian community.84

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London circa 1820 is a place of just such “idiorrhythmic” encounters, where multiple intentions are herded together in a messy, motley stream of broken hearts. In the passive and unintended kindness of the crowd, which conceals S from H and H from S simply because concealing people is an accidental property of crowds, H experiences a new mode of partisanship that is almost entirely deindividuated. At the very last moment, the book of love rethinks its use of initials—of S and H and the “tall, rather well-looking young man” whose name is Mr. C—as figuring the dispersal of singular personhood into the non-specific identity of the crowd, whose numbers are just enough to hint at the possibility of a syncopated “Living-with-several-other-people.” In an essay with the compelling title of “Cities and the Natural History of Hatred,” the geographer Nigel Thrift proposes that we consider the utility of hate, rather than love, when it comes to making peace. This is not just any kind of hate, but a unique sort of enmity that flows through urban areas, and which coexists with an equally urban practice Thrift calls “repair”: that “continuous hum of . . . maintenance” that emanates across everything from early-morning construction work to emergency-service vehicles to the buzz of computers to the stop-start sounds of do-it-yourself home improvement.85 These reparative circuits create noise and dirt; they are profoundly irritating and disruptive, but they are also part of the city’s “potential nests of kindness.”86 Individuals, Thrift argues, may despise one another, but the city itself is able to protect and care for everyone, to gather all populations into its overpopulated home; as for kindness, it is superior to love in valuing public works over private attachments, and the dispersed stresses of the crowd over the intensity of interpersonal feeling. “We passed at the crossing of the street without speaking,” writes H, and in that moment love loosens up, curling outward from the object called S to hug the anaphoras of “change” and “passed” or “past.” It detaches itself from persons or, as the case may be, pseudo-persons and reattaches itself to “what had passed,” to the irrecuperable losses that undergird the prospect of refurbishing a frayed world. In the next and final chapter, we find ourselves in the quite different urban and, for that matter, affective landscape of Victorian Britain, where the organization of life and the distribution of resources take on a decidedly anti-utopian shape. If “history is the sternest critic of utopias,” the transition from the Romantic to the Victorian period forces the question of how utopia limited is different from utopia never.87 Prompted by this question, and in search of some provisional answers to it, this chapter turns to political economy,

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which advertises itself as an interim ethics mediating between this world and a hypothetical better one. Political economy turns out, however, to supplant Romanticism’s discourse of renunciation with renunciation’s asymmetric distribution. Amidst ongoing industrialization, nineteenth-century capitalism converts Thrift’s notion of repair into an anti-egalitarian regime of ongoing struggle, a way of life pushed to be unavailable to habits of reluctant but habituated kindness. In the place of such habits the late-Romantic economists forcibly unite formal practices of adjustment with a new, pseudo-utopian discourse of abstinence, whose temporal berth is the promise of a future predicated on the conservation not of scarce resources, but of an unevenly shared scarcity.

CHAPTER SIX

Narrating Capital, Reading Rcsm “O poesy is on the wain For fancys visions all unfitting I hardly know her face again Nature herself seems on the flitting The fields grow old and common things The grass the sky the winds a blowing And spots where still a beauty clings Are sighing ‘going all a going’ O poesy is on the wain I hardly know her face again” —John Clare, “Decay A Ballad,” c.1832

study of labor and the trope of innocence in early modern England, Joanna Picciotto makes a compelling case that Gerrard Winstanley and the radical agrarian movement known as the Diggers “identified innocence as the freedom to work, to exploit,” in Winstanley’s words, “the free content of the fruits and crops of this outward Earth.” This condition, Winstanley declares, “was called The mans innocency, or pleasure in the Garden before his fall.” As Picciotto explains, “Not just a means of paradisal recovery, the Diggers’ delving was paradise itself, an Eden of labor restored on actual physical ground.”1 The fall from innocence is thus a fall from the capacity to experience work as pleasure, because pleasure itself depends on a kind of co-embodiment with the earth, a “delving” that does not need to alienate earth’s resources for man’s use because those resources are already “outward,” rising up to meet the shovel. There are many variations on the story Winstanley tells, and each of them is predicated on one simple idea: once, there was enough. Eden, or whatever name designates the better circumstance from which people have been cast out, is a place of plenty, so that even though one might have had to dig for one’s supper there was never any danger of having no supper to dig for. Unfortunately, this story has a familiar, downward trajectory. Whoever has been

IN HER REMARKABLE

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put in charge of this paradisical state of affairs becomes concerned that living in such an easy, unanxious state will prompt human beings—since they have nothing else to worry about—to begin to aspire beyond their station. And so “The brandished sword of God,” with torrid heat, And vapour at the Libyan air adust, Began to parch that temperate clime; whereat In either hand the hastening Angel caught Our lingering Parents, and to the eastern gate Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast To the subjected plain—then disappeared.2

And so eventually, the ground, formerly free to all As the air or sunlight, Was portioned by surveyors into patches, Between boundary markers, fences, ditches. Earth’s natural plenty no longer sufficed. Man tore upon the earth, and rummaged in her bowels.3

Later came enclosure—ruin was her guide, But freedoms clapping hands enjoyed the sight Tho comforts cottage soon was thrust aside And workhouse prisons raised upon the scite Een natures dwelling far away from men, The common heath became the spoilers prey The rabbit had not where to make his den And labours only cow was drove away[.]4

Conventional utopias, from the Land of Cockaigne to William Morris’s Nowhere, run these stories of ruin backward, rolling the world in reverse up the hill of its own wreckage. They imagine utopia by undoing history, a strategy consistently prone to representing both the Edenic past and mankind’s future redemption as places where nobody works, or where nobody has to

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work in order to live. Morris’s dream-vision is subtitled “An Epoch of Rest,” and sure enough News from Nowhere repeatedly conflates the obsolescence of industrial society—“[t]he soap-works with their smoke-vomiting chimneys were gone; the engineer’s works gone; the lead-works gone; and no sound of rivetting and hammering came down the west wind”—with the closely correlated elision of “work” with “amusement.”5 Although Morris devotes a whole chapter of his News to contesting the popular prejudice that there is a “Lack of Incentive To Labour In a Communist Society,” his insistence that utopian living means “all work is now pleasurable,” motivated by “pleasurable excitement” at the thought of “gain in honour and wealth” and accompanied by “conscious sensual pleasure in the work itself,” reduces labor to pleasure and so ends up making the seductive but unremarkable claim that communism inspires people to have a good time.6 “Rest” and “Labour” are simplified under the sign of enjoyment, whose centrality to the economy of Nowhere papers over the ferociously contingent, inexorably fraught relationship between human beings and the environment they exploit to survive. Morris’s dream of a “postwork” society that frees people up “to partake of existing possibilities for meaning and fulfillment, and . . . to invent new ones” risks at the very least a rhetorical isolation of possibility from the constraints of planetary life, whose resources must be available only limitedly to human invention if they are to remain available at all.7 If the earth of Nowhere is no longer subject to having its innards ransacked for precious metals, oil, or gas, it is also pictured as endlessly fertile and benevolent, a playground of sowing and tilling no worse for its perpetual wear. This curious blend of plenty and lassitude gives unlimited utopias their weirdly woozy but frenetic air. Even a painted utopia like Bruegel’s Land of Cockaigne feels inwardly animated by the activity of impossibly passive consumption, which registers less as rest than force-feeding. Here, sleeping men are approached by a prancing egg bearing a knife or spoon in its own half-shell, asking to be eaten; here, a goose droops its neck across a metal platter, the curved shape of its neck mirrored by the postures of the men. Although Jameson nominates “narrative analysis” as “the most reliable guide” to assessing the complexities of utopian fiction, the play between horizontal and vertical axes in the Land of Cockaigne is far more suggestive of the effects or arguments space can make in favor of formal “closure,” or the appearance of reconciliation between those elements that, in the real world, are locked into competition for material and representational resources. If the picture’s horizontal plane is dotted with human and non-human animals in states of

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sleepiness or submission, and the vertical plane propped up by trees, poles, and posts, these figures are united in the nearly dead-center image of a table piled with food and wrapped around a tree trunk. This is Cockaigne: the place where natural processes of growth are not just keyed to but hemmed in by the human need for food, a need which prompts Bruegel’s men to dream of meals that actually do grow on trees. The dream itself expresses a wish to omit agricultural processes—to omit work—while filling the world with work’s more delectable products. It is a fantasy of autonomous growth in which history has stopped but the earth goes round, and humans go on eating of it. This in turn suggests, perhaps, that what is unthinkable in conventional utopia is an ethically responsive and socially restrained relationship to necessity. Like labor in its most pedestrian sense as “work,” hunger in utopia must be instantly gratified so that it no longer registers as hunger, but merely as a kind of pleasant, temporary dream-state from which one always, assuredly wakes. “There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry anymore.”8 Hunger is supposed to be anathema to utopia because utopia ought to be a place of abundance, where bellies and hearts alike are perfectly full. Furthermore, once it becomes clear that eggs do not ask to be eaten, nor do pigs come into the world already roasted, the project of making sure everyone has enough to eat is not an especially exciting one. We know we are supposed to feed the world, but what could be less sensational than the procuring of a daily allowance of calories? Hence the fantastical treatment of food production and consumption in conventional utopias, where sustenance, even if it doesn’t grow on trees, sprouts effortlessly out of the ground.9 When it comes to utopia limited, nutrition also poses a challenge, for how can the shallow, recalcitrant metrics of fats and proteins and vitamins and minerals collaborate with the formal processes of limitation that give low adjustment its aesthetic and affective heft? They seem essentially unamenable to the play of contraction and release built into the structure of the Blakean bounding line, for they seek to be neither more nor less than sources of a subsistence both non-negligible and non-negotiable. Subsistence embraces restraint because it has no other choice; in fact, the primary meaning of subsistence is the mere existing of an entity of substance, as theologians sometimes characterize the Trinity as figuring one divine essence in three subsistences. In a less elevated vein, subsistence is the papery and bare life being led by the spectral figures haunting Wordsworth’s earlier poems, with their leech-gatherers and discharged soldiers, unwed mothers and deserted wives. These figures’ stories, as Wordsworth himself says, are

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“no tale[s],” no “iterable, booklike” parables possessed of a native interest.10 Malnutrition and unrelenting poverty are, in other words, disconcerting but they are also unremarkable.11 One background contention of this final chapter is that those modes of governance and sociability we call liberal have been too summarily grouped with the harms perpetrated by industrial and post-industrial capitalism, in particular the harms of hunger and its associate, scarcity. To be clear, this book is not pro-liberal, and it has been at pains to distinguish an ideology of private satisfaction and political timidity from the strenuous commitment to restraint evident in Romantic utopianism—a restraint keyed to the renunciatory management of resources, from food to language. I do want to suggest, however, that a widespread scholarly skepticism about limitation, so often tied to the critique of liberalism, is partly the result of a confusion between liberal attitudes and capitalist systems. As Catherine Gallagher suggests, liberalism is often viewed solely as “the direct ideological justification of a particularly rapacious capitalism,” so that privacy, individualism, heteronormativity, humanism, and hierarchical class structures have all been said to go hand in glove with private property, corporatization, the maintenance of a readily available and exploitable labor force, and the destruction of the planet.12 Because these ills are obviously forms of selective limitation in their own right, it is but a hop, skip, and jump toward the premise that all forms of limitation aid and abet economic regimes that are limiting insofar as they allow (indeed require) resources to be stockpiled by those at the top of the global class hierarchy. Nonetheless, I want to argue from the position that as liberalism wanes and capitalism—despite rumors to the contrary—thrives in the fluorescent light of postmodernity, we might pause before assuming either a complete identification or a causal relationship between social norms and economic models that may, in the final analysis, be merely historically coincident.13 In other words, capitalism and liberalism can be comorbid without being coterminous. This idea is pertinent here insofar as this chapter addresses the phenomenality of subsistence without reference to categories like “the liberal individual,” “the disciplinary subject,” or “the capillary effects of power.”14 The literature of industrial capitalism travesties low adjustment utopia by taking adjustment as its own public face, when in fact capitalism cares for no utopia at all, no matter how abbreviated or curtailed. Its tactical embrace of carefully chosen utopian paradigms is an aesthetic appropriation

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and not an ideological one. It ought accordingly to be understood in aesthetic terms, and this is why, in what follows, I bracket familiar Foucauldian accounts of biopower, governmentality, and differential modes of access to something called liberal subjecthood in order to recover what Rob Nixon calls “the temporal dispersion of slow violence” within the narrative form of pseudo-utopian fiction.15 A pseudo-utopia is a world governed unequally by the principle of limitation, where the poor are invited to starve and the rich to exhaust the earth; it is also a place where the principles of restraint that motivate low adjustment utopia are yoked to specious moral standards and equally specious rewards. Although the nineteenth-century texts I deal with here are offshoots of the kind of literature grouped as realist, it is not their realism per se that expresses their pseudo-utopian impulses; it is their unique treatment of the “dispersed” mode of realist narration known as free indirect discourse. In cases like these, free indirect discourse effects a slow violence of its own, “faceless yet physically intimate, percolating through the penumbral time” of scarcity as it is attributed, in these texts, to the fact and the specter of population growth.16 Building on Edward Snow’s study of another Bruegel painting (Children’s Games), Alex Woloch suggests that Bruegel is best viewed as a painter whose “referenced world,” made up chiefly by the “persons who populate, and overpopulate, the canvas,” appears as “a manifestation of the very compositional dynamics that sustain it.”17 In other words, rather than read Bruegel narratively or allegorically, we could attend to the “kinetics of differentiation” that spring up among the human figures congesting the frame as the deep structure of the reality given by the painting, a reality entirely collected from the actions and reactions, appearances and disappearances, “manifestation and neglect” of those same figures. From the sixteenth-century painting to the nineteenth-century text, the movement of persons turns from a basic structure of society to the basic structure of political economy, a theoretical enterprise that increasingly separates out good populations, whose number is never excessive, from bad ones, whose own dynamics threaten to upset the sustainability of political economy itself. Needless to say, a persistent, transhistorical characterization of the poor as congenitally “selfish, perverse and turbulent” has provided convenient distraction from state- and/or corporation-sponsored regimes of unsustainability.18 Mike Davis, for one, has written searingly of the ways in which Victorian ideas about “free market economics” served “as a mask for colonial genocide,” a fine example of

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teamwork between the material differentiation of wealth and the mythological (which is to say, the racial) differentiation of people.19 Less spectacularly, political economy also works as a mode of formal realism that lends itself to the imagination of human existence as steadily improved by the gradual erasure of poor people but not of poverty from the world.20 Insofar as it is heavily laced with what Elaine Freedgood calls “optimism,” the narrative register of late Romantic texts like Thomas Robert Malthus’s essays on population and Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy apes the limited utopianism of Shelley, who also treats loss as an affective resource if not, alas, a caloric one.21 Such optimism should, however, be characterized in Lauren Berlant’s terms as “cruel,” for unlike Cythna’s sorrowful utopia the Malthusian fantasy of present suffering and future pleasure seeks actively to strengthen inequity within the social field. In Berlant’s account, cruel optimism chains us to a psychic pattern whereby the thing we desire—the thing that becomes for us the sign and assurance of a good life—impedes our ability to live better.22 One of the many virtues of this argument is that it allows the pleasures of being impeded to be dealt with not as phantasms of ideology or offshoots of a masochistic sensibility, but as motivational structures that give shape to social existence, including the social existence Woloch calls the artwork’s “referenced world.” If “the only way to formulate the truth of capital is to [take its] fictions” seriously, we might argue that only way to read the fictions of capital is to take its truths at their word, as they are registered tonally in the gnomic, anonymous voice of the everywhere felt but nowhere seen.23 My reluctance to treat the “modern liberal subject” as a primary analytic unit avers the unfashionable but no less astute observation that liberalism “by now it seems, or ought to seem, anything but an obvious choice as the unique terminus ad quem of historical narrative.”24 Certainly “the historical violences that underlie a secular, universalist liberal humanism” continue to supply those privileges—a sense of autonomy, the promise of a protected private sphere and a malleable, responsive political one, the pleasures of detachment and neutrality, the redemptive fetishization of ambivalence and diffident or diminished agency—that are still to be had for a price. Nonetheless, what interests me is the emergence of a historical and cultural milieu in which violence would not be hidden but be made manifest through the literary technology of free indirect discourse, which works precisely by playing hide-and-go-seek around the fixed poles of character and the more

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flexible posture of narrator. Without suggesting (as others have done) that narration itself is a form of violence, I offer free indirect discourse as one of those “frameworks of visibility” through which economic processes of a gargantuan scale may be represented more or less as they are felt, omnipresent, intermittently tangible, sometimes seen and sometimes heard though only ever partially, in the unsteady reverberation of their consequences.25 * * * No one who has read Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure is likely to forget the text of the suicide note written by Jude’s young son, who hangs himself and his two younger stepsiblings “because,” as he puts it, “we are too menny.”26 Gillian Beer calls the murder-suicide “a late-Malthusian tragedy,” and Father Time’s self-authored epitaph certainly does employ the vocabulary of population demographics.27 The boy has caught the hint that he is unwanted or burdensome because his father is always losing jobs and his family always being evicted when it gets out that Jude and Jude’s partner, Sue, are not married. Much to Father Time’s dismay, Jude and Sue try to improve matters by living apart. The boy’s shocking act is intended to allow his father and stepmother to reunite, in more comfortable circumstances than the presence of three little children and another one on the way would permit. As for his unconventional spelling of “menny,” it is perhaps meant to chime with the inscription “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Uphar’sin” that appears on the wall in Belshazzar’s palace in the Book of Daniel.28 Summoned by Belshazzar to interpret this primordial scene of writing on the wall, Daniel the prophet puts things this way: Mene means “God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it”; tekel, “thou art weighed in the balance, and art found wanting”; and uphar’sin, “thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and the Persians.”29 Like Belshazzar, the children have been “numbered, weighed, and divided” from their parents, and doom comes for them, too “numbered” or numerous as they are, as it does for the Babylonians; and like Daniel, Father Time, the resident prophet of Jude the Obscure, has “a chain [put] about his neck,” though his is of boxcord rope, not gold.30 The chilling biblical allusion of Father Time’s suicide note ask us to consider the indecisive status of what it means to be “wanting,” particularly in the social and economic context of poverty. When Daniel tells the Babylonian king that God finds him wanting, he means that the king’s conduct— particularly his spiritual conduct—has been deficient or faulty. When Father

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Time offers Jude and Sue his own interpretation of Daniel’s prophecy, “to want” and to be “too menny” are brought into a peculiar correlation. Want is lack and lack implies scarcity, whereas “menny” is the assertion of too much. However, the children are only too many because they are themselves wanting, both lacking the ability to work and, in yet another sense, full of desire—mainly for food, but also for life. Shortly before his death Father Time tells Sue he wishes he had never been born, to which she replies, “you couldn’t help it, my dear,” as though the unconscious wish for life pulled his soul flailing into his body. In that case, says Father Time, “I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted, they should be killed directly, before their souls come to ’em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about.” The next morning, he is found one of a “triplet of little corpses” whose wants have been preemptively terminated.31 The language of want couples scarcity with desire, and in the Romantic period this is as much a problem for the imagination as it is for the body. In the introduction to the first volume of her Illustrations of Political Economy, Martineau observes that “science in a familiar, practical form” can give us political economy’s “history [and] its philosophy[,] but we want its picture” if we are to be able to exploit what it teaches us.32 This last phrase recalls a memorable remark in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, in which Shelley insists that despite the prodigious advances in human knowledge achieved over the last century or so, we yet “want the poetry of life”: We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government, and political economy, or at least, what is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat in the adage. We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest.33

For Shelley, the problem is that advanced cultures have accumulated an excess of scientific knowledge, or “produce,” without the moral or conceptual

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skills necessary to allocate it justly; for Martineau, it is that most people live in ignorance and act before they think. Yet both the high Romantic poet and the late Romantic reformer filter the problem of syncing theoretical with practical knowledge through the language of overpopulation, and the practices of “distribution” for which it does and does not allow. In 1820, a year before composing his Defence of Poetry, Shelley had denounced Malthus as “a priest” in disguise, possessed of the “doctrines . . . of a eunuch and of a tyrant.”34 Nonetheless, the idiom of distribution, multiplication, conception, imbalance, and overeating haunts his own picture of a world where, as Malthus put it in his Essay on Population, “plenty [has been] changed into scarcity.”35 Both poetry and demography exist to restore “the order and harmony” of what is (or once was) given abundantly by Nature, to establish equilibrium with respect to her “mighty feast.”36 As Shelley points out, however, the possibility of using poetics to calibrate the rate of production to the rate of consumption, to temper our appetites and our wants, is complicated by the fact that poetry too has become more and more vulnerable to “calculating processes.” In the era just after the Enlightenment, Shelley finds both art and science swallowed up by the unhallowed union of “scientific and economical knowledge” that vomits forth an ever-increasing amount of extraneous information. It seems (or so Shelley implies) that the robust intellectual climate of the Enlightenment did not see economics coming.37 Its dreams of music combined with optics, or physics combined with sculpture, has fallen by the wayside of a march of progress that takes the oikonomia of human civilization as its most distinctive priority.38 There is also something to be said here for the establishment of imaginative writing as a commercial activity during the 1820s, when Shelley wrote his Defence and Martineau would be forced, following the failure of her father’s business, to begin selling essays and short stories along with her needlework to keep the family fed and sheltered. She would later credit the Martineaus’ descent into poverty with her own professional success, of which the Illustrations represent the most popular and widely read examples. Martineau’s Illustrations are designed, in Shelley’s sense, to help conception catch up to calculation, to give color and emotional interest to the dry-asdust details of political economy. It is, moreover, on the very issue of “conception” that they take their own creative stand, in an effort to teach their audience how to find the poetry of life in the extinction of sex. Nonetheless, it turns out that the Malthusian and Martineauvian pedagogy of abstinence

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has a poetry of its own. In place of Shelley’s “generous impulse to act that which we imagine,” it installs another, presumably even more generous impulse to not act. For both Malthus and Martineau, abstinence reconciles Romantic and post-Romantic views of “want,” which the demands of subsistence pressure into overcoming biology by hitching it to the nominally superior impulse of love. In his essay on Malthus in The Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt observes dryly that however much “light [Malthus] has thrown” on the question of population, it remains to be seen “whether he has not also endeavoured to spread a gloom over the hopes and more sanguine speculations of man.”39 Like Shelley, Hazlitt paints the picture of a Malthus who (like Blake’s Newton) comes bearing “geometrical and arithmetical ratios in his hands,” and who advocates for the “utmost control of reason” over sexual reproduction (272). That said, what really rankles Hazlitt about Malthus is that his “principle of population” both mimics and dismisses “schemes of Utopian improvement” without offering anything in their place. He refuses, or so Hazlitt says, to specify what he means by “moral restraint, [or by its] more comprehensive title, the preventative check” (274). This kind of evasive “reasoning,” Hazlitt concludes with one of his trademark deflationary flourishes, “is enough to give one a headache” (275). Pace Hazlitt, Malthus actually does have an account of moral restraint, and while it may not reflect robust utopian ideals, neither does it quite vindicate Hazlitt’s charge that the Essay is merely “the political bible of the rich, the selfish, and the sensual.”40 If Malthus is (as his critics grumbled) obsessed with sex, he is positively rhapsodic about love, particularly when it comes after the “period of delayed gratification” inspired by self-control (296). The 1803 edition of the Essay assures readers that late marriages promote not only a decrease in birthrates but an increase in extramarital intimacy. Under the “custom of not marrying early,” young adults will be able to form partnerships based on “a more familiar and friendly intercourse” than those encouraged by “violations of chastity.”41 They will cultivate habits of innocent sociability that would, in turn, allow [t]wo young people [to] converse together intimately without its being immediately supposed that they either intended marriage or intrigue; and a much better opportunity would thus be given to both sexes of finding out kindred dispositions, and of forming those strong and lasting attachments, without which the married state is generally more productive of misery than

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of happiness. The earlier years of life would not be spent without love, though without the full gratification of it. The passion, instead of being extinguished, as it now too frequently is, by early sensuality, would only be repressed for a time, that it might afterwards burn with a brighter, purer, and steadier flame; and the happiness of the married state, instead of only affording the means of immediate indulgence, would be looked forward to as the prize of industry and virtue, and the reward of a genuine and constant attachment.42

Michael Warner describes nineteenth-century temperance movements as “expand[ing] [the] concept of desire as a limit on the will” such that, “it [becomes] possible to imagine desire no longer as self but as the paradigm case of heteronomy”—as, that is, the principle of being compelled to act by a force outside oneself.43 To exercise control over one’s body is, therefore, to become free. In his own way, Malthus too is “radicalizing the concept of volition” so that it can maneuver between the sovereign and heteronomous pressures of romantic love.44 By choosing to not gratify its impulses, the young couple knowingly enhances the intensity of its future attachment. Malthus’s fantasy of abstinence is one in which sentimental conventions—unlimited intimacy, mounting passion, long-term fidelity—let reproductive desire play peekaboo with an iron will toward controlling the population, incentivizing abstinence by making it seem like the promise of a better, fuller gratification. All this may seem to prove the grim diagnosis that “the bourgeois have made of satiety, which might be akin to bliss, a term of abuse.”45 It is equally crucial to recognize, though, that in Malthus’s culture of poverty restraint is not only a repository for displaced social energies but their richest and most feeling expression. What Benjamin Kahan says of Marianne Moore goes for Malthus, too, namely that he “reads celibacy as a sexuality,” one whose “temporal underpinnings” direct it toward a prize whose pleasures lie not in its acquisition but in its enthusiastic deferral.46 Decidedly less upbeat are Martineau’s didactic tales, which, with their epilogic lists of principles and maxims, are designed to give shape to the historical condition of scarcity by providing guidelines on how to survive it. Her tips and tricks bear out Bifo Berardi’s claim that “information” is “a creation of form, which is inoculated into the object or the event” and turns it into an occasion to produce epistemic value under conditions whose complexity has been duly sanitized.47 Strangely perhaps, the emotional equivalent of Martineau’s maxims is not (as one might imagine) certainty but

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intimacy, a sense of charged proximity or closeness not—as in Malthus—to another person but to the unreliable workings of capital. There is, moreover, a parallel so strong it ought to be called a causal connection between the intimate knowledge of political economy and the intimate knowledge of abstinence, which appears in the Illustrations not only as a contraceptive method but a structure of feeling whose socioeconomic corollary is subsistence. Capital, as Martineau explains it, is a tripartite entity made up of the following three things: “the subsistence of labourers,” “the materials, simple or compound, on which labour is employed,” and finally “the instruments of labor.”48 Labor’s instruments represent “fixed capital” while its materials, and the subsistence of workers, are “reproducible capital”—which is another way of saying that the worker’s survival is a renewable resource but not the worker himself. People, substance, tools, numbered, weighed, and divided: this is the prophecy written on Martineau’s wall, where capitalism announces itself as uninterested the reproduction of people, but wholly committed to maintaining the conditions whereby people may breed just enough to satisfy the labor market without straining the capacity of highly precarious food and wage systems. Subsistence, then, is an evidentiary term testifying to political economy’s delamination of life from living things. As for abstinence, it isolates desire from the prospect of future gratification, at least gratification in the form of sex. Like subsistence, abstinence is a seemingly renewable resource that keeps people in check and capital flowing, sustained and made sustainable through the conventions of love. In “Weal and Woe in Garveloch,” the identification of abstinence as one of capital’s composite terms is made absolutely explicit; so too is the role it plays in engineering the intimate social bonds that make poverty its own reward. “Weal and Woe” follows up Queen Victoria’s favorite of the Illustrations, “Ella of Garveloch,” with the further adventures of a handful of families in a Scottish fishing village. Like “Ella of Garveloch” “Weal and Woe” focuses on the dubious morality of bearing children one cannot afford to feed, particularly when one’s livelihood is contingent upon a capricious natural environment. It is also a love story about the thwarted passion between Ella’s brother Ronald and a widow named Katie. Both Ronald and Katie are relatively solvent: Ronald is childless and “free from all cares” associated with having a hungry family, and Katie’s excellent management of her own children sets a good example for the community (2:122). They have been infatuated with each other for years, but Ronald still won’t

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ask Katie to marry him. Why? Because “the state of society in the islands [has made] him and other thoughtful men give up the intention of marrying” (2:94). When Katie asks Ella why Ronald has not proposed to her, Ella replies that “every prudent man, like Ronald, not only prevents a large increase of mischief, but, by increasing capital, does a positive good.” The dialectic between preventing and positing, between taking away and giving, lies at the core of Ella’s subsistent theology, in which “[e]very such act of restraint tells; every such wise resolution stops one drain on the resources of society” (2:98). Ronald may feel as “he ever did” for Katie, but he also knows that “awful are the tokens of [a] pleasure” yielding only “dead children . . . shrunk under poverty like blossoms withering before the frosts, the fading of the weak, the wasting of the strong, thefts in the streets, sickness in the house, funerals by the wayside” (2:96–97). This is all too clear in a small village like Garveloch, where it is “evident that since capital increases in a slower ratio than population,” the food supply must be defended from “the more vigorous principle of increase” that is unchecked breeding. It also makes the honor of Ronald’s stopping one drain on Garveloch’s limited resources seem more prodigious than it would in a large “city . . . crowded with a half-starved population” whose members there is not even room to bury (2:103–104).49 Freud would probably call Ronald’s chastity an example of “moral masochism,” and indeed his well-known essay on “The Economic Problem of Masochism” treats the word “economic” as a shorthand for “hedonic” or, that is, “utilitarian.” For Freud, masochism seems mysteriously to defy our organismic tendency toward “the avoidance of unpleasure and the obtaining of pleasure.”50 His essay addresses the vexed question of why some people enjoy unpleasure, even for reasons that appear to be “loosened” from any connection with sexuality. In other words, it may make psychoanalytic sense to enjoy being “gagged, bound, painfully beaten, whipped” and so forth if we have chosen to be so, but it makes no sense actually to relish the exigencies of “impersonal forces or circumstances.” But in moral masochism, Freud concludes triumphantly, “morality becomes sexualized once more” through the experience of a heteronomous agency that (as Warner suggests) helps yoke desire to impersonal forces.51 Masochism’s unpleasure enables people like Ronald to see the demands of money, population, and food as things whose skillful handling is a source of a very specific kind of joy: the thrill of inhabiting generic narratives of romantic attachment, in this case of

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thwarted but persistent love. Martineau’s “ingenious suggestion” here is that unpleasure binds unconventional practices, like abstinence, to conventional forms, making the bizarre conditions of early industrial capitalism livable by making them seem culturally and emotionally familiar. There is no anticipation of a joyful future for those inhabiting the subsistent present; there is only the eking out of minor pleasures telepathically, above all the pleasure of being aware of one’s own desire being held at a distance.52 As for Warner’s description of temperance as a kind of queerness, Ronald fits this bill, too, especially if we consider queerness less a sexual than an aesthetic mode that “contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity.”53 In the case of Katie and Ronald, abstinence serves as an educated form of desire that gives sex an active and anticipatory relation to time, in particular the time of pseudo-utopia. “As society advances,” Martineau argues, the “preventative check” of celibacy and the “positive checks” of unruly independent contractors like starvation, disease, war, and (spontaneous or deliberate) abortion trade places; the former becomes more and the latter “less powerful,” until “positive checks [are] wholly superseded by the preventive check” and “society . . . attain[s] its ultimate aim—the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (2:140). Martineau’s prophecy is a cheery one even if it insists on deprivation and denial in the present tense, happily imagining a more just world in which the mild check of abstinence has at last done its work. Lest we be under any illusions, however, this world is still one where the category of “the greatest” is defined in superlative relation to those who do not have much, even if there are fewer of them. The goal of Martineauvian utility, moreover, is to spread happiness by enlarging wealth without questioning the definition or value of wealth itself. In contrast to Romanticism’s limited utopians, Martineau refuses to include material loss in her vision of ultimate plenitude, even as the maximalist principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” is haunted by the unnamed figure of those left out from the bloated calculus of “the greatest.” Hers is a political economy that seeks only a gradual expansion of the number of people enjoying capitalism’s fruits, and for which progress means simply, to invert Martineau’s formula in the way it begs to be inverted, the least suffering for the least number, as opposed to an equal distribution of suffering among us all. Compare “the poor are always with us,” a popular misquotation of Matthew 26:11 (and Mark 14:7 and John 12:8) that Martineau echoes in her “Cousin Marshall,” where an authorial stand-in named Miss Burke insists that “there

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must always be poor in every society,” however advanced (3:30). To say that the poor are always with us is to constitute an exclusion in the guise of fostering unity, for like “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” this phrase, too, conjures the collateral damages of inequality by dint of grammatical implicature: “The poor” suggests that “us” designates the category of the not-poor only a bit more forcefully than “the greatest number” crows over those whose lot is to be the least. To be fair, what Jesus actually says is considerably more ambiguous about the separation of us from them. “The poor,” he notes, “you will always have with you, but you will not always have me,” a chiastic pronouncement that identifies Jesus with the poor while underlining the spiritual poverty of the addressees—“you”—whose sociability is purely self-reflexive. Under capitalism, however, the poor are not us but near us, at least as Martineau sees things. This proximity becomes her guiding formal principle, which strives to represent nearness through “concern,” a psychological pose that has its origins in tactility. Something that concerns us touches us, belongs to us insofar as we are contiguous to it. It is a mental attitude that shapes our relation to others, letting them come close while also allowing us to keep our distance from them. It is also an affect that simultaneously generates interest and detachment, allowing us to occupy a position that is morally sound while ethically ambiguous; to put it a bit differently, concern does not tell you what to do, it simply enjoins you to keep maintaining thoughtful involvement in other people’s plights. Finally, concern is a medium, a means of reaching out, creating distance, and getting purchase on the obscure object of exotic suffering, particularly when that suffering is the sort of low-level, constant deprivation often referred to as grinding poverty. Not for nothing does the Victorian sage Frederic William Farrar point out, in his best-selling Life of Christ, that when “Jesus chose voluntarily” to be poor, he did not opt for “an absorbing, degrading, grinding poverty, which is always rare, and almost always remediable, but that commonest lot of honest poverty, which . . . can provide with ease for all the necessaries of a simple life.”54 As Farrar’s distinction between “honest” and degrading but “remediable” poverty implies, to be ground down by want is not only unfortunate, it is also fraudulent.55 The uncertainty hovering around want, which (again) suggests both real need and the more elective inclinations of desire, fuels the familiar suspicion that those whose poverty is extreme in some sense choose not to have it remedied or, as the case may be, remediated. To remediate poverty is

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both to turn it into a more stand-up, less oppressive version of itself and to work on it by different means than those we might apply to the Christ-like simple life. For Martineau, concern volunteers itself as the appropriate medium through which to approach those lives of unquiet desperation that have been and are yet pulverized by want; this in contrast to the spiritual exercise recommended by Farrar, a practice of identification through which we come to align ourselves with Christ by mimicking his identification with poverty, though not with the less abstract, more repugnant object of the poor themselves. But perhaps this “identification,” if it is to be successful, “can’t in any straightforward way mean imagining yourself in the position of the person with whom you are identifying,” since once we try to see through eyes that are not ours “we are brought to an intense awareness of [mutual] difference.”56 Bruce Robbins addresses the challenge of identifying with poverty by describing a new kind of aesthetic experience he calls “the sweatshop sublime,” an offshoot of that late-breaking edition of political economy known as neoliberal globalization. Although it finds an ancestor in Robinson Crusoe’s meditation upon “the strange multitude of little things necessary in the providing, producing, curing, dressing, making and finishing . . . one article of bread,” the sweatshop sublime has for its subject not the self-avowedly self-determining homo economicus of eighteenth-century capitalism, but the passive beneficiary of global systems capable of picturing neither those systems nor her relation to them clearly.57 Robbins’s case in point is drawn from a scene in David Lodge’s 1988 novel Nice Work, in which a professor of nineteenth-century literature gazes down out the window of an airplane to visualize, somewhere far below, a housewife turning on her electric teakettle. The housewife is unaware of, or just not thinking about, everything that has gone into the making of her morning cup of tea, from the building of the power station that gives her electricity to the mining of the ore lining the kettle to the kettle’s marketing, pricing, distribution, to “all the myriad people and agencies concerned in its production and circulation.” There’s that word again, “concerned”; for Lodge as for Martineau it signals an imaginative practice that would allow us to conceive or at least pretend to conceive of “a world economic system of notoriously inconceivable magnitude.”58 Like Nice Work, the first volume of the Illustrations begins by “play[ing] up and down the scales of the immensely large and infinitesimally small,” turning the very idea of scale into an aesthetic strategy for soothing the nagging sense

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that we ought to pay more attention to where things come from, and from the logic of unequal want that puts them in our hands: [I]f we were to dedicate [the Illustrations] to all whom it may concern, it would be the same thing as appealing to the total population of the empire . . . Is there any one breathing to whom it is of no concern whether the production of food and clothing and the million articles of human consumption goes on or ceases? whether that production is proportioned to those who live? whether all obtain a fair proportion? whether the crimes of oppression and excess on the one hand, and violence and theft on the other, are encouraged or checked by the mode of distribution? Is there any one living to whom it matters not whether the improvement of the temporal condition of the race shall go on, or whether it shall relapse into barbarism? whether the supports of life, the comforts of home, and the pleasures of society, shall become more scanty or more abundant? whether there shall be increased facilities for the attainment of intellectual good, or whether the old times of slavery and hardship shall return? Is any one indifferent whether famine stalks through the land, laying low the helpless and humbling the proud; or whether, by a wise policy, the nations of the earth benefit one another, and secure peace and abundance at home by an exchange of advantages abroad? Is there any one living, in short, to whom it matters not whether the aggregate of human life is cheerful and virtuous or mournful and depraved? (1:xv–xvi)

Robbins’s sweatshop sublime evokes Kant alongside other examples of trying to conceive the inconceivable. Certainly Martineau’s vision of political economy, like Kant’s of nature, involves the imagination of “a system [that exists] in accordance with laws the principle of which we do not encounter anywhere in our entire faculty of understanding.”59 The question is how to wrap our minds around the planetary polysyndeton of food and clothing and millions of articles of human consumption. Whom do we picture when we think of “the total population of the empire”: of “those who live,” or “the race,” or “the helpless” or “the proud,” or “the nations of the earth”? Notice that Martineau’s use of “we” in the first sentence is nosistic: it is as though in trying to imagine herself into the plural subject of “population,” or of everyone alive, she ultimately falls back into the reinvigorated, even pompous sense of self Kant says is afforded by an encounter with sublimity. That “we” is rigged tight, and it passes through the tidal waves of people and things to answer the essential question the passage poses: “Is there any one living”

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who cares about the future of the world? There is, and her name is “we.” This is not a sublime that arises from the pressure of too many numbers, as in Kant’s mathematical sublime, but from the far more literal pressure of too many people involved in a number of fragile interdependent procedures. Having gazed into the maw of industry and lived to tell the tale, it is up to Martineau to explain the mechanism by which the whole thing moves and operates. That mechanism turns out to be supply and demand, which Smith famously anthropomorphizes as an invisible hand. Martineau comes back repeatedly to the invisible hand, an image not out of place in Kant’s metaphysics. For Kant, nature operates through an unseen principle, but we can only speculate on what that principle might be by positing an analogy between the natural world and something made by human skill. Using artifacts and the people who make them as aides à penser is, as Jacques Rancière notes, a well-established and important trope in the history of Western philosophy. From Plato to Heidegger, figures of human industry pop up to illustrate difficult concepts concerning unworldly or noumenal realities. There is Plato’s shoemaker, one of the four or five kinds of people needed in an ideal republic; there is the image of peasant shoes Heidegger borrows from Van Gogh to discuss the origin of the work of art. What happens when human artifacts cease to be analogies for philosophical inquiry and become, simply, its stock in trade? Does the philosophy of political economy need to have a different attitude toward the shoemakers, shoes, and all those other “million articles of human consumption” than, say, the philosophy of the beautiful and the just? How might the philosophical treatment of labor and its products be different in a work of literary fiction, ostensibly freed from the constraints of rigorous argumentation and bound to another kind of constraint, namely the injunction to delight as well as instruct, to be as Martineau puts it “effectual as well as . . . popular” (1:xiii)? As we look at the vast number of things gathered into Martineau’s vision of political economy, they might seem to congregate into what Deleuze and Guattari famously call an assemblage—a mesh, crunch, or jam of variously aesthetic, machinic, informatic, and formal effects.60 When assemblages migrate into literature, they speak in a very specific voice or, rather, there is a very specific kind of voice which gives literary life to the assemblage. That voice is free indirect discourse, which for Deleuze and Guattari has an “exemplary value” when it comes to articulating “all the voices present within

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a single voice,” perhaps the total population of the empire present within the persona of the concerned citizen. With free indirect discourse “there are no clear, distinctive contours,” no “insertion[s] of variously individuated statements, or an interlocking of different subjects of enunciation,” but assignations of individuality and their “shifting distributions within” writing that represents human thought and speech.61 Both Frances Ferguson and D.A. Miller, meanwhile, have argued that it is Jane Austen who first makes it possible to see free indirect discourse as a “third term between character and narration” that “gives a virtuoso performance . . . [of its] detachment from character,” or from character’s psychological and subjective investments.62 Detachment is what enables the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”—to serve not only as the opinion of Mrs. Bennett and not only as an article of universal credence, but a belief shared by a particular social milieu at a particular historical moment.63 It is also a claim ratified by the novel’s plot, so that even the most devout rereader of Austen’s novels will remain unsure exactly how this statement is to be taken: as an ironic comment on the marriage market? As a hypothesis the novel can and does prove? As an elegy for the lost possibility of a world where not everyone is forced into marriage (or into heterosexuality)?64 This lack of certainty is not, however, the same thing as the productive confusion and radical disjuncture of voice from identity yielded, ostensibly, by the assemblage. Reading Austen beside A Thousand Plateaus, Gregory Flaxman finds that what Austenian free indirect discourse “gives up in the way of pronouns it takes back in the form of judgment: the effects may be ironic, sympathetic, subtle, and complex, but we would almost never call them morally vague.” The novel’s use of free indirect discourse may therefore “be said to consist [of ] relinquishing the narrative voice in favor of so many other voices . . . only in order to return the metaphysical-moral subject to the stage that much more certainly.”65 That subject may not be coincident with a particular character, but it is still capable of vocalizing a judgment to which a character, including the narrator, might be attached. Such judgments include predictions of things which may or may not come to pass, as when Emma, contemplating its heroine’s anxiety that her beloved Mr. Knightley may have fallen for her friend Harriet Smith, warns that “[i]f all took place that might take place among the circle of her friends, Hartfield must be comparatively deserted;

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and she left to cheer her father with the spirits only of ruined happiness.”66 Somewhere between Austen and A Thousand Plateaus lies Martineau’s own use of free indirect discourse, along with the spirits of ruined happiness by which it is enlivened. In the Illustrations, free indirect discourse turns out to be the voice of a third term between character and narration called political economy, or even just capitalism. This voice is not so much omniscient as principled—that is, it doesn’t know the thoughts of characters but rather the most likely way in which economic laws of profit and loss, supply and demand, probability and possibility will play out in their lives. It is a voice that, like Austen’s, occasionally shifts into judgment in the mode of mockery or disdain, but it hews closely enough to the mundane and depressing details of Martineau’s characters’ lives to suggest that it has concern for their plight or, to sound a more sinister note, that it concerns itself with them. In “Weal and Woe in Garveloch,” political economy drops in to address the probable fate of Dan and Noreen, a profligate Irish couple representative of those “quarrellers” who “go on marrying early, and raising large families” for which they provide only the guarantee of “future starvation.” They slap each other around and shake their only living baby’s “weak frame to pieces,” until Dan finally abandons Noreen to join the army. Even in the midst of the hubbub caused by the visit of recruiting officers to Garveloch, Noreen makes her complaint heard—or rather, someone or something makes it heard for her: [A]ll the bustle and noise—nothing remarkable perhaps in an English city, but very astonishing in Garveloch—could not call off attention from a woman’s rage, or drown the screams of a woman’s scolding voice. The vixen was Noreen; and if ever a vixen had an excuse for her violence, it was she at this moment; for Dan, the husband for whom she had, as she declared, left the beautifullest home of the beautifullest country in the world—Dan, whom she had defended through thick and thin, for having “kilt” her and “murthered” her “babbies,”—Dan, who had said so often that a man needed nothing in life more than a cabin and a potato-ground, and an “iligant” wife, had enlisted, and was going to leave her and her last remaining child to starve. Had not he a cabin? she wanted to know; and had not he a potato-ground, as good as any at Rathmullin? and had not he called her his “iligant Noreen” before the fancy came across him to break her heart? (2:127–128)

Most of the speech being reported here belongs to Noreen. When Noreen speaks, the Irishisms of “muthered,” “babbies,” and “iligant” quarantine

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her inside Martineau’s scare quotes, and twice the “violence” of her accusations is ascribed more or less directly to her, through the phrases “as she declared” and “she wanted to know.” Nonetheless, by the time we get to the half-factual, half-hypothetical claim that Dan is “going to leave her and her last remaining child to starve,” the attributive pull of “as she declared” is considerably diluted. As for “she wanted to know,” it plainly has its hooks in the three questions with which the passage closes. In the sentence that begins “Dan, who had said so often,” Noreen comes through clearly in the word “iligant,” ostensibly the Irish pronunciation of “elegant.” Yet the intrusive marking of Noreen’s accented voice here, and the quotation marks around it, suggest that contrary to what we might assume, the specter of her and her child’s death is cordoned off from her perspective even as it is obviously something she herself fears. The conviction that Noreen and her child will die does not seem to belong to the narrator either; she remains skeptical of everything about Noreen, including her pronunciation. Furthermore, even though “Weal and Woe” closes by describing the fates of all the story’s main characters, it leaves Dan and Noreen out of the bargain. Someone knows that Noreen and the “babbie” are doomed—but who is it? I would argue that it is political economy, to whom this story or “illustration” is said ultimately to belong. Political economy pulls into the text information it has from the world of its own laws, principles, and systems, a world that hangs over around the plot like a semitransparent cloud of smog. Its tone, like that briefly assumed by Emma to describe Emma’s imagined exile at Hartfield, is a free-floating hum of impending catastrophe. The technique is similarly in effect in “A Manchester Strike.” Here, the young people of Manchester decide that, as long as they are striking and don’t have jobs to go to every day, they should take advantage of the holiday and get married: They looked up at the clouds, and hoped the rain would not make the parson cheat them. They were going to be married. Several had begun to think of this some time before (as lads and lasses that work together in factories are wont to do); and this seemed the very time, when they had a holiday they did not know what to do with, and were sure, they believed, of ten shillings a week as long as the turn-out should last. So, amid the warning looks of elderly friends, and the remonstrances of parents who justly thought this the worst possible time to take new burdens upon them, several thoughtless young couples went laughing through the rain to the altar, and snapped their fingers at

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the clergyman behind his back because his careful enquiries brought to light no cause why the solemnization of matrimony should not proceed. (5:59–60)

Harry Shaw has written of the literary uses of vernacular speech as “filter[ing] concrete examples of character’s . . . speech through a medley of reportorial forms” including “language approaching free indirect discourse.” “This mixture of modes” produces “a voice for the content of a character’s thoughts” discrete from the voice of the character herself. It is a version of free indirect style shaded by local color, and therefore lacking in some of the graceful weightlessness so apparent in Austen’s novels. Shaw finds such a “culturally specific vernacular language” most characteristically on display in the historical romances of Walter Scott, who moves in and out of dialect whenever it suits his purposes.67 In this passage, the most pertinent vernacular is the lingo of the church, the institution which undertakes the doomed “solemnization of marriage.” These words anchor the passage’s considerable irony. Insofar as they belong not to a character but rather to the voice of ecclesiastical authority and bureaucracy, they participate in the effort of Martineau’s free indirect style to draw out the dark undertones of this superficially happy occasion. The marriages of the poor are “solemn” in three senses: official, important, and ominous. What solemnizes marriage—what makes it so bleak—is the chain of events that will unfold after it has taken place, namely the endless breeding, and starving, and going on the dole that characterize the lives of factory “lads and lasses.” Thus while the church owns the language of marriage’s solemnization, the knowing twist on those words comes courtesy of political economy, which cannot resist commenting on what it believes to be the inevitability of poor people’s reproductive indiscretion and doom. Like the invisible hand, or the principle of increase, or even just political economy, the theory of free indirect discourse Miller and others have propounded implicitly establishes free indirect discourse itself as an intentional agent. It does or wants this or that, it keeps and tells secrets, it alternately parrots, undermines, and endorses the views of characters, narrators, and readers while maintaining a subtle distance from their perspectives. This does not mean, however, that free indirect style is or resembles a person, any more than the invisible hand is intended as a synecdoche of some human individual or corporation. It has, as Miller writes, “negation as [its] prime mover”—that is, it has had its relationship to some specific consciousness, like the consciousness of an author or character, “voided,” has become an

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autonomous actor with no obligation to represent any other figure’s thoughts or opinions accurately or transparently.68 And yet, when all is said and done, free indirect discourse is a responsible commentator: we have to work to understand what it is telling us, but once we do we can take it at its word. This is precisely how Martineau feels about political economy, whose own style of detachment she writes into her stories. The trick, however, is that political economy is constitutively irresponsible, and can be trusted only insofar as it confesses its own unreliability. Markets will go up, markets will go down; supplies will increase, and supplies will decrease; there will be boom and bust, and then, as Martineau repeatedly insists, there’s the unknown variables to worry about, things like war and natural disasters and riots and strikes, regime changes and technological breakthroughs. For Deleuze and Guattari, this sort of unpredictability is, again, a positive characteristic, for it points toward the “redundancy” inherent in language, whose purpose is not to convey information but to repeat itself and confuse its users. Unfortunately, it is not so easy to view confusion as charged with liberatory or subversive potential when it comes to an economic regime that thrives on the uncertainties of the marketplace, and on the redundancy of another kind of resource: people. In the Illustrations, the commitment to irony and obliquity apparent in free indirect discourse matches the unregulated structures of industrial capitalism note for note. It vocalizes the lawlessness of political economy and the impending catastrophes that hover over all Martineau’s characters, driving them onward to “disaster and death.” Put in slightly different terms, it is through free indirect discourse that political economy becomes “immanent to language,” so that whenever those characters speak they confess their own redundancy, their own superfluity to the macroscopic processes carelessly deciding their future.69 The aesthetic achievement of Martineau’s free indirect discourse, then, is that it conveys the superfluousness of people in tandem with the scarcity of the resources they need to live. This is a unique deployment of free indirect discourse that essentially teaches the same lessons as the “summary of principles illustrated” at the end of the Illustrations, only in a more abstracted and diffuse manner. These principles are a list of best-guess maxims like “the increase of populations is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence,” or “since successive portions of capital yield a less and less return, and the human species produce at a constantly accelerated rate, there is a perpetual tendency in population to press upon the means of subsistence,” or

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The condition of labourers may be best improved,— 1st. By inventions and discoveries which create capital. 2nd. By husbanding instead of wasting capital:—for instance by making savings instead of supporting strikes. 3rd. BY ADJUSTING THE PROPORTION OF POPULATION TO CAPITAL. (3:136)

Note Martineau’s capitalization of the final principle, as the voice of political economy lowers itself into character by trying to shout down the competing voice of trade unions and the collective persona of laborers on strike. Here the free indirect discourse of capitalism and its laws stumbles into what Miller calls the “stylistic mishap” of “mere omniscient narration,” the shrilly declarative near-fragment underlining as truth something free indirect style would let rest as likelihood. Miller is referring to the repetition of the phrase “Emma could not forgive her” that closes the second and opens the third chapter in Volume II of Emma, and which reveals the melancholy longing of free indirect discourse “to possess the perfection of a Person,” to have character and not simply a voice.70 That the effort to attach voice to character would fail in this pedagogical instance of omniscient narration suggests, in Martineau’s case, that when political economy gets too attached to people—so attached that it fantasizes about becoming one of them—it ends up telling them outright things it is more effective for them to learn from experience, including the experience of reading. The question remains whether the literature of political economy ever recognizes what John Clare calls “the voice of a poor man” as a formal device on par with free indirect discourse.71 Clare is known as a poet, although he did produce quite a bit of prose. He is best known, however, because of his relatively long-standing affiliation with so-called green Romanticism, which Jonathan Bate identifies with a “Wordsworthian ecology [that] Morris shared with [John] Ruskin.”72 To hear Clare tell it, however, he is “many degrees lower in the Thermometer [of ] distress” than Morris and Ruskin. His voice is distinct from theirs above all in its refusal both of the detached persona of free indirect discourse and of the hedonic aspirations of conventional Victorian utopianism. It “speak[s] from experience and not hearsay or hopes,” and what it talks about is neither subsistence nor the dream of not having to work but loss in a register consistent with if importantly distinct from that of Rcsm.73 Clare’s short prose piece “Journey Out of Essex”—written as he

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traveled from Essex, where he had escaped from a lunatic asylum, back to his home in Northborough—tracks this loss across ecological and intimate contexts. Besides getting out of the “mad house,” the purpose of Clare’s journey was to return to the love of his life, Mary Joyce. Joyce had died in a house fire three years earlier, although Clare remembers an “old story of her being dead six years ago,” a story he calls a bunch of “blarney having seen her [himself ] about a twelvemonth ago alive and well and young as ever.”74 As he makes his ninety-mile walk from High Beach to Helpston, he sings to himself “the air of highland Mary,” an old tune to which Robert Burns had set some new words. “Highland Mary,” which begins with a series of reminiscences about kissing Mary underneath birch and hawthorn trees in bloom, ends on a very different note than Clare’s confident call of “blarney”: Wi’ mony a vow and locked embrace Our parting was fu’ tender; And, pledging aft to meet again, We tore oursels asunder; But, O, fell Death’s untimely frost, That nipt my flower sae early! Now green’s the sod, and cauld’s the clay, That wraps my Highland Mary! O pale, pale now, those rosy lips I aft hae kissed sae fondly; And closed for aye the sparkling glance That dwelt on me sae kindly; And mouldering now in silent dust That heart that lo’ed me dearly! But still within my bosom’s core Shall live my Highland Mary.75

The truth of Burns’s song is the blarney Clare tries to bury, namely that Mary is dead and gone. The abstinent intimacy invoked in the poem’s third stanza, where Mary and the speaker tear themselves asunder, is met with what political economy insists abstinence keeps at bay: death waits for the poor whether they get married too early or not, whether they calibrate their proportion of population to capital or else make more babies than they can count. The culprit here is “frost,” a familiar metonym for death

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whose conventionality reveals a sad, straightforward truth, that people who are poor are more vulnerable to dying when it gets cold. Like Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal” or “She dwelt among th’untrodden ways,” “Highland Mary” attempts to recuperate the beloved’s death by blending her body and spirit irrevocably with the natural world, for just as Lucy is “rolled round in earth’s diurnal course/With rocks and stones and trees,” so too do Mary’s “rosy lips” return to the green sod in which roses grow.76 Burns wrote “Highland Mary” in 1792 and Wordsworth his Lucy poems between 1798 and 1801, but for Clare, on the lam in 1841, there is no longer any elegiac consolation to be derived from a landscape that has been changed utterly by the slicing and dicing and mapping and tracking of what Iain Sinclair calls enclosure’s “green-belt real estate.”77 When Clare longs for Mary all he can do is “press the common air,” which remains (for now) free and available to all. As Clare’s “Journey Out of Essex” implies, it is under these conditions of personal and ecosystemic calamity that the poor man finds himself “homeless at home and half gratified to feel that [he] can be happy any where.”78 It is also where he discovers that the loss of his own Mary is totally irremediable: “July 24th 1841 Returned home out of Essex and found no Mary— her and her family are as nothing to me now though she herself was once the dearest of all—and how can I forget[.]” This passage, which closes the “Journey,” ends in the middle of a sentence, without a period or any other punctuation, inviting us to ask what, precisely, Clare doubts he can forget. Unlike Burns, Clare does not find his Mary living still within his bosom’s core, nor can he remember her lips, her glance, her heart, and so on. She is memorialized only as nothing, or as the fact of nothing where there was once something superlative to all else. By the end of Clare’s “Journey,” then, both Clare and Mary resemble Marty South in Hardy’s The Woodlanders, “scarcely perceptible,” “effaced,” “abstract” to the point of “touch[ing] sublimity” because they have been forsaken by a world that is almost already gone, disappearing under the roads, tunnels, and bridges that bury the promise of both “home and Heaven.”79 Since Clare has a wife named Patty, and since they have nine children, one of whom comes with his mother to track his father down on the public road, the loss of Mary Joyce (who died unmarried) cannot be converted into an indirect expression of the virtues of abstinence. Nine children was far more than Clare could afford, but more to the point his insistence on characterizing Mary as his first wife suggests at once a tragicomic undermining

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and a wretchedly first-hand experience of the laws of population control. Like Katie and Ronald, Mary and John never married. John and Patty, however, went on to reproduce in precisely the way with which Martineau takes issue—to put it colloquially, like rabbits. The story of John Clare thus demonstrates what the Illustrations of Political Economy are at pains to disguise, namely that under the conditions of industrial capitalism there is no such thing as a purposive loss. For Clare, abstinence is death and marriage is madness, the loss, as he will put it, of one’s “self identity.” Another prose fragment, also from 1841 and fittingly titled “Self-Identity,” warns “forget thyself and the world will willingly forget thee until thou art nothing but a living dead man dwelling among shadows and falshood [sic].”80 In “Journey Out of Essex,” it becomes clear that the forgetting of what Clare cannot forget about Mary is an extension of this same process of self-loss, as is Clare’s experience of being misrecognized along the public road as a “broken down haymaker,” or of misrecognizing his wife Patty as a strange woman “either drunk or mad.” The voice of this poor man is not the confident polyphony of free indirect discourse but it does work on multiple registers, moving hauntingly between social and economic history, personal tragedy, and mental breakdown. What enclosure destroys, at least for Clare, is the possibility of being an alive and enlivened man rather than a living dead one, for whom there is no grey zone of subsistent existence but only an unendurable dwelling in ruined circumstances. Where does this leave utopia, limited? I have already remarked upon Clare’s status as Romanticism’s first self-conscious ecologist, whose sensuous immersion in the local, even at the point of its obsolescence, chimes with the injunction toward abbreviated desires and acts of small, inhibited impact. Politicized localism—the local food movement, for example, or Clare’s poetic taxonomies of birds and beasts under threat from mining and logging—is a mode of resistance whose emphases are as much temporal as they are geographic. The point is to do something that capitalism seems to have made impossible, and in some cases tries to forbid: eat what grows nearby, mourn the lives of species past. In the last few pages of this chapter, I want to return to Berardi’s idea of the soul, which is also something that ought not to exist within capitalism. Berardi defines the soul as a kind of rhythmic interface between a person and the world, one that lends the former an ability to desynchronize from tyrannical economic and psychological regimes. This sort of soul is an embodied mental mechanism that takes our thoughts

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off in unexpected directions “at uncertain times/and at uncertain points,” treating the physical world as a platform for coordinating the hardware of the body with the software of the imagination.81 When we talk about the soul in Romanticism, we are talking about psyche or, rather, Psyche, as in Keats’s great ode of 1819. “Commentators have expended a great deal of effort making an allegorical identification of Psyche”: for Walter Jackson Bate, she is “the mind rescued by love”; for Harold Bloom, the “human-soul-inlove”; for Paul Fry, “the simple consciousness of Being.”82 I prefer Berardi’s plain definition of psykhe as “soul,” which is what it meant for the Ancient Greeks. The “Ode to Psyche” represents what Helen Vendler characterizes as a rejection of the more pictographic impulse behind the earlier “Ode on Indolence,” relinquishing pastoral for a more speculative treatment of myth as a “movement” away from “art [as] artifact.” On this account, trying to come up with an art without artifacts is also an assertion of “the constructive activity of the mind” in the face of “loss,” since aesthetic concepts, in contrast to aesthetic objects, are seemingly invulnerable to injury or decay.83 Thus, we might argue, the “Ode to Psyche” opens with a promise to be redundant in a manner distinct from the human redundancies of commercial manufacture. First, the poet asks the goddess’s pardon for whispering echoes of “secrets . . . /Even into [her] own soft-conchèd ear.”84 Then, he proceeds through a series of bizarre and discomfiting repetitions, from the wincingly saccharine “O happy happy dove,” to the near-identical reprise of lines 30–35 in lines 44–49, to the image of the “fane” to Psyche the poet builds in his mind to the “rosy sanctuary” he builds in his brain. There is also the Ode’s major redundancy, namely the redundancy of the poem itself: if the whole thing already exists so fully in the poet’s mind, why write it down in words at all? The poem confronts loss by distributing excess as a safeguard against it and, more crucially, by playing up the fact that its excesses are purely linguistic and therefore, one might say, biodegradable. Keats’s favored means of heightening the poem’s garrulity is the hyphenate—“soft-conchèd,” “cool-rooted,” “fragrant-eyed,” “silver-white,” “calm-breathing,” and “eyedawn” all in the first stanza alone—each instance of which jiggles the poem’s iambs until they bounce between pentameter, trimeter, and dimeter lines. This metrical variety in turn prepares the reader for the ode’s climatic utterance, in which the poet declares that his brain’s aforementioned rosy sanctuary will be dressed with “buds, and bells, and stars without a name,/With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,/Who breeding flowers, will never

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breed the same” (61–63). Metrical variety becomes horticultural variety of an impossible order, as Fancy prepares for Psyche a garden that is always made new. Perhaps there is a sinister implication here, a hint at the forced hyperproductivity of the industrial marketplace, always flooding itself with more and more brand-new, state-of-the-art, latest-model goods. But coeval with this compulsory, accelerated newness is also a compulsory, accelerated loss, for if you particularly like the latest of Fancy’s flowers, too bad: you’ll never see that flower again. Thus for Keats “aestheticism and asceticism become nearly indistinguishable, in meaning as well as sound,” and “art [itself ] . . . a cheat” through which Fancy’s buds, bells, and stars are able to fulfill the impossible wish Keats reported to Fanny Brawne, that he and she might be “butterflies and liv[e] but three summer days” in an elongated but terminal instant of coordinated bliss.85 We can read Keats’s fantasy of abbreviated life as a desire for ecstasy all the more rapturous for being condensed into a tight temporal frame, but we can also read it as the expression of an eroticized minimalism. The difference between Fancy’s garden and capitalism’s marketplace is that consumer goods, unlike flowers, remain on earth long after their technological obsolescence, or after they have gone out of style; flowers just decay. In the real world, they decay and are expected to come back again; in the poet’s mind, they are subject to a perpetual extinction and so, paradoxically, are always coming back to life in a different form. At a historical moment just beginning to grapple with Georges Cuvier’s establishment of extinction as a biological fact, the Ode imagines a world where regular “catastrophic” annihilations of whole species are accompanied by the proliferation of new ones.86 It is a bid less for an art that is “competitive with nature” than for a poetry that creates itself in the image of an eccentric sustainability.87 The poetry of Fancy makes sure to clean up after itself, to dispose completely of what it has put on the earth, and yet it also contributes unnecessary, superfluous addenda to the external world in the shape of that world’s imaginative re-presentation. “Ode to Psyche” experiments, as Berardi says the soul does, “with autonomous forms of production based on high-tech/low-energy models,” in this case the high-tech/low-energy model called poetry.88 Keats’s poem does not try to transcend the world’s materiality but to temper the harm done to it by maximizing the inventiveness of the mind. It does not triumph over loss so much as rethink plenitude as a condition that participates in extinction’s irreparability:

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O latest-born and loveliest vision far Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy! Fairer than Phoebe’s sapphire-region’d star, Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky; Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none, Nor altar heap’d with flowers; Nor Virgin-choir to make delicious moan Upon the midnight hours; No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet From chain-swung censer teeming; No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming. (24–35)

In the introduction to his 1994 edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Morton Paley explains the book’s poor performance among Romantic readers by suggesting that perhaps Shelley’s contemporaries were just not ready for such “threatening subject matter” as the extinction of the human race. We modern readers, by contrast, are said to comprise a “reading public [better] acquainted with imagining Lastness,” primarily on account of our “experience of living with the Bomb.”89 Twenty-odd years later, it is not the threat of nuclear war but the fact of clear and present ecological catastrophe that structures our contemporary discourse of being Last. Keats’s poem, with its sustained attention to all manner of vanishings, goes some way toward upsetting Paley’s logic, in which contemporary anxieties illuminate the occluded prophecies of the past. Extinction, the “Ode” says, is omnipresent, which does not make it any less frightening. As history moves forward—and Keats, as both Hyperion poems also suggest, does indeed seem to have a relatively linear view of history—we learn or ought to learn how to procure replacements for the things we have lost without censoring the irremediable tragedy of those losses themselves. Whether we like it or not, the Ode tends to treat all losses as more or less equivalent. The lines quoted above invite us to assume that the absence of the temple and the altar is of the same order as the absence of voices, lutes, pipes, and poets, even as the poet’s vocabulary moves up and down the ladder of large and small, material and immaterial things. Yes, a temple and an altar and a choir of virgins are certainly things one can lose, as one loses Troy or the Great Library of Alexandria; and no, it is not exactly clear how one loses someone else’s voice, and besides voices,

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unlike temples, are not built to last. Meanwhile, a thing like a grove is lost by being mowed down, or burnt up, or razed—processes that seem quite distinct from the simple progress of centuries that takes us from the age of Apuleius to the age of Keats, what Hazlitt called the “age of talkers” who, instead of building temples, apparently “make a moan/upon the midnight hours” (30–31).90 And yet, there is a not-so-hidden connection between the fragility of architecture, the impermanence of religious cultures, the frailty of music and art, and the evanescent facts of sense experience. “The cloud capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,/The solemn temples, the great globe itself,/Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve” because homo faber is categorically given to destroy that which he has created. This is not a post-atomic condition but, Keats implies, a perennial one, recorded in a long human story that links the dismantling of civilizations to the profanation of the earth: the “haunted forest boughs” of the ancient world are no longer haunted nor “holy,” while “the air, the water, and the fire,” so easily handled by new technologies like steam engines and spinning jennies, have been denuded of their pagan significance. Keats, who allegedly passed his medical exams on the strength of his Latin, no doubt knew that the word “paganus” means a field marked off by boundaries, not unlike the parcels of land squared off by enclosure. Of course the pagani of antiquity were not like the grids that cropped up where land held in common had been; if Keats is the poem’s resident pagan in the word’s more standard sense, he also guards another view of the earth, a word he leaves off his list of unhallowed elements (air, water, fire) and indeed out of his poem, as if to suggest that the poet himself, or at least his brain, is the poem’s new and primary figure for the terrestrial. It is difficult to remember, while caught up in the precision of Keats’s description of the fane he will build for Psyche—with its “dark-cluster’d trees” and “wild-ridgèd mountains,” its “moss-lain Dryads” being lulled to sleep “by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees”—that none of it is real (54–57). More to the point, there is no indication that building the fane will reverse the “untrodden” condition of the poet’s mind: all that will be sown there are “thoughts,” not pines, and all they shall do is “murmur in the wind,” their already muffled sound hushed as soon as it is made. The poet’s thoughts are all but lost in the hissing “midst of this wide quietness,” whose muting effects cloak brain and earth in the near-silence that accompanies the near-aftermath of slow-moving world-historical ruin.91 Yet even surrounded

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by this sibilant calm—audible too in the “dress” of the brain’s “trellis”—the brain itself may still be dressed impressively (68). Though the physical world is too exhausted from bearing the weight of temples and of the ruins they become, decorating the earth in the mind’s eye comes cheap and leaves behind only the feather-light bones of fantasy, made in the brain and going back into the ground as dust to dust. The poet’s fane and the Ode itself are lowimpact love tokens, built according to the demands of a “happy adaptation” that, as Berardi points out, need not signify acquiescence to a bad new world but a way of proliferating the forms and means of living in it.92 A window “ope” to let whatever is to come inside, the adaptive mind cradles the loss it must itself work upon, molding it into novel shapes knowing those, too, will not last. Both Keats and Berardi ask what happens when the domain that confronts the soul is not the domain of thought but of the depleted world itself, after its cache of familiar objects has been emptied out; Keats, for his part, petitions for models of the mind, the brain, and the artwork that have opened themselves up to the possibility of existing only in language, using only words as their cornerstones. That, I think, is what the poet means when he promises to leave a window in Psyche’s fane ajar “to let the warm Love in” (67). Introducing Love with a definite article (“the”) leaves the reader unsure whether the poet refers to Psyche’s husband, Cupid, the god of Love, or to a feeling that might be welcomed into a room the same way we say someone opens a window to let “the breeze” in, though presumably any non-specific breeze will do. Keats’s reader is left contemplating that tiny word, “the,” as a roadblock instead of a resting-place, a key to reading the poem and the threshold over which its interpretation trips and pauses This small definite article hints at the redundant magic of a language that can say not only the same thing in different ways, but can also say different things in the same way, creating ambiguity where it seems to offer certainty. If there is something utopian in the many gestures of limitation that structure this poem and its fane, it is in the poet’s advocacy of an art that takes up as little room, breathes as little air, and leaves as infinitesimal a material trace as it possibly can. To adapt a phrase from the contemporary poet Charles Bernstein, “The Only Utopia Is in a Now,” or, if you like, a the.93 A version of “Psyche”’s melancholy awareness of excess and lightness happily intertwined surfaces too in Keats’s early ballad “Think not of it, sweet one, so,” written in 1817 but not published until Richard Monckton Miles’s 1848 edition of the poet’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains:

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Think not of it, sweet one, so; Give it not a tear; Sigh thou mayst, and bid it go Any, any where. Do not look so sad, sweet one, Sad and fadingly: Shed one drop then—it is gone— Oh! ’twas born to die! Still so pale?—then dearest, weep; Weep! I’ll count the tears: And each one shall be a bliss For thee in after years. Brighter has it left thine eyes Than a sunny hill: And thy whispering melodies Are tenderer still. Yet, as all things mourn awhile At fleeting blisses, Let us too!—but be our dirge A dirge of kisses.94

Sounding anticipatory notes of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall,” the poem never identifies the “it” that brings a tear to the beloved’s eye. Where Hopkins’s speaker eventually solves the riddle of why Margaret grieves—“it is Margaret you mourn for”—Keats swaps out the ominous, unnamed it of his first line for the sigh of his third (“Sigh, and bid it go”) and the teardrop of his seventh and thirteenth (“Shed one drop then—it is gone—/Oh! [it was] born to die”; “Brighter has it left thine eyes/Than a sunny hill”). Not only are we not to weep over “it,” we are not to know its name either. Of course, it takes no great stretch of the imagination to suspect that here, as in “Spring and Fall,” “it” is mortality or, in stronger terms, death, “the blight man was born for.”95 Keats delivers the message more obliquely, metonymizing death with the “dirge of kisses” that at once hails and belies death’s triumph: a dirge is played at a funeral, but dead people don’t

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kiss. These kisses, along with the sigh and the teardrop that annex death’s nebulous pronoun, are intimations of partial immortality, extended into the indefinite but still not infinite time of “after years.” At once “fleeting” and robust, kisses and sighs and tears are harmless without being ineffectual, for it is these gestures, says the poet, that distinguish “us” from “all”—a claim that is neither an argument about the uniqueness of the human species compared to everything else nor about the special status of the couple, but a hint to take the smallest unit of expression or utterance as a blueprint for how to survive the future as innocuously as possible. Not a love poem, then, but a poem about how love may stimulate a “shuttling back and forth . . . between immersion in the fervent matter” of mortal feeling and a “recognition of the immobile medium” of mortal bodies: a poem, in short, about form, the operation that makes the movement between matter and medium visible as “shuttling” or a weaving together where it might otherwise look pointless or confused.96 When we think through and then past its amatory content, “Think not of it” promotes an aesthetic of “whispering melodies” that anticipates the well-known line from “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” namely “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter.”97 In the earlier poem, we are in the realm of the barely heard rather than the unheard, while seeking what is tactile and “tender” rather than hazily “sweet.” This may be because “Think not of it” is addressed to another person and “Grecian Urn” (as William Empson notoriously insists) to “a pot”: only among artifacts and not among others, perhaps, is there such a thing as absolute silence.98 The two poems are nonetheless replete with similarities, not least their treatment of love as a trope that “beckons us toward an absent fulfillment and leaves emptiness, nothingness, in its former place.”99 Instead of taking this nothingness as a lack or a loss, this book has meant to use it to shift expectations of “fulfillment” away from an acquisitive model of having it all and toward a strategic conflation of loss itself with the notion and ambition of utopia. Such expectations might then be honed into lively and livable practices of renunciation, with the same eye Keats turns toward a future “in midst of other woe,/Than ours” (47–48).

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INDEX

Notes

PROLOGUE

Epigraph: William Wordsworth, epigraph to “Ode (‘There was a time’),” better known as the Intimations Ode, in “Poems, in Two Volumes,” and Other Poems, 1800–1807, by William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). 1. Barbara Johnson, “The Last Man,” trans. Bruce Robbins, in The Other Mary Shelley, ed. Audrey Fisch, Anne Mellor, and Esther Schor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 258–266; 258. 2. The London Magazine (1826), quoted in Morton Paley, “Mary Shelley’s The Last Man: Apocalypse without Millennium,” Keats-Shelley Review 4 (Autumn 1989), 1–25; 2. 3. Johnson, 258. 4. Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, Delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain (London: T. Cadell, 1790), 49. 5. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), VI.556–572. 6. Johnson, 258. 7. For an elaboration of the virtues of constructing Romanticism in these expansive terms, see the briefs collected for “The Romantic Century: A Forum,” ed. Susan Wolfson, European Romantic Review 11.1 (2000), 1–45.

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8. See primarily Paul Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415.6867 (2002), 23, as well as Dipesh Chakrabarty’s influential “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009), 197–222. 9. For this linkage and this phrasing I am indebted to Seulghee Lee’s discussion of Afro-pessimism and its alternatives in “The Zen of Black Optimism,” paper presented at the 2014 meeting of the American Comparative Literary Society, New York University, New York, March 24, 2014. 10. “‘If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible.’” Judith Butler, quoted in Kishani Widyaratna, blog entry, October 24, 2011, VersoBooks. com. Retrieved March 24, 2014, from versobooks.com 11. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 119. 12. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013). 13. We might contrast the language of impossibility with the journal Boom’s recent cover for its “Future Issue,” whose articles are framed around questions like “What on Earth is Sustainable?” The cover features an architectural drawing of a pale gray, thin-limbed suspension bridge designed to accommodate vertical farming, gestured toward by images of vegetal walls, shrubs, and flowering trees. The copy just below the bridge divides the bottom half of the cover into two sections, with the right-hand side reading, in gray font, “What Is Is” and the left-hand side, in orange, “What Is Not Is Possible.” As a motto of sorts, these two statements obvert the rhetoric of the impossible by excavating the promise that rhymes inside of it: is possible. By holding the immanent domain of “what is” in tandem with an equally immanent category of extant but unactivated possibility, this way of describing the set of objectives called the future allows futurity itself to remain anchored by the pressures of a materially restrictive present. It is a utopian description that redefines utopia by placing it in a declarative relation to earthly limits, which the future will not transcend but exalt, and to a preference for the careful and complex measure of potential reconceived as capacity. See Boom: A Journal of California 3.4 (Winter 2013). The cover image is of the Bay Bridge Project by Taller David Dana Arquitectura. 14. Hayden White, “The Future of Utopia in History,” Historein: A Review of the Past and Other Stories 7 (2007), 11–19; 12. 15. Ibid., 12. 16. Ibid., 13. 17. Ibid., 13. 18. Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 109. 19. William Galperin, “‘Describing What Never Happened’: Jane Austen and the History of Missed Opportunities,” ELH 73.2 (Summer 2006), 355–382; Jacques Khalip, Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford, CA: Stanford University

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Press, 2009); Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 93. 20. To be clear, it is the tendency of some new formalists to regard historicist criticism as coextensive with “cultural studies; contextual critique; ideology critique; Foucauldian analysis; political, intersectional, and special-interest criticism; suspicion hermeneutics; and theory” that Levinson finds “regrettable.” I hope I don’t distort Levinson’s luminous and helpful account by assuming that any formalist methodology uneasy about historicism because it considers historicism sympathetic to politically-charged scholarship will also, by corollary, be uneasy about politically-charged scholarship. Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?,” PMLA 122.2 (March 2007), 558–569; 559. 21. See, for example, Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011), 434–72; Walter Benn Michaels, “The Beauty of a Social Problem (e.g. unemployment),” Twentieth-Century Literature 57.3 and 57.4 (Fall/Winter 2011), 309–327; and Todd Cronan, “The Aesthetic Politics of Affect,” Radical Philosophy 172 (March/April 2012), 51–3. 22. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 30. Throughout this book, and in a departure from one of the more meticulous (if not universally shared) conventions of writing about affect, I use the terms “affect,” “emotion,” and “feeling” more or less interchangeably, with an intent to lay general stress on the mutual constitution of formal operations and personal or collective somatic states. No special value accrues to “affect” because it is inchoate, and no shame is heaped on “emotion” because it is allegedly affect degraded into linear narrative. That said, for a detailed taxonomy of these terms and the reasons one might want to discriminate between them, see Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). Retrieved August 26, 2013, from journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php 23. The hidden intimacy between the discourses of affect and those of poststructuralism is wonderfully limned in Rei Terada’s Feeling in Theory: Emotion after “The Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 24. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003), 46. 25. Gregory Claeys, ed., Preface to The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), xi. 26. George Herbert, “Paradise,” in Herbert, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (New York: Penguin 2005), 7–15. 27. Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 86. 28. Herbert, 5. 29. Wordsworth, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, in “Lyrical Ballads,” and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 739–765; 739.

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30. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 1997), 41. The reference to enclosure’s “protecting wall” is taken from John Clare, “The Progress of Ryhme,” in Clare, The Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell, and Tom Paulin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 103. 31. Adorno, 41. 32. Agnes Denes, “A Manifesto,” in The Human Argument: The Writings of Agnes Denes, ed. Klaus Ottmann (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2008), 1. 33. Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 86. 34. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1840), xvii. 35. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1930), 7:118. 36. Étienne Balibar, “Citizen Subject,” in Who Comes after the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 33–57. 37. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 3:172. 38. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 259–279; 265. 39. François, 33. 40. Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, “Organism and Environment,” in Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 31–34, 34. As Lewontin and Levins explain, the slogan “Save the Environment” is utterly without meaning given this necessary relay of creativity and damage, as well as in light of the fact that “‘the’ environment,” singular, “does not exist.” 41. Bloch, 172. 42. Leigh Hunt, “Literary Notices, No. 39,” The Examiner 527 (February 1818), 75–76; 75. 43. Hunt, “Literary Notices, No. 40,” The Examiner 530 (February 1818), 121– 122; 122. 44. This book strongly disassociates itself from the work of someone like John Gray, the self-proclaimed “green conservative” whose version of what he (though not I) might call a limited utopia rests on privatizing common space, like oceans and public transportation. Gray’s goal is “to enhance the opportunities for the private accumulation of capital—itself [he says] a necessary condition of the Green virtue of social stability and the conservative virtues of harmony and independence.” As far as I can see, Gray takes the basic formula of capitalism and installs the planet as its new

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beneficiary; where capital was once to trickle down from haves to have-nots, it is now meant to flow from the haves to the earth. The appeal of this plan to corporate interests is so obvious it need not be stated. I merely wish to point out that limited utopia uses the work of art to produce concrete solutions to illimitable problems, where “concrete” means engaged in a self-compromising submission to the fragility and impoverishment of the earth’s resources. The capitalist idealization of consumer autonomy is absolutely antithetical to the ethics of loss the artwork makes visible through the simple fact of its own formal deficits. Again, my guide here is Adorno, who might, in response to Gray, resurrect this memorable dictum from Minima Moralia: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” See John Gray, “An Agenda for Green Conservatism,” in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings (New York: Anchor, 2009), 307–383; 348; and Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 43. 1. RCSM, AN INTRODUCTION

Epigraph: William Blake, Annotations to the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, in The Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), 647. 1. Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 31. 2. William Blake, “Number XV. Ruth.—A Drawing,” from A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, in The Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), 550. 3. William Wordsworth, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, in “Lyrical Ballads,” and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 740–760; 745. 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols., in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969–), 7:2:83. 5. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 757; 755. Comparing Wordsworth’s language in the Preface to the philosophical essays and novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Saree Makdisi argues that Wordsworth adopts an essentially bourgeois and sentimental perspective that attends to “emotion” primarily in the name of emotional hygiene; thus what I am characterizing as Wordsworth’s devaluation of order actually conceals his deeper, class-based commitment to disciplinary practices of “self-control.” Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 235–238. 6. Steven Goldsmith, Blake’s Agitation: Criticism and the Emotions (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 34. 7. Walter Benjamin, “Exposé of 1935,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 10.

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8. Theodor Adorno, Lecture 7, “Attempted Breakouts,” November 30, 1965, in Lectures on Negative Dialectics, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2008), 65–75; 74. 9. Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 154. For a thorough and interpretive survey of “utopian studies,” a field with which this book does not strictly identify, see the penultimate chapter in Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), 179–206. 10. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 237. 11. Ibid., 124. 12. Ernst Bloch, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988), 1–17; 3. 13. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 119. 14. Ibid. 15. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 73. 16. Ibid., 57–58. As Imre Szeman points out, Jameson seems chiefly to approve of allegory “as a mode of interpretation” when it is hitched to the category of the nation, which Jameson insistently aligns with “the political.” Although utopia is nothing if not a political concept, the allegories of limitation I explore here for the most part work outside the complex framework of Romantic nationalism. My fourth chapter, on the Irish writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is to some degree an exception. See Szeman, “Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (2001), 803–827; and Jameson’s controversial “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986), 65–88. 17. Jacques Khalip, Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 135. 18. Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism, 113. 19. Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight,” in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C Mays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1:51–52; John Keats, “To Autumn,” in Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 31–32; John Clare, “The Shepherd’s Calendar: November,” in The Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 141–142; Wordsworth, “Michael, a Pastoral,” in “Lyrical Ballads,” and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 323–325.

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20. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Penguin, 1992), 211–242; 229–230. 21. On Romanticism and infinity, see Rachel Feder, “The Poetic Limit: Mathematics, Aesthetics, and the Crisis of Infinity,” ELH 81.1 (2014), 167–195. 22. According to von Humboldt, no language has so many words in it that it could be used to express everything human beings could possibly think, for the domain of the thinkable is infinite. We can do what we can with the words that we have, and we can invent new words, but ultimately all these addenda to our linguistic toolbox will be brought up short against the endlessly expansive province of “the soul.” That said, even if language is, at best “a resting-place for [the soul’s] inner activity,” the “striving and counter-striving of the soul” with language also produces “an ever-greater refinement of language [itself ], a growing enrichment thereof in spiritual content, which [in turn] enhances the demands made of language in precisely the same measure as they are better satisfied.” Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language. On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species, ed. Michael Losonsky, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 91. 23. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 229. See also Wordsworth, “The Idiot Boy,” in Lyrical Ballads, 450. 24. Northrop Frye, The “Third-Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1969–1972, ed. Michael Dolzani (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 288. Hereafter noted in text by page numbers in parentheses. 25. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 23. 26. Frye, The “Third Book” Notebooks, 68. 27. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 755. 28. Mark Seltzer, “The Official World,” Critical Inquiry 37.4 (2011), 724–753; 727. 29. John Clare, The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 66. 30. Thom Gunn, “Saint John the Rake: Rochester’s Poetry,” in Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric, ed. Jonathan F. S. Post (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 242–256; 246; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on Political Economy,” in The Basic Political Writings, ed. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2011), 121–152, 136. 31. Marianne DeKoven’s Utopia Limited also cites Gilbert and Sullivan as an inspiration, but interprets “limited” in the corporate sense of “ltd.,” a designation that signals the commodification of the civil rights movement by postmodern art, postmodern politics, and “late-capitalist consumer culture.” See Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 321.n26.

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32. William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, Utopia, Limited, or The Flowers of Progress, in The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997), 2.559. 33. In other words, Gilbert and Sullivan show nineteenth-century imperialism to be the point of origin for what Naomi Klein will describe as “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities,” which Zara herself is trying to kickstart by plunging her island into the “interminable confusion” of poverty and disease. Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007), 6. In a more recent article on climate change, Klein voices a judgment correlate to this book’s when she writes that “at its core, [climate change] is a crisis born of overconsumption by the comparatively wealthy, which means the world’s most manic consumers are going to have to consume less.” See Klein, “The Change Within: The Obstacles We Face Are Not Just External,” The Nation, May 12, 2014. 34. Carolyn Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 333. 35. Ibid., 325. 36. Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 36. 37. See Dolzani, Introduction to The “Third-Book” Notebooks, xxviii. 38. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2004), 15. Needless to say, I disagree with Eagleton that this delusion is distinctively “Romantic,” even if I share his skepticism about the allure of a disinhibited anti-normativity. One might compare what Eagleton says here to those passages in Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future seeking to distinguish between “Utopian Imagination and Utopian Fancy,” both of which are in some sense compromised even if the latter is more obviously problematic in its endorsement of “liberal pluralism or multiculturalism.” While the Imagination is closely keyed to “an absolute formalism, in which content emerges itself from the form and is a projection of it,” Fancy is mostly subservient to the seductions of ideological content put in place as mere “decoration.” We are tempted, Jameson implies, to fetishize “the absolute” in a manner that ultimately betrays the dialectical commitments that ought to be embedded in the idea of utopia, much in the same way as we are tempted toward the promise of sublimity held out by the vocalization of what Eagleton calls a “prejudice against norms.” Both temptations, for both writers, are hallmarks of a “postmodern” consciousness that is not only (in Eagleton’s words) “politically catastrophic” but that also actually mirrors the commitment to boundlessness that drives postmodernism’s economic expression in neoliberalism. See Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: On The Desire for Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 212. 39. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 1.

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40. Harold Bloom, ed., “The Internalization of Quest Romance,” in Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1970), 3–23. 41. David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 117. 42. Shelley’s Spenserian stanzas and Scott’s Ivanhoe are two of the examples of Romantic-era romance offered by William St. Clair in his extraordinarily well-researched The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. In emphasizing the roles played by the ballad tradition and the so-called oriental tale on long poems like Southey’s Thalaba and Joan of Arc, Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Giaour, and The Bride of Abydos, and Thomas Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming, St. Clair adheres to the thematic reading of romance from which this study gently dissents. My own purpose in this introduction is to uncover an application for romance that exceeds parameters like being “set in the past, or in some imaginary age,” being “divided into ‘books’ or ‘cantos,’” or desiring “to revive the apparent simplicity of the old English and Scottish narrative ballads.” See St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 210–213. 43. Samuel Johnson, “Romance,” in A Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Penguin, 2007). Nina Baym summarizes the Johnsonian account of romance nicely when she writes that romance, “when it was distinguishable from the novel,” was associated with “the highly wrought, the heavily plotted, the ornately rhetorical, the tremendously exciting, and the relentlessly exterior.” See Baym, “Concepts of Romance in Hawthorne’s America,” in Feminism and American Literary Theory: Essays by Nina Baym (New Brunswick, NY: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 57–70; 64. 44. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 120. 45. Ellen Rooney, “Form and Contentment,” in Reading for Form, ed. Susan Wolfson and Marshall Brown (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 25–48; 42–43. 46. Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France: Containing Many New Anecdotes Relative to the French Revolution, and the Present State of French Manners (London: T. Cadell, 1792), 2:4–5. 47. Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 132. The story Luhmann tells is one in which the polyamorous aristocratic sensibility of the early modern period is gradually dismantled by its middle-class appropriation and conversion into the cultural and psychological discourse of conjugal love. Although that historical trajectory is, in many ways, the same one that leads from Williams’s “age of chivalry” to her age of public interest, this book is not interested in reproducing familiar critiques of the French Revolution’s own bourgeois origins and conservative outcomes. In other words, rather than view the politics of the Romantic period as insufficient, I ask why tropes of insufficiency and its cognates were so central to

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Romantic utopianism, and what we might learn from viewing those tropes in a less suspicious light. 48. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), §90. Wittgenstein’s emphasis on possibility motivates what he describes as the “grammatical” thrust of his own semantic analyses, which are flexibly engaged in the study and assessment of how concepts fit together and how they might fit together differently, under altered and sometimes even impossible circumstances. 49. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope Vol. I (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 6. Note that Bloch’s vocabulary of the new, like Williams’s reference to the newspaper, implies a secular temporality in which dramatic, even world-altering events promise to remain in viable continuity with what has come before: a thing is only “new” in comparison to the old it has superceded and to the unknown that will supercede it. Meanwhile, on the subject of grammar, Bloch offers the following pitch and punchline: “In his first attempt at a Latin grammar, M. Terentius Varro is said to have forgotten the future tense; philosophically, it has still not been adequately considered to this day.” 50. Stanley Cavell, “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” in In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 153–180, 177. 51. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Vol. I, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 144. 52. Cavell, “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” 176. 53. Cavell, “Texts of Recovery (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Heidegger . . . ),” in In Quest of the Ordinary, 50–75, 60. Mary Favret notes that this essay is itself “littered with casual killings, dead bodies, and extinguished worlds,” so that the project Cavell calls “bring[ing] philosophy peace” might be less straightforward than he implies. See Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), 157–159. 54. “Devout” or devoted can also mean doomed. Cf. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Tesky (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004), 9.901. The phrase “earth’s diurnal course” is from Wordsworth, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” in “Lyrical Ballads,” and Other Poems, 7. 55. Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, De l’Allemagne, 3 vols. (Paris: H. Nicolle, 1813), 1:291. My translation. 56. Ibid., 290. My translation. 57. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’Origine de l’Inégalité Parmi les Hommes (Paris: Flammarion, 2012), 54. 58. Friedrich von Schlegel, Fragment 116 from “Atheneum Fragments,” in Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 175.

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59. Schlegel, Fragment 37 of “Critical Fragments,” in Philosophical Fragments, 147. 60. de Staël, 1:291. My translation. 61. Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London: A. Millar, 1762), 119–120. Hurd importantly contrasts the militarized culture of chivalry, which is born with feudalism, to the courtly ethos of romance, which reins in the violence of medieval civilization by attaching honor to the pursuit of heterosexual, and usually chaste, erotic passion. See also Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, through Times, Countries, and Manners; with Remarks on the Good and Bad Effects of It, on Them Respectively: in a Course of Evening Conversations (Colchester: W. Keymer, 1785). 62. While de Man cautions against the association of irony with the inevitable failure of allegory to achieve that destiny or even to represent it adequately, he might accede to the claim that irony sneaks into romance because its perfectibility—the condition of its future perfection—is also the condition of its insufficiency. Paul De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 102–141. 63. Thomas Carlyle, “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter’s Review of Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne,” in The Works of Thomas Carlyle: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Henry Duff Traill, 5 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899), 1.476–501; 448.n1. 64. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, in Essential Writings of Friedrich Engels (St. Petersburg: Red and Black Publishers, 2011). Engels is probably thinking of Bacon’s “Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est”: knowledge is power in the form of potential, and potential is determined by the entanglement of position and direction that produces orientation. I explore the significance of orientation to Romanticism further in Chapter 2. See Francis Bacon, Meditations Sacrae, in The Works of Francis Bacon: Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, and Lord High Chancellor of England (London: W. Baynes and Son, 1824), 10:319–329; 329. 65. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 71. Coleridge’s primary concern with Lyrical Ballads, especially once his own poems had been edited out of its second edition, has to do with what he took to be the homogenizing power of Wordsworth’s verse. Reading the 1800 Ballads against its “Preface,” he observes that, far from replicating “the real language of men,” Wordsworth flattens the many differences that make men who they are: individual, intellectual, regional, economic, and so on: I object, in the very first instance, to an equivocation in the use of the word “real.” [ . . . ] For ‘real’ therefore, we must substitute ordinary, or lingua communis. And this, we have proved, is no more to be found in the phraseology of low and rustic life than in that of any other class. Omit the peculiarities of each and the result of course must be common to all. And assuredly the omissions and changes to be made in the language of rustics, before it could be transferred to any species of poem, except the

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drama or other professed imitation, are at least as numerous and weighty, as would be required in adapting to the same purpose the ordinary language of tradesmen and manufacturers. Not to mention, that the language so highly extolled by Mr. Wordsworth varies in every county, nay in every village, according to the accidental character of the clergyman, the existence or non-existence of schools; or even, perhaps, as the exciteman, publican, and barber happen to be, or not to be, zealous politicians, and readers of the weekly newspaper pro bono publico. Anterior to cultivation the lingua communis of every country, as Dante has well observed, exists every where in parts, and no where as a whole. (Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:54)

66. Cavell explicitly credits “Blake and Shelley” with “the creation of a new inhabitation”; “Wordsworth and Coleridge,” by contrast, exemplify the impulse toward “a new creation of our habit.” Both are legitimate projects for “bringing the world back, as to life.” See Cavell, “Texts of Recovery,” 53. 67. David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 57. 68. Wordsworth, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, in “Lyrical Ballads,” and Other Poems, 740–760; 745. 69. Wordsworth, The Excursion, Being a Portion of the Recluse, A Poem (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814), 666. Hereafter noted in text by line numbers in parentheses. 70. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. 33–34. Simpson phrases the double-jointed promise of the sublime nicely when he writes that, “on the one hand,” those eighteenth-century writers who wrote of its power “could celebrate the principle of confusion and a decidedly antirationalist expressive convention; on the other, and precisely as exponents of the sublime, they could inscribe themselves into a posture of control” that was social as well as psychological. See Simpson, 127. 71. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) §5:245, 129. 72. Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 15. 73. Ibid., 143. 74. In contrast to these more or less negatory categories, what Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois call the informe is not a thing without form but rather an “operation” that makes visible the deterioration of form. There are some similarities, then, between the art of the informe and what I am calling the formal practices of limitation and adjustment, which likewise figure a letting-go of “plenitude” as an object of aesthetic, “semantic,” or political interest. One might think in compelling ways about how the limited utopianism of the Romantic period, and in particular the relation to materiality it models, finds its way into the work of Robert Rauschenberg, Gordon Matta-Clark, and others. Nonetheless, it is also the case that even the most minimal of minimal optimisms proper to low adjustment utopia avoids the implicit or outright

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solicitation of discomfort, distress, and even repulsion that marks most of the artobjects to which Krauss and Bois attend. See Bois, “The Use-Value of Formless,” in Krauss and Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 13–40; 25. 75. Richard Terdiman identifies a recent scholarly turn to love across the humanities, and rightly stresses that such a turn presumes “love’s comprehensibility or representability” even as it often falls back upon “assertions that love is simply inexplicable.” Although my own focus is how the desire for love’s ineffability—its formlessness— must necessarily struggle against form in both political and aesthetic contexts, I also wonder if we might adopt Claire Colebrook’s critique of a similar turn to the topic of “life” to get a historically sensitive view on the present popularity of love. In “Not Symbiosis, Not Now,” Colebrook keys the sudden emergence of life as a zone of interest for humanistic scholarship to that very same “point in history when the continuation of life was anything but certain”; in other words, what has been called neo-vitalism might be interpreted as a fetishistic disavowal of our present age of mass species extinction. As Colebrook makes clear, such a disavowal is often accompanied by the repudiation of critical or literary theory. “What the vitalist turn diagnosed,” she writes, “was a supposed idealism or formalism” at work in the hermeneutic style of poststructuralism, as if poststructuralism’s “focus on text was just another form of mind-centeredness” or of “anthropocentric idealism.” Theory thus misconceived is forced into place alongside other “continuations of Western reason’s comportment of violent and murdering dissection.” That last clause alludes suggestively to Wordsworth’s short poem, “The Tables Turned,” published in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. There the speaker’s mildly hysterical cri de couer—“Our meddling intellect/ Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—/We murder to dissect”—is often taken as a tagline for Romanticism in general, along with Keats’s warning in Lamia that “Philosophy,” in contrast to poetry, “will clip an angel’s wings.” Like many taglines, however, these actually falsify the content of what they are taken to advertise. In both the early Wordsworth and in Keats, the relationship between life and theory, or matter and mind, is one of distinction but not antithesis, and both poets keep with Colebrook in their insistence that to sunder intellection or discursivity from life is an act of wishful thinking. Meanwhile, if a fascination with the category of life-itself may be said to distract from present and impending extinctions, the fascination with love could likewise be accused of making peace with neoliberalism’s intimate public sphere, in which the performance of a capacity to love authorizes one’s inclusion into putatively universalist and impersonal categories like citizenship. See Terdiman, “Can We Read the Book of Love?,” PMLA 126.2 (2011), 472–482; 473; Colebrook, “Not Symbiosis, Not Now: Why Anthropogenic Change Is Not Really Human,” The Oxford Literary Review 34.2 (2012), 185–209; 192; Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” in “Lyrical Ballads,” and Other Poems, 26–28; and Keats, Lamia, in Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 234. 76. Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 42.

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77. George Walker, The Vagabond: or Practical Infidelity (London: G. Walker, 1799), ix–x. 78. Lord Byron, Don Juan (New York: Penguin, 1996), 1.7.3–4. 79. Kipnis, 92. For a masterfully narrated survey of comparable demands, see Against Love, 84–92. 80. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), VI.527. Sedgwick likewise finds this craving for the titantic and unrestrained in examples of contemporary “theory [that] seems explicitly to undertake the proliferation of only one affect, or maybe two, of whatever kind—whether ecstasy, sublimity, self-shattering, jouissance, suspicion, abjection, knowingness, horror, grim satisfaction, or righteous indignation” in the name of variously counterhegemonic projects. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–152, 146. 81. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 179. Hereafter noted in text by page numbers in parentheses. 82. Jacques Rancière, “The People or the Multitudes?,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 84–90; 87. 83. It is also in the context of writing about Romanticism, and specifically about Blake, that Steven Goldsmith queries Negri’s involvement in the recent “sentimental revival . . . in fields as diverse as anthropology, philosophy, neuroscience, economics, and literature” that privileges ungoverned affect over rational thought, and that unites “mainstream liberals and radical materialists” in its enthusiasm for treating “the affects as a cognitive resource necessary to agency” only insofar as they remain “irreducible to either mind or body,” invaluable because in excess. See Goldsmith, 171–172. 84. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 190. 85. Ibid., 191. The Garden of Eden, at least in John Milton’s description, is creepily overabundant, resisting accumulation even as it invites it. As Adam says to Eve, Eden’s “branches overgrown” “mock our scant manuring, and require/More hands than ours to lop thir wanton growth[.]”Milton, Paradise Lost, 4.627–629. 86. Sanford Kwinter, “Who’s Afraid of Formalism,” Phylogenesis: FOA’s Ark/Foreign Office Architects (Barcelona: Actar, 2004), 96–99; 96. 87. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 201. 88. Blake, “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, in The Complete Poetry and Prose, 17–20. 89. de Man, Allegories, 88. 90. de Man, “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism,” in Blindness and Insight, 20–35; 31.

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91. Frye, The “Third-Book” Notebooks, 174. 92. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–1904), 1.329–359; 351. 93. Ibid., 342. 94. Ibid., 353. 95. Ibid., 342–343. 96. Ibid., 354. 97. Eileen Myles, “Iceland,” in The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 13–50; 30. 2. WORLDFEEL FROM KANT TO WORDSWORTH

Epigraph: This is my own, deliberately literal translation of Goethe’s phrase “Was bin ich denn gegen das All? Wie kann ich ihm gegenüber, wie kann ich in seiner Mitte stehan?” The Princeton edition of Goethe’s works gives the less abstract “What am I in the face of the universe? . . . How can I stand before it, stand in its very midst?” See Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, trans. Jan van Heurck in cooperation with Jane K. Brown, in Conversations of German Refugees; Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or, The Renunciants, ed. Brown (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 177. 1. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 9.48, 9.54, 9.73. All quotations are from the 1805 Prelude and are hereafter followed by book and line numbers in parentheses. 2. Cf. John Milton, Paradise Lost (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004), 2.951. 3. Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 69. 4. Humberto Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 224. See also Edward Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” in The Question of Palestine, Vintage Books Edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 60–66. 5. Colin Jager, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 17. 6. Sarah Tindal Kareem, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2. 7. Talal Asad offers bracing and highly influential taxonomies of these terms in both his Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) and Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 8. Cornel West, “Dispensing with Metaphysics in Religious Thought,” in Prophetic Fragments: Illuminations of the Crisis in American Religion and Culture (Grand Rapids,

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MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1988), pp. 267–270, 268–269. Recent writing on Romanticism and the sciences offers a very different picture of the cultural reception of scientific and experimental practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See especially Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Maureen McClane, Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2002). 9. Akeel Bilgrami, “The Wider Significance of Naturalism: A Genealogical Essay,” in Naturalism and Normativity, ed. Mario de Caro and David Macarthur (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 23–54; 34. 10. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (W.W. Norton and Company, 1971), 12. 11. Ibid., 91. When it comes to post-Kantian philosophers, Abrams is thinking particularly of Johann Fichte, whose investigation of subject-object relations verges on a parody of Romantic philosophies of cognition. 12. Ibid., 339. Steven Goldsmith offers a thorough critique of this interpretation of apocalypse, particularly as it was once received and deployed by scholars of Romanticism, in his Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 13. John Keats, letter to Fanny Brawn, October 13, 1819, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 2.223–224; 223. The next few lines of the letter are as follows: I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion—I have shudder’d at it—I shudder no more—I could be martyr’d for my Religion—Love is my religion—I could die for that—I could die for you. My creed is Love and you are its only tenet—You have ravish’d me away by a Power I cannot resist.

14. Homer, The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 6.487–488. Interestingly, the OED finds the first use of Weltanschauung in an English-speaking context courtesy of this remark by William James: “I remember your saying . . . that the characteristic of the Greek ‘Weltanschauung’ was its optimism,” not the most likely word for describing The Iliad. “Weltanschauung, n.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, March 2014). Retrieved May 12, 2014, from www.oed.com 15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 138. 16. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 4. In the English edition of Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables, Pascal David points out that “actually, one does indeed come across the term kosmotheôria . . . but in modern Greek—and

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this as a translation or transposition of Weltanschauung!” David, “Weltanschauung,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, gen. ed. Barbara Cassin, trans. ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 1224–1225. 17. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 368. The major source of information about how Le Brun’s painting was exhibited is Émile Legouis, The Early Life of William Wordsworth, 1770–1798: A Study of “The Prelude,” trans. J. W. Matthews (London: J.M. Dent, 1921). 18. André Malraux, Les Voix du Silence (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). 19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 62. Merleau-Ponty’s essay is a response to Malraux and focuses particularly on his account of the museum and how it contributes to or intercedes in historical interpretation. 20. This is Alain Badiou’s bold and generally persuasive critique of the ban on religious covering in French public schools, a ban whose racist and xenophobic as well as misogynistic motivations Badiou identifies as part of the psychic makeup of the neoliberal state. Badiou, “The Law on the Islamic Headscarf,” in Polemics, trans. Steve Cocoran (London: Verso, 2006), 98–110, 103. 21. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2001), 10. 22. Ibid., 11. 23. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 41. 24. Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 37. 25. As Michael Frede explains, generally speaking the Platonic and Aristotelian use of the verb aisthanesthai—to feel, to perceive, to be affected by—does not limit perception to something that happens only through the senses: “All cases of becoming aware of something . . . are construed along the paradigm of seeing, exactly because” neither Plato nor Aristotle “see[s] a radical difference between the way the mind grasps something and the way the eyes see something.” While Frede takes care to outline the narrower and much more rare usages of the verb in Plato’s Phaedo, Republic, and Theaetetus, the standard understanding of aisthanesthai, and of aesthetics, is the one to which I stick here. See Frede, “Observations on Perception in Plato’s Later Dialogues,” in Essays in Ancient Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 1–10; 4. 26. Taylor, 26. 27. On child molestation and nineteenth-century sexology, see Foucault’s memorable discussion of “the familiar game called ‘curdled milk’” in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 31–32. 28. Ian Hacking, “Kind-Making: The Case of Child Abuse,” in The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 125–162; 130.

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29. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?,’” trans. H. B. Nisbet, in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–60, 91. Translation modified slightly. 30. Ibid., 58. 31. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Orientation in Thinking?,” in Political Writings, 237–249; 238. Hereafter followed by page numbers in parentheses. 32. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, 1981), 23. 33. Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 66. 34. Here I quote from Thomas Pfau’s helpful analysis of this same scene from Kant in Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 8. 35. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin, 2003). 36. Stanley Cavell, “Being Odd, Getting Even,” in In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 105–130;127. 37. Ibid., 126. 38. Ibid., 127. 39. As Cleanth Brooks writes, “[i]f the poet is to be true to his poetry, he must call it neither two nor one: the paradox is his only solution.” The rhetorical figure of paradox thus now becomes the “one” around which it was meant to circumlocute. Cleanth Brooks, “The Language of Paradox,” in The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1947), 3–21; 20. 40. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 11. 41. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817 version of “Dejection, An Ode,” in The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (New York: Penguin, 1997), 38. Hereafter followed by line numbers in parentheses. Coleridge’s discussion of his poem in relation to the philosophy of Kant originally appeared in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal and is quoted in Complete Poems, 553.n21–38. 42. In draft, the poem that would become “Dejection” was originally addressed to Coleridge’s wife Sara. When it first appeared in print, Coleridge made his appeal to “Edmund” instead of a “Lady,” though the apostrophe is obviously directed at Wordsworth, whose name Coleridge had written in for Sara’s before publication only to change it once more. The Lady was introduced, finally, in 1817. 43. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1990), 13–15. 44. I have in mind here Keats’s own axiom that “[a]xioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.” Kant might say that axioms in philosophy are only axioms because we know we have pulses to prove them on. See Keats, letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, May 3, 1818, in The Letters of John Keats, 1.273–293; 279.

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45. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 4. 46. Taylor, A Secular Age, 594. 47. Coleridge, “Fears in Solitude, Written in April 1798, during the Alarm of an Invasion,” in Complete Poems, 116. 48. Taylor, 517. 49. Ibid., 518. 50. Ibid., 518. 51. Ella Bourne, “The Messianic Prophecy in Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue,” The Classical Journal 11.7 (1916), 390–400, 391. Many thanks to Joseph Howley for his help on the philological parameters of Vergil’s reception across the Empire and in late antiquity. 52. Wordsworth, “Ode (‘There was a time’),” in “Poems, in Two Volumes,” and Other Poems, 1800–1807, by William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 9; hereafter followed by line numbers in parentheses. The compositional order of “Dejection” and the Intimations Ode remains somewhat controversial. David Erdman’s essay “The Otway Connection” offers a thorough discussion of the evidence in favor of one poem being written before and responded to by the other; see Erdman, “The Otway Connection,” in Coleridge’s Imagination: Essays in Memory of Pete Laver, ed. Richard Gravil, Lucy Newlyn, and Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 143–160. 53. Keith DeRose, “Solving the Skeptical Problem,” The Philosophical Review 104 (1995), 1–52; 27–29. The well-known “hands” example is from G. E. Moore, “Moore’s Paradox,” in G. E. Moore: Selected Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin (London: Routledge, 1993), 207–212. 54. Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 203. 55. Hartman, 205. See also John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV (“Batter my heart, three-person’d God”), in The Complete English Poems (New York: Penguin, 1996), 11. 56. Saint Augustine, Confessions, Vol. 1, Bks. 1–8 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 3.6.11. 57. Gustave Flaubert, letter to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantpie, March 18, 1857, in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 97–98, 97. 58. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 17. 59. Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France: Containing Many New Anecdotes Relative to the French Revolution, and the Present State of French Manners (London: G.G. & J. Robinson, 1792), 2:4. Hereafter followed by volume and page numbers in parentheses. 60. Friedrich Schiller, “Die Götter Griechenlandes,” An Anthology of German Poetry, 1730–1830, ed. Jethro Bithell (London: Taylor and Francis, 1957), 85–86. Taylor

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offers the less faithful “God-shorn nature” as a translation of Schiller’s “entgötterte Natur” in A Secular Age, 316–317. For a pointed discussion of Taylor’s use of Schiller in this context, see Bruce Robbins, “Enchantment? No, Thank You!,” in The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now, ed. George Levine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 74–94; 74–75. 61. David Hume, “Of Parties in General,” in Political Writings (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1994), 157–164; 164. 62. The scene also plays like a happy re-writing of the end of “Animal Tranquillity and Decay,” if only the old man Wordsworth meets along the road were headed to see some friends and not his son the mariner, “Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth/And there is dying in an hospital.” Wordsworth, “Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch,” in “Lyrical Ballads,” and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 19–20. 63. Augustine, 7:5.7. 64. Gumbrecht, 54. 65. We might think, too, of Walter Benjamin’s favorite Kabbalistic meditation on what the world looks like after it becomes the Kingdom of the Messiah: “The clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.” Gil Anidjar helpfully explains how this “parable” appears to have been passed on from Gershom Scholem to Benjamin in his “Our Place in Al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 292.n104. See also Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), 7. 66. Frances Ferguson, “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” in Representations 20 (1987), 88–112. 67. Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 11. 68. Nilüfer Göle, “The Civilizational, Spatial, and Sexual Powers of the Secular,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig J. Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 243–264; 254. 69. Wordsworth, “Ode (‘There was a time’),” 194. 70. Some scholars have proposed that the revival began in 1787, when Wordsworth published his ode to (none other than) Helen Maria Williams, “On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress.” See Paula R. Feldman and Daniel R. Robinson, eds., Introduction to A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14. 71. Poems, in Two Volumes also has a Vergilian epigraph, though this one is drawn from the probably spurious Appendix Vergiliana. Once again, Wordsworth’s mode of introduction is comparative, for where the Intimations Ode offers to speak of slightly

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greater things, the lines from the poem “Culex” (“The Gnat”) on the title page of Poems promise the reader that “later,” when the poet isn’t exhausted from working so hard on his farm, “our Muse will speak to [him] with a more serious sound.” 72. Wordsworth, “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow rooms,” in Poems, in Two Volumes, 1–2, 13. Hereafter followed by line numbers in parentheses. 73. Barbara Johnson, “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 10.2 (1998), 549–574; 550. Johnson has Wordsworth specifically in mind here: “Indeed, the sonnet form has been compared to a prison (Wordsworth) or at least to a bound woman (Keats)[.]” 74. Gumbrecht, 4. 75. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols., in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969–), 7:2:54. 76. Ibid., 190. 77. Wordsworth, “With how sad steps, O Moon thou climb’st the sky,” in Poems, in Two Volumes, 5–6. 78. Ibid., 9. See also Philip Sidney, Sonnet XXXI in Astrophil and Stella, in Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 153–212; 165. 79. Ibid., 13–14. 80. Wordsworth, “Where lies the land to which yon ship must go?,” in Poems, In Two Volumes, 11. 81. Wordsworth, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1803,” 4–5, and “These words were uttered in a pensive mood,” 9–11, in Poems, in Two Volumes. 82. David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 18. 83. Wordsworth, “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,” in Poems, In Two Volumes. 84. Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), xvii. 85. Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight,” in Complete Poems, 54–55. 86. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129–156; 155. 87. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the desire for mastery is actually conceived in enchanted terms: “For the scientific temper, any deviation of thought from the business of manipulating the actual, any stepping outside the jurisdiction of existence, is no less senseless and self-destructive than it would be for the magician to step outside the magic circle drawn for his incantation; and in both cases violation of the taboo carries a heavy price for the offender. The mastery of nature draws the circle in which the [Kantian] critique of pure reason holds thought spellbound.” Max Horkheimer and

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Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 19. 88. Ibid., 33. 89. Augustine, 10.6.9. 90. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 64. 3. LOSING GROUND IN SHELLEY’S REVOLT

1. [John Gibson Lockhart], “Observations on the Revolt of Islam,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 4.22 (January 1819), 475–482; 475–476. 2. Leigh Hunt, “Literary Notices, No. 41,” The Examiner, No. 531, Sunday, March 1, 1818, pp. 139-41, 140. 3. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in The Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), 5.34. 4. Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay (London: John Camden Hotten, 1868), 233. By “natural” Swinburne means “free,” and by “free” he means polygamous. “Sacred,” meanwhile, signifies an extra-institutional attachment sanctioned not by legal marriage but by the hallowed because intractable sway of lust. Urizen can brandish his compass all he wants, but until he honors the ungovernable oomph of sex he will remain “a God who weeps over his creature and subject with unprofitable tears, [who] rules by forbidding and dividing,” who is clothed forever “with the coldness and the grief of remote sky and jealous cloud.” Swinburne’s nowfamiliar vision of Blake as an apostle of sexual freedom is mostly accurate, as is his characterization of Urizen as a bad king whose erotophobia lies at the root of his tyranny. That said, careful readers will know that Urizen is a more complex character than Swinburne and, for that matter, Blake can make him out to be, and that he is often the guardian of the bounding line and a sometimes sympathetic emblem of the melancholy of governance. See Swinburne, 119. 5. Ellen Willis, “Nature’s Revenge,” in No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 15–18; 16. 6. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, 2001). 7. Blake, America, a Prophecy, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 51–59, 1. Hereafter followed by plate and line numbers in parentheses. 8. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Penguin, 1994), 220. 9. Swinburne, 245; William Keach, Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 137. 10. Swinburne, 245. See also Bloom’s commentary on America in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 902n1:11–2:17.

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11. Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 179. For an extended discussion of Blake’s poetic assessment of time as dilation and suspension, see Steven Goldsmith’s chapter-length account of the “pulse” in Blake’s Agitation: Criticism and the Emotions (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), pp. 226–261. 12. Michel Serres, Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution?, trans. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 73. 13. Carol Jacobs, “On Looking at Shelley’s Medusa,” Yale French Studies 69 (1985), 163–179; 171, 176. 14. Serres, 20. 15. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 209. 16. Needless to say, all persons regardless of sex or gender may be victims of sexual violence—though one would not know it from the material discussed in this chapter. 17. Anne Kostelanetz Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (London: Routledge, 1988), 80. 18. Barthes’s paradigm is a normative concept defined by a binary opposition between two terms. Utilitarianism, Romanticism’s most conventional expression of utopian desire, depends on a strong opposition between pleasure and pain, an antagonism Shelley, and Blake and Holcroft before him, strenuously attempt to dissolve. See Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 7. 19. The same rhetorical move is made in More’s Utopia when, after identifying the first rule of nature as obeying and loving God, Hythloday explains that The second rule of nature is to lead a life as free of anxiety and as full of joy as possible, and to help all one’s fellow men toward that end. [. . .] Nothing is more humane (and humanity is the virtue most proper to human beings) than to relieve the misery of others, assuage their griefs, and by removing all sadness from their life, to restore them to enjoyment, that is, pleasure. Well, if this is the case, why doesn’t nature equally invite us to do the same thing for ourselves? Either a joyful life (that is, one of pleasure) is a good thing or it isn’t.

Twice Hythloday has to explain what he means by “joy” or “enjoyment” by offering up the synonym of “pleasure” (voluptãs) to give substance to those less particular terms. Voluptãs implies a pleasure that is physical and embodied, and when it is introduced, each time, after “that is” (id est) the suggestion is one of benign embarrassment, as when Milton’s Raphael blushes to admit that angels, just like humans, make love. 20. Susan J. Wolfson. “Introduction: Reading for Form,” in Reading for Form, ed. Wolfson and Marshall Brown (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 3–24.

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21. Hazlitt, “The Late Murders,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1930–34), 20:192. There is more than a hint here of Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, who “disturb[s], with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame,” lurking around “the dissecting-room and the slaughter-house [to] furnish . . . materials” for his experiments. M. Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 36. 22. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 69. 23. De Sade notably favors the slang term “le foutre” to refer to ejaculate, perhaps because it does the grammatical work of utilitarian mathematics, dividing an act (foutre) into an object (le foutre) with volume and mass. Although he only mentions Sade briefly, and that in a footnote, D. A. Miller describes the word foutre as having been weaponized during the Terror, of which Sade was himself was an especially famous victim. Miller, “Foutre! Bougre! Ecriture!,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.2 (2001), 503–511; 508–509. 24. Marjorie Levinson, “Notes and Queries on Names and Numbers,” Romantic Circles Praxis (April 2013). Retrieved August 22, 2013, from http://www.rc.umd.edu/ praxis/numbers/HTML/praxis.2013.levinson.html 25. Jeremy Bentham introduces the algorithm of felicity in the fourth chapter of his An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London: W. Pickering, 1823), 49–55. The famous variables or vectors one must factor into the felicific equation are intensity (how strong is the pleasure?), duration (how long will it last?), certainty (how likely is pleasure to occur?), propinquity (how soon will it occur?), fecundity (what are the odds this pleasure will produce more pleasures of the same kind?), purity (what are the odds that it will not be followed by sensations of the opposite, unpleasurable kind?), and extent (how many people will share in or be affected by this pleasure?). 26. Charles Bernard Wadström, Plan for a Free Community at Sierra Leona, upon the coast of Africa, under the protection of Great Britain; with an invitation to all persons desirous of partaking the benefits thereof (London: T. & J. Egerton, 1792), vi. 27. John Keats, letter to John Taylor, January 30, 1818, in Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 57. 28. The Empire of the Nairs, which is set in India in a place called Malabar, records the founding and customs of a matriarchal society where women take as many lovers as they please. In an 1812 letter to Lawrence, Shelley describes himself as “a young man, not of age, and . . . married a year to a woman younger than” himself. “Love seems inclined to stay in the prison,” he remarks ruefully, a somewhat opaque statement that perhaps refers to Harriet’s reluctance to expand their erotic circle. Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 1:323.

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29. Thomas Holcroft, Anna St. Ives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 132. Hereafter followed by page numbers in parentheses. 30. Shelley, Defence of Poetry, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 480–508; 482. 31. Karl Marx, letter to Louis Kugelman, October 9, 1886, quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 637–638. Marx is referring here to the work of Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, whose utopian schemes contain the genetic code of “a new world.” Note that while Benjamin’s Passagenwerk tends to be remembered for its apprehension of the socialist potential in the productions of industrial capitalism, it is also highly indebted to Marx’s formalist reading of nineteenth-century utopian literature. 32. Fredric Jameson, “Pleasure: A Political Issue,” in Formations of Pleasure, ed. Tony Bennett et al. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 1–14; 12–13. 33. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 61.n5. See also Gerard Genette, “Métonymie chez Proust,” in Figures III (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), 41–63. Hayden White similarly explains that a metaphor is a “transfer” of properties from one thing to another while metonymy is a “name-change,” comparable to the act of taking of the surname of one’s spouse. See White, “Freud’s Tropology of Dreaming,” in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 101–125; 104. 34. de Man, 60–61.n5. 35. Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1989), 41.200A. 36. Frank’s insistence that Anna is his “by right” also bears out Frances Ferguson’s claim that “utilitarianism . . . evaluates[s] individuals”—as, in this case, good candidates for a socialist project—“whether the individuals would choose to be evaluated or not.” The right exists independently of Anna or what Anna thinks of it, and is itself a reflection of her social worth. Ferguson, Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 22. 37. Serres, 73. 38. Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 124. 39. Ibid., 128. 40. Nancy E. Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law: Critiquing the Contract (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 65. 41. As Susan Stewart notes in her review of Malfeasance, Serres himself has a tendency to fall back on a romanticized essentialism that conflates women with nature, sexuality with heterosexuality, and sex with penetration. See Stewart, “Sacred Dirt,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 22, 2011. 42. Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, & Other Writings, ed. and trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 319.

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43. Adorno and Horkheimer, 93. 44. Dante Alighieri, Il Convivo, trans. Richard H. Lansing (London: Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 1990), 3.6. 45. George Gordon, Lord Byron, letter to John Cam Hobhouse, November 23, 1818, in Byron’s Letters and Journals: “The Flesh is Frail,” ed. Leslie Marchand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), 81–84; 83. 46. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam; a Poem, in Twelve Cantos (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1818), 12.146. All quotations hereafter followed by canto and line number in parentheses. 47. Shelley, Letters, 1:563–564. 48. David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 5. While I agree with Duff ’s contention that the poem is a woefully “unrecognized” item in Shelley’s oeuvre, I nonetheless have to dissent from his claim that “the poem moves according to the dynamic of quest narrative or myth rather than history.” If The Revolt of Islam is to adopt a truly “redemptive” perspective on historical events, that redemption by Shelley’s own account requires a complicated maneuvering around and against the diegetic conventions of “narrative” via an exploration of the messier, more viscous properties of interpersonal feeling. 49. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), 34. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 35. 52. Drawing on the meaning of the verb caler, to wedge or prop up, Brent Edwards suggests that “décalage indicates the reestablishment of a prior unevenness or diversity.” In the context of what Edwards calls black internationalism, models of diasporic community and connection offer a “prosthesis” (that word again) to writers concerned with the expression of unity in the midst of geographic and regional difference. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 14. 53. Alva Noë, Varieties of Presence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 149. 54. Ibid., 147. That form may not be naturally occurring, but to say that some experience is enabled by formal containment does not mean that the experience itself will be intermediary or oblique. As Gareth Evans, glossing the work of Gottlob Frege, puts it, “a way of thinking of an object is no more obliged to get in the way of thinking of an object, or to render thinking of an object indirect, than is a way of dancing liable to get in the way of dancing, or to render dancing somehow indirect. Gareth Evans, “Understanding Demonstratives,” in Collected Papers, ed. Antonia Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 291–321; 302–303. Evans’s point seems to be that even the most robustly phenomenological approach to experience should involve

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accounting for experience as it is rendered formally and figuratively, through a complex alchemy of rhetorical maneuvers that are always to some degree self-conscious. In other words, we might say, it may not be the job of phenomenology to account for figures, but it may very well be the job of figures to enable phenomenology. Compare the opening pages of The Prose of the World, in which Merleau-Ponty makes a bid to recuperate Saussurian linguistics for a phenomenological approach to “the experience of expression,” including expression’s rhetorical means. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 22–34. 55. Shelley, Defence of Poetry, 480. Shelley’s characterization of poetry as the reflection of an impression is most obviously indebted to the moral philosophy of David Hume and to the claim that sense perception and cognition occur through an affective relay of empirical observation and habitual sequences of association. In Annette Baier’s reading of the Treatise of Human Nature, moral sentiments—among which Shelley would include both love and poetry—are impressions of reflections “that take as [their] object other ‘impressions of reflection.’” Thus sentiments are always dealing with other sentiments, with higher-order objects of cognition rather than mere ocular phenomena. Poetry, for Shelley, is really a sort of meta-sentiment, an act of affective cognition that thinks about, organizes, and re-orders other such acts and gives them a political and sociable force. See Baier, The Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 196. 56. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 33–34. 57. Ibid., 101. 58. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, I.i.809–811, 189. 59. Nancy, 107. 60. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, I.i.817, I.i.20, I.i.23. 61. Lee Edelman, Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 17–19. 62. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 372. 63. Ibid., 373. “L’anima amante si slancia fuori del creato, e si crea nel infinito un Mondo tutto per essa, diverso assai da questo oscuro e pauroso baratro.” 64. Shelley, Defence of Poetry, 488. 65. Shelley, Epipsychidion, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 573–577. 66. Ibid., 423, 592–593. 67. William Butler Yeats, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol. I, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner’s, 1996), 17–18. 68. Janet Halley, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break From Feminism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 345.

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69. “Bore, n.1,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, September 2013). Retrieved November 18, 2013, from http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/21636?rskey=rR6 Cqn&result=1&isAdvanced=false 70. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 205. 71. Erwin Panofsky, quoted in Timothy J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 96. Note Panofsky’s echo of the last line of the first stanza of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”: “Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!” 72. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (New York: Penguin, 2005), Part 3, Proposition 11. In October 1817, a few weeks before the publication of Laon and Cythna, Shelley began dictating a translation of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus to his wife Mary. He was still working on it, this time with his friend Edward Williams serving as amanuensis, in 1821. The text was meant to have been published in Pisa as a joint effort between Shelley and Byron, who agreed to add his name to the translation. Shelley’s death in June of 1822, when he and Williams both drowned in the Bay of Spezia, put the project on permanent hold, and the translation is now lost. 73. 1 Corinthians 7:29. 74. Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 124–125. 75. Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. R.J. Tarrant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), I.301–312. 76. Serres, 80. 77. Sacrifice, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky. Kino International, 2011. 78. Anna Lawton, Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 131. Lawton quotes a portion of Tarkovsky’s remarks on the haiku here; they may be found, in their entirety, in Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 106. 79. Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies,” American Journal of Sociology 11 (1906), 441–498, 444. 80. Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 253. 81. Ibid., 253. 4. BAD TASTE, OR VARIETIES OF EMPIRE AND ANTICOLONIALISM

Epigraph: A View of the State of Ireland: Written Dialogue-Wise betweene Eudoxus and Irenaeus, in The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. Henry John Todd, 8 vols. (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, T. Payne, Cadell and Davies, and R. H. Evans, 1805), 8.297–512; 430–431. 1. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

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2. On the literary and philosophical confluence of personhood and animality in the eighteenth century, see Heather Keenleyside, “The First-Person Form of Life: Locke, Sterne, and the Autobiographical Animal,” Critical Inquiry 39 (2012), 116– 141; on the production of sentiment around the figure of the animal, especially in an eighteenth-century context, see Tobias Menely, “Zoöphilpsychosis: Why Animals Are What’s Wrong with Sentimentality,” symploke 15.1–2 (2007), 244-267. 3. For a comprehensive history of this “problem,” see Leonidas Montes, “Das Adam Smith Problem: Its Origins, the Stages of the Current Debate, and One Implication for Our Understanding of Sympathy,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 25.1 (2003), 63–90. 4. Amartya Sen, “Capitalism beyond the Crisis,” New York Review of Books, February 5, 2009. Retrieved August 26, 2013, from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/ archives/2009/mar/26/capitalism-beyond-the-crisis/?page=1 5. Sen, “How Does Culture Matter,” in Culture and Public Action, ed. Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 37–58; 45. 6. A now-native feature of smartphones and motor vehicles, GPS was developed by the United States Department of Defense in 1973. It was put to its first-known military use during the Gulf War, which Bradford Parkinson, who helped pioneer the technology, describes as “almost a boutique war to demonstrate the effectiveness of GPS.” Adam Barrows puts the implications of GPS for critical theory well when he writes that “poststructuralist theoretical celebrations of a global shift toward denationalized, deterritorialized spaces become less compelling when the role of GPS in manipulating global space and time is taken seriously”—for “the use of space, even as a conceptual tool” is unevenly distributed, and while the world may be increasingly unified by technology only “the dominant power has the right map to read and manipulate that unified space.” Adam Barrows, The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 157–158. 7. Roland Barthes, “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 309–331; 325. 8. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 87. 9. Ibid., 65. In her taxonomy of the cute, Ngai appears to shift Kant’s standard account of aesthetic judgment, which Kant identifies both as incontestably empirical and predicated on the private response of the individual, from the subject of taste to its object. 10. The extension of Romanticism into the nineteenth century allows not only for the fate of Ireland to be counted among the pressures on the Romantic imagination, it also makes way for a new, expansively ecological reading of Romanticism bookended on its later end by the Great Famine of the mid- to late 1840s. Such

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a reading posits a non-causal but paratactical relationship between the history of literature and the history of man-made environmental disasters. I will not say much more about this proposal, but I offer it at the outset to thicken the contextual frame in which this chapter is situated, and which its own paratactical maneuvers—between Ireland and France, France and America, America and the would-be utopia of the New World—sketch. 11. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel without A Hero (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853), 199. 12. Maude Gonne, “The Famine Queen,” in Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish Literature, 1789–1939, ed. Stephen Regan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 183–185; 184. 13. Ibid., 185. 14. Lord Byron’s poem The Giaour likewise uses the language of vampirism as a figure for the uncertain time of imperial encounter, which the poem angles through the prism of conflict between Muslims and Christians in Central Asia. A self-described “fragment,” The Giaour forms a broken mirror through which the confident pose of Romantic philhellenism, to which intervention in the Greek cause of independence from the Ottoman Empire seems an absolute necessity, is reflected back as a critique of intervention and the inter-ethnic hatred on which it rests. See George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Giaour, A Fragment of a Turkish Tale, in Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 123–125. 15. Gonne, 184. 16. Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2001), 231. 17. Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 308. 18. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), 32. 19. Thackeray, 199; Gonne, 184. 20. Benjamin de Constant-Rebecque, De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation dans leurs rapports avec la civilisation européenne (London: J. Murray, 1814), 55. My translation. 21. Elizabeth Rose Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 18. 22. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’Origine des Langues, published posthumously in Traité sur la Musique (Geneva: Du Peyrou, 1781), 51. 23. Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, in Œuvres Completes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris: Furne et Cie, 1845), 2:70. 24. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Cymbeline, in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, and John Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), V.v.422.

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25. Columbus’s own diaries reveal some confusion over how best to translate the word “cacique”—as king, governor, or something else entirely—and to understand what degree of power it connoted. See The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–1493, trans. Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 271. 26. Return Digizé to me, and you vanquish me through her. Your weapons could not subdue my rebellious heart, But you have laid it low with your kindness. Rest assured that, from this moment on, you will never have A friend more devoted, a subject more true.

Rousseau, La Découverte du Nouveau Monde, in Œuvres Complètes, 3:III.iv. My translation. Hereafter followed by act and scene numbers in parentheses. 27. Rousseau, The Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 39–152, 41. Translation amended slightly. 28. There’s no such thing as an untamed heart When it comes to love; And as soon as you let yourself Get caught up in it It won’t be done by halves. No other pleasures Are so sweet as its chains. (My translation.)

29. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 53. 30. Digizé refers to her husband with the formal “vous” but he, in speaking to her, uses “tu.” 31. A recent, relevant experiment in the imperial-operatic tradition of La Découverte du Nouveau Monde is Paul Muldoon and Daron Hagen’s 1996 opera, Vera of Las Vegas, which, perhaps surprisingly, contains many of the same elements as Rousseau’s masque. Opening in an interrogation center in Northern Ireland, Vera of Las Vegas follows the adventures of two former operatives from the Irish Republican Army, Taco and Dumdum, who are living illegally in New York City. With INS agents hot on their trail, Taco and Dumdum make a break for Las Vegas, where they take up with Vera, “a strikingly beautiful, if somewhat androgynous, black woman” who hatches a plan to save them from the United States government. Throw in a chorus of “Pequods dressed in extremely sharp suits but wearing quivers and carrying bows” and “some poor Mexican kid” losing “half his leg” (“Talk about being footloose/and fancy free”) to one of those trigger-happy INS goons, and the virtual map of invasion, migration, and occupation drawn by Rousseau looks suspiciously like a rumpled blueprint for Muldoon and Hagen’s Vera. In an aria, Vera describes herself as “the very centre” of an environment marked by a strong but ultimately mistaken distinction between center and periphery—an opposition whose binary

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structure is rattled by the disclosure that Vera, who acts as its epicenter, is in point of fact a “guy [in a] skirt”: For I, Vera of Las Vegas, am the Way the Truth and the Light. I who seem to be on the periphery of things am, truth to tell, at the very centre. I who seem shrouded in mist am as clear as daylight. For it’s only through their outward forms that things truly show themselves.

When Taco touches “Vera’s middle leg” and finds himself aroused, he suddenly sees that “there’s no right way./There’s no right. No left. There’s no centre,” as the startle reflex of surprising desire unbalances both vernacular and positional notions of what it means to be (to use Dumdum’s word) “straight.” As for Vera, she associates straightness with a definition of empire as the supranational supervision of people’s whereabouts, which her own critical poetics cleverly scrambles. Name-checking Death in Venice, William Tell, Abelard and Heloïse, and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos” in the simultaneously vatic and conversational patter of a Brecht-Weill collaboration, Vera’s aria swings between high-, middle-, and lowbrow references to falsify the signals of cultural authority as her body falsifies the coherence of sexual identity. The aria itself becomes model for the sort of interference that might be run, successfully or not, on pan-global networks of border control, whose prerogative is to weed out forms of deviance from the migratory to the erotic. See Paul Muldoon, Vera of Las Vegas (New York: Gallery Books, 2001). 32. Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl, ed. Claire Connolly and Stephen Copley (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), 214. Hereafter followed by page numbers in parentheses. 33. William Butler Yeats, “Samhain: 1901,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 8: The Irish Dramatic Movement (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 9. 34. Ibid., 266. 35. Theodor Adorno, “The Radio Symphony,” trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in Essays on Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 251–270, 261. The concept of the “articulate” in music, and specifically in Beethoven’s symphonies, suggests to Adorno the drama of the encounter between part and whole that underwrites the structure of the artwork as he understands it. To be articulate is to be jointed, or made up of discrete connected pieces, and it is also to be capable of lucid, intelligible self-expression. I borrow Adorno’s criticism of the symphony as it is disarticulated by radio broadcasting to describe Glorvina’s own “trivialization,” her “relapse into [an] empirical time” tracked to the historical progress of empire. 36. Kent Puckett, Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 134.

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37. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 133–134. 38. Jane Austen, letter to Cassandra Austen, January 17–18, 1809, in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deidre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 172–175; 173–174. 39. Quoted in Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries, and Correspondence, ed. W. Hepworth Dixon, 2 vols. (London: William H. Allen, 1862), 1:293–294. 40. In other words, it is in some sense anachronistic to speak of kitsch before the Victorian period, where the alchemical history of mass production, commodity forms, and the first golden age of advertising produce a global industry of what Anne McClintock calls “imperial kitsch.” See McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), esp. 207–231. 41. “Kitsch,” Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 1st ed. 42. Umberto Eco, “The Structure of Bad Taste,” in Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 180–216; 180; and Samuel Richardson, letter to Lady Bradshaigh, in Correspondence, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 6 vols. (London, 1804), 4:224–225. 43. For a thorough history of the Ossian affair, and how “the contest over the authenticity of Macpherson’s pseudo-Gaelic productions became a seismograph of the fragile unity within restive diversity of imperial Great Britain in the age of Johnson,” see Thomas Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1. 44. Goethe’s own observations on the writing of Werther openly acknowledge the comic potential of his bourgeois tragedy. See “Reflections on Werther,” in The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings, trans. Catherine Hutter (New York: Signet, 1962), 132–155. 45. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 99–103. 46. Edmund Burke, “Speech in Opening the Impeachment of Warren Hastings,” in Empire, Liberty, and Reform: Speeches and Letters, ed. David Bromwich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 377–400; 397. 47. In his essay on “The Spirit of Conquest,” Constant, writing against Napoleon, draws on similarly nutritive images to worry over the damage done by an oppressive imperial regime not to people, but to art. “Independence of thought is as necessary, even to light literature, the sciences and the arts, as air is to physical life,” and so it is as unreasonable to ask artists to labor under the conditions of imperial censorship as it is to “make men work under a pneumatic pump, arguing that they are not compelled to breathe, but only to move their arms and legs.” In times like these the hands of the artist are “shackled with irons,” the “source of [their] talent dries up . . . together with that hope for glory which feeds on liberty alone”—a state of affairs whose odd

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consequence is that, “by some mysterious but undeniable connection between things which [cannot] be kept isolated,” people who make art suddenly lose “the faculty to represent the human face nobly, once the human soul as been abased.” Constant, 57. 48. Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 30. 49. Ibid., 30. 50. Ibid., 30–31. 51. Ibid., 30. 52. Jane Austen, Emma, in The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 5 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1932–34), 4:242. Based on Jo Modert’s convincing chronology of the novel’s events, which seem to follow the Farmer’s Almanac for the year 1814–15, Austen probably means Irish Melodies 5, which came out in December of 1813, since the piano is a Valentine’s Day gift for Jane delivered on February 14, 1814. See Jo Modert, “Chronology within the Novels,” in The Jane Austen Companion, ed. J. David Grey, A. Walton Litz, and Brian Southam (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 53–59; 55–57. 53. Herbert Tucker, “Literal Illustration in Victorian Print,” in The Victorian Illustrated Book, ed. Richard Maxwell (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 191. Appallingly timed, that is, because it coincided with the early years of the Great Hunger. 54. My primary biographical source on Moore is Ronan Kelly, Bard of Erin: The Life of Thomas Moore (London: Penguin, 2008). 55. Maria Edgeworth, Life and Letters, ed. Augustus J. C. Hare, 2 vols. (London: Edward Arnold, 1894), 1:300. 56. Thomas Moore, “Letter on Music, to the Marchioness Dowager of Donegal,” Irish Melodies (London: J. Power, 1821), 231. 57. Ibid., 232–233. 58. For a thorough and impartial history of Cromwell in Ireland, see Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London: Faber and Faber, 2008). 59. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Ryan Patrick Hanley (New York: Penguin, 2009), I.1.4. 60. “Period,” The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th ed. 61. Compare Greil Marcus on the diegetic pause that, coming in the middle of a musical or lyrical phrase rather than at its end, signifies the perpetuation of narrative and the necessity of forward motion. Marcus, The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (New York: Picador, 2001), 45. 62. Thomas Flanagan, The Year of the French (New York: New York Review of Books, 1979), 22. 63. Ibid.

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64. James S. Donnolly, Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 100. 65. Jacques Khalip, Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 9. 66. Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 1. 67. Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 26, 39. 68. [Anonymous,] “Works on Ireland: Memoirs of Captain Rock—Croker’s South of Ireland,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 15 (May 1924), 544–558; 546, 544. 69. Ibid., 545. 70. Asad, 29. 71. Moore, Memoirs of Captain Rock, ed. Emer Nolan with annotations by Seamus Deane (Dublin: Field Day, 2008), 25. Hereafter followed by page numbers in parentheses. 72. “Je bâtis a roches mon langage.” Édouard Glissant, L’intention poétique (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1969), 50. 73. Lily Gurton-Wachter, “‘An Enemy, I suppose, that Nature has made’: Charlotte Smith and the Natural Enemy,” European Romantic Review 20.2 (2009), 197–205; 198. 74. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), VI.608. 75. Gurton-Wachter, 200. 76. My translation. The closing couplet is adapted from Samuel Garth’s poem The Dispensary (1699), where it is spoken by a gladiator called Mirmillo. 77. On the discursive interplay between the European intellectual culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the English depredation of Ireland, see Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 78. Rei Terada, “Looking at the Stars Forever,” Studies in Romanticism 50.2 (2011), 275–309; 280. 79. Terada, “Out of Place: Free Speech, Disruption, and Student Protest,” Qui Parle 20.1 (2011), 251–269; 264. 80. Asad, 75. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., 76. 84. Seamus Heaney, “Bogland,” in Door into the Dark (New York: Faber & Faber, 1972), 55–56. 85. Rousseau, Confessions, trans. Angela Scholar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 145–146. Translation modified slightly.

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86. Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in The Destructive Character, by Dick Raaijmakers (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2011), 9–10. The Destructive Character is Raaijmakers’s commentary on Benjamin’s 1931 essay from the vantage point of postmodern experimental art and music. Here Raaijmakers, an artist and composer himself, uses the work of John Cage and the Fluxus group (not to mention Laurel and Hardy) to suggest, contra Benjamin, that the “clearing away” of which Benjamin speaks is always a new beginning, an act of creation. 87. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 133. 5. HAZLITT’S DISAPPOINTMENT

1. Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (Picador: London and Basingstoke, 2004), 333. All subsequent quotations from this text are followed by page numbers in parentheses. 2. Karl Marx, untitled newspaper article, in Karl Marx: A Reader, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 235–240; 236. 3. Gabrielle Starr, “Ethics, Meaning, and the Work of Beauty,” in Marcel Proust, ed. Harold Bloom (Broomall: Chelsea House, 2004 ), 243–266; 259. 4. Ibid., 263n20. Abigail Zitin suggests, in a similar vein, that Hogarth’s Analysis is only expediently tied to the line of beauty, and that it abjures what Starr calls “determinate forms” for an emphasis “on the mental discipline of formal abstraction” as the only means by which “beauty, as [itself ] a formal phenomenon, [can] be adequately perceived and fully enjoyed.” Zitin, “Thinking Like an Artist: Hogarth, Diderot, and the Aesthetics of Technique,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 46.4 (2013), 555–570, 556. 5. Rei Terada, “Looking at the Stars Forever,” Studies in Romanticism 50.2 (2011), 275–309; 279. 6. William Hazlitt, Liber Amoris, or The New Pygmalion (London: John Hunt, 1823), 1. Hereafter followed by page numbers in parentheses. Although more recent editions of Liber Amoris are in print, I refer to the original edition here in order to reference directly typographic elements in the first published text. 7. Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 88–133; 95. 8. Terada, 279. 9. Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2007), 3. 10. Laura Quinney, The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1999), xi. 11. Meredith Martin, The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 178.

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12. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 50–51. 13. Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762 to 1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 277. 14. [Review of Liber Amoris,] Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 13 (1823), 640– 646; 641. 15. I hope that this formalist reading of Liber Amoris goes a little bit of the way toward shifting the terms of recent debates over the book’s sexual politics. Those debates have been riven by a conflict between feminist and, loosely speaking, historical accounts of Hazlitt’s animosity, but the book strikes me as neither an unreflective excrescence of male rage nor an occasion to contemplate what Wu calls “the stupidity of modern literary criticism” that applies “twenty-first century American values” (in this case, sexual self-determination) to British Romantic literature. The way to consider the relationship of the book’s aesthetics to its misogyny is to understand that relationship as predicated upon particular conventions of form, in particular how, when, and why they misfire; after all, misogyny is among other things the reproduction of a convention. Meanwhile, since contemporary reviews of Liber Amoris more or less anticipate (though in different language) the latter-day feminist critique of the book, it cannot simply be the case that being repelled by H’s behavior is a response only a twenty-first-century Puritan would have. See Duncan Wu, William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 328–329. 16. Sonia Hofkosh, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 104–121. The story goes that, having been rejected by a local Keswick girl to whom he had made unwelcome sexual overtures, Hazlitt publicly spanked her, only to be later pursued by a mob of villagers and saved through the assistance of Wordsworth and Coleridge. 17. Elizabeth A. Williams, The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 30. 18. “Animosity” and “Animus,” Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed. 19. This is how one of Hazlitt’s more sympathetic critics described the style of his The Spirit of the Age in an essay printed in The Monthly Review 107 (May 1825), 1–15; 2. 20. Frances Ferguson, “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” Representations 20 (Autumn 1987), 88–112; 109. See also Marilyn Butler, “Satire and the Images of Self in the Romantic Period: The Long Tradition of Hazlitt’s ‘Liber Amoris,’” The Yearbook of English Studies 14 (1984), 209–225. 21. Ibid., 109. 22. Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 175.

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23. Tilottama Rajan, The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 134. 24. Francis Jeffrey, review of The Giaour, Edinburgh Review (July 1813), 300–309; 300. For more evidence of the popularity of the fragment, see Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 22–23. 25. As John Barrell and Harriet Guest note, eighteenth-century epics tend, like other poems of this period, to be “mixed compositions” that throw together a multitude of classical genres from georgic to pastoral to elegy to didactic verse to satire. This diversity is, in Barrell and Guest’s words, well-suited to describing “the proliferation of interests and occupational identities within a commercial society” in all its “divided and ramified forms.” One might suggest that the Romantic fragment emerges from this hybrid condition through a process of formal abstraction, which tingers with neoclassical bricolage until it breaks into isolated parts of some lost or elided plenitude. See Barrell and Guest, “The Uses of Contradiction: Pope’s ‘Epistle to Bathurst,’” in Barrell, Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 79–99; 90. On the rise of the lyric poem in the Romantic period, and its negotiation of Petrarchan routines of libidinal confession, see M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 84–88. 26. Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 52. 27. Roland Barthes, “To the Seminar,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), 332–342; 334. 28. Compare Eve Kosofky Sedgwick’s celebrated remark that of all forms of love, paranoia is the most ascetic, “the love that demands the least from its object.” Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, quoted in “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–152; 132. In his general construction of the character of H, especially during his interrogations of S, Hazlitt may be drawing on the famous scene in Twelfth Night when Malvolio, poring over a letter written (he thinks) by his mistress Olivia’s hand, tries to make its references “resemble something in [him],” to “crush” Olivia’s words until it seems impossible that they would have to do with anyone else. Of course, were he actually Malvolio, H would not be quite so tormented by S’s refusal to disclose the secrets of her heart to him; he would simply tweak that refusal into a confession. Instead, he is caught between the sliding doors of either/or, if-then, “more or less,” or, as Barthes says, “not even,” the perpetual dissatisfaction that comes with being paranoid, but not paranoid enough to dwell wholly and committedly in his own reality. See William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, 2.5.118, 136. 29. Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; Or, The Formula,” Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 68–90; 76.

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30. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 33. In S/Z, Barthes will describe the letter “Z,” the “graphological inversion” of the letter “S,” as “the letter of mutilation,” a “chastising lash, an avenging insect” hidden among the generous “curves of the alphabet. If we invert Barthes’s “Z,” we get something like Hogarth’s “S,” whose promise of being “unravell’d” invites us to pursue it but refuses either to be caught or to leave its punishing mark on us as a record of the chase. See Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 106 31. Hogarth, 33. 32. Ibid., 34. 33. Paul De Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 3–19; 10. 34. For an especially engaging account of why and how fictional characters attract the compassionate attention of real people, see Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 35. Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3. 36. Teodolinda Barolini, “The Self in the Labyrinth of Time,” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 33–62, 33. 37. Maureen McLane, “On the Use and Abuse of ‘Orality’ for Art: Reflections on Romantic and Late Twentieth-Century Poiesis,” Oral Tradition 17.1 (2002), 135–164; 150. 38. Keats, Lamia, in Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 60. See also [Review of Christabel,] Edinburgh Review 27 (September 1816), 58–67, widely attributed to Hazlitt. Hazlitt’s attenuation of Coleridge’s characters’ names is part of his extended attack on the poem’s narrative tedium; in one instance, he gets a good bit of comic mileage from the nine lines Coleridge delivers on a “mastiff bitch, who is much too important a person to be slightly passed by.” 39. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Christabel,” in The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (New York: Penguin, 1997), 599–608. 40. [Review of Christabel] from the Critical Review, reprinted in The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers, Vol. I., ed. Donald A. Reiman (New York: Garland Publishing, 1972), 317. 41. Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930–34), 4:221. 42. Byron, Don Juan (New York: Penguin, 1996), XI.60. Keats died of tuberculosis. 43. Hazlitt, “On Effeminacy of Character,” in Works, 8:15–18; 16. 44. Heather Dubrow says of the lyric that it shifts between “success and failure and power and impotency” in ways that draw on the motifs of sexuality but cannot

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be reduced to them. Although Hazlitt refers to Keats as being deficient in “masculine energy,” H’s own performance of poetic debility is not really tied to a failure of sexual or sexualized verve. If anything, Liber Amoris uses “Written on a Blank Leaf of Endymion” to show that the incompetence to poetry and the incompetence to sex are not at all the same thing, and so much the worse for H who, instead of failing actually at poetry and allegorically at sex or vice-versa, fails spectacularly at both. See Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 18. 45. Ibid., 18. With his flair for the well-placed tasteless joke, Hazlitt adds that when it came to winter, Keats “seemed not to have known [it] till he felt the icy hand of death!” 46. Jonah Siegel, “Among the English Poets: Keats, Arnold, and the Placement of Fragments,” Victorian Poetry 37.2 (1999), 215–232; 223. 47. Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem, 25. Levinson’s analysis of the fragment poem presents it as the inverse of the poem “written on a blank leaf ” of another poem, at least as McLane describes it: if the fragment poems solicits its own completion, the poem inscribed adjacent to another nominates itself as that completion, implicitly casting the original text as fragmentary, unfinished, even inadequate. That Hazlitt invokes both genres in his sonnet further enhances its serpentine character, as the sonnet now appears to be pulled in two directions, at once inviting “resolution” and clumsily undertaking it. 48. This whole episode might be read as a parodic inversion of Friedrich Hölderlin’s 1797 poem “Bonaparte,” which advises poets to leave Napoleon “untouched” since his spirit would doubtless “burst/Any vessel that tried to contain it.” Hölderlin, “Bonaparte,” Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Penguin, 1998), 5. 49. Sonia Hofkosh, “Broken Images,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 36.1 (Spring 2009), 27–54; 44. 50. Grant Farred, “A Fidelity to Politics: Shame and the African-American Vote in the 2004 Election,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 12.2 (2006), 213–226. 51. Benjamin Robert Haydon, Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon: Historical Painter, from His Autobiography and Journals (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853), 279. 52. Hazlitt, “Of the Spirit of Partisanship,” in Works, 17:37. The non-intuitive connection between Bonapartism and English radical or Jacobin politics is thoroughly documented in Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 53. James Chandler finds in both Hazlitt and Marx a properly Romantic framework of “historical casuistry,” which unites the “spirit-of-the-age discourse” perfected

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by Hazlitt with “the notion of ends-means mechanism” distinctive of the utilitarian tradition (which Hazlitt professed to abhor) that begins with Jeremy Bentham. See Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 252. 54. Hazlitt, “Partisanship,” 37. 55. Farred, 216. 56. Ibid., 218. 57. Hazlitt, “Partisanship,” 34. 58. The Examiner, February 28, 1821. The neutrality of the notice impressed Blackwood’s publisher William Blackwood, who wrote to the writer William Maginn that same day expressing relief that “we did not insert your article against Hunt” in the most recent number of the magazine. Of the notice itself Blackwood observed that it “is one of the fairest accounts [of the duel] that has been published, and since the Cockney has shown so much forbearance in alluding to [Blackwood’s], surely we owe him something in return.” He then goes on to defend Hunt by suggesting that an offensive article thought to have been written by Hunt “was not written by him but by Hazlitt.” Reprinted in Annals of a Publishing House: William Blackwood and His Sons, Their Magazine and Friends, ed. Margaret Oliphant (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1897), 1:380. 59. Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 60, 122. 60. Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries; with Recollections of the Author’s Life, and of His Visit to Italy, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), 1:50. 61. Hazlitt, “Partisanship,” 38. 62. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26. This distinction, as Schmitt makes abundantly clear, is not at all theoretical, but “receive[s] [its] real meaning precisely because [it] refer[s] to the real possibility of physical killing.” Ibid., 33. 63. Hunt, in The Examiner for Sunday, February 25, 1816, quoted in Hazlitt, “A Letter to William Gifford, Esq.,” in Works, 9:11–59; 22–23; Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 71. 64. Hazlitt, “Partisanship,” 34. 65. Ibid., 34, 36, 37, 41. 66. Ibid., 42. 67. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 4–5. The Peninsular War is part of a greater trend during the Napoleonic period toward the casualization of military combat. As Mary Favret observes, “it was in fact during [this] period that the term ‘noncombatant’ as well as the popular understanding of ‘civilian’ as nonmilitary first emerged in English.” Relatedly, it was in this same context that the notion of irregular combatants becomes a problem for the moral as well as strategic etiquette of military violence. See

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Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 13. 68. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 6. 69. Ibid., 92. 70. Robert Southey, History of the Peninsula War, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1832), 3:43. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 268. 73. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 90. Schmitt attributes this remark to Che Guevara. 74. Ibid., 92. 75. Ibid., 6. 76. Ibid., 92. 77. Ibid., 71. 78. Hazlitt, “Partisanship,” 40. 79. The word “Fabian” points both toward the distant history of ancient Rome, where the general Fabius Maximus defeated Hannibal by slowly wearing down his army’s endurance, and forward to the gradualist socialist movement known as the Fabian Society, which was formed in Britain in the 1880s. 80. Quoted in Richard Stites, The Four Horsemen: Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 250. 81. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 3:172. 82. This is how Catherine Earnshaw describes her love for Heathcliff to Nelly Dean in Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (London: Penguin, 1982), 82. Gerald Lahey, editor of the 1980 edition of Liber Amoris, believed that the text ought to have been grouped with Wuthering Heights, along with The Revenger’s Tragedy, Tristram Shandy, Sartor Resartus, and Moby-Dick, as among the few “works in the English language [that] should be classified as unique.” See Lahey, Introduction to Liber Amoris: Or, the New Pgymalion (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 1. 83. Hazlitt, “On the Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity,” in Works, 20:62. 84. Barthes, How To Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 22. 85. Nigel Thrift, “But Malice Aforethought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30.2 (2005), 133–150; 136. 86. Ibid., 143. 87. Lewis Mumford, “Utopia, the City and the Machine,” in Utopias and Utopian Thought: A Timely Appraisal, ed. Frank Manuel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 3–24; 12.

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6. NARRATING CAPITAL, READING RCSM

Epigraph: John Clare, The Major Works ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1–10. 1. Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 57. 2. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004), 12.633–640. 3. Ted Hughes, “Creation; Four Ages; Lycaon; Flood,” in Tales from Ovid (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997), 11. 4. Clare, “To a Fallen Elm,” in The Major Works, 55–62. 5. William Morris, News from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 7. 6. Ibid., 79. 7. Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 169. 8. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2006), 166. 9. Compare Margaret Atwood’s dystopian Oryx and Crake, which satirizes the claims of permanent abundance peddled by those in favor of genetically modified organisms by presenting the reader with neo-Bruegelian images of chickens being grown like “animal-protein tuber[s].” Atwood, Oryx and Crake (New York: Random House, 2003), 202. Thanks to Sarah Arkebauer for suggesting this comparison. 10. Paul H. Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 40. 11. As Geoffrey Hartman rightly points out, the experimental character of Wordsworth’s early poetry lies precisely in its focus on unremarkable and uninteresting things. See Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 12. Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1. 13. Slavoj Žižek’s much-quoted pronouncement that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism has some relevance here, although the insight itself seems to belong originally to H. Bruce Franklin in his 1979 essay “What Are We to Make of Ballard’s Apocalypse?” To quote Franklin, “Ballard’s imagined world is reduced to the dimensions of that island created by intertwined expressways on which individuals in their cellular commodities hurtle to their destruction or that apartment complex in which the wealthy and professional classes degenerate into anarchic tribal warfare among themselves. And hence Ballard accurately, indeed magnificently, projects the doomed social structure in which he exists. What could Ballard create if he were able to envision the end of capitalism as not the end, but the beginning, of a human world?” H. Bruce Franklin, “What Are We to Make of Ballard’s

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Apocalypse?,” in Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers, Vol. 2, ed. Thomas Clareson (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1979), 82–105; 104–105. Jameson may have Franklin’s essay in mind when he writes: “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” but does not identify who the someone may be. See Jameson, “Future City,” New Left Review 21 (2003). 14. Jürgen Habermas, “Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 266–293; 292. 15. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 3. 16. Ibid., 61. 17. Alex Woloch, “Partial Representation,” in The Work of Genre: Selected Essays from the English Institute, ed. Robyn Warhol (Cambridge, MA: English Institute in collaboration with the American Council of Learned Societies, 2011), Paras. 241–244. Retrieved November 25, 2013, from http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c= acls;idno=heb90055.0001.001 18. Charles Edward Trevelyan, permanent secretary to Her Majesty’s Treasury from 1840–59, quoted in Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), 40. 19. Ibid., 37. 20. I use the term “formal realism” here, as Woloch does in his discussion of Bruegel, in Ian Watt’s sense, to mean the method “whereby [a] novel embodies a circumstantial view of life.” In this chapter, both “circumstance” and “embodiment” are terms defined, first, by political economy and, second, in relation to the unequal distribution of resources native to capitalism in its variously mercantile, industrial, and post-industrial incarnations. See Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 32. 21. Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 22. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 23. Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 60. The oftinvoked phrase “everywhere felt but nowhere seen” is Flaubert’s. See Flaubert, letter to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantpie, March 18, 1857, in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 97–98; 97. Flaubert is referring in this instance to the shadowy presence of the author in a work of modern fiction, a presence which (as he puts it somewhat cheekily) should be diffused like that of “God in creation.” 24. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–152; 139.

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25. Ibid., 140. 26. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (New York: Bantam, 1996), 354. 27. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 240. 28. Walter K. Gordon, “Father Time’s Suicide Note in Jude the Obscure,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 22.3 (December 1967), 298–300. 29. Daniel 5:28–29, The Bible: Authorized King James Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 30. Ibid., 5:29. 31. Hardy, 351, 353. 32. Harriet Martineau, Illustrations of Political Economy (London: Charles Fox, 1832), 1:xi. 33. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1930), 7:134. 34. Shelley, A Philosophical View of Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920). Maureen McLane persuasively argues that Shelley and Malthus, and their theories of poetry and population, part ways specifically on the question of futurity. In brief, the poet believes futurity escapes understanding in the mathematical terms of calculation and measurement, while the demographer believes that this is the only meaningful way it might possibly be grasped. McLane, Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 109–111. 35. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 2nd ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1803), 531. 36. Ibid., 531. 37. In her magisterial Genres of the Credit Economy, Mary Poovey opposes Romanticism and political economy on the grounds that each advances a different “model of value.” In brief, for Poovey, Romantic culture prioritizes imaginative labor and aesthetic products over scientific research and factual information. Literary criticism, for its part, inherits the former, Romantic model, with the result that when contemporary critics (her example is Catherine Gallagher) want to examine Martineau’s Illustrations, they judge the book to be most interesting where it violates or contradicts the economic principles it intends to advance. I do wonder, however, if it makes a difference to either Poovey’s or Gallagher’s theses that the Illustrations are not about money but about its lack—not, in other words, about the commercial society of the eighteenth century but the industrial society of the nineteenth. Commerce implies trade where industry implies labor, in particular labor’s division across class and geographical situation. It also implies a system motivated (at least in theory) by personal interest, whereas to refer to industry is always to be talking about something that emerges from the compound of multiple, superhuman entities, including companies or corporations, state

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laws, means and modes of production, and environmental conditions. See Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 340–352. 38. This nervousness around quantity and numbers may seem curious in Shelley, whose earlier utilitarian writings cheerfully promote abundance in all things, especially sex. I have tried to show, however, that in poems like The Revolt of Islam this hedonist philosophical framework gives way to a melancholy awareness of how loss must be included in even the most idealized vision of a better world. The revised utilitarianism that surfaces from the poem is uneasy about itself, and some measure of that disquiet migrates into the Defence, where it appears as a generalized skepticism about all systems of “morals, government, and political economy.” 39. William Hazlitt, “Mr. Malthus,” in The Spirit of the Age (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1960), 269–280; 270. Hereafter followed by page numbers in parentheses. 40. [Robert Southey], “Malthus’s Essay on Population,” Annual Review 2 (1803), 296–297. For more on Southey’s critique of Malthus, see Gallagher, 10–15, and Phillip Connel, Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of ‘Culture’ (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 13–62. 41. Malthus, 497. Christopher Herbert suggests that Malthus’s emphasis on delayed gratification arises primarily out of his conviction that human beings unite physiological gratification with moral norms. If people can be persuaded that later sex is better sex, they will begin to place a higher cultural value on the postponement of marriage. See Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 115. 42. Malthus, 497. 43. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 273. 44. Ibid. 45. Adorno, 176. 46. Benjamin Kahan, “‘The Viper’s Traffic-Knot’: Celibacy and Queerness in the ‘Late’ Marianne Moore,” GL 14.4 (2008), 509–533; 509. 47. Bifo Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 95. 48. Martineau, 1:139. Hereafter followed by volume and page numbers in parentheses. 49. Compare William Cowper’s discussion of the cloud of toxic ash unleashed by the explosion of Iceland’s Laki volcano in 1783: “The present obfuscation (if I may call it so), of all nature may be ranked perhaps among the most remarkable; but possibly it may not be universal; in London at least, where a dingy atmosphere is frequent, it may be less observable.” Cowper, letter to the Reverend John Newton, June 29, 1783, in The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 2:149.

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50. Sigmund Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (19231925): The Ego and the Id, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), 19:155–170, 159. 51. Ibid., 162. 52. It is worth noting here that the progressive utopian movement whereby prevention will overcome positive checks does not apply to human beings who are disabled. To Martineau, they represent a pure liability, one which has to be controlled not by abstinence alone but quarantine. In “Cousin Marshall,” two characters express horror at “a marriage taking place between a blind man and a woman in the [local] asylum” for the blind. “It struck me immediately,” says one, “as a crime against society.” The other sniffs that perhaps the man could “play the organ” and the woman “knit, and make a sash-line,” and so they were able to pass themselves off as having a minimal degree of economic competence. Where they really belong, of course, is an asylumcum-workhouse, which is where the visually impaired character Sally, a teenage girl, ends up. See “Cousin Marshall,” in Illustrations of Political Economy, 3:1–132; 41–42. 53. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 87. 54. Frederic William Farrar, Life of Christ (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1874), 81–82. 55. Cf. Robert Burns, “Song—For a’ that and a’ that,” which contrasts “honest Poverty” to the lot of “the coward-slave,” in Burns, Complete Poems and Songs, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 1–3. 56. William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 16. 57. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (London: W. Taylor, 1719), 138–139. 58. Bruce Robbins, “The Sweatshop Sublime,” PMLA 117.1 (2002), 84–97; 85. 59. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 130. Kant himself makes two references to political economy in the Critique of Judgment, and in both instances dismisses it, along with housekeeping, “the art of social intercourse, and the prescriptions of dietetics,” as a matter of mere “skill.” Political economy is “technically practical”—that is, it is a thing people do, either well or badly—but it is not “morally practical,” which is to say not “grounded entirely on the concept of freedom to the complete exclusion of the determining grounds of the will from nature.” See ibid., 60–61. 60. Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, ed. Andrew Parker, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 240.n2.

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61. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 88. 62. D. A. Miller, Jane Austen or The Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 59. Frances Ferguson writes of Emma that “the novel’s one and only formal contribution to literature” is, impressively, free indirect discourse. Ferguson, “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form,” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000), 157–180, 159. 63. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, in The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 5 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1932–34), 2:3. 64. This last interpretation is borrowed from William Galperin, “‘Describing What Never Happened’: Jane Austen and the History of Missed Opportunities,” ELH 73 (2006), 355–382. 65. Gregory Flaxman, Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy: Powers of the False, Vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 221–222. 66. Jane Austen, Emma, in The Novels of Jane Austen, 4:169. 67. Harry Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 216. 68. Miller, 76. 69. Deleuze and Guattari, 91. 70. Miller, 92. 71. John Clare, [“Apology for the Poor”], in The Major Works, 445–447; 445. 72. Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991), 59. 73. Clare, [“Apology”], 446. The subject of Clare’s experience, and the object of his skepticism, is the Corn Law of 1815 and subsequent laws passed during the 1820s to protect English farmers from the competition of foreign markets. Such laws were good for wealthier farmers but bad for “the poor man” who, Clare predicts, “will only be ‘burning his fingers’ and not filling his belly by harbouring any notions of benefit from that quarter[.]” While “the Farmers should again be in their summer splendour of ‘high prices’ and ‘better markets’ as they phrase it the poor man would still be found very little above freezing[.]” As is customary with Clare, rural life and poverty afford to the poet a language of embodiment mediated by lay-scientific protocols of measurement, observation, and evaluation. These in turn are positioned against what he considers the purely theoretical and totally unempirical (non-)science of economics, with its arbitrary language of prices and markets. 74. Clare, [“Journey Out of Essex”], in The Major Works, 432–437; 437. 75. Burns, “Highland Mary,” in Complete Poems and Songs, 17–32. The song is a fitting choice for Clare, for it links Mary Joyce to Mary Campbell, with whom Burns had a brief affair before she died—most likely of typhoid fever—in 1786, at the age of twenty-three. For more on Burns’s relationship with his “Highland Mary,” see Robert

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257

Crawford, The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), esp. 214–217. 76. William Wordsworth, “A slumber did my spirit seal,” in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James A. Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 7–8. 77. Iain Sinclair, Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s ‘Journey Out of Essex’ (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005), 117. 78. Clare, [“Journey”], 437. 79. Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (New York: Penguin, 1998), 366. 80. Clare, [“Self-Identity”], cited in Sinclair, 123. 81. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Frank E. Copley (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011), II.218–219. Jason E. Smith’s Preface to The Soul at Work phrases Berardi’s relation to Lucretius and classical materialism beautifully: “The soul is the clinamen of the body[. . . .] The materialist tradition represented by Epicurus and Lucretius proposed a worldless time in which bodies rain down through the plumbless void, straight down and side-by-side, until a sudden, unpredictable deviation or swerve—clinamen—leans bodies toward one another, so that they come together in a lasting way. The soul does not lie beneath the skin. It is the angle of this swerve and what then holds these bodies together. It spaces bodies, rather than hiding within them; it is among them, their consistency, the affinity they have for one another. It is what they share in common: neither a form, nor some thing, but a rhythm, a certain way of vibrating, a resonance. Frequency, tuning, or tone.” See Smith, Preface to The Soul at Work, 9. 82. Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 302n3. 83. Ibid., 48–49. 84. John Keats, “Ode to Psyche,” in The Complete Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 4. Hereafter followed by line numbers in parentheses. 85. Anne-Lise François, “‘The feel of not to feel it,’ or the Pleasures of Enduring Form,” in A Companion to Romantic Poetry, ed. Charles Mahoney (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 445–466; 446; Keats, letter to Fanny Brawne, July 1, 1819, in The Letters of John Keats: 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:122–124; 123. 86. Cuvier’s catastrophism first gained popular currency in the English-speaking world when his introduction to an edition of his papers on fossil quadrupeds was republished in 1813 as Essay on the Theory of the Earth, with additional “mineralogical notes” by translator and editor Robert Jameson. For a discussion of Keats’s knowledge of Cuvier, see Hermione de Almedia, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), as well as Almeida’s “Prophetic Extinction and the Misbegotten Dream in Keats,” in The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed.

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Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 165–182. 87. Vendler, 48. 88. Berardi, 220. 89. Morton Paley, Introduction to Mary Shelley, The Last Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), xxii, xxiii. 90. Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, 194. 91. To Keats’s use of sibilance in this line, compare Rachel Carson’s “On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of scores of bird voices there was now no sound[,]” a sentence whose early tumbling rush of life is suddenly slowed by the elongated vowels of its last three words. Where Keats’s wide quietness is a brisk static hiss, Carson’s is a pained howl befitting an emphasis on silence over Keatsian quiet. See Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), 2. 92. Berardi, 220. 93. Charles Bernstein, “The Only Utopia Is in a Now,” in The Sophist (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1987), 34–36. 94. John Keats, “Think not of it, sweet one, so;” in The Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 63. 95. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,” in The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14–15. 96. Vendler, 128. 97. Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in Complete Poems, 11–12. 98. William Empson, “Thy Darling in a Pot,” The Sewanee Review 55.4 (October– December 1947), 691–697; 694. 99. Paul H. Fry, A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 196.

Acknowledgments

version of this book began at the University of Chicago, where the mentorship of Bill Brown, Bradin Cormack, Elizabeth Helsinger, Jennifer Scappettone, and Jay Schleusener inspired it and me. Also in Chicago, the Affective Publics Reading Group became a home away from home when it was most needed. I owe a special, almost inarticulable and certainly immeasurable debt to Jim Chandler for the combined gift of his skepticism and faith; to Lauren Berlant for many things, but most of all for her kindness and crack comic timing; and to Elaine Hadley for persisting always as a true north. Many thanks to my wonderful colleagues at Columbia, in particular to James Eli Adams, Rachel Adams, Marcellus Blount, Sarah Cole, Julie Crawford, Patricia Dailey, Nicholas Dames, Jenny Davidson, Michael Golston, Erik Gray, Matthew Hart, Jean Howard, Marianne Hirsch, Eleanor Johnson, Sharon Marcus, Edward Mendelson, Molly Murray, and Bruce Robbins for their support and good counsel. Stationed elsewhere at Columbia, Joseph Howley and Türküler Isikel were and remain ideal comrades. Sarah Arkebauer and Gabriel Bloomfield provided vital assistance not just as copy editors but as trusted, creative readers. For their exceedingly warm A VERY DIFFERENT

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A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S

welcome, I would also like to thank my new colleagues at UCLA, especially Ali Behdad, Helen Deutsch, Jonathan Grossman, Sarah Tindal Kareem, Marissa López, Felicity Nussbaum, Saree Makdisi, and Mark Seltzer. This book is fortunate to operate under the influence of extraordinary scholars working in or around Romanticism. For the gift of their example over the years, I am deeply grateful to Sam Baker, Miranda Burgess, Timothy Campbell, Julie Ellison, Mary Favret, Rachel Feder, Frances Ferguson, Anne-Lise François, Denise Gigante, Noel Jackson, Celeste Langan, Marjorie Levinson, Sandra Macpherson, Anne McCarthy, Brian McGrath, Jon Mee, Jonathan Mulrooney, Emily Rohrbach, Jonathan Sachs, Michele Speitz, Andrew Stauffer, Emily Sun, and Nancy Yousef. Ever exceptionally generous, Akeel Bilgrami has my thanks for many acts of unnecessary kindness. Paul Fry will, I hope, see how this book began in his undergraduate seminar on defenses of poetry. Billy Galperin’s vivacity keeps my faith in intellectual labor alive. Kevis Goodman, Vergilian guide, has set the standard for what it means to be a real thinker in a sometimes too-virtual age. Lily Gurton-Wachter’s scholarship and friendship made the homestretch feel like a great adventure. Colin Jager combed through many tangled versions of this manuscript, and offered his exacting attention to each. Jonathan Kramnick is forever mentor, friend, philosopher, and consigliere. Maureen McLane’s lyricism is, quite simply, my model for all things. Finally, Lindsay Waters saw what the book was about and helped me see it, too. I am additionally grateful for the support, and the patience, of Meral Agish, Lauren Beck, Naela El-Hinnawy, Antonia Frydman, Sophia Frydman, Gabriel Greenberg, Elizabeth Harris, Cassie Kaufmann, Bliss Kern, Kristian Kerr, Kelly Kleinert, Marie McDonough, Michelle Menzies, and Michael Robbins. Sara Marcus said the right words at the right time; so did Alessandra Sternberg. Many thanks to Balthazar and the Swicord-Kazan family for years of hospitality, and to Zoe for her remarkable friendship. For their love and encouragement, I’m grateful to my family, in particular to my parents, Edward Nersessian and Mary Luallen, and to all the Armstrongs and the Barays, especially Penne and Frank. Rudy and Oscar kept things in perspective. And as for Josh Armstrong— best beloved, best friend, best reader—this book is for him.

Index

abstinence, 2, 4, 41, 163, 171, 181–186, 197–199 abundance, 25, 32, 160, 175, 181, 222n85, 251n9 accumulation, 16, 37–38, 89, 98, 104, 180–181 adjustment: and low adjustment utopia, 9, 21,

aesthetics, 12; as aesthesis or sensation, 15, 47, 50, 55–57, 60, 63–64, 225n25; and asceticism, 201; appropriated by capitalism, 176–177; of bad taste, 111, 113, 121, 110–141 passim; colonial and decolonial, 11, 119, 129; of décalage, 94; experimental, 128, 154, 167; and

25, 40, 44–45, 176–177; as accommodation

formal restraint, 13, 16, 23, 175; of free

to the world, 3; accommodationist, 22, 126;

indirect discourse, 190, 195; of the hortus

as adaptation, 22, 24, 204; as agreement or

conclusus, 89; idealized, 20; in the poetry

attunement, 21, 29; as diminishment, 6, 7,

of John Keats, 200–201, 206; and the

12; as formal and ethical operation, 2–5,

line of beauty, 144; low-impact, 12; and

22, 62, 171, 175; high, 21; irony generated

mood, atmosphere, tone, or Stimmung,

by failed or partial, 40–41; as pedagogy of

63–64; and non-compensation, 141; and

positive bondage; 6; pleasures of, 12–13, 18;

politics, 2, 5–6, 9, 19, 20, 31, 35, 143,

in The Revolt of Islam, 74, 77

146; queerness and, 186; of Romanticism,

Adorno, Theodor, 6, 8–9, 12, 16–17, 175,

145; and the sweatshop sublime, 188; and

212n44, 240n35; Dialectic of Enlighten-

terrorism, 139, 141; and “Third-Book”

ment (with Max Horkheimer), 51–52, 72,

Notebooks, 20–21, 25; as weighting, 55–56

83, 85, 90

agriculture, 115, 122, 126–127, 132, 135,

262 175; agrarian socialism, 81, 85–87, 89; agro-terrorism, 131–132, 135, 138 allegory, 13, 18, 26, 30–31, 42, 54, 79, 86, 97, 99, 117, 120, 125–127, 141, 153, 200 ambivalence, 37, 39, 40, 127, 157, 178 anonymity, 133–134, 149, 166, 168 apocalypse, 1–2, 10, 17, 46, 62, 74, 104–106, 251n13 art: of adaptation, 24; Adorno on the utopian

INDEX

Melodies 131; in Memoirs of Captain Rock, The, 131–135, 137, 140–141; as response to empire, 113, 119–123; in Wild Irish Girl, The, 119–123, 127; utopian impulse of, 141 Barthes, Roland, 64, 112, 152, 169–170, 247n30 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 15–16, 140, 228n65, 233n32 Bentham, Jeremy, 84, 232n26

possibilities of, 12, 16; and Blake’s bound-

Berlant, Lauren, 178

ing line, 14–15, 19; as condensation

Bernstein, Charles, 204

and amplification, 129; and economi-

Berardi, Bifo, 183, 199, 200, 201, 204

cal knowledge, 181; of empire and bad

Bilgrami, Akeel, 46

taste, 113; furnished by the abdication of

Blake, William, 1–2, 9, 14, 17, 20, 22, 36,

possibilities, 3; Heidegger on the origin

77, 78–81, 98, 182: America, a Prophecy,

of, 190; in “Introduction” to Songs of In-

78–80; bounding line of, 14–16, 19, 175;

nocence, 39–41; and the inhuman, 120; as

Descriptive Catalogue, 14–15; “Introduc-

instance of positive bondage, 6; Jameson’s

tion” to Songs of Innocence, 39–40, 42;

skepticism concerning, 17–18; and orientation in thinking, 56; as performance of non–fulfillment, 8, 23, 25; as propositional

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The, 77 Bloch, Ernst, 16, 28, 167, 218n49; notion of militant optimism of, 10–11, 13, 167, 169

grammar, 31; referenced world of, 178; and

Bloom, Harold, 26, 79, 81, 200

relation of artwork to its own totality, 18;

“Bogland” (Seamus Heaney), 139

representing crisis, 141; Schlegel on, 30,

Boom: A Journal of California, 210n13

40; of sinking, 121; soul as emblem for,

Bruegel the Elder, Pieter: Land of Cockaigne,

98–99; syntactical rules of, 20; terrorism

174–175, 177

represented as, 138–139; threatened by

Burke, Edmund, 1, 26, 32, 34, 92, 126–127

scientific in “Ode to Psyche,” 200–201,

Burke, Kenneth, 140–141

204; as way of worldmaking and weighting,

Burns, Robert: “Highland Mary,” 197–198

50, 55–56; Urizen’s struggle to produce,

Butler, Judith, 3–4

78; utopian resonance for Romanticism,

Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 2, 128, 151,

13, 18, 19, 30, 41

156, 158, 222n78, 238n14

Augustine, Saint, 63; Confessions, 72–73 Austen, Jane, 120–121, 128, 191–192, 194;

capitalism, 3–4, 5, 18, 23–4, 45, 72, 111–113,

Emma, 128, 191, 196; Pride and Prejudice,

172–208 passim; as distinct from liberal-

191

ism, 176; and free indirect discourse, 192–196; Marx on, 18, 161; as pseudo-

bad taste, 11, 110–141: as bathos, 112, 121, 123; as decolonial aesthetics, 111, 113, 128; as exorcism by misnomer, 140–141; as formalization of excess, 113; in Irish

utopianism, 11, 111, 171, 176–177, 186, 212n44. See also political economy Cavell, Stanley, 28–29, 30–32, 34, 38, 41, 55, 220n66

263

INDEX

Clare, John, 12, 196–199; “Decay A Ballad,”

of, 8, 16, 77, 90, 199; and dispossession,

172; [“Journey out of Essex”], 196–198;

87–88; earthbound, 62; habitual sway of,

[“Self-Identity”], 199; “To a Fallen Elm,”

67; as heteronomy, 183, 185; for identity,

23

97; for the infinite, 3, 108; as infinite,

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 15, 18, 31, 74, 76,

eternal, and apocalyptic, 17; intimate or

146; Biographia Literaria, 68, 219n65;

erotic, 74, 183, 87, 90; in liberalism, 163;

“Christabel,” 156–157; conversation poems

in Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The, 77;

of, 149; “Dejection, an Ode,” 56–59, 61,

necessity of renegotiating or regulating,

74; “Fears in Solitude,” 59; “Frost at Mid-

25, 38; political, 3, 28, 86; proprietary,

night,” 18, 71; Rime of the Ancient Mariner,

89–90; and real depression, 59; for reward,

The, 29, 32

152; Romanticism as marking the limit

colonialism and anti-colonialism, 8, 110–141;

of, 17; seemingly elective, 187; as spatial

and decolonial aesthetics, 113, 128;

and temporal vector of empire, 118, 135;

in Découverte du Nouveau Monde, La,

and subsistence, 58; unrequited, 144, 146,

117–119; in Ireland, 110–112, 113–117,

147, 166; for utopia, 5, 8, 9, 64; viewed as

119, 121–141; as occupation, 112, 120,

coerced, 35–36

128, 133, 135, 136; and sentimentalism,

as want, 41, 180

111, 116, 117, 119, 123–125, 127, 128,

detachment, 40, 101, 152, 160, 178, 191, 195

130–134, 137, 139; in Victorian Britain,

disappearance, 5, 58, 99–100, 168–169, 177;

23–24 conservatism, Romantic: 9, 26, 32–34, 36, 76, 147, 162–163 Constant, Benjamin de Rebecque, 11, 116–117 conventionality, 6, 8, 31, 35–36, 66, 74, 144;

of people from the world, 81, 145; of posited worlds, 47, 59, 198; in Wordsworth’s sonnets, 67–70 disappointment, 136–137, 142–171 passim dispossession, 5, 73, 80–81, 87–88, 90, 94–98, 104, 106, 108

of intimacy or love, 167, 183–184, 186; in

divestment, 13, 81, 103, 107

literature, 40, 67, 197–8; and lyric form,

dystopia, 4, 6–7, 72

58, 146, 151, 155; in the representation of utopia, 4, 107, 173, 175, 196, 231n19 Crary, Jonathan, 4 Cuvier, Georges, 201

Eco, Umberto, 123, 125 ecology, 2, 4, 12, 16, 20, 196–197, 199, 202; and ecological imperialism, 111. See also environment

Daniel, Book of, 179–180

Eden, 38, 29, 172, 173, 222n85

Davis, Mike, 177–178

Edgeworth, Maria, 121, 124, 128–129; and

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 36–37, 190–191, 195 desire: and abstinence, 184, 186; aesthetic,

Richard Lovell Edgeworth, 121 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “The Transcendentalist,” 41–42

144; ambiguous, 149; for barriers or limits,

Empson, William, 92–93, 206

20, 183, 201; consolidation by the general

Endymion (John Keats), 84, 156, 158–159

will of, 118; and critiques of secularism,

Enlightenment, 2, 10, 21, 28, 30, 31, 77,

59–60, 72; curtailment or renunciation

137; in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 83–84,

264

INDEX

90; Kant’s ideas concerning, 51–56; and

adjustment, 2, 3, 22, 40, 62–3, 171, 175;

post-Enlightenment thought, 19, 181; and

in affect theory, 5–6; applied to excess,

secularism, 10, 44, 51–52, 54: Cavell on,

113; arising from extinction, 201; of the as-

28–29, 55

semblage, 190; as attenuation, 32; attuned

enclosure, 8, 23, 131, 173, 198, 199, 203

to feeling, 21; bad or poor, 120, 123, 141;

environment, 2, 10, 13, 72, 80–81, 165, 169,

collectivity as vacant, 101; constitutive

174, 184. See also ecology

of intimate demands, 36; corrective, 20;

Evans, Gareth, 234n55

critiques of, 32–36, 39; derangements of,

everyday, the, 10, 22, 28–29, 54, 56,

82; disappointment as, 155; as enabling

133–134, 138; secular realism and, 46, 51,

proximity, 187; evasion of, 27; exemplary

59, 60, 66, 72. See also ordinariness

of material constraint, 13, 16, 22; figural

equality, 4, 7, 86, 92, 112, 113, 118, 130;

and affective, 81; as forced fit, 8–9; and

as Divine Equality, 102–103, 105–106,

harm, 79; of impact without accretion,

108; as equal distribution of restraint,

80; impassive and resistant, 138, 144;

11–12, 128, 177, 186; as equivalence, 107;

and the informe, 220n74; inoculated into

and inequality, 22, 37, 119, 187, 189; as

objects and events, 183; irony arising from

universalization of scarce resources, 107;

non-alignment of, 40; irritating, 54; lack

utilitarianism and, 83–84

of, 113; as limitation, 8, 19, 35, 95, 113,

excess, 14, 24, 63, 66, 67, 105, 120; bad taste

175, 176; of lyric, 146, 155–158; narrative,

formalizing, 113, 121, 129; disburdened,

177–179; of novelistic personhood, 154;

104–105; entwined with lightness, 204;

as ordering action, 38–39; phobia of, 9; of

linguistic, 200; of population, 177; of

poetic fragments, 146, 158, 160, 166–167;

scientific knowledge, 180–181; of significa-

of pruning, 7, 30; purely alphabetical, 160;

tion, 151; as syncope, 96. See also plenitude

as redistributive, 35, 56; regulatory proper-

exemplarity, 83–86, 94

ties of, 20; and resolution or closure, 18,

extinction, 1–2, 11, 12, 23, 103, 201–202,

174; of romance, 28; and the serpentine

221n75; of human rights, 163; of sex, 181

line, 153; as shuttling or weaving, 206; of the Spenserian stanza, 92, 102; uniting mu-

failure, 10, 16, 40, 56, 57, 74, 120, 122, 144–

sic and history, 131; as withdrawal, 18, 95;

146, 148, 151, 154, 167; agricultural, 127

in “Written on a Blank Leaf of Endymion,”

Farrar, Frederic William, 187–188

155–158; l/c formalism, 5, 12, 16, 5, 38;

Farred, Grant, 160–161

and anti-formalism, 9, 32–39; and Blake’s

Ferguson, Frances, 66, 148–149, 191, 233n37

poetics, 14–15, 22; and the Frankfurt

figure: diffusion of history into, 155; and

School, 12, 15–17; and sexuality, 35–38,

exemplarity, 85–86; of likeness or identity,

186; identified as utopian, 15–18, 113;

94, 96, 107; magnifying and diminish-

mimetic of minimal harm, 16, 22, 88;

ing, 121; musical, 130; partnership with

neo-Marxian, 16; new, 5; of governance,

measure, 84; and secular realism, 50–51,

34; of partisanship, 146, 163–166; of

68, 70–71; soul as, 99. See also simile

Wordsworth’s sonnets, 67–70; true, 38–39;

form, 8, 13, 15; abstracted from spatial representation, 8; as addendum, 78; of

unmixed, 152; Wordsworth’s anxiety regarding, 9, 32–35

265

INDEX

fragment: and Clare, 198–199; and fidelity,

and geological time, 135–136, 139; 28;

160–161; Keats as, 158; Liber Amoris as,

imagined as better, superior, or happier, 5,

145–146, 155, 159, 160, 166–167; mate-

31, 32, 35, 85, 135; imminent versus coun-

rial disposition of, 147; and Rerum vul-

terfactual, 41; imperial, 125, 127–128,

garium fragmenta, 155; Romantic taste for,

135, 137; Malthusian, 178, 183–184, 186,

150–151; statue of Bonaparte as, 159–160;

192; poetry as syntax of, 99; predicated on

tendency toward resolution, 158–160;

negativity, 81; romance as daily relation

“Written in a Blank Leaf of Endymion” as,

to, 28; secular, 49, 71; as tense, 1, 31; of

155–156, 159

uneven scarcity, 171; utopian, 102

François, Anne-Lise, 5, 12 free indirect discourse, 12, 177–179, 190–196

Glissant, Édouard, 135

freedom, 6, 12; of the air, 198; as borrowing,

Godwin, William, 81; Enquiry Concerning

106; as divestment, 101; Enlightenment

Political Justice, An, 84–85

concepts of, 51–52, 54; forced, 119; found

Goodman, Kevis, 5

in restraint, 67, 183, 184; as free love,

Goodman, Nelson, 20, 50–51, 55–56, 63

38, 76–78, 81, 82, 87, 89, 98–99; as free

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 9, 123,

play of emotion, 15, 35–36; as free trade,

241n44

145; idealized, 20, 24, 41; injurious, 23;

Gonne, Maude, 113–117, 135

liberal notions of, 162; love as lack of, 119;

Gunn, Thom, 23

Marx on, 18–19; as non-expectation, 104;

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 63, 65, 68, 73

redefined by Hazlitt, 168; romance as end

Gurton-Wachter, Lily, 135–136

of, 135; as self-abandon, 36; and work, 172, 174 French Revolution, 1, 10, 18, 22, 27–28, 32–34, 43–44, 49–50, 67, 91, 160

Hacking, Ian, 51 Haraway, Donna, 6 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, 36–38, 41

Freud, Sigmund, 54–55, 58, 60, 63, 185

Hardy, Thomas, 179–180, 198

Frye, Northrop, 6, 17, 40, 44; and Blake, 20,

harm, 3, 8, 10, 22, 74, 78–79, 81, 90, 176;

22; on high adjustment, 21; on limitation, 17, 18; on low adjustment utopia, 9, 25,

minimization or tempering of, 16, 42, 88, 201

40; and Rcsm, 9, 21–22, 24–25; on Revolt

Hartman, Geoffrey, 62–63, 251n11

of Islam, The, 101; on romance, 21–22,

Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 160–161

25–26; “Third Book” Notebooks, 20–21,

Hazlitt, William, 142–171; on age of talkers,

24–25

203; critique of utilitarianism, 82–83, 85;

fulfillment, 5, 8, 19, 36, 72, 73, 84, 104, 116,

disappointment of, 142–171; engagements

174, 201, 206; and non-fulfillment, 8

with lyric of, 11, 155–157; and John Scott,

future: authentically temporal destiny of,

161–162; and Hogarth, 145; “Late Murders,

31; anticipated as new era, 13, 20, 206;

The” 82–83; Leigh Hunt on, 162; Liber

characterized by want or lack, 41; con-

Amoris, or, the New Pygmalion, 144–161,

founded with past and present, 28, 103,

166–170; “On the Doctrine of Philo-

125, 135, 169; in conventional utopias,

sophical Necessity,” 168; “On the Spirit of

173; doomed, 114–115; fidelity to, 160;

Partisanship,” 161–164, 166; opinion of

266

INDEX

Keats, 158; opinion of Malthus, 182; on

Hunt, Leigh, 13, 76–77, 78, 92, 161–164

Troilus and Cressida, 158; radicalism of, 146;

Hogarth, William: Analysis of Beauty,

relationship with Sarah Walker, 147–148; review of “Christabel,” 156–157; support of Napoleon, 160–161, 166

143–145, 153 Hopkins, Gerard Manley: “Spring and Fall,” 205

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3–4 Heidegger, Martin, 48

imperialism, 23, 110, 125; as agricultural man-

Herbert, George, 7–8

agement, 127–128, 138; and anonymity,

history, 27–28, 125; in America, a Prophecy,

133; and bad taste, 113, 121–123; Burke

80; Liber Amoris as, 147; bathos as mode

on, 126; cast as reparative, 137; and Dé-

of narrating, 122; cordoned off from

couverte du Nouveau Monde, La, 117–119;

sacred time, 43; as critic of utopias, 170;

destructive character of, 140–141; ecologi-

diffusion into figurative conditions, 155; of

cal, 111; and hyperbole, 122; and intimacy,

Enlightenment, 10, 28–29, 44–45, 51, 55;

119, 122, 125, 135; liberal, 127; Marx on,

of experimental writing, 146; and formal-

161; merely moody responses to, 120; and

ism, 38–39; and historical materialism, 5;

Napoleon, 164, 166; as occupation, 112; in

as hubbub wild, 43; imagined as undone,

“Of the Spirit of Conquest,” 116–117; and

173, 175; of imperialism, 118, 127; of

potato blight, 115; and romance or recon-

industrialization, 2, 22–23, 131; of Ireland,

ciliation, 119, 135, 144; and sentimental-

112, 114–116, 122, 126, 129–130, 132;

ity, 114; and untimed future, 135; in the

and kind-making, 51; and music, 129–131; and the present or recent past, 27, 65–66, 68, 71, 105; as the real, 4–5; linear view of, 202; literary and political, 21, 22, 25, 26, 121; multiple registers of, 169; narrative and lyrical, 146; natural, 126, 136, 170; partisan as element of, 164–165; of political economy, 180; progress as retreat from, 122; secular realism and, 46, 49–50, 68; virtual, 144 History of the Peninsula War (Robert Southey), 165 Hofkosh, Sonia, 147–148, 159–160 Holcroft, Thomas, 81, 84; Anna St. Ives,

Victorian period, 24 impossibility, 3–4, 5, 86, 96, 151, 160, 167, 201 industrialization, 2, 16–17, 22–23, 27, 111, 131, 171, 173, 176, 186, 195, 199, 201; and the post-industrial, 2, 37, 122, 176 infinite, the, 3–4, 17, 19–20, 42, 47, 65, 68, 98, 108, 215n21 intimacy, 11, 28–29, 31, 36, 38, 63, 65, 74, 87, 105, 119, 122, 125, 135, 144, 167, 182, 197; of free indirect discourse, 177; to workings of capital, 183–184 Ireland, 11, 110–116, 119, 124–129, 131, 133–137; topography of, 132–133, 139

85–90, 94, 104 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 29 Hollinghurst, Alan: Line of Beauty, The, 142–145, 153

Jameson, Fredric, 17–18, 26, 41, 86, 174, 214n16, 216n38 Johnson, Barbara, 1–2

Hume, David, 28, 65, 235n56 hunger, 6, 112, 175; and famine, 105–107, 110, 112–116, 132

Kant, Immanuel: and the Marquis de Sade, 83, 90; on aesthetic judgment, 237n9; on

267

INDEX

the sublime, 34, 189–190; and suprasen-

as curtailment, 18, 113; of desire, 17–18,

sibility to, 60–61; and Weltanschauung,

22; distribution of, 12, 177; of empirical

10, 47–49, 59; “What Is Enlightenment?”

knowledge, 60; enabling aesthetic and

51–52, 54; “What Is Orientation in Think-

affective heft, 175; form as, 35; Hora-

ing?”, 51–56

tian, 23; imaginative, 17; imposed by the

Keats, John, 12, 47, 84, 142, 151, 161,

city, 168; of liability, 23–24; Marx on,

224n13, 226n24; Endymion, 84, 156,

19; by the means of subsistence, 195; as

158–159; as fragment, 158; Hazlitt on,

non-fulfillment, 8; partisan, 11, 164–166;

158; Hyperion poems, 3, 138, 202; Lamia,

pleasures of, 11, 13; as pruning, 7, 25, 29;

156; “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 206; “Ode

as renunciation, 11, 23, 171; Romantic

to Psyche,” 200–204; “Think not of it,

pursuit of, 12; skepticism concerning, 176;

sweet one, so,” 204–206

social ills as, 176; and the utility of harm,

Khalip, Jacques, 5

90; utopian, 6, 7–8, 13, 16, 18–19, 20,

Kipnis, Laura, 35–36, 41

24, 60, 204, 210n13, 212n44; viewed as

Kleist, Heinrich von, 119–120 Kwinter, Sanford, 38–39

repressive, 23–24, 176; of the will, 183 limitlessness, 4, 19, 23, 183; of access, 12, 13, 83, 87; as aesthetic and political ideal, 20,

labor, 7, 8, 15, 56, 63, 82, 95, 101, 126, 138, 172, 174, 175, 184, 190 Levinson, Marjorie, 5, 83–84, 158, 160 Liber Amoris; or, the New Pygmalion, 144– 160, 162, 166–170; animosity in, 145, 148–149, 163, 166, 167; autobiographical

23–24, 41; catastrophic imperative toward, 19; of the corporeality of God, 65; idealization of, 12, 108; and transcendence, 42; as utopian, 35–6, 174 line of beauty, 143, 145, 153, 157; as serpentine line, 153

aspects of, 147–148; as experimental text,

Liu, Alan, 146

11, 144, 146, 147, 150, 154–155, 167; as

Lockhart, John Gibson, 76, 161–162

fragment poem, 145–146, 155, 159, 160,

loss, 2, 38, 59, 69, 96, 186, 192, 206; as

166–167; lyric dimensions of, 146, 151,

absence, 85; accelerating, 25; additive or

155; minimal agency in, 169; Napoleon in,

positive figuration of, 5, 10, 59, 78–81;

147, 151, 159–160, 166; notion of charac-

as affective resource, 178; as core aesthetic

ter in, 147–149, 152, 154, 158; serpentine

principle of Romanticism, 145; as form

line in, 145, 153, 157

of impact without accretion, 80; love as,

liberalism, 25, 110, 111, 127, 137, 161, 176,

84, 98; in “Ode to Psyche,” 200–204; of

178; difference from partisanship, 145,

persons and convictions, 169; and poiesis,

162, 164–165; as distinct from capital-

3; possession grounded in, 87; and pros-

ism, 176–177; Hazlitt on, 145, 147, 160,

pects of renewal, 170; as a precondition of

161, 166; Schmitt on, 162–164. See also

utopia, 2, 5, 81, 95–98; redeemed as gain,

neoliberalism

7; in Revolt of Islam, The, 80–81, 84, 96,

limitation: as abbreviation, 20, 25, 27; aesthetic, 15, 19, 20; as anti-capitalist,

98, 100, 104. See also dispossession love, 33, 36–38, 39, 74, 154, 206; and

24; of availability, 174; in Blake’s poetics,

abstinence, 182–184, 186; as animos-

14–15, 19; as boundedness, 14–15, 19–20;

ity, 148–149; in Anna St. Ives, 84–90;

268

INDEX

and colonial or imperial romance, 116,

materialism, 5, 19, 37; honed by external

117–119, 122, 134, 135, 138, 141; con-

force, 15; as imperiled resource, 2, 12,

ventions of, 184; as dispossession, 87–90,

174; infinitesimal traces of, 204; as life-

94–98; endangered by form, 36; free, 38,

less heap, 36–37; of mortal feeling, 206;

76–79, 81, 82, 87–90, 98; in Epipsychidion,

organized in dwindling space, 31; petri-

98–100; for God, 72–73; and harm, 81;

fied, 135; phenomena in excess of, 63–64,

inferior to kindness, 170; in literary stud-

72; and poor use, 88; transcendence or

ies, 221n75; obsessive and pedantic, 152;

catclysmic alteration of, 18, 47, 201;

as philosophic tendre, 28; in Platonism,

under duress, 16

87, 90; as renunciatory attachment, 82,

McLuhan, Marshall, 88–89

87, 88; in Revolt of Islam, The, 75, 90–98,

Memoirs of Captain Rock, The (Thomas

103–104; as romance, 28; and socialism,

More), 11, 111, 127–128, 131–141;

81, 87; and structure of consent, 149; as

French satirical tradition in, 137; and

theology of surrender, 39; unrequited, 146,

geological time, 128, 135–136; terrorist

151, 166, 167, 169

discourse of, 112, 128, 131–134, 136,

Lucretius, 257n81 lyric: conventions of, 58, 68, 146, 151, 155; incompetence to, 141; Romanticism, 11

138–139, 141 Miller, D.A., 191, 194, 232n24 Milton, John, 138–139; Paradise Lost, 43, 218n54, 222n85; Samson Agonistes,

Makdisi, Saree, 80, 213n5 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 11, 131, 178–183,

138–140 minimalism, 36, 201; lyric, 155; as mini-

184; Essay on Population, 181, 182–183;

mal agency, 42, 169; regarding harm or

Hazlitt on, 182; and Jude the Obscure, 179

demand, 3, 23, 16, 80, 88; Romanticism

Man, Paul de, 39, 86–87, 97, 153, 219n62 marriage, 21, 28–29, 85–86, 119, 182, 191, 194, 199; metonymy as, 86 Martineau, Harriet, 11–12, 181, 199; Illustrations of Political Economy, 178, 180–181, 183–196; use of free indirect

as, 17 metaphor, 63: as liaison, 86, 97, 233n34; as prosthesis, 80; and utilitarianism, 84–86 modernity, 1, 2, 4, 21, 27, 61, 138, 160, 163; secular, 44–45, 59, 66 Moore, Thomas, 11, 111, 128–129; Irish

discourse, 179, 190–196; vision of pleni-

Melodies, 128–129, 131, 133; Memoirs

tude of, 186

of Captain Rock, The, 11, 111, 127–128,

Marx, Karl, 18–19, 143, 161, 233n32 matter: artwork severed from, 16; bereaved relationship to, 145; conscientious regard

131–141 More, Thomas, 16–17, 231n20 Morris, William, 6, 21, 173–174, 196

for, 8; as constraint, 12, 13; detained or curtailed by aesthetic form, 15, 16, 18;

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 96–97

distension of, 65; of the everyday, 10;

Napoleon, Bonaparte, 144, 146, 160–161,

exploitation of, 83; form viewed as coerc-

164–166; “Bonaparte,” 248n48; in Liber

ing, 35; fragmented or shattered, 147,

Amoris, 147, 151, 159, 160

160; of the future, 31; geological, 128;

naturalism, 45–46, 60, 69; and natural super-

gravitational pull of, 39; and historical

naturalism, 45–46, 63. See also realism.

269

INDEX

nature: alignment with femininity, 79, 89,

Memoirs of Captain Rock, The, 134; during

198; apparent chaos of, 34; art competi-

the Peninsular War, 164–166; Schmitt on,

tive with, 201; in Augustine’s Confessions,

146, 164–166; telluric-terrestial character

72–73; in conventional utopias, 173–175;

of, 164–167

in “Dejection, an Ode,” 57–58; desire

Paul, Saint, 104–105

for mastery over, 72, 78; end or death

perfection: as exhaustion or surfeit, 2, 17,

of, 2, 29; evacuated of gods, 64, 72; in

29–30; fantasy of, 24; in combination with

an imperial context, 118, 126, 134, 140;

frailty or deficiency, 77, 90; and perfect-

in “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence,

ibilité, 30; in review of Revolt of Islam, The,

39–40; Kant’s view of, 189–190; and

76–77; susceptibility to, 29–30; utopia

natural supernaturalism, 46; and naturalism, 45–46, 63, 69; personified as Nature, 57, 73, 90, 136, 172, 181; recalcitrance of,

wrongly conceived as, 18, 76–77 personhood, 35, 51, 153, 154, 196; in Liber Amoris, 147–149, 152, 154

29; resources of, 17, 105; in Revolt of Islam,

Picciotto, Joanna, 172

The, 93, 101, 105; rights of, 23; serpentine

plenitude, 4, 5, 18, 186; and free love, 87, 99;

line in, 143; simple apprehension of, 48;

participating in extinction, 201; as plenty,

time or history of, 29–30, 126, 135–136;

181; rhetorical or symbolic, 58, 160; and

and Wordsworthian natural piety, 63, 67.

the Romantic fragment poem, 246n25;

See also ecology and environment

utopia conventionally associated with, 107,

necessity, 35, 127, 137, 163, 168–169, 175 neoliberalism, 4, 35, 144, 188

172–175. See also excess poetry: bad, 158; 15, 39, 40, 201; and demog-

Nixon, Rob, 177

raphy, 181; as foreknowledge of criticism,

Ngai, Sianne, 113

39; as high-tech and low-energy, 201;

Noë, Alva, 94–95

displacements of, 81; formal labor of, 63;

number: as meter or beat, 67, 96–97; as popu-

found in the extinction of sex, 181–182;

lation, 177–187, 190–191, 195–197, 199;

lyric, 58, 68, 141, 146, 151, 155; 40;

and utilitarianism, 82–84, 186–187

naïve and sentimental, in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, 85, 96, 99, 180–181, 235n36,

optimism, 12–13, 29, 51, 74, 76, 81, 85, 94, 138, 141, 178; militant, 11–12, 167–169 ordinariness, 8, 10, 21–2, 27–32, 55, 61–63, 151 orientation: 58–59, 18, 41, 112; in “What Is Orientation in Thinking?”, 51–56, 60–61 Owenson, Sydney, 11, 111–112, 138; Austen

254n38; politics as, 99; Romantic, 30, 155; synonymy with love, 96; wanted, waning, or missing, 172, 180–181 poiesis, 3, 12, 37, 63, 79, 87, 106, 158 political economy, 4, 9, 23, 170–171, 177, 180–181, 184, 186, 188–190, 197; as economics, 26, 177, 181; and free indirect

on, 120–121; Edgeworths on, 121; Wild

discourse, 192–196; in Illustrations of

Irish Girl, The, 119–128, 137, 139

Political Economy, 178, 180–181, 183–196, 199; Kant on, 255n59, as mode of formal

partisanship, 11, 34, 146, 166, 168, 170; as form of militant optimism, 167; Hazlitt on, 145–146, 155, 161–164, 166; in

realism, 178. See also capitalism politics: absent, 133–134; and aesthetics, 6, 7, 8–9, 12, 18, 20, 27, 31, 146; of America,

270

INDEX

a Prophecy, 79; and animosity, 145, 148;

poverty: grinding or honest, 187; 35, 112,

anti-property, 90; of chivalry, 26, 92; of

126, 176, 179, 183–185; and the poor,

coercion and consent, 117; and desire, 3,

187–188

135; disappointment in, 167; of divest-

Price, Richard, 1, 3

ment, 13; environmental, 13; fidelity to,

progress, 23, 52, 77, 81, 91–92, 203; of capi-

160–161; as formal, 38–39; and forms of

talism, 161; of empire, 111, 127, 134, 161;

civil life, 99; as formula, 144; and ideal

figured as egress from history, 122; by the

of unlimited freedom, 20; as immanent domain, 65–67; of impasse, 138, 144;

standards of political economy, 181, 186 property, 18–19, 36, 87–90, 96, 176

indicted by Wordsworth, 33–35, 49; of injury, 100, 101; liberal side of, 162–164;

Rancière, Jacques, 36, 255n60

of limited utopia, 11–12, 13, 18, 22–23,

Rajan, Tilottama, 149

25, 60, 101, and passim; of localism, 199;

realism, 4, 21, 26, 74, 125, 135, 148–149,

as locus of self-destructive engagement, 11;

177–178; Barthes on, 64; critique of, 72;

of modern utopianism, 32, 35–38; and

as house style of capitalism, 64; as secular

music, 129–130; of partisanship, 165; and

realism, 44–46, 50–51, 60, 64, 66

pleasure, 84, 86, 98; and politicization,

religion, 10, 34, 39, 45, 51, 60, 64, 68, 203;

113–114, 116; of Romanticism, 11, 20;

conflicts with secularism, 47–49, 50,

like warfare, 166; of withdrawal, 101. See

52–53, 72; and Wordsworth’s sonnets,

also political economy

67–71

Pope, Alexander, 121, 125

repair, 76–78, 166, 170–171, 201

population: 177–187, 190–191, 195–197,

resource(s): abstinence as, 184; agricultural,

199; and overpopulation, 181–183 possibility: abandoned, 7; abbreviation of, 20;

132, 172; claims to, 88; distribution of, 170; as finite or threatened, 2, 12, 16, 17,

abdication of, 3; absorbed, 83; of adjust-

19, 171, 195; habits as, 69; human, 195;

ment, 2; of better worlds, 64, 210n13; of

of the literary object, 19; loss as, 178; man-

change, 34, 60, 167; constraint, 174; dimin-

agement of, 12, 104, 105, 176; material,

ishing, 4; as economic factor, 192; gram-

2, 174; obsolescent worlds as, 50–51; or-

matical, 29, 34; grieved, 59; of innocuous

ganized by form, 38; and private property,

survival, 206; isolated from latent, 42; Leigh

18–19; poisoning of, 80; renewable and

Hunt on, 76–77; of lightness, 32; lost, 191;

non-renewable, 184; representational, 174;

of purely linguistic existence, 204; of synco-

stockpiled, 176; survival as, 184; treated as

pated living, 170; of systems and catalogues,

inexhaustible, 83; universalization of access

36; threat of depletion of, 77; Wittgenstein on, 28, 34. See also impossibility potential: blocked or stifled, 35, 37, 38; for

to, 107; untapped, 127 Revolt of Islam, The: 10, 13, 26, 74, 75–77, 84–85, 90–98, 100–09, 254n38; apoca-

dissent, 113; exhausted, 17; human, 29,

lyptic elements of, 101–108; ; publication

108; for kindness, 170; and non-fulfill-

history of, 75–76; as romance, 92; sexual

ment, 19; reconceived as capacity, 210n13;

violence in, 90–92, 100; similes in, 81,

as susceptibility, 29, 42; 139; uncertainly

92–94, 97–99, 101, 107; Spenserian stan-

subversive, 195; utopian, 24

zas in, 82, 92–93; vegetarianism in, 105;

271

INDEX

vision of utopia in, 80, 81, 90, 95, 100,

67; and secular realism, 44–46, 50–51, 59,

101, 102–104, 106–107

60, 64, 66, 72; in Wordsworth’s sonnets,

revolution, 10, 22, 35, 66, 69, 75–76, 91–94, 101–105, 144, 151. See also French Revolution Richardson, Samuel, 123, 148–149 Robbins, Bruce, 188–189 romance, 9, 20, 21–2, 25–28, 30–31, 32, 34,

67–71 sense, 21: Kant on, 47–48, 52–56; marked by disappearance or evaporation, 47, 59, 71 and sensation or aesthesis, 47, 50, 56; and the suprasensible, 47–48, 53, 55, 59–60, 72 sentimentalism, 111–114, 116–117, 119,

42; of empire, 116, 119, 134–135; France

123–125, 127–128, 130–134, 137, 139

as region of, 27, 64; political, 36; Revolt of

serpentine line, 143, 145, 153, 157. See also

Islam, The, as, 26, 92 Romanticism: as accommodationist, 22; anti-capitalism of, 24; apocalypse in, 1–2;

line of beauty Serres, Michel, 80–1, 87–8, 94, 96, 104, 106, 113, 233n42

as bad Romanticism, 141; degradation of,

Schiller, Friedrich, 64, 72

145; as discourse of renunciation, 171; and

Schlegel, Friedrich, 30, 40, 108

divestment, 13; green, 196, 199; herbal,

Schmitt, Carl, 146, 162–166, 168, 249n62

30; and idealization of spontaneity, 15;

science fiction, 1, 6–7, 17

innovations of, 20, 21; and indigence, 35;

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 6, 21, 222n80,

and naturalism, 46; as minimalism, 17, 36;

246n28

Irish Romanticism, 110, 130; lyric and po-

Seltzer, Mark, 22

litical, 11; as pedagogy of limitation, 6, 13,

Shakespeare, William, 21, 70, 117, 158,

17–19, 23, 164; as Rcsm, 9, 11, 21–25, 27, 29, 31–32, 34, 36, 38, 40–42, 47, 70, 145; as resettlement, 29; as romance, 9, 21–2

246n28 Shelley, Mary, 1, 3, 82, 90–91; Last Man, The, 1–2, 6, 202

25–28, 30–31; in the Romantic century, 2,

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 30, 82; Defence of Poetry,

5, 17, 237n10; soul in, 200; as susceptibil-

85, 96, 180–181, 235n36, 254n38; Epipsy-

ity, 29; de Staël on, 29–30; utilitarianism

chidion, 98–100; Queen Mab, 82; Revolt of

in, 82, 90; utopian formalism of, 15–16

Islam, The, 10, 13, 26, 74, 75–77, 84–85,

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 23, 119, 123–124; as composer, 139–140; Découverte du Nouveau

90–98, 100–09 simile: additive and disjunctive properties of,

Monde, La, 117–119; Du Contrat Social,

10; in America, a Prophecy, 80–81, 91; as

118–119; Nouvelle Héloise, La, 117, 124

cinematic haiku, 108; dispossessive, 81, 97, 104; as figure of likeness or sameness, 94,

Sade, Marquis de, 83, 89–90, 98, 100, 232n24

99, 107; ; propositional, 104; in Revolt of

scarcity, 107, 171, 183

Islam, The, 81, 92–94, 97–99, 101, 107; in

secularism, 8, 10; critiques of, 44, 49–50;

the Spenserian stanza, 92–93; as technol-

as enchantment or disenchantment, 51,

ogy of moral allegory, 30; in Wordsworth’s

59, 71–72; ; and eschatology, 74; and the

sonnets, 69, 71

Enlightenment, 51–56; during the French

Smith, Adam, 111–112, 130, 190

Revolution, 44, 49–50; Letters from France,

sonnets, 67, 70, 73, 155; in Liber Amoris,

64–67; and the Romantic sonnet revival,

155–158; Wordsworth, 10, 67–71

272 Spenser, Edmund, 110, 112; and the Spense-

INDEX

transcendence, 4, 18, 21, 42, 59, 66, 165, 201

rian stanza, 26, 82, 92–93, 102 Spinoza, Baruch, 52, 103 Staël, Germaine de: D’Allemagne, 29–31, 77, 165; Thomas Carlyle on, 31 sublime, the: 29, 34, 188–190 subsistence, 58, 116, 131, 175–176, 182, 184–186, 195–196, 199 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 78–79

use: 19, 80, 87, 94, 95; as poor use, 88, 104–105 utilitarianism, 81–85, 87, 90, 97, 185–186, 231n19 utopia: and allegorical uses of pleasure, 86; and austerity, 11; as better world, 5, 21–22, 64; as caprice, 4; of cognition, 16, 21; and the commodity form, 16; as Concrete Utopia,

Tarkovsky, Andrei, 107–108

16; conventional, 6–7, 107, 173–175, 196;

Taylor, Charles, 50, 59–61, 64, 66, 72

criticized by history, 170; and decolonial

Terada, Rei, 138, 141, 144, 211n23

aesthetics, 113, 141; deficiency as asset to,

terrorism: agarian, 11, 112, 132, 131, 138–

90; and deprivation, 107; as diminishment,

139; in Memoirs of Captain Rock, The,

6; disinhibited versions of, 41; disposses-

112, 128, 131–134, 136, 138–139, 141

sion or privation and, 95, 100, 106; as

“Third-Book” Notebooks, The (Northrop Frye), 20–21, 24–25

divestment, 13, 103; as doing-with-less, 3; enriched but not overfull, 64; en-

Thackeray, William, 113–114, 116

tanglement with ordinariness, 60; as equal

Theory of the Partisan (Carl Schmitt), 162–167

distribution of restraint, 12; and food, 175,

Thrift, Nigel, 170–171

6; as formally analogous to art, 19, 22; as

time: of agriculture, 122; competing senses of,

high adjustment utopia, 21; idiorrhythmy

169; crossed by modernity, 138; erosion

structuring, 169–170; impermanence as

by narrative space of, 122; geological,

fundamental to, 37; as insufficiency, 107;

135–136; as grammatical tense or mood,

and loss, 5, 45, 80; as low adjustment

29, 31, 41, 78, 80, 91, 104, 106, 151, 169,

utopia, 9, 21, 25, 176–177; as mending,

186, 218n49; hyperbolic annihilation of,

77–78; and militant optimism, 10–11,

121; indefinite but not infinite, 206; as

13, 167, 169; and minimization of harm,

musical period, of negation, 68; of occupa-

16; as no-place and good place, 16–17;

tion, 135; 130–131; of pseudo-utopia, 186;

as paradise, 2, 7–8; as perfect world, 1–2,

seasonal, 29; shortened, 104; simile and,

17, 18; as place without people, 10, 74,

80; slow violence percolating through, 177;

81, 101–105; and poor use, 104–105; as

as the time being, 127. See also history and

positive investment in limitations, 6, 7–8,

future

13, 16, 18–19, 20, 24, 60, 204, 210n13,

tone, 21, 130, 193: as atmosphere, mood, or

212n44; and pseudo-utopia, 11, 90, 111,

Stimmung, 60–61, 63–64, 68, 73; events

171, 177, 186; refusal of perfection, 17,

abstracted into, 131; fictions of capital

18; as situation of maximum liability, 24;

registered as, 178; as response to empire,

as spatial counterworld, 8; and subjugation

120, 129, 133; ways of life reconstituted

of nature, 72; as threat to art, 8; as tran-

as, 46; Wordsworth’s gift for spreading,

scendence, 4; as universalization of scarce

68

resources, 107; in Utopia, Limited (W.S.

273

INDEX

Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan), 23–5; as zone

yon ship must go?,” 69; “With how sad

of attenuated agency, 106; Utopia, Limited,

steps, O Moon thou climb’st the sky,”

or The Flowers of Progress (W.S. Gilbert and

68–69; “World is too much with us, late

Arthur Sullivan), 23–25

and soon, The,” 69 world: accomodation to, 3; adjustment

Vendler, Helen, 70, 73, 200

to, 62–63; better, 5, 18, 21, 22, 64;

Vera of Las Vegas (Paul Muldoon), 239n31

constructed and destroyed, 12; demands

Vergil, 1, 13, 61, 66, 228n71

placed on, 11, 16, 22, 204; depleted, 204; disburdened, 25; disenchanted, 51, 59,

want, 41, 93, 179–182, 187, 188, 189

71–72; dispossession of, 81–82, 88, 94,

Warner, Michael, 183, 185, 186

104, 106; distension of, 65–66; end of

Weltanschauung, 10, 47–48, 224n14. See also

the, 1–2, 107; on the edge of utopia, 45;

worldfeel

as fragile or finite, 8, 19, 29; as framed

White, Hayden, 4–5, 223n24

or composed, 85, 94–95; as mundus sensi-

Wild Irish Girl, The, 119–128, 137, 139

bilis, 48; as resource for figures, 50–51,

Williams, Helen Maria, 228n70: Letters from

71; filled with trash, 113; finite resources

France, 27–29, 32, 64–67

of, 16, 17, 83; human impact on, 23, 42,

Winstanley, Gerrard, 172

46; intuition of, 47–48, 52, 70; of the

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 28, 34

literary object, 19, 63–64; making of, 15,

Wolfson, Susan, 14, 15, 82

21, 50–51, 59, 70; materiality of, 5, 201;

Woloch, Alex, 177, 178

misery of, 13; natural, 39–40, 190, 198;

Wordsworth, William, 1–2, 9, 13, 15, 20, 36,

naturalistic view of, 46, 60; orientation

38; anti-formalism of, 32–35, 38; “Com-

in, 53–56; without people, 42, 74, 93,

posed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3,

101–104; of political economy, 193; pose

1803,” 69; Excursion, The, 9, 32–35, 156;

of resistance to, 40; radically transformed,

gift for tone of, 68; and Helen Maria Wil-

31; rearranged or reordered, 12, 20;

liams, 32, 64, 228n70; on intertexture, 22,

referenced, 177, 178; refurbished, 76–77,

28; Intimations Ode, 1, 9, 61–63; “It is a

170; representation of, 22, 47, 66, 201;

beauteous evening, calm and free,” 69–71;

restrictive, 30; soul as interface between

Lyrical Ballads, 15, 31, 35, 67; “Nuns

person and, 199–200; tarred as fallen,

fret not at their convent’s narrow room,”

40; temporal, 31, 71; transcendence or

67–68; Poems, in Two Volumes, 10, 67–71,

supercession of, 42, 47; utopia as perfect,

228n71; Prelude, The, 1–2, 43–44, 48, 64, 136; “Slumber did my spirit seal, A” 29, 198; 69; sonnets of, 69–71, 228n70;

1, 2, 16, 17, 18 worldfeel 10, 48, 50, 55, 56, 59, 66, and 43–74 passim. See also Weltanschauung

“These words were uttered in a pensive mood,” 69; “Where lies the land to which

Yeats, William Butler, 119, 123