Trauma, transcendence, and trust: Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot thinking loss [1st ed] 9780230104969, 0230104967, 9780230117549, 0230117546, 9780230313651, 0230313655

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Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters

This series presents original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of literary works and public figures in Great Britain, North America, and continental Europe during the nineteenth century. The volumes in Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters evoke the energies, achievements, contributions, cultural traditions, and individuals who reflected and generated them during the Romantic and Victorian period. The topics: critical, textual, and historical scholarship, literary and book history, biography, cultural and comparative studies, critical theory, art, architecture, science, politics, religion, music, language, philosophy, aesthetics, law, publication, translation, domestic and public life, popular culture, and anything that influenced, impinges upon, expresses or contributes to an understanding of the authors, works, and events of the nineteenth century. The authors consist of political figures, artists, scientists, and cultural icons including William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor, and their contemporaries. The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD (Indiana University), FEA. She has taught at William and Mary, Temple University, New York University, and is Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle and the author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, and editions, essays, and reviews in journals. She lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory, intellectual history, publishing procedures, and history of science.

PUBLISHED BY PALGR AVE: Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson Byron, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson Romantic Migrations, by Michael Wiley The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider British Periodicals and Romantic Identit y, by Mark Schoenfield Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter Romantic Diasporas, by Toby R. Benis Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print, by Alberto Gabriele Romanticism and the Object, Edited by Larry H. Peer Poetics en passant, by Anne Jamison From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett Victorian Medicine and Social Reform, by Louise Penner Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, by James P. Carson Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism, by Arnold A. Schmidt Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America, by Shira Wolosky The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, by Annette Cozzi

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Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull

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Romanticism and Pleasure, Edited by Thomas H. Schmid and Michelle Faubert Royal Romances, by Kristin Flieger Samuelian Trauma, Transcendence, and Trust, by Thomas J. Brennan, S.J.

The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America, by David Dowling Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain, by Clare A. Simmons Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism, by B. Ashton Nichols The Poetry of Mary Robinson, by Daniel Robinson Romanticism and the City, by Larry H. Peer Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, by Gregory Leadbetter Romantic Dharma, by Mark Lussier Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought, by Peter Swaab

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FORTHCOMING TITLES:

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WO R D S W O R T H , TE N N Y S O N , A N D E L I O T TH I N K I N G L O S S

Thomas J. Brennan, S.J.

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T R AU M A , T R A N S C E N D E N C E , A N D T RU S T

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TRAUMA, TRANSCENDENCE, AND TRUST

Copyright © Thomas J. Brennan, S.J., 2010. All rights reserved.

First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10496–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brennan, Thomas J., 1960– Trauma, transcendence, and trust : Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot thinking loss / Thomas J. Brennan. p. cm.—(Nineteenth-century major lives and letters) ISBN 978–0–230–10496–9 (hardback) 1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Loss (Psychology) in literature. 3. Psychic trauma in literature. 4. Transcendence (Philosophy) in literature. 5. Trust in literature. 6. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809–1892—Criticism and interpretation. 8. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR585.T75B74 2010 821⬘.709384—dc22

2010014007

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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The cover art, “Peele Castle in a Storm,” by Sir George Beaumont, is used with permission of The Wordsworth Museum and Art Gallery/ The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, LA 22 9SH, United Kingdom.

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For my parents, Thomas J. and Elizabeth Brennan

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Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Traumatized Trust

xiii 1

1 Gazes of Trauma, Spots of Trust: Wordsworth’s Memorials in The Prelude

33

2 “Wound” in the “Living Soul”: Tennyson’s In Memoriam

73

3 Castrated Referentiality: Eliot’s The Waste Land

119

Epilogue: “The Tone We Trusted Most”: Merrill’s The Book of Ephraim

163

Notes

177

Bibliography

191

Index

197

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C ON T E N TS

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W

hat threads this book together is the consistent concern that the poets discussed have with the gaps in their experiences, especially in the light of traumatic loss. Indeed, such holes seem written into the concept of text, as literary criticism characterizes it. The term refers to “the very words, phrases and sentences as written” in discourse (OED 1a), but its etymology also connects it, from ancient times, to “that which is woven, web, or texture” (OED). In literary study, therefore, it has become a commonplace to think of texts as analogous to tapestries or fabrics. The words and lines of a poem weave around, but never completely crowd out, the blankness of the page or computer screen. Indeed, the white space of the page or screen corresponds to this necessary hole or gap in the fabric. Neither artifact would be comprehensible without it. Now, I might have said lack or emptiness where I have used hole or gap. As the reader may be disappointed to learn, the former, more abstract set of words is also part of this book’s lexicon. That is because they mark the melancholic and traumatized desire with which each of these poets grapples in the wake of loss. At the outset, however, holes and gaps have a refreshingly physical heft to them. Such a stress is salutary for this study in at least two ways. First, their concreteness reminds us that, however complex and theoretical literary responses to trauma necessarily become, these writers are people dealing with the suffering entailed on them by present losses., This suffering is typically embodied in their memories of the dead. Second, the more concrete pair of words suggests that the artifact or text built around such memories will always miss something. Of necessity, the memorial falls short because the substitution of words for the living person is never adequate or complete. James Merrill’s famous poem “b o d y” aptly illustrates how the notion of a hole is written into the production of texts and, implicitly, that of bodies:

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P R E FA C E

body Look closely at the letters. Can you see, entering (stage right), then floating full,

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P R E FACE then heading off — so soon — how like a little kohl-rimmed moon o plots her course from b to d — as y, unanswered, knocks at the stage door? Looked at too long, words fail, phase out. Ask, now that body shines no longer, by what light you learn these lines and what the b and the d stood for.1

Simultaneously, the “o” is both the center and the hole in the poem. Not only does the letter appear close to the middle of the title word, and to the middle of the poem, but its physical resemblance to the “b” and the “d” sets up a trajectory or “course” that marks its brief performance as one reads from left to right. In addition, its likeness to the numeral zero highlights that the “b” and “d” enclose a nullity. Most importantly, the act of framing the gap calls attention to the hole that is essential to the making of the “b” and “d” as well. What the “b” and “d” stand for, we might say, is that the attempt to frame loss or emptiness inevitably exposes the same quality in the attempt itself. Finally, the “y” remains “unanswered” while the performance continues; as long, that is, as the living body has life onstage and is in relationship to others, it must overlook—or miss—its own ending in death. Only in this way can the “o’s” “floating full” be momentarily achieved. Formulated by Jacques Lacan, the schema of this missed encounter with death as one of the preconditions for life articulates, as we will see in the Introduction, one of the theoretical poles of this study. Another pole, however, is suggested by the question anticipated at the end of “b o d y.” Although words inevitably fail, the “light” within which we learn about them and apply them to our bodies remains. Literally, this reference recalls the beginning of the poem. In order to examine the letters as carefully as the speaker directs, one might need a fairly strong lamp. Light, though, also implies the frame of mind in which one makes this examination. The poem, in other words, assumes that a degree of trust in language’s power subsists with the lack that resides in any particular expression of it. Considering how trust and lack intertwine with each other leads me to Melanie Klein’s theory on subject positions that individuals assume as responses to the trauma and loss that life presents. In making this connection, I am not arguing that Lacanian loss and Kleinian trust are reducible to each other. Rather, as chapters on The Prelude, In Memoriam, and The Waste Land show, the explanatory

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power of holes and gaps as principles of literary creation returns Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot to trust as the lack within the lack or the hole within the hole that is never overcome. Consolation, or the plugging of the gap left by what has been lost with the words of the poem, eludes the writers discussed here. But trust in poetry as the language for this loss strangely persists, a stance that marks each poet as faithful to the desire that impelled writing in the first place.

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P R E FACE

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his study began as a reading of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam and grew into a consideration of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Along the way, I benefitted enormously from careful reading and re-reading of Jacques Lacan’s seminars with Laura Quinney, at Brandeis University, who eventually read and critiqued the whole manuscript in both its early and late stages. Francis Burch, S.J. at Saint Joseph’s University, did an early edit of the manuscript and has continually encouraged me in this work. Most recently, Deirdre McMahon, at Drexel University, completed a third reading and critique in the process of preparing the index. The professionalism—and the patience—of these colleagues puts me very happily in their debt. Additionally, this work would not have been completed without the support and insight of these colleagues: William Flesch, Victor Luftig, Paul Morrison, Jeff Nunokawa, Ronald Wendling and the late Robert Barth, S.J. At Palgrave Macmillan Marilyn Gaull has been an encouraging series editor, and Brigitte Shull, Lee Norton, Rachel Tekula, and Joel Breuklander have all been indispensable in helping me navigate the work of putting the book into production. At Newgen Productions Rohini Krishnan and Kendra Millis worked very hard on the copyediting of this book. The English Department at Saint Joseph’s University, where I have taught for the last nine years, has proven a congenial place to work and think about many of the ideas in this book; I also benefitted from a year’s sabbatical from school to complete this work. Finally, no acknowledgment would be complete without mention of the ongoing support of my family and of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits)—in simplest terms my gratitude to them is beyond words.

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AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

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Tr au m at i z e d Trust

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ear the end of Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan comments on Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia”: In a famous article called “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud also says that the work of mourning is applied to an incorporated object, to an object which for one reason or another one is not particularly fond of. As far as the loved object that we make such a fuss in mourning is concerned, we do not, in fact, simply sing its praises, if only because of the lousy trick it played on us by leaving us. Thus, if we are sufficiently cruel to ourselves to incorporate the father, it is perhaps because we have a lot to reproach this father with.1

The whimsical tone highlights the excess involved not in the Oedipal rivalry itself but in the way that rivalry comes into representation. In the same lecture, Lacan discusses Freud’s belief that the setting up of the superego as the internalized voice of the parent marks the end of the Oedipus complex in the child. The tone of the summary mimics the fierceness of the child’s representation of the father. At the same time, the tone conveys the inevitability of adducing the Oedipus complex as the explanation for subsequent feelings of loss in adulthood. Finally, perhaps Lacan recognizes the tension that inheres in the category of mourner as presented by Freud. In this regard, Leo Bersani claims that one reason for current interest in Freudian theory derives from the frequency with which that theory fails to formulate its position. Such moments of “theoretical collapse,” according to Bersani, signal to the reader—especially one familiar with literature—moments of “psychoanalytic truth.”2 As I argue, Freud intuits this collapse in “Mourning and Melancholia.” Although he sets out

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Introduction

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to differentiate the normal mourner from the pathological melancholic, he discovers that these theoretically distinct types of person in practice prove difficult to tell apart. Indeed, one of the definitive characteristics of the mourner—her ability to come to a close with grief and thereby frame it in narrative—only comes into view after the mourning has ended. In the interim, during the time of writing and reading the poem, we confront the repetition of grief that characterizes the melancholic’s utterances. Yet the melancholic’s discourse need not constitute an impasse for reading about death and loss as it seems to have done for Freud in the analyzing of it. Where he speaks impatiently of the melancholic’s protestations of her worthlessness—suggesting that she is no doubt correct—I argue that the melancholic’s eschewing of narrative closure in literature has ethical potential that distinguishes it from the site of analysis as conceived by Freud. In particular, the refusal of narrative closure keeps the focus on desire as the manifestation of an unconscious knowledge in human beings. This desire derives from a lack at the core of being that trauma, as a concrete repetition of the death drive, instantiates. Lacan, not surprisingly, offers the methodology for this approach, especially with respect to his rereading of the dream of the burning child (from The Interpretation of Dreams) in Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. As Cathy Caruth argues, Lacan’s focus on trauma lays special stress on the position of the survivor whose continuance in life is in no way a happy passage beyond disaster but a continued sign of the disaster’s return.3 This reading of Freud implies that the survivor of trauma resembles a signifier—specifically of the lack that forms the center of human desire. To imagine the survivor in this way means recognizing that nothing occurs automatically or easily in the performance of this role. Rather, the necessity of the survivor’s resistance to consolation simultaneously links this figure to the melancholic and invests the former, as Lacan argues with respect to the character of Antigone, with tragic dignity. Most importantly, dwelling on this resistance to consolation calls attention to trust—a trust in desire that surfaces in the repetition of trauma. To articulate this notion, I turn to the work of Melanie Klein. Emphatically, for her, trust is not a consistent state at which one arrives as the result of an uninterrupted and linear process of development. Her concept of different “positions”—paranoid-schizoid and depressive—that the infant and baby endure precludes such an interpretation. Although Klein believes that paranoid-schizoid anxiety gradually diminishes with the advent of its depressive counterpart

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after about the age of four months, the residue of the first position inheres in the second. Most importantly, adult mourning may reactivate both. Operating in the child’s idealizing of the parents, Kleinian trust suggests that the lack evident in the paranoid-schizoid position never has absolute sway. This claim, however, does not diminish the importance of working with lack and loss as they reappear in life; this dictum applies as much in Klein’s theory as it does in Lacan’s. Indeed, Klein’s emphasis on the trauma of the paranoid-schizoid position demonstrates a similarity in both writers’ understanding of the death drive, especially with respect to its deferral through anxious fixation on external objects. In this way, my stress on Kleinian trust attempts to account for why one might engage reparation as an ongoing but never completed work. On the one hand, because reparation always winds up reciting the loss and lack from which it arises, the trust it invokes always retains a melancholic color. On the other hand, because we can conceive of the trauma that informs this loss as shared, the ethical relation between those caught in its web—a relation Lacan envisions—becomes possible.

Mourning and Theory At the outset of “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud’s confident tone fits with his clinical purpose: he will differentiate between mourning as a temporal response to loss and melancholy as its non-temporal and possibly pathological counterpart. Yet, as the essay progresses, the similarities between the two states occupy him and undercut his confidence in the distinction he had stipulated. Especially when he arrives at his discussion of “profound mourning”—or mourning occasioned by trauma—he finds its connection to melancholy via narcissism both counterintuitive and theoretically compelling. Inasmuch as the melancholic speaks her loss and does so quite insistently, Freud’s difficulty in distinguishing the melancholic from the mourner proves instructive. Ultimately, the former’s volubility and the latter’s taciturnity do not simply delineate different types of people one might encounter in analysis or even different stages of grief in the same person. Rather, as divergent styles with respect to using language, they suggest the centrality of what we have not yet claimed in speech with respect to traumatic loss. Freud begins this essay by confidently describing mourning as a comprehensible response to loss because it foresees closure through substitution: “Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of

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Introduction

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one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”4 Repetition marks the mourner; Freud notes that she “regularly” reacts as he describes by substituting “a loved person” with a series of other objects as indicated by the “and so on” at the end of the sentence. In describing what mourning does, the prose mimes what he expects the work of mourning will accomplish: the substitution of one object (the actual lost person) with new ones. That this substitution embraces a potentially vast range of objects—also signaled by “and so on”— gives further warrant for the way the mechanism of mourning works. With supreme understatement, he then moves to the “work” itself: “In what, now, does the work which mourning performs consist? I do not think there is anything farfetched in presenting it in the following way” (SE XIV: 244). Seeing nothing “farfetched” in the description he has not yet offered, Freud imparts a sense of the inevitability of what he goes on to describe. The same sense of inevitability also characterizes the description of substitution. Even the mourner’s apparently idiosyncratic investment in the lost object poses no surprise to the analyst. Rather, it represents a predictable stage in treatment: “Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object.” Although the command of reality stirs up resistance, this reaction is “understandable” inasmuch as “people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them” (SE XIV: 244). By saying, however, that the substitute “beckons” to the mourner, Freud suggests that a sign is already operating in this person’s ego that will bring the mourner’s attachment to the dead to a close. Additionally, by implementing the demands of reality “bit by bit,” the mourner plays out a “compromise” with reality’s demands but not defiance of them. Thus, with confidence grounded in “fact,” Freud finishes the description of the work of mourning: “The fact is, however, when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” (SE XIV: 245). By linking freedom with lack of inhibition, he suggests the irresistibility of “compromise.” The mourner’s instinct for survival, in other words, gradually rediscovers the desirability of a less trammeled existence and yields to this good. If reality’s demands operate in the mourner via the substitute’s beckoning her back to ordinary pursuits, they also operate in the analyst who knows not to see this condition as pathological. Mourning’s clearly defined temporal trajectory underlies this confidence: the whole process resembles a plot. First, mourning structures events in

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a meaningful sequence or plan that works through some tension (in this case the loss of a loved person) and finds resolution in a restoration of lost freedom. Second, this ending at least retrospectively brings the operation of the whole plan into focus. Some aptitude for other objects besides the dead person exists in the mourner and allows the substitutes mentioned by Freud to go to work. In this sense, we might say that the character of the mourner proves to be her destiny. Looking back on the whole course of mourning, it always had to be that this person would succumb—albeit slowly—to the power of “reality-testing.” Within this temporal construal of mourning as a task or work to be finished, melancholy’s pathology does not reside in the resistance to the work. The mourner’s “reality-testing” constitutes an ordinary form of such resistance. Rather, the pathology comes into play through the melancholic’s exaggeration. Again with great understatement, Freud notices that the melancholic “does not behave in quite the same way as a person who is crushed by self-reproach and remorse in a normal fashion.” Rather, this person lacks a sense of decorum about the situation and annoyingly demands an audience for her adversities (SE XIV: 247). What the mourner avoids—other people’s attention—is precisely what the melancholic’s self-dramatizing language about her worthlessness seeks out. I will have more to say about the melancholic’s approaches to language, but first we should notice that this self-dramatization on the melancholic’s part is the only feature that distinguishes her from the mourner. The other ones Freud mentions emphasize the similarity of the two states: depression, withdrawal from the “outside world,” diminished capacity for love, and the loss of interest in formerly pleasant activities. Only a “disturbance of self-regard” marks the melancholic (SE XIV: 244). Thus, a note of uncertainty comes into Freud’s discussion. In particular, he takes up the case of “profound mourning” or “the reaction to the loss of someone who is loved” (SE XIV: 244). Consistent with his view on the length of time the work of mourning takes, he states that one should not classify this condition as an illness. Indeed, with regard to profound mourning, Freud makes clear what the mourner has lost (“someone who is loved”) and that the mourner can begin to replace this lost object with other ones. Yet he characterizes profound mourning in oddly qualified terms: “It is really only because we know so well how to explain it that this attitude does not seem to us pathological” (SE XIV: 244). Mourning remains a non-pathological human behavior, but in extreme cases, Freud wonders about the etiology of this sense of ordinariness. Does

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ordinary mourning simply reflect the analyst’s fluency in explaining it rather than anything intrinsic to the condition itself? This uncertainty also applies to one of the basic assumptions of “Mourning and Melancholia” as a whole. The mourner’s lost object— especially when connected to a dead person—proves accessible to analysis because “there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious” (SE XIV: 245). While the mourner does not draw attention to the loss because she—and everyone else—is already conscious of it, the melancholic’s lost object is not as clear. Possibly the object has not died, “but has been lost as an object of love” (SE XIV: 245). Alternatively, this loss of love may have happened, but neither the melancholic nor the analyst perceives it: “In yet other cases one feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot clearly perceive what has been lost either” (SE XIV: 245). Amplifying what he has said, Freud claims that the patient may know “whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him” (SE XIV: 245). In the process of discussing the distinction between mourning and melancholia, we see Freud gradually recognizing that the difference does not hold up as clearly as his initial discussion of mourning had suggested. On the one hand, the melancholic starts to resemble the mourner inasmuch as both may have suffered a loss verifiable by the analyst. On the other hand, the mourner’s conscious loss might prove to have the unconscious component adduced to melancholia. Neither condition has clearly intrinsic qualities; rather both have to be defined in terms of their differentiation from the other. This difficulty in distinguishing between mourning and melancholia carries over to the discussion of ambivalence attending each condition. The “self-reproaches” of the mourner can give “a pathological cast” to this state inasmuch as the mourner behaves as if she has brought about the loss of the object. The severity of this obsession underscores the power of ambivalence, even when the drawing in of the libido—as in melancholia—has not occurred: “The obsessional states of depression following on the death of a loved person show us what the conflict due to ambivalence can achieve by itself when there is no regressive drawing in of the libido as well” (SE XIV: 251). The grounding for this theory lies in Freud’s theory of narcissism. The melancholic regresses to an oral state of gratification characteristic of infants. Instead of relating to an external object as external, the melancholic’s ego eats it up: “The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of

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libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it” (SE XIV: 249–250). Though mourning does not illustrate such regression, his calling attention to the power of the mourner’s ambivalence suggests that it bears traces of this earlier “cannibalistic phase” which it shares with melancholy. The common etiology of mourning and melancholy in the cannibalistic phase of the infant’s development, though a theoretical exploration for Freud, also has enormous practical consequences. As theory, it links the conscious awareness of the mourner’s present narrative to an earlier supposed one. The trauma of the infantile state operates even in the mourner’s conscious discourse. This imbrication with trauma is even clearer with respect to the melancholic. Practically, the common origin for mourning and melancholy iterates the analyst’s style of listening to individual patients. Though “Mourning and Melancholia” at first looks like an attempt to categorize different types of patients, it ends by implying that a mourner resides in every melancholic and a melancholic in every mourner. In particular, by stressing the melancholic’s self-dramatizing behavior, Freud can hypothesize the cause of the difference between the mourner’s behavior and the melancholic’s. Above all, for the melancholic, the “self-criticisms” are very real ones. Regardless of their accuracy, Freud stresses “that [the melancholic] is giving a correct description of his psychological situation” (SE XIV: 247). In other words, his analytic approach takes seriously what the melancholic sees as self-evident: her worthlessness. This respect for the melancholic’s discourse leads Freud to emphasize the limits of treatment as fundamental. Just as one would not treat the mourner’s condition as “pathological,” so it is “fruitless” to contradict the melancholic’s self-criticism (SE XIV: 243). Within the frame of “Mourning and Melancholia,” this type of listening allows Freud to narrate the alternate way in which the melancholic’s ego uses psychic energy. This supposition leads to the paper’s most famous discovery. In ordinary cases substitution of the lost object with a new one would have occurred, but in this case the psychic energy that would have enabled this substitution “was withdrawn into the ego” and redirected onto the lost object. The part of the melancholic’s ego that identifies with the lost object is criticized and judged as worthless by the part that has remained unaligned (SE XIV: 249). Hypothesizing its splitting leads him to argue that what looks like the melancholic’s self-hatred actually disguises a hatred of the person who has been lost. In its most radical expression, the melancholic’s suicidal wish really expresses the desire to kill the person

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who has been lost since, crucially, that person is still experienced as alive by the melancholic (SE XIV: 252). More broadly, Freud’s interest in the repetitions of the melancholic underscores the extent to which, even in an essay very invested in the patient’s conscious disclosure, unconscious trauma may still hold a position of mastery. As Thomas Pfau argues, the language of the Freudian melancholic is always inviting the analyst to identify the secret reason—secret even from the melancholic—for her distress. Pfau sees the same relation holding between the author/patient and critic/analyst.5 Regardless of the efficacy of either exchange, Pfau argues that the melodrama of the melancholic’s ordeal does not simply equate with an individual—and perhaps pathological—condition. Instead, the melancholic’s speech points to something more generally characteristic of all humans’ attempts at communication. As we have seen, Freud recognizes that the melancholic’s incessant reciting of diminishment cannot equate simply with the loss of a person— often enough, no person may have died. Expanding on this idea, Pfau argues that the melancholic’s use of language reflects “the speaker’s insight into the inescapably social and iterative character of all affective experience and language.”6 Though the melancholic might like to think of her loss as uniquely personal, Pfau says that we must also see her as recognizing, through the very repetitiousness of her claims, that this alleged interiority is “something inherently social.”7 The persistence of the melancholic’s discourse, especially the repetitious way in which she sticks to her story, thereby represents a defeat in Freud’s project of offering mourning as the normative account of response to loss, and, especially, of bringing it to closure. Even in the essay that tries to distinguish mourning from melancholy, we see Freud unable to maintain the distinction as sharply as he would have liked. Instead, he lingers between the poles of mourning and melancholy. To these features of survivorship, we will regularly return. Seventeen years before writing “Mourning and Melancholia,” however, he had already presented an example of a survivor in the father who dreams of his burning child in The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s failure to link this earlier trauma to the death drive—which bedevils Lacan—is the topic we now consider.

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Reading the Dream of the Burning Child Like “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud’s account of the dream of the burning child admits of both an explanation that stresses its narrative components and a more theoretical one that derives from the

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A father had been watching by his child’s sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?” He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them.8

In his analysis of the dream, Freud emphasizes three elements. First, the light from the fire hitting the father’s eyes, in addition to actually awakening him, also leads him to the conclusion that the candle had “set something alight in the neighborhood of the body.” This event confirms the fear that the father had before retiring: that the old man watching the body could not perform this task (SE V: 509–510). Second, by delaying the awakening when the need to get up and put out the fire was immediate, Freud argues for the dream as wish fulfillment. Despite the danger, the father has the child alive again for a few more moments. Finally, the words that the son addresses to the father are, Freud theorizes, probably words actually said to the father when the son was sick with fever (SE V: 510–511). The dream and its termination, therefore, represent the combination of a wish that the father meditates, actual memories of what the child said, and the immediate physical condition of the fire. Commenting on the dream in Seminar XI, Lacan takes the father’s wish with equal seriousness, characterizing the dream as one “suspended around the most anguishing mystery, that which links a father to the corpse of his son close by, of his dead son.”9 The uncertainty of the dream contributes to the poignancy of the wish. Just at the moment when the dream seems to offer fulfillment of the wish as the boy speaks, the question reminds the father that it is already too late to do anything to save him. This momentary fulfillment inscribed in the larger defeat of the father’s wish leads Lacan to a question about

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resistance to narrative which, as Lacan points out, shows up in the dream’s problematic connection to the waking world. Freud begins his discussion of “this model dream” by linking it to wish fulfillment:

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the efficacy of Freud’s example: “What is the point, then, of sustaining the theory according to which the dream is the image of a desire with an example in which, in a sort of flamboyant reflection, it is precisely a reality which, incompletely transferred, seems to be shaking the dreamer from his sleep?” (1977: 34). As Lacan poses his question, the dream of the burning child seems to parody wish-fulfillment in its excess. The father gets the child back, but in a way that underscores just how little he understands about the desire or “burning” at work in his son or, for that matter, in himself (1977: 34). The momentarily fulfilled wish then returns Freud to the enigma in desire. In particular, this mystery centers on “the world of the beyond”—the unconscious—that does not belong to either the father or the son but exists between them and speaks through the boy’s question. At this juncture, Lacan introduces the Oedipal aspect to the example: “What is [the son] burning with, if not with that which we see emerging at other points designated by the Freudian topology, namely, the weight of the sins of the father, borne by the ghost in the myth of Hamlet, which Freud couples with the myth of Oedipus?” (1977: 34). The father passes on his desire for the mother to the son. On the one hand, the desire points out a transgression or “sin” in the son (just as it was in his father vis-à-vis his father). On the other hand, it is only by grappling with this transgression that the son becomes subject to the father’s law, which enables desire itself to survive. For Lacan, however, the Oedipal desire does not matter as much as Freud’s failure to mention it. Meditating on this omission, Lacan suggests that the “beyond” Freud is wrestling with anticipates Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which the unconscious death drive functions “beyond” the purely economic principles of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, which, on the surface, characterize conscious activity. Lacan will discuss this primacy of the death drive near the end of Seminar XI, but for the moment he defers this explanation, apparently bowing to Freud’s purpose of showing rather than telling how this truth of the unconscious is produced. As a result, the stress falls on what Freud overlooks in this example—its susceptibility to an Oedipal reading. Indeed, Freud backs away from such a discovery: “Everything is within reach, emerging, in this example that Freud places here in order to indicate in some way that he does not exploit it, that he appreciates it, that he weighs it, savours it” (1977: 35). In other words, Lacan sees Freud doing exactly what he expects his readers to do: dwell in the midst of the dream’s non-explainable elements with respect to the waking world. Rather than speaking on Freud’s terms—that is, through the wish fulfillment and, for the moment,

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the Oedipus complex—the unconscious manifests itself in the lingering sense of malaise the dream evokes. The father knows himself to be addressed by the dream, but he does not understand this address’s purport. Neither, Lacan argues, does Freud. From this refractoriness of the dream to explanation emerges recognition. The insistence of doubting becomes its own indication of certainty. For this reason, Lacan sees Freud’s procedure as “Cartesian”: “doubt is the support of his certainty” (1977: 35). By putting such a heavy stress on “certainty” as intertwined with doubt, Freud avoids the mistake that his successors in ego psychology would make. For them “the first thing to be done is to overcome that which connotes anything to do with the content of the unconscious—especially when it is a question of extracting from it the experience of the dream” (1977: 35). Lacan highlights the futility of this undertaking; ego psychology is trying “to overcome that which floats everywhere, that which marks, stains, spots, the text of any dream communication—I am not sure, I doubt” (1977: 35). Instead of seeing the unconscious as what analyst and patient must ally against, Lacan sees Freud as recognizing that the “everywhere” in which the unconscious “floats” includes the conscious world. Dreams, Lacan argues, become Freud’s clue to this process. Just as the doubtfulness of the dream stains the whole dream (and not just a part of it), so the whole stained dream (as a product of the unconscious) stains the conscious discourse it inhabits. As an indicator of this ubiquity of the unconscious, the stain operates in several fields of awareness. Most famously, Lacan relates it to vision. Specifically, it manifests itself as the blind spot in dreams and reveals we are all subject to others’ gazes as much as we are ones who gaze at others.10 We shall have more to say about the gaze and its castrating power in the chapter on Wordsworth, but we should notice that Lacan also sees the stain operating in a verbal and auditory register as much as a visual one: “Impediment, failure, split. In a spoken or written sentence, something stumbles. Freud is attracted by these phenomena, and it is there that he seeks the unconscious” (1977: 25). For Freud the stain is found in slips of the tongue that then point out the operation of the unconscious. Lacan, however, is suggesting that not only moments in conscious discourse but the discourse as a whole is made strange by such slips. Thus, just as the stain—as image— functions to screen the subject from its condition of being gazed at, so the stain as an auditory signifier functions to shield the subject from recognizing the extent to which her conscious discourse is actually preprogrammed in her body by the surrounding environment.

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Describing such stains in speech, Lacan stresses that they appear as a gap: “What occurs, what is produced in this gap, is presented as discovery. It is in this way that the Freudian exploration first encounters what occurs in the unconscious” (1977: 25). Consistent with his comments about the dream of the burning child, Lacan does not focus so much on the content of the “discovery” as on its mode of presentation. Indeed, the “discovery” equates with its mode inasmuch as the dream is something by which the subject “always feels himself overcome.” This feeling arises because, though the unconscious has opened precisely at the point where the explanation of the dream as wish fulfillment falls short, “[the unconscious] is always ready to steal away, thus establishing the dimension of loss” (1977: 25). Desire, therefore, is not only intimately bound to the unconscious but also to the subject’s feeling of lack in the very moment of her constitution. Of course, the expression “to feel desire” invokes the notion of wish, suggesting desire’s connection to the enjoyment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. With regard to the father in The Interpretation of Dreams, it would also correspond to the pleasure the father momentarily has in having his son back. Mourners experience such feelings as proper to themselves. In this case, the dream apparently belongs to the father since it expresses his personal, conscious wish that he would see fulfilled. Lacan, however, sees this equating of desire with a wish and its possible fulfillment as a mistake because it does not take into account the operation of the unconscious. Specifically, the process of such wishing inadvertently produces the “beyond” of the unconscious, which, as we saw above, stains the dream. Unlike the wish, the unconscious as desire is not the property of the one who experiences its effects. That is because, as Joan Copjec argues, this desire always involves an excess on the part of the one who desires, for the person or thing desired, that the latter cannot reciprocate in intensity.11 By exposing this asymmetry, the dream suggests that built into the father’s wish to have his son back lies an element that remains outside of the father’s psyche, and, even more radically, betokens his death as much as the son’s. This component of desire Lacan famously characterizes as the “desire of the Other”—it exists in the subject but, because it refers to the death drive, can never be experienced as a counterpart to the subject.12 To assume that it could be so experienced would simply reduce the Other to the field of the subject’s ego relations. As his critique of ego psychology suggests, Lacan believes analysis all too often makes this mistake. To correct this error, he sees the Other as referring to the effect that the external environment (expressed in the discourse of law, religion, family, medicine, and the

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like) has on the subject as she struggles to navigate these fields. Other people’s language, of course, mediates these systems to individuals, but Lacan’s focus remains on the general principle that the Other always recalls. Speech can only take place if we can either consciously or unconsciously imagine a listener as present. In Seminar III, he characterizes the Other as “the locus in which is constituted he who is speaking with him who hears.”13 Language, therefore, is no more the property of the subject than desire. Indeed, the operations of both suggest that the power of the Other, as it operates in the subject, always resides in the unconscious. Objects of experience, in turn, elicit desire on the part of the subject. Late in Seminar XI, Lacan returns to the question of pleasure and pain as each refers to the ego and its objects. Now using the German words, he reiterates that Lust and Unlust work beyond purely economic principles of pleasure and pain ordinarily understood as governing people. Most importantly, by using “Ich” for “ego,” he characterizes the ego under the sway of Lust and Unlust as an object defined by both a biological element (“the central nervous system”) and by “the condition of homeostasis” (1977: 240– 241). Homeostasis he identifies as “Lust” while its disruption is “Unlust”: As for Lust, this is not a field strictly speaking, it is always an object, an object of pleasure, which, as such, is mirrored in the ego. This mirror-image, this bi-univocal correlate of the object, is here the purified Lust-Ich of which Freud speaks, namely, that which, in the Ich, is satisfied with the object, qua Lust. Unlust, on the other hand, is what remains unassimilable, irreducible to the pleasure principle. It is out of this, Freud tells us, that the non-ego will be constituted. It is situated—note well—within the circle of the original ego, it bites into it, without the homeostatic functioning ever managing to reabsorb it. You see here the origin of what we find later in the so-called functioning of the bad object. (1977: 241)

This stress on the relation of “Lust” and “Unlust” to “good” and “bad” objects illustrates Melanie Klein’s influence. For both writers, the “good” object denotes what the subject can assimilate into the mirror image or ideal; the “bad” object, what has not been assimilated. Although he does not directly mention the persecutory power of the latter, its “biting” into the “circle” of the “Ich” suggests that

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this disruption represents a trauma that the subject never manages to reabsorb fully. The piece bitten away corresponds to the empty space or lack that allows for desire. Only by means of it can the subject recognize the Other as the one it addresses in the first place. And only by seeing itself as so constituted before the Other can the subject recognize the unconscious operating in the exchange with the analyst. Lacan’s term for what symbolizes this lack that elicits desire is the objet a: “The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ” (1977: 103). Although he speaks of four such objects, the physical entities themselves do not primarily concern him. Rather, he focuses on the quality repeatedly found lacking in each. What was expected to turn up but did not spurs desire: “far from the dialectic of what occurs in the subject’s unconscious being able to be limited to the reference of the field of Lust, we have found a certain type of objects which, in the final resort, can serve no function. These are the objets a—the breasts, the faeces, the gaze, the voice” (1977: 242). In its absence—evident when it disappears from the child—the objet a functions as much as a bad object as a good one. Possessed of this dual quality, the objet a shows that the overvaluation that inheres in desire also characterizes the relation of love. Lacan illustrates this overvaluation by correlating the uniqueness of this object with the subject’s wish to mutilate it: This paradoxical, unique, specified object we call the objet a. I have no wish to rehash the whole thing again, but I will present it for you in a more syncopated way, stressing that the analysand says to his partner, to the analyst, what amounts to this−I love you but because inexplicably I love in you something more than you −the objet petit a−I mutilate you. (1977: 268)

The quality loved in a person that is nevertheless completely beyond that person, the objet a marks a place in the subject for where the unconscious opens, but also for where it fleets away. For this reason it occasions such strongly positive and negative feelings of love and mutilation. Behind this conception of the objet a is Lacan’s understanding of the drive. As we have seen, like Freud, he locates the death drive beyond the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain that inheres in wish fulfillment. To speak, however, of the drive as singular ignores what Lacan sees as basic to its composition—that it really amalgamates partial drives whose succession in the composition of the human

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being does not articulate a pattern of organic development but of violent interruption: “The passage from the oral drive to the anal drive can be produced not by a process of maturation, but by the intervention of something that does not belong to the field of the drive—by the intervention, the overthrow, of the demand of the Other” (1977: 180). Even more problematic is the supposed linkage of the oral and anal drives to the two others he identifies: “the Schaulust, or scopic drive” and “the invocatory drive (la pulsion invocante).” None of these, he insists, show “the slightest relation of deduction or genesis” (1977: 180). That these drives each take their place in the narrative of maturation does not reflect teleological growth but traumatic supersession. What gives each of the partial drives its apparent coherence is the object that it ultimately finds lacking “as something that must be circumvented” (1977: 181). Death, as the event that all living persons must face, ultimately exemplifies such an object. Foretold in the traumatic way that the drives succeed each other, it operates in the present or empty space that desiring continually circumvents. Most importantly, because it plays out this repetition in language, the objet a raises the question of language’s relationship to the subject’s desire. On the one hand, embedded within whatever positive demand the subject expresses in speech, the explicit or implicit invocation of the objet a also encodes the loss of a supposedly immediate relation to the object of love. In Seminar III Lacan implies such a loss in his discussion of the phallus as the occasion of desire in the mother-child relationship: We’re told that a mother’s requirement is to equip herself with an imaginary phallus, and it’s very clearly explained to us how she uses her child as a quite adequate real support for this imaginary prolongation. As to the child, there’s not a shadow of a doubt—whether male or female, it locates the phallus very early on and, we’re told, generously grants it to the mother, whether or not in a mirror image, or in a double mirror image. The couple should harmonize very well around this common illusion of reciprocal phallicization. Everything should take place at the level of the mediating function of the phallus. Now, the couple finds itself on the contrary in a situation of conflict, even of respective internal alienation. Why? Because the phallus is, as it were, a wanderer. It is elsewhere. Everyone knows where analytic theory places it−it’s the father who is supposed to be its vehicle. It’s around him that in the child the fear of the loss of the phallus and, in the mother, the claim for, the privation of, or the worry over, the nostalgia for, the phallus is established. (1955–1956: 319)

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The mother lacks a phallus, and the child would grant herself to the mother as a phallic signifier; both have the illusion that this particular desire can admit of immediate and completely satisfying expression. Through the Oedipus complex, however, the father supervenes as the phallus’ “vehicle,” emphasizing that desire makes itself felt in the subject as emptiness rather than as fullness. Described in this way, the phallus, as Slavoj Zizek argues, “gives body to a certain fundamental loss in its very presence.”14 Yet if the phallic signifier points to something lost or forgotten in the past, the fact remains that the subject only accesses this loss in the present. How this loss unfolds, therefore, is one of Lacan’s main concerns. The interrupted “reciprocal phallicization” with the mother has the structure of a trauma inasmuch as the child feels its subsequent effects as symptoms or repetitions in the present. Yet, the original event—the rupture of the mother-child couple—can never be known. In Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, Lacan stresses Freud’s understanding of this distinction, as evidenced by his work with the Wolfman, who either observed or fantasized that as a child he had seen his parents copulating (cf. SE XVII: 36–38). From this beginning, Lacan sees Freud as recognizing that “trauma is an extremely ambiguous concept, since it would seem that, according to all the clinical evidence, its fantasy aspect is infinitely more important than its event aspect.”15 Human development operates by means of such actual or imagined shocks, suggesting that Lacan’s view of human subjectivity is fundamentally tragic. One does not overcome loss and lack; rather, they appear and reappear in life. The objet a, we might say, emblematizes this situation. By virtue of its always incomplete expression in language, it marks the death drive as operating in the unconscious of the subject. Above all, the logic of the objet a parallels that of trauma. Precisely because the objet a or the trauma may point back to something forgotten in the past, the possibility remains that both the objet a and the trauma can reappear in the present. Indeed, that both will reappear together if they reappear at all is at the core of the logic of the tuché—or missed encounter—as Lacan describes it in Seminar XI (1977: 53–64). It is not simply that the father does not see that his son was burning when he was alive. It is also that only by virtue of this missed chance—this gap in the father’s experience—does the trauma become readable as a repetition. This reading happens because for Lacan, the death drive marks off that part of desire that still remains to be brought into symbolization and thus is radically outside of the subject. In turn, this outside quality to desiring and to language—what Lacan designates as the

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Real—becomes his main concern as he links the repetitive logic of trauma to the position of the survivor. In the case of the dream of the burning child, the father awakens to his new task: “The real has to be sought beyond the dream—in what the dream has enveloped, hidden from us, behind the lack of representation of which there is only one representative” (1977: 60). As we saw above, the desire functions between the father and son and has an Oedipal structure that represents the ambivalent bequest from one generation to the next. Freud’s not seeing this element points to the lack in his reading that then allows Lacan to show that the drive of the Real beyond the dream amounts to what the father unconsciously plays out in the narrating of it. Lacan thereby implies that he has read Freud ethically by remaining true to the lack in the dream of the burning child as the locus point of desire. Inasmuch as one’s experience of the phallic signifier determines whether there will be lack, it would appear that an interpretation’s ethical consistency also depends on this signifier. For this reason, Lacan emphasizes that the anxiety connected with any of the manifestations of this signifier—the objets a—must be taken “in small doses, so that one is not overcome by it” (1977: 41). In Seminar VII, this perspective on anxiety—as necessary for the operation of the ego but potentially overwhelming—relates to Lacan’s comments on sublimation. Specifically, sublimation reorients the drive from an aim that involves repression to one that elevates its object to a glamorized if ephemeral incarnation: the Freudian Thing (1959–1960: 113–114). In this way, Lacan stresses that the subject’s imagining it as realized desire has more importance than its alleged fulfillment: “realizing one’s desire is necessarily always raised from the point of view of an absolute condition.” In turn, the absoluteness of this impossible objective—which corresponds to “the trespassing of death on life”— means that raising the question will always have a “dynamism” to it (1959–1960: 294). As a result, sublimation in artistic creation expresses the overvaluing Lacan finds in love as a movement of desire. Two vivid examples from Seminar VII illustrate this point. First, among the earliest known human artifacts, he calls attention to the vase. The clay from which it is made, he emphasizes, encloses an emptiness, or lack, that becomes the most important structural principle in its production. Once constructed, the vase “creates the void, and thereby introduces the possibility of filling it” (1959–1960: 120). In this way, the concepts of emptiness and fullness come into operation: “It is on the basis of this fabricated signifier, this vase, that emptiness and fullness enter

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the world, neither more nor less with the same purpose” (1959–1960: 120). The mode of this creation is “ex nihilo” because the nothing the vase encloses is also the nothing around which the material from which it is made turns in its formation. The drives, inasmuch as they organize themselves around particular objets a, operate in a similar way. Most importantly, with respect to the death drive, the enjoyment taken in the pursuit of a particular objet a, or jouissance, functions to divert this drive from death by eliciting the fierce response of prohibition. Discussing Freud’s concern with the superego’s excess severity in Civilization and its Discontents, Lacan argues that without such a contemplated violation of the law to which the superego reacts, no such expression of jouissance could take place: If the paths to jouissance have something in them that dies out, that tends to make them impassable, prohibition, if I may say so, becomes its all terrain vehicle, its half-track truck, that gets it out of the circuitous routes that lead man back in a roundabout way toward the rut of a short and well-trodden satisfaction. (1959–1960: 177)

That one only needs to contemplate the violation of the law is significant; this contemplation recalls the nothingness from which the prohibition subsequently arises. Second, in Sophocles’ Antigone, Lacan finds his most famous example of this kind of creation. Dismissing the argument that the play has to do with the conflict between the values in civil society, represented in Creon, and those of the individual, represented in Antigone, Lacan stresses that the latter’s insistence on burying her brother—the traitor Polynices—has already moved her beyond Creon’s world to an embrace of death. Antigone’s very strong awareness of the awful particularity of her situation as Oedipus’ daughter ordains what she does. In this way, Lacan suggests, ordinary life in Creon’s household is impossible for her not simply because she has buried Polynices, but, even more fundamentally, because she was born of Oedipus’ transgression (1959–1960: 263). By always keeping in mind the uniqueness of her situation and the opportunity she has to bury her one remaining brother, Antigone embodies a purity of purpose that contrasts with the impurity of her brother’s desecration by birds and dogs (1959–1960: 279). The futility and emptiness of Antigone’s death, in its severe consistency, exposes the incoherence of Creon’s not allowing Polynices’ burial. Just as surely as her life circles around the nothingness that constitutes her legacy from Oedipus, so too does Creon’s and the society he represents. Antigone, however,

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embraces this knowledge where others do not. We see, then, that Sophocles has an ex nihilo perspective on creation because the play articulates a “will to create from zero or a will to begin again” (1959– 1960: 212). This energy in the play’s action, however, does not reduce to a will to destructiveness. Rather it exposes the genealogy of the social order represented by Creon as historically contingent. It is, in other words, situated in the same beyond of the unconscious from which the dream of the burning child emerges. One effect of this perspective on sublimation and creation is to call into question any view that art somehow redeems or repairs traumatic experience. In this regard, Lacan raises the issue of suffering. Describing “the typical Sadean scenario,” he argues that suffering “doesn’t lead the victim to the point where [she] is dismembered and destroyed”; instead, it suggests that this person “is to retain the capacity of being an indestructible support” (1959–1960: 261). This kind of suffering certainly operates in Antigone. Though the heroine does die at Creon’s hands, her death does not express a succumbing to suffering but the passing on of it to others—just as Oedipus passed it on to her. The survivorship represented in the play, therefore, is of a very dark kind. What we have seen in connection with the father in the dream of the burning child also applies to Antigone’s survival of Polynices as well as to Creon’s survival of both his son and his wife. In none of these cases does living on represent the transcendence of its horror. Rather, one continues to live in the midst of its repetition. But how do such commemorations, or narratives of awakening, acquire their rhetorical force? This issue brings us back to Lacan’s notion of the stain. As we saw above, the unconscious “stains” the account of the father’s dream with the son’s haunting question. The father gets his wish fulfilled in the dream, but in a way that will always remind him of the failure of consciousness to notice the trauma that was then unfolding. For the same reason, it also marks the trauma as not simply the father’s private affair but as something that is to be disclosed. To act responsibly, the father—like Oedipus, Antigone, and Creon—must pass on his fragmentary awareness of what he missed in the past and what impels him toward a future that does not properly belong to him. What, though, makes this responsibility one that survivors of trauma—and those who hear their stories—can bear? Lacan’s answer to this question stresses the importance of repetition to understanding the death drive. Thus, he suggests that one never gets beyond working with the pain of lack and loss as they appear and reappear, especially in moments of trauma. In carrying out this task,

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What, for the analyst, can confirm in the subject what occurs in the unconscious? In order to locate the truth—I have shown you this in studying the formations of the unconscious—Freud relies on a certain signifying scansion. What justifies this trust is a reference to the real. But to say the least, the real does not come to him easily. (1977: 41)

As I will argue in the final section, the trust Lacan has in view can be correlated with the survivor’s trust in the discourse of trauma, and Melanie Klein’s discussion of mourning provides the coordinates for articulating its force.

Trusting Texts Stained by the Unconscious From a Lacanian perspective, Kleinian trust resembles a stain. It appears to function as a necessary illusion of consistency that allows the subject to make essential connections to the external world while covering over the lack that elicits desire. Yet, when we look at the genealogy of this trust, Klein’s thinking becomes counterintuitive. Specifically, she theorizes this external world as founded on an internal—and largely unconscious—one where first paranoia and later depression dominate. That trust does operate even here suggests it has a force as primordial as that of Lacanian lack. Both qualities, I will argue, are transferred to the narratives of survival that subsequent chapters will explore. For Klein’s adult situations of mourning—and especially trauma—typically reactivate paranoia and the defenses against it. Both the paranoia and the defense have their origin in infancy. Above all, Klein sees these feelings as characteristic of ordinary situations. Childhood paranoia and mourning, instead of being overcome by the adult, inscribe themselves into the normative itinerary of development. For example, in “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic Depressive States” (1940), Klein creates the persona of “Mrs. A” to describe her reaction to the unexpected loss of her son and the recollections from her own childhood that this trauma brought into focus. Following the boy’s death, Mrs. A, dreams of a child who will die or has died:

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however, he also argues that the analyst has reference to the subject’s Real, a fact that he sees Freud on the point of apprehending:

She saw two people, a mother and son. The mother was wearing a black dress. The dreamer knew that this boy had died, or was going

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Like Freud in the dream of the burning child, Klein first notes how the dream and subsequent associations play out Mrs. A’s wishes. Specifically, Mrs. A links the boy in the dream with a schoolmate of her brother’s who was going to give her brother some tutoring. The mother in the dream represents the schoolmate’s mother, whom Mrs. A remembers as very condescending toward her mother in this situation. From this detail, Klein notices a sense of triumph and revenge in the dream: Mrs. A punishes the woman for condescending to her mother and brother by having her son die in the dream. This “death wish,” as Klein stresses, derives from Mrs. A’s strong identification with her brother in his “resentful feelings” toward the other boy (1940: 356). More profoundly, Klein also interprets the dream as Mrs. A’s revenge on her own mother and brother. This view derives from her admitting negative feelings toward her brother. Though Mrs. A had loved him, she had envied him as well, especially because of “his greater knowledge, his mental and physical superiority, and also his possession of a penis.” Klein then hypothesizes that this feeling has its roots in her relationship with her mother whom she envies for having such a child (1940: 356–357). Already, then, we see desire operating in Mrs. A, which, like that of the father in the dream of the burning child, runs deeper than the conscious wish. The schoolmate’s mother becomes a stand-in for her mother who did not lose her son. Characteristic of Mrs. A’s feelings toward her mother and her brother is ambivalence. With regard to the latter, this feeling, “though modified through her strong motherly feelings,” carries over to her present situation of mourning for her son (1940: 357). From this perspective, Klein then points out that the dream knows more than Mrs. A at this point: In the dream there was only one slight hint of Mrs. A’s growing unconscious knowledge (indicating that the denial was lessening) that it was herself who lost her son. On the day preceding the dream she was wearing a black dress with a white collar. The woman in the dream had something white round her neck on her black dress. (1940: 358)

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to die. No sorrow entered into her feelings, but there was a trace of hostility towards the two people.16

The white collar—a detail that Mrs. A only mentions in passing in the original presentation of the dream—demonstrates that the unconscious is speaking in her dream though she does not yet realize it.

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She was flying with her son, and he disappeared. She felt that this meant his death—that he was drowned. She felt as if she, too, were to be drowned but then she made an effort and drew away from the danger, back to life. (1940: 358)

In the subsequent analysis, Klein stresses Mrs. A’s feelings of triumph at remaining alive when her son has died: these bring her both satisfaction and guilt. That she can experience these feelings together suggests to Klein that “the unconscious knowledge of her loss is much more accepted” than it had been in the earlier dream (1940: 358). At the same time, Mrs. A also has a changed view of her parents. At one stage of her mourning, she felt that “her loss was inflicted on her by revengeful parents.” As the ability to live with mixed feelings grows, however, Mrs. A “could now in phantasy experience the sympathy of these parents (dead long since), [and] their desire to support and help her.” Perhaps most importantly she could also imagine them as having experienced loss, and therefore “shared in her grief as they would have done had they lived.” Consequently, the tears that Mrs. A experiences after the second dream are not merely hers but those of “the internal parents” she now thinks of as grieving with her (1940: 359). Mrs. A’s work of mourning, therefore, has a prominent place in Klein’s thinking because it illustrates the two key positions of childhood experience that the adult revisits: the paranoid-schizoid position, in which the patient experiences her mother as a persecutor, and the depressive position in which sorrow and guilt allow the fuller expression of love and reparation. Before looking at persecution, love, and reparation in more detail, however, we should note that Kleinian trust is not simply an illusion that the adult invents so as to negotiate the emptiness of loss. With respect to Mrs. A, she has not simply peopled her internal world with kindly parents to help her bear the tragedy of her son’s death. If this were the case, one could object that Kleinian trust is embarrassing because of its childishness and dangerous because of its refusal to attend to the lack that the traumatic verdict of death highlights. The first objection about its childishness simply overlooks Klein’s basic assumption: the incompleteness of even the normal child’s integration

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Klein’s thinking, therefore, anticipates Lacan’s. The white collar, ironically, functions as a stain because it covers over the emptiness she feels at her son’s death but cannot yet acknowledge consciously. Mrs A’s second dream both confirms this interpretation and brings the issue of her surviving her son directly into focus:

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of inner and outer worlds inevitably colors the adult’s development. Klein is suggesting, therefore, the significance of this failure as part of the ordinary adult’s growth. In general, one of the most critical figures in this process for both the child and the adult is the mother. Juxtaposed in the child’s image of the mother, we find anxieties relating to her “external” and “internal” manifestations that constantly interact with each other (1940: 346). Although the baby experiences the internal mother as being just as alive as the external one, it cannot notice or judge this internal figure in isolation (1940: 345). This doubt, in turn, becomes “a continuous incentive to the young child to observe and make sure about the external object world, from which the inner world springs, and by these means to understand the internal one better” (1940: 346). Thus, Klein not only emphasizes the extent to which the external reality works to verify the internal one, but also how capricious this internal world remains even under the most favorable of circumstances (1940: 347). The second objection—that Kleinian trust is dangerous—implies that if trust is construed as more than an illusion of consistency, it leaves no room for lack in the subject’s relation to its objects. And, as Lacan shows, if lack does not operate in a subject, neither does the phallic signifier—a situation that marks the onset of psychosis. Potentially, then, Klein’s emphasis on trust marks her resistance to the suffering and pain that Lacan sees as the repeated expression of the death drive played out even in non-pathological circumstances. To this objection, I would argue that for Klein, lack and trust subsist as twin impulses even in the infant’s earliest relations to the world. With the advent of guilt in the depressive position, the absolute claim that each originally makes becomes modified. Lack, on the one hand, clearly characterizes the paranoid-schizoid position. In “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946), Klein emphasizes that anxiety “arises from the operation of the death instinct within the organism” and that this anxiety has its roots in the infant’s early fear of persecution (1946: 4). Projection gives the infant a way of overcoming the danger imagined (1946: 6). Subsequently, in “The Development of Mental Functioning” (1958), she offers a further distinction. The deflection of the death drive by means of projection actually involves one of two moves: either the directing of the instinct into the object (which turns the object into a persecutor) or the retention of it in the ego (thus turning the ego into a persecutor) (1958: 238, n.1). Trust, on the other hand, does not represent the complete elimination of the lack that inheres in persecutory anxiety but the growing recognition that life and death instincts have always been intertwined

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The libidinal cathexis of the breast, together with gratifying experiences, builds up in the infant’s mind the primal good object, the projection on the breast of destructive impulses the primal bad object. Both of these aspects are introjected and thus the life and death instincts, which had been projected, again operate within the ego. (1958: 238)

Much earlier, in “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict” (1928), Klein had already correlated these instincts with sadistic and constructive fantasies about the parents that battle with each other in the young child. Echoing Freud’s emphasis on the cannibalistic phase of development in infants, she argues that in children about one year old, dread of being devoured oneself accompanies the feeling of wishing to devour one’s parents. This devoured and then devouring “libidinal object”—roughly the parent—functions ambivalently in the child. If the child imagines it as “bad” and capable of “devouring,” “cutting,” and “biting” her, that is because she has already imagined herself as capable of performing these same actions on the parent (1928: 187). From the child’s point of view, this parent simply responds in kind. Yet, these feelings would not play out so fiercely if the original identification between the child and the same parent as “good” did not have corresponding strength. Internally, the persecutory parents— and the paranoid child’s reaction to them—express themselves in quite frightening ways. Simultaneously, however, Klein unearths an ideal parent lost in this struggle. Indeed, the importance of the infant’s positive identification of the breast even in the throes of the persecutory position would explain the “epistemophilic impulse” that Klein eventually hypothesizes in this essay. Though bound up with sadism against the mother, this impulse also drives the child’s curiosity about the world around it:

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with each other. Critical here is the infant’s relation to the mother’s breast, which is a surrogate for the mother herself. Elaborating on the interplay between the life and death instincts, Klein emphasizes that the way in which the infant introjects the breast offers an important insight into later development:

The early connection between the epistemophilic impulse and sadism is very important for the whole mental development. This instinct, activated by the rise of the Oedipus tendencies, at first mainly concerns itself with the mother’s body, which is assumed to be the scene of all sexual processes and developments. The child is still dominated by the anal-sadistic libido-position which impels him to wish to appropriate the contents of the body. He thus begins to be curious about what

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it contains, what it is like, etc. So the epistemophilic instinct and the desire to take possession come quite early to be most intimately connected with one another and at the same time with the sense of guilt aroused by the incipient Oedipus conflict. This significant connection ushers in a phase of development in both sexes which is of vital importance, hitherto not sufficiently recognized. It consists of a very early identification with the mother. (1928: 188–189)

Overall, the “epistemophilic impulse” centers on “sexual processes and developments,” as embodied in the mother, while the sadism against her comes from its frustration at not having this curiosity satisfied. Most importantly, as Klein then elaborates in “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego” (1930), the focus of the anxiety connected to this paranoia relates to one of the organs that Lacan will link to the objet a: the breast. This anxiety drives the child to identify the breast with “other things.” These objects, in turn, become objects of anxiety, and the child then makes “other and new equations” by means of them. These new objects, in turn, become objects of anxiety themselves, thereby enabling still more equations. The child, therefore, must reach a balance in her anxious relation to the outside world. Clearly, the anxiety must not be so strong as to make any relation to an object impossible. At the same time, Klein postulates that a certain amount of paranoid anxiety enables the child to develop an interest in new objects (1930: 220). As the title to the 1930 essay suggests, the stake in the “other equations” the child is making reflects her capacity to use symbols in language. Inasmuch as these equations depend on the maintenance of the “epistemophilic impulse,” Klein implies that the child must counteract the considerable paranoia arrayed against her right from the start. Her success in doing this work, Klein implies, highlights the importance of reparation as a component of trust in the external world. This link between trust and reparation is most evident in the essay “Our World and its Roots in Infancy” (1959). Arising in the aftermath of the infant’s paranoid cannibalistic destruction of the good internal parents, the depressive wish to make reparation, which manifests itself at around age one, points to the operation of the super-ego at a very early stage in development.17 When this wish is aligned to love, socially constructive activities in children result, and its “impetus” plays a vital role in the sublimation in adulthood that produces art (1959: 258– 259). Similar to the value she finds in anxiety in this process, Klein also stresses a positive role for guilt: “The irrevocable fact that none of us is ever entirely free from guilt has very valuable aspects because it implies the never fully exhausted wish to make reparation and to

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create in whatever way we can” (1959: 259). This linking of ongoing reparation with creativity suggests the profundity of the infant’s original paranoia. Judith Butler very pointedly describes the depth of this suffering: “If any and all objects carry the persecutory function, then any and all objects threaten the annihilation of the ego, and so must be annihilated. It is not that some objects are consoling, and others threatening, but that object-status as such is a sign of their potential or actual persecutory force.”18 While the increasing integration of the life and death drives described above mitigates the fierceness of the persecution, traces of the lack that characterizes the persecutory stage remain; reparation is never an established state but an ongoing need. Indeed, the lack implied by the never realized need for reparation suggests that trust also has a role in Klein’s account of creativity. Klein implies this view when she says that guilt may not be the only factor operating when people make extraordinary sacrifices to save others: “love, generosity, and an identification with the endangered fellow being” also come into play (1959: 259). In turn, gratitude and the ability to enjoy what one has underwrite these feelings (1959: 254). We see that this idea corresponds with favorable development as described in “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic Depressive States.” Brought about by “adaptation to the external world,” trust eases but does not erase the splitting in the internal world of infancy and early childhood. In effect, the child recognizes the extremes of feeling manifested towards the internal parents. First, she no longer feels as persecuted by bad parents who want to destroy her. Second, she feels less guilt at triumphing over these bad parents and less paranoid about protecting the good ones from her persecutory desires. This integration also bears fruit in the adult mourner who recognizes that the person who has been lost—a repetition of the parent—“was not perfect.” Specifically, this person’s ability to live with the fact of the lost object’s imperfection points to the ongoing negotiation of this depressive position (Klein 1940: 355). Thus, reparation emphasizes how a “good” object from the outside world continues to function in the subject alongside the residues of powerfully persecutory ones. Following Klein, Robert D. Hinshelwood points out that in the infant “unbearable anxiety”— what Butler’s view of objects implies—does dominate. This situation, however, does not merely underscore the infant’s suffering but also the external mother’s role in containing this anxiety as the child projects it onto her. Only in this way can the child then reintroduce a modified version of the object that will allow it to deal with what seemed so terrifying in the first place.19 The same dynamic,

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Hinshelwood claims, also applies in the analytic situation: the analyst acts as a container for the patient’s anxieties by giving some form to them.20 Neither mother nor analyst, however, is “perfect” or “ideal,” but a combination of good and bad. Klein implies this idea of a good and bad mother in “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States” (1940). In this essay, she speaks about the ideal mother as only a “picture” in the patient’s mind: In some patients, who have turned away from their mother in dislike or hate, or used other mechanisms to get away from her, I have found that there existed in their minds nevertheless a beautiful picture of the mother, but one which was felt to be a picture of her only, not her real self. The real object was felt to be unattractive—really an injured, incurable and therefore dreaded person. The beautiful picture had been dissociated from the real object but had never been given up, and played a great part in the specific ways of their sublimations. (1940: 270)

Bersani claims that the ideal or “perfect” object presented here “is nothing more than a function of the attacked object.” He then generalizes this sublimation of paranoid anxiety to an aesthetics implied by all of Klein’s later work. Equating the “picture” mentioned above with all “[i]ntellectually valuable pursuits,” he argues that for Klein, such activities are “disguised repetitions of an infantile defense against infantile aggressions.”21 This “picture,” in other words, defends against a lingering persecutory mother. This argument underscores the ongoing resonance of the paranoid-schizoid position—and its constitutive lack—in Klein’s view of sublimation, especially in the adult. Yet this critical trace of paranoia is exactly what Lacan misses in Klein. Consequently, he sees her understanding of sublimation as limited to “a restitutive effort of the subject relative to the injured body of the mother” (1959–1960: 106). He then dismisses Klein’s view of art as a means of achieving this restitution. It simply affords its practitioners a means for laying out and resolving personal problems: All of that which is included under the heading fine arts, namely, a number of gymnastic, dance, and other exercises, is supposed to give the subject satisfactions, a measure of solution to his problems, a state of equilibrium. (1959–1960: 107)

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Such “puerile results,” Lacan claims, leave out the consideration that art of any value must achieve some “social recognition,” an element

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that brings into focus the key problem of sublimation: “What does society find [in a work of art] that is so satisfying?” (1959–1960: 107). In terms of Antigone, we have seen that he answers this question by stressing that she remains true to her desire. Most importantly, because it has such destructive results for Creon and the social order he represents, this satisfaction can only be played out on the stage or in the work of art. For this reason, Sophocles can only posit Antigone as an ideal. Her impossible behavior represents the lack around which the play turns. In more prosaic terms, Klein’s perspective on art anticipates Lacan’s. At the core of the child’s picture we also find a lack: the ideal mother, as Bersani shows, does not—and never did—exist. Like Antigone, but also like Lacan’s vase, Klein’s picture expresses a desire that turns on the impossibility of its realization. What Klein specifies about such ex nihilo creation is the notion that the nothing out of which the picture emerges has creative power: something in the external world convinced the child that the ideal mother did exist. This force I would identify with Klein’s conception of trust. Surprisingly, the view that art defends against the lack that inheres in persecutory anxiety seems coextensive with this trust. Both lack and trust, in other words, survive as components of the mature ego. In one of her last essays, “Some Reflections on The Oresteia” (1963), Klein discusses this issue with respect to the conclusion of The Eumenides, the third play in Aeschylus’ triology. In this play Orestes, who has killed his mother Clytemnestra in order to avenge her murder of his father Agamemnon, appears before the court convened by Athena in the Areopagus. The court must adjudicate between the Furies, who want Clytemnestra’s death avenged, and Orestes, who has followed Apollo’s command in killing her. Commenting on Athena’s role, Klein argues that the goddess functions as a “mature super-ego”: Athena’s attitude as guiding but not dominating, characteristic of the mature super-ego built round the good object, is shown in her not assuming the right to decide over the fate of Orestes. She calls together the Areopagus and chooses the wisest men of Athens, gives them all the full freedom to vote, and reserves for herself only the casting vote. If I consider this part of the Trilogy again as representing internal processes, I would conclude that the opposing votes show that the self is not easily united, that destructive impulses drive one way, love and the capacity for reparation and compassion in other ways. Internal peace is not easily established. (1963: 298)

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Indeed, it would appear that, as far as the ego is concerned, a lasting peace never really arrives. As Klein goes on to say, these conflicting impulses in the ego never become “identical” but subsist as “contradictory” entities (1963: 298). Artistic genius lies in the ability to work with these contradictory symbols. Describing specifically literary symbols, Klein emphasizes the tension: “The creative artist makes full use of symbols; and the more they serve to express the conflicts between love and hate, between destructiveness and reparation, between life and death instincts, the more they approach universal form” (1963: 299). The conflict at the level of the artistic symbol, therefore, replays the processes of early childhood. Anticipating Lacan’s stress on the importance of social recognition for art, Klein points out that some artists have the capacity for universal appeal: “The dramatist’s capacity to transfer some of these universal symbols into the creation of his characters, and at the same time to make them into real people, is one of the aspects of his greatness” (1963: 299). With respect to The Eumenides, Athena’s reconciling the Furies by making them the guardians of justice in the city parallels the ego’s ability to—as Lacan says—“canalize” anxiety (1977: 41). Though they impose cruel torture on Orestes, they are also, as Klein emphasizes, tortured themselves, with “blood dripping from their eyes and from their lips” (1963: 291). The reconciliation of these characters is ongoing rather than absolutely finished. This unfinished quality points back to emptiness that is the occasion for Kleinian as much as Lacanian accounts of desire and sublimation. Klein, however, gives full play to trust in sublimation. This move allows her to illuminate freedom’s role in the creative process. Returning to Mrs. A., we should recall her tears. They result from her imagining that her internalized parents grieve with her. By giving expression to such a fantasy, Mrs. A. demonstrates that the harsh strictures the ego imposes in the paranoid-schizoid position have yielded to the more permissive use of internal objects in the depressive position (1940: 359). This freedom, I think, resembles what Hannah Segal sees as driving identification with good objects in artistic sublimation. Underlying Segal’s view is the work of mourning demonstrated in Mrs. A’s case: one may give up a lost object if, within the ego, an internal restoration of it has allowed it to begin to function as a symbol. Since the subject imagines she has created the symbol, she begins to use it “freely.”22 Ethically, this freedom does not reduce to the question of determinism versus choice. Indeed, because the subject arises from lack, it always operates within significant psychic constraints. Instead,

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Introduction

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drawing on Klein, I think that how one continues to negotiate the remainders of the paranoid-schizoid position in the present may prove the distinctive mark of freedom. In artistic terms, if creation ex nihilo always returns the creator to the truth of desire, this return happens because desire and creation bear important resemblances to each other. The former is never conscious or chosen and the latter is only partially so. As a way of describing this state for the poet, I will use the term vocation. Derived from the Latin vocare, meaning to call or to summon, this term, in its secularized sense, suggests an uncertainty about the source and terminus of this calling for each of the poets I discuss. With regard to the source, for example, Alfred Tennyson characterizes his singing as something impelled but whose origin remains unknown to him. Responding to critics who see his mourning for Arthur Hallam as simply self-indulgent lyricism, he declares: Behold, ye speak an idle thing: Ye never knew the sacred dust: I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing.23

Not knowing where his music comes from, Tennyson simply continues to sing. In poetry, he has the freedom to imagine that he has discovered the work he was made to do. With regard to the endpoint of this calling, Wordsworth and Eliot offer accounts that are surprisingly similar in their resistance to consolation. In “Peele Castle,” his elegy on the death his brother, John, Wordsworth implies that the call to poetry remains, though it may not lead anywhere: Not for a moment could I now behold A smiling sea and be what I have been: The feeling of my loss will ne’er be old; This, which I know, I speak with mind serene.24

The stress on serenity of mind—and the poem’s subsequent turn to his living friend “Beaumont” (line 41)—suggests that the logic of substitution is operating in him as he moves toward closure. Yet, the trauma of the loss remains fresh—something which “will ne’er be old”—a formulation that suggests the persistence of melancholy. Consequently, he evokes the apparently ideal picture of “lasting ease” and “Elysian quiet” (lines 25–26), only to expose the failure of this

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ideal: “So once it would have been—‘tis so no more” (line 33). The dash punctuating the middle of the line suggests that the trauma of John’s death revives in the present of writing the poem and of reading it. In Freud’s terms, Wordsworth knows whom he has lost but what he has lost still eludes him. Precisely because he expresses this uncertainty as he turns to address a a living person, we get the sense that the trauma with which he struggles is not simply his private affair but inheres in the way language works. Eliot offers an even bleaker recognition of trauma and lack as recurring rather than finished in The Waste Land. Near the end of the poem, after lamenting the death of an undefined “he,”25 the speaker continues with a grim emphasis on death-in-life for the survivors. Those who remain alive “are now dying / With a little patience” (lines 329–330). The difference between the physical death of one person and the gradual death of a community or culture comes down to pace; the individual’s fate, in other words, sums up what is happening imperceptibly to everyone, and the poet iterates this eventuality. Yet Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot also experience this interval between deaths as a moment of creativity. The tension between trauma and trust, therefore, structures the inquiry of the subsequent chapters of this study. With each poet, three concerns recur. First, like the father in the dream of the burning child, all three poets confront the melancholy responsibility of passing on traumatic knowledge— whether it relates to an accidental death as in Book V of The Prelude, to the death of a friend as in In Memoriam, or to history itself as in The Waste Land. Second, since all three poets find the trauma a recurrent one, their vocation always retains an incomprehensible element; the very futility of restoring what has been lost makes them suspicious of narrative forms that would offer substitutions for the dead. Finally, this kind of desire brings each poet to a reckoning with how trust in—but not transcendent understanding of—the external world might be re-conceived. Like the paranoia with which it shares a common origin, trust suggests an orientation in the subject toward its objects—external and internal as well as good and bad. That this orientation might be celebrated in a lighter key without diminishing the constitutive lack in the subject is the focus of the Epilogue on James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover. This argument articulates a notion of responsibility that Petar Ramadanovic characterizes as “the courage to face the repetition of history, the courage to encounter the dead and our own mortality without turning those who have died into the property of the living.”26 Implicit in this view is that the responsibility will always

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exceed what anyone can do by way of adequate action in a particular situation. The excess, in turn, arises because the history involved is traumatic. Simultaneously, it is based on the need to remember the loss, and the recognition that no one dead or alive can fully meet this need. This needing—or desiring—to remember points to the object of loss or what “cannot be substituted” and thereby resembles the operation of justice. Ramadanovic writes: “We can call it a justice that knows no law (no law since it offers no substitute), for we need memory as we need justice, but neither memory nor justice can restore the absence of the other, an absence which is, in crucial ways, beyond loss.”27 The poets considered in this study prove particularly effective at awakening us to this kind of absence. Of course, this appreciation offers no guarantee that we will become more just in either our words or deeds. Perhaps, though, by sensitizing us to lack and absence, these poets can root our pursuits of justice in a tone of humility that makes a legitimate claim on others’ attention.

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G a z es of Tr au m a, Sp ots of Trust: Wor ds wort h’s M e mor i a l s i n TH E P R E L U D E

“Father don’t you see I’m burning?”—the sternness of the son’s

question in Freud’s dream of the burning child marks, for Lacan, the “stain” on the father’s account of the dream. Through the dream, the father can experience his child as alive again, but at the cost of always remembering the failure of consciousness at the time the dream was unfolding. This notion of stain enables Lacan to elaborate the functioning of the gaze. On the one hand, the father certainly “saw” that his son was burning up from fever while the boy lived. Indeed, Freud iterates this mode of perception at the start of his analysis. On the other hand, the son’s question in the dream introduces the father to a way of “being seen” that he could not have contemplated until after the boy’s death. Above all, this “being seen” by the son is logically prior to the father’s actually seeing the son because the former must first imagine himself as addressed by the latter in order for the “seeing” of the son in the dream to take place. For this reason, seeing the child correlates with the blindness in the father to the actual circumstance of the candle’s burning the boy’s corpse. Falling under the son’s gaze, the father awakens. He desires his son precisely at the moment when he realizes the boy is no longer there. Emphatically, this desire cannot be mastered and fully represented in language. Rather, it amounts to a trauma that reasserts itself in the present. How the text of the dream—perhaps the father’s memorial to the son—can then become an object of trust that orients him to an unknown future lays out the ethical challenge of Freud’s vignette.

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Chapter 1

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As I will argue in this chapter, William Wordsworth resembles this father—both in terms of his conscious wish about the dead and in terms of the unconscious desire articulated in this wish. Nearly a century before the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, Wordsworth wrote a sonnet on the death of his three-year-old daughter, Catherine. Though not focused on a dream, “Surprised by Joy, Impatient as the Wind,” like the dream of the burning child, focuses on a waking transport of having the child back only to have the hope abruptly cancelled: Surprised by joy — impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport — Oh! with whom But thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, That spot which no vicissitude can find? Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind — But how could I forget thee? Through what power, Even for the least division of an hour, Have I been so beguiled as to be blind To my most grievous loss! — That thought’s return Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore, Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn, Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more; That neither present time, nor years unborn Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.1

Twice in the poem Wordsworth speaks of a privation of sight. The first reference centers on wish fulfillment and the hope of restoration it seems to offer. Some “power” has tricked him, albeit only for an instant, into thinking that the little girl is still alive and that he might share what he is experiencing with her. In this sense, he claims to be “blind,” momentarily forgetting “my most grievous loss.” Most importantly, the “power” remains unidentified; this mystification marks it not only as suspect but also as linked to “love,” which he identifies as “faithful.” In so connecting the positive and negative associations of this “power,” he gives this wish to have his daughter back an aura of transcendence. Specifically, it allows him to think about “transport” as one of what Cathy Caruth terms the “conceptual conditions for thinking about the world in the first place.”2 In this way, the “transport” resembles the dream of the father in Freud’s account. In both cases, the overvalued experience momentarily appears to bring about what both fathers wish for—the return of the child. This restoration, however, comes in the form of something missed. For Freud’s dreamer, it refers to a specific event—the father

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overlooks that the candle has set the corpse on fire. For Wordsworth, the restoration has a more general but no less oppressive import—he has forgotten his child’s loss in the instant of imagining her alive. The second reference to a privation of sight has to do with desire. In contrast to his earlier blindness, now he can see, but his “sight” only reminds him that the child whom he had expected to find in his field of vision—indeed, this expectation launches the original “transport”—is now missing. In Lacanian terms, the child—or, more precisely, her face—recalls the father’s desire for her restoration. As a result, he continues to look for the “heavenly face,” and even allows himself to think that she has come back, only to confront anew the fact of her absence. Linking this reference to a “face” with the start of the poem, we can see that Wordsworth, like the father in Freud’s dream, also falls under the child’s gaze. Fundamentally, he wants to “share” his “joy” with another person—the “thee” addressed. In the moment of making this gesture, however, he finds the experience itself cut off by the fact of the little girl’s death. The listener Wordsworth had expected—but failed—to find at the start of the poem, therefore, identifies with the never-to-be-seen “heavenly face” at its close. In very condensed form, these references to blindness and to sight illustrate how trauma structures Wordsworth’s imagination about death. Specifically, he characterizes the return of the “thought” that the child has died as “the worst pang that sorrow ever bore” with one exception: “when I stood forlorn/Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more.” Presumably, he is referring to receiving the original news of her dying, but he does not say so directly. As a result, the whole poem has the character of a trauma whose full effects remain hidden from him but that he nevertheless relives in the present. This unconscious registering of the trauma comes through in Wordsworth’s forgetting and then remembering that his daughter has died. Only partially and too late does he glimpse the fact that he has always fallen under the gaze of the “heavenly face” that reminds him of a loss beyond restoration. As a result, he wishes for his daughter as audience at the start of the poem—even to the point of forgetting she has died. At its close, the trauma of the rediscovery of her death reminds him that she will always be missing from his sight, a fact that will begin the cycle of wishing, forgetting, and remembering—all forms of desire—again. Catherine Wordsworth occasions such desire in her father and therefore functions as an objet a in his experience. The objet a’s “referent,” as Ellie Ragland argues, “is the limit point of symbolic language and imaginary identifications.”3 We might say that if Wordsworth

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Distance enables the looker or hearer to discount, or, even romanticize, a visible palpable trauma. Indeed, an artifact, archive, painting, narrative or poem often gives the lie to a trauma by covering over the Real of its suffering with images and words which seem to tame it, giving it the quality of mere art. In Lacanian terms, one could say that the passion of ignorance reveals its roots in the desire for homeostatic constancy—a drive which Freud and Lacan placed on the slope of Thanatos—that pushes individuals to avoid terror, horror, and pain at all costs.4

In his meditations on death, Wordsworth unconsciously registers this desire. Closely linked to his concerns with transcendence, this desire for constancy explains his fascination with the stone and the shell from the dream about the horseman in Book V of The Prelude. The ambiguity of whether Wordsworth had the dream or heard about it from someone else, I suggest, is a productive one because it forces him to think about dreams and texts as the product of desire: the desire of those who have the dreams or produce the texts and of those who hear or read about them. At the conscious level, this desire resembles wish fulfillment. Wordsworth believes he has a vocation to poetry, and the stone, which transcends time and place, as well as the shell, which transcends linguistic differences, appear to reinforce this idea. Most importantly, by using the word “pure” to describe the former, he links transcendence with an idealizing of these images. Unconsciously, however, the dream also registers the impact of trauma—symbolized by the deluge from which the horseman flees. Fixed in the gaze of this deluge, Wordsworth finds his own text—the dream, but also books generally—stained by a trauma that he does not overcome, but that continues to erupt in the present. As used in this study, stain intertwines with the notion of the gaze. In Seminar XI, Lacan characterizes it as “marking the pre-existence to the seen of agiven-to-be-seen” (1977: 74). Commenting on this passage, Ragland stresses that this “given-to-be-seen” points to consciousness’ roots in the unconscious: “this something is the void thought of as a point of blackout, the point at which we do not see the world as clearly as we think we do: our blind spots.”5 In this way Lacan exposes consciousness as a site of delusion where the very act of wishing in accord with the pleasure principle actually illustrates

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could just get some distance from this loss, it would cease to have this kind of repetitive power over him. Yet, as Ragland also stresses, this distance turns out to be symptomatic of a “passion of ignorance” rooted in the avoidance that also marks the reality of death:

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the refusal to see the nothingness of the stain against which the wish unfolds. Since conscious representations can never completely cover the void that forms their backdrop, the stain manifests itself as the point where sight breaks down.6 The evidence of this staining lies in the desire whose circuit extends from the text of the dream of the horseman to the lives that Wordsworth memorializes in the rest of Book V. In particular, the “internal thought” that has “crazed” the horseman in the dream also entangles Wordsworth in a trauma that he cannot write as a finished “homeostatic” text (1805, V.144–145; 1850, V.145–146).7 This difficulty arises because the trauma carries over to his present recollections. Specifically, a dichotomy exists between the purity of the stone and the shell and the stained quality of the text they generate— The Prelude—as the product of the gaze. Successive efforts at poetic memorials exemplify this tension: Wordsworth’s brief memorial to his mother, his mute contemplation of the Boy of Winander, and finally the traumatic return of the Drowned Man at Esthwaite. In these three incidents, desire appears in the same form as it does in the reflection on Catherine’s death. Consciously, Wordsworth wishes to memorialize the dead—and thereby live out his vocation as a poet. Yet this wish always entails replaying the trauma of the loss. This shock, in turn, forms the unconscious horizon of his wish. This ambivalence at the core of desire returns continually in Wordsworth’s forty-plus years of developing The Prelude. Rather than resolving the tension in desire, Wordsworth comes to trust the fact that his text is not finished or fixed, but stained by unconscious, unfolding trauma. These stains—exemplified by the two spots of time common to the 1799, 1805, and 1850 texts—contain the anxiety accompanying subjectivity as Wordsworth understands it. This containment, finally, provides a critical insight into the poem’s autobiographical form. Found everywhere in life, the spots of time offer the raw material for the textualized self Wordsworth presents. But the spots work as powerful records because they describe this self not as a finished product, but as the result of an experience of surviving without transcending trauma. By linking survival to Wordsworth’s embrace of the autobiographical form, I foreground ongoing trauma as an under-represented element in the critical discussion about The Prelude’s language, and especially its effect on the reader. David Collings describes the tension between the poet’s sense of vocation and the poem’s autobiographical form. Specifically, he notes the conflict between Nature’s extraordinary calling to one of her privileged sons and the more ordinary

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narrative of personal growth into which the poet tries to insert himself. Collings correctly links these two elements to the mixed legacy Wordsworth received from his forbearers. From Milton he carries on the sense of a strong prophetic role in the vocation of the poet; from the Enlightenment he has the desire to write a philosophical poem on the development of his mind. Instead of reading the poem as a resolution of this conflict, Collings sees the ongoing tension between these poles as artistically fruitful for him. By defining himself as a visionary who has failed, Wordsworth also presents himself as someone who has remained true to his calling into language and especially into poetry.8 The tension that Collings identifies provides a good lens for characterizing other discussions of the poem. On the one hand, by looking at The Prelude as a connected narrative of development, critics can accentuate its didactic elements and its very particular audience. With respect to its lesson, Gordon Thomas argues that the episode of the Drowned Man at Esthwaite simultaneously teaches the young Wordsworth about Nature’s beauty and its brutality. Thomas sees this contrast as evoking a sympathetic response in a reader who watches him meditating on such encounters and eventually maturing into a poet who teaches others about the overcoming of such fears.9 As the friend most generally addressed in the poem, Samuel Taylor Coleridge assumes the role of the reader, an issue David Haney takes up. Wordsworth and Coleridge engage in an exemplary dialogue about how the mind integrates itself with Nature. With Coleridge as auditor, Wordsworth revisits earlier events in connection with later ones, and thereby orients the past toward the future.10 In this interchange “truth emerges from interaction instead of appearing as the telos of a line of argument.”11 Coleridge as the audience for The Prelude plays an important role in Ashton Nichols’ argument as well. Specifically, the poem functions as a gift to an absent and sick friend whose health Wordsworth wants to help restore.12 Nichols stresses that this objective leads Wordsworth to present himself as a philosopher meditating on the fact that his youth has passed. Thus, he becomes the prototype of the narrative of development that Coleridge had wanted. This role, however, has a price: “Coleridge . . . fostered the silencing of Wordsworth as the Boy of Winander and the production of Wordsworth who is the mute observer at the grave of that boy.”13 Thus the dilemma: this lost self, symbolized by the child, has affinities to the privileged self who has received a vocation. In The Prelude, says Nichols, Wordsworth has a powerful mind because he discovers he can always enlarge his imaginative “sympathies” (1805,

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II.181). The source of this power, as recalled to him after the failure of the French Revolution, identifies with the feminine influence on the developing child.14 If Wordsworth can impart healing to Coleridge, this cure happens because Nature, ultimately personified in his sister Dorothy, has already healed him.15 One implication of this stress on the connection between an exceptional call and childhood power concerns parents—or, more precisely, the lack of them—in The Prelude. In this regard, Guinn Batten argues that Wordsworth regularly tries to forestall “the deaths of parental figures” both by memorializing them and also by dreaming about guides, such as the horseman in Book V.16 Extending this preservation of parental figures to include Nature, Batten claims that Wordsworth’s project is one of trying to rediscover his dependence on her as distinct from the delusive freedom offered to a supposedly sovereign self.17 Yet such strategies of restoring parents, or at least forestalling their absence, must reckon with the abruptness of their loss. How does one subsume this shock into the alleged narrative of development? Duncan Wu calls attention to this problem when he reads the episode of the Drowned Man at Esthwaite as one in which “perception” is brought about by “intense trauma.”18 Wu’s analysis suggests the ambivalence of the poem’s stance toward childhood recollection. On the one hand, Wordsworth is trying to preserve the capacity for surprise in the midst of terrifying mental repetition. On the other hand, because such trauma underlies perception, the attempt to manage it by the recalling and writing of it never erases it. Caruth has a similar point of departure in her essay on Wordsworth and Freud. Commenting on the mother presented in the Blessed Babe passage in Book II, Caruth sees her as Wordsworth’s way of designating “an empirical beginning” for the child that one can eventually locate in time and space. But the mother also partakes of a grander fiction of origin whose collapse replays itself in the text’s syntax. For this reason, although Wordsworth claims to write a narrative of self- development that arrives at “self-knowledge,” Caruth remains skeptical. The Prelude may really express “the narrativization of a less knowable relation, which may even be disruptive to narrative as such.”19 The most recent criticism of The Prelude has continued to raise the importance of real and imagined trauma as disturbing the continuous narrative of Wordsworth’s adult life. This focus comes across in the forcefulness of the critics’ language in describing the poet’s reaction even to his experiences in The Prelude. In perhaps the gentlest terms, Christopher Miller stresses that the Boy of Winander’s “shock of mild surprise” runs through the “sway of the habitual” as

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enacted by the mimicry of the owls (1805, V.407; 1850, V.382).20 Discussing Wordsworth’s moderate Girondist leanings during the Revolution, Orrin N. C. Wang argues that this political leaning nevertheless “circumscribes and excludes the revolutionary sublime from his life.”21 With regard to the death of Wordsworth’s father, Eugene Stelzig argues that Wordsworth never adequately processes this shock, a failure signaled by the guilt Stelzig finds in the spots of time.22 Finally, on the Blessed Babe passage, Noel Jackson emphasizes that Wordsworth presents “the origins of infant sensibility” while being very aware of “the specter of [this sensibility’s] desecration.”23 Desecration, guilt, exclusion, and even surprise—these words constitute the critical vocabulary for Wordsworth’s meditation on the work of the poet andsuggest the pervasiveness of the trauma that repeats itself at the edge of his consciousness. While this recurrence defeats the project of self-knowledge, perhaps it also iterates the enduring sense of poetic vocation. Indeed, Wordsworth continues to trust in his vocation, even when faced with the defeat of both prophecy and philosophy. He calls the reader to this same work—that of surviving in a world whose narratives are always exceeded by the trauma that incites them.

Wish Fulfillment and Wordsworth’s Dream of the Horseman Wordsworth’s lifelong work of revising The Prelude suggests that he has this trust. And one of the most important problems raised by the revisions of The Prelude centers on the question of who has the dream of the horseman—is it Wordsworth himself, as presented in the 1850 version? Or is it the “friend” (1805, V.49) who tells Wordsworth the dream in the 1805 text and to whom Wordsworth attributes it until 1839? Numerous accounts of the friend who supposedly told Wordsworth this dream, as well as the circumstances that finally led him to claim it as his own, exist.24 As Timothy Bahti argues, the key feature of this compositional history does not center on property. The dream does not belong to Wordsworth or anyone else, but circulates between those who read and reflect on it: “Rather than being the relation of a dream which is significant because it is Wordsworth’s, ll.71–140 are a text which floats from narrator to narrator, and of which the primary importance is that it be introduced, narrated and interpreted; it is, compositionally and narratively, a ‘found text’ which yet . . . must be narrated (written) and interpreted (read).”25 Developing the idea of a “found text,” Bahti argues that just as the horseman finds

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the stone and the shell, which he identifies as books, so Wordsworth’s friend finds the dream in Baillet’s biography of Descartes and tells it to him. Completing the circuit, the reader of The Prelude finds this text of the dream recorded there.26 Bahti prefers the 1850 version because, by making Wordsworth the dreamer, it emphasizes his dual role: he functions as both “the reader of his own writing, and the writer of [the text’s] own meaning.”27 Bahti’s stress on how texts accrue meaning within an interpretative community reflects the notion of desire that is operating in the dream of the horseman. As we saw in the last chapter, Lacan’s account of the gaze upsets the idea that “representations” belong to an individual subject (1977: 80–81). Most importantly, Bahti’s description of texts as “floating” among narrators closely resembles Lacan’s view of the unconscious as a “stain” that floats everywhere and marks one’s subjugation to the gaze. If the production of texts, however, runs parallel to the notion of desire, then we must be cautious about Wordsworth’s eventual claim to have been the dreamer. Indeed, the fact that the account had once been something Wordsworth attributed to someone else—perhaps that he even resisted taking on himself—marks or stains it as the product of the unconscious. This resistance stems from trauma experienced as erupting in the present—whether the present of 1805 or of the later revisions. To show how this trauma continues to operate despite Wordsworth’s claim to have made it (and the dream) his own, we will need to use both the 1805 and 1850 texts. In ways that resemble Freud’s dream of the burning child, both versions of the dream of the horseman recast the immediate situation of the dreamer prior to falling asleep. First, the dreamer was reading Cervantes. Second, he was thinking about poetry and geometry. Third, he fell asleep near a body of water. All of these elements reappear in the dream, and Wordsworth stresses, whether as dreamer or as auditor, the “terror” of awakening: “whereat I waked in terror, / And saw the sea before me, and the book, / In which I had been reading, at my side” (1805, V.137–139; 1850, V.138–140). Most importantly, after the dream ends, both versions articulate a clear wish: to follow the horseman. The wish, in turn, seems fairly clearly related to poetic vocation. In both the 1805 and 1850 texts, the dreamer, in response to the horseman’s command, holds the shell the latter was carrying to his ear:

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. . . I did so And heard that instant in an unknown tongue Which yet I understood, articulate sounds,

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Seemingly shaped to fit around the ear, the shell not only connects the horseman to the dreamer but also invites a connection between the dreamer and one of Nature’s artifacts. This artifact, in turn, has an equivocal message. As Douglas B. Wilson points out, its “harmony” nevertheless threatens “destruction to the children of the earth.”28 For Wilson, these “contraries” point to the basic imaginative strategy of The Prelude as a whole. Wordsworth consistently “revitalizes his creative stance by working through annihilation” and especially by “testing the resilient power of poetry in the face of death.”29 It is no accident either that the poetic form to which Wordsworth adverts at this point is the “ode.” Defined as “the most formal, ceremonious, and complexly organized form of lyric poetry” still in use today, it is “frequently the vehicle for public utterance on state occasions.”30 In this instance, uttering prophecy occasions the poem. Linking the resilience that Wilson predicates of all of The Prelude to the particular interest in the ode at this juncture, we might say that Wordsworth is suggesting that the “harmony” poetry can articulate has an immediate performative force that brings on the “deluge.” Thus, the dreamer’s reaction to what he hears: simultaneously, he claims to have heard the utterance, understood it despite its expression in a foreign language, and recognized its fulfillment as immediate. Pressing danger, in other words, has a direct consequence, and Wordsworth suggests his aptitude for proclaiming this warning to the public at large. The substitution entailed, however, by this public, ceremonious form may mask a deeper protest against death generally. As Harold Bloom argues, the claim of “emotional maturation,” though a “pragmatic” one, does not really befit a “strong” poet like Wordsworth: To equate emotional maturation with the discovery of acceptable substitutes may be pragmatic wisdom, particularly in the realm of Eros, but this is not the wisdom of the strong poets. The surrendered dream is not merely a phantasmagoria of endless gratification, but the greatest of all human illusions, the vision of immortality. If Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood contained only the wisdom found also in Freud, then we could cease calling it “the Great Ode.” Wordsworth too saw repetition or second chance as essential for development, and his ode admits that we can

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A loud prophetic blast of harmony, An ode in passion uttered, which foretold Destruction to the children of the earth By deluge now at hand . . . (1805, V.93–99; 1850, V.91–97)

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In terms of the dream of the horseman, Bloom’s stress on substitution suggests that the ode form, though replaced by the autobiographical and more personal one, still haunts The Prelude with its “protest.” The concession, in other words, to “time’s tyranny” in the “Immortality Ode” takes thirteen (1805) or fourteen (1850) books of The Prelude—and even then has not come to term. The purer and more concentrated form of the ode, which Wordsworth characterizes as “uttered” rather than written down, hearkens to a powerful role for the poet that he only withdraws from grudgingly and incompletely. If this public, ode-centered understanding of poetic vocation accurately characterizes Wordsworth’s aspiration, then his fascination with the horseman—whether he has the dream or not—is fairly comprehensible. In both the 1805 and 1850 texts, the wish to share in the horseman’s journey follows upon “a perfect faith in all that passed” (V.114). This “perfect faith” is based on the horseman’s identification, again found in both texts, of the stone and the shell with “books.” After telling the dreamer that the stone is “Euclid’s Elements” (V.88), the horseman stresses that this book “held acquaintance with the stars, / And wedded man to man by purest bond / Of nature, undisturbed by space or time” (1805,V.104–106). The 1850 text intensifies this idealism by changing “man to man” to “soul to soul” (1850, V.104). Either way, the promise held out by the stone is—to use Kelly Grovier’s term—that of “psychological freedom.” This freedom is reflected in “the degree to which one has control over his space but also of the extent to which one is in control of the use of his time” and illustrates Wordsworth’s recognition that memory, perhaps even more than physical space, may be colonized by social forces.32 A part of the poet’s vocation, therefore, involves resistance to this enslaving of the mind by stressing the oneness of the soul. The shell, on the other hand, “was a god, yea many gods, / Had voices more than all the winds” (1805, V.107–108; 1850, V.106–107). J. Mark Smith has argued that “voice” for Wordsworth subsists between the animal articulation of a sound and the reader’s “following” this expression into meaning. Smith then defines poems as “structures of sound and sense that disclose—negatively—a potentiality of meaning which is, from the start, in time, of time, consigned to time.”33 What Wordsworth resists—physical, but even more, mental enslavement—is represented in the stone. This resistance, however, only begins to open up a space

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redirect our needs by substitution or sublimation. But the ode also plangently awakens into failure, and into the creative mind’s protest against time’s tyranny.31

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where many meanings derived from many voices have the potential for expression. In formal terms the linking of these two symbols corresponds to the aspiration of the ode. The horseman, though, does not simply describe the poem’s ideal qualities—he also transfers this view to the dreamer. Subsequently, the dreamer’s acceptance of these interpretations illustrates that, for his part, he idealizes not only the stone and the shell, but also the horseman himself. Specifically, in the 1805 text, Wordsworth describes the dreamer as feeling anxiety, apparently from being “alone upon the sands” (V.74). This feeling then changes to joy when the horseman appears: “Distress of mind / Was growing in him when, behold, at once / To his great joy a man was at his side, / Upon a dromedary mounted high” (V.74–77). The dreamer’s feeling of joy persists because he believes he has a “guide” (V.82). Similarly, in 1850, Wordsworth describes himself as feeling “distress and fear” that the arrival of the horseman alleviates. Indeed, in the latter case, the “unerring skill” projected onto the “guide” (V.81–82), implies that the idealization of the horseman has become even stronger. With the disappearance of the horseman, one could argue that the wish—ultimately to write poetry—will be fulfilled not because the horseman accepts Wordsworth as a companion, but because Wordsworth overcomes this precursor’s resistance to him. Specifically, he puts into practice the prophecy foretold by the “blast of harmony” from the shell by writing The Prelude. He redirects or substitutes the destructiveness of the “deluge”—perhaps symbolizing the French Revolution—into the synthesis involved in writing a poem about the growth of his own mind. Coleridge expresses such a view of the poem’s structure in “To William Wordsworth.” For him The Prelude sings Of that dear Hope afflicted and struck down, So summoned homeward, thenceforth calm and sure From the dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self, With light unwaning on her eyes, to look Far on — herself a glory to behold, The Angel of the vision! Then (last strain) Of duty, chosen laws controlling choice, Action and joy! — An Orphic song indeed, A song divine of high and passionate thoughts To their own music chanted!34

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Specifically, Wordsworth grieves the “dear Hope afflicted” of political change but replaces it with an extended meditation on the power of poetic imagination to articulate its “passion” independently of adverse

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circumstances. In this connection, Coleridge characterizes the poem as an “Orphic song.” The Prelude, in other words, predicts its readers’ transport to “high and passionate thoughts”—a transport for which Coleridge offers the paradigm. The feeling that this “Orphic song” elicits in the reader, moreover, corresponds to the music the poet originally “chanted.” This reciprocity is possible because Wordsworth’s living out his calling as a poet manifests a connection between the world of the unconscious, symbolized by sleep, and the world of conscious experience, symbolized by waking. Meditating on the dream either as his own or as one recounted to him, Wordsworth can give “substance” (1805, V.143; 1850, V.144) to the horseman—a “substance” that preserves Wordsworth from the obliteration of being completely engulfed in conscious life. In this way, the dream itself augurs its own fulfillment in the writing of poetry. Just as the shell empowers those strong enough to face its prophecy, so too the dream as a whole foretells that Wordsworth can live out his vocation as a poet even when awakened to a painful future. Yet, does this notion of poetic vocation as the wish fulfilled in the dream hold up when one considers the desire that operates between the dreamer (or Wordsworth) and the horseman? As we saw in the discussion of the dream of the burning child, the dream may simply express the wish to remain asleep. Thus, the wish to follow the horseman can only be fulfilled as long as the dreamer remains asleep. Likewise, the performative character of the “ode in passion uttered” operates only as long as the poet remains asleep. Awakening, rather than marking the carrying out of this wish, may actually signify its abrupt cancellation. Clearly, this possibility also concerns Wordsworth. Elliptically, the external world comes back into focus: “[I] saw the sea before me, and the book / In which I had been reading at my side” (1805, V.138–139; 1850, V.139–140). In the dream, he had anxiously tried to preserve the stone and the shell as “books.” Once he awakes, however, these same sources of inspiration elicits his terror. Indeed, by choosing “Books” as the title for Book V, Wordsworth replays the trauma of the dreamer and the horseman while awake. The eruption of trauma in the present, rather than the overcoming of it, links the world of sleep and dreams to the world of being awake. Like the horseman, Wordsworth wants to preserve books. In both the 1805 and 1850 texts, this concern precipitates the dream: “Oh, why hath not the mind / Some element to stamp her image on / In nature somewhat nearer to her own?” (1805, V.44–46; 1850, V.45–47). Both texts also address this complaint about written language to a friend and then follow it up with another. Something more permanent than

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books should serve as the “shrine” for the “powers” of the human “spirit” (1805, V.47–48; 1850, V.48–49). Quickly, in conversation with his “friend,” he gibes at this serious tone. Both, however, realize that they have had the same fear, and this understanding provides the immediate frame for the dream. Just as the dream offers—and then withdraws—a guide in the form of the horseman, so also with books. Their power reminds Wordsworth of his desire for a guide as he pursues his vocation. Simultaneously, their frailty makes him fear the withdrawal of this guide and the lack around which this calling circles. This lack of a guide, in turn, recalls the trauma that Wordsworth would like to present as overcome but that perennially intrudes on him. In describing the origin of this desire in the dream, the 1805 and 1850 texts contrast significantly. In the former, the dreamer recalls that, after hearing about the stone and the shell, “A wish was now engendered in my fear / To cleave unto this man” (V.115–116). The account seems straightforward: the dreamer’s conscious wish to follow the horseman—and become a poet—dates from the time when he had the dream. By contrast, in the 1850 version, Wordsworth says of himself, “Far stronger now grew the desire I felt / To cleave unto this man” (V.115–116). In the later text, he represents desire as having already been in operation when he had the dream. The dream, in other words, crystallizes the desire but offers no insight into the desire’s origin. By simultaneously crystallizing the desire but also emphasizing its obscurity, we see the extent to which the shell, the stone, and the horseman all function as objets a or limit points to what Wordsworth can represent about his poetic calling. On the one hand, he remembers them not only immediately after hearing about them from his friend (or after he awoke from the dream) but also more than forty years after he began the project that would culminate in the texts of The Prelude. This remembering, Wordsworth believes, never dies and suggests the depth of his belief in his own calling to be a poet. Thus the joy he experiences when the horseman arrives. On the other hand, this idealizing articulates a desire whose source ultimately remains unknown to him. In its baldest terms, this unknowable core of desire centers on death. Wordsworth wants to follow the horseman and sees this move as part of his vocation. Yet the horseman is riding to his death. Consequently, the wish to follow him will also lead to the dreamer’s—and implicitly Wordsworth’s—death. In Freudian terms, the relationship has moved beyond pleasure (the “joy” at not being alone) and pain (the horseman’s ignoring the dreamer) to the

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operation of the death instinct. In Lacanian terms, the relationship has gone beyond ego-dominated relations because the particular desire operating both before the dream began and after it has finished points to the fact that the rendezvous with the horseman— like the father’s with his son—has already been missed. Wordsworth, whether he heard about the dream or actually had it, desires what he has already missed. The dreamer’s waking “in terror” suggests that the trauma of the guide’s departure now follows one of two circuits: either from Wordsworth’s friend to Wordsworth and thence to the reader (as in 1805) or from Wordsworth to his friend as a stand-in for the reader (as in 1850). Either way, though, the linking of terror, desire, and death—extending from the dreamer to the audience— becomes clear. Impending deluge preoccupies the dreamer in both texts, a fact that signifies trauma’s repetitiveness. The 1805 text presents the dreamer’s following of the horseman in these terms: “On he passed / Not heeding me; I followed, and took note, / That he looked often backward with wild look” (V.117–119). As the subsequent passage suggests, the horseman is looking at the advancing waters: His countenance meanwhile grew more disturbed And looking backwards when he looked I saw A glittering light and asked him whence it came. “It is,” said he, “the waters of the deep Gathering upon us.” (V.127–131)

Literally, the “wildness” of the horseman’s concern fits with the danger of the waters and his intention of burying the shell and the stone before it is too late. The waters’ danger, however, does not simply equate with a physical or natural phenomenon. First, the horseman gives them volition: in both texts Wordsworth recalls him as saying that they are “gathering upon us.” Second, both the dreamer in 1805 and Wordsworth in 1850 recognize this intentionality because they characterize the waters as “in chase of him” immediately before the dream ends (1805, V.137; 1850, V.138). Most importantly, by stressing the play of light on the water, Wordsworth gives us the sense that the waters stare back. In the 1805 version, the dreamer speaks of seeing a “glittering light” and in 1850, Wordsworth says he “saw, over half the wilderness diffused, / A bed of glittering light” (V.128–129). Because of its glint, the waters possess an elusive yet wandering quality that the “wild look” of the horseman mirrors. In 1850, this look is diffused

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into the landscape as a whole—Wordsworth’s use of “wilderness” attempts to diminish the look’s concentrated force by spreading it into a “bed.” This attempt at domestication, however, succeeds only partially. The waters’ malign quality is still reflected in the horseman’s disturbed look, and internalized by Wordsworth, who is “not unseen” by the horseman (1850, V.118). Grovier characterizes this internalization as a double that regularly appears in The Prelude. First, in Book II, Wordsworth speaks of “two consciousnesses”—one of himself in the present and one of “some other being” from the past (1805, II.32–33). The tension between these selves derives from an external event impinging on consciousness and acquiring the force of “an Other” in the mind. 35 Second, quoting from Book VIII, Grovier equates this internalization of the past with the external world’s “striking upon what is found within” (1805, VIII.767).36 Finally, in discussing Book XIII, he calls attention to Wordsworth’s stress on “a genuine counterpart / And brother” (1805, XIII.88–89) who represents “a mysterious secondary self whose existence has impressionistically materialized over the course of the entire work.”37 In the dream of the horseman, the gaze of this Other, personified by the deluge, marks what Lacan characterizes as the manifestation of the drive, in this case the scopic one. The drive’s operation has two features as presented in the dream. First, Wordsworth consciously wishes that the horseman would notice him and allow him to share in his quest. Second, he is unexpectedly caught in the glint of the water while trying to carry out this pursuit. This glint does not organize itself in terms of a person literally looking at him but in terms of the lack or failure of sight where, in the form of the horseman or guide, Wordsworth had expected to find it. As Antonio Quinet argues, images of light, because of their long equation with “vision” and “knowledge,” often prove particularly effective representatives of this absent object.38 As with the stone, the shell, and the horseman, the light on the water suggests that Wordsworth has arrived at the limit point of representation. Literally, he has survived the deluge either because he listens to the narrative (the 1805 text) or because he has awakened from it (the 1850 text). Yet he recognizes his entanglement in the dream by trying to give the horseman “substance” in his later reflections. Quinet also stresses that the gaze makes itself felt in situations of anxiety.39 With regard to the dream of the horseman, the desire occasioned by the objet a carries with it a trouble in the mind expressed by the dreamer’s or Wordsworth’s “terror” upon awakening. He would

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like to subject the symbolic system to his gaze. In that case he could represent this power in the poem as the product of his poetic vocation. Instead, he finds himself subjected to the anxiety-producing gaze of the Other that represents the symbolic system even as it subjugates him. The dual character of the horseman illustrates this subjugation to a symbolic system that nevertheless always feels incomplete and unsatisfactory. Both the 1805 and the 1850 texts describe this figure as “the very knight / Whose tale Cervantes tells, yet not the knight, / But was an arab of the desart too” (1805, V.123–125; 1850, V.122–124). If the dream simply reflects what Wordsworth or his friend was reading prior to and after the dream, then it makes sense to speak of him as a “knight” or “semi-Quixote” (1805, V.143; 1850, V.142). Yet, as the prefix “semi” suggests, the instability of a name for this figure registers the instability of Wordsworth’s grasp on what he has either dreamed or had represented to him. For this reason, it continues to function as a trauma erupting in the present. The alternative identification—“an arab of the desart”—fits with this uncertainty. Specifically, it marks an element of the unknown (what Wordsworth has not subjected to his gaze) as nevertheless constitutive of his representation of this figure. The same dualism operates in the language from the shell: the “Ode” is expressed “in an unknown tongue, / Which yet I understood” (1805, V.93–94; 1850, V.94–95; 96). The desire speaks through Wordsworth’s claim to understand and his readiness to utter prophecy; the attached anxiety through what is not known but to which he is nonetheless subject. Consequently, the dream of the horseman sets up a dichotomy in Wordsworth between the pure text toward which The Prelude aspires and its stained realization. The former corresponds to the stone and the shell, and the latter to the dream that attempts to contain them. Most importantly, Wordsworth’s ambiguity about who had the dream suggests that this stain applies to The Prelude as a whole. Poet and reader, in other words, find themselves fixed in the operation of a desire that subjects them to a gaze whose mark is anxiety. The conclusion of this episode in the 1805 and 1850 texts illustrates this point aptly. After mentioning that he could “share” the horseman’s “errand,” Wordsworth, in the 1805 text, then qualifies his statement:

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Oftentimes at least Me hath such deep entrancement half-possessed When I have held a volume in my hand – Poor earthly casket of immortal verse Shakespeare or Milton, labourers divine. (V.161–165)

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Oftentimes at least Me hath such strong entrancement overcome, When I had held a volume in my hand, Poor earthly casket of immortal verse, Shakespeare, or Milton, labourers divine! (V.161–165)

In both versions, the alleged purity of Shakespeare’s and Milton’s texts recalls the purity of the stone and the shell from the dream. In addition, by speaking of this ideal as a “strong entrancement overcome” in 1850, we might argue that Wordsworth finally has discovered a way of safely presenting the dream as his own. Trauma, in this sense, would have become a known event that he has historicized, reconstructed, and dispelled. He can, finally, speak of the dream as his own because he thinks he has subjected what was disturbing about it to his gaze and represented it as consistent with his poetic vocation. Yet traces of being “half-possessed” by this “entrancement” stand out as a stain even in the later text. Wordsworth’s revision thereby signals his desire rather than his ability to overcome the traumatic elements of his dream. In particular, the connection of texts in general to “caskets” suggests that the attempt to contain language in a form—that of the ode or the autobiography—can never happen in the ideal, transcendent terms the dream envisioned. This impasse arises because, more than he knows, Wordsworth feels subjected to the gaze of the deluge. This feeling arises precisely when he most wants to subject it to his power. As we shall see, this same subjugation surfaces when he moves from the world of the dream to the waking world—encounters that literally bring him face to face with death.

Face to Face With Death Often in The Prelude, the power of the gaze comes into view when Wordsworth describes other people’s deaths. In Book V, for example, he especially stresses his mother’s purity and innocence as traits that she wanted to pass on to her children. Her gaze, however, troubles this memorial. Similar to the gaze of the deluge, it reminds him of his subjection to a symbolic system just when he had expected to subject it by speaking in his own words. The same tension carries over to his description of the Boy of Winander, which, more directly than the passages connected with the descriptions of

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This is the 1850 version:

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Wordsworth’s mother, emphasize the poet’s muteness in the face of loss as a dimension of the trauma he experiences as ongoing in the present. Most strikingly, we see this tension between the wish for a pure text and the fact of a stained one in the description of the Drowned Man at Esthwaite, where Wordsworth actually confronts a corpse in a lake where he had hoped to find Nature’s pictorial qualities most evident. In both the 1805 and 1850 texts, Wordsworth introduces his memorial to his mother with a description of a “parent hen and her brood”: Behold the parent hen amid her brood, Though fledged and feathered, and well pleased to part And straggle from her presence, still a brood, And she herself from the maternal bond Still undischarged. (1805, 1850, V.246–250)

As the repetition of “brood” suggests, the parent and the young will eventually separate. The mother’s remaining as “A centre of the circle which they make” (1805, 1850, V.252) calls attention not only to the continuance of this relation but also to its eventual end. Just as “natural appetites” (1805, 1850, V.254) cause the hen to “ransack up the earth” for food both for herself and her young (1805, 1850, V.255– 256), so these appetites will eventually drive the fledglings away from her. In this homely and apparently non-threatening context, the shift to his mother’s death comes very abruptly: “Early died / My honoured mother, she who was the heart / And hinge of all our learnings and our loves” (1805, 1850, V.256–258). By speaking of his mother in idealized terms, Wordsworth turns her life into its own pure epitaph. In the few lines that refer to her—ones that could go on a tombstone—he emphasizes her innocent belief that her children would always be safe in the world. In both the 1805 and 1850 texts, he presents her as having derived this belief from a proper education that stressed the secure possession of the past rather than anxious worry about the future. She was “not falsely taught, / Fetching her goodness rather from times past / Than shaping novelties from those to come” (1805, 1850, V.266–268). Free of anxiety about the future, she exemplifies the “faith that He / Who fills the mother’s breasts with innocent milk / Doth also for our nobler part provide” (1805, 1850, V.271–273). Most importantly, this quality did not derive “from faculties more strong / Than others have,” but from the ability to remain at peace

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in the “times” and “spot in which she lived” (1805, V.285–287; 1850, V.288–290). This stress on reconciliation to the time and place in which she lived corresponds to the psychological freedom Wordsworth allegorizes in the stone held by the horseman. His mother, in her quiet way, possessed this attribute. In the present, he claims to be able to read this quality in the pattern of her life and impart it to the reader. This purity finds a practical expression in her calm belief in the goodness of the world, a perspective that fits with Wordsworth’s overall stress on Nature as a guide or teacher. Addressing Coleridge directly in the 1805 text, he suggests that Nature instructs people in the way his mother would have wanted: This verse is dedicate to Nature’s self And things that teach as Nature teaches: then, Oh, where had been the man, the poet where – Where had we been we two, belovèd friend, If we, in lieu of wandering as we did Through heights and hollows and bye-spots of tales Rich with indigenous produce, open ground Of fancy, happy pastures ranged at will, Had been attended, followed, watched, and noosed Each in his several melancholy walk, Stringed like a poor man’s heifer at its feed, Led through the lanes in forlorn servitude? (V.230–241)

Though the wording of the 1850 text changes, many of the images of books remain. The “bye-spots of tales / Rich with indigenous produce” become “vales / Rich with indigenous produce” (1850, V.235–236), but the characterization of books as an “open ground / Of fancy” and as “happy pastures ranged at will” is still there. By stressing the prematurity of his mother’s death, therefore, Wordsworth tries to guarantee her ideal status in both his and the reader’s memory. She becomes, in short, indistinguishable from the epitaph offered in her honor in the poem. Wordsworth’s awareness of her absence, however, stains this memorial. If substitution were operating here, then Nature would provide a consistently nurturing presence for Wordsworth and his siblings. By making a point of saying that his mother’s death left the family “destitute” (1805 and 1850, V.259), however, he suggests that, unlike the fledgling chickens, they did not have what they needed to make their way after she was gone. The shock of her death, mimed in the placement of the word “destitute,” regularly recurs and underscores

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the emptiness which, as an adult, Wordsworth continues to feel. The same holds true when he speaks of his “gratitude” as “unheard” by her (1805 and 1850, V.265–266). With a shock, we recall that her deafness reflects her absolute removal from the living. In this way, the tension Wordsworth experiences in the dream of the horseman also plays out in his waking life. Though he wants to believe that he has overcome the trauma of his mother’s death, the traces of the loss still register with him. Critically, this moment of loss of the mother also marks the onset of desire for her as expressed in the drive. As Caruth argues, Freud, in Three Essays on Sexuality, presents an account of the sexual drive that does not depend on substitution: “To begin with, sexual activity attaches itself to functions serving the purpose of self-preservation and does not become independent of them until later . . . At its origin . . . it has as yet no sexual object.”40 This lack of an originating object informs her analysis of the famous passage from Book II about the infant babe and the mother’s eye. These lines come from the 1805 text: Blessed the infant babe — For with my best conjectures I would trace The progress of our being — blest the babe Nursed in its mother’s arms, the babe who sleeps Upon his mother’s breast, who, when his soul Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul, Doth gather passion from his mother’s eye. (II.237–243)

Caruth interprets the reference to the “breast” in the context of Wordsworth’s subsequent claim about the child’s isolation. The breast, in other words, represents one of “the props of my affections” that is eventually gone and whose departure he survives (1805, II.29).41 Such artificial propping, as Caruth shows, brings into focus the extent to which the mother functions artificially and mechanically for the child, even as Wordsworth asserts her natural presence. Along the same lines, the blessed babe passage exemplifies what, as noted in the Introduction, Lacan describes as “reciprocal phallicization”; the child’s body becomes an artificial extension—or phallus—of the mother’s body. For allowing itself to be thus subjectified to the mother, the child can then extend his synthetic gaze to the rest of the world in the same way. Specifically, the “passion” that passes into the child via the mother awakens the child to the

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Thus day by day Subjected to the discipline of love His organs and recipient faculties Are quickened, are more vigorous; his mind spreads, Tenacious of the forms which it receives In one beloved presence. (1805, II.250–255)

Intensifying the point, Wordsworth broadens the claim to the rest of the world as the child “exalts / All objects through all intercourse of sense” (1805, II.259–260). The 1850 text offers a less vivid version of this connection to the mother, but the revised passage contains the same components. Where Wordsworth had claimed that the child’s “soul doth gather passion from his mother’s eye” in 1805, he now says that he “drinks in the feelings of the mother’s eye” (V.237). Similarly, the memory of the mother’s “dear Presence” still enables the child to raise up “Objects through widest intercourse of sense” (V.239–240). To an extent, these changes illustrate Wordsworth’s eventual concession to the diminishment in intensity of the mother-child bond as one grows up. Still, he registers this loss not as part of a natural process, but as a privation. These lines appear in both texts: “No outcast he, bewildered and depressed; / Along his infant veins are interfused / The gravitation and the filial bond / Of nature that connect him with the world” (1805, II.260–263; 1850, II.241–244). Though the “filial bond” allegedly works as naturally as gravity on the child’s affections, Wordsworth’s concern with a possible “outcast” condition remains constant. This defensiveness also has a parallel in the next verse paragraph. In both the 1805 and 1850 texts, he first describes how his “infant sensibility” was “Augmented and sustained” (1805, II.285–287; 1850, II.270–272), but then shifts to bewilderment and depression: “For now a new trouble came into my mind / From unknown causes: I was left alone / Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why” (1805, II.291–293; 1850, II.276–278). The difficulty arises not because his connection with the outside world fails him. Rather, it lies in his recognition that the death of his mother, though something he understands to have happened, remains, as Caruth says, “something that is not known or assimilable to cognition.”42 Wordsworth, in short, still feels bound to the trauma of his mother’s death. Such subjugation, in turn, fits with the infant’s taking in “passion” from the mother’s “eye”; indeed, this

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possibility of subjugating his immediate surroundings to his eye:

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connection forms part of the reciprocity in the gaze that binds the mother and child together. The oddity of having only one maternal eye focus on the child should alert us to its insufficiency. A metonymy for the mother, the eye, in its detachment from the rest of the body, suggests that something is always missing from the mother’s desire. This incompleteness is then transferred to the child as incompleteness in his desire. Although Wordsworth presents this loss of reciprocity with the mother as something he survived, his survival also has become an enigma to him: “The props of my affections were removed, / And yet the building stood, as if sustained / By its own spirit” (1805, II.294–296; 1850, II.279–281). As in the dream of the horseman, Wordsworth again finds himself situated in the gaze of the Other. In the former case, the gaze appeared in the glint of the waters “gathering” upon him. Now he discovers it in the mother’s eye from which he “gathers passion.” Where he had supposed himself to be able to subjugate desire by representing it, he actually finds himself subjected to it. The same pattern also structures the description of the Boy of Winander. Like Wordsworth’s mother, the Boy is initially presented as partaking in an untroubled continuity with Nature’s processes. Wordsworth describes how he “Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls / That they might answer him” (1805, V.398–399; 1850, V.373–374). These “mimic hootings” produce varied and unpredictable sounds: And they would shout Across the wat’ry vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call, with quivering peals And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud, Redoubled and redoubled. (1805, V.399–403; 1850, V.374–378)

As this “concourse wild” of sound continues, the distinction between the original presence of the owls and the copy that incites the sound becomes less and less relevant. Though the Boy “mimics” the owls, his act of “mimicking” incites their actual response. Provisionally, at least, this mixing of original and copy seems playful. It does not need a purpose, and it emphasizes the oneness between the human being and the scene in which this person participates. As with his mother, however, Wordsworth introduces the Boy’s death into the text very abruptly. Initially, he joyfully imbibes the natural scene with a “gentle shock of mild surprise” (1805, V.407; 1850, V.382). Then he dies: “This Boy was taken from his mates, and

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died / In childhood” (1805, V.414–415; 1850, V.389–390). Two features of the episode stand out here. First, the deepening silence allows Wordsworth to make the transition between the Boy’s internalizing the scene and dying. Second, Nature operates in the Boy as a partially conscious but also partially unconscious force. Dwelling on the unconscious dimension, Wordsworth presents the Boy’s interaction with Nature as both passive and indefinite. Specifically, the “surprize” comes into his “heart” in the form of “the voice of the mountain torrents” or “the visible scene” that enters into his mind (1805, V.409; 1850, V.384). In the same way death comes on the Boy before he—or anyone else—can resist it. Like the dream about the horseman, the stone, and the shell, Wordsworth emphasizes that what the Boy hears and sees functions at the limit of his symbolic capacity. Clearly, he would have understood that he was hearing the mountain torrents, but what connects them to the silence? Smith argues that the mountain torrents exemplify one of Wordsworth’s “intervenient sounds.” Secondary to another “more intentional” pursuit (in this case the calling to the owls), intervenient sounds are distinguishable by the emptiness of content and by the mood they call forth.43 Wordsworth would thus be suggesting that the quieting of the owls allows the Boy to attend seriously to the sound of the water more than he had previously, but what mood does it elicit in Wordsworth as distinct from the Boy? Largely, I think, he feels anxiety. In contrast, for example, to “Surprised by Joy,” where he is caught momentarily unaware of his daughter’s death, he seems determined not to let his awareness drop with respect to the Boy. The stake in maintaining this anxiety as a defense against the trauma of the Boy’s death is high. As is well known from MS. JJ,44 which precedes the versions that appear in The Prelude, Wordsworth identifies himself with the Boy of Winander. In this earlier manuscript, he describes the owls as responding to his call, the “voice of the mountain torrents” as entering his heart, and the visual scene as penetrating his mind (cf. MS. JJ lines10–24). In contrast to the dream of the horseman, where Wordsworth originally attributes the experience to a friend, and only later to himself, he now works in the opposite direction, reassigning lines about himself to the Boy. As Pieter Vermeulen points out, this move allows him to add the lines about the Boy’s death to “There Was A Boy” (published in 1800 as part of Lyrical Ballads). As a result, he can finish the story and project the trauma of the boy’s death into Nature where it is suspended—through the abruptness of the transition—into the reader’s present.45

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In the 1805 and 1850 versions, however, Wordsworth resists thinking of trauma in this open-ended way, preferring, as in the case of his mother’s death, to imagine it as overcome and memorialized in a pure text. This preoccupation is evident in the description of the church and its surrounding yard, which follows the description of the Boy’s death. Personified in both the 1805 and 1850 texts as a seated woman, the Church building has perpetually watched the living children at play: “May she long / Behold a race of young ones like to those / With whom I herded” (1805, V.431–433; 1850, V.406– 408). One can easily explain the building’s “seeing” the children as Wordsworth’s way of expressing his own wish that children’s play will always be possible at this spot. Another, more difficult personification, however, precedes the one connected with seeing and calls attention to the oddity of both. Specifically, he says that the church listens to the sounds of the children. Here is the building as presented in the 1805 text: Even now methinks I have before my sight The self-same village church: I see her sit — The thronèd lady spoken of erewhile — On her green hill, forgetful of this boy Who slumbers at her feet, forgetful too Of all her silent neighborhood of graves, And listening only to the gladsome sounds That, from the rural school ascending, play Beneath her and about her. (1805, V.423–431)

By framing the church’s forgetfulness with his act of seeing and remembering the dead, Wordsworth is suggesting that his sight is the more powerful of the two. Indeed, one of the more important changes in the 1850 text supports this idea. Instead of saying he has the church “before my sight,” he now says it “appears before the mind’s clear eye” (1850, V.399). Stressing how he has internalized the recollection, Wordsworth can depict his sight as broader than the forgetful gaze of the church. Where the church had forgotten the Boy of Winander, he is reversing this pattern as he undertakes his own act of memorializing the dead. In this sense, the textual memorial to the Boy, like that to Wordsworth’s mother, aspires to stasis and constancy as the transcendent conditions of continued existence. Because he dies before he grows up, the Boy never loses his musical power, symbolized not only by his “mimic hootings” of the owls, but also by the way in which “the gentle shock of mild surprise” penetrates his heart and mind.

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Now, if the textual memorial so preserves the Boy’s power from diminishment, then Wordsworth, by identifying with the Boy, can have the same assurance about his power. This concern seems to be the focus of the lines describing hanging. The Boy of Winander “hung / Listening” for the sound of the owls (1850, V.406–407) and in the ensuing silence Nature imbues him with power. As an adult, Wordsworth stands before the Boy’s grave in the churchyard that “hangs / Upon a slope above the village school” (1850, V.417– 418). Critically, however, where the Boy could listen in silence, the adult’s internalizing the Boy’s act of perception proves deadening. Famously, Wordsworth imagines himself as standing “Mute looking at the grave in which he lies” (1850, V.422). Far from empowering him, looking at the grave deprives him of speech because the trauma of death—not for the Boy but for Wordsworth—continues to operate in the present. Ultimately, while Wordsworth thinks he has overcome the trauma of death by fixing the Boy in his gaze, his act of remembering actually places him in the forgetful gaze of the church in whose yard he stands. As with his daughter Catherine and with the horseman, he finds himself subject to a desire whose object—Lacan’s objet a—always returns as something lacking and for which the Boy of Winander serves as a marker. Curiously, the duration of this muteness also links this incapacity to the story of the Drowned Man at Esthwaite. In both the 1805 and 1850 texts, the muteness lasts a “half-hour” (V.421, 396). Similarly, in The Prelude of 1799, Wordsworth identifies “Half an hour” (I.270) as the amount of time he spent staring at the “heap of garments” (I.269) left by Esthwaite’s Lake in anticipation of the owner’s return. In the 1805 and 1850 versions, however, the time spent gazing at the clothes becomes “long I watched” (V.462, 438). As Wu argues, in his looking at the clothes, the emphasis on the delay in which nothing happens registers resistance to narrative and resistance to death.46 This delay carries such weight with the adult Wordsworth because, as long as the corpse does not appear, he thinks he can recreate the solemnity and silence that had characterized the Boy of Winander’s connection to Nature in his own experience at Esthwaite. In both the 1805 and 1850 texts, Wordsworth’s description of how he winds up on this particular “peninsula” supports this view. Like the Boy of Winander, he is wandering by himself. “I was roaming up and down alone,” he says, and then conjoins this claim with the idea that he was “seeking” for something even if he did not know what it was (1805, V.455–456; 1850, V.431–432). “Seeking” does not appear in the 1799 text; there he only mentions his “chance” crossing of

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the field (I.263). By adding the mention of “seeking” to a seemingly chance happening, he overlays the event of his wandering with the solemnity of being on that lake for a serious reason that is to be revealed to him. With this sense of purpose, the detail that the “peninsula” on which he stands is one of several “shaped like ears,” though it appears in all three texts, takes on greater significance in the 1805 and 1850 versions (1799, I.264; 1805, V.457; 1850, V.433). As we have seen, the adult Wordsworth has already recollected that the Boy of Winander listens in silence to the intervenient sound of the mountain torrents. Where the Boy’s attentiveness eventuated in death, however, Wordsworth’s same attentiveness presages survival. He pays careful attention to the clothes, and lives to tell what happened to him. Consistent with the delay in introducing the death into the Esthwaite scene is the downplaying of the impact of the trauma once the body does surface. In contrast to the descriptions of the death of Wordsworth’s mother and of the Boy of Winander, the transition to the discovery of the Drowned Man is much smoother. Returning to the scene on the following day, Wordsworth explains that the pile of clothes now tells “a plain tale” of death (1805, V.467; 1850, V.443), an echo of the dream of the horseman, in which he plainly saw a shell and a stone. In both cases, the details of the situation make clear that this man’s death is an irreducible fact. As Wu points out, the body’s “bolt upright” appearance gives it a resemblance to the “grapplingirons and long poles” used to extract it from the lake.47 Even the metaphors reinforce the unrelenting literalism of the situation. Nevertheless, we see the same kind of splitting in Wordsworth’s language about the corpse as we did in the dream of the horseman. Though the body “is what it is” as a corpse, an excess of signification comes into play. In all three texts, he describes how the man “Rose with his ghastly face” (1799, I.279; 1805, V.472; 1850, V.450). The face, in other words, appears unattached from—or as an appendage to—the rest of the body. Slavoj Zizek’s comments on the phantom’s face in The Phantom of the Opera give us a template for understanding the kind of terror operating in Wordsworth’s encounter with the corpse:

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[T]he flesh has not yet assumed definite features, it dwells in a kind of preontological state, as if “melted,” as if having undergone an anamorphotic deformation; the horror lies not in [the] death mask, but rather in what is concealed beneath it, in the palpitating skinned flesh– everyone who catches sight of this amorphous life substance has

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Tr au m a , Tr a ns c e n de nc e , a n d Trus t entered the forbidden domain and must therefore be excluded from the community . . . Therein consists the ultimate paradox of the “living dead”: as if death, the death stench it spreads, is a mask sheltering a life far more “alive” than our ordinary daily life. The place of the living dead is not somewhere between the dead and the living: precisely as dead, they are in a way “more alive than life itself” having access to the life substance prior to its symbolic mortifications.48

The Oxford English Dictionary defines anamorphosis as “a distorted projection of anything so made that when viewed from a particular point, or by reflection from a suitable mirror, it seems regular and properly proportioned” (OED 1). An onlooker, in other words, can become blind to such a deformity if the right perspective or mirror is available. This stress on perspective informs Zizek’s Lacanian discussion of psychosis as “the massive presence of some Real which fills out and blocks the perspective openness constitutive of ‘reality.’ ”49 The troubling matter is that the traumatic Real, in this case the deformity of the phantom’s face, occasions desire prior to the work of symbolization, which, through the imposition of perspective and distance, turns it into fully conscious “reality.” Applying this analysis to Wordsworth’s seeing the Drowned Man, we can begin to apprehend the trauma that revives in him as he recalls the episode. In the 1805 and 1850 texts, the lines immediately following the dredging of the body put a strong stress on the recovery of perspective. In Zizek’s terms, the deformity of the “ghastly face” is anamorphotic because it is redescribed from the poet’s controlling point of view, which has been able to subjugate its terror. Specifically, Wordsworth disallows any crude or childish fear. He can imagine such mastery because books have made these images familiar to him: “for my inner eye had seen / Such sights before among the shining streams / Of fairyland” (1805, V.476–478; 1850, V.453–455). Although his meditation focuses on romances, the images come from the book of Nature as well. Emphasizing the calmness and beauty of the lake, Wordsworth domesticates the dead man’s face by joining it to the “spirit” of “purest poesy” (1805, V.478–480; 1850, V.456–459). With this stress on “purity,” we return once again to the characterization of Wordsworth’s mother, whose “pure faith” in the goodness of the world now seems vindicated by its alignment with the fixed, static form of Greek sculpture. The same impulse continues in the next section where he returns to the comparison of a book to a stone “Hewn from a mighty quarry” (1805, V.488; 1850, V.465). In its pure, static, and stone-like form, therefore, this

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book symbolizes the external world—or Nature—as he would like it to operate. This wish to believe that he has mastered the trauma of seeing the dead man clearly guides Wordsworth in the revision of The Prelude. Above all, it explains the omission of one of the more haunting passages from the 1805 and 1850 texts. Immediately after describing the corpse in the 1799 text, Wordsworth stresses the “independent life” that “accidents,” such as the drowning of the man at Esthwaite, later took on in his life: I might advert To numerous accidents in flood or field, Quarry or moor, or ‘mid the winter snows, Distresses and disasters, tragic facts Of rural history, that impressed my mind With images to which in following years Far other feelings were attached — with forms That yet exist with independent life, And, like their archetypes, know no decay. (1799, I.279–287)

Like the “solemn images” that carried into the Boy of Winander’s mind and heart, Wordsworth claims that he has had many “images” impressed on his mind as a result of experiences like the one at Esthwaite. Despite his attempts to fix such events in past history, however, their “independent life” and archetypal status point to the force of trauma that revives in the present. As we have seen, Wordsworth finds himself subjected to the gaze of the light on the water in the dream of the horseman and to the maternal eye from Book II. In the same way, he is also subject to the gaze of the Drowned Man at Esthwaite. Though the 1805 and 1850 revisions try to obscure this feeling, we see a prominent trace of it when he characterizes the corpse in both accounts as “a spectre shape / Of terror” (V.472–473). At the core of this traumatic “independent life” for the dead man lies the desire which regularly confronts Wordsworth in the writing and rewriting of The Prelude. On the one hand, this desire consciously revives for him the traumatic images of death that he would like to believe he has transcended by memorializing them in a text that he can subject to his gaze. Thus the horseman, his mother, the Boy of Winander, and the Drowned Man at Esthwaite continue to occupy his attention for as long as he works on The Prelude. On the other hand, in the course of placing—and replacing—these figures in his text,

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Anxious Spots The episodes discussed in the previous sections suggest that Wordsworth has difficulty canalizing the anxiety with which Nature confronts him. Specifically, trauma’s eruption in the present produces anxiety. In the dream of the horseman, the anxiety focuses on the absence of a guide and the desire this situation elicits—expressed as poetic vocation—to carry out the horseman’s quest. This wish leads Wordsworth to idealize the stone and the shell as pure, static texts that he believes he can subjugate to his gaze. Subsequently, he attempts to replicate this purity in his memorials to his mother, the Boy of Winander, and the Drowned Man at Esthwaite. These idealizations, however, bring him to an impasse. Instead of being able to reduce his experiences with death to unchanging texts, he finds himself subjected to desire, as articulated in the gaze and experienced as stained texts. The effect, finally, of encountering these texts is a kind of muteness played out at the Boy of Winander’s grave where the language for describing what he is feeling eludes him. Visually, he suggests an equivalent for this muteness in the appearance of the Drowned Man at Esthwaite. The corpse’s face allows no distance for Wordsworth—even as an adult—to adequately symbolize the trauma that is registering within him. The famous “spots of time” episode—originally in Book II of the 1799 Prelude and eventually relocated to Book XI of the 1805 text and to Book XII of the 1850 text—takes the idea of a stained text one step further. Often, the expression “spots of time” is understood in terms of the portability of Wordsworth’s images of Nature. He wants to carry comforting memories with him as a means of consolation in difficult times. This notion also fits with a desire to spatialize time. In this respect, The Oxford English Dictionary defines “spot” as “a small piece, amount, or quantity” (OED III.7.a), so we can say that Wordsworth’s spots of time are small pieces of time that he has preserved—consciously or unconsciously—in his memory. In turn, this spatial understanding of the “spots of time” fits with his general conception of them as articulated in the 1799 description and largely retained in

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Wordsworth always finds himself at the point of being subjected to their gaze because the trauma they repeat continues to operate in the present. The final section of this chapter will focus on how such stained texts from the past nevertheless orient him toward future responsibility.

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There are in our existence spots of time Which with distinct preeminence retain A fructifying virtue, whence, depressed By trivial occupations and the round Of ordinary intercourse, our minds – Especially the imaginative power – Are nourished and invisibly repaired. (1799, I.288–293)

The 1805 version changes “fructifying” to “renovating,” and adds “false opinion and contentious thought / Or aught of heavier and more deadly weight” to the causes of his depression (1805, XI.259; 260–261). The 1850 text retains all of these changes. Yet the overall sense of “spots of time” as perennial sources of relief that Wordsworth carries with him remains prominent. As we shall see, this function of the “spots of time” strongly resembles the trusted good objects that Klein sees the child internalizing from the external world, as a part of healthy development, and that underwrite artistic sublimation. Before turning to this idea, however, we need to attend to a less noticed but equally important notion of “spot” as “stain” and even, as I will argue, as “a mark or speck on the eye” (OED 13a). This idea of the spot as a stain—and one that arises in the act of perceiving the object as much as in the object itself—adds two important dimensions to Wordsworth’s “spots of time.” First, like texts, these spatialized moments in time never arrive in a pure, homeostatic, or transcendent form to the observer. Rather, Wordsworth’s famous examples of spots of time on Penrith moor and in the aftermath of his father’s death demonstrate that their continued operation in the present reflects an underlying trauma. Second, they involve an interpreter—either Wordsworth or his reader—whose sight is not perfect, and who may even be in danger of going blind. Indeed, the bridge passage added to the 1805 text addresses such a contingency: The days gone by Come back upon me from the dawn almost Of life; the hiding places of my power Seem open, I approach, and then they close; I see by glimpses now, when age comes on May scarcely see at all. (1805, XII.333–338)

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the 1805 and 1850 versions:

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The 1850 text changes “my power” to the more impersonal “man’s power,” thereby calling into question its agency (1850, XII.279); additionally, he changes “I approach” to “I would approach” (1850, XII.280), suggesting a blockage in this effort. Most importantly, by stressing that he sees “by glimpses,” Wordsworth calls attention to the fragility of seeing, especially as one grows older. By putting the stress on the approach of blindness rather than its definitive arrival, therefore, Wordsworth seems closer to understanding the extent to which a gaze from somewhere else subjects him. In other words, precisely because he desires to subject the objects of his experience to the power that his eye still possesses, he becomes subject to the power of an eye from somewhere else.This sense of being seen explains why the hiding places of power appear to close when he comes near to them. In this way, he shows the troubling way in which power has been implanted in his mind. Where he had expected it to be a means of subjugating the world to his gaze, he discovers with time that he is really subjected to the gaze’s vagaries. This sense of subjugation is very evident when Wordsworth, as a five-year-old boy, gets lost on the Penrith moors. Although not literally blinded, he does stumble uncertainly when he is separated from his grandparents’ servant while they are out riding. This trauma contrasts with his high expectations as he mounted the horse, a feature common to all three versions. Here is the 1799 text: I remember well (‘Tis of an early season that I speak, The twilight of rememberable life), While I was yet an urchin, one who scarce Could hold a bridle, with ambitious hopes I mounted, and we rode toward the hills. We were a pair of horsemen: honest James Was with me, my encourager and guide. (1799, II.296–303)

Once lost, he dismounts the horse “through fear,” a detail that he also stresses in all three texts (1799, II.305–306; 1805, XI.285–286; 1850, XII.232–233). Though Wordsworth does not specifically link riding a horse with poetic vocation in any of the texts, his sense of being mounted high on the horse does echo what he says in 1805 and 1850 about the power of the “spots of time.” Their “virtue” contributes to “pleasure” which “penetrates, enables us to mount / When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen” (1805, XI.265–267; 1850, XII.216–218). Read in conjunction with the dream of the horseman

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(not part of the 1799 text), these lines signal that the desire for transcendence increasingly haunts Wordsworth as he revises The Prelude. By linking this desire to be mounted up high with his immature and mistaken view of his powers, Wordsworth suggests that, each time he revisits this episode, he feels more self-conscious about the limitations on his powers—both spiritual and poetic—to overcome trauma. This increased self-consciousness about transcendence is also evident in the character of his “guide.” Unlike the horseman in his dream, “honest James” very much belongs to the quotidian world. Indeed, by 1850 he is simply “an ancient servant of my father’s house” (1850, XII.229). The ordinary world represents the one Wordsworth would leave behind when the dream of the horseman ends. Yet, when he does speak about spiritually renovating “spots of time,” it is in connection with living in this ordinary world rather than in the dream. Perhaps the most important contrast between the three versions of the Penrith episode has to do with Wordsworth’s eventually chancing upon the gibbet. The 1799 text makes no mention of writing at this place. It simply refers laconically to the grass where there used to be “bones,” “iron,” and “wood”: “only a long green ridge of turf remained / Whose shape was like a grave” (1799, II.311–313). Then, in the 1805 text, Wordsworth introduces the detail about the murderer’s name “carved” in the “turf” (1805, XI.291–293). Finally, both the 1805 and the 1850 texts describe this writing as “monumental.” This is the 1805 version: The monumental writing was engraven In times long past, and still from year to year By superstition of the neighbourhood The grass is cleared away; and to this hour The letters are all fresh and visible. (1805, XI.294–298)

By adding the description of the letters in the later texts, Wordsworth offers a clearer reason for his departure from the “spot” as compared to 1799: the letters’ freshness and visibility scared him as a boy and continue to make their effect felt as he recalls it. Indeed, given the comparison between the ground adjacent to the gibbet and “a grave” in the 1799 text, we can say that the “monumental writing” at this spot resembles a tombstone; consistent with this idea, the 1805 text speaks of the letters as “inscribed” in the turf (1805, XI.300). Beyond this desire for clarity, however, Wordsworth’s revisions also bring him closer to the trauma of what happened. In particular, when he catches sight of the letters, he uses the word “characters” to

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describe them in both 1805 and 1850 (1805, XI.300; 1850, XII.245), suggesting that they are cut into his mind even more permanently than into the ground. Thus they have the quality of a wound that proves all the more affecting because he came upon this “spot” so casually. In the 1805 text, it is a “chance” event that brings him into the presence of this frightening inscription (1805, XI.300). In the 1850 text, his “casual glance” at the writing seems overpowered by the letters’ permanence (1850, XII.246). These revisions suggest that in the long process of incorporating this “spot of time” into his poetic autobiography, Wordsworth did not so much overcome its terror as continue to grapple with it. Though the “spots of time” do have a renovating function for his spirit, Penrith also remains a place of trauma for him. All three texts register this effect through the spare images Wordsworth uses for what he encounters after leaving this locale. “Reascending the bare slope” (a “bare common” in 1805 and 1850), he notices “a naked pool,” “the beacon on the summit,” and “a girl who bore a pitcher on her head / And seemed with difficult steps to force her way / Against the blowing wind” (1799, II.315–319; 1805, 1805, XI.303–307; 1799, 1850, XII.249–253). Unlike the images present in the dream of the horseman, these lack any connection to each other beyond that of temporal sequence; they simply present what he, as a child, chanced upon while looking for someone else. By portraying the scene in these minimal terms, Wordsworth thereby enacts the insufficiency of language for what he has experienced. Literally, the pool, the beacon, and the woman reinforce the lack of “colours and words” he confronts in trying to describe the trauma of being lost (1799, II.321; 1805, XI.309; 1850, XII.255). In Lacanian terms, they point to the gap or hole around which he builds his text. Nevertheless, where the dream of the horseman simply ended with his awakening terrified, his powers of speech do not shut down as he recalls what happened at Penrith. Instead, he keeps on looking and seeing—both as a child and as an adult—while he thinks about the trauma he confronts. In this sense, the terror of his desire proves productive; he can imagine a kind of empathy with what he sees because he shares a sensation with his surroundings. Like the “naked pool,” the frightening “characters” of the gibbet leave him vulnerable. Like the beacon, he must now act as a guide even though he feels very isolated and inadequate. Above all, like the woman with the bowl, the wind literally and figuratively tosses him. Of course, this wind symbolizes creative power, but the force possesses him rather

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a mild creative breeze, A vital breeze that passes gently on O’er things which it has made, and soon becomes A tempest, a redundant energy, Creating not but as it may Disturbing things created. (lines 1–6)50

The same thought then reappears in different versions in the 1805 and 1850 texts. In both, Wordsworth begins The Prelude by rejoicing in the “blessing in the gentle breeze” (1805, I.1; 1850, I.1). In the 1805 text, he goes on to consider how this external breeze affects him internally: For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven Was blowing on my body, felt within A corresponding mild creative breeze, A vital breeze which travelled gently on O’er things which it had made, and is become A tempest, a redundant energy, Vexing its own creation. (1805, I.40–47)

In the 1850 version “a corresponding mild creative breeze” that has specifically “made” objects becomes one that “gently moved / With quickening virtue” (1850, I.35–36). Even in the later version, however, Wordsworth remains very aware of how experience of the external world of Nature interacts with the internal one of artistic creation. Most prominent is the unpredictability of the latter world: very quickly the invocation’s mood shifts from one of gentle recollection to violent tempest. As Wordsworth develops his thinking about the experience on the Penrith moors, however, these shifts in mood come to subsist with each other because he discovers that the external world can, to adopt Klein’s schema, contain both impulses as necessary components of his inspiration. In other words, as Wordsworth rethinks The Prelude, he recognizes that he can enjoy the blessing of the “corresponding mild creative breeze.” But he must face—in the manner of the woman carrying the pitcher—the vexatious wind that hinders his work. Like her he is brought low (he dismounts his horse) as a

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than vice-versa. In one fragment from MS. JJ, Wordsworth records his ambivalent response to the wind as a symbol of poetic inspiration. Initially, it stirs him to life, but then it becomes a destructive tempest:

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result of being lost. In Kleinian terms, this negative experience with the external world—one he survives and meditates on—suggests that some internalization of Nature as a whole and good object has already happened. Most importantly, with time and revision, the splitting of the bad “wind” from the good “breeze” becomes less intense, indicating that he trusts his projection of inspiration into the text. Critical to this process is that Wordsworth retains his curiosity in the Penrith scene through all the revisions—Klein’s “epistemophilic impulse” is operating here. In particular, Wordsworth sees that his ambivalent response to the woman’s suffering and to the wind still carries creative potential. For this reason all three texts stress the landscape’s “visionary dreariness” (1799, II.322; 1805, XI.310; 1850, XII.256). In addition, in the 1805 text, he recalls roaming about the site “in the blessèd time of early love” (1805, XI.317), an expression he changes to “the blessed hours” in 1850 (1850, XII.261–262). Wordsworth has an enduring interest in this scene because the trauma of the first visit becomes intermixed with the creative “power” he can project on it in the second visit and in his later revisions: Upon the naked pool and dreary crags And on the melancholy beacon, fell The spirit of pleasure and youth’s golden gleam – And think ye not with radiance more divine From these remembrances, and from the power They left behind? (1805, XI.320–325)

In both the 1805 and 1850 texts, he elaborates on the “efficacious spirit” of the spots of time to give the “mind” the sense of being “lord and master” over the “outward sense” (1805, XI.268–271; 1850, XII.218–222). This feeling of mastery, in turn, corresponds to the “power” he mentions here. Simultaneously, he finds the whole scene precious because he has come to recognize this power as passing and traumatically imposed on him. For this reason, he emphasizes being “[I]n daily presence of this very scene,” suggesting, as always, that he is fixed in its gaze and subject to it even in the moment when he imagines himself as having subjugated its components to his act of perception. Where this sense of being looked at had produced splitting in Book V, the conflict is not as strong here. The pool is still “naked” and the beacon is still “melancholy,” but these features do not undercut the “radiance” that they derive from being part of his remembered past (1805, XI.320–321; 1850, XII.264–265).

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Ultimately, he places his trust in the way positive and negative feelings subsist with each other: “So feeling comes in aid / Of feeling, and diversity of strength / Attends us, if but once we have been strong” (1805, XI.325–327; 1850, XII.269–271). The original “visionary dreariness” underwrites his later—and more pleasant—experiences at Penrith. Only because the feelings connected with the traumatic first visit continue to work in him as a source of anxiety can he speak of the second visit with interest and trust. This sense of subjugation to what he sees fits with his attunement to suffering as something passively endured. Just as the woman with the pitcher on her head endures the harsh wind into which she walks, so Wordsworth comes to recognize that inspiration’s harshness also identifies it as trustworthy. This perspective colors his response to the second spot of time, which describes the death of his father. In the 1799 Prelude, the connection between the episode at Penrith and this one centers on the “power” mentioned above: Nor less I recollect – Long after, though my childhood had not ceased – Another scene which left a kindred power Implanted in my mind. (1799, II.327–330)

In meditating on his father’s death, he comes to recognize that this subjugation to power has a personal dimension. Specifically, it relates to human suffering both in the sense of having pain inflicted and, more generally, as a process one undergoes rather than controls. All three versions of the account divide between his eager anticipation of going home from school for the Christmas break and the belated recognition that the days he wanted to pass so quickly coincided with the last ones of his father’s life. Wordsworth recalls sitting by the “naked wall” at school, and speaks of the “single sheep” and “hawthorn” as his “companions” while he watches intently for the arrival of the horses to take him home (1799, II.343–346; 1805, XI.357–360, 1850, XII.299–302). Echoing the “naked pool” from the previous scene, the “naked wall” suggests the boy’s sense of vulnerability. As an adult looking back on the scene, he now knows that in a few days he and his siblings will be “orphans.” This retrospective sense of a trauma to come also colors the characterization of his “companions.” The adult already knows that the boy will need companions in the future and accordingly projects them into the child’s life before the father’s death. Finally, Wordsworth’s straining of his eyes through the mist also brings together past and present. In

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both the 1805 and 1850 texts, he has already registered his anxiety about losing sight in the future and the difficulty he has as an adult in finding the places where his power is concealed. The child’s straining his eyes to see if the horses have arrived anticipates this blindness. Hurtling toward the future, he is also hurtling toward his father’s death. Most importantly, in all three texts, Wordsworth refers to the sense of “chastisement” he had as a result of his father’s death, identifying it with a childish sense of guilt for wishing that time would pass quickly (1799, II.355; 1805, XI.369 1850, XII.311). In this regard, he speaks of “bow[ing] low / To God who thus corrected my desires” and, as in his reaction to the girl with the water, he recognizes the ambivalence of his feelings (1799, II.359–360; 1805, XI.373–374; 1850, XII.315–316). On the one hand, his obeisance to “God” occasions “trite reflections of morality.” On the other hand, the adult recognizes that the youth offered them with “deepest passion” and thus takes them seriously (1799, II.358–359; 1805, XI.372–373; 1850, XII.314–315). Although he is referencing belief in a personal God at the time of his father’s death (and to which he had returned in the latter half of his life), this theological issue is not the focus of his reflections in any texts dealing with this episode. Rather, the depth of the “chastisement” he felt is his concern. In contrast to the Penrith moor spot of time, Wordsworth now wants to identify this power in whose gaze he is beginning to find himself fixed, and “God” provisionally names this entity. Operating at the edge of his consciousness, this power functions like the Lacanian Other. Though apparently only a symbol left over from childish piety, “God” still sees and subjugates him even as he tries to subjugate the world around him. Unlike the earlier descriptions of the gaze’s operation, however, Wordsworth’s sense of suffering in this episode subsists with his tranquil recollection of the elements of the scene in subsequent times. Specifically, in all three texts, his memory of the sheep, the tree, and the mist on the road all become “spectacles and sounds to which / I would often repair, and thence would drink / As at a fountain” (1799, II.368–370; 1805, XI.382–384; 1850, XII.324– 326). By speaking of these images as sources of later refreshment, Wordsworth underscores the extent to which he has internalized a scene that has also elicited suffering and guilt. In keeping with Kleinian analysis , the sheep, the tree, and the mist are objects that do not need to be split off from the anxious desire to which they are connected. This acceptance of their mixed status also puts them

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And I do not doubt That in this later time, when storm and rain Beat on my roof at midnight, or by day When I am in the woods, unknown to me The workings of my spirit thence are brought. (1799, II.370–374; 1805, XI.384–388)

They also come back to him in the 1850 version, albeit in a somewhat different form. First, he diminishes the “workings of my spirit” to “some inward agitations” in the later text (1850, XII.332). Second, where he had spoken of these stirrings as “unknown” in the earlier versions, he now speculates on them as a relief from a more serious “course” of thought or as simply the focus of “an hour of vacant ease” (1850, XII.335). Nevertheless, even at this late stage, the images remain at the edge of his mind, and their placement at the end of Book XII in the 1850 text emphasizes the extent to which Wordsworth’s thought continues to turn back on itself throughout the writing—and rewriting—of this work. That thought has the freedom to function in this way implies that the autobiographical form of this poem ultimately can contain the anxiety that accompanies subjectivity as Wordsworth comes to understand it. In the dream of the horseman, this anxiety centers on “an ode in passion uttered” that Wordsworth sees as part of his vocation as a poet to announce. As his acts of memorializing the dead in the rest of Book V make clear, however, this kind of pure, homeostatic text—one that he could subjugate to his eye—is exactly what eludes him as a result of the various traumas that confront him in the past and the present. His moral conundrum thus becomes clear. He believes he has a calling to write poetry of a high, prophetic kind. Yet the demand he experiences to write this kind of poetry always exceeds anything he can do to meet this responsibility. The autobiographical form—into which Wordsworth works himself through more than forty years of work on The Prelude—allows him the freedom to give this anxiety play as spots of time. On the one hand, those that he formally identifies—being lost on the Penrith crag and the death of his father—illustrate how hard won his trust in the external world is as a result of the traumas that beset him. On the other hand, in both the 1805 and 1850 texts, he claims that he finds these spots “scattered

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on the cusp of the unconscious. In the 1799 and 1805 versions, he speaks of them as sources of trust even though he cannot pinpoint their operation directly:

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everywhere” (1805, XI.274; 1850, XII.224), suggesting that the enlarging of The Prelude testifies to this breadth. This articulation of spots of time into poetic autobiography means that the trauma that underwrites them is ongoing rather than completed. At the same time, the continuing effort of trusting internalized objects characterizes Wordsworth as a survivor of trauma. That this trust encompasses poetic form highlights his legacy to the nineteenth century and—as we shall see—to Alfred Tennyson.

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“ Wou n d” i n t h e “L i v i ng S ou l”: Te n n y son’s I N M E M O R I A M

As we noticed in the preceding chapter, Wordsworth’s gaze is struc-

tured by the dead he memorializes: the horseman in his dream, his mother, the Boy of Winander, and the Drowned Man at Esthwaite. Indeed, such memorializing distinctively marks his poetic calling. Nevertheless, in the process of living out this vocation—a process that the long composition of The Prelude comes to metonymize—he discovers that one by-product of his pursuit is the repeated trauma that inheres in this project and that he expresses through the spots of time. We can make some similar claims about In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson’s mid-century poem of mourning for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Like The Prelude, its formation also took a long time; Tennyson did not publish the poem until seventeen years after his friend had died in 1833. The clue to its long production may well be that the trauma of Hallam’s death did not break on Tennyson all at once but rather came upon him in waves.1 Tennyson suggests as much in the late lyric addressed to his living friend Edmund Lushington: . . . the imaginative woe, That loved to handle spiritual strife, Diffused the shock thro’ all my life, But in the present broke the blow. (85.53–56)

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Chapter 2

Melancholic loss, as with Wordsworth, has a temporality parallel to the poetic vocation: both take a long time to find even partial expression. For this reason, In Memoriam, like The Prelude, can develop a

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view of Nature that emphasizes Lacanian lack and Kleinian trust as competing responses to traumatic loss. The difficulty of their relationship intensifies for Tennyson because, in his relationship to Nature, he also reads a discourse of religion and immortality in tension with that of science and evolution. I focus on the elements of both sets of tensions in the first two sections of this chapter. On the one hand, “Caring for Nothing” links the shock of Hallam’s loss to the lack that inheres in Tennyson’s relationship with what he sees as the feminized force of Nature. Her famously grim pronouncement in section 56 clearly includes the poet’s friend: “I care for nothing, all shall go” (56.4). This carelessness with regard to the human type and the meaninglessness of the course of the stars represents the death instinct and lack writ large in the poem. Nature, akin to the bad mother in Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position, persecutes by means of her indifference. More forcefully than Wordsworth, Tennyson registers this anxiety as the product of particular kinds of discourse. Though the death of his friend occasions the poem, it is the continuing experience of having survived this trauma that sustains it. Strikingly, Tennyson does not dismiss the discourse of religion and immortality; instead, he finds that his friend’s immortality already reiterates the emptiness articulated by Nature as humanity’s fate. As a survivor in a world where the discourses of religion and science surprisingly come together to iterate the lack in the subject, Tennyson embodies Lacanian alienation. Called into subjectivity, he nevertheless discovers that making this vocation present as a poet only accentuates his self-division. On the other hand, “Wishing Hallam Back” brings out the extent to which trust also inheres in his engaging the discourses of religion and science. In Kleinian terms, Tennyson loosens his control over his dead friend so as to bring him back into the living world as the creation of poetic language that remains very conscious of the emptiness out of which it emerges. He symbolizes this external world in a vision of physical Nature that seems to grieve with him. Nature protects Hallam’s remains, provides a spot for his burial, and, in the climactic section 95, is ultimately the site for his reconstitution as a heavenly spirit and muse of the poem. Tennyson never forgets, however, that this reconstituting of Hallam is also a recapitulation of his traumatic loss. If Nature consciously speaks of carelessness in creation, Hallam, who visits Tennyson in a trance, perhaps represents the opening of the unconscious in protest against such inexorable change. This shift in anxiety also signals a change in how he experiences the trauma of

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loss. Specifically, Tennyson now begins to recognize himself as being subject to desire rather than its master. The imaginative possibilities and blockages that the tension between Lacanian lack and Kleinian trust opens up is the focus of “Separated Desire.” Like the father confronted with the burning corpse of his child in The Interpretation of Dreams, Tennyson can only experience Hallam as someone already absent, thus insuring that the trauma of his loss repeats itself precisely at the moment when his wish to have his friend back is fulfilled. The visitation in section 95 and his subsequent dream about his friend illustrate this point. Much like the monuments presented in Book V of The Prelude, they are stained with the fact of trauma just as they come to realization. In this sense, Hallam blocks the opening of the unconscious. As Tennyson says late in the poem, his friend “fillest all the room of all my love” (112.5–6), implying that further exploration of how his friend functions as an ideal either need not or cannot occur. Compounding this problem is an additional feature: Hallam represents not only his ideal for living, but also as his ideal reader. As a result, the blockage that Tennyson projects by embracing Hallam’s spirit carries over to the reader. Simultaneously, however, Tennyson’s trust in the external world expresses the profundity of his reparative urge toward the world. The end of In Memoriam thereby yields a discourse that, in Lacanian terms, remains separated from belief in either a revealed God or a positivistic science. Neither discourse can tell Tennyson—or his readers—what the Other wants. That he can make this address, however, suggests that Tennyson sees that his poem implicates others in his grief through an act of interpretation. Though never redemptive of the loss, this work orients them toward a future they have a role in creating. By emphasizing his reader’s role in his grief, Tennyson endeavors to make present through language what he has lost in Hallam. Most importantly, he sees this move as empowering: perhaps future readers can bear living in a world where trauma’s repetition implicates them in each other’s stories. My argument thereby builds on criticism from studies of his work over the last twenty years. One strand of this discussion has focused on Tennyson’s religious beliefs and whether he trusts the available language for the supernatural. Donald Hair, for example, claims that “Tennyson uses words like ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ frequently and confidently in In Memoriam.”2 The former has to do with the individual as created by God, while the latter evokes “something in us which enables us to make sense of ourselves and the world in which we live.”3 For Hair, the poem moves toward the awareness denoted by “soul” and ultimately typified by Hallam. In

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addition to Hair, Michael Wheeler, John D. Rosenberg, W. David Shaw, and Robert Bernard Hass address the question of Tennyson’s religious belief. In varying ways each of these authors stresses the useful distinction that Tennyson does not try to prove the existence of God, but to set out the conditions in which belief is possible.4 Even when the critic’s concern is not with Tennyson’s religion, though, a kind of secular faith in language’s power is regularly imputed to him. Discussing the so-called “In Memoriam stanza,” Sarah Gates argues that Tennyson vocalizes his grief as a release from silent anguish. Thus, while he claims in section 5 that words do not provide a channel for his feeling, the doubling back of the “abba” stanza form teaches us to expect a rethinking of this position both in particular lyrics and in the poem as a whole.5 At the same time, a second strand in this discussion has noticed the tentativeness with which Tennyson embraces philosophical language about Hallam as a substitute for his physical presence. In this regard, Gerhard Joseph stresses Tennyson’s belief in “the possibility of a silent but coherent subject.”6 But the need to express feeling in “the inadequate mediation of language”7 also daunts this subject. Along with this skepticism about one’s ability to represent the self in language comes the question of desire’s formation in the poem. Taking up the second of these questions, Denise Gigante argues that Tennyson diffuses Hallam into the poem as his lost “prime passion” (85.76). At the same time, he can only speak of this passion between men indirectly. For this reason, Tennyson uses the stanza form of In Memoriam to create a hymnic voice that works communally and anonymously.8 As Gigante’s discussion anticipates, recent studies of In Memoriam focus on what Tennyson can do with this language, assuming he has at least some trust in it. For some critics, religion remains fundamental to Tennyson’s poetic vocation. In particular, Michael Tomko sees the poem as effecting a radical separation between the spiritual and material worlds that fits with the mysticism of geologists such as Sir Charles Lyell.9 James W. Hood notices the same division between the spiritual and material in the poem, but sees it as bridged by the typically sexual references to Hallam. Sexual attraction supposedly brings about spiritual union that heals the chasm between desire and fulfillment, language and expression, and humans and God.10 Other readings see Tennyson as using religious practices as part of the rhetoric for a more secular ethics. Devon Fisher, for example, argues that Tennyson canonizes Hallam as a secular saint whose life “demands the imitation of an entire culture.”11 More pessimistically,

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David Riede links these secularized ethics to the issue of melancholy, a state of mind that reflects a conflict between “personal desire” and “conscience.”12 In allegorizing the restoration of Hallam’s love, Tennyson records only a wish for this connection, not a vision of it.13 Given this separation of the linguistic signifier from what it signifies, we can say that In Memoriam makes its circuit around the lack named Arthur Hallam. Erik Gray implies such a constitutive lack in the poem: through the nostalgia it elicits, the poem registers resistance to “religious and poetic transcendence” instead of promoting such ends.14 Readings such as Riede’s and Gray’s suggest that one mistakenly characterizes the poem’s ethics as apodictic. As I will show, these readings also provide a point of departure consistent with an ethics of representation that allows Tennyson to stay true to a desire that he can never completely own.15

Caring for Nothing At the beginning of his lecture on alienation, Lacan recapitulates his understanding of the Other: it is “the locus in which is situated the chain of the signifier that governs whatever may be made present of the subject” (1977: 203). This “making present” of the subject happens at the level of the drive which, as we have seen, does not express itself as teleological development, but as traumatic supersession. Consistent with his interest in the invocatory drive, Lacan stresses that the alienated subject has recognized subjectivity as that which calls to him: “And I said that it was on the side of this living being, called to subjectivity, that the drive is essentially manifested” (1977: 203). For Tennyson, this calling has its more particular adumbration in the calling—or vocation—to be a poet, and the famous portrayal of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (56.15) dramatically brings this concern into focus. Where Tennyson had hoped that Nature would be “careful of the type” (56.1), he abruptly confronts the lack in both himself and the cosmos: “From scarped cliff and quarried stone / She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone: / ‘I care for nothing, all shall go’ ” (56.1–3). Crucially, Tennyson’s anxiety does not annihilate poetic power, but enhances it: Nature is personified as a forceful female speaker. At the same time, as Isobel Armstrong argues, Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology underwrites much of what Tennyson says about the evolution of the human species. Evolution occurred because the continually shifting plates on the earth’s surface were collocated at an opportune time in the earth’s geological development for it to

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happen. From the fossil record we should learn that Nature has no care for any type, including the human.16 According to Armstrong, Tennyson fears that without a notion of type, or of a language to describe the difference between humans and animals, the distinction itself also disappears. By virtue of their very accomplishments, in other words, humans become even more monstrous than the dinosaurs. Neither recognizes the violent underpinning of their actions; but human beings, by thinking that they have advanced in comparison to other species, actually demonstrate that so-called knowledge has made them all the worse: . . . A monster then, a dream, A discord. Dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their slime, Were mellow music matched with him. (56.21–24)

The dinosaur lived in an undifferentiated “world of ‘slime’ in which attacker could barely be distinguished from attacked.”17 But this brutality is “mellow music” compared to the activity of humans who mistake the emptiness out of which evolution emerged and toward which it is moving for a purpose. The language of types has power in the sense that it gives human beings a potentially mistaken “dream” of their own evolutionary destiny and superiority to Nature’s other creatures. In fact, however, this language only expresses their deeper alienation. Nature’s “caring for nothing” reflexively demonstrates this point. On the one hand, as personification, it calls attention to the fact that Tennyson has made himself present as a poet by the use of this literary device. On the other hand, the shock and emptiness that this invention echoes back to him brings out the lack that inheres for him at the heart of this vocation. In dwelling on such a world, Tennyson evokes the paranoia of early infancy that Klein describes. As Eli Zaretsky argues, the infant in this position does not imagine her relationship to the world as an ethically meaningful one.18 Rather, the mother brings out the infant’s destructive impulses. Returning to In Memoriam, we see that these impulses have their parallel in the way the dinosaurs behave. By characterizing the dinosaurs’ actions as “mellow music” compared with that of human beings, Tennyson makes a very strong case against assuming that language acquisition has allowed humans to move forward. Tennyson recognizes that humans’ belief in evolutionary destiny has force because language differentiates this species from other animals. But even more compelling for him is the possibility that this

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characteristic may have resulted only from the accident of the species’ inhabiting the earth’s crust at the right time. This coincidence offers no assurance that evolution can assuage the anxiety about death. Indeed, as the destructiveness of section 56 suggests, evolution may point out death’s inevitability as much as anything else. Consequently, Tennyson registers Nature’s indifference as something malign. This element of the paranoid position comes across in the way he presents Nature’s femininity. According to James Eli Adams, this personification does not so much bespeak Tennyson’s fear of evolution as his fear of women. In fact, Nature’s startling repudiation of teleology links evolutionary development with the woman’s abandonment of her proper role as caregiver in home and in family. Detached from this sphere, women, like Nature, become “red in tooth and claw” (56.15)—in Adams’ words, a “demon” or “Fury” rather than simply an animal.19 This argument has two implications. First, by demonizing the woman who detaches herself from the domestic sphere, Tennyson gives a very specific focus to the kind of wrongheaded development he foresees if humans misuse their knowledge. It may lead to the utter collapse of social relations based on the presumed superiority of men to women. Second, while Tennyson’s fears about evolution started with a reading of the external world, and especially the fossil record, the linkage of Nature to woman suggests that Tennyson confronts a terror that works internally as much as externally. Subsequently, this internalized sense of feminine caprice colors how he interprets Nature’s wasting of future life. Trying to interpret her “secret meaning in her deeds,” he is shocked to learn that “. . . of fifty seeds / She often brings but one to bear” (55.10–12). Implicit in his wanting to learn this “secret meaning” is his belief that Nature should function economically: where fifty seeds are sown, fifty should grow. But events defeat this expectation, leaving him isolated like the infant in Klein’s paranoid position. The trauma of this thinking registers most powerfully for Tennyson when he connects it to Hallam. In the baldest sense, his friend is one of the “seeds” who has not come to fruition. The labored syntax of Tennyson’s response to Nature’s dismissal of the type makes this shock clear: “And he, shall he, / Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair . . .” (56.8–9). By enjambing the referent of the pronoun “he” not only across the line but across the stanza, Tennyson momentarily leaves the line’s meaning open. Although “he” refers to “man,” this momentary indefiniteness also reminds us of Hallam. Reinforcing this effect, Tennyson separates the modal “shall” from the rest of the verb with eleven lines that testify to the human’s glory. Consequently,

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when Tennyson finally completes the verb—shall he “be blown about the desert dust, or seal’d within the iron hills?” (56.19–20)—we have the sense of how much has been lost in the collapse of this ideal and the shock Tennyson feels as he tries to articulate it. The trauma’s repetition compounds Tennyson’s anxiety. In section 3, for example, Sorrow, which Tennyson also identifies as feminine, speaks in terms that resemble Nature’s: ‘The stars,’ she whispers, ‘blindly run; A web is wov’n across the sky; From out the waste places comes a cry And murmurs from the dying sun: ‘And all the phantom, Nature, stands— With all the music in her tone, A hollow echo of my own — A hollow form with empty hands.’ (3.5–12)

Nature’s denial of the type echoes a larger tragic understanding of a universe subject to futility and decay. Even if Sorrow does speak reductively at this point—and Tennyson does speak of her “lying lip” (3.4)—this kind of thinking continues to have a strong pull on him. Sorrow’s speech can have this kind of effect because the trauma with which Tennyson grapples does not simply equate with Hallam’s death. This loss also plays out in the broader pattern of how he imagines the universe to operate. Amounting to a recurrence in adulthood of Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position, it demonstrates that Tennyson is a survivor—one who, against his will, faces the repetition of trauma in life’s continuation. Section 16 makes one of the most direct approaches to the trauma. Musing on his alternating feelings of “calm despair” and “wild unrest,” he seems amazed at a language that he does not recognize even though it comes from him: What words are these have fall’n from me? Can calm despair and wild unrest Be tenants of a single breast Or sorrow such a changeling be? (16.1–4)

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We will have more to say about the Lacanian notion of separation and how it plays out in language in the concluding part of this chapter. In this stanza, however, Tennyson’s sense of words that emanate from him but are not his own suggest an unconscious knowledge operating

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in him that he names as sorrow. This explains why he has difficulty in characterizing sorrow’s “deep self” (16.8). It represents his “deep self” facing the trauma of life’s continuation. On the one hand, with respect to his calm despair, Tennyson wonders whether this self may be like “some dead lake” that reflects only “the shadow of a lark / Hung in the shadow of a heaven” (16.9–10). On the other hand, as he reflects on his moments of “wild unrest,” he imagines this self as resembling the “unhappy bark / That strikes by night a craggy shelf / And staggers blindly ere she sink” (16.12–14). He verges on apprehending a lack at the alleged depths of human subjectivity as a result of his loss, but only its inefficacy registers its presence. Calm despair most obviously illustrates this blankness. Just as the dead lake lacks any real connection to the shadows that come and go across it, so his mind simply registers desire as something that operates in him but does not belong to him. In section 4, for example, he speaks to his heart in a dream. The heart “shoulds’t fail from thy desire, / Who scarcely darest to inquire, / ‘What is it makes me beat so low?’ ” (4.6–8). It is failing because of its desire, which also expresses the wish of the dream. Logically, we could say that he wishes for Hallam, but he speaks of the heart as something apart from him, and does not name his friend as the wish’s source. In Lacanian terms, the lines call attention not to the possession of his friend, but to the failure of possession or even the nostalgia for it. Indefiniteness about the heart’s loss is less a dodge than a necessary protection from trauma, and Tennyson characterizes the heart’s loss as “some pleasure from thine early years” (4.10). The vagueness of this feeling connects it to inefficacious desire because, while both may come into the conscious mind via the dream, they nevertheless work independently of the mind. By predicating desire of his heart as if it were a separate entity, Tennyson demonstrates a basic Lacanian dictum: desire belongs with the Other as much as with the self. This desire includes the one for interaction with other people. Such vacancy, however, is only one way in which desire manifests itself. In his wilder moods, Tennyson also recognizes this desire as linked to the experience of trauma. Hallam’s death, in other words, is the “craggy shelf” on which his mind, like the boat, founders before sinking—or dying. In the interval before the boat sinks—or the interval of his life before death—he lays out the most obvious effects of his suffering. Deprived, at least temporarily, of his power to reason, he finds that his “fancy” takes over. Though this shift clearly associates with a distortion in his mind, it is not completely wayward. Traces of the false intermix with the true (16.15–19). In this

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connection, Tennyson stresses that both come to him in “flashes,” a mode of communicating that also characterizes what Lacan says about the unconscious. In Seminar XI he remarks that the unconscious is “always ready to steal away, thus establishing the dimension of loss” (1977: 25). Like his calm despair, therefore, Tennyson’s mood of wild unrest brings him to the threshold of a desiring that he cannot own as his experience and that he cannot fully own up to in language. This failure, akin to the child’s not becoming the phallus for the mother, reveals all desiring as deeply intertwined with death. Tennyson’s confrontation with desire parallels the confrontation with language: called into subjectivity and poetry, he nevertheless recognizes that words are not made for him. As Lacan stresses, this difficulty recapitulates the child’s difficulty in beginning to use language. Though the child’s future development depends on this move, nothing guarantees that she will begin to use it. This contingency arises because of the profound pain involved in giving up the fantasy of an all-sufficient mother. Once, the child believed that the mother could automatically and without speech provide for all of her needs. In beginning to speak, however, the child implicitly recognizes that such a fantasy no longer operates. This observation leads Lacan to argue that beginning to use language is a losing choice, or vel, for the child because either she does not begin to speak or she accepts that the use of language will always fall short of its intended meaning: “Alienation consists in this vel which . . . condemns the subject to appearing only in that division which, it seems to me, I have . . . articulated sufficiently by saying that, if it appears on one side as a meaning produced by the signifier, it appears on the other as aphanisis” (1977: 210). The thing lost is the pleasure supposed by the child in relation to the mother—really the Other.20 A “non-meaning” always lost in every act of meaning, this loss makes itself felt as the disappearance of an aspect of the previous self that the adult nevertheless remembers (1977: 211). In section 5 Tennyson expresses this difficulty with language by comparing it to clothes that he borrows: “In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er / Like coarsest clothes against the cold” (5.9–10). Referring both to widow’s “weeds” and to plants, he recognizes the provisional quality in his relationship with both natural phenomena and the language of mourning. Like the desiring described above, language also does not belong to him. This sense of linguistic dispossession continues to attract critical attention. Just as Tennyson works through his grief in waves, so he also acquires fluency with this borrowed language. Herbert Tucker, for example, claims that the concern

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in this section centers on whether language, either of “words” or of “nature,” can adequately portray the poet’s feeling, arguing that how the mind comes to accept language’s mediation of loss becomes the “central project” in the poem.21 Eventually, Tennyson will speak in the language of his culture while also preserving “the Romantic character of individual experience.”22 Likewise, Gates points out that although Tennyson protests the inadequacy of language to mediate grief, he nonetheless gives the grief “in outline” (5.12) and, as we will see in section 19, vocalizes it in words.23 Both critics, therefore, suggest that even in this early and grim meditation, Tennyson makes clear the antecedents of his eventual recovery and reconnection to the world. I agree with these assessments because they accentuate the fact that Tennyson’s relationship to language develops with his project of mourning. What role, however, does anxiety—anxiety that points toward the continued operation of the death drive—play in such a narrative? We see the anxiety in the correlation between speaking about his grief and sinning: “I sometimes hold it half a sin / To put in words the grief I feel” (5.1–2). On the one hand, the transgression evoking anxiety and guilt recalls Freud’s melancholic: Tennyson is overindulging in grief; consequently, he writes his concern with his audience’s sensibility on this point into the poem. On the other hand, the thought that he is overindulging only occurs to him periodically and does not stop him from continuing to express his pain. Either way, by using the word “sin” in a context where “misjudgment” might have been more accurate, Tennyson underscores that the language he uses, though he may have some mastery over it, still retains an alien quality. Through this combination of assertion and denial, he thereby creates the pose of a melancholic and poet—one underwritten by anxiety. Additionally, Tennyson experiences anger when advised by others to seek consolation. Section 6 displays this feeling. Receiving a note of sympathy, he suggests the general shallowness of consolation: One writes, that ‘Other friends remain,’ That ‘Loss is common to the race’— And common is the commonplace And vacant chaff well meant for grain. (6.1–4)

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Throughout these lines, Tennyson relies heavily on commonplaces. In the first two lines, they arrive as standard expressions of condolence. In lines 3 and 4 he accepts the good intentions of the writer but

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also expresses his frustration with the traditional language. Rather than bringing him comfort, these truisms only increase his isolation and sadness. At the same time, he recognizes his implication in this language by adding a general statement of his own: “Never morning wore to evening / But some heart did break” (6.7–8). Buried in the middle of such expressions lies his fear that, whether they come from him or from others, these commonplaces amount to “vacant chaff”; language about the dead person does not substitute for that person. Indeed, since this last negative image of “chaff” disrupts the proliferation of other images that at least hold up the possibility of healing, it illustrates the extent to which, in struggling with Hallam’s death, Tennyson also struggles with language for it. Though he has recourse to common cultural forms, he cannot evade the possibility of their meaninglessness. In section 7, Tennyson confronts this blankness more directly. The sentimental evocation of the first stanza collapses against the baldness of the surroundings. Reflecting on the past, he recalls how he quickened to life while “waiting for a hand” (7.4) at the door of his friend’s house. Now, though, as he returns “once more” to the “Dark house” (7.1), this hope fades against the fact of death, symbolized not by the hand, but by its absence—“a hand that can be clasped no more” (7.5). James Krasner discusses how the loss of a loved one sometimes physically disorients survivors: “When we lose ones we love, we mourn them, in part, by continuing to feel the vitality of this intervening space as the dilation of our body schema, and we know terrible confusion when the space turns out to be not between two bodies but only around the edges of ours.”24 The scene before Hallam’s door, Krasner argues, brings out the embodied dimension of Tennyson’s loss: he feels that Hallam’s hand should grasp his, and he repeatedly seeks it out.25 The subsequent lines transfer this absence from the nonexistent hand to Tennyson’s presence. In a move that anticipates later parts of the poem, he imagines himself as like a ghost returning to earth: “Behold me, for I cannot sleep, / And like a guilty thing I creep / At earliest morning to the door” (7.5–8). Rosenberg argues that the bulk of the poem’s early readers understood these lines as addressed to themselves. They became “silent auditors of their Laureate’s grief, witnesses of his progress from suicidal despair to troubled faith.” But, on a more intimate level, Rosenberg also sees them as directed toward Hallam; in this way Tennyson wanders “outside the limits of normal waking life in quest of his dead friend.”26 Perhaps the difference between “suicidal despair” and “troubled faith” lies in the collective belief in immortality. Tennyson, in other

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He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day. (7.9–12)

“Far away” has two antecedents in these lines. Clearly, it refers to the distant sound of the street and its noise, suggesting Tennyson’s remoteness from everyday life as a result of his friend’s death. It may also refer, though, back to Hallam (the “he” in line 9), meaning that Tennyson has not ruled out the possibility of his friend’s living on in heaven. As with the dual meaning for “weeds” in section 5, Tennyson emphasizes how one word can work in two ways in the same expression. Where “weeds” allowed him at least a provisional access to the language of mourning, “far away” works in the opposite direction. Because Hallam is “far away,” everything around Tennyson seems like “noise” that is “far away” as well. Most especially, the words themselves that describe Hallam’s immortality (possible or hoped for) take on an alienating quality. On the one hand, he has learned to speak them with fluency. Hallam is not dead, but far away, a claim he makes matter-of-factly. On the other hand, this friend’s distance—corresponding to his removal to heaven—points to a loss of immediate relationship that still haunts Tennyson. Analogous to the mother—as a stand-in for the Other and for the symbolic system as a whole—his friend’s name becomes a signifier that not only underscores the dead man’s absence from the world but also a constant absence or lack for Tennyson. Much of In Memoriam’s discussion of immortality bears the mark of this non-meaning around which its acts of meaning turn. In this way, the sorrow that inheres in Tennyson’s “deep self” (16.8) dominates his perception without his being fully conscious of it. In the process of stressing the alienation he finds in thinking about immortality, Tennyson evokes Wordsworth. Famously, the latter’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” conflates Miltonic and Shakespearean allusions by speaking of “our mortal nature” as trembling “like a guilty thing surprised” as it moves about “in worlds not realized.”27 Humans contemplating immortality may soar towards what they have never known with fascination, like Milton’s Eve when she dreams of the tree of good and evil in Book V of Paradise Lost. At the same time,

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words, looks to his readers for some reinforcement of his troubled belief the afterlife:

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they may flee away from it like the ghost of Hamlet’s father at daylight. Standing before Hallam’s door in the early morning, Tennyson understands both sides of this experience. Confronted with the totally foreign world of his friend’s immortality, he feels anxious and guilty about mourning too much. Yet he repeats his visits to the place where he knows he will not find him. He takes up the same connection between immortality and loneliness in section 41. The first stanza celebrates Hallam’s “spirit” as finding its proper element in the sky; in soaring ever higher it thus resembles “the heavenward altar fire.” Ironically, however, this comparison describes the time “ere our fatal loss,” or before his death (41.1–3). Since Hallam’s death, when his spirit might literally be imagined as in heaven, Tennyson, in isolation, cannot rejoice in his friend’s elevation. Rather, Hallam has become a strange being, and Tennyson no longer shares the connections that would allow him to take part in whatever Hallam might now be experiencing (41.5–6). Such a gap occasions further anxiety. Though Tennyson may attempt to trace “The wonders that have come to [Hallam]” (41.22) in the afterlife, this endeavor only reminds him of his own life as “evermore a life behind” (41.24). Lack of belief in his friend’s removal to a higher sphere does not seem to be the stumbling block at this point. Rather, Tennyson apprehends that his belated status as a survivor of this removal causes the problem. In section 42, he concedes that this sort of musing simply leads to further agitation: “I vex my heart with fancies dim” (42.1). Nevertheless, the persistence of these “fancies dim” highlights a significant concern. Alan Sinfield pessimistically concludes that such musings color Tennyson’s perspective on human development, the whole purpose of which may be to bring us to the afterlife so that we will not have to go through this process again. 28 Language expresses this isolation, as section 45 makes clear. “The baby new to earth and sky,” Tennyson supposes, does not know how to use the pronouns “I” and “me” and thus does not know the full use of language. As in the idealized description of his friendship with Hallam, in which “Thought leapt out to wed with Thought / Ere Thought could wed itself to Speech” (23.15–16), so with the child. Imagining the baby pressing its “tender palm” to “the circle of the breast” (45.2–3), Tennyson describes a time when the baby did not need to think about itself as distinct from the mother because the mother allegedly could meet all the baby’s desires. The same now holds true with him as he idealizes his relationship to Hallam. The advent of speech, however, contradicts such a fantasy. Like the child

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But as he grows he gathers much, And learns the use of ‘I’ and ‘me’ And finds ‘I am not what I see, And other than the things I touch.’ So rounds he to a separate mind From whence clear memory may begin, As thro’ the frame that binds him in, His isolation grows defined. (45.5–12)

Loss frames the gains from development. And this “isolation” does not represent a new experience in the child’s existence; it simply recalls a latent one. Constant in both the child’s and the adult’s experience is the fact that an ideal because completely gratifying connection to the mother—or to Hallam— never existed. The trouble is that for both the baby and for Tennyson this disappointment is always felt as new. Section 54 articulates the painfulness of this isolation. Tennyson initially claims a collective, teleological faith not only in God, but also in human progress generally: “Oh yet we trust that somehow good / Will be the final goal of ill” (54.1–2). But the whole project hinges on a “somehow.” In the face of this ambiguity, his language for this faith—expressed by the “we” who imagine a “goal”—falters to an “I”: Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last — far off — at last, to all, And every winter change to spring. (54:13–16)

By shifting from “we” to “I,” Tennyson recalls the process of development described in section 45. Like the baby detaching from the fantasy of an all-sufficient mother, Tennyson also must detach from his fantasy of connection to Hallam. In Lacanian terms, the payback comes in having a language to express his loss, but this facility bears the trace of his alienation. He has his dream of connection to an apparently all-sufficient Other that invites expression in language. This entry into language, however, confronts him with a lack that constitutes him as a desiring self. Thus, he characterizes himself as “An infant crying in the night: / An infant crying for the light: /And with no language but a cry” (54.17–20). As in the description of the dinosaur, awareness does not function temporally, but spatially. The

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he describes, Tennyson feels the alienation that the use of language entails:

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infant cries because where it had perceived “light” that presages the mother’s arrival, it now feels the terror of her absence. While we might think of this language of the cry as regressive, that critique remains linear, and such models of time fail Tennyson at this point. As Lacan argues about the Freudian drive, its apparently continuous and straightforward progression actually masks its composition from a series of partial drives that interrupt and supersede each other. The same holds true for Tennyson. At both the level of the species and the individual, development does not proceed in a continuous linear flow. Rather, the human’s use of this term cobbles together a series of traumatic interruptions and projects inevitability onto them. Tennyson has anticipated as much at the start of the poem. Once he believed “That men may rise on stepping stones / Of their dead selves to higher things” (1.3–4). With Hallam’s death, however, life’s contingency confronts him with full force: “But who shall so forecast the years / And find in loss a gain to match?” (1.5–6). Tennyson recognizes that Nature’s capriciousness may obliterate human beings, and he accepts this possibility as a given of existence. He becomes anxious, though, as he notices the extent to which this force subsequently is internalized in the individual and re-expressed as a link between desire, death, and language. The gain here is the ability to speak about the loss and even craft it into a plausible and moving account about his friend’s immortality. This forward movement, however, entails the question in lines 5–6. The return may prove too small. These concerns coalesce with his proposal of marriage to “Sorrow”: O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me No casual mistress, but a wife, My bosom-friend and half of life; As I confess it needs must be? (59.1–4)

We have seen that Nature’s declaration that she cares for nothing expresses a more particularized version of Sorrow’s tragic perspective on the universe’s development and decline. By attempting to domesticate his grief through marriage to Sorrow, Tennyson suggests the need to adapt to the external world, no matter how inscrutable its laws may be. He will not only allow Sorrow to govern his “blood” (59.5), but he will also attempt to trust in her as one of the good objects in his imagination. Previously, she had whispered lies (3.4). Now he concedes the necessity for this union. For her part, Sorrow must put aside

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her “harsher moods” and “be sometimes lovely as a bride” (59.5–9) in order to make room for less careworn types of contact: “But I’ll have leave at times to play / As with the creature of my love” (59.11–12). This sexual pun on play lightens the tone. Hallam’s death, of course, occasions Tennyson’s grief, and he will always know “Sorrow” for his friend as the focus of his desire (59.9). But he will also expect Sorrow to put on a lighter face (59.13); as a result, it may happen that “some / Could hardly tell what name were thine” (59.15–16). If Sorrow’s “deep self” represents that part of Tennyson’s grief that remains removed from consciousness, then his marrying her suggests that this unconscious element in his grief has at least momentarily surfaced. In Freudian terms, Tennyson glimpses what he has lost in Hallam, and not merely whom he has lost. Centered on the family Hallam would have had, this fantasy describes Tennyson’s solicitude for “boys of thine” (84.12). The erasure of the woman from the family allows Tennyson to take her place as Hallam’s true partner. After imagining himself playing with the children, he says: “I see their unborn faces shine / Beside the never-lighted fire” (84.19–20). Finally, Tennyson imagines his friendship with Hallam extending into old age. At this point, the latter’s death also marks his own because their spirits will have become bound by their love and their destiny (84.38). In heaven, Christ “Would reach us out the shining hand / And take us as a single soul” (84.43–44). Thus Tennyson imagines attraction for Hallam lasting until his own desiring comes to an end with his death. By speaking of his loss in these terms, Tennyson wants to indicate its enormity. As Christopher Craft suggests, such an extension of desire fits with the poem’s movement: Tennyson ultimately can endure the wait for Hallam by dispersing his friend “on the rolling air” and “where the waters run” (130.1–2). In this way, Hallam becomes a presence to be found everywhere in the external world.29 The sentimentality of the fantasy that Tennyson indulges, however, calls attention to his self-consciousness about it. He not only speaks of the never-to-be born children of a dead man, but he also imagines a spiritual communion with this person that homosexual panic would make impossible to conceive if both parties were still alive. By consciously describing his internal world in this way, Tennyson unconsciously highlights the emptiness from which these imaginings proceed. Struggling to speak of this lack directly, he rewrites it as a gulf between the earthly and the heavenly spheres. Discussing the poem’s language for the relation between heaven and earth, Jeff Nunokawa argues that Tennyson uses two models—one of evolution and one of social mobility—to describe how he imagines Hallam’s

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And if thou cast thine eyes below, How dimly character’d and slight, How dwarf’d a growth of cold and night, How blanch’d with darkness must I grow! (61.1–8)

According to Nunokawa, the “perfect flower of human time” (Hallam) brings out the potential that the “dwarf’d . . . growth” (Tennyson) might have achieved because both belong to the same evolutionary chain.30 Similarly, section 64 characterizes the mobility in the social hierarchy. “[T]he divinely gifted man / Whose life in low estate began” (Hallam) manages to break the barriers imposed on him by birth in order to become the “pillar of a people’s hope / The centre of the world’s desire” (64.15–16). At the same time, Tennyson holds out the possibility that the dead man still remembers “the limit of his narrower fate” as typified by “his earliest mate” (Tennyson) who has remained in his “native lea” and wonders whether his “old friend” remembers him (64.21–28). In Memoriam depends on such flexibility in the evolutionary and social order; only in that way does it arrive at a conception of immortality. This flexibility, however, comes at a cost. As Nunokawa argues, it erases Tennyson’s desire for another man from the poem. In section 62 he refers to his own “downward cast” eye and disavows any attempt to disturb Hallam in his heavenly state (62.1). Were his love to cause Hallam embarrassment in the afterlife, Tennyson would want it to be understood as an “idle tale” or “fading legend” (62.3–4). Nunokawa points out that in Sonnet 116, Shakespeare ironically insists on the truth of his love for another man as a “marriage of true minds,” which would last as long as his text: “If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved” (Sonnet 116: 13–14).31 By contrast, at the end of section 62, Tennyson recants a similar claim as an “error” in development. Hallam’s perspective on earthly life illustrates the developed (heterosexual) perspective on an earlier “passion” for the same sex: either the latter “wholly dies” or becomes “matter for a flying smile” (64.9–12).32 It would appear, therefore, that desire for another man can take one of two possible courses in the poem. Possibly evolution entirely eviscerates it, as one of the seeds that Nature dispersed but failed to bring to term. Or one might dismiss it as a youthful peccadillo that subsequent development transcends. Regardless of which future we conceive

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new life. In section 61, for example, the poet considers himself as “dwarf’d” by comparison to his friend who now lives in heaven:

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for same sex desire, the entire speculation about Hallam translated to the afterlife calls attention to the lack in Tennyson’s language about immortality. On the one hand, in section 61, he addresses Hallam’s spirit in language filled with ardor and longing. Even if their earthly relationship no longer exists, Tennyson would like to recapture the depth of connection he imagines he once enjoyed with Hallam: Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore Where thy first form was made a man; I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can The soul of Shakespeare love thee more. (61.9–12)

On the other hand, he can do this only because Earth now looks like a place of doubt to Hallam’s Spirit. The alienation entailed on Tennyson by thinking of—and perhaps believing in—Hallam’s immortality is always on the verge of expression in this poem. Critically, Tennyson’s anxiety about Nature’s indifference has the same effect as his anxiety about his friend’s imagined immortality. The first reads the external world as the product of an accident that has death for its eventual destination. The second removes Hallam to heaven where he can be imagined as safe from such a vicissitude, but where he remains equally inaccessible to his living friend. Both of these claims reflect Lacanian lack at the center of desire that traumatic loss momentarily raises to consciousness. As such, they keep Tennyson at a distance from moral connection with the world, and his language registers this vacancy as alienation. He can evocatively describe how Nature cares for nothing and how far away Hallam now seems from this world. As we will see in the next section, however, he also feels the pull to trust in this alienated language, whether its referent is Nature or Hallam. For this reason, he never can forget the suffering entailed on him by membership in a discursive community. Specifically, this suffering always replays the loss of a supposedly immediate connection to the Other. To Hallam as the object of this speech, we now turn.

Wishing Hallam Back

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Tennyson launches his case for Hallam’s immanence in the world in the “Prologue.” In this lyric, immortality relates to the consolation typically found in elegies. He frames his “grief for one removed” (line 37) as “the confusions of a wasted youth” (line 42), making this retraction in a series of religious commonplaces that suggest a fairly

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Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Whom we, that have not seen thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Believing where we cannot prove. (Prol.1–4)

Unlike his anxious address to Hallam in section 61, this address to Christ is much more confident. Belief in immortality and in God involves faith that recognizes the limits of the mind’s power without ignoring the mind’s significance. Above all, Tennyson aligns life and death as intertwined forces in creation: Thine are those orbs of light and shade; Thou madest Life in man and brute; Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot Is on the skull which thou hast made. (Prol.5–8)

Life arises out of the emptiness or nothingness of death. By presenting Christ as about to crush the skull, Tennyson not only suggests that God negates the negation of death but that this emptiness, like the vacant space that structures Lacan’s vase, plays a vital role in the creative act itself. Thus does Tennyson make a case for trust in God; it does not come cheaply to a person. First, he struggles with the mixture of darkness and light in human experience: We have but faith: we cannot know; For knowledge is of things we see; And yet we trust it comes from thee, A beam in darkness: let it grow. (Prol.21–24)

Second, he believes that those whom death has withdrawn from this world still live in heaven. Referring to Hallam for the first time, he says: “I trust he lives in thee, and there / I find him worthier to be loved” (Prol.39–40). Here, however, as in the later sections on immortality, Tennyson makes a rather large jump. From a conventional statement of trust in the Almighty, he moves to a claim that sounds as if he, still alive, has had access to his friend in heaven, or, as he says, “there.” In his wilder moments, he worries that he “mingles all without a plan” (16.20). The faith described in the Prologue and at the end of the poem functions because he can imagine that Hallam,

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conventional Christian belief in God as the creator and sustainer of the world:

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like God, is immanent in the world. This immanence, as Craft suggests, is the result of his own poetic “mingling” of his friend with everything in creation: “Behold, I dream a dream of good, / And mingle all the world with thee” (129.11–12). The mingling with the world contrasts with Tennyson’s withdrawal from it as represented by “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (56.15). Drawing on Klein’s argument about the difference between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, we can say that when Tennyson speaks of engagement with the world, his anxiety shifts from paranoid to depressive. Like Mrs. A, he can experience Nature as an internalized good object that assists him in his work of mourning. But he never overcomes the paranoid, traumatic origin of this feeling either. So while Tennyson’s project resembles the Freudian one, it also points to a real difference. Peter Sacks, following “Mourning and Melancholia,” suggests that the dilemma for Tennyson consists in keeping the personal memory of Hallam intact while completing the work of mourning. Inasmuch as he has not given Hallam up by the poem’s close, Tennyson revises his melancholy by linking his friend to the world of Nature.33 We should also notice, however, the extent to which trauma operates in desire’s continuation. As we will see, Hallam’s visiting him in the trance of section 95 is as traumatic as anything Nature, in section 56, says to him about the dismissal of the type. Nevertheless, he embraces the former vision of Nature over the latter. This move does not reflect a preference for having Hallam in any form over not having him at all. Rather, it speaks to how Tennyson’s understanding of Nature oscillates between trauma and trust. The trance vision places both friends in the supernatural sphere; they transcend the death ordained by Nature. Yet Tennyson sets the trance in a beautiful physical place—his boyhood home— where Nature has already proven trustworthy. In “Love, Guilt and Reparation” (1937), Klein meditates on this mixed view of Nature. As in the relationship to the mother, positive and negative elements also characterize the connection to Nature: The relation to nature which arouses such strong feelings of love, appreciation, admiration and devotion, has much in common with the relation to one’s mother, as has long been recognized by the poets. The manifold gifts are equated with whatever we have received in the early days from our mother. But she has not always been satisfactory. We often felt her to be ungenerous and to be frustrating us; this aspect of our feelings toward her is also revived in our relation to nature which is often unwilling to give. (Klein 1937: 336)

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In a manner that parallels Mrs. A’s trust that her internalized parents mourn with her, Klein argues that Nature may have a similar role: “The poet tells us that ‘Nature mourns with the mourner.’ I believe that Nature in this connection represents the internal good mother” (Klein 1940: 359). This experience of “mutual sorrow and sympathy” happens because of a relaxing of the tight control over the internal objects by the ego (Klein 1940: 359). And the relaxing of control over these internal objects can take place because experiences in the external world have themselves proven favorable. The mourner, in short, can trust that the internal parents sympathize with her plight because, in fact, real living persons have also manifested such sympathy. The earliest evocations of Hallam’s corpse illustrate this same trust. Specifically, Tennyson emphasizes Nature’s cooperation in bringing his friend’s remains home safely and in their interment in a familiar place. Once he has completed this work of placing the remains both in Nature and in the text, Tennyson then imagines his friend’s spirit as returning and renovating the world he has left. At both stages in this process, Tennyson’s trust in the world around him, and especially in Nature, remains constant. One of the first lyrics written after Hallam’s death, section 9 illustrates this process by evoking the kind of calm that the poem as a whole presents as achieved gradually.34 Thinking of the ship bringing his friend’s remains home, Tennyson addresses it as a protective bird: “Spread thy full wings and waft him o’er” (9.4). The “placid ocean plains” convert the dangerous sea into land and thereby allow an undisrupted movement of the body from Italy to England (9.2). At the end of this section, this sense of a protective envelope in which Hallam now moves is specifically linked to a speech act. Addressing the morning star, Tennyson describes its light as enfolding the ship just as the ship holds his friend’s body: “Sphere all your lights around, above” (9.13). With repeated emphasis on “Sleep,” the lines present the scene as in a condition of rest and tranquility that Tennyson achieves in the process of evoking it. Yet the setting does not fully acquiesce in this feeling: though the winds move gently, they do continue to speed the ship. The motion is a subdued symbol of creative power. By literally keeping his thoughts on moving things, Tennyson also imagines the possibility of running his own “widow’d race” (9.18). This stress on a race or path returns frequently in the poem. Conjoined with the idea that external Nature is taking care of Hallam, it suggests that even in the immediate aftermath of his grief, Tennyson imagines himself as a survivor who will live on if only to tell the story of the loss.

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Of course, the stillness of his friend’s body counterpoints such small gains. In his despair, Tennyson describes the ocean’s calm waves as resembling the “dead calm in that noble breast / Which heaves but with the heaving deep” (11.19–20). In addition, this preoccupation with the remains of his friend sometimes becomes morbid. For example, he reflects on meeting Hallam in the afterlife: “I, falling on his faithful heart, / Would breathing thro’ his lips impart / The life that almost dies in me” (18.13–16). Yet Tennyson never completely identifies with the dead body. Rather, he balances this futile gesture of resuscitation with a positive one. Imagining the ship to have returned to England, he thinks of his breath as part of the gentle breeze that has brought the vessel safely home. His prayer “Was as the whisper of an air / To breathe thee over lonely seas” (17.3–4). In the next stanza, Hallam supposedly moves “Thro’ circles of the bounding sky, / Week after week” (17.6–7). Like the apostrophe asking the morning star to encircle the ship with light, this image of the sky emphasizes Tennyson’s trust in the external environment as a protective envelope for the body. The whole sky “from the Italian shore” (9.1) from which the ship embarks to the place where it arrives in England embraces Hallam much as a loving parent would. We especially see this parental role in section 12 where he thinks of himself as the “dove” which has brought news of woe. Imagination then transports him to the ship: Like her I go; I cannot stay; I leave this mortal ark behind, A weight of nerves without a mind, And leave the cliffs, and haste away O’er ocean mirrors rounded large, And reach the glow of southern skies, And see the sails at distance rise, And linger weeping on the marge. (12.5–12)

The expression “ocean-mirrors rounded large” not only recalls “the placid ocean-plains” of section 9 but also shows that even in a daydream, Tennyson finds that Nature reflects his loss back to him in a sympathetic way. Imagining that Nature grieves with him, he once again faces the prospect of survivorship. Though he approaches Hallam’s ship and flies back and forth “about the prow” (12.18), he does not remain in that locale. Instead, he returns to his own body—or “mortal ark”—and, somewhat bemusedly, finds that he has been “an hour away” (12.20). By leaving and, even more crucially, by

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returning to his own body, Tennyson reiterates one of Nature’s central if understated roles in the poem: it acts as the protective matrix or zone not only for Hallam but for him. Tennyson feels this same sense of protection and orientation towards life as he reflects on Hallam’s remains once they are interred. As in the lyrics about the ship’s returning to England, he presents Nature as the source of this comfort: “it looks in truth / As if the quiet bones were blest / Among familiar bones to rest / And in the places of his youth” (18.5–8). Prior to the body’s arrival in England, his concern had been with creating a protective space in which to imagine it on its trip home. Now, however, he shifts the focus to time by embracing the natural process of decay and recomposition. In particular, his friend’s bones will become something else, possibly “the violet of his native land” (18.4). This image has a parallel later in the poem. Noticing the capacity of the birds to “change their sky” (115.15), and thereby to go about the work of renewing life, Tennyson also makes the same claim for himself: “and my regret / Becomes like the April violet / And buds and blossoms like the rest” (115.18–20). The mention of the violet in section 18 does not merely suggest that Hallam’s body may become something new. It also shows that Tennyson is working at converting his “regret” into a “violet” even when he does not completely realize it. Cyclic renewal proves an apt way of demonstrating that trust in the external world of Nature is strong even if not fully conscious. This force orients him to the work of memorializing his friend in language. The same trust in Nature and in language returns in section 19. Tennyson represents the body’s safe passage to England as a shift from one river to the next: The Danube to the Severn gave The darken’d heart that beat no more They laid him by the pleasant shore, And in the hearing of the wave. (19.1–4)

Commenting on this stanza, Darrell Mansell points out that it omits any reference to the “elaborate cortege” by which Hallam’s body was actually transported across England to the family home at Clevedon. Additionally, Tennyson implies that the grave was outside when, in fact, Halllam was placed inside the family vault. The actual circumstances, about which Mansell assumes Tennyson knew, lead him to conclude that the poem represents a rewriting of

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the account of Hallam’s death on Tennyson’s own definitive terms in distinction from the actual burial as carried out by Hallam’s family.35 What, though, would lead Tennyson to such a contradiction of his friend’s family? Largely, I think, this historical revisionism points to an even deeper source of competition: William Wordsworth. In “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth recalls the sound of the River Wye as “these waters, rolling from their mountain springs / With a soft inland murmur.”36 Describing Clevedon, Tennyson emphasizes the conjunction of the Wye with the Severn River. The former river fills the latter, “And makes a silence in the hills” (19.8). With the stress on the silencing of the “babbling Wye,” the question of the scene’s relationship to speech and language comes to the foreground (19.7); the murmuring of the water in “Tintern Abbey,” like its hushing here, operates between a fully articulated sound and silence. While “Tintern Abbey” stresses the mind’s thinking back to the water’s point of origin in the mountains, in In Memoriam the thought is moving forward to the terminus of the Wye in the Severn. Most importantly, this end point—the mouth of the river as identified with the mouth of the poet—also corresponds to the moment of speech: The tide flows down, the wave again Is vocal in its wooded walls; My deeper anguish also falls, And I can speak a little then. (19.13–16)

Like the reference to the violet in section 18, grief once again naturally issues in speech. Later in the poem Tennyson returns to this idea. Sorrow sometimes “loosens from the lip / Short swallow-flights of song, that dip / Their wings in tears, and skim away” (48.14–16). Such songs allow him to enact a psychological distance from his precursors—especially if conceived in poetic terms. As we will see, he needs this distance because his view of poetic vocation is actually quite close to Wordsworth’s. Specifically, section 67 illustrates the beneficent effect of this psychological distance. As in sections 18 and 19, Tennyson again meditates on Hallam’s tomb, and the natural beauty of the scene informs the mental picture of it. At home in bed, he thinks about the moon shining on Hallam’s grave: “I know that in thy place of rest / By that broad water of the west / There comes a glory on the walls” (67.1–3). The light identifies with the “silver flame” that allows him to imagine

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reading his friend’s name and age on the stone (67.5). Unlike sections 18 and 19, with their focus on the supposed outdoor location of the grave, the perspective in section 67 is from a distance and as the grave actually exists—inside a church. As Mansell says, Tennyson is suggesting that his defensiveness about having to stage Hallam’s burial on his terms has diminished.37 But an even more important addition is included with this correction—the mystic light. Tennyson comes to realize that the actual details can coexist with his imaginative projection. Ostensibly, Tennyson’s staging this correction as acquiescence to reality fits with Freud’s trajectory of mourning. Both foresee an end to grief through substitution. Words for the deceased take the place of the deceased. For this reason, Tennyson underscores the similarity between the grave or vault as a memorial to Hallam and the poem as a memorial in words. Whether it be a tomb or a poem, language identifies the memorial, represented here by “the letters” of Hallam’s name and “the number” of his years on it. Inasmuch as his name and dates not only can be but also apparently are read as the “silver flame” steals across them, Tennyson affirms that his poetic memorial to Hallam will avoid total obscurity. Consequently, even when the “mystic glory” (67.9) passes after the moonlight fades, he can still see a gain. Not only does he sleep in peace, but on waking at dawn, he imagines the tomb afresh: “And in the dark church like a ghost / Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn” (67.14–15). At the level of wakeful, conscious imagination, section 67 brings to a close the concerns of the earlier Nature lyrics. Knowing that the family has interred Hallam at Clevedon, Tennyson also inters him in the poem. Like the tablet glimmering in the morning light, the poem appears to stand as a recognizable memorial to his friend. Yet if section 67 appears to substitute a memorial for Hallam in place of his presence, section 95 works in the opposite direction. Structurally, the poems resemble each other. Section 67 moves from the poet’s wakeful night (stanza 1), to the reading of the tablet (stanza 2), to the passing of the vision (stanza 3), to a renewed glimmering that coincides with the dawn (stanza 4). In the description of section 95, he follows the same pattern. Alone at night after everyone else has retired (stanza 5), Tennyson reads or recalls the dead man’s letters (stanza 6). This recollection brings on the trance during which he feels touched by Hallam (stanzas 9–10) only to be disappointed because the vision fleets away (stanza 11). But out of the night, a new day dawns, and a voice directs the poet to attend to its enhanced possibilities (stanza 15). By embedding these alleged visitations into

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a structure where they are first affirmed, and then denied, and then reimagined more broadly, both section 67 and section 95 call attention to the dialectical quality of Tennyson’s connection to the surrounding world. Critically, however, section 95 adds the details of the touch and voice from the dead man as components of the vision. In Lacanian terms, the stress on these elements of the dead man’s presence—both of which are so easily withdrawn—suggest that substitution for him is not possible. Hallam’s voice and touch, in short, occasion desire in Tennyson as manifestations of the drive. In this way they resemble objets a. Before turning to section 95 in detail, we need to look at sections 68 and 69 to understand how Hallam’s visitation also works in conjunction with Nature. Trances and dreams, of course, point to a highly internalized mode of presentation for the dead man. Additionally, because these experiences all ratify Tennyson’s vocation as a poet, we can say that Hallam resembles one of Klein’s good internal objects. Tennyson, in other words, carefully articulates his trust in the external world represented in Nature by paying attention to his friend as part of his inner landscape. For this reason, considerable resistance to the fact of Hallam’s death surfaces in the dream. While the substitution of words about the person for the actual person works at the conscious level, the dream reverses this view at the level of the unconscious. Like the father in Freud’s dream of the burning child, Tennyson gets his wish fulfilled; he has Hallam back again. Yet what we saw about the father’s wish fulfillment—that it is framed by trauma that repeats itself—also proves true in Tennyson’s case. The opening stanza of section 68 illustrates this tension: When in the down I sink my head, Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, times my breath; Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, knows not Death, Nor can I dream of thee as dead. (68. 1–4)

Line 4 expresses Tennyson’s unconscious resistance to the fact of Hallam’s death. Indeed, he can sleep because he can imagine Hallam as alive, the same thing that allows the father to sleep even beyond the tipping of the candle. By describing sleep and death as twin brothers, however, Tennyson implies that the wish of sleep—having Hallam back—depends, at least in the dream, on Death’s not being known to him. Death, therefore, functions at the level of the unconscious in this dream. Though not visible to the sleeper, it is nevertheless sensed as intrinsic to the dream’s process.

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The remainder of section 68 and all of section 69 explore the implications of such unconscious knowledge. Initially, Tennyson recalls the time when his friend was alive, a time also characterized by his trust in Nature: “I walk as ere I walk’d forlorn, / When all our path was fresh with dew” (68.5–6). This stanza echoes section 22 in which Tennyson and Hallam are said to walk life’s “path” together “by tracts that pleased us well” and “From flower to flower, from snow to snow” (22.2–4). Yet just as “the Shadow fear’d of man” interrupts this daydream of the past by breaking the friends’ “fair companionship” (22.12–13), so, in the dream, an interruption forces Tennyson to wake up: But what is this? I turn about, I find a trouble in thine eye, Which makes me sad I know not why, Nor can my dream resolve the doubt: But ere the lark hath left the lea I wake and I discern the truth It is the trouble of my youth That foolish sleep transfers to thee. (68.9–16)

Though Tennyson would not have known The Prelude when composing In Memoriam, this description has several parallels to Wordsworth’s dream of the horseman. First, the trouble in Hallam’s eye, like the “wild look” Wordsworth observed in the horseman, suggests the approach of death. Ultimately, the hope that Hallam is alive becomes the stain on the dream. In other words Tennyson’s hope momentarily obscures the fact of his friend’s death; but this foolishness of sleep simultaneously presages the dream’s termination. Second, being seen by Hallam places Tennyson in the gaze of the Other. His wish to have Hallam back, momentarily fulfilled in the dream, confronts Tennyson (via the trouble in the eye) with that piece of desire which, as we saw in the Introduction, Lacan describes as bitten off and not belonging to the subject. Also corresponding to the bad object of Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position, this trouble in the eye symbolizes the lack that Tennyson’s trust in Nature does not erase. Awakening coincides, as it did for Wordsworth, with the moment of poetic vocation. Section 69 elaborates what has troubled Tennyson since his youth. At the outset, Nature’s power, and with it the power of language, both are in ruins:

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Tennyson, while leaving the noise of the town, does not eschew Nature. Rather, he goes into the woods, binds thorny branches around his head and wears this “like a civic crown” (69.6–8). In Freudian terms, he once again acts like a melancholic. Overdramatizing his role, he returns to the town where he meets with ridicule (69.9–13). Finally, he discovers an “angel of the night” (69.14) whose touch turns the crown to laurel and who speaks comfortingly to him (69.19–20). Perhaps, though, within this melancholic overstatement of loss, is the powerful lack of the paranoid-schizoid position. In this scenario, people’s ridicule of him would reflect a persecutory anxiety, culminating with his assuming—again with excess—a Christlike pose. Subsequently, by turning the thorns to laurel, Hallam both eases Tennyson’s anxiety and anticipates the honor he would receive as poet laureate. Hallam’s angelic presence in the dream, therefore, fulfills Tennyson’s wish of becoming a great public poet. This wish grows from their personal relationship and continues to operate after his death. In contrast to the persecutory audience, Hallam functions as Tennyson’s ideal reader. Consequently, the dead man becomes linked to the living of one’s poetic vocation, but in a way that works outside of temporal constraint. Not only did Hallam heal the trouble of Tennyson’s youth—originating in a time before they knew each other—but he also continues to reassure him from beyond the grave. Through the melancholy excess of his dream, therefore, Tennyson comes to the threshold of a desire that suggests the opening of the unconscious: it operates in him but is also bigger than what he can express. In this context, the lyrics on Nature leading up to section 95 do not anticipate the trance that introduces Hallam’s spirit into the poem. Rather, they expose the inadequacy of anticipation as a structuring device for interpreting this experience. Specifically, these lyrics register his friend’s continued presence in Nature, which Tennyson, still traumatized, has been slow to recognize. In section 83, for example, Tennyson addresses the delayed spring:

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The streets were black with smoke and frost, They chatter’d trifles at the door. (69.1–4)

Dip down upon the northern shore, O sweet new-year delaying long, Thou doest expectant nature wrong; Delaying long, delay no more. What stays thee from the clouded noons? Thy sweetness from its proper place? Can trouble live with April days,

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If the first stanza merely anticipates the spring’s or Hallam’s arrival in the poem, then the question in lines 5–6 is rhetorical: asking why spring and Hallam have not come amounts to a demand that both come now. On the other hand, the vividness of the imagery in the third stanza suggests that spring and Hallam already inhabit the poet’s mind but not at a fully conscious level. Spring’s delay brings out the connection to such knowledge: “O thou, new-year, delaying long, / Delayest the sorrow in my blood” (83.13–14). By “delaying” its arrival, in other words, the spring prolongs (“delayest”) “the sorrow in my blood,” an image that recalls the “deep grief” (16.8) whose understanding still eludes him. Correspondingly, Tennyson notices that his blood itself longs “to flood a fresher throat with song.” As in section 19, where speech comes after a relaxing of the “deeper anguish” (19.15), the poet trusts that he can look forward to the relief of articulating his loss and receiving from Nature a sympathetic response. This anticipation, however, does not mark the overcoming of deep loss. Rather, the hoped for relief and the deep loss both emerge from and recede into the unconscious. Section 86 also deals with this sense of a release in Nature that bespeaks a release of sorrow in Tennyson. Thinking of the breeze that follows a rainstorm, he notices that this “ambrosial air” (86.1) blows through everything in the “round of space” (86.5) it inhabits. He asks the wind to send its breath through him: “. . . and sigh / The full new life that feeds my breath / Throughout my frame . . .” (86.9–11). In contrast to section 18, in which he had imagined himself expending breath to bring home the ship containing Hallam’s remains, Tennyson now imagines himself receiving breath from Nature. The “fancy” that he voices takes him beyond Nature. Released by “Doubt and Death” (86.11), it flies “To where in yonder orient star / A hundred spirits whisper ‘Peace’ ” (86.15–16). What began as an affirmation of the peace evident in Nature eventually envelopes him and all his doubts related to death as well as his dreams of immortality. The whisper of “Peace” at the end of the stanza identifies the source of this enfolding of him as a voice that comes from afar and from many “spirits.” Like the voice of the “dawn” in section 95, and that of the angel in section 69, this whisper suggests a degree of composure

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Or sadness in the summer moons? Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire, The little speedwell’s darling blue, Deep tulips dashed with fiery dew, Laburnums, dropping wells of fire. (83.5–8)

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within Tennyson’s internal world associated with Hallam’s ongoing presence there. Within this interior mental landscape, Tennyson’s boyhood home at Somersby has an especially important role. Here Hallam once found relief from the city. Describing the same lawn on which Hallam’s spirit visits him in section 95, Tennyson emphasizes the dark and light that intermix at this spot: “Witch-elms that countercharge the floor / Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright” (89:1–2). Hallam, who “brought an eye for all he saw” (89.9), regarded it the same way. Just as the friends share the dream in sections 69–70, they share the eye mentioned here. By correlating his present vision of the scene with Hallam’s past one, however, Tennyson is not simply indulging nostalgia. Clearly, the memory of Hallam lends importance to even mundane aspects of the scene: “He mixt in all our simple sports” (89.10). Mixing, as becomes increasingly evident, is one of the poem’s structural keys. From one who “mingles all without a plan” (16.20), Tennyson changes into one who “mingle[s] all the world with thee” (129.12). The memory of Hallam’s “mixing” with the Tennysons calls attention to the fact that the poet continues to see the scene as lovable because he imagines that Hallam is still enjoying family life and Nature with him. At the core of this love lies what Lawrence Kramer sees as Hallam’s central role in the poem: he feeds Tennyson through remembered conversation. Thus, the poet’s declaration that “heart and ear were fed / To hear him” (89.32–33). Their interchange takes place in a scene flowing with milk and honey. Kramer sees these images as tokens of Hallam’s maternal care for Tennyson: And brushing ankle-deep in flowers, We heard behind the woodbine veil The milk that bubbled in the pail, And buzzings of the honied hours. (89.43–44; 49–52)38

As the mixing of the senses in these lines illustrates, Tennyson feels Hallam’s presence most intensely at Somersby. This presence, additionally, does not derive from isolated aspects of the dead man, but their integration: his conversation, his sensibility, and his empathy. In Kleinian terms, Tennyson presents Hallam as a whole rather than a partial object. A feature of the depressive position, this awareness of a whole object does not depend on transcending the lack in the paranoid-schizoid position and the infant’s internalization of partial objects. Rather, the easing of the death instinct—distinct from the

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The early methods of splitting fundamentally influence the ways in which, at a somewhat later stage, repression is carried out and this in turn determines the degree of interaction between conscious and unconscious. In other words, the extent to which the various parts of the mind remain porous in relation to one another is determined largely by the strength or weakness of the early schizoid mechanisms. (Klein 1952: 66–67)

In In Memoriam this porous quality of mind comes across most clearly when Tennyson describes what contact with Hallam’s disembodied spirit would involve. Clearly, he does not equate this contact with a séance. Preparing for his friend’s visitation in section 95, he resists the notion that it will correspond to the physical apparition of the man he knew in life. Such a vision might be “but the canker of the brain” (92.3). This same suspicion of the visual carries over to section 93: “No visual shade of someone lost, / But he, the Spirit himself, may come / Where all the nerve of sense is numb” (93.5–7). While he rules out the possibility of seeing a ghost, he entertains that of becoming one. If he meets his friend, it will be a relation of “Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost” (93.8). In Kleinian terms, the conscious (Tennyson’s Ghost) becomes more open to the unconscious (Hallam’s Ghost), a change that the close of section 93 illustrates. On the one hand, Tennyson consciously requests that Hallam come into his body. On the other hand, this conscious wish fulfillment correlates with the living man’s becoming ghost-like or insentient: Descend, and touch, and enter, hear The wish too strong for words to name; That in this blindness of the frame My Ghost may feel that thine is near. (93.13–16)

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erasing of it—makes possible the permeability of conscious awareness vis-à-vis the unconscious in the depressive position. Klein describes this process in “Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant” (1952):

Trauma is operating here in the impairment Tennyson would bring on himself by embracing this condition. As in section 7, he feels the physical disorientation of reaching for Hallam’s hand and finding only vacancy. By means of the trance, he now wishes to have this vacancy permeate his whole body as a means of becoming—he imagines— like his friend. He also suggests this impairment in the fact that the

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wish eludes full expression, both because of its sublimity and because it involves two men. In the trial version of the poem, lines 13–14 had read, “Stoop soul and touch me: wed me hear / The wish too strong for words to name” (93.13–14).39 At least implicitly, Hallam’s coming to inhabit Tennyson resembles a sexual penetration of him. Thus, what Klein sees as the porous quality of the conscious mind in relation to the unconscious arrives with a shock in In Memoriam. Tennyson relives the trauma of Hallam’s loss in the violent treatment from his friend’s ghost. This same porous quality of the conscious mind in terms of the unconscious also characterizes the trance in section 95. Hallam’s “living soul”—what Tennyson is not fully conscious of—seems to enclose Tennyson’s and suspend his thinking: And all at once it seem’d at last The living soul was flash’d on mine, And mine in this was wound, and whirl’d About empy’real heights of thought, And came on that which is, And caught the deep pulsations of the world . . . (95.39–44)

Until 1872, the soul referenced here was followed by a masculine pronoun: And all at once it seem’d at last His living soul was flash’d on mine, And mine in his was wound, and whirl’d About empy’real heights of thought, And came on that which is, And caught the deep pulsations of the world . . . (95.39–44)40

Once again, Tennyson presents himself as an almost inert recipient of the “living soul’s” force: he is “wound and whirl’d” as if he were body-less. The circularity of the image suggests that the disembodiment felt here—like that in section 93—not only repeats itself but also registers in him as violent and traumatic. Like Lacan’s description of the vase in Seminar VII, which is created by being spun around its own emptiness, Tennyson and Hallam embrace around a constitutive lack: “the empy’real heights of thought” and “that which is.” The removal of the male pronouns intensifies the effect. Tennyson embraces, and is embraced by, his own sense of absence. Nevertheless, out of this violent, traumatic experience arises the sense of Nature’s sympathy with what has happened to him even though the trance has

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been “cancell’d, stricken through with doubt” (95.44). The physical elements of the scene return to the poet’s awareness: “The white kine glimmer’d, and the trees / Laid their dark arms about the field” (95.51–52). These lines repeat lines 15 and 16; together, all four lines serve as a frame for the recalling of Hallam’s letters that brought on the trance. When first mentioned, the trees interspersed with the cows, and the shadows of the branches on the fields seem like merely bucolic details (95.15–16). But in the trance the poet has a revelation about himself and about Hallam’s place in Nature: everything, including sentience itself, is part of a greater absence or lack. They are creations from nothing. As a result of the deceased’s visitation, Tennyson realizes the hidden and even divine import to his natural surroundings. As Robert Langbaum shows, during the trance Hallam’s spirit enables Tennyson to look past the linguistic traps of doubt to the positive idea they contain (95.31–32).41 Trusting in this message, Tennyson has a moment of insight in which he recognizes Hallam as inspiring the meaning behind his words. Paradoxically, such meaning can only come through the same inadequate words: So word by word, and line by line, The dead man touch’d me from the past, And all at once it seem’d at last The living soul was flash’d on mine. (95.33–36)

Analogously, when returned to the living world of sensuous perception after the trance, Tennyson finds that Nature’s symbols also reveal an internal meaning. Specifically, the wind is “suck’d” (95.56) into the scene. In this way, the poet suggests, just as Hallam’s letters suggested in the trance, the momentary filling of the void created by his friend’s death. This sensation culminates with an utterance presumably from Hallam—“The dawn, dawn” (95.61). Like the “mystic glory” (67.9) on the tombstone and the trance itself, these words also immediately die away into silence and emptiness. For this reason, they represent a stain covering the nothing that Nature has already announced in section 56. At the same time, only by means of the nothing that Hallam has become can Tennyson attend to the mixing of lights “like life and death” and the arrival of “boundless day” (95.61–64). Faced, therefore, with the trauma of the trance, Tennyson also finds himself trusting the ebb and flow of imaginative power. Expressing both the life and death drives, this power operates in the unconscious or the field of Tennyson’s desire. By bringing Hallam and Nature together,

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Tennyson intuits, without fully understanding, the range of this force. We take up its link to desire in the next section.

Discussing the child’s practice of repeatedly asking “why” to any answer given by a parent, Lacan argues that this question reiterates the “enigma” of adult desire. The child’s question, in other words, rehearses the fact that the Other—in this case the parent—is desiring: The desire of the Other is apprehended by the subject in that which does not work, in the lacks of the discourse of the Other, and all the child’s whys reveal not so much an avidity for the reason of things, as a testing of the adult, a Why are you telling me this? ever-resuscitated from its base, which is the enigma of the adult’s desire. (1977: 214)

This ongoing attempt to figure out the desire lurking beyond the adult’s discourse has a grip on the child formulated by the anxious question: “[The Other] is saying this to me, but what does he want?” (1977: 214). In facing the question about the unknown parental desire, the child first brings into play the possibility of her own death as a way of answering it. In his essay “On the Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” Lacan discusses the sense of life’s contingency as related to anxiety that moves beyond ego relations and to the level of language: For it is a truth of experience for analysis that the subject is presented with the question of his existence, not in terms of the anxiety that arouses at the level of the ego and which is only one element in the series, but as an articulated question”What am I there?” concerning his sex and his contingency in being, namely, that on the one hand he is a man or a woman, and, on the other, that he might not be, the two conjugating their mystery, and binding in the symbols of procreation and death.42

This recognition of lack in the Other underscores the extent to which we always bear a knowledge about desire from which we remain separated because it operates unconsciously. For Tennyson, one indication of this knowledge centers on the feelings that his family’s departure from Somersby evoke. Highlighting Hallam’s love of Somersby and the rural eccentricity it celebrates, Patrick Scott argues that the family’s departure

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from this locale—described in sections 101 through 106—painfully underscores a shift away from a trusted place in Nature and from Hallam.43 Tennyson registers the pull of this homesickness in section 101, in which it takes the form of a litany of all the things that will not be noticed in the natural scene once the family has gone. Although “the garden and the wild” will eventually hold a “fresh association” for some “stranger’s child” who will replace the Tennyson family (101.18–20), this change occasions added anxiety. Lacan’s comment about contingency illustrates why this vicarious connection matters to Tennyson. Like the child pondering the adult’s desire and the possibility of death as a way of meeting it, Tennyson foresees the absence that will result from his departure from Somersby. For this reason, he ponders Nature’s discourse as it relates to him. Going into the garden for one last look, he finds two competing spirits that personify this discourse: One whispers, ‘Here thy boyhood sung Long since its matin song and heard The low love-language of the bird In native hazels tassel-hung.’ The other answers, ‘Yea, but here Thy feet have stray’d in after hours With thy lost friend among the bowers And this hath made them trebly dear.’ (102.9–16)

The “matin song” responds to a supposed language of Nature expressed by the “low love language of the bird.” Like Wordsworth, Tennyson is claiming that from his early life Nature has played a vital role in teaching him to love. He contrasts the “matin song” with an equally important but later period represented by Hallam. By saying that these two voices “have striven with each other” (102.18), Tennyson accentuates his divided memory: he cannot decide which influence—Nature’s or Hallam’s—had the more profound role. Just before leaving the garden, however, he notices that the two voices now resemble two bodies: “They mix in one another’s arms / To one pure image of regret” (102.23–24). In a muted way, leaving Somersby replays the loss of Hallam. Thus, Tennyson recognizes, as Wordsworth did in “Peele Castle,” that he can never think of this place again without connecting it to loss and lack. At the same time, Tennyson’s musings on who will notice the beauty of Somersby once he has departed from there point to a sense

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of responsibility for Nature. Understood as living both around him and inside of him, Nature resembles the Kleinian good object in whom he can trust. For this reason, the regret, while it iterates his sense of lack and loss, also enables him to leave the family home behind. At the end of section 102, Tennyson says: “I turn to go: my feet are set / To leave the pleasant fields and farms” (102.21–22). “Feet” refer not only to Tennyson’s body and to the literal act of leaving this place but also to poetic feet. Linguistically, he thinks he can now “ring out” the “mournful rhymes” of the poem and introduce a “fuller minstrel” for its remainder (106.19–20). His reflection in section 103 on the connection between language and poetic vocation introduces this claim. Here he describes the dream he has on the night before the family leaves Somersby; it “left [my] after-morn content” (103.4). This source of contentment is not simply personal, but centered on the kind of poetry he now imagines he can craft. Specifically, the dream portrays Tennyson in a castle with maidens who “sang of what is wise and good and graceful” (103.10–11) before a “statue veil’d” that he recognizes as Hallam’s figure (103.12–14). A dove brings a “summons from the sea” (103.16). It reduces the maidens to tears, but they still go with him to a small boat in the river (103.19). Gliding through the water, “The maidens gather’d strength and grace / And presence, lordlier than before” (103.27–28). So, too, does Tennyson, who feels “the thews of Anakim, / The pulses of a Titan’s heart” (103.31–32). Thus prepared, they meet Hallam who is now “thrice as large,” too (103.41–42). Boarding the ship, Tennyson immediately embraces Hallam and turns his back on the maidens. Consequently, they renew their crying and complain to him: “ ‘We served thee here,’ they said, ‘so long, / And wilt thou leave us now behind?’ ” (103.47–48). Significantly, it is Hallam’s invitation to the maidens to come onboard that eventually assuages their grief. The idealization of Hallam works in two ways. First, Tennyson’s connecting him with sculpture freezes his friend at one point in life—presumably his early manhood. Fixed at this point, not only will he never grow old, but Tennyson can also magnify what he would have become. Second, as in sections 68–69, Hallam functions as an ideal reader. In his notes to the Eversley edition of the poem, Tennyson commented that the maidens represent “the Muses, poetry, arts—all that made life beautiful here, which we hope will pass with us beyond the grave.”44 As in section 69, Hallam’s approbation allows his friend to recognize his work’s value. There, his approval made Tennyson’s crown of thorns into a crown of laurel

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As one would sing the death of war, And one would chant the history Of that great race, which is to be. And one the shaping of a star. (103.33–36)

Moving away from Somersby, Tennyson claims that his powers acquire a broader range. Where Sorrow had spoken of the universe’s inevitable decay in section 3, now the Godlike powers of poetic language not only capture but also sing into existence new stars, greater races, and all sorts of social gains. Left unspecified, however, is the destination of this ship: “We steer’d her toward a crimson cloud / That landlike slept along the deep” (103.55–56). Earlier, Tennyson had spoken of the ship bringing Hallam’s remains as sailing across “placid ocean plains” before arriving safely in England (9.2). By contrast, the ship presented in section 103 is returning to the ocean and sailing in the direction of the setting sun, suggesting that it is also moving towards death. Oddly, when Tennyson’s trust in language reaches its peak, so, too, does his sense of lack. This effect very much recalls that of “Ulysses” in which the Greek hero summons his mariners to sail on the “deep” that “Moans round with many voices”—presumably those who died on his earlier voyages.45 Following the lead of these companions, Ulysses states his purpose: “to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars, until I die” (lines 60–61). In section 103, when Tennyson and the maidens approach Hallam’s ship, their boat is also at the point where the river’s mouth meets the sea. For this reason, the tides foam and the boat feels the pull of the deeper water. In section 18, he compared the mouth of the river to the rediscovered capacity for speech. Thus, just as he cannot reverse his voyage—onto the deep and toward death—so he cannot reverse his song. It memorializes both him and his friend. Of course, Tennyson’s dream of undertaking this voyage differs from the one in “Ulysses” because he now imagines Hallam as present. Not only does his friend correspond to “the valiant man and free” (106.29), but also, implicitly, to “the Christ that is to be” (106.32) whom the poetry envisioned in the dream hails. Curiously, however, such idealizing of his friend does not necessarily lead to engagement

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leaves. Here, a gigantic Hallam invites the maidens onto the ship. In anticipation of the invitation, the maidens sing the same kind of public poetry implied by Tennyson’s “fuller minstrel” (106.20) and “vaster passion” (130.10):

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But thou, that fillest all the room Of all my love, art reason why I seem to cast a careless eye On souls, the lesser lords of doom. (112.5–8)

Second, when his thoughts turn outward, personal loss combines with foreboding about human events generally. “ ‘Tis held that sorrow makes us wise; / Yet how much wisdom sleeps with thee” (113.1–2). By making line 2 a statement rather than a question, he registers his concern that the world is following a mistaken course. Hallam’s wisdom should not only have guided him personally, “But served the seasons that may rise” (113.4). Compounding this anxiety is the fact that the world so needs such a person. In this spirit, he offers a list of roles his friend might have played: “A life in civic action warm, / A soul on highest mission sent, / A potent voice of Parliament” (113.9–11). Tennyson’s worry, though, goes beyond personal shortcomings in either himself or in other people. Even more basically, some element in what is meant by wisdom seems deficient. He explores this defect in wisdom more fully as he meditates on its connection to knowledge. Clearly, if wisdom can exercise restraint on knowledge, then it would also be the goal of evolution. Tennyson embraces this perspective in section 118 in which he asks his readers to meditate on the whole of evolutionary history: “Contemplate all this work of Time / The giant laboring in his youth” (118.1–2). This request, a rejoinder to the terrifying contemplation of the earth upheld by Nature in section 56, recapitulates what Tennyson says in section 57: “the song of woe / Is after all an earthly song” (56.1–2). Now he is articulating a perspective beyond that of earth. In this way, as Hass argues, he makes “Nature’s” refusal of teleology and the type a relative concern.46 Such an utterance, in other words, may only have amounted to a “dream” (118.34). Yet, what can we make of such an injunction when the poem has already placed so much stress on dreams? This request reflects an anxiety that dreams do not admit of conscious control. Faced with this prospect, Tennyson relies on intuition: “I trust that I have not wasted breath” (120.1). The belief that the dead still breathe “an ampler day” leads him to trust that he has not wasted his breath in composing the poem—or in living (118.6). Still, this basic trust in the desire that underwrites the breathing out of this poem is double-edged because it may.prove insubordinate

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with the world. First, Tennyson concedes this inefficaciousness in his own case:

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Who loves not knowledge? Who shall rail Against her beauty? May she mix With men and prosper! Who shall fix Her pillars? Let her work prevail. (114.1–4)

The first two questions are rhetorical: everyone loves knowledge, and speaking against her “beauty” would be ridiculous. Her work is to be encouraged. Yet “knowledge” acts like a woman who spends too much time with men. Even though Tennyson sees this development as inevitable and potentially good, its power frightens him. Without discipline, she poses a threat: “What is she, cut from love and faith, / But some wild Pallas from the brain / Of Demons?” (113.11–13). With the enjambment across the break between stanzas, the lines momentarily hold in suspense whose “brain” they describe. By adding “demons,” Tennyson relocates knowledge’s danger to a sphere that is distinct from humans. At the same time, the pause between the stanzas suggests that this brain is not completely different from the humans’, either. As with “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (56.15), Tennyson is evoking a feminine force that resembles the death drive. It is “in” persons but not properly “of” them. Knowledge is “fiery hot to burst / All barriers in her onward race / For power” (114.13–15). That this anxiety about his entire enterprise recurs so close to the end of the poem suggests that the traumatic loss of his friend still colors Tennyson’s expressions of trust in nature and the external world. The shock of Hallam’s loss, in other words, lends rhetorical power to his ongoing struggle to believe in a beneficent external world. Sometimes the tension has a religious inflection. “Like Paul with beasts, I fought with death,” he says, suggesting not so much that he has fought the good fight and lost, but that death, with which he has struggled, still awaits a future battle (120.4). At other points, this struggle takes a more secular form. Evolution, especially at the human level, resembles the making of metal. It does not come premade as “idle ore” but involves a process of heating “with burning fears,” dipping “in baths of hissing tears,” and battering “with the shocks of doom” (118.20–24). Echoing the “shocks of chance” and the “blows of death” featured in the trance of section 95, Tennyson implies that trauma, far from being overcome as humans develop, really animates

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to wisdom. Tennyson describes this problem in general terms in section 114 in which the human pursuit of knowledge has an analogue in sexual passion. Initially, he speaks with calm authority:

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the whole process. His view on the evolutionary development of the species, therefore, comes to resemble Lacan’s account of the drives in the individual. The gaps, or holes, in its account become the only means by which we can construct its continuity. By writing trauma into the narrative of evolution, Tennyson begins to apprehend the extent to which the life and death instincts generally subsist in his experience. How he continually negotiates their connection is the issue of section 124. At the outset, he states that God’s existence (“The power in darkness whom we guess” [124.4]) does not derive from any kind of proof. Then he shifts the focus to his own experiences. To the voice that once might have told him to “believe no more” (124.10), he replies with the instinct of faith: A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason’s colder part And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer’d ‘I have felt.’ (124.13–16)

Immediately, however, he amends his reply. Rather than being like a wrathful person, his heart responds with the doubt and fear of a child who cries out already knowing the father stands close by (124.17–20). Critically, Tennyson changes the tone of his reply from the calm but isolated man to the child crying out for a parent. In this way, he directs his language to someone else (the father) and he submits to this person’s authority, thereby implying that his language is not his own but part of their relationship. Following Freud, Sacks sees this move as a substitution. The abandoning and abandoned mother, symbolized by Nature, is replaced by masculine authority—of God, of the father, of the father’s language, and, critically, of Hallam.47 Yet Hallam is also the one lost—and thus the one who consistently occasions desire. Such ambivalence explains Tennyson’s calm in the midst of chaos: “Well roars the storm to those that hear / A deeper voice across the storm” (127. 3–4). The voice in the storm clearly alludes to Christ’s calming of the storm while he and the apostles are travelling from one side of the lake to the other. In each of the Gospel accounts, once the storm is subdued, Christ rebukes his followers for having little or no faith (cf. Mt. 8:23–27; Mk. 4:35–41; Lk. 8:22–25). Tennyson, we might say, takes the Gospel claim one step further. Not only should the believer have recognized Christ’s power as always present, but this person should also understand the adversity of the

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storm as something that actually bodes for the best. Of course, the circularity of this position returns the poem to the conundrum of section 124. Tennyson’s belief, or trust, amounts to the repeated statement “I have felt” (124.16). Just as important as the repeated discovery of this belief, however, is its occasion. To use the language of section 127, Tennyson’s feeling for God circles around the “storm” or trauma of Hallam’s absence. Consequently, his friend can function as the Christlike savior of humanity and focus of Tennyson’s personal devotion. For example, he speaks of his love as something much bigger since Hallam’s death: “My love involves the love before; / My love is vaster passion now” (130.9–10). Even more striking is the subsequent assertion; though “mix’d with God and Nature,” Tennyson finds him all the more lovable for this fact (130.11–12). We have seen that the trauma of Hallam’s absence stirs up the creative energy for the poem. As In Memoriam draws to a close, Tennyson suggests that his inspiration derives from the absence of God as well. In the Prologue, he establishes Hallam as God’s mediator and even God’s “Son” (Prol.1). By the end of the poem, he justifies this large jump by virtue of the intense feeling that attaches to Hallam and, implicitly, to God. Both, in short, acquire the status of the objet a. Tennyson’s willingness to take this idea to its extreme also comes out in section 127. The shocks of history’s tumult potentially teach us to imagine this presence emerging momentarily out of the chaos and loss. Indeed, the greater the shock, the greater the consolation to be imagined from his friend’s solicitude. Perennially, the “red fool-fury of the Seine” slaughters its own people in revolt (127.7–8). Similarly, the earth’s “crags” and “spires of ice” fall down and re-form (127.11–13). Most importantly, “the great aeon”—or history itself—will drown in its own blood surrounded by “hell’s fire” (127.16–17). Yet Hallam “O’erlookst the tumult from afar / And smilest, knowing all is well” (127.19–20). In Kleinian terms, the bloody vision Tennyson presents corresponds to the paranoid-schizoid position; only now he replays the infant’s destruction of its world as the inevitable outcome of history itself. In Lacanian terms, such a perspective represents the poem’s most dramatic example of creation ex nihilo. The signifying chain that is history has its emptiness revealed in the figure of the “aeon.” Hallam’s smile as he overlooks this brutal process highlights the faith beyond reason—and founded on feeling—to which the poem has moved. But it also suggests that Tennyson’s defense against death, even at this late point in the poem, still has its manic element. Klein

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Infantile death-wishes against parents, brothers and sisters are actually fulfilled whenever a loved person dies, because he is necessarily to some extent a representative of the earliest important figures, and therefore takes over some of the feelings pertaining to them. Thus the death, however shattering for other reasons, is to some extent also felt as a victory, and gives rise to triumph, and all the more to guilt. (Klein 1940: 354)

Hallam, therefore, represents that part of Tennyson that has survived destruction—both in infancy and in adulthood. However, this triumph is never a complete one because it also gives rise to guilt. And guilt ultimately marks the lack that makes the work of reparation an ongoing affair in which it is possible to trust. In this respect, Tennyson’s concern with bringing his living readers into the circuit of his mourning is the most significant indication that reparation is operating. As we saw above, Tennyson speaks of espousing Sorrow, an apostrophe that illustrates his wish to keep his grief in manageable limits and produce a fitting memorial to his friend. The effect of this restraint is to bring him into connection with other living persons and ultimately his readers. Consistently, he focuses on repairing relationships disrupted by his melancholic reaction to Hallam’s death. For example, immediately after Nature’s denial of the type, he addresses another mourner: “Peace; come away: we do him wrong / To sing so wildly: let us go” (57.3–4). Having already characterized the “song of woe” as an “earthly song,” he is gently encouraging this person to keep grief within bounds, just as he is trying to do (57.1–2). The reference to “wild” singing, therefore, echoes the retraction of “these wild and wandering cries” in the Prologue (Prol.41). In both cases, Tennyson is restraining the self-indulgent part of his song in favor of the elements that are more controlled and outwardly directed. Echoing section 7, Tennyson worries that in indulging his grief— and perhaps in encouraging others to indulge theirs—he and this other mourner do wrong to their friend’s memory. More generally, as the evocation of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” suggests (56.15), this wild song of grief identifies with the persecution characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position. In the context of the poem’s conclusion, Tennyson’s guilt about mourning too much now becomes a move toward reparation. The loss of his friend triggers a primitive anger in him represented by Nature’s destructiveness. Subsequently,

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characterizes this defense as triumph:

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this feeling also returns him to the sadness and longing to make reparation for having caused this loss that characterizes the depressive position. This view agrees with Urania’s advice to him in section 58. To his “sad words” of “farewell” she responds: “Wherefore grieve / Thy bretheren with a fruitless tear?” (58.9–10). In raising this question, the muse emphasizes the possibility of taking a more suitable leave of his friend with the kind of public poetry envisioned, as we saw, at the end of his dreams in sections 102–104. In order to attend to this concern, however, he does not so much suppress his private grief, as project the lack that allows him to create onto his audience. This gesture to the audience allows him to replay his loss in manageable form and invest it with significance. Section 57 illustrates this evocative strategy: Yet in these ears, till hearing dies, One set slow bell will seem to toll The passing of the sweetest soul That ever look’d with human eyes. I hear it now, and o’er and o’er, Eternal greetings to the dead; And ‘Ave, Ave, Ave,’ said, ‘Adieu, adieu’ for evermore. (57.9–16)

Perhaps more than at any other point in the poem, Tennyson succeeds here in linking the pervasive sense of lack and loss around which In Memoriam circles with a profound trust in language to render this emptiness in an intelligible way. On the one hand, the lines actually say very little—the “Aves” and “Adieus” suggest a vacancy rumbling through him that will continue long after the obsequies are finished. On the other hand, by linking the empty sound of the words to the tolling of the bell, Tennyson implies that all language, like this sound, functions as something he encounters rather than as something he has made. Instead of telling us that he has heard the bell, he plays out how he hears it. The formal and even ritual quality to the lines thereby convey that he is listening to his voice as it echoes and deepens the sound of the bell. Contributing to this effect is the repetition of the s sound in lines 10 and 11. By slowing down the pace, Tennyson emphasizes the enduring sadness of the moment. Consequently, we begin to apprehend that language is not anyone’s property but a powerful force that can convey deep feeling. Most importantly, by chanting in this language, Tennyson articulates an ethical stance. As the persistent tolling of the bell reminds

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him, nothing can bring Hallam back; his absence always remains beyond loss. In coming to this understanding, he recognizes his poetry as one of the linguistic forms desire takes and that this desire structures his calling. Thus, he will remain faithful to his mourning “till hearing dies” (57.9). Returning to the beginning of the poem, we see that this faithfulness led him to articulate his loss in language in the first place. In section 21, for example, he refutes those who question the appropriateness of such mourning in times of national crisis: “I do but sing because I must, / And pipe but as the linnets sing” (21.23–24). Birds sing because they must, and so does he: poetry represents a defining part of his life that he must not neglect. Later on, he makes a similar claim: “To breathe my loss is more than fame / To utter love more sweet than praise” (77.15–16). Breathing, as always, refers to respiration and to the singing of poetry: he cannot live without engaging in both. Correspondingly, loss refers both to Hallam’s actual death and to Hallam as the name for the lack in Tennyson that elicits desire. Mourning his friend in verse, therefore, is not the self-indulgent exercise of a solipsist but faithfulness to the way he has been made and to his vocation. Finally, vocation gives form to Tennyson’s survival and especially to his relationship with his readers. Acutely aware of the gaps in the discourse of science and religion as they construct a self, Tennyson nevertheless feels drawn to trust language as the way in which he can render his trauma to someone else. Part of this narrative centers on a wish to have his friend back, and he plays out its fulfillment in his trance and dreams. The most enduring legacy of In Memoriam, though, involves a final turn to Hallam: Strange friend, past, present, and to be; Loved deeplier, darklier understood; Behold, I dream a dream of good, And mingle all the world with thee. (129.9–12)

As someone to be intermixed with the living, Hallam represents what Tennyson would like to convey to his readers in order to achieve the social renovation he has in mind. At the same time, Tennyson recognizes that loss has produced this wish in him—a loss whose effects never cease to renew themselves. Thus, new life with this strange friend comes at a cost—specifically, that of a darkening of understanding, with respect not only to why his friend died prematurely but also to a world that has not conformed to the wisdom that this new Hallam embodies.

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C a st r at e d R e f e r e n t i a l i t y : E l io t ’s T H E W A S T E L A N D

“T

his is what the subject meant”—in his second lecture of Seminar III, Lacan cautions his listeners that this statement far too often characterizes the interpretations that analysts in training place upon their paranoid patients. The analyst thereby lets her desire “to fill the case with understanding” obscure the most important aspect of the interchange with the patient—not the “kernel” of meaning supposedly “understood,” but that this “kernel” is “inaccessible, inert, and stagnant with respect to any dialectic” (1955–1956: 22). By making concepts of “meaning” and “understanding” so absolute, the analyst fails to recognize that these “kernels” only amount to bits of conscious interchange at the level of ego relations and for that reason are of no interest whatsoever. At the same time, the clarity with which the analyst appears to have comprehended what the patient meant blocks the unconscious from opening in the course of the exchange. What disrupts such a facile exchange between the analyst and patient at the level of conscious ego relations is the fact that desire is part of a larger dialectical relationship to the unconscious. The analyst’s presence—sometimes even more than what she says—reminds the patient of this dimension to the relationship: “The ever-present possibility of bringing desire, attachment, or even the most enduring meaning of human activity back into question, the constant possibility of a sign’s being reversed as function of the dialectical totality of an individual’s position, is such a common experience that it’s stupefying to see this dimension forgotten as soon as one’s fellow whom one wants to objectify is concerned” (1955–1956: 23). The objectification

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refers to the analyst’s desire to articulate what the subject meant. By stressing that the analyst’s “question mark” may signify the only “sufficient” interpretation in response to the patient’s discourse, Lacan emphasizes that an ethical relationship to one’s patients recognizes the complexity of their desire as expressed in language. Just as people can both mean and not mean what they say at the same time, so they may simultaneously desire and not desire something as well. Several weeks into the same seminar, he generalizes this point to characterize his relationship with his listeners. Instead of being disappointed that they have not grasped his teaching, he emphasizes that their confusion fits with the notion of language he has been expounding: “I teach you that misunderstanding is the very basis of human discourse” (1955–1956: 163). Expanding on this idea, he characterizes the listeners’ uncertainty about what he is saying as part of the effect he intends: “I would say that it is with a deliberate, if not entirely deliberated, intention that I pursue this discourse in such a way as to offer you the opportunity to not quite understand” (1955– 1956: 164). As a result, Lacan can envision an ethical relationship with his listeners just as they may do with their patients. Not quite understanding him leaves open the possibility of future correction. This correction is something that a clear understanding of what he meant would rule out: In other words, if I were to try to make myself very easily understood, so that you were completely certain that you followed, then according to my premises concerning interhuman discourse the misunderstanding would be irremediable. On the contrary, given the way I think I have to approach problems, you always have the possibility of what is said being open to revision, in a way that is made all the easier by the fact that it will fall back on me entirely if you haven’t been following sooner − you can hold me responsible. (1955−1956: 164)

Behind this differentiation between the moments of understanding and of not understanding lies the differentiation between the conscious and the unconscious. This resemblance derives from the teaching that Lacan sees as the source of his students’ difficulty—that the unconscious is structured like a language. Consequently, it “always presents the essential duality of signifier and signified” (1955–1956: 167). On the one hand, the unconscious has recourse to signifiers: as with any discourse, it uses them to refer to what is signified. On the other hand, the discourse signifies nothing—the nothing that corresponds to the lack that occasions desire.

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In bringing this desire back into question, Lacan highlights that it exists prior to the subject. Initially, the subject amounts to “an inchoate collection of desires,” and she feels the organization of these desires as a violent imposition. This sense arises because the subject always experiences its objects in terms of competition: “A primitive otherness is included in the object, insofar as primitively it’s the object of rivalry and competition. It’s of interest only as the object of the other’s desire” (1955–1956: 39). Most importantly, the notion that something has gone missing from the subject’s conscious self, or its ego, always leaves a trace in its use of speech. As we have seen, in Seminar XI he locates this lack in the identification of the ego with the gaze as epitomized by the objet a. What we have not stressed thus far is this lack’s connection to castration: “In so far as the gaze, qua objet a, may come to symbolize this central lack expressed in the phenomenon of castration, and in so far as it is an objet a reduced, of its nature, to a punctiform, evanescent function, it leaves the subject in ignorance as to what there is beyond the appearance, an ignorance so characteristic of all progress that it occurs in the way constituted by philosophical research” (1977: 77). Distinctive about the gaze is that it can be withdrawn in the moment that it is bestowed. For this reason, it resembles what Lacan says about understanding his teaching. One always feels uncertain and on the point of falling back into ignorance about what he has said. Yet this feeling of impotence— symbolized by castration—also occasions desire and underwrites the possibility of its future correction. This dual quality of desire focuses the lament in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. More directly than The Prelude or In Memoriam, The Waste Land exposes the vocation to write poetry as being intertwined with the desire to have it understood. Famously, he writes an explanatory note to the poem, directing the reader to pay attention to Tiresias, the Theban prophet, when he appears in the poem. Less famously, but perhaps more tellingly, the producers of the movie “Tom and Viv” imagine a scene in which Eliot and his first wife Vivien read the poem to her parents. Vivien prefaces the reading with her anxious explanation that the work represents the utterances of Tiresias, the great seer. It would appear, then, that Eliot’s directions on how to approach the work presume the reader’s ability and willingness to construct the poem’s meaning. As Tiresias, the spectator-reader becomes a player in interpreting the poem because how she synthesizes all of the characters encountered there will determine what is understood as the poem’s substance. Yet, Tiresias is blind, so what he sees, at least in the most literal sense, is nothing, and the same may hold for the reader as

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well. Blindness and various hindrances to sight figure prominently in the poem as does the stress on nothing as an almost palpable entity. Linking blindness to castration, we thus recognize the ambivalence of Eliot’s stress on the reader. Though The Waste Land transfers the desire for a complete understanding and explanation from the poet to the reader, the bequest proves a dark one. Not only does the poem offer no guarantee of understanding, but the work turns on the privation of it. Such a privation, indeed, characterizes Tiresias as an ongoing focus in critical discussions of the poem. Older treatments of his role claim that the raising of the reader’s consciousness of the culture is the poem’s main concern. Thus, F. O. Matthiessen speaks of Tiresias as “the exact symbol for such haunting inclusive consciousness” as described in Eliot’s Notes and condensed in the poem itself.1 Though the pursuit of such awareness may not be pleasant or edifying, Matthiessen assumes it remains the proper goal for the reader and one for which Tiresias serves as guide. Robert Andreach makes the same assumption. Drawing on the designation of him in the Notes as a “spectator,” Andreach argues that Tiresias functions as the character through whom the reader enters the poem. Specifically, this character’s experiences of death and the underworld become the means through which the reader, though not Tiresias himself, can experience the rebirth foreshadowed at the poem’s close.2 More recent criticism has not denied the broadening of cultural consciousness as one of the poem’s concerns. Rather, it has questioned where this project leads. In this vein, Lois Cuddy sees Eliot blending “diverse characteristics” of different persons in this figure.3 Tiresias’ suffering thereby becomes universal in its scope and ultimately orients the reader away from the classical tradition and toward the need for Christian purgation at its close.4 Such a redemptive stress on Tiresias’ suffering also figures in Benjamin G. Lockerd’s interpretation. Specifically, he stresses the dualisms in this character: blindness and sight, masculinity and femininity, and presence and absence. By blending these dualisms into other characters, such as the absent crucified figure in line 55, whose death may presage his rebirth, or the hooded figure in line 364, whose gender remains unclear, Tiresias overcomes the tension between matter and form. For this reason, says Lockerd, his suffering has a purpose.5 Finally, Suzanne Churchill argues that Tiresias articulates the notion of “personhood as a dynamic blending of voices, genders and sexualities.” In this way each reader is confronted with inevitable “social entanglements and historical limitations.”6 For Churchill, awareness of these elements

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leads to responsible reading that simultaneously bears witness to personal experience and testifies to identity as “a shadowy, unfolding, permeable and composite entity.”7 Using the same evidence, however, other critics take a more skeptical view. Sanford Schwartz, for example, also calls attention to Tiresias’ function as an onlooker to the poem. Tiresias regards his own dramatic role in the poem, but this awareness goes nowhere.8 Schwartz’s argument implies that Tiresias resembles Eliot’s Hamlet: possessing the capacity to see himself and others as playing roles, he can only iterate them. While Eliot’s move unifies The Waste Land by foreseeing the kind of roles into which people are forced, this unity reinforces the poem’s artificiality. For this reason, critics who stress Tiresias’ role as a signifier—or even a citation—have offered particularly compelling additions to the skeptical perspective. John Paul Riquelme points out that Tiresias is a classical name connected to a modern text.9 Though Tiresias does raise the reader’s cultural awareness, Eliot’s citing him also points out that the subjectivity supposed to animate this awareness remains a creation of texts and of language. This view of Tiresias parallels Paul Morrison’s. Though the subject always experiences herself as “unique,” Tiresias marks the subject as an “invention of language.”10 Expanding such meta-reading to the poem as a whole, Juan Suárez stresses Eliot’s fascination with gadgets for rendering voice, such as the gramophone. For this reason, Eliot anticipates a post-structuralist understanding of language “as an autonomous force, an energy without beginning, end or direction.”11 In a Lacanian turn, Suárez also sees the poem as resembling the discourse of the Other: the circuit of sending and receiving messages through all of the characters takes precedence over what any of them might be saying.12 Though he does not mention Tiresias, it would seem that such a character becomes a personification of the symbolic system so articulated. As spectator, in other words, Tiresias recalls that all speech must have an audience; in this spectral role, he becomes the occasion for all desire and discourse as projected onto him by the other characters in the poem. Perhaps, then, the melancholy and traumatic aspects of Tiresias’ awareness loom large over criticism of this poem because they provide the reader with the clearest point of access to it. With regard to melancholy, Cyrena N. Pondrom argues that Eliot produces Tiresias’ masculinity as the poem’s principle performance of gender. The sadness in this identification centers on its never linking up with the same-sex object of desire, a failure that Pondrom generally sees as characteristic of modernism.13 Shannon McRae notices a different

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aspect of the same melancholy identity. Tiresias witnesses the ugliness of heterosexual attraction in the scene between the typist and the clerk, raising the question of whether the temporary cohesion that this character lends to the poem leads to anything beyond disgust.14 In terms of their perspectives on reading, both of these critiques seem very close to Schwartz’s, Riquelme’s, and Morrison’s: reading may raise consciousness but it provides no guarantee that anything (or anyone) will change as the result of it. With regard to trauma, this melancholy blockage in reading may suggest that the trauma recorded in The Waste Land still haunts us as much as it did Eliot’s original readers. Like Pondrom and McRae, Gabrielle McIntire calls attention to the gender slippage played out in Tiresias; it is “part of the general unpredictability and vulnerability of desire which . . . never fully knows either its object or its subject.”15 More than the other readers, McIntire shrewdly relates desire’s lack of direction to specific historical trauma. Simultaneously, the “subject positions” presented in the poem “reveal a stuttering inability and desire laden refusal to flee from the histories that pervade them.” How one might imagine the present as new when the dead are constantly crossing through it becomes the focus of her argument.16 The concern of such a trauma-laden present with the possibility of poetic vocation is the focus of this chapter. “Voice, Vocation, Speaker, and Reader” suggests that, in “The Burial of the Dead,” Eliot, like Wordsworth and Tennyson, is gripped by the idea of poetic vocation expressed as a shared language between speaker and reader. What accounts for the hold of this idea, however, is really a nostalgic longing for vocation, rather than its presence, in the would-be poet. Bound up with the disappearance of male bodies from the poem, this longing calls attention to the melancholic functioning of desire and provides no substitute for the lost object of love. “History, Trauma, and the Gaze” considers the gaze as a symptom of this desire especially with respect to the two vignettes in “A Game of Chess.” The sketches of the neurotic woman and her partner as well as of Lil and Albert comprise this section. Both descriptions share an obsession with the visual, and thereby point to imprisonment in the present that no one can reverse. Oddly, however, Lil’s gazing at her interlocutor at least holds out the possibility of a retelling of the trauma of subjugation that will articulate, rather than obscure, history. “Tiresias’ Responsibility” links this issue of narrating history to the prophet’s one direct appearance in “The Fire Sermon.” Like the father in the dream of the burning child, Tiresias must repeat what he has seen as resistance to, rather than a statement of, meaning. Too readily,

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though, he converts the experience of the typist and the clerk into a repeated pattern that he must suffer. The very certainty of his understanding contrasts powerfully with the partial, disgusting objects rather than full persons whom he encounters. As a result, his act of meaning appears suspect. “How You Would Have Responded” sees Eliot as projecting this knowledge onto the reader in the form of a question about how we listen to such traumatized voices in “Death By Water” and “What the Thunder Said.” Perhaps the poetic form of question and response—found near the end of the poem—can occasion the reader’s trust. This conversation, however, comes too late for Tiresias: he can conceive of but not enact it.

Voice, Vocation, Speaker, and Reader In “The Burial of the Dead,” this crisis in the performativity of voice articulates one of Eliot’s central concerns. As is well known from the facsimile edition, the original title of the first part of the poem was “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” a reference to Sloppy, a character in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, who can mime what the police say in the newspapers in various tones. His reading provides great entertainment to his adoptive mother, who brags about his ability to imitate the police to her guests.17 Sloppy’s virtuosity with tone marks him as an individual even as his reading in different voices annihilates the single voice by which we could recognize him as a person. This paradox becomes a template for Eliot in Book I in which a series of hard to identify voices can only become distinguishable through these shifts in tone. In this way, he radically puts into question what subjectivity will mean in the poem even as he underscores the permanence of each speaker’s desire to be understood as an individual with a voice. His eventual choice of epigraph illustrates this point. On the one hand, the sibyl at Cumae recalls the famous prophetess whom Aeneus consults before visiting the underworld. In this role, she seems authoritative even though, as she tells Aeneus in Book XIV of the Metamorphoses, her lot is to degenerate into a voice before her thousand-year term of life expires: “To such changes I shall pass / No eye shall see me then: my voice alone / The Fates will leave, my voice by which I’m known.”18 A further indication of her authority centers on the interest in her prophecies. Though the wind regularly disarranges the leaves on which they are written, her followers continually endeavor to put these fragments in order without any help from the sibyl. For this reason, in the Aeneid, Aeneus promises the sibyl that he will build her “a great shrine” in his restored kingdom

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and requests that she sing her prophecies directly so as to keep them from being “mocked by the plundering winds.”19 On the other hand, Eliot does not refer directly to the sibyl’s prophetic role in the Metamorphoses or the Aeneid, but to her ridicule in the Satyricon. Trimalchio, hosting a dinner party, claims to have seen her “with my own eyes” and recalls boys who, without any awe, ignore her wish to die. 20 Even if the destructive winds have not taken away the sibyl’s glory, subsequent portrayals of her have. By choosing a portrayal of the sibyl that already operates at second hand, Eliot emphasizes this figure’s dependence on the text to mediate her—and with a demeaning effect. The same worry about selves as reducible to voices, and voices as dependant on texts, marks a central concern of “The Burial of the Dead.” Indeed, by changing the title of the section from “He Do the Police In Different Voices” to “The Burial of the Dead,” Eliot suggests that, with respect to modern poetry, the written text inevitably entombs the voice. The former has become the latter’s only means of mediation. In the poem’s opening lines, this mediation is effected by participles enjambed across the line breaks. These create the impression that one person is speaking. Additionally, since the speaker refers to herself as “Marie” in lines 15–16, it would appear that she is female. This identification of gender, in turn, suggests that the memory mentioned in line 3 would be of sledding with her cousin the archduke as described in lines 13–16. Yet, the speaker’s gender and history, instead of determining her voice, follow on the reader’s assigning it coherence based on the repeated line endings. Linking this inflection in Marie’s voice with Eliot’s claim about Tiresias’ importance as an onlooker to the poem, we can argue that the prophet embodies Marie’s consciousness of being before an audience. For this reason, his presence as audience elicits a desire in her for cohesiveness as a subject. This desire, and its failure to achieve cohesion, plays out in Marie’s bit of traumatized narrative. Reading the incident with the archduke in Kleinian terms, Tony Pinkney argues that her anxiety about sledding depressively projects her sexual fear of her cousin. Hands in the poem regularly lead to sexual intercourse, specifically in the case of the clerk and the typist as well as the mention made of them by the third daughter of the Thames. Marie’s clutching her cousin, in Pinkney’s view, suggests that she has acknowledged “the psyche’s own sadistic impulses,” putting aside “a manic denial” of death. 21 For Pinkney, her depressive guilt focuses on the action of sledding. Preoccupied with keeping her balance on the sled, Marie does not realize that she has fallen victim to “the male’s shamelessly voyeuristic

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gaze” embodied in the archduke.22 Later in the poem, the image of someone trying to hold on reoccurs as fingers grasping the wet river bank in line 174. Similarly, Marie’s utterance about sliding down the slope anticipates not only the drowning of Phlebas in “Death by Water” but also the allusion to Ophelia in “A Game of Chess.” Having sex on the wet bank and physically falling down before intercourse remain occluded from Marie’s awareness, but not from Eliot’s. According to Pinkney, Marie’s dwelling on the sleigh ride serves to naturalize her fear. Rather than attributing it to “the sinister presence of the archduke” and his sexual desire for her, she struggles to remain unconscious of his gaze.23 While Pinkney correctly foregrounds the male gaze in this scene, the woman’s resistance to becoming conscious of it needs more attention. Lacan argues that the gaze derives from the precedence of the field of vision or a “given-to-be-seen” in any individual’s act of seeing (1977: 74). Because the field of vision always exceeds any one act of seeing, the gaze manifests itself as a “stain” (1977: 74), “scotoma” (1977: 83), or limitation in vision that people are not ordinarily aware of. As the stain on Marie’s memories of winters in the pure, white mountains, her cousin’s leering does not simply express an isolated memory of real or potential sexual violence. Additionally, it suggests that subjectivity emerges as a defense against desire that is always experienced as antithetical to the self. For that reason, I think Marie’s anxiety is more paranoid than depressive. Specifically, she experiences April as a persecutor. The month is not merely cruel, but cruellest, because of the distorted way in which it assumes the maternal function of reproduction. The lilacs breed automatically, demonstrating a mechanical element in desire that operates against the subject’s experience of herself as an individual. In the face of this anxiety, she resists by aligning forgetfulness to another maternal function: clothing and feeding. Thus, she describes the snow as clothing for the ground, and the bulbs that might produce new life as present food. Her stake in embracing this cold season—and, inadvertently, the gaze of her cousin—remains high. Only in this way can she imagine maintaining her cohesion as a subject and the authoritative voice of her experience. Consequently, summer repeats winter in the sterility of her routine. Like J. Alfred Prufrock, who has lived his life measured out “with coffee spoons” (CPP 5), Marie’s memories of stepping under a row of columns to get out of the rain, then moving on to a garden after the sun comes back out, and of sharing coffee and conversation reveal as much as they conceal. On the one hand, she voices the distinct memories characteristic of a speaking subject. On the other hand, this

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subjectivity comes at the price of blocked and traumatized desire and is expressed in conversation that sustains life without nourishing it. The tone of the next voice, evident in lines 19–24, more directly recognizes the brutality that inheres in subjectivity. Physically, everything mentioned in this description highlights the intensity of the sun, whose inescapability links it to the desire mentioned by Marie at the poem’s start. Trees provide no shelter from it, crickets no distraction from it, and stones no “water” to quench thirst. In their failure, they force the reader—or “Son of man” (line 20)—to recognize their status as “images” (line 22). This second voice’s language, therefore, assumes a reflexive quality that Marie’s lacks. In this way, Eliot suggests that the capacity to reflect on and critique language operates even when one’s hold on identity is not fixed. Although one might imagine that language originates from a stable subject, the poem consistently challenges this supposition. As we have seen, the poem begins with obsessive concern about its construction from other texts. With the introduction of the “Son of man,” it introduces a further consideration: that the someone else whom a voice hails may prove more important than the putative source of the voice itself. This someone else again evokes Tiresias; the “Son of man” epithet calls into question the addressee’s gender, and Tiresias later describes himself in line 219 as an aged man with sagging breasts. Just as important as what the “Son of man” line might say about the addressee, therefore, is what it fails to show about the speaker. Directing these lines to another party and telling that person that he cannot describe himself as a male, this second speaker is at once less identifiable as a subject than Marie and much more reflective. In the failure of identification, that is, this person achieves a kind of identification itself. Most importantly, because the lines deal with the speaker’s projection about the audience, both characters and spectator find themselves subjected to the gaze because the shared desire for identification also marks this identification’s failure. Like Wordsworth and Tennyson, Eliot is concerned with poetic vocation in connection with this gaze. The prophet Ezekiel, to whom the note on the Son of man line alludes, was addressed by God as “Son of Man” and, in chapter 37, directed to prophesy to the dead bones of a defeated Israel, thereby bringing them back to life (Ezekiel 37: 1–14, RSV). Ezekiel’s words, therefore, resemble the stone and the shell in Wordsworth’s dream of the horseman, and Tennyson’s dream of singing a new social order into existence in the presence of Hallam. In each case, words supposedly exert a life-giving and immediate effect on the hearer. By having this second voice address

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the interlocutor as someone who cannot even entertain such a future vocation, however, Eliot does not merely suggest that the efficacy of words has been lost—as we have seen, Wordsworth and Tennyson face the same problem. Eliot also wonders how such a suspension of disbelief could have happened in the first place. Hence, the problem for the “Son of man”—or would-be poet—is not ignorance of the canon, but knowledge of it. The “images” referenced in lines 19–24 represent the chain of allusions that constitute The Waste Land. Their failure to work has not come about from a refusal to study the past or to pay heed to the literary masterpieces. Rather, the “Son of man’s” impotence reflects the use of the past to construct subjectivity as a defense against desire. Marie does the same thing with her personal memory of sledding with the archduke. The difference in lines 19–24 is that with the mention of the “Son of man,” Eliot broadens this failure to the culture as a whole. This second voice invites the addressee into the shade: “(Come in under the shadow of this red rock)” (line 26). By parenthesizing this line, Eliot puts a visual cue in the text, a move that has two implications. First, as a written, rather than a verbal, marker, the parenthesis again stresses the primacy of the text. The voice is already entombed in the lines themselves. Second, because the parenthesis resembles a stage direction, it underscores that the “Son of man,” like Tiresias, is also playing a role. And both of these roles intertwine with Eliot’s desire to be understood. In his note about Tiresias, Eliot describes him as a “personage,” and The Oxford English Dictionary defines personage as “any of the characters (dramatis personae) of a play, or of a dramatic poem, novel, etc.”; it also specifically cites Eliot’s use of the word in The Sacred Wood as one of its examples (7b). By presenting Tiresias as someone who simultaneously suffers desire—especially with respect to sex—but whose presence elicits desire in other characters, Eliot problematizes the notion of a unique individual as the center of this poem. Returning to the parenthetical invitation in line 26, we see the lack of an individual narrative where one might expect it as a prominent feature of the discourse. In lines 27–29, the speaker builds up to what looks like a substantial disclosure. The shadows mentioned here recall the trivial life that Marie is living and the useless imagery alluded to in the “Son of man” passage. Instead of bringing the listener outside of this wreckage, however, the speaker only offers more trash: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (line 30). Many critics have pointed out that this sequence is based on the beginning of Eliot’s suppressed poem “The Death of St. Narcissus.” In this earlier poem, the invitation to come under the shadow of the

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rock is not parenthesized, and the body has not eviscerated into dusty remains. Rather, the clothing, body, and visage of the corpse are on full display.24 In Merrill Cole’s view, Eliot’s rewriting of “The Death of St. Narcissus” for The Waste Land is a universalizing move. The poet trades the saint’s “concrete embodiment” in a male corpse for the “handful of dust” that parallels the sibyl’s decay to dust at the poem’s start. For Cole, “a disembodied and de-eroticized fear dilates into an ahistorical chiding of the human condition.”25 In making this argument, Cole stresses that such revision is not merely concerned with avoiding the issue of homoeroticism. Rather, Eliot “calls forth the homoerotic in order to extinguish it.”26 I will come back to the argument about the historicity of The Waste Land in the next section, but before doing so, I want to suggest that the suppressed homoeroticism of The Waste Land may be the most pointed illustration of a broader anxiety about the presence or absence of the male body with respect to the poetic text in general. Rats, of course, are said to carry away the corpses’ bones in “A Game of Chess.” Thus, Eliot suggests the decay of the man’s body to bones as well as the disappearance of the bones themselves. A similar decay and disappearance is occurring—albeit more gently—with Phlebas the drowned sailor in “Death By Water.” Already dead for two weeks, he has his bones picked at by the current. Both men, therefore, resemble the female sibyl because their bodies are vanishing. Most importantly, twice the poem conjoins pearls and eyes. First, Madame Sosostris mentions them as she unfolds the tarot cards. Second, the partner of the neurotic woman makes the same link in the course of their interchange. Two very different characters nevertheless speak in exactly the same way about the sailor’s eyes, suggesting that the latter has visited the former and that her words made an impression on him. Yet, this bit of narrative coherence between Parts I and II of the poem raises as many problems as it addresses. If the memory of the dead sailor haunts the living man’s relationship with the woman in “A Game of Chess,” it nevertheless remains unclear what kind of relationship the man—if he even is a man—had with the sailor. In addition, what kind transformation does the replacing of human eyes with pearls suggest? As the operation of the gaze—in this case that of the sailor—points out, one’s field of vision may actually reflect the subject’s desire more than anything else. With regard to the possible relationship between the sailor and the male speaker, I would argue that the latter’s nostalgia need not be for a specific prior homosexual relationship that he has irrevocably lost, but for the prior and lost element that the poem’s “heterosexual

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logic” attributes to all homosexual relations. As articulated by Judith Butler, this logic endeavors to see gender identification and sexual desire for a member of that same gender as mutually exclusive. 27 What emerges from this attempt is “heterosexual melancholy” or “the ‘normal’ constitution of gender presentation” whose particular expression proceeds from a set of “disavowed attachments labeled as homosexual.”28 The burden of this feeling accounts for the lament at the start of “What the Thunder Said.” Not only has Phlebas, specifically, died, but, in line 330, the speaker also declares that everyone is coming to the same end, albeit more patiently. Phlebas’ death should eventually lead to substitution but instead occasions a melancholic refusal to give him up characterized by this gradual death. This melancholy then overshadows the heterosexual relations in the poem. As we shall see, it plays out in the episodes involving the two couples in “A Game of Chess” and in the subsequent piece about the typist and the clerk in “The Fire Sermon.” Summed up in Tiresias’ act of looking on, this lack is the occasion of the desire that permeates their utterances. At the same time, it corresponds to Lacan’s comments in Seminar III about castration: the fear of losing the phallus and the subsequent privation of it establish it as the primary signifier in the Oedipal itinerary. The Waste Land links the castrated and melancholic element of this path of development with its defensive use of prior texts to preserve some cohesion in its speakers. 29 So just as identifiably male bodies disappear from the poem, the body as a text becomes more prominent. At the end of “The Burial of the Dead,” for example, the speaker encounters a procession of ghosts on London Bridge and declares that he had not realized how many people belonged to this aggregate. As Eliot points out in the Notes, the vignette alludes to Book III of the Inferno where Dante and Virgil meet “the sorry sect of those who are displeasing to God and to his enemies.”30 Having lived “without infamy and without praise,”31 small insects now goad these souls, thereby reflecting the smallness of their imaginations. Where Dante emphasizes the spirits’ displacement in order to make a moral point, Eliot, at least initially, calls attention to their displacement so as to reflect on the trauma of World War I and its aftermath. As hallucinations, these ghosts suggest that the speaker is experiencing a version of traumatic stress. Dante may not speak to the cowardly, but Eliot’s speaker calls out to and stops an acquaintance. In addition to having served with the speaker in battle, however, the ghostly “Stetson” (line 69) also represents the readers of the poem. Referencing Baudelaire, all of the

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speaker’s epithets for his companion are in apposition with his name and suggest that it is the similarity between the poet and his audience, as much as between two former soldiers, that makes this kind of address possible. Thus, though the speaker violates Stetson’s anonymity as a ghost and our anonymity as readers of the poem, the address itself implies that this anonymity amounts to little more than pretense. What gives the pretense away is that both Stetson and the speaker share knowledge about a body in the former’s garden. At one level, this corpse stands for the many corpses that Eliot and his readers know about as a result of having survived World War I.32 Without specifying one particular traumatic event in anyone’s history, Eliot is nevertheless suggesting that recognizing trauma as a repetition in so many people’s histories is the only way to face without hypocrisy the death-in-life of the postwar world. As Morrison argues, however, this “corpse” also symbolizes a corpus or text,33 highlighting Eliot’s heavy investment in meta-linguistic devices in this poem. As “The Burial of the Dead” draws to a close, the speaker asks if the “corpse” has sprouted (lines 71–72), thereby bringing into focus two possible itineraries for this text. On the one hand, if it does “sprout,” then the trauma of Eliot and his contemporaries may admit of future transformation into something else. Instead of simply reiterating the melancholic functioning of desire, the text will diagnose the loss and point to the possibility of substitute objects. On the other hand, if it does not sprout, this will point to an unexpected event, ushered in by the cold and the “dog” (line 74). Either the weather or the animal might upset this substitution by unearthing what should remain buried. By confronting the Stetson-like reader with the reality of the “corpse” in the garden, the speaker performs the second possibility and precludes the first. As text, The Waste Land resembles a corpse hidden in plain sight, just as the “corpse” in Stetson’s garden is already exposed by the speaker’s mention of it. This exposure accentuates the castrating gaze of male sexuality—so much on display in Marie’s clinging to identity. At the same time, the gaze expresses the other side of a profoundly anxious use of allusion embodied in the sibyl and projected by Eliot onto his reader in the form of ghostly Stetson. Suggesting an overall fear of the traumatic loss of the male body from the poem, Eliot’s frequent citation of prior texts historicizes the operation of desire that binds his speakers and readers together under this gaze. To the gaze as the symptom of this desire—and this trauma—we now turn.

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As we saw in “Mourning and Melancholia,” both of these states have a common origin in the cannibalistic position of early infancy in which the ego wants to incorporate a loved external object by devouring it. The difference is that the self-dramatizing melancholic looks to a hidden cause as the explanation of this condition in a way that the mourner does not. This recourse to a hidden cause—hidden even from the melancholic herself—closely resembles what Lacan says about the operation of the gaze. In Freud’s dream of the burning child, Lacan stresses that the father sees his son coming toward him with “a face full of reproach.” In the same moment, however, the son’s voice becomes a “solicitation of the gaze” summed up in the poignant question “Father can’t you see . . . ?” (1977: 70). What the father can see—his son—comes about by way of what he was necessarily blind to in order for the act of seeing to take place. That seeing or consciousness necessarily remains blind to its roots in paranoid fantasy concerns Eliot in poems about troubled heterosexual relations that are contemporary with The Waste Land. In more condensed form, these poems anticipate how the gaze functions in the first scene of “A Game of Chess.” Famously, “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” (1920) portrays heterosexual relations in brutally violent terms. In contrast to the episode between Marie and the archduke, “Rachel nêe Rabinovitch” clearly has no self-consciousness with respect to having a man look at her. Indeed, the man’s gaping does not intensify his presence, but reduces it: as the poem progresses, he diminishes from a “silent man” to a “silent vertebrate” (CPP 34). The cause of each character’s dehumanization, however, remains unclear. Does he regress from human to inhuman in the moment of regarding her or because he regards her? Does Rachel become an animal grabbing at grapes as a result of being watched by him? By not offering an answer to these questions, the poem suggests that these characters have become blind to their de-humanization precisely in the moment of becoming obsessed with seeing and being seen by each other. All the while, Eliot accentuates the melancholic element in this heterosexual connection. Specifically, the man’s anxiety centers on Rachel’s joining in “league” with “the lady in the cape” (CPP 35). Even if the man mistakenly attributes a lesbian connection between the women, he appears reduced to a stereotypically feminine reaction to such a projection—he feels tired. Ultimately, his emasculated departure from the scene replays the traumatic loss symbolized by the death of King Agamemnon both in the poem’s epigraph and at

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its close. Just as the nightingales are singing in the street outside the restaurant in which Rachel and the other characters meet, so they were singing in the woods where the King was buried. In mockery of the melancholia projected onto the Greek warrior’s death, Eliot points out that the bird droppings fall “to stain that stiff dishonored shroud” (CPP 36). The birds’ refuse does not bring about Agamemnon’s loss of power and disgrace; it merely accentuates what history has already effected. Similarly, the female characters in “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” do not actively bring about the degradation of the men. Rather, through their subjugation to the gaze, the women unwittingly expose the men’s subjugation as well. This mocking of melancholia is even more direct in the prose poem “Hysteria” (1917). Eliot presents a male speaker describing his anxiety in the presence of a laughing woman: “As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being / part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a / talent for squad drill” (CPP 19). Critics discussing this poem usually emphasize that the speaker’s sexual attraction to the woman is contrasted with his need to defend himself against her all-devouring mouth. 34 This defensive posture on the part of the speaker in “Hysteria” functions in the same way as the leering and the withdrawal of “the man in mocha brown” does in “Sweeney Among the Nightingales.” Where the man sees a threat in Rachel’s devouring of the fruit, this speaker fears becoming the meal himself. Though the poem makes no direct mention of eyes, the circuit of the man’s gaze becomes the entire focus of the lines. After noticing her teeth, he confronts the darkness and power of her throat. In the process of this looking, however, we also sense what the speaker’s sight necessarily remains blind to: that careful attention and subtlety will not erase her laughter or reestablish his illusion of control. Indeed, like Tiresias, the man’s status as an onlooker prolongs, if it does not occasion, the woman’s fit. Both figures thereby play out their subjugation to the desire that operates between them. This mutual construction of desire proves decisive for understanding the poem as a whole. In the process of articulating the woman’s hysteria, Eliot makes us aware of the man’s as well. For both, anxiety arises because neither sees the extent to which desire— figured as the gaze—has subjugated them. The same necessary blindness functions between the upper class woman and the man at the start of “A Game of Chess.” In this way the gaze produces the melancholy heterosexual relations that characterize the scene as a whole. The episode opens with the woman apparently sitting alone in her bedroom. Eliot’s note to line 77 directs

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us to Enobarbus’ description of Cleopatra’s barge in Antony and Cleopatra: “The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne / Burned on the water” (II.2.198–199).35 By alluding to these famous lines from Shakespeare, the speaker in The Waste Land clearly stresses the ironic contrast between the pathetic woman sitting at her makeup table and powerful Cleopatra as her attendants row her across the water. Yet, if the woman presented in The Waste Land is no Cleopatra, the allusion also suggests that the eyes gazing on her do not belong to those of the seasoned male warrior Enobarbus, either. By calling attention to the man whom the interlocutor is not—a male soldier—Eliot not only anticipates the absence of the male body from the conversation but also links this absence to the traumatic loss of male soldiers in the War. As a point of reference for the kind of male who does inhabit this room in this scene, the table legs consist of small sculpted Cupids. If the contrast to Cleopatra reduces the power of the woman’s presence, the power of the male’s eye does not benefit by comparison to Cupid, either. Not only is it connected to the diminutive of a child’s name (“Cupidon” [line 80]) but by parenthetically noting that the one figure averts his eyes, Eliot imputes naughtiness and triviality to the whole interchange rather than serious transgression. At the same time, by mentioning Cupid as part of the furniture, Eliot does not so much suppress the sexual energy in the scene as redirect it from the woman to her possessions. First, the light from the candles is intensified by its reflection in the glass and marble and by the glints from her spilled-out jewelry. Second, the overwhelming scent of many manufactured smells both overcomes the senses and acts as incense for the candles that have remained lit for too long. Most importantly, all of the pictures on the wall acquire an uncanny power to stare at what is transpiring. Indeed, their capacity to lean out of their frames and impose a tense quiet on the whole room derives from the power of looking. The hallucinatory aspect to the staring pictures on the wall intensifies the effect of the peeping Cupidons. Far from ignoring history, Eliot sees it as returning in the accounts on the walls. Literally, the walls say nothing and yet, when combined with the overwhelming scent of the room, they say too much and effectively haunt the man and the woman who live there. In their intensity, the pictures thereby highlight the split between the gaze and the eye. As we saw above, for Lacan the gaze always suggests a limitation in the operation of seeing of which the subject is not ordinarily aware. He also stresses that when this fact of being seen does approach consciousness, the resulting feeling is of strangeness: “The world is all seeing but it is

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not exhibitionistic—it does not provoke our gaze. When it does, the feeling of strangeness begins too” (1977: 75). That the man in “A Game of Chess” has begun to recognize this strangeness is evident in the way he dwells on the woman’s Medusa-like hair just before she begins to speak. Like the staring pictures in the room, the woman’s hair acquires a volition of its own that issues in speech. What Eliot conveys, however, bears no resemblance to a natural voice. Rather, like the laughter of the woman in “Hysteria,” the words pour out of the woman in this scene because she has lost control over her speech. Oddly, though, as her syntax breaks down in lines 112–113, she registers a preoccupation with speaking and thinking that are central concerns throughout the vignette. Obliquely, her clipped speech echoes Tennyson’s nostalgic portrayal of his conversations with Hallam before death separated them: When each by turns was guide to each And fancy light from fancy caught, And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought Ere thought could wed itself to speech. (23.13–16)

As Lacan’s discussion of alienation makes clear, thought’s linkage with speech entails the loss of an idealized relationship to the mother and, more generally, the Other. Just as traces of this trauma resurface in Tennyson’s loss of his friend, so they persist in the man’s interchange with the woman in this scene. Above all, the emphasis on the failure of speech to connect with thought recalls the scene in the hyacinth garden from “The Burial of the Dead.”36 Approaching the man with both arms full of flowers and wet hair, the “hyacinth girl” (line 36) in that earlier scene seems to be a symbol of Nature’s fertility and promise. By contrast, the man’s failure to respond to her sexually occasions what he takes to be a punishment: as lines 38–41 point out, he cannot speak, he goes blind, and he does not know anything. But do these penalties— and especially the last one—really result from what he has not done? Indeed, his belief that he has failed sexually seems to have more to do with his thinking that this alleged female should be an object of his desire. But is she really a “girl”? By associating her with hyacinths, which were tokens of Apollo’s lost boy lover, Eliot simultaneously calls into question both the “girl’s” gender and the speaker’s view of how he ought to have responded to “her.”37 In so doing, he accentuates desire’s impropriety. Belonging neither to the speaker nor to the “girl,” desire marks a lack in both characters at this point. On the one

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hand, the speaker’s saying he does not know anything suggests the alienation Lacan describes in the subject upon coming into language. He goes on desiring precisely because he cannot put into words the fertility and life that he believes the “girl” should represent to him at this point. On the other hand, the anxiety that the “hyacinth girl” is not really a “girl” at all highlights the speaker’s excessive investment in what he takes the symbolic system to want from him: a heterosexual relationship. In this way she functions as the Other whose lack—that she may not be a girl—puts into question his performance of masculinity. Returning to “A Game of Chess,” we see the man and woman enacting similar roles to those played out in the hyacinth garden. When commanded by the woman to think and to speak, the man can only recall the complete annihilation of rats carrying away bones. The word “nothing,” especially, becomes a focus for this vacancy that inheres in desire and in speech. To her repeated questions about sounds in the hushed room, he brusquely replies that she only hears wind. The repeating of the question brings a still more impatient response of “Nothing again nothing” (line 120). This interchange and its abrupt curtailment recall the beginning of Shakespeare’s King Lear where Cordelia, when asked by Lear what she can say to get a bequest from him that will be more generous than what her sisters have received, replies “Nothing” (I.1.81). Angered, the King then reminds her that “Nothing can come of nothing” (I.1.82), a statement that the play refutes since it is Cordelia’s response of “nothing” which leads to their separation and eventual reunification before death. In The Waste Land, though, the speaker’s “nothing,” even if it does work like Shakespeare’s, takes a much more indirect track. To the woman’s badgering about knowing, seeing, and remembering “nothing,” the man, in lines 124–125, notices that pearls have replaced the dead sailor’s eyes. Thus, in terms of the woman’s next question—“Is there nothing in your head?” (line 126)—at least it is clear that one thing remains there: the memory of the sailor’s eyes. In his making this connection, one might argue that memory offers the man a path out of his emptiness. Just as pearls turn up in the eye sockets of the sailor’s corpse, so the memory of the sailor possibly represents a pearl in the corpse that the rest of this man’s life has become. The same would also hold true for the corpus of The Waste Land as a whole: though it focuses on death, it alludes to the possibility of resurrection and life. As is well known, the reference to the “pearls” comes from the spirit Ariel’s song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In this play,

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Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. (I.2.399–404)

The sea-change Alonso undergoes symbolizes his coming to recognize the wrong he has done to Prospero by helping Antonio to deprive him of his throne. Ariel’s music, as Ferdinand describes it, “is no mortal business, nor no sound / That the earth owes” (I.2.409– 410). Building on this reference to The Tempest, some critics have seen the man in “A Game of Chess” as caught up in a similar process of renewal whose workings remain concealed from him at this point in the poem. Lockerd, for example, argues that the speaker combines characteristics of both Ferdinand and Alonso: though he mourns like the former, he is transformed into something “rich and strange” like the latter.38 In terms of Lockerd’s larger argument, the transformation of eyes into pearls illustrates a version of the “aethereal rumours” (line 417) that “suggest a transcendence, however uncertain or fragmentary, of the physical and spiritual fragmentation the poem describes.”39 The appeal of this argument lies in its nuance: The Waste Land presents not an account but a glimmer of transcendence. Most importantly, Lockerd establishes that the poem has a claim on our trust because the text performs a style that proves as fragmentary as the history it has invoked. We will return to this argument at the close of this chapter, particularly with respect to its concern with a good, whole, and trusted object of love that possibly operates in someone before the mind can completely know or express its reality. For the moment, however, we should notice that this section of “A Game of Chess” closes by once again stressing the operation of the gaze and the power of the man and woman’s paranoid anxiety in connection to it. To the woman’s frantic question in line 134 about the future, the man simply offers a litany of their day-to-day routine. According to Pondrom, the woman’s question is “performative” and “ethical” and not merely descriptive of their lives.40 Her partner’s inability or refusal to reply in the same register, however, relates to his not seeing either the woman or

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Ferdinand, the prince of Naples, has been shipwrecked on Prospero’s island, and thinks his father, Alonso, has died. The song anticipates the end of the play and the latter’s being found alive:

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himself as full persons, but only as partial objects. In this respect, water does not function symbolically as something that cleanses the whole person, but only as a thing to be manipulated. Early in the day, the woman makes it hot to take a bath, while later on, she, like Marie, shields herself from the rain by ordering a closed taxicab. Above all, the reference to eyes that cannot close contrasts with the pearls that were the sailor’s eyes. On the one hand, if the pearls allude to a transformation of past loss, that change depends on a transformation in seeing. Like Ferdinand, the couple in “A Game of Chess” must see persons as whole objects and not just partial ones. On the other hand, the unclosed eyes that the man and woman possess can only see in the literal sense. Lacking any relief from sight, these eyes suggest that the entire field of vision—or of the gaze—is also inescapable. Where the sailor’s eyes allude to an alleged transformation of loss, unclosing eyes point to the speaker’s enslavement in a present where no such change can occur. This bondage to the nothing of the present continues in the second half of “A Game of Chess,” which focuses on the relationship between Lil and Albert. While the interchange between the neurotic woman and her partner looks forward to someone knocking on the door, this second scene suggests that such an event has already happened, but proved of secondary importance. Whether Albert has stayed with Lil, in other words, has little bearing on the telling of Lil’s story. Initially, for the narrator and those listening to the story in the bar, Albert’s return from World War I appears decisive. Syntactically, Eliot’s embedding the bartender’s request that the patrons go home into the story sums up the message that the narrator was trying to convey to Lil at the end of the War. She would have to decide whether she would try to hold onto her husband when he came home. The War’s end, a major event for history books, also marks a major event in Lil’s private life. Would she try to keep Albert by satisfying him sexually when he came back? Indeed, by attending to her appearance, the narrator implies that Lil might have distracted Albert from the fact that she did not get the new teeth for which he gave her money. Under the cover, therefore, of supposedly friendly advice, Lil has had to confront the fact that others are ready to give Albert what he wants sexually if she does not. Likewise, for the readers of the poem, the event of Albert’s return, even if temporally removed from them, also seems to have preeminence. As Margaret E. Dana argues, the interruption of the story “reminds both [the reader] and the other characters of the temporal movement in which we and they are caught.”41 The narrator must have a certain dispatch in telling her story because

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the hour for leaving the bar has arrived. The repetition of “I said,” “he said,” and “she said” throughout the description emphasizes this exigency. Conscious of being interrupted, and thereby slowed down, the narrator makes these interjections in order to bring the story to a conclusion. Despite the expectation of finishing the story, however, the bar closes, and the story does not arrive at an event or outcome. Instead the narrator simply recalls going to have dinner with Lil and Albert one Sunday. Where we would expect this occasion to resolve the tension between the narrator and Lil, the story simply dissolves into the farewells of the patrons of the bar. Following this succession of goodbyes, another voice then offers Ophelia’s “good night” as an ironic postscript in line 172. By including this line verbatim from Hamlet, Eliot calls attention to the dropped “d” in the barroom farewells. Not only does this elision invest these salutations with a perfunctory quality—the regulars at the bar will certainly meet again—but it contrasts them with the finality of the “d” in Ophelia’s mad “good night.” The words quoted come at the end of her mad thoughts about her father Polonious’ death: I hope all will be well. We must be patient. But I cannot choose but weep to think they should lay him i’ th’ cold ground. My brother shall know of it. And so I thank you for your good counsel. Come, my coach! Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night. (IV.5.67–72)

Without realizing it, Ophelia moves the play toward an event insofar as her plight eventually incites Laertes to kill Hamlet. No such conclusion, however, is possible for Lil. Ophelia’s “We must be patient” perhaps applies to the hearers of Lil’s story in the barroom and, by extension, to The Waste Land’s readers. But neither release nor transformation, the two eventualities represented by death, are available to The Waste Land’s speakers or to the characters they describe. I do not want to imply, however, that The Waste Land elides traumatic history; it simply resists positing one event, such as Albert’s return from the War—or the War itself, for that matter—as the foundational moment for this trauma. If the speaker’s address to Stetson reveals war trauma as the cause of the speaker’s hallucination, still the reader can only intuit the trauma in the present through its representation and repetition as a text. This truth about repetition operates in the way that the traumatized speaker hails the ghostly Stetson during their encounter on London Bridge. Trauma as a component of

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representation also plays out in Lil’s story. Much more clearly than Albert, she is the one traumatized, by the future as much as by the past: the money to get her teeth fixed instead went to terminate a sixth, and possibly deadly, pregnancy. Obsessed with Lil’s failure to attend to her looks, however, the narrator merely glances at the way a child-based fantasy of the future solidifies into an oppressive reproductive ideology. While the narrator can recognize Lil’s choice to buy and take the drug as the logical one, given that she already has too many children, the violence of Lil’s situation, and its specific connection to childbearing, escapes her. By overlooking Lil’s suffering, the speaker can tell this story in a way that will appeal to the listeners in the bar. This narrator’s blind spot has two implications. First, it brings into focus the kind of trauma we have seen in surviving an encounter with death. Lil must face the possibility of living on in a world where the negative effects of not having died from her last pregnancy may never become apparent. Second, if, like the corpse in Stetson’s garden, this repetition of Lil’s story will have any visibility, then we must attend to Lil herself as the blind spot in the speaker’s presentation. Specifically, when confronted with the possibility that the narrator may try to satisfy Albert sexually if she will not, Lil does fight back. To the narrator’s not so veiled threats to steal Albert, Lil summons both speech and gesture: “Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look” (line 151). The Oxford English Dictionary defines “straight” as “steady” or “bold” and cites this use from The Waste Land as its most recent example (OED 3b). This glance contrasts with the averted eyes of both the narrator and Albert at the time he told Lil to buy new teeth; neither her friend nor her husband can stand to look at her decayed mouth. That Eliot juxtaposes Lil’s glance with the other two characters’ inability to look suggests that her gaze has made a deeper impression than either Albert or the narrator consciously realizes. In this way, Lil’s straight look, like the staring pictures at the opening of “A Game of Chess,” emphasizes that the attempt to subjugate her trauma in a story necessarily exposes the story’s teller and listeners to a gaze that reveals their powerlessness as much as hers. Indeed, by claiming that she will know who to thank if Albert leaves, Lil strikes a note of irony, showing that she does not entirely lack a language for articulating her position, and that she will attempt to use it. Her brief interjection into a story that otherwise denies her voice thus resembles Philomel’s repeated “Jug Jug” (lines 103; 204). In both cases the woman victimized by sexual violence attempts to speak on her own terms about what has happened to her. Nevertheless,

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the very truncated quality to each woman’s utterance suggests that their voices may become indistinct from the chattering noise of what the other characters have to say about them. As the narrator of Lil’s story says, Lil has been warned that Albert may leave her. But Lil’s story, like Philomel’s, stands out for the way in which narration can obscure as much as it shows. With respect to Philomel, Morrison points out that The Waste Land leaves out a crucial element of that woman’s story: her weaving the tapestry of her rape once Tereus has cut out her tongue. Omitting this detail in “A Game of Chess,” Eliot presents Philomel as lost in “the private gallery world” that is the neurotic woman’s apartment and, potentially, the poem as a whole.42 Conversely, by telling too much of Lil’s story, the poem risks a similar obscurity for her. The antidote to this obscurity is not simply the repeating of Lil’s or Philomel’s trauma, but noting the style in which it is presented. As a nightingale, Philomel “Filled all the desert with inviolable voice / And still she cried, and still the world pursues” (lines 101–102). Inviolability is a characteristic valued by the speaker who needs to represent her as pure, and of the world that finds an intact hymen as an object of sexual pursuit. Consequently it resembles the comment about her rape in the previous line—it was “So rudely forced” (line 100); simultaneously this fact is recited and prettified. The ugliness of “Jug Jug” breaks through such “gallery world” comments and— albeit only barely—points to the brutality of what has happened and to the continued brutality of strategies of representation that overlook it. Subsequently, in “The Fire Sermon,” the same juxtaposition of words reappears with a few additions: Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc’d. Tereu (lines 203–206)

Line 203 again attempts to prettify what happened to Philomel, this time by presenting her song as the conventional sound ascribed to birds. Additionally, with the dropping the “e” from “forced,” we have the sense that this softening of Philomel’s story is proceeding. Like the dropped “d” in the barroom “Goonight,” the trauma wanes in its own repetition and representation. Yet, like the speaker confronting Stetson on London Bridge, one more surprise emerges. “Tereu” marks Philomel’s tongueless attempt to name her attacker—Tereus— while also hinting at Tiresias’ narrative presence in the poem.43 His

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role as one who repeats—and potentially obscures—the trauma he witnesses is the focus of the next section.

At the end of her discussion of the dream of the burning child, Cathy Caruth focuses on the father’s responsibility in the aftermath of his missed encounter with the boy’s burning corpse. He must now tell the story of the burning and not misrepresent the trauma of the event as somehow resolved. In The Waste Land, Tiresias has a similar role. As we have noticed, Eliot presents him as an onlooker to the poem, and in this sense, he resembles the father who must repeat what has happened to him as a tragic destiny. Eliot’s understanding of subjectivity in this way would also be evident later in his career when he wrote a favorable review of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. Published more than fifteen years after The Waste Land, this novel articulates an understanding of suffering that “The Fire Sermon” had already enacted. Cautioning readers not to dismiss Barnes’ characters as pathological freaks, Eliot argues that they embody a universal suffering and misery that remains hidden from most people. Considering the relationship between those who suffer and those who observe others’ suffering, he goes on to claim that misery stays concealed from the one in the midst of the affliction. By contrast, the one observing the pain may experience it more directly. This dichotomy arises, says Eliot, because although individuals might partially wish to know the cause of their troubles, they have an even deeper wish to hide this knowledge from themselves.44 With respect to The Waste Land, Eliot’s argument about Barnes has two implications. First, as one who gazes on the other characters in the poem, Tiresias suffers more than they do. Second, as one who gazes on Tiresias, the reader suffers more than this speaker. As in “A Game of Chess,” so too in “The Fire Sermon”: history is not elided, but played out as a repeated trauma, no matter what the characters, narrator—and now the reader—try to do about it. Tiresias’ history especially suggests that this trauma has much to do with his experience of sexual pleasure as the pleasure of someone else—someone, in other words, who is subjected to his gaze. At the end of the note explaining Tiresias’ role in the poem, Eliot quotes a long section about the prophet from Book III of the Metamorphoses. As recounted by Ovid, Jupiter and Juno playfully disagreed, the former saying that women had more pleasure from sexual relations and the latter that men did. They referred the question to Tiresias who

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had had experience of both sexes. Initially, he had been changed from a man to a woman when he saw two snakes copulating in the woods and struck them with a stick. In the eighth autumn after this encounter, he was changed back to a man when he saw the same thing and again struck the snakes. Because Tiresias sided with Jupiter in saying that women have more pleasure in the sex act, Juno blinded him. Jupiter then gave him the gift of foresight to compensate for the loss of sight.45 Without further comment, Eliot remarks that the tale is “of great anthropological interest” (CPP 52). From a Lacanian perspective, Tiresias’ answer to Jupiter and Juno’s question brings out the competing aspects of jouissance. As defined by Lee Edelman, this term articulates “a movement beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the distinctions of pleasure and pain, a violent passage beyond the bounds of meaning, identity and law.”46 In imagining the vanishing of the distinction between pleasure and pain, Edelman paradoxically recognizes that the collapse of this binary happens violently. Jouissance thereby destroys the subject even as it apotheosizes its pleasure. Applying this concept to the incident from Ovid, we should first notice that Jupiter and Juno both refuse to claim the maximum pleasure from sex. In so doing, they unwittingly demonstrate that one performs identity in the presence of an audience—in this instance, a member of the opposite sex. Most importantly, the surplus pleasure imputed to someone else becomes a kind of pain or lack in the subject advancing the question and in this way functions as the occasion of desire. Unlike Jupiter and Juno, Tiresias is already living beyond the pleasure principle. His declaration in the Metamorphoses before hitting the snakes for the second time recognizes the violence inhering in the act of identification and its link to repetition: “If striking you has magic power / To change the striker to the other sex / I’ll strike you now again.”47 Not only does he repeatedly inflict violence on the snakes, but he suffers it by undergoing the castration symbolized by Juno’s blinding him. On the one hand, after being blinded, he gains access to the rewards of patriarchy symbolized by foresight. Indeed, he takes on an identity—that of a seer with a place in the symbolic system—as a result of his subjugation to desire. Jouissance in such a context serves to solidify the process of subjugation by attaching itself to “a particular object or end” and then fantasizing satisfaction from this move.48 On the other hand, his possession of male power comes at the price of blindness; he will always experience his status in patriarchal culture—or identity—in conjunction with the lost pleasure of physical sight. This incapacity

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also calls attention to his having been drawn into such a losing question posed by the Olympians in the first place. Caught between Juno and Jupiter, Tiresias seems fated to suffer no matter whose side he takes, a condition that his blindness and foresight continually reiterate. In this respect, jouissance also operates. While it attaches to a particular end or identity, it simultaneously works at “unravelling the solidity of every object including the object as that which the subject necessarily takes itself.”49 These competing aspects of jouissance are also evident in Eliot’s Note on Tiresias. On the one hand, he supposedly can see “the substance of the poem” (CPP 52), suggesting that The Waste Land, like the seer himself, is an object perhaps even endowed with an identity. When we consider, for example, Marie and her cousin, as well as the woman and man at the beginning of “A Game of Chess,” Tiresias’ foresight resembles the male gaze. The man sees not only what the woman in both cases does not see, but also what she cannot see in the process of being subjugated to desire and thereby becoming herself. On the other hand, as Eliot also emphasizes in the Note, characters have a way of “melting” into each other (CPP 52), thereby bringing about the “unraveling” of identity that Edelman analyzes. Lil and Philomel, as their chiming names imply, blend into a too familiar narrative of female subjugation. Following the argument about suffering that Eliot makes with respect to Barnes, we should not be surprised that the poem’s onlooker, therefore, blends both the foreseeing “Tiresias” and the foresuffering “Tereu” (line 203). For both characters the violent experience of identity’s unravelling amounts to the poem itself. In imputing such understanding to his speaker, Eliot thereby defeats it. As “Tiresias,” this speaker experiences the surplus enjoyment—or jouissance—that marks the emergence of the drive whose pleasure must always be attributed to someone else. As “Tereu,” however, the same speaker experiences desire as a lack always replayed in terms of one’s own repeated trauma. The emptiness of the opening scene of “The Fire Sermon” clearly suggests Tiresias’ blindness. The water nymphs referenced in line 175 and repeated in line 179 have gone, a detail that sets up the contrast with the refrain from Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion: “Sweet Themmes runne softly till I end my Song.” As the title suggests, the “end” or event of his “song” will also mark the beginning of the wedding ceremony for two of the river’s “Nymphes” (line 83). Describing the preparation of these nuptials, Spenser’s speaker especially notices the reaction of the surrounding countryside. After a stanza in which

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And gentle Eccho from the neighbor ground, Their accents did resound. So forth those joyous Birdes did passe along, Adowne the Lee, that to them murmurde low, As he would speake, but that he lackt a tong, Yet did by signes his glad affection show, Making his streame run slow.50

For Lockerd, the betrothal that Spenser hails joins not only the two women with their spouses, but also human beings in general with Nature. Even from the vantage point of his own weariness and disappointment with court life, Spenser can still look forward to the impending marriage and to the renewal that it promises.51 Like Philomel, the river Lee has no tongue; his slowing, however, sufficiently demonstrates the mind’s reciprocity with Nature. By contrast, no such reciprocity between human beings and Nature characterizes Tiresias’ evocation of the Thames. As critics have noted, the vacancy of the scene suggests that the speaker is meditating on summer from the standpoint of fall or winter; consequently, he does not find the detritus of summer night couplings recalled in lines 178 and 179.52 This seasonal change also explains the reference to the river’s covering now being undone: the leaves on the trees overhanging the river no longer act as a tent for it.53 Hence, while the pollution of the Thames does not fully display itself, its emptiness elicits disgusting memories, and this automatic recall points to the vacancy that proves just as constitutive of the human voice as the fullness of sound is in Spenser’s poem. To illustrate this negative construction of the voice, we should consider two other texts in connection with this later portrayal of the Thames. As Michael Whitworth shows, D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow (1915) and J. E. G. De Montmorency’s short story “Sweet Thames, Run Slowly” (1920) also contain references to the line from the Prothalamion quoted in “The Fire Sermon.” In the former, Ursula, summoned to an interview at a place called “Kingston-on-Thames” falls into a dream about the Renaissance that includes the progress of Elizabeth I on the Thames also mentioned in lines 280–289 of “The Fire Sermon.” The whole reverie then concludes with the quotation from Spenser. As a result, her own life seems less real than the fantasy she momentarily constructs.54 In the latter, Reverend Snodland, who studies Medieval

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one of the brides sings, he personifies the birds and river in happy communion with the event:

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manuscripts, is returning home from the library for dinner. Passing one of the streets that leads to the Thames, he meets a woman who takes him to a pageant that corresponds to the one he had been reading about that day. The pageant commemorates the reburial of Richard the Lionheart, whose heart, the reverend learns, still beats for the nation. After the pageant, he arrives at his house and tells the vision to his wife, who laughs at him.55 Language itself occasions the visions described by both Lawrence and De Montmorency. For Ursula, a place name brings on this excessive effect while for Reverend Snodland, a medieval text induces it. By contrast, Tiresias’ allusion to Spenser confronts him with the lack of a dream or vision in the same text in which others found it elaborated so intensely. Most importantly, this lack in The Waste Land seems closely linked to Eliot’s stress on meta-linguistic devices. As Whitworth says, the poem at this point “appears to allude to the very idea of allusion.”56 Thus, we can say that Tiresias’ crisis arises not from an inability to use language, but from his virtuosity with it. The vacancy following on excess that he feels in evoking the Thames carries over to the reader. As Calvin Bedient emphasizes, even when Eliot is describing what is not there, his language has a performative element: “The river may bear no empty bottles, but the river sentence does, and after you have reflected on each item in the series, you have no strength left to think of the river cleansed of the garbagey clutter, and no recollectable motive for doing so.”57 Like the “broken images” (line 22) in “The Burial of the Dead,” Eliot’s sentence about the Thames becomes a metaphor for the poem as a whole. Tiresias gazes on the wreckage before him and makes elaborately allusive connections to other texts. Yet, if the excess of his allusiveness parallels the surplus of jouissance that marks the emergence of the drive, this same play of signifiers also turns on the lack that occasions desire and, especially in “The Fire Sermon,” can only render human beings as partial objects or pieces of words. We see this reduction of humans to body parts in Eliot’s famous description of the end of the work day, the only point in the poem at which Tiresias is named. By comparing office workers to taxicabs “throbbing” to leave (line 217), Eliot stresses that the rhythm of the body and the rhythm of the machine are not really distinct, a connection the clerk and the typist then play out. Moreover, for Tiresias, the throbbing centers on what he lacks—sight and female gender identification. This lost identification with women, symbolized by the disused breasts, occasions the same feeling of disgust evident in “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” and “Hysteria.” In The Waste

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Land, however, it arises from the absence of the woman in Tiresias, rather than from her presence in another person. Indeed, this absence links Tiresias, the typist, and the clerk in a current of desire that precedes their functioning as supposedly cohesive subjects. Because of his greater self-consciousness, Tiresias can describe how he perceives the typist’s routine. As with Marie in “The Burial of the Dead,” the emphasis falls on the trivial. He dwells on the typist’s clothing as it dries from her window. At the same time, he notices her meal portioned out of the metal containers from which she eats. Mechanization sums up the overall pattern of her day: coming home, clearing the breakfast, eating dinner, and having sex with the clerk. In the performing of all of these activities, she resembles the machine by which she earns her living. Subject to the pulsing of sexual desire, she reproduces a chain of signifiers in the repetitions of her life that has as little meaning to her as the language that comes from her typewriter. Such predictability is even more characteristic of her lover, whom Tiresias mockingly associates with making a guess both in his professional and personal life. The employee of a small trading concern, he plays a minor role in a business where speculation and guessing constantly figure in the work. Indeed, even when he leaves the typist’s room, Tiresias emphasizes that he “gropes” (line 248), since the building’s stairway has no lighting. If Eliot reduces her to hands, in the way she mechanically reproduces words on a page, he intensifies this synecdoche with the clerk. Indifferently, his hand pets her just as it does the wall when he feels his way down the stairs. For this reason, the clerk evokes the “Son of man” (line 20) addressed in “The Burial of the Dead.” Just as the former could not “guess” (line 21) that he was a “Son of man,” so the latter, despite his continued guessing, remains the captive of an automatic desire that has dehumanized him. This quality is most obvious in his decision about when to assault the typist. He guesses correctly that her boredom and weariness will make her less likely to resist his advances. In his moment of sexual triumph, however, his blind spot also becomes evident. Specifically, her utter disinterest in fighting back “makes a welcome of indifference” (line 242). The oxymoron in this line suggests that the man imagines himself as an object of desire when, as Tiresias recognizes, she actually despises him. At this juncture, Tiresias’ reflective awareness of the scene almost coincides with the woman’s experience. After the clerk leaves, the typist pauses in her routine to look in the mirror. Her one moment of possible thought now that she is alone almost allows melancholy. As the Notes point out, the description alludes to Oliver Goldsmith’s

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When lovely woman stoops to folly, And finds too late that men betray, What charm can soothe her melancholy, What art can wash her guilt away? The only art her guilt to cover, To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her love, And wring his bosom—is to die.58

Melancholy for the woman Olivia sings about explicitly derives from guilt, and, as the references to art suggest, to the skill and cunning needed to cover up the transgression. Though the woman described may present herself as pure in appearance, the song’s questions imply that Nature, as opposed to art, will always bring out the fact of her guilt. Her suicide, however, does become a way of outwitting Nature by diverting attention from the spectacle of sexual transgression to that of her death. Within the terms of the song, therefore, it functions as a kind of art as well. We see, then, two features of these lines that identify the melancholy as Freudian. First, melancholy may lead to suicide because the melancholic—in this case the woman—experiences her lost lover as still in a relationship with her and still alive. In killing herself, she really expresses her wish to kill him by wringing his bosom. Second, in her self-dramatization, the melancholic woman solicits an audience. In the moment of attempting to cover her guilt and shame, she also seeks the attention of the lost man and the public at large for the repentance—but also the revenge—that she is performing. The incident described in Olivia’s song, however, differs significantly from her situation in the novel. Just as she finishes the second stanza, Squire Thornhill, far from withdrawing from the narrative as the man in the song seems to have done, reappears, and requests that the vicar allow him to continue as his daughter’s lover. To her father’s moralizing about the girl’s ruination and the loss of family honor, the Squire makes a shocking proposal:

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The Vicar of Wakefield. In this novel, the vicar’s oldest daughter, Olivia, has been seduced by Squire Thornhill, also the vicar’s landlord. Returning to the place of the seduction with her parents, Olivia sings this ditty about a young woman whose reputation is ruined by a man:

“If she or you,” returned he, “are resolved to be miserable, I cannot help it. But you may still be happy; and whatever opinion you may have

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For all its impiety, Thornhill’s plan nevertheless imagines an end to the “pleasing distress” that Olivia’s singing of this song had elicited in her parents. More generally, this termination of melancholy parallels the conclusion of the novel, in which Olivia’s marriage to her seducer—which the vicar and his family had thought invalid—actually proves authentic and binding. Clearly, in the scene of the clerk and the typist, the melancholy reprises that of the woman in the song Olivia sings. Where Olivia can enforce commitment on her attacker, however, the typist has no such opportunity. Consequently, the melancholy of the typist’s life takes on a timeless quality that parallels Tiresias’ mode of narration. Specifically, he “perceives” everything up to the arrival of the clerk. The “rest” of the vignette—corresponding to the sexual encounter itself—equates with what he then “foretold” (line 229). Unlike Madame Sosostris in “The Burial of the Dead,” who predicts the future without becoming invested in it, he imagines a link between “foretelling” and “foresuffering.” The typist’s bed becomes everyone else’s because Tiresias already recognizes these two characters as part of an undifferentiated “all” (line 243), whose features, like those of Marie and her cousin, the neurotic woman and her partner, as well as Lil and Albert, remain all too visible. As Morrison says, the triangle of Tiresias, the typist, and the clerk points to “a continuity between antiquity and contemporaneity” that is “too absolute.”60 Far from becoming detached from the past, modern culture repeats it. In this repetition, melancholy also operates, but not with the same trajectory towards death evident in Goldsmith. Tiresias has walked among the dead, but he lives on, seemingly coterminous with the desire occasioned by the return of April at the poem’s start. This persistence of desire fits with the other prominent feature we have noticed in it: disgust. In the earlier (and suppressed) poem “Ode” (1920), Eliot also uses a polluted river to articulate this link. In “Ode,” though, the noxious fumes of the “Mephitic river” have a much more condensed effect. Not only do they refer to the failure of a poet to find inspiration in his material, but they also suggest that the material itself identifies with the smell of his wife on the morning after failed coitus. From the smell, she transforms into the blood of her vaginal discharge.61 With this pattern of images in mind, Colleen

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formed of me, you shall ever find me ready to contribute to it. We can marry her to another in a short time, and what is more, she may keep her lover beside; for I protest I shall ever continue to have a true regard for her.”59

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Lamos argues for a similarity between the “Mephitic river” of “Ode” and the polluted Thames of “The Fire Sermon.” Feminine powers preside over both, and instead of enhancing the man’s inspiration, they only block it.62 Extending Lamos’ argument, we should note that the reduction of the woman to her menstrual blood turns her into another partial object. The failed “bridegroom” can only think of his wife in terms of the “blood upon the bed” on the morning after their night together (lines 8–11).63 Since the woman occasions persecutory anxiety, the man must destroy her by reducing her to pieces—a characteristic of the feelings governing the paranoid-schizoid position. At the end of “The Fire Sermon,” the markers of this feminine presence are the three female voices whom Eliot describes in his Notes as the “daughters of the Thames.” The first voice strikes the note of detachment characteristic of all three as they recall their sexual encounters. In particular, place names along the river where the seductions happened replace the proper names of the partners. The poem does not represent either the women or their partners as whole persons, suggesting that the trauma of what has happened continues to operate in each woman’s repetition of her song. Especially in the case of the first of these speakers, the place names become the actors in the scene. “Highbury” carries the woman on the water, “Richmond” and “Kew” undo her clothes, and by “Richmond” she also raises her knees just before penetration (lines 292–295). Of course, this technique may be the result of never knowing the names of the men, thus reflecting the impersonality of the act. Yet this personification of places underscores that not only has the woman’s sexual desire become alien to her, but so has the language for describing it. Indeed, she experiences language as something not her own (and thus like her absent partner). For this reason, she can only describe her sexual feelings as strange. The second voice expresses the most graphic fragmentation: her heart has been placed under her feet. By speaking of her body as dismembered, this speaker draws attention to the violence previously noticed by Eliot in his account of Tiresias’ subjectification by Jupiter and Juno. If we read these images of heart and feet not merely as body parts but, respectively, as the seat of the affections in the person (the heart) and as poetic feet, then the woman’s language has become separated from, and maybe even tramples down, any notion that her heart or her desires somehow cohere in a whole subject that language can articulate. The tone in which the woman retells the story denies it the pathos which even her partner would like it to have. While he

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clings, unconvincingly, to the possibility of starting over, and thereby asserting some control as a whole person over his desire, she withholds saying anything to him about their relationship. Describing sexual intercourse as an “event” (l.297), this woman recalls the curtailed outcome of Lil’s story when the bar closes. Whether the end is reached (as in the case of this woman) or unknown (as with Lil) no longer matters. Either way, the disconnection between language and desire proves complete. “What should I resent?” (line 299) universalizes this disconnection between language and desire. Ostensibly voiced to herself, this second woman’s closing question reminds us that Tiresias quotes these words to us. Thus, in both the content as well as the form of what she says, this second daughter of the Thames shows that the alterity of desire in general inheres in the act of putting this desire into language. Like the first two daughters of the Thames, Eliot links the third woman to a specific location: “Margate Sands” (line 300). With respect to her present condition, this speaker refuses causal connections for the sexual desire operating between her and her partner even more emphatically than her predecessors. The nothingness she reiterates has a correlative in her partner’s filthy hands and fingernails. Yet, this woman’s stated lack of a connection turns out to be a connection, especially to earlier parts of the poem. First, her claim, especially in the aftermath of sexual contact, recalls the scene with the typist and the clerk. Just as the former has a moment of introspection before turning on the record player, so the latter meditates on her experience before coming to a dead end with a comment on the lowness of her social origins. Her belief that “nothing” (line 305) will come from this encounter parallels the meaninglessness of the sexual contact described by the previous voice. At the same time, the bit of information she gives about her social class suggests that the wish to explain—though the explanation proffered goes nowhere—continues to operate in her. In this way, the woman’s speech confronts us with her trauma even if she is beyond perceiving it herself. Second, the stress on “nothing” recalls the scene of the man and woman in the first part of “A Game of Chess.” As we saw in that incident, the man’s “nothing” in response to the woman might signify the “pearls” that were the sailor’s eyes. In linking one vacancy with another, however, this third voice enacts a more pessimistic use of language. Like so many other characters whom Tiresias encounters, the expression of trauma represents part of an endless recitation of a language whose only meaning is the desire it performs. As “The Fire Sermon” draws to an end, Eliot quotes from the Buddha to show that the flame

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How You Would Have Responded While Tiresias may elicit pity from the reader for the characters he meets by foresuffering their lot, disgust also surfaces in his presentation. This irony governs “The Fire Sermon,” making it unable to effect the moral exhortation its title suggests. Disgust reflects the extent to which Tiresias presents the characters as partial objects rather than as whole ones: they amount to pieces of bodies that increasingly speak in fragmented voices and play out the anxiety of Klein’s paranoidschizoid position. Occasionally, however, Tiresias does move toward a more depressive perspective related to a more integrated object coming into view. In “The Fire Sermon,” the most prominent example of this shift centers on the rendering of the Church of Magnus Martyr, immediately following the episode with the typist and the clerk. The section begins with the quotation from The Tempest about the music Ferdinand hears prior to discovering that his father is still alive: “This music crept by me upon the waters” (line 257). Tiresias connects this music to the music of a mandoline that he sometimes hears as he passes by a bar frequented by the fish vendors in London. Framed by the Church, whose beauty unaccountably captures Tiresias’ attention, the urban scene at Magnus Martyr brings into focus what has been lost more generally in the poem. Tiresias cannot explain his reaction because, as we have seen in his descriptions of the typist and the clerk and the Thames daughters, his vision more typically dwells on the partial objects of paranoid fantasy rather than whole ones related to depressive mourning. The strangeness with respect to whole objects carries over to the rendering of Phlebas, the drowned sailor, in “Death by Water.” Detached from making or losing money, the sailor directly contrasts with the merchant encountered by Tiresias in “The Fire Sermon.” Like the clerk and the typist, the merchant is associated with equipment specific to his trade. In his pockets he carries the dried fruit in which he trades; as line 211 makes clear, even these have been itemized for “cost, insurance and freight.” This careful measuring in trade carries over to the invitation the merchant extends to Tiresias—they will have lunch and then spend two days together in a hotel. Like

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of desire in human beings exempts no one. Indeed, the quote from Augustine about being taken out of this fire, minus its grammatical object in line 310, merely enacts the longing for release as part of the bondage. How the audience can adjudicate between these claims about language and desire is the focus of the final section.

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the clerk with the typist, the merchant has measured out and calculated the cost and benefits of sex with Tiresias. Regardless of sexual orientation, therefore, all four remain subject to a circuit of desiring that reduces people to partial and fragmentary objects of disgust in Tiresias’ retrospective vision. Conversely, Phlebas’ forgetting the money made or lost appears to remove him from the machinations of desire working throughout “The Fire Sermon.” Indeed, one might argue that the account of the sailor’s death finally frames desire with a heretofore missing exhortation to the audience: “Consider Phlebas, who once was handsome and tall as you” (line 321). More directly than at any other point in the poem, Eliot seems to hold out the possibility of depressive mourning for a lost full object of love. This stress on depressive mourning for a whole object—and the allied project of addressing a cohesive reader—fits very well with interpretations of The Waste Land that see a transformative vision operative in it. According to Lockerd, Phlebas’ going into the swirling waters and passing through his life from adulthood back to youth marks the “transcendence” of time and place. For Lockerd, the sea changes the sailor into the “something rich and strange” (I.2.404) of The Tempest.64 Consequently, when the speaker asks the audience to think about the corpse of the drowned sailor, he is raising the question of the efficacy of the poem itself. Having demonstrated the automatic and unending movement to desire in “A Game of Chess” and “The Fire Sermon,” he is now going to offer some end or meaning to this desire in light of Phlebas’ death. Nevertheless, just as Magnus Martyr’s power remains unavailable to language, so Eliot presents the sailor’s transformation as only barely audible. In neither case does the lost object as whole seem firmly established in Tiresias’ imagination. Subsequently, in “What the Thunder Said,” similar whispers possess a hallucinatory and arbitrary quality. In lines 378–382, a woman plays with her hair, generating “whisper music” (line 379). Simultaneously, bats keep time with this sound by flapping their wings and creeping down a charred wall. As Matthew Hart argues, the “violet light” of this passage recalls the time of day at which the clerk and the typist return, as well as the violence of collapsing buildings in ancient and modern cities alike. For this reason, Hart concludes that in The Waste Land, even the most mundane details of private life cannot avoid implication in the larger movement of history: “the English commuter . . . becomes an objective correlative for the collapse of Europe’s imperial towers.”65 Extending this argument, I think that the whisper music performs this collapse as the return of paranoid anxiety in response to the repeated trauma of a city whose violent upheavals,

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masquerading as sociopolitical reform in line 373, lead nowhere. Barely audible in this chaos is “the murmur of maternal lamentation” (line 366). Like the “far away” Hallam, this music, even if it is real, remains at a remove from the speaker. An expression of depressive mourning in a recognizable form, the lamentation’s obscurity contrasts with the fierce presence of the sound heard at this juncture. Resembling the neurotic woman in “A Game of Chess,” the woman in line 378 also has hair that has come to life. Where the former seems to telescope the excess signification of the staring pictures into angry, almost incoherent speech, the latter presents an aural equivalent of this gaze. Just as the pictures in “A Game of Chess” allude to past stories even as they stare in the present, so the reference to the burned wall in line 382 conflates two references in William Blake’s “London.” Describing “the chimney-sweeper’s cry” and the “soldier’s sigh,” Blake’s speaker exclaims: How the chimney-sweeper’s cry Every blackning Church appalls And the hapless soldier’s sigh Runs in blood down palace walls.66

By rhyming “sigh” and “cry,” Blake announces the futility of any attempt to break out of “the mind forged manacles” (line 8) that imprison the human imagination. Similarly, Eliot’s speaker implies that the music he hears shackles him much as the gaze did earlier. By stressing the whispers that govern the bats’ movement, the speaker emphasizes that the hallucinatory and random quality to what he sees nevertheless has its own logic. Without the anchorage of a whole signifier that would create a binding relation to the external world, the speaker must create a delusion to cover this unbearable lack in desire. At the start of “What the Thunder Said,” the same lack in desire has given rise to the speaker’s obsession with water as he walks through a parched region in the mountains. The images of rock and sand recall the previous references to rocks and dust from “The Burial of the Dead.” Now, though, Eliot magnifies the wreckage to encompass the vastness of the scene around the speaker. Once again, he can focus on parts of bodies, but not on whole ones. Clearly, his desperation comes from physical thirst; he would drink if he could find some water. Yet the extremity of his physical condition intersects with his paranoia. In line 337, for example, the feeling of dried sweat, and feet surrounded by sand, confronts us with the immediacy of his condition while also

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stressing his fragmentation. Like the Thames daughters, he only understands his body as a collection of parts. These parts, in turn, double as metaphors for a landscape that, like the whisper music, also seems hallucinatory: “Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit” (line 339). His own depleted glands suggest Nature’s inability to spit even a little rain. This conflation of the larger scene with the individual’s body further iterates the paranoid fear operating in the speaker’s imagination. With their stress on the sounds of running water and of birds, lines 353–359 appear to hold out the possibility of a reversal of this fear. In particular, critics recognize the “hermit-thrush” as an allusion to Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”67 As Ronald Bush argues, the bird’s presence in the poem, along with the hallucinated sound of water in line 356, calls attention to both poets’ fascination with the sheer incantatory power of language.68 In terms of Klein’s account of trust, it appears that Eliot’s speaker hopes to find in the image of the thrush another depressive object which would help him to repair his faith in the external world by at least anchoring him to a vision of what he has lost. Such trust characterizes Whitman’s speaker who sees the bird as a double: “In the swamp in secluded recesses, / A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song” (lines 18–19). Though Whitman’s speaker also focuses on death, this person at least seems to recognize what has been lost: “Song of the bleeding throat, / Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know, / If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)” (lines 23–25). Eliot’s bird, however, is much more ambivalent.69 On the one hand, in line 357 the speaker mentions its singing, suggesting nostalgia for a whole object that would elicit love and trust. On the other hand, The Waste Land evokes this bird in the midst of a scene whose carnivorousness makes paranoid anxiety the speaker’s more immediate reaction. As the speaker approaches the chapel, he actually does hear the sound of a cock crowing. This sound, however, remains just as ambiguous as the thrush’s illusory song. Possibly it recalls Peter’s betrayal of Jesus before the crucifixion. This interpretation, though, assumes that the speaker still has something to lose, a reading that the scene does not support. Physically, the building has already become an empty shell, only noticed by the speaker after he sees the ruined graves with the overgrown grass making music. While the music might echo the sounds that Tiresias has heard near Magnus Martyr, or the maternal lamentation, its origin in strands of dry grass more directly evokes the whisper music played on the woman’s hair. This harsher sound fits

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with the overall portrayal of the bones’ desiccation in line 392. These bones may come from the graves around the chapel. Or perhaps they describe the chapel itself, which, without windows, and with its door swinging in the wind, has deteriorated into a skeleton of a building. Either way, the sounds that come from its vicinity do not proclaim its power. Rather, they suggest an absence of power from a place where one might have expected to find it, because the chapel’s wreckage reminds the speaker of his own impotence. In Lacanian terms, this impotence corresponds to the lack that marks the operation of desire and subjugation to the gaze. By placing it in a mountain setting, Eliot also connects it to the Himalayas, where the thunder supposedly speaks. As in the description of the chapel, the expectation of some sort of powerful disclosure plays a critical role. Specifically, an approaching thunderstorm occupies the speaker. Although the gathering clouds portend an overwhelming display of Nature’s power, nothing of the sort actually occurs. Rather, the dominant image in lines 396–398 is of withered leaves. These recall the opening of “The Fire Sermon” in which they resemble fingers holding onto the muddy bank. Like the dry bones and the wrecked chapel, the leaves evoke parts of bodies, but not whole ones. Consequently, they point to what the speaker cannot access—a full object of depressive mourning. Indeed, the desire for this object focuses the speaker’s expectations. Yet another sound—the thunder’s “DA”—mimes a voice. The conjunction of such a portentous sound with rain occasions a series of interpretations about the “DA” that might make us believe that a shift beyond paranoid anxiety to depressive mourning has occurred. Most famously, in lines 401–410, the speaker first characterizes the “DA” as related to an act of giving and even surrendering. Unlike the portrayal of the clerk and the typist or of the merchant and Tiresias, premeditation does not immediately enter into the exchange, suggesting the speaker’s vulnerability to another person that the earlier examples lack. In addition, by beginning the interchange with the question in line 402, Eliot underscores its importance as part of authentic conversation. Of course, we have seen conversations, or recollections of conversations, earlier in this poem: Marie and the archduke, the incident with the hyacinth girl, the man and woman at the start of “A Game of Chess,” and even the story of Lil and Albert. All of these, however, depend on the asymmetry of the power relationships between the participants. Here, by contrast, the speaker’s answer to the question posed by the thunder holds out the possibility that, finally, he has encountered a whole object of love which, in spite of its being lost, also has proved worthy of him. Critically, this object

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emerges as a result of the exchange and does not need to be controlled by one or the other of the participants; thus it demonstrates a degree of mutuality.70 Specifically, the speaker addresses the thunder as a companion in line 403 and elaborates the connection between the need for love implied by the question and the individual’s response of giving love. This response, on the one hand, may prove dangerous because it involves at least a moment of acquiescence to a power beyond the self. Emphatically, such submission is not concerned with future memorials, as represented by obituaries, memories, or wills. On the other hand, the speaker clearly desires this subordination because it offers the only assurance that the self had of having lived as a particular individual. Some critics have argued that the risk in the speaker’s surrender derives from indulgence in a forbidden relationship with a person of the same sex.71 Such an argument reveals little about Eliot; at the same time, the excess of signification attached to homosexual pleasure plays a key role at this point in the poem. In particular, this pleasure works against automatic compliance to the dictates of prudence. Recalling Tiresias’ entrapment in the losing question about whether men or women get more pleasure from sex, we see that the surrender described in this passage represents an embrace of this disavowed sexual pleasure. Instead of imagining sexual pleasure as predicated of someone else—or, as Jupiter and Juno did, of another gender—the speaker apprehends the responsibility to submit to the pleasure and chaos of sex that does not have a properly generative future connected with it. Edelman characterizes this responsibility as one that queers can bring into view by identifying with the negativity of the drive: “De-idealizing the metaphorics of meaning on which heteroreproduction takes its stand, queerness exposes sexuality’s inevitable coloration by the drive: its insistence on repetition, its stubborn denial of teleology, its resistance to determinations of meaning (except insofar as it admits this refusal to admit such determinations of meaning), and, above all, its rejection of spiritualization through marriage to reproductive futurism” (27). In the example from Ovid, Jupiter and Juno represent this normative production of meaning. By default, Tiresias confronts the queer identification with the drive, which it becomes his responsibility to assume. Yet such concerns with generativity and futurity prove difficult, if not impossible, to overcome. This problem becomes evident in the second “DA” of the thunder. Now the setting shifts to a prison, as evidenced by the speaker’s obsession with the locking and unlocking of the cell door. Jewel Spears Brooker argues that the prison works

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as a metaphor for the individual understood as separated from the objects of the surrounding world.72 Following “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” she also sees Eliot engaging a dialectic that allows such personal suffering to become “an object for criticism and recreation.”73 Thus, by objectifying his own suffering, Eliot can give it a future-oriented and even redemptive value. But while he may understand this move conceptually, can he actually perform such trust in the poem? That this question haunts him is signaled by the switch from “I” to “we,” in lines 414–415, as the speaker meditates on being locked in. All human beings, it would appear, are locked into subjectivity and particular historical circumstances. Most importantly, from a Lacanian perspective, language acquisition and mastery, while essential, also effect this separation. With respect to The Waste Land, the concern with the key as a future means of leaving the prison of subjectivity has become the problem. The allusion Eliot makes in lines 412–415 illustrates this point. In Book XXXIII of the Inferno, Dante speaks to Count Ugolino of Pisa, who had been locked in the city tower to starve to death. Since Ugolino’s young sons were locked in with him, he also had to face the prospect of no future for them. Nevertheless, as the finality of the key’s turn suggests, the fantasy of futurity dies very hard. The same is true of the “aethereal rumours” (line 416) that momentarily revive Coriolanus. In alluding to this Shakespearian hero, the speaker also must confront the fact that he died a prisoner. Subjectivity, Eliot suggests, does not prove tragic because we find ourselves imprisoned in history and language while facing repeated trauma in the present. Rather, the difficulty arises when dreams of futurity foreclose the kind of enhanced living in the present that would make life feel less regimented. The final “DA” registers this missed opportunity. Ugolino, Coriolanus, and, implicitly, all the prisoners met by Tiresias see freedom in terms of anything that would undo external constraint. Yet, this obsession with freedom as simply the opposite of determinism exemplifies the problem. Clearly, the speaker connects freedom to memory. Recalling a boat trip with a good sailor, he speaks of the journey as a pleasure because the one in charge of the boat had become so attuned to the external environment. Unlike Maria’s memory of the mountains as a place of alleged freedom, however, this memory of sailing does not operate as part of a redemptive or future-oriented project. Several details support this view. First, the emphasis does not fall on the boat’s destination. Rather, the speaker points out a particular set of conditions—the wind, the sailor, and the water—that made the entire movement graceful at that one moment.

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Second, what looks like a lesson or meaning from this experience actually highlights the occlusion of this possibility. Addressing the reader in lines 421–423, the speaker suggests that just as the boat responded gracefully, so too would anyone else present. Furthermore, by stressing that the boat obeys the sailor’s competent hands, the speaker again takes up the issue of surrender. The temptation lies in thinking that the future would have provided the redemption—or at least an explanation—of how such giving over of the will is possible. In fact, it plays no such role. If it did, then the sailor’s hands would be reminiscent of In Memoriam’s “hands / That reach thro’ nature, moulding men” (124.23–24). In other words, they would replace the groping hands of the clerk on the typist as well as the clutching fingers of Marie and the Thames daughters. The statement in line 421, however, is in the past conditional: Eliot is stressing that although the reader would have responded in this way, the opportunity was missed. Indeed, the stress on an invitation raises the question of knowledge in the past. Perhaps the opportunity for submission was missed because of a defective will. Even more importantly, though, he seems not to have recognized the invitation when it came. In this sense, the speaker’s missed invitation to surrender resembles Lacan’s redescription of the dream of the burning child. Both Lacan’s and Eliot’s experiences announce their own impossibility as conditions for an individual’s becoming conscious of them at all. This impossibility at the core of human consciousness returns at the end of The Waste Land. In the closing vignette, the speaker sits fishing and, in line 425, reflects on setting his own domain right. Echoing the title of the poem, this voice recalls the reflexivity of the reference to “broken images” (line 22) in “The Burial of the Dead.” In addition, fishing recalls the speaker’s earlier mention of “fishing in the dull canal” and “musing on the king my brother’s wreck / And on the king my father’s wreck before him” (lines 192–193). One might argue, therefore, that he hopes to distinguish himself from the “wreck” not only of biological, but also of pagan, literary predecessors.74 Most importantly, the speaker again nods toward a redemption of experience as implied by the quotation from Dante’s Purgatorio: “Poi s’acose nel foco che gli affina / Quando fiam uti chelidon” (lines 428–429; “Then he hid himself in the fire that purifies him”).75 Describing the troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel, Dante emphasizes that after speaking, Arnaut wants to return to the purgatorial fire that will save him. Coming at the end of The Waste Land, this declaration suggests that the speaker also aspires to engage in a process of correcting his own sexual desire in the same manner as Arnaut and Dante.

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Yet the poem’s close contains two other citations. Read together, they suggest that the future redemption envisioned by Arnaut amounts to a fantasy that enacts its impossibility in the moment one becomes conscious of it. These traumas register this blockage as the prolonging of desire. First, the mention of a bird in line 429 once again takes up the story of Philomela, but as told in the first or second century love poem The Vigil of Venus. In this poem, the narrator longs to be raped as Philomela was so that he can undergo transformation into a bird that can sing. By embedding this image in an exclamation, the speaker prolongs the violence rather than bringing it to completion.76 In this way the conclusion of “What the Thunder Said” connects language to an act of traumatic brutality that is witness to the perennial functioning of sexual desire rather than to its transcendence in a projected future. Second, the allusion to Hieronymo in Kyd’s The Revenger’s Tragedy places strong emphasis on the hero’s deprivation of speech. Wanting to avenge his son’s murder, Hieronymo puts on a play in the course of which he kills the murderers, who have themselves commissioned the performance. Interrogated by the authorities, he then bites out his tongue rather than admit to what he has done.77 In a sense, therefore, this character’s relation to his audience is ironic, a trait which Eliot’s speaker underscores with the reference to fitting to an adversary in line 432. Just as Hieronymo has agreed to “fit” or accommodate himself to the murderers’ plans in order to carry out his own, so Eliot’s speaker also ironically aligns himself to his audience’s redemptive fantasy by offering Kyd’s text as one of the poem’s final sources. The closing lines of the poem indicate that the pervasiveness of this fantasy in people’s imaginations actually underscores its failure. By highlighting Philomela’s and Hieronymo’s traumas, the speaker simultaneously performs his own captivation in desire and subjectivity as well as his inability to articulate what such identification means. In the same way, the last six words of the poem iterate this defeat but do not explain it: “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih” (lines 433–434). In repeating the three words of the thunder, the speaker for a final time emphasizes that his continued subjugation to desire equates with subjugation to a language that he has experienced as constitutive of the discourse of the Other. Wishing to discover a way out of subjugation to language in his recollection of Hieronymo, the speaker instead finds that desire not only has mastered but also always will master him. His repetition of “Shantih” three times, while it may close the poem, does not end it. Although the poem does end in quiet, this quiet simply reiterates the speaker’s

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likeness to the human remains that have appeared throughout the poem. They memorialize a failure of meaning at the level of both language and sexuality. This failure defeats, rather than enhances, the human subject’s projection of a future. How one might rediscover trust in a present detached from such a future is the focus of James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover. It is also the topic of the Epilogue.

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“Th e Ton e We Trust e d Most”: M e r r i l l’s T H E B O O K O F E PH R A I M

Trauma repeats itself in the survivor as an emptiness perennially

recited by desire. Yet around this emptiness a discourse also circles that is bound up with trust as one of its creative principles. The Prelude, In Memoriam, and The Waste Land bear out this tension as an ongoing melancholy whose refusal of a substitute for the dead ultimately articulates an ethical stance. Wordsworth offers a vivid touchstone for such faithfulness to desire as he stands “Mute” before the Boy of Winander’s grave (1805, V.422; 1850, V.397). Having placed the boy in his gaze, he is simultaneously exposed as fixed in the gaze of the Other, whose presence is signaled by the impairment of speech. On the one hand, his repeated visits to this and other “spots of time”—through actual journeys and through memory— suggest the pull of a trauma to which, like the grave, he continually returns. On the other hand, the return itself bespeaks a trust in the language for his loss that is the basis of his poetic vocation. Tennyson takes this concern with impairment a step further by rebelling against it. As In Memoriam progresses, the question is less whether there is an afterlife than whether he can communicate with Hallam in the present. In section 82 he affirms the transcendence of his friend’s goodness: “I know transplanted human worth / Will bloom to profit otherwhere” (82.11–12). The difficulty is that Hallam and he are so far apart that they cannot converse:

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Epilogue

For this alone on Death I wreak The wrath that garners in my heart He put our lives so far apart We cannot hear each other speak. (82.13–16)

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Tennyson is faithful to his desire by continuing to address Hallam as his elusive interlocutor. Ultimately projecting him into the poem as an ideal reader, Tennyson comes close to saying that trust in language resembles trust in God. Both kinds of trust illustrate Tennyson’s fideism; feeling forms the basis for his trust in God and for his trust in language. The circularity of this reasoning, in turn, highlights the lack that constitutes the speaking self. Finally, The Waste Land would appear to represent the impossibility of this faith inasmuch as despair in the face of trauma seems to follow the same logic. Eliot explores frequent impairments to communication, ultimately with the effect of blurring the distinction between the dead and the living to the point where life becomes a kind of stain that covers up its constitutive emptiness. Early on, one of the speakers notices a large crowd on London Bridge. “I had not thought death had undone so many” (line 63), he comments, just before calling out to Stetson—a reader with a buried “corpse” or corpus. But this traumatized audience does not seem to hear. Near the poem’s close, the first utterance from the thunder, in addition to being a missed chance for friendship and love, is also a conversation manqué: . . . What have we given? My friend, blood shaking at my heart, The awful daring of a moment’s surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract, By this, and this only, we have existed. (lines 402–406)

Whether real or imagined, the exchange is moving because it brings into focus what may not be retractable about a person’s work and words. In this way it resembles the “prophetic blast of harmony” that Wordsworth’s horseman is so anxious to preserve (1805, V.96; 1850, V.95) as well as the poems Tennyson brings onto the boat aboard which he and Hallam will sail the “deep” (103.16). Yet the stillborn quality to the conversation Eliot imagines emerges in the fact that the lines proceed negatively. The daring that might make one remembered—or loved—is intertwined with emptiness at the core of being that, for Eliot, is the most apt commemoration. Most importantly, the defeat inscribed in Eliot’s memorial may expose the vulnerability of the two earlier poets. His voice comes from the thunder, Tennyson’s and Wordsworth’s from dreams. This emphasis on lack as constitutive of poetic voice and of its legacy remains prominent in contemporary poetry. James Merrill’s

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trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover, and especially its first part, The Book of Ephraim, is a case in point. To a degree, it parodies the discourse of trauma—both individual and collective—as a way of characterizing and explaining the pain of lack and loss as they appear and reappear in life. In contrast to Wordsworth’s muteness before the grave, Merrill and his partner David Jackson (respectively, JM and DJ in the poem) enjoy an ease of communication with their “familiar spirit” Ephraim, whom they contact by means of a Ouija board. The informality of their preparation in section B makes this point: Properties: A milk glass tabletop. A blue-and-white cup from the Five & Ten. Pencil, paper. Heavy cardboard sheet Over which the letters A to Z Spread in an arc, our covenant with whom it would concern; also The Arabic numerals, and YES and NO. What more could a familiar spirit want? Well, when he knew us better, he’d suggest We prop a mirror in the facing chair. Erect and gleaming, silver-hearted guest, We saw each other in it. He saw us.1

As Merrill would later comment in his memoir, the spirits—possibly in contrast to Hallam’s in In Memoriam—were quite willing to speak to them. Additionally, the Ouija board through which spirits and mediums communicate is precisely the kind of interaction with the dead that Tennyson dismisses as his poem builds up to Hallam’s visitation. At the same time, with respect to Eliot’s blurring of the boundaries between the dead and the living, the use of the Ouija board sets up a boundary between these states that is demarked in Merrill’s poem by the lettering. The spirits’ speech is always marked by capital letters, the mediums by conventional lower and upper case writing. Yet Merrill’s concern is not exclusively, or even primarily, satiric. Like Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot, he grapples with very real losses and their continued effects. For example, in the trilogy’s Coda: The Higher Keys, he poignantly registers the shock of an unexpected death. The final session at the Ouija board is to be conducted at DJ and JM’s home in Athens, during which JM will read from the completed text and to which they have invited many of their spirit friends. Just before starting, though, JM and DJ are surprised by their living

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Epilogue

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. . . A reverence MAJESTY AND FRIENDS—when shatteringly The doorbell rings. Our doorbell here in Athens. We start up. David opens to a form Gaunt, bespectacled, begrimed, in black, But black worn days, nights, journeyed, sweated in – Vasili? . . . (CLS 558)

Embarassed, they wish to put away the game, “Because, just as this life takes precedence / Over the next one, so does live despair / Over a poem or a parlor game” (CLS 558). Vasili, however, insists that they continue with it, believing that it will help divert him from his grief. This request brings into focus JM’s “worst fear”: insofar as this poem is “written for the dead,” it will “leave a living reader cold” (CLS 559). That this is not the effect of the poem—at least not on Vasili—is suggested by Mimi’s inclusion in the party by another dead female friend, Maria Mitsotaki. Discovered to be the spirit of Plato speaking to the mediums through Maria’s voice, Maria as Plato now receives Mimi into their company: . . . Drawing Mimi to her breast, Maria dries her tears; praising their constancy Their CHILDLESS LOVE and MR BASIL’S WIT Bids him ATTEND AND MAKE GOOD SENSE OF IT (& CHANGE THAT SHIRT!), NOW, POET READ! . . . (CLS 559)

With a touch of humor directed at Vasili’s unkempt clothes, Maria as Plato points to an inclusiveness of vision in the poem that does not diminish the trauma of Vasili’s loss of Mimi. Rather, it connects it to JM and DJ’s ongoing sense of Maria’s absence, precisely because she is now imagined as Plato. By ending The Changing Light at Sandover in this way, Merrill thereby suggests that the traumas of ordinary life not only can but also need to be integrated into art—everything depends on whether the poet has adequately understood the tone his material requires. In this respect, Merrill’s offhand inclusion of a list of “Dramatis Personae” in section D of The Book of Ephraim is illuminating. This list, like the guests invited at the end of the trilogy, represents a mixture of both fictional and real characters. That the distinction does matter accounts, as the incident with Vasili illustrates, for the poem’s

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friend Vassilis Vassilikos, who arrives unexpectedly from Rome where his wife Mimi had died suddenly:

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Lodeizen, Hans, 1924–1950 Dutch poet. Author of Het Innerlijk Behang, &c. Studies in America. Clever, goodnatured, solitary, blond, All to a disquieting degree. Plays a recording of the “Spring” Sonata One May night when JM has a fever; Unspoken things divide them from then on. Dies of leukemia in Switzerland, The country of a thousand years of peace. (CLS 12)

Hans and JM’s “division”—not necessarily a quarrel—apparently arises after the former’s act of kindness. Like Eliot’s “awful daring of a moment’s surrender,” it centers on vulnerability: physical for JM; emotional, and perhaps sexual, for both. Most importantly, the source of division is either consciously left unsaid or perhaps not expressible in words. Whatever the case, this lack of fluency plays out in their relationship both at the time of Hans’ illness and when he returns to them through the Ouija board. With regard to Hans’ illness, Merrill had already memorialized his friend in “The Country of A Thousand Years of Peace” (1959). The poem describes Hans as not fluent in Switzerland’s “fourth tongue,” which is death: Here they all come to die, Fluent therein as in a fourth tongue But for a young man not yet of their race It was a madness you should lie Blind in one eye, and fed By the blood of a scrubbed face. (CP 57)

Impending death in one so young troubles the Swiss caretakers. Consequently, “the glittering neutrality / Of clock and chocolate and lake and cloud” (lines 9–10) become oppressive not because they are reminders of death, but because they so resolutely resist it. As he would recall in his memoir, Merrill initially believed that this deferral of death made it insufficiently “real” to his friend and was therefore unfair to him. From this perspective, the sword mentioned in the fifth stanza, as Merrill also stresses in his memoir, recalls the

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pathos. Even before this climax, however, in The Book of Ephraim, Merrill offers a glimpse at the depth of loss on which the entire work turns. This is the description of Hans Lodeizen:

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sword of Damocles.2 Hans, that is, suffers the power of “the old masters of disease”—the doctors—“Who dangling high above you on a hair / The sword that, never falling, kills” (lines 15–16). They have the power to keep him alive temporarily, but Merrill sees this delay as a kind of death-in-life from which he would like to see his friend released. What the doctors want to do is bring Hans back from “that starry land / Under the world” (lines 17–18) that can only be glimpsed through death. Subsequently, however, Merrill comes to see this interpretation as mistaken or at least insufficient. In particular, he recognizes that his anger over the supposed deferral of Hans’ death “was pure poetic double-talk, meaning, if it meant anything, that I as survivor remained incapable, and would for months and months, of deeply realizing what had befallen my poor friend” (ADP 501). The breakthrough comes when he realizes that the sword was not his own invention but came from one of Hans’ poems—“his image and the image of his youthful valor, which on his deathbed he had put into my hands” (ADP 501). “The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace,” therefore, concerns the transmission of poetic vocation; Merrill feels the sword’s “finish and sharp weight / Flashing in his own hand” (lines 19–20). With regard to Hans’ return via the Ouija board, the “starry land” anticipates The Book of Ephraim as the site in which Hans’ foreclosed promise comes to expression in the lives of JM and DJ. No direct conversation, however, occurs between the mediums and Hans in this part of the poem; a curious feature, since, in the third part of the trilogy, Scripts for the Pageant, they will have extended conversations with the spirit of another poet, W. H. Auden. Just as Hans was not fluent in the discourse of death during his illness in Switzerland, so he is denied “taste and hearing”—and implicitly speech—at his current “stage” of existence after death (CLS 12). This emphasis on impairment in speech echoes Tennyson’s evocation of Hallam. In both cases, a young literary man, who has died prematurely, is imagined as having a strong enough spirit to inhabit the work of his living friend. Where Hallam visits Tennyson on the lawn at Somersby, Hans comes into JM and DJ’s living room: “For Hans at last has entered the red room— / Hans who on his deathbed had still smiled / Into my eyes” (CLS 24). Though he cannot hear or speak to them, he can see them, and JM recalls the emotional intensity of this presence in section D:

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Hans’ Stage is that of vision pure And simple; rinse the cup with rum for him, He cannot find his tongue, his eyes alone Burn, filling . . . as this moment do my own. (CLS 12)

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Though the presence of Hans is beneficent, the force of his gaze— beyond him as much as it is beyond JM and DJ—is also quite evident here. In the moment of being seen by JM’s dead friend, the couple also becomes aware of a pull toward separation in their relationship that the experience of the Ouija board does not cause so much as bring to the surface. JM captures the melancholy of this awareness in the lines immediately preceding Hans’ arrival in their home: We take long walks among the flying leaves And ponder turnings taken by our lives. Look at each other closely, as friends will On parting. This is not farewell, Not now. Yet something in the sad, End-of-season light remains unsaid. (CLS 23–24)

Autumn gives them a foretaste of parting even if the moment has not yet arrived. Hans had looked into JM’s eyes before his departure; now JM and DJ look at each other in the same way. Indeed, absence embodied in the very presence of the beloved is what characterizes the relationship between JM and DJ.. Through Ephraim, they learn that Hans has intervened, “as patrons may not,” for JM. The discovery is that this life is to be the last one for JM. Since Hans may not speak to them directly, Ephraim communicates the information back to them: “[Hans Lodeizen] REMEMBERS U / STILL HEARS THRU U JM A VERNAL MUSIC /THIS WILL BE YR LAST LIFE THANKS TO HIM” (CLS 24). JM’s reaction to this news is to be “of two minds”: “Do I want it all to end? / If there’s a choice— and what about my friend? What about David? Will he too—?” (CLS 24). Something here is left unsaid. JM protests that he doesn’t want to go to heaven without DJ and comically refuses the role of the Blessed Damozel for the duration of the remaining two to three lives that DJ faces. This mixture of comedy and poignancy at this juncture is important. On the one hand, the comic components—DJ has more lives to face and JM does not—brings into focus the overall resistance to being a couple that their portrait embodies. As the poem linked to the ring DJ gives JM for their twenty-fifth anniversary reads:

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Epilogue

JM from DJ entering Our 25th year – Often distant, ever dear. (Diamonds not from Pharaoh’s barge But MFJ’s engagement ring – Sorry they’re so large!) (CLS 352–353)

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On the other hand, this scene has the function of foretelling the increasing separation between JM and DJ as the years go on, something this recollection of the encounter with Hans and Ephraim appears to predict. At the height of his anger, JM can only complain that Ephraim was “insensitive” to them. Although JM tries to reassure DJ, the memory of the incident lingers: Foreshadower of nothing, dearest heart, But the dim wish of lives to drift apart. Times we’ve felt, returning to this house Together, separately, back from somewhere – Still in coat and muffler, turning up The thermostat while a slow eddying Chill about our ankles all but purrs. (CLS 25)

The nothing mentioned here has several features. First, it may simply reiterate that the Ouija board is all play—Ephraim’s prediction is simply the “nothing” that comes out of this “parlor game” (CLS 558). Second, it contrasts with the one matter of substance in the prediction. Specifically, it foreshadows their “dim” but real “wish” for some kind of separation. Though not a fully conscious wish, JM apprehends that it will get played out eventually. Third, perhaps it is the lack that makes their relationship work. JM and DJ require some space—physically, affectively, and sexually—for the partnership that produces the poem to continue. The tragedy is that the discourse of heterosexuality, embodied in the “ornaments in pairs / Gazing straight through us, dust-bitten, vindictive” (CLS 25), does not allow for this need. In The Waste Land history returns as the “staring forms” (line 104) that haunt the neurotic woman and her lover with a feeling of strangeness, thereby pointing to a split between the eye and the gaze. Similarly, JM and DJ find their own history repeated back to them as they arrive home alone even though they are in each other’s company. The most striking emblem for this absence in presence is “the ghost of roughness underfoot” (CLS 25) in their threshold. While it refers to the melancholy that JM and DJ confront in their history, it also literally refers to the heart that another dead friend, Maya Deren, had emblazoned in the entryway of their apartment by burning white meal sprinkled with rum in the shape of a heart. Describing the figure, JM suggests that it shows how their relationship has evolved around

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. . . Much come-and-go Has blackened, pared the scabby curlicue Down to smatterings which, even so, Promise to last this lifetime. That will do. (CLS 25)

If this mark on the floor recalls that the relationship between JM and DJ will not last for eternity, it also stresses the importance of the present life in which living and loving remain possible. Above all, this focus on the present enables Merrill to introduce a note of humor into his meditation that is missing from the other texts this study has considered. JM lays out the nuances of this tone in section E. Initially, he describes Ephraim’s patient education of his pupils even though he must have found them “Ignorant and lazy” (CLS 15). With regard to sensual pleasures, Ephraim gives this advice: . . . TAKE our teacher told us FROM SENSUAL PLEASURE ONLY WHAT WILL NOT DURING IT BE EVEN PARTLY SPOILED BY FEAR OF LOSING TOO MUCH. (CLS 15)

In the moment of enjoying something related to the senses, JM and DJ should notice what they can hold without fear of losing. This unspoiled pleasure gives one an easy grasp on what has been enjoyed and ought to be all that is remembered. JM emphasizes that this was “the tone / We trusted most, a smiling Hellenistic / Lightness from beyond the grave” (CLS 15). On the other hand, the tone to be trusted least is Ephraim’s whimsy about George Bernard Shaw, one of the other spirits at level six in the afterlife. Patron to a recently dead child who had been cooked alive, Shaw is “MADE SQUEAMISH” by his responsibility (CLS 17). Ephraim’s rhyme teases Shaw’s vegetarian fastidiousness: “AT 6 WITH ME / VEGETARIAN ONCE HAD TO CLAIM A FINE BROTH OF BOY COOKED OVER FLAME” (CLS 17). Impatiently, JM comments: “This was the tone we trusted not one bit / Must everything be witty?” Ephraim’s reply, however, exposes that the tones at the start and at the close of section E are not so completely different: “AH MY DEARS / I AM NOT LAUGHING I SIMPLY WILL NOT SHED TEARS” (CLS 17). Hans’ smiling in the face of death, therefore, becomes Merrill’s strategy as well. It works in two ways in The Changing Light at Sandover. First, it suggests a pleasure in present life that is no less

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the cycle of arrivals and departures that also structure the poem:

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real for its being refined. This pleasure begets a style that is light and inviting—“the tone / We trusted most.” Second, this tone is tied up with friends like Hans who have been lost—or like DJ from whom he is increasingly separated. The shock is that this light tone is embedded in an often traumatic history—personal, national, even at the level of the species—where lack remains the formative principle. In The Book of Ephraim, JM comes closest to naming this principle in the characterization—or non-characterization—of his mother. After summarizing the legend of St. Theodore, who rescued his mother from a dragon, he playfully alludes to Hellen Ingram Merrill as the absence in this book. Discussion of the legend, in other words, “lights up, as scholarship / Now and then does, a matter hitherto / Overpainted—the absence from these pages / Of my own mother” (CLS 83–84). This claim leads to his concession: “of course she’s here / Throughout, the breath drawn after every line, / Essential to its making as to mine” (CLS 84). By associating his mother with breath, and specifically with the breath one takes at the end of the line of poetry, JM aligns the gap or space between lines with the breath imparted to him at birth. Poetic production thus resembles the continuation of life. Both depend on breathing in order to be sustained. Above all, by virtue of its ephemeral character, the stress on breath illustrates the similarity between JM’s presentations of Hans, of DJ, and of his mother. Like his friends, she is a presence in absence to him. Though not explicitly named, she makes herself known through “Maya’s prodigality” and “Joanna’s fuming” (CLS 84). With regard to the latter, layered onto the references to breathing and inspiration is the habit of cigarette smoking. Joanna, a character in the manuscript of JM’s lost novel, smokes incessantly. Lest we make the too easy equation between Joanna and Hellen Ingram Merrill as smokers, and therefore blockages to inspiration, JM directly warns us off: My mother gave up cigarettes years ago (And has been, letters tell, conspicuously Alive and kicking in a neighbor’s pool All autumn, while singsong voices, taped, unreel, Dictating underwater calisthenics). (CLS 84)

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Indeed, JM’s real mother seems rather benign and attentive to her health. Joanna, by contrast, is someone JM wants to get to know better. In section J, he explains that reading “Jung on the destructive / Anima” would eventually help him “to breathe the smoke of her eternal cigarette”; to hear her “snorts of euphoria” as she places the fingers of one of the male characters between her legs; and to see

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her “sun-scabbed brow” and dyed hair (CLS 35). All of these images coalesce in the picture of her as a dragon with “smoke pouring from her nostrils” (CLS 33) as she sits on a plane waiting to be flown to the other characters in the novel. Nevertheless, this dragon’s power is on the wane. “Is she / The last gasp of my dragon?” asks JM in section X (CLS 84). The pronoun could refer either to his mother swimming in the pool or to Joanna smoking her cigarette. By leaving open the question of Joanna’s relation to his mother, Merrill suggests that poetic vocation is a difficult and not necessarily healthy business. In his memoir, for example, he wonders why he regularly portrays his mother in brief sketches: “Why these compulsive vignettes? Perhaps their heroine lends herself more readily to anecdote than to any firsthand account. Or is it that her behavior— like the muse’s own—keeps crystallizing into verse or narrative?” (ADP 541). The decisive concern is not with any particular connection between Joanna and JM’s mother, but with how he discloses both women. Both the real woman and the fictional character only become known through short description; the firsthand account of his mother, like the novel containing Joanna, has gone missing from Merrill’s oeuvre. In breathing Joanna’s cigarette smoke and all of the details of her personality, he does not fill this vacancy so much as incorporate it into himself. In this way, as the conclusion of section J stresses, he becomes the “entire parched landscape” of New Mexico, into which he flies Joanna in the lost novel and also in the published poem. Another dimension to Merrill’s characterizing the vignettes about his mother as “compulsive” is that, in their frequency, they parallel Maya’s prodigality. As we have seen, she burns a heart onto the threshold of JM and DJ’s apartment, a gesture that suggests openness and hospitality. For that reason JM believes that even its scratched out remainder will be enough to support them in the present life. Yet the etymology of her name also designates “illusion, unreality, deception, or magic” (OED). Is her abundance, therefore, an illusion or a creation of magic that her death has cut short? The dream she has in section M provides some clues. JM summarizes what Ephraim had originally described to DJ and to him:

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Maya in the city has a dream: People in evening dress move through a blaze Of chandeliers, white orchids, silver trays Dense with bubbling glassfuls. Suavities Of early talking pictures, although no Word is spoken. . . . (CLS 44)

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What makes the dream distinctly Maya’s is the plethora of light, flowers, and champagne. At the same time, like the other dreams considered in this study, it holds something back. In particular she is wearing black—“mourning weeds”—until her companion brings her to a source where everything is turned white. The change is the negative or the reversal—but also the imprint of what has just been described. Abruptly, however, the dream cuts off: “Then it was time to go.” Maya wakes up “in bliss” (CLS 44). Inasmuch as Maya was an experimental filmmaker, JM is suggesting that her films have a dreamlike quality to them. Most important is their effect. Like Dante’s Paradiso, on seeing Maya’s film he wants to get up and generate more material for his own work: . . . Often, having seen A film of Maya’s, read a page of Dante, Nothing was for it but to rise and shine Not in the fields, god knew, or in blue air But through the spectacles put on to focus That one surface to be truly scratched – A new day’s quota of shortsighted prose. (CLS 46)

The “shortsighted prose” is the lost novel from which pieces of The Book of Ephraim were generated. But it is also the poem itself as it is brought into the discipline of form. In section X this relationship to form is explicitly linked to JM’s and DJ’s fondness for Ephraim. Specifically, JM feels sad in parting from him just as he has already noticed with Hans, DJ, and Maya. When the time comes to put away the Ouija board, he evokes this separation as an entombment: Back underground he sinks, a stream, the latest Recurrent figure out of mythology To lend his young beauty to a living grave In order that earth may bloom another season. (CLS 85)

This recognition—that Ephraim represents the separateness, the lack behind so many of his interpersonal relations—once again raises the issue of tone. JM wonders whether he can approach the “Springtide” when Ephraim returns—when, with DJ, he resumes the Ouija board—in a “lighter-hearted” mood knowing that this lack is there and will manifest itself in his work (CLS 85). On the one hand, the longing for a form, the longing for a guide, and the longing for Ephraim all suggest that the return is as inevitable as the vignettes that issue from a compulsive muse. In this sense, Ephraim seems

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to personify Merrill’s destiny as a poet. The spirit is the “kismet / Veiled as a stern rhyme sound” that the living poet cannot bypass. Confronted with this haunting by form, Merrill feels the temptation simply to remain tethered to it: “. . . In neither / The world’s poem nor the poem’s world have I / Learned to think for myself much” (CLS 85). On the other hand, when he seems ready to take flight in a speech about the reciprocal vacancy involved that form fills, he is brought back to earth. His foot—both poetical and physical—has gone to sleep, perhaps from remaining in a too rigid frame: Muse and maker, each at a loss without the – O but my foot has gone to sleep! Gingerly I prod it: painful, slow, hilarious twinges Of reawakening, recirculation. (CLS 85)

The unfinished thought at the end of the line and at the end of the stanza abruptly shifts the register of the discourse from the meditative and abstract to the concrete and physical. Additionally, the stress on circulation and its blockage aptly reiterates that inspiration, like other human processes, is not neat, continuous, or finished. Rather, it may actually depend on what stops it—trauma, pain, and loss—for its reawakening. The mixed tone in which Merrill conveys this perspective suggests that he is ultimately “of two minds” (CLS 24) about language. First, Ephraim and his cohort are the creations of language—a language that makes its circuit around the emptiness symbolized by the movements of the cup on the Ouija board. Second, this language elicits trust that the lack at its center can re-create itself. By approaching his material in this manner, Merrill is not diminishing the seriousness of trauma as it appears and reappears in ordinary life. Like Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot, he recognizes the blockage that surrounds this event as the sad legacy of the human subject. The humor that he brings to this undertaking, which distinguishes him from these predecessors, is perhaps best characterized by Ephraim’s smile without laughter. The reconciliation of trauma and trust is a melancholic task because, unlike mourning, it is never finished. It is an ongoing responsibility because it shows how even the most tragic of lives is nevertheless spotted with moments of beauty.

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Epilogue

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Preface 1. James Merrill, “b o d y,” in Collected Poems, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 646. The subsequent reference to “The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace” corresponds to this edition and is noted parenthetically by page number in my text.

Introduction: Traumatized Trust 1. Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, (New York: Norton, 1992), 307. All subsequent references to this seminar are noted parenthetically in my text by volume and page. 2. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 10. 3. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), 91–112. 4. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. XIV, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, (London: Hogarth, 1953), 243. All subsequent references to “Mourning and Melancholia” correspond to this text and are noted parenthetically in my text by volume and page. 5. Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, Melancholy, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), 324. 6. Ibid., 414. 7. Ibid. 8. Freud, Standard Edition, vol. V, On the Interpretation of Dreams, 509. 9. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, (New York: Norton, 1977), 25. All subsequent references to this seminar are noted parenthetically in my text by volume and page. 10. Antonio Quinet, “The Gaze as an Object,” in Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard

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11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

Notes Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus, (Albany: State U of New York P, 1995), 144. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, (Cambridge: MIT P, 1994), 148. In Seminar III, Lacan does make a distinction between the “absolute Other” that I have been discussing and the little “other” or “counterpart.” Corresponding to “the imaginary other, the otherness in a mirror image,” the little other “makes us dependent on the form of our counterpart” (1955–1956: 252). As Zizek points out, by linking this “counterpart” with the “mirror image” of the subject, Lacan articulates his notion of the ideal ego. The subject projects an image of itself with which it wants to identify (The Sublime Object of Ideology, 105–107). By contrast, Lacan stresses that the absolute Other offers no such reassuring counterpart to the subject: “The latter, the absolute Other, is the one we address ourselves to beyond this counterpart, the one we are forced to admit beyond the relation of the mirage, the one who accepts or is refused opposite us, the one who will on occasion deceive us, the one whom we will never know is deceiving us, the one to whom we always address ourselves. His existence is such that the fact of addressing ourselves to him is more important than anything that may be placed at stake between him and us” (III: 252). In speaking beyond the counterpart to the Other, Lacan offers not only an image of speech as existing between subjects but also of its insufficiency. The actual counterpart is always deficient as a listener. Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, (New York: Norton, 1993), 273. The subsequent reference to this seminar is noted parenthetically in my text by volume and page. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London: Verso, 1989), 157. Lacan, Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, (New York: Norton, 1975), 34. The reference to the Wolfman’s dream is found in Freud, Standard Edition, vol. VII, On Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 36–38. Melanie Klein, The Writings of Melanie Klein, vol. I, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–1945, (New York: The Free P, 1984), 356. All subsequent references to “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict” (1928), “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego” (1930), “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic Depressive States” (1935), “Love, Guilt, and Reparation” (1937), and “Mourning and its Relation to Manic Depressive States” (1940) are noted parenthetically in my text with the date and page. Klein, Writings, vol. III, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963, 255. All subsequent references to “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946), “Some Theoretical Conclusions

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18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

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Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant” (1952), “Our Adult World and its Roots in Infancy” (1959), and “Some Reflections on The Oresteia” (1963) correspond to this text and are noted parenthetically in my text with the date and page. Judith Butler, “Moral Sadism and doubting one’s own love: Kleinian reflections on Melancholia,” in Reading Melanie Klein, ed. John Phillips and Lyndsey Stonebridge, (London: Routledge, 1998), 181. Robert D. Hinshelwood, “Transference and Counter-Transference,” in The Klein-Lacan Dialogues, ed. Bernard Burgoyne and Mary Sullivan, (London: Rebus P, 1997), 136. Ibid., 139. Leo Bersani, “Death and literary authority: Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein,” in Reading Melanie Klein, 236. Hannah Segal, “A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics,” in Reading Melanie Klein, 214. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, ed. Susan Shatto and Marion Shaw, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), section 21, lines 21–24. All subsequent references are indicated parenthetically by section number and line number within my text. William Wordsworth, “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, painted by Sir George Beaumont,” in The Cornell Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Parrish and others; Poems in Two Volumes and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983), 268, lines 37–40. All subsequent references to this poem correspond to this text and are noted parenthetically and by line number in my text. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980), 47, lines 328–330. Subsequent references to The Waste Land are referred to by line number in my text. References to “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” and to “Hysteria” are referred to by page number from The Complete Poems and Plays in my text. Petar Ramadanovic, Forgetting Futures: On Memory, Trauma and Identity, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 73. Ibid.

1 Gazes of Trauma, Spots of Trust: Wordsworth’s Memorials in THE P RELUDE 1. William Wordsworth, “Surprised by Joy, Impatient as the Wind,” in The Cornell Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Parrish and others; Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Karl H. Ketcham, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989), 112–113. 2. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 77–78. 3. Ellie Ragland, “The Psychical Nature of Trauma: Freud’s Dora, The Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort! Da! Paradigm,” Postmodern Culture 11.2 (2001), 6.

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4. Ibid. 5. Ragland, “The Relation Between the Voice and the Gaze,” in Reading Seminar XI, 189. 6. Ibid., 193–194. 7. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 158–159. All subsequent references to the three texts of The Prelude and to Manuscript JJ correspond to this edition and are noted by book and line number in my text. 8. David Collings, “A Vocation of Error: Authorship as Deviance in the 1799 Prelude,” Papers on Language and Literature 29.2 (Spring 1993), 226–233. 9. Gordon K. Thomas, “ ‘Orphans Then’: Death in the Two-Part Prelude,” Charles Lamb Bulletin (October 1996), 157–160. 10. David P. Haney, “Incarnation and the Autobiographical Exit: Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Books IX, XIII (1805),” Studies in Romanticism 29 (Winter 1990), 550–551. 11. Ibid., 553. 12. Ashton Nichols, The Revolutionary ‘I’: Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation, (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 79. 13. Ibid., 16. 14. Ibid., 109. 15. Ibid., 117–118. 16. Guinn Batten, The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism, (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 187–189. 17. Ibid., 165–175. 18. Duncan Wu, “Tautology and Imaginative Vision in Wordsworth,” Charles Lamb Bulletin (October 1996), 182–183. 19. Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991), 56–57. 20. Christopher Miller, “Wordsworth’s Anatomies of Surprise,” Studies in Romanticism 46.4 (Winter 2007), 420. 21. Orrin N. C. Wang, “Ghost Theory,” Studies in Romanticism 46.2 (Summer–Fall 2007), 210. 22. Eugene Stelzig, “Wordsworth’s Bleeding Spots: Traumatic Memories of the Absent Father in The Prelude,” European Romantic Review 15.4 (December 2004), 533–534. 23. Noel Jackson, “Archaeologies of Perception: Reading Wordsworth After Foucault,” European Romantic Review 18.2 (April 2007), 183. 24. For a recent discussion of this issue that includes the extensive scholarship on it, see David Chandler, “Robert Southey and The Prelude’s ‘Arab Dream,’ ” Review of English Studies 54.214 (2003), 203–219. Against the consensus that Wordsworth either did have the dream or made it up, Chandler argues that he may have heard it from

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25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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Southey, with whom he had become friendly at the time he was writing the 1805 Prelude. Increasingly, Wordsworth recognized that the dream described an anxiety that he felt very acutely: that of dwelling in the power of words until their meaning is gone. Southey’s parallel obsession and the dangers of it became very real to Wordsworth as the former increasingly slipped into madness after 1839. In that same year, probably with knowledge of his friend’s worsening health, Wordsworth claimed the dream as his own (217–219). Timothy Bahti, “Figures of Interpretation, The Interpretation of Figures: A Reading of Wordsworth’s ‘Dream of the Arab,’ Studies in Romanticism 18.4 (Winter 1979), 608. Ibid., 609. Ibid., 618. Douglas B. Wilson, The Romantic Dream: Wordsworth and the Poetics of the Unconscious, (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1993), 175. Ibid., xvii. Stephen F. Fogle and Paul H. Fry, “Ode,” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), 855. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, (New Haven: Yale UP, 1973), 9. Kelly Grovier, “ ‘Shades of the Prison House’: ‘Walking’ Stewart, Michel Foucault, and the Making of Wordsworth’s ‘Two Consciousnesses,’ ” Studies in Romanticism 44.3 (Fall 2005), 352. J. Mark Smith, “ ‘Unrememberable’ Sound in Wordsworth’s 1799 Prelude,” Studies in Romanticism 42 (Winter 2003), 518. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “To William Wordsworth, Composed on the Night after his Recitation of a Poem on the Growth of an Individual Mind,” in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. XVI, Poetical Works I, ed. J. C. C. Mays, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), 817, lines 38–47. Grovier, 358–359. As quoted in Grovier, 348. Grovier, 342. Quinet, 144. Ibid. As quoted in Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant and Freud, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991), 47. Ibid., 50. Caruth, Empirical Truths, 51. Smith, 504–506. See Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, 492. Pieter Vermeulen, “The Suspension of Reading: Wordsworth’s ‘Boy of Winander’ and Trauma Theory,” Orbis Litterarum 62.6 (December 2007), 467.

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46. Wu, 175. 47. Wu, 176. 48. Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 2nd ed., (New York: Routledge, 2001), 115–116. 49. Ibid., 119. 50. See Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, 494.

2

“Wound” in the “Living Soul”: Tennyson’s I N M EMORI A M

1. Herbert Tucker discusses this issue in terms of the genesis of the poem, arguing that some of the parts of the poem written closest to Hallam’s death “display a firmly social orientation.” At the same time, its later sections often function to “smooth over wilder predecessors.” Structurally, therefore, moments of private lyrical grief are enveloped by more controlled attempts at framing and reflecting on the loss. See Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988), 377–78. 2. Donald Hair, “Soul and Spirit in In Memoriam,” Victorian Poetry 34.2 (Summer 1996), 175. 3. Ibid., 179. 4. For Wheeler, Tennyson is committed to a mystical tradition dating back to Augustine, which understands the visible as an avenue to the invisible (252–253). At the same time, he knows how to present his vision in more “provisional and experiential” terms than the religious tracts and failed epics about death and the future life that were appearing in the early nineteenth century (Wheeler 118). Taking up the theme of immortality, Rosenberg maintains that Tennyson’s genius lies in being able to bring the public’s private anxiety about this question into his poem. The poet achieves this end by implying that the dead may be more real than the living and that in his ghosts others will recognize theirs (Rosenberg 308–309). Finally, Shaw sees In Memoriam as a “confessional elegy” in which melancholia becomes consolable grief and conversion marks the completion of the work of mourning (Shaw 50–60). This gradual change over time, moreover, has the form of “assent” to an irresistible and loving God rather than that of compulsion to what is logically necessary (Shaw 71). All three, in other words, are analogous ways of interpreting human experience. Tennyson’s confidence in using religious language, in turn, makes possible his consolation at the poem’s close. This assumption underlies Robert Bernard Hass’s argument about the poem as a synthesis of classical, romantic, and Christian perspectives on the locus amoenus or comforting place (Hass 681). The poet finds moments of authentic consolation by means of the mind’s ability to construct in language “necessary boundaries that

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5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

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will save the psyche from the destructive forces of mechanistic decay” (Hass 685). Sarah Gates, “Poetics, Metaphysics, Genre: The Stanza Form of In Memoriam,” Victorian Poetry 37.4 (Winter 1999), 510–511. Gerhard Joseph, Tennyson and the Text: the Weaver’s Shuttle, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 23. Ibid., 24–25. As Joseph also argues in “Producing the Far-Off Interest of Tears,” In Memoriam demonstrates the problem of language’s mediation particularly well through its deployment of economic metaphors for the poet’s learning how to speak. Hallam’s loss, says Joseph, becomes Tennyson’s “gain” (80.12) because the latter is able to imagine his friend as a continuing exemplar for his own life. Yet, precisely because this very extended metaphor for the whole poem also describes the extended quality to mourning, it necessarily points to words’ limitation (“Producing,” 125–127). In Joseph’s view, Tennyson, like Freud, ultimately doubts he has a “foundational language” to explain why grieving should take so long (“Producing,”129–130). Gigante builds her argument about desire on the one made by Christopher Craft and discussed below. With them I share the view that language creates and embodies desire. For an account that argues that In Memoriam momentarily envisions “an extra discursive space” for desire, however, see John Schad’s discussion of section 95 (Schad 180–181). While Schad’s suggestion is intriguing, he overlooks the extent to which the trance that becomes the medium for Tennyson’s supposed encounter with “that which is” (95.39) is itself brought on by an act of reading. Michael Tomko, “Varieties of Geological Experience: Religion, Body, and Spirit in Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Lyell’s Principles of Geology,” Victorian Poetry 42.2 (Summer 2004), 113–134. James W. Hood, Divining Desire: Tennyson and the Poetics of Transcendence, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 105. Devon Fisher, “Spurring an Imitative Will: The Canonization of Arthur Hallam,” Christianity and Literature 55.2 (Winter 2006), 222. David G. Riede, Allegories of One’s Own Mind: Melancholy In Victorian Poetry, (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2005), 70–71. Ibid., 84. Erik Gray, The Poetry of Indifference: From the Romantics to the Rubáiyát, (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2005), 76. Jane Wright brings out the implication of Tennyson’s grappling with this kind of desire with respect to the overall project of memorializing Hallam: “Tennyson’s inability to make adequate distinctions between his musings and broodings and accurate memories of Hallam encourages other kinds of appreciation: estimative and valuative” (83). An ethically valid tribute to the man does not emerge from a distant or

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16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Notes detached representation but one that recognizes desire as something that operated between them as opposed to being proper to one of them. A similar view of desire perhaps also colors Rhian Williams’ discussion of Tennyson’s use of the sonnets Shakespeare addressed to another man. Early criticism of In Memoriam charged that the poem did not perform the properly moral function of reflecting “values and principles already upheld by the reader” (181). Instead it used “linguistic obscurity as a mask for sexual deviance” (187). Tennyson’s genius is to link the sonnets’ “linguistic reputation” to the popularity of articulating an ideal of male friendship (183). He achieves this success, however, not by distancing himself from the memory of his friend but by intertwining himself with it. Isobel Armstrong, “Tennyson in the 1850s: From Geology to Pathology,” in Tennyson: Seven Essays, ed. Philip Collins, (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 114. Ibid. Eli Zaretsky, “Melanie Klein and the emergence of modern personal life,” in Reading Melanie Klein, 39. James Eli Adams, “Woman Red in Tooth and Claw: Nature and the Feminine in Tennyson and Darwin,” Victorian Studies 33 (Autumn 1989), 9–15. For a discussion of the mother as Other see Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), 53–54. Tucker, 379–380. Ibid., 404–405. Gates, 510–511. James Krasner, “Doubtful Arms and Phantom Limbs: Literary Portrayals of Embodied Grief,” PMLA 119.2 (March 2004), 225. Ibid., 227. Rosenberg, 298. Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” in The Cornell Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Parrish and others; Poems in Two Volumes and Other Poems 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983), 275, lines 145–147. Subsequent references to the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” correspond to this text and are noted parenthetically by line number in my text. Alan Sinfield, Tennyson, (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 72. Christopher Craft, Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850–1920, (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994), 61. Jeff Nunokawa, “In Memoriam and the Extinction of the Male Homosexual,” ELH 58 (1991), 431. As quoted in Nunokawa, 432. Nunokawa, 433.

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33. Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985), 169. 34. On this point, see Christopher Ricks, Tennyson, 2nd. ed., (Berkeley: U of California P, 1989), 113; and Tucker, 377–378. 35. Darrell Mansell, “Displacing Hallam’s Tomb in In Memoriam,” Victorian Poetry 36.1 (Spring 1999), 97–101. 36. Wordsworth, “Lines Written a few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” in The Cornell Wordsworth; Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, ed. James Butler and Karen Green, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992), 116, lines 3–4. 37. Ibid., 101. 38. Lawrence Kramer, “Victorian Poetry/ Oedipal Politics: In Memoriam and Other Instances,” Victorian Poetry 29.4 (Winter 1991), 357–358. 39. Shatto and Shaw, 110. 40. Ibid., 112. 41. Robert Langbaum, “The Dynamic Unity of In Memoriam,” in Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ed. Harold Bloom, (New York: Chelsea, 1975), 69. 42. Lacan, “On the Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” in Ecrits: A Selection, (New York: Norton, 1977), 194. 43. Patrick Scott, “Tennyson, Lincolnshire, and Provinciality: The Topographical Narrative of In Memoriam,” Victorian Poetry 34.1 (Spring 1996), 44–46. 44. As quoted in Shatto and Shaw, 262. 45. Tennyson, “Ulysses,” in Works, ed. Christopher Ricks, (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987), lines 55–56. The subsequent reference to “Ulysses” is indicated parenthetically by line number in my text and corresponds to this edition. 46. Hass, 675. 47. Sacks, 199.

3

Castrated Referentiality: Eliot’s THE WASTE L A ND

1. F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry, (New York:Oxford UP, 1958), 60. 2. Robert J. Andreach, “Paradise Lost and the Christian Configuration of The Waste Land,” Paperson Language and Linguistics 5.1 (Winter 1969), 306. 3. Lois A. Cuddy, T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Evolution: Sub/versions of Classicism, Culture, and Progress, (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2000), 158–159. 4. Ibid., 166. 5. Benjamin G. Lockerd, Aethereal Rumours: T. S. Eliot’s Physics and Poetics, (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1998), 173.

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6. Suzanne W. Churchill, “Outing T. S. Eliot,” Criticism 47.1 (Winter 2005), 23–24. 7. Ibid., 20. 8. Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot and Early Twentieth Century Thought, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985), 193. 9. John Paul Riquelme, Harmony of Dissonance: T. S. Eliot, Romanticism, and Imagination, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991), 172. 10. Paul Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Paul de Man, (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), 169–173. 11. Juan A. Suárez, “T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Gramophone, and the Modernist Discourse Network,” New Literary History 32 (2001), 753. 12. Ibid., 755. 13. Cyrena N. Pondrom, “T. S. Eliot: The Performativity of Gender in The Waste Land,” Modernism/Modernity 12.3 (September 2005), 429–433. 14. Shannon McRae, “ ‘Glowed Into Words’: Vivien Eliot, Philomela, and the Poet’s Tortured Corpse,” Twentieth Century Literature 49.2 (2003), 204. 15. Gabrielle McIntire, Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), 58. 16. Ibid., 64. 17. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), 198. 18. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville, (New York: Oxford UP, 1986), 329. 19. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Frederick Ahl, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 130. 20. Petronius, The Satyricon, trans. P. G. Walsh, (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996), 48. 21. Tony Pinkney, Women in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot: A Psychoanalytic Approach, (New York: Macmillan, 1984), 101. 22. Ibid., 102. 23. Ibid., 103. 24. As quoted in Merrill Cole, The Other Orpheus: A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 94. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 92. 27. Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 1.1 (1993), 28. 28. Ibid., 25. 29. McRae argues that masculinity’s eradication in the poem simultaneously creates its textual body. Commenting on the scene in the hyacinth garden, she points out that the poet’s “failure of speech” coincides with a “failure of the phallus.” These twin failures then shadow subsequent attempts at speech in the poem: “His only

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30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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remedy for the disastrous failure of language is to appropriate the voices of other poets—past masters of his craft. But even his borrowed words fail to cohere, for women disrupt him continually, their disorderly speech shattering his every attempt at intelligibility in the poem” (204). I agree with McRae, and would add that this failure is traumatic because it is related to how war trauma plays out in The Waste Land. At the same time, the failure is repetitive: there is no substitution of a living person for the dead, but simply the repetition of the corpse in the corpus. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, trans. Charles S. Singleton, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970), Canto 3, lines 63–64, p. 29. Ibid., Canto III, line 36, p. 27. Raphaël Ingelbien, “They Saw One They Knew: Baudelaire and the Ghosts of London Modernism,” English Studies 88.1 (February 2007), 52. Morrison, 89. See Colleen Lamos, Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 83; McIntire, 57–58; and Schwartz, 190–191. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor and others, (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1988), 1010, II.2.198–199. Subsequent references to King Lear, Hamlet, and The Tempest correspond to this edition and are noted parenthetically in my text. See Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study of Character and Style, (New York: Oxford UP, 1984), 66; Donald J. Childs, T. S. Eliot: Mystic, Son and Lover, (London: The Athlone P, 1997), 114. See James E. Miller, T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons, (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1977), 70; Patrick Query, “They Called Me the Hyacinth Girl: T. S. Eliot and the Revision of Masculinity,” Yeats Eliot Review 18.3 (2002), 17–18. Lockerd, 173. Ibid., 154. Pondrom, 433. Margaret E. Dana, “Orchestrating The Waste Land: Wagner, Leitmotiv, and the Play of Passion,” in T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra: Critical Essays on Poetry and Music, ed. John Xios Cooper, (New York: Garland, 2000), 278. Morrison, 88–89. McRae, 211. As quoted in Miller, 31. Ovid, 60–61. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, (Durham: Duke UP, 2004), 25. Ovid, 61. Ibid.

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49. Ibid. 50. Edmund Spenser, “Prothalamion,” in The Works of Edmund Spenser: the Minor Poems, eds. Charles Grosvenor Osgood and Henry Gibbons Lotspeich, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1947), 260, lines 112–118. 51. Lockerd, 170–172. 52. Dana, 283–284. 53. Matthiessen, 58. 54. Michael Whitworth, “ ‘Sweet Thames’ and The Waste Land’s Allusions,” Essays in Criticism 48.1 (January 1998), 38–39. 55. Ibid., 39–41. 56. Ibid., 53. 57. Calvin Bedient, He Do The Police In Different Voices: The Waste Land and Its Protagonist, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986), 110–111. 58. Oliver Goldsmith, Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, vol. IV: The Vicar of Wakefield, Poems, The Mystery Revealed, ed. Arthur Friedman, (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1966), 136. 59. Goldsmith, 137. 60. Morrison, 96. 61. As quoted in Lamos, 98. 62. Lamos, 99. 63. As quoted in Lamos, 101. 64. Lockerd, 177–178. 65. Matthew Hart, “Visible Poet: T. S. Eliot and Modernist Studies,” American Literary History 19.1 (Spring 2007), 186. 66. William Blake, “London,” in The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, ed. David B. Erdman, (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 26–27, lines 9–12. The subsequent reference corresponds to this text and is noted parenthetically in my text. 67. See, for example, John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After, (Berkeley: U of California P, 1981), 105; Sandra Gilbert, “ ‘Rats’ Alley’: The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti) Pastoral Elegy,” New Literary History 30.1 (Winter 1999), 194–195. 68. Bush, 75. 69. Gilbert, 194–195. 70. Pondrom, 436–438. 71. This argument can be traced back to questions about Eliot’s friendship with Jean Verdenal, a Frenchman whom he knew briefly in Paris before World War I and who died in the Allied campaign at Gallipoli in 1915. James A. Miller documents these references to Verdenal in Eliot’s work: (1) the dedication of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917); (2) the dedication of the American edition of Ara Vos Prec (1920); (3) the dedication of Poems (1925); and (4) Eliot’s 1934 recollection of Verdenal crossing the Luxemburg Gardens waving “a branch of lilac” (17–19). Verdenal also eventually figured in an

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72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77.

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interpretation of The Waste Land as an elegy for a same-sex lover. John Peter made this case in 1952 without mentioning Verdenal, and Eliot successfully sued to have Peter’s article suppressed. Subsequently, in 1969, Peter published the piece with a postscript describing his dealing with Eliot and specifically mentioning Verdenal as a possible inspiration for Phlebas (Miller 11–14). Yet Miller’s book, rather than Peter’s essay, remains the most controversial focus of this discussion. Churchill sees Miller as attempting to reduce The Waste Land— and “just about everything else Eliot wrote”—to a “grief stricken response to Verdenal’s death” (9). Query concedes that the issue may be overstated in Miller’s analysis but stresses that Miller’s reading remains the only one that recognizes same-sex attraction as “an unavoidable and important presence in the life and in the poetry” (12). Pondrom, noticing the sharp exchanges on both sides of this issue, cautions against any essentialist reading of gender performance in the poem, including Miller’s argument that Eliot’s “ ‘real’ sexual orientation was homosocial” (430). Cole makes a similar point about Miller’s reductiveness, suggesting that criticism of the poem has become implicated in this oversimplification by ignoring how the poem turns closeting into an erotic act (92). Cole’s claim, focusing on how a particular kind of desire functions in this poem, aptly suggests that disavowal becomes a moment in its constitution. Jewel Spears Brooker, Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism, (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994), 202–203. Brooker, “Dialectic and Impersonality in T. S. Eliot,” Partial Answers 3.2 (2005), 140. Cuddy, 156. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio, trans. Charles S. Singleton, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973), Canto 26, line 148, pp. 288–289. Miller, 132. Riquelme, 177–179.

Epilogue: “The Tone We Trusted Most”: Merrill’s THE B OOK OF E PHR A IM 1. James Merrill, The Changing Light At Sandover: A Poem, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 5–6. Subsequent references come from this text and are noted parenthetically in my text. 2. Merrill, A Different Person, in Collected Prose, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 500–501. Subsequent references to A Different Person come from this text and are noted parenthetically in my text.

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Adams, James Eli, 79, 184 note 19 Aeneid, 125–126 Aeneus, 125 Aeschylus, 28 Agamemnon, 28, 133–134 Alighieri, Dante, 131, 159, 160, 174, 187 notes 30–31, 189 note 75 Andreach, Robert, 122, 185 note 2 Antigone, 2, 18–19, 28 anxiety and art, 27–29, 77 and death instinct, 23, 79, 83 depressive, 93 and the gaze, 48–49, 134 and immortality, 86 and language, 107, 180–181 note 24 and masculinity, 130, 133–134, 137 and Nature, 74, 91 and the objets a, 17 paranoid, 2, 25–26, 93, 127, 138, 151, 154–157 and spots of time, 62–69, 71 and the stain, 37 and trauma, 60, 80, 112 and trust, 51 aphanisis, 82 Armstrong, Isobel, 77–78, 184 note 16 Auden, W.H., 168 Augustine, Saint, 153, 182 note 4 autobiography, poetic, 50, 66, 71 Bahti, Timothy, 40–41, 181 note 25 Baillet, Adrien, 41 Barnes, Djuna, 143 Batten, Guinn, 39, 180 notes 16–17 Bedient, Calvin, 147, 188 note 57

Bersani, Leo, 1, 27–28, 177 note 2, 179 note 21 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 10 Blake, William, 155 blindness, 33, 34, 35, 104, 133–134 and castration, 122 and Tiresias 144–145 Wordsworth’s fear of, 64 Bloom, Harold, 42–43, 181 note 31 “b o d y” (Merrill), x The Book of Ephraim (Merrill), 165, 166, 167, 168, 172, 174 breast symbolic function of, 14, 24–25, 53, 86, 128, 147–148 Brooker, Jewel Spears, 158–159, 189 note 72–73 Buddha, 152–153 Bush, Ronald, 156, 187 note 36, 188 note 68 Butler, Judith, 26, 131, 179 note 18, 186 notes 27,28 cannibalism fear of, 134 cannibalistic phase, 6–7, 24–25, 133 Caruth, Cathy, 2, 34, 39, 53–54, 143, 177 note 3, 179 note 2, 180 note 19, 181 notes 40–42 castration, 121–122, 131, 133, 144 and blindness, 122 Cervantes, Miguel de, in The Prelude, 41, 49 Chandler, David, 180 note 24

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Index

The Changing Light at Sandover (Merrill), 31, 162, 163–175 Coda: The Higher Keys (Merrill), 165 chastisement, 70 Childs, Donald J., 187 note 36 Churchill, Suzanne, 122–123, 186 notes 6–7, 189 note 72 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 18 Coda: The Higher Keys (Merrill), 165 Cole, Merrill, 130, 186 notes 24–26, 189 note 72 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 38–39, 44–45, 52 Collings, David, 37–38, 180 note 8 consolation, 2, 30, 62, 83, 91, 114 “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of ManicDepressive States” (Klein), 27 Copjec, Joan, 12, 178 note 11 Coriolanus, 159 “The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace” (Merrill), 167–168 Craft, Christopher, 89, 93, 184 note 29 Cuddy, Lois, 122, 185 notes 3–4, 189 note 74 Dana, Margaret E., 139, 187 note 41, 188 note 52 death drive, 2–3, 8, 10–19, 23, 26, 29, 74, 103–104, 110, 113–115 anxieties about, 83 as creative force, 26, 46–47, 106 deflection of, 18, 23, 29 as feminized force, 112 see also thanatos “The Death of St. Narcissus” (Eliot), 129–130 De Montmorency, J.E.G., 146–147 Deren, Maya, 170, 172, 173–174 “The Development of Mental Functioning” (Klein), 23–24 Dickens, Charles, 125, 186 note 17 A Different Person (Merrill), 168, 173

dream of the burning child, 2, 8–12, 17, 19, 21, 33–35, 41, 45, 75, 99, 124, 133, 143, 160 gaze in, 133 stain, 33, 160 and traumatic knowledge, 31, 34, 143 “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict” (Klein), 24–25 Edelman, Lee, 144–145, 158, 187 note 46 ego psychology, 11, 12 elegy, 91, 182 note 4, 189 note 71 Eliot, T. S., 30, 119–162, 164–165, 167, 175, 179 note 25 and futurity, 159 and Hamlet, 123 and language, 123, 132, 147 note on Jupiter and Juno, 143–144, 151 note on Tiresias, 121, 123, 129, 143, 145 on poetic vocation, 30–31 see also “The Death of St. Narcissus,” “Hysteria,” “Ode,” “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” The Waste Land Eliot, Vivien, 121 Enlightenment, 38 ethics, 2–3, 17, 29, 33, 76–78, 116, 120, 138, 163, 183 note 15 see also freedom, justice, responsibility The Eumenides, 28–29 Eve, 85 evolution, 39, 74, 77–79, 89–90, 111–113 Tennyson’s fear of, 79, 89

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Fisher, Devon, 76, 183 note 11 Fogle, Stephen F., 181 note 30 freedom, 4, 5, 29, 30, 39, 43, 52, 71, 159 French Revolution, 39–40, 44

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Freud, Sigmund, 1–32, 46, 53, 89, 93, 98, 113, 133, 149, 177 notes 4,8, 183 note 7 dream of the burning child, 9 and lack, 17 mourning v. melancholia, 1–8, 149–150 and trauma, 16 and trust, 20 see also death drive, melancholy, substitution Fry, Paul H., 181 note 30 futurity, 158–159 gap, ix–x, 12, 16, 66, 86, 113, 117, 172 Gates, Sarah, 76, 83, 183 note 5, 184 note 23 gaze, 11, 14, 33–37, 41, 48–50, 52–58, 61–64, 68, 70, 73, 100, 121, 124, 126–130, 132, 133–143, 145–147, 155, 157, 163, 169, 170 aural equivalent of, 155 and blindness, 144 and castration, 121, 132 and desire, 124, 130, 133–134 as God, 70 as inescapable, 139 mother’s, 50–51, 53–55, 60–61 and the Other, 163, 169 and poetic vocation, 128 and powerlessness, 141 as split from the eye, 170 and stain, 11, 33, 36–37, 41, 48–50, 62, 127 subjugation to, 49, 64, 68, 70, 134, 157 and traumatic memory, 61–62, 143 gender, 188–189 note 71 identification, 126, 131 slippage of, 124, 128, 136 and Tiresias, 122–123, 147, 158 gibbet, 65–66 see also The Prelude, Penrith

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Gigante, Denise, 76, 166 note 8 Gilbert, Sandra, 188 notes 67,69 Goldsmith, Oliver, 148, 188 notes 58–59 Gray, Erik, 77 Grovier, Kelly, 43, 48, 181 notes 32,35–37 Hair, Donald, 75, 182 notes 2–3 Hallam, Arthur Henry, 30, 73–117, 128, 136, 155, 163–165, 168 as Christ figure, 101, 110, 113–114 as figure of Tennyson’s survival, 115 as ghost, 104–106 as good object, 99 as ideal reader, 75, 99, 101, 109–110, 164 and immortality, 85–86, 89, 90–91, 114 internment, 97–98 as lack, 84, 104, 113, 117 as mother, 87, 103 and Nature, 74, 79, 81, 88, 91, 101–104, 106–107, 108 unborn family, 89 unfulfilled career, 111 visitation in trance, 74, 98–99, 104–106 and social renovation, 111, 117 as Tennyson’s ideal reader, 75, 99, 101, 109–110 Hamlet killed by Laertes, 140 and Oedipal drama, 10, 86 and role play, 123 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 140 Haney, David, 38, 180 notes 10–11 Hart, Matthew, 154, 188 note 65 Hass, Robert Bernard, 76, 111, 182 note 4, 185 note 46 heterosexuality, 90, 124, 134, 170 and anxiety, 137 and discourse, 170 and melancholy, 131–133 violence of, 133

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Hinshelwood, Robert D., 126, 127, 179 note 19 Hollander, John, 188 note 67 homeostatic text, 13, 36–37, 71 homosexuality, 76, 91, 105, 123–124, 130, 188–189 note 71 disavowal of, 130 eclipsed by evolution, 89–90 as non-generative, 158 see also lesbianism Hood, James W., 76, 183 note 10 “Hysteria” (Eliot), 134, 147 immortality, 42, 74, 84–86, 88, 90–91, 92, 102, 182 note 4 “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego” (Klein), 25 Inferno (Dante), 131, 159 Ingelbien, Raphaël, 187 note 32 In Memoriam, 31, 73–117, 121, 160, 163–165 Prologue, 91–92, 114, 115 section 3, 80, 88 section 5, 82–83, 85 section 6, 83–84 section 7, 84–86, 104, 115 section 9, 94, 95, 110 section 12, 95–96 section 16, 80–81, 92, 102, 103 section 18, 95–97, 102, 110 section 19, 96–97, 102 section 45, 86–87 section 54, 87–88 section 56, 74, 77–80, 93, 106, 111, 112, 115 section 57, 111, 115–117 section 59, 88–89 section 61, 90–91, 92 section 67, 97–99, 106 section 68, 99–100 section 69, 100–101 section 83, 101–102 section 84, 89 section 85, 73, 76

section 93, 104–105 section 95, 74–75, 93, 98–99, 102–103, 104, 105–106, 112 section 101, 108 section 102, 108–109 section 103, 109–110, 164 section 106, 109, 110 section 112, 75, 111 section 113, 111, 112 section 118, 111, 112 section 120, 111, 112 section 124, 113–114 section 127, 113–114 section 129, 93, 103, 117 section 130, 89, 110, 114 see also Hallam, immortality, Nature, Tennyson The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 2, 8, 12, 34, 75 see also dream of the burning child Jackson, David, 165 anniversary rhyme to JM, 169 as DJ, 165–174 Jackson, Noel, 40, 180 note 23 Joseph, Gerhard, 76, 183 notes 6–7 jouissance, 18, 144–145, 147 justice, 29, 32 King Lear (Shakespeare), 137 Klein, Melanie, 2–3, 20–30, 63, 67–68, 74, 78, 80, 93, 99, 100, 103, 104, 109, 114, 178 note 16, 178–179 note 17 artistic creation, 26, 63 conscious and unconscious mind, 103–105 and depressive mourning, 153–157 depressive position, 2, 20, 22–26, 29, 93, 103–104, 116, 126–127 dream of Mrs. A., 20–23, 93, 94 epistemophilic impulse, 24–25, 68 lack and trust, 23, 156 on mothers, 27 and Nature, 93–94

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objects, good and bad, 13, 24, 26, 63, 88, 99–100, 109 paranoid-schizoid position, 3, 22, 23, 27, 29, 30, 74, 80, 100, 101, 103, 114, 115, 151 subject positions, 2–3 and trust, 2–3, 20, 22–25, 74, 156 see also anxiety, death drive, mother, mother’s breast Kramer, Lawrence, 103, 185 note 38 Krasner, James, 84, 184 notes 24–25 Kyd, Thomas, 161 Lacan, Jacques, 1–3, 8–20, 113, 114, 177 note 1, 185 note 42 alienation, 15, 74, 77–78, 82, 85–87, 91, 136–137 and the analyst’s desire, 119–120 and jouissance, 144 and misunderstanding, 120 objet a, 14–18, 25, 35, 46, 48, 58, 99, 114, 121 and the Other, 12–15, 48–49, 55, 70, 75, 77, 81, 85, 87, 91, 100, 107, 123, 136–137, 161, 163, 178 note 12, 184, note 20 scopic drive, 15, 48 scotoma, 127 separation, 77, 80, 107–117, 159 stain, 127 tuché, 16 see also death drive, dream of the burning child, ethics, gap, lack, Lust and Unlust, phallus, unconscious lack, 2, 47, 100, 105, 107 and castration, 121 and creativity, 17–18, 115–116, 164–165, 175 and jouissance, 144–147 and language, 91, 147 and nothingness, 170, 174 as occasion of desire, 16, 74–75, 120, 131, 136, 155 and tone, 172

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and trust, 110 Lamos, Colleen, 150–151, 187 note 34, 188 notes 61–63 Langbaum, Robert, 106, 185 note 41 Lawrence, D.H., 146 lesbianism, 133 Lockerd, Benjamin G., 122, 138, 146, 154, 185 note 5, 187 notes 38–39, 188 notes 51,64 Lodeizen, Hans, 167–169, 171, 172, 174 “London” (Blake), 155, 188 note 67 “Love, Guilt, and Reparation” (Klein), 27–28, 93 Lushington, Edmund, 73 Lust and Unlust, 13 Lyell, Charles, Sir, 76, 77, 176 note 9 Lyrical Ballads (Coleridge and Wordsworth), 56 male body disappearance of, 130–132, 135 Mansell, Darrell, 96, 98, 185 note 35 Manuscript JJ (Wordsworth), 56, 67, 180 note 7 Masculinity performance of, 137 Matthiessen, F.O., 122, 185 note 1, 188 note 53 McIntire, Gabrielle, 124, 186 notes 15–16, 187 note 34 McRae, Shannon, 123–124, 186 notes 14,29, 187 note 43 melancholy, 83, 101, 149 and criticism of The Waste Land, 123–124 and heterosexuality, 130–131, 134 and homosexuality, 169–170 versus mourning, 1–8, 175 refusal of substitute, 163 and suicide, 149 Merrill, Hellen Ingram, 172–173 Merrill, James, ix–x, 31, 62, 162, 163–175 and David Jackson, 169–170 as JM, 165–174

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Metamorphoses (Ovid), 125–126, 143–144 Miller, Christopher, 39, 180 note 20 Miller, James E., 187 notes 37,44, 188–189 note 71, 189 note 76 Milton, John, 38, 49–50, 85 modernism, 123 Morrison, Paul, 123–124, 132, 142, 150, 186 note 10, 187 notes 33,42, 188 notes 60–61 mother in The Changing Light at Sandover, 172–173 as ideal, 16, 26 injured body of, 27 in In Memoriam, 93–94, 103, 113 as lack, 28 in The Prelude, 39, 50–54, 57–60 in The Waste Land, 127, 136, 155 mother’s breast, 24, 51, 53 “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (Klein), 20–23, 26, 29, 94, 115 “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud), 1–8, 133 Nature and death, 55–58, 74, 88, 112 and ex nihilo creation, 106 as external world, 61, 67, 74, 94, 95, 99, 103, 112 as feminized force, 39, 52, 74, 77, 79, 80, 88, 94, 112, 113 as good object, 68, 93, 109 and homosexual desire, 90 as hostile to humans, 74, 77–79, 91, 136, 146, 156–157 as mourner, 94–95 as parents, 39, 94, 113 and poetic vocation, 37 as teacher, 52, 108 and trust, 93–94, 96, 99–100, 108, 112 Nichols, Ashton, 38–39, 180 notes 12–15

Nightwood (Barnes), 143 nostalgia, 15, 77, 81, 103, 108, 124, 130, 156 “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (Klein), 23 Nunokawa, Jeff, 89, 90, 184 notes 30–32 ode, 42–44, 50 “Ode” (Eliot), 150–151 Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (Wordsworth), 42–43, 85 “On the Possible Treatment of Psychosis” (Lacan), 107 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 125 “Our World and Its Roots in Infancy” (Klein), 25–26 Ovid, 143–144, 158, 186 note 18, 187 notes 45,47–48 Paradiso (Dante), 174 Paul, Saint, 112 “Peele Castle” (Wordsworth), 30, 108 performativity, 42, 45, 125, 138, 147 Peter, John, 188–189 note 71 Petronius, 186 note 20 Pfau, Thomas, 8, 177 note 5 phallus, 82, 131, 186–187 note 29 in the mother-child relationship, 15–16, 53 as signifier, 16 The Phantom of the Opera (2004), 59–60 Pinkney, Tony, 126–127, 186 notes 21–23 Pondrom, Cyrena N. 123–124, 138, 186 note 13, 187 note 40, 188 notes 70–71 The Prelude (Wordsworth), 31, 33–72, 73, 75, 100, 121, 163 Blessed Babe, 39–40, 53 Boy of Winander, 37–39, 50, 55–59, 61, 62, 73, 163

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Query, Patrick, 187 note 37, 188–189 note 71 Quinet, Antonio, 48, 177–178 note 10, 181 notes 38–39 Ragland, Ellie, 35–36, 179 note 3, 180 note 5 The Rainbow (Lawrence), 146 Ramadanovic, Petar, 31, 32, 175, 179 notes 26–27 readers in In Memoriam, 75, 84, 85, 111, 115, 117 in The Prelude, 45 in The Waste Land, 124, 131–132, 139, 140, 143 reproduction maternal function of, 127 responsibility, 3, 19, 31, 50, 62, 71, 117, 143–153, 175 see also ethics, freedom The Revenger’s Tragedy (Kyd), 161 Ricks, Christopher, 185 notes 34, 45 Riede, David, 77, 183 notes 12–13 Riquelme, John Paul, 123–124, 186 note 9, 189 note 77

Rosenberg, John D., 76, 84, 182 note 4, 184 note 26 Sacks, Peter, 93, 113, 185 notes 33, 47 The Sacred Wood (Eliot), 129 The Satyricon (Petronius), 126 Schad, John, 183 note 8 Schwartz, Sanford, 123, 124, 186 note 8, 187 note 4 Scott, Patrick, 107–108, 185 note 4 Scripts for the Pageant (Merrill), 168 Segal, Hannah, 29, 179 note 22 Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique (Lacan), 16 Seminar III: The Psychoses (Lacan), 13, 15, 119–121, 131 Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan), 1–3, 17, 105 Seminar XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan), 2, 9–13, 16, 36, 82, 121, 127, 133, 136 Shakespeare, William, 49–50, 85, 90–91, 135, 137, 159, 184–185 note 15, 187 note 35 Shatto, Susan and Shaw, Marion, 179 note 23, 185 notes 39,40,44 Shaw, George Bernard, 171 Shaw, W. David, 76, 182 note 4 Sinfield, Alan, 86, 184 note 28 Smith, J. Mark, 43, 181 note 33 “Some Reflections on The Oresteia” (Klein), 28–29 “Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant” (Klein), 104 “Sonnet 116” (Shakespeare), 90 Sophocles, 18–19, 28 sorrow in Klein, 21, 22, 94 in Tennyson, 80, 81, 85, 88–89, 97, 102, 110–111, 115 in Wordsworth, 34–35 Southey, Robert, 180–181 note 24

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death of father, 69–71 death of mother, 50–54, 57–60 dream of the horseman, 36–37, 40–50, 53, 55–56, 59–61, 62, 64–66, 71, 100, 128 Drowned Man at Esthwaite, 37–39, 51, 58–59, 60–62, 73 Penrith, 63–71 spots of time, 37, 40, 62–63, 65–66, 71–72, 73, 163 1799 v. 1805 version, 58–59, 61, 62, 65–66, 69–70 1805 v. 1850 version, 40, 43, 44, 46–48, 54, 71 Principles of Geology (Lyell), 77 Prothalamion (Spenser), 145–146 Purgatorio, 60

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Spenser, Edmund, 145–147, 188 note 50 stain of the unconscious, 11–12, 19, 20–22, 33, 37, 41, 49–52, 75, 100, 106, 127, 164 in Eliot, 127, 164 and gaze, 11, 33, 36–37, 41, 48–50, 62 in Klein, 20–22 and spots of time, 62–63 in Tennyson, 75, 100, 106 Stelzig, Eugene, 40, 180 note 22 Suarez, Juan, 123, 186 notes 11–12 subjectivity, 125 brutality within, 127–128 as creation, 123 sublimation, artistic, 17, 19, 25, 63 Lacan on, 27–28 substitution, 30, 31 in Eliot, 131–132, 186–187 note 29 in Freud, 3–4, 7–8, 113 in Tennyson, 98–99, 113 in Wordsworth, 42–43, 52–53 suffering, 19, 23, 26, 68–70, 81, 91, 122, 141, 143, 159 superego, 1, 18 “Surprised by Joy” (Wordsworth), 34–35, 56 “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” (Eliot), 133–134, 147 “Sweet Thames, Run Slowly” (De Montmorency), 146–147 Tennyson, Alfred, 30–31, 73–117, 124, 128–129, 136, 163–164, 165, 168, 175, 179 note 23 as ghost, 85–86, 104 and Hallam family, 96–97 resemblance to Freud’s melancholic, 83 and Shakespeare, 90 and Wordsworth, 97 see also evolution, Hallam, immortality, In Memoriam, Nature, readers, “Ulysses,” women

thanatos, 36 see also death drive Thomas, Gordon K., 38, 180 note 9 Three Essays on Sexuality (Freud), 53 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 97 Tiresias, 121–126, 128–129, 131, 134, 142–147, 148, 150–154, 156–159 “Tom and Viv,” 121 Tomko, Michael, 76, 183 note 9 “To William Wordsworth” (Coleridge), 44–45 transcendence, 19, 34, 36, 65, 138, 154, 161, 163 see also trauma, trust trauma and anxiety, 60, 80, 112 and creativity, 19, 31, 65–69, 166 cycle of trauma and memory, 32, 35, 70, 115, 127, 152, 163 and death, 30–31 and the death drive, 2, 8 and desire, 40–50, 60, 81, 93, 104–105, 134 and development, 15, 88, 112–114 and early infancy, 3, 20 and history, 172 and language, 136 as narrative, 141–142 and the objet a, 16 parodied, 165 and pleasure, 14–15 repetition of, 2, 33, 35, 37, 41, 45–49, 51, 53, 54, 58, 60–63, 72, 73, 75, 80–81, 99, 152–153, 163 and the succession of drives, 15 traumatic stress, 131–132 as unconscious, 8 see also ethics, responsibility, transcendence, trust trust and creativity, 20, 28 in external world, 31, 71, 112, 138, 156, 159

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“Ulysses” (Tennyson), 110, 185 note 45 unconscious blockage of, 119 and consciousness 104–105 and desire, 82, 106 and knowledge, 98–99 and language, 120 opening of, 74–75, 101 Urania, 116 vel, 82 Vermeulen, Pieter, 56, 181 note 45 The Vicar of Wakefield, 149–150 The Vigil of Venus, 161 Virgil, 131, 186 note 19 vocation, poetic, 30–31, 36–38 and desire, 30, 41, 43, 45–46, 101, 117, 124 and Eliot, 121, 124, 125–132 and Merrill, 163, 168, 173 and Tennyson, 73–74, 76–78, 99–101, 109, 117 and trust, 30, 38, 40, 46, 71, 100, 163

and Wordsworth, 40–41, 43, 45–46, 49, 64, 71 Wang, Orrin N.C., 40, 180 note 21 The Waste Land, 31, 119–162, 163, 164, 170 “The Burial of the Dead,” 124, 125–132, 136, 147, 148, 150, 155, 160 “Death By Water,” 125, 127, 130, 153–154 “The Fire Sermon,” 124, 131, 142, 143–153, 154, 157 “A Game of Chess,” 124, 127, 130, 131, 133–142, 152, 154, 155, 157 “What the Thunder Said,” 125, 131, 153–161 Wheeler, Michael, 75–76, 182 note 4 “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” 156 Whitman, Walt, 156 Whitworth, Michael, 146–147, 188 notes 54–56 Williams, Rhian, 184 note 15 Wilson, Douglas B., 42, 181 note 28 women and disgust, 150–154 and hysteria, 134, 136 Tennyson’s fear of, 79 Wordsworth, Catherine, 34–37, 58 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 39 Wordsworth, John, 41 Wordsworth, William, 30–31, 33–72, 73–74, 85, 97, 100, 108, 124, 128–129, 163–165, 175, 179 notes 1,24, 180 note 7, 181 note 44, 182 note 50, 184 note 27, 185 notes 36–37 anxieties about future blindness, 64, 70 and brother’s death, 30, 31 and Coleridge, 44–45

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and the future, 37, 162 in God, 164 in Lacan, 20 and lack, 3, 20, 23, 24 in language, 110, 116, 163–164, 171, 175 and melancholy, 3 and narrative, 40 in Nature, 93–94, 96, 99–100, 108, 112 in poetry, 40, 69, 71–72 and readers, 125, 138 in spots of time, 63, 68, 69 as stain, 20 and sublimation, 29 and tone, 171 see also Klein, transcendence, trauma Tucker, Herbert, 82–83, 182 note 1, 184 notes 21–22, 185 note 34

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Wordsworth, William—Continued and daughter’s death, 34–37 and father’s death, 69–71 and mother’s death, 50–54, 57–60 see also Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, “Peele Castle,” The Prelude, “Surprised by

Joy, Impatient as the Wind,” “Tintern Abbey” World War I, 131, 132, 139 Wright, Jane, 183 note 15 Wu, Duncan, 39, 58–59, 180 note 18, 182 notes 46–47 Zaretsky, Eli, 78, 184 note 18 Zizek, Slavoj, 16, 59–60, 178 note 12

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