Introduction
I
A NEW WORD is abroad these days in Wordsworth scholarship — "historicist"
— and the adjective carries distinctly heterodox overtones.'
What is thereby refused is an idealizing interpretive model associated with
Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and even M. H. Abrams. At the same
time, historicist critique distinguishes its interests and method from historical scholarship, or from the
researches and argumentation of David Erdman, Carl Woodring,
and E. P. Thompson. More specifically, a number of works published over the
last three years position themselves as demystifications of Romanticist
readings as well as of Romantic poems. They use history, or sociopolitical
reconstruction, to resist the old control of Yale. However, insofar as they
repudiate the empiricist, positivist concept of historical fact, in that they
focus textual
antinomy and erasure rather than manifest theme and achieved form, and in that they use their
historical remove with conscious opportunism, these works are deeply of the
devil's party.
By way of illuminating this curious consensus, I would
like to situate this book in the general field of Romantic criticism over the past ten or fifteen years, and
then within the very different context of today.
My project took shape some five years ago in a critical climate which I perceived as inimical to
the contextual elucidation of Wordsworth's poetry. By contextual, I refer not
to an academically contoured intellectual or literary domain, but to a factual
universe: the place of political realities and of the ideological pressures
that organize this material into determinate sociopsychic
experience. The context I hoped to reconstruct from and around the poetry was
not, in other words, a formal or heuristic category (e.g., Rousseauvian
primitivism, associational psychology, literary ballad) but something closer to
an `extrinsic' referential universe. I had the persistent feeling
that Wordsworth's most generalized representations owed their pronounced
ideality to some disturbing particular and to the need to efface or elide it.
This suspicion – neither a theoretically derived (Freudian, Marxian)
assumption, nor a heretical gesture – arose from my efforts to teach the great
period poems to undergraduates, who had not learned not to ask irrelevant and
irreverent questions. They wondered why, for example, in a poem commonly known
as "Tintern Abbey" and, by its title, very
concretely situated with respect to time and place of composition, there is no
mention of an abbey, and only the most generalized treatment of occasion. When
I reflected on this discrepancy – a logical contradiction between title and
text – it occurred to me that the amassing harmonies of Wordsworth's poem
effectively muffle the
social and political resonance of the date inscribed in the title, of the designated five-year
interval, and of the scene of writing. As I began to recover that resonance – a semantic dimension – I
saw that it did not
dilute, discredit, or remain extrinsic to the poem's psycho-logical and
metaphysical argument. Quite the contrary, these new meanings, that related
Wordsworth's existential Angst to his own less mediated
experience, as to the truths of his moment and his nation, materialized what had come
to seem an impossibly displaced and textualized meditation. It became clear,
for example, that many of "Tintern Abbey's most
innocent affirmations – doctrinal and iconic – signified within the universe of
contemporary social discourse as negations. Under the sign of history,
Wordsworth offers the
growth of a poet's mind: a privatized, self-generative, and causally perspicuous sequence. So
smooth, scaled, and, in the language of "Tintern
Abbey," purified a history does the poem develop, that history in the commoner sense, and
the conditions of Wordsworth's historiography, have no room to surface.
Those commonplaces, and their relation to the uncommon
wisdoms Wordsworth produces from them, were my quarry. My idea was not to
produce the concealed subjects and occasions of Wordsworth's poetry like
rabbits from a hat, nor was it (and perhaps this amounts to the same thing), to
revaluate his most celebrated and transcendent poems with reference to some standard of
first and final
Truth. John Goode, in his excellent study of Gissing,
puts the matter clearly and concisely: we do not expect "absolute
veracity" from .any fiction, but rather "a veracity
made true by the historic significance of its mode of idealisation."
2 Plainly, one cannot gauge the nature or success of the
idealization until and unless one restores to the work that `actual' (a
congeries of conditions experienced by an epoch as its given Real) which the
form so uniquely, so interestedly, and with such complete necessity makes
symbolic. Far from seeking to depreciate Wordsworth's transcendence
or to trivialize profoundly
moving works, I hoped to renew our sense of their power by exposing the conditions of their
success: that recalcitrant facticity with which they
had to contend, explicitly and unconsciously. Neither was the
point of this exercise to invert the old, idealizing control, and designate as either superior or typical those works
revealing the most conflicted relation to their moment. That line of thought
would, of course, merely replace one Romantic agony with another. My object was
to explain the particular and particularly constrained manner in which
Wordsworth sought figurally, mythically, or formally to resolve
those conflicts which were his idees fixes, so to speak, his ideological knowledges.
The ablest practitioner of the method I sketch (and the
best thing that has happened to Wordsworth studies in the past ten years) is
John Barrell. While Barrell is everywhere and passionately concerned to
restore diverse representational decisions to their determining social
contexts, he also refuses – practically and theoretically – the referential
privileging that tends to accompany such elucidations and to hypostatize the
critic's own working know-ledge. Barrell
offers, for example, a cautionary critique of a writer who "ignores the
surface" of Constable's paintings, the attempts to
"conceal the pain of agricultural labour,"
as if that surface "is only varnish to be cleaned off before we can see
Constable in his true colours." Barrell compares this approach to Raymond Williams's
notion of `real history' – "what really happened in the
agrarian history of
Psychoanalysis is limited by what
justifies it ... It is precisely this internal limitation of the Freudian problematic that will
invite us, in a
first phase, to oppose to it another explanatory
point of view ... and then, in a second phase,
to find in psychoanalysis itself the reason for going beyond it. The task of that second reading is not so
much to unmask the repressed and the agency
of repression in order to show what lies behind the masks, as to
set free the interplay of references
between signs . . . The only thing that gives a presence to the artist's fantasies is the work of
art; and the reality thus conferred upon
them is the reality of the work of art itself within a world of culture.
Barrell's respect for the reality of the
appearance — the depth that is Constable's surface — highlights the question of style in Words-worth's
poetry'. Or, one might study Wordsworth's mythic resolution of logically insoluble
problems (what E. P. Thompson has called "search for a synthesis at a moment of arrested
dialectic" and what we might conceive
as an ideological compromise formation), in terms of the textual procedures that
transform lived contradiction into the appearance of aesthetic complexity.' By
these procedures, historically produced difference is mobilized into spatial
and doctrinal design, and where there was unworkable, unspeakable loss, there
is redemptive,
figural definition. Because criticism has for so long and so volubly articulated
Wordsworth's impulses from vernal woods, it is difficult to remember that the
dominant effect of his poetry — its peculiar
style — is its extreme artlessness, an apparent absence of style. In Arnold's phrase, Wordsworth's poetry is most
distinctive when it is least distinctive, when it is `as inevitable as Nature
herself.'
Much of the recent historicist
work on Wordsworth addresses poems or parts of poems that sketch (ambivalently,
of course) the social
dimensions of their primary representations. The later portions of The Prelude, The
Excursion, "The Old Cumberland Beggar,"
"Guilt and Sorrow" — these are all predictably inviting subjects of
explication. Marilyn Butler's brisk, trenchant positioning of "Laodamia" and some of the lyrical ballads, Jerome McGann's reading of "A Slumber Did My Spirit
Seal," and David Simpson's treatment of "Alice Fell"
and "The Reverie of Poor Susan," are the exceptions.° They
remind us that Wordsworth is most distinctively Wordsworth, most Romantic, and
most successful in those poems where the conflicts embedded in his materials, motives, and methods are most expertly displaced and
where, as a result, the poetry looks most removed from anything so banal as a
polemic or position.
The poems I present — "Tintern Abbey," "Michael," the Intimations Ode, "Peele
Castle" — are not only incontestably among the poet's greatest works, they are preeminent examples of that 'inevitability'
so valued by readers such as Arnold, Pater, and Mill.
These poems speak not a word about those
sociopolitical themes which had occupied Wordsworth and others less than a
decade before and which had become, in the light of the post-Revolutionary
world, awkward on a number of levels. My argument is that the extreme
disinterest evinced by these works indicates their resumption of those
problematic themes at the level of image and of metaphysics, precisely because
they were deadlocked at the practical level. More simply, these poems seek to
resolve formally, through certain representational strategies, issues that
were unthinkable under any but the most sublime — the most discursive —
conditions.
Another reason these works
solicited my attention is that while they appear to emerge with complete
spontaneity and to owe their utterance to the profoundest, most diffuse and
ineffable motivations,
each poem perversely advertises its occasional, topical character. I ask the reader to recall,
for example, Wordsworth's letter to Fox, where the poet identifies
the social purposes informing his "Michael" and
"The Brothers." Alerted by that letter, we focus
references within Wordsworth's "pastoral" to distressing
socioeconomic trends particularly evident in the Lake District. Or consider the
title of "Tintern Abbey," which,
with its prolix explicitness,
underlines the multiple anniversaries, national and personal, marked by the date of composition, and the
very public meanings
lodged in the landscape that the poem registers by negation. Similarly, the
Intimations Ode, largely composed on the day which concluded the ignominious Peace of
Amiens, alludes with a strange, typological specificity to ostensibly generic items, and it develops its lofty metaphysical argument
by way of a historically specific and, at the time of composition, distinctly polemical
representational style.
The object of each of these poems is to replace the
picture of the place with "the picture of the mind," such as it might
be at any time and in any place. The structural device by which this usurpation
is achieved is repetition or return. In "Tintern
Abbey," the Intimations Ode, and "
II
Some time
ago, E. P. Thompson sought to undermine the assumption, common among Wordsworthians at that time, that the poet's artistic
success was a function of his political disengagement. In the view of M. H.
Abrams, for example, "the great Romantic poems were written not in the
mood of revolutionary exaltation but in the later mood of revolutionary
disillusionment or despair," when "the militancy of overt political
action" had evolved into "the paradox of spiritual quictism."8
Thompson's campaign, assisted by
David Erdman and Carl Woodring, aimed to prove that
Wordsworth's great art emerged from the tension between his "Jacobin
affirmation and recoil." Once this tension evaporated, the poetry
contracted and settled into "a point of rest.'
What
Thompson and his fellow workers could not, given their critical moment,
address, were the subtler languages of politics in Wordsworth's poetry, and the
way these languages inform and inflect the manifest doctrine of the poetry, as
well as its innocent aesthetic decisions. These scholars brilliantly
illuminated that doctrine — the presented themes of the poetry — by restoring
the social and political discourses wherein those themes were first
articulated. Their research was not, however, directed toward textual intervention. Their arguments — astute
and completely persuasive — could not change one's fundamental sense of the poetry, an
impression determined by particular representational procedures, or the text's
imperceptible way of framing its world and its readers.
While the historians were
conducting their investigations, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and Paul de
Man seized as their Wordsworthian truth the great
epistemological and ontological arguments of the poetry — arguments developed
by the poet and his exegetes in what was, to
all appearances, a disinterested, philosophic fashion.'°
These scholars investigated the subtle negotiations whereby the mind of Man
knew, `married,' and redeemed (`humanized') Nature. They read both
those agents, Mind and Nature, more or less sympathetically, or as they figure
in the poetry. As Bloom, Hartman, and de Man developed their remarkable theoretical
talents, one could look back on their practical criticism and appreciate the logic
of their attraction to deconstructive thought (or, of their interpretation of
that thought). Wordsworth's poetry — with its reception protocols, its
narrative contingencies, its reflexivity, its thematizing
of figuration and desire, discourse and plenitude, repetition and reproduction
— in short, its irony and aporia, provided
deconstructive theory with a perfect, that is, perfectly accommodating model
of the literary. To put this more polemically, Romanticism's
ideology of writing is deconstruction's ideology of reading. The
reasons for this identity are various and complex. Gerald Graff, in his Literature
Against Itself, offers a sociopolitical analysis
of the Romantic ideology, then and now, and Terry Eagleton,
more sketchily but very suggestively, situates Yale's resistance to the
"terrorism of determinate meaning" within the context of less
academic horrors: specifically, the Holocaust.' 1
The Romantics, we recall, and especially
the first-generation poets, knew apocalypse and terror as well: the Revolution
and Napoleon. The origin and evolution of critical methodologies is not my
subject. I merely observe that the marriage of Romantic poetry and contemporary
semiotic theory was perhaps happier for the theory than for the poetry. In
Wordsworth's case, the effect of this critical liaison was further
to attenuate an already idealized canon, and to defend it more securely from
properly historical interrogations. The more deliciously were we teased out of
thought, the less likely were we to pose the
kinds of questions ("Who
are these . . . To what green altar ... What little town ...?")
that would arrest the sport.
While Thompson and Erdman were reconstructing Wordsworth,
and Yale was deconstructing him, M. H. Abrams was busy at Cornell with his own project,
which was located somewhere beyond history
and before theory. In his Natural
Supernaturalism and
several landmark
essays, Abrams related Wordsworth's and his generation's political concerns to
certain formal and stylistic issues. Whereas the stricter historians were
textually noninvasive, Abrams's interest in the political
commitment of the early poetry, and the `quietist' or retired mode
of the post-Revolutionary verse, sensitized him to the topical meanings carried
by the poetry's nonthematic features. He
perceived, for example, that certain very general, and, it seemed, perfectly
innocuous words, such as "hope," were in fact politically charged
"leitmotifs" focusing specific contemporary debates.12 Abrams's subject, however, was the big
picture — the general and relatively conscious poetic response to the failure
of the Revolution. The christological concept he so
brilliantly discovered in the poetry, and which he used to explain the
carryover and transformation of those leitmotifs and interests, was a greatly
enabling idea of order, but it further rationalized and totalized works which
were subtly but deeply scored by contradiction.
Marilyn
Butler's work takes up where Abrams (and Thompson, Erdman, and Woodring) leaves off. In her
Jane Austen and the War of Ideas,
Peacock Displayed, and most dramatically,
Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, she brings her impressive historical erudition to bear on
the most innocent aspects of the work: a word, a character type, a narrative donne. By recovering and elucidating the polemical meanings of those
representations and procedures in their originary
context, she gives her readers a more authentic and immediate relation to the
literature. To focus Romantic Hellenism, for example, as a reaction to a
contemporary ideological conflict and its literary inscription, is to
understand the deeply political character of this Romantic escape, this
`luxury.' It is to register concretely the difference between the apolitical
and the anti- or adversarially political.
Butler's
work makes of us informed contemporary readers of Romantic literature; what she
does not do is use her belatedness to theorize that within or about the work
which the informed contemporary reader could not possibly know but which we,
not so in-formed, can. Or, to put this another way,
what Abrams did not do was to present the contradiction implied by his
findings: on the one hand, a smooth, generalized, metaphysically preoccupied
surface, and on the other, the historically specific, ideologically expressive,
and greatly problematic methods that produced that manifest representation.
Structuralism, by way of deconstruction, materializes textual absence and
identifies its semiotic charge, so to speak; the reconstructive efforts of
Thompson through Butler expose the faceted nature of works that present to our
view a single plane. What was wanted was a way to mediate those projects, a theory of negative allegory.
Such a
theory emerges in this generation from the work of Louis Althusser,
Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Pierre Macherey, and it is deployed in the more practical studies of John Barrell, James Chandler, T. J. Clark, John Goode, Kurt Heinzelman, Kenneth Johnston, Alan Liu, Jerome McGann, David Simpson, and James Turner. These writers, at
once materialist and deconstructive, rep-resent the literary work as that which
speaks of one thing because it cannot articulate another — presenting formally
a sort of allegory by absence, where the signified is indicated by an
identifiably absented signifier. Here, for example, is Althusser's
defense of a particular but representative hermeneutic move.
No doubt this was to add
something to
Marx's discourse: but in a different respect,
I was merely re-establishing, i.e., maintaining
his discourse,
without yielding to the temptation of his silence. I heard this silence as the possible weakness of a discourse under the pressure and
repressive action of another discourse, which
takes the place of the first discourse in favour of
this repression, and speaks in its
silence: the empiricist discourse. All I did was to make this silence in the first discourse speak, dissipating
the second.13
That silence or `unspeakable'
(Jameson's "logical scandal," Macherey's
"rupture" and "fissure," Bakhtin/Volosinov's
"intonation," Della Volpe—McGann's
"quid"), inheres within the work and can determine its peripheral
contours as well. The internal scandal occurs in those syntactic, dramatic, thematic,
affective, and rhetorical contradictions that so deeply made (produced) and
make (constitute) the work as to be nearly imperceptible to readers who share
that work's field of vision, what these writers call its problematic. The
omission of the picture of the place (as opposed to `mind') from "Tintern Abbey" is a contradiction of this kind, a
thematic/iconic bind. The syntactic contradiction in line 33 of "Pcele
Castle" ("So once it would have been, — 'tis so no more":
opposition of a past conditional to a present indicative, thereby suppressing
the unconditional past, i.e., the so once it was), locates another such node. Precisely where the work blurs its manifest
representations and where its smooth surface thickens,
invaginates, or breaks open, is where its ideological
situation can begin to take shape for us. These places — quite literally, spots of time, or deposits of historicity — are where the
privatized `world' of the poem (Abrams's "heterocosm")
confesses its possession by the world, "the place where, in the
end,/We find our happiness, or not at all" (The Prelude, Book u, lines 143—44)
To focus
these contradictions does not mean to discount the work's manifest themes and
rhetoric, or what used to be called its achieved form. The idea
is that criticism take possession of these trouble spots, or take up a
position within but not of the ideology it seeks to
articulate: a position at once intimate and removed. Criticism can use these
logical binds to plot the polemic developed by the work's most spontaneous
moves and its readiest materials: their reactive and dialectical, as well as
their celebratory and more simply reflective dimensions. To read in this way is to split the atom of Romantic symbolism and organicism. Less flamboyantly, it is to set image against idea, form against content, process against pro-duct, in the hope that we may
thus compel a tired organic apparition to reveal its fabulous fusions.
It is
difficult to read Wordsworth in this conscientiously contentious way because
the poetry explicitly rebukes even the gentlest material interest. Consciously
or otherwise, one wants to defer to that celebrated, seductive instruction —
let the feeling give importance to the incidents. What we must bear in mind is
that we cannot use Wordsworth's protest on behalf of
the inner life and his rejection of an obsequious mimesis, unless we first and
continuously try to reproduce his universe of objects considered as objects, and the historically
specific conditions of his apprehension and representation of that universe.
This is the kind of work that leads to a know-ledge of Wordsworth's
achievement, since this — the object world and its modes of availability — is
what the expressive and the heterocosmic orientations
refuse.
Another
textual obstacle to the sort of exercise I describe is that spectacular agon of self and other enacted throughout Words-worth's
great period poetry. Clearly, a deconstructive materialism must ultimately
undermine the categorial distinctions which that
Cartesian dynamic enforces: meaning—psyche—poetry vs. matter–sociality–history.
Students of Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Pope, Johnson, Joyce, Whitman, and
Lowell are better positioned to perceive the slippages whereby the mind's idea
and the heart's desire and all that is conceived as external and inimical to
that privileged (and therefore threatened) interiority, in fact produce,
repro-duce, and invade each other. Wordsworth's later poetry, like that of
Coleridge, Shelley, and most passionately, Keats, mythically figures that
enfolding – an interpenetration of private and public domains – but in the
poetry of Wordsworth's great period, those ontological and social blendings or vortices are registered as contamination and
they are fiercely resisted. The unacknowledged knowledge that
Imagination and Nature are not only not distinct (and therefore not liable to
prolific marriages) but are, equally, indifferent avatars of historical consciousness
and its severe conditions, is the unthinkable in Wordsworth's
poetry. This is the logical scandal, and the place where the directly
humanitarian concerns of the early poetry can be seen to determine the bent of
the later (1807 volume) poems and more
surprisingly, the institutional impersonalities of The Excursion.
The trend
in Wordsworth criticism today — and I do mean today — is crystallized by the phrase,
"historical imagination." By this phrase, criticism names its belief that ideology
is exactly that outside or social, which is invisible as such (that is to say, which is
experienced as Nature or the order of things) precisely because it has so
perfectly framed what is inside: psyche. The oxymoronic phrase,
"historical imagination" (like "natural
supernaturalism" or, for that matter, lyrical ballad, a peculiarly apt Romantic motto) organizes a criticism which
seems to older, historical scholars, unnecessarily and therefore inaccurately
ingenious (and, to deconstructionists, tediously circumstantial and
recidivist). I refer to the procedure employed throughout this book, whereby a
manifold of contemporary meanings, originally associated with or
systematically in-forming the poet's representations, is restored to a work
which defines by its illogical affirmations the contours of that repressed
material. The deconstruction proceeds by way of this reconstructed alterity, situated by the critic at the heart of the
manifest discourse. The spectacle of this re- and de-construction is offered to
the reader as an opportunity to appreciate the historically actualized human
character of works that have been so powerfully abstracted and idealized – so canonized, in short
– that all we can do is admire them.
Today's
younger Romanticists, and bold older ones, are trying to mediate Yale and the
historians, not just because knowledge will be used (one cannot unknow Derrida), but
because they have begun to appreciate the profounder meanings of Romantic
irony, or of a poetry which extends its enchantments in great good faith,
requires of its readers a willing suspension of disbelief, and all the while
criticizes itself and those complaisant readers mercilessly for their illusions
and elisions. Visually, one might conceive this poetry as one of those silhouettes
which works from both the dark and the light side,
figure and ground ever reversible and contingent, and refusing simultaneous
figural motivation by a single observer.
The dark ground which defines
Wordsworth's poetry is, first or finally, that sense of lost things
which engenders all human creation, but the form which those losses assume
through the language of the poetry and of the age is deeply specific.
Wordsworth's grief in 18o6, one year after the death of his brother, is,
whether we are aware of it or not, moving
and interesting to us precisely because it is so different from one's own real or imagined griefs.
And that difference is a
function of the diverse contemporary meanings subsumed by that death — a
function of the historicity of that loss and the representation of it.
The death of John Wordsworth was, to the poet, a class
loss, containing a collection of losses and betrayals, many of them drawn from
what we might call, the public sector. The poet does
not speak these things; he does not draw the arrow leading from private grief
to public critique, because he does not, he cannot know this connection. To produce the poem — the heterocosmic affirmation — Wordsworth cannot connect the Isle of Wight
with the Rampside interlude, the death of John Wordsworth with the
deaths of Marat, Robespierre, John Taylor, and Raisley Calvert, Beaumont's sublime sea with the devouring
Revolutionary deluge. To do so would be to name the contradiction which organized his culture and his particular mode of
insertion/implication in that culture.
David Erdman, in a private correspondence, observed
the skeptical, negative character of scholarship today, and this, ironically,
among so-called historicist readers. What Erdman — a great and greatly
historical scholar — dislikes about this new wave is its penchant for reading
what he considers the "nothing that is not there." What he fails to
appreciate is, first, "the nothing that is" and second, the meaning
of this interest in that absence everywhere. It betrays, like Erdman's own
work, an appetite for reality, not a rejection. Where it differs from
Erdman's pursuit is in its desire for a more intimate knowledge, a knowledge not of circumstance and
response – a linear and nonreversible causality – but of the
imbrications of those seemingly sequential and distinct moments. This is a
criticism that seeks to take hold of the conditions of literary production in a
profounder way than historical inquiry into manifest theme is capable of. It is
a self-consciously belated criticism that
sees in its necessary ignorance – its expulsion from the heaven of
Romantic sympathy – a critical advantage: the capacity to know a work as
neither it, nor its original readers, nor its author could know it. It is a
criticism that uses the devices of deconstruction to materialize a greatly
idealized corpus; or, to locate the body in Wordsworth's poetry. In certain
respects, this trend in Wordsworth studies realizes some ideals associated with
feminist criticism: specifically, that movement's adversarial tactics, its
sensitivity to the interdeterminations of psychic and
social forms, and its respect for the
material — the physique of things — as the limit of contraction and expansion.
Yale
provided the enabling concept, the method, and the machinery; Erdman and the
historians discriminated and elaborated the poetry's political and material
dimension. Perhaps the two groups read too literally, "Opposition is true
Friendship," or perhaps the time was not ripe for the marriage of Heaven
and Hell, re-and deconstruction. To return to my opening observation — viz, the defensive, anti-New Havenish
tone of some of this year's Romantic work — let me remark that the generation of
Americans writing about Wordsworth today learned to think its subject from Bloom and Hartman. One read the historians (and Frye and
Abrams) of course, but how hard it was for students trained as close readers to
use that material. The great precursor, then, synecdochically speaking, was Hartman, not Erdman. I
suspect that the defensive tone and the polemical tactics of this new
historicist criticism confirm the syndrome Bloom himself conceived: the anxiety
of influence. The dependence, and the admiration, then, persist
in this form.
Notes
Introduction
1 Historicism is, of course, an old and Hegelian
word transvalued. In its original context, and by way
of Althusser's usage and Benjamin's
critique, historicism denotes a reconstructive project conducted along the
grain. The dominant narrative and, plainly, ideological principle of this kind
of discourse is that of causal connection, continuity, homogeneity, and
self-coincidence. To put it crudely, historicism in its original sense defines for materialist
critique an instance of
empiricist and positivist idealism. (Louis Althusser, Lenin
and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster {London: Monthly Review Press, 19711, pp. 49, 50; Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster {London: NLB, 19681,
pp. 91-144).
One could argue, of course, that Althusser's own project, to propose "a theory of
ideology in
general, in the
sense that Freud presented a theory of the unconscious in
general" — a project Althusser
justifies by reference
to the "omni-historical
reality"
of the object, ideology, itself represents a more aggressively positivist
historicism than that which Althusser locates in The German Ideology. I say "more aggressively"
because not only does Althusser stress the
theoretical, as opposed to historical necessity for this omni-historical character, ideology, but he aligns this necessity with the
"eternity of the unconscious." (For a bracingly
wrongheaded, rightminded critique of Althusser's position, see E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays {London:
Monthly Review Press, 1978}.)
Historicist critique, as practiced
today by some Romanticists (and, more strikingly, by such Renaissance scholars
as Stephen Greenblatt, Frank Whigham,
Louis Montrose, and from a slightly different angle, Nancy Vickers) means
something a good deal closer to Benjamin's anti-historicism. Within this
discourse, the practically reflexive narratives that particular writers and
epochs construct as their historical truth are positioned as complexly mediated representations
of the structures that enable and indeed, necessitate that peculiar reflexiveness. By submitting that textual enlightenment to the
concepts which a removed
Notes
to pages 2—3
critique
can formulate, one produces the contextual truths which that enlightenment effaces. What
distinguishes today's historicist work is its conviction that the content goes beyond the form,
or that its own, operationally
critical concepts
are as reflexively limited as the histories on which they operate. In the Romantic idiom, we could
describe this activity
as a redemptive violence visited upon the mythoi of the past, and anticipated from a future present.
(See Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a
Revolutionary Criticism {London: Verso and NLB, 1981), PP. 43—78)
I sketch
the complex history of the word `historicist' in order to put in perspective a statement such as
the following. In a critique of Jerome McGann's
The Romantic Ideology
(Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1983),
Nina Auerbach notes that "almost all the major books
published this year (1983) share a historical vision that
finds no need to proclaim itself" and, she continues, "for most
of us, the deeply political nature of Romanticism does not need this sort of overassertion." (Auerbach, "Recent Studies in the Nineteenth
Century," SEL 24 (1984),
770-806). Auerbach is right - we have known for a long time of the "political
nature of
Romanticism," and that very locution - so easily, dismissively general - inscribes the special
ignorance which such knowledge maintains. Simply, we have not understood the "actual life of
the past" in such a way as to explain its profound procedural pressures on
actual Romantic poems and on dimensions other than manifest theme and gross
form. Nor have we had till now a way to theorize those pressures and their
mechanisms. McGann's "overassertion,"
properly contextualized, is, of course, nothing of the sort. Moreover, in
linking "empiricist and historicist," and reading this
"tendency" as a "repudi{ation} {of} the abstruse
abstractions, the bardic pretensions, the political
myopia, associated with Yale's visionary company," Auerbach rehearses the old, idealizing positivism. In short,
she misrepresents the
situation of much contemporary Romantic work - its objectives, procedures, and
provenance.
2 John Goode, George Gissing:
Ideology in Fiction (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979),
p. 30. This remark occurs in the context of
Goode's appraisal of Dickens's realism. I do not think that Goode would object to the liberty I take in
abstracting and generalizing his local observation.
3 John Barrell,
The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural
Poor in English Painting, 173o-184o (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980),
p.164. Also, Barrell, English Literature in History 173o-8o: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson Press, 1983); and The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 173o-1840; An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972). For superb work in this line, see James Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and
Society in English Poetry 1630-1660 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979) and
Notes
to pages 4-15
T. J. Clark,
Image of the People: Gustave
Courbet and the Second French Republic 1848-5i (Conn:
New York Graphic Society, 1973); "Preliminaries to a Possible
Treatment of `Olympia' in 1865," Screen, 1980, vol. 21, no. 1,
19-41; and "Courbet the Communist
and the Temple Bar Magazine," in Malerei and Theorie
Das Courbet-Colloquium 1979, 23-48.
4 Paul Ricoeur,
Freud and
Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1970), pp. 176-77.
5 E. P. Thompson,
"Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon," in Power and Consciousness, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien and W. Vanech
(London: Univ. of London Press, 1969) p. 152.
6 Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and
Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 176o 1830, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982); Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical
Investigation, (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983); David Simpson, "Criticism,
Politics, and Style in Wordsworth's Poetry," Critical Inquiry, Sept. 1984, vol. u, No. 1, 52-81; and lecture, Univ. of Pennsylvania, April 1984.
7 In "Michael," the
mediations are enabled by the postulate of a poet narrator removed temporally,
sociologically, and ideologically from the chronicle he delivers.
8 M. H. Abrams, "English
Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age" in Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970),
pp. 107, 110.
9 Thompson, "Disenchantment or
Default," pp. 155,
180.
10 I have, of course, polarized the field so
drastically as to suppress the important and influential work of David Perkins,
Harry Lindenberger, Stephen Parrish, Mark Reed, Paul Sheats, and others. What I try to identify by my scheme are
the spheres of influence that tend to determine the way these mediating voices
get used.
II Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: NLB, 1984).
12 Abrams, "Spirit of the Age," 90-118.
13 Louis Althusser
and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB 1970; first pub. 1968), p.90.