Shelley's unwriting of Mont Blanc.

Today, the critic who would tackle "Mont Blanc" must confront more than one kind of mountain. Along with the eponymous subject of the poem looms an overwhelming mountain of criticism, accumulated over the years like (to mix metaphors only slightly) snowflakes on an alpine glacier. We might say, borrowing another image from Shelley's poem, that the critic who ventures to write on "Mont Blanc" may well have the nagging sense that any new tributary to this "vast river" of ink will amount to little more than a "feeble brook." (1) In recent years it has become something like a prerequisite for commentators to allude to this predicament--sometimes explicitly, but more often implicitly, by noting the poem's status as central or pivotal not only within the Shelley oeuvre but also within the discourse of Romantic or nineteenth-century studies. Thus, in a paradox Shelley might have enjoyed, the assertion of a given critical work's importance (by virtue of the poem's importance) is shadowed by the distinct possibility of its relative triviality (since so much has already been written).

In opening my essay with these observations, I am, of course, attempting to stake my own claim in the debate. My direct acknowledgement of the vast mountain before me is admittedly a rhetorical gambit, a tacit assurance to the reader that this snowflake is unique--that although it may not, as in the description of the avalanche from Prometheus Unbound, loosen "some great truth" that leaves literary critics "shaken to their roots" (II.iii.37-42), at least it will make a meaningful contribution to the critical discussion. Yet my opening is not merely strategic. My description of "Mont Blanc" as a sort of occasion for the textual sublime is also a convenient analog for the way I believe Shelley himself experienced the landscape about which he wrote. Just as critics must consider the poem in the context of a vast discursive network, so Shelley was cognizant of a comparable network as he viewed, contemplated, and poetically represented Mont Blanc. The speaker of the poem, after all, as he faces the alpine scene, becomes aware of a cacophony of voices: the Ravine of Arve is a "many-voiced vale" (13), a conduit of "ceaseless motion" and "unresting sound" (32-33), its caverns" echoing to the Arve's commotion" (30). One of my main contentions here will be that the poem must be understood in large part as a record of Shelley's experience with, and response to, these voices. In my view, readers have tended to overlook or greatly underestimate the importance of this aspect of "Mont Blanc." Even those critics who have explicitly focused on the poem's intertextuality, (2) or who have rightly recognized the poem's self-reflexivity--its awareness of both its internal workings and, more germane here, its situation within a larger literary and aesthetic context--have fallen short in pursuing the implications of that recognition. Not the least of these implications, I shall argue, is a new perspective on one of the great conundrums in all of English literature, the famously enigmatic question with which the poem concludes:

 
    And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, 
    If to the human mind's imaginings 
    Silence and solitude were vacancy? (142-44) 

My reading will thus be part formalist and part historicist. That is, in addition to reading the text closely, with attention to its thematic concerns and its rhetorical operations, I shall show how the poem demands to be understood in the larger context of literary history. A third concern, moreover, will become explicit toward the end of my essay. For I shall ultimately argue, against those critics who regard the poem as an expression of philosophical idealism, or who see the actual mountain as more or less irrelevant to the text, (3) that "Mont Blanc" expresses a radical but redemptive skepticism which accepts, even embraces, the otherness of wilderness. In a sense that I shall explain, my aim is to recover--or, rather, to show that Shelley aims to recover--the mountain, the real mountain, of the poem.

I. Letters from Abroad

That Shelley was truly enthralled upon visiting the Alps in 1816 has been amply documented, the primary source being the poet's own firsthand account of his travels. In a series of letters (modestly revised and published the following year in a History of a Six Weeks' Tour) addressed to Thomas Love Peacock, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and Lord Byron, sent from Geneva and dated from 15 May to 25 July, Shelley describes the region in tones often rhapsodic: "But how shall I describe to you," he asks Peacock, "the scenes by which I am now surrounded.--To exhaust epithets which express the astonishment & the admiration--the very excess of satisfied expectation, where expectation scarcely acknowledged any boundary[?]" (I.495). (4) Angela Leighton has shown how Shelley's language here and elsewhere in the Geneva letters falls clearly within the tradition of the sublime as it had developed throughout the eighteenth century. (5) Although his expressions of "astonishment" and "admiration" are conventional, and even "histrionic" at times (Leighton, 38), the feelings they describe are clearly genuine. Of course, as Leighton points out, few writers would have been more keenly aware than Shelley of invoking literary conventions. Thus we might posit--at this juncture, as merely a preliminary hypothesis--that even as he recognized the sublime aesthetic to be the appropriate idiom to express his wonder, he must have also found it entirely inappropriate for an experience so extraordinarily unconventional. (6) Indeed, that dilemma is evident in the quotation above: the phrase "how shall I describe to you" plainly registers Shelley's awareness of the insufficiency of his words, as does the suggestion that whatever epithets he might offer would be quickly "exhaust[ed]." Yet even such expressions of speechlessness, as Leighton notes, were themselves standard fare in the literature of the sublime--an ironic complication that the poet must have found at once vexing and intriguing.

In a similar vein, by mentioning that the scene exceeds his "expectation" Shelley directs our attention to the gap between preconception and actual experience. This proves a recurrent motif in the letters, as when he writes that the scene near Mont Blanc "exceeds and renders insignificant all that I had before seen, or imagined" (L I.494). An apparent displacement occurs, reminiscent of Wordsworth's description (which Shelley could not have known) in The Prelude of his own first glimpse of the mountain: