Graved in tropes: the figural logic of epitaphs and elegies in Blair, Gray, Cowper and Wordsworth. (Robert Blair; Thomas Gray; William Cowper; William Wordsworth)

Some of the most influential work in the deconstruction of rhetoric, work often tested on Romanticism at large and on Wordsworth in particular, has repeatedly returned for discussion and debate to a figural complex - namely, the overlap of prosopopoeia and apostrophe (personification and invocation) - that is found implicated when the relation of death to language is pursued under the common denominator of absence. This work has proceeded along lines that tend to obscure the classically-based distinctions between these two figural modes and that further disable a full appreciation of the ways in which these very tropes are widely mobilized in neo-classical verse, especially in poetry on the subject of death. Without such distinctions about eighteenth-century texts, tropological employment in Romantic verse is easily misconstrued. Before turning to Wordsworth's critically devalued Excursion, I wish to offer as test cases three eighteenth-century poems about death by Blair, Gray, and Cowper, and suggest that their range of figural logic challenges the usual explanations of tropological functions and their relation to representations of death.

We will find that, although evaluative literary history has tended to grant Robert Blair's The Grave (1743) only occasional attention - despite the poem's immense influence and its central location in the eighteenth-century Graveyard School - its simultaneous bestowal and erasure of animicity capitalizes in didactic fashion on the very failure of prosopopoeia and apostrophe to animate or to act as catalysts for vocalization. The dizzying series of displacements and substitutions of subjects, always considered a crux in Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751), results from a complex manipulation of epitaphic rhetoric. While the structure of the "Elegy" hinges on the traditional epitaph's separation of personification and apostrophe, William Cowper's "Inscription for the Tomb of Mr. Hamilton" (1800) partially collapses the boundaries between speaker, addressee, and reader by making the reader's body the site of personification and apostrophic address. In appropriating the very person of the reader in order to personify meaning, Cowper not only works within an epitaphic tradition for didactic purposes, but anticipates Romantic definitions of the more self-commemorating epitaphic mode. These three works mark stages in the representation of an intersubjectivity - that phenomenological sense of a network or nexus of consciousness - rendered increasingly generalized and community-oriented. Wordsworth's Excursion (1814) is thus revealed, not as the unwitting lapse into sentimental philosophizing, but as the deliberate, culminating expression of the collective rather than the individualist nature of the epitaphic charge. But before visiting any poetic sites, our figural excursion will begin by revisiting major deconstructive interpretations of tropological logic to establish how figural representations comment on their interpretations and vice versa.

The crux of all the texts to be considered here - both poetic and theoretical alike - is the situating of voice. It is not surprising that there should be difficulties in establishing a logic of address in an epitaphic text or in a theoretical exploration of the implications of absence-riddled language, since the traditional epitaph itself regularly problematizes the issue of who is speaking to whom. A reader-response situation is literally inscribed in "Halt, traveler," that imperative opening common to so many classical epitaphs, from which the English epitaph borrows much of its structure and many of its motifs. Made to pause in his journey, the traveler is often instructed to read the text before him in order to honor and, in a rather shadowy sense, to reanimate briefly the deceased, who through the epitaph, demands attention. A promise of general good fortune or of similar commemoration in the future after the current reader is dead - a return on funerary "credit" - may be tendered to increase the appeal. Of course, the reader is already activating the text by the time the instruction comes to do so; his arrest depends on his recognition of an inscription as something requiring a reading. Unlike private reading, however, which "gives voice to" a text, reading out loud transforms the epitaph into a public voicing that creates a relationship with the deceased and her inscription, no matter how tenuous or temporary. The silent voice of the tombstone, otherwise inert language, is heard when it is read; the deceased, silenced now in death, speaks through the reader, whose voice is conscripted by this epitaphic possession. Even if a particular epitaph is reticent to foreground its dependence on voicing, underlying most such inscriptions is a sense of reading and voicing as commemoration, both in the classical world and the modern.(1) Reflecting eighteenth- and nineteenth-century funerary customs, the Poet of Wordsworth's Excursion reports that when he and his friends encounter sepulchral texts, they read them: "the tribute by these various records claimed / Duly we paid." The process involves a conscious bestowal of animation: "And, to the silent language giving voice, / I read."(2)

But if we try to analyze this giving of voice, constructed from multiple figures, who should we say is giving voice to whom? Apostrophe enables direct address to the halted reader in a voice that may be represented as that of the deceased, the bereaved who erected the memorial, the tombstone or the inscription itself in the absence of the writer, or an unnamed mediator of information about the dead. In the case of the bereaved, the reader may function as a substitute for the person represented as speaking to the dead in grief. Whoever or whatever the identity of the supposed speaker behind the inscription, textual activation depends on vocalization, while vocalization depends on animation, ostensibly bestowed prior to the reader's activation of the epitaph. But which prosopopoeia occurs first, that of the memorial or that of the reader? To "hear" the inscripted address, the reader must enter a tropologically activated world of the dead in which the tombstone, animated by prosopopoeia, appears simultaneously to invoke the reader through apostrophe even as the reader activates the text.(3)

The epitaph's eerie conflation of readerly conscription and inscriptional activation, created by a figural nexus of prosopopoeia and apostrophe, offers a site for important work in the deconstruction of rhetoric that considers the implications of language in relation to death. Paul de Man's essay "Autobiography as De-Facement," one of the most influential critical texts on the epitaph and its related tropes, has nonetheless helped to propagate two misconceptions on which it seems to rest.(4) First, in the use of Wordsworth's Essays Upon Epitaphs to define autobiography through the epitaph, de Man actually ignores what is particular to epitaphic inscription in these texts. Second, because he collapses apostrophe within prosopopoeia, he misrepresents the kinds of linguistic moments that are created by the epitaph. Although the tropes may overlap in the temporal action of the epitaph, they are nevertheless discursively distinct, performing separate functions in the communicative cycle.

Despite de Man's claim that "no lengthy argument" is required to demonstrate the autobiographical "components" in the Essays Upon Epitaphs, his linking of the two is not adequately demonstrated.(5) De Man begins his sketch of correspondences between the Essays and the genre of autobiography by noting that the third Essay ends with an epitaph taken from The Excursion about the deaf Dalesman; he rightfully identifies this as a Wordsworthian motif in which discourse that had resulted most often from "an accident of birth" or "a sudden shock" is "sustained beyond and in spite of deprivation."(6) But a rapid slide from The Excursion to The Prelude obfuscates the context and intent of the selection: it is one of the many framed epitaphs from book 7, narrated by the Pastor who oversees the Churchyard Among the Mountains, intended as a didactic exemplum for the living, the group of listening characters who are allegorically named (The Wanderer, the Poet, the Solitary) standing in for the larger group of the living who read both the sepulchral text through them and, by extension, the poetic text of The Excursion itself.(7) Deprivation overcome or suffering faithfully endured, so this lesson extrapolated from the dead goes, allows placement within a living community and recuperation after death for each person, regardless of capabilities or experience. De Man exits as quickly as possible from The Excursion - as many readers have done before him - by appealing to the text that is likely to be more familiar to readers of Wordsworth: "one thinks of such famous passages in The Prelude."(8) Automatic associations are made with the ostensibly autobiographic epic, the impersonal syntax suggests, since these connections are so natural: "or one thinks of the drowned man in book 5. . . . And one thinks most of all of the equally famous episode [of] . . . the Boy of Winander. . . . Numerous verbal echoes link the passage from The Excursion . . . to [this] story."(9) An appeal to widely-shared perception about the Boy's story closes this "proof":

As is well known, it is this episode which furnishes, in an early variant, the textual evidence for the assumption that these figures of deprivation . . . that appear throughout The Prelude are figures of Wordsworth's own poetic self. They reveal the autobiographical dimension that all these texts have in common.(10)