Kindling and ash: radical aestheticism in Keats and Shelley.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-03

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1. "Touch the very pulse of fire / With my bare unlidded eyes"

I TAKE THE TITLE OF MY OPENING SECTION FROM KEATS'S "SONG OF FOUR Fairies," and specifically from its rhapsody on flame. While the spirits of air and water are left to their own delights, Dusketha, the spirit of the earth, promises to join Salamander, the spirit of fire, in congress, to be "bedded in tongued flames" (93): "Sprite of fire! I follow thee [and] / at thy supreme desire, / Touch the very pulse of fire / With my bare unlidded eyes" (80, 84-86). (1) In an otherwise unremarkable poem, these remarkable lines on the "supreme desire" of the spirits also propose an allegory of reading that at first sight can only appear to be an allegory of blindness: by the promise recorded in these lines to make the eyes into organs of touch, Dusketha guarantees in the process to deprive them of sight. But something is gained by such self-blinding; for it is only by the searing touch of the eyes that this encounter with "the very pulse of fire" can be consummated. What, moreover, is the "pulse of fire" other than its beat, its metrics? Thus, to press "bare unlidded eyes" to fire's pulse is to read the fire, a reading which blinds on contact. Once this reading is "bedded," it promises to give desire a voice, to become a speaking, a poetics of "tongued flames." The poem does not pursue further the ramifications of this conjunction. But since Keats often plays with fire in his poems, Dusketha's lines announce an incendiary poetics that I would like to explore in their more detailed and adventurous forms. This entails turning from the "very pulse of fire" to the figures that we might read without the same fear of blindness, figures that lend this lyric pulse the illusion of a history, figures that transform fire into a narrative of burning--namely, the figures of kindling and ash, fire's origin and outcome, cause and consequence. To be "bedded in tongued flames" is thus to point from the kindling of the spirit of fire to the ashes of its result.

To kindle means, of course, to set on fire, to ignite. Figuratively, it can mean to inflame, to excite, to animate. And, as is often the case in Shelley's poetry, it can also take an intransitive form, as in "to take fire," to commence burning. As a noun, kindling means either the act of causing to burn, or the material, easily lighted, that starts a fire. Ashes are the earthly or mineral residue left when combustible material is thoroughly burned. Ashes are cinders, signs and traces of a burning. I am interested in the ways in which ashes are textual residue, the signs and traces of what I am calling a "radical aestheticism" which is "kindled" at certain critical instances in the poetry of both Shelley and Keats. This radical aestheticism is not reducible to the aestheticisms that we have come to associate with or assign to Pater, for a radical aestheticism is nothing that can be espoused. (2)

But these days nothing is less likely to be espoused than an aestheticism of any sort. In fact, if there is one thing in the fractured field of what used to be called literary studies that a conservative humanist, a critical Marxist, a rhetorically oriented deconstructive critic, and a practitioner of cultural studies can actually agree on, it is likely to be a rejection of aestheticism. It is certainly ironic--perhaps even symptomatically so--that the major critical currents of late twentieth-century literary analysis can find agreement in an aversion to aestheticism, even as they often ascribe an aestheticism to their various opponents. Critical approaches as divergent and even irreconcilable as structuralist poetics and hermenuetics, feminism and the New Criticism, myth criticism and the New Historicism could all be said to share this aversion to aestheticism. Conservative critics continue to oppose it on the basis of many of the same moral and ethical objections raised against it at the end of the nineteenth century. To those critics influenced by Bourdieu's sociology of "the rules of art" within "the field of cultural production," aestheticism appears as the mystified celebration of the logic of aesthetic autonomization. (3) From the perspective of a Marxist critical theory, in which Adorno's Aesthetic Theory stands as perhaps its most magisterial if austere achievement, aestheticism is understood dialectically as a critique of the commodification of culture and, simultaneously, as the withdrawal into a reified and ultimately fetishistic conception of an autonomous and pseudo-sacred art. If, on the one hand, Adorno believes that the most profound human hopes are those that have by necessity acquired aesthetic form, nothing degrades those hopes more than what Adorno denounces as "aesthetic hedonism." (4) From the perspective of deconstruction, in which de Man's last essays still constitute the last word, the sensory seductions of the aesthetic conceal a more originary violence that is confronted in the textual disarticulations which are disclosed by the experience of reading. It is impossible to read Aesthetic Ideology without regarding it in some sense as an extended dismantling of the premises and promises of aesthetics (even as it demonstrates the insistence of the aesthetic). (5) If my own readings here owe a deep debt to the practices of interpretation and rhetorical analysis designated by the rubrics of Marxism and deconstruction, it is because the trajectory of their critiques have delivered us to the constitutive aporias of the aesthetic. If, on the other hand, I am not drawn to Bourdieu's sociology of aesthetic "distinctions," it is not because I am invested in what he decries as "the angelic belief in a pure interest in pure form" (Rules of Art xx). I am not espousing the "aestheticism unbound" that John Guillory famously proposed as a solution to our critical dilemmas. (6) Rather, I believe that by engaging fully the trajectory of a poetic immersion in the aesthetic we encounter the scene and the effects of its radicalization, what both Keats and Shelley identify as kindling and ash. This results in a crisis from which we may turn away but which may well have significant repercussions for the conceptions of culture and the aesthetic that remain the legacy of romanticism.

What I am calling a radical aestheticism should not be confused with the aestheticisms that we customarily ascribe to the poets of the second generation. It is not, for instance, the aestheticism that is often--and, I believe, mistakenly--attributed to the chiasmic intertwining of truth and beauty in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; nor is it the politically radical declarations of a poetic legislation that we find in the ambitious last sentence of Shelley's Defence. In other words, neither poet is committed in any way to a radical aestheticism. Nevertheless, I believe that the notion of a radical aestheticism is the best way to reckon with what takes place at certain moments in certain poems by both Shelley and Keats. To arrive at this radical aestheticism a poem must first reflect on art: taking the aesthetic as its subject matter, the poem must pose questions on art's relationship to history and to knowledge, and on the relationship between art's sensuous aspects and its ethical or political responsibilities. Of course, such reflections do not of themselves constitute an aestheticism: one need only think of "Ozymandias" to demonstrate that a poetic reflection on art can produce unrelenting critical and demystifying effects. But such a poetic reflection on the workings and effects of the aesthetic is a necessary precondition to a genuinely radical aestheticism. In the broadest sense, an aestheticism can be attributed to a poem when the performance of its aesthetic reflection (which is necessarily a self-reflection) severs the relationships (whether analogous, homologous, preparatory, supplementary, complementary) between art and knowledge by subsuming the latter into the former. And, finally, a poem can be said to constitute a radical aestheticism the moment it delivers itself and the aesthetic to its vacating radical, which is paradoxically the moment that aesthetic immersion is experienced as the undoing of any aesthetic claim to an autonomous and self-reflexive formal totality. What I am describing as the radical aestheticism of these poets is best understood through the Latin root of the word radical: namely, something that is taken, as through a process of burning, to its radix, its root or extreme elements. In this sense, a radical aestheticism is the experience of a poetics that exerts such a pressure on the claims and assumptions of the aesthetic that we encounter through these works something like auto-immolation, something which is reduced to its kindling and leaves as residue nothing but ashes. A radical aestheticism does not result in the "reassuring" knowledge Bourdieu promises with his sociology of the aesthetic; it leaves us, rather, with what Celan would call the singbarer Rest, the "singable residue." (7)

A radical aestheticism delivers us not to an autonomous domain of pure sensuous perception but to the effect of an interference what Keats calls a "barren noise"--that voids all that we habitually claim in the name of the aesthetic. (8) To say that it delivers us to its radical is thus much like saying that we are given to the ashes that are the constitutive mineral matter of the burnt substance and to the remains of an event which has erased itself. Thus, to the extent that we may follow those Victorian aesthetes who in one form or another attribute the birth of aestheticism to the poems of Keats, this birth bears with it a simultaneous radicalization of its issue in the ashes of its kindlings. At certain decisive moments throughout the brief poetic careers of Shelley as well as Keats we encounter a radical aestheticism, one that undoes the claims made in the name of the aesthetic--as redemptive, restorative, liberating, compensatory, humanizing, healing--claims which are not only an irreducible aspect of the legacy of romanticism but are often spelled out in their most compelling forms by the poets themselves. Indeed, each of these poets resists the radical aestheticism he encounters in and through his poetry, Shelley by recourse to the twin projects of political liberation and utopian poetics, Keats by way of a tortured commitment to a humanizing, ethical dimension of poetry.

What I am hoping to disclose in the readings that follow is the performance of a poetics of "kindling" that produces nothing but cinders and ash. By asserting that these poems achieve a radical aestheticism, I am not suggesting simply that they are radical works of art, which would be a judgment of a rather different order, one that would entail a consideration of literary history, social history, or their properly dialectical relationship. By saying that they arrive at a radical aestheticism, I am arguing that these poems produce a radical engagement with the very processes by which we conceive of the aesthetic, those processes by which the world is not merely known but felt. A radical aestheticism returns us to the aporias between perception and sensation, on the one hand, and cognition and conceptualization on the other--indeed, the very aporias out of which the aesthetic as a "domain" is constituted in the first place. It is upon this highly unstable, aporetic fault-line that Shelley's "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery" inscribes itself; and the poem generates a radical aestheticism at the moment that it not only reflects upon but implicates its own performance in the volatile intrications between thought and the gaze, the epistemological and the sensual.

To attend to the force and implications of a radical aestheticism as it manifests itself in Keats and Shelley demands a practice of reading that offers no resolutions to historical or ideological dilemmas. Certainly, to propose that we read ashes by the light of their own kindling is--both methodologically and ideologically speaking--to propose a very different set of questions about the literary event from the sociologies and historicisms that continue to dominate the study of romanticism. I am not, in other words, proposing to read Shelley and Keats symptomatically: I am not proposing to interpret their poems as aversions or displacements of their historical moment. What I am proposing is a renewed examination of the relationships between these poems and another of their contexts, the highly unstable context of the aesthetic, in order to revisit the nature of the textual performances we encounter here, performances which in these instances prove to be on the order of self-consuming events. By shifting our focus from a historicizing of romanticism to a version of romanticism's own aestheticism, my readings may appear to reassert the most conventional of formulations between text and context: the widely discussed and anthologized poems of two canonical writers of the second generation of English romanticism. This is particularly the case since my readings have nothing to say about the historical conditions of the production or reception of these poems. Moreover, it may well seem ideologically questionable and methodologically outmoded to examine two poets in one essay, particularly since I make no claims for an influence or a shared poetic project, though I believe that Adonais is among many other things Shelley's song of a Keatsian "burning" that gives no light to the world.

I am not arguing that a radical aestheticism is a generic feature of romanticism, canonical or otherwise. Despite the thematic, rhetorical, and formal adventurousness--indeed, radicality--of many of the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge, I am not convinced that one encounters in them a radical aestheticism (with the spectacular exception of "Kubla Khan"). Nor is this merely a generational matter: Byron's feverish poetics of subjectivity, for instance, never culminates in anything which resembles a radical aestheticism." (9) And I would argue that the undeniable radicality of Wuthering Heights or Frankenstein involves the constitutive relationships between desire, language, and subjectivity but not the radical of the aesthetic). (10) And yet a radical aestheticism is by no means an achievement limited to certain poems by Shelley and Keats. I believe, for instance, that Hopkins' poetry is delivered, quite in spite of the poet's intentions, to a confrontation with aestheticism's radical, which demonstrates that the atheism or agnosticism of Shelley and Keats is not a condition of radical aestheticism. Nor is this radical aestheticism an exclusively British formation: it can be discerned in other poets belonging to this Anglo-American...

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