Keats's nausea.(John Keats)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University

Perhaps I eat to persuade myself I am somebody. (1)

--John Keats

Now no comfort avails any more; longing transcends a world after death, even the gods; existence is negated along with its glittering reflection in the gods, or in any immortal beyond. Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence; ... he is nauseated. (2)

--Friedrich Nietzsche

KEATS IS KNOWN TO HAVE AS PERPLEXED A RELATION TO THE SENSORY--particularly the savory--as any poet. Elizabeth Bishop remarks in a letter to Robert Lowell that "Except for his unpleasant insistence on the palate, he strikes me as almost everything a poet should have been in his day." (3) The view was shared by many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, including Carlyle, for whom Keats was "a miserable creature, hungering after sweets which he can't get, going about saying, `I am so hungry; I should so like something pleasant!'" (4) Yeats immortalized him as a school-boy with his face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window. (5) And critics since Lionel Trilling have read him as "possibly unique among poets in the extensiveness of his reference to eating and drinking and to its pleasurable or distasteful sensations." (6) Whether we believe, with Helen Vendler, that this preoccupation with gustatory taste represents a healthy relation to a world of vigorously taken pleasure, or, with Marjorie Levinson, that it signals a dysfunctional aesthetic attitude, the physical metaphor of taste informs both his poetry and poetic theory. (7) Keats's chameleon-poet famously "lives in gusto," a term derived from gustus (taste) and characterized by Hazlitt as an effect whereby the eye acquires "a taste or appetite for what it sees." (8) The "poetical character" is defined by its ability to "taste" and "relish" the world it perceives: "its relish of the dark side of things ... its taste for the bright one" (Letters 1: 387). And Keats himself, on December 31, 1818, the eve of his so-called annus mirabilis, declared that he had "not one opinion upon any thing except in matters of taste" (Letters 2: 19). (9) While it would be unwise to assume that Keats really did renounce everything but "matters of taste," we continue to grapple with this particular aspect of his own self-fashioning.

As Keats's own experience never let him forget, it is the body that "tastes," or experiences pleasure metaphorically through taste, and in Keats's case, that body was a consumptive body--one that wasted away, consuming itself, as it literally starved to death. In the tragic account of his last days left by Joseph Severn, Keats constantly raved that he would die from hunger as his stomach, rather than nourishing the rest of his body, became instead its devourer: "his Stomach--not a single thing will digest--the torture he suffers all and every night--and the best part of the day--is dreadful in the extreme--the distended stomach keeps him in perpetual hunger or craving." (10) By the end of his life, he had suffered (in Severn's words) "a ghastly wasting-away of his body and extremities" (qtd. in KC 1: 202). The problem for a poet devoted to acts of self-definition through "matters of taste" is that to be hungry, to be physically driven by appetite, cancels all pretensions to taste. As Kant states concisely in his third critique: "Hunger is the best sauce; and people with a healthy appetite relish everything, so long as it is something they can eat. Such delight, consequently, gives no indication of taste having anything to say to the choice. Only when men have got all they want can we tell who among the crowd has taste or not." (11) Whereas the legendary figure of the chameleon feeds upon air (as Keats knew from reading Hamlet), Keats recognized that he himself could not be sustained on the transcendental food of airy infinity.

This essay will show how Keats's frustrated effort to exist in the ethereal world of aesthetic taste thrust him (and the idealism implicit in romantic poetics) into the modernist condition of nausea. To see how taste gets remade by Keats as a modernist aesthetic, particularly in the Hyperion poems, it will first be necessary to examine how he develops an understanding of the aesthetic process as an "allegory of taste" based on Milton. The second section of the essay will turn to "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" as Keats's "ballad on taste"--and the place where his allegory begins to founder upon an all-too-real hunger. Finally, I propose to show how this blocked or interrupted allegory of taste figures into the Hyperion poems. After his effort to "taste" and "relish" the world like a true "poetical character" sickens the eponymous hero of Hyperion, the human speaker of The Fall of Hyperion must struggle hard to escape the nausea: an ontopoetic condition of unpalatable, and finally unallegorizable, existence.

1. The Allegory of Taste

Keats's obsession with the metaphor of taste originates early. In his essay "On Gusto" (1817), Keats's mentor in all "matters of taste," William Hazlitt, describes the creative process in aggressively gustatory terms based on Milton: "Milton has great gusto. He repeats his blows twice; grapples with and exhausts his subject. His imagination has a double relish of its objects" (4: 79-80). Keats always acknowledged his debt to Hazlitt's "depth of Taste," which he proclaimed to be (along with Haydon's paintings and Wordsworth's poetry) one of the three things of the age in which to rejoice (Letters 1: 203-5). Sometime during his reading and annotation of Paradise Lost, Keats adapted this Miltonic paradigm of pouncing on, grappling with, and relishing the world of beauty to his own allegory of taste as follows:

Milton in every instance pursues his imagination to the utmost--he is `sagacious of his Quarry' ... he sees Beauty on the wing, pounces upon it and gorges it to the producing his essential verse ... (12)

What Keats and Hazlitt share perhaps above all is an emphasis on taste, on gusto as central to the poetic process, and both portray the poet as a ravener. Yet Keats puts into allegorical form even more explicitly than Hazlitt the restricted economy of consumption that defines taste: the subject consumes beauty metaphorically through the mouth and processes it into expression.

In reading this temporal sequence whereby the poet pounces upon, gorges, and expresses beauty--a cycle of appetitive and fiercely carnivorous consumption--as an "allegory of taste," the term allegory is not arbitrarily imposed by me. Keats held that "A Man's life of any worth is a continual allegory," his foremost example being Shakespeare: "Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comment on it" (Letters 2: 67). What Keats means by allegory is not the same thing as we inherit from Coleridge, who defines it in The Statesman's Manual of 1816 as an inferior literary device compared to the symbol. For Coleridge, the symbol was a sublime entity, able to contain the sort of ineffability that Wordsworth would call "infinity," while allegory was a more flat-footed means of representation, a false "picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses." (13) Paul de Man has since challenged an uncritical acceptance of Coleridge's elevation of symbol over allegory, arguing that it is a less honest literary mode than allegory, which at least recognizes its distance from that which it is striving to portray. The symbol, in this view, becomes a site of aesthetic ideology, marked by "the translucence of the especial in the general, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in the general" (Coleridge Works 6: 30). De Man claims that Coleridge privileges a phantom translucence over material substantiality, and that the latter therefore dissolves into "a mere reflection of a more original unity that does not exist in the material world." (14) Steven Knapp reads Coleridge more sympathetically, countering that "the fact that Coleridge seems equally comfortable with the metaphors of substance and of translucence suggests that an emphasis on the symbol's materiality is misplaced. (15)

Yet Keats viewed allegory (certainly his allegory of taste) in much the same way that Coleridge viewed his scriptural sequence of symbols: a manner of projecting the self into vital material (or translucent) form. For Keats, "a life of Allegory" means "a life like the scriptures, figurative," where existence is always elevated above its embodied, phenomenal reality. Here too, he differs from Coleridge, who prefers to read scripture against the grain, not as allegory but as "a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors" (Works 6: 29). Written in the same year as his 1816 Theory of Lift, Coleridge's description of symbols as "conductors" in The Statesman's Manual borrows from the contemporary idea of electric life, suggesting that like electrical conductors symbols transmit vital power through material particulars. Unlike this sequence of symbols, the "picture-language" of allegory consists of mere unenlivened signs. Either allegory is too abstract to be taken seriously as Being, or else it lacks the vital spark ("translucence") that would enliven it into something more than a material mechanism. As Knapp translates the problem, "the dilemma of allegory is clear. Conceived (in Coleridge's lecture notes) as a medium between literal opacity and figurative reference, allegory can fail in two ways: by surrendering its literal power and thus its interest, or by surrendering its figurative content and thus its character as allegory" (15). What Coleridge's caution lends to Keats's allegory of taste is the recognition that navigating subjectivity through the literary technique of allegory runs the risk of making one's identity either too ethereal, and hence immaterial (what kind of pleasure, after all, is that?), or else too material to qualify as aesthetic--to "live in gusto" and feast upon airy nothings.

What often goes unremarked in Keats's model of pouncing and gorging on beauty is the fact that in Paradise Lost it is not Milton himself, nor his epic narrator, who is "sagacious of his Quarry," but the allegorical figure of Death. In his edition of the poem, Keats underscored the lines in which Death "Grinn'd horrible a ghastly smile, to hear / His famine should be fill'd, and bless'd his maw / Destined to that good hour" (PL 2.846-48; qtd. in Lau 41). His fascination with the hungry creature comes to a peak later in Book 10, when Death (again, in lines Keats underlines) anticipates the mortal feast spreading out before him and "upturn'd / His nostril wide into the murky air / Sagacious of his quarry from so far" (PL 10.280-81; qtd. in Lau 162). In Milton's day, as in Keats's own, "sagacious" was a hunting term for the pouncing creature's acute sense of smell. Thus, in Milton's analogy Death is sagacious "As when a flock / Of ravenous fowl ... come flying, lured / With scent of living carcasses" (PL 10.273-77). Smell is a sense that has been linked throughout the ages not to the more intellectual or "higher" senses of vision and hearing, but to the other bodily sense of taste. (16)

Smell brings one down a notch to the level of the animal, but it can also elevate one to the distinction of the refined connoisseur, or gourmet. The olfactory nerves are responsible for perceiving flavor, and as Frank A. Geldard writes, "Were there no sense of smell there would be no gourmets, only consumers of nutriments." (17) Keats's "Sagacious" poet, like allegory itself, can thus be interpreted in diverse ways. On the one hand, like Milton's Death, he does not have the discrimination necessary to qualify as a gourmet. As Byron puts it in Don Juan, Death is a "Gaunt gourmand" (15.9.5) who devours one and all with like voracity. Death himself knows that he is best off where he is hungriest, or where he can achieve his fullest ravenous potential. In a moment of sublime pathos, he admits: "To mee, who with eternal Famine pine, / Alike is Hell, or Paradise, or Heaven, / There best, where most with ravin I may meet" (PL 10.597-99). Death is a predatory animal closer to the vulture than the votive of taste, though the term sagacious also implies "knowing." As such, it entails the possibility that he is also a creature of discrimination or taste (from the Latin sapere: to taste, to know).

Milton purposively remains equivocal about whether Death's hunger is the "Real hunger" of an actual body or an abstract ideal allegorically embodied, and as a result Death vacillates between body and no body, shape and shapelessness, as a "shape, / If shape it might be call'd that shape had none" (PL 2.666-67). Coleridge alludes to Milton's allegorical figure of Death, the shapeless shape, when he claims that allegory is "an abstraction from objects of the senses ... both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot" (Works 6: 30). Death effectively became the allegorical figure of the romantic period, but...

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