Black Gates and Fiery Galleries: Eastern Architecture in The Fall of Hyperion.(John Keats)(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-00

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ACCORDING TO RECENT DISCUSSIONS, KEATS'S HYPERION FRAGMENTS draw on a historiography of style that opens with the ancient sublimities of Egypt and moves on to the lucent beauties of Greece and Rome. This argument is based largely on descriptions of the Titans which allude to Egyptian sculpture, thus recasting the war with the classical Gods as an "international event" pitting the west against a "prototypical Orient."(1) The identification of the Titans with Egypt is also grounded in Keats's biography; Egyptian sculptures were displayed in the British Museum next to the Elgin Marbles, where the poet viewed and was impressed by both.(2) However, the Titans' spectacular temples and palaces are not exclusively or even primarily Egyptian. Rather, they participate in the Regency's architectural "exoticism," which included Egyptian and Greek designs but drew on a broader range of eastern styles among which Indian sources were prominent.(3) Like the Egyptian, the Indian stood for antiquity and sublimity, for the commercial and imperial domination of the East by Europe, and for a generic thrill related to but separable from these other effects.(4) Because of British involvement in the subcontinent, the Indian also foregrounded, more clearly than did domestically neutral Egyptian elements, the exotic style's potent but ambiguous status in the culture at large.(5) Indian designs were pervasive and controversial, and if the discourse surrounding them tended in one way or another to "construct" India as "Other," it remained unclear whether this Other was properly an object of rigorous intellectual inquiry or a source of lucrative cheap thrills.(6) Meditating on how best to please his audience, Keats had concluded that "what they want is ... sensation," and his descriptions of eastern architecture are significant not because they express a vision of history but because of their visual sensationalism, which poses itself against the anti-pictorial, anti-commercial orthodoxy of the Regency's critical establishment.(7)

The question of description is suggestive for an inquiry into the social elements of literary language and taste because it bears on the fundamental difference between image and word. This difference, which criticism has often emphasized in order to favor the latter over the former, has recently faced a "pictorial turn" in theory. W. J. T. Mitchell, for example, refuses to absorb poetry and painting into a single semiotic but argues that "there is no essential difference" between them, and Christopher Collins, surveying research in psychology, concludes that "mental imaging" closely resembles the seeing of the eye, although their physiological and phenomenological differences are also important.(8) That is, we don't have to pretend to confuse poems with paintings in order to acknowledge that "visual conceptions can be transmitted through the agency of language" and that the pleasures of pictorial language are genuinely visual.(9) The exclusively linguistic mind is thus a discriminating mind in an entirely social sense. The elite reader, whose interpretive strategies emphasize what is most difficult to do but also what can be naturalized over time, favors the culturally and semiotically allusive over the vulgarly, simply referential.(10) Complex codes of linguistic signification are more difficult to internalize than the Skills required by most pictorial strategies, which depend upon a combination of immediate, consensual understanding (a noun stands for a common, if potentially complicated, object) and detail-by-detail reconstruction of significant people, places, or things.(11)

Conversely, when visual pleasure is generated by written language, not painting or sculpture, it offers to destabilize critical orders based in linguistic authority. As Collins argues, such orders "maintain their own credibility by asseverating the truth of their written messages," but the power of words to produce images is an all-too-vivid reminder of their power to lie.(12) Of course, this is not to say that every act of poetic description is inherently subversive, but that such acts, as well as the rhetoric of evaluation surrounding them, are likely to be bound up in extra-linguistic problems and premises.(13) Because of local forms of"imperial anxiety" and the long-standing equation of eastern cultures with deceptive visuality, Regency descriptions of the east demanded particularly to be reined in by structures that moderated, in one way or another, their sensual richness.(14) Yet Keats's own descriptions are anti-institutional, if not entirely democratic. The Hyperions' stately blank verse and "naked, Grecian" language may be his attempt to act the gentleman poet instead of the working-class "pet lamb," but his eastern architectural passages, by virtue of their Indian resonances and their aggressively visual appeal, reject the structures of cultural distinction upon which this stylistic division is based.(15)

Keats's earliest significant treatment of Indian material is in Endymion. In the final book of that poem, the young shepherd-king meets a displaced Indian maiden who has been seduced away from the banks of the Ganges River by Bacchus and taken on a triumphal march around Egypt, "Abyssinia," "Tartary," and India itself.(16) Endymion eventually decides that loving this real, fleshly woman is preferable to continuing his quest for the unattainable moon-goddess Phoebe, a choice of the Asian subcontinent over Greece that also emphasizes Keats's conventional connotation of the Indian as exotic, desirable, and physically attainable. The plot of the poem is quickly resolved when it is revealed that the "Swan of the Ganges" is Phoebe in disguise:

And as she spake, into her face there came Light, as reflected from a silver flame: Her long black hair swelled ampler, in display Full golden; in her eyes a brighter day Dawn'd blue and full of love. Aye, he beheld Phoebe, his passion! (4.982-87)

Endymion shall have east and west, sense and sensibility, at once; for in the rollicking narrative of Endymion, there is always room for these principles to co-exist, or, as the remarkable description of Phoebe's emergence as a literal dawning suggests, at least to succeed each other as part of a single, organic process. The Indian-maid-who-is-not-one is both an eastern counter to the western Phoebe and the corporal origin of the moon's spiritual arrival.

The Indian maid's metamorphosis reflects a central aspect of the Regency's stylistic exoticism: it works best when it is synthesized with the more familiar modes of gothicism and/or neoclassicism. An important architectural analogue is the Prince Regent's Brighton Pavilion, a folly that passed through a number of different stylistic identities before Richard Porden finally established an Indian theme for it by 1815.(17) A twentieth-century critic describes some of the design issues raised by the building:

Porden's Indian style, influenced by George Dance's London Guildhall of 1788, was in fact only skin deep. [Many details of the building] can be traced back to celebrated Indian buildings ... illustrated in the Daniells' Oriental Scenery. Yet the overall proportions are unmistakably classical. (Gervase Jackson-Stops, in Nash 116)

The Brighton Pavilion riding house was immediately recognizable as an Indian building by contemporaries, but the relatively shallow Indian-ness of its detailing, like Phoebe's disguise, was also part of the point. Pierre Bourdieu notes that the spontaneous recognition of styles is an essential aspect of the aesthetic attitude, and a building like the Royal Pavilion offered ample opportunity for the exercise of that faculty (Distinction 50-52). The Maid and her transformation are not simply a stylish Indian flourish but a shrewd metaphor for the work of exoticism: Indian exterior and classical deep structure redeem each other in the eye of the genteel, discriminating Regency beholder, whose appreciation of classical lines grounds his apprehension of the good while his recognition of the oriental indicates his alertness to the fanciful and new.

Exotic architecture had at its core an ongoing project in which studies of material artifacts were translated into a variety of different forms. The linguistic inquiry that produced Sir William Jones's late-eighteenth-century versions of Sanskrit was succeeded, in the eighteen-teens and -twenties, by "analytical" treatments of Indian and Egyptian buildings.(18) The Indian revival in British architecture was a manifestation of this study, and although the movement itself was mainly sponsored by connoisseurs, the images associated with it circulated widely. Thomas and William Daniell, for example, following the lead of the artist William Hodges, published a very successful series of aquatints of Indian buildings throughout the period; they also regularly exhibited oils and watercolors at the Royal Academy and the British Institution, making Indian architecture familiar to attendants of London's galleries (Conner 119). Printed images were directly related to built realizations: a number of English country houses drew on engravings or aquatints to recapture the detailing of Indian structures that their owners, returned British nabobs, had seen first-hand.(19) As images of artifacts were displayed, reproduced, and recirculated, absolute fidelity to Indian originals was sometimes abandoned, and the purely reproductive aspects of the project were replaced by an emphasis on novelty or "fancy." Indian architecture is a two-sided tradition, and this distinction could also be lost on British audiences. The designs adopted for buildings in England drew on symmetrical Mughal work, but artists often illustrated, and writers often commented on, Hindu traditions that Regency audiences knew best from representations of the cave temples at Elephanta and Ellora.(20) Thomas Hope's famous "Indian Room" mingled these styles freely, and exhibitions at East India House also ranged across Mughal and Hindu material.(21)

In England, evaluative discussions of Indian culture were always implicated in the post-Hastings debate, and while Indian images received serious attention from scholars, they were never treated as entirely legitimate by British audiences at large. Utilitarian and evangelical critics had clear-cut political reasons for denigrating Hindu and Mughal achievements, and their attitudes were shared by an aesthetically conservative critical establishment.(22) Describing the Brighton Pavilion in 1819, the Monthly Magazine derided India, the Prince Regent, and the exotic style at once, archly observing that the Regent "deemed it respectful to his Indian dependencies to exhibit a palace in conformity with their notions of architectural perfection" (quoted in Head 55). In poetry, Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama (1810; fourth edition, 1818), its machinery drawn from Hindu materials, was characterized as "absurd," and Thomas Moore's vastly successful Lalla Rookh, a Persian/Indian epic for which he received 3000 pounds in 1817, was dismissed as light.(23) On the other hand, 1817 was also the year James Mill published his History of British India, a work dedicated to insulting Indian culture in the face of what its author perceived as a widespread over-appreciation of it.(24) Despite critical resistance, the taste remained suited to those who profited directly from imperial trade, and, in its more diffuse form, to the larger group that could afford to evince an entirely neutral, deeply but not pedantically informed, appreciation of visual novelty.

Moore's Lalla Rookh and Southey's Kehama exploited Indian exoticism in the poetic marketplace, but if the sellability of eastern spectacle was apparent, the acts of description central to this mode were troublesome. Not only did Southey and Moore...

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