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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
EDWARD SAID ARGUES IN CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM THAT "IDEAS SUGgesting, often ideologically implementing, imperial rule" dominate nineteenth century European art and literature.(1) This orientalist narrative, though acknowledged, is not seen as dominating the poetry or informing the poetics of Keats, a lack of emphasis that may be due to a later effect of an earlier marginalization of a "political" Keats. Jerome McGann has said, for instance, that the 1820 volume is a reactionary book in which Keats seeks to "dissolve social and political conflicts in the mediations of art and beauty" with "an eye to attracting the favorable attention of the public ... and to allay conflict" that had greeted his earlier work.(2) In a similar way, Keats is marginalized in relation to imperialism. Nigel Leask suggests Keats's limited presence in a political discourse of empire when he writes that politics and ideology have informed many current readings of the romantics, "even Keats."(3) In "Endymion," Leask writes, Keats's "orientalism is primarily a question of style, an imperial heraldry uncomplicated by the anxiety of empire" (125). Developing a closer tie between Keats and a complicity with imperialism, Debbie Lee views Keats as appropriating traces of African Voodoo and its social configurations in slave culture "to celebrate the poetic imagination through the magic and mystery of Africa," thus exercising "his colonial prerogative to possess and dispossess" that particular history.(4) But it might be argued that Keats's "zombification," Lee's term for his death-in-life type wakefulness (14), is an echo of McGann's apolitical dead zone found in the silence of the Grecian Urn. Keats, in so far as he is seen as creator and consumer of such orientalist constructions, is thus viewed as distancing himself from or, at most, aestheticizing the realities of oppression and victimization. When Keats is seen as subversive, his poetic practices serve to reinforce his marginal status in relation to the paternal forces structuring language: he subverts by displaying his lack. Marjorie Levinson argues that Keats's use of popular works (or, were it a focus of her study, orientalist paraphernalia) consisting of travel books, dictionaries, illustrated encyclopedias and translations of classical works, signals vulgar or "bad access" to the forces that shape and dominate society.(5) Because Keats is seen as a person whose experience, in Paul de Man's words, is "mainly literary" (quoted in McGann 440) or, in Levinson's terms, reflects a fetishistic disavowal of social impotence, thus providing insight into the mechanisms running that society, Keats's relation to imperialism may suffer from over-determined readings which prevent the emergence of a Keatsian body and body of work that engages the shaping forces of political and imperial narratives.
One characteristic that these critiques share is the juxtaposition of Keats's relationship to political power and an identity. A set of letters written in October 1818 interconnect references to identity and politics, specifically the politics of imperialism and relationality to otherness. Keats writes to his publisher, Hessey, that "The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man";(6) later he writes to his publisher's lawyer, Woodhouse, of the nature of the "poetical Character itself ... the camelion Poet" and the consequences of possessing such a character: "When I am in a room with People ... then not myself goes home to myself ... but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a very little time anhilated [sic]."(7) It is thus in a sequence of letters to his publisher and publisher's lawyer, and after the reviews of "Endymion," that Keats describes his poet of no identity who, from this nullity, raises the names of "saturn" and "Ops" ("To Woodhouse," Letters 1.387). He also writes to George and Georgiana a few days before signaling the emergence of a multifaceted identity which is "with Achilles shouting in the Trenches," or among the pastoral poets in Sicily, or "throwing [his] whole being into Troilus,"(8) thus juxtaposing these poetic capacities with the impotence of the lower case "saturn." Again, identity in the letter to George and Georgiana is described as scattered among "a thousand of those beautiful particles" (Letters 1.403) and "anhilated" by the impress of the crowd as in the letter to Woodhouse. Other strands of these related topics intersect when Keats is introduced to Jane Cox and is excited by her "rich eastern look"; when he compares Jane to Charmian and Cleopatra; and when he meets with the "enigma," Isabella Jones. Finally, juxtaposed with the emotions expressed about Jane Cox, is a description of the political situation in Europe underscored by references to a cosmic apocalypse: "Peace of England," "Cause of Napoleon," "The Emperor Alexander," the fall of "China" and "Turkey," and an encircling of "european north" by Russia's "horns" and her constant "intrieguing [sic] ... with France" ("To George and Georgiana," Letters 1.395, 402, 397).
Keats's references to identity are organized around a series of shatterings and reconstitutions: shattered by the reviewers, poetry will reconstitute itself "in a man"; shattered at a social gathering so that "myself goes not home to myself," the poet is reconstituted on another occasion, not by one wife and one child, but by "a thousand of those beautiful particles"; disoriented by the "Leopardess" and an "imperial woman" so that "one has no sensations," Keats's identity re-emerges by means of the "enigma," Isabella Jones, whose disappointing handshake, reconstitutes the poet who, despite the handshake, was made to "feel more pleasure"; George's "George" will also reconstitute the poet, who, having no "libidinous thoughts" about her, awaits the birth of the "first American Poet"; and finally, a shattering at the political level and an undertone of an apocalyptic shattering at the cosmic level occurs with Czar Alexander splitting himself into multiples and "intriguing" with France, all reconstituted in the stalemated political situation.
Seen from a psychoanalytic perspective, the letters suggest a series of resistances to and formations against a structuring entity. The Canon is resisted by becoming a lower case "saturn," or metonym for milton, epic tradition, quarterly review. This victory is purchased at the expense of a normalizing organization with proper terminations; "saturn," an introjected object of the melancholic, could be seen as reflecting the mental weight the poem was to become and the consequent fragmentation and lack of resolution; the women, the "others," become phallic mothers, imperial women, Jane Coxes, or George's "George" or enigmas; the great political powers are themselves split off and each repressed and stalemated until England has no virtuous men, France is immobilized, Russia menaces, and America is marginalized. Yet the letters are far from immobilized. Throughout the journal letter, Keats mentions the need to cover two sheets a day, "whether it be three clays or a fortnight" before the mail boat sets sail; the letters take for their topic identity and split this identity into many parts and move it around the world through an imperial space echoing one of Keats's wishes that "Endymion" be read in the "wilds of america" and the "plains of Egypt,"(9) so, as he had written earlier, "not myself goes home to myself"; females' otherness, the result of successful organization of female difference according to a structuring male gaze, is presented in varying degrees of successful reorganization, from the successful projection of a fantasmatic leopardess to the enigma who emerges in human form to shake hands and finally to George's "George," the much looked to mother/sister of poets. It might be argued that though the political configuration referred to in the letter is a stalemate, the apocalyptic forces underneath threaten to shatter what is but an appearance. Finally, not only is there an introjected "saturn" but a fully operational "Ops." Thus, in almost every instance the neurotic symptom evanesces, and a frozen identity splits and re-emerges and reconstitutes itself along a different structuring motif. It is this kind of mobility that points not to the shaping forces of social power, but the interplay between the individual and these powers along different paradigms of relationality.
Keats's use of orientalist motifs, the interplay between mastery and subservience, foregrounds the problem of this identity: does his use of these motifs make him complicit in the dispossession and re-creation of otherness, or do his many borrowings from the orientalist discourse serve only further to isolate him from the underlying structures of real social empowerment? The free use of the motifs, on the one hand, would signal his success at mastering this deeper structure, but, on the other hand, his very mastery of these terms signals a failure to bridge the fissure between the "bad access" to empowerment revealed by the vulgar display of "borrowings" in his texts and a lack of mastering the social powers that drive the system of signification. But a poetry like Keats's, readily admitted to be involved with alienated production techniques, and also participating in a major cultural displacement outward into empire and encounters with otherness, might be examined as a possible commentary on otherness, a sometimes willed and sometimes determined extension of a perspective on a condition which is equally complex, at times structured and unstructured but admitting of form and expression.
A dualistic paradigm of dispossession may not be adequate to the task of engaging an identity that develops in relation to an unstable set of circumstances. Identity formed by means of and around imperial "anxieties" may exist, but that identity, which is a resolution to anxieties, has generated what Joseph Boone calls the "paradigmatic fictions of otherness that have made the binarisms of West and East ... at once powerful and oppressive," referring to the disorientation of the western subject position as reflected in a particular kind of travel literature.(10) Through Boone's talismanic warning, an alternative model for engaging imperial anxieties emerges within a continuum touching upon the way power changes both its objects and its practitioners. At the simplest level, just revisiting the paradigm with an eye to the interdependence of colonized and colonizer emerging from the encounter, reveals a hybridity, a movement of cultural forces from peripheral colonized areas to metropolitan centers of renewed cultural creation. This reverse movement, given voice in Said and expressed by Mary Louise Pratt's term, "transculturation," reflects the dissolution of identities of both colonized and colonizer and the reformation of those identities.(11) On a more difficult level, hybridity accentuates a psychological aspect of identity which absorbs or is predisposed to absorbing what is apparently opposite and develops a mobile identity around internal fissure and opposition. In a negative reformation, the creation of identity may signal the repression of otherness, but such an act of repression already signals the development of a more complex structure within that identity. One such acknowledgment of an internal otherness in the very act of excluding otherness, is found in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as homosexual panic, a negative reaction formation that occurs when the uncertain boundaries demarcating the homosocial continuum, or social relations between men, are shifted or reshaped. While these boundaries exist to enforce the exclusion of the female and thus ensure her subservience, they also open up a fissure within, based on exclusion, by which sameness or desire for sameness becomes suspect, so that outbursts of focused rage against a perceived desire seem the only balm for an inner wound. Though homosexual panic and ensuing acts of violence against homosexuals imply in the public imagination a latent homosexuality in perpetrators of this violence, an association discussed in Sedgwick's later Epistemology of the Closet, the mixture of "eroticism and prohibition" through which homosexual panic comes to exist, nevertheless, "represents ... the latent energy that can hurtle [philosophy and culture] far beyond their own present place of knowledge."(12) Thus, Blakean dualities gain permanence in a mental palace of cruelty which is also a furnace of creation leading not only to meaningless loss and fantasmatic projections that continue to cripple but also to acts of recuperation and hybridization.
Instead of perpetuating dualistic paradigms, the concept of hybridity...
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