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COPYRIGHT 2006 Boston University
On ne concoit pas comment I's aurait disparu (1)
THE FIGURATIVE PROBLEMATIC I WISH TO MAP IS ANTICIPATED BY GILLIAN Beer's article "Discourses of the Island," in which she argues that "the concept of ['British'] nationhood ... relies upon the cultural idea of the island." This reliance draws strength, in turn, from the word-play legible in the spelling of Island as "Iland" in important influences on British Romanticism, such as the King James Bible, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton: "The word 'island' has a peculiar force in English which emphasizes its connection with individualism. The sounded 'I' at the beginning of the word creates a habituating consonance between the ego and the island." (2)
Beer, however, seems to unduly limit the literal indeterminacy between "Is"/"I" when she parses it in terms of the question "Is or I: Dasein or Ego" (15). Heidegger, one of the twentieth century's most rigorous questioners of ontology (Is being Sein) in relation to the existential life-world, is closer to the truth when he uses "Da-sein" to signify You or I as a "being-with others" ("being-with and Mitda-sein") and not as a psychoanalytically delimited Ego divorced from body, historicity, and community. (3) Being and Time (1927) reminds us that we still need to refine our terms if we are to produce a knowledge of the precise rapport between philosophy and literature in relation to dominant contemporary discourses: psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and historicism. I propose that a questioning of the I-land as a reassuring figuration of the relationship between self and society will contribute to this redefining of Romanticism in a reflexive and theoretically informed manner.
Tilottama Rajan's recent redefinition of British Romanticism (4) symptomatically registers the problematic figuration that I wish to address via an interrogation of the literary letter and the figure of allegory (the relevance of the latter will soon be clarified)--the figuration of the Nation as I-Land:
There is the insularization of Romanticism as British Romanticism despite the ambivalence of many Romantics to Britishness: their desire for 'the experience of the foreign,' a phrase by which Antoine Berman signals neither exoticism nor colonialism but an opening of the self toward its own disruptive alterity (my emphasis). (5)
Rajan problematizes this definition by questioning the disciplinary organization of the "disruptive alterity" of "British Romanticism" by Anglo-American publishing networks, universities, and other institutions of epistemic and cultural management, yet the problematic I want to focus on is encapsulated by the word "own" (propre).
Derrida has worried the question of the proper to death, (6) and it is our relation to death that insists that alterity can never be managed, that the absolute otherness of death may come flying out of the blue on a sunny September day. The words "exoticism" and "colonialism" also historicize the philosophically abstract category of "alterity" at play in Rajan's text by concretely situating British Romanticism as a complex response to an ever-expanding world system: a delirious exchange of alien peoples, foreign commodities, and uncanny (un-home-like) tropes. (7) The otherness that the Western subject wants to enjoy as "its own" colonially owned other cannot, in other words, be contained within the home-territory by the insular figure of the Island.
If the "most profound hermeneutic shift ... made by deconstruction" was to "shif[t] the ground of interpretation from philosophy to psychoanalysis," as Rajah contends, (8) then the safely internalized philosophical abstraction constructed by the phrase "its own disruptive alterity" needs to be further problematized by a psychoanalytic style of reading. Would it be too aphoristic to state that unconscious investments in the foreign find themselves in flight from a death that cannot be masterfully mapped? The absolute contingency of mortality, the unconscious other that thinks below and beyond the control of the Ego, and the cultural otherness disturbing British Imperialism cannot, in other words, be disciplined. The defensive, insular, and nationalistic subject constructed by British Romanticism suffers, as a result, perpetual deterritorialization on three unmanageable fronts, all of which will be closely read in what follows: 1) death as what cannot be dominated by discourse; 2) a psychoanalytic discourse on the unconscious whose "little letters" evade the mastery of a Lacanian science (9) (or the myth of a Mathesis Universalis organized by the fiction of the impossible, as in the Lacanian writings of Slavoj Zizek); 3) an unmasterable yet marginal real genealogically over-determined by the uneven development of Romanticism as a historical fault-line in "which the globalizing forces of capital entered a decisive phase: the phase in which colonialism became fully fledged imperialism." (10)
Rajan's definition of Romanticism symptomatically registers, in short, three things instead of the all-explicating Thing at the center of Lacanian systems, three "things" that continue to be displaced, disfigured, and denied by the contemporary "insularization of Romanticism as British Romanticism" in spite of the ambivalence of many critics. In a post-9/11 world, it is unsurprising that we want to belong to a nationalist "we" that exists nowhere in particular, to find some sort of island-like ground somewhere, anywhere out of this world on the viewless wings of ideology.
I question the insularity of Romanticist Studies in order to re-conceive the I-land figure as a screen that obscures our mediated relations to an existential, institutional, and disciplinary life-world--that is, to everything repressed by the self-isolating figuration of an autonomous Ego: "body, Mitsein, and historicity." (11) I plan to cross-examine both the "little letters" we read as literature and the figure of allegory we employ to make these little no-things mean, since this empty world of allegorical meaning insulates us, I argue, within an indefinite lecture hall: "Allegories are always allegories of metaphor and, as such, they are always allegories of the impossibility of reading [i.e., lecture in French]." (12) I focus on the literal and the allegorical as literary-historical problems that reciprocally render British Romanticism (and Anglo-American Romanticist practice) problematical vis-a-vis the inter-related, three-fold reality I mean to query: death, the unconscious, and a (properly unrepresentable) world-system of interminable exchanges (polemical, economical, cultural, tropic, etc.). I can already hear the ear-deafening cry of the phenomenologist--"Back to the texts!"--and so I turn to Keats's "Ode on Melancholy" as a symptomatic text for addressing these issues.
Washed Ashore (On a Lonely Island in the Sea) "There is no sea in the Garden of Eden ..." (13)
A myth governing the study of second generation Romanticism is that Keats, Shelley, and Byron are more deterritorializing than the first generation: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake (the latter never left England and abandoned London only for a sea-side sojourn at Felpham Sussex in the years 1800-1803). This myth is resilient in that it resurfaces in the displaced form of an internalized deterritorialization even when a "straw man" first generation is kept out of the picture. The trio can then be said to have gained a critical distance from their own early insularities thanks to a mythic critique immeasurably enabled by the undeniable fact that all three died in continental exile.
Byron dies in Greece. His last poem invents his own Republican death so as to bury it forever in a foreign territory: "Seek out--less often sought than found, / A Soldier's Grave--for thee the best, / Then look around and choose thy ground, / And take thy Rest" (37-40). (14) Shelley also dies mythically, in his case in Italy on board a boat christened Don Juan (the name of Byron's wandering outlaw) and blessed by the apocryphal biographical anecdote that he intentionally capsized the craft by preventing the sails from being lowered in spite of a raging storm. (15) And Keats died in Rome pining for his lost English love. In each case, death produces closure and not deterritorialization.
A closer look at the critical reception of the "Ode on Melancholy" will help to demystify the second generation's allegedly "disruptive" difference from either the insularism of the first generation or from their own early self-absorption, the latter typified by Lord Byron's obsession with the Island's conflictual literary scene in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" (1809; 1: 227-64), or by the circular returns effectuated by Keats's Endymion, which ends in death, or the apotheosis of the mortal protagonist, and Shelley's Alastor, which ends with the hero's death, or the transcendence of an impossible mourning. (16)
The apotheosis of a non-disruptive alterity also provides closure for Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Byron, the narrator, and Harold become one with Ocean while holding onto a holistic identity, thereby effecting the inexpressible resolution of insularity and deterritorialization I am interested in questioning:
There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne'er express, yet can not all conceal. (2: 184; 4.178: 1596-1602)
Byron underlines that my focus on the "Ode on Melancholy" is over-determined by the peculiar space the poem occupies: a sea-shore topos where a dialogic between island and world, I and alterity, "Man" and "Nature," me-ship and Ocean, is at work and in play.
Me-Ship? Yes, for that is what Keats wanted to be in Endymion: A Poetic Romance of exploration (1818). The figurative identification of I, I-land, and Ship (i.e., the Navy, the Mercantile Marine, and Exploratory projects as relatively autonomous branches of Empire) is a crucial ideological vehicle for the mobile insularity of British Imperialism. (17) Endymion informs us that Keats discovered this imaginary identity early in his career as a metaphor for mastering the romance genre's unregenerate Wanderlust: (18)
'So reaching back to boy-hood: make me ships Of moulted feathers, touchwood, alder chips, With leaves stuck in them; and the Neptune be Of their petty ocean' (Endymion, 1.881-84)
The Keatsian subject wants to make the "I" afloat on a sea of fragmentary letters ("moulted feathers, touchwood, alder chips, With leaves [or literary pages] stuck in them") into a happy equation ("me = ship"), a jubilant mis-recognition ("me ship!"), or an integrated unity: "me-ship." To be all this and more without ever leaving the enveloping shore.
Harold Bloom once a-historically defined "the side of the ocean" as a poet's space of incarnation in relation to his precursors. (19) The shore ought, however, to be spatially re-conceived as a historical topos where the identity of I, I-land, and Me-Ship is placed in radical doubt. The "Ode on Melancholy" is situated on this shore where the poet "inter-views" Iland and Other--to use the verb Byron felicitously inscribes to conflate a constructed vision and a dialogical discourse of disruption. The textual fact that the "Ode on Melancholy" takes place on the historically significant site of the shore is, then, exactly what has been overlooked throughout the poem's reception history. (20)
In the eighteenth century the sea-side developed into a site where one could aesthetically appreciate the sea instead of dreading it as a Classical space of "Fear and Repulsion" (see Corbin 10-18). (21) Fear of shipwreck is never banished even as the sea becomes a place where the body's pain can be dispelled: "Cure-takers began rushing toward the sea-shore around 1750 in order to relieve an old anxiety: this was one of the tactical weapons used to combat melancholy and spleen" (Corbin 57). The body finds itself in an immersive milieu where the subject can: 1) dissolve spatial boundaries between sea and land; 2) exit historicity or the existential anxiety of being fundamentally adrift in finite time; (22) and 3) restore the bond between community and ego via "melancholy and spleen," or the English Disease as it was nationalistically named.
James O'Rourke has stressed this historically located sense of Melancholy in Keats's poem:
Melancholy had been identified, at least since George Cheyne's 1733 work The English Malady, as a particularly English affliction, and the phrasing of Keats's advice to the melancholic [in the first stanza to the final version of "Ode on Melancholy], in emphatic, monosyllabic verbs, accords with his decision to adopt the 'northern' dialect of Chatterton.... (23)
Yet if it is true that the "Ode on Melancholy" embodies a deconstructive play of letters, as O'Rourke goes on to argue ("The language of the poem becomes literally unparaphrasable through its exploitation of pronouns as shifters"; i.e., the ambiguous referent of "She" in stanza three, among other indeterminacies O'Rourke analyzes, for example, "I" and "We"), these ever-shifting letters threaten to wash away the possibility of a historicist meaning for the poem unless they are concretely related to a border-line figuration of Keats's nationalist life-world (O'Rourke 133; my emphasis).
Enter Margate, a sea-cure resort where a "new pier, built in 1815, was the first example of a jetty designed as a parade" (Corbin 264). Margate was, after all, one of the transitional spaces the harassed writer retreated to in order to compose poetry. There, for the price of "a penny," Keats could have "spen[t] the day looking at the sea" (Corbin 264): "Oh ye who have your eyeballs vext and tir'd, / Feast them upon the wideness of the sea ... Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired" ("On the Sea" [1817]: 9-10, 14).
They quire each to each but not to the me-ship as a whole. Things fall apart into sea/see, eye/I, ye/you, yet it is Keats who begins this literal dismemberment by lopping off the "original" first stanza, an exhortation to the melancholic that begins with the speaker telling the other in himself not to give in to the temptation to set sail from the all-enclosing shore:
Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones, And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast, Stitch creeds together for a sail, with groans To fill it out, bloodstained and aghast; Although your rudder be a Dragon's tail, Long sever'd, yet still hard with agony, Your cordage large uprootings from the skull Of bald Medusa; certes you would fail To find the Melancholy, whether she Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull (470)
I begin my study with the cancelled stanza because it contains, as I will show below, the consensus-reading of the poem. The extra stanza registers the narrative-thematic formalist blueprint that has constrained readings of the poem, yet it also marks an outside to formalism by indicating the repressed conditions responsible for producing the apparently closed finality of the Ode as an organic whole.
I contend that the cancelled stanza is key if we want to understand the relations of cultural production over-determining the disinterested illusion of a sui generis object of aesthetic enjoyment: a 30-line Ode as self-enclosed as the mundane life of Christ that would be consummated, three years later, by crucifixion, or, in Keats's case, by the secular transcendence the 33-line "To Autumn" grants in response to the mortal transience the "Ode on Melancholy" dwells upon to the point of pathological obsession. If these connections appear to be a frivolous jouissance, rest assured, the Christocentric unconscious does not think so. (24)
Yet there are conscious enjoyments aplenty in the Ode proper. One enjoys "Beauty," "Joy," "pleasure," and "Delight" in the compacted form of a "Melancholy" smart enough to reflexively refer to itself as the allegorical abstraction "Veil'd Melancholy" (21-26). If the reader heeds the warning that the canonical first stanza is able to exhort on the repressed basis of the cancelled stanza and stays fixed on the shore, "he" or "she" (You or Me, I or We) will re-find "the isle of Lethe dull" rejected by the cast-off fragment as all-too-disillusioning in the sublimated form of an allegorical island housing a "temple of Delight" wherein dwells "the Melancholy" in "her sovran shrine" (25-26).
The existentially deterritorializing experience of the extra-insular, the foreign, and the exotic that is recorded by the wanderings of "the Melancholy" in the undisciplined "Drea[m]" of the first stanza is, then, only apparently refused, as is stressed by Helen Vendler's influential reading of the Ode in terms of a "heroic romance quest, a voyage to the ends of the earth": "Though Keats rejected this stanza, he kept in his ode the notion of the...
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