Rereading Shelley. (Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Publication: ELH

Publication Date: 22-SEP-93

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COPYRIGHT 1993 Johns Hopkins University Press

Geoffrey Hartman's conception of the "Romance of Being Named" serves to describe how autobiography is determined as a kind of quest "by the idea of a hidden--spectral or specular--name."(1) Miming precisely the sort of sublimity as is associated with the treasure-hunt for the Holy Grail, the quest for the divine logos, autobiography is "about," always and everywhere, the endeavour to live up to one's name. Shelley's writing, I suggest, is articulated with this theory. Through the production of such texts as Laon and Cythna, Prometheus Unbound and the Homeric Hymn to Mercury there is revealed a keen interest in the haunting, fixative, unifying power of "being named." I shall show that the extent of this concern can be traced the most closely if, in a reading of these "romances," we focus psychoanalytic attention on the poet's repeated and symptomatic use of shell imagery.

To be inscribed in language is to undergo a truly traumatic experience. In terms of Freudian theory, there is a "primal repression" in which an irrecoverable fantasy is established in the unconscious.(2) This fantasy then seeks to reveal itself by means of not only disturbances in, but also a whole conditioning of the subject's use of language. There is both a disruption and an overturning of the order of one's discourse: a figuring of what is virtually unfigurable. Trauma of this kind, occasioned by one's being placed by a signifier, occurs for all of us when we are named at birth.

In other words, we are wounded as we are named, bearing the scars of that moment--that maiming--for the rest of our lives. (And by "wound" here I mean, among other things, a "blessing": the mere pronunciation of words somehow to bring favor upon another.) Now if the proper name is conscious, what of the irrecoverable fantasy, the "improper" name, the catachresis it induces in the unconscious? We resort to the figurative naming of that which appears to have no literal name to mark what is unremarkable. Posing the question of what corresponds to the Lacanian "mirror phase" on the level of language, Geoffrey Hartman wonders whether "there may be such a thing as a specular name or |imago du nom propre' in the fantasy development of the individual" (FC, 93).

The preverbal infant of the Lacanian imaginary discovers an interior signifier the purpose of which is to serve as the specular base for other imagery, carrying out an integrative and unifying--though illusory--function in the face of a prior and deeper system of symbolic difference. Such an infant is thus the de facto subject of a larger magical or religious tradition motivated with the driving ambition to possess the Word. Hartman brings to Lacan Derrida's posterior interest in the truly spellbinding effect of "being named." This step leads him to posit as correspondent to the mirror phase on the level of language what he himself characterizes as "the scene of nomination" (FC, 94). What happens in this scene? Hartman suggests that at the same time as we are named in a public and civic sense, "the specular name or identity phrase--our true rather than merely proper name--is reaffirmed in time by a textual mimicry, joyful, parodistic, or derisory, of the original |magnification'" (FC, 94).

In the cultural construction of the named/maimed subject, we may say, there is an unstable economy of the proper name and its imago figure, of the signature and the specular name. The nature of this instability has been theorized the most extensively through psychoanalytic investigations into the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements of the mind. We can now use this body of theory to illuminate the workings of not only society, but also art. For if the specular name remains merely a more or less repressed and unconscious aspect of the psychosexual development of most individuals, it is a troubling and decisive thing for those others whom we recognize as artists. The scene of nomination dramatizes the birth of the artist in its all. Hartman quotes Derrida in this respect to the effect that "The signature is a wound, and there is no other origin to the work of art" (FC, 93-94).(3) On this basis, art is itself the product of the active insistence of the specular name as an unremarkable, unrecapturable, fugitive fantasy felt in the life of the artist. The whole argument of Hartman's theory of the Romance of Being Named tends to converge on the following proposition: "The repetition of the specular name gives rise to texts that seem to be anagrammatic or to conceal an unknown-unknowable key, a |pure' signifier. These texts are called literature" (FC, 94).

According to Hartman's hypothesis, then, literature is "the elaboration of a specular name" (FC, 108). The proper name turned joyful, parodistic, derisory thing figures the Alpha and Omega of literary discourse. Without it the artist would have nothing to say (nor, for that matter, would his or her discourse be "literary"). Yet with it, he or she says, in a sense, nothing but this absolutely ludicrous thing.

Jonathan Culler, through an interest in what puns show about the functioning of language, literature and the psyche, has intensified our understanding of how the literature of the specular name produces its effects, concentrating attention even at the level of the syllabic phoneme: the smallest unit of significant sound in a given discourse. He notes the instance of Shakespeare ringing the changes on "Will" in the Sonnets in particular, speaking in general terms of "the poem as a punning exfoliation of the proper name."(4) He thus develops a preeminently functionalist standpoint on the fantasmatics of the specular. Taking up Hartman's avowedly Derridean perspective, he goes on: "From this vantage, literature can be seen not as an author's appropriation of the world but as a dissemination or dispersal of the proper name, the transformation of it into the elements of a world--in short, a foundation of letters."(5)

Significantly, it is precisely that property of language recognized as the pun which exemplifies the agency of this transformation. "Pun" is taken as paradigm for the play of language. Culler explains in a magisterial sentence:

The pun is the foundation of letters, in that the exploitation of

formal resemblance to establish connections of meaning seems the

basic activity of literature; but this foundation is a foundation of

letters only, a foundation of marks whose significance depends on

relations, whose own significative status is a function of practices

of reading, forms of attention, and social convention.(6) The vital metaphoricity of the word is the empirical reference of the world. There's that old Catholic joke about St Peter/saltpetre standing as the in fact self-differing instance of the Rock of Ages. Samuel Beckett quips in his fiction: "In the beginning was the pun."(7)

We have now refined considerably our theory of literature as autobiographical dissemination, articulated as the product of the call of the phoneme (and thus exposed as a species of logocentric romance). The writing of the signature has been deconstructed into its significant units ("Will" in William Shakespeare, for instance, is seen as the sheerly verbal foundation of letters in that author's text). From here, we can take up what is the main interest of the present discussion, beginning to analyze, literally, what goes on in Shelley's name.

The task in hand, then, itself entirely novel, I believe, is to open up the specular dimension of everything associated with the name of Percy Bysshe Shelley. I must cover myself in this respect by acknowledging the value of Paul de Man's sensitive reading of the shifting mirror surfaces of light and water apparent in Shelley's last major poem The Triumph of Life. Of the demanding experience of trying to read the layerings of this veritable palimpsest of a text, de Man writes: "Its meaning glimmers, hovers and wavers, but refuses to yield the clarity it keeps announcing."(8) This kind of analysis--where reading is, above all, a matter of reading off--has yet to be extended beyond the writing of a single text to Shelley as phenomenon.

Interestingly, the lesson which de Man learns from reading The Triumph of Life is that, in a sense, the momentous act of naming and concomitant inscription in language constitutes but one blind and violent speech act among others, working to shatter just as many specular structures as it calls forth. Irrecoverable fantasies, as products of these unbearably unrelated impositions, become, if anything, that much more irrecoverable. De Man comes to understand the enigmatic, feminine "shape all light" (352), an erotically tantalizing flickering in the poem's general movement from erased self-knowledge to disfiguration, as "the figure for the figurality of all signification" (SD, 62). Her oscillation between presence and absence may well be the mode of being of all figures. For de Man, Shelley's text "warns us" that nothing ever happens in relation to anything else, "but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence" (SD, 69).

The ideology of this text may well be that of a pre-Nietzschean will to power. Yet as Shelley himself shows elsewhere, were we to put the "randomness" of this outlook on ice, so to speak, to immobilize and crystallize it literally into articulation, we could in fact begin to trace out the trajectory of a further repression. To be sure. The Triumph of Life is an unfinished work and therefore not necessarily to be taken as an authoritative final statement or authorized last word on the meaning of life. De Man is to be seen, perhaps, as perpetuating rather than putting in its place a certain gesture of recuperation. In fact, as the "overdetermining ambiguity" of the poem's title implies, the meaning of the text is capable of radical reinscription, its fabric can be folded inside out. Derrida suggests in another Nietzschean reading contemporaneous with that of de Man that "the triumph of life can also triumph over life and reverse the procession of the gentitive."(9)

In Shelley's writing of an Epitaph for John Keats at the end of 1821 we are presented with the heroic...

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