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COPYRIGHT 1995 Johns Hopkins University Press
We cannot put aside, and yet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which we represent to ourselves as supreme amongst all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: "I am from eternity to eternity, and outside me there is nothing save what is through my will, but whence then am I?"
- Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (A613=B641)
'Tis paltry to be Caesar:
Not being Fortune, he's but Fortune's knave, A minister of her will.
- Antony and Cleopatra (5.2.2-4)
Harold Bloom's Freudian conception of the anxiety of influence might be usefully related to Marcel Mauss's analysis of the ambivalence imposed by any gift. To receive a gift is to know its source to be elsewhere, outside yourself, and to incur an obligation to that source. Bloom's analysis of belatedness tends to show strong latecomers reacting to this obligation by trying to see themselves as self-originating. Even if their original vocation was as readers of other poets rather than as writers, they free themselves by claiming to be beholden to no one for their poetic wealth. Similarly, Mauss's central anthropological insight was to show that the ambivalence with which gifts are regarded by their beneficiaries is universal, that generosity is always a mixed blessing for its beneficiary. Generosity confers on its objects both benefit and obligation. Often this obligation is intangible: it is the obligation to admit obligation and dependency. The donor of the gift appears to the recipient, and intends to appear, as having a privileged relation to substance. The prestige that attaches to the donor, the donor's charisma, is charismatic precisely because it is opaque. It is inconceivable as a first-person experience, because the notion of experience already presupposes the receptivity of the person experiencing. Charisma consists in giving the impression of a self-sufficiency inconceivable for first-person experience: charismatic authority always belongs to the other (originally to the parental imago). To put it in perhaps too lapidary a form, the paradox of wealth is that for the first-person all wealth would seem ultimately an ambiguous blessing. Wealth can never be conceived of as having a first-person origin. Any human substance derives from sources outside the self - what Wittgenstein called "the world as I found it," or Emerson the "Not-me."
For both these figures, there is nothing we can call ours except our own poverty and the assertion of this original ownership of non-ownership is one way to claim self-reliance and independence. In this essay I want to reread Keats's "To Autumn" fairly radically. My interpretation will seem counterintuitive to many people (although it is not at all counterintuitive to me). I hope both to draw on and to modify Bloom's theory of influence, in order to claim that Keats's true precursor was not just Milton or Wordsworth, but Shakespeare; and yet this is an even richer composite Shakespeare of Keats's own creation, one that includes aspects of Spenser, Milton, and Wordsworth. The main modification of Bloom will be in my attempt to show the ways in which Keats tries to free himself from that influence: not by asserting a counter-strength but by a sort of refusal of wealth and hence of the obligation it marks.
In "To Autumn" a figure of endless abundance guarantees, even in the teeth of scarcity, the world's inexhaustibility. Despite the imminence of winter, Autumn continues "to set budding more, / And still more, later flowers for the bees, / Until they think warm days will never cease, / For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells."(1) It is in keeping with Autumn's generosity that he is patient, and encourages patience.(2) Autumn is an allegory of time's generosity, and Keats's ambivalent achievement in this poem is to come to an at least temporary reconciliation with time. But "To Autumn" also suggests, I think, the darker side of this generosity: that it feels alien to its beneficiaries. The costs to the beneficiary of this apparently free generosity are unavoidably part and parcel of the consoling attestation of its alien independence from the insecurity and uncertainty that emblematize its beneficiary's neediness.
Now, I want to suggest that Antony and Cleopatra is among the most important and most ambivalently regarded of the poem's literary precursors. Specifically, Antony is a precursor for the ambivalent imago that Autumn represents for Keats. Keats's stance towards generosity (here personified by Autumn) is that of a beneficiary, and what he derives his substance most from is the generosity of a precursor. It seems to me that "To Autumn" is in a way based on the most literal kind of misreading, or at least on a choice about a textual crux in Antony and Cleopatra. There's a sense in which much of Keats' poetry after 1817 is haunted by the presence of Antony and Cleopatra, and I think that the figure of Autumn is the culmination of this presence.(3)
Theobald had trouble with Cleopatra's lament to Dolabella:
His legs bestrid the ocean, his rear'd arm Crested the world, his voice was propertied As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends; But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty, There was no winter in't; an Antony it was That grew the more by reaping. His delights Were dolphin-like, they show'd his back above The element they liv'd in. In his livery Walk'd crowns and crownets; realms and islands were As plates dropp'd from his pocket.(4)
(5.2.82-92)
Antony anticipates Keats's Hyperion, and Caesar anticipates the boyish, Keats-like "young Apollo." More threateningly, Antony represents Autumn, as he literally does in this passage. Keats underlined this passage in 1817; his Whittington edition of the poem follows Theobald, whose 1726 emendation reads: "An autumn it was / That grew the more by reaping."(5) This is right as a reading of the line, but weakens it unnecessarily, especially since Cleopatra has already reversed tenor and vehicle, and made Antony the ground of all comparison: "Something it is I would - / O, my oblivion is a very Antony, / And I am all forgotten" (S, 1.3.88-91). These reverse personifications are a sort of apotheosis: the standard of bounty is not autumn, but Antony, and even autumn is judged by this standard. But Keats also owned a facsimile of the First Folio, and so knew the original version (though he doesn't underline this passage there).(6)
What Shakespeare (and so Antony) represented for Keats, more than any other precursor for any poet, was not a rival poet whose access to the source of plenitude seemed to exceed the latecomer's, but the personification of the source of plenitude itself: a poet so inexhaustible as to be equated with the ambivalently regarded benefactor. Unlike any other poet in our culture, Shakespeare, here through the persona of Antony, has been treated as the very source of generosity instead of its object. As I argued above, it is the fate of human consciousness to know itself, as both Descartes and Kant argue, at its deepest levels only as radically passive: what it is conscious of is always something other than the self. And so any other consciousness it can conceive of it conceives also as passive. (This is why Kant says that the idea of God's consciousness is so unbearably vexatious.) Generosity is only something that happens to consciousness, not something consciousness originates - this is the conundrum at the heart of the anxiety of influence, formed of the incompossibility of reading and writing. It may be rephrased as Clifford Geertz does as a puzzle about the simultaneously social and psychological, external and internal, nature of charisma.(7) The paradoxical character of charismatic figures (which is a version of the paradox of the precursor, or of Lacan's description of the phallus as always allegorical, never the possession of a person) consists in (our belief in) their incomprehensible ability to see themselves as self-originating, their incomprehensible ability not to wonder about the source of their charisma, about the origin of their power of self-origination.(8) Theirs is a mode of being without the passivity that is inherent in consciousness.
Consciousness of generosity, then, is always consciousness of a generosity that comes from elsewhere. This is the anteriority (for Bloom) and exteriority (for Maurice Blanchot) that haunts writing. But for Keats, Shakespeare's poetic power (as, at other times, Milton's) successfully presents, like charisma, what should be a contradiction in terms: a consciousness sentient without passivity and original without the unconsciousness...
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