Introduction
Theresa M. Kelley
University of Wisconsin, Madison
The essays in this volume insist that irresolvable frictions mark Romanticism in its
time and in our critical present. They do so by lingering with dubieties that fissure
Romantic writing about its own historical moment and by insisting on surprising and
difficult alignments between Romantic historiography and contemporary theory and
philosophy. In doing so, these essays convey what it means to think about Romanticism
in our present time. Beginning with Ian Duncan’s reading
of the problem of man and species in Scott’s later
fiction and the waning of the Scottish Enlightenment, the collection moves from
writing committed to a nuanced grasp of the difficulties embedded in the relay
between difficult histories and texts to writing as complexly committed to
philosophical readings of Romanticism. Across this array of critical dispositions,
these essays describe aspects of Romantic writing that render it both difficult and
difficult to leave behind.
In her meditation on the proximity or distance with which Romantics write about the
“field of war,” Mary Favret recognizes a parallel
impulse in the way contemporary scholars and theorists remove scholarly concepts from
particular events and especially suffering. Daniel
O’Quinn argues for a critical triangulation between the British loss of
America, its assorted defeats and victories in India and the formal, aesthetic
contours of poems about trees that evoke, or are made to evoke, national interests.
Matthew Rowlinson’s double interrogation of
Walter Scott’s anonymity as both a matter of
authorship and financial credit argues that a Lacanian allegory of Marx’s Capital inhabits the folds of credit and debt in
Scott’s financial rise and fall. Colin Jager argues for a return to thinking about Romantic
consciousness by way of recent cognitive theory concerning emergence, which supposes
that the mind’s difference from and proximity to body and world can be postulated but
not fully known. Reading contemporary philosophical writing about disaster and ruin
beside Wordsworth’s poetry, Jacques Khalip argues that
The Ruined
Cottage lingers with disaster in ways that urge a non-apocalyptic poetic
turn toward the ordinary, barely sheltered conditions of living and dying. Considered
together, these six essays insist on textual remainders of the stubborn frictions
that mark Romanticism then and now.
They do so in significant measure by turning away from an earlier, still influential
critical supposition that thinking about historicism and thinking about theory are
mutually exclusive operations. In too many conferences and not a few essays, this
suspicion is sustained by looking past the frictions between things, events, cultures
and theories that constitute Romanticism’s problematic sense of itself, hoping
instead to see a Romanticism that does one thing or the other.
Leon Chai recapitulates the history of this critical
divide in Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary
Era, 264-270. Cynthia Chase presents a
brief, nuanced account of the divide in her “Introduction,”
Romanticism, 1-4, 31-35. Thomas Pfau
argues for a philosophically oriented Romanticist criticism in “Reading beyond
Redemption: Historicism, Irony, and the Lessons of Romanticism,"The Lessons
of Romanticism, 1-37 and and in occasional bouts with historicist
critics in Romantic Moods, 337-39. Essays in Repossessing the
Romantic Past present the new historicist side of the divide.
The essays in this volume instead convey how these two aspects of Romanticism are,
even in opposition, complexly bound to the problems and dubieties they inhabit.
It is the claim of this introduction and collection that Romanticism is anything but
schematically divided into round and square, and much more like a field of forces
bent on fissuring and proliferating itself. This impulse works against the desire for
a system that neatly bifurcates itself so that historicists might sit at one table
and theorists at another, preferably in different rooms. I allude here to the
cultural habits of scholarly conferences, but also to a wider impulse that would
understand the interrogation of history as traduced by its inner empiricism and those
of theory as traduced by a love of philosophy and concept that sorts ill with
thinking about historiography. Both dispositions slight the traffic between history
and philosophy or theory within Romantic writing; for that reason, they also miss a
compelling way forward for contemporary writing about Romanticism.
That way is through, not around, frictions between and within these perspectives.
Precisely because it deals with material traits and efforts to manage distinctions,
Romantic biological classification suggests how the friction between specimens,
species traits and higher taxa kept distinctions in play even as nineteenth-century
taxonomists sought to order them into a fixed system. In the end, taxonomists could
not settle on one system to explain all possible relationships among natural kinds
not so much because the ongoing discovery of biological plentitude outpaced efforts
to classify them (taxonomists were and still are tireless), but because that
plenitude could not be mapped adequately by a single systematic. Charles Darwin’s definition of species as
whatever his fellow biologists agreed was a species registers both the problem of
biological classification and his diplomatic non-solution, inasmuch as many of his
contemporaries could not agree on what the term species meant or even on
whether it was a viable concept.
Darwin, Origin of Species, 38.
A century after Linnaeus, the effort to create a fixed system of stable
species and kingdoms of nature had met its other, a spirit of differentiation that
could imagine, like James Hutton’s theory of the earth, no prospect of an end.
As a principle of botanical investigation that goes back to Aristotle and Cesalpino,
differentiation is the centrifugal engine working inside taxonomic inquiry. Nearly as
soon as the Linnaean system was more or less accepted in the second half of the
eighteenth century as standard practice for botanical taxonomy, taxonomists began to
devise what Antoine de Jussieu and his successors called the “Natural System.” In all
its incarnations prior to Darwin’s
Origin of Species, the Natural System recognized multiple affinities
among plant characters or traits such that there might be both a primary taxonomic
home based on one structural similarity and many more affine relationships that might
well cut across recognized species, families and even genera, as the ascending plant
orders were then described.
Although Jussieu and others believed that the Natural System would eventually, when
complete, record a continuous series of creation, the work of differentiation
produced more species, subspecies, varieties in one direction and more families and
genera and orders, even multiple plant kingdoms, in another, and all within the
domain of what we have called the Romantic view of nature, a phrase that says nothing
about the complexity of that nature, taking comfort instead in a sentimentalizing
category that asks little of us and less about how Romantics thought about what
nature might include. A-P. de Candolle, the Swiss taxonomist who consolidated the
Natural System, concluded that Nature is not a continuous series but rather that
there are leaps or gaps in nature that taxonomy cannot bridge. De Candolle’s
recognition makes taxonomic differentiation a grounding principle instead of an
unwelcome outsider. In his study of the history of plant systematics in the
nineteenth century, Peter Stevens includes some of the cognitive maps or schematics
which taxonomists devised to represent, or try to represent, different and at times
competing taxonomic relationships. None of them worked. If finding one that worked
forever were really the only game in town, the history of systematics right up to
present work in evolutionary and then cladistic analysis would seem pointless. In
recent decades the kingdoms of nature have divided yet again, to accommodate
plant-like groups that now appear to be something else and to belong somewhere else,
in a kingdom of their own that is neither plant nor animal.
What this history of biological systematics conveys is the logical and conceptual
necessity for an ongoing friction, admittedly provisional and probably impermanent,
between local, material evidence and competing schematics for their meaning. Whether
or not any single systematic will suffice is less important than what each finds and
tries to gather up into a conceptual frame that is adequate to the array of
differences it tries to gather together. The work of finding and mapping,
conceptualizing the relationships among singularities or differences always turns up
something to be worked at, debated, and by such means kept on the table, not shunted
off into a corner where it cannot cause trouble, where its difference becomes or is
claimed to be monstrous. Indeed, the taxonomic inquiry that paid close attention to
so-called botanical monsters did so because their very difference suggested a
mechanism or operation otherwise hidden and thus in need of attention.
The parable suggested by the cascading array of frictions among natural kinds and
human systematic for thinking about Romanticism is perhaps obvious, but so much the
better. Attention to the on-going work of differentiation leads to friction, constant
friction, between objects of inquiry and the structures used to map those objects.
Competing systematics are all the better because they fight for what should be
counted or not. The ensuing friction is good for heat and perhaps some light. Even so
for the friction between those who emphasize Romanticism’s cultural historiography
and those who emphasize its philosophy, literature and aesthetics. In one sense, this
divide splits Romantic writing in remarkably artificial ways, choosing to ignore the
degree to that body of writing persistently worked across these terrains. But in
another sense, this disciplinary divide unfolds and expands a deeper set of frictions
within Romanticism, and within our critical understanding of what this term and era
entail, between the historical and the local and the abstract or philosophical. What
rightly emerges from these frictions is a sharp reminder that efforts to read
Romanticism as a smoothly articulated, undifferentiated field or period have often
and quite rightly found it difficult, even rough going.
For Jacques Derrida, Paul De
Man and Jean Lyotard,
différance gathers to itself the work of friction by preserving
notice of the singularity of persons and events that disrupts systematic,
generalizing projects. For de Man, difference is the work figures do to undo unitary
reading and meaning. For Derrida, difference
prompts the philosophical demand to unsettle claims to absolute knowledge. The
political and institutional force of this project is, as Jean François Lyotard has argued, apparent when
one considers who or what might be said to be just. Derrida, Of
Grammatology, and “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of
Authority’,” Deconstruction and the Possibility of
Justice, 3-67; de Man, “Rhetoric of Tropes,” Allegories of Reading , 103-18; Lyotard, The Differend and Neal Curtis, Against Autonomy: Lyotard, Judgement and
Action.
Arkady Plotnitsky observes that singularity,
chance, and contingency trouble the effort to create a system or concept that would
subsume differences. Plotnitsky, “Difference,” Glossalalia, 51-74. “Singularity” has become a watchword in its own
right. See Timothy Clark, The
Poetics of Singularity and Derek
Attridge, The Singularity of Literature.
Jean-Luc Nancy emphasizes the difficulty that haunts
efforts to preserve singularity as a concept. In
The Inoperable
Community he distinguishes, after
Hegel and via
Hegel after
Goethe, the individual from
singularity: whereas the individual, like the annual plant that is the subject of
Goethe’s
Metamorphoses
of Plants, dies, what is singular remains so in part because its identity
is secured by its antithetical yet also implicated relation to community, which
Nancy characterizes as the “socially exposed
particularity” that
Marx sought to preserve against the
“socially imploded generality” that Capitalism uses to put singularity in its place.
Nancy,
The Inoperative Community, 59; Goethe, Metamorphosen der
Pflanzen. Tilottama Rajan examines
the philosophical itinerary of singularity from Hegel to Nancy in "System and Singularity From Herder to Hegel," European Romantic Review , 137-49; "Dis-Figuring
Reproduction: Natural History, Community, and the 1790s Novel," The New Centennial Review,: 211-52; and "The Unavowable Community of
Idealism: Coleridge and the Life Sciences," European Romantic
Review, 395-416. The philosophical problem of aligning
singularity with community is suggested by
Nancy’s
return to this topic in
The Sense of the World, where
singularity or “one” means necessarily “some ones
and some others, or
some ones with other ones.” To claim, as
Nancy then
does, that what mediates between singularity and community is a “transcendent
curiosity”
Nancy, The Sense of the World, 71 and
73. on either side seems at once profoundly attractive and Romantic. It too
is also a philosophical move that consolidates and categorizes what is singular.
The task of thinking about Romanticism as an historical moment urges resistance to
this move. In foregrounding the “irreducible inequality” of difference in the
sensible world, Gilles Deleuze indicates how the
resistant logic of historical or cultural difference might derive from the
phenomenal, event-ridden domain of Romantic history. His remark that “everything
bathes in its difference” Deleuze, Difference and
Repetition, 222 and 243. conveys what Romantics experienced, a
world in which friction, not unity or closure, was the work at hand. The rub of
difference is at work in the global theater of race and variety; in the politics and
economics of scarcity during a time of war Mary Favret, “War in the Air,” MLQ, 531-59. ; in debates about whose religion or gender or
race qualifies individuals to be counted as persons or members of a body politic; and
in scientific, philosophical and literary efforts to resist, accommodate, mark or
eradicate such differences.
Despite Romantic and post-Romantic efforts, then, to posit the unity of the one life,
as Samuel Coleridge argued one night in 1797, singularity and difference, whether
found in rocky outcroppings, Barbara Stafford, Voyage into
Substance: Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel Account
1760-1840.
plant species or recalcitrant human individuals, articulate the eruptive,
discontinuous temporality of event and aesthetic response with which Romanticism
works against the grain of a Burkean system of inheritance that imagines itself
governing history and its remains. From this perspective, to provide one example, it
becomes easier to notice how Walter Scott’s
Waverley retrospectively tracks fissures in the 1707 Union of
Scotland and England in ways that do not constitute fictional corroboration of that
political union as accomplished without remainder.
On Scott, compare Katie Trumpener, Bardic
Nationalism with Ian Duncan, “Hume, Scott and the ‘Rise of Fiction’,” Angles on the English-Speaking World, 63-76 and “Authenticity Effects:
The Work of Fiction in Romantic Scotland,” SAQ,
93-116.
If Romantic forms, including Coleridge’s, are as often ruins as not, as Thomas McFarland argued, McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin and Susan
Wolfson, “Reading for Form,” MLQ. such
formal difficulties specify the enabling rhythm of Romantic writing, a rhythm
articulated in the midst of a jostling of events and an inclination toward dissent
that no writer or philosopher of the age could quell. The view of Romanticism
entailed by framing its event and discourse horizons as marked by difference
evidently responds to a long-standing debate about what Romanticism is or was.
Looking back on that debate in the early 1990’s, Mark
Parker remarked, “perhaps we have come to a place where an ironic
counterhistory of Romanticism, one less intent on closure, one more alive to the
accidents and contingencies of descent, as at once possible and necessary.”
Mark
Parker, “Measure and Countermeasure: The Lovejoy-Wellek Debate and
Romantic Periodization,” in Theoretical Issues in Literary
History, ed. David Perkins, 247.
Although the debate about whether Romanticism exists or whether it is not one but
many typically concludes by not concluding as critics speak for, against or somewhere
in the middle of this question, its persistence is instructive. In separate
assessments, Parker and Thomas Vogler note the stubborn
resistance that the debate about what Romanticism is (or whether it exists) presents
to fixed chronologies and conceptual boundaries. They also note the equally stubborn
critical desire to recognize Romanticism as a viable category and event. From A. O.
Lovejoy and René Wellek, who began this twentieth-century debate, to critics in the
near present, Romanticism either names a category that is convenient, perhaps even
valuable, or it registers the impossibility of such a category and period
designation.
As the disputed middle of this long debate, Romanticism names a conceptual and
historical manifold that repays critical attention less for its sureties that for its
inner resistance to coherence. As a period or event horizon, it is not defined by a
single leading indicator like the French Revolution (although this event evidently
does matter, in manifold directions), Marshall Brown, “Romanticism and Enlightenment,”
The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism, ed. Stuart
Curran, 44-47. Essays in The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain
and France, 1750-1820, ed. Colin Jones
and Dror Wahrman, argue that the idea of revolution
requires a longer and broader trajectory. See, for instance, the editors’
“Introduction: An Age of Cultural Revolutions?,” 1-16 and James K. Chandler, “Moving Accidents: The Emergence
of Sentimental Probability,” 137-170. but by the jostling presence of many
temporalities, different levels of momentum, and different moments of intensity. In
one direction, which its writers certainly promoted, Romanticism enters a new era,
one characterized for a time by the prospect of freedom as the projected ground of
poetic imagination and Romantic prophecy. Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of
Romantic Prophecy. Reading this era as a “hot chronology”—Claude Lévi-Strauss’s term for those cultures that
appear at certain moments to develop more quickly than others—James Chandler evokes both to the Romantic sense that
time and events had speeded up and to the modern critical desire to read Romanticism
as hurrying toward the future it imagined. In The Savage Mind Lévi-Strauss argues that there exists an “uneven development” among
societies such that some exhibit “hot chronologies” while others do not, 259.
Although he is wary of the primitive /civilized subplot of Lévi-Strauss’s phrase, in England in 1819 James Chandler uses
it to characterize Romantic writers’ sense of the quickened pace of their era,
68-69. Reinhart Koselleck emphasized the
broad European conviction that the French Revolution introduced an “accelerated
tempo which seemed to open up a new and different age” in Futures
Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 59. Yet Lévi-Strauss’s phrase invokes more than a hint of
a progressive, evolutionary bias in which a neo-Hegelian march of world and spirit moves
forward, away from the “cold” chronology of primitive cultures and “the savage mind.”
Such a view ignores too easily the extent to which Romanticism’s global interests
permeated other cultures and sustained a retrograde preference for slavery for some,
even in the midst of imagining freedom for all. That this was so Romantics were well
aware. Centrifugal pressures that challenged the myth of a consolidated Britain
during the era reveal how fragile and how fractured the era also looked to those who
lived it. Tom
Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and
Neo-nationalism, 86; Ian Duncan,
“Primitive Inventions: Rob Roy, Nation, and World
System,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 82 and “Authenticity
Effects,” 103.
As a category, a moment, and a matrix of ideas and contentions, Romanticism suggests
how we might think about periodization without putting aside the need to historicize
in precisely the differential manner conveyed by the echo of Fredric Jameson’s dictum “always historicize.”
Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 9.
As a culture and discourse that stretch across these extremes, Romanticism may
well be what it looks like—an era under construction and inhabited by transient
figures who cannot locate themselves at home or even in those putatively houseless
woods near Tintern Abbey. In this Romanticism, singularity and contingency belong to
the concept they animate and yet, as Hegel and Derrida differently
acknowledged, Rodolphe Gasché, Inventions of Difference,
171-98. these traits also make the concept, here Romanticism, tremble from
within. This, rather than a posited conceptual stability, is the event horizon of
Romantic history and philosophy. Even Hegel, who argued for a Romantic moment and spirit that could resolve
earlier historical and philosophical shortcomings, found himself confronting a time
whose “instability, …tearing, [and] passage,” as Jean-Luc
Nancy puts it, is the strange fundament of history. Nancy, Hegel, 27.
If Romanticism is marked by frictions among competing definitions all the way down,
as A. O. Lovejoy’s frustrated account of the
discrimination of Romanticisms implied, those frictions, along with those among
readers and critics, need to be on the table. Romantic writing and culture is shot
through with local and material, literary and cultural frictions that anticipate its
modern critical identity, pungently declared in Jacques
Rancière’s study of what he calls “mésentente,” usually
translated as “disagreement,” but closer in spirit to an idea of fundamental discord,
arising from different grounds and premises. Rancière argues that to think about justice and the aesthetics of
politics, we must first grant the irreconciliability of certain arguments, no matter
how much we may hope or image their congruence. Under the sign of
mésentente, Romanticism might be characterized as an historical
moment when singularity, chance, and contingency become the work of the day. This
claim is not a staging ground for an easy settling into commonality; it argues
instead for recognizing that friction is always about several, discordant
possibilities. The cultural and political frictions that Anna
Tsing describes among inhabitants, national programs and global capitalism
in modern Indonesia takes another shape in the Romantic era, when revolution, war,
and imperial advance prompted occasions for thinking about as well as trying to
ignore fundamental disputes. Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente:
Politique et Philosophe; English translation, Dis-agreement: politics and philosophy, trans. Julie Rose; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction.
Kept in play instead of pushed off to the side, friction and irresolvable
disagreement remind us that relationships among singularities or differences always
turn up something to be worked at, debated, and by such means kept on the table, not
shunted off into a corner where it cannot cause trouble, or dismissed as something
monstrous and thus categorically inadmissable.
Viewed this way, Romanticism specifies competing refractions of time and event within
or inside its pulsating chronology(ies). What counts as Romanticism is not who gets
there first or last, or even who or what goes in reverse or forward, but the way that
its differences jostle for attention. That said, the frictions that mark out the
space of Romanticism suggest that its nature or definition has more flow than edge.
This apparent weakness offers a surprising advantage: it transforms a persistent
feature of Romanticism—its holding together of extremes like those Blake imagines as contraries, or extremes of scale in
Romantic visual representation, or the polarities that separate Burke’s political assumptions from Paine’s—into tensile strength. Paradoxically,
Romanticism becomes more flexible and commanding as a category to the degree that it
does not expend itself in an effort to seal its borders. The essays in this volume
insist on what this Romanticism looks like, in its time and in our critical moment.
In the first essay Ian Duncan addresses the
instabilities of Romantic and Enlightenment classifications of the species of man in
a reading of Scott’s penultimate novel,
Count Robert of Paris, as a work that thoroughly overturns
Romanticism’s sense of its futurity as well as its past. Whereas
Waverley, the first of the Waverley novels, could be read to argue for
the shared national histories of Scotland and England, an outcome shadowed but not
undone by its internal ironies, not the least of them concerning the heroic status of
its reckless English hero,
Count Robert raises many more
questions than
Waverley had put in abeyance, beginning with
“man,” the biological category the later novel leaves in shreds, even as it undoes
most of the traits that
Scott is said to have
established for the historical novel. Reaching back to a time and a place
(Constantinople at the close of the eleventh century) that are at once too far off
from Scotland and so Byzantine in style and manner that critics have suggested
Scott was slipping even as he wrote the novel that he
(mistakenly) believed would be his last,
Count Robert
replies, and puts an end to the great project of the Scottish Enlightenment, the
science of man. A novel uncertain of its own genre or species, and rife with species
that put the solidity and superiority of that of “man” in question,
Count Robert looks backwards in ways that challenge Romantic hopes for
the future. This eastern metropolis presents a hodgepodge of species and nations
that make different claims on the idea of man, none more so that the Ourang-Utan
Silvan, who speaks a dialect all its own and understands Anglo-Saxon. In the bloated
world space and anarchically polygenetic array of peoples and species of
Scott’s fictionalized Constantinople, Romantic hopes for
historical progress stumble on the limitations of their own view of racial and
species difference. As the logic of the historical novel shifts in
Scott’s most phantasmagoric fiction, knights imagine
retrograde motions that bizarrely undo the forward momentum of Crusade campaigns.
Duncan’s account of the worlds
Scott evokes in
Count Robert
insists on instabilities within the historiographic projections of the Scottish
Enlightenment that turn essentially on problems with the category of man signaled by
Lord Kames’s notice of the species of men and pursued by Lamarck.
Mary Favret‘s essay takes up the phrases “field of
history” and “field of battle” to consider the metaphoric slide from event and
persons to concept and figure that each phrase imagines or seeks. Whereas Scottish
Enlightenment historiography had supposed that writing about war required the distant
perspective conveyed by understanding and describing battles as scenes on the field
of history, the relative safety of such metaphors seemed by the end of the eighteenth
century, a time of near constant warfare for England and its allies, as Favret puts it, little more than “wishful thinking” or
worse, insofar as its call for dispassionate observation suggested that blood and
suffering seen at close range were not the stuff of which history is made. Favret uses this friction between distance and metaphors
that preserve that distance and what war looks like up close to query contemporary
theory and criticism, beginning with Michel Foucault’s argument that history and
historiography are war. For although Foucault insists that these terms should not
become just figures, they nonetheless do as Foucault’s use of them slides toward
intellection, away from the experience of war or, for that matter, of history.
Recognizing the importance of Reinhardt
Koselleck’s notice of the incompatibility between history at the micro
level—that is all that happens in fine grain detail or however much of it we can
capture—and the macro level—which tells grander, concept driven stories about fields
of history—Favret argues that thinking about
Romanticism historiographically frequently risks or assumes the status of a
macrohistory by taking up the dispassionate and distant vantage point on “details”
for which theory speaks. Anna L. Barbauld,
Favret observes, reverses this tendency in “Dialogue
in the Shades,” charging History with reckoning and limiting what happens to the
mortal body. Barbauld’s refusal of dispassionate distance and the kind of history
writing that occurs at a distance specifies an enduring friction within Romantic
historiography and contemporary criticism between concept and event, human lives and
grand designs.
Daniel O’Quinn assesses the figural connection
between distinct but uncomfortably intertwined British war zones: the Mysore state of
India in the decades when the East India Company’s military forces repeatedly battled
Tipu Sultan for control of lower India and North America, where British military
forces spectacularly failed to manage the colonies. O’Quinn argues that half a globe away from each other, America and Asia
constitute a cultural and historical imaginary for the British, who use triumphs in
one arena to forget defeats in the other. This curious triangulation moves in this
essay by way of figure and specifically figures of trees, Cowper’s destroyed British
oak versus the Indian Banyan tree which William Hodges reimagines in
Travels in India not as the symbol of Indian monstrous proliferation, but
as one protected by the British army, whose troops are sheltered there and shelter
others. The difference between the way Hodges wishes to read the banyan and earlier
readings that identified its proliferation of trunks with a suspect sexuality
constitute, argues
O’Quinn, a crisis in
representation. For although Hodges’s banyan redirects this earlier iconography to
claim the banyan as a proleptic figure for the spread of Company rule well before the
East India Company had fully consolidated its power in the region, that argument also
exposes the “wishful thinking” or self-delusion that C. A. Bayly has identified as a
crucial element of British governance prior to and during the imposition of the
Permanent Settlement.
O’Quinn reads both Cowper’s
Oak and Hodges’s Banyan as figures whose ironies register the give and take (one
battle won here, another lost there) of British nationalist identity and imperial
desire. This “global historic dynamic” requires reading across both the
geographic and cultural terrains each figures. Romantic historiography by way of
figure here makes visible and linked arguments that might otherwise appear to be
isolated claims about America or India under British eyes. Whereas both
Favret and
O’Quinn are
concerned with what figures do,
O’Quinn contends
that some figures reveal a larger cultural imaginary than one might otherwise
glimpse.
Matthew Rowlinson’s argument about Scott’s fiction, anonymity and capital takes up an
intriguing middle ground in the collection. Rowlinson offers on an astute and detailed understanding of how Scott relied on Scots systems of credit and finance that
required the anonymity of authorship that he famously insisted on and played with,
like money in the bank. Rowlinson reads the
uncertainty about what is and what is not money in Scott’s
Antiquary as one instance of a problem of
textual boundary that recurs in the Waverley novels, with their serial form,
indistinguishable protagonists, and the extensive textual periphery of introductions,
prefaces, notes and other apparatus. By such turns,
Scott’s fictional voices create the simulacrum of capital in ways that
anticipate the role of Capital in
Marx’s analysis as a
Lacanian marker for the real in a symbolic order. Yet the point of
Rowlinson’s essay is not simply that
Scott anticipates
Marx, but
rather that its riveting historiographic evidence discloses a deeply economic
rationale for
Scott’s mystic and permutable anonymity
and, further, that this highly fictive circulation of identities conveys the
allegorical character of
Marx’s Capital and the author
“Walter Scott” among his various fictive voices, frequently leaked identities. Moving
between
Scott’s publishing history, Scottish finance,
Marx, Lacan, and back,
Rowlinson tracks the work of allegory and credit such that the distinction
between historiography and theory remains, but their conjoined work becomes more
telling.
Colin Jager takes up the question of Romantic
consciousness, an inquiry that recent work on Romanticism has either put aside or
taken up in ways that he contends are less productive than they might be. Much of the
essay considers developments in cognitive theory that literary scholars of
Romanticism have only partly begun to read. He identifies two recent approaches to
consciousness: neurological arguments which regard mind as a synonym for the brain
and emergence theory, which has a longer track record (stretching back to the
nineteenth century) but does not claim to answer the “hard question” of cognition,
how mind is related to world or more precisely how we can physically know that the
mind has consciousness. Using examples that recur in recent accounts of emergence and
cognition, Jager notes that although neither bees nor
ants possess consciousness, a bee-hive or an ant colony could be said to demonstrate
the kinds of collective and individual organization we might understand as necessary
activities from which consciousness would emerge. Lower-level self-organizing and
self-modifying systems such as Goethe
found in plant development and many other Romantic writers found in different animals
and insects would constitute, then, physical evidence of activities from which
consciousness might emerge. What is arresting about this argument, Jager emphasizes, is its tentativeness, its capacity to
rest, as Keats urged, in doubt and uncertainty. This attitude, Jager suggests, recalls too Wordsworth’s “natural piety,” a phrase Anne-Lise François uses to imagine a Romantic environmentalist ethic
poised to stand back and think about what might emerge in us that is, however
indistinctly or problematically, from nature.François, "’O Happy Living Things’:
Frankenfoods and the Bounds of Wordsworthian
Natural Piety,” 42-70.
Jager argues via emergence theory for a more tentative
theoretical disposition that is less commanding than the habits of mind Favret questions.
Jacques Khalip’s concluding essay argues for a
dwelling with ruin and disaster that begins by asking this question about the story
of Margaret and Armytage as narrator in Wordsworth’s
Ruined Cottage: how can poetry and
reading dwell with the non-normative effects unleashed by disaster to discover forms
of non-triumphal, wasted life?
Khalip addresses this
question via Martin Heidegger’s shadowed notion of being as persisting in ruin, Rem
Koolhaas’s vision of the accumulated wreckage of modern life, Maurice Blanchot’s
insistence that disaster cannot be forgotten but must be lived with, and the strange
hospitality that
Derrida urges for our relation to
the nonhuman, the vegetable, and the dead. With these arguments engaged,
Khalip returns to the “harassed unrest” of
Wordsworth’s Margaret. Working from a very
different point of departure, shadowed as much by the Holocaust as it is by Romantic
wartime,
Khalip finds very different ground to
return readers, as do
Favret and
Duncan, to a Romantic poetics that cannot turn from suffering, the wasting
of human life, the instability of bodies and species in the kingdoms of nature.
Khalip insists on unsatisfied hermeneutic economy that
theorizing at times seeks to offer: in exchange for this suffering, here is a theory
of war or peace that will make up the difference. The elegy of the
Ruined Cottage, as
Khalip puts it,
“disasters the payments ordinarily recouped by acts of mourning.” It is an open
question, I think, and was for
Wordsworth as
well, whether elegy can do even this much without denying loss.
Khalip’s unremitting theoretical exploration of what
doesn’t tidy up, what doesn’t find an easy settlement in Romantic writing shares with
other authors in this collection a reading of Romanticism that lingers with its
instabilities and doubts. Each of these essays takes up its own position along a
continuum in which historiographic and theoretical interests lie, unevenly
distributed, with several opportunities for friction between critical practices. None
is assimilable in argument or method to the others. All six essays nonetheless insist
on reading Romanticism for its frictions.
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