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The Distanced Imagination

I

It seems obvious that British Romanticism should be interpreted in the context of the debate on slavery. For one, they share exact dates. British Romanticism, as conventionally defined, begins somewhere in the 1780s (with Blake’s publications) and ends somewhere between 1832 (with the passing of the Reform Bill) and 1850 (with Wordsworth’s death). The slave question occupied this same period. The first protests against slavery in Britain, initiated by the Quakers, took place in the 1780s, and these led to a massive effort to abolish the slave trade in the 1790s.¹ It was not until 1807 that Parliament outlawed the slave trade, after which followed an even more passionate debate for the emancipation of slaves in the colonies. Although the Emancipation Act was passed in 1833, it did not come into effect until 1834, and then it included a clause regarding apprenticeship that delayed official emancipation until the 1840s.

But beyond sharing dates, slavery and Romanticism are concerned with similar themes. Certainly, one cannot bring the greatest imaginative literature of the period together with the greatest moral question of the age without noticing a common vocabulary of terms like “slave” and “master,” “tyranny” and “oppression.” Nor are these terms used sporadically in Romantic poetry: they appear with startling regularity. For instance, images of freedom and its British opposite, slavery, are mentioned throughout Blake’s poetry, in lines like “the slave grinding at the mill / And the captive in chains,” from The Four Zoas.² Likewise, Mary Wollstonecraft frequently designates women as “slaves” in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Men, she writes, “will endeavour to enslave woman:—and who can tell, how many generations may be necessary to give vigour to the virtue and talents of the freed posterity of abject slaves?”³ Both Byron and P. B. Shelley use the idea of slavery in their lyrical dramas. In Byron’s Manfred (1817), Manfred himself asks the witch, “Obey? And whom? The spirits / Whose presence I command—and be the slave / Of those who served me? Never!” (2.2:158–60). Throughout Prometheus Unbound (1820), Shelley explores the irony and injustice of slavery. In one striking instance, Asia asks Demogorgon a question about the dialectic of mastery and slavery, “Declare / Who is his master? Is he too a slave?” (2.4: 108–9). Also, Mary Shelley regularly employs the terms “slave” and “tyrant” in exchanges between the monster and Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein.

Although many of these writers may seem to be using the terms “slavery” and “freedom” in abstract and even universal ways, in the sense that everyone is a slave to something and seeking freedom from it, the terms are, in fact, grounded in the historical specificity of the transatlantic trade and plantation slavery, the stories of which surrounded these writers. This study sets out to demonstrate, in detail, just how this is so. In some cases, the historical specificity of slavery is there in clear view, as in Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude” (1798).⁴ Coleridge writes,

Like a cloud that travels on,

Steamed up from Cairo’s swamps of pestilence,

Even so, my countrymen! have we gone forth

And borne to distant tribes slavery and pangs,

And, deadlier far, our vices, whose deep taint

With slow perdition murders the whole man,

His body and his soul! (47–53)

Romantic writing operates within the context of slavery, certainly, but what is the relationship between slavery and freedom in the poetry? On one level, Romantic works celebrate a kind of personal freedom that stands in alarming contrast to slavery. This is perhaps expressed most clearly in Coleridge’s 1794 “Religious Musings,” where he refers to the depths of slavery and then celebrates the expansive and diffusely free British imaginative self:

The whole one Self! Self that no alien knows!

Self, far diffused as Fancy’s wing can travel!

Self, spreading still! Oblivious of its own,

Yet all of all possessing! (154–57)

Indeed, the period might be characterized by this central irony: the British “self, spreading still” and “all of all possessing,” springs to life in some Romantic writing at the exact time that the slave self, suicidal and destroyed, haunts other Romantic writing. For instance, John Gorton’s 1797 poem “The Negro Suicide” ends with an enslaved African plunging “this pointed steel” into his heart.⁵ In 1802, a poem printed by Hannah More called The Sorrows of Yamba; or, The Negro Woman’s Lamentation speaks of another method of suicide: during the middle passage, many Africans, “sick and sad,” died refusing to eat the “Nauseous horse-beans” otherwise forced down their throats.⁶ Mary Robinson’s “The Negro Girl” of 1800 ends with yet another form of self-destruction: the slave girl Zelma throws herself “in a wat’ry grave.”⁷ Perhaps the strangest example of all is in James Montgomery’s 1809 poem The West Indies, where he records how slaves die “by the slow pangs of solitary care, the earth-devouring anguish of despair.” “The Negroes,” explains Montgomery in a footnote, “in deep and irrecoverable melancholy, waste themselves away, by secretly swallowing large quantities of earth.”⁸

Clearly, many writers who were fascinated with their own vibrant identities were the same ones who were quick to watch slave identities drown in the Atlantic or waste away from a diet of dirt. Yet to say that the literature of the period portrays confident, expanding British selves at the expense of slave selves who submissively disappear is not entirely correct. For there also exists, among some writers, an unstoppable desire to see this expansive British self become not-self in the face of the other. In fact, the loss of self recorded with such dramatic intensity by abolitionist poets was integral to the poetic theory of many Romantic writers. In 1819 (to return to the example this book begins with), the same year in which Tommy complained about the analytic distance which was used to dehumanize him, John Keats targeted the concept of aesthetic distance in one of his compelling letters on the imagination. Writing to George and Georgiana Keats on 19 March 1819, Keats mused, “Very few men have ever arrived at a complete disinterestedness of Mind: very few have been influenced by a pure desire of the benefit of others…. I perceive how far I am from any humble standard of disinterestedness” (my emphasis, KL, 2:79). In using the term “disinterestedness,” Keats means a freedom from self-interest. For Keats, disinterestedness implies a feeling for the suffering of others that is so intimate it can only happen by divesting the self of its own interest.

In his letter, Keats is so taken with the subject that he cannot let it drop. He writes a little later, “Wordsworth says, ‘we have all one human heart’—there is an ellectric fire in human nature tending to purify—so that among these human creature[s] there is continu[a]lly some birth of new heroism—The pity is that we must wonder at it: as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish—I have no doubt that thousands of people never heard of have had hearts comp[l]etely disinterested: I can remember but two—Socrates and Jesus” (KL, 2:80). As Keats sees it, the imaginative mind produced the self distanced from its own ego. In a letter to Richard Woodhouse of October 1818, Keats had called Wordsworthian imagination the “egotistical sublime,” a quality he wanted nothing to do with: “As to the poetic Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; …) it is not itself—it has no self” (KL, 1:386–87). But a year later, he seems to have clarified his notion of imaginative distance and could even see in Wordsworth an aspect of the imagination that felt compelled to divest itself of egotism. Certainly, this idea does occupy a place in the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802). The poet, writes Wordsworth, must “bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time, perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs” (W Prose, 1:138).⁹

The imaginative idea of self-loss was not limited to any single Romantic writer.¹⁰ In 1802, Coleridge wrote, “It is easy to cloathe Imaginary Beings with our own Thoughts and Feelings; but to think ourselves in to the Thoughts and Feelings of Beings in circumstances wholly & strangely different from our own … who has atchieved it?” (CL, 2:810). This same idea gripped Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1821, when he wrote the Defence of Poetry, his strangely ethereal poetic treatise, which carefully links the imaginative mind and the distanced heart. “The great secret of morals is Love, or going out of our own nature,” says Shelley, with great emotional flourish. This means, in no uncertain terms, “an identification” with a “thought, action, or person not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause” (SP, 487–88). The “creative faculty,” he declares, in a statement that is fundamental to his philosophy, is what compels artists to produce poems, novels, and paintings. But like Keats, Shelley views this imaginative faculty, and the products of its labor, as self-distanced in the sense of being divested of ego. The imagination, not taken up with itself, has a special power that enables the self to escape the tediousness of its own interests. It implies sympathy, a “going out of our own natures,” but also empathy, the ability to identify with and feel for another human being.

One way to think about this distinction between self-interest and disinterestedness, between the expansive self and the loss of self, is through the aesthetic/philosophic categories of intimacy and distance, which were, as Chapter 1 details, also geographic categories. The power of what I am calling the distanced imagination comes from a definition of self as for the other. Although literary theorists have not spent much time analyzing the concept of the distanced imagination, its legacy is stubbornly present in modern discussions among poets, critics, historians, and philosophers. The present-day American poet Eleanor Wilner defines distance in two different senses: analytic distance and aesthetic distance. In the case of analytic detachment, writes Wilner, “distance separates and frees a person from feeling for what he observes. But what aesthetic distance separates us from is not the emotions but the ego. With poetic imagination, it is precisely this distance from the ego that enables the emotional connectedness we call empathy—and because it is remote from ego-threat, as we enter imaginatively what is actually at a remove from us, we are given both vision and connection.”¹¹ In theory, and in some of their best practical moments, Keats, Shelley, and the other Romantic writers viewed the imagination in this way.¹² But more importantly, it was the African and slave presence in Britain that forced them to articulate the possibilities of the distanced imagination in their creative work.

II

The distanced imagination—a creative faculty at once expansive and self-sacrificing—has its roots in the change in moral consciousness that took place in the eighteenth century.¹³ Because this change can be traced both politically (as Chapter 1 argues) and theoretically, the two strands must have developed dialectically. In the realm of theory, the Romantics were fundamentally influenced by the astounding number of eighteenth-century texts that celebrated the imagination’s expansive capabilities, works such as Joseph Addison’s “The Pleasures of Imagination” (1712), Zachary Mayne’s Two Dissertations Concerning Sense and the Imagination (1728), Archibald Campbell’s Enquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue (1728), John Gilbert Cooper’s Letters Concerning Taste (1757), Alexander Gerard’s An Essay on Taste (1759), and Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759). These were just a few of the theorists to anticipate Adam Smith’s immensely popular Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), a text that explicitly outlined the relationship between imagination and sympathy, a precursor to the Romantic idea of self-sacrifice.¹⁴

Some of the first important publications on imagination in Britain were Joseph Addison’s essays in the Spectator titled “The Pleasures of Imagination.” These appeared in 1712, a good one hundred years before Keats and Shelley wrote about the imagination. “The Pleasures of Imagination” reads like fairly straightforward eighteenth-century material, dealing with ideas of “taste” and “wit.” Addison says the imagination is “that Faculty of the Soul, which discerns the Beauties of an Author with Pleasure, and the Imperfections with Dislike” (original emphasis).¹⁵ Yet although he discusses the imagination in conjunction with eighteenth-century taste, his fundamental claim for the imagination is its capacity for enlargement. “It is the Power of the Imagination,” Addison says, “when it is once Stocked with particular Ideas, to enlarge, compound, and vary them at her own Pleasure” (my emphasis). Magnificent buildings and scenes of nature, he goes on to say, “help to open Man’s Thoughts, and to enlarge his Imagination” (my emphasis). “Nothing,” he emphasizes, “is more pleasant to the Fancy, than to enlarge it self” (my emphasis).¹⁶ Certainly the discoveries of the Enlightenment—Newtonian physics, natural history, and geographic exploration—must have influenced Addison’s view of the imagination as a faculty of the mind whose purest pleasure came from enlargement. And this claim for enlargement would cling to discussions of imagination in every variation it underwent throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

For instance, almost fifty years later, Alexander Gerard, in An Essay on Taste (1759), defines the imagination in terms of the expansive mind: “When a large object is presented, the mind expands itself to the extent of that object, and is filled with one grand sensation, which totally possessing it, composes it into a solemn sedateness, and strikes it with deep silent wonder and admiration: it finds such a difficulty in spreading itself to the dimensions of the object, as enlivens and invigorates its frame: … it sometimes imagines itself present in every part of the scene which it contemplates; and from the sense of this immensity, feels a noble pride, and entertains a lofty conception of its own capacity.”¹⁷ The imagination, in Gerard’s view, longs for expansion. “The mind,” he says, “acquires a habit of enlarging itself to receive the sentiment of sublimity” and longs to “expand its faculties.”¹⁸ Again in 1759, Edmund Burke expresses this idea of imaginative enlargement in its most powerful extreme. What Burke calls “vastness of extent,” an aspect of the sublime, finds its ultimate expression in the idea of “infinity.”¹⁹

In contrast to the expansive, powerful imagination of Gerard and Burke, in this same year—1759—Adam Smith published his Theory of Moral Sentiments, conceiving of the imagination in terms of self-sacrifice, or what he called “fellow-feeling.” “By changing places in fancy with the sufferer,” wrote Smith, “we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels.”²⁰ The popularity of Smith’s arguments can be traced to the heart of distanced imagination. The first part of Smith’s essay, “On Sympathy,” establishes a new role for the imagination, one that enlarges itself in order to be selfless. “Whatever is the passion which arises from any object in the person principally concerned,” he writes, “an analogous emotion springs up, at the thought of his situation, in the breast of every attentive spectator.” Here, Smith thinks in terms of proximity and distance and of the coin-cidence one can feel with another. He continues, “In every passion of which the mind of man is susceptible, the emotions of the by-stander always correspond to that, by bringing the case home to himself, he imagines should be the sentiments of the sufferer.” The imagination allows one to “bring the case home,” implying an intimacy and hospitality in relations between self and other that were, up to this point, unheard of. Clearly, then, the expansiveness of the imagination seen in previous theorists had taken a new turn with Smith, leading to the moral consciousness that would shape the actions and the poetry of the Romantic period.

Since slavery was the most egregious form of suffering, and thus the form of suffering most likely to evoke fellow-feeling, slavery is the first example Smith offers in “On Sympathy.” The imagination may be a mental activity, but it implies a bodily experience, an altering of selfhood on the most fundamental level. “Though our brother is upon the rack,” writes Smith, “it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case.” “By imagination we place ourselves in his situation … we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him.”²¹ Smith makes the enlargement of the imagination not a selfish but a selfless faculty. One expands the ego boundaries of the self in order to feel for the other. Shelley, following Smith, writes much later, “the imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived” (SP, 490).

If imagination defined the self as both expansive and sacrificial, these qualities also characterized the political realm. But in politics, expansion was again conceived of as motivated by self-interest. Adam Smith himself provides a striking example: he developed The Theory of Moral Sentiments which advocated fellow-feeling and then he turned, less than twenty years later, to champion capitalism, free trade, and the flow of money in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith’s was the first major work of political economy, examining in detail the consequences of economic free markets, such as division of labor, the function of markets, and the international implications of a laissez-faire economy. Though Smith’s two books seem to have opposite emphases—one springing from selfless motives, the other on selfish interests—both, in fact, rivaled one another in popularity for reading audiences. As historian Richard F. Teichgraeber explains, the discrepancy between the assumptions governing these two works has been a problem for Smith scholars ever since the Victorian period, so much so that late nineteenth-century German scholars called it “The Adam Smith Problem.”²²

Curiously enough, a version of the Adam Smith problem is currently the focus for historians of British slavery who have discussed at length the ways in which the two opposed forces of sympathy and capitalism dominated the abolitionist movement. A finely tuned and wonderfully nuanced debate by the veteran historians David Brion Davis and Thomas L. Haskell is notable on several counts. Just as self-sacrifice and self-expansion characterized the nineteenth-century British concept of imagination, these historians agree that humanitarianism and capitalism defined British economics of the same period. In fact, what strikes Haskell as significant is the way in which humanitarian and capitalist attitudes dovetail.²³ “Capitalism fosters self-regarding sentiments, while humanitarianism seems other-regarding,” writes Haskell. “What can account for the parallel development in history of two such opposed tendencies?” One answer lies in the fact that despite their antithetical aims, both humanitarianism and capitalism “depend on people who attribute to themselves far-reaching powers of intervention.”²⁴ This power of intervention can also describe the relationship between self-sacrifice and self-expansion in the realm of creativity and imagination. Romantic poets, as Coleridge’s poetic exclamation of the spreading self proves, had confidence that their ideas would have national appeal, if not the powers to intervene.

III

One of the best ways to understand the relationships between self-sacrifice and self-expansion of the distanced imagination is, I propose, through the concept of alterity. Alterity means “difference,” but it also encompasses the idea that because the self is responsible, ethical, and human, it preserves the difference of the other and acknowledges the relativity of subjectivity. Alterity was, from the beginning, a concept of the Romantic imagination. Although the word was used sporadically in the 1600s, the OED credits Coleridge for introducing the concept into the language.²⁵ For Coleridge alterity is a mode of self-consciousness. He claims there can be no consciousness, no being, without alterity. Alterity allows the self to distinguish its own being; it is “namely a distinction of the Scitum from the Sciens” (the thing known from the knowing agent). Although alterity gives the self its consciousness, its distinctness, Coleridge clearly grants the alterity of the “thing known” its own integral status. Alterity’s relativity produces “reality”: “outness is but the feeling of otherness (alterity), rendered intuitive … because we find this outness and the objects, to which, though they are, in fact, workings in our own being, we transfer it, independent of our will, and apparently common to other minds, we learn to connect therewith the feeling and sense of reality” (original emphasis) (SWF, 2:929). Further, Coleridge attributes alterity to the Trinity and, therefore, to transcendental being. He opposes “selfness and identity” to “otherness and alterity,” whose “synthesis” is the community of the spirit. Identity and alterity, like the Father and the Son, can maintain integral being in the unity of synthesis.

Perhaps Coleridge’s clearest definition of the dynamic between alterity and identity is in his marginalia, specifically to the writings of Jakob Bohme. In contemplating the impossible unity of opposites, Coleridge writes:

+A passes into +B to lose itself, and in the next instant retracts itself in order to give an Alterity to +B, and this in order to lose itself in another form by loving the self of another as another—(CM, 1:680)

Coleridge comes back again and again to the concept of alterity to explore the classic Romantic dilemma of selfhood as simultaneously same and other, alienated and unified, fragmented and whole, connected and distinct. Ultimately he views the self as capable of sacrifice for the other but also as expansive through transcendence.

Today, in philosophy, identity politics, and postmodern theory, in recalling and developing the concept of alterity, we are using Coleridge’s terminology and concept of “outness” or “otherness,” and are revising a classic Romantic problem of attempts to reconcile seeming opposites. The concept is central to philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, anthropologists such as Michael Taussig, and literary theorists as diverse as Mikhail Bakhtin and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In 1982, A. J. Greimas and J. Courtes called alterity a “non-definable concept, which is in opposition to another concept of the same sort, identity,” two terms which at least can be defined by way of reciprocity.²⁶ Likewise, Mark C. Taylor’s recent study of alterity concedes (using an alternate spelling) that “‘Altarity’ is a slippery word whose meaning can be neither stated clearly nor fixed firmly.”²⁷ Though never completely decidable, Taylor says that the linguistic field of “Altarity” can be approached through the network of its associations: “altar, alter, alternate, alternative, alternation, alterity.”²⁸ He provides a thorough genealogy of the concept, starting with Hegel and devoting a chapter each to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Bataille, Kristeva, Levinas, Blanchot, Derrida, and Kierkegaard. Thus, despite alterity’s nondefinable quality, it is frequently used in Coleridge’s original sense, to explain how the self tends toward, desires, seeks, and needs the other in order to distinguish itself and realize its subjectivity.

More importantly, recent discussions have shifted the domain of alterity from transcendental philosophy to social/historical investigation. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, for example, in their Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty (1990), designate “alterity” the best word to use in the study of ontology and identity politics. Unlike the term “otherness,” “alterity’ shifts the focus of philosophic concern away from the epistemic other’ to the concrete ‘moral other’ of practices—political, cultural, linguistic, artistic, and religious. This is consistent with the movement from the concerns of modern philosophy of knowledge and of the subject to the more decentered philosophies of post-modernism.”²⁹ Although Coleridge does not explicitly reserve alterity for moral otherness, this ethical dimension of alterity is implied in his writings, especially on slavery. In his Lecture on the Slave Trade, Coleridge begins with the grandest possibilities for the “Imagination,” equating it with “glittering Summits” and “Alpine endlessness,” only to condemn its powerful uses in the execution and maintenance of colonialism: “horrible has been its misapplication,” he writes (Lects 1795, 235–36). The Lecture goes on to engage the imagination in alterity by detailing the sufferings that the slave trade had, up to that time, instigated. Thus, even though the notion of alterity seems to be transhistorical and trans-cultural, it does, in fact, lend itself to historical and cultural specifics, like the relationship between Britons and Africans in the nineteenth century.

Coleridge’s investigations into the concept of alterity, its moral possibilities and responsibilities, find their fullest extension in the works of Emmanuel Levinas (although Levinas was not influenced directly by Coleridge’s writings but developed his philosophy in the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger). Born in Lithuania, educated in Russia and Germany, and naturalized French in the 1930s, Levinas went on to become one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, producing a number of important works, including two major philosophical texts, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being; or, Beyond Essence.³⁰ The originality of Levinas’s thought emerges from his synthesis of ethical philosophy and Talmudic commentary, but readers also cannot help sensing the enormous personal energy that characterizes all his works. This is especially true of the collections of lectures and interviews, such as Thinking-of-the-Other: Entre Nous and Ethics and Infinity, the latter a wonderfully readable set of interviews conducted by the philosopher Philippe Nemo.³¹

In fact, the most striking qualities of Levinas’s works are their accessibility and their immediate applicability to politics, aesthetics, and history. Indeed, it is a little surprising that his work has not been used to examine the relationships between Romanticism and slavery before now. In 1998, a small collection of essays entitled “Alterity in Discourses of Romanticism” appeared, which suggested applying Levinas’s ideas to Romanticism, and in 1999 David P. Haney wrote an eye-opening essay called “Aesthetics and Ethics in Gadamer, Levinas, and Romanticism,” but neither of these has generated any large-scale studies.³² It is safe to assume that Levinas would have welcomed an application of his thought to questions of slavery and empire, since he was generally enthusiastic when his philosophy informed political insights and social activism. In 1982, for instance, Levinas was told that various attempts had been made to apply his philosophy to Marxism, to which he replied, “I have gotten to know a very sympathetic South American group that is working out ‘liberation philosophy.’… I am very happy, very proud even, when I find reflections of my work in this group. It is a fundamental approval.”³³ One of the reasons Levinas’s theories are applicable is his bold rejection of grand philosophical schemes coupled with his use of elegantly simple phrases like “the face-to-face” and “responsibility for the other.”³⁴ But most of all, Levinas’s philosophy is attractive because he moves beyond polemics of guilt and blame to a different plane altogether. Levinas’s work allows for an ethical connection between self and other in a post-slavery and post-Holocaust world. In this book, I invoke Levinas to provide a philosophical explanation to the previous discussions of the imaginative self as sacrificial and expansive. His work helps explain how some Romantic writers approached the African other of slavery and exploration in their creative work.

Like Coleridge, Levinas describes alterity as the self’s responsibility for the other, as the self’s imperative to place the other at the center of his or her own being, and as the self’s desire to respect and preserve the difference of that other. Alterity in this sense is a relation that does not compromise the selfhood of the other. Because alterity carries an ethical dimension, a reciprocity or responsibility for the other, for Levinas “eros” (as the key dimension of alterity) becomes the only way to recognize the other. Indeed, eros occupies a primary place in relationships. It is, writes Levinas, “a relationship with alterity, with mystery—that is to say, with the future, with what (in a world where there is everything) is never there, with what cannot be there when everything is there—not with a being that is not there, but with the very dimension of alterity.”³⁵ And just as Coleridge attributes alterity to the idea of God and thus to transcendental being, so Levinas describes alterity as the “proximity and the uncanniness of God” who is present in the face-to-face encounter: “Transcendence is what turns its face towards us,” he writes. Further, thought awakened to the transcendence of alterity “believes itself to go beyond the world or to listen to a voice more intimate than intimacy” (original emphasis).³⁶ In this way, the imaginative self can be both sacrificial and expansive.

Levinas conceives of consciousness as always involved with the other in a state of proximity, or presence, which he describes as the “face-to-face.” This is close to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s description of the intimacy produced by the touch. In Merleau-Ponty, explains Levinas, “one hand touches the other, the other hand touches the first; the hand, consequently, is touched and touches the touching—one hand touches the touching. A reflexive structure: it is as if space were touching itself through the man.”³⁷ The proximity of the face-to-face follows a similar logic. For Levinas, the other always presents him or herself as a face, and it is the face of the other that “signifies for me an unexceptionable responsibility, preceding every free consent, every pact, every contract. It escapes representations; it is the very collapse of phenomenality. Not because it is too brutal to appear, but because in a sense too weak, non-phenomenal because less than phenomenon. The disclosing of the face is nudity, non-form, abandon of self, aging, dying, more naked than nudity. It is poverty, skin with wrinkles, which are a trace of itself.”³⁸

Alterity begins with the most important theme of Levinas’s work: the relationship between two people. In his ethical philosophy, his Talmudic commentaries, and his political discussions that often hinge on the aftermath of the Holocaust, the well-being of the other person is of utmost concern. In fact, so strong is this idea, that to Levinas, “the only absolute value is the human possibility of giving the other priority over oneself.”³⁹ Levinas develops a philosophy with the politically and socially disenfranchised in mind: the slave, the orphan, the prisoner, the foreigner, the stranger. His philosophy gives us new insights into Romantic writers’ use of the imagination to bring the self face-to-face with the alterity of the radical other of that period: the slave self. It approximates Shelleyan “going out of our own natures” and Keatsian “disinterestedness.” In fact, Levinas uses the term “dis-inter-estedness” to define the being-for-the-other in all human beings.⁴⁰

The essence of being-for-the-other is self-sacrifice, a fundamental condition of human consciousness. Levinas, in fact, defines consciousness as “a preoccupation with the other, even to the point of sacrifice, even to the possibility of dying for him or her; a responsibility for the other. Otherwise than being! It is this shattering of indifference—even if indifference is statistically dominant—this possibility of one-for-the-other.”⁴¹ In ways that both recall and go beyond late-eighteenth-century philosophers like Adam Smith, Levinas sees that responsibility, being-for-the-other, must ultimately test itself against suffering: “For me the suffering of compassion, suffering because the other suffers” is one part of the relationship between self and other that is “much more complex and complete at the same time.”⁴²

But how do we understand this ethical relationship in the writings of British poets? The main problem scholars have in applying Levinas’s philosophy to literature is in coming to terms with Levinas’s rejection of representation. As David P. Haney points out, Levinas is “suspicious of art” because of its seeming autonomy from the ethical other. Despite this, Levinas does champion critical discussions that relate “the inhuman work of the artist into the human world.”⁴³ Still, if Levinas rejects representation, insisting that the face is not a representation and that art has no access to transcendence, how can we face the faceless other, the other of representation? The answer lies in Levinas’s notion of “trace.” In his essay “The Trace of the Other,” he defines “trace” as “the beyond from which a face comes…. A face is in the trace of the utterly bygone, utterly past Absent … which cannot be discovered in the self by any introspection.”⁴⁴ Since trace is a substitute for the other, it becomes the way that the absent other appears. Trace thus allows representation to have an ethics. The one bears a responsibility for the represented other, and, in fact, some scholars even believe that trace itself is what constitutes the ethical relationship between self and other.⁴⁵

Along with the idea of trace, another important concept for Levinas, something also directly applicable to art, is his belief that the face of the other is discursive. “Face and discourse are tied,” Levinas says. “The face speaks” he continues, and thus “renders possible and begins all discourse.”⁴⁶ This idea has attracted some of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, most notably Jacques Derrida, who delivered a eulogy at Levinas’s funeral in 1995, which was published with a speech he gave at a seminar held in Levinas’s honor one year later.⁴⁷ Here, Derrida reinterprets and extends some of Levinas’s ideas, particularly the notion of “hospitality,” of meeting the face of the other in discourse. In support, Derrida quotes Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence:

To approach the Other in discourse is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Discourse, is … an ethical relation.⁴⁸

In fact, Levinas ends his most important philosophical work, Otherwise Than Being, with a summary of the connections he has made between discourse, alterity, proximity, and responsibility: these are the very principles at work in the writings of British Romantics in the face of the other because it is here that the other overwhelms the egoism of the self and causes the self to lose its sovereignty.⁴⁹

To sum up, I am suggesting that Romantic alterity, the philosophical underpinning of the distanced imagination, helped writers form some of the most powerful poetic works of the period. This aspect of the Romantic imagination developed in conjunction with the entire culture’s growing awareness of the alterity of Africans and slaves, who were the most discursively visible example of British otherness. Further, I believe that a strand of what has been canonized as Romantic writing explores issues of alterity that are directly linked to slavery.⁵⁰ Writers from Wordsworth to Keats, from Blake to Mary Shelley, incorporate the powerful images and ideas of African and slave otherness into their creative works. The literary is the mode through which these writers accomplish proximity, in Levinas’s sense of the face-to-face, a discursive responsibility for the other. By using and reshaping information available to them through various discourses, Romantic writers bring Africans and Britons into a relationship of alterity, one that would have been impossible in the original discursive forms—abolitionist poetry, parliamentary papers, or travel literature—that are either overly sentimental or politically rigid. These forms only reinforce the unequal power relationships between self and other (a typical example would be the abolitionist medallion, crafted by Josiah Wedgwood, which pictures an African in chains kneeling at the feet of a paternalist white man). On the other hand, creative works that are modeled on the distanced imagination acknowledge the unequal power relationship between Africans and Britons, but at the same time they manage to build an imaginative space for mutual alterity and mutual empathy, in Levinas’s sense of the face-to-face.

There are three methodological ways, I suggest, for twenty-first-century readers to account for the ethics of the faceless other of Romantic representation. The first, and most important, happens between the artist/poet and his or her creative subject (for example, Wordsworth’s ethical relationship with the black woman in “The Banished Negroes”; Blake’s with the little black boy). In this case, it is the job of the critic to understand the face as representing an other whose trace faces the poet him-or herself. The second way to understand Romantic literature using Levinas’s philosophy is simply to read the ethical relationship between the one and the other within the stories told by poets and writers (for example, between the ancient mariner and the wedding guest, or between the monster and Frankenstein), and then to evaluate how these ethical moments reshape what is being said in other discourses (parliamentary debates, travelogues, abolitionist propaganda). The third way is to accept the possibility of an ethical relationship between the reader and the trace of the other in representation. To take the example with which this book begins, Tommy’s slave complaint offers a trace, a proxy of the face, which faces the reader, and it is this very trace that points to an ethics between the one and the other. Similarly, Mary Prince, whose story concludes this study, establishes, through representation, an ethical relationship between self and other.

In the chapters that follow, I show how the images drawn from the culture of slavery, abolition, and African exploration reappear in Romantic literature, with a difference. With the exception of The History of Mary Prince, all the works I examine—Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Blake’s engravings and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Keats’s Lamia, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Witch of Atlas,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and poems from Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads—have a critical history of being about the imagination, and, while this is true, they are also about Africans and slaves. I investigate the fever behind “The Ancient Mariner” but at the discursive forefront of literature on slavery and African exploration; the monkeys behind Blake’s engravings but at the forefront of race-science debates; the snakes behind Keats’s Lamia but at the forefront of discussions on African religion; the African map behind Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Witch of Atlas” but at the forefront of British exploration; the savage cannibal behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but at the forefront of discussions of slave rebellion and African customs; and the murderous mother behind Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads poems and Mary Prince’s History but at the forefront of debates over slave emancipation. The distanced imagination releases these topics from the discourses of power where alterity is impossible and renders them in a language and vision unparalleled in Britain to that time. “For the Eye altering alters all,” says Blake in 1800.⁵¹ By drawing on this altering vision—this alterity—Romantic writers created a language that even today offers an alternative to the sterile repetition of history.