Читать книгу Surface Tension - Julie Carr - Страница 6
ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
On he flared . . .
John Keats, “The Fall of Hyperion” i
1.
If a poem has a surface and a depth—the one embellishing, ornamental, and attractive, the other meaningful, soulful, ideational—there can be little debate about which is the principal part. The poem’s surface, its formal devices and linguistic play, is valuable for what it serves: its role is supportive, and therefore secondary. The poem’s depth, whether construed as idea, argument, emotional truth, or narrative, is by contrast valuable even when the surface is removed, even when the poem is translated into ordinary speech. But what happens when the pathway from surface to depth approaches impenetrability? What happens to the poem’s importance, its value, its force, when its decorative qualities begin to assert themselves over and into content, when the poem’s argument or message loses itself in the folds of ornament?
These are the questions of modern and postmodern poetics and might seem to have less purchase in a study of Victorian poetry—a poetry that is commonly understood to be perhaps decorative, but primarily ideological, devotional, narrative, or dramatic, and not, as in the self-conscious works of the twentieth century, intensely focused on language’s surfaces, on language as surface.ii And yet, from Tennyson’s highly wrought sonic experiments to Swinburne’s metrically vigorous and syntactically complex poems, one finds in Victorian poetry a longing for language to move toward abstraction—to move in the directions that the modernists—Mallarmé, Pound, Stein, and Zukofsky, for example—would take it, toward “the condition of music.”
In the poets I examine, this interest in the surfaces of language is particularly intensified. Furthermore, many of the deep un-rests of the latter half of the nineteenth century—the epistemological, political, and social tensions of the period—register themselves in and as a debate about the status of the surface in poetics. As Victorian poets and theorists of poetry and art—Arthur Hallam, J. S. Mill, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, D.G. Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, William Morris, and Gerard Manley Hopkins—sought to define the social role of the poet and of poetry in their period, sought to understand or forge a relationship between poetry and social change, cultural criticism, revolutionary or conservative political positions, they participated in a long and ongoing debate about the social value of highly wrought aesthetic surfaces.
As its title indicates, this book examines the relationships among such complex textual surfaces, extreme or intense affect, and engagements with temporality in the works of four major poets: Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.iii With the exception of Arnold, these poets and their poems speak for a specific strain in Victorian temporality, especially as it is applied to visions of social change. Whereas the Victorian period is generally and justly thought of as dedicated to gradual, developmental social progress, numerous studies from Jerome Hamilton Buckley’s seminal book, The Triumph of Time (1966), forward have argued that the latter half of the nineteenth century experienced an “apocalyptic mood,” a mood encouraged by developments in physics, geology, biology, politics, and by growing religious doubt.iv I argue that the formal intricacy of much of the poetry of this late Victorian period, while often deliberately employed to provoke intense affectivity, also and importantly serves to invoke this cataclysmic, as opposed to progressive, sense of change.
I chose Rossetti, Morris, and Hopkins as primary subjects because of the ways in which each models this cultural engagement with cataclysmic temporality, though each poet turns his attention toward a different arena of—and for—change. Rossetti’s lens is firstly focused on selfhood, on erotic and aesthetic experiences and their effects on the transformation of the self. Morris, a committed socialist (who, long before reading Marx, was deeply concerned with the problems of alienated and oppressed labor), focused on social and political transformation—eventually on Marxist revolution per se, but earlier in his career on revolutionizing aesthetic production as a means toward achieving a revolutionized political and economic future. Hopkins was, of course, concerned with spiritual transformation, that of the individual subject, and that of the larger community. My fourth figure, though the one I discuss first, Matthew Arnold, stands somewhat uneasily as the counterpoint to these poets of transformation. Arnold was by all accounts a gradualist, consistently working toward developmental social change, mostly through advancements in public education. And yet, in his poetics (though not necessarily in his poems, as we will see), Arnold argues for a conservative aesthetic, one that privileges content over form, or depth over surface. Poems, for Arnold, function best when they are transparent spheres in which ideas can be contained. This poetics of containment, wed as it is to gradualist ideas of progress, is thus contrasted with the poetics of surface, which the other poets in this study so enthusiastically perform.
Deeply dissatisfied with the political and cultural moment in which they found themselves, Rossetti, Morris, and Hopkins imagined their work in revolutionary terms, even though this meant quite different things for each of them. My intention will be to demonstrate the connections these poets forged between the intricacies of their poetic surfaces and the sudden transformations they imagined.v
Thomas Carlyle’s Professor Teufelsdrockh announces the period’s fascination with the problem of surface and depth when, in his “Philosophy of Clothes,” he “expounds the moral, political, even religious Influences of Clothes; [and] undertakes to make manifest, in its thousandfold bearings, this grand Proposition, that Man’s earthly interests, ‘are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by Clothes’” (Carlyle, 40). Teufelsdrockh insists that “Society is founded upon Cloth,” while his editor maintains that “a Naked World is possible, nay actually exists (under the Clothed one)” (50). Of course Carlyle’s prose and the layered structure of his “splendid rhapsody” (xxii) provide ample opportunity for thinking about the relationship between surface and depth in literary works. One hardly knows whether for Carlyle artifice is a burden (as he argues in “Characteristics,” his treatise against self-consciousness) or a source of authorial pride. Perhaps both.
More than forty years later, Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “Poetry is speech . . . framed to be heard for its own sake and interest over and above its interests of meaning,” and we understand this as defense of and encouragement for his own ornate and densely woven textual surfaces (Journals, 289). By placing the value of the poetic utterance directly on language as such, rather than on its referent, Hopkins, the most “modern” of the poets in question, turns our attention to the sensations that poetic language creates rather than the cognitions that it provokes.
This valuation of surface is everywhere in Hopkins (even though for Hopkins, the surfaces of the physical world, what he called “inscape,” provide the deepest, because eternal, Revelation).vi But importantly, Hopkins’s celebration of the surface is not unique in late Victorian poetics. Indeed, much British poetry written during the latter half of the century by the Pre-Raphaelites and those associated with them emphasizes surfaces both as subject-matter for poems and as the most valued aspect of poems themselves. Rossetti’s faces and reflections, Morris’s fabrics and fonts, Hopkins’s cloud formations and animal hides—all of these register an obsession with visual pattern and form—what Ruskin called “the science of aspects.” Needless to say, Rossetti, Morris, and Hopkins were not only writing about visual surfaces, they were also immersed in creating and evaluating visual arts. While Hopkins was not a painter, he considered becoming one early on, and his notebooks are filled with sketches and references to visual culture.vii Rossetti, of course a painter as well as a poet, made many works that incorporated both arts, and Morris designed wallpapers, textiles, carpets, and tapestry, sometimes while he wrote or translated epic poems. And yet, despite the interest of the visual works these poets produced, my intention is to examine how and why they manipulated word, line, and poetic sequence to such a degree that their poems became ornate and highly-wrought surfaces themselves.
In molecular physics “surface tension” describes the effect of molecular bonding at the surface of a liquid. By virtue of being on top, these molecules have fewer molecules with which to bond, thus the energetic bonds between them are stronger than they would otherwise be. I use this metaphor because in the poems I examine a similar bonding effect occurs within the poem’s lexicon; homophonic relationships such as internal rhyme, near-rhyme, repetition, alliteration, metathesis, and assonance (what Hopkins called “oftening, over-and-overing, aftering”)viii tend to draw the reader’s attention to the sounds and shapes of the words themselves, at times distracting her from the semantic meaning the words are meant to impart.ix In other instances, metonymic and associative chains, as well as intertextual references, neologisms, excessive detail, rhythmic disruptions, and the anagrammatic and decorative aspects of words and letters, similarly distract the reader from the poem’s story or message, creating the sense that the thickened surface is distinct from, and perhaps in the way of, the poem’s actual content. However, to return to physics, when a fluid demonstrates surface tension, one need only to pierce the surface to discover that the difference between surface and depth is an illusion; the two are molecularly (though not energetically) identical. This is how I understand the poetry I address; despite the resistance of the surface, there exists a fluid continuity between the poem’s conceptual content and its form. My analysis of the formal qualities of these poetries thus does not stand at a remove from either the poems’ contexts or the social meanings they express. Rather, as in the formalist criticism of Herbert Tucker, Isobel Armstrong, Susan Wolfson, and many others, formal analysis is meant to reveal how poetry makes meanings at the level of its most intricate and intimate engagements with language.
This study thus asks questions about how the Victorians understood the social uses of poetry and of the aesthetic more broadly. But it also asks a more general question about how aesthetic productions that emphasize ornament and affect might be understood to participate in social critique and, ultimately, in social change. In this sense my project contributes to the growing interest in the political possibilities of aesthetic forms, one that has tended, with some notable exceptions, to focus on Romantic or contemporary texts.x I assert the primacy of Victorian poetry in terms of its political commitments as well as its lasting relevance to contemporary poets and theorists of poetics, arguing that this poetry is relevant to us now specifically because of how the difficult aesthetic surface is invoked as an agent of radical change. Thus, while this study is in one sense historical, it is also theoretical. The periodization of literary texts makes sense when we are reading these texts for the history, literary and otherwise, of which they speak. But texts and the theoretical positions within them have lives that extend far beyond their historical origination, even as they necessarily carry that history as well. “The work of art . . . is essentially a-historic . . . ,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “[for] the specific historicity of works of art is not manifested in the ‘history of art’ but in their interpretations” (qtd. in Moses, 85).
Thus I read these poems not only for what they teach us about the years in which they were written, but also for how they might help us to reflect on our contemporary assumptions and attitudes about how aesthetic productions participate in transformation.
2.
With this equivocal periodization in mind, I would like to begin with a text that hangs between the Romantic and Victorian periods: John Keats’s “The Fall of Hyperion.” The poem, a revision of Keats’s earlier Hyperion fragment, was written in 1819, but was not printed until 1856, and even then in a very limited edition. Bridges and Hopkins knew the poem, but it is likely that Arnold, Rossetti, and Morris were familiar only with the earlier version, published in 1820.xi However, this is less a question of influence than of confluence: I choose “The Fall” because it is here that Keats most clearly lays out the problem of poetry’s social usefulness once the dominance of depth over surface is undone. I choose Keats, rather than the more obviously political Shelley, for three reasons. First, Keats is the most beloved poet of the Pre-Raphaelites. Drawn to his medievalism, his enthrallment with sensation, the struggle in his work between the ideal and the real, the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” (PRB), and Tennyson before them, turned to Keats as an important, even necessary, predecessor. xii Pre-Raphaelite painter Holman Hunt’s first exhibited painting at the Academy was “The Eve of St. Agnes,” taken from Keats’s poem of that name. John Millais’s first painting that bore the PRB insignia was of a scene from Keats’s “Isabella” (Thompson, 51). The convergence of the original Pre-Raphaelites—including Rossetti, Hunt and Millais—occurred at least in part because of their shared enthusiasm for Keats. Some critics maintain that it was in fact Keats’s interest in Italian art before the time of Raphael that inspired Rossetti to come up with the term “Pre-Raphaelite.” xiii William Morris concludes News from Nowhere with a direct reference to the last line of “Ode to a Nightingale.”xiv Matthew Arnold was also strongly influenced by Keats—perhaps most interestingly so because the influence was also agonistic.xv
I begin with Keats also because if periodization has anything to do with reception, then Keats is in at least one limited sense a Victorian poet. It was in the Victorian period that Keats’s poetry, as George Ford puts it, “came into its own” (2).xvi There were no reprints of Keats’s work until 1840, and the first biography of Keats was published in 1848. Ford’s important study, Keats and the Victorians, makes clear that the Victorian poets and Keats hold each other in mutual debt: while the former owe much of their art to Keats’s influence, he owes much of his fame to theirs.xvii
The third reason I have chosen to begin with Keats has to do with precisely how Keats’s work might be read as critical, as opposed to purely aestheticist. Keats’s poetry, like that of Rossetti and Hopkins, is not, or rarely, overtly political in theme. Rather, the poems openly consider, or simply evoke, questions about the relationship between aesthetic experience and social responsibility. While such concerns run throughout Keats’s poems and letters, “The Fall of Hyperion” most directly confronts the pressing question of the artist’s social role, a question that animates all of this book’s subsequent chapters.xviii
In the now canonical essay, “The Resistance to Theory” (1986), Paul de Man takes on various semantic uncertainties and opacities in the title of “The Fall of Hyperion” in order to demonstrate how “the grammatical decoding of a text leaves a residue of indetermination that has to be, but cannot be, resolved by grammatical means” (15). “No grammatical decoding,” de Man continues, “however refined, could claim to reach the determining figural dimensions of a text” (16). De Man points to two moments of indeterminacy in Keats’s title, and argues that once introduced, these options create alternative ways of understanding the poem, alternatives which contradict each other to such a degree that they invent an impasse of understanding just at the poem’s entryway. We do not need to repeat the specifics of de Man’s argument here, but it is important to note that for de Man, this undoing of grammatical sense is not mere play.xix Rather, such reading practices constitute the heroic appeal of literary theory, for it is precisely this “disturbance of the stable cognitive field that extends from grammar to logic” (17) that allows theory to do the work of “upset[ting] rooted ideologies by revealing the mechanics of their workings” (11).
The choice of Keats as an object-lesson for such “upsetting” is no accident, of course, for Keats theorized the pleasures and profits of indeterminacy long before de Man. “Negative capability”—the capacity to reside in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”—is one way of defining de Manian “reading.” And yet, what we find when we move beyond the title of “The Fall” is that for Keats, language’s opacity, rather than simply imposing a destabilizing force into ideologies, presents ethical problems, problems that Keats does not resolve (and neither, of course, does de Man). And it is precisely these ethical problems, as we will see, which resound so deeply in the works of nineteenth-century poets who follow him.
In “The Fall of Hyperion,” the aspiring poet engages in a developmental process by which he attempts to advance from “dreamer”—one who vexes the world—to “poet”—one who “pours out a balm” upon it. The final step in this process is a direct confrontation with the muse. Clearly, for Keats, the true poet is a healer, deeply engaged in the world and responsible toward others. And yet the advancement of the speaker into the role of “poet” leads, in this poem, to a tautological silence that speaks less for the poet’s healing capacity than for his vacancy. The poem opens on the speaker’s worry that despite his best efforts, he might turn out to be nothing but a dreamer, but its conclusion touches a more central anxiety: the tragic vision to which the speaker aspires fails in this poem, and in the earlier Hyperion fragment, not because of the speaker’s unworthiness, but because of language’s opacity, its potential failure to “mean” beyond its surface.xx
Once Keats’s poet (under the threat of death) has successfully mounted the muse’s altar steps, he is confronted with her veiled face, which both attracts and terrifies him. This muse, a “veiled shade,” refuses to reveal meaning, and thus presents an irrepressible challenge to the poet who has staked his life on poetry’s power to heal. Moreover, once he lifts the muse’s veil, her opacity only thickens, for the exposed face is itself a veil—her “visionless” eyes express nothing and immediately he desires to see into them as well. He is then remarkably allowed access to her “hollow brain,” and yet what should be a moment of revelation is instead a tautology: “Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,” the passage begins, and this is the key rhetorical move of the poem: within the veiled shade is a shady vale. Keats’s muse has no within. Language, to say it more simply, is its own referent. Again de Man: “It is not . . . a priori certain that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but its own language” (Resistance, 11).
And yet I believe the poem speaks of more than just language, and thus forces us to stretch away from the “linguistic turn” de Manian reading can stand for here. For again, the poet’s muse, this hollow, barren “womb”—is Mnemosyne. The act of identification between the poet and his muse, figured as an invasion of her mind, is the self’s attempt to penetrate its own history, its own depths. That the scene thus revealed is one of non-redemptive and non-productive stasis (and what could be more static than tautology?) suggests that the poetic self is finally construed as lack. Keats’s question, articulated in “The Fall” as whether the poet vexes the world or pours out a balm upon it, suggests that for Keats, the emptied selfhood of the poet is bound in moral tension. For if the writing self “has no identity,” if the writer/muse is an empty space, then where does one locate one’s responsibility to others? If there is no “I,” then what can I do for you?
In Keats’s famous October, 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse he writes:
If then [the poet] has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would right write no more . . . It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature—how can it when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to to [sic] press upon me that I am in very little time an[ni]hilated. (Letters, 151)
Here is Keats’s anxiety about his cipher-like subjectivity. Even the error—“right” where he meant, “write”—seems to betray the problem of social isolation that arises from the absented self as a moral problem. The painful moral self-doubt is amplified in the next paragraph of the letter when Keats writes, “I am ambitious of doing the world some good . . . I will assay to reach to as high a summit in Poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer.” In this prose rendition of the poet’s ascent to tragic vision in “The Fall,” we see clearly that the ascent is meant as a movement toward social usefulness, or healing power. And yet we also see that for Keats, whose understanding of the poet’s selfhood strips it of ground, of center, and of necessary relation to others, this moral ambition is in crisis.
The barren scene within the muse’s mind, as I’ve said, returns us directly to her opacity, her veil/vale. And while the speaker has acquired, in this moment, the vision which wins him the right to be called a poet, what he sees has “No stir of life,” for it is the scene of the fallen Titans, the mythical moment of post-revolutionary disappointment. Saturn, the fallen deity, “degraded, cold, upon the sodden ground,” speaks only to instruct his “brethren” gods to “moan” for their own loss of power. This “moaning” is the inarticulate sound of energy stripped of agency. It is, in another way of reading, the failure of language that results from the poet’s full identification with the muse, which is to say, the poet’s full identification with himself as poet, as negativity. The burden of the vale/veil is, then, the suffocating burden of language’s self-reflexivity, a burden that is all the more painful because of the manner in which it radiates outward toward the moral and indeed political tensions within Keats’s larger poetic project. xxi
3.
If Paul de Man provides us with one way of thinking about the relationship between Keatsian indeterminacy and excess and the social uses of the literary, a critic much closer to Keats’s moment does as well. Matthew Arnold’s 1853 Preface to Poems, in setting out to describe and prescribe the function of poetry at the present time, rails against “the Keatsian School” precisely because of what Arnold deems contemporary poets’ (such as his unnamed antagonist, Alexander Smith’s) overindulgence in affect and sensation, including the sensations of language itself. Such work, Arnold argues, can serve no useful social function because it is too enamored of surfaces—too fascinated by momentary and sudden expressions of beauty, which fail to add up to any determinate meaning. Yet for Arnold, the problem is not only or even primarily that such work is too interested in its own language, it is also that such work is over-invested in affect, in specifically the non-productive affect of unresolved desire—an emotional territory we cannot not associate with Keats.
Perhaps the largest problem that Keatsian poetics brings up for Victorian readers is this problem of desire. Expressions of intense and ongoing longing press against Victorian masculinity’s dominant ethos of renunciation, disinterestedness, rationality, and social usefulness. James Najarian argues that while Keats was one of the major figures of influence in the Victorian period, his “sensuous diction made writers both imitate it and fear the ways that it might implicate their own bodies” (1). And Susan Wolfson calls Keats “the sign of an unseemly desire,” arguing that for Romantics and Victorians alike, Keats’s celebrations of Eros, his perpetual youth, his immersion in the languages of physical pleasure and pain, and the affront that his class and status enact on the literary elite, combine to make him a key figure of excessive desire: “Keats the sweet-maker, the sweet-taker, is too conspicuous, childish, appetitive, excessive, all the while failing to produce or consume anything of substantial value” (Borderlines, 259). “Not just a poet,” writes Wolfson, “Keats was also a language” (244). The language of desire no doubt, but Keats’s work also brings us to the desires of language, to the ongoing restlessness that language’s indeterminacies provoke. And for Arnold in 1853, Keats, or “the Keatsian School,” represents destabilizations at the level of language and affect, destabilizations that constitute, finally, a social threat.
Apprehension about the relationship between poetry and social unrest laces the language of Arnold’s 1853 attack on the “Keatsian School” and of subsequent works such as “On the Modern Element in Literature,” “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” and “The Study of Poetry.” Arnold’s worry about the destabilizing effects of the “confused spectacle” of modernity leads him to call on poetry, or culture more broadly, as a potentially unifying force. And yet Arnold makes clear that writing that overemphasizes its own status as material, that seems too involved with “the brilliant things which ar[ise] under [the poet’s] pen as he [goes] along” (Works, 1:7), and too little concerned with its ultimately didactic message, cannot achieve this unifying goal. In an 1852 letter to Arthur Hugh Clough, Arnold writes:
They still think that the object of poetry is to produce exquisite bits and images—such as Shelley’s . . . and Keats passim: whereas modern poetry can only subsist by its contents: by becoming a complete magister vitae as the poetry of the ancients did: by including, as theirs did, religion with poetry, instead of existing as poetry only . . . ” (Selected Letters, 75)
Arnold’s derision sets the terms of debate about the social, and at times political, value of poetry that professes to be “poetry only,” that subsists, not by content alone, but by its kaleidoscopic surface, formed of exquisite bits and images which reflect and refract off each other in dazzling, and sometimes dizzying complexity.
We can understand how gender plays into this debate by looking into one of Arnold’s defining metaphors. When providing an answer to the ineffective and emotionally burdened surfaces of the works he resists (including, his own), Arnold calls for a poetry of wholeness and unity—for which he employs the metaphor of pregnancy. The poem is pregnant, however, not with its own likeness: it is pregnant with the progeny of the (masculine) critic—that is, it is pregnant with criticism’s rationally achieved ideas. Thus, even as Arnold genders poetry female, in deemphasizing the importance of the surface, and emphasizing instead the poem’s ideational and “disinterested” content, Arnold effectively remasculates the work of poetry. As Naomi Schor argues, neoclassical aesthetics (such as Arnold’s), in privileging wholeness, abstraction, and ideology over fragment, materiality, and contingency, reveals a “persistent association” “with the discourse of misogyny” (5).xxii
Indeed, Arnold’s rejection of desire as a subject worthy of poetry and the embrace of desire as the primary subject of interest for Rossetti, the motivating force for social change by Morris, and the ground of both spiritual and poetic exaltation for Hopkins, can be usefully read within the context of Victorian masculinity. While desire finds a voice in poetry by women from the period—Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, Christina Rossetti’s exploration of the crisis of amorous relationships, and the homoerotic theme to be found in some of the poetry of Michael Field provide the most well-known examples—the issues attending female poetry about desire and male poetry about desire are fundamentally different and require different kinds of negotiations from their authors.xxiii For Victorian women, assuming the position of subject rather than object of desire (or, in the case of Michael Field, assuming both) is in itself a political act. For male writers from the period, representing unresolved longing and desire renders them the target of attacks such as Arnold’s on “The Keatsian School” and Buchanan’s on “The Fleshly School.” As arguments against the uses of desire in male poetry have historically lead to restrictive notions of what poems can and should do, this study examines how three poets resisted precisely these restrictions, thus not only inventing new poetics, but also re-imagining Victorian masculinity in the process.xxiv And while gender is not always central to my readings, it is always relevant to my characterization of the poets in question.xxv
My first chapter, “Matthew Arnold’s Pregnant Poetry,” reads Arnold’s poetics as a counter-example to the poetics of surface tension. I begin by connecting Arnold’s rejection of desire as a fit subject for poetry to the rhetoric of pregnancy and the pregnant body that supports, undermines, and exposes the limits of Arnoldian cultural and aesthetic ideology. In direct contrast with Keats, Arnold positions himself against “all feelings of contradiction, and irritation, and impatience,” all expressions of irresolvable desire, and in the process constructs a poetics that, while insisting on poetry as an implement of cultural development, removes from poetry, or “poetry only,” any autonomous political agency; the figure of the poet as creative agent is replaced by a poetry that only acts insofar as it relies parasitically on “criticism.” Because for Arnold the poem’s function is essentially ideological, the pregnant poem necessitates a transparent theory of language and form. Furthermore, this poem, imagined as an “inviolable” sealed sphere, suggests a body not productive but rather statically suspended in a state of perpetual pregnancy. If, however, Arnold seems to imagine pregnancy, and thus poetry, as something kept forever in the realm of pure potential, other moments in his work—such as the famous “Wragg” passage in “The Function of Criticism” and the songs of Callicles in Empedocles on Etna—suggest that he was also anxiously aware of poetic language’s capacity to generate meaning at the level of its surfaces, to produce an excess that his criticism could not in fact contain. In these moments of verbal play, what we might call, following Roman Jakobson, the poetic function, evokes the limits of Arnold’s poetics of pregnancy, as well as suggesting the limits of his more politically focused valuations of gradualism and containment.
My second chapter, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Aesthetics of Emergency,” argues that despite Rossetti’s alleged indifference to politics, Rossetti’s work, emphasizing the very affects that Arnold advises “banishing” from the mind of the poet—desire, anxiety, irresolution—directly confronts the political predicament wherein the individual is thoroughly mediated both by the art and literary markets and by the institution of marriage. In readings of the early (though multiply revised) prose piece “St. Agnes of Intercession” and of three complexly surfaced sonnets from The House of Life, I argue alongside critics such as Jerome McGann and Elizabeth Helsinger that for Rossetti throughout his career, aesthetic productions, whether paintings or poems, are never free from the pressures of the market. I emphasize, however, that even as mediation thus becomes one of Rossetti’s central themes, aesthetic labor is nonetheless presented as capable of liberating subjects from the institutions that threaten to subsume them. Furthermore, in poetic investigations of desire’s constitution and attainments, Rossetti constructs an “ethics of Eros” in which desire, rather than locking the subject in self-scrutiny, moves him outward toward the beloved, who remains incommensurable. This, I argue, enacts a resistance to the Victorian ideology of marriage as an indissoluble union of perfectly mirroring opposites. And yet, even as aesthetic and erotic desire (the two are generally conflated) are presented as capable of liberating subjects from the pressures of institutional forces, Rossetti’s densely textured poems recognize and comment on the ways cultural institutions specifically produce and limit desire. This paradox is the “emergency” to which my title refers, but the word also suggests the cataclysmic transformation, the emergence, of the individual that Rossetti’s poems and prose construct. xxvi
Rossetti’s “politics” is thus a politics of the personal—of the individual male subject resisting the pressure to give over his affective property to the institution of marriage and his aesthetic property to the demands of the market. Rossetti’s is a heterosexual masculinity that therefore positions itself outside of cultural norms even as the defensiveness of this position can seem, for today’s readers, an aggressive and masculinist individualism. If we recall the attack on the aesthetic put forth most strongly by critics Jerome McGann and Terry Eagleton in the '80s, and early '90s in which the ideology of the “autonomous art-object,” supposedly supported by Romanticism’s concept of organic form, is seen as contributing to capitalism’s repressive ideological claims for the bourgeois subject’s autonomy, or as irresponsibly avoiding its own historical/social placement, Rossetti’s heroics of desire might seem a case in point. As Eagleton describes it, the concept of aesthetic autonomy, seen from what he calls a “radical political viewpoint,” is “disabling”:
It is not only . . . that art is thereby conveniently sequestered from all other social practices, to become an isolated enclave within which the dominant social order can find an idealized refuge from its own actual values of competitiveness, exploitation and material possessiveness. It is also, rather more subtly, that the idea of autonomy—of a mode of being which is entirely self-regulating and self-determining—provides the middle class with just the ideological model of subjectivity it requires for its material operations. (Eagleton, 9)
However, Rossetti, far from assuming the art object to be autonomous, recognizes and addresses the debt that all aesthetic productions owe to material (and market) forces. The Rossettian subject wins his distinction from such forces not by imaging himself as immune from the market and its ideologies, but rather because his very dependence upon the market compels him to become its critic.
A third chapter, “Murder in Utopia: William Morris and the Surface of Desire,” examines Morris’s writings on politics and design, his utopian novel, News from Nowhere, and his decorated manuscript, A Book of Verse. While Morris’s textile designs provide striking examples of complexly patterned surfaces, his poetry itself tends toward narration, evenness of meter, and regularity of rhyme, and thus, of all the poets discussed, he seems the least interested in the surfaces of language. The calligraphic and intricately ornamental poems of the 1870 A Book of Verse, however, by virtue of the exuberant ornamental work that spills into and around the texts of the poems, attract attention to their visual surfaces far more readily than they demand reading for narrative sense, and in this way, they provide a visual, as opposed to textual, model of “surface tension.” Furthermore, Morris’s work is theoretically invested in the political uses of the aesthetic surface. For Morris, beautiful surfaces in and of themselves carry affective and political purpose: encounters with beautiful objects create longings for more such encounters, igniting the intense desires necessary to motivate revolution. In addition, as Morris learned from Ruskin, surfaces of complex beauty reveal the individual hand that formed them, thus indicating the freedom of their maker.
And yet, while Morris embraces a revolutionary, or even apocalyptic temporality, and claims a direct correlation between the aesthetic surface and revolutionary change, as we see in News from Nowhere, the aftermath of revolution is not for him the end of all desires, but rather desire’s perpetuation. Desire is not only necessary for the advent of revolution, it is also the crucial antidote to the boredom that Utopia threatens. This politico-aesthetic celebration of desire is reflected in the dense surfaces of Morris’s illuminated texts. In my reading of a key example of these texts I examine how the illustrative surface serves to delay or obscure readability, producing in the reader a state of suspended expectation not unlike that experienced by the various characters of News from Nowhere. For in that novel, while the revolution brings rest from what Morris called “meaningless toil,” it cannot do away with the energetic striving that constitutes “meaningful work,” and which adds texture to what might otherwise be a flat existence. And yet, the violent desires that Morris invents for the characters of News from Nowhere suggest that the meeting of rest and desire is not, in Morris’s political or aesthetic theory, easily achieved.
But if Morris’s work taxes the aesthetic with balancing the affective and political need for striving with the social and personal need for rest, then the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins charges aesthetic production with an even more epic task. In Hopkins’s particular approach to Christian eschatology, all the variegated, interwoven, and intense sensations of the present moment are not barriers to redemption’s temporal transcendence; rather sensation, and especially the visual sensations offered by the natural world, when deeply experienced, provide direct access to God. Poetry engages these complex surfaces, which Hopkins called “inscape,” but is also itself an example of such inscape, and thus, for Hopkins at his most optimistic, the poem, especially the difficult poem, is a direct portal to the eternal. Hopkins’s work therefore most clearly demonstrates the way in which the poetry of surface tension assumes the highly wrought aesthetic object as a vehicle for sudden and absolute transformation, even though for Hopkins this transformation is theological (a conversion) rather than political. Hopkins’s theological position, which is also an aesthetic position, is thus homologous to the aesthetic socialism of Morris and to the individualism of Rossetti, though these poets imagine different outcomes for the transformations they assert.
In my final chapter, “Gerard Manley Hopkins and The Reck of the Moment,” I turn not just to Hopkins, but also to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on the relationship between Hopkins’s staging of temporality discussed above and his early reception. Throughout a century of writings on Hopkins we find a persistent effort to position him as “timeless,” as fully belonging neither to his moment nor to modernism, but instead to the timeless moment of the perpetual present. Hopkins evades periodization in part because of the history of his publication, but also because his poetry is at once thoroughly modern in its embrace of the fleeting and intense present and thoroughly traditional in its commitment to Christianity. I argue that the tension in Hopkins’s work between such investments in present-time sensation and evocations of the Apocalypse lead to a tendency toward messianism in his critics. xxvii
And yet, I also argue that the messianic strain of Hopkins’s criticism is in no way unique in twentieth and even twenty-first century criticism and poetics. Thus, in the book’s coda, I turn to examples of contemporary North American poetics that similarly bestow a messianic power on the complex surfaces of the poem. These critics and poets, like the Victorians I study, seek to find in “difficult” poetry a pathway toward, or indication of, radical social or psychic transformations. This secular messianic poetics tends to identify its origins in Frankfurt School theories about the relationship between aesthetic productions and social change. It does not however tend to recognize its close ties to nineteenth-century aestheticism and to Victorian temporality. This book locates this impulse historically, acknowledging and rebalancing the debt we still owe to Victorian poetry.
Keats’s “Fall of Hyperion” is at once about temporal stasis and about the potential failure of language to mean outside of itself. The static and suffocating scene the poet encounters within the muse’s mind speaks directly against the hope that poetic language might hold a redemptive futurity behind its veil-like surfaces. And yet, those nineteenth-century poets who responded to Keats as their most important guide seem, like the flaring figure of Hyperion himself, energized, rather than deflated, by the challenge of Keatsian doubt as they take surface complexity as the first step toward a liberated and liberating poetics. These late Victorian poets repeatedly imagine the aesthetic moment—charged, variegated, intensely focused—as capable of birthing a new, and newly redemptive, culture. Thus, this book contends that late Victorian poetry, even when least explicitly political, yields new understandings of how poets engaged, and often re-envisioned, the period’s pressing concerns about social progress, decadence, and revolution.
