Romantic Interlunations

Jerome McGann, in The Romantic Ideology , makes claims for a stylistic component in his "revisionist critique." Stressing, first of all, a reading of texts in and against "the socio-historical ground" of their production and consumption, he is quick to insist: "This does not mean that 'purely' stylistic, rhetorical, formal, or other specialized analyses cannot or will not be pursued."^[17] Few books of such frankly historicizing ambitions are so professedly open to stylistics, and so McGann's work might serve as a test case for the always elusive rapprochement between linguistic and socio-historical reading. But what kind of "stylistics" are in order? Nothing is ever spelled out by McGann, only ruled out. In order to support his sense of the radically destabilized ideological ground of Romantic assumptions in the major texts of the period, their uneasy compromise with their own contradictions, McGann resists what he sees as the critical compromise that takes the texts as part of a "poetry of process" (28), exploratory and irresolute. In such an (unsatisfactory) view, the exemplary Romantic texts, searching, tentative, and ambiguous, participate in their own uncertain interpretation, an approach related by McGann to the "reader-response school." In his view, any such method passes the buck. It makes over the poetry's deep self-divisions, the rifts and contradictions of its insufficiently examined purposes, into a capacious dialectic in the hermeneutics of reception. For McGann more is at stake, and at peril, in the Romantic text. What, then, might any sort of stylistics have to offer by way of elucidation? How are the fissures of Romantic ideology conveyed to, or carried by, the verbal topography and tropology of a text? The closest we get to a direct confrontation with such questions in McGann's book is his reading of the last four stanzas of Adonais , with their poignant tension between a sense of irreparable human loss and a consolatory "futurism" (123) of poetic immortality. Lest the reader relax into the "sentimental idea" of the latter, McGann proposes "an historical analysis" that would help "distinguish the ideological, the stylistic, and the emotional aspects of poetic work." Though issues "stylistic" are twice invoked in this culminating paragraph of McGann's chapter on Shelley, and though he quotes as full an excerpt from any Romantic text as we will find submitted to commentary in his entire study, there is no adduced evidence whatever of specifically "stylistic tensions" (123)—except, perhaps, in the closing tonal contrast between "cold mortality" and the shining "abode" of Keats's immortally fixed "star." A tension in metaphor ? Even this is not specified.

The present discussion, of course, has earlier closed in on more strictly stylistic—or morphophonemic—details of this passage. If we were now to recast the tenor of earlier observations in terms of emotional contrasts widen-

ing to ideological contradictions, if we were to register moments when the verbal texture of the poem protests too much its own visionary resolution, we might first return to that recurrent echo of the verb of being, "is," in "Adonais." By the close of the poem, predication itself, displaced and sacralized, is absorbed into the strained and grammatically unstable plural of the last rhyming word: "The soul of Adonais, like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are." "Beacons," as we have seen, is not quite "beckons"—indeed, not quite as inviting as "beckons." At the other end of the line, capitalized and reified, "the Eternal" might emerge as if it were an abstract singular noun, requiring (students regularly assume so) a singular verb (as in the earlier "A portion of the eternal" [l. 340]). Until, that is—in a reader-response trajectory? surprised by sublimity? by anonymity?—we realize that Keats's single "star" is put in rhyme with, even while erased in its singularity by, the plurality, the host, of those who have gone before to their immortality. Romantic individualism in a stylistically coded tension with meliorative eschatology? Poetic eternity as cold comfort for the intensified subjectivity that attends life in the flesh? Ideology at odds with desire? And this a tension that is itself part of the uneasy ideology of the transhistorical long view?

Looking again at the final stanza, which McGann has not so much read as simply delivered wholesale into evidence, we can notice a transegmental marker of just such a gulf between human feeling and visionary schedule, between mourning and ideological manifesto:

The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, . . .

The smiting loss of all that might have been is converted to the "might" of poetic inspiration, fanned by the breath of the lost Other only when internalized as the living speech of creative continuance. The comma that interrupts the more natural enjambment at "driven / Far from the shore" seems momentarily to mark the poetic "drive" in its other sense, as the thrust of literary ambition. This repeated lexical tension is prolonged by the homophonic double of "spirit's bark" (the rather quaint metaphor) in the more clichéd and predictable "spirit's spark," related to the earlier image of the poetic "fire" that "outlives the parent spark" (l. 408). For one thing, the suggestion of "spark" draws on the "breath" of inspiration descended upon the living poet earlier in the line. Second, by way of a more distant early prediction, the poem has long before imaged the sad remains of a death without poetic immortality as the "sparkless ashes" of an "unlamented urn" (l. 360)—as opposed to the urn of aesthetic permanence in the Keatsian

intertext. The closing transmutation of Keats's dying breath into Shelley's inspiration is, after all, more likely—as "spark" rather than "bark"—to fan the soul than to put wind in any sails. When this transegmental alternative, or matrix, is thus repressed by the paraphonic variant ("spark" by "bark"), what has happened is that the normal resuscitative energies of a mourning friend and poet, lifted to new confidence in the name of the Other, is graphemically recast—sobered, if not chastened—by the more ominous figuration of the bark's deathward voyage, "darkly, fearfully, afar." In short, the disturbing ideological cross-purposes of this climactic passage—wavering between an elegiac fervor converted to furor poeticus and a more distant philosophical consolation—are kept alive in the cross-lexical phonemic ambivalence of "spirit's spark" versus "spirit's bark."

All this said in amplification of McGann's sparse gesture toward the work of "stylistic tensions" still leaves us far from any systematic understanding of the relation of style, let alone the activity of the phonotext, to the "sociohistorical ground" of literary production. Yes, ambiguities—whether understood as textual mechanisms or as reader-response signals—may negotiate (or embody or enact or thematize) various contradictions and cross-purposes. Given the self-conscious architectonics of certain texts, one might even be willing to say that a verbal cleft, a lexical blank, a consequent segmental slippage may actually replay a conceptual irruption or schism in the ideological superstructure determining a poem. But what about an ideology of the text itself, as textuality? McGann early on explains that he will substitute the term "ideology of poetry" for "theory of poetry" (10) in his deliberations. But is that emphasis meant to imply the relegation of both poetics and aesthetics? Moving even beyond the literary text, can we responsibly subordinate all of linguistics and philology to the ideology of a historical epoch as well? Here, of course, our questions verge again upon Foucault's archaeology of the human science of language. Understood in Foucault's terms, the Romantic moment—exemplified, for instance, by Shelley's expressive tensility of phrase, his romancing of the phoneme—stretches as watershed between classical conceptions of discourse as representation and the modern ontology of language as a thing in itself.

Yet this epochal turning point of Romanticism finds that its ideology of language—conceived as the means of an independently articulated armature of human communication—is an ideology, and an ideal, mediated at crucial literary turns by the lyric operation: as in itself a suppressed crisis in subjectivity, a site of anxieties less expressed than covertly enacted by language. These anxieties have, in fact, to do in good part with the relation of language to time passing, of record to history, of writing to things recoverable. In all the Romantics, history is in some sense or another rewritten as the Fall, first in

Blake, where recovery involves an at least intermittent access to the unhindered tongues of Beulah. This would entail no reversion to mere babble but, rather, the achievement of an organized lingual innocence—available to the poetic effort within and against, not simply before, the Urizenic or rationalist hegemony. If for the Romantic enterprise as a whole in one of its important aspects—as for Shelley, in particular—language is identified as "a perpetual Orphic song," the underworld to which it makes its foray and from which it retrieves its visionary treasure is the unconscious itself. This is the locus of expressible desire still in touch with a poetic impulse before symbolic acculturation, though later absorbed into it (ideally, without too extreme a denial). To dwell in these alogical depths is not only the beginning but also the end of speech; to visit there, however, in the visionary raids of Orphean adventure, is to mine that song waiting at the very root of speech, that rhythm underneath reason, that lyric pulse before linguistic ordering—in Kristeva's terms, if we choose, the semiotic stratum upon which the symbolic is mounted. But to do so programmatically could never be a matter of a poet's conscious decision from line to line. Any cogent sense of such Orphic power in Romantic poetry, therefore, resides merely in the recognized tendency to a certain excessive and unregimented texture, to the preferred surplus of signifier over signified, to Coleridge's "soft-floating witchery of sound" (validated by analogues in nature, to be sure: this is its most obvious ideological component). These are the resonances and reverberations that, in other terms, inflect the Shelleyan interlunations of both world and text; of world and text together, the one in the other's image: as Wordsworth put it, of nature's meanings half-created, half-received. One avowed philosophy—or ideology—of language in Romantic poetry rests just here: in a recognition that its lyric aspirations work toward a "Daedal harmony" connatural with what is visible and audible in the labyrinthine symmetries of the experienced world—a synesthesia, for instance, no more artificial than nature's own admixtures and sensory interfusions.

This program entails a more perplexed ideology, whose contradictions thus go unexamined, when it requires for lyric transmission a theory of the uttering subject, of subjectivity as utterance. This is a verbally conscious subject whose anxious discontinuities—whose psychic caesuras and ellipses, ambivalences and elisions—must also be mapped, along with the landscape of nature, onto the topography of a text. Romanticism, it may be shown, arose contemporaneously with the dawn of philology in an independent but parallel gestation, birth, and development. It continued to flourish, or at least survive, in Victorian and even twentieth-century revisions only as long as the systematic study of language, the scientific rigors of linguistics, did not threaten the cherished metaphysics of individual selfhood. Inspiriting as they were to the

style of poetry as part of the generalized spirit of an age, its verbal predisposition, these linguistic investigations could thrive only as long as their rigor was kept from deconstructing exactly that lyric subjectivity, that bardic centrism, lending authority to a philologically preoccupied art of words. But the frictions that would become fissures were already apparent, even in high Romanticism, already seeking appeasement by rhetorical deflection. The ideological cleavage McGann spots at the end of Adonais might in this light be recast as the living poet's recognition that in the death of Keats, the death of the Author as Other, lies the innate destiny of all authorship, the fixity of a presence only within the structured absence which is any and every text. In or out of the elegiac mode, all prosopopoeia is merely figural, funereal—and on both sides of the personifying contract. As the almost dead-metaphoric "spark" of Keats's living genius is scriptively overruled, to become instead the more insistently figural "bark" of immortal destiny and reputation, something like a true "stylistic tension" has thus opened consciousness to the potentially terrifying void between even the persona's own psyche and his text, between all voice and any poem. Here, then, is an ideological irreconcilability—to be laid bare a century and a half later in Derrida's term "thanatopraxis"—which Romantic instances of the elegiac genre disclose only to contain.

If the Romantic ideology of language is such that the word is seen to absorb and transfigure experience, then the extreme malleability of language—when highlighted, for instance, at a junctural slippage—may offer a stylistic emphasis to an even more oblique metalinguistic tremor of the text. Here we may look aside for a moment from Shelley to a comparable instance in his nearest peer. There is no overt evidence in the "Ode on Melancholy" that the Keatsian persona is speaking as a literary voice, that he is writing his way into a poetic stance. For all the florid staginess of his conceits, there is, in short, no mention of writing, of the melancholic as writer. The "speaker" appears to be merely setting forth the existential rather than literary premises of the melancholic visionary, who sees, among other things, the beauty of the fleetingness of beauty. He addresses the first two stanzas in second person to a kind of spiritual advisee, if implicitly to himself at one remove. It is only by extrapolation from the "sovran shrine" of a personified Melancholy that the courted goddess may become in fact the Muse, the presiding genius of that poetic wisdom won from the bittersweet of luxuriance. Explicitly in the lines, it is merely the human agent, as "poetic" sensibility, not in particular the poetic craftsman, whose fate is sealed at the close of the poem, in a stanza that has shifted into a general third-person formulation: "His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, / And be among her cloudy trophies hung." But if Melancholy is not only a general inspiration to the Romantic spirit but, after all, the specific Muse of Keats's verbal artistry, his one hope of that bardic

immortality which would enshrine forever his insights about a terrible pleasure feeding deep on loss, then the closest hint of this may appear in a poetic warping of the final juncture: literally, letterally, the poem's last word(s). Anticipating this, it is easy to imagine a figural transference in the last line from him who can "burst Joy's grape against his palate fine," the ultimate credential for melancholic service, to the poetic use of the mouth in lyric utterance. Following from this, it is then by the overtone of a sibilant liaison in "trophies s (h)ung " that the "him who" of this last stanza becomes a melancholic dedicant specifically hymned into the pantheon of spiritual insight. In our phonemic adjustment of Riffaterre's terms, to have one's achievement "sung" among those of the goddess's other adulants is the avoided cliché; to be "hung" among them, incarnate, is the more striking paraphone of that monosyllabic matrix. Once again, phonemic reading can work to sustain the Romantic dream of verbal embodiment, the very stuff of "cloudy" and evanescent incarnation.

Precisely because so many of the phonotextual instances we have noted fall within the always-churning realm of the contingent, no direct ideological link can be demonstrated, except by way of the general inclination toward such a thickened, excessive, and hence polyvalent style. This is just what would doom to confusion any programmatic attempt to read off some Romantic "ideology" from the unregimented verbal flicker and phonemic slip. There is, we can readily see, an ideology (read, "poetics") of the Romantic lyric, an ideology (read, "aesthetics") of Romantic euphony therein. Both, moreover, predispose such texts to a richness given (and sometimes given over) to phonic accidents poised against the graphic grain. This predisposition is, in fact, part of the largest antirationalist bias of the period, its nostalgia for the unfallen state of nature and for its psychic cognate in the "immortal sea" of imaginary totalization. But the poetic (or, rather, psycholinguistic) counterideology — of a subjectivity neither preceding nor exceeding the letter of the text, and thus dispersed and imperiled by the text's every lapse — this must wait, long and impatiently, with an impatience warping the surface of many a text in the meantime, for the theoretical enterprise of another century.