Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley

Nietzschean Subjectivity and Genre

Mark Sandy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351910668
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Beginning with a reassessment of contemporary romantic studies, this book provides a modern critical comparison of Keats and Shelley. The study offers detailed close readings of a variety of literary genres (including the romance, lyric, elegy and literary fragment) adopted by Keats and Shelley to explore their poetic treatment of self and form. The poetic careers of Keats and Shelley embrace a tragic affirmation of those darker elements latent in the earlier writings to meditate on their own posthumous reception and reputation. Fresh readings of Keats and Shelley show how they conceive of the self as fictional and anticipate Nietzsche's modern theories of subjectivity. Nietzsche's conception of the subject as a site of conflicting fictions usefully measures this emergent sense of poetic self and form in Keats and Shelley. This Nietzschean perspective enriches our appreciation of the considerable artistic achievement of these two significant second-generation romantic poets.

Chapter One
Reading Nietzsche's Anti-Romanticism

'Romanticism: an ambiguous question, like everything modern.'¹

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

Nietzschean readings of romanticism and romantic readings of Nietzsche abound.² These readings illustrate the divergent versions of Nietzsche championed by respective critical programmes. Theoretical accounts have gone beyond charting these parallels to draw upon Nietzschean philosophy as a source for critical practices and appropriate vocabulary. Nietzsche's re-absorption into theoretical literary commentaries on romanticism partly stems from the renewed interpretative interest in Nietzschean ideas spearheaded by Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. In the sixties, these French theorists disseminated versions of Nietzschean thought into two antithetical Anglo-American paradigms of critical interpretation.³ Derrida's deconstruction of the 'metaphysics of presence'⁴ inspired Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller to re-discover in Nietzsche, with varying degrees of emphasis, a philosopher of rhetoric, aporia, linguistic free play, supplementation, dismantled subject and duality, deliberate misreading and even (in Bloomian terms) authorial will. Alternatively, Foucault's taxonomy in The Order of Things bequeathed to those exponents of 'sociological poetics'⁵ — or New Historicism — a Nietzschean legacy of an ideological will to power, deconstructed hierarchies, institutionalised authority, subjective autonomy, power relations and structures.

Since Nietzsche's speculation, in Daybreak, that all romantics were merely 'resurrectors of the deacT⁶ his philosophical corpus was assured a long-standing, often controversial, relationship with romanticism. Harold Bloom's admonishment that a reconstruction of romanticism is 'excessively impoverished by a Nietzscheinspired deconstruction'⁷ typifies Nietzsche's contested status among romantic critics. Ironically, Bloom's own critical ratio of the 'anxiety of influence' is as firmly rooted in a Nietzschean as Freudian psychopathology of authorial straggle.⁸ This reveals more of Bloom's critical assumption that Nietzsche is a proto-deconstructionist than Nietzsche's impact on romantic literary studies. Whether by accident or theoretical design, Nietzsche now occupies a central, if ambiguous, place in the critical machinery of romanticism. In spite of many significant historical, cultural, and generic differences that separate romantic writings from Nietzsche's philosophical work, scholars have not been deterred from establishing parallels between them.⁹ Even critics without explicit theoretical agendas have traced significant similarities between texts written by major romantic writers and Nietzsche. M. H. Abrams's seminal reconstruction of romantic psychic conflict and its re-appropriation of religious redemptive patterns for a secular arena finds a corollary in Nietzsche's duality of the Apollonian-Dionysian¹⁰ for the project of romanticism. Within these parameters Nietzsche's philosophical concepts and romantic literature are often connected in two ways: either Nietzsche's fictionalising of the self and world is used to measure an individual romantic writer's own struggle to come to terms with the nature of self and world, or the preoccupation with self-awareness, irony, and affirmation in romantic texts is viewed as a precursor to the concerns of Nietzschean philosophy.

Poststructuralism's internal interpretative dynamics are often a genealogical extension of the Nietzschean intellectual project of 'a philosophy of the future'¹¹ and modulated at every turn by conflicting interpretations of Nietzsche's persistent presence. For instance, Paul De Man's version of Nietzsche enables his explorations of romantic rhetoric to question subjective authority and dismantle the duality of romantic consciousness.¹² Yet Nietzschean emphasis on the inextricability of authors from their work, sharply distinguishes Nietzsche's own thinking from those poststructuralists who celebrate him as a proto-deconstructionist and claim that his critique of onto-theology initiated the end of authorial intention.¹³ De Man's depiction severely limits the meaning and full implications of Nietzschean philosophy by conservatively reducing truth as radical fiction to the mere figuration of language. De Man re-appropriates Nietzsche's claim that truth is 'a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms' (OTL, p. 46) to describe the deconstructive operations of lyric poetry, as the incessant madness of words, at the expense of his own critical blindness to Nietzsche's preservation of romantic categories of authorial subjectivity, imagination, symbol, myth, and figure,¹⁴

New Historicism has equally interrogated these romantic typologies in a bid to evade the hermeneutic circularity of past critical interpretations. For Jerome J. McGann, criticism that fails to 'pass through those Romantic forms of thought'¹⁵ has mistakenly foregrounded epistemological crisis over those more vital factors of personal, social and political circumstance. Literary acts become social ones, as an author's creative work is regarded as a cross-referential catalogue to the social nexus of its own inception and reception. This kind of intertextuality depends upon those underlying assumptions New Historicism shares with deconstruction about textual indeterminacy derived from aspects of Nietzschean philology concerned with truth as only continually shifting signifiers. Determined by Foucault's sense of Nietzsche as arch-historian and genealogist of ideological power structures, New Historicism accords historical discourse a privileged position unprecedented in deconstruction. Historical referents are not enough to secure an anchorage in a perpetual flux of shifting signifiers, as a text's historical genesis and meaning is no less indeterminate than any other poststructural linguistic sign. Frequently, New Historical accounts sense the need to embrace further the textual practices of poststructuralism just as those textual readings of poststructuralism frequently acknowledge the increased relevance of recourse to history and culture.¹⁶ New Historicism, at least conceptually, endeavours to liberate literature from a de Manian 'prison-house of language' (BI, p. 18) but, in practice, invariably rehearses those inherent linguistic difficulties posited by poststructural analysis of a romantic failure to recover a point of origin and meaning. It is, perhaps, no less surprising McGann's socio-historicist approach finds a touchstone with poststructural textual practices than that De Man's style of deconstruction shares with New Criticism a delight in literary ambivalence, ambiguity, and paradox.¹⁷ These distinctive critical methods foreground a debate over what is intrinsically or extrinsically valuable to a literary analysis of romantic negotiations with symbol, origin and consciousness and demarcates the perimeters of current debate in romantic studies.

Susan Wolfson has recently identified the formal properties of romantic literature as the point of interstices for these diversely complex textual and contextual interpretative practices. Her study, Formal Charges, concentrates on poetic form as the governing principle that shapes literary texts from within and without, as their formal characteristics are fashioned according to internal structures of order and external cultural pressures. Her work enables a dialogue between those critical conceptions of textual form as shaped both by intrinsic, self-regulating, aesthetics and extrinsic, coercive, historical forces.¹⁸ The fact that Wolfson finds a precedent for her neo-formalism's reconciliation of formal and historical literary methods in Barthesian criticism (FC, pp. 18-19) explains why so many of her poststructural antecedents (which prioritise textual concerns over contexts) remain alert to political, social, and cultural history as appropriate contexts for their interpretative acts.¹⁹

Tilottama Rajan situates her discovery of underlying tensions in romantic aesthetics and deconstruction of organic notions of unity within the wider cultural context of European intellectual thought. So, she reads Nietzsche's Apollonian-Dionysian dynamic as an allegory for the deconstructive potential of romantic art Rajan's treatment of The Birth of Tragedy shares with her predecessors, Abrams and De Man, a reductive sense of Nietzsche's philosophy as a mere set of aesthetic principles rather than fully appreciating a Nietzschean aestheticisation of self and world. Within this restrictive framework, Rajan reads the trajectory of Keats's poetic career as a movement away from Apollonian idealism towards a tragically Dionysian understanding of art. By contrast, Shelley is interpreted by her as constantly endeavouring to maintain a sceptical idealism by immersing the Dionysian in the Apollonian. Keats's self-conscious Dionysian tragic sensibility is circumscribed to his final poetry and Shelley's poetics perpetually lack self-awareness about the disclosure of its own fictional status.

The present comparative analysis of John Keats and P. B. Shelley is sensitive to current re-negotiations between textual and contextual criticism. This study relates the formal and generic aspects of their writing to their fascination with creating self-consciously imaginative fictions within the broader intellectual context of Nietzsche's philosophical legacy and his important contribution to modern constructions of romanticism.²⁰ By emphasising intellectual history, my study is alert to the complexities of reconstructing the contemporary milieu of romanticism from our critical standpoint in the early twenty-first century. Works by Keats and Shelley constitute an important site, within romantic discourse, where this confluence of romantic and Nietzschean concerns is at its most acute. Through their self-aware treatment of subjectivity and poetic language, Keats and Shelley both anticipate Nietzsche's understanding of the self as fictional and point towards a Nietzschean account of their own aesthetic theory and practice. Nietzsche's Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic (and adopted subsequently by numerous critics of romanticism) is more extensively explored in light of his self-professed anti-romanticism, critique of Enlightenment metaphysics, changing sense of the Dionysian category, and pivotal concept of the Overman [Übermensch].²¹

Nietzsche's vehement anti-romanticism frequently attests to an aesthetic sensibility of affirmation central to the poetics of Keats and Shelley. For Nietzsche, the lyric poet 'is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art' (BT, p. 37), and life-denying art is inevitably bad art authored by romantic decadents. Nietzsche, on one hand, is an outsider commentating on the 'romantic credo' (BT, p. 11) and, on the other, a conspirator implicated in the impending cultural catastrophe of decadence synonymous with romanticism. Nietzsche's conception of art as encompassing life is possible because he conceives of life as art.²² This model of life as art enables him to distinguish between those of a romantic disposition, who 'seek calm seas [and] redemption from themselves through art and knowledge,'²³ and those so he believes, like himself, who advocate art as a 'voyage over strange [Fremden] dark seas' (UM, p. 116) and 'great-stimulant to life' (WP, III, p. 853). Nietzsche's trope for these opposing types of art suggest only nominal differences and are symptomatic of his preference for a Dionysian 'over-fullness of life' (GS, p. 328). By ensuring life's redemption through an art over-burdened with its own awareness of life, Nietzsche reverses his prior claim that idealist romantic art is merely an 'impoverishment of life' (GS, p. 328). This reversal is easily achieved since, if life is modelled on art, then all artistic projects inevitably confront life. For Keats, Shelley and Nietzsche, affirmation of life through such transfiguring art is inextricable from a fictionalisation of self and world.

As with those poetic theories and practices of Keats and Shelley, Nietzschean treatments of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editors' Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Reading Nietzsche's Anti-Romanticism
• 2 Fictions of the Self
• 3 Tragic Romance
• 4 Lyrical Transgressions
• 5 Posthumous Meditations
• 6 Poetic Ruins
• Bibliography
• Index