Annoying the Victorians

James Kincaid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317971177
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What happens when bad criticism happens to good people? Annoying the Victorians sets the tradition of critical discourse and literary criticism on its ear, as well as a few other areas. James Kincaid brings his witty, erudite and thoroughly cynical self to the Victorians, and they will never read (or be read) quite the same.

The Second Part
Poets And Propriety

6
Forgetting to Remember Tennyson's Happy Losses

Remember we found a lonely spot
And after I learned to care a lot,
You promised that you'd forget me not,
But you forgot to remember.

-Climactic lyrics to "Remember," an affecting song

My memory is the thing I forget with.

—Anon

They teach us to remember; why do they not teach us to forget?

—F. A. Durivage

The time is close when you shall forget all things and be by all forgotten.

—Marcus Aurelius

Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records.

—Hamlet

And the best and the worst of this is
That neither is most to blame,
If you have forgotten my kisses
And I have forgotten your name.

-Swinburne

Illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.

-Mrs. Malaprop

I THINK MOST of us realize how poignantly the criticism we write is attached to the body which writes it, and not just metaphorically either. (My own body is something to behold.) A friend told me that the removal of some of her intestine not only altered her prose style but caused her to lose her faith in formalism. There's evidence for you. A full study of the corporeal situation (what sort of body you have and what you do with it) and its investment in literary theory is badly needed, but I am not the one to provide it. I do, however, wish to offer a suggestion on posture, sitting more exactly. I think we should sit to watch Tennyson and write on him from the worst seat in the house, the one least valued, least comfortable. I myself want the seat that has been kept warm by Harold Bloom and his antithetical criticism, the seat so far to the side of the back of the balcony that it's been uncontested, partly because one would as soon do battle with Hulk Hogan, of course, but also because it offers such a peculiar view. Since Bloom is firmly lodged there, I'll be satisfied with edging in on his left cheek, as it were, cuddling up to just one of his comments, one that will lead me to

My Thesis

My thesis is that if memory really worked it would be of less than no use to us: it would kill us; or, if not us, it would kill our Muse; worse, it would kill all eros. What we need is forgetting, with that we can construct being, poetry, and eroticism. But all of that, while it is my thesis, does not pick up the Bloom comment which was providing the transition. What Bloom says refers to the poem "Mariana," and what he says about the poem is that Mariana "is herself a poetess" and that what she "is longing for is not her belated swain but a priority in poetic invention." Her "deliciously unhealthy poem" celebrates a "primal narcissism" so complete and so at one with Tennyson's own that there is no room or no need for anyone who cometh not: "What would she do with him, what mental space has she left for him?"¹

Such brilliant commentary opens up possibilities so full and unhealthy that critics with bodies up for it (me) cannot resist. What if he did come? He couldn't get past the moat, and Mariana wouldn't let him in anyhow, Bloom says. Good. But she also wouldn't recognize him. She'd think he was a UPS man or a Jehovah's Witness. She couldn't remember him, even if there was a him to remember. Mariana's poem celebrates her misplacing him, moving from the slightly uneasy (or maybe titillating) "He cometh not" to the blissful "He will not come." As it is, she can fill up a world of black happiness—of old faces glimmering, old footsteps trodding, old voices calling, and a devilish sexy poplar—precisely out of his absence. Memory works wonderfully when it forgets, when it scours us free of any intrusive substance, any Others, so as to allow us to make our being and our erotic life out of the purity of the vacant.

That's probably clear enough, but nothing much is to be lost by repeating it. Tennyson's clever "Ancient Sage" speaks of "The Passion of the Past"² by which he has been haunted since boyhood, a passion packed with the allure of that which is "Lost and gone and lost and gone!" (1. 224). Let's say we construe that phrase—you with me here?—as signalling to us that the passion is for the lost and gone itself, for loss that is absolute. Thus loss is, first, a poetic subject and a personal fixation. Let's claim, too, that such loss becomes a structural necessity in the poetry, that the poems always need to evoke what is not there, that they, like Hardy's novels, depend almost entirely on the force of absence, the force of what is beyond recall. In Tennyson, though, things that matter are not only beyond recall but strangely empty, forgotten.

To get at these possibilities, then, we need to deconstruct the oppositions between loss and gain and then between forgetting and remembering, just to see where that lands us.³ Well, to be candid, we know where that'll land us, as haters of deconstruction never tire of pointing out. What these splenetics, a curse on them all, fail to realize, though, is that it's the voyage that concerns us not the destination. We'll land in emptiness, sure enough, but the getting there—oh my! And even the emptiness can be made productive, can manufacture sexual excitement at least; and that's not to be sneezed at.

To illustrate in brief form, let's descend to a little evidence—not much— namely the point in "The Two Voices" where the dismal voice argues that any conception of beginnings or origins implies necessarily an ending: if you start, you finish (perish). The voice we are all rooting for somewhat alarmingly accepts that logic but suggests that through erasing memory we can sign up that same reasoning for our team: if beginnings and endings are so eternally wed; then no beginnings, no endings. "Yet how should I," we crow, "for certain hold,/ Because my memory is so cold,/ That I first was in human mold?" (ll. 340-42). We don't mean here that we were first monkeys but part of some general and formless life agency maybe, who knows?, one that does not proceed in linear developments but "cycles always round" (1. 348). Our continuous lives then are cycles forged by beings (me and you) who "Forget the dream that happens then,/ Until they fall in trance again" (ll. 537-38). With this possibility before us, brought up out of the sea of forgetting, we are allowed to proceed to the most beautiful of forms: "... if first I floated free,/ As naked essence, must I be/ Incompetent of memory" (373-75). Turn this around (why not?): making myself incompetent of memory, I become free-floating and naked (desirable) pure (bare) essence; there is no Other, no memory, nothing to remember or intrude on my being or my desire. I never started, hence, I never stop. Being continues without end precisely because there is no substance behind one, no memory; my self comes into being alone and majestic, naked and desirable, free to build its own images of desire out of the void—and to make poetry out of a memory that produces nothing, that has no wheels that grind. There is now nothing to gain or regain, to remember or forget.

The deconstructive tour that follows, then, takes us (off-season rates) to loss; then to forgetting; then to a whole host of exemplary instances of memory being shooed away, inverted, vacated; then to nightmarish negative examples of memory returning from the dead; then to objections to our thesis (a side-trip, extra fee charged); then to the erotics of it all; and finally to the abyss. Put your tray tables up.

How Can I Lose You; Let Me Count the Ways

A better line would have been, "'Tis better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have lost at all!" But Samuel Butler thought of it first, and I'm no plagiarist. Even Butler, who understood nearly as well as Tennyson the pleasures of fort and the horror of da, succumbed to the itch to provide specific (and peculiar) reasons for his preferences, as if the superiority of loss to gain were not self-evident. I will provide no reasons. You don't need them. If you did you would not be reading Tennyson, much less this essay. It's not that you are an experienced loser yourself; it's just that you need no one to tell you where the real kicks come from or that hide and seek was never played to find.

You're thinking you don't need me either to tell you how important loss is to Tennyson and to the pleasure we derive from him. After all, his contemporaries felt that, and even if they hadn't, T. S. Eliot did and memorably spotted Tennyson's "moods of anguish."⁴ The Tennyson revival, such as it has been, was spearheaded by misery—Arthur J. Carr's influential "Tennyson as a Modern Poet" (1950) set his modernity in terms of frustration, melancholy, and loss.⁵ We are unlikely any time soon to locate a robust can-do Tennyson or a knockabout comic Tennyson, in part because we have not had our fill of the dismals. This makes it difficult for anyone (me) writing on Tennyson either to depart from the lugubrious paradigm or to find original or compelling things to say within it. If I argue that Ulysses is running after losing, chasing all those sinking stars, I will attract no dissenters but no audience either. Citing lesser-known poems might help a little:

Immeasurable sadness!
And I know it as a poet,
And I greet it, and I meet it,
Immeasurable sadness!

-1864 epigram; Ricks, p. 1227

But if I use them to make familiar points, why bother? The tolerance for redundancy, even among academics, has its limits.

The first step in finding something to say (and avoiding the embarrassment that descends when a whole group stands silent, drinks in hand, staring at ground, subject dying, dying, dying) is this: treat loss not as a subject Tennyson wrote about but as a state of being we wrap ourselves o'er (like weeds), a position we construct, seek out because we need it desperately. The usual line is that loss represents a deprivation,⁶ something to be avoided if at all possible. Gain is made the clearly superior term, loss the bad dream. But who would value gain at all were it not for its thrilling capacities to invest us with glimpses of loss? Who invests resources but to bring home their vanishing; who buys but to raise the erotics of theft? Gain is parasitic on loss, the only positive term in the equation.

Loss must therefore be earned, courted, seduced. We read loss as the Tennysonian Muse, the real horror being that loss might be lost. But our Tennyson is an optimistic poet and spends little time on such fears, evoking with supreme confidence his own Romantic bird, not a nightingale but a darker raven, croaking to the spirit songs of blankness: "Oh sad No More! Oh sweet No More!/ Oh strange No More!" ("No More," ll. 1-2; Ricks, p. 161). Evoking these powerful No Mores as losses—sad, sweet, strange—Tennyson makes what is not there into a center, whether it be grounds of faith, Hallam, or the Queen of the May. Gain is unthinkable: the lotos-eaters will not regain their homeland, Tithonus his youth, or Mariana her lover. Gain or presence are the negative terms. Only in absence and in loss do we find substance. So when Tennyson brings into being what is not there, he actively erases substance, foregrounds the poetic act of will which empowers denial and distancing. In this way we see that, finally, it is not loss which is centered after all—we were wrong to say so. What is willed is an uncentered nonsubstance. Put it this way: both loss and gain conspire in protecting the idea of the Other, the something outside ourselves that can be misplaced or tripped over once again, forted or daed. The more blissful strong creation (and the fuller deconstruction) strips aside such protections and undoes any notion that there is anything out there, anything to lose or find, anything Other. There is only Tennyson, the self, the critic. There is only me. No wonder we so love the experience of reading Tennyson. No wonder you are loving this essay.

Who Can Ever Forget . . .?

And so it is with memory. Tennyson calls up the past obsessively in order to demonstrate how much he does not need it, does not remember it. It is evoked to reveal that it is not there; he works his mind backward to show that there is no backward. Tennyson has no antecedents, then, no origins. And we recall from "The Two Voices" that such a maneuver buys us eternal life: no starts, no endings. Tennyson, memoryless, has no behind, no limits in time or space. He is Vastness itself, immortal and boundariless. We, all of us, don't deny it, have a weak glimmering of this majesty and even try to grasp a form of it by pretending to be absentminded. Freeing ourselves from the demands of certain appointments and chores, we sneak in as much of this Vastness as we dare, which isn't much. We are, as Bloom says, pathetically weak poets, writing private little shamefaced (pornographic) notes of primary narcissism for ourselves by laying claim, now and then, and when the risks (an angry spouse, student, mortgage company) are not too great, to a faulty memory. But that's a long way from no memory at all, from a Being so complete as to need no controls, roots, or explanations. Tennyson is no petty pornographer but a major criminal; the pleasure we take through him is the pleasure of voyeurism and transference. We get to watch as he plays out for us the grand and enormously risky drama of forgetting—everything.

Evidence (Optional Reading)

What I have for you now is a thirty-five mile-long (judging from my notes) parade of examples, counting the drill teams and the Appaloosa horses, A welter of examples can, of course, always be produced to spiffen up any argument whatever; and we've surely had enough of "evidence" in our line of work. Evidence can be conjured up (I know this and so do you) to prove any point. I am sure this argument, for instance, could work nearly as well (far better) with any other poets (philosophers, politicians). Tennyson, however, is the subject of the moment; so here are some details of how memory gets shooed away and forgetting rewarded.

Tennyson starts his career by attacking memory, almost before he has any to attack. As early as age fifteen or thereabouts, he is puling about the miseries of remembering: "Memory! why, oh why,/ This fond heart consuming,/ Show me years gone by,/ When those hopes were blooming?" ("Memory [Memory! dear enchanter]," ll. 17-20; Ricks, p. 83). The idea here is (as you've likely caught, but just in case—) that memory terrorizes our later years by lobbing ironic grenades at us just when we are most vulnerable, contrasting earlier grand hopes with present paltriness: visions of "the brilliant courts of spring" are not welcome when we are hiding out in "age's frosty mansion." And it's not just a happy past that beglooms our maturity either. A mirror poem from the same adolescent period, "Remorse," makes it clear that memory is as nasty in its darker moods: "Oh! 'tis a fearful thing to glance/ Back on the gloom of mis-spent years;/ What shadowy forms of guilt advance,/ And fill me with a thousand fears!" (ll.1-4; Ricks, p. 87). Either way, memory's got us.

Unless, of course, we can deactivate it or, better yet, get it to work for us by producing emptiness. These, we might say (and why not?), are the projects undertaken by Tennyson's major poems. A few examples ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• The Part Before The First Part
• The First Part: Dickensian Jugglers
• Interlude I
• The Second Part: Poets and Propriety
• Interlude II
• The Third Part: Fictional Strippers
• "Afterword"
• Notes
• Index