Landscapes of Eternal Return

Tennyson to Hardy

Roger Ebbatson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783319328379
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319328386
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book is about the resonance and implications of the idea of 'eternal recurrence', as expounded notably by Nietzsche, in relation to a range of nineteenth-century literature. It opens up the issue of repetition and cyclical time as a key feature of both poetic and prose texts in the Victorian/Edwardian period. The emphasis is upon the resonance of landscape as a vehicle of meaning, and upon the philosophical and aesthetic implications of the doctrine of 'recurrence' for the authors whose work is examined here, ranging from Tennyson and Hallam to Swinburne and Hardy. The book offers radically new light on a range of central nineteenth-century texts. 

© The Author(s) 2016

Roger EbbatsonLandscapes of Eternal Return10.1007/978-3-319-32838-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Roger Ebbatson¹

(1)

University of Lancaster, Lancaster, UK

End Abstract

Walter Benjamin wittily characterised the nineteenth-century philosophical doctrine of eternal recurrence as ‘the punishment of being held back at school projected into the cosmic sphere’ in a process whereby ‘humanity has to copy out its text in endless repetition’. ¹ Whatever the bizarre problematics of such an idea, it will be argued here that the notion is inaugural in its attempt to negotiate the mysterious otherness of time, and that its implications are especially resonant for literary and cultural studies. As Ned Lukacher stresses, Nietzsche recognised that his idiosyncratic and challenging doctrine of return ‘could only make the promise of eternity credible if it could turn it into a work of art’. ² As a belief which seeks to deny change, and insists that life as it is now will never be anything else, it would seem that eternal recurrence seeks to counter and destabilise not only Christian belief but also any subscription to a radically changed future, whether Marxist, technological or capitalist (although in fact the idea of the new as the ‘ever-same’ was economically defined in Marx’s analysis of commodity production). In promulgating what he defined as ‘the hardest possible thought’, Nietzsche sought to emphasise what he termed ‘the eternity of the moment here and now, the irrevocability of the one and unique opportunity and test of living’. ‘Against the paralysing sense of universal dissolution’, he maintained, ‘I hold the Eternal Recurrence’. ³ The aesthetic consequences of such an idea were manifold, as this study sets out to explore, but one of the most significant factors for art is what Gary Shapiro designates ‘the Augenblick, the twinkling of the eye or moment of vision’, which he translates as ‘a gateway, a place of transition, an opening to possibility’ generated by ‘a clash of past and future’. ⁴ As Shapiro acknowledges, Nietzsche’s experience of eternal recurrence, as first registered in his alpine retreat in the summer of 1881, ‘was a vision of dissolution and transformation’ which ‘changes the way in which we understand and experience those twinklings, Augenblicke, or subtle errors that constitute our lives’. ⁵ The fundamental paradoxical implication of eternal recurrence, Rainer Nägele observes, is that ‘time is not a smooth, continuous sequence from past to present to future, but a conflictual configuration of fragmentary moments’, ⁶ and this formation would have deep consequences for poetic and narrative structure. Art created in the light of this principle is transmuted into what Maurice Blanchot defines as a region

where nothing ever begins and nothing ever ends, where everything is repeated ad infinitum because nothing has ever taken place. The eternal perhaps, but if so, the eternal recurrence. Just as the world of art is tied to absence, so the time of art is related to eternal repetition. ⁷

In the cultural text, that is to say, we may perceive what Blanchot terms ‘the glory, the joy of a repetition that nothing seems able to prevent from always being new’, the artwork inevitably embodying ‘the absolute fixity of a present preserved’, in a process which ‘replaces linear time, the time of salvation and progress, with the time of spherical space’. ⁸

It is therefore possible to posit a strategic (mis-) reading of texts through the framework of eternal recurrence, bearing in mind Benjamin’s observation that

It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. ⁹

Poetic structure is peculiarly and uniquely imbricated in the principle of recurrence, in ways which were acknowledged and defined by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

The artificial part of poetry, perhaps we shall be right to say all artifice, reduces itself to the principle of parallelism. The structure of poetry is that of continuous parallelism, ranging from the technical so-called parallelism of Hebrew poetry and the antiphons of Church music up to the intricacy of Greek or Italian or English verse … Now the force of this recurrence is to beget a recurrence or parallelism answering to it in the words or thought and, speaking roughly and for the tendency than for the inevitable result, the more marked parallelism in structure whether of elaboration or emphasis begets more marked parallelism in the words and sense. ¹⁰

Hopkins’s annotation of the poetic principles of recurrence and parallelism might be illustrated with reference to one of Tennyson’s English Idylls: Audley Court, composed in 1838, takes the specific and self-conscious form of repetition, based as it is upon the seventh idyll of Theocritus, which centres upon a harvest festival and homoerotically inflected song-contest. As David Halperin explains notwithstanding ‘the heightened pastoral tones’ adopted in the idyll, ‘the erotic theme continues to dominate’, with the first song, that of Lycidas, taking the form of ‘an amatory send-off poem for a traveller’. ¹¹ In Tennyson’s revisitation of this scenario the song-competition is transmuted into a debate about the current Corn Law agitation, garnished by geological references to a Devonian pie:

‘The Bull, the Fleece are crammed, and not a room

For love or money. Let us picnic there

At Audley Court.’

I spoke, while Audley feast

Hummed like a hive all round the narrow quay,

To Francis, with a basket on his arm,

To Francis just alighted from the boat,

And breathing of the sea. ‘With all my heart,’

Said Francis. Then we shouldered through the swarm

And rounded by the stillness of the beach

To where the bay runs up its latest horn.

We left the dying ebb that faintly lipped

The flat red granite, so by many a sweep

Of meadow smooth from aftermath we reached

The griffin-guarded gates, and passed through all

The pillared dusk of sounding sycamores,

And crossed the garden to the gardener’s lodge,

With all its casements bedded, and its walls

And chimneys muffled in the leafy vine.

There, on a slope of orchard, Francis laid

A damask napkin wrought with horse and hound,

Brought out a dusky loaf that smelt of home,

And, half-cut down, a pasty costly-made,

Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay,

Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks

Imbedded and injellied; last, with these,

A flask of cider from his father’s vats,

Prime, which I knew; and so we sat and eat

And talked old matters over; who was dead,

Who married, who was like to be, and how

The races went, and who would rent the hall:

Then touched upon the game, how scarce it was

This season; glancing thence, discussed the farm,

The four-field system, and the price of grain;

And struck upon the corn-laws, where we split,

And came together on the king

With heated faces; till he laughed aloud;

And, while the blackbird on the pippin hung

To hear him, clapt his hand in mine and sang –

‘Oh! Who would fight and march and counter-march,

Be shot for sixpence in a battlefield,

And shovelled up into some bloody trench

Where no one knows? But let me live my life.

‘Oh! Who would cast and balance at a desk,

Perched like a crow upon a three-legged stool,

Till all his juice is dried, and all his joints

Are full of chalk? But let me live my life.

‘Who’d serve the state? for if I carved my name

Upon the cliffs that guard my native land,

I might as well have traced it in the sands;

The sea wastes all: but let me live my life.

‘Oh! who would love? I wooed a woman once,

But she was sharper than an eastern wind,

And all my heart turned from her, as a thorn

Turns from the sea; but let me live my life.’

He sang his song, and I replied with mine:

I found it in a volume, all of songs,

Knocked down to me, when old Sir Robert’s pride,

His books – the more the pity, so I said –

Came to the hammer here in March – and this –

I set the words, and added names I knew.

‘Sleep, Ellen Aubrey, sleep, and dream of me:

Sleep, Ellen, folded in thy sister’s arm,

And sleeping, haply dream her arm is mine.

‘Sleep, Ellen, folded in Emilia’s arm;

Emilia, fairer than all else but thou,

For thou art fairer than all else that is.

‘Sleep, breathing health and peace upon her breast:

Sleep, breathing love and trust against her lip:

I go tonight: I come tomorrow morn.

‘I go, but I return: I would I were

The pilot of the darkness and the dream.

Sleep, Ellen Aubrey, love, and dream of me.’

So sang we each to either, Francis Hale,

The farmer’s son, who lived across the bay,

My friend; and I, that having wherewithal,

And in the fallow leisure of my life

A rolling stone of here and everywhere,

Did what I would; but ere the night we rose

And sauntered home beneath a moon, that, just

In crescent, dimly rained about the leaf

Twilights of airy silver, till we reached

The limit of the hills; and as we sank

From rock to rock upon the glooming quay,

The town was hushed beneath us: lower down

The bay was oily calm; the harbour-buoy,

Sole star of phosphorescence in the calm,

With one green sparkle ever and anon

Dipt by itself, and we were glad ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Fragments of Romanticism: The Poetry of Arthur Hallam
• 3. Knowing the Orient: The Young Tennyson
• 4. Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur: The Landscape of Eternal Return
• 5. Friendship and Melancholia: In Memoriam LXXXV
• 6. Repetitious Labour: Women in the Field
• 7. Seeking the Beyond: Sacralising/Desacralising Nature in Richard Jefferies
• 8. ‘Time’s Mindless Rote’: Nietzschean Evolution and Recurrence in Hardy’s Texts
• 9. Tess’s Boots: Hardy and Van Gogh
• 10. The Isle of Slingers: Hardy & Portland Bill
• 11. ‘Before the Mirror’: Swinburne, Hardy, Kristeva
• 12. Afterword
• Backmatter