Reading with John Clare

Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism

Sara Guyer

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780823265589, 9780823265572
• eBook ISBN: 9780823265596
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism

Reading with John Clare argues that at the heart of contemporary biopolitical thinking is an insistent repression of poetry. By returning to the moment at which biopolitics is said to emerge simultaneously with romanticism, this project renews our understanding of the operations of contemporary politics and its relation to aesthetics across two centuries.Guyer focuses on a single, exemplary case: the poetry and autobiographical writing of the British poet John Clare (1793–1864). Reading Clare in combination with contemporary theories of biopolitics, Guyer reinterprets romanticism's political legacies, specifically the belief that romanticism is a direct precursor to the violent nationalisms and redemptive environmentalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Guyer offers an alternative account of many of romanticism's foundational concepts, like home, genius, creativity, and organicism. She shows that contemporary critical theories of biopolitics, despite repeatedly dismissing the aesthetic or poetic dimensions of power as a culpable ideology, emerge within the same rhetorical tradition as the romanticism they denounce. The book thus compels a rethinking of the biopolitical critique of poetry and an attendant reconsideration of romanticism and its concepts.

1. The Viability of Poetry

On December 28, 1841, John Clare became an inhabitant of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, one of the genre of institutions that Michel Foucault identifies with the management and restoration of the population.1 Clare wrote extensively while in the asylum, where he went largely unmonitored. While much of his poetry of this period (he was there until his death in 1864) has not been preserved, an undated lyric “To Mary” is one of the hundreds of poems that survive. Clare addresses the poem to a girl that he loved in childhood, but whose father intervened because he was convinced that their marriage would leave his daughter in poverty.2 While Clare went on to marry and have children with another woman, Patty Joyce, he remained irremediably attached to Mary, as is evident in the journal that he wrote during his escape from his first asylum, which concludes with a letter to Mary Clare whom he addresses there as “My dear wife.”3 In the journal, Clare explains that he has been told of Mary’s death, but that he simply does not believe it, complaining that it is just an “old story of her being dead six years ago which might be taken from a bran new old newspaper.”4 Clare remains convinced that Mary is alive and often acknowledges that he has two wives.5

“To Mary” opens with the chilling announcement that while the poem’s subject (Clare) sleeps and wakes with Mary, she is not there.

To Mary

I sleep with thee and wake with thee

And yet thou art not there;

I fill my arms with thoughts of thee

And press the common air.

Thy eyes are gazing upon mine

When thou art out of sight;

My lips are always touching thine

At morning, noon, and night.

I think and speak of other things

To keep my mind at rest;

But still to thee my memory clings

Like love in woman’s breast

I hide it from the world’s wide eye

And think and speak contrary;

But soft the wind comes from the sky

And whispers tales of Mary.

The night wind whispers in my ear,

The moon shines in my face;

A burden still of chilling fear

I find in every place.

The breeze is whispering in the bush

And the dew-fall from the tree,

All sighing on and will not hush

Some pleasant tales of thee.6

The poem candidly acknowledges the failure of poetic apostrophe to solve the problem of absence or death (“and yet thou art not there”), and likewise, the failure of absence or death to exhaust the usefulness of direct address and the fictional presence that it remarks and effects. Mary emerges as both too resilient and utterly absent. One could say that her spectral presence is the effect of psychosis or delusion, the result of misunderstanding the difference between embodied and disembodied forms, life and language. And one could go even further to say that this confusion is not just a conventional outcome of lyric surmise, but rather the source of Clare’s incarceration. Read in this way, “To Mary” stands as a form of autobiographical and psychological evidence, rather than a dramatization of the simultaneous power and weakness of literary figuration. And yet, at the very moment that it is taken as autobiographical evidence—as a sign of Clare’s illness—it reveals the impossibility of poetry, that is, the impossibility of the forms of uncertainty that define the lyric. Clare’s “To Mary” reflects the limits of rhetorical and biopolitical accounts of poetry when dissociated from one another, and it opens not only new ways of reading Clare, but more significantly, new ways of thinking about reading the rhetoric and politics of life. In other words, Clare’s poem offers a radical account of the relation between lyric animation and life itself in part because it shows how poetry can simultaneously sustain an attachment—can make others live—and make the life of its first-person subject virtually unlivable. It shows, further, another version of what Paul de Man called autobiography as de-facement, not the defacement of the “I,” but of poetry itself. In what follows, “a long digression” on rhetoric and biopolitics (to only slightly revise Foucault), I turn first to de Man and then to Barbara Johnson, in order to reread their accounts of lyric animation, before returning to Clare and Mary. The aim is to better describe and understand the form of lyric life.

Despite having written extensively on lyric animation, romantic lifewriting, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, Paul de Man seemed to have very little interest in the question of life itself. Indeed, like death, de Man takes life as a displaced name for a linguistic predicament, that is, as a figure of figure that reflects a problem of propriety and belonging. Those texts that seem most preoccupied with life (for example “Autobiography as De-facement” and “Shelley Disfigured”) are not simply “about” death or even the undecidability between life and death (recall: “one moves, without compromise, from death or life to life and death”), but about rhetoric and figural language. When in his essays of the late 1970s, later collected in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, de Man apparently turns away from organicist accounts of language (that is, language as a vehicle or sign of life), he does so in order to turn our attention to the ideology of rhetoric (or literature) as a restorative, indeed indissociably restorative and privative, operation. Autobiography (or lifewriting) operates through a figurative movement that “deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores.”7 (Returning to the example I introduced earlier, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein acknowledges this movement in all of the scenes where the encounter between Victor Frankenstein and his creature involves a series of faintings and restorations.) Although, de Man focuses on William Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs and Percy Shelley’s “Triumph of Life,” privation, disfiguration, and restoration in his account are not matters of life and death, an assumption that would remain within an organicist paradigm, albeit a negative one, but rather matters of cognition, apparition, and image. It is sensation, and the relation between the visible and the knowable worlds, rather than life and death, that are at the core of de Man’s observations.

For all of these reasons, it might seem antithetical to turn to de Man in an effort to track the relation of literature to life and develop a theory of biopoetics. However, despite de Man’s apparent allergy to questions of life and his indifference to biological processes or political analysis on a grand scale, his understanding of figuration has laid the groundwork for other accounts of lyric figures (apostrophe, prosopopoeia) that take place in a more explicit relation to the politics of life, for example those of Barbara Johnson. Moreover, as I will argue over the course of this book, it might be time that we allow there to be a little life in de Man’s readings and that we not give up on reading in order to think about life itself.

Johnson offers one of the earliest and most engaging versions of this possibility. In her 1986 essay “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” Johnson draws upon de Man’s account of figure to ask whether “the very essence of a political issue—an issue like, say, abortion—hinges on the structure of figure,” and she considers the centrality of personification to arguments for “the right to life.”8 In some sense, Johnson just repeats de Man’s gesture, suggesting that politics—and the politics of life and death—is a name for linguistic or rhetorical predicaments. But if this is what seems to be the case, in fact something else is happening. When Johnson insists that abortion is an issue not because life is sacred or because women’s rights are at stake, but because it is structured like a figure, she reminds us that as soon as we think about politics in terms of rhetorical force, we also are thinking about poetry. More than this, she compels those who mistake de Man (or later Judith Butler) as claiming that it is all just language, to recognize the very power of rhetorical language in relation to life and death.9 Johnson goes on to ask if there is “any inherent connection between figurative language and questions of life and death, of who will wield and who will receive violence in a given human society,” which is to say, whether any use or consideration of figure is already a matter of life and death, and specifically, of the power over life and death.10 Put in other words, she is asking whether the rhetoric of tropes and figures is indissociable from biopower.

When Johnson’s essay appeared in the mid-1980s, Foucault’s various discussions of “making live” in the nineteenth century remained overshadowed by his much more substantial considerations of governmentality, the body, and its discipline. Reading her essay today—after Foucault and Giorgio Agamben and their readers—the contribution is clear: Johnson registers first as a question and then as a claim that the question of life is an inherently poetic and political one. In other words, her reflection on apostrophe, animation, and abortion is an argument for the essentially poetic structure of what we later have come to call biopolitics. Insofar as politics is a matter of power, and power is a matter of violence, the essence of any political issue is the question of life and death, of the power over life and death, and this is where poetry (or figural language) comes into the picture. For politics in Johnson’s account “hinges on the structure of figure.”11 It hangs on, depends upon, and is suspended by a rhetorical device that makes “present, animate, and anthropomorphic,” a device that, recalling Foucault’s account of political power, makes live.12 In other words, Johnson shows that biopolitics is a figural predicament, and at the same time that apostrophe is a biopolitical predicament. Put another way, what de Man registered as rhetorical is already, inherently, political and, as Johnson shows avant la lettre biopolitical.

While this poetic conception of life has a particularly compelling presence in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century lyric, and the various effusions that run throughout the poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats among others, Johnson argues that it has an afterlife in a domain that typically appears more political than it does literary, and she allows us to see (through a reading of Charles Baudelaire) that the poetics of animation also is indissociable from politics. For Johnson, the most apropos, if uncomfortable, example of the convergence of politics and poetics is abortion itself, as evident in the rhetoric around the fetus and the fraught, rhetorically manifest relation between mothers and potential children that occurs in abortion (and its aftermath). This is a convergence that recurs in the lyric, whether or not it takes abortion as a theme. In both cases (abortion and lyric) the question of viability—of whether and at what point someone or something may be said to be able to survive—is transformed not only by new and still emergent technologies, but also by linguistic acts and literary figures that condition our conception of the ends of life. As anyone even mildly familiar with the rhetoric around abortion in the United States knows, one side builds their position upon the assumption that a fetus feels, knows, and speaks (even silently screams) like the living, that it is a form of rights-bearing life, a person rather than a mute entity whose viability is fundamentally in question.13 Here, politics relies upon tropes and figures when life is at stake. More than this, as soon as the relationship between life and death becomes a rhetorical one, viability, which the rhetoric of personhood and life seek to settle, becomes a question, which is to say the political question of life reappears.

Johnson begins her essay by showing in a rather traditional sense how lyric apostrophes, as acts of animation that assume the difference between the living and the dead, turn out to undo the very distinctions upon which they seem to rely. Her initial examples, drawn from Baudelaire and Percy Bysshe Shelley, relay scenes in which a lyric subject addresses an inanimate object in order to endow it with the power that will retroactively animate the very voice responsible for the address in the first place. Johnson teasingly reads these canonical poems in the romantic lyrical tradition in which a male poet undertakes to obtain a voice from the outside together with poems by women in which “the question of animation and anthropomorphism is . . . given a new and disturbing twist,” poems that “textually place aborted children in the spot formerly occupied by all the dead, inanimate, or absent entities previously addressed by the lyric.”14 Like Foucault, Johnson seems to register a shift in modernity’s relation to sovereignty, showing that an emergent structure of animation in the nineteenth century remains at the core of political thinking in the late twentieth century; and, like Foucault, again, she is interested in rereading and recasting an earlier emergence (which we could in both cases call biopower) from the perspective of its violent...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Life of Reading
• 1. The Viability of Poetry
• 2. The Origins and Ends of Poetic Genius
• 3. Can the Poet Speak?
• 4. Inventions of Self-Identity
• 5. The Poetics of Homelessness
• Coda: The Reading of Life
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index