The Supplement of Reading

Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice

Tilottama Rajan

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501723155
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Tilottama Rajan illuminates a crisis of representation within romanticism, evident in the proliferation of stylistically and structurally unsettled literary texts that resist interpretation in terms of a unified meaning. The Supplement of Reading investigates the role of the reader both in romantic literary texts and in the hermeneutic theory that has responded to and generated such texts. Rajan considers how selected works by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft explore the problem of understanding in relation to interpretive difference, including the differences produced by gender, class, and history.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

The Supplement of Reading

The Disappearance of Actualization

It is now a commonplace that the period once associated with an organicist aesthetic that naturalizes the sign produced a large number of texts that are intentional in structure, “able to posit regardless of presence but, . . . unable to give a foundation to what [they posit] except as an intent of consciousness.”¹ This study takes as its starting point what I shall call the disappearance of narrative, dramatic, or conceptual ‘actualization,’ a phenomenon that results in the absence from romantic writing of embodied or achieved meaning as opposed to discarnate meaning. The problem is most obvious in the many texts that are fragments, where the written ‘text’ does not coincide with the hypothetical totality of the ‘work.’ In Coleridge’s Christabel, for instance, the work is not limited to Christabel’s captivation and ontological deconstruction by Geraldine. It may include a happy ending, in which the difference of Christabel from herself is annulled, as she and Sir Leoline are reconciled and Geraldine is either vanquished or saved. But this ending, sketched by Coleridge in comments to friends, is never incorporated into the text, which concludes with Christabel’s being rejected by her father, and which intimates the ending only negatively, as a desire for something that might correct the present unjust state of affairs. Similarly, in Keats’s Hyperion Apollo’s deification is intimated at the end but is undermined by the perfunctoriness of the description and the abrupt termination of the text in a series of asterisks. For Apollo undergoes no psychological development until he somewhat unconvincingly ingests the lessons of several millennia of history in five lines, as though to make us aware that his deification is not something that happens in divine history, but is a linguistic event, subject to doubt and dismantling. To bring the poem to its ‘conclusion’ we must leave the text, which derealizes itself, for the unheard melodies of a work ‘intended’ by the author.

But the disappearance of actualization is not just a feature of fragments. Blake’s major prophecies present a completed action culminating in the reintegration of the divided psyche. Yet the characters are often flat and abstract, notations for characters rather than fully developed personalities. Moreover, the action, though predictable, does not unfold logically, but proceeds discontinuously through a series of imaginative leaps. As Ronald Grimes suggests, the characters “do not develop biographically.” At the level of the plot “connective devices are muted. The spaces between events seem to be blank, as if inviting the reader to fill them in by himself.”² As ‘visionary forms dramatic,’ to use Blake’s own phrase, the prophecies require the participation of the reader if vision is to be dramatized, made concrete. Leslie Tannenbaum has discussed with reference to biblical hermeneutics this notion of the reader’s actualizing the text in a “prophetic or apocalyptic theater, which . . . through the communication of [the] prophecy, is relocated in the mind of the reader.”³ Much the same can be said of Prometheus Unbound, which is technically complete but does not follow the semiotics of Aristotelian drama, in which the play is the imitation of a probable action and not of an intention. Although in this case the arrival of the Promethean age is described in the text, it remains allegorical: a sequence of visionary abstractions spoken by dramatis personae who are voices and not persons. That a mythopoeic text cannot be realistic is obvious. But verisimilitude can be psychological or metaphysical as well as photographic, and this kind of verisimilitude is achieved only if we as readers stage the play in the theater of our own experience.

The disappearance of actualization is not just a feature of fictional texts. We find it also in expository prose, where continuous argument normally serves the function of plot and narrative syntax. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, for instance, is made up of disjunctive and unsynthesized parts. Its centerpiece is a redemptive theory of imagination as a reconciliation of opposites that reduplicates the primal act of creation. But the link between Coleridge’s aesthetics and the ten scholia from Schelling that precede it and provide its metaphysical grounding is not made in the text. Moreover, though Coleridge promises a hundred-page treatise on the imagination, the very extensiveness of which would give the theory philosophical credibility, what he provides are two elliptical paragraphs that must be fleshed out by the sympathetic reader. Characteristic of all these texts is an erosion of the reportorial, psychological, or even conceptual realism that comes from creating transitions between parts. The text becomes like the script for a film or the score for a piece of music rather than the film or music itself. It would be all too easy to conclude that much romantic literature is technically incompetent, especially since at first sight it lacks the self-consciousness about technique that might lead us to defend it as experimental. But in fact we are dealing with a series of far-reaching shifts in concepts of the location and nature of meaning, the relationship of reader to text, and finally the status of discourse itself.

Corresponding to this shift in literature itself is a shift in romantic aesthetics, from a concern with the text as a finished product that contains its own meaning to a concern with the creative and receptive processes as loci of meaning. An aesthetics of pictorialism is replaced by one based on feeling as a way of achieving ‘immediacy,’ making meaning present. Wallace Jackson traces through the eighteenth century the decline of the idea that literature should approximate to painting in order to summon up its subject before our eyes, and its replacement by a Burkean aesthetics of the sublime that makes us feel the experience instead of painting it for us.⁴ Presence comes to be located not in depiction but in an effect, something that happens in the consciousness of the reader, and correspondingly definiteness ceases to be a criterion for rhetorical success. This undoing of the model that underwrites the idea of art as a making visible⁵ has far-reaching implications. But for the moment it is enough to note that it aims to preserve, not to deconstruct, an aesthetics of presence. As important as the fading of pictorialism is the diminishing emphasis on genre, as a means by which the text encodes and institutionalizes what it says. Here, too, the desire is not to question, but to relocate at the level of organic form, the presence of a unitary meaning. The decline of generic criticism is matched on the intratextual level by a diminished emphasis on the structural grammar of the text emphasized by neoclassicism.⁶ In chastising Milton for those breaches of decorum that make Paradise Lost and “Lycidas” fail as acts of representation, Samuel Johnson assumes that stylistic and structural integrity are versions of logical proof, and that a text marked by aesthetic dissonances is unpersuasive. But though a first-generation romantic like Coleridge continues to give some emphasis to matters of construction, such as the relationship of part to whole, he already designates as secondary imagination the capacity for formal shaping that is specifically the possession of the poet, and describes as primary imagination the originating creative perception that precedes and gives value to aesthetic structuring. We see in Coleridge the beginnings of a shift from a formalist aesthetics of craft to a phenomenological aesthetics of genius, though he stops short of rejecting structural actualization as unimportant. In this he resembles Schleiermacher, for whom psychological interpretation is primary, though grammatical interpretation is also necessary. But from here it is only a short step to a second-generation romantic like Shelley, who at times introduces a dualism between inspiration and composition that can shift the locus of meaning away altogether from the written text. Though the work behind the text is assumed to be a totality, the written text is no longer required to be an autonomous formal unit. The text may become the trace, the re-presentation, of a signified that precedes it in the creative process. Or it may become an intent of consciousness, the catalyst for a signified to be produced in the reading process. More commonly it becomes both, in a hermeneutics that sees the reading process as a corrective that recovers the separation of signifier from signified that occurs in writing.

Of interest here is the movement away from narrative realism described by Hans Frei in biblical interpretation as it develops from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. What Frei traces, in delineating a shift from a system that codifies the rules governing the interpretation of subject matter to a hermeneutics of understanding that locates meaning in the interpretive act, is not a change in representation itself, but rather a change in the conventions of reading the Bible. But assumptions in biblical hermeneutics about the presence and location of meaning exerted a profound influence on the construction as well as the reading of secular scriptures in the romantic period. Frei describes how an increasing focus on the synoptic gospels, which are disconnected and aggregational in form, erodes the reading of biblical narrative in general as novelistic or history-like. More and more it is felt that the “cohesion of depiction with subject matter on the one hand, and of subject matter with its accessibility to present understanding on the other, requires something more than the narrative account itself.”⁷ Hence the ‘essential meaning’ is deferred from the text itself to the cogito of the author, to a macrocosmic version of this cogito known as the Spirit of the Age, or to the text’s ‘applicative’ reading.

Crucial to this development is Schleiermacher, at least as the nineteenth century culminating in Dilthey saw him. Schleiermacher’s notion of a reading that takes place on two levels begins the erosion of a belief in the self-sufficiency of the text. Though the text can be studied “grammatically”—in terms of its structural and linguistic parts—it must also be studied “psychologically,” through “a projection into the inner creative process,” if we are to grasp the wholeness of the work.⁸ More importantly, Schleiermacher anticipates the Derridean sense of writing as something that threatens the identity of meaning, though he does not share in the deconstruction of a dualism that privileges parole over écriture. Psychological reading restores to a text made up of ‘isolated signs’ the presence that comes from making contact with the voice behind those signs. The point is that the growing emphasis of hermeneutics on the reader as coproducer of the text is initially a response to an anxiety about the self-sufficiency of the linguistic system and its subset, the textual system. This is not to say that Schleiermacher denies the presence of meaning in the text. For in the 1819 Compendium, at least, he avoids any disjunction between work and text by seeing the psychological and grammatical readings as complementary. Yet he stands on the edge of a radical shift from a concept of literature as mimesis to one of literature as a re-presentation that defers the presence of a unitary meaning. From here it is but a short step to a hermeneutics that sees this ‘meaning’ as present only in the writer’s intention, which becomes a separable mental entity from the process of working out thoughts in language.

It would be wrong to say that this step is taken in The Defence of Poetry. For if Shelley intensifies a movement away from the text to consciousness, in the end he also reimplicates conception in expression by turning reading into a heuristic rather than hermeneutic activity. But he does seem intermittently to be mounting a hermeneutic defense of logocentrism in the wake of a growing uneasiness about the stability of the sign, and it is this strand in his aesthetics, as representative of a romantic trend, that will concern us for the moment. Early in his argument Shelley proclaims a view of language as a free-standing system similar to that conceived by Saussure, in which words bear a direct relationship to thoughts, or in which the acoustic image evokes the concept signified by it. Acoustic images or “sounds” (to use Shelley’s word) “have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent” (SPP, p. 484), and it is the former, the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations among signifiers, that guarantee the coherence of the signified and its uptake by the reader. But Shelley also questions this belief that the relationship between conception and expression is unproblematic, describing the mind as a fading coal and lamenting the fracturing of the sign that occurs between inspiration and composition. Given this disjunction between signifier and signified endemic to writing, a selfpresent meaning can no longer be located in the text but must be sought in the conception that exists before it is formulated in a language that makes it different from itself. The view of the communicative process here voiced by Shelley goes far beyond Schleiermacher’s: it short-circuits grammatical reading of the text by seeking a fusion with the author on a subliminal or transverbal level. Correspondingly, it also eliminates the need for structural actualization:

a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. (SPP, p. 505)

A single sentence may be considered as a whole though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated portions. (SPP, pp. 485–86)

Moreover, Shelley can go far beyond the concept of reading as an actualization of the text to a concept of reading as reversal, which will be discussed later. His own readings of Dante and Milton are hermeneutic but not exegetical. Instead of explicating what is in the text, he locates the meaning of the work in an intention radically at odds with the published text, and thus inaccessible except to a purely psychological read-ing.

We can only touch on developments in language theory that might have led to the emphasis on the reader and to the declining importance of the grammatical level in hermeneutics itself. The radical shift after the Renaissance from an Adamic theor...