CONTENTS:

THE ANGLO-SAXON FOUNDATION (450-1066)

THE MIDDLE AGES (1066-1500)

THE RENAISSANCE AND THE AGE OF MILTON (1500-1660)

THE NEOCLASSIC AGE (1660-1780)

THE ROMANTICS

INDEX OF AUTHORS
 Argument

The present survey course covers a timespan of fourteen centuries, tracing the progress
of one of the most prestigious literatures in the world. On establishing a great tradition of key
texts on an undergraduate course manageable within one year, the author has been faced with
difficult choices: whether a comprehensive coverage would be better than an in-depth approach,
favouring intense tuition to the expense of wide reading; whether one should think of one ideal
syllabus or opt for a realistic one, satisfying both curricular requirements and the amount of
information that can reasonably be handled by beginners in literary history and theory. We hope
to have untied rather than cut this Gordian knot by including in our canon those texts which are
highly representative of each historical paradigm, while being dismissive of those which,
although not lacking in literary merit, do no fit into the respective pattern. In this way our
students will become aware of the way literature works, of the meaningful design a critical
historian will always discover in the apparently chaotic mass of texts makig up a people’s
literary heritage. It does not necessarily mean that we are going to observe the authority of
previous readers, dealing with already classified stuff in a dead museum of literary fossils. As
we move back into history, we take the present with us, judging the literary past according to
standards of the present, opening new perspectives on tradition and the way which it works
within our changed horizon of expectations. Our lectures will be little in the way of a “story” or
storage of facts, the literary historian being permanently backed by the critic and theoretician.
Students are expected not only to amass a certain amount of historical information but also to
develop philological skills enabling them to identify, when presented with an unknown text, its
theoretical and formal (genre, literary convention, rhetorical strategies) features. Each main
division in the history of English literature from the origins to the present will focus four
aspects: a historical mapping (negotiations between literature and society) the epistemological
paradigm (literature in the context of the other discourses of the age), representative writers and
paradigmatic texts.
 THE ANGLO-SAXON FOUNDATION
(450 – 1066)

THE ANGLO-SAXON FOUNDATION (450-1066). British literature as a

blend of Latin and Germanic, pagan and Christian traditions. Popular
literature (mnemonic verse, wise sayings, charms). Courtly epic. Beowulf;
form and structure. Courtly lyric (elegies, riddles). Christian lyric (dream
vision, allegory, bestiary, advent lyrics, devotional poems, topographical
poems). Anglo-Saxon prose (chronicles, letters, laws, geographical
descriptions, saints’ lives, liturgical books). Venerable Beda and the
teleologic design of history

The term “Anglo-Saxon” has been preferred to that of “Old Englsh” in reference to
the Germanic inhabitants of Britain up to the Norman Conquest, as the latter, which has
been in use since the seventeenth century, is merely based upon a need for continuity
with what went afterwards. However, one should remember that the entire literature that
has come down to us from the seventh century to about 1100 is a type of West Saxon,
while Modern English is based on a Midland or Mercia type which was almost non-
literary [1]. 30,000 lines have survived from this early period as the fruit of the monks'
work in the loth century monasteries. They are treasured in four codices: Junius XI in
the Bodlein library, Vitellius in the British Museum, Vercelly (a library in Northern Italy)
and the Exeter Book.

Our information of the distant British past is mainly derived from Historia
Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English Race) written
in Latin by the Venerable Bede or Beda (673 – 735), a priest who spent most of his
time at Jarrow, a Northumbrian monastery. He was also a poet (A Book of Epigrams), a
scientist (On the Nature of Things and On Time) and a rhetorician (The Art of Poetry,
with a small work appended: On Tropes and Figures).

The prehistoric populations had inhabited the land for 50 to 250 thousand years [2]
when, in the last centuries of the Bronze Age, the Celtic tribes made their way to it and
settled there mixing up with the natives. Their language was probably first Gaelic, later
Britannic, from which Welsh, Breton and Cornish derived. Julius Caesar's expeditions of
55 and 54 B.C. paved the way for the Romans' conquest of Britain (43 A.D. under
Emperor Claudius). As a Roman province Britain developed a flourishing urban type of
life: forums, schools, theatres, baths, libraries, military roads and camps (castra, a word
that has survived as a suffix in such names as “Lancaster”, “Manchester”, etc.).
Archeological findings reveal the existence of an orderly civilization, regulated by laws
contained in official documents and of a highly literate society: inscriptions on stone,
trade-marks on manufactured goods, letters, wording and images upon coins which
might have served as sort of official propaganda.

About 450 A.D. the Romanized Celts were driven west and north by the invasion of
tribesmen from the Germanic territory extending from the Rhine to the Elbe Rivers (Old
Saxony) and from the present-day Denmark (Jutland and Angulus) (Fig. 1).

The language they spoke sprang from that of the Old Teutonic peoples in
prehistoric times. At the time of the invasion they spoke dialects of a common language.
Old English belongs to the West Teutonic (Germanic) branch of the Indo- European
family, and it was related to the North Teutonic languages (Icelandic and Scandinavian
languages), to the East Teutonic (Gothic) and to West Teutonic (Frisian and
Franconian). The national Germanic alphabet, borrowed from the Latin or Greek, was in
runes (letters of an angular shape), the word itself meaning “mystery”, “secret”. They
were considered to be endowed with mystical powers, the function of communication
coming next to that of magic. Odin, the rune-master, was believed to have sacrificed his
life in order to learn their use and hidden wisdom. They were engraved (writan, which
has come to mean “to write”) on tablets of wood, staves, coins, weapons, rings, drinking
horns, stone monuments. The tablet of wood was called boc (book). It was later
superseded by a coating of wax scratched with a pointed instrument of metal,
parchment or velum (sheep-skin or calf-skin), but it was only in the fifteenth century that
paper manuscript, pen and ink-horn became available.

The invaders were organized in small political units, and the chiefs or leaders of
the expeditions founded the royal dynasties of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, which was
later named after the Angles (Angul-cyn: “race of the Angles”; Englisc): Northumbria,
Mercia and East Anglia, populated by the Angles, Kent settled by the Jutes; Essex,
Wessex and Sussex, settled by the Saxons (originally “Anglo-Saxon” referred to the
Saxons in England, as different from those on the Continent) (Fig. 2).

The leading nobles arround the king (retainers) constituted his court, bound by a
strong commitment of mutual trust. The Old English for this comitatus, mentioned by
Tacitus in his Germania, was dright. The retainers claimed equal lineage with that of the
king, who was primus inter pares, and was chosen by them. The king made them gifts
of land or gold, while they were supposed to defend him in battles and show him loyalty
to the death. Family loyalties were also vital. Relatives would avenge one's death or
exact the payment of a sum of money (wergild) from the slayer, as it was settled by law
codes in accordance with the victim's rank.

The Celts had known Christianity through the Roman occupation in the third
century, and some of the Romanized Celts in the north and west remained Christians
after the Germanic invasion. The conversion of the English was the work of Pope
Gregory the Great, who in 597 sent a Benedictine monk, St Augustine, to Kent, whose
king, Ethelbert, had a Christian Frankish queen. On Christmas Day 597 ten thousand
people were baptized, following the example of their king, who had been converted but
in a few months. Canterbury became the seat of the first Englsh bishopric. By the end of
the seventh century, almost all of the English had been converted, either through the
effort of the Irish missionaries of Aidan in the north or by Augustine's monks in the
south. The difference was that, while the latter disseminated the Roman diocesan
tradition, which meant the building of churches for bishops and priests, the monks from
Iona in the Hebrides founded monasteries (Lindisfarne, Jarrow, Whitby in Northumbria)
in which marvellously illuminated manuscripts and stone crosses were produced. The
reason for this remarkable appeal of the new faith might have been that suggested by
Beda in his account of the conversion of King Edwin in Northumbria: whereas Fate
(Wyrd) condemned them beforehand, leading them to their final doom, Christianity
offered hope of salvation. Here is Coifi, Edwin's High Priest:

I have long realized that there is nothing in what we worshipped, for the more
diligently I sought after truth in our religion the less I found. I now publicly confess that
this teaching clearly reveals truths that will afford us the blessings of life, salvation, and
eternal happiness [3].

The alliance of Christianity, royalty and writing remained strong throughout the
Middle Ages (as in this picture of King Athelstan presenting St. Cuthbert with a
manuscript of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica (Fig. 3).
 However, as revealed by the archaeological excavations (1939) of the Sutton Hoo
(East Anglia) royal ship burial in a sanded mound, dating back to the seventh century,
the next two or three centuries were a period of transition in which pagan and Christian
elements freely mingled. The treasures keeping the corpse company after life coexisted
with two silver spoons on which the names “Saul” and “Paul” were engraved (Saul
converted to St. Paul) [4]. C. L. Wrenn also mentions in his book the little box made of
whalebone which Bregowine, Archbishop of Canterbury, sent to the Bishop of Mainz in
the third quarter of the eighth century (now housed by the British Museum and known
as the “Franks Casket”). On each side there are carved episodes from Christian history,
from ecclesiastical Roman history, and from Germanic heroic legends, with descriptive
notes in runes. Such historical circumstances are of great help in any approach of that
“melting pot” of heterogeneous elements out of which English literature emerged. As the
Latin alphabet travelled with Christian missionaries, the Germanic runes made room for
the Roman rustic capital of St. Augustine's monks, later superseded by the Latin half-
uncial hand, brought over by the Irish monks – a character of great beauty and
precision. Three runes were still preserved to render sounds for which there was no
graphical correspondent in the Latin alphabet: w, th (thorn) and eth (this). The
manuscripts, of calf skin or sheep skin, were so precious that, in the Middle Ages they
were fastened with chains to the shelves (Fig. 4).
References

[1] C.L. Wrenn, A Study of Old English Literature, Harap, 1967, p.VII.

[2] Roman and Anglo-Saxon Britain, edited by Kenneth O. Morgan, Oxford University Press, 1984 and
Robert C. Hughes, The Origins of Old English to 8oo A.D., in Beowulf, edited by Joseph F. Tuso,
W.W. Norton, 1975, p. 59

[3] Bede, An Ecclesiastical History of the English Race (King Edwin's Council) in The Anglo-Saxon
World, an Anthology edited and translated by Kevin-Crossley-Holland, Oxford University Press, 1982
pp. 159-160.

[4] C.L. Wrenn, Op. cit. p. 4.

Popular Literature

The most elementary forms of expression known to the ancestors of the Anglo-
Saxons, while they were still on the Continent, were associated with the experience of
the community as a whole: forms of work, magic rituals, the socialization process
(educating the young in order to help them fit into the patterns of communal life).

The mnemonic inscriptions on jewels or household objects usually make known

the workman's skill or his patron's name. The oldest runic inscription was dug up on the
German-Danish border in 1734 (dated about A.D. 400): ek Hlewagastir Holtigar horna
tawido (I Hlewagastir Holting made this horn). Sometimes the inscriptions take the form
of prosopopoea or personification (the object itself is made to speak): Aelfred mec
heht gewyrcan (Alfred ordered me made).

The memory verses were meant to keep alive a knowledge of laws and
genealogies (thula). They were often included by professional poets in their recitations
before the warriors, rekindling the memory of the race, reviving the history of the tribe
that was handed down orally, from generation to generation.

The wise saying (gnomes) comment sententiously on weather and crops, on the
forces of nature and the behaviour of people, at times displaying a genuine touch of
poetic imagination:

A stream with the sea

 shall mingle its waves. The mast on a boat

as sailyard shall stand. A sword – lordly iron -

shall be on one’s bosom. Old dragon shall live

in a cave with its riches. The fish in the water

shall bring forth their kind. The king in the hall

shall deal out treasure.

The perfectly balanced clauses, with a pause for breath in the middle (the modern
translations of Old English texts observe the main characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon
metre, based on stress, caesura and alliteration), point to a stable world of preordained
things, reaching out to eternity in its statu quo. Realistic observation makes room for
fantasy, as is the case with those primitive times when people believed that gods still
trod the ground, and controlled man’s destiny. The gnomic situation, therefore, may be
known either from actual experience (that of the migratory sea-raiders) or from fairly-
tales, which enjoyed an equal share of belief (the dragon hiding a treasure in his den).
Action is conditioned by social position and the values of a heroic society. The king is
expected to be liberal in gifts to a trusty band of followers, from whom to was to receive
loyal service in case of war, as well as to the minstrels who chanted and played songs
to the harp in the mead-hall (the hall where the king and his warriors gathered together
and the mead – an alcoholic drink from honey and water – was served).

The charms were meant to control the course of nature, ensuring fertility of cattle
or fields, keeping off rain falls and droughts. Their structure achieves a sort of hypnotic
effect through repetition (the doubling of subject, or elementary imperatives). The
Christian heaven was shaped by popular fantasy in the image of everyday realities,
saints (here, one named “Garmund”) being conceived of as “thanes” (retainers,
followers) of God. They could be called upon to recover stolen goods – like any benign
spirit of the primitive world of magic – or to punish thieves, as reads the following
charm:

Garmund, thane of God,

Find the cattle and lead the cattle,

and guide the cattle home.

Let him never have any land, he that may lead it away,

nor any earth, he that may take it away

nor houses, he that may keep it away

 Should anyone do so, may it never prosper for him!

Pagan deities coexist with Christian saints as products of an archetypal imagination that
works in a similar way in various parts of the world, e.g. Woden, a serpent killer (like
Apollo battling with the Python or St. George killing the dragon), and Erce, an earth
goddess of fertility, reminiscent of the Greek Gaia:

A worm came creeping he cut at a man,

Then Woden took nine glory-rods,

then the struck the adder so it burst into nine.

........................................................................................................

Erce, Erce, Erce, mother of earth,

may the all-ruler grant thee, eternal lord,

fields that are growing and flourishing,

increasing and strength-giving

Courtly Epic

Old English professional writing has only been preserved in copies compiled, in
general, by Christian monks, years after their composition. The definite time when these
works were produced or the names of their authors are, therefore, a matter of
conjecture. Even the pagan tradition emerged reshaped by the monastic scribes, so that
we may say that all English writing is Christian. Another conspicuous aspect is the early
redaction in the vernacular, preceding by several centuries any form of such writing in
the rest of Europe, which was dominated by the Latin of the Church. The earliest
example of Old English vernacular is Ethelbert’s code laws (c. 600).

In his often quoted book, C.L. Wrenn makes an attemp at identifying those general
features of Old English culture which were “carried over from one age to the next” [5]:

a) a love of ordered ceremony and ornament;

b) a genius in conservation of tradition;

c) gnomic moralizing, and

 d) a remarkable power of adaptive assimilation.

We tend to subscribe to all of them, unless the point is stretched too far. On page
12 we can read: most of the intellectual aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture are derived
rather than original, practical rather than creative. It may be true that Greek and Latin
writing (particularly patristic) had provided formal matrices, but these were emptied of
their original content and creatively adapted to Anglo-Saxon realities and modes of
sensibility. The need for form may inhere in a people’s sensibility as the option for a
certain literary norm, but it does not necessarily imply lack of originality. If the poetic arts
of the Roman-Greek antiquity had defined art as that which delights and instructs, the
Anglo-Saxon words for “poet” define artistic creation as a form-giving and an
entertaining activity. They are scop (from OE scieppan:”to create, form, shape”) and
gleeman (from OE gleoman: “joyman, musician”). As far as the prose of the time is
concerned, it may indeed be practical rather than creative, yet it would be unprofitable
to ignore it in a discussion of poetry, for which it provided competing and nourishing
discourses.

The epic poetry is replete with allusions to the legends of the Völkerwanderung –
the great tribal migrations of the 4th – 6th centuries. The prevailing motifs are those of
the code of values characterizing a heroic age: loyalty to the death, blood revenge,
treachery, and exile. From the point of view of the humanity they foreground, there are
important differences among them. The Battle of Finnesburh, e.g., a 48-line fragment
about the defence of a small group of Danes captured in the hall of Finnsburg and
attacked by King Finn of the Frisians, is more characteristic of the continental heroic
saga (Niebelungenlied, Chanson de Roland), with its stress on action and disregard of
motivation and moral characterization. In counterdistinction to them, Beowulf – the
earliest and the only complete Germanic epic – which was probably composed in the
first half of the eighth century, displays a monumental composition, with moving,
atmospheric descriptions, vivid portraits, dramatic scenes, and meditative passages,
probing into heroic or supernatural adventures, reclassified as heroic and moral drama.
The red thread of the Danish matter is, at a closer look, woven round the controversy
between Hrothgar's subject, Unferth, and Beowulf around the issue of true courage
versus empty, boisterous tirade. Which be the difference between “foolish boast”, or the
barbarous display of physical strength and the imposition to abide by one's vows ? Or,
between competitive vanity and gratuitous exercise of martial impulses and the testing
of heroic virtues that can propitiate even the hand of undaunting Fate? Here is
Unferth's reckless challenge:

Are you the Beowulf who competed with Breca,

vied with him at swimming in the open sea

when, swallen with vanity, you both braved

the waves, risked your lives on deep waters

 because of a foolish boast ?

Beowulf rewrites the ethos of the primitive migratory tribes, swelling with Achylles's
anger and fierceness in a new key, attuned to the binding constraints of honour, faith
and duty to one's people. :

.... Breca and I made a boast,

a solemn vow, to venture our lives

on the open sea; and we kept our word.

Moral qualities can change one’s destiny for the better, by tilting in his favour the
scales of the higher powers presiding over mankind:

... Fate will often spare

an undoomed man, if his courage is good.

There is here a very delicate poise between the predestination of pagan Wyrd and
the new possibility for judgement, which Christianity was to open up to man. The pagan
view is doubled up by the scribe's changed religious background.

Finally, the exercise of martial qualities is necessary in the process of

socialization. Beowulf's fight with whales and other monsters had prepared him for the
confrontation with Grendel, while Unferth's lesser courage and skill were responsible for
his land being devastated and his fellow Scyldings (Danes) being killed in the mead-
hall. While Unferth had slain his brothers and kinsmen, Beowulf had fought the evil in
the world for the protection of the human kind. :

... For that deed, however clever

you may be, you will suffer damnation in hell.

I tell you truly, son of Ecglaf,

that if you were in fact as unflinching

as you claim, the fearsome monster Grendel

would never have committed so many crimes

against your lord, nor created such havoc in Heorot.

Loyalty to the lord and to one's kin has got the upper hand over primitive
enjoyment of triumphant martial enterprise. The verbal contest is later tested and
Beowulf's promise is made good. Unferth lacks the courage to descend into the lake
sheltering Grendel's mother, thereby losing “his renown for bravery”. He makes over to
Beowulf his beautifully wrought sword, as a token of repentance and recognition of “his
better as a swordsman”.

Beowulf. Form and Structure

The 3138 lines in alliterative metre draw on events occurring about A.D. 500,
incorporating an impressive body of Scandinavian historical episodes as well as folk
legends, including the Finnesburh fragment. The elements indicative of English
civilization would be the use of the harp, the existence of the king’s council (witan) and
of a paved road in the Roman fashion. Anyway, there are textual indices of differences
between the time of action and that of narration. The narrator’s distancing device is
meant to show that things have changed since those pagan events. Christianity is the
great issue at stake:

At times they offered sacrifices to the idols

in their pagan tabernacles, and prayed aloud

to the soul- slayer that he would assist them

in their dire distress. Such was the custom

and comfort of the heathen; they brooded in their hearts

on hellish things – for the Creator, Almighty God,

the judge of all actions, was neglected by them.

The text is a very complex one, primarily through this double perspective on
events: that of the characters taking part in action and that of the Christian narrator who
interpolates his own commentaries. In what way did the change work? It is obvious from
this very fragment. Whereas Fate is a must, to be accepted as final doom, whereas the
pagan god will slay souls, the Christian God will judge and redeem them: moral values
are added.

Leisurely elaboration and expansion by mean of episodic miscellaneous matter

became important factors in the retelling of the original stories. Hand in hand with such
fashioning of the legends into a poem of epic proportions went a spiritualizing and
Christianizing process. A strong element of moralization was mingled with the narrative:
the characters became more refined, the sentiment softened, the ethics ennobled.
Beowulf rose to the rank of a truly ideal hero, and his contests were viewed in the light
of a struggle between the powers of good and evil...[6]

Two types of material went into the making of the epic. On the one hand, historical
characters, Scandinavian chieftains, attested by documents. On the other, there is the
supernatural realm of fairy- tales: water-monsters, fire-spewing dragons who establish
kinship with Biblical characters (the monster Grendel is a descendant of Cain). The epic
develops an elaborate superstructure through inserted set pieces, such as descriptions
and formal speeches.

The epic opens with an appeal to the audience for attention (Listen!), which
reminds us of the oral character of all early literature, meant to be recited and to
impress the auditory sensibilities of the public. Old-English prosody is a powerful
reminder of the oral character of the composition and dissemination of all early
literature. As a consequence, it relies heavily on sound patterns for capturing the
attention of its auditors. Alliteration (the repetition of the same sound in stressed
syllables) and other auditory effects are an essential part of the metrical scheme. The
line is divided by a caesura into two half-lines of approximately equal length, with two
stressed syllables in each. The sound in the first stressed syllable of the second half-
line gives the alliteration for the entire line. The number of unstressed syllables (as
different from regular European metre) varies from one line to another, which lends this
metre a much more flexible and unrestrained quality. The verses were intoned or
chanted, usually with harp accompaniment. The favourite trope is antonomasia (a kind
of compound metaphor or paraphrase, describing a thing instead of naming it) better
known under its Irish name as kenning. For instance: land-dwellers for “people”, bone-
frame for “body”, house’s mouth for “door”, heath-rover for “stag”, etc. This is sort of
Adamic speech, which appropriates an unknown world, an enigma for the searching
mind. The favourite rhetorical strategy is antithesis, the same primitive mind usually
apprehending or representing reality through sharp contrasts.

The story is broadly that of the Danish king Hrothgar’s conflict with Grendel, a
monster, of whom he rid himself with the help of the Gaetish hero, Beowulf. Even in the
redaction of the late tenth century, which is the oldest extant manuscript, the formulaic
phraseology and structure of a pagan scop’s epic can easily be traced. The poem starts
in the usual fashion, with the genealogy of Hrothgar, going back to an ancestor, Scyld
Scefing, whose glorious life is remembered by his people at the hour of his death. The
pagan ritual of the body being entrusted to the sea on a ship piled with weapons and
treasures was unrefutably confirmed by the Sutton-Hoo excavations. The reigns of
Scyld’s son and grandson are quickly passed over, and we are brought to Hrothgar, the
son of Healfdene. Hrothgar’s building a majestic hall, Heorot, in which to entertain his
retinue, has something majestic about it. It is a demiurgic act of ordering a work of art
into being, somehow resembling God’s creation of the world (the two events are
textually related):

It came in his mind

 to build his henchmen a hall uproar,

a master nead-house, mightier far

that ever was seen by the sons of earth.

...........................................................................................................

Wide I heard was the work commanded

for many tribe this mid-earth round,

to fashion the folkstead. It fell as he ordered,

in rapid achievements, that ready it stood there,

of halls the noblest: Heorot he named it

As of the building of the hall reminds one of the Urbild (Genesis), God’s archetypal
creation of the world itself is subsequently mise-en-abyme in the minstrel’s song, as if in
an endless process of re-figuration:

He sang who knew

tales of the early time of men,

how the Almighty made the earth,

fairest fields enfolded by water,

set, triumphant, sun and moon...

The heavenly and the earthly are once more brought into union through the motif
of the fall: just as Cain’s murder of his brother brought doom upon mankind, so did the
seed of evil in Heorot (the king’s feud with his son-in-law) result in misery for his people
(Grendel’s raids on his hall of thanes, whom he kills and carries away). As the code of
loyalty requires it, Beowulf from Geatland (South Sweden) comes to the rescue of
Hrothgar, who befriended his father in youth. Although not lacking in courage, the
“grizzled and old” Danish king can no longer be expected to save his people in single
combat with the hellish monster, as was the custom in a heroic society. Beowulf is
young and a proved hero, who has fought monsters in the night and won perilous
contests (swimming in the open sea, braving the roaring waves).

Beowulf crosses the sea, accompanied by fourteen thanes, who, on the way to
Heorot, present a dazzling show in their minutely described war apparel.
 The road was paved; it showed those warriors

the way. Their corslets were gleaming,

the strong links of shining chain-mail

clinked together. When the sea-stained travellers

had reached the hall itself in their fearsome armour,

they placed their broad shields

(worked so skilfully) against Heorot’s wall,

Then they sat on a bench; the brave men’s

armour sang. The seaferers’ gear

stood all together, a grey-tipped forest

of ash spears;

In the light of the heroic code, the virtues celebrated in the guests are not humility
or the endurance of wretched exiles (which would have gratified a Christian moralist)
but “stern-faced” determination and proud quest of ambitious adventures. This is
Wulfgar, one of Hrothgar’s warriors, who welcomes them:

You must have come to Hrothgar’s court

not as exiles, but from audacity and high ambition

The rest of the moral paradigm is to be inferred from Beowulf’s settlement of his
combat with Grendel: the monster is a perfect “rascal”, because he refuses the use of
weapons, like any civilized man, fighting with his hands, like a beast, yet Beowulf is to
confront him on equal terms, as it suits a noble thane. That means alone, sparing his
followers’ lives, and open-handed. The guests are warmly entertained by the king of the
Danes, his queen and their thanes. During the night, the monster bursts into the hall,
which has been left to Beowulf and his men, killing one of them. Beowulf, without
armour or weapons, puts Grendel to flight, after mortally wounding him. During the
banquet in honour of Beowulf and his victory other famous heroes of the past are
brought to the memory of those present. The Geatish hero receives gifts from Hrothgar
and a valuable necklace from the queen, which Beowulf will give to his king, Hygelac,
on his return home, being in his turn rewarded with a sword and a large share in the
kingdom of the Geats.
 During the next night, Grendel’s mother comes to avenge her son’s death, carrying
off the king‘s chief councillor. Beowulf follows the monster into her den in a pool,
apparently connected with the sea. The description of the place is exceptionally moving
and atmospheric, conveying all that abysmal terror which the migratory people ought to
have felt, as they advanced into new territories, with Death grinning at them from behind
every tree or rock. Grendel, making his appearance from the gloomy, misty crags, or his
mother, hunted down into the deep waters on which flames dance at night, are
embodiments of atavistic fears of people constantly facing the unknown:

Untrod is their home;

by wolf-cliffs haunt they windy headlands,

fanways fearful, where flows the stream

from mountains gliding to gloom of the rocks,

underground flood. Not far is it hence

in measure of miles that the mere expands,

and o’er it the frost-bound forest hanging,

sturdily rooted, shadows the wave.

By night is a wonder weird to see,

fire on the waters. So wise lived none

of the sons of men, to search those depths!

Beowulf kills the monster and severs the head of Grendel’s corpse he finds in the
cave, bringing it to his companions as a trophy. After the death of Hygelac and that of
his son at the hands of the Swedes, Beowulf succeeds to the throne proving the
“kindest, the most just and the most eager for fame” king that has ever been. In old age
he gets one mare chance to prove his courage and self-sacrifice for the good of his
people. As a fire-spitting dragon is ravishing the land, he decides once more to meet the
inhuman enemy in single combat. It is only Wyglaf, a young thane whom he loves as if
he were his son, that helps him in his final battle, while the other warriors prove as
“empty and idle” as Hrothgar’s in his old age. Beowulf kills the dragon, but he himself
dies from the wounds he receives. The king’s body is burnt on a pyre, and the remains
are covered by a huge barrow, the dragon's treasure being placed in it. The poem
comes thus to a round end. Beowulf’s fame, just like that of the ancient Scyld, outlasts
his brief journey on earth as the only immortality granted to man in pagan times. The
complexity of this gem of ancient poetry may be inferred not only from the substantial
body of critical comment it has enjoyed so far, but also from the contradictory opinions
ventured by various commentators. It has often proved a stumble block for reputed
critics, and it still claims a revaluation.

In a famous polemical essay, entitled The Monster and the Critics (1936),
R.R.Tokien identifies the following general design: essentially a balance, an opposition
of ends and beginning. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of the two
moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely
moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death. But
Beowulf's final victory over the dragon is also an achievement, the more so as it costs
his life for the benefit of his people. Is the temporal dimension of existence al there is
at stake? From this point of view, the poet asserts no difference between the hero and
the dragon – one more “enemy of mankind”:

Beowulf paid

the price of death for that mighty hoard;

both he and the dragon had travelled to the end

of this transitory life.

They both are mortals. Time is their common enemy: Beowulf is destroyed by a
fifty-foot serpent at the end of a fifty-year- reign. But Beowulf has rescued the treasure
from his non-human antagonist. Much has been made of the hero's lust for gold: When
a king seeks treasure himself, the cost may be ruinous for his people. Hygelac's Frigian
raid and Beowulf's dragon fight are examples. Although Grendel's cave is rich in
treasure, Beowulf takes away only a golden sword hilt and the severed head of
Grendel: his object is to gain revenge, not treasure. Hrothgar's speech to Beowulf after
his return contains warnings on pride in heroic exploits and on the ease with which gold
can make a man stingy, hoarding his gold like a monster [7] There seems to be a
general misunderstanding about Beowulf taking away a sword from the monster's den.
On reading the text more attentively, one can see that the “long-hilted sword” with
patterned blade is Unferth's gift to Beowulf, possessed of magic powers, like the rest of
the armour he is wearing on diving into the pool. The blade melts when flooded by the
poisonous blood of the monster, so Beowulf can recover the hilt. The treasures in the
cave are not described, as different from the very special treasure which Beowulf
recovers from the dragon, whose symbolism offers the key to the understanding of
Beowulf's final acts. We need not complain about “some master key, lost since Anglo-
Saxon times” [8], since the comprehensive reader is inscribed in the very texture of the
poem. Does Beowulf decide to fight the dragon alone because he means to lay hands
on the treasure for his private use? He is convinced that the salvation of his people
depends on him alone, and he bravely takes it upon himself, even in the eventuality of
giving his all, for he does not rule out the possibility of Fate deciding again him:

This is not your undertaking, nor is it

possibile for any man but me alone

to pit his strength against the gruesome one...

As for the treasure, he humbly thanks God for having been able to gain it “for the
Geats”:

With these words I thank

the King of Glory, the Eternal Lord,

the Ruler, for all the treasures here before me,

that in my lifetime I have been able

to gain them for the Geats.

As far as the treasure itself is concerned, its chief value is its immortality: it will
survive its owner... whosoever hidest it! What else makes it invaluable? It is not a hoard
of solid gold, coin or other market-value goods. It is primarily the work of people of old –
the testimonies of human endeavour and craftsmanship, still to be admired in the rusty
helmets, in the cunningly wrought armlet, in the standard fashioned with gold strands,/ a
miracle of handiwork. Their value does not inhere in the material substance, it is not a
given; it is “created “, “fashioned”, added to nature by man's skilled hand. We think we
can identify, throughout the epic, a permanent opposition between nature and
civilization, a theme which runs, like a red thread, through the entire subsequent history
of English literature. Antithesis pits the joyful human companionship in the mead-hall – a
shelter of humanity, of sharing songs, and stories of old, and memories of valuable
works – against the threatening, dark, ragged landscape out of which Grendel emerges
in his progress to Heorot. People in the banquet-hall enjoy music, poetry, and
conversation. Grendel is only seized with irrational anger. The mead-hall is a space of
mutual generosity. Everybody has something to share with the others. The jewels, the
gifts are only outward signs of admiration, loyalty, devotion. Grendel or the dragon hide
such treasures meant to be shared in their earth-half. In vain, the poet remarks, would
anybody expect Grendel to pay wergild for the warriors he murdered, as a token of
remorse, as was the custom. Of the physical traits of characters, either human or
monsters, we know next to nothing (apart from sturdy looks or daring attitudes, or the
terrifying effect of Grendel's mother's “infernal” aspect). Instead, the finely wrought
pieces of armour are minutely described and implicitly celebrated. As the poet of an epic
speaks in the name of the race, it is obvious that the Anglo-Saxons took justified pride in
their civilization: in Western or “Latin”-cultured Europe the Anglo-Saxons were pioneers
and leaders in such material arts as sculpture, metal-work, and textile embroidery
throughout their history, as well as in penmanship and literature [9]. When the world
picture and the hierarchy of values pertaining to a particular historical time are
misunderstood, we can get distorted explanations for human action, like the following:
All turns on the figure of Beowulf, a man of magnificence, whose understandable,
almost inevitable pride commits him to individual heroic action, and leads to a national
calamity by leaving his race without mature leadership at a time of extreme crisis, facing
human enemies much more destructive than the dragon. (Beowulf the Hero and the
King, an essay by John Leyerle – 1965). The question is: are they not facing the
outcome of their flight from the devastating raids of the dragon? Is not the new “crisis”
brought about by the peculiar circumstances of Beowulf’s death? That a hero was
supposed to risk his life the poet tells us plainly. As for Wiglaf's gloomy prophecy, he is
literally ascribing it to the warriors' cowardice at the time when Beowulf mostly needed
them. The king's former generosity is contrasted with the unworthiness of his faithless
men who well deserve Wiglaf's angry words for cowards:

Too few defenders

rallied round our prince when he was most pressed.

Now you and your dependants can no longer delight

in gifts of swords, or take pleasure in property,

 a happy home, but after thanes from far and wide

have heard of your flight, your shameful cowardice,

each of your male kinsmen will be condemned

to become a wanderer, an exile deprived

of the land he owns. For every warrior

death is better than dark days of disgrace.

Recent approaches (among them, Father McNamee in his article, “Beowulf – An

Allegory of Salvation, and Alvin A. Lee, Symbolic Metaphor and the Design of “Beowulf”
[10]interpret the poem as an allegory of the Christian story of Salvation, with Grendel's
defeat as the embodiment of its core, the descent to the mere as the Harrowing of Hell,
and the fight with the dragon as the death of the Saviour. R.E. Kaske (The Governing
Theme of “Beowulf” – ibidem) is right in asking the following question, but wrong in his
answer: what are we to make of the apparently fatal objection that whereas mankind is
saved by the death of Christ, the Geats are doomed by the death of Beowulf? I would
suggest that in this final decisive difference we are to see the raison d ’ętre of the
entire analogy. The champion Beowulf, in life reminiscent of the champion Christ in
various aspects of his wisdom and power, is in the end revealed to be not God-man but
man, his death not a supernatural atonement but a calamitous natural phenomenon[11].
In our opinion, Beowulf, inscribed in a numerological pattern suggestive of a Christ
figure (fourteen companions, saving the Danes after twelve years of wretchedness,
having his heroic life exalted by twelve worthy warriors who ride round his tomb),
justifies the analogy to the end. In Matthew 23:29-37, Jesus prophesizes that the
murder and persecution of God's messengers will fall upon the Pharisees and their
homes will be laid waste. Not all the Geats will be “homeless” but only those who
betrayed their lord's trust. While failing in his mythical interpretation of the epic against a
Christian background, R.E. Kaske is most effective, however, in his discussion of the
heroic ethos of “sapientia et fortitudo” as a common epistemological link between
Beowulf and other works produced by the same culture: Statius’s Dares and Dictys, the
Chanson de Roland, Isidore's Etymologiae. Beowulf is wise and stout-hearted, and,
according to Hrothgar, governing with all his strength and in the wisdom of his heart.
The Christian poet himself had the “wisdom” to observe the mentalities and phraseology
of the time he looked back to, while manipulating a sophisticated parallel with his own
time, to make the story intelligible for his contemporaries. This mythological framing
takes us from a cosmogonic myth towards a Last Judgement ensuring both punishment
for betrayal and immortality for the hero's soul which, unlike his body, has not been
destroyed by the dragon.

Courtly Lyric

Social relationships occasioned by the patterns of communal life (even Wyglaff

assists his king in battle not out of an individual commitment but as a kinsman and a
thane) are foregrounded in Beowulf, while personal relationships (Beowulf's marriage,
feelings of friendship or love) are completely neglected. The same holds true as far as
the “lyric” poems are concerned. The quotation marks are restrictive, as this poetry is
only lyric insofar as it is the personal expression of a single mood. Reflexivity is held in
check by an early awareness of form and literary convention. In Widsith, the poet is
actually building his mask as an Anglo-Saxon scop of the seventh century, as a social
institution, with a certain career and repertory.

Among members of the military caste there were certain talented warriors who
undertook to entertain their fellows in the mead-hall with songs covering a set range of
themes or topics: glorifying leaders, urging to combat, or to revenge, mourning the
brave who fell in battles. They were rewarded by their patrons with gifts of gold or land,
the relationship being the same as the one which held between the lord and the
retainer. The economic ties were, however, doubled by feelings of reciprocal affections,
and such relationships occasioned the only love poetry of the heroic age. With one
notable exception (the elegiac Wolf), it is not earlier than the feudal twelve century,
under Norman and Latin influence, that we can trace expressions of love between the
sexes in England.

Widsith is a wandering type of scop, the name being maybe a kenning rather than
the actual one („he who travels far”). Kemp Madone in The Old English Scop and
“Widsith” even speaks about “author” and his “hero” as two distinct persons [12], and
the narrative framing introducing Widsith's song defends his reading. The famous scop
is afterwards allowed to speak in the first person. His speech – which might be
considered the first dramatic monologue in English literature (the poet speaking in the
guise of a “persona”) – displays a five-part structure: an introduction boasting his
professional skill, three thulas (nomenclatures, the names of princes and heroes, some
of whom are celebrated in Beowulf) accompanied by his comments which testify to his
historical knowledge, and a conclusion proclaiming the poet's pride in the power of his
songs to render immortal the people and events of the transitory life on earth.
 A companion piece is Deor, which introduces the theme of the rival poet, to be
found later in Shakespeare's sonnets. The appearance of a more gifted poet could lead
to a loss of the patron's favour and gift of land. The poet seeks in stories of former
misfortunes, whose pain edged off in time, comfort for his present distress. As the poet
speaks about himself in the past, we have a feeling that he is not so much expressing
his present grief as somehow writing a poem-epitaph, framing his figure as Wyrd's
victim for the ages to come.

... once I was a scop of the Heodeningas,

dear to my lord. Deor was my name.

For many years I had a fine office

and a loyal lord, until now Heorrenda,

a man skilled in song, has received the land

that the guardian of men first gave to me.

The confident, narcissistic self-assertiveness of Widsith has yielded to an elegiac

mood. This kind of poetry, growing alongside heroic poetry, expressing regret for the
loss of a person or a position, takes the particular form of the lament. C. L. Wrenn (Op.
cit. pp. 140-141) divides the Old English elegies into two categories: those nearer to the
Old Germanic tradition in point of diction and style, and those which are clearly the work
of poets, probably ecclesiastics, who use the commonplaces of Christian Latin
allegorical teaching and familiar Latin devices of rhetoric

In the first category, he includes such poems as The Ruin, The Wife's Lament and
The Husband's Message.

The Ruin is the first topographical poem in English, the reverse of an encomium
urbis, as it bemoans the collapse of the works of civilization (probably, of Bath) under
the Germanic invaders. The ubi sunt lamentations for the fall of ancient cities in the late
Roman Empire might have served as a model, yet the phraseology is akin to that of
Beowulf (wrecked by fate... the work of the giants is perishing).

The Wife's Lament and The Husband's Message are ussually associated, although
they may not have had the same author. They refer to common social conflicts at the
time (conspiracy among relatives, exile) while the riddling effect and condensed
metaphors draw on Germanic rhetoric. The husband has been banished for plotting and
murder, and so has been his wife, to an earth-cave, by his kinsmen. The poem is cast in
form of prosopopoeia: the rune stave on which the husband's message to his wife is
carved is made to speak. Part of the message is encoded in runic letters which need to
be explained. The runes apparently stand for sun-path-ocean-joy-man, which might be
interpreted as: “Take the southern path over the ocean, and there you'll find joy, as your
man is waiting for you”.

Important changes occur in the other group of elegies, “contaminated' by the spirit
and diction of patristic writings. The native genius of creatively adapting alien models is
here fully manifest. Pagan Anglo-Saxon realities coexist with the Christian matter and
rhetoric. Love is still the bond between the lord and his retainer, that manly attachment
which Shakespeare would call a “marriage of true minds”, uniting the poet to the fair
youth of the sonnets. Here is the Anglo-Saxon “Wanderer”:

A man who lacks advice for a long while

from his loved lord understands this,

that when sorrow and sleep, together

hold the wretched wanderer in their grip,

it seems that he clasps and kisses

his lord and lays hands and head

upon his lord's knee as he had sometimes done

when he enjoyed the gift-throne in earlier days.

The way in which man apprehends his relationship to the conditions of existence,
and, consequently, the signifying practices are being subverted by the new values of an
increasingly Christian world. The Wanderer, as a poem produced by an age of
transition, is innerly torn between the two matrices of thought. Providence (God's mercy)
and blind Fate (Wyrd meaning “what will be”) seem to have cast dice and won man
either for the afterlife or for his brief journey on earth, respectively:

Often the wanderer pleads for pity

 and mercy from the Lord, but for a long time,

sad in mind, he must dip his oars

into icy waters, the lanes of the sea;

he must follow the paths of exile: fate is inflexible.

Only nine lines below, man's predicament changes again. Even during his earthly
life, it has become possible for man to withstand Fate through fortitudo, which is no
longer that of the body but that of the mind able to control the pas-sions of the heart:

The weary in spirit cannot withstand fate,

a troubled mind finds no relief:

wherefore those eager for glory often

hold some ache imprisoned in their hearts.

Thus I had to bind my feelings in fetters,

often sad at heart, cut off from my country....

While the world picture is a movable one, the sense of the importance of ordered
discourse remains constant with the English poet. Had not the author of Beowulf
imaged the antagonism between man and the earth-bound monsters as that between
the patterned blade of a sword and the form-dissolving effect of their life-blood (and
not just that between steel and flesh)? The scene of the heroic Anglo-Saxon society is
recast in the rhetorical mould of the Ovidian and Chrysostomic [13] ubi sunt, as the
creative act means participation in a structure of ceremonious address and formulaic
speech:

Where has the horse gone? Where the man? Where the giver of gold?

Where is the feasting place? And where the pleasures of the hall?

I mourn the gleaming cup, the warrior in his corselet,

the glory of the prince.

 But the idea of exile itself has broadened into an allegory of the soul's pilgrimage
on earth. The exile no longer seeks one more lord or patron, but the Father in heaven,
the safe home that awaits us all.

With The Seafarer, exile is charged with more Christian connotations: it has
become a choice in view of redemption, peregrinatio pro amore dei. The dreary picture
of the loneliness and hardships of life at sea shifts into the joyous picture of nature
waking up in spring – an objective correlative of the pilgrim's spiritual rejuvenescene.
The destitute Anglo-Saxon seafarer willingly metamorphosizes into the Christian pilgrim,
confident in the “Strength” of his Soul:

He thinks not of the harp nor of receiving rings,

nor of rapture in a woman nor of worldly joy,

nor of anything but the rolling of the waves;

the seafarer will always feel longings.

The groves burst with blossom, towns become fair,

meadows grow green, the world revives;

all these things urge the heart of the eager man

to set out on a journey, he who means

to travel far over the ocean paths.

The characteristic Anglo-Saxon tropes (the whale's domain, the whale's way) and
atmospheric descriptions are now applied to the Leviathan world of sin. Such works
produced at the origins of English literature most persuasively reveal it as a fortunate
combination of the discipline and fulness of the classical heritage with the freedom and
energy of the North [14].

The love of mystery and enigmatic expression bore fruit in the verse rid-dles
(thirty one have survived unburned and unscarred out of the original ninety-six that were
once contained in the Exeter Book), some of which were modelled after Latin
forerunners (Eusebius, among others). They are not catch-questions but semi-
metaphorical riddles, such as occur in the Koran and in the Bible. They might also be
described as extended kennings, communicating some hidden, coded meanings about
familiar objects in the everyday world (plough, anchor, weathercock, key, book), people,
or natural phenomena. The hermeneutic situation polarizes the assertion of reality's
intriguing and puzzling appearance (“I saw a strange creature”…) and the codified
process of making meaning out of it. The reader is expected to decipher the code:

A creature came shuffling where there sat

many wise men in the meeting-place.

He had two ears and only one eye,

he had two feet and twelve hundred heads,

a back, two hands, and a belly,

two shoulders and sides, a neck,

and two arms. Now tell me his name.

Being possessed of two feet and two hands, the creature would appear to be
human. He has twelve hundred heads, yet he does not belong with the group of “wise
men”. Contrariwise, the “one eye” would rather point to a deficient vision, a mental
infirmity. Could the spiritually blind, “one-eyed merchant” in T.S. Eliot's Wasteland be
looking back to this Anglo-Saxon “one-eyed seller of onions” ?

Christian Lyric

Christian matter, as we have seen, went into the making of much Old English
poetry, yet only some of them drew explicitly on the Bible and Apocrypha, on
hagiography and homilies, being also cast in the mediaeval continental convention of a
“dream-vision”. This was based on a belief, that during the night man's mind is relieved
from the siege of the noisy earthly show. Pope Gregory the Great, made known in
England not only in the original but also through King Alfred's translations, provided in
his Moralia a somatic support for St. Augustine's express belief in the virtues of a life of
contemplation as against one of action (The City of God): The voice of god is heard in
dreams when with a tranquil mind there is quiet from the action of the world, and in this
silence of mind divine precepts are perceived[15]. However, Caedmon's Hymn of
Creation, which marks the beginning of English literature, appears to have sprung from
personal rather than bookish experience. Beda's account [16] of the first English poet
ascribes him a status different from that of the Anglo-Saxon scops, who took twenty
years to learn their metier: For himself had learned the art of poesy not through men nor
taught by men: but he had received the gift of song freely by divine aid. Wherefore he
could never make anything of frivolous or vain poetry, but only those verses which
belong to piety, which were becoming to that religious tongue of his. Caedmon was a
simple herdsman, who had been shyly deserting his company every time the harp
reached him, out of an inability to sing. One nigh he had a dream in which a strange
man commanded him to sing “of the beginning of created things”, and, to his
amazement, he discovered he could do it. On waking up, he added other verses “in the
same rhythm and metre”. It was during the abbacy of Hild at Whitby (658-680), who
received him into her community as a monk, encouraging him to write more religious
poetry in the vernacular. Caedmon did write poems drawing on Genesis, the New
Testament and visions of Doomsday. Here is the nine-line hymn which shows that the
God in Cadmon's dream possessed a Germanic scop's lore of kennings, doubled
subjects and half-lines:

Now shall we the heaven-

praise keeper's warden,

the might of God and his mood-

thought,
work of the
Glory-Father as He of all
wonders,
the Eternal Lord
established the
He first created start.

heaven as a roof, for the children of

men
Next the middle
realm the Holy Creator.

the Eternal Lord the mankind's

- ward -

for men of the

 afterwards fashion

earth,
the Ruler
Almighty.

From Aldhelm, who enjoyed an immense reputation in Wessex, no writings have

been left behind. Apart from Caedmon, only the name of one more poet of the time is
known, as it was signed in runes at the end of four extant religious poems, assigned to
the late eighth or early ninth century: The Fates of the Apostles, Christ B, Juliana, and
Elene. Although apparently conversant in both the classical and Christian traditions,
Cynewulf too is indebted to the tradition of secular heroic epics. The Dream of the
Rood, whose composition started from some words engraved in runes on the famous
Ruthwell Cross, is also attributed to him because of a similarity of style The poem
combines the Christian dream allegory and the Germanic handling of prosopopoeia.
The poet sees in a dream the Cross on which Christ was crucified and hears it speak
forth. The cross, bright with gold and jewels but stained with blood, doubles the level of
significance: it is a concrete object but also a “beacon”, symbolizing spiritual triumph
over the death of flesh. Its story, from a tree felled in the woods to the living symbol of
Christ”s Victory, is an allegory of the entire earth's redemption through the Crucifixion. A
pagan frame of mind might have been unconsciously assimilating Christ to a fertility
ritual, and the scene of God's followers, seated at a feast “in eternal bliss”, to the
Germanic Valhalla. The poem is most impressive in its gradual revelation of the
awesome identity of the Cross, colour symbolism, pathos of the Cross' anguished
speech, and animistic vision of the entire nature being seized with agony.

Some of the manuscripts in the Exeter Book and the Vercelli Book are attributed to
the Cynewulfian School, authorship being uncertain. Cynewulf es-tablished the
monastic tradition of the early ninth-century (Wessex, according to Wrenn, “probably
Mercia”, according to Kevin Crossley-Holland, 1982) – based on a Christian Latin
education, homiletic and didactic –, which has survived in the Classical Anglo-Saxon of
late ninth-century Wessex. However, the Advent Lyrics in Christ A are close enough to
Cynewulf's style to be sometimes associated with the Christ B (the Ascension)
manuscript. These poems, based on antiphons (pieces sung responsively by alternating
choirs in Church), straddle the lyric and the dramatic, preparing the way for the
medieval religious drama. The best known is a dialogue between Joseph, who
expresses his moral doubts about Mary's pregnancy, and her explanations about the
Annunciation (the birth of “the child of God”).

Allegory is also the rhetorical strategy of the medieval bestiary (fables of birds and
animals endowed with moral qualities). The Latin translation of the Byzantine
Physiologus had disseminated the animal allegory with moralizing and Christian didactic
purposes throughout medieval Europe. In Anglo-Saxon poetry, this literary mode is
represented by The Panther, The Whale, and a sixteen-line fragment (believed to refer
to the partridge). The Panther, at war with the dragon, conveys that West-European
image of God as both destroyer and redeemer (unlike the East-European benign,
forgiving God). The manner of The Whale is more specifically allegorical, in its
vacillation between literal meaning and emblematic guise. The poet imagines a crew
who mistake the back of a whale for an island, anchoring on it at dusk. During the night,
the whale sinks, drowning them. Allegorical interpretation and grave moralizing are
immediately added:

Such is the method of demons,

the way of the devils who, by dissembling,

deceive the troop with magic powers:

they tempt them from good works with trickery,

lead them a dance so that sadly they seek

solace from their enemies....

The Byzantine hand had set the mode for the eager Anglo-Saxon poet to follow.
The “remarkable power of adaptive assimilation” is to be seen in one more animal
poem, which completes the allegorical picture of the elements (water, earth, air): The
Phoenix, by a poet of the Cynewulf School. Its text, of 677 lines, is divided into two
complementary parts: a free adaptation of the Latin Phoenix, attributed to Lactantius,
and a Christian interpretation. The story of the Arabian bird's death and rebirth is made
into an allegory of humanity falling from a happy condition, experiencing the Flood and
finally emerging purged and redeemed through apocalyptic fire.

The holy writs are filtered through the recent memories of migration and
colonization. Social realities steal into the divine drama of sin and retribution. In the
Genesis (Junius XI), Satan is “chief of the angels” who, like some rebellious chieftain in
the service of one of the kings in the heptarchy, has sinned through pride and greed. He
had demanded “to have a home and a throne in the northern part of the kingdom”, to
partition with God the mansion of the heavenly kingdom. The barbarous “bragging”,
“boasting”, “splendour” and “beauty” are broken and blotted, and the “rebellious army” is
sent upon a long journey. Exile, which was the supreme misfortune of the lordless
Anglo-Saxon, well matched the hardships of the “journey” to Britain, still lingering in the
memory of the race. The making of Adam and Eve sounds like some other episode in
the story of the settlement: God was to resettle the realm with pure souls...

The ubi sunt lament shifts back to encomium; the poet no longer exalts “works of
the giants” but the tombs of the holy people that had turned Durham into a city of “the
man of God”, serenely awaiting Doomsday. This topographical poem, composed
shortly after the uncorrupted body of St Cuthbert (a disciple of Bede) was moved into
the newly-built cathedral (llo4), is the last example of Old English traditional
versification. The swiftly-flowing river with fish dancing in the foam, the rocky slopes, the
Edenic abundance of animals, the liberal expanse of sprawling, tangled thickets convey
the same grandeur and unstained purity as the city's historical memories and holy relics.
A settled people had managed to tame the adversities of monster-breeding nature,
making it its propitious home.

Anglo-Saxon Prose

The earliest examples of Anglo-Saxon prose are generically linked with the
narrative of history, and redacted in Latin: Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (HE),
produced in 731 by the Venerable Bede, doctor of the Catholic Church and, probably,
the most celebrated scholar of his time, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

In his argument on his sources, method, purpose and structuring of material, Bede
expounds the double nature of the medieval historian's enterprise. On the one hand, the
accurate tracing of events, “as I have been able to ascertain them from ancient
documents, from the traditions of our forebears, and from my personal knowledge”; on
the other, the theological orientation of his project, helped along by his knowledge of
“the venerable Fathers” of the Church: “to comment on their meaning and
interpretation”. The imposition of some divine teleology and the anagogical gloss are
indispensable to the medieval writer, as we can see, whether he is writing from his own
experience or from imagination, whether he is writing verse or prose.

The HE was composed in the context of Bede's Scriptural commentary. Scripture

provided Bede with the paradigmatic medieval historical narrative, and the Catholic
commentary tradition offered Bede a way of understanding the role of history in the
scheme of salvation. [17] According to Stephen J. Harris, as a priest of Wearmouth and
Jarrow, the author 's aim was chiefly to demonstrate the meaning of historical events
within the overall scheme of mankind's salvation. Particularly, the salvation of his own
race. Bede relates the notion of race to that of salvation, in accordance with the
Scriptural account: the chosen Jewish people and the Jewish faith. He relies upon the
story of a famous episode associated with the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, which
was current in the Anglian oral tradition and had also been entered into the Whitby
chronicle. It was said that Pope Gregory had been prompted on his work of converting
the Angles after having seen two boys exposed for sale in a Roman market. The Pope
thought they were destined to be saved, on account of their fair, angel-like complexion
(candidus corporis), their language – king Aelle's name was an incipient Alleluia -, and
their home, Deira (one of the early kingdoms), which seemed to convey the providential
urge of saving them from God's wrath (de ira). In accordance with the current
symbolism at the time, physical beauty, as we read in a letter sent by Boniface, the
Anglo-Saxon monk who christianed the Germans, to his disciple Lull, was considered a
symbol of God's beauty or even of God's wisdom. Bede goes through all lengths to cast
an allegorical net over his historical record, pointing in an allusive manner to the
providential design underwriting man's pilgrimage on earth. His own prayer is that God,
who had imbibed his words with divine knowledge, would eventually admit him in his
presence: “the Fount of all wisdom”.

In like fashion, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ascribes a providential meaning to all

major events. The Vikings' first raids, for instance, are said to have been prophesied by
“dire portents”: immense whirlwinds and the flashes of lightening, and fiery dragons
were seen flying in the air. The battle of Hastings was also preceded by “a sign in the
skies... a long-haired star”. In Gildas and in Nennius, Aurelianus Ambrosius (the
national hero, Arthur, who had managed to gather all the Romano-Britons under his
command) was victorious in the battle of Mons Badonicus against the invading Anglo-
Saxons, as he was carrying the Virgin's image on his shoulders.

Writing in Latin benefited by the models of a consumate rhetorical tradition. Britain

of the first millenium created a new model for prose, in the current, native idiom.
 For all the critcism brought up against Anglo-Saxon prose (“clumsy”, “utilitarian”.
“didactic”), the existence of a prose tradition of various use (from epistolary to
philosophical) in the vernacular some centuries before any other in the rest of Europe
remains an extraordinary fact. Gloria mundi gentis anglorum passed in turn from
Northumbria (seventh century) to Mercia (eighth century) and from here to Wessex
(ninth century). Responsible for this whimsical fate were the raids of the Danes who by
87o had conquered Northumbria and Mercia. It was Alfred the Great, King of the West
Saxons from 87l to 899, who managed to beat the Danes several times, restricting their
rule to a territory called “Danelaw” and converting King Guthrum to Christianity.

The king initiated a national program of education and reforms, in the attempt to
restore the heptarchy to its former glory, when English missionaries made a name for
themselves in Europe (Boniface, who Christened the Germans, becoming their bishop
in 675, Alcuin, the learned councillor of Charlemagne). In the late ninth century, the
necessity was felt for the teachers themselves to be taught, as the clergymen had so
much decayed that few understood any Latin any more. Following famous examples
(the Greeks translating the Old Testament, the Romans translating from Greek), King
Alfred undertook to forge an Anglo-Saxon idiom for liturgical, geographical, legal and
philosophical works. He translated Pope Gregory's Cura Pastoralis (Shepherd' s Book)
which he sent to every bishopric in the country. His “Legal Code”, having a historical
introduction (explaining the legislator's need for precedent, which was found in the
Mosaic Law) and an introduction proper, sets out to deal out justice indiscriminately to
the rich and to the poor. Drawing on travellers' accounts of the North, the King added
his own information to a translation of Historia adversus Paganos – a compendium of
world history and geograpy by a fifteenth-century Spanish monk. The fatalistic bent of
the Anglo-Saxons found an affined expression in the sense of an overruling fate, which
pervades the works of the philosopher Boethius, imprisoned by the Ostrogothic king
Theodric. Alfred translated his treatise redacted in prison, De consolatione philosophiae,
which had an enormous impact upon English writing. To it, he added Augustine's
Soliloquies (a treatise on God and the soul), De Civitate Dei (extolling the virtues of a
life of contemplation as against one of action), and De Videndo Deo.

On the king's injunction, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (the monks' record of

important events committed to the pages of the Easter Tables) abandoned Latin for the
vernacular after 89l.

In the hands of Aelfric (955-l020), a monk in Oxfordshire, the English prose

vernacular became flexible enough to mix utile dulci. He recovers the visualizing quality
of traditional epic descriptions and the auditory effects of alliteration. Particularly moving
is his account of The Passion of St. Edmund – the king of the East Angles martyred by
the Danes for having refused to give them wergild. St Edmund became the second
(after St. Alban) patron saint of England, being later superseded by Edward the
Confessor, Thomas ŕ Becket and St. George.

Aelfric's pastoral epistles, homilies, saints' lives display a formal tightness

which proves that the road from poetry to prose has been smoothed out.

References

[5] Ibidem, p. 18.

[6] Fr. Klaeber, Genesis of the Poem in Beowulf, Op. cit. p.8l.

[7] John Leyerle,The Interlace Structure of “Beowulf in Beowulf, Op. cit., p. 169.

[8] Kenneth Sisam, The Structure of “Beowulf”, in Beowulf, Op. cit. p. 117.

[9] C.L. Wrenn, Op. cit., p. 2.

[10] See Beowulf, Op. cit. pp, 120, and 146 to 158.

[11] R.E. Kaske, The Governing Theme of “Beowulf”, in Beowulf, Op. cit. pp. 129-l30.

[12] Kemp Malone,The Old English Scop and”Widsith” in Beowulf, Op.cit. p. 76

[13] Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto, Book 4, Letter 3. ; Chrisostom, Exhortation on the Death of Theodric.

[14] William J. Entwistle & Eric Gillett, The Literature of England A.D. 500-1960, Longmans, p. 9

[15] Apud Colin Wilcockson, Mum and the Sothsegger, The Review of English Studies, May 1995

[16] The Anglo-Saxon World, Op. cit., p. 161

[17] Stephen J. Harris “Bede and Gregory’s Allusive Angles”, in Criticism – A Quarterley for Literature
and the Arts, Summer 2002, Vol. 44, No. 3.
 THE MIDDLE AGES
(1066 – 1500)

THE MIDDLE AGES (1066-1500). The social and literary scene. The
alliterative and the Continental traditions. Literary kinds
(romance, dream vision, allegory, bestiary, estate satire, sermon,
confession, moral tract, fabliau, dits amoureux, dits de Fortune,
danse macabre, de casibus stories) and conventions (framing
devices). The new voices of authority: Church and Castle.
Medieval lyric (amour courtois or pro amore dei). Medieval epic
(The Arthurian Saga and the code of chivalric values. Sir Gawayne
and the Grene Knight). The voices of subversion. William
Langland: satirist and preacher. Geoffrey Chaucer, or, “God’s
plenty”, breaking out of medieval confines. Medieval drama
poised between eschatology and contingency

The Middle Ages is a period well-defined by the Norman Conquest (1066)

and the Reformation of the Church (1533-1559). The arrival of the Norman
conquerors led by William meant the end of a heroic society and the onset of the
feudal age. The change had actually started before, as early in the century
Wulfstan, Archbishop of York (1003-1023), was already composing a dirge on the
loosening of bonds between thane and thrall, father and son, and on the impending
collapse of the traditional values of the patriarchal way of life. In any event, it was
only after the Anglo-Saxons' defeat by the Norman Gauls, with their different social
grammar, that the personal relationships, which could be felt also as natural and
affectionate bonds between king and thane, thane and thrall, began to be rapidly
replaced by a rigid and complicated social hierarchy. Being a “bond person” no
longer meant “loyalty”; it meant lack of freedom and of the means of personal
economic sustenance. The civil hierarchy of king and peers (duke, marquis, earl,
viscount, baron) and a middle stratum composed of knight, squire and burgess
(well-to-do citizens, who could be elected to Parliament), and the ecclesiastical
hierarchy of prelates were towering haughtily above the majority of the population
made up of peasants (franklin, yeoman and husbandman) and serfs (tied to the
land, with no right over it). The Domesday Book, a survey of the land and its
inhabitants, compiled by order of William I in 1085-86, leaves no doubt about the
king regarding them as his own possessions, thus revealing the mercantile nature of
the power-relationships informing the entire social edifice: Patronage was lucrative.
Men offered money in order to obtain what the king had to offer: offices (from the
chancellorship down), succession to estates, custody of land, wardship, and
marriage – or even nothing more concrete than the king's good will. All of these
were to be had at a price, and the price was negotiable[1]. According to the Book,
half the value of the country was in the hands of less than two hundred men. Power
and wealth were accumulating at the centre of the feudal state. Another power
structure still retained forms of patriarchal gender and age discriminations, A “Roll
of Ladies, Boys and Girls”, dating from the administration of Henry II (1154-1189),
mentions Lucy, the widowed Countess of Chester, who offered the King 1,500 marks
for the privilege of remaining single for five years. No wonder that at a time when
both marriage and being single were equally subject to taxation, we should find the
following comment in the Dialogue of the Exchequer (1170) by Richard FitzNeal,
Bishop of London and Treasurer of England: the power of princes fluctuates
according to the ebb and flow of their cash resources...

Obviously, such a cold-blooded scheme did not work a favourable impression

on those – the greatest numbers of the population – called upon to provide for their
betters. Therefore, the dominant classes worked it into a fiction: A sermon delivered
in the 1370 by Bishop Thomas Brinton of Rochester supplements the hierarchical
view of society with a more organic view of the interdependence of its estates. We
are all, he says, the mystical members of a single body, of which the head (or
heads) are kings, princes and prelates; the eyes are judges, wise men and true
counsellors; the ears are clergy; the tongue is good doctors. Then within the
midsection of the body, the right hand is composed of strenuous knights; the left
hand is composed of merchants and craftsmen; and the heart is citizens and
burgesses. Finally, peasants and workers are the feet which support the whole [2].
Once triggered, imagination was quick in producing other seductive images of the
organically compounded social body, giving everyone an impression of being
needed to fulfil some providential scheme: the kingdom as a well-trimmed garden
or as a well-run bee-hive, as we can read in a fragment of 1751 lines of alliterative
verse, composed under Henry IV (entitled Mum and the Sothsegger, by its first
editors, M. Day and R. Steele, 1936). Not only images but also literary forms and
conventions were inspired by this social outlook: dits de Fortune and De casibus
stories, which bemoaned changes in the social hierarchy (from high to low social
position) attributing them to the whims of Fortune, on the one hand, and, on the
other, estate satires and danse macabre, which presented a general picture of all
social estates, engaged in a vivid repartee, acting for a common purpose
(devotional or economic) or sharing the same metaphysical destiny (all being
subject to Death).

1066 was the beginning of a long period of French influence, during which the
native language was replaced by Latin in the theological and ecclesiastical
discourse and by French as the language of statecraft, civil record-keeping,
entertainment and schooling of the new aristocracy. Beyond everyday speech,
English was only employed in oral instruction that is in sermons or addresses from
the pulpit to a congregation that did not understand Latin. The native language was
thus deprived of the necessary exercise of accomodating new ideas occurring in
theology, politics, law etc. The influence of the dominant French culture was
reinforced by the Angevin conquest of 1153-4. Henry I (1100-1135), who had
succeeded to his brother, William II (1087-1100) had been left without an heir after
his son's death. His daughter, Empress Matilda (so called on account of her first
marriage to the Emperor of Germany) was married a second time to the much
younger Geoffrey Plantagenet (a nickname describing his coat of arms), Count of
Anjou. Their son, Henry, who married Eleanor of Aquitaine (previously married to
Louis VII of France) became King of England (Henry II, 1154-l189). From King John
(1199-1216), who succeeded to his brother, Richard I (Coeur de Lion, who had spent
most of his time crusading or on his domain in France), after getting rid of his
nephew Arthur, the legitimate heir to the throne as the son of an elder brother, the
English Royal House descended in straight line through Edward I (1272-l307), and
Edward II (1307-1327) to Edward III (1327-1377). The French properties of the
English kings and their claims to the crown of France were the cause of the one-
hundred-year- war between the two countries. The family policy of Edward III saw to
it that his numerous sons held in their power the entire kingdom: Edward, Prince of
Wales, who did not live to see the end of his father's long reign, Lionel, Duke of
Clarence, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Edmund, Duke of York. Apparently,
another son, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, was killed on his own
father's command, out of his partiality for Richard, Duke of Kent (the son of the
Prince of Wales, the valiant Black Prince), who became King Richard II (l377-l399).
With the usurpation of Richard by Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster (after
John's death), the fratricide War of the Roses began. The House of Clarence, united
in time through marriage ties to the dukedoms of York (having a white rose as its
emblem) and Gloucester, and the earldom of March launched a coalition against the
House of Lancaster (the red rose). After the successful reigns of Henry IV (1399-
1413), and Henry V (1413-1422), they finally managed to defeat the weak Henry VI
(1422-1461), and to put Edward of York on the throne (Edward IV, 1461-1483). The
cunning schemes of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, including the assassination of his
brother, George, Duke of Clarence, and of his nephew, Edward V (1483), won him
the throne in 1483. His defeat (in the famous battle of Bosworth, 1485) by Henry,
Earl of Richmond, (a descendant of Owen Tudor of Wales, married to the widow of
Henry V) marked the end of the war, as Henry's marriage to Elizabeth of York sealed
the peace between the two houses. Richard III was the last Plantagenet, the last of
the Angevin dynasty. Henry VII (1485-1509) founded the Tudor dynasty (Henry VIII,
Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth I), which saw England through the exceptionally
flourishing period of the Renaissance, and that meant, as anywhere else, the
assertion of the national spirit. But the French spirit had long been extinguished,
yielding to the native. In the middle of the fourteenth century, Henry, Duke of
Lancaster, wrote a devotional treatise (Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines), apologizing
for the quality of his Anglo-Norman French: par seo qu jeo suit engleis [3].
 The Anglo-Norman society may be said to have been a literate one, considering
that tens of thousands writs were produced, not only for learned people but for day-
to-day transactions as well; e.g. eight million charters confirmed the land ownership
of smallholders and peasants alone in the 13th century. Whereas in the Anglo-
Saxon period a seal had been only the King's privilege, each landowner was now
possessed of one. Although people were passing from an oral society to an
extended participation in literacy, literary compositions were still meant for an oral,
social enjoyment. Mixed assemblies of people would sit about one hearth (not only
in the gorgeous dining-halls of peers or prelates, but also under the modest roofs of
smaller owners and cultivators of land), listening to readings by private individuals
or performers of songs, ballads, romances, mummings, shows, interludes, moralities
etc. Even when such compositions were committed to writing, the manuscripts
remained in private ownership (sometimes multiplied and disseminated among the
patron's acquaintances). The fact was of great import, both in point of rhetoric (the
emphasis upon auditory effects and the visualizing potential of the artistic medium),
and in that of the manuscripts' chance of being known among a wider readership or
of survival. There was no such thing as the homogeneous discourse and the
unifying literary consciousness that collects at a certain time (Chaucer, Langland
and the Gawayne poet, although contemporaries, may not have known each other,
which resulted in their widely diverging discourses), and we may suspect that lots of
manuscripts have been lost, considering that a masterpiece like Sir Gawayne has
only come down to us thanks to the chance survival of one manuscript.

The literature of the entire period was controlled by the power discourse of the
dominant ideologies. The paradigms map the three traditional estates of medieval
society: the seigneurial, the spiritual, and the agricultural. Those constituting official
authority were the first two: the discourse of the church disseminating received
ideas (auctoritates) in hosts of homiletic, hortatory writings, and didactic poems,
and the discourse of the aristocracy, reifying the images they constructed of
themselves, codified as chivalry and courtly love (romances and lays). The
agricultural communities welcomed the homely tradition of the humorous fabliaux,
Arthurian legends, as well as the legends of the East (those of the Holy Rood
contained in the Jewish legends, the Book of Adam and the Book of Enoch, an Old
English version of Apollonius of Tyre wooing the king of Antioch's daughter by
solving a riddle narrated in Chap. 153 of Gesta Romanorum), Oriental stories of
magic and wizardry, which were brought to England by crusaders, and by warriors,
ecclesiastics and statesmen visiting the great abbeys (St. Alban). The crusades had
stirred an interest in the fabulous East which, alongside the institution of chivalry
and the mystic symbolism of the Church entered into the melting pot which
produced the modern romance (12th century).

All these discourses knew dynamic exchanges of their semantic energies,

literature being very far from autonomous at the time when English came in its own
right (thirteenth-fourteenth century). Education was largely responsible for
stimulating moral and religious anxiety, even in works of the imagination, created
for entertainment.
 By 1220 Oxford and Cambridge were established as seats of learning. They
taught as main subjects theology, philosophy, science, poetry, but also much
pastoral work: compendia of dogma and ethics, series of model sermons, improving
stories, saints' lives, paraphrases and explanations of the books of the Bible. The
hermeneutic work on the doubly-articulated language of the New Testament, the
structure of the sermons – the most widely-spread form of preaching – helped shape
an awareness of multi-layered discourse.

In his authoritative book on Medieval Imagination [4], Jacques Le Goff

comments on the double temporal structuring of an exemplum. On the one hand, in
order to grasp the interest of the listener/reader, the preacher passes off some
anecdote, brief narrative, for recent experience (audivi, vidi, memini): this is real,
this is no vain talk, it may happen to you any time. On the other, he produces a
diachronical narrative, looking back to official authorities (exempla, auctoritates,
rationes, quotes from the Scriptures) and forward to the end of the world (the time
of redemption) – that is, set in eschatological time. Finally he returns to the present
moment, trying to persuade his auditors into starting on their work of redemption
that very moment (hodie). The medieval discourse is hierarchical, just like the
social structure, or the heavenly hierarchy of God on his throne and his angelic
company of various degrees.

Northrop Frye, in his Theory of Symbols (Ethical Criticism), describes the

medieval four-level scheme of meanings in a hierarchical sequence, in which the
first steps are comparatively elementary and apprehension gets more subtle and
rarefied as one goes on. It is not a sequence of meanings, in fact, but of contexts or
relationships in which the whole work of literary art can be placed, each context
having its characteristic mythos (narrative) and ethos (characterization), as well as
its dianoia or meaning [5]. Frye's word for these contexts and relationships is
“phases”. Not only allegory but also framing devices produce independent layers of
meaning. In Chaucer, for instance, the prefatory phases or the closures usually
subvert the meaning of the framed narrative, which draws on some pre-existing
source, therefore we find rather improper the comparison of this structural
technique to that of Gothic architecture, where the various juxtaposed “panels”,
“masses” and “blocks” do not comment on one another [6].

Medieval Lyric

The linear perspective of a totalitarian society, as was that of the late Middle
Ages, streamlined writing practices, even if they were springing from different
sources: lay and religious, the seigneurial Castle and the dogmatic Church. In time,
they merged into a common tradition, with hybrid generic figures, like the errant
knight whose secret love is Virgin Mary (see poem 85 in the Harley 2253
manuscript, collected in Herefordshire and written in a timespan of about half a
century, between the late thirteenth and the early fourteenth centuries). The love-
quest, the traditional topic of the chanson d'aventure, is further purified from the
idealistic, non-marital love of the courtly lays, in order for the rider to “cast out
fleshly lust” and fuel the somber teachings about mortality delivered from the
pulpit:

Though bright and fair of face you be,

Decay shall fade your flowers.

For almost two centuries after the Norman Conquest, the vehicle of poetry was
Norman French or Latin. The male tradition is usually one of stern admonishing,
arduous praise, particularly of Virgin Mary, and of self-conscious pride in literary
achievement which served the higher purposes of devotion (see poet Richard's
eulogy of “the finest verses of our time”, in poem 74 of the same collection).
Famous is The Love Song of Friar Thomas de Hales, written around the year 1270 by
a Franciscan, the most liberal religious order which did not reject love of nature and
beauty or the secular art which could serve God's greater glory. Friar Thomas
undertakes to write “a lover's lay”, as a troubadour used to do, in the romance
tradition, yet sending forth a different message: let the lady forfeit worldly deceit
and vanity and betrothe herself to Christ in a convent. The following picture of the
knight-at-arms deceived by love and withering away like meadow grass may have
inspired Keats in his refurbishing of a French poem by Alain Chartier (1424), La
Belle Dame Sans Mercy:

The thanes who once were fierce and bold

Have gone like wind upon the gad;

Beneath the ground they moulder cold,

Like meadow grass which withers dead.

With its double scheme of worldly trivia pitted against a spiritual heaven, this
poem might also have lingered in T.S. Eliot's mind on writing his Love Song of Alfred
Prufrock.

As the vehicle of sacred learning in the Middle Ages, Latin must have sounded
like a firm anchorage for the vernacular. In the following example of Macaronic
poetry – verse written in two or more languages –, hymn and prayer combine to
produce a meditation on the Nativity as humanity's progress from destruction to
salvation through Mary, summed up in the key Latin words:
 Well he knows he is your Son.

Ventre quem portasti; whom you bore in your womb

Your prayers to him he will shun,

Parvum quem lactasti. whom as a baby you suckled

So kindly and so good he is

That he has brought us all to bliss

Superni of heaven

And shut for ever the foul abyss

Inferni of hell

Marie de France, whose twelve lais have been treasured in the Harley
manuscript, was probably a Plantagenet Princess and Abbess of Shaftesbury in the
late twelfth century. She puts forth no proud claims of authority and originality,
reserving for herself the modest role of interpreting and glossing what the ancients
“assez oscurrement dissaint”. Her poetry is, however, counter hegemonic, effecting
a reversal from estoire to conte, from the written tradition to the oral Breton lais,
from Latin to the vernacular, from masculine to feminine narration. As Eva Rosenn
says in The Sexual and Textual Politics of Marie's Poetics, she was privileging
marginality in all respects. In Lecheor, Chaitivel or Equitan, she multiplies the
narrative voices. Women produce stories, from different points of view, in a sort of
women's lai contest.

A more relaxed attitude, far from the strictly religious assumptions and
dogmas, can be seen in the miscellaneous secular poems of the time, for instance
in this poem from the Harley Manuscript about “The Man in the Moon”. Associated
with Cain, as the humanly shaped patch in the moon appears to be wearing thorns,
or with the man in Numbers XV, 32-36, stoned to death for gathering sticks on the
sabbath, this popular figure of the English folklore invites in this poem
commiseration rather than the abhorrence of evil. He is one of the wretched of the
earth, impoverished by his bundle of sticks, frozen and paralysed with fear for
having trespassed property or for some other transgression of the law („half
crippled with dread”) The speaker takes pity on him and imagines a humorous
scene in the homely country life, which might release the Man in the Moon from his
pledge to the bailiff:

Your pledge may be taken, but bring home your boughs:

Put your other foot forward and stride out free:

 We'll pay host to the bailiff here in the house,

And make him at ease in the highest degree.

We'll give him strong drink till his spirits rouse;

Our housewife will pleasantly sit on his knee,

And when he's as drunk as a drowning mouse,

We'll take back the pledge from the bailiff, you'll see.

The Man gives no reply, as he is imprisoned in his fear of authority, like the
sluggish Man in the Moon, choosing wrong idols and masters in Shakespeare's
Tempest, instead of the true redeemer.

As the young aristocrats enjoyed private tutorship, the students of Oxford and
Cambridge were usually middle class – sons of the gentry, burgesses, priests,
clerks. There is a liberal tradition in medieval verse, for instance in the political
poems produced in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Song of the Battle
of Lewes (1264) is antimonarchic and antiabsolutist, supporting the cause of Simon
de Montfort, whose endeavours finally led to Parliament, which limited the king's
power. On the Death of Edward III is a patriotic poem, allegorizing the state as a
ship bereft, after the powerful king's death, of its rudder. The war with France had
created new wealth and had shifted the balance of power. Next to the king, who
had secured the whole nation's loyalty, is placed the House of Commons, while the
Lords is as “out of sight and out of mind” as the country's glory under Edward III,
now that he is dead:

The Commons, by the cross on high,

I liken to the vessel's mast,

Who with their wealth and property

Maintained the war from first to last.

By the end of the thirteenth century the military suppression of the Albigensian
and Waldensian heresies had silenced the more unorthodox voices, while the
Provencal royal house of the cult of woman, of love and gallantry had symbolically
collapsed. It was the decay of the baronial class, on account of the loss of labour
caused by the Black Death (1348) that had allowed of the rise of the bourgeoisie
and of a renewed confidential tone among the “Commons” in the next century.

In the late fourteenth century subversion takes the form of social satire
(Langland, Chaucer), parody of courtly romances (Chaucer), and the transformation
of the hegemonic discourses themselves, which are now appropriated by merchants
and farmers. The romance, for instance, is rendered familiar, centred on the home,
thematizing the common duties of the marital couple, united in a more egalitarian
domestic bond (see the Franklin's romance in The Canterbury Tales).

Deceptively democratic is the argumentative or debate tradition of the Middle

Ages, which, in fact, served the official code of values. The Thrush and the
Nightingale is a debate poem, opposing the Thrush's misogyny to the Nightingale's
defence of women.

Each of them brings in arguments for and against woman's worth, and it is the
Nightingale who makes her point by bringing up the issue of Mary who had washed
away Eve's fault.

The Owl and the Nightingale, a poem in the vernacular from the second half of
the thirteenth century, in French octosyllabics (one of the earliest examples of the
shift from alliterative to regular metre), combines the tradition of the bestiary, in
which birds and animals are endowed with moral qualities (ethos), with that of the
French débat. The dialogue between the two birds reads on a second, allegorical
level, as a dispute between a disciple of Eros and a didactic, patronizing priest.

A dialogical form (the popular and the theological) may be identified in a

dream-vision allegory, Piers Plowman, whose three surviving versions have been
recently dated in the l370s. Of the author of the poem, William Langland, we only
know what the poem tells us: that he was born in the Midlands, was educated at the
Benedictine school at Malvern passing afterwards to London, where he dedicated
himself to a professional writer's career. Written in the popular tradition of the
alliterative verse, the poem imposes upon us its theological design through a
characteristically medieval handling of allegory and prologue framing.

In the prologue, the author tells of his falling asleep and dreaming that he
beheld a “field full of folk”, going about their daily work, within the space between
the Tower of Truth and the Valley of Evil (Death). The setting is at once local and
universal, descriptive and allegorical, defining humanity as engaged in a perilous
pilgrimage, leading to either doom or salvation. The dreamer – who is dressed like
a shepherd, passing judgement on what he sees like a priest or Christ, who are
Shepherd figures, blends his account of a society plagued by deceiving friars,
merchants and pardoners with a pageant of allegorical figures, which is a comment
on the former: Falsehood and his companion, Lady Mead (Reward of Bribary),
surrounded by Flattery, Simony, Guile and other sins, more or less deadly. The
poem is divided into sections of unequal length, called “passus”, while,
thematically, it falls into two parts: Visio of Piers Plowman, which is a satire of social
sins and an exhortation to cure them, and Vita of Piers, which shows three forms of
the good life, sought under the names of Do-Well, Do-Bet, and Do-Best. These
blessed states invite a reading on three levels: literal, moral, and anagogic. Do-Well
means living a good life, in accordance with the precepts of the Church, and the
practice of Charity – the supreme Christian virtue. Do-Bet is the state which finds its
consummation in active religious commitment: preaching to the people. Do-Best is
humanity which, having grasped the essence of Christianity is reformed in its spirit,
and merges with Christ. Piers, the busy and dilligent farmer, assumes the task of
assisting the seven Deadly Sins on their way to repentance (Passus V). Their
dramatic monologues render them exceptionally vivid, through the details of
physical appearance, manners, dress, habits etc. The “visio” of Sloth, for instance,
impersonated by an idle priest, looking dirty, shabbily dressed, in love with good
food and other worldly delights, illiterate and forgetful of his duty makes us quite
oblivious of the allegorical convention. The next metamorphoses of Piers place him
within the contexts of the Christian ethos. On one occasion, when the narrator falls
asleep again, he has a vision of Chrystes passion and penaunce. The “old folks” are
now those who have been redeemed through the Crucifixion, singing Gloria laus and
osanna. And who should show up, in a resplendent show, local and universal,
medieval and mythic, but Piers himself ? Langland sees him at the climactic point of
medieval ceremony, like a knight who comes to be dubbed, “without spurs or
spear”, but also “semblable to the Samaritan”, and, through a third expansion of
the allegorical design, barefooted on an ass – a Christ figure. The authoritative
Derek Traversi is mostly aptly describing the allegorical design in its full medieval
form (implying) the capacity to see a situation simultaneously under different
aspects, each independent and existing on its own level, in its own right, but at the
same time forming part of a transcendent order in relation to which alone its
complete meaning is to be ascertained[7].

At the end of a mid-fifteenth-century manuscript of Piers Plowman, containing

only the first four passus, there is a fragment of 93 lines[8], Mum, Sothsegger (Shut
up, Truth-teller), which was edited by W.W. Skeat as Richard the Redeless and
attributed by him to Langland. Apparently it was composed in the last year of
Richard's rule, referring to his misdemeanour, under the influence of unworthy royal
favourites, and making a splendid allegory of the jewels in the crown as the
desirable virtues in a king (a meaning mediated by the metaphysical symbolism of
gems in the Revelation). The narrative persona falls asleep and comes to an idyllic
garden, with fruit coveted by men, children and ladies alike. The gardener explains
to him how he keeps the garden free from weeds and caterpillars. The garden is an
allegory of Eden, the earthly Paradise which can be regained, if only man will allow
the Sothsegger in his heart to speak the truth.

John Burrow Longman included in his 1977 anthology of English Verse. 1300-
1500 a fragment from a later manuscript, dealing with the government under Henry
IV, telling the king another cautionary tale on the necessity for the king to be told
the truth. The manner of freely mixing up characters in flesh and blood (the
Sothsegger) and allegorical embodiments of abstract qualities (Mum) is indeed
characteristic of Langland. The end, with the narrator waking up and offering the
king a “bag of writings” which will tell him the truth about his subjects is
reminiscent of the Welsh bag of poetry (Craneskin) [9]. The anagogic meaning is
pointed out by a Latin sidenote quoting Matthew 5:10 (Blessed are they that suffer
persecution for justice' sake). This is the Sothsegger who is sitting anointing his
wounds, while Mum, the principle of keeping one's mouth shut, is having a great
time at a mayor's banquet. The narrator, who is so grieved at Mum being such a
master among men of good that he falls in a swoon, dreams of the blooming garden
and the perfectly-run bee-hive as allegories of a good state and of Eden.

References:

[1] The Oxford History of Britain, edited by Kenneth O. Morgan. Vol, II, The Middle Ages, by
John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffith, Oxford, 1988, p. 45

[2] Paul Strohm, The Social and Literary Scene in England, in Chaucer, edited by Piero
Boitani & Jill Mann, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 2

[3] Ibidem, p. 6

[4] Jacques Le Goff, Imaginarul medieval, Editura Meridiane, 1991, pp. 147-151

[5] Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton University Press, 1957, pp. 71-78

[6] Barry Windeatt, Literary structures in Chaucer, in Chaucer, Op, cit., p. 196

[7] Derek Traversi, Langland's Piers Plowman in the Penguin Guide to English Literature,
The Age of Chaucer, Penguin 1981, p. 133

[8] See Colin Wilcockson, Mum and the Sothsegger in The Review of English Studies, May
1995.

[9] Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Faber & Faber, 1992, pp.
458-460.

Medieval Epic

The international codes of chivalry and love in the Middle Ages generated a
metamorphic genre, gradually emerging through translations, adaptations and
intercultural contacts established mainly through the crusaders who tapped the romantic
imagination of Eastern fables and magic. The romances – a term derived from the Old
French “mettre en romanz”, meaning to translate into the vernacular French –, were the
creation, in Norman-French, of the French feudal aristocracy of the twelfth century. The
Angevin court, transplanted, through Henry II Plantangenet and his wife, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, to England in mid century, was the cradle of medieval romance, beginning
with translations and adaptations of Latin epics and chronicles, to which chronicles of
royal genealogies – of the British rulers, from the legendary Brutus, Aeneas's grandson,
or of the Norman House (Robert Wace, Roman de Brut and Roman de Rou) – were
further contributed in order to connect the “matter of Britain” to the “matter of Rome”,
and secure a sort of dynastic, heroic and imperial legitimation. Eleanor, whose
grandfather, Guillaume IX of Aquitaine had been the first troubadour, sponsored the
creation of an elite culture centred on the imagined community, flattering aristocratic
vanity, of chivalrous knights and their courtly ladies, engaged in what became an
international and normative erotic discourse, for which Gaston Paris coined the term
“amour courtois” in 1883. The Celtic tradition, driven underground by the Anglo-Saxon
conquest in the southern main island, was revived, merging with the Provencal ideas of
chivalry and idealistic love, and enriched with stories of Oriental magic, or the
Mozarabic passion of love-lyrics and fables imported from the Middle East. Brian Stone
(Introduction to Medieval English Verse, Penguin Books, 1971) mentions two more
possible sources: the religion of love in Ovid's Ars Amatoria and the figure of a female
character on fire, in Norse and Icelandic saga, a femme fatale imposing service to her
menfolk through passion. Whatever the inspiration, the myth worked its way into the real
world. The fits of bravery performed by a knight in the service of a lady, his chivalrous
conduct and accomplishments, the exercise of arms earned him points in an
international top of medieval knighthood as sportsmen score points today in world
rankings.

For instance, a certain Sir Giles d'Argentine was considered the third best knight in
Christendom. Another interesting story is that of William Marmion, who received a
golden helmet from his lady, with the imposition that he would wear it on some perilous
adventure. He set out for Norham castle, on the Scotish border, where he engaged the
garrison in a battle with the Scots which almost cost him his life....

In the 1160s Chretien de Troyes threw various elements of the legend of King
Arthur and his Round Table into a mixing pot, cooking the first Arthurian romance, Erec
et Enide.

The Welsh king Arthur was the leader of the British Celts in their defence against
the Anglo-Saxon invaders. The historical Arthur, who in the Battle of Badon (on his
shoulder, appears in a few Welsh poems, in a Welsh prose tale, in the eighth of his
twelve against the English) in 516 put the enemy to flight “with great slaughter”, aided
by the image of Virgin Mary (or of Christ) which he was carrying two Latin chronicles
compiled in Wales ( Nennius's Historia Britonum, and De Excidio et Conquestu
Britanniae by Gildas) and in Annales Cambriae. As Arthur's body could not be found,
he was believed to be living on, in fabled Avelon, wherefrom he would come again to
rescue his people. It was Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. 1154) with his Historia regnum
Britoniae that opened Arthur's career as European hero of romance, known as far as
Italy and Greece. He concocted a history of Britain going back to a legendary Brutus, a
grandson of Aeneas, who led a group of Trojans to Britain (so named after him). Arthur
was born out of the union of a mortal (Ygraine) and a spirit (Utter Pendragon) disguised
as her absentee lord, and assisted by the magic of the wizard Merlin. Robert Wace's
Roman de Brut (towards 1155), drawing on Monmouth and dressed as a metrical
romance, introduced Arthur to France. He invented the Round Table, ordered by Arthur
in order to settle all disputes about precedence among his knights. It is the symbol of an
active code of chivalry, with “companionship”, understood as sharing of values, as the
main component.

Layamon, a priest who lived near the Welsh border, produced his own Brut in 1205
as the first articulate utterance in the vernacular after the Norman conquest. Other
imaginative elements were added to round up the Arthur story: his coming into the
world, assisted and blessed by elves, who bestowed upon him the necessary gifts for
him to become a mighty king in Camelot, Excalibur, his magic sword, Argante (Morgan)
Le Fay, Arthur's half-sister, who takes him to enchanted Avelon, and heals his wounds,
so that he may come back to his people, Arthur's prophetic dream about his death at the
hands of his treacherous nephew, Mordred, a.o. Layamon was the one who introduced
the rhymed couplet (lines rhyming in pairs) into the English verse, using it alongside
the old Anglo-Saxon alliterative metre. Other characters are brought onto the Arthurian
stage, after the European pilgrimage, some contributed by Chretien de Troyes:Tristram,
Isolde the Beautiful, Isolde of the White Hands, Lancelot, Perceval. New elements of
wonder are added: the Grail (a cup in which John of Arimathea collected the blood that
flowed from Christ's wounds). The original seeker of the Grail was Gawayne, later
superseded by Lancelot, who failed on account of his adulterous relationship with
Arthur's wife, Guinevere. It was the pure Perceval who finally proved successful in the
Grail quest, since, in a Christian world, it is not physical strength but moral integrity that
is put to the test. The original Celtic tales are metamorphosed into French romances of
courtliness and chivalry, having inscribed in them the spirit of the troubadours and
trouveres. The chivalric tradition of courtly love is described by David Aers [10] as a
literature of desire, as it presented a radical alternative to the real organization of Eros
and marriage in medieval society. Female patronesses, especially Eleanor of Aquitaine
and her company, were the great image-makers of the nascent love romance of the
Middle Ages, which they subsequently brought to England. It was to Eleanor and Henry
II that Marie de France dedicated her collection of lais, and it was Eleanor's daughter by
King Louis VII, Countess Marie de Champagne, that gave Chretien de Troyes the
subject for his Lancelot. If the veil of romance is torn, the real relationships present an
inverted show: marriages (sometimes to fourteen-year-old bridegrooms, like Henry
Plantagenet, or to eight-year-old brides, like the second French wife of Richard II) were
merely land transactions. On being married, a woman lost all her possessions,
undergoing a sort of civil death. She remained as a childbearing appendage to the land,
whom nobody consulted for an opinion, and who was the target of the woman-
demonizing propaganda sponsored by the church. Women found in this escapist
literature a compensation for the social regard that listed them with children and boys,
or with land possessions and other goods of their lords, and we may form an idea of its
appeal by going through the booklists bequeathed by Isabella of France to her son,
Edward III, and passed on to Richard II: French books, including a Brut, deeds of
Arthur, and Tristan and Isolde, copies of Aimeri de Narbonne, a Romance de la Rose
and a Romance de Perciuall & Gawyn. Aussi de quelle passion les femmes devaint-
elles lire ces romans de la Table Ronde ! quelles splendides et ravissantes visions
devaint-ils faire passer dans ces faibles cervelles troublées, et combien de pauvres
Bovary purent-ils faire ! [11] This day-dreaming seems to have sprung from a social
phenomenon, though. The personal devotion of the knight to his overlord was extended
to his lady, who represented him, when he was away to war or on a crusading
expedition. One should not forget, however, that, on such occasions, the lord locked up
his wife before his departure, like any other valuable possession. The worshipper,
whose poetic gift enabled him to extol his lady's beauty in verse (troubadours,
connected with the baronial courts of the Southern provinces of France) professed to be
living for her approval alone, to owe her what was best in him. As his love was an
absolute, removed from any vulgar interest in reward or satisfaction, he was
worshipping her from afar, ready to risk his life to protect her, ready for any sacrifice or
humiliation to please her will. Amour courtois was an extramarital tie between man and
woman and a form of love by the book. Under the patronage of Eleanor of Aquitaine, a
Latin book was actually written by a priest, Andreas Capellanus, which laid down the
rules of the new system of love (c. 1180). As it was incompatible with marriage, the
expensive game of love was the strict prerogative of the nobility, and it found expression
in stories (either metrical or prose narratives) called “romances”, because they were
composed in a post-classical Romance vernacular. Very soon, however, the term
assumed the sense of fantasy in a narrative form, having love for its theme and knights
and ladies for its characters. The motifs of the Celtic tales which furnished the materia
prima of the romances composed in Central and Northern France, and later in other
parts of Europe as well, were, among others, the union of a mortal with an otherworldly
being (Arthur) the boy born to be a king, exiled, growing up in a poor man's hut and in
the end returning to claim his rights (Sir Percevall of Galles, royal infants in
Shakespeare's romances), the contest between a knight and the keeper of an
otherworldly castle (Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight). It was only natural that on
Arthur's homecoming, with a Welsh poet's assistance (Layamon's), the original
symbolism of these motifs should be revived. This happened in a jewel of medieval
romance, composed in alliterative metre, preserved in a manuscript dating from the end
of the fourteenth century, which also contains other three poems deploying the
paradigm of chivalric virtues: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience. The story is a test case,
whose purpose certainly reaches beyond Morgan’s wish to warn Guinevere and the
other ladies and knights of the dangers of adultery. On a New Year's Eve, Arthur and
his knights receive a challenge to an exchange of blows from an odd knight dressed in
green, mounted on a green horse. Gawayne is allowed to answer the challenge, and he
severs the knight's head with one single blow. The knight picks up his head, which
invites his antagonist to meet him at the Green Chapel next New Year's morning. One
year later, about Christmas time, Gawayne, who is on his way to the Chapel on a dreary
winter weather, finds lodging with the owner of a castle, who puts his virtue to the test:
he will go hunting each day, and in the evening they will exchange what they have
received during the day. Gawayne gladly exchanges the kisses he has received from
his host's wife, nobly resisting her temptations, while keeping to himself a green garland
which she says may preserve him from harm (obviously in view of his impending
encounter with the Green Knight). The three blows he receives from his antagonist – no
other than his host – cause him only a slight wound, as a punishment for having
preserved the lace. However, the Knight has to admit to Gawayne having passed the
test of virtue: as pearls are of more price than white peas, so is Gawayne of more price
than other gay knights. On his return, the ladies and knights of the Round Table agree
to wear a bright green lace as a badge of honour. As it becomes a member of Christian
knighthood, Gawayne modestly confesses to his cowardice and greed, but that, of
course, is only the expected exercise in humility. By the end of the manuscript is found
the legend of the Order of the Garter, founded about the year 1345, which may suggest
a French or Norman source: honi soit qui mal (y) penc. For all that, the world of the
poem is characteristically native. The timing – New Year's Eve – would point to the
Celtic origin of the knight and his otherworldly antagonist, who were initially distinct
phases of one and the same god: the old and the young sky-god, the old and the new
year. In our opinion, the symbolism of the poem is the antagonism between nature and
the human soul. The time of rejuvenescence, the severed head that resumes its life, like
a new nature cycle, the green colour are suggestive of fertility rites. Christianity means
nature spiritually transformed: the green of grass made into a chapel, the soul put to the
test, the need for a spiritual shelter in the midst of the raging elements (which is also a
seat of civilization, the narrator taking much delight in detailing elements of medieval
architecture). The metrical unit is a stock of twelve to thirty-eight alliterative lines, with
four stressed syllables in each and a variable number of unstressed syllables, followed
by a “bob” (a short line of two syllables) leading to a “wheel” of four short lines. The
periodic verse contraction and dilation is in keeping with the rhythmic course of nature
or man's progress from sin to redemption:

O'er a mound on the morrow he merrily rides

into a forest full deep and wondrously wild:

high hills on each side and holt-woods beneath,

with huge hoary oaks, a hundred together;

hazel and hawthorn hung clustering there,

with rough ragged moss o'ergrown all around;

unblithe, on bare twigs, sang many a bird,

piteously piping for pain of the cold.

Under them Gawayne on Gringolet glideth,

through marsh and through mire, a mortal full lonesome,

cumbered with care, lest ne'er he should come

to that Sire's service, who on that same night

was born of a bride to vanquish our bale.

Wherefore sighing he said: “I beseech Thee, o Lord,

and Mary, thou mildest mother so dear !

some homestead, where holily I may hear mass

 and matins to-morrow, full meekly I ask!

thereto promptly I pray, pater, ave,

and creed.”

He on his prayer,

And cried for each misdeed;

He crossed him ofttimes there,

And said: “Christ's cross me speed !”

So poised between Christian piety, chivalric idealism and vulnerability, even if only
temporary, to temptation, between his dedication to the bonds of knighthood and his all
too human desire to secure some protection in view of his encounter with Bertilak,
Gawain has lost, in this late medieval romance, some of his earlier sternness as
nephew (the good one, unlike Mordred, the traitor) and champion of king Arthur, the
exemplary figure of a masculine agenda of tournaments, sieges and narcissistic rivalry,
keeping aloof from consuming erotic passion or religious commitments. It is he who, in
Chretien's Yvain, frees Arthur from womanish snares, who, in other romances, is
merciless towards the unfaithful Guinevere, whose ascetic solitude of knighthood is
motivated by distrust of female character (in the dogmatic thirteenth century an anti-
matrimonial satire currently reproduced in university circles turned on the Gawain figure
and status as chivalric hero, whose fighting left him no time for a settled union. [12].

Chaucer's parody of the romance tradition in his unfinished tale of Sir Topaz, which
exasperates his middle class audience of pilgrims, in anticipation of Cervantes's
exploration of the untimely in connection with discoursive fashions, signalled the “time
out” for the paradigmatic textuality of the medieval aristocracy. By the second half of the
fifteenth century the time had come for a final recapitulation of a century-long narrative
tradition. This was done by Thomas Malory, a retainer of Richard Beauchamp, earl of
Warwick, whose Works, finished in 1469, was partly the fruit of his imprisonments for
turbulent acts and for attracting upon himself the dissatisfaction of King Edward IV. The
war with France, which had been raving for a century, represented a masculine
enterprise, an affair of bonded men depending upon loyalty, fidelity and skilful use of
arms. As Sheila Fisher remarks in “Women and men in late medieval English romance”
(The Cambridge Companion to English Romance, Op. cit., pp. 150-164), in Malory's
refurbishing of the Arthurian legends, women are marginalized and silenced. They are
often exchanged (Lancelot returns Guinevere to Arthur at the Pope's command, in “The
Vengeance of Gawain”) in order to ciment political alliances or to stregthen dynasties,
the orders of chivalry and aristocratic families. The revelation of Guinevere's infidelity
causes huge dissentions between Arthur's knights, a fact which wrings from the king the
following confession:
 And much more I am sorier for my good knights' loss than for the loss of my fair
queen; for queens I might have now, but such a fellowship of good knights shall never
be together in no company.

A statement enforced by Guinevere's whimsical, fickle and intriguing character.

Malory's Morte Darthur was printed by Caxton in 1483, the printer recommending it
as a book which, through the “depiction of acts of humanity, gentleness and chivalries”,
can bring the reader to “good fame and renown”. The idealization of unity and
wholeness in his view of the Round Table fellowship supersedes the interest in
individuality (overweighing in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes). “Fellowship” meant
much more than “companionship”: it incorporated a whole code, an active order of
chivalry that bound the knights together in the name of the “endless knot” (pentangle) of
charity, loyalty, fellowship, cleanness and courtesy.

Medieval romances entered the thesaurus of the world's mythopoetic tradition,

whose magic did not fade with time. The Victorian poets appealed to them in order to
convey a new ideology. For instance, William Morris, turning the tables in Guenevere's
favour in his celebrated Defence of Guenevere. Her voice is only heard, and her
unrelentless persecutors (Gawain, above all) are exposed for cruel, unnatural and
incomprehensive judges.

At other times, the original symbolism is used as the underlying code of a new
work of art. For instance, Floire et Blancheflor, a romance of star-crossed lovers and of
religious conversion, was enfolded within a contemporary romance, set in New York.
The protagonist is a professor teaching medieval literature, whose wife is murdered in a
terroristic act of fanatic hate of the elite, induced by the irresponsible host of a radio
phone-in item: The Fisher King, directed by Terry Gilliam. Crazed by the event, he will
take refuge into the world of idealistic love as the knight of Blancheflor, in whose name
he will convert the broadcasting man to a more humane and ethical life.

A knowledge of the original symbolism can serve both the production and the
enjoyment of such culturally dense works of art.

Geoffrey Chaucer has long ceased to be canonized as simply an augural figure in

the history of English literature; he is now apprehended as a poet of genius, extended
learning and exceptional formal refinement and complexity. Terms like “unreliable
narrator”, “dialogical form”, “constructed contexts”,” interpolation by commentary”,
“handling of juxtaposition and framing devices”, “art of context”, “contextualizing
received materials”, “consciousness of historical distance” construct Chaucer against a
background of twentieth-century discourse. The deconstructive approaches laying bare
the author's own deconstructive handling of traditional literary forms cropped up already
in the mid-eighties.

Apart from being the first major poet who drew on the Continental tradition of
metrical poetry, Chaucer also differed from his contemporaries in creating dialogical
forms, in which the discourses of authority – either of the church or of chivalry – are
inscribed only to be subverted, through subtle rhetorical strategies. The superimposed
framing discourses usually have the effect of disconnecting the signifying batteries of
the framed material, subverting and deflecting their meaning. His work is a summary of
medieval literary forms, themes and motifs, which look like a gilded monument on which
Chaucer composed an epitaph rather than as the nurturing foundation of what he
himself had to say. We shall give only an example here of the way in which what the
Parson asserts in his concluding tale to the Canterbury collection is denied through the
subverting function of rhetoric. The tale is a sermon, meant to persuade the listeners
into shunning the Seven Deadly Sins and suppressing the body and all worldly delight,
in view of redemption. If persuasion is what the parson is after, his choice of rhetoric is
mostly unfortunate. He employs, as is the custom in sermons, a quote from the Bible
(Jeremiah 6:16) which, through the connotations and sonorities of its alien Latin words
presses home an uncomfortable feeling of the body being frozen or congealed: State
super vias et interrogate de viis antiquis que sit via bona; et ambulate in ea, et invenetis
refrigerium animabus vestris. The respective passage, entitled Israel Rejects God's
Way, expresses God's wrath with Israel for the nation's oppression of others, urging
them to return to the old piety, the good way: Ask for the ancient paths and where the
best road is. Walk on it and you will live in peace. As the story-telling starts with a pagan
tale, which might stand for the “old way”, and as the Wife of Bath has heartily advocated
the satisfaction of desires, as it was God himself that created the body, the reader is
prepared to interpret the precept in a sense contrary to the parson's intention: that the
new ways of Christianity, as different from the pagan ones, oppress human nature,
suppress the healthy life of the body. By way of a conclusion, the parson makes one
more unfortunate choice of a trope: that of organic growth in the tree image, as well as
of a triad of heat, satisfaction and germination to refer to the victory of abstract
religious concepts over the extinguished life of the body: the root of the tree of
Penitence is contrition, the branches and the leaves are confession, the fruit,
satisfaction, the seed, grace and the heat in that seed, the Love of God.This splendid
piece of deconstruction might have served Paul de Man in his Allegories of Reading
(Yale University Press, 1979) as well as the Figural Language in Rousseau, Rilke,
Nietzsche and Proust. The strategy is so subtle that the tale is generally misunderstood
for a boring sermonizing piece and left out in selective editions of The Canterbury
Tales.

The distance between the writer's social descent (wealthy middling class) and the
world into which he moved (appointed to the House of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, later
admitted to that of John of Gaunt, as his brother-in-law, and even as valettus to King
Edward III) may have been responsible for his ambiguous oscillation between reverence
and slight. Even his career – between diplomatic mission on behalf of royalty and the
successful management of public works and trade policy – maintained him on the
threshold towards a feudal order challenged by civil wars, the peasants' uprising and the
increasing power of the moneyed burgesses. What his two journeys to Northern Italy
(1372 and 1378) revealed to him was not only the dependence of the crowned heads of
Europe on the merchant-bankers of the Italian city-states – which certainly meant a long
way off from the power relations that had dictated the writing of the Domesady Book –
but also the new artistic vision that had hurled the potentates of the day into hell while
building up on it a Purgatorio of the most famous artists in Europe.The suspicion that
the poet might be il miglior fabro when competing with the makers of history would have
been lurking in the mind of Chaucer on bringing back to England works by Dante,
Boccaccio, Petrarch. The fact is his works effect a deconstruction of history as
transcendental teleology, and of the author as occupying a transcendent position in
relation to his writing. When drawing on ancient events or characters, Chaucer no
longer assumes the existence of a universal human nature or of a providential scheme
of historical development. He is well aware of historical distance, of changing
conventions and institutions, of the constitutive and constructive frames which mediate
our appropriation of past events. The generic model assumed by Langland in his satire
on contemporary social evils (the canker of flattery and bribery perverting all social
classes, including royalty), is the revealed word of the Bible, with himself a Moses-
shepherd figure, and with his allegorical cast of characters set in an eschatological
script. With Chaucer there is a significant mutation from (sacred) history to a series of
discourses, to a generalized textuality inscribing differences in beliefs, values, manners,
behaviour from one age to another. Instead of revelation and self-identification (with
Moses, with God through the revealed word, in dreams of supernatural origin, when the
word of God may be heard, of Piers with Christ etc.), there is the production of a new
text through differentiation from those of old: Chaucer will select, or leave out,
transform through his own imperfect experience, urge the reader to add from his own,
supposedly richer. His authorial activity is one of reinscription and also a limited one: if
the reader is interested in the war deeds of Troilus, let him go to Homer and other texts,
for his “approach” is confined to the love-story, and impaired by an inadequate personal
acquaintance with the subject... The dream-vision, a device meant to construct and
augment devotional pieties, deconstructs the reality of the dream into literary
convention. In The House of Fame, the narration of the dream follows a Proem – a
classical introductory set piece, which is an exposition of the subject of a literary work.
The mystical experience is deconstructed into a writing scene, and the art of narrative
is made part of the subject, the author inculpating the reader with his authorial choices,
preferences and anxieties, mainly about his moral responsibility. The author constructs
his mask of a porous ego, of rather poor intellect, tedious and given to apologies and
retractions, presenting himself as biased and unreliable.

Chaucer's voice is first heard in disguise: as the translator of a fragment from that
epitome of medieval Chivalry and romance, cast in a dream vision and allegorizing love
as a knight's quest of the rose: Le Roman de la Rose, started by Guillaume de Lorris in
1237 and finished by Jean de Meung about 1277. The octosyllabic couplet (lines of
eight syllables rhyming in pairs) is used soon after in an original work: the Book of the
Duchess. Drawing on the tradition of the dits amoureux and dits de Fortune, developed,
among others, by Guillaume de Machaut (Le Jugement du Roy de Behaigne and
Remčde de Fortune), Jean de Froissart and Eustache Deschamps, the book is an elegy
on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the first wife of John of Gaunt. The lament
extolling her, uttered by her husband, the Black Knight, emerges in a dialogical form, as
the dream-scene is rendered by a narrator of middling intelligence who can hardly take
in the Knight's high-flown rhetoric. The traditional motifs and conventions too are
significantly modified. The origin of the Book is in a dream but the dream has been
induced by the reading of a book in which a dream is said to have come true. In other
words, the narrator does not lay a more serious claim to the truth of his dream than that
of any story-making. His dream may be said to come true, as he sits down to write it
down. The text is thereby made to reflect back upon its own making. As for the Fortuna
labilis motif, it is troped as a beautiful but deceiving female figure, a seductress as well
as a destroyer. Chaucer's departure from Boethius or from Machaut is a very important
one, Fortune being further troped as the Knight's chess-mate. She wins because she
cheats, while the Knight loses because he does not possess Pithagora’s mathematical
tricks. The remedy for Fortune's calamities is not a virtuous life with hope in a reward
beyond (as in Machaut) but a good knowledge of mathematics. A transcendental
rapport is thus redeployed on a human, desecrated level, and metaphysical
determinism boils down to a mathematical contest. The rigid, all-inclusive value system
of the Middle Ages breaks up into an ethical dispersal of individual truths, the supreme
good embodied by the duchess in her life having been her ability to understand
someone else's motivation. Absolute standards tend to disappear.

Chaucer's creative developments crop up in versification as well, the

synchronization with European metres being his own recent achievement. In the
Parliament of Fowles and in Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer creates the rhyme royal
(seven-line stanzas, rhyming ababbcc), out of the Boccaccian ottava (eight-line stanzas
of hendecassyllabic – eleven-syllable-line – verse forms, rhyming abababcc).

The Parliament of Fowles combines the bestiary and the dream vision in a parody
of the former and the author's particularization of the latter.

Chaucer's description of the dream machinery resembles what Freud was to call
later “condensation” and “displacement”. A hunter at rest will dream of the woods, a rich
man, of more gold, a sick man, of a banquet, a lover, that he has won the object of his
desire. The dream projections of subconscious desires fills in a table of invariants, a
taxonomical chain, that is they no longer reside in the phenomenal field of an
otherworldly agency, or of chance and haphazard. The dream is displaced from the
origin by the act of reading about dreams. As the narrator says, books will crop up from
books of old, just as new harvests will be nourished by the same ancient soil. The text is
generated from an abyss of the dream-figure rather than framed by a dream-narrative:
The poet's dream is induced by his reading of Scipio (according to Macrobius, the
commentator of Scipio's Dream by Cicero, whom Chaucer takes for the real author)
who, in his turn, dreamed of his grandfather prophesying his victory over Catharge – in
fact, his own appetite.

As for the dream-bestiary, the narrator tells of the birds flocking on a St.
Valentine's Day and chattering like humans in a real parliament. The topic of debate is
courtly love. Obviously, the birds of the higher order (the birds of prey, representing the
aristocracy) support the code laid down by Andreas Capellanus, prophesying loyalty to
the death, unicity of commitment and unflinching devotion, even if unrequited, while the
fowls feeding on corn (the peasantry) subject love to a market-value negotiation: If she
won't love him, let him love another.

Chaucer enlarges more upon the nature of dreams in The House of Fame. Actual
dreams, with their fundamental ambiguity, cannot be adequately translated into the
language of the body (I, Proem, 45-50), which Chaucer never forfeits for the sake of
some transcendental experience. His dream theory owes more to Galen and
Hippocrates, quoted in The Book of the Duchess, than to St. Augustine's and Pope
Gregory's theological works.

Dante's dream of an eagle carrying him up into the heavens in the second cantica
of his Commedia is not the only element inviting a comparison between Chaucer's
House of Fame (octosyllabic couplets) and the Divine Comedy. Similar are also the
tripartite structure, the journey to another world, the supernatural guide. Yet it is
differences that really count. Dante is guided by Beatrice (a figure of Theology) to Love
of God. The garrulous Eagle, a figure of Philosophy, tells Chaucer, quoting Aristotle,
that every thing has its allotted place in the world, towards which it naturally tends.
Therefore, he will carry the plump body of the self-deprecatory narrator, complaining
about his weight, to the House of Fame. Whereas Dante's journey ends up in revelation,
Chaucer has no access to the ultimate revelations on love of some higher authority that
never shows up. All he knows of love is his experience of reading the love story of
Dido and Aeneas. The implicit question would be, how could Dante fail to recognize the
purpose of his journey in its very beginning with Virgil, the literary founder of Rome ?
The temple of art is an artizan's work: Domus Dedali, and its inhabitants are not God
and His company, but the myriad sounds produced by the breath of Logos. Each
whisper, each spoken word is embodied on earth in the image of the speaker. Under its
ironic guise, the poem features a recognition scene: the poet mirroring himself in the
poem. All that Chaucer knows or cares to know is the language of the body: the brain
treasuring his transcription of his visions, the eyes that contemplate the beautiful female
form of the muse Caliope, whom Nature could not give birth to and other scenes from
the classical mythology, decorating the temple of glass, the ears catching the motioned
air from the lips and from the strings of the harp. And what are the whispered tidings if
not the new, original works of art that are permanently created, like some earthly
analogue of the Annunciation ? Paradise has been supplanted by a Pantheon of the
arts. Chaucer is writing an allegory of art and authorship, with the artist's self-portrait
inscribed in his work.

Chaucer's representation of art as breath, speech and memory in the brain rather
than in writing was only natural in an age which believed in the centrality and primacy of
the Logos as breath (God's spoken word) as well as at a time when literature was still a
heard and seen experience, appealing to the auditory sensibilities of the audience [13].
It is to this scene of public reading he draws our attention at the beginning of Troilus
and Criseyde. It is doubtful whether in specifying Maximus Lollius as his best source,
Chaucer has misinterpreted the first lines in Horace's Second Epistle (Book I),
presenting Horace as reading from Homer at Praeneste, while his friend, Lollius, is
declaiming in Rome. Chaucer knew very well his sources, Troilus's anguished
confession of love (58–60), for instance, being a translation of a very famous sonnet by
Petrarch (CXXXII), and not a debt to “bard Lollius” whom he claims to be quoting.
Rather than a proof of false consciousness, it seems to be an apology for his very
liberal interpretation of the Homeric source; he is not reading or quoting but interpreting
it in the spirit of contemporary Italy. “Lollius” is just a figure of reinscription and up-
dating. His real source is Il Filostrato – Boccaccio's romance refurbishing of two minor
Homeric characters: the Trojan Troilus falling in love with Criseyde, the daughter of
Calchas, a prophet who, having foreseen the fall of Troy, had defected to the Greeks.
As history is no longer seen either as an objective record of events or as providential
but as textuality, a range of discursive practices which are culture specific, it looks but
natural that Chaucer, in producing his own version, should have exchanged Homer for a
medieval love-story, with its amour courtois values, rites and ceremonies. Troilus is the
gay knight of the courtly romances, who is punished by Amor with the qualms of love for
his formerly affected indifference to his power. Love comes through the eyes, which are
the soul's windows in the prison of the body. It is under Criseyde's good influence (her
honour, estate and womanly noblesse – a language alien to Homer) that Troilus
becomes the friendliest wighte,/ the gentliest... the thriftiest. As Criseyde is concerned
about her reputation, the lovers meet in secrecy, with the help of Pandarus (ever since a
common noun, meaning a “go-between”), Criseyde's uncle – a shrewd, world-wise old
man, in whom Chaucer may have satirized the hypocritical sermonizers of the day, as
he is given to quoting proverbs and precedents. While taking all precautions for offering
his sympathetic view of this illegitimate love, mainly by blaming it on his lack of
experience and by appealing to the reader's complicity, who may have experienced
more, Chaucer also finds psychological motivations for Criseyde's betrayal when she is
carried away to the Greeks by the young, handsome and unscrupulous Diomede, in
exchange for a Trojan, Antenor: she yields to her abductor, as she is a weak woman,
having no support among strangers. The final twist to a medieval topos may be an
ironical comment on the similar ancient concept of all-powerful destiny, which relieves
the individual from all personal responsibility. The world is but a fair of vanities. As
Chaucer role-plays himself as an unreliable narrator [14], a fundamental ambiguity is
playing about this story, which has been classified both as “the first (psychological)
novel in English” and as a medieval tragedy, in its sense of a decline of fortune, a
descent from a higher to a lower standing.

Had not a totalitarian society stifled and distorted Chaucer's voice, it may have
sent forth to us its pure “renaiscent”, Petrarchan sound. His choice of Petrarch's version
of a Boccaccio story in his Decameron, challenging the medieval idea about woman as
a commodity lacking a will of her own, is telling in this respect. A new ideal, of human
fortitude in the face of misfortunes, is replacing Griselda's confession that, on leaving
behind her humble froc in her hut, and accepting Walter's rich attire, she has also left
behind her “will”, her “liberty”:

So listen to what Petrarch has to say:

“This tale has not been told so that wives should

 Imitate Griselda in humility

They'd find it intolerable if they did !

But that everyone, whatever his degree

Should be as steadfast in adversity.

As Griselda!.

(The Oxford Clerk's Tale)

But social and political developments were slower in England, and so were the
power discourses of the age. For his realistic record of a woman's conflicting
psychology and of her all but human frailty, Chaucer saw himself forced to write a
retraction, probably his most orthodox writing; The Legend of Good Women, a palinode
having its generic source in Stesichorus (7th-6th century B.C.) who wrote an ode
against Hellen of Troy and afterwards a Palinodia glorifying her. The portrait gallery of
the famous women of the world is framed by a Prologue which, in fact, extols the glory
of books for providing the “key to memory” – the textuality of history as the only
immortality. Chaucer's balance of tradition and innovation can be seen once more in his
creation of the heroic couplet (decasyllabic lines, rhyming in pairs), which would know
a glorious career in English poetry, beginning with the majority of his Canterbury Tales.

Chaucer's sense of the solidarity between social structure and structurality of

discourse is responsible for the writing of an estate satire (a survey of all late medieval
estates, that is social status corresponding to some form of property), and at the same
time of a compendium of medieval narrative forms of discourse. The discursive
practices display, in Chaucer, an awareness not only of genre but also of the codes of
values associated with them. Chaucer uses literary forms, while implicitly commenting
on them. His critique of genre takes the form of self-reflexive forms.

It is not certain whether Chaucer was familiar with Boccaccio's Decameron, but his
handling of the convention of the framed narrative (a collection of tales framed by a
prologue) differs any way in important respects. Whereas Boccaccio's story-tellers
belong to the same social class (a group of aristocrats who leave Rome because of an
outbreak of plague, telling a tale every day to beguile their time), Chaucer's thirty odd
pilgrims, who gather at the Tabard Inn at Southwark, wherefrom they are to set out for
the shrine of Thomas a Becket at Canterbury, belong to all classes of society except the
highest (above the knight) and lower than the Plowman (tied labourers). Chaucer is not
interested in those who were too few in number to create a distinct culture or in those
who, being serfs, did not have a say in the life of the forum. His comical humanity falls
into five groups. The gentry is represented by the Knight and his son, a Squire. The
second social estate includes the representatives of various holy orders (lower than
prelates: a Prioress, a Monk, a Friar, a Nun, the Nun's Priest and two other priests). The
third and largest group are nearly all middle class: the Merchant, the Oxford Clerk, the
Lawyer, the Franklin, the five gentlemen and their Cook, the Shipman, the Physician,
the Canon, and the Wife of Bath. The fourth group is marginal: the Plowman and the
Canon's Yeoman. The fifth is a picturesque gallery of rogues: a Reeve and a Miller, a
Summoner, a Pardoner, a Manciple and... the narrator who humorously includes himself
among them. The inn-keeper, Harry Bailey, has the idea of each pilgrim telling two
stories, two on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. He is only a master of
ceremonies, so that, together with the author diminished to the stature of a witness and
story-teller, he makes room for a decentred multi-dimensional discursive space, lacking
the single theological view of the other texts of the time. Authorship is further
deconstructed by the witness-narrator's parody of the extremes of medieval discourse:
romance in a cliche of popular entertainment (the unbearably boring fiction of chivalry:
The Tale of Sir Topaz) and the practical inefficiency of bookish instruction (Melibee's
moral tract on Prudence, one of the medieval virtues, often allegorized, which is no
solution or retribution for his daughter's wounds). The very name of the inn („tabard”
meaning, among others, a herald's coat blazoned with the arms of his sovereign, an
emblem of social identity) makes us think of the pilgrims in terms of a human comedy,
with social, moral and discursive types. Only twenty-four stories, some unfinished, have
been left for readers along centuries to grant the award for the best. However, the fact
that Chaucer specifies that the Parson's is the last shows that he had in mind a pattern
of precise significance. The first is a pagan story (based upon Boccaccio's Teseida),
while the last is a sermon, paralleling the pilgrims’ progress from a place of worldly
enjoyment (Tabard Inn, where they assemble for the journey) towards a seat of
Christian piety (a shrine). As the journey starts in April (apparently lasting for five days,
April 16 to 2o), the year's rejuvenescence is symbolical of spiritual rebirth (a tradition
going back to The Seafarer). Close reading, however, will disclose another structure of
meaning, underpinning the conventional self-replicating code of “church-talk”.
Unawaringly, the Parson confirms our impression that, in spite of the retraction at the
end, categorising his fictional work as acts of sin, while acknowledging as virtuous his
translations of Boethius and homiletic writs, Chaucer was nostalgically looking back,
like a Renaissance man, to the “old ways” of the pagan antiquity.
 The Knight's Tale is the only one which is not framed by a prologue, whose
function is usually [15] a subversive one. Contrary to the opinion that each tale suits the
story-teller, we find all the others dialogical in form. The tales fall within six narrative
types.

For Chaucer, a proper court romance is not just a narrative whose theme is love
and other upper-class pursuits, in a court setting with chivalrous knights and virtuous
ladies as characters; it also inscribes a code of timeless values, whether those of
equality in marriage (The Franklin's), of love as absolute trust (The Wife of Bath's), of
the forms and ceremonies of civilization versus rude nature (The Knight's ). Those
which are confined to empty story-telling are promptly cut short (The Squire's,
Chaucer's).

The structuring of The Knight's Tale proceeds through a mise-en-abyme of the

pilgrimage figure: from Palamon's and Arcite's roaming to and fro (see Kolve's most
enlightening discussion of imagery) to Egeus's final generalization: And we are pilgrims
passing to and fro/ Death is the end of every worldly sorrow. And yet, through the
elements Chaucer adds to the Italian original, this medieval allegory of the soul's
wanderings on earth like a pilgrim without a homeland, is made into something positive:
the victory of Theseus over the Minotaur in the intricate Labyrinth becomes the Ur-deed
foretelling his building of the Amphitheatre (already an intimation of the Renaissance
and baroque topos of the theatre of the world). This is a representation of the entire
civilization: the mathematical and architectural sciences, the worshipped gods, the
paintings and the murals, housing the most ceremonious affair of medieval courtly life,
that is, a tournament. The building of the amphitheatre (in Boccaccio, the seat of
confrontation is already in existence) is placed in the middle of the narrative, carrying a
heavy weight in its economy. The hyperbolic building (In the whole world there was no
place like it) becomes axis mundi, walled in and ditched without, separated from the
tangled, chaotic and lawless woods. It makes Theseus a new Hrothgar who has shut
Grendel out. The story is richly patterned, in antithetical blocks: the amphitheatre is
“most noble in its plan”, while the temple of Mars has its walls decorated with “a forest
with no plan”; Palamon appeals to Arcita's sense of honour and bond of kinship, while
Arcita is in for a lawless competition ; Palamon's is a “spiritual love”, while Arcita sees in
Emily a woman, not a “goddess from above”. Although imprisoned, Palamon is guilty of
no devotional breach; he realizes his pagan gods are unjust, yet the remedy for
fortune's adversities is to “curb” his will in all the lusts that cattle may fulfil, and pay the
duties that are owed/ to God. Arcita, although set free, yet bereft of more opportunities
to see Emily, gives way to his animal lust (like a lover on the rack/ Of Eros) and to an
irrational despondency which makes him a prisoner of his own melancholy madness.
His uncurbed passion makes him stoop down to the humble status of a servant in
Theseus's household for the benefit of serving Emily, his sister-in-law, doing all sorts of
humiliating chores. When Palamon himself escapes, he can only think of a heroic
solution: to rally an army behind his back and either kill Theseus, the conqueror of his
Thebes, or perish in battle. Before the final encounter with Arcita, he addresses to
Venus, the goddess of Love, a most ceremonious prayer, while Arcita prays to Mars,
the god of war, hinting at his embarassment when Vulcan surprised him lying with his
wife – a speech much more adequate for a fabliau. Chaucer's description of their first,
informal fight in the woods, before Theseus imposes his (feudal) rites of hunting or
ceremonious duels with witnesses and referees, is a methodical (and ironical)
deconstruction of humanity as the locus of social bonds, feelings, formal
behaviour:

There was no salutation, no “Good day”

But without word or prelude straight away

Each of them gave his help to arm the other

As friendly as a brother to his brother;....

You would have thought, seeing Palamon engage,

He was a lion-fighting mad with rage,

Arcita a cruel tiger...

Fabliaux are versified tales designed for the diversion of city traders, guildmen and
their associates. Essentially anti-romantic, they picture victimized husbands, the crimes
and due punishments of thieves and adulterers through extended jokes, set among the
lower orders of society. Chaucer's choice for their story-tellers lies with the rude and
drunkard Miller, the Reeve, the Cock, the Friar, the Summoner, the Shipman, the
Canon's Yeoman, the Merchant.

Their essential drive is subversive of any meaningful and significant order: In

religious tales and saints' legends, an equally self-transcending system of values
operates, in this case proving the significance of life through the demonstration of its
ultimate insignificance in relation to life eternal. Comedy sets all this aside, and asserts
that there are no values, secular or religious, more important than survival and the
satisfaction of appetite [16]. The action is not apprehended “under the aspect of
eternity”, the parodic mode no longer being that interplay of light and shade that gives
moral characterization its relief (as in The Knight's Tale) but an end in itself. The
description of Alison, the adulterous wife in The Miller's Tale in terms of nature
(compared to a frolicking kid or calf, graceful like a swallow, with a mouth as sweet as
mead, or ale or honey etc.) is a light-hearted irony on the young woman's gratification of
her healthy bodily instincts.

Saints' lives and pious tales are narratives for edification following a similar
pattern: the will to undergo martyrdom, the renunciation upon worldly joys, the miracles
attending persecution and martyrdom. The Clerk, the Man of Law, the Physician, the
Prioress tell such narratives. The artistic illusion is often impaired by what we know
about the story-teller (for instance, the Prioress's misplaced charity), or by the prologue
to the story. The Physician's Tale of Roman Virginius' sacrifice of his daughter lest she
should be carried away from him as a slave is framed by an argument on the proper
education of children, interspersed with exhortations and parables like the following,
which is an ironic hint that Verginius himself has played the wolf:

Beware lest the example you present

Of your neglect in giving chastisement

Cause them to perish; otherwise I fear

If they should do so you will pay it dear.

Shepherds too soft who let their duty sleep

Encourage wolves to tear the lambs and sheep.

Sermons are exhortations to embrace virtues and shun vices They in-corporate
biblical and classical stories (exempla), quotations, proverbs, maxims, the abstract
themes being blooded by contemporary events. By illustrating the downfall of eminent
persons from prosperity to a miserable death, the exempla have a didactic intention,
illustrating precepts like memento mori, vanitas vanitatum, which sometimes, as in the
Monk's Exemplum, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, are at odds with the narrator's love of
luxury, good food and the excitements of hunting. His Prologue gives the medieval
definition of tragedy as “story”, which acts its fictional disintegration upon the characters
in the ensuing sacred script (the fall of Lucifer, Adam, Samson...). According to the
misogynic view of the Church “fall from glory” is induced by evil women. Quite
unexpectedly, it is a representative of the Holy Orders that deconstructs religion into
myth (story), amalgamating Biblical and Greek, historical and fictitious characters:

Tragedy means a certain kind of story

As old books tell, of those who fell from glory...

The Pardoner's Prologue to his own sermon is another splendid piece of

deconstruction. The exploded myth of the inspired shepherd leaves behind it a
metaphysical wreck, whose ruins can only be rebuilt into a rhetorical construct and a
deft dramatic show, meant to sell pardons and pseudo relics of saints, like any other
commodity, to a gullible congregation. Whereas the metaphysical grounding is gone,
the rhetorical recipe for the effective advertising of the means of salvation is unfailing.

In a confession, the narrator looks back on his life, usually in sign of repentance,
and out of a wish of expiation. This is not at all the case of the Wife of Bath, who takes
up this type of narrative in order to launch, from her marginalised position, a fierce
attack upon the dominant male discourse, shaped by representations of women as
inferior and evil in the tradition of the Church. A woman of liberal means, who has
married five times, most often for money, and who has gradually subdued her
husbands, cheating on them (in love as well as in affairs), this frank and experienced
woman knows that it is easier to change things in the real world (where she has turned
the tables in her favour, making good money by treating her own body as a commodity)
than to change mentalities. She will not be taken in by the church propaganda, which is
cultivating a guilty conscience, particularly in women. The entire issue comes down to
the cultural conditions of discourse-making and representations. They are the province
of men alone, who take a gender-bound, biased view of mankind's other half. There is
no absolute ethical truth, it is only a question of point of view: had the lion drawn the
picture, would he not have shown himself to be the victor instead of the hunter ?

Make no mistake, it is impossible

That any scholar should speak good of women

Unless they are saints in the hagiographies.

Not any other kind of woman, no !

Who drew the picture of the lion ? Who ?

 My God, had women written histories

Like cloistered scholars in oratories,

They'd set down more of men' wickedness

Than all the sons of Adam could redress.

The moral tract is a didactic essay, trying to persuade the listener into accepting a
certain moral or religious dogma. Chaucer's dismantling of the authoritative medieval
discourse, which by the end of the fourteenth century had decayed into empty rhetoric
and mannerism, takes one step further in the narrator being talked to and persuaded by
his wife – not a common woman, it is true, but an allegorical figure: Prudence. While
cowardice and inaction, rhetorically spiced as Prudence, win the argument, true
Wisdom (their daughter, Sophia) is left to dress her wounds. The distance between the
argument on the virtue of Prudence, conducted with scholarly skill, and its practical
inefficiency in redressing the wrongs committed (in opposition to the Wife of Bath's
mistrust of the truth of language and pragmatic confidence in taking action) is measured
by Chaucer against the new voices of subversion coming from the rising bourgeoisie,
the marginalized category of women, and the artist who comes to a realization of the
tension between tradition and the need for innovation, between the long durée of his art
and the necessity to humanize and desublimate the authorities of the age reified in
texts. Chaucer's achievement helped establish English as a fully developed literary
language, capable to employ all the genres of the time in a masterly canvas and to
plumb human nature to unprecedented depths. Suffice it to compare The Canterbury
Tales to the highly conventional Confessio Amantis, another collection of tales in
octosyllabic couplets by Chaucer's contemporary, John Gower (died 1488). The poet
meets Venus on a May morning, who advises him to make a confession, while Genius,
her priest, launches into a blood-freezing treatise upon the Seven Deadly Sins. There is
no logical connection between the tales and the general frame, the action is full of
artificial scenes, attitudes and commonplace ideas.

The fifteenth century brings the Middle Ages to an end. All the sap has dried up
from John Lydgate's use of literary conventions: of De casibus in his Fall of the Princes
(a collection of medieval “tragedies”) and of the Danse Macabre, in which Death the
leveller remembers himself to all classes of men, from Pope, Emperor, Cardinal, King
down to labourer, friar, clerk, hermit, pointing to the vanity of all worldly glory, and
cultivating guilt and anxiety.
 Medieval Drama

The growth of towns, and with them the growth of craft guilds, fostered the
development of religious drama in the vernacular towards the end of the fourteenth
century. During the Middle Ages, mimetic performances in Latin were added as an
ornament of the liturgical rituals of the church. The quotations and answers introduced
into the authorized text of the liturgy as tropes or amplification became dramatic when
they were subjected to impersonation. An eleventh-century Easter mass of Monte
Cassino in Italy mentions a dialogue occurring before Christ's sepulchre:

When terse has been finished, let one priest go before the altar, dressed in white,
and, having turned towards the choir let him say with a clear high voice:

„Whom seek ye ?”

And let two other priests standing in the middle of the choir answer thus:

„Jesus of Nazareth,”

And the one priest:

„He is not here: He is risen”

And they, turning to the quire, shall say:

„Halleluiah, the Lord is risen.”

The “Ressurexi” should follow.

In time such mimetic performances were undertaken by laymen (guilds and secular
fraternities), removed from the interior of the church outside, on the steps, and, later, in
open squares. In England, Latin was first replaced by French, and later, by English.
Thematically, they fall into three groups.

The miracle plays are based on sacred history, from Creation to the Last
Judgement. The acting was done on wooden platforms mounted on wheels, called
“pageants”, which could be drawn from one place to another, their coming being
heralded by standard bearers called “vexillatores”. The performers were role-playing
themselves, in a way, as the scenes were appropriate to their daily work: For instance,
at York, the plasterers showed God creating the earth and the cardmakers, the creation
of Adam and Eve; the shipwrights undertook the construction of Noah's ark; the bakers
staged the Last Supper. Some miracle plays got up saints' lives.
 The language of the anonymous “playwrights” (clerics or minstrels) was fitted to
the broad, unsophisticated audiences of towns and villages: the lucid, plain vernacular,
condensed and concise, yet not devoid of a certain ceremonious solemnity. The
interpolation of comical scenes (interludes) was felt as a necessary psychological relief
from the strain of an action charged with the complexities of medieval theology, even if
the audience was familiar with the dogmatic body of the Church, popularized in the
frequent addresses from the pulpit.

The extant cycles of the Biblical plays belong to the Northern districts: the York
cycle, begun in the middle fourteenth century, and the cycle of Wakefield (the Townley
Plays), both of which were influenced by the metrical narrative called The Northern
Passion. The Wakefield cycle knows frequent lapses into broad comedy, whose social
hints and parodic effects de-sublimate the sacred script into a more humane version.
The Second Shepherd's Play is a burlesque episode describing how a peasant named
Mark tries to save a stolen lamb from confiscation, tucking it up in bed beside his wife,
and claiming it is their new-born baby. By juxtaposition with the religious logic of the
Nativity play of the cycle, this realistic pastoral sketch is a transcription in a comic key,
exploring the contemporary relevance of the archetypal scene and symbolism (with
lamb, new-born baby, shepherds and even social persecution and threat).

The processional character of the performance was inspired by the triumphal

procession on Corpus Christi Day, symbolizing Christ’s victory over sin. The Chester
pageants – 24 in number, corresponding to the number of Companies in the City -, were
wheeled one after the other, from Abbey gates, to the Pentice at the High Cross before
the Mayor, to Watergate Street, etc., and the complete round offered simultaneously an
image of Calvary and Victory and of the contemporary setting: the social life of the
community, with its work scenes, occupational chart, power conflicts, elements of
traditional and pagan entertainment, etc.

In spite of the dogmatic character of medieval thought, the addressee of the

discourse-maker was invited to ponder upon received ideas, to find out reasons,
motivations, to exercise one’s critical (dissociative) habit of mind. “Compare and
contrast” was the favourite assignment in universities, comparative values were pitted
against one another in poems drawing on the French debate tradition (love versus
asceticism, Eve versus Virgin Mary, etc.), while the dramatizations of episodes from the
Bible (with supplementary ones from the apocryphal tradition, for instance, The Fall of
Lucifer, The Harrowing of Hell) gave reasons for divine as well as human conduct: an
enhanced ethical design (Ethos) for the Biblical story (Mythos).

With all its popular interpolations, medieval drama reveals a subtle mind, casting a
philosophical net on each happening, with the emphasis falling on causality. The author
is a Scriptural commentator, doubling up as dramatist. In The Creation, and the Fall of
Lucifer, God is making the doctrinal "I am Alpha and Omega, the life, the way, the truth"
more explicit: I am maker unmade, all might is mine (...) Unending without ending.
Apparently, in making Lucifer "mirror of [His] might", He displaces Himself from his
logocentric, full and unique presence. He changes himself into a sign to be read by
Lucifer, to be reflected in a mirror image of Himself. This makes room for Lucifer's, i.e.
His specular double's, attempted subversion of the original, which, within a logocentric
frame of thought, dominated by the transcendental signifier, is impossible. The moment
Lucifer thinks of himself as God's equal, he is tumbled down into Hell - a place of doom
which is brought into existence by the rebel angels' transgressive act:

LUCIFER. I shall be like unto him that is highest on height.

Oh, what I am dearworth and deft! -

Oh, deuce! all goes down:

(The bad angels fall from heaven)

God seems to have ... partially learned His lesson, as, in the creation of Adam and
Eve, on the fifth day of the Genesis (The Creation of Adam and Eve), He both repeats
His mistake of trying to create a rational mind capable of worshipping His Creation, of
which He was so proud, and tries to repair it by inducing in man a sense of humility:

God. Of the simplest part of the earth that is here

I shall make man, and for this skill [reason]

For to abate his haughty cheer,

Both his great pride and other ill;

And also to have in mind

How simple he is at his making,

For as feeble I shall find

When he is dead, at his ending.

The preacher's urge to humility was well served by this scene of God creating
Adam out of dust, and so was his cautionary advice about the persistence of the seed of
evil by the scene of Satan causing the fall of man in having Eve and Adam eat out of the
"fruit of good and ill", in order for them to "be as gods", i.e. "as wise as God".
 For all the burden of moral anxiety that was inbred into the believer through the
repeated lesson of the omnipresence of evil, the moral plays, which enriched the Ethos
of the Biblical Mythos on the microscopic stage of man's conscience, wakened up the
spectators to a sense of responsibility for the way they lived their lives.

The morality plays, warning of the existence of evil in the human soul, and
pointing to the need for and means of salvation, are allegorical in form. Their characters
are personified qualities or ideas: The Castle of Perseverance, Wit and Understanding,
Mankind, Everyman (indebted to or even the translation of a Flemish play).

The social stratification and the lay power relations are rendered impotent from an
eschatological perspective, and from a standing elevated above the entire mankind. The
theme of Everyman is memento mori. The young man, richly dressed, young and
handsome, is called upon to make an account of his life before God, as he is going to
die. The allegorical meaning thereof is that death may reach you when you least expect,
therefore spend your life in perpetual anxiety about the moment when you will be
eternally doomed or saved. The scene is allegorical, set between the steps of the
cathedral and the open tomb, ready to swallow up its careless victim, while the
characters' emblematic dress and appearance make them easily recognizable: Death is
a lean figure, with a sickle, wearing a monk's black garb; Riches is a very fat man
carrying two sacks of gold etc. The world goes through an apocalypse and emerges
reshaped as a code of Christian pieties. Everyman learns that whatever he has relied
on in life (Fellowship, Kindred, Beauty, Riches...) is of no avail to him in the hour of his
death. It is only his Good Deeds (a frail female figure, suggesting that there have been
but few of them) that will lead him to Knowledge (of the divine law and of the divine plan
of the universe), and from here to Confession. His worldliness chastised, and his guilt
internalized through repentance, he is now prepared for the beatific vision of God.

The most original and fruitful development of English popular poetry yielded, in
the fourteenth century, the ballad and the carol. The latter was derived from “carole” or
dancing song, connected with fertility rituals (maybe that was how it came to be
associated with Christmas). The leader sang the stanza, while the chorus danced round
in a circle, stopping to sing the refrain, or “burden”, rhyme-linked with the stanza. The
ballad, with its alternating refrain, probably developed from another kind of dancing, is
based upon a simple verse pattern: four-line stanzas consisting of two iambic
pentameters alternating with two iambic trimeters:

God prosper long our noble king,

Our lives and safeties all !

A woeful hunting once there did

In Chevy Chase befall.

(Chevi Chase)
 Some ballads are founded on romances (Hind Horn, or King Horn), on historical
events, battles (The Hunting of the Cheviot), legendary figures (the Robin Hood
ballads), others are woven round simple life situations: lovers separated by feuds of
class distinction, fidelity and betrayal, rescue and sudden death. Supernatural elements
are not unfrequent, a widespread motif being the dead lover that returns to haunt the
living (The Demon Lover, The Wife of Usher's Well).

References:

[10] David Aers, Chaucer, England and the Creative Imagination, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1980

[11] Gustave Lanson, Histoire de la littérature française, Hachette, 1916, p. 60

[12] Thomas Hahn, “Gawain and popular chivalric romance in Britain”, in The Cambridge Companion to
Medieval Romance. Edited by Roberta L. Krueger, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 219)

[13] V.A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, Edward Arnold, 1984.

[14] Mark Lambert, Telling the story in “Troilus and Criseyde”, in Chaucer, Op. cit. pp. 59-73.

[15] C. David Benson, The “Canterbury Tales”: Personal drama or experiments in poetic variety ? in
Chaucer, Op. cit., p, l03: But despite such general agreement, the intense, personal association
between teller and tale automatically assumed by followers of the dramatic theory is rare in the
Canterbury Tales. The classical learning of the Knight's Tale, the polished art of the Miller's Tale, the
moral delicacy of the Friar's Tale, the cleverness and learning of the Summoner's Tale, and the
dogged didacticism of the Monk's Tale – none of these qualities, but rather their reverse, is
suggested by what we know of the pilgrims outside the tales. Perhaps the most extreme disjunction
of teller and tale is the contrast between the rough, murderous Shipman, of the General Prologue and
the cool, sophisticated art of the Shipman's Tale.

[16] Derek Pearsall, The “Canterbury Tales” II: Comedy, in Chaucer, Op. cit. p. 126.

The Renaissance
and the Age of Milton
(1500-1660)
 The Renaissance world picture. Historical background and literary
scene. Early Tudor revival and Elizabethan High Renaissance.
Renaissance poetry: reinscription and experimentation.
Renaissance drama : architecture, rhetoric, types of conflict, plot,
generic conventions; constructions of race, gender, and class. The
Shakespearian Canon. Shakespeare and history. Shakespeare and
the traditions of comedy and tragedy. From the entanglements of
history to the aesthetic haunts of the pastoral. Jacobean and
Caroline Drama, or the black comedy at the end of a cultural phase.
Seventeenth-century poetry. Jonson's Cavaliers and Donne's
Metaphysicals. John Milton and the English Revolution.

In his influential book, The Elizabethan World Picture (1943), E.M. Tillyard
defines the Elizabethan Age as a secular period between two outbreaks of
Protestantism, when New Humanism was allowed to shape literature. The
religious reform, started by John Wycliffe (1320-1384), was completed by Henry VIII'
declaration of independence from the Church of Rome (1533). Chaucer's ironic
treatment of a Dominican monk's book (Bernard de Louen's Livre de Melibée et
Prudence) already points to the existence of growing impatience and discontent
with medieval scholastic thought in the late fourteenth century. More material signs
of the humanistic turn can be detected during the Tudor monarchs, the
Renaissance swelling in its full tide under Elizabeth I (1558-1603), and taking a
baroque twist at the hedonistic court of the first Stuart king: James I (1603-1625).
The second outbreak of Protestantism was responsible for the Civil War and the
execution of an absolutist monarch, who had chosen to rule the country without a
Parliament: Charles I (1625-1649). The Restoration of the monarchy, that is the
return to England of Charles II and his court (1660-1685), marked a complete
change in literary diction in the direction of neoclassicism.

The admixture of styles in the seventeenth century makes periodization

difficult. John Donne had already launched his flamboyant baroque lyric in the 90s,
and the poetry of his Caroline followers (the so-called “Metaphysical School”) differs
sharply from that of the royalists' (the Cavalier School of Ben Jonson), with their
neoclassical taste for order, harmony and discipline. John Milton's classical learning
and mixed styles (a Spenser in baroque and neoclassical disguise) borrowed a more
factious colouring from his Puritan commitment to the Civil War, whose spirit, apart
from administrative action (closing down the theatres in 1644), found a more
orthodox literary outlet (allegorical form and theological anchoring) after the
Restoration (John Bunyan: Pilgrims' Progress, 1678, The Holy War, 1682), ill-
assorted with the formal elegance and refined cynicism of the court. Although
Milton, Vaughan or Marvell produced the bulk of their work after the Restoration,
they do not belong to the characteristic, “Augustan” spirit and movement of the
day. Our periodization, therefore, is typological rather than chronological.

For some time now the English Renaissance has been studied less from a
morphological viewpoint (inventory of themes, motifs, forms) and more from that of
the mode of articulation between history and epistemology. The Renaissance is
seen as a poise between the medieval and the modern world, a shift from
ontotheology to the centrality of the human being defined through cultural
ontology. The prestigious scholastic thought of the twelfth century – Duns Scotus,
John of Salisbury, William of Ockham – had supported a theocentric
perspective, with the world interpreted as the embodiment of the divine Logos
(Salisbury in his Metalogicon: God's signature). Here is Jacques Derrida, describing
the logocentric view of the world: res is chose créée ŕ partir de son eidos, de son
sens pensé dans le logos ou l'entendement infini de Dieu [1]. The modern revolution
means a redeployment of the whole structure of values and signification on a
human level, and the Renaissance man, centrally situated in the new world picture,
took decisive steps in this direction. The mind no longer looks up or beyond; it turns
and feeds upon itself. The experience of interiority (characters brooding upon
what they have said or done and being transformed in the process), self-reflexivity,
the dialogue of the mind with itself, our own awareness of role-playing) are seen as
basic in the shaping of the modern self by Harold Bloom in his recent revaluation of
Hamlet [2]. There seems to be no one-to-one correspondence between “thing” and
“symbol”. Meaning is not given but constructed through language. The new
world picture is no longer revealed but coming into focus through a plurality of
intersecting discourses. What has struck all postmodern commentators (M.
Foucault, J.-F.Lyotard, R. Girard) is the remarkable homogeneity of the semantic
energy circulated by the Elizabethan discourses. The question is: do they mirror
what the Elizabethans thought or were they constitutive of the frames of
evaluation against which people measured themselves? Is the writing subjectivity
disclosing an order of meaning – like Scotus's and Salisbury's hermeneutic efforts
to interpret the divine meaning hiding in the things in the world –, or is it assumed
as producing it through discourse? The reliance on the discursive body of the age –
whether philosophical, ethical, legal, religious, artistic – the practice of
intertextuality and the foregrounding of a process of linguistic ontology [3] – show
that the Elizabethans regarded themselves as meaning beings, bestowing
meaning on the world rather than deciphering one already inscribed in it. The
“secularization” process replaces the transcendental attitude by cultural
constructs:...if thought, language, and social processes are mutually
interdependent, then meaning itself cannot be a simple question of reference – the
establishment of an equivalent between “symbol” and “thing” – but must be a
construction in language. It therefore follows that the mechanisms deployed in the
construction of language, and the selection of certain possibilities from within those
governed by the system as a whole which takes place in the act of reading, are
those which, in principle, determine the way in which particular communities make
sense of the world. In other words, the means of establishing a hierarchy of values
at the conceptual level correspond to a process of differentiation at the material
level of the construction of the signifier [4].

I. Maybe the broadest definition of the Renaissance outlook is that the world
out there is something different and inferior to the “making sense of it”. The Titanic
drive of the “self-born” spirit to test all habitudes of thought is manifest in all walks
of life. Time, personified in The Winter's Tale as a split personality, sees itself either
as empty passage, on-going movement, or as meaningful fulfilment of human
intentions and purposes; either as the inflexible law of nature's course, or as the
realm of human signifieds („custom”).

TIME: Impute it not a crime

To me or my swift passage that I slide

O'er sixteen years and leave the growth untried

Of that wide gap, since it is in my power

To o'erthrow law and in one self-born hour

To plant and o'erwhelm custom.

The word “custom” here seems to envelop the sphere of Pierre Bourdieu's
“habitus” [5]: a set of interpretations that enable persons and social groups to make
a virtue of necessity; the perceptual, evaluative, and classificatory schemata, codes
of the social imaginary which have a capacity for self-replication within individual
imaginations.

The meaning structure of the Renaissance discourse has received several

names – “life style”, “heuristic model”, “episteme”, “framework of evaluation”,
“signifying practice”, “semantic energies”, “world picture”, “habitus”, “chronotope”
(the time and space inscribed in discourse) – which are, in effect, more or less
synonymous, designating analogous codifiers of Elizabethan ideology.

The books relating to history, discovery and navigation, in an age of universal

curiosity, were breeding a sense of the emancipation of the intellect in the
general process of man establishing his empire over nature. Being and
meaning-making had grown independent of each other: there is nothing either good
or bad, but thinking makes it so (Hamlet, II/2). The unique narrative of Christianity
or history was now competing with several histories, several meta-narratives.
Historical distancing was a frequent device, the theme was often a conflict of
values, pagan or Christian, or a comparison between the present and the past (Here
is Thomas Wilson, the translator of Demosthenes: every good subject should
compare the present and the past, when he hears of Athens and Athenians, he
should remember England and the Englishmen). The static world outlook nourished
by the immobile medieval status was seriously being challenged by the discovery of
human communities with different values and beliefs. In 1492 Columbus discovered
America because of an inference made possible by contemporary science. The time
had come for new territories to be discovered in the mind before they were
discovered on the planet. Or, once discovered, to be reshaped according to the
human measure: Many great regions are discovered,/ Which to late age were never
mentioned.// Who ever heard of the Indian Peru ?/ Or who in venturous vessel
measured/ the Amazon's huge river found true ?/ Or fruitful Virginia who did ever
view ?// Yet all these were, when no man did them know;/ Yet had from wisest ages
hidden been:/ And later times things more unknown shall show...(Edmund Spenser,
prologue to the second book of The Faerie Queene).

II. New worlds were not only discovered, measured out, colonized through
translations but also invented by a future-oriented humanity, capable of projective
behaviour (Hamlet: looking before and after, IV/4). The convention of the ideal
state, not topical but imaginary, which became familiar among the contemporaries
of Tommaso Campanella (La citta del Sole) and Francis Bacon (The New Atlantis,
1626) meant pioneer work in Thomas More's Utopia or The Discourses of Raphael
Hythloday, of the Best State of a Commonwealth, written in Latin, in 1515. Utopian
fictions connect the two poles of a great time for change. Their authors reminded
their societies, and not generic mankind, of their responsibility to themselves, and
not to God, in improving on their social organization, in advancing upon the road of
that kind of knowledge which can benefit everyone during one's life on earth, which
is not vain, but can be made glorious. Is truth ever barren? Bacon's rhetorical
question in his essay, The Praise of Knowledge, is met with a new pragmatism: Shall
we not be able thereby to produce worthy effects and to endow the life of man with
infinite commodities ? The ideal of the life of contemplation is forfeited in
favour of active involvement, for in this theatre of man's life it is reserved only
for God and angels to be lookers on (The Advancement of Learning, 1605, a
philosophical essay, in the manner of Montaigne).

III. Bacon is the maker of the modern mind also in that combination of
empricism and awareness of the need for an adequate method in science,
that is of the mind leaning upon itself. As different from Aristotle's “organon”, his
new instrument – Novum Organum, 1620 –, has an inductive character, proceeding
through comparison, antithesis, distinction and rejection. The Renaissance mind
takes nothing for granted, the epistemological inquiry (into the grounds of
knowledge) being the distinguishing mark of modern consciousness. Bacon uses the
word “idol” to describe man's false consciousness coming from philosophical
systems, whether empirical, sophistical or superstitious (idols of the theatre),
from noncritical assumptions about the world's delusive appearances (idols of the
tribe, for instance the deceiving movements of the heavenly bodies, as they
appear to the senses, or idols of the cave, originating in individual likings or
biases), or from the improper use of language (idols of the market-place).
Bacon's denial of Cratylism[6] and the idea that words react on the understanding
were some of the earliest critical and analytical approaches to language.
Shakespeare's own awareness of the way language works [7] is worth the attention
of contemporary semiologists.
 IV. Printing (Recuyll of the Historyes of Troye was the first book published by
William Caxton in England in 1474) had an enormous contribution to the
dissemination of the new ideas of Humanism and the Renaissance, while
the translation of the Bible, begun by Thomas More, and continued by William
Tyndale (1536), later revised by Coverdale, Matthew and the English exiles in
Geneva, and printed as the Authorized Version in 1611, made available in great
numbers an English idiom so refined as to seem touched by the breath of divine
inspiration.

The medieval access to the works of the Greek and Latin antiquity had been a
limited one, partly through censorship, partly through distorting commentaries
(pagan works valued for supposed prophecies of Christiandom). Lorenzo Vala was
the founder of philological and historical criticism, while Erasmus himself, who
taught Greek at Cambridge from 15lo to 15l3, distinguished (in a famous letter to
Martinus Dorpius, 1515) between theology (philological ignorance and rigid forma
mentis) and bonae litterae (litterae humaniores, studia humanitatis, humanae
litterae, humaniora, studia humanista), that is, the liberal studies, including
grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, moral philosophy – set apart from theology.

V. The self is generated within new matrices of meaningful social

action, which is the most important aspect of man's centrality in the Renaissance
world picture. In this we differ from E.M.W. Tillyard [8], who identifies a solidly
theocentric... a simplified version of a much more complicated medieval picture,
while receiving support from Rene Girard’s opinion that, in Shakespeare, the
structure of meaning is based not upon the “stable significance” of the
original Logos (natural significance), but on codes built on differences
(symbolical order): Le Degree est plus que la source de toute signification
stable, plus qu'un mecanisme de différenciation: c'est aussi le principe de l'unité
entre les hommes, éminemment paradoxale, puisqu'il est aussi désunion,
séparation, distance hierarchie. As this issue is fundamental in any Shakespearean
apparoach, let us take a closer look at what Shakespeare himself and the
anonymous author of a Homily published in an 1547 collection have got to say. The
Shakespearean quote is from Ulysses' famous speech in Troilus and Cressida, I/3.

When that the general is not like the hive

To whom the foragers shall all repair,

What honey is expected ? Degree being vizarded,

The unworthiest shows us fairly in the mask.

The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre

Observe degree, priority and place,

 Insisture, course, proportion, season form,

Office and custom, in all line of order;

Every degree of people in their vocation,/ calling, and office, hath appointed to
them,/ their duties and order, some are in high /degree, some in low, some kings
and princes,/ some inferior and subjects, priests and/ lay men, masters and
servants, fathers and / children, husbands and wives, rich and poor,/ and every one
needs of other, so that in all/ things is to be lauded and praised the goodly/ order of
God...

The author of the homily does not describe an entire social hierarchy, nor does
he stick to a unique criterion, which would make any possible (social estate, family
ties, ecclesiastical or lay appurtenance, financial means etc.) These are simply
binary oppositions on which codes are founded. The Renaissance mind is more
interested in the superstructure of meanings created through social intercourse,
than in the fixed social estates which none of the Canterbury-bound pilgrims means
to transgress.

Ulysses notices the empty Greek tents and the embittering sight inspires him
with a disanalogy: as different from a hive (the medieval common trope for society),
where all bees do their duty, humans are in a position to choose, either to act their
parts or to play truant. The next opposition between vizard and mask shows that
nothing about the human being is a given. Man can either insert himself consciously
into the social cast, in which case there is an identity between self and mask (an
individual socialized as warrior, the man and his socially ascribed role) or become
an actor, the mask being an empty marker, having no referent out there in the
world. However, the identity between self and eidos has been conventionalized and
relativized. Both vizor and mask are not solidary with but they merely stand for the
actual face (a relationship of the kind establishing between thing and signifier). The
difference is that one signifier is full, validated by a necessary or ideal social order,
while the other is an empty marker. The truth of the mask is the link between body
and social signifier. The mind is permanently on the watch out in order to harmonize
the private and public selves (see the conflict between private desire and the
requirements of the public office in Measure for Measure) to give a good example,
when in high office, for rulers are permanently observed, not only in their open
affairs, but also in their secret passe times (from a sermon, towards the end of the
sixteenth century). Failure to fulfil the allotted social role may result in general
disaster (see the tragedy of Gorboduc, written by Thomas Norton and Thomas
Sackville, 1562, about the king whose self-willed abdication ends up tragically or
Lear's similar fate in Shakespeare's play, 1605).

The crisis of degree was the result of the emergence of the new world of
mobile liquid capital. The Malta where the action of Marlowe's Jew of Malta is set is a
fragmented world, lacking historical roots and national identity, a mere knot in the
web of financial capital spreading its net all over Europe. The Prologue spoken by
Machiavell places this shifting, cosmopolitan world under the patronage of the
Italian merchant prince, the archetypal subverter of inherited status and under the
sway of money heaped up in the opening scene by Barabas. But even this rich Jew
can stabilize not even his own home: his daughter, Abigail (like Jessica, in
Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice) shifts her allegiances to Christianity. Allegiance
versus inherited status was the defining moment in the new construction of identity.
According to Jacob Burkhardt, the Renaissance meant the end of feudal collective
selfhood (the individual used to be defined through some form of collective identity:
a member of a class, religious or lay fraternity, etc.) and the beginning of the era of
bourgeois individuality: the self-made capitalist, who feels free from the world.
Stephen Greenblatt, a contemporary American historicist, supports the idea, coining
a term for it: self-fashioning. The individual feels free to choose his status in the
world, to shape his own identity, particularly through discourse. Marx's opposite
theory, of the Renaissance man being defined through objects, through the material
condition of his existence, as, in the new market system, commodities have merely
an exchange value, wich depends on offer and demand not on the identity of the
producer, was adapted by the French poststructuralist Jean François Baudrillard to
his theory of simulacra, or of the empty signs, no longer tied down to a fixed,
material referent. Any face can assume any vizor. Money can buy status, power;
feudal fixities and aristocratic privileges had come under stress.

In Shakespeare there is a permanent tension between these two constructions

of identity. Queen Elizabeth's sumptuary laws had regulated expenditures so as to
maintain social distinctions through outward markers of rank, as, for instance,
vestments. The Bastard, in King John, alludes quite transparently to the new
Machiavellian political philosophy of instrumental rationality (to pursue what is
efficient, irrespective of moral aspects) which had ruled out the ancient imposition
of honesta utilitas (the useful should also be honest). This is a sort of
dematerialization of the world into the emptiness of signs, simulacra („all-changing
word”) through the exchange value of marketable goods („Commodity”). The whole
world, displaced from origin, enters upon a “bastard” stage. The natural
countenance, the lively face mirroring the war of genuine emotions, had smoothed
down into the immobility of the social mask.

That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling Commodity,

Commodity, the bias of the world;

The world, who of itself is poised well,

Made to run even upon even ground,

Till this advantage, this vile-drawing bias,

This sway of motion, this Commodity,

 Makes it take heed from all indifferency,

From all direction, purpose, course, intent:

And this same bias, this Commodity,

This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word...:

The loss of property turns both Lear and Edgar into zero figures (according to
the current ideological construction of identity). However, both characters will
finally assert their intrinsic human worth, which survives the loss of property. The
redeemed Lear, who has learned that the clothes of the rich only serve to hide
vices, will freely discard outward garments (Undo this button...), as the medicinal
effect of changing places with the wretched had taught him the true value of
“pomp”.

Unlike such attempts to resist the solvent effect of capitalism upon social and
human ties, more characteristic of the chronicle plays, lost in legendary times, or of
the romances, removed from historical time, the black comedies, or Troylus and
Cressida, an early example of theatre of the mind, privilege a new form of character
construction, which anticipates pragmatist theories of identity as constative, shaped
by public discourse, or the recognition one gets from his social others. Whereas
Ulysses's address to the army stresses the importance of each man's duty
according to his degree or place in society, for obvious military purposes, in his
conversation with his friend, Achilles, as his purpose changes (to end his sulky and
indolent retreat to his tent), this sly, shape-shifting leader of the Greek armies
defines human worth as that which resides in the eye of the beholder. If Achilles
does not fight, like an actor whose fame depends on uninterrupted acting, his
reputation will go over to Ajax. Inherent worth, essential human nature is no longer
the issue, it is the “applause”, the public ratification that consecrates one's social
status.

In All's Well that Ends Well, friendship, loyalty, love or virginity are all turned
into commodities, goods to be exchanged for the best offer at the timely moment of
demand...

The rejection of natural law, of morality, the new politics, no longer constrained
by the practice of virtues, represent, according to Leo Strauss, the “first wave of
modernity” (“The Three Waves of Modernity”), whose signs Shakespeare, Marlowe
or the metaphysical poets intercepted with the sensitivity of the immunological
system to the noxious germs entering the body.

VI. A more valuable aspect of modernity dawning on the world at the time of
the Renaissance was the end of medieval dogmatism and totalitarianism.
Modernity, according to Gabriel Josipovici (The Lessons of Modernism) meant the
end of transcendental authority, contributed by three potent challengers: Science
(everything was being reexamined in the light of truth and rational investigation),
Protestantism (according to Calvin and Luther, the Church was no longer needed
in the dialogue of the alone with the Alone: the believer and God) and the
Bourgeoisie, a social class which disturbed the pre-existing hierarchical
arrangements.

Two more challengers of medieval hermenutic and of a unified body of belief

should be further considered, as they fostered modern relativism, whose first
articulations, from Montaigne (16th century) to Chladenius (his concept of
“Sehepunkt”, in the 18th century) bore upon the structuring devices of the arts and
their modes of representation: Copernican perspectivism and Bacon's critique
of language and representation.

The previous age had been dominated by Ptolemaic cartography, which meant
the neutrality and stability of the geometrical vision in constructing maps of the
world. The eye was diametrically opposed to the first chosen meridian. Latitudes
and longitudes stretched out from this spot to produce a two-dimensional
representation. Copernican astronomy had rendered this representation
problematic. The viewer's correct representation depended on astronomical
referents and on the instruments of measurement. It was correct only if the eye was
lined up with the North Star. The rules of perspective, laid down by the Italian
painter Alberti (Della Pittura) exposed artistic representation for an illusion, an
artifice, as the artist no longer copied over or faithfully mirrored the world; he set it
in perspective. One's sense of reality was going through a crisis, as perspectivism
did not echo, it doubled up being. In King Lear, Edgar induces his father to believe
that he is standing up at Dover, by imaginatively describing a mound of small
height according to the rules of perspective. Blind Gloucester jumps from it to his
safety, and his belief in a miracle restores his faith in life and divine justice. The
time honoured tyranny of the mimetic principle is overthrown, and Philip Sidney can
safely proclaim art's emancipation from reality in his Defence of Poesy:

... the poet's persons and doings are but pictures what should be, and not
stories what have been, they will never give the lie to things not affirmatively, but
allegorically and figuratively written. And therefore as in history, looking for truth,
they may go away full-frought with falsehood, so in poesy, looking but for fiction,
they shall use the narration but as an imaginative ground-plan of a profitable
invention.

Pesrpectivism nullified Aristotle's distinction between the historian's discourse

of truth as against the poet's invention. The positionality of the observer, the
accuracy of his methods or instruments intervened as uncontrollable variables in his
mediation – rather than discovery – of truth. In the playhouse for the Stuart court,
built by Inigo Jones according to the rules of perspective, it was only the king's seat
that permitted the central viewing position. Only the king's vision was correct...
 Bacon's theory of idols precipitated the sense of “homini confusio” permeating
the arts of the baroque. Ideas of the world can be fallible, he says, on account of
misrepresentations, which he calls “idols”.

Cratyllic language (words having some precise meaning according to their

eidos – their image in the divine mind) gives way to signs as empty stand-ins,
whose meaning is negotiated in communication. The theory of the conventional
nature of language was to be completed by John Locke (An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding).

Such early manifestations of modern scepticism and relativism take us over to the other,
dark side of the Renaissance, traditionally associated with the birth of rationalism, the
scientific spirit and man's increasing control of the universe.

VII. Is there an occult side to the Renaissance as well, as Hélčne Vedrine

would have us believe in her Philosophies de la Renaissance? [9]. If Renaissance
belief in the validity of social structures of meanings and values is above all
disputation, the interest in the occult or in metaphysical schemes appears to us as a
purely rhetorical stratagem. Did people really believe in the validity of their
representations of the world, summed up by Tillyard as “chain of being”, “cosmic
dance”, “the doctrine of the four elements” or “correspondences between planes of
being” as firmly as the medieval spectator who felt his blood freezing on watching
Everyman, or were they just tropes? The very amalgamation and repetition confirms
the latter suspicion. In his Fairy Queene, (The Mutability Canto) Spenser tropes the
dissolution of the world both as regress from subtler to more inferior elements (fire,
air, water, earth) and as the Christian apocalypse. In his sonnets, Shakespeare too
inscribes both figures: in sonnets XLIV and XLV, his person appears to be divided
between that part made up of earth and water, which pulls him downwards, when
his love moves away, and the other two, slight air and purging fire, which are his
better self, activated in the presence of his love. In sonnet CXLIV, he appears as the
Christian split double nature, with his better angel outwardly projected as the fair
youth, and his base, or evil self, personified by the Dark Lady. The recurrent
motif of the warring body and soul have become a metaphorical way of
speaking about a psychological polarity: the mortality of the body and the slavery
of passions and instincts in counterdistinction to the freedom of the spirit,
participating in the immortality of books or seeking eternal glory through them
(Castiglione's Courtier, XLIII, translated by Thomas Hoby). Ancient and
contemporary masters are ransacked for models and precepts: Aristotle'
Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero's De Officiis, Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and
Romans, A Mirror for Magistrates (interrogating aspects of conduct in historical
figures), Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor. The “chain of being”
points to the vector of a human meliorist project, which replaces natura naturans by
the dramatist's art: Prospero's brave new world, rescued from the sub-human
Caliban stage – that is man in his natural state) – and dimystified from Ariel's
enchantment. Dropping the magic of the magician's book and staff, Prospero claims
applauses for the illusionary power of artistic representation. The self, permanently
confronted with models and paragons, is often self-dramatized, and cast into a self-
reflexive type of discourse: play within the play, framing and comment on the main
action through parallel plots, dumb shows, prologues etc.

Under Henry VII, the court became an artistic centre, where drama could grow
more secular and less other-worldly. Under Henry VIII, it also became anti-clerical,
launching fierce attacks on the Catholic Church. The new sites of dramatic
performances (in colleges, at court, in aristocratic households) encouraged an
appropriation of classical learning and a more developed language and structure.
Native roots should not be underestimated, however (encouraged even by the
breaking down of the European religious community into national
churches). A metamorphic process, with help from classical models, led naturally
from the morality play to the Renaissance historical play, with the nation
removed from an eschatological frame and set within a historical one (Kynge Johan,
by John Bale, dated around 1539); from interludes to the comedies of the
professional scholars from the universities, full of farcical situations, structured into
acts and scenes according to classical models, yet dealing with native topics and
characters and experimenting with songs, in the unrestrained manner of popular
festivals. Udall's Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle, by an identified
author, are the best known. In the latter, the whole sophisticated machinery of
classical comedy – a Prologue introducing the subject, division into acts and scenes,
the unfailing end-line rhyme of the couplets, in sharp contrast to the rudimentary
language of the folk songs – is employed for a farcical situation of the basest sort.
An old woman loses her needle, a fact which causes an entirely disproportionate
despondency and agitation (so fearful a fray), only to find it finally in her servant's
breeches which she has mended. The homely goods of a village kitchen, the popular
superstitions, the colourful language are among the first attempts in the way of a
realistic comedy. The prevailing mode, however, is the mock-heroic. Tudor drama
converted the morality play, preaching humility, faith, obedience to God, into a
heroic play, celebrating power, riches, beauty or knowledge, no longer of divinity
but of the world, or into a kind of theatre having a political agenda and targeting
specific goals in the context of an altering political map. Characters are no longer
disembodied abstractions. In Henry Medwall's Nature, Pride is a courtly type
representing himself in terms of materialistically determined social status: ancestry,
a large estate, fashionable dress, being served at the table. Vestments, lifestyle,
possessions ascribe him to some particular social class. As Cardinal Morton's
chaplain, Medwall served his patron's interests by staging a performance in honour
of the Spanish and Flemish ambassadors gathered at Lambeth Palace on the
Christmas Eve of 1497. The Cardinal had not been born but appointed to a high
social position, therefore he was interested in reclassifying status as individual
talent and accomplishment. Henry VII himself, who could not make a very strong
case for his accession to the throne, and who was relying on the Commons and on
the gentry in his attempt to curb the power and arrogance of the baronial class, was
encouraging the new definition of nobility as an acquisition rather than a given. In
Medwall's Fulgence and Lucrec, a Roman senator's daughter is faced with the
problem of choosing a suitor: will she settle for Publius Cornelius, an aristocrat by
birth, or for Gaius Flaminius, who had worked his way up in society through virtuous
conduct and services to Rome? Unlike the Roman senators, the servants in the
subplot mirroring the main plot support the privilege of blood. A and B, in love with
Joan, “the flower of the frying pan”, will solve their rivalry over the same woman
according to the rules of courtly love and courtship by tournament. The
worthlessness of the aristocratic values is suggested through this parody set in low
life.

However, even Elizabethan or High Renaissance drama continues to

incorporate elements of medieval drama as well as of popular culture – folk songs
and dances, figures and motifs of the carnivalesque low tradition of village festivals
– as well as the double plot mingling the serious and the comic threads of the
miracles and interludes, for the sake of a more complex effect, secured by the
existence of multiple perspectives on the subject. Elements of medieval morality
steal into Elizabethan tragedy, usually broadening its appeal: allegorical characters
and pageants of the Seven Deadly Sins in a heroic play (thematizing the thirst for
knowledge and power) like Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe allegorical dumb
shows, commenting on the main action through archetypal or hic-et-ubique
projections (Gorboduc, by Sackville and Norton, Hamlet, romances). Apart from
being tardy, English Renaissance also chose to take its original course. The
Shakespearean genius broke all rules and created its own dramatic forms. As a
matter of fact, Aeschylus and Sophocles were not translated at all over this
timespean, while Euripides was only known through a paraphrase of the Phoenissae
(1566). Machiavelli's Prince, which challenged the medieval view of a fixed system
of hierarchies, divinely ordained, was not translated into English until well into the
seventeenth century (164o), Bacon objecting that one ought to write what one
should, not what one thinks. The Faustus figure was played down as a conjurer,
satisfied to play childish tricks on the potentates of the day. Elizabeth, who was a
new type of woman, learned, emancipated, undertook to translate a medieval
philosopher, Boethius, while her champion of the sea, Walter Raleigh, was not only
a discoverer but also a theologian. Erasmus was more influential through his
Enchiridion Militis Christiani (The Christian Soldier's Textbook), echoed in various
writings of the time, than through the cunning social satire of Encomium Moriae
(The Praise of Folly). It is true that Alexander Barclay's Ship of Fools (1509) was
published shortly after Sebastian Brant's invention of this new narrative convention
(Das Narrenschiff, Basel, 1494), which is a Renaissance version of the medieval
Danse macabre or estate satire: representatives of all social estates are gathered
together for satirical purposes. Unlike him, Shakespeare was an explorer of past
worlds and past narratives alike (apart from the longue durée of his atemporal
romance worlds), and attempts to establish an underground political allusiveness to
real people are dismissed with an ironical comment by Northrop Frye, in his book
On Shakespeare. Frye remarks the absence of any reference to contingent political
events in the histories, as well, such as of Magna Carta in King John or of the
peasants' revolt in Richard II: I make this point because every so often some
director or critic gets the notion that certain characters, such as Titania, refer to
her. The consequences to Shakespeare's dramatic career if the Queen had believed
that she was being publicly represented as having a love affair with a jackass are
something we fortunately don't have to think about [10]. Censorship was exercised
as a royal prerogative through the Master of Revels who licensed companies, read
and approved all plays, for a considerable fee, often demanding changes before
they got his assent. Printing was controlled by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the
Privy Council through their ecclesiastical authorities and court officials, and
enforced through the Stationers' Company, a state-licensed monopoly. What was
being suppressed? According to Margot Heinemann, [11] Questions of morality or
taste scarcely arose except for the banning of oaths in 1606; rape, incest,
mutilation, and brothel realism seem not to have troubled the censors at all.

Apparently a history of censorship will reveal what potentates mostly dislike or

fear. The licentious court of King James I, with the king himself guilty of erotic
transgression and the queen presiding over an endless revelling in her “dancing
barn” of White Hall, to say nothing of a nobleman murdered by his wife and her
lover under the court's protection, did not make much fuss about morality. It was
only political transgression that mattered.

The sore points of court politics changed from the Elizabethan to the Stuart
reign. Elizabeth, who had ordered the maiming of a man who had written a
pamphlet on her prospective marriage to the French dauphin (he had his right hand
cut off), mostly feared issues of legitimacy and succession, as well as of religious
extremism and fanaticism. The Elizabethan Settlement had restored the power of
the bishops, according to the principle “no bishop no king”, while the Stuarts made
further progress on the way to a restoration of Catholicism, dramatically ended by
the Civil War. A proclamation of 1559 had even forbidden the treatment of religious
and political issues except in front of persons endowed with “discretion” (wisdom,
the capacity to discern and discriminate). Marlowe wrote different prologues and
epilogues for his Jew of Malta, depending on the site of performance. The prologue
for the White Hall play alluded to the fact that the play had passed censorship and
could now gratify the spectators’ judicious “princely ears”, while the prologue for
the Druary Lane (Cockpit or Phoenix) theatre only advertised the author as the
“greatest poet” of the age and commented on aesthetic issues. With all his
precautions, his daring idea that hell is only a state of conscience (Doctor Faustus)
and his opinion that Thomas Harriot, the Queen's mathematician, was a Juggler who
used religion to enslave the naive minds of the primitive people in Virginia (see
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakepearean Negotiations, pp. 21 and the following) put
down in a police report might have contributed to his early and suspect loss of life.

The state control of dramatic performance made all dramatists dependent

upon patronage for security and a livelihood. Shakepeare's patron, the Earl of
Southampton, was a friend of Robert Devreux, Earl of Essex, who began by asking
subversive question, such as whether a King might not err, and ended in overt
rebellion leading to his execution. Shakespeare's contribution to the cause was
probably The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, putting on the map questions
about a king's worthiness, legitimacy, and deposition shortly before the outbreak of
the Essex revolt.

Under James I, it was the king's bent toward absolutism that represented the
main concern of his subjects. The king claimed that he was ruling by divine right (no
longer, like Elizabeth, “with their love”, as she had stated before a deputation of the
Commons), that his subjects’ lives depended on him, that he could dispose of them
as he well pleased, and that he was the father of the nation like a patriarch in his
family. The pastoral mode was the frequent attempt at the time to mitigate the
asperities of a totalitarian regime. Its founding convention was the oneness of
existence, and its integrative poetics spanned the range of drama and poetry from
Shakespeare’s late romances to Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island, published in 1633,
i.e. shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. The difference is that, whereas
Shakespeare modulated the pastoral stuff into an aesthetic parable, Fletcher shows
the new concern of the baroque poet with the human body:

Phineas Fletcher's allegorical atlas of the human body, The Purple Island; or,
The Isle of Man (1633), models both the geophysical composition and the social
character of a fictional Pacific Island on the skeletal structure and anatomical
systems of the human body. (...) What is intriguing in Fletcher's treatment of this
trope, in his celebration of tributaries as what is perhaps the smallest organ of the
human body, is the implicit claim that political agency resides in all aspects of the
state and not exclusively in the head of the monarch. Fletcher diverges from the
centralized political theodicy offered by the Stuarts and redistributes political
agency to the most minute parts of that body politic. Because this strategy is
inimical to the prevalent Stuart ideology that sought to redefine the unity of wills
between ruler and subject (unitas in voluntaribus) as the governing and
regulating will of one man (unitas una et regulatrix), I argue that Fletcher
contributes to alternate traditions rooted in primitive notions of pietas and richly
adduced poetically throughout the pastoral tradition. The pastoral tradition, which
reached its apogee under Elizabeth, itself becomes increasingly saturated with
discussions of a unitary model of political will which will, at this time, also provides
the model for poetic patronage in a new political climate. As poets adjust to the
absolutism of James's rule, the pastoral landscape becomes increasingly structured
from above; it is overseen by a single ruling entity rather than a group of shepherds
working in the harmonious pursuit of common interests, necessitating a generic
renegotiation to reflect the disparate ruling ideologies in the shift from Tudor to
Stuart. [12].

Poetry's coverage at the time was much more comprehensive, though. It

turned to politics as well as to religion, science or the sister arts. William Harvey's
recent discovery of the circulation of the blood had probably spurred Fletcher's
imagination, yet a look at the larger historical context can always enrich a literary
historian's explanatory narrative.

Renaissance Poetry: Reinscription and Experimentation.

English poets displayed an unhibited handling of generic conventions, working

freely with forms, thematic elements, topics and conventions.

All the literary forms the English revived from the antiquity or borrowed from
the recent developments on the Continent underwent significant transformations,
so that the argument on the comparable value of the moderns and of the ancients,
imitated in a servile spirit, needed to be imported from France to England towards
the end of the seventeenth century, where it knew an unglorious career (settled in
favour of the native genius by Dryden and ridiculed by Pope). Instead, the first book
of Don Quixote was translated into English before the second appeared in Spain,
and the “fantastic Spaniard” who loves by the book in Shakespeare's Love's
Labour's Lost was the kindred offspring of another comic genius. The literary
heritage of Don Quixote was to be a lasting one among the English authors,
interested ever since the Renaissance in the epistemological aspects of textuality
(life by the book), in the pilgrimage of books (“errant texts”) in the indifferent world
of things[13].

The ancient literary forms were first recovered either through translation or
imitation. Or both, we should say, as the Scot poet, Gavin Douglas, translated the
Aeneid keeping to the original sense and proportions, yet recasting it into heroic
couplets, while the great innovator, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, reshaped it to
blank verse, that is unrhymed, enjambed (run-on, instead of end-stopped lines)
pentameters – the first in English.

The extensive use of the pastoral mode (originating in the Idylls of Theocritus,
3rd cent. B.C.) both in poetry (the pastoral eclogue) and in prose romances (Robert
Greene, Philip Sidney) was, according to William Empson (Some Versions of the
Pastoral, 1935), the expression of an attempt to break through the strong class
system, making the high and the low in status (country and city, shepherds and
royalty) feel at home with each other. A deconstruction of social hierarchy in order
to reconstruct it as moral hierarchy. The dialogue between shepherds in a world
free from conflict and temporal decay (a Golden World in stasis) is propitious to
ecclesiastical and political allegory (“pastor” meaning both “shepherd” and
“priest”). Edmund Spenser's Shepherdes Calendar, a series of twelve eclogues,
combines the elegiac autumnal mood with an emphatic tone of political
denunciation, reminiscent of Langland. As required by the literary convention, the
decorative and graceful imagery of a stylized countryside is coupled with a taste for
obsolete words, indicative of no particular locale. Another foreign model which
Spenser appropriates and transforms in his Faerie Queene is the poema
cavalleresco, the Renaissance version of the epic, created by Lodovico Ariosto and
Torquato Tasso (Orlando furioso and Gerusalemme liberata, respectively). Spenser,
however, is not interested in a time-bound literary form (with topical allusions to the
relatively recent crusades and wars, a recital of adventures and romance, with
sensational fits of madness and recovery by simply breathing in one's lost senses,
brought back to earth in a phial...). Spenser does not write just for entertainment,
being intent upon a very serious moral allegory, whose initial design included
twelve books dedicated to Aristotle's twelve moral virtues, out of which only six and
one fragment (the Cantos of Mutability) were written. Apart from the moral allegory,
the poem has two more layers of meaning: the legendary story of King Arthur
seeing Gloriana, Queen of the Faeries, in a dream and setting out to seek her out in
faery land, and a political allegory (Gloriana standing for Queen Elizabeth, to whom
the poem is dedicated, other parallels to contemporary persons and events having
been identified as well). Framing and allegory make any approach of contingent
realities remote and only relevant through re-contextualization. The twelve days of
Gloriana's feast may be also linked to the twelve nights of the Christmas Holidays at
Elizabeth's court, suggestive therefore of the moral rebirth of the nation which
accompanied the expansion of the Empire under the glorious queen. On each day
the queen sends forth one of her knights (embodying one of the cardinal virtues –
Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy, Constancy – which
are tested and reinforced in the adventure) to aid one of her subjects in distress.
The poem opens thus to the world of philosophical vision and moral admiration,
while the descriptions of nature are the fruit of observation of the Irish countryside,
where the poet spent some time as secretary to the governor (1580-1599). From
the splendour of the romance world we step down into a homely environment
surveyed with the peasant's pragmatic eye for the human relevance and use of
nature: the builder oak, the aspine good for staves, the birch for shafts, the sallow
for the mill etc. (I/1,8-9). Traditional themes, like the pageant of the Seven Deadly
Sins (I/4), the “ubi sunt theme”: (All things decay in time and to their end do draw,
III/6) of medieval literature, combine with the newly revived pastoral convention of
the “delightful garden”, used, however, as the site of socio-political allegory (Queen,
the New World and the civilizing mission), in the manner of Baptista Spagnuoli. The
easy flow and musicality of the line is ensured by the metrical pattern, the famous
Spenserian stanza consisting of nine lines, eight iambic pentameters, followed by
a solemn hexameter.

The Italian canzone is merged with the classical and Renaissance wedding
ode in one of the most beautiful love-songs in the language: Spenser's
Epithalamion, occasioned by the middle aged poet's second marriage, which
concludes his 89 sonnet sequence entitled Amoretti. Elizabeth Boyle is
transfigured into the eternal bride, who finds her prototype in Solomon's Song of
Songs (her snowy neck is like a marble tower), for the planes of meaning in the
ceremonious proceedings of the day, from sunrise to the rise of the moon, engage,
just like in the celebrated Hebrew poem, all levels of existence, from natural
landscape and the mortal wedding guests to God Bacchus and the Graces, in a
pastoral Echo-world of the universal One:

The whiles the maidens do their carol sing

To which the woods shall answer and their echo ring.

The processional pageant or masque of Hymen is accompanied by the music

which Plato will have imagined at the birth of the universe (The Republic), as well as
by the homely carol, natives and myhological figures, Graces (let the Graces dance)
and maidens (carol: dancing song) joining in a cosmic dance.
 The sonnet was a new form, invented by Jacopo da Lentini (first half of the
thirteenth century). Its original, Italian form consists of fourteen lines, divided
metrically and rhetorically into an octave (eight lines rhyming abba) and a sestet
(six lines rhyming cdecde) Thomas Wyatt borrowed it on one of his diplomatic
missions on the Continent, yet changed its form to three quatrains, rhyming abba
and a couplet, forcing a cumulative effect into some generalized, sententious
statement. The personal experience of the Italian sonneteer is thus made into
something of a more universal appeal, in the manner of the sage discourse:

For as there is a certain time to rage,

So is there time such madness to assauge.

The thought content is pretty conventional: codified love attitudes, professions

of faith and truth, love complaints (the mistress is cruel or indifferent, as
inaccessible as the lady of the amour courtois tradition), love pleas. Nevertheless, a
decay of fortune could wring from the poet's pen the following touching plaintive
tones of sublimated emotion, which were quoted in a story by the 20th century
American Thomas Wolfe, on the lost happiness of irreversible time which, Dante
says, hurts the most in times of sorrow:

They flee from me, that sometimes did me seek

With naked foot stalking within my chamber,

Once have I seen them gentle, tame, and meek

That now are wild, and do not once remember

That sometime they have put themselves in danger,

To take bread at my hand, and now they range,

Busily seeking in continual change.

Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better: but once especial

In thin array, after a pleasant guise,

 When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small,

And therewithal, so sweetly did me kiss,

And softly said: dear heart, how like you this ?

The sonnet form was taken up by Henry Howard, who gave it the so-called
“Shakespearean form”, as it was employed by his brilliant successor: three
quatrains rhyming abab and an epigrammatic couplet. The second half of the
century produced the English sonnet sequences, in imitation of Dante (Vita Nuova)
and Petrarch (Il Canzoniere).

The sonnet sequence is made up of sonnets interspersed with other lyric

genres: songs, madrigals, complaints etc. The first in English was Thomas
Whatson's Hekatompathia (1582), a conventional encomium. The poet con-fesses
he has written a derivative song of praise giving fame to a type-cast mistress. He
does not mean to be original, confining himself to working up the received conceits
of the modish sonneteering image-makers. The female type of the Renaissance
emerged from his pen in a form apt to exasperate Shakespeare, who wrote his own
Sonnet CXXX as an anti-encomium, in response to Whatson's: Her yellow looks
exceed the beaten gold/ Her sparkling eyes in heaven a place deserve/ (...) Her
words are music all of silver sound./ (…) On either cheek a Rose and Lily lies/ Her
breath is sweet perfume, or holy flame / Her lips more red than any coral stone.

References:

[1] J. Derrida, De la grammatologie, Les Editions du Minuit, 1972, p. 22

[2] Harold Bloom, Hamlet. Major Literary Characters, Chelsea House Publishers, 1990, p.
214.

[3] See S.C. Boorman, Human Conflict in Shakespeare, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.

[4] John Drakakis, Introduction to Shakespearean Tragedy, Longman 1992, p.2l.

[5] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, in Big-Time
Shakespeare, edited by Michael D. Bristol, Routledge, 1996, p. 128
[6] See Paul de Man on the phenomenal link between word and thing in Plato in The
Resistance to Theory, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 33, University of Minnesota
Press, 1986.

[7] Maria-Ana Tupan, The Mirror and the Signet. The Shakespearean Search for Archetypes,
Institutul de Studii Sud-Est Europene, 1993, pp. 103-106.

[8] E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, Chato & Windus, 1973. p. 2

[9] Hélčne Védrine, Les philosophies de la Renaissance, Presse Universitaire de France, 197l.

[10] Northrop Frye, On Shakespeare, Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1986, p. 38.

[11] Margot Heinemann, “Political drama”, in The Cambridge Companion to English

Renaissance Drama. Edited by A.R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway, Cambridge
University Press, 1995, pp. 167.

[12] Mark Bayer “The Distribution of Political Agency” in Phineas Fletcher’s Purple Island in
Criticism. A. Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Summer 2002, Vol. 44, No. 3, pp. 249-
50.

[13] Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses, Editions Gallimard, 1966.

Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, consisting of 108 sonnets, declares war on
convention and conceited elaboration. The opening sonnet is a poetical art as important
as his Apologie for Poetry, which had defined the Renaissance idea of the hero
(seeking the moral strength and pieties of Aeneas, not physical strength, as in Homer).
The poem is a recusatio, that is the expression of a desire to redirect poetic tradition.
The poet is seen to hesitate between the “derivative” hypostasis of the humble
imitator (Studying invention fine, her wit to entertain) and the naturally born genius
(Invention, Nature's child). The imagery properly enacts the theme. The octave
develops the image of the learned poet: elaborate, artificial (I sought fit words to paint
the blackest face of woe), sterile (Oft turning others leaves, to see it thence would flow/
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunne-burned braine), unnatural (step-dame
Studies). The sestet points to the new direction into which the poet intends to move:
originality. The imagery, in sharp contrast to the former, is connected with natural birth:
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throwes/ Biting my truant pen,
beating myself for spite,/ Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write. In other
sonnets, however, is voiced the Neoplatonic cult of Intellectual Love (Aphrodita
Urania), in opposition to earthly love (Aphrodita Pandemos) to which he bids farewell:
Leave me, O Love! which reachest but to dust. In the Platonizing spirit introduced by
Castiglione's Courtier, transitory earthly beauty can only serve as an incentive to the
contemplation of the immutable and incorruptible Archetypes.

The polarity of heavenly and earthly love has brought us to William

Shakespeare's sonnet sequence, which came out, in Thorpe's edition of 1609. Out of
the 154 sonnets completed with A Lover's Complaint to form a numerological pattern,
only two had got into print by 1599. It is commonly believed they that belong together
with the two long poems dedicated to his patron, Henry Wriothesly, Earl of
Southampton: Venus and Adonais and The Rape of Lucrece (1593-94). They could
have been composed in the leisurely time the poet enjoyed in the Earl's company at his
country residence, where they had taken refuge from an outbreak of plague in London.
Irrespective of the date of composition, the sonnets differ wildly though from
Shakespeare's early idiom, being characteristic of the late Renaissance, baroque style:
the heterogeneous, conceited imagery borrowed from various walks of life, previously
considered unfit for literature, the technique of amplification (clusters of related images,
proliferation of tropes), the mise-en-abyme technique, specific tropes, as, for instance,
the conceit of the speaker contemplating his own image in the lover's heart, violent
oppositions, shocking associations, a.o.

The first 125 sonnets and the 126th poem which is an epigram, are addressed to a
mysterious fair youth, while the remaining 28 sonnets are addressed to an equally
mysterious “Dark Lady”. As for the long poem at the end, John Kerrigan [14] thinks he
has identified Shakespeare's model in Samuel Daniel's Sonnets to Delia, followed by
The Complaint of Rosamond, in which a woman is overheard lamenting her seduction
by a handsome young man (alluding to the seduction and enforced suicide of the
mistress of Henry II). The attempts to identify the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady in
contemporary persons have been, obviously, even more frequent. From what we gather
in reading the poems, there are no contemporary persons alluded to; they are simply
tropes. The poet's attitude to his two loves changes in time, the sonnets being
connected (logically or even grammatically). The first 25 sonnets unfold, on a familiar
tone and in a vocabulary borrowed from the contingent and the everyday, a common
Elizabethan narrative. A young man of exceptional beauty is threatened by the decay
brought by the passage of time and the two remedies suggested are either marriage
and perpetuity through children (generation ending up in regeneration), or art: in the
poet's song, the youth will ever live young. The marriage however is presented not as a
private affair but some cosmic union, like that between Christ and the Church, or the
maiden wailing for her demon lover (God and his people) in The Song of Songs:

Ah ! If thou issueless shalt hap to die,

The world will wail thee, like a makeless wife;

The world will be thy widow, and still weep

 That thou no form of thou hast left behind

When every private widow well may keep

By children's eyes her husband's shape in mind (IX)

The word “issueless” does not imply mixture, blend, but “outgoing, outflow”, while
the world would remain not only a widow, but uncreated. The imagery is sooner
suggestive of God coming out of himself in creating the world (thou of thou) than of any
equal blend of separate entities. The dubious nature of such union is maybe responsible
for the uncommon vocabulary of usurers, legal and market arrangements which
constructs the unnatural or impossible marriage and children-bearing:

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend

Upon thyself thy beauty's legacy ?

Nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend,

And being frank, she lends to those are free:

Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse

The bounteous largess given thee to give ?

Profitless usurer, why dost thou use

So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live ?

For having traffic with thyself alone,

Thou of thyself thou sweet self dost deceive;

Then how, when Nature calls thee to be gone,

What acceptable audit canst tou leave ?

Thy unused beauty must be tomb'd with thee,

Which, used, lives th' executor to be.

 The fair youth has the aspect of Hermaphroditus, painted by Nature with “a
woman's face” to be the poet's “master-mistress”, a godly figure, therefore, above the
category of sex. First designed as a woman, Nature had changed her mind, so that the
poet's love can never be carnally consummated, it can only be spiritual (Sonnet XX).
Baroque hyperboles (see the images of Time's destructive power in Sonnet XIX, with
the climactic burning of the Phoenix in her blood, i.e. that kind of destruction which can
go no farther but yield in rebirth) and baroque conceits are bracketing the body, allowing
of the souls' reciprocal reflection (XXIII, XXIV). This scene of recognition (marriage of
true minds CXVI) determines a shift in the relationship between speaker and youth. Up
to now, he has been patronizing and showing off as world-wise and skilled in his
immortal rhyme; now he admits to a relationship of “vassalage”, sending his written
“ambassage” to his love (who belongs, therefore, to another world, maybe ontologically
distinct) in the graceful and ceremonial address to an overlord (XXVI). From market
capitalism, Shakespeare escapes into the discourse of chivalry. The cherished image of
the youth is no longer sought out in the real world, but revived in the mind's eye after
going to bed in the chamber engulfed in darkness (XXVII). Sonnet XXXV sounds very
intriguing, for it seems to be more than a brilliant baroque conceit. As everything in the
world of matter and immortality is imperfect (roses have thorns and silver fountains,
mud), the fair youth's “sensual fault” (presence in the phenomenal world) is taken by the
poet upon himself, to wash away his sin. The military and political conceits are so
powerful, that they actually induce an impression that the war against the senses takes
place within the poet:

And 'gainst myself a lawful plea commence;

Such civil war is in my love and hate

That I an accessory needs must be

To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.

The next sonnet intimates something of this kind: although they are one through
their spiritual love, let them remain “twain”, so that the “blots” would remain with himself.
Sonnet XLII introduces an unusual theme for the genre: the triangular scheme: poet,
youth, Dark Lady. Sophistic reasoning comforts him with the idea that it is the poet's
love of the Lady that the youth loves in her, that he is not moved by carnal desire.
Sonnet XLV is explicit about the barrier between himself and the youth: his bodily self:

If the dull substance of my flesh were thought

Injurious distance should not stop my way

 But the poet's body is pulling into different directions, being made of two base
elements, earth and water, and two elements driving him upwards to the spirit, to the
fair youth (Sonnet XLV).

From Sonnet LIII onwards, Platonic imagery and speculation are easily
recognizable. The fair youth is an Idea (of Intellectual Beauty), which has millions of
strange shadows (copies in matter). He is present in archetypal embodiments of beauty
(Helen, Adonais, in an ideal Hermaphroditus), and in seasonal shapes contemplated in
the real world (your beauty doth appear), yet is himself present in none. The books of
the world are also such copies, so that the youth's beauty can be found in them too
(since mind at first in character was done, Sonnet LIX). Ideas are inscribed in the mind,
the mind only needs to wake up to them. Sonnets LXXX – LXXXIV introduce the theme
of the “rival poet”, dating back to the Anglo-Saxon Deor. What if some other poet should
surpass him in his exercise of admiration? The poet comforts himself again at the
thought that, since the object of his love is god-like self- identity, uniqueness (you alone
are you), any paraphrase or description is impossible or supplementary. The youth is
now primum mobile (moving others, are themselves as stones, XCIV), removed from
the lust of action. From Sonnet CV, the figure of the youth is cast into even the more
spiritualized frame of Testamental discourse: three in one (fair, kind, and true), the
youth's beauty prophesised by “antique pens”, the world dreaming on things to come,
an echo from Psalm 115 (Have eyes to wonder). The vocabulary is homiletic: like
prayers divine,/ I must each day say o'er the same;/ (...) even as when first I hallowed
thy fair name.... (CVIII)'

The Dark Lady sonnets bring a complete change. Her eyes are mourners, as if
seeing that she is the death of him (CXXXII). The sonnets from CXXX to CXXXIV heap
up images of bondage (the Lady holds them both prisoners), prison, death, slavey,
market-value. Satire and complaint reach a climax in Sonnets CXXXV and CXXXVI,
punning on “will” (meaning “testament”, the poet's name, genitals etc.) Whereas the fair
youth is unique and existing unto himself, the fair woman symbolizes multiplicity (as
she's got so many lovers, what's the big deal adding him up?), supplementary, “Will in
overplus”, confused identity, equivocity, meanings sliding beneath signifiers. The
imagery is domestic (let her accept him like a housewife gathering chickens scared off
by a storm), often grotesque, licentious. The poet is waging his war not only with the
woman that has enthralled him against his better judgment, but also with the blazon
tradition (songs in praise of a type-cast mistress), which lowers the purpose of art (we
remember him priding himself on treating of higher subjects than the “antique pen”). He
parrots Petrarch's sonnet which Chaucer borrowed for his Troilus (which proves that it
was a “hit”):

If that be fair whereon my false eyes dote,

What means the world to say it is not so ?

If it be not, then love doth well demote... (CXLVIII)

and systematically deconstructs the Watson sonnet in an anti-blazon:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun:

Coral is far more red than her lips' red:

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask'd red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks:

And in some perfume is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound:

I grant I never saw a goddess go,

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

Commentators tend to take the couplet in a positive sense: He finds comparisons

odious because, when they conceal what a mistress's eyes might eventually be, they
neglect particularity and being [15]. If considered in the context of the entire sequence,
the meaning can only be this: and although she is odious, I am so stupid as to find her
as rare as those women to whom she could only falsely be compared. It is obvious that
the poet is not referring to an author's misplaced comparisons but to the mistress
comparing herself to others: she would prove unlike if she compared herself to the
women constructed through such similes.

The body as a prison (“the sinful earth”) with the “poor soul” at the centre (CXLVI)
is the source of the conflict, which is now revealed to be taking place within the poet,
and not in a triangular, outward relationship. In fact, the poet is writing a sequential song
about himself:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,

Which like two spirits do suggest me still:

The better angel, is a man, right fair,

The worser spirit, a woman, coulour'd ill.

To win me soon to hell, my female evil

Tempeth my better angel from my side,

And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,

Wooing his purity with her foul pride.

And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend

Suspect I may, yet nor directly tell;

But being both from me, both to each friend,

I guess one angel in another's hell:

Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,

Till my bad angel fire my good one out. (CXLIV)

 The last four sonnets are “love complaints” sui generis: when Ideas or the Platonic
archetypes are erased through oblivion (till each to razed oblivion yield his part –
CXXII), man yields to Aphrodite Pandemos, Venus of the natural world. Innuendo and
phallic imagery (Cupid's brand stolen by a nymph of Diana's and quenched in a
fountain) is interpreted by John Kerrigan and other commentators as a topical reference
to the bath-sweating tubs used to cure pox in Jacobean London.

A Lover's Complaint is, in pure baroque style, a myse-en-abyme of the whole

sonnet sequence. The fair youth, in control of the elements, subduing his horse into a
graceful race (What rounds, what bounds, what course, what stop he makes!), wrapped
up in the glamour of ceremony and the redeeming logos (deep-brained sonnets, built of
gems, which symbolize metaphysical power, like the building blocks of heavenly
Jerusalem) has seduced and abandoned a female figure focusing an opposite imagery:
tearing of papers and phraseless hand (divorce from logos), breaking rings atwain (fall
into the world, from original Oneness), the carcass of a beauty spent (subject to the
spoliation of time). Mortals cherish reflections of the fair youth as if from another land,
which they remember and recognize in Platonic fashion:

„Many there were that did his picture get,

To serve their eyes, and in it put their mind;

Like fools that in the imagination set

The goodly objects which abroad they find

Of lands and mansions, theirs in thought assign'd;

And labouring in more pleasures to bestow them

Than the true gouty landlord which doth owe them”.

Why look into the world for the icons which are “charactered” in the mind and can
only be remembered not actually possessed? On earth, beauty is granted in lease, in
due time any dark lady is left a carcass. The mind's homecoming is active spiritual
contemplation.

The baroque dialogue between Logos and the World, Self and Soul, Body and
Mind etc. finds in Shakespeare the most consummate expression. And what is his entire
dramatic work if not an exercise in the recovery of “part” (role) from “razed oblivion”, and
ideal reinscription of the orderly, archetypal script of the world? Man's redemptive work,
made possible through self-consciousness, does not concern only himself. His moral
and physical beauty is part of the all-enveloping Renaissance meliorist project, ranging
from the beautifully trimmed gardens to polite manners, from cultural refinement,
whether in discourse or collected works of art, to the need for a meaningful social order.
The British historical prototype, the Magnificent Man of the Renaissance was Thomas
Morus. Shakespeare did not need to be either Morus or Francis Bacon, to whom his
work is sometimes ascribed. He achieved more by patterning this project for al
subsequent times. His plays enact a perpetual recovery from oblivion of social order
(historical plays), of identity (comedies), of values (tragedies), of the original oneness
(romantic comedies and pastoral romances). It is only his cautionary dark comedies
that remain somehow locked within a crisis, only to show future generations, like
Macbeth’s head, the grim look of “belying” masks usurping the “vizard” of life “tried” as
valid human signified.

Renaissance Drama

The Renaissance and, particularly, baroque representations of the world worked

through huge symmetries and a complex system of correspondences [16]. Human
destiny could only be understood in relation to the macrocosm. This world picture was
inscribed in the very building structure of the public theatres in London. One of
them, the most famous, having Shakespeare as actor, share holder and deputy
manager, was significantly called “The Globe”. The oldest, which had previously served
as innyards, were round or octagonal, with the pit (or yard) open to the sky. Tiers of
covered galleries ran round the yard, except for the section occupied by the stage,
which was a large platform, divided into an outer and an inner stage, which could be
curtained off. Above the inner stage was the upper stage, a gallery covered by a
thatched roof (the turret). Beneath the main stage there was a cellar (cellarage). The
entire arrangement had a symbolical meaning: the theatre stood for the globe (theatrum
mundi), the turret, with its canopy of painted stars suggested heavens, and the
cellarage, hell. The outer and the inner stage were designed to represent distinct worlds
(this-worldly or other-worldly, for instance, that in which Thaisa is brought back to life
through the magic of Cerimon in Pericles). Robert Weimann [17] considers that the two
portions of the stage perpetuated a division existing in the medieval pageants, between
the place of the throne (scaffold) and the acting ground, which was not delimited,
practically merging with that of the audience. The distinction between platea (in close
proximity to the audience) and locus, or place occupied by figures of power, allowed
thus of a dialogue between the self-images constructed by feudal absolutism and the
subverting popular voice.

Obviously, the motif of theatrum mundi cannot be reduced to such simplifying

sociological explanations, nor does the economy of the main stage give a satisfactory
account of the entire hierarchical arrangement. Nevertheless, the various levels of
existence were thought to be so intimately linked (in that chain of being running from the
humblest forms of existence through man up to God), that transgression from nature to
society, to art, or a world beyond did not effect any breach of illusion. The characters
afforded to forget themselves and mix up references. For instance, Hamlet, in his odd
speech which has elicited such strenuous hermeneutic effort from commentators, refers
to “this fellow in the cellarage” (the actor beneath the stage on which he is standing, in
the cellar) instead of “my father's spirit imprisoned in hell”. Unless we are familiar with
the conventions of dramatic representations, we are apt to miss important meanings.
Scenery was nonexistent, the whole burden falling on speech and action. Apart from
public arenas, there were also private indoor playhouses.

The rhetoric of Elizabethan drama fully explored the auditory and rhythmic
potential of the unrhymed iambic pentameter cadence, or blank verse. Sound (the
incantatory effects of alliteration, repetitions, echo, syntactic parallelism) was sometimes
privileged to the detriment of meaning.

The type of conflict differs from the medieval, in being redirected from a
metaphysical to a moral or realistic frame. The term “tragedy” undergoes important
semantic changes. In the Middle Ages, it does not imply “dramatic form”, in fact, or
conflict. It resembles rather a narrative recounting the life of some ancient or eminent
personage who suffered a decline of fortune towards a disastruous end [18]. Despite
Franco Moretti’s opinion in The Great Eclipse [19], the idea of tragedy does change in
a Tudor work, edited by William Baldwin, entitled A Mirror for Magistrates, which ran into
six editions from 1559 to 16lo. The purpose of the book, the editor makes it clear, is to
show how great men are destroyed not only by the vagaries of fortune but also by their
personal vices, of which the greatest is ambition, for it challenges the status quo. The
editor goes on commenting a quote from Plato: well is the realm governed, in which the
ambitious desires not to bear office. The moral purpose of the book is to show the
slippery deceits of the wavering lady (Fortune), and the dew rewards of all kind of vices.
To what extent Renaissance man allowed himself to be shaped by current discourses
can be inferred from the close paraphrases we read in a rhetorician of the day, George
Puttenham (The Art of English Poesie, 1589) : to show the mutabilities of fortune, and
the just punishment of God in revenge of a vicious and evil life; or, in the long title of the
English version of Historia von D. Johan Fausten: The Damnable Life and Deserved
Death of Doctor Faustus. Ambition is the motif triggering action in the paradigmatic
heroic, historical and tragical plays of the time, mainly focusing the disastrous effects of
transgression. Rulers do not simply fall; they grow tyrants (Gorboduc) or choose to
enjoy leisure and avoid responsibility (King Lear). Their fall is partly their own doing, and
their errors bear upon the entire community, normally held in place by precise bonds
and degrees. The tragical end is no longer simply a discretionary act of Fate but an act
of justice, engaging the hero’s own responsibility in his fall.

A sign of modern mentality is the new association, within the same individual,
of homo sapiens and homo faber, generating a new type of conflict: the antagonism
between nature and art. Philip Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie (1595) argues that: the
poet makes things either better than Nature brings forth, or quite new forms such as
never were in Nature. Improving upon nature becomes Prospero, the playwright. A
disanalogy, bespeaking a modern, sceptical mind, establishes between being or reality
and imagination (The Knight of the Burning Pestle, by Beaumont and Fletcher, in
imitation of Don Quixote).
 The conflict in most cases, is an inner one deriving from the Erasmus paradigm
(Enchiridion) of the human personality split between angel and beast, mind and body,
reason and passions or base instincts, with even greater emphasis upon the individual's
worth, which is the Renaissance distinctive mark.

The dramatic stage onto which Shakespeare was brought by a touring company in
the late eighties was dominated by the so-called “University Wits” Thomas Kyd,
Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly (also the author of a novel presenting the 16th
century male paragon, Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit, in an artificial, conceited style,
imitative of Guevara, from whose title the noun “euphuism” has been derived), Robert
Greene (the founder of the English comedy with his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay),
George Peele and Thomas Lodge were among the first secular professional
playwrights, with a good classical background (educated at Oxford and Cambridge, in
the new humanistic climate).

The medieval morality (preaching humility, faith, obedience to God) is yielding,

under the spur of the Tudor myth of expansion of knowledge and discovery, to the
heroic play, whose theme is a quest for power, riches, for the individual's self-assertion
and control of the world. The late moralities and theological writings already show an
interest in the cunning Latin books, in pagan knowledge, which finds an excuse in
serving as a progress towards knowledge of God himself (The Interlude of the Four
Elements). The historical Faustus, alluded to in documents of the early sixteenth
century, had probably been an itinerant scholar, a disseminator of the new knowledge,
to whom the book of a Protestant theologian (1547) ascribed the practice of
necromancy and a death at the hands of the devil. The figure of Faustus could only
emerge at the time of the Renaissance, because, as different from Prometheus, he is
egotistic, self-centred, obeying the pulls of his own arrogant will. Things had changed
since the Middle Ages, when people were puppets in the hands of Fortune. The self-
reliant Faustus lives in a more liberal world, a world of the accumulating capital, in which
even metaphysical arrangements are settled through negotiations and contractual
bonds, properly signed (in blood). The devil (in Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History
of Doctor Faustus, for instance, but even in late miracle and morality plays), often plays
an unheroic, comical part. As, in Marlowe, Mephistophilis is pleading with Faustus
against the compact, through his wistful recollections of lost Heaven, man's
centrality, so typically renascent, in the Faust-plot is challenged by no second party.
The hero chooses and enacts his own damnation. Saint Augustine himself says in his
City of God that the devil only conquers by fellowship of sin (allegorized in the blood-
letting scene, i.e. becoming kindred, accompanying such covenants). Since the devil in
Chaucer's tale of the Friar recognizes no kindred voice in the carter's abuse of his
horses, he will not take them even against their owner's express wish (he knows the
carter does not mean what he says). In letting the devil conjured by Faustus show up
disguised as a Franciscan Friar (fratris imagine, in the image of the brother), Marlowe's
irony cuts in two directions: an anti-Catholic onslaught and the suggestion of Faustus
belonging with the devil not through what he has not yet accomplished but through
what he thinks. His question about the location of hell is promptly answered by
Mephistophilis: Hell is where we are. The real conflict is within, in the evil mind
becoming conscious of what it is. It is through such subtle mutations, worked by a mind
fully apprehensive of the spirit of the age, and not only through the majestic rhetorical
effect of his blank verse and tight dramatic structure (twelve scenes framed by a
Prologue) that Marlowe's play mainly appeals to our imagination today. His text is in fact
an exercise in deconstruction: of the Prometheus figure in Faustus dumping his
projects to benefit his nation (improvement of education, works of civilization, the
political independence of Germany etc., all of them worthy of a Renaissance
Magnificus), while choosing to gratify his own appetite (a kiss from Helen of Troy), and
of the Biblical divine figures through the hero's blasphemous techniques (magic circle
with astrological insignia anagrammatizing Jehova's name etc.). Faustus takes heart
through misquoting – When Mephistophilis shall stand by me,/ What god can hurt
thee?, parroting Psalm 22: The lord is my light and my salvation/ Whom shall I fear? –
or misapplying quotes, as when he accompanies his Satanic conversion by Christ's
words on the cross: Consummatum est. Whereas the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins
is a throwback upon an earlier allegorical mode, Good Angel and Evil Angel, always
appearing after Faustus has already made his decision, suggest personifications of his
own divided mind. Trained as a divinity student, Marlowe give a Renaissance version to
Augustine's Manichaeism and psychomachia (fight for the soul between God and the
Prince of Darkness).

Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, dating from about the same time, probes a
similar vision of hell, as a state of mind and not as some naive concept about a terrifying
underground locale. Hieronimo’s heart is torn between his dead son's appeal to
revenge him (Vindicta mihi) and the Christian precept that Vengeance belongs to God:
And there is the torment, there is hell. Medieval dogmas about resolutions passively
relegated to a world beyond and pagan attitudes to the worth of immediate action, or
about due punishment for crime clash in the problematical modern consciousness,
whose thinking about action will always take longer than action itself. Idea and deed are
weighed against each other, and Hieronimo chooses the latter: not inactive hope in
divine retribution, but personal act of justice; not consolation in the fictional truth of art (a
painter offering to paint the tragical death of his son) but deconstruction of illusion into
brute act (while acting on the stage, he kills in earnest his son's assassin). The revenge
plot and the dubitative consciousness anticipate Shakespeare's Hamlet, but the play
is overwhelming in itself, through its violent representations of the fallen human world, in
which every noble intention ends up in its contrary, in which love itself is described in
terms of war – II/4 (Eros/Ares). Pluto and Proserpine's kiss (Eros/Thanatos) in the
framing Prologue becomes the emblem a dramatist of solid classical learning imprints
on the restless, warring European countries of the postclassical age. The bridge over
time (the present victimizing war between Spain and Portugal reminding Hieronimo of
the Trojan precedent) enforces the sense of an eternal human destiny and unavoidable
doom.

Whereas in Christopher Marlowe's brief career the conflict remains the same
throughout (lust for imperial power in Tamburlaine the Great, or for moneyed power in
The Jew of Malta, loss of power in Edward II), in William Shakespeare, the conflict
changes a great deal by the turn of the century. Walter Cohen [20], explains the shift
from histories to tragedies as a shift in social conflict: the former pits feudalism against
absolutism, while the latter opposes absolutism to capitalism. However, sociological
motivation in tragedies is not that important in Shakespeare. A more interesting
explanation, an epistemological one, comes from W.R. Elton: To turn from theological
to philosophical contexts, the Renaissance epistemological crisis emphasized the
notion or the relativity of perception, recalling the appearance-versus-reality motif
recurrent throughout Renaissance drama. Present throughout dramatic history, it was a
manifestation as well of theatrical illusion and the new theatre of the baroque.
Confusion between appearance and reality, as well as the exploration of their validity, is
a feature of such contemporary writing as Cervantes' Don Quixote (Pt. I, published in
1605). The separation of reality from illusion, truth from mere hallucination, is, in part,
the task set Hamlet by the Ghost. Recognizing the contradictoriness of truth, as well as
the conflicts in his intellectual heritage, Montaigne, doubting whether mankind would
ever attain certainty, turned inward to explore his ambiguous and changing self.
Perhaps, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, Montaigne ends with an awareness, related to
the dialectic of drama, that contradiction is truth. As in Shakespearian drama, without
dogmatic or reductive exclusions, he experiments, “essays”, and questions, in an open-
ended and inconclusive manner, the world of experience [21] The “baroque
epistemological crisis” would probably sound better. And it is not the Ghost setting
Hamlet the task to “separate truth from hallucination”, since Old Hamlet well knows the
truth, while Hamlet, as different from Horatio, has always been convinced of the Ghost's
reality. It is Hamlet himself who undertakes to test, through the euristic fiction of the
Mouse Trap, the truth of the Ghost's words, which he discovers to be pound's worth
(having the validity of genuine gold). And this because, whereas his father lives in the
medieval time of battles decided in single combat between the leaders and of sternly
exacted revenge, Hamlet is a student in Wittenberg, a modern university, associated
with Faustus. He is a restless, Faustian spirit, believing in nothing, taking nothing for
granted and inquiring into the causes of everything. Lafew’s speech in All's Well that
Ends Well – They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to
make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless – points to the new
sceptical habit of mind. The change in the general, philosophical climate will have been
reinforced in Shakespeare by the gloomy spirit induced by his son's death. After
Hamlet's realization that nothing is but only appears to the self in one way or another, a
dialectic of ironies and ambiguities, that cannot be easily sorted out, makes any point of
view or solution controversial. The antithetic structuring of tragical actions and
characters, making problematical the spectator's identification with any, and the
convention of “dark comedy” (a baroque tragicomedy, in which a potential tragical end is
ultimately deterred by doubtful means and procedures) are the formal changes
accompanying the modified world view. From the ordely and hierarchical representation
of the universe before 1600, when the conflict is generated by the threat to this order,
Shakespeare crosses this baroque chiaroscuro, philosophical as well as moral (conflict
of values), towards the serenity of the last romances. The Jacobean cult of pastoral (a
baroque taste) also seems to have been connected with the accession to the throne of
James I, when the kingdom expanded to include Scotland, as well as far-off territories
through colonization. There was a feeling of general prosperity, of a return to the
Golden Age, which received a literary expression in the pastoral mode (masques,
romances, in dramatic, lyric or prose forms), and in the encomiastic tropes of the
Jacobian image-makers. Even the revisionists of the Bible, headed by the Puritan John
Reynolds, who undertook to “purge” the corrupted Tudor versions (under Henry VIII and
Edward VI) would labour on the trope of a Sun-King who had dispelled the mists
gathering under the “Occidental Star of Queen Elizabetth”, through his “undoubted” title
(unlike that of Anne Boleyn's daughter) and wise “Government”. James was growing to
a myth of the divine monarch, bringing “peace and tranquillity” to the English in their
“Sion” (Preface to the Authorized Version of the Bible, dedicated to the King). In
Shakespeare's last plays, the conflict springs from antagonism to the pastoral vision of
harmony, unity, oneness (separation of parents and children, lands and leaders,
husbands and wives), the resolution being the reconciliation of all opposites, reunion.

A new type of conflict inheres not within the world of representation but in the
competing perspectives on it. This is the case when a text is reading another text
(reinscription of a subject, literary work, chronicle etc.), i.e. when an author takes a
polemical view of a world already encoded in representation. Setting out from Roland
Barthes’s conviction that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological
meaning (the message of the author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a
variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of
quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture (Image, Music, Text, Glasgow
1977, p. 46), John Drakakis enlarges upon the thesis of a text anonymously elaborated,
out of which the “great Will” has completely evaporated: Attention should rather be
drawn to what in Shakespeare's case was an intrinsically collaborative enterprise, the
production under determinate circumstances, and with a series of generic models to
guide the process, of a dramatic text. Viewed from this perspective, the ascription of the
independent authorial “voice” of “Shakespeare” to these texts is tantamount to a
collusion of an unstated romantic theory of composition, implying a fully conscious
writer occupying a transcendent position in relation to his writing, for which historical
evidence is sparse if it exists at all[22]. Such extreme opinions are not tenable, if only
because Shakespeare found most such texts brick and left them marble.

The fact is, to Shakespeare, reality has ceased to be one, existing independently
of human subjectivity. His inroads into the past are also explorations of time-specific
cultural conventions. Apparently finding that every worldview is deeply buried into
symbolical forms, rhetorical figures, long narratives, and, consequently, that there is no
such thing as past or present realities but only past and present worldviews.
Shakespeare produces his own texts as dialogic structures: by differentiation from or
displacement of old. His own texts are highly patterned, imagery is consistently
structured. Even in a light comedy like the Taming of the Shrew (unbelievably complex,
when properly studied), there is not just one Italy but several versions of it – Virgil's,
Ovid's, Boccaccio's, Terence's – which send their echoes into Shakespeare's mise-en-
abyme of Ariosto's Suppositti (the source of the Bianca plot). All these palimpsestic
reinscriptions belong to the geographical and ethnic frame in which the action of
Shakespeare's play is set, as if Shakespeare thought they made up a more genuine
Italy. In his Apologie for Poetrie, Sidney posits the question of representation: I can
speak of Peru without being in Peru, but, if the action is set in Peru, then I have to
represent it through a native's house. When Shakespeare means to create in his
audience a sense of being in Italy, he does not resort to scenery (there was so little of it,
anyway); he makes allusions to texts produced within this space and only to them.
An ethnic group and locale are transferred from being in the world to being in the word.
Italy becomes its own BOOK, or, rather, a whole library in which it is crosslit from
various perspectives and progressively constituted [23]. The Induction and the play
within the play oppose the British to the Italian world, as well as British to Latin/Italian
texts having something in common: they all thematize deception, which is also the
theme of Shakespeare's play. The deception played upon Sly by the Lord, or upon
Katharina by Petruchio, or by Lucentio upon Bianca's father, or even by Katharina upon
herself, claiming to see what Petruchio wants her to see, etc. is thus made into a figure,
and writing becomes the process of its endless reinscription: Hieronimo playing his
deceptive game upon the audience of the play-within-the-play (Thomas Kyd, The
Spanish Tragedy), Pantalone of the Commedia dell’arte being deceived by lovers in the
same way as Gremio is by Lucentio and Bianca, Zeus disguising himself to conquer
Leda, and Petruchio dressing like a madman to cure his wife's fierce temper, Katharina
allowing herself to be changed into a yes-saying doll, thereby reminding of Griselda's
patience in the successive transcriptions of Petrarch, Chaucer, Gower, while Ovid's
Metamorphoses offers a mise-en-abyme of the whole text's metamorphic and specular
nature. There is not one scene or character in Shakespeare's Shrew but bears the trace
of a previous text, serving it as a sort of locus of copia. Most often the model is distorted
and parodied, as it will suit comedy. For instance Lucentio professing his love to Bianca
among quotes from one of Ovid's epistles – the first Heroid. The quote establishes the
identity of the place: Hic ibat Simois; hic est Segeia tellus; / Hic steterat Priami regia
celsa senis (This is the river Simois, this is the Sigean land, here was Priam's grand
palace), whereas Lucentio slips in information about his unheroic person, and disguised
identity: I am Lucentio, son unto Vicentio of Pisa, disguised thus to get your love... The
meaning of Shakespeare's treatment of the Ariosto plot is as clear as a pointed finger:
the Italian's plot of common tricks and licentious innuendo is trivial, whereas
Shakespeare elevates the subject, making it into an experiment in the phenomenology
of culture. Although a comedy, the theme of the Shrew is as serious as the quoted
“authorities”: the opposition between the British feudal culture (the Lord's graceful world
of ceremonious speech, art, feudal rites), in which even a hoax is not meant for
deception, on the contrary, it leads to self-recognition, and the mercantile Padua, where
deception is a self-interested game. Sly, connected with the Padua scene through his
Italian phrases, is actually deceiving himself about his high descent from “Richard the
Conqueror”. The Lord's game contributes to Sly’s awakening from illusion and
acknowledgement of his true, humble condition. Petruchio and Lucentio are capable of
any hoax in order to get what they want. Petruchio would, in fact, marry anybody for the
sake of a fortune, even if he himself is already rich. Money has become an end in itself.

Apart from self-deception, there are other forms of character destabilization in

Shakespeare's plays. We have seen the role-playing of Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida.
Or, the dismantling of Cressida's idealistic lover figure in the protagonist's imagination.
The floating copula verbs, no longer predicated upon a stable, recognizable identity
after her betrayal – She was beloved, she loved; she is and doth. Was Cressid here?
This is and is not Cressid… – the ghostly poise between affirmation and negation,
deconstruct her in Troilus's afflicted language of romantic disenchantment. In language
is constructed King Lear, who depends upon others to tell him who he is, after his loss
of the economic and social ground of his identity. “Royal father”, to Cordelia, “authority”
to Kent, whose loyal vision still invests the body of Lear's mortality with the body of his
majesty, the king's immortal double, but only “an old foolish man”, to his daughters, a
mandated identity – “my mistress's father” – to Oswald, a servant, or a zero figure to the
clown. E. A. J. Honigmann, in his 1976 Impressions of Character and Norman Rabkin,
in an essay, “Meaning and the Merchant of Venice” 1981, included in John Russell
Brown's anthology entitled Studying Shakespeare, 1990, are exploring the complexities
of Shakespeare's characters, as the earliest examples of heroes with identity
problems, emerging as social or intersubjective constructs, as a criss-cross of
impressions (impressionistic portraits, gradually emerging from the other characters'
opinions about them). Who is Shylock ? The money-crazed usurer or the bereaved
widower who affectionately remembers the turqoise his former wife had given him as a
token of love ? The Christian-hating villain or a victim of the Christians' deception and
greed? The heroes are inhabited by the ghostly presence of others, like Hamlet,
hooked into an alien signifying battery, speaking and acting his father's words and
thoughts. In Marx's Ghosts, Jaques Derrida interprets the presence of the ghost in
Hamlet as an allegory of any text's semantic indeterminacy. There is no unique
structure of meaning, there are always other possible meanings lurking beneath. Each
text is haunted by other possible interpretations. Another explanation would be the
transition from the medieval concept of the same – as identity stabilized through the
fixities of birth, rank, estate (see J. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange, and Death 1976) –
to the modern idea of the Other, the symbolical order in whose court the individual self
is brought to trial.

The generic mix of Shakespeare's plays provides a frame for a similar

juxtaposition of character types from different traditions – “a jumble of schemata” to
quote Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare's Use of Genre, 1974. In Falstaff meet the Vice
figure of medieval moralities, the Lord Misrule of popular Carnival, the tempting devil,
the burlesque Player King, the braggart soldier. Identity evaporates into simulacra, a
pageant of masks hiding no face.

Neither are the race/gender/class divisions as stable as they used to be in the

Middle Ages. The issue of race polarizes the couple in Othello as the white Venetian
lady and the Moor, the racial Other. Yet the lovers have crossed over to each other's
position. Othello has become, through loyal military service, a wealthy Venetian general,
while, in choosing him for a husband, Desdemona has become a “Lady of Barbary”.
Their love and faithfulness to each other are unquestionable, yet it is the power of the
social stereotype that will bring their relationship to a disastrous end. As Alan Sinfield
persuasively argues in “Cultural Materialism. Othello and the Politics of Plausibility”,
Othello is deceived by Iago because the latter exploits the culturally given, Othello's
sense, induced by social cliches, of his racial inferiority, of his outsider position.
Desdemona cannot truly love him; she must have been sexually aroused – a token of
sensuousness which renders her sexual transgression plausible. He had internalized
the racial stereotype, the automatic association of blackness and evil: Desdemona's
character is as black as his face. Physical features are mapped onto moral
characteristics: this is the mechanics of the social construction of reputation which
Shakespeare’s genius had intuited. Othello has been taught, during the process of his
socialization, to assume the place of the non-European Other, placing himself within the
colonial paradigm together with “an Indian, an Arabian, a Turk, a Judean”. As he
realizes his mistake, he splits into the Imperial justicier inflicting death upon himself as
the barbarian Other who had wasted a Venetian pearl, and who had sinned against
Venetian values.

He had been blinded by social prejudices and hypocrisy, yet we do not agree with
Sinfield, that Shakespeare reinforces here a social stereotype. Othello is not
interpellated in the end as a barbarian who has learned his place, because it is his
better reason that condemns his own deed.

The importance of voice should be stressed in dealing with such slippery issues. In
The Tempest, for instance, Europocentrism and the contempt for non-Europeans is
voiced from the beginning by unreliable characters, former usurpers and would-be
murderers. It is Sebastian and Antonio who express dissatisfaction with Alonso having
wasted his daughter on an African prince and their contempt for the Carthagian queen
whom Aeneas was wise enough to abandon in order to build an Empire in Europe.
Leslie Fiedler's sympathy with Caliban as Prospero's colonial victim is objectless.
Prospero is not idealized, he himself has to part with his vengeful, irrational part, while
Caliban, assumed by Prospero as some “thing of darkness” within himself, shows
himself capable of spiritual redemption and acculturation.

Two paradigms were current among Shakespeare's contemporaries with respect

to gender. Aristotle's Historia animalum had encouraged misogyny by ascribing women
an inferior biological essence. The female type is quarrelsome, deceitful, false,
shameless, but also tameable and submissive. This seems to have been the stereotype
behind Shakespeare's construction of Katarina in the Taming of the Shrew, yet, by the
end of the play, he has exposed the economic ground of gender division: Katarina's will
is nullified because a woman possesses nothing of her own, her husband is the bread-
winner, feeding and clothing her, and in exchange for his gifts he can afford to be as
wild in his demands as he pleases.

The other paradigm, of Platonic origin (Symposium), is that of woman as part of an

androgynous human nature. The Twelfth Night or As You Like It play upon the idea of
the relativity or reversibility of gender distinctions. On hearing the false report of
Romeo's death, Juliet experiences a sense of alienation from her true identity (ay is not
I), as it is only through Romeo that she can be complete. The lovers claim their mutual
affection despite social divisions, and Juliet appeals to allegory in order to denounce the
unnatural character of hate artificially imposed by the Law of the Fathers: that which is a
rose by any other name would smell as sweet. In nature, there are no differences,
human signifieds lose their validity. However, in man's world, as they tragically
discover, a name can kill, because here human artefacts and meanings are as real as
to their effects as the things in the world. Irrational laws and social arrangements are
finally resolved into a more humane order, but at the cost of the protagonists' lives.

Shakespeare and History

Apparently William Shakespeare started his career as a king's man (The Lord
Chamberlain's Men company, in which Shakespeare held an important position,
became “The Kings' Men” in 1603). That is as a writer of historical plays echoing the
Tudor monarchs' anxieties about the deposition of a king and social rebellion. The genre
was a new one, and the interest in it coincided with an inceptive inquiry into the truth of
historiographical writings, into the validity of the extant records. A conversation between
little prince Edward and Buckingham on their way to the Tower in Richard III is an
anachronism for it was only in Shakespeare's time that historians belonging to “The
Elizabethan Society of Antiquarians”, founded about 1586, were taking the trouble to
check written records against physical relics and to compare both with oral tradition.
Shakespeare's recasting of old matter into new epistemological frames was to
become a common “reedification” practice:

Prince: I do not like the Tower of any place.

Did Julius Caesar build that place, my Lord ?

Buck.: He did, my gracious lord, begin that place.

Which since succeeding ages have reedified.

Prince: Is it upon record or else reported

Successively from age to age he built it ?

Buck.: Upon record, my gracious lord.

Prince: But say, my lord, it were not register'd.

Methinks the truth should live from age to age,

And even to the general all-ending day.

 (Richard III, III/l)

The kind of “truth” Shakespeare was prepared to tell about “majesty” was still
coloured by the medieval belief in destiny in his first historical tetralogy :The First, The
Second and The Third Part of King Henry VI (1589-91) and The Tragedy of King
Richard III (1592-93). Henry VI appears as a pathetic figure, a Boethian philosopher
commenting on the cruel fate that sets father and son in bloody fight against each other,
ends up a victim of his wolfish wife, and of the cruel Yorks. As for Richard III, he too is
seen as a victim of Destiny which shaped him as a monster already from his mother's
womb, denying him any claim to love and predetermining his life of hatred and crimes. A
man of fascinating energy, he is allowed to appear somehow as an emissary from the
other world, purging the scene of the Civil War of all its crimes (do not George of
Clarence himself and other victims of Richard's have their hands stained by fratricide
blood?) His dream before the battle of Bosworth would rather suggest that he did
experience qualms of conscience. Anyway, he is psychologically broken and defeated
before the battle gets on the way. In a later historical play, King John (1596-97),
Shakespeare is merciless in exposing the king's evil temper and acts, the emphasis
falling upon political behaviour (man in relation to power, the relationship between
the requirements of the office and the limitations of the man holding it, between moral
scruples and political efficiency), which provides the central conflict in a historical
play. With his second tetralogy (The Tragedy of King Richard II, 1595-1596, The First
and The Second Part of King Henry IV, 1597-98, and The Life of King Henry V, 1598-
99) Shakespeare goes back in time to interrogate into the causes of the War of the
Roses, that destroyed families, devastated the land, and made England vulnerable in
front of foreign enemies.

As Shakespeare's plays are richly patterned, we can identify an archetypal

structure, which they all share. G.B. Gabel and Ch. B. Wheeler, in The Bible as
Literature [24] write that any history written on Christian principles will be of necessity
universal, providential, apocalyptic and periodized. Most histories begin with the end
of one reign and the beginning of another. The plot covers a period of discord,
whether foreign or internal. Almost all of them figure a “salvation history”: a
providential leader shows up at the end, promising, as Prince Henry does in King
John, to set a form upon this indigest/ Which he hath left so shapeless and so rude.
King John's crime against the legitimate inheritor of the throne, his nephew Arthur, is a
crime against the divinely ordered law of patriarchal succession. The breach of
providential order causes a disaster for the entire land: From forth this morsel of dead
royalty,/ The life, the right and truth of all the realm/ Is fled to heaven (IV/ 3)

Three kinds of conflict lead to breach of order:

 The Machiavellian challenger of providential order [25] In Richard II, the
providential view of history (John of Gaunt: the king is God's substitute, / His deputy
anointed... His minister – I/l; Richard II: God for Richard hath in heavenly pay/ A
glorious angel – III/2) conflicts with Henry Bolingbroke's Machiavellian trust in military
power and his right to change the existing order. Shakespeare does not decide
between the two outlooks on history, developing another conflict, that between
feudalism (with the feudal lords enjoying their privileges according to status and rank)
and absolutism (the monarch's own usurpation of Bolingbroke's right over his land,
taken from him while he is in exile)

Take Hereford's rights away, and take from Time

His charters and his customary rights;

Let not tomorrow then ensue today;

Be not thyself – for how art thou a king

But by fair sequence and succession ?

(II/ l)

Richard needs to be reminded of the immutability of status: If that my cousin be

king of England,/ It must be granted I am Duke of Lancaster (II/ 3). If he is the King, so
is Henry Duke of Lancaster. Finally, however, it is the “issue of these arms” (II/3),
Henry's military superiority and cunning, launching the attack, while Richard's army is
“despatched for Ireland” (to suppress Wat Tyler's l38l uprising, which is not mentioned,
since popular rebellion was a bit of a taboo) that works the lawful king's deposition.
Henry Bolingbroke speaks the capitalist language of social contract and financial
negotiations which sounds awry in his “dialogue” with Northumberland, Henry Percy
and Lord Ross, who speak the language of feudal vows and bonds of vassalage.
Bolingbroke goes on raving about his “fortune” “treasury”, “bounty”, which is now
“infant”, but will “ripen”, “enrich”, “come to years”, so he makes a “covenant” to
“recompense” (repeated twice lest it should be missed) what the others define as
chivalrous “approved service and desert”, being made “rich” by Bolingbroke's mere
“presence” – a fine fiction indeed, which the pragmatic Bolingbroke disparagingly
dismisses as “the exchequer of the poor”...

Whereas Richard appeals to the authority of his legitimate title (Arm, arm, my
name), Lord Bardolph's rebels in The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth are marked
as Machiavels by their Realpolitik, the careful plotting of the whole military enterprise
and its grounding in facts and material resources: The plot of situation and the model
(...) or else we fortify in papers and in figures/ Using the names of men instead of men
(I/ 3)

Phyllis Racken (Ibidem) identifies a second type of conflict, between a pattern of

masculine order and feminine subversion. Shakespeare depicts male protagonists
defending masculine historical projects against female characters who threaten to
obstruct them. The champions for the French and for the English in I Henry VI are Joan
la Pucelle and Talbot (later Earl of Shrewsbury) respectively. Talbot speaks in the name
of masculine values, fighting bravely according to the patriarchal order. Joan is a
youthful peasant who resorts to craft, subterfuge, sneaking into Rouen, in disguise, to
admit the French army and recapture the city. The Countess of Auvergne also resorts to
craft and stratagem to entrap Talbot. Whereas Sir William Lucy speaks of the “valiant
Lord Talbot” in the heroic language of an epitaph, describing his patriarchal lineage and
heroic military deeds, the countess merely desires to be assured of Talbot's physical
appearance, as the indubitable proof of his worth. To her disappointment, the hero looks
like a “child, silly dwarf”. Shakespeare's idea of a hero has obviously worked the shift
from the sturdy Ajax to the moral Aeneas. Joan of Arc too shows the same blindness to
moral values, reducing her estimation of the hero to the stark fact of his mortality : Him
that thou magnifi'st with all these titles,/ Stinking and fly-blown lies here at out feet (IV/
7). Shakespeare sets out Talbot's valour by antithesis to Joan and by parallelism to
Talbot's own son. Whereas the hard-hearted Joan rejects her father and shamelessly
declares herself a bastard, finally lying about being pregnant in order to save her life at
all costs, Talbot's son will not desert the battlefield to save himself. He chooses a valiant
death lest his father's renowned named should be abused. Were he to run away, he
would lose his title and become like the peasant boys of France (IV/ 5, 6) Queen
Margaret, another female subverter, sets herself against her husband's desires, orders
his most loyal subjects executed in spite of his weak protestations, proving a tiger's
heart wrap'd in a woman’s hide (III Henry VI, I/ 4).

One more threat to the established order is Jack Cade's uprising, people in low
degree being even less entitled to rebellion than the rackless aristocrats, who, after all,
are family...Shakespeare's representation of social conflict reveals the Elizabethans'
fear of the multitude as a many-headed monster, threatening status and the hierarchical
relationship within the feudal pyramid. Cade is a leveller, bringing the entire social
edifice down to the dead level of a community of property, money and... women.
Scholars, lawyers, courtiers, gentlemen are blacklisted, writing and reading are
catalogued as crimes and capital offences against illiteracy, a death penalty being the
retribution for the erection of a grammar school or the use of Latin phrases.

Like King Midas who changed into gold everything he touched, Shakespeare distils
any kind of confrontation (political, social, cultural) into a conflict of values.

The language of the first tetralogy is still indebted to medieval rhetoric: allegorical
scenes (father carrying his dead son's body, whom he killed not knowing who he was,
or the other way round), dream visions, in which Richard III has to face his victims' trial
and sentence, the occurrences portending evil which presided over Richard's birth, the
bestiary device in reverse: humans compared to beasts and animals of prey according
to the Physiologus practice of ascribing them moral qualities (vices).

The language of the second tetralogy and of King John is one of impressive
language-awareness, including reinscription: a war of texts, fictions, discourses, figures.
The allegorical characters of medieval popular drama (Falstaff's company: Shallow,
Shadow, Wart, Feeble, Mouldy a.o.) are introduced to serve the education of a future
king through negativity. Emblems of the time Shakespeare is reconstructing are
interlaced with those of the new discourse. Colin Wilcockson (Ibidem) identifies the
source of the garden image in Richard II and of the bee-hive in Henry V as allegories of
the perfect, organic state, in a comparative reading of Mum and the Sothsegger: There
are unmistakable verbal echoes in the Gardener's speech in the 14th century fragment:

root away the noisome weeds... keep law... like an executioner... cut off the
heads...wholesome herbs swarming with caterpillars

Here are Shakespeare's Gardener and one of his servants, talking of the king's
deposition and his neglect of England (“razed Oblivion”), while they are giving
substance to the model (“charactered in the brain”):

Gardener: Give some supportance to the bending twigs

Go thou, and like an executioner,

Cut off the heads of too fast growing sprays,

That look too holy in our commonwealth:

All must be even in our government.

You thus employ'd I will go root away

The noisome weeds that without profit suck

The soil's fertility from wholesome flowers

First servant: Why should we in the compass of a pale

Keep law and form and due proportion

Showing as in a model our firm estate…?

 (Richard II, III/4)

The anonymous voice of the 14th century, telling the king a cautionary tale of
“razed Oblivion” and its effects on the garden-state (an image echoed in John of
Gaunt's feudal discourse about royalty – II/ l), is met by the Queen's fiction of the
“second fall” of Adam, medieval allegory being replaced by a Renaissance analogy
between Adam and Richard, between Christ sold out for thirty silver coins and Richard
being betrayed by his subjects. Later, in prison, when Richard himself realizes that he
has been guilty in not keeping the true concord of state and time..., in breaking
proportions, he drops this fiction, accepting the disanalogy: he cannot answer Christ's
summon (Come, little ones) because, paraphrasing again, It is as hard to come as for a
camel/ To thread the postern of a needle's eye (V/ 4)

Of Richard's metaphorical sweeps, symbolical visions and majestic rhetoric much

has been written (see, especially, David Green, The Actor in History. Studies in
Renaissance Stage Poetry. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988). Less
attention has been paid to Bolingbroke's pragmatic discourse of few words, less
imagination and inadequate troping (money and the imagery of natural growth, for
instance). Shakespeare has dropped indiscriminate ornament and authorial comment in
favour of coded imagery, working language into the dramatic representation of a
character's mind. Language is no longer reporting but enacting meaning.

Shakespeare and the Tradition of Comedy and Tragedy

A meaning is inscribed in literary forms by association with a certain thought-

content from the moment of their birth. Jacoppo da Lentini loves a woman, and it is
through her love that he is guided towards love of God. Dante's Beatrice or Petrarch's
Laura are such guides in a world beyond. The British sonneteers, unless a contrary
desire is conveyed in a recusatio, follow into their predecessors’ footsteps: Sidney
distinguishes between earthly and intellectual love, Spenser sees his bride as his link to
cosmos, Shakespeare wrestles with his dark angel, to allow the good one to win. Great
writers always display awareness of meaningful form. The word “comedy” means
“merry-making”, and Shakespeare's traces its model back to the Old Comedy of
Aristophanes: a blend of farcical situations, fantastic plots, remarkable characters,
combining verse, dance and satire, in a word, closer to the popular festival. In this
Menippean (upside-down, from “Menip”, a cynic) world, the meaning inscribed as farce,
hoax, qui-pro-quo is problematical identity. This is the issue Shakespeare's light
comedies – The Comedy of Errors (1593-94), The Taming of the Shrew (1593-94),
Love's Labour's Lost (1594-95), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1598-99) – set out to
explore.
 In identifying the archetypal pattern each individual comedy shares with the others,
Northrop Frye saw himself criticized for reducing the plenitude of Shakespeare's
comical textuality to one Ur-plot.Yet is there any system that does not run this risk, or is
knowledge available in any other than systematic form? In discussing the structure of A
Midsummer Night's Dream (On Shakespeare, p. 38), Frye mentions the three parts of a
normal comedy [26] : a first part in which an absurd, unpleasant or irrational situation is
set up; a second part of confused identity and personal complications; a third part in
which the plot gives a shake and twist and everything comes right in the end.

References:

[14] The New Penguin Shakespeare. The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, edited by John Kerrigan,
1986.

[15] Ibidem, p. 23

[16] For a complete picture see Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses, Hélčne Védrine, Les
philosophies de la Renaissance and E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture.

[17] Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre, Hopkins University
Press, 1978, pp. 208-237.

[18] George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, in Shakespearean Tragedy, Op. cit., p. 55.

[19] Franco Moretti, The Great Eclipse. Tragic Form as the Deconsecration of Sovereignty in Signs
Taken for Wonders. Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, London 1983

[20] Walter Cohen, Aristocratic Failure in Shakespearean Tragedy, Op. cit., pp. 96-116.

[21]. Shakespeare and the Thought of the Age. Shakespeare Studies, edited by Stanley Wells,
Cambridge University Press, 1996.

[22] John Drakakis, Introduction to Shakespearean Tragedy, Longman 1992, pp. 19-20.

[23] Maria-Ana Tupan, Ethnikos, Ethikos, and Discourse, in “Cahiers roumains

d’etudes litteraires”, l-2/1996

[24] John B. Gabel & Charles B. Wheeler, The Bible as Literature, Oxford University Press, 1990
 [25] Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History. Shakespeare’s English Chronicles, Routledge, 1990.

[26] Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective. The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and
Romance, Columbia University Press, 1965 and On Shakespeare, Op. cit. p. 43.

Confused identity has a different meaning in Shakespeare's light, romantic or dark

comedies. In the first category of plays, farcical confusion is a temporal overthrow of
order and a state of mistaken identities (Menippean carnival), whose paradoxical effect
is that it leads not to a mechanical removal of the mask the character has assumed in
order to disguise himself from the others, but to an enlightened recognition and to a
discovery of a deeper, more genuine identity in the characters themselves. They have
been deceiving themselves and now they are forced to check what they feel to be their
deep self against their social image for others (the Lacanian “mirror stage”). This is no
outward deceptive game, but a change in the mind. One of the Dromios tells his brother
at the end of The Comedy of Errors: You are my glass and not my brother. Unless the
two pairs of brothers meet again, they can get no objectified image of themselves, they
cannot come to a realization of what they are. Being mistaken for his twin brother,
Antipholos of Syracuse, finds himself showered with gifts, including a costume which he
puts on, receiving the following comment from his servant (IV/3).

Dro.: What ! have you got the picture of old Adam new apparelled ?

Ant.S.: What god is this ? What Adam dost thou mean ?

Dro. : Not that Adam that kept the Paradise, but that Adam that kept the
prison...

His brother actually gets arrested for debt and is tied up as lunatic. His symbolical
“apparel” shows him for what he is: a prisoner of the flesh, of his devastating passions.
As his wife repproaches him, his shameful life stains herself, as husband and wife are
one. The visiting brother has put up at The Centaur. The allegorical meaning is that in
Ephesus, his good native nature is doubled by people's deceptive association between
himself and his sinful brother. The latter lives at The Phoenix, his good self being finally
resurrected from the ashes of his worldly waste. Alexander Leggatt, in Shakespeare's
Comedy of Love, compares Shakespeare's play to its source in Plautus' Manaechmi.
Whereas the Plautine Epidamum is a place of Ribalds, Parasites, Drunkards and
Courtezans, in Shakespeare's Ephesus there is the more sinister deception and shape-
shifting that attack not only the purse but the body and soul (I/ 2):

Ant. S.: They say this town if full of cozenage;

 As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye

Dark-working sourcerers that change the mind,

Soul killing witches that deform the body,

Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,

And many such-like liberties of sin.

The final image of Falstaff, with horns on his head, beaten and ducked, may
resemble what Frye identifies as a “fertility spirit”, yet this tableau vivant is first of all the
hero's objectified realization, pressed home by the community, that he is anything but
the flattering Jove and irresistible lover figure he once assumed. Unlike other comedies,
The Merry Wives demystifies the character's cherished self-image by the more genuine
“mask” built by social others, who see him as he really is.

The Katharina at the end of her taming has learnt the truth which the other self-
willed wives are still ignorant of: in a society in which women are married off after
negotiations and financial arrangements like those made for any other commodity, men,
as the only possessors of the means of production and providers of the means of
consumption are absolute for power, while women, for subjection. It is the social
organization of work and retribution that ascribes women the role of the tenderly-
pampered dolls, and men, the heroic posture (V / 2)

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,

Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,

And for thy maintenance commits his body

To painful labour both by sea and land,

To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,

Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;

And craves no other tribute at thy hands

But love, fair looks, and true obedience;

 What best example of self-deception rather than of deception attempted on others
is Love's Labour's Lost ? Love by the book or “love of books” set against the most
natural drives of human nature was a subject in the air in the late Renaissance, which
both Cervantes and Shakespeare grasped at about the same time (Don Quixote had
been circulated in manuscripts before the date of its publication). Ferdinand, King of
Navarre and his company of “book-men” have decided to break all ties to the other half
of humanity, and dedicate themselves to a male project of glory and immortality by
sharing in the lives of books. Their deceptive project is self-directed (war with our
affections) and the recovery of true identity implies a process of removing the inner,
self-imposed disguise. The patterned speech, with repetitions and syntactic parallelism
is characteristic of Renaissance dramatic rhetoric (IV/ 3):

Berowne: Fools to abide by what they have sworn.

For wisdom's sake, a word that all men love,

Or for love's sake, a word that loves all men,

Or for men's sake, the authors of these women,

Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,

Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths,

From exploration of the world, the modern mind in the making was turning upon
itself. Man, whom Renaissance humanism had placed at the centre of the universe as
its microcosm, was growing uneasy about his own nature, pulling towards either
escapism into artificial imaginary worlds or the mysticism of the flesh: We are used to
thinking of the period as an era of pessimism, chaos, and violence, succeeding the
optimism of the Renaissance when man, having asserted his birthright as the centre of
the universe, felt the world his, and himself and the world were one harmonious
whole.... we may perhaps call baroque the artistic outcome of this destruction of the
balance between feeling and intellect, the distortion of reality through the cravings of
unruly emotions and the desperate vagaries of the imagination (...) The senses and the
spirit are usurping each other's vested interests; time has split into unconnected
moments; the irregular beats of the human heart swing from paradise to hell; what is
reality ? Baroque sensibility was bound to question the intrinsic value of its wild flights of
fancy. Hence this theme of the confusion of reality and illusion, which is one of the most
important themes of the first half of the seventeenth century. In Germany the themes of
the “Theatre of the World”, of “Life as a Dream”, the interplay of Sein und Schein, are
characteristic of the literature of the period. They are also to be found in Shakespeare,
in the French dramatist Rotrou, and in the famous play of Calderon, La vida es sueno.
The puzzling qualities of Corneille's comedies L'Illusion comique or Le Menteur may be
partly due to the impact of illusion on reality. Misunderstandings, lies, or magic are not
merely dramatic devices – they illustrate and stress the repeated assertion that human
beings are not what they seem to be, that night is very dark and love uncertain. The
fashionable Pastoral, French, Italian, or English, and later the Opera, open the gates of
a paradise of fallacies and disguises, an earthly compensation for frustration and
failure. And of illusion and reality, which is the more valuable? [27]The characters' self-
deception has been induced by books; it is books have taught them that life is bogus
and they the only immortality. It is books that provide the model: to love like Hercules.
The mask is coextensive with the biased self, in-built through fictions. The distance
between the individual and his material mask (courting the ladies who attend on the
Princess of France, disguised as Blackamoors in Russian clothes, grotesque
personages playing gods and heroes, Armado courting a vulgar country wench “by the
book”, like Hercules and the fashionable sonneteers) is by far greater than that between
the characters' natural drive and their self-induced deception. Speech is not only
comically dislocated, as in the other light comedies, by being placed in the wrong
context (see Armado's rhetorical flourish in a letter addressed to the “base wench”,
read aloud by the unsympathetic King of Navarre and to the ears of the clown who
cannot understand a word) but simply going to pieces, any attempt at communication
proving abortive (a recurrent image, from the title to the last scene).

Shakespeare's dark comedies are problem plays approaching the absurd drama
in our century through their unresolved tensions and paralysing sense that man does
not really have a choice in a fallen world. As the name suggests, they are plays in
which action heads towards a tragical climax and it is only by chance (and not by
necessity or some moral design) that it finally reaches a festive (comical)
conclusion, without completely dispelling the gloomy picture of the moral
ambiguities in society and in man's heart. Shakespeare produced them by the turn
of the century, his writing “hinging” on them in its shift from history and comedy towards
the Gordian Knot tied in the great tragedies and cut in the escapist romances:

The Merchant of Venice: 1596-97

Much Ado About Nothing: 15598-99

 All's Well that Ends Well: 1602-1603

Measure for Measure: 1603-1604

In a dark comedy, the mask is deliberately assumed in order to play some

deceptive game, usually seeking personal gain to the detriment of another interested
party. The Duke in Measure for Measure may be flattering himself about playing the
scheming God for a more fortunate settlement, yet for some of the pawns in his social
game of chess it proves more than they have asked for. Angelo does not express his
wish to marry Marianna, who has deceived him through a bed-trick. He only says he
loves Isabella, and that he wants to die for having blackmailed her and attempted her
honour. After all, Shakespeare's model for Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, appears to
have been the scrupleless Cesare Borgia, who employed Ramiro de Orco to redress
the lawlessness of the dukedom of Romagna, because he did not want to appear cruel
himself in the public eye. The orthodoxy of Vincentio's employing Angelo, known as an
unflinching legalist, to do what he did not dare to do with his own hands, returning
afterwards in a priest's disguise to eavesdrop on what was going on is highly
questionable. And even if his schemes do work in the end, averting unnecessary
executions and attempted seduction, the more serious dilemmas – legal social, moral –
lurking in the background are still left without a satisfactory solution. Harriet Hawkins is
listing some of them: What violation is to be tricked into bed with someone you would
not choose to? Which Christian virtue, charity or chastity, must take precedence ?
Should a brother allow his sister to prostitute herself in order to save him? Should a
young novice jeopardise her immortal soul in order to save her brother? What is the
value of law when it conflicts with the biological and psychological laws of human
nature? Or shot-gun weddings? Can all these dilemmas be solved through bed tricks
and marriage certificates?[28] Man no longer finds support in his heroic nature. Claudio
is designed on a more human scale than the Renaissance Magnifico. When the Duke
(in order to test his courage) urges him to be “absolute for death”, Claudio cannot help
feeling frightened. The votaries of absolutes are pitiable failures. Angelo, in whom
Shakespeare inscribes the contemporary issue of the relationship between private man
and public man, begins by firmly asserting his invulnerability to temptation Yet too soon
is he heard confessing the split between social “ego” and the unsuppressable “id”,
ingeniously rendered through the rhetorical scheme called “antimetabole” or “epanodos”
(repetition of words in converse order)

Ang.: When I would pray and think, I think and pray

 To several subjects”: heaven hath my empty words,

Whilst my invention, hearing not my tongue,

Anchors on Isabel; heaven in my mouth,

As if I did but only chew his name,

And in my heart the strong and swelling evil

Of my conception (...) Blood, thou art blood;

TIsabella is offered no acceptable solution. From our present perspective, that

would be: she can only choose between dishonour and a broken heart to see her
brother executed whom she could have saved through self-sacrifice. But not from her
point of view. Isabella too is as morally rigid and inhumanly upright as Angello. Her
brother has been guilty of infringing the law. Premarital sex is a crime, and Isabella, who
is to become a novice. abhors the idea of pleading for what is socially tabooed:

Isab. There is a vice that most I do abhor,

And most desire shall meet the blow of justice,

For which I must not plead, but that I must;

At war 'twixt will and will not.

This is the voice of the LAW, which Shakespeare subverts through another voice
inscribed in the popular form of the romance. His source, apart from George
Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra, is a story in an Italian collection by Cinthio. The
area of literature made up of euphuistic tales, Italianate novellas, picaresque novellas,
Greek romances, Peninsular romances, based upon Spanish and Portuguese originals,
adventurous romances inherited from the Middle Ages, is located by John Simon (Open
and Closed Books; a Semiotic Approach to the History of Elizabethan and Jacobean
Popular Romance) to a space cleared by a tension between an urban middle class,
which constituted the reading public of the texts and which was increasingly gaining
economic power, and an aristocracy which retained ideological hegemony and,
consequently, control over important state institutions [29] The basic plot – Northrop
Frye remarks (On Shakespeare, p. 141) – has three well-known folk themes: the
disguised ruler, the corrupt judge and the bed trick. The subverting voice in the play
is implicitly posing several unsettling questions: Is Claudio, who means to marry the
woman carrying his child, morally baser than Angelo, the “corrupt judge”, who has
abandoned Mariana because she has lost her fortune? Are law and religion any good
when precepts can lead to diametrically opposed conclusions ? For instance, in Mark, 4:
21-4, the law is to be set on a candle-stick, not put under a bed. Yet in Luke, 6:36-42
there is a question whether the blind can lead the blind, whether it is just to see the
mote in your brother's eye and not the beam in your own. Is Angelo entitled to deal
justice, to impose a law which he proves the first to break? Are the Duke's
compromises, manipulations of the others' consciences, contrivances perfectly entitled?
What sort of law is that which condemns a man sincerely in love, while releasing a
bawd? In confusing “benefactors” and “malefactors”, Elbow, a constable, is scarcely
mistaken about the moral chiaroscuro in Vienna, the same which engulfed the Tudor
hierarchy of values in the Jacobean and Caroline age. Now they are decentred, out of
focus. In All's Well that Ends Well (through another bed trick), the healing of the king
sounds like a medieval romance. Yet the healer is no Perceval, but an orphan lady
brought up by a countess, to whom the values of feudal vows are meaningless. She
replaces them by social contracts and market exchange of services. If she heals the
king, she demands some favour in return; if she appeals to another woman's sympathy,
she shows herself ready to pay for it: Love is to be met with recompense. Nor does
Bertram, the object of her unrequited love, obey the king's command and marry her, as
he is expected by the ancient ties of vassalage. Those ties are broken, yet the cunning
bourgeois individualism achieves as much. Helena is finally pleased to see herself
married off to Bertram, even if the means have been “unfit”.

Shakespeare was prepared to give a voice to those whom the official discourse
excluded from power. There were few Jews in England at the time he was writing The
Merchant of Venice, yet Shylock is no simplified, demonized caricature, like Marlowe's
Barabas (mentioned by Shylock in the play, so his bitterness against current
representations has at least one identifiable and justified source) or other such
characters distorted by social biases. Unlike the light comedies, where the theme is
self-deception, in the dark comedies characters are deceived about social others
whom they judge unfairly, with possibly tragical consequences. Human alienation, social
disruption, narrow-minded intolerance follow the type-cast social and art representations
whose validity Shakespeare is interrogating. Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing) is
certainly wrong in considering all males vicious, and it is her own voice that gives her
away: How can she pass judgement on the human race of which she is herself a part?
What would be the consequences if ideas about human nature represented in the
haunts of discourse (of theology, for instance, obsessing with the necessity for man “to
make an account of his life”) were taken literally by a female Quixote? Are not systems,
ideas supposed to bear upon reality? On being asked whether she intends to marry,
Beatrice seems to be quoting the Enchiridion (enlarged through contemporary
knowledge of geology), Benedick's trustworthy nature proving such fictions
preposterous. The parodic intention is unmistakable (II/ 1)

Beatrice: Not till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not
grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust? To make an
account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I'll none; Adam's sons are
my brethren; and truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred.
 Angelo is deceived about man's vulnerability to temptation before he experiences
its power on himself. Shylock's famous discourse in III/ 1 is claiming a recognition of his
human likeness to the rest of Christians, suggesting that, while preaching humility and
forgiveness of the others' abuse, they will exact revenge just like any pagan: If a Jew
wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. Shylock's psychological motivation for
his attempt to “better the instruction” in his revenge as well as his forced conversion at
the end by a totalitarian society complicate a good deal our response to a controversial
issue which was quite familiar, particularly from homiletic, scholastic writing, to
Shakespeare's contemporaries: the conflict between the idea of retribution as “eye for
an eye” and strict legality and the New Testamental dispensation of Charity,
forgiveness. Shakespeare undertakes a critique of the simplified representation through
dogmas of such an insoluble lump: So our Elizabethan, brought up in the general
teaching of the Church, found himself in the thick of incompatibilities: logically he was a
fallen creature, born in original sin, and therefore liable to suffer the inevitable, just
results of sinfulness (...) On the other hand, his ministers assured him... that the logic of
his damnation could be wept aside by heartfelt repentance and, above all, faith in God's
mercy through the love of Christ for sinners [30] If a Jew is said to have eyes, hands,
organs, dimension, senses, affections, passions (the inferior, vegetative and animal
soul), is a Christian any different ? If Portia is admired for her loyalty to her dead father's
will, why should Jessica receive public acclaim for walking out on her father and robbing
him, being immediately greeted by the Christian majority as “gentile and no Jew”
(“gentile” meaning “Christian” at the time). The Duke and Antonio even make sure that
she gets at the hands of the law what she has not already stolen. Shylock's exacting of
a “pound of man's flesh” is an implicit irony on the Christian representations of Jews as
having no soul but only a body, and his speech is parroting the discourse of the Church,
mockingly representing a Jew in its reductive version as passive biology: If you prick us,
do we not bleed ? If you tickle us, do we not laugh ? If you poison us, do we not die ?
He is intent upon demonstrating the reality of the body in a Christian and betters the
instruction of the Church by comparing a Christian's flesh to that of dead animals, to the
animals' advantage: not as estimable, profitable neither,/ As flesh of muttons, beefs, or
goats (I/ 1).

In the dark comedies, the show of evil and deception may be extended to the
entire society, as in Bassanio's speech in The Merchant of Venice (III/ 2), and it is
precisely the knowledge of the discrepancy between reality and mask that helps him
make the right choice (avoiding the deceiving polished appearance of the wrong
caskets)
 Bassanio: So may the outward shows be least themselves:

The world is deceived with ornament,

In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt

But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,

Obscures the show of evil? In religion,

What damned error but some sober brow

Will bless it and approve it with a text,

Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?

There is no vice so simple but assumes

Some mark of virtue on his outward parts.

Is Bassanio anticipating here the “gracious voice” of Jessica's sophistic plea, as is

Shylock's speech making us aware of the “sober brows of religion”? Be it as it may,
Shakespeare shows himself interested in deceiving signifying practices (“ornament”)
more than in the material aspects of society..

What about a character like Don John in Much Ado About Nothing? Is
Shakespeare carrying the idea of evil to its extreme: Don John choosing evil-doing as
an end in itself? Or is he mocking the Spanish romances and their Manichaean view of
human character, and lack of motivation ? Shakespeare was writing the play at the time
he was working on Hamlet, where the Prince shows himself completely dissatisfied with
the recent books in which authors take a superficial view of human nature (the signs of
age, for instance). The source of the celebrated speech of Polonius to Laertes has been
identified in a farmer's almanac of the time. Osric finds in Laertes the very card or
calendar of gentry V/ 2) – naturally, we should say, if this is what his father has taught
him – to which Hamlet replies like a humanist: to know a man well were to know himself.
Human nature is universal, in Laertes I see my own cause, I understand him because I
know myself well.. The Renaissance had been urging people to look themselves in the
mirror (Hamlet: his semblage is his mirror... his umbrage, nothing more), spelling out
how people should behave, dress, speak, govern, think, what to do every day of the
year, in works ranging from The Courtier and A Mirror for Magistrates to “farmer's
almanacs”. The Renaissance had bred a monstruous individualism, a self-absorbing
interest in the outward show of the human personality, as well as of the mind in its own
workings (Montaigne: the world is a deceptive show, let me shut myself up in the prison
of my mind) Baroque restlessness was partly due to this maddening Narcissism and
abyssmal mirroring. Shakespeare's bitterest tragedies are indictments of individualism
(Timon's mysanthropy, Lear's Narcissistic demand for professions of love from his
daughters and of unconditioned loyalty from his subjects, Macbeth's belief that
Providence should be serving him, Coriolanus 's self-exile). The baroque was
maintaining the outward show of Renaissance thought, while emptying forms and
representations of any rooting in a deeper meaning. Parallelism between planes is still
there; but there are no lower and higher planes, the movement works both ways, either
towards the macrocosm or towards the miniature, depending on what end of the
telescope one is looking through. The mirroring technique is still there, but there is an
abyssmal proliferation of reflections, without the presupposition of an archetype. Forms
are admirably symmetrical, but decentred, out of focus, out of origin, Protean. Don
John's self-abasement is too radical to be taken for granted. It is only nature that is
never motivated, being either canker or rose: In a tragedy, even villains speak a
meaningful language: they are motivated for the worse. In a dark comedy, a character is
evil for no cause at all, which falls bellow human understanding. Even Richard III
practices evil for the lack of a choice. Don John's self-abasement is gratuitous. If the
baroque was the age of the “travestied Aeneid” (hybrid, dialogical forms were created,
so characteristic of the sceptical modern consciousness: tragicomedy, mock-heroic,
parody, burlesque), Shakespeare is probably giving us in the Don John plot a travestied
Spanish romance:

D. John: I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace: and it better
fits my blood to be disdained of all than to fashion a carriage to rob love from any: in
this, though I cannot be said to be a flattering honest man, it must not be denied but I
am a plain-dealing villain. I am trusted with a muzzle and enfranchised with a clog;
therefore I have decreed not to sing in my cage. If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had
my liberty, I would do my liking: in the meantime, let me be that I am and seek not alter
me. (I/ 3)

Shakespeare's dark comedies mirror not only some of the problems that
oppressed the Elizabethan mind, but also their representation in discourse, with an
underpinning idea of the discourse-maker's responsibility.
 Weary with all the incongruities of reality, Shakespeare turns to fiction where things
can come out all right, divisiveness is laid, and harmony achieved. This is the world of
his romantic comedies:

The Two Gentlemen of Verona – (1594 – 1595)

A Midsummer Night's Dream – (1595 – 1596)

Twelfth Night – (1599 – 1600)

As You Like It – (1599 – 1600)

Their imaginary space may be ordained to one's liking and delight (As You Like It).
In their representations of time, space and human nature, the romantic comedies
recover the wholeness of the pastoral, in an overall structure of meaning. The twelve
nights of the Christmas holidays are an image of Time in the miniature winter festival,
while the midsummer solstice [31] is another emblem of the One. As the spirits are
believed to be released upon the world, whether in the pagan Walpurgis Night or in the
Christian St. Baptist, space is enlarged to include both the this-worldly and the other-
worldly. Masks, disguises, cross-dressing and cross-coupling are the means of an
“honest deception”: they point to a structural identity between man and woman, the
transformation of gender identity figuring the emergence of the ideal Hermaphroditus,
as a complete human being, out of a twinned sexual nature. Unlike other Renaissance
stories of social transformations of human beings past all recognition (king confused
with beggar, pauper with a rich lord), Orsino (The Twelfth Night, V/l) delights in unifying,
mirror images: One face, one voice, one habit and two persons,/ A natural perspective,
that is and is not !. The text of the romantic comedies mirrors precisely this dialectic of
is and is not, that is its own generation as transfer of reality into signs, meaning. Under
a categorial aspect, the twin image of the “gentlemen of Verona” works the reunion of
Proteus (Protean, shifty reality) and Valentine (the ideal space of the text, Valentine
being what his name suggests, a writer of love letters, in time replaced in Milan by his
letters). The world of referentia is infinite, but the semiological space constructed
through Silvia (the pastoral, “silva” tradition) and Valentine is one reduced to an
inventory of easily identifiable cultural forms. It is enough to hear Valentine declare
himself a “servant” who obeys Silvia's “command”, who professes that Silvia is his
“essence” and that by her fair influence he is foster'd, illumined, cherish'd, kept alive to
recognize at once the pattern enacted: amour courtois. Last but not least, there is an
ontological reconciliation between the represented and representation in the textual self-
referentiality of the pastoral: the awareness of role-playing. In the end Rosalind
assumes the part of the “epilogue”, of the actor convention, yet well does she know that
that role is usually played by men, etc.

The pattern identified by Northrop Frye is action which moves from irrational
law to festivity, symbolizing a movement from one form of reality to another. The
characters overcome the power of the irrational law, reinstating order again, through a
rite of passage. They are transformed through the agency of the forest or green
world (...), a symbol of natural society which is the proper home of man not the
physical world he now lives in but the “golden world” he is trying to regain,
associated with dream, magic, chastity and spiritual energy, fertility, renewed
natural energies. (A Natural Perspective). In the romantic comedies, the “green world”
of pastoral is, even according to Hellenistic tradition, literarity, awareness of form,
which reflects back upon itself. The symbolical space of pastoral (of woods,
shepherds, whereto the Duke and his court, in As You Like It, retire for broad comment
on political and philosophical issues) is doubled by an inquiry into the nature of figural or
semiological space [32].

What is in a name? Launce (The Two Gentleman of Verona) is able to divine the
difference between sign and figure, between his dog “Crab” which will not “speak a
word” and himself and his sister: this staff is my sister; for, look, you, she is as white as
a lily and as small as a wand; this hat is Nan, our maid; I am the dog; no, the dog is
himself, and I am the dog; O! the dog is me, and I am myself (II/3)

Launce cannot be himself and the dog whose name suggests (like Caliban as
“tortoise”) withdrawal, refusal to come out of itself. As Lacan says in his famous essay
on Poe's Purloined Letter [33], realité est toujours ŕ sa place. But a sequence of letters
or sounds, a thin plate of tin painted blue with a straight white arrow on it, pointing
upwards, are themselves while also standing for something or somebody else, a street
sign (signifying ’one- way road”). “Nan”, a maid, “Crab”, a dog, are “en-tombed” (sema:
tomb) in or replaced by their nominal being. The wand being like the sister works a
further displacement, of the sign into figure (“wand” a word standing for a thing and
serving as an analogue for another thing/person). If the Quince play in A Midsummer
Nght’s Dream comes out all wrong, it is because the mechanics getting up a mask for
the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta destroy the artistic illusion by robbing words of
their signifying function. For fear he should scare the distinguished company and get
imprisoned, one of the actors, playing the lion, warns the audience that he is ’Snug the
joiner ’, so they needn't mind his ’roaring gently ’. He remains ŕ sa place, refusing to
stand for a lion, to enact the meaning of the scene/text.

Intersubjective communication, made possible by a body of meanings shared by

a community of speakers, Lacan says in the same essay, is that in which the enunciator
gets back his own message in reverse form. Silvia is said to be wooing Valentine “by a
figure” because she asks him to write a letter from her to some supposed lover, thereby
indirectly confessing her love for him. Valentine can be said to be writing a letter
addressed to himself, as he is the intended recipient of the message (II/ 1):

Speed: To yourself.. Why, she woos you by a figure.

Val.: What figure ?

Speed: By a letter, I should say.

 Val.: Why she hath not writ for me ?

Speed: What need she, when she hath made you write to
yourself ?

Speed, as a “clownish jester”, has something of a fool's wisdom, the idea of that
special kind of paradoxical folly having filtered through Renaissance writing from
Erasmus’s famous “eulogy”. Just like Poe's story, in Lacan’s reading of it, the scene
presents several levels of awareness: Valentine's view, which does not grasp the
meaning of the concrete situation, Silvia’s “jest”, mocking Valentine’s naivety, and
Speed’s view, which is the broadest awareness. Although uninvolved, he is able to
grasp the entire situation, thanks to the autonomy of the symbolical space. His lesson
on the “figure” comes from his acquaintance not with a real situation (the sentimental
relationship between Silvia and Valentine) but with one of signification: I speak in print
for in print I found it. Communication through figurative language is only possible
through traditional associations in the human subjects inserted into a symbolical order.
La subjectivité ŕ l ’origine n ’est d ’aucun rapport au réel, mais d ’une syntaxe qu ’y
engendre la marque signifiante [34]. Speed asking Valentine: be not like your mistress,
be moved, be moved, has both an immediate, literal meaning (let us get something to
eat) and a figurative one: allow yourself to be a mover through a chain of signifiers, from
the place of “scribe” ascribed by mocking Silvia, to one of addressee, as the true object
of her love. However, Jonathan Goldberg’s denial of any depth of interiority in
Shakespeare’s characters which are reduced to “foldedness within a text” [35], for
instance, the literal and figurative genesis of Silvia (silva) and Valentine (letter on St,
Valentine’s Day), which turns them from real persons into mere “figures placed within an
image repertoire”, fails to rally Shakespeare’s nominal representations and their
Platonic source. Proceeding to an etymological reconstruction of the words “nomos”
(name) and “nous” (intellect) in Laws XII (958), Plato points to the divine and admirable
law possessing a name akin to mind. Anamnesis is necessary to recover the eidos, the
archetypal design informing the pastoral world, which is one removed from the
accidents of contingency, as is the coded language of pastoral different from the
oceanic referentia of the common language of the tribe. Shakespeare’s amazing
awareness of the workings of language, of the way in which meaning is produced or a
poetic economy made possible does not remove his romantic comedies from a
logocentric frame. The vertical extension of the action into upper and lower worlds,
identified by Frye (A Natural Perspective) is a proof of an attempt at rooting literary
conventions in the myths they have descended from: Shakespeare draws away from
everything that is local or specialized in the drama of his day, and works toward
uncovering a primeval dramatic structure (...) literature in the form of drama appears
when the myth encloses and contains the ritual [36]. Contact with the “green world” of
mythical analoga (unity of nature, man and divinity) works its spell of healing a
conflictual and confusing reality. Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, of all his works,
come closest to the Renaissance “world picture”. The pastoral convention is meant to
serve the recovery of a lost Edenic condition (essential speech, like the divine Logos),
theatrical representation being usually a source of confusion, leading to an abyss of
identity (see the ridiculous mechanics in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Rosalind’s
confusion about her being male or female, actor or epilogue). The motif of the “theatrum
mundi” requires qualifications. There are three meanings attached to it in As You Like It:
The Duke pits against each other the “wide and universal theatre” which “presents more
woeful pageants” and “the scene wherein we play”, while there is also the scene in
which Rosalind appears as merely a signifier, an element in the verbal texture of
Shakespeare’s text. The first order is that of unruly reality, in which dignities are
usurped, people take delight in destroying their kin – a lapserian, Cain world. This world
is measured by conventions: the clock, individual names (Frederick), clothes associated
with values in an arbitrary fashion. Rosalind’s metonymies (doublet and hose ought to
show itself courageous to petticoat; therefore, courage, good Alena) express a common
prejudice about men showing more courage than women, which the action of the play
proves to be false. The banished Duke and his company play on a different stage, that
of pastoral, a universal one, being the same for Theocritus’ shepherds and for Robin
Hood of the folk ballads:

Oliver: Where will the old duke live ?

Charles: They say he is already in the forest of Arden, and a many merry men
with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. They say many young
gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the
golden world (I/ 1)

In this archetypal scene, the “verities” of the real world are meaningless The truth
of experience is replaced by identity to ideal form (archetype). Anachronism (lions in the
forest of Arden) is the very means of suggesting the autonomy of this symbolical space
from realistic impositions of the here and now. Names are here based upon a necessary
relationship between signifier and signified. The” Duke” needs no further specification,
the name denotes his “dignity”, his position in an ideal social order, or in a providential
script, in which roles are lawfully ascribed. “Silvius” is he who inhabits the woods. Phebe
is the traditional shepherdess, not a woman one is most likely to run into in the real
Forest of Arden. “Melancholy”, associated with madness, in the Renaissance feigning
“wise fools” and also with Montaigne’s introspective habits, is the proper qualification for
Jaques (the play was written at about the same time as Hamlet). Time is subjective:
staying with lawyers, trotting with a maid between the contract of marriage and the
wedding. Nature is imaginatively assimilated to the human: men are April when they
woo and December when they marry. Rosalind’s male disguise (unlike flattery at the
court) reveals the moral truth about her courageous heart. The “doublet and hose” no
longer lie, they signify what they “ought to”. In this world of the “ought to” a Cain figure is
converted to genuine love for his brother. In the pastoral tradition, wild beasts symbolize
vices of the soul, so Orlando’s killing of the lion works a moral redemption in his brother,
Oliver. As this is a Renaissance reinscription of pastoral, the Duke does not inhabit
“the golden world”. Nature is not as good and benevolent as it had been for the Edenic
couple or for Hesiod’s first generation of men. Violence is there to remind man of his
lapsed soul and need for redemption, the hardships of winter remind the Duke of the
penalty of Adam, the seasons’ differance. Can man do away with this burden of
corrupted nature in his aching body ? Is there a possible return to a golden age, of
universal reconciliation (inward/ outward, subjective/objective, material/ideal,
soul/body) ? The text of the play is such an autonomous order, in which an epilogue is a
form identitical to itself, irrespective of the material, circumstantial conditions of its being
represented on a stage, by a male or female actor etc. The story of Pyramus and
Thisbe provides the model of love met with parental opposition for any subsequent
reinscription of such an action, and it remains valid, irrespective of the mechanics’ poor
work on it. The truth of the first “theatre” (reality) is empirical. It is experience that tells
us whether lions do live in England or in some other part of the world. The truth of the
second “theatre” – the formalized world of pastoral – is symbolical, encoded in
signifying practices, epistemologically grounded. We understand it as long as we are
familiar with the generic identity of the text. This type of convention is rooted in
ideology, in epistemology, therefore it will undergo changes in time. The relationship
between man and nature will be seen in a different light by the pagan third-century
Theocritus and by a Christian Renaissance dramatist, some eighteen centuries later.
However, the universal language of pastoral will make itself understood in similitudes as
well as in deflections from the initial code. The truth of the third “theatre” (where a text is
enacted and the illusion of reality attempted) is one of representation (arbitrary
convention). It is only here that Rosalind becomes an empty marker, a mover through a
chain of signifiers – woman, character, actor, epilogue... It is the deletion of the first two
levels that has dislocated textuality from its logocentric positioning, abstracting it to a
“voice terminal echo” in postmodernism.

In the romantic comedies there is no express ontological transgression. Even in A

Midsummer Night’s Dream ambiguity safeguards the ontological stability of the Athenian
society: Everything might have been just a dream: Bottom’s bottomless communications
from the abyss of the unconscious, an oneiro-fantasy of the lovers lost in the woods,
who in the morning see “double”. Oberon’s world is a Platonic-Orphic one, of truth and
harmony. The flower working the love-spell is associated with the mermaid at whose
song “the sea grew civil” (II/ 1), and with Cynthia, the “imperial votaress” whose chastity
quenches the fire of Cupid’s arrow. Its name, “love-in-idleness” suggests to us
Socrates’s “non-lover” in Plato’s Phaedrus, who opposes the “desire for the beautiful
and the good” to the “natural desire of pleasure”. Oberon’s remedy or love filter is
supposed to restore “true love’s sight” some true love turn’d and not a false turn’d true.
(III/ 2). The true Platonic love, opposed to irrational, instinctual infatuation, is the one
which had kindled in Demetrius for Helena in childhood (the time of innocence) and had
bound Hermia and Helena like coats in heraldry (IV/ 1). It is therefore free from mere
bodily desire, it is, as well as in Plotinus, love of intellectual beauty, of ideal forms
(archetype, heraldry). Demetrius feels as if restored from sickness to health, when his
love is thus spiritually purged. Finally, there is the conventional space of the stage and
of the theatrical representation which produces its own spell, a paradoxical one,
imposing its illusion in spite of its artificiality. The blockage intervening in the Quince
representation is caused by the deconstruction of the symbol into sign. The convention
is laid bare, the actor is presented as a prop (that which stands for “moonshine”).
Hippolyta and Theseus, speaking about the actor in terms of a real moon – he is no
crescent, I wish it would change or he is on the wane – ironically comment on the
improvised performers’ methodical breach of artistic illusion. The violation of the truth of
representation (analogy between signifier and signified, represented and
representation) is what mars the Peter Quince performance. The archetype works a
reunion of all levels of existence, as Cynthia (the moon in the sky) corresponds to
Diana, the virgin huntress, who is once mentioned by Ovid as “Titania”, and to Hecate in
the underworld (Puck mentions Hecate’s triple team, he himself being a mischevious
spirit). An archetypal story of two men’s’ rivalry over the same woman links Chaucer’s
Knight’s Tale to Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Another such story, of
parental opposition to youthful love ranks Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Pyramus and Thisbe)
next to Shakespeare’s modern “translation” of it. The poet is defined as the one who
doth glance from heaven to earth, in the neoplatonic sense of the heavenly ideal forms
and the earthly “habitation and name” (V/1) Essential speech, for Shakespeare, is this
reinscription of the original pattern: la verité de l’eidos comme de ce qui est identique ŕ
soi... et qui peut toujours ętre répété comme le męme (...) la loi est toujours la loi
d’une repetition [37]. Structurally, this neoplatonic recourse to archetype, model,
pattern finds expression in the Renaissance devices of analogous action or pairs of
characters (foil characters, mirroring one another’s situation, the doubling of the plot,
mise-en-abyme through dumb shows, play-within-the play, choruses, narrative framing,
like Oberon’s Orphic “story” of the love-drug)

In the romances the Platonic forms are extended into the real world. Supernatural
agency invades the phenomenal world, proving, alongside art, its restorative force. In
point of genre, these plays are tragicomedies, following a pattern of disappearance or
even death and resurrection, leading from a tragical situation to a final festive resolution
(see Northrop Frye, On Shakespeare, and Frank Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser,
Donne[38]). The romances belong to the last phase of Shakespeare’s career:

Pericles – (1608 – 1609)

Cymbeline – (1609 – 16l0)

The Winter’s Tale – (16lo-16ll)

The Tempest – (16ll-1612)

They show the taste of the Jacobean age (and of the baroque, in general) for the
pastoral, for which William Empson, in Some Versions of Pastoral, provides a
sociological explanation: It is important for a nation with a strong class-system to have
an art form that not merely evades but breaks through it, that makes the classes feel
part of a larger unity or simply at home with each other. Whereas the heroes of the
tragical part are scaled down to erring common mortals (see Leontes tortured by base
jealousy, inquiring into his son’s legitimacy in shocking speech, considering it comes
from a king), the comical part is cast into pastoral, mounting the staircase of a meliorist
scheme. Not only does Shakespeare’s pastoral, in its representation of the Many as
One, strive to give a sense of dealing with life completely (Empson), it also deals with
life discriminately, erecting, on the ruins of the social hierarchy (royal children brought
up among peasants, shepherds speaking of the Princess, my sister), a moral one.

In a sceptical age, in which Montaigne and other “modern philosophers” were

reducing traditional beliefs to “opinions” changing from one age to another, in which
Renaissance enthusiasm over the possibility of a rational control of nature and society
was on the wane, Shakespeare found in his escapist romances a reunion of nature,
myth and art. The redemptive figure is a mysterious healer associated with the
metaphysical power (according to Plato) of music (Pericles), a prophet (Cymbeline), a
magician (The Tempest) or an artist (The Winter’s Tale). Nature is spiritually informed.
Perdita’s recital over the meaning and proper destination of flowers in the order of the
yearly round of seasons symbolizes the human assimilation of the natural space.
Placed at the centre, humanity plays its parts sub specie aeternitatis, in the eye of God.
An epistle of mysterious origin, deciphered by a soothsayer, prophesizes the future
history of Britain in Cymbeline (by analogy with the Pentateuch, whose five scrolls
materialized into Hebrew history). It is only when man breaks his ties to the other
elements in the spiral of being that he fails tragically (Leontes ignoring the oracle which
had proclaimed Hermione innocent). Not only the music of Apollo but also the art of
Giulio Romano, a painter and sculptor, can restore Hermione (according to
Renaissance dictionaries, a variant of Harmonia). The good and the beautiful are no
longer a natural datum of a pastoral Arcadia. Even the shepherds’ world of the second
half of The Winter’s Tale can be hospitable to Autolychus, the bragging thief. In Ovid,
Autolychus is the son of Mercury and Chione, who “in theft and filching had no peer”.
Chione had another son (Autolychus’ s twin brother) by Apollo: Philemon, who “excelled
in music”. It is the honest deception of Renaissance art, which requires faith, like
religion, that reestablishes Arcadian “harmony” in Sicilia, torn by crimes of jealousy,
restoring it to its origin as the cradle of pastoral.

Time in the romances, supposed to cover at least the life of one generation (which
caused irritation even among contemporaries, as a breach of the Aristotelian unities),
can be interpreted as that of an exemplary biography, as the microscopic image of all
humanity, or of eternity. In The Winter’s Tale, Perdita and Florizel, who come to Sicilia
in autumn, after the sheep-sharing festivities (the action had started in winter, the yearly
cycle is now complete), are welcomed “as is the spring to the earth”. The coexistence of
spring and harvest, characteristic of the Golden Age (see Virgil’s Eclogues), is here a
trope. In the first three romances, the action unfolds over the required timespan: Marina
is lost by her father in infancy and is only reunited to him as an adult woman (Pericles).
In Cymbeline, Belarius, an exiled nobleman, kidnaps the king’s sons, who are brought
up in a cave in the woods to full-grown men. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes, king of
Sicilia, suspecting his wife of unfaithfulness, orders her infant to be put away. Perdita
(that which is lost) is saved by shepherds and brought up in Bohemia until the end of
the play, when she is restored to her royal condition. It is only in The Tempest that
Shakespeare ever observed the unities of time (the action lasts as long as the
performance) and space (one locale, the island). However, instead of the actual time of
Miranda’s growth to maturity, we get the story of her evolution, under Prospero’s wise
guidance and instruction, from unawareness (thy crying self, the inarticulate baby) to the
cultivated woman of Prospero’s brave new world. She is a very young woman, why
should Prospero speak about her inability to recover past events as “the dark backward
and abysm of time “? If we consider the yardstick imposed on her as the measure of
memory (by any other house, or person), it is obvious that Prospero, like any
Renaissance man, sees it as the history of civilized humanity, the memory of the race.
This play has often been considered to be Shakespeare’s replica to Montaigne’s essay
Of the Cannibales (Florio’s spelling in the translation published in 1603). He actually
reverses Montaigne’s thesis, according to which man only spoils “our great and
puissant Mother Nature” through his inventions, and that the colonizers from the
civilized countries had merely corrupted the natives’ innocence through their words that
import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, envy, debauchery etc. Caliban (an
anagram of “cannibal”), the son of a water witch (a spirit of Mother Nature), feeding on
berries, is obviously the primitive man in his natural condition. Shakespeare enlarges
the story into a mythical script. Caliban, the natural man (thou earth, thou tortoise),
learning from Prospero how to name everything around, attempting a sexual assault on
Miranda and being therefore punished to earn his living by hard labour, reenacts the fall
of Adam. But Prospero has introduced him to a world not only of names but also of
differences (the bigger and the lesser light, the sun and the moon), upon which any
form of civilization is edified. Caliban recapitulates the history of humanity, rising from
the indifference of nature (like the roaring breakers of the ocean, that know nothing of
the name of “king”) to a meaningful order, making wrong choices (false idols, a clown
and a jester taken for gods fallen from the sky), and finally recognizing the supreme
power in the master of the “dukedom of books”. Prospero, as his name suggests, is an
example of melior natura, helping the other characters “prosper” in a chain of being
which ranges from Caliban to Ariel. In Jewish demonology, names ending in “el”, a
suffix meaning “god”, are given to angels, and in alchemy there is the god “Air”, of the
Intellect [39]. They learn how to restrain animal appetite through learning and art, the
play abounding in figures of resurrection and redemption: the brave new world, the
Arabian bird, Phoenix, the banquet of the senses (knowledge offered instead of food),
nature emancipated to mythical figures, which are human constructs (goddesses of
nature and fertility: Ceres, Isis, Juno), the hunt and the hounds destroying matter to
reveal the spirit in alchemy (Silver: argentum vivus, lapis, the philosopher’s stone), a
drowned man’s eyes transformed to pearls in Ariel’s comforting song to Ferdinand,
Ferdinand put to the test of carrying logs and proved worthy etc. Individual destiny is
projected into a mythical frame, a universal drama is enacted in a timeless world. The
presence of anachronisms is deliberate, as the hic et nunc is like the ubique. For
instance, in Pericles, the parade of the knights at Pentapolis, each in full armour, with
his page carrying an emblematic shield is a medieval show, yet set at the same time as
the worship of Diana at Ephesus. In The Winter’s Tale, Apollo’s oracle belongs to the
same world as Julio Romano, a Renaissance artist. In Cymbeline, Leonatus goes to a
sort of Renaissance Italy, the action being set at the beginning of the first millenium.
Trans-temporality is a test of validity.

Space in the romances is symbolical, values being associated with specific

locales. In The Winter’s Tale, Sicilia, with its luxury and indulgence, its repute for crimes
of jealousy, is the world of experience, while Bohemia, where the leading male
characters spent their childhood, symbolizes innocence, a sort of Edenic garden,
previous to the fall.

The action frequently resembles that of a fairy tale (the calumniated virtuous
woman, royal children lost and found, a ring of recognition) or of myth (fall and
redemption, death and resurrection, hermetic and alchemical topoi)

Names display a Cratyllic link between signifier and signified: Perdita is the lost
child who, like man, God’s lost sheep, will be found; Prospero is a magician in the
commedia dell’arte; Philarmonius in Cymbeline remarks “the apt construction” of the
name of Leonatus Posthumus: he who was born after the death of his father, Leonatus.
The hero is also associated with the divine scroll – Logos – which is embodied in British
history; Marina was born at sea; Miranda deserves to be admired etc. The self-
referential pastoral has completely transcended the phenomenal world. The Tempest –
an allegory of art as the great preserver and restorer of the mortal self as a
Montaignean figure of the artist in his work – is Shakespeare’s artistic will.

Recent epistemology tends to date the great change to the modern world in the
seventeenth century rather than in the Renaissance, but the roots were certainly there.
The audience of Hamlet, in 1600, must have sensed its depth, if not its direction. The
bulk of revenge tragedies staged in the second halph of the sixteenth century had
familiarized spectators with the theme, the type of action, the stock characters.
Shakespeare was challenging the whole tradition. His avenger was quite reluctant about
taking action, wasting his time in inquiries about the act of revenge: its motivation,
circumstantial evidence, the proper timing (which seemed to tarry ad infinitum), and
finally his “readiness” for it, which was all, so the action as such did not much matter.
And all this “philosophy” was not even coming from some erudite scholar, stalking about
with his disciples, lecturing on everything “in heaven and earth”, but from some madcap,
whose ambiguous speech threw everybody – characters and audience alike – into
confusion about what he actually meant.

The shift from a medieval type of theatricality – embodiment of some idea,

concept, or famous character – towards the modern representation of the development
of character was accompanied by epistemological inquiry and relativity. The
transcendental subjectivity of the totalitarian Middle Ages was breaking up into private
individual representations of the world, and the characters were mediating these
representations for the audience in soliloquies of increasing psychological and
dramatic self-consciousness.

Montaigne’s Apologie de Raimond Sebond was an impressive record of all the

incoherences, errors and contradictions lurking in the systems and practices that kept
changing from one age to another, proving in their chaotic accumulation mankind’s
impossibility to reach constant truth. While transcendental scepticism ended in universal
doubt, man’s inquiry into his own nature appeared as legitimate. Erasmus had himself
fostered the modern sceptical and relativistic attitude in his Encomium moriae showing
how everything in human existence is Janus-faced. Folly stands at the origin of social
evil as of social good, of social injustice and greed, as of human creativity and moral
values. Madness can take the form of irrational outbursts with devastating effects or of
an enlightened refusal of dogmatism and acceptance of a more complex paradoxical
meaning, even if logically inconsistent. Such are Hamlet’s madness in his irrational
murder of Polonius and his “prophetic soul”, divining the truth about the murder and
usurpation case, or his final redeeming acceptance of the providential scheme of the
universe in spite of all contingent “rottenness”.

Not only from an epistemological but also from a structural point of view,
Shakespeare worked important changes in the classical and medieval tradition of
drama. A.C. Bradley, in The Shakespearean Tragedy, a book based, like Frye’s, on a
teaching course in Shakespeare and published in the thirties, undertakes a systematic
approach of the subject. A general picture is certainly a reductionist one, Shakespeare’s
manner changing greatly from his first tragedy – Titus Andronicus (1592-1593) – to his
last – Coriolanus (1606-1608 ).

Simplifying colour allegory in Titus Andronicus (Aaron, the moor, whose evil nature
is, in medieval fashion, allegorized in the blackness of his skin) no longer works in
Othello, for instance, where the black moor’s crime and suicide are justified by his
allegience to certain values: Desdemona’s supposed unfaithfulness is a stain upon the
firmament, as is later his own crime, not so much against some particular woman as
against Venetian worth, which he has doubted, abused and wasted. However such
basic assumptions about dramatic structure and function are necessary in establishing
a canonic picture:

Titus Andronicus – (1592-1593)

Romeo and Juliet – (1595-1596)

 Julius Caesar – (1599-1600)

Hamlet – (1600 – 1601)

Othello – (1602-1603)

Timon of Athens – (1604-1605)

King Lear – (1605-1606)

Macbeth – (1605-1606)

Antony and Cleopatra – (1606-1607)

Coriolanus – (1606-1608)

Etymologically, “tragedy” comes from “tragos” (goat-skin), that is from a ritual of

sacrifice. Shakespeare retrieves this original sense: Julius Caesar’s assassination is
envisioned by Brutus as a sacrifice to the gods; Hamlet takes it upon himself to set right
the disjointed axe of the world and the “distracted globe” acting like a Christ figure
(Saviour through his own sacrifice); Timon’s unfaithful guests, on whom he bestowed
his generosity, are said to have his meat in them, and the frequent references to
“eating” Timon and “tasting” Timon would also suggest a Holy Supper manquée; Lear’s
appearance with a crown of wild flowers on his head also suggests a sacrificial ritual.
Lavinia’s lopped arms like “two branches” and severed hands like “open leaves” prepare
us, through what looks like a fertility sacrifice, for her death at the hands of her father in
the name of a primitive code of honour, which prescribes the same retribution for
violated innocence and for deliberate sin.

A tragedy, Bradley says, is pre-eminently the story of one person, the hero, or, in
love tragedies, of the hero and the heroine. The Renaissance had its own idea of the
hero as the embodiment of the entire society. Hamlet is explicit about his having nothing
in common with Hercules – the ancient embodiment of physical strength – and his being
closer to the “Nemean lion”, which Hercules killed. He is a new Hercules in fighting and
finally erradicating the evil in himself („Hamlet’s madness”), allowing his reason to
suppress irrational impulses and to lay his father’s heritage of sin, by recognizing
Fortinbras’s valour and right over the land. It is Hamlet’s victory over himself, even
more than over his exterior antagonists (Claudius and his instruments of destruction),
that finally entitles Fortinbras to declare him a hero.
 The story, Bradley goes on, is one of suffering and calamity, conducting to the
death of the hero. As Troilus remains alive, even if tragically disillusioned with life,
Troilus and Cressida has been ruled out of the canon, although it is precisely the sense
of life’s absurdity that makes it a modern tragedy.

The suffering and calamity befall some conspicuous person, a person of high
degree: kings or princes, leaders in the state, like Coriolanus, Othello, Brutus, Antony,
or members of great houses, whose quarrels are of public interest. In the Gorboduc
tradition, the fate of the social leads affects the entire society, according to the medieval
conception about king and state as his body politic. Romeo and Juliet is not a simple
story of two people in love; it engages a social feud which is a threat to the very stability
of the state (I/1):

Prince: Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace,

Profaners of this neighbour-stained steel -

Will they not hear ?

The total reversal of fortune for someone who stood in high degree, which
appealed to the medieval mind, is still considered a moving subject, as the mortal body
was doubled by its “dignitas” in the political economy of the society (see Frank
Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser Donne, Op. cit.). According to medieval philosophy,
this “dignity” was immortal and represented by ceremonies. Maddened Lear offers a
sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch,/ Past speaking of in a king because he has
fallen from species to individual, from the perpetuity of his office to the perishableness
of his body, whose hand smells of mortality. One should be careful, however, about the
dramatists’ point of view which may differ from that of his characters. It is obvious, in the
context of the play, that, having selected an action set in the remote past, Shakespeare,
like a cultural anthropologist, conscientiously reinscribes the beliefs and discourses
characteristic of it (as he had done in Richard II, reinscribing fragments from Mum). The
end of the play voices (through Edgar or Albany) a different belief, that the future
history will be changed by the young. It is obvious that Shakespeare’s spokesmen are
Kent, Edgar, Albany, who do not need ceremony or the paraphernalia of dignitas and
royalty in order to stick to the perennial values of loyalty, love and generosity.

References:

[27].. Odette de Mourgues, The European Background to Baroque Sensibility,in The New Pelican
Guide to English Literature, edited by Boris Ford, 1990, pp. 98, 103
 [28] Harriet Hawkins, Measure for Measure, The Harvester Press, 1987.

[29] Jacobean Poetry and Prose, edited by Clive Bloom, Macmillan, 1988, p. 10

[30] S.C. Boorman, Human Conflict in Shakespeare, Op. cit., p. 27

[31] Northrop Frye, On Shakespeare, Op. cit. p. 42

[32] Maria-Ana Tupan, The Mirror and the Signet, Op. cit. pp lo7-l14.

[33] Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire sur la lettre volée in Ecrits, Editions du Seuil, 197l.

[34] Ibidem

[35] Jonathan Goldberg, Voice Terminal Echo, Methuen, 1986.

[36]Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective, Op. cit.

[37] Jacques Derrida, La pharmacie de Platon in La dissémination, Editions du Seuil, 1972, p. 14l.

[38] Frank Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne. Renaissance Essays, Routledge & Kegan Paul,
197l.

[39] C.G. Jung, Psychologie et alchimie, Editions Buchet/Chastel, Paris, 197o.

Several of Shakespeare’s plays oppose epistemological views upheld by

different locales (Egypt and Rome in Antony and Cleopatra, Venice and the Turkish-
moor aliens in Othello, Rome and the barbarians in Coriolanus) or ages (Old and Young
Hamlet, Lear and Edgar/Albany, Timon/Alcibiades or Timon and his servants as the Old
Man and the New Man about the time of the birth of Christ etc.), and this is to be
expected from a writer living no longer in a totalitarian medieval Europe but at a time of
shifting episteme. A.C. Bradley is right, however, in pointing out that, unlike medieval de
casibus stories, depicting the fall from high estate through the Wheel of Fortune,
Shakespeare’s tragedies show calamities which are produced by the actions of
the characters themselves. According to Aristotle, the downfall of the tragical hero is
brought about by some minor fault. The hero is not absolutely evil, in which case his
misery would fail to elicit our pity, nor absolutely innocent or flawless, in which case his
tragical end would show the world to be utterly absurd and life, meaningless. The hero
himself contributes in some measure to the disaster in which he perishes, the
catastrophe follows inevitably from the deeds of men, and the main source of
these deeds is in character. Ambition rules Macbeth, the vanity of being flattered and
weariness about his royal duty leads Lear to disaster, suspicion and jealousy blind the
naive moor of Venice, the absolutization of evil makes Hamlet destroy also the good
and innocent around him, inflexibility destroys Coriolanus, misanthropy driven to
unnatural extremes makes Timon finish off his life among the beasts of the wood etc.
Other factors intervening in the unfolding of the action are of minor importance. Bradley
lists the following:

a) Abnormal conditions of mind, like somnambulism, hallucinations are

themselves expressive of character. Lear’s distracted mind is an objective correlative of
the social order with the king at the bottom instead of the top which his love of leisure
had tragically inverted. Macbeth's hallucination of a dagger in the air is by himself
explained as a projection of his own criminal intent (a dagger of the mind).

b) The supernatural is present in some of the tragedies: ghosts, prophetic

dreams, witches, possessed of metaphysical knowledge, which cannot be properly
translated into the language of mortals (Old Hamlet’s complaint) and whose meaning
needs to be “negotiated” (Hecate, in Macbeth, III/5). Therefore it can be said that they
are present only to give a more distinct form to something already looming in the
character’s thoughts: Hamlet’s “prophetic soul”, suspecting that something darker than
impropriety is hidden in his mother’s hasty marriage and his uncle’s seizure of the
kingdom; Richard III’s remorses of consciousness; Macbeth’s murderous plan of
becoming king. The encounter between Macbeth and the witches is a key scene for the
understanding of the way in which the supernatural informs the action of a
Shakespearian tragedy. The three witches are only looking into the “seeds” of time, they
cannot know the harvest the hero will choose to reap. A sense of indeterminacy hovers
over their predicament. Their language sounds oxymoronic, but it is merely ambiguous.
When the battle is lost and won simply means that it is won on one side and lost on the
other. When the hurleyburly’s done may mean either produced or finished. Fair is foul
and foul is fair, releasing the energy of the antonyms both ways, affirms as much as
Plato in Symposium (sometimes that which is beautiful may appear as foul...), and is
immediately confirmed by the fact that Macbeth and Banquo react in different ways to
the same prophecy of greatness. Banquo, whose conscience is clean, finds no fault with
the prophecy (things do sound so fair), while Macbeth starts and seems to fear, as the
idea occurs to him, unless previously entertained, of murdering Duncan and seizing the
crown. Later Hecate rebukes the witches for daring to trade and traffic with Macbeth/ In
riddles and affairs of death. As is the case with any “negotiation”, Macbeth has added
something of his own thoughts and intentions. And, being one who, as Hecate
characterizes him, spurns fate and lets his hopes carry him ‘bove wisdom, grace and
fear, Macbeth lends their voice a murderer’s ear, and rounds up their message with his
own schemes of usurpation. Unlike the unfailing and explicit oracles of ancient Greek
tragedy, this Christian oracle gives Macbeth the possibility to choose. The Anglican
Church under Elizabeth had tended towards Calvinism, with its emphasis upon doom
and Providence, but the Arminian influence of the nineties had also made room for
man’s free will and choice. The influence of Jacob Arminius, a Dutch theologian who
died in 16lo, grew under James I and Charles I. In any event, the supernatural agency
in no way removes the hero’s responsibility for his deeds.

c) Chance or accidents may also have some influence on the action (Desdemona
losing her handkerchief, Juliet not waking from her sleep a moment before Romeo kills
himself), but they occur when the action has al-ready taken a decisive course towards
the catastrophe, whose origin is in the characters’ fatal errors.

The conflict is described as a twofold one: between opposing parties or persons

or an inner one, between conflicting passions, tendencies, ideas within the characters.
This new type of conflict, which complexifies the ancient confrontation between man
and man or man and Destiny, is the expression of the Christian internalization of Fate:
man’s hereditary sin, stamped on his body from his birth. Hamlet fights his stepfather’s
confederates, but at the same time he acknowledges his own split personality: his
rational self and his “madness” (the faction that wrongs Hamlet) which kills Polonius. To
these two types of conflicts we should add one which, to our knowledge, at that time
was Shakespeare’s alone. The shifting of epistemological perspectives in some of the
plays (particularly, in Hamlet, the most “philosophical” of all) allows of various
intersecting and conflicting discourses to coexist. The author’s ambiguous position
to the various idioms intertextualized in the play (Plato, Montaigne, Erasmus,
contemporary almanacs, the discourse of the Church), has allowed of so many
interpretations, including the violent condemnation of Hamlet (by Brecht, among others)
and the rehabilitation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (see Thomas Stoppard’s play,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, produced in the 1960s). Shakespeare was
still trying to tell some central story, but he had become aware of the difficulty at a time
when traditional assumptions were receiving serious blows.

The hybris of the Shakespearean hero is an infringement upon universal order

(the “ought-to” theatre of the world). Individualism is severely reprobated. It is obvious
that Coriolanus is an exceptional hero, that he is spiritually superior to the many-headed
monster of the Roman mass of citizens.

Yet Shakespeare does not extol the Renaissance Titan. In his last tragedy, he
teaches Socrates’s lesson. Individual worth comes next to the values commonly shared
by civilized human communities. On being offered the possibility to save his life by
“fleeing from well-ordered cities” to the “disorder and licence” of Thessaly, thereby
depriving his children of Athenian citizenship and education, Socrates decides that
existence is not worth having on such terms (Plato, Crito). Coriolanus is twice mistaken
in his decision to leave Rome: his rebellion is as efficient as that of the head against the
belly (an individual’s interests are always commensurate with those of the rest of the
body of citizens, as Agrippa had taught him in his parable), while his support to the
barbarian Volsces in destroying (plough and harrow) a flourishing civilization not only
hurts his family but also destroys his human identity as the filler of a certain dignity in
the social scheme He had been acting as if he had been his own father, when in fact
each individual is constituted by the anonymous order of his society (V/ 3):

Coriolanus: Like a dull actor now

I have forgot my part, and I am out,

Even to a full disgrace.

Socrates had chosen to be a victim of men rather than of the laws – not only the
Athenian “covenants and agreements” but also “the divine and admirable law”.
Shakespeare’s tragedies are not merely crime and punishment cases. Most of his
heroes fail because of an excess or insufficiency in relation to this universal order. The
imagery supports the universal scope of the moral scheme. Macbeth plans to usurp the
lawful king, and his own being is shattered in the enterprise: his hair is unfix’d, his
seated heart knocks at the ribs/ Against he use of nature, his single state of man is
shaken and smothered in surmise. The murder of the king of Denmark disjoints the very
axis mundi. The world is out of joint, Hamlet complains, oh cursed spite that I was born
to set it right. The gravedigger, in the churchyard scene, which is no less allegorical
than the garden scene narrated by the ghost in the first act, had started his funeral work
on the symbolical day when old Hamlet had killed Fortinbras, seizing a part of his land.
It had been Old Hamlet, not Claudius that had committed the first murder and
usurpation act – later traced back to Cain who did the first murder. M.M. Mahood, in her
enlightening book on Shakespeare’s Wordplay[40], signals out several cases of
possible misprints in the Shakespearean texts. The rather nonsensical “smote the
sledded Polacks on the ice” might have been “smote the pole-axe on the ice”, which
would consort with other images in the play (disjoint and out of frame, distracted globe,
out of joint). Even if the original word “Polacks” was correctly rendered by the copyists,
a pun may be suspected here. Lear’s “cease of majesty”, the murder of Julius Caesar,
the breaking of traditional bonds between parent and child, king and subject, are
prophesied by portentous signs of cosmic disorder (the late eclipses in the sun). Antony
and Cleopatra offers, in Philo’s opening speech, the English translation of hybris
(overflows the measure), which shows both Shakespeare’s awareness of genre identity
(Aristotelian motivation of the hero’s downfall) and his special use of it. Opening
Plutarch’s story, he locates it in the Renaissance world picture:

Philo: Nay but this dotage of our general’s

O’erflows the measure; those his goodly eyes,

That o’er the files and musters of war

Have glow’d like plated Mars, now bend, now turn,

The office and devotion of their view

Upon a tawny front;

Philo is less interested in what Antony does than in what he thinks. His vision is
different, like Coriolanus’s in exile, who feels that in Rome he had been “carrying”
another pair of eyes. Antony’s infatuation with Cleopatra makes him forsake Rome
completely, and whatever it stands for: art and civilization, addiction to moral order,
military virtue, power over the world, choosing instead to become a plaything in the
hands of a whimsical woman – a gipsy from the Roman viewpoint. Renaissance
ideology is insinuating itself into the text: Cleopatra’s insertion into an anatomy of the
four elements (her spiritual transformation is described as her ascent from the baser
elements to air and fire), of Antony into a Christian paradigm of hereditary faults and
goodness coming from “what he chooses”, Antony’s association with the dolphin, the
primate of fish (see Tillyard’s list of Renaissance primates: emperor, dolphin, lion,
eagle), and with the trinity (one of the three pillars of the world), universal order pictured
as a crown (chain or dance). Cleopatra’s death, after the high Roman fashion (that is
choosing death to disgrace) reestablishes the world’s harmony: Charmian is “mending”
her crown. The heroes’ destiny engages changes in the world’s geometry. As at the
beginning their love appears to them as an absolute, the architecture of both Roman
and Egyptian civilizations may collapse into the Tiber (into the Nile, respectively):

Antony: Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch

 Of the ranged empire fall! (I/ 1)

Cleopatra’s angle in her hooking game with Antony and Antony’s Philippan sword,
which she steals from him, are the mocking substitutes or parody of the world’s triple
arch (the triumvirs of the Roman empire) and of the soldier’s pole which had made
Rome the centre of the world. Antony’s return to the Rome values (in the end contented
to be by another Roman “valiantly vanquished”) and Cleopatra’s conversion to the
Roman “fashion” reestablish the true hierarchy. Cleopatra finally understands that
human valour makes all the difference (degree, the odds) in the world, while the rest is
Death, the Leveller, Nature’s “indifference” (the cloud “dislimmed” in water), Lethe’s
dulness of beastly “sleep and feeding” :

Cleopatra: The crown o’ the earth doth melt. My Lord !

O! wither’d is the garland of the war,

The soldier’s pole is fall’n: young boys and girls

Are level now with men; the odds is gone,

And there is nothing left remarkable

Beneath the visiting moon. (IV/ l3)

Nothing loftier, more majestic and moving has probably ever been written on the
sense of a world being entombed with the lost lover. Antony and Cleopatra is
Shakespeare’s most poetic play.

Opening a closed text to engraft a new ideology [41] was not a new practice,
but by the time Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, ideology itself had become problematical.
The competition of discourses shows the human mind in suspense. Is a
metanarrative, a central story, a universal form of life still possible ? Is the human self a
stable identity ? Is there some definite answer to the opening question in Hamlet:
Who’s there ? Human voices are heard and identified in the dark, while, at the end of
the play, Hamlet’s dying voice says the rest is silence. The hero’s concern is no longer
the immortality of his soul, but Horatio’s voice mandated to repair the reputation of his
“wounded name” by telling his story. Individuals are abstracted to a tissue of languages.
Which one is reporting Shakespeare’s opinions ? Which one is telling the true story,
worth a thousand pounds ? The same events are perceived in a different way by
different people. The guards and Hamlet believe in the reality of the ghost, while the
sceptical Horatio, recently returned from Wittenberg, says it is all their imagination.
Similar words are used by various characters (the world is out of joint, the state is
disjoint and out of frame) yet it is obvious that Hamlet and Claudius, respectively, mean
different things. As for writing, the historical distance between tables of stone,
parchments and folded writ is much longer than that of a generation. As a “chronicle
play” [42], whose source is lost in the mists of an Icelandic legend, reproduced by the
twelfth-century Saxo Grammaticus in his History of the Danes, Hamlet can afford such
anachronisms, which lend it the aspect of a timeless story of universal appeal (Hamlet:
hic et ubique, I/5). However, just like Antony and Cleopatra, which replaces an old,
broken measure (the conflict between duty and sexual indulgence) by a new,
Renaissance standard ( the yardstick of civilization against the dull uniformity of nature),
the play inverts the premise: the legend of centuries is not one but several scores, in
different keys.

Old Hamlet, walking restlessly in his armour of the day he killed Old Fortinbras,
belongs to the Middle Ages: single combat, an ethic of revenge, political view of king
and his relationship to body politic (A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark/
Is by a forged process of my death/ Rankly abused – I/ 5), Catholic orthodoxy of the
need for confession and repentance for sins which are now weighing heavily against the
unshriven soul.

Young Hamlet lives in Shakespeare’s time, with Wittenberg as an established

university, with modern plays of the latest hour (as indicated by Polonious’ didactic
exposition – the pastoral-comical, tragical-comical and historical being recent
inventions), fencing, readings from Montaigne, Calvinist doctrines of Predestination
(Hamlet born to redress the distracted globe), Election (Hamlet thinks the election
lights/ on Fortinbras, who actually shows up like some supreme judge), Providence
(there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, there’s a special providence in the fall of a
sparrow – V/ 2) and individual relationship with God (seeking out for signs in the world
for the divinations of his prophetic soul). Hamlet’s soliloquies on life and death in the
first part of the play are interspersed with paraphrases of Montaigne’s essay, That to
Philosophise is to Learn how to Die, also quoted in King Lear. The essays, published in
158o, had been enormously influential in the French edition, before Florio’s translation
of 1600 entered the Stationers’ Rolls, coming out in 1603. Hamlet wonders whether it is
nobler to suffer the stings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the thousand natural
shocks that flesh is heir to or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing
end them. Montaigne’s text reads: the grief, poverty and other accidental crosses to
which life is subject (...) whenever it shall please us cut off all other inconveniences and
crosses.

Hamlet thinks people are prevented from taking their lives by fear of the
undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveller returns. Montaigne describes life
beyond comme en pays suspect, whose strangeness needs to be atoned by constantly
thinking of it. He finds that life is neither good nor evil, but the place of good and evil
according as you prepare it for them. Hamlet: for there is nothing either good or bad but
thinking makes it so. Quoting Thales, Montaigne agrees that Death is indifferent: the
water, the earth, the air, the fire and other members of this my universe are no more the
instruments of thy life, as of thy death. Once the mask is gone, man returns to the
elements, losing his identity. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are merely
instruments, lacking personal will and convictions, are the indifferent children of the
earth. Drowning Ophelia has too much water and through death she is neither man nor
woman, but an it, like Old Hamlet’s Ghost. The way of nature has nothing in common
with the way of humanity – the world of differences, of signifieds. If Hamlet’s rebellious
and suicidal mood of the first part seems to be conflicting with the meak and docile let it
be of the second part, so are Montaigne and Calvinistic thought. There is no
psychological motivation to be expected, as Shakespeare is here merely contrasting
points of view. Hamlet’s theory of man as divided (quitessence of dust and angel,
paragon of animals, large discourse, that is broad understanding) originates in
Erasmus’s Enchiridion and the subsequent devotional writing of preachers and the
Church. Erasmus’s Folly, with cap and toga, is the model for Hamlet dressed as a
madman, and yet capable of such pregnant (full of meaning) replies (Polonius, II/ 2), for
Yorick’s gambols and excellent fancy. Life is revealing its tragical paradoxes: Hamlet
being mostly sincere while role-playing himself, Hamlet fighting Laertes in whom he
recognizes his own “cause”, his displaced social grammar (uncle-father and aunt-
mother).

The literary self-awareness of Renaissance drama is displayed by Hamlet’s

concern with the comparative values of speaking and writing, the relationship between
art and reality, truth of representation, the art of the actor, the importance of the subject
of a literary work, the endurance of a work of art. In a logocentric age, speech, voice are
primary (imitating God’s creative breath), while writing is derivative and inferior, a mere
image of the former. Shakespeare will have had in mind Plato’s Phaedrus, St. Paul’s 2
Corinthians, 3: 6, but the subject seems to have been debated by more recent authors
as well: Luther’s defense of speech, because Christ wrote nothing, Thomas Wilson’s
contention, of 1560, quoted by Malcolm Evans[43], that Arte without utterance can do
nothing. Socrates says that, once written, words are tumbled about anywhere, they can
be misunderstood, read by an uncomprehending reader, when their absent author
cannot defend himself (Phaedrus). Hamlet too associates voice with breath, memory,
and the possibility to defend or repair a wounded name, while dismissing writing as
derivative copia folded... in the form of the other, base and yeoman’s service. He finds
Osric does Laertes no service by wrapping him in the calendar of gentry, (probably the
farmer’s almanac wherefrom Polonius had borrowed his speech), instead of rawer
breath. Shakespeare’s exclusive concern with the theatrical representation of his plays,
leaving their writing at the mercy of negligent copyists who gave posterity a hard time
deciphering them, must have sprung from a deep Socratean conviction. Barbara Everett
(Essays on Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Clarendon Paperbacks, 1989) thinks, for
instance, that Enter Osric is a misprint. It had probably been Enter a gentle Astringer
(keeper of goshawks) or a stranger
(A courtier, in the Quarto). The pedantic courtier resembles Plato’s Sophist (A
Stranger), Hamlet being as exasperated by him as Socrates in Plato’s dialogue by
Zeno’s disciple. Whereas Hamlet upholds the necessity for a language of natural
signification, Osric’s art of splitting hairs in matter of words supports “margents”, the
glossematique of formal language (of arbitrary association between signifier and
signified, Hermogenes’s conventional names):

Hamlet: What call you the carriages ?

Horatio: I knew you must be edified by the margent ere you had done.

Osric: The carriages, sir, are the hangers.

Hamlet: The phrase would be more germane to the matter if we could carry
cannon by our sides; I would it might be hangers till then. (V/ 2)

Osric is preceded in this by his foil, Polonius. Plato’s Stranger provides tideous lists
and meaningless classifications (for instance, the hunting of animals in water or on the
earth etc.), just like Polonius’s “hurley-burley” of dramatic kinds. Plato’s Sophist
compares his acquisition of knowledge (which for Socrates, as for Hamlet, is through
memory) with “the angler’s art”. Here is Polonius, instructing Reynaldo, in the sophistic
art of getting information about Laertes:

Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth:

And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,

 With windlaces and with assays of bias,

By indirections find directions out (II/ l)

What wonder “mad” Hamlet should call him a “fishmonger” ?

Ancient, medieval and Renaissance discourses are competing in the play, holding
up the mirror to the restless end of the sixteenth century, finding a release into the
seventeenth, when their confrontation would take the more radical form of the battle of
the ancients and the moderns. Finding fault with Shakespeare’s plays usually springs
from failure to read them in their key. Why does Shakespeare resort to this discursive
renovation? Empiricism constructs an unmediated reality, directly available to the
senses, Malcolm Evans opinates (Ibidem, p. 35), while idealism assumes unchanging
essences, a world given and readable rather than constructed and therefore available
to be rewritten. Polonius is avidly nosing about, hunting and fishing for information about
everybody, reproducing some banal simulacrum of wise discourse in a popular
almanac, contradicted immediately after by his actual behaviour which has nothing to do
with his moral precepts. He gives a most attentive ear to everyday conversation: ‘Good
sir’, or so; or ‘friend’ or ‘gentlemen’,/According to the phrase or the addition/ Of man and
country. Hamlet supplies a parody in the churchyard scene, lost among the cautionary
skull-emblems, so much endeared by baroque art:”Good morrow, sweet lord! How dost
thou, good lord? This might be my Lord Such-a-one, that praised my lord Such-a-one’s
horse, when he meant to beg it, might it not? – while dismissing the authors of such
thrash as the calves and the sheep of whose skin parchments are made.

Shakespeare’s world is a formalized one of patterned actions and characters, of

universal appeal. His art is not tied down to a concrete referent at a given time and in a
given space. In the grammar of his texts, characters are defined in relationship to one
another, repetition and difference ensuring a self-sufficient code. There is no need, like
in Gorboduc, for intuitive dumb shows explained at the end (see Hamlet’s explanatory
comment on The Mouse-trap for the “benefit” of the king). The doubling of plot and
characters codifies them into an autonomous structure. The foursome of sons avenging
their fathers (Pyrrhus, Fortinbras, Hamlet, Laertes) removes the conflict from a possible
concrete context, tracing it back to the origin of human history and writing: the Trojan
War, Homer. The revenge plot is made into a pattern of social disruption as a historical
datum. The impact of the performance on the audience, the spectator’s identification
with what is going on the stage are dramatized as part of that generic awareness
which marked the shift to modern theatricality.
 Like most Renaissance texts, Hamlet is a generic mix. It incorporates elegies, an
aubade, lyrics, ballads, a play within a play, a dumb show, etc. There is a tendency
towards carnivalization, a mixture of tragedy and comedy, as the event triggering the
plot is itself a combination of mourning and mirth. Hamlet’s antics, his slanderous words
and conduct, the gravediggers’ resentment and objections to the privileges of the rich (a
few decades later other Diggers, let loose by Cromwell, were to demand the abolition of
private property and communal work of land) foretell social disruptions. Formally and
stylistically, it was moving into the baroque world of generic hybrids, such as the
tragicomedy or the mock-heroic.

Basically, however, Hamlet belongs to a subgenre: the revenge tragedy,

structured, after Seneca’s model, in five parts. In the exposition, a ghost or some other
wronged personage is presenting their motifs for seeking revenge. In Seneca’s
Hercules Furens, Juno swears to hunt Hercules down in order to avenge herself on
Jupiter’s love affair with Alcmena, who subsequently had given birth to the famous hero.
In Troades, it is the ghost of Achilles who demands that Polyxena be sacrificed to him,
while Calchas requests the sacrifice of Astyanax, the son of Hector and Andromache. In
Thomas Kyd’s Induction, the scene is actually set in the underworld, whose king and
queen promise the murdered Andrea Revenge, which is personified and is keeping the
victim company, glutting in the enactment of revenge.

In Shakespeare, the model is subtly refurbished to answer the expectations of the

anxious early modernity. The ghost is placed on the dissecting table of a sceptical
intellect, probing into the nature of whatever comes within its perceptual ken. To the
atheistic Horatio, schooled at Wittenberg, the ghost is something that baffles rational
thought: it is a “mote” against the understanding. Instead of being struck with awe,
Hamlet puts the ghost to the test through what might pass for a very elaborate and
carefully conducted scientific experiment. He is possessed by his father’s ghost, carried
along with it into extremes of passion, and his final liberation in the end – “naked and
alone” – may symbolize the Renaissance man’s need to unload the heritage of
medieval warfare, dogmatism and superstition, substituting for them “youthful
observation” (empirical sciences), a rapport to God and one’s fellows freed from
institutional control (Protestantism), and an aesthetic ideal as the modern embodiment
of the Stoics’ search for some durable good to compensate for the existence of evil in
the world. Hamlet commends the manuscripts that outlive the great warrior Alexander,
the savings of memory and the story which will reestablish his reputation, for art alone
can perform true justice and restoration. What is not articulated as Logos, is a worthless
surplus of creation, its rest of silence.
 The second part of a revenge play, the anticipation, stages the planning of
revenge, which, in Hamlet, is not confined to Hamlet’s personal destiny, it is a plan to
redress the whole world, which is out of joint. The other parts are the confrontation
between the avenger and his victim (eventually it is mundane art that exposes
villainy, not some message from the other world), the partial execution (of the king’s
mercenaries) and the completion of revenge. The death scene is, in Shakespeare, an
instruction lesson, as Claudius is proved a murderer in the very act. In Hercules Furens,
it is Juno who induces Hercules’s madness, which makes him kill his own wife, thinking
she was his persecutor. As he recovers from his delusions, he refrains from using the
“notched shaft” to kill old Amphytrion, which would have meant a “sin of thine own, will
and knowledge”. Hamlet is wronged by the evil inside himself, his irrational other, which
he also views as the beastly, the natural, instinctual self within man. Nature was
beginning to be felt as the other of the culturally shaped human identity. Setting the
world in a wrong perspective (treating Ophelia as a potentially frail woman, seeing evil
everywhere) is Hamlet’s error of judgement. As the veil falls from his eyes, he is trying
to make amends for his “idols” (false representations). Unlike Seneca, who produced
distinct plays for the transgressive Hercules and the redeemed hero seeking heaven,
Shakespeare joined the two episodes in the archetypal story of man’s fall and
redemption.

Renaissance Fiction

If the Shakespearean text appears most often to be the focal point of a mass of
discourses circling round it, derived from a dozen systems of knowledge, Renaissance
fiction too is weaving a panoply of cultural conventions played against each other.
Amadis of Gaul, the medieval romance parodied in the Knight of the Burning Pestle, is
only one of the texts opened and recodified by Philip Sidney in his Arcadia. In recreating
the pastoral convention, he seeks completeness by selecting his sources from all ages,
as if aware of epistemological change from one age to another: a third-century Greek
romance (Heliodorus, Ethiopian History), a medieval French romance (Amadis of Gaul)
and a sixteenth-century Italian pastoral (Sannazarius, Arcadia). Following his own
injunction in the Defence, Sidney resorts to “imitative patterns” to give his work form,
while shedding on them the light of his own time’s eyebeams. With Sannazarius, the
closest in time, he shares the feeling that man’s alienation from nature is irreversible. It
is not a realistic Arcadia his hero Pyrocles is seeking out in Basilius’s retreat. The text
draws attention to its own literarity and artifice: the artist’s golden Arcadia is superior to
Nature’s brazen work: Nature never set forth the earth in so rich a tapestry as divers
poets have done; neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers,
not whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is
brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. Following Pyrocles in his dream of Philoclea
(„famed for love”), the reader is inculpated with Sidney’s writing of the story. The
heroes, the landscapes, the actions have betrayed their merely linguistic ontology.

The norms of the ancient and of the medieval romances are inverted. The central
chivalric formula in Amadis of Gaul is the power of amour courtois to inspire “bounteous
deeds”, prowess. Oriana’s love or scorn makes or un-makes Amadis. From a hermit,
Amadis is transformed by Oriana’s confession of love into the most valiant mortal – the
Knight of the Green Helmet. Sidney’s heroes embrace the bastard love of carnal desire.
Pyrocles drags Philoclea into an unlawful union, while his friend Musidorus convinces
Pamela to elope together. Sin and guilt enter Arcadia. Perfection, the final prize, is to be
reached by a hero who rises from his fallen condition to virtue. In the pagan pastoral,
the clash and identification of the refined, the universal, and the low (Empson, Versions
of Pastoral, p. 50), is spatial (Court and country Autolychus and Florizel brought
together etc.), whereas in Sidney it is internalized. The coexistence of moral good and
evil within the same character triggers a story of fall and redemption. Love makes no
chivalrous heroes out of Pyrocles and Musidorus: they resort to shameful disguise, lies
which lead to fatal consequences, are mocked, humiliated. Pyrocles approaches
Philoclea disguised as an Amazon, causing her father Basilius to dote on him. He
discloses his identity to Philoclea, who already feels attracted to him in a strange way.
Philoclea confesses her love to her mother, unaware that she too loves Pyrocles. To get
rid of his lover’s parents, Pyrocles makes vain promises to meet them in a cavern. The
Duke is thus made to commit adultery with his own wife in the dark, and drink from a
poisoned cup. Seized with remorses, Gynecia admits to being a plague to [herself] and
a shame to womankind. Confused and dangerous division in the land are caused by the
aristocrats yielding to vice. Yet redemption is possible. The slaying of the beasts, which
look like embodiments of their vices, works the princes’ liberation from the evil in
themselves. In the final trial scene, Heliodorus’s heroes prove innocent and worthy,
Theagenes passes the fire test, making the astonished witnesses ask for the lovers’
pardon. Sidney’s heroes have proved lusty and guilty of every possible breach: of
hospitality, of virtue, of truth, of civility [44]. And yet the trial proves their supreme virtue:
magnanimity. Each of them is accusing himself alone, while asking for the others’
pardon. A miracle of resurrection (another Christian influence) saves them: Basilius is
revived to pardon them all.

The end of the century brings with it carnivalizing tendencies, not only in the
superimposition of schemes and conventions but also in the dialogical form of courtly
convention and popular subversion. John Simons’ essay, Open and Closed Books: a
Semiotic Approach to the History of Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular Romances
(starting from J. Kristeva’s Semeiotike), analyses the English romances of the turn of
the century as derivative from the medieval genre. While opening the closed product of
the medieval world to the new mercantile capitalism and absolutism, the chivalric code
in describing adventure is still preserved. Henry Robartes is typical in this sense, as he
recovers a medieval convention, locating it in a new class consciousness. Sir Francis
Drake maintains an uneasy balance between chivalric glory (contributing political
advantage and international prestige to the country) and the demands of the material
world, from a different, mercantile perspective. Drake is requested in The Trumpet for
Fame, a poem of 1595, to think of England’s honour, while The gain is yours, if millions
home you bring From his first venture into fiction, A Defiance to Fortune, Robartes
moves into the much more interesting Historie of Pheander the Mayden Knight. The
story of prince Dionisius, whose journey and reward in fame for audacity fail to get the
girl as long as he is disguised as a merchant, shows that status and rank still held their
sway but merely as conventions in comparison to the substantial reality of individual
enterprise.

The departure from Sidney is more obvious in the baroque mock-heroic of

Thomas Nashe. Neil Rhodes, in Nashe, Rhetoric and Satire (Jacobean Poetry and
Prose. Op. cit.), compares and contrasts the chivalric rhetoric of Sidney’s Arcadia,
mannered and ornamental, brimming with tropes and figures, and Nashe’s subversive
caricature: an elaborate exercise in the low style. Such is the description of the
Anabaptist revolt in Munster in the Unfortunate Traveller, where Leiden’s “flourishing
pretensions” are deflated by conveying his martial ostentation in terms of worn-out
household utensils, culminating with a canker-eaten scull on their heads which had
served their ancestors as a chamber pot for two hundred years (...) dripping pans
armour-wise, to fence his back and his belly. Rhodes aptly defines it as an
extravaganza of base amplification of purest baroque essence.

Jacobean and Caroline Drama

By mingling the strands of life and literature, Ben Jonson had assumed certain
risks. Unlike Shakespeare, he saw himself censored by the royal family, whose
tendency towards absolutism was also manifest in the patronage, licence and increased
control of the arts. Jonson’s play, Epicoene, the story of an idiosyncretic character, who,
hating noise, chooses a dumb bride, becoming the victim of a hoax, was found to be
hinting in its fifth act to Stephen, Prince of Moldova, who had courted Lady Arabella
Stuart. Jonson replied in amazement that he had meant to make a play, not a slander.

The absolutist Jacobean and Caroline monarchy put an end to the feudal idealistic
picture of the mutual love between king and subjects, which was still invoked in
Elizabeth’s Golden Speech of 160l. The mounting tension between Court and
parliament, Puritans and the Laudian faction in the Church, patronized by the King,
court and city, aristocracy and middle class, which led to civil wars, bloodshed and
political intolerance, ended in 1688, with the deposition of the Stuart monarchy: James I
(1603-1625), Charles I (1625-1649), Charles II (1660-1685), James II (1685-1688). The
year 1688 meant the beginning of the constitutional monarchy, the victory of the City
over the Court, of the middle class, the end of any claim of authority from the Catholic
Church. On another level, it marked the triumph of the desacralized bourgeois culture
and worldview: the scientific-mechanistic picture of the universe and the mathematical-
experimental methods in research.

At the beginning of the century the picture was pretty hazy and contradictory.
Political, social and epistemological mobility generated a feeling of insecurity and
universal doubt. This is the age of the prose paradox (John Donne and Thomas
Browne), of “heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together”.

Under James I, England knew a period of colonial expansion (into the New World
as well). Artificial glamour of manners and witty conversation were supposed to make
up for the lack of moral earnestness. According to a contemporary, James would never
bestow his favour on two sorts of men: those whose dogs and hawks flew and run as
well as his own, and those who were able to speak as much reason as himself
(scholarship coming next to hunting) [45]. Under Charles I, who was reading
Shakespeare in prison on the eve of his execution, the royal society grew more
temperate, and orderly, yet luxury was so lavish as to impress Rubens, who was
familiar with the splendour of continental royalty. Whereas James, and particularly his
wife, Anne of Denmark, had been in the habit of commissioning masques for the twelfth
night or other Court ceremonies and celebrations, which were actually royal pageantry,
working the epiphany of the monarch, Charles showed a more refined taste, in his
exchange of gifts from his art collection with European prelates and statesmen, as well
as in his patronage of the most famous baroque Flemish artists (Van Dyck and
Rubens).
 The Jacobean masques, to whose staging Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones made the
most substantial contribution, presented a world travailing for perfection, over which the
king presided as the sun – the favourite image of absolutism. In the 1605 Masque of
Blackness, for instance, commissioned to Jonson, Queen Anne and eleven of her ladies
appeared as black-a-moors. The twelve nymphs, daughters of Niger, want to change
their complexion, in view of which, as instructed in a vision, they are to seek a land
whose name ends in “tania”. The moon informs them that their dream can come true in
the blessed isle, Britania:

Britania (whose new name makes all tongues sing)

Might be a diamond worthy to inchase it’

Ruled by a sun that to this height doth grace it,

Whose beams shine day and night, and are of force

To blanch an Aethiop, and revive a course.

The Masque of Beauty followed, which worked the desired change. The foil or
false masque or anti-masque provided the necessary antagonist for the baroque
“yoked” opposites and for the neoplatonic allegory of the victory of light over darkness.
The Renaissance tradition was continued in the mixture of recital, song and dance, as
well as in the final reunion of actors and audience, giving that sense of harmony and
oneness, characteristic of pastoral. A new element, however, could be discerned in the
architecture of the stage, separating, through its sophisticated machinery, the audience
from the space of representation, which functioned like a screen, posing problems of
perspective. Inigo Jones, whose ambition to recover the style of classical antiquity
urged him to seek instruction in Marcus Vitruvius, a Roman architect of the first century
B.C., as well as in the sixteenth-century Andrea Palladio, worked a revolutionary
change in organising space on mathematical principles. Leonardo da Vinci had
used the human figure as a base for the construction of geometrical figures, applied to
the planning of buildings, the humanistic symbolism of Renaissance architecture
replacing the Gothic aspiration to God. It was Jones who introduced the laws of
perspective to England, which make infinite space the effect of an illusionary geometric
play: converging lines give an impression of distance, smaller objects on the canvas
seem to be placed further away from the viewer’s eyes. Jones’s persistent use of
perspective in the masque was not only to demonstrate a principle of Renaissance
optics; it also had an emblematic function. It reordered the room in terms of optical
hierarchy, for the lines of perspective met only in the eyes of the King. The lower a
person was in rank, the further away he was from the monarch and, therefore, the more
distorted the view. Truth of vision came significantly with proximity to a monarch who
claimed Divine Right. The king as the embodiment on earth of the godhead was central
to the whole of Jones’s thought [46]. In a paradoxical way, the invention had also
subverted the idea of “universal, unique vision”, and the invention of the telescope,
which may be considered a symbol of the age, also fostered a sense of relativism of
perception and problematized “truth of vision”.

Spectators, living their autonomous lives outside the theatre, and the fictional
space (no longer embodiment, presentia, but effect of illusion and artifice), were no
more limbs of the same body (chain of being). The curtain was not the only invention of
Jones’s dramatic engineering. The machinery of illusion also included the machina
versatilis (revolving stage), and the scena ductalis (use of side wings and backshutters
allowing of scene changes and variations. The same mixture characteristic of English
Renaissance can be seen however in his graft of classical art upon national history, in
his overlaying of a neoclassical structure onto a Gothic one (see the Barriers, 16lo,
planned for Prince Henry’s knightly exercise. The baroque mixture of mottoes, emblems
and inscriptions on his pictures’ surfaces is also breaking the neoclassical orthodoxy.
And also typical of the artists’ vacillation between neoclassical and baroque is Jones’s
advice to Charles I to invite Van Dyck to England. Ruben’s enlarged vision of life’s
dynamism, the rehabilitation of the flesh and of sensuality in an age of metaphysics
under stress, cracking identities and dissolving boundaries, was completed by his
disciple’s “official” portraiture of the high society and of royalty, which turned fashion into
a cherished value for the first time. Van Dyck’s paintings of his aristocratic models show
them as they liked to see themselves imaged, from the arrogant look and the
contemptuous curled lip of the youthful descendant of ancient peerage, from the frozen
stance of the modish pursuit, on horseback or dismounted, or posing for the family
portrait gallery, to the details in the fine embroidery of the rich coat sleeve and the
gleam in the deftly set gem.

The mixture of neoclassical principles of dramatic structure, social realism, satire,

and of Renaissance epistemology – the theory of humours, of the four elements, in
earnest, and of alchemy in jest – in Ben Jonson is telling of an age in which the
revolutionary theories of Copernicus and Galilei coexisted with those of Galen and
Paracelsus, in which astrology still maintained its grasp on Tycho, in which William
Gilbert (theory of magnetism) and William Harvey (the circulation of the blood) were on
the staff of the neo-Aristotelian, Galenist, Royal College of Physicians. Here was
Montaigne confirmed, and William Drummond of Hawthornden did not refrain from
stating it plainly: thus sciences are become opinions, nay Errores, and leave the
Imagination in a thousand labyrinths. [47]

In the prologue to his first play, Every Man in His Humour (1598), Ben Jonson
makes an attempt to impose neoclassical principles on the prodigal Elizabethan drama
(the bastard chronicle history plays, the fanciful and loose romances, the violent
tragedies):

Deeds and language, such as men do use;

And persons, such as comedy would choose,

When she would show an image of the times,

And sport with human follies, not with crimes.

The comedy that Jonson chooses is of a type more available in English

adaptations than any other dramatic works of the Greek-Roman antiquity: the New
Comedy of Terence (six plays) and Plautus (about a dozen). There plots are more
tightly knit, observing the unities and lacking Aristophanes’s melting pot of folk festival,
song, political satire and direct allusions to actual people and events. The theme is
usually youthful love in difficulty and finally victorious, while the characters are human
types, which remain unchanged throughout the play: Old Knowell, showing his
dissatisfaction at his son’s dreaming of not by idle poetry – a capital sin in an age of
material acquisition – is senex irratus Young Knowell is the accomplished youth
(adulescens) in love, Brainworm is the servant (dolosus servus) whose “trick” mirrors a
seventeenth-century strategy of making money from fooling other people (by selling a
common weapon as a Toledo). Squire Downright makes a convincing miles gloriosus.
In the upside down world of comedy, it is the hawking and hunting languages studied
more than Latin and Greek and the aspiration to an upper status than one’s own
(Master Matthew, a fishmonger’s son, aping the aristocracy) that appear as legitimate to
the common eye. The ancient, wooden human types are blooded by the image of the
times and drawn to the force field of a mobile social structure. In England there was no
patriciate, no caste of the kind that existed on the continent. If not the aristocracy, the
landed gentry was hospitable to the yeomen, city merchants or lawyers who had
enough money to afford landownership. Since the first-born son got all the land, the
younger brothers would often go to town and enter into trade or marry a rich burgher’s
daughter. As money could confer honour, love, respects, long life, valour, safety, victory
(Epicure Mammon in The Alchemist), a father disinherits his son in favour of Volpone –
another cunning, avaricious Mammon, who feigns sickness in order to see how all his
acquaintances (Corbaccio, Corvino, Voltore and the rest) are perching around to peck
for carrion, as ravens, vultures or crows will do, when sensing imminent death (Volpone,
1605). Jonson’s alchemy is not meant to transmute inferior metals into gold – it is all a
hoax – but to distil the human swarm of the beginning of the century into social models.
Alongside Volpone, The Alchemist (16lo) illustrates the new type of city comedy, with its
ambiguous picture of both the moral evil cropping up in the early capitalist urbs and the
fascinating accumulation of wealth and power, showering commodities and delights
upon its fortunate citizens. The colonial expansion had created a special sort of
Epicureanism, to which even the delicate, allegorizing fancy of Spenser had paid its
tribute:

Mammon: My meat shall all come in Indian shells,

Dishes of agate set in gold and studded

With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths and rubies:

The tongues of carps, dormice, and camels’ heels......

My foot-boy shall eat pheasants, calvered salmons,

Knots, godwits, lampreys; I myself will have

The bards of barbels served instead of salads....

For which I’ll say unto my cook, ‘There’s gold;

Go forth, and be a knight'. (The Alchemist, II/ 2)

The story is simple enough, but the grasp of an essential element of change – the
old social order going to pieces – is unfailing. The owner of a house, who has taken
refuge into the country from the 16lo plague, is leaving behind his butler to play the
wizard's apprentice. Face allows a swindler and a woman of the town to settle
themselves in the house, and an unscrupulous scheme of deception is set up. Subtle,
the would-be alchemist, takes money from gullible people with a vain promise of giving
them the philosopher's stone in return. Who are his clients ? A squire wants to sell his
land and become a city gallant. A clerk wants to give up his profession and win cups at
horse races; a chemist wants to marry into the landed gentry; two Puritans seek the
holy pure gold for the brethrens' pure cause. There is a chaotic movement, in which
every trade loses its traditional hold and meaning, while the gold hunt overwhelms
moral scruples. In Squire Kastril – whatever his humour, probably choler – Jonson has
immortalized the masses of country gentlemen who abandoned their estates (with the
exception of the harvest time) and crowded in London, going all its round of pleasures:
swimming and boating on the Thames, dicing and card-playing, horse-races, theatres,
wrestling matches, Court and city activities – till the King ordered them, in an official
proclamation, to return home.

Scholarly accuracy and observance of the unities are all there is “left remarkable”
about Jonson's tragedies, Sejanus (1603) and Catilene (16ll).

Under the Stuarts, there is nothing left remarkable about tragedy in general, if
measured by an Elizabethan yardstick. The patterned speech of the Elizabethans, the
majestic breath of the blank verse make room for empty rhetorical verse, irregular
metres or even for the plodding rhythms of prose or of colloquial speech. The knowing
soliloquy of the self-dramatized consciousness or of the searching mind is replaced by
the castrated sound of tirades, adjurations, and addresses. The moral reflector is out,
the popular entertainer is in. The plots are no longer developed naturally from situations
and character; they are full of exciting events and surprising turns of fortune. Such
popular characteristics as clever intrigues, unexpected transformations, sharply pointed
dialogue, betray a relaxation of intellectual and moral anxiety. A hybrid dramatic kind is
catering for an audience given neither to serious reflection on the human condition nor
to an abysmal view of its scope. The audience would rather be spared the devastating
effects of tragical action and its consequences. The tragicomedy, mentioned with
Polonius's dry didacticism and parodied by the “merry and tragical” play of Pyramus and
Thisbe, is defined in Guarini's 160l Compendio della poesia tragicomica as a careful
mixture of the elements of each kind. The opening scene of the play should already
signal to the audience that what follows is not a tragedy (the roaring does not come
from a lion). The denouement is supposed to arouse feelings of awe and wonder, while
still giving the illusion of a realistic explanation of events

Whereas Ben Jonson was programmatically (see the induction to Every Man out of
His Humour) holding up a mirror (As large as is the stage whereon we act) to the
courteous eyes of his audience, meant not to flatter but to “scourge” vainglorious
knights and affected courtiers, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, themselves
gentlemen of position, educated at Oxford and Cambridge (unlike Jonson, a bricklayer’s
self-taught son, who later received honorary degrees from both universities), chose to
please their aristocratic audience and to follow the fashion of the day, which they
assimilated without criticism. Their up-to-dateness in coming very close to the European
Lope de Vega school was something new in England, where writers had used to
interpret and transform foreign models. Jointly they produced the most important body
of dramatic work during the Stuart period. Fletcher was on his own in the composition of
The Faithful Shepherdess (1609), which was the first English canonical tragicomedy.
Being new, it needed “margents”, that is Fletcher had to introduce this new and popular
form of drama. He did so in a reassuring preface, keeping close to Guarini and in a
characteristically superficial manner: A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth
and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet
brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a
representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned

The best of the Fletcher-Beaumont canon is dated 16ll: Philaster, The Maides
Tragedy and A King and No King. The unexpected turns of situation in The Maides
Tragedy is balanced by the cast of disillusioning yet truthful characters. Amintor, a noble
youth of Rhodos, forgets his former engagement to Aspatia in order to marry Evadne,
acting on the king’s advice. On the day of the wedding he is appalled to find out that the
king has forced him into that marriage bond not out of endearment but out of base self-
interest. Evadne is his mistress, and Amintor is to serve as their cover, and official
father of Evadne’s bastards. The action unfolds through a sequence of scenes of great
dramatic impact, culminating in the confrontation between Evadne and her brother.
Melantius, who stands for the old, patriarchal moral values and military honour, proves
more efficient in breaking down Evadne’s cynical view of the situation than the virtuous
yet weak Amintor, to whom she shamelessly confesses the whole scheme. It is not to
Amintor’s moralising speech but to her brother’s determinism and physical terror that
she finally responds. The “solution” she can think of is both violent and immoral (in their
rendering of character, Beaumont and Fletcher pave the way for the amoral Restoration
drama). She thinks that by stabbing the king through a cowardly act (while he is asleep),
she will win back Amintor’s love. On hearing what she has done, Amintor shrinks back
in horror.

In the Stuart drama, even if a set of values is present, it is neither efficient

(Melantius is more effective in his crude speech and rustic manner than in his moral
convictions) nor stable. Characters have no categorical imperative, and tend to rely on
the opinions and judgement of others. Amintor is more interested in saving appearances
than in redressing his injured honour. The innocent characters appear to be helpless
when confronted with bawds and Machiavels who laugh at them. The King adds to his
moral injury an equally outrageous haughty behaviour towards Amintor. Melantius’s
moral scruples are not strong enough to stop him from playing an opportunist deception
by denying in public his asides to Calianax. Characters keep changing sides or moral
allegiances, for instance Evadne, turning from the king’s passionate mistress into his
murderess in a wink of the eye. Her rapid conversion breaks any norm of psychological
verisimilitude. The characters’ lack of depth is to be expected, as some of them are
derived from comic types: the braggart soldier, the forsaken maiden, the cuckolded
husband of the fabliau, the Tyrant, the virago, the girl page descended from Greene and
Shakespeare.

The doubly interrupted plot and the personified audience go well with the quixotic
motif which Beaumont and Fletcher translate into the dramatic structure of The Knight
of the Burning Pestle (1609, printed 16l3). In this play, composed soon after the
publication of Don Quixote (I), the dramatists somehow reverse Cervantes’s manner,
displaying an aristocratic anxiety about invasion of security by the middle class to a
greater extent than the burgesses’ commonsensical comment on medieval chivalry.
Ralph, the “grocer errant”, having a burning pestle engraved on his shield in honour of
his former trade, joins the plot of medieval adventure and feats of love by demand of
the audience. The City world embodied by Citizen George and his Wife steps onto the
stage, their point of view being introduced simultaneously with their vivid image.

The revenge plot undergoes transformations in the direction of desacralization and

deflation of scope and cast. The hero inflamed with outrage is replaced by a malcontent
(John Marston created the type in The Malcontent), only seeking social promotion by
unorthodox means. Cyril Tourneur, in The Revenger’s Tragedy, eliminates the ghost in
the opening scene. It is set in Italy, revealing Vindice (Revenge; the crude symbolism of
the names lays bare the allegorical design) holding a skull in his hands. The skull is the
motif of his discontent and a favourite image in baroque allegorical painting. We get a
reversed Petrarchan blazon, as Vindice is trying to reconstruct his beloved’s face from
the horrible skull in his hands. The baroque artist takes interest in morbid sights as an
illustration of the general rundown of the world:

Thou sallow picture of my poisoned love,

My study’s ornament, thou shell of death,

Once the bright face of my betrothed lady,

When life and beauty naturally filled out

These ragged imperfections;

When two heaven-pointed diamonds were set

In those unsightly rings...

However, the scene is set for the revenge and the motif is quite plain: he will
avenge his beloved who had taken her life after being raped by the “royal lecher”. The
world out of joint – a marrowless age, and worthless humans, whose hollow bones are
only stuffed with low desires – will not be set right. There is no catharsis. There is, in
fact, no plan for the revenge. Vindice and his brother, Hippolito, are helped by
accidental circumstances to carry it out by placing the duke and his bawd of a son in
their hands. Instead of valiantly confronting the villain, Vindice and Hippolito kill
Lussurioso while wearing masks and one of them unwittingly whispers the secret of
their identity into the victim’s ears. The plot comes down to a display of sheer violence,
emblematic of society’s moral corruption and symptomatic of an age beset by tyranny,
yet showing an emerging resistance to it. The satirical element drives the heroic
asunder. The hero lacks moral authority, turning into a villain himself, as evil is
contagious. Man is impelled by instinctual desires, by lust and appetite, which drive him
to destruction: luxury (Lussurioso), ambition (Ambitioso), self-promotion (Spurio).

The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, casts a set of

characters in a sort of crazy dance in which partners keep changing their identities. A
slippery and shape-shifting humanity empties out the traditional meaning of all
affectionate or loyal attachments. The bonds between lovers, husband and wife, master
and servant, host and guest slip away, the plot of actually exchanging some person for
another is allegorized in the disappointing “transfiguration” of a beautiful maid into a
scheming and murderous whore.

These plays unfold on double layers of reality and fictionality, revealing themselves
as empty theatrical representations, with absolutely no effect on the actual evil in the
world:

Alsemero:

All we can do to comfort one another,

To stay a brother’s sorrow for another,

To dry a child from the kind father’s eyes,

It is no purpsoe, it rather multiplies.

(Epilogue to The Changeling)

Vindice roleplays himself, he confesses to be acting on Saint Michael’s behalf (on

Michaelmas), whose name means to be like God. He too makes men, that is, produces
versions of himself, changing disguises until he is no longer sure of his own identity.

A departure from cynical display of ruthless violence can be noticed in John

Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, in the alternative images of the orderly French monarchy
and the centrality of a female protagonist; this she-tragedy provides a moving picture of
domestic peace and mutual understanding, as a refuge from the public world of cruel
deception and state crime. This is no longer a tragedy of state, promoting power as
defined by dynastic lineage. The male leaders of Aragon, secular and religious, who are
the duchess’s brothers, are proved incestuous, sadistic, crazy. The duchess’s feminity
is undermining the fabric of high politics, while preparing the way for a new set of values
centred on the home, on protective womanhood and genuine affections. She steps out
of stereotypical representations. As she explains to Antonio, she is not some figure cast
in alabaster kneeling at her husband’s tomb. She refuses to fit her body into the empty
effigy which authority was imposing upon widows of rank. She gives up on the privileges
and constraints defining the aristocracy of the blood, marrying beneath her status,
refusing an official ceremony, placing private feelings and values above state politics.
Moving is the defiance of a woman who asserts her dignity and spiritual strength despite
all vicissitudes. If the stars are shining still, as she is mockingly told, so is she Duchess
of Malfi still, unmoved in her decisions, with all the outward pressure her antagonists
(some of whom are her relatives) are putting on her. Moral steadfastness as a
categorical imperative receives its first expression.

Webster’s plays open decidedly to baroque manner and sensibility, yet they are
more engaging in their gloomy vision of life’s incongruities and man’s failed aspirations.
They reach the extremes of tragic horror: intrigue succeeds intrigue, crime follows crime
and a pile of corpses mounts before the spectators’ eyes. The baroque taste makes
itself felt in the exaggerated passions, corruption, perversion and sadistic elements, in
the heterogeneous imagery, somehow symbolical of the unreconciled conflicts inherent
in human existence (the Eros/Thanatos association: a love-knot used to strangle, a
painting poisoned by a husband, knowing his devoted wife will kiss it). In The White
Devil (1608), the revenge theme is developed into a plot woven around the
Machiavellian type of the Renaissance. Brachiano, the Duke of Padua, devises a
scheme to get rid of his faithful wife, Isabella, in order to marry his mistress, Vittoria
Corombona, a Venetian lady. In her turn, Vittoria has her elderly husband, Camillo,
killed with her brother’s assistance. Francisco de Medicis, Duke of Florence, plans to
revenge his sister, Isabella, through another Machiavellian plot of treachery and
poisoning. As it has been often pointed out, Webster’s characters, however, are not
perfect signifiers of the Machiavellian moral frame, being more complexly built and
steeped in a baroque chiaroscuro. They have a double nature – not alternating, as in
split personalities, but blurred and run together. Dignified and heroic love, supreme
beauty and glamour are mixed in Vittoria with lust and selfishness, a mixture which
turns her into something defined by the oxymoronic “white devil” of the title. The
aspiration to climb in the world of the Malcontent and the readiness to commit any foul
deed or murder to achieve this aim combine in Flamineo, her brother, with a heart-felt
melancholy about life’s meaninglessness and a feeling close to remorse about his
“riotously ill” deeds as a tool villain. Brachiano is ready to make profitable use of his
wife’s love for him in murdering her, yet he also shows himself full of military qualities,
courageous in combat and capable of affection and tenderness to Vittoria, his second
wife. Evil seems to come from outside, as part of social entropy, as a by-product of
universal decay. If Hamlet appears finally reconciled with himself and the world, the
conflicting elements in Webster’s characters are neither polarized nor reconciled.
Renaissance dialectic yields to a sense of life’s absurdity, lack of meaning.
Shakespeare’s King Lear and Macbeth are considered his bleakest tragedies. Yet we
know why Macbeth finds life a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing: because
this is what he has made of his. In King Lear, a contrary set of values works against
Gloucester’s complaint that the gods are indifferent or cruel (Like flies to wanton boys
are we to gods; they kill us for their sport). If there is no sign from above, there is the
loyal and devoted Edgar to stage a miracle for him, so as to cure Gloucester’s apostasy,
and show the heavens more just. In Webster, there is no clear-cut pattern of character.
And yet the modern audience will undoubtedly respond even more fully than Webster’s
contemporaries to Flamineo’s anxious plumbing of the mystery hiding in the human
heart, at war with itself:

There is nothing of so infinite vexation

As man’s own thoughts (V/6)

Evil is not brought up by the Wheel of Fortune nor is it gushing to the surface from
the depth of a diseased mind. It simply cannot be accounted for. The impurity of
Webster’s drama brings it in the vicinity of the twentieth-century theatre of the absurd.

References:

[40] M.M. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay, Methuen, 1957.

[41] J. Kristeva, Semeiotike: recherches pour une semanalyse, Editions du Seuil, 1969.

[43] A.C. Bradley defines Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth as “chronicle plays”, characterized by a free
handling of a subject set in the distant past, in counterdistinction to the historical plays proper,
closer to the time of their composition, in which Shakespeare was obliged to observe historical
truth.

In Macbeth, for instance, he afforded to change the character of Banquo (an ancestor of James I) to
please the king. For a complete picture of Shakespeare’s sources see Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative
and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare’s, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.

[43] Malcolm Evans, Signifying Nothing, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.

[44] A.C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney. A Study of His Life and Works, Cambridge, 1977, pp. 43 et
passim.
 [45] Marjorie Cox, The Background to English Literature: 1603-1660. The New Pelican Guide, Op. cit.,
p. 25

[46] Roy Strong, Inigo Jones, Vitruvius Britannicus, Ibidem, p. 179.

[47] Marjorie Cox, Ibidem, p. 19.

Seventeenth Century Poetry. Jonson’s Cavaliers and Donne’s

Metaphysicals. John Milton and the English Revolution

The awareness that something is different from what it used to be, the awakening
of the critical consciousness to cultural transformations was quickened in the nineties by
the spirit of Montaigne who had said: I do not depict being, I depict passage [48]. The
interest in the exploration of complex and divided states of mind as the true mirros of
human condition (chaque homme porte la forme entičre de l’humaine condition –
Montaigne) was fostered in England by the Puritan emphasis upon the individual
consciousness, and by the publication of John Davies’s Nosce Teipsum. We have
heard their echoes in Hamlet. But there are also other writers, whose strong intellectual
fibre became manifest in the last decade of the century, bearing fruit into the next: Ben
Jonson and, even to a greater extent, John Donne. The bifurcating poetry stemming
from their genius was known in the Caroline age as the metaphysical school of Donne
and the cavalier school of Jonson. The metaphysical, baroque vein, however, gushed
to the surface of an entire century, (down to the Restoration, with Henry Vaughan and
Andrew Marvell), while the neoclassical principle reemerged distilled into its purest
expression in the Augustan Age. The grouping – pointing to different epistemological
frames, political allegiances and styles – is not characterized by a clear-cut line, some
poets drawing on both masters (see Abraham Cowley, who defected from Jonson to
Donne, or Marvell’s handling of classical forms, strengthened by the vigour of
metaphysical wit). They certainly have something in common: the rejection of
Petrarchan conceits, mythological décor, and medieval idealism, in favour of
robust imagery, passionate argumentation, subtle dialectic, satirical wit. In
counterdistinction to the shallow pageantry commissioned by the Court, they reveal the
reverse of the age: scholarly refinement, earnest engagement with the
controversial issues of England’s passage to the modern age.

Anyway, the mixture of religion, learning and poetry, as well as ideological

commitment, had become a must at a time when they could mean loss of office,
possessions, life. King James I might well prefer his hawks and dogs to anything else,
yet he showed a cunning worthy of Machiavelli’s naturalistic political philosophy (and
Charles I followed his example, in spite of his pose as patron of the arts) when he
extended his influence over the two universities, Cambridge and Oxford, in the
establishment of curriculum and the election of Chancellors. It goes without saying that
Crommwell, who was the better Machiavelli, had the loyalists expelled during his
Protectorate. The Renaissance had taught people that knowledge means effective
power. The ideal of a gentleman was now associated with that of an educated man,
who was no dreamer. Business and a humanistic education went on well together, as
proved by the curriculum of the Inns of Court in London (including music, literature,
dancing), from which common lawyers or even future MPs graduated. Writers got
involed into issues of education or of religion. Bacon and Milton attacked medieval
reminiscences in the university curriculum, Ben Jonson praised the Inns as the
nurseries of humanity and liberty, and joined the Tew Circle, whose members opposed
their enlightened humanism and religious tolerance to the religious hysteria mounting all
around, while Crashaw and Cowley lived from Fellowships at colleges, until they were
ejected by the Puritans.

The poetic diction drawing on heterogeneous walks of life of the “metaphysical

school of Donne” betrays a tendency towards a modern empirical grounding of any
human activity (science, literature, philosophy). The Metaphysical Poets had the
capacity, as T.S. Eliot says in the essay so titled, to devour any kind of experience.
Even the intense religious poetry generated by the change of values and attitudes is
sometimes couched in shocking terms of concrete human activity. The interplay of
language and science, politics, law etc. is the most important characteristic of this kind
of poetry, based upon “concetti metafisici et ideali”. The Italian poet Testi (1593-1646)
was the one who first used the term, and the conservative English poet, William
Drummond of Hawthornden (1585- 1649), the first to criticize such metaphysical ideas
and scholastic quiddities. The Italian tradition of the witty, conceited poetry, enriched by
a didactic-encyclopedic vein, contributed by the Huguenot poet du Bartas (translated in
the 9o’s) cropped up in the most enduring body of poetry of the age, with the exception
of Milton’s: John Donne (1572-163l), George Herbert (1593-1633), Richard Crashaw
(16l3-1649), Andrew Marvell (162l-1678), Thomas Traherne (1636-1674), Henry
Vaughan (1622-1695). Paradoxically enough, the response to a strikingly innovative
language was a charge of “scholasticism”. Frances Austen, in The Language of the
Metaphysical Poets, after summing up the symptoms of uncertainty in all spheres of
Life, goes on to a Renaissance epistemological explanation of this baroque imagery of
shocking associations. Hermeticism and Paracelsus’ doctrines of correspondences
between planes of being are made responsible for the tendency to yoke by violence
heterogeneous images (conceits). But the poetry of the Donne school, often reflecting
on political events or on intimate love scenes of unrepressed sexuality, covers a
broader range than the concern with first principles and the essence of being and
knowing. In a recent essay, William Righter considers that, rather than the Elizabethen
world picture, it was the epistemological crisis that allowed of the permanent shift
between levels of experience unrelated by any fixed philosophical categories that
generated the new codifying principle and signifying practice. A further implication of
such a necessary seeing of everything in terms of everything else is that there is no
uninterpreted feature of any component of this scene. There is nothing described in a
way that does not imply such relations with other elements that the understanding of it
is not conditioned or “placed”[49]. The crossing eyebeams come from a Vitruvian
macrocosm/microcsom analogy, which Inigo Jones thought to have identified at
Stonehenge, but also through the inverted end of the telescope, darting from books of
emblems and religious verse, reflected by the homely pulley of a fountain or by a dog’s
collar, flashing into the hermetic sublunary world of matter but also spent into squibs
above the hydroptique earth of scientific language.

With all his erudition and reputed taste, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) gave a
rather simplifying definition of the Metaphysicals’ poetic language, associating it with
Marino’s mannerism and the characteristically baroque taste for unresolved tension: But
wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and
philosophically considered as a kind of “discordia concors”: a combination of dissimilar
images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike (...) The most
heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for
illustrations, comparisons and allusions; their learning instructs and their subtlety
surprises, but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though
he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

This statement appears in Lives of the Poets, Abraham Cowley, that is precisely
the poet who, in his Ode; Of Wit, does his best to defend the concept of wit from “odd
Similitude” obtruding and forced upon all things. “Wit” is not reduced to a far-fetched
metaphor, an ingenious, shocking comparison, with the linking element deleted. It is a
language of presence, like that of myth, which goes beyond categorial distinctions:

In a true piece of Wit all things must be,

Yet all things there agree.

As in the Ark, joyn’d without force or strife,

All Creatures dwelt; all Creatures there had Life.

Or as the Primitive Forms of all

(If we compare great things with small)

Which without Discord or Confusion lie,

 In that strange Mirror of the Deitie.

It was not only the return to the classical forms and themes in the Cavaliers that
offered a firm ground shoring the artist from the political deluge. The metaphysical poets
too were fighting the discord and confusion, they were sensing more deeply not only the
religio-poltical but also the epistemological impasse. Nothing of what was shifting
ground remained alien to them: modern cosmology which was beginning to be taught
according to Copernican views, the developments in physics, mathematics, astronomy,
for which three new chairs were created at Grasham’s College in the nineties; the rise of
the middle class which increased the importance of the city, the changed view of the
sexes (no longer polarized, into virgin and whore, rake and Platonic lover) and the
rehabilitation of sexual love in marriage by the Puritans, the increasing modern
scepticism, the secularization of belief by the realistic location of the golden age in
remote historical ages or in far-off places, uncorrupted by civilization (early Greece,
Byzantium, the Bermudas), the grounding of power relationships in the material
circumstances of an expanding Empire. They took stock of a vast range of experience,
but it was filtered through a mechanism of sensibility, which allowed them to achieve a
fusion of thought and feeling [50]. They did not mean to instruct and to improve, like
the later poets of Johnson’s Age of Reason; their voices were voices of concern. A
new language was needed in order to express the complexity (not the intractable
heterogeneity) of this experience and to fuse (not to yoke by violence) its
contradictory aspects. Thought and language were welded in a new combustion. What
to say was as important as how to say it. Abraham Cowley’s (1618-1667) Ode is, like
Shakespeare’s anti-blazon in sonnet CXXX, a recusatio, an attempt to reshape poetic
diction. Neither rhetorical bombast (Lines as almost crack the stage), and Elizabethan
ornament (Nor a tall Meta’phor in the Bombast way), nor mannerism (odd Similitude)
but the embodiment of life’s infinite variety (A thousand different shapes it bears). In
Jordan, George Herbet is even more radical, rejecting all the trends of the early
seventeenth century: the Elizabethan myth-making (Is all good structure in a winding
stair?), Jones’ rules of perspective (May no lines pass, except they do their duty/ Not to
a true, but pained chair?), the medieval romance of enchanted groves, the pastoral of
shepherds, nightingale and spring, and mannerist hermeticism (Must all be veil’d, while
he that reads divines/ Catching the sense at two removes?). The dynamic associations
of unlike elements is the functional outward expression of complex mental processes
which never reach a dogmatic resolution. Why be forced to choose among the three
churches that were competing for supremacy (Donne’s third Satire), when the searching
mind is its own end (doubt wisely, inquire right)? The intellectualized, difficult aspect of
language is there in order to render the intricate meanders of thought and the
irresolution of the mind for fear of simplifying the irreducible mystery of the human
being:

Of any who decipers best,

What we know not, our selves, can know,

Let him teach me that nothing.

(Donne, Negative Love)

The fanciful and the mythological are replaced by the realistic and erudite, the
“poetical” style by the rhythms of everyday speech and by the ironic realism traditionally
associated with satire.

John Donne, the founding father of the new school, created not just a new manner
but a new way of looking at the world. The new frame of mind meant the deliberate
overthrowal of all traditional assumptions, forcing the mind to take a fresh view and
respond in a new, critical way to the experience of the world, which has edged off the
exercise of judgement through custom and repetition. Man’s cunning reasoning faculty
is demonstrated in the distortions of conventional truths through paradoxical exercises,
syllogistic distortions and baroque amplification (Donne’s Paradoxes and Problems).
What is it that the deft intellect cannot prove? Even that physical satisfaction is the
supreme good, only surpassed by women’s inconstancy, for whatever does not move is
proved to rust (Gold) or get stale (Water).

Donne’s verse satires are a check on public current opinion, in the manner of
Juvenal. He responds fully to the changing economic structure, increase of absolutism,
religious intolerance. As W. Milgate remarks in his Introduction to Donne’s Satires
(Clarendon Press, 1967), they are remarkably contemporaneous and up to date,
portraying a crowded, busy London life, from king to kitchen-maid, from patriotic ape to
treacherous officer of state.

The traditional aubade (song of lovers at parting in the morning) serves just as well
to subvert the position of the king, hinting at his common pastime, hunting, and
displacing the sun – as the image of the absolute monarch – from the centre of the
universe, while allowing the lovers’ room to assume the central position in the
Copernican reversal. From symbol, the sun is degraded to sign (pointing hours, days,
months, which are the rags of time). The abrupt opening of great dramatic effectiveness
has a shockingly deflating effect on the traditional image repertoire of the sun: Busy old
fool, unruly Sun (...) Saucy pedantic wretch. Poetically “deposed” and inserted into the
realistic picture of the busy workaday world set moving in the early morning, the king
comes the last but one (preceding the country ants)
 Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

Late school boys, and sour prentices,

Go tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride

Call country ants to harvest offices;

The second stanza reveals the world constructed by the poem as one of visionary
essence, abstracted by consciousness from the empirical and called into being or
extinguished by an act of will: I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink. The poet
vacillates between internalized cosmic landscape and outward projection of the
contents of his mind, in a manner which anticipates Dylan Thomas in our century. The
feel of the age is there however, in the fascination exerted by the Indias of spice and
Mine, in the conceited troping of the relationship between lovers as that between Prince
and his State:

She’s all states, and all Princes, I

Nothing else is.

The positioning of the two pronouns at the end of the line (with the respective
violation of syntax) is extremely ingenious, it suggesting the bracketing of the entire
universe in the absolute love union, floating freely in the void of “nothing else”.
Androcentrism is saved in spite of all the other displacements, yet sexuality is no longer
inferior to the Platonic “non-lovers”. The language framing woman as a Francis Drake
enterprise (the Indian woman discovered by the European conquistador) is resumed at
the end of the day, in a similar attempt to defend physical, carnal beauty. To His
Mistress Going to Bed is an openly erotic poem, in which the Petrarchan blazon
representing the woman as the embodiment of virtue and spiritual beauty vanishes into
a conceited association of sexual and land conquest and in a reification of the woman’s
body, no more conventionally painted but invited to undress. The polyptoton (words
derived from the same root: man/manned) renders the sexual act both as a concrete
colonial conquest – the extension of the empire of masculinity over womanhood – and
as a mythical fulfilment of the Hermaphroditus fantasy (one Man, both male and
female):

O my America, my new found land,

 My kingdom, safeliest, when by one man manned,

My mine of precious stones, my empery

How blessed am I in thus discovering thee !

Even more shocking is the marriage and sexual imagery employed in describing
his relationship to God in a “divine poem” ( Holy Sonnet XIV):

Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain

But am betrothed unto your enemy.

Divorce me to you, imprison me, for I

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Although a Dean of St Paul’s and the first great pulpit orator, Donne was quite
unconventional in his treatment of the religious, both before and after his conversion
from Catholicism to the Anglican Church. In the two elegiac Anniversaries (16ll-1612),
written in memory of Elizabeth Drury, his patron’s young daughter, the decay of
religious faith is seen as part of the general collapse of the patriarchal structure of
affectionate ties within the social hierarchy or the family (Prince, subject, father, son are
things forgot). The virtuous female figure was supposed to act like Beatrice, admitting
mortals to the world above, and interceding with the Divinity in their favour, or like
Cordelia, reminding everybody to love everybody else according to their “bonds”. But
the epistemological matrices that had given them birth were wearing off. The poet
communicates no visionary experience, he simply makes the anatomy of the world
(First Anniversary), unable to remember Macbeth’s trafique and trade with the
otherworldly:

The art is lost and correspondence too.

For heaven gives little, and the earth takes less,

And men least knows their trade and purposes.

If this commerce twixt heaven and earth were not

Embarr’d, and all this trafique quite forgot,

 She, for whose loss we have lamented thus

Would work more fully and powerfully on us.

The ingenuity of reversing the object of his lament (it is those left behind that need
salvation) is equalled by the baroque amplification of trading imagery.

Donne’s religious experience is also communicated in his sermons – whose lofty

and inspired language, mingling the sage discourse and exhortation is often quoted –
and in the Holy Sonnets and Hymns written after his wife’s death (1617). The
Petrarchan form of the sonnet is employed in order to create a drama of salvation.
The octave usually evokes the plight of the fallen human soul “summoned” by sickness
and death, while the sestet is a pray for salvation, of psalmic intensity.

Images drawn from various fields of experience breathe new life into a type of
discourse twice canonical (as fixed form and devotional address). The terms and
imagery drawn from natural sciences, geometry, physics and astronomy ( The
Canonization, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, A Nocturnall upon St Lucies Day)
seems to have been borrowed from the notebooks of the Gresham graduates. A
Nocturnall offers one of the most typical examples of baroque amplification on the
image of “nothingness”, suggested by his lover’s death. Love and separation are
polarized as cosmos (hemispheres without sharp North, without declining West) and
chaos (when the lovers part, they grow into two chaoses). The vision of universal
extinction is overwhelming, sometimes in anticipation of contemporary theories. For
instance, the notion of “spent light” (the sun is spent).

The literary-mindedness of baroque poetry is apparent in the exploration of

conventions and traditional tropes, the poet moving from language to the psychological.
Donne imitates Ovid’s love elegies (Amores), while deflecting the subject from love to a
heart-searching meditation on death, loss and perpetuity. In Elegie: His Picture, he
uses the Petrarchan conceit of the lover’s image locked in the heart, to which he
opposes his reified image in a miniature portrait, which will last even after their deaths:

Here take my Picture: though I bid farewell,

Thine, in my heart, where my soule dwells, shall dwell.

‘Tis like me now, but I dead, t’will be more

When we are shadows both, than ‘twas before.

The metaphysicals are writing with an awareness of previous literary modes at the
back of their minds. It is the idea of art not as lyric expression but as contained
material form that distances here Donne from Petrarch. The sense of different scales
prompted by the invention of the microscope and telescope is answered by the
miniaturizing technique of the age, which replaces speculation on the relationship
between macrocosm and microcosm by artistic forms which reify the idea,
encompassing much in little. The allegory of the ashes which are more valuable if
contained in well-wrought urns than in halph-acre tombs (The Canonization) glorifies
golden art at the expense of Nature’s brazen work. Unless experience is patterned and
canonized, dislocated from the empirical and placed in a constructed frame, (We’ll build
in sonnets pretty rooms) it remains meaningless and is doomed to perish. The
reification of ideal relationships (love as a relationship between land and landowner,
hemispheres, a pair of compasses) is accompanied by a literalization of metaphoric
speech. For instance, the ecstasy of love is brought down to a literal-minded
apprehension of it in the etymological sense of ek-stasis, gone out (The Extasie). The
poet imagines that their two souls have gone out of their bodies, which are left like two
statues on a tomb, while they are negotiating like two armies in combat. The purified
souls achieve a subtler, purer union (the abler soul), yet the love relationship is not
marred when the souls return to the bodies, because it is through the body that they can
take stock of each other. The body is the “book” of the soul, the language of the body
leads to spiritual disclosure. The concept of ideas and feelings as “elemented” by
empirical experience of the world is already pointing towards Hobbes in his opposition
to Descartes’s ingrained ideas. Coined compounds are meant to render this spiritual
fusion: inter-animated, inter-grafted, inter-assured.

Donne’s manner and representation of the “fragmented rubbige” of the city, with its
divided, alienated crowds, to which he opposes his own private world of a personal love
relationship or of religious meditation is pretty consistent. One cannot say the same
thing about the Caroline George Herbert, whose poetry constructs heterogeneous
interpretational frames and framing discourses. Sometimes he sounds like Paracelsus
or Shakespeare’s Ulysses:

Man is all symetrie,

Full of proportions, one limb to another.

And all to all the world besides:

Each part may call the furthest, brother:

And both with moons and tides.

(Man)

Sometimes it is conflict that is absolutized, the poet needing to be raised from the
shifting sands of his quarrelsome thoughts to an understanding of the divine, inflexible
law, by the... rope of a pulley (The Pulley). The record of Herbert’s religious experience
is however more central and more comprehensive: the rebellious worldly spirit needs to
be subdued to the divine will, the inner flame, flickering low, needs rekindling. A parish
priest in Bemerton, he was also a scholar who wrote Latin and Greek verse, religious
fervour being coupled with a cunning scholarly mind. His effective imagery draws
equally on the Bible and on the homely everyday world. The emblem books, with
allegorical pictures, whose moral is explained in a versified gloss, had been the fashion
since 1586 (the most famous was Francis Quarles’s collection, Emblemes), and they
had a great impact on Herbert’s imagination. In Love Bade Me Welcome, containing an
anecdote of Love’s entertaining of a dusty character, whose guilty conscience hesitates
to accept the generous hospitality, is an emblem of the Eucharist (wine and bread
transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ) but also an illustration of the New
Testamental dispensation for sinners who turn to God, even in the last hour (see the
parable of the grape gatherers, who get paid the same whether they come to work early
in the morning or late in the day). God’s infinite love for erring man, based on an
Augustinian concept of grace and of man’s response to it, creates the possibility of
appeasing conflicts, as God can thus return to himself through man (Romans, 8:23-7). A
constant pattern of imagination in Herbert will consequently be a transposition of the
human and the divine. Easter-Wings (printed on the page in the shape of wings) casts
into the graphical design of the emblem book the idea of fusion between the physical
and the spiritual which the Holy Ghost announcing the Incarnation of the divine made
possible. The reverse process, man’s aspiration to the divine, engages the poet’s
metaphysical wit. He picks up on images from everyday life – collar, cage, cable, rope,
pulley – to describe both the tension and the mutual drive between the human and the
divine. They all suggest the iron authority which provokes the individual mind to
rebellion against the Lord, the broken rhythms and irregularities of syntax being formal
correlatives of the iconoclastic mood surging in Herbert’s real world as well. The end of
The Collar takes an unexpected turn, the prison image in which the soul seems to be
confined being suddenly revealed as a spiritual bond. God does not call out to man like
to a servant but to a child: Methought I heard one calling, Child ! And I replied, My Lord.

Andrew Marvell, whose popularity has been lately increasing (particularly as a

satirical wit), departs significantly from Donne, in the direction of an impeccable,
neoclassical control. John Donne had fused directions as different as Ovidian,
Neoplatonic, Petrarchan in his Songs and Sonnets, in an unmistakeable baroque
manner, with miniaturizing, boxing-in-effects (patterns locked within patterns),
telescoping stanza forms (starting from a brief rhyming unit which is then “exploded” into
lengthening series of lines, the reverse of the myse-en-abyme, which proceeds from a
broad pattern to its miniaturized epitome). Andrew Marvell employs classical forms
together with classical themes and motifs, which he handles with the orthodoxy, ease
and grace of “Ben’s tribe”, the original element being only the fanciful imagery doing
violence to life’s categories, and sometimes the political concern which was natural in a
writer who was personally involved in the Civil War (Joint Secretary of State with Milton,
during Cromwell’s Protectorate) and a Member of Parliament after the Restoration.
Whereas the nineties had displayed the black-and-white picture of a new genesis –
allowing of the coexistence of Sidney and Nashe, of Daniel’s Petrarchan and
Shakespeare’s anti-Petrarchan sonnets, of Thomas Campion’s lyrics set to music in
Elizabethan fashion, and of Ralegh’s intellectual strain in seeking new worlds, or trying
desire, of Drayton’s pastoral locus classicus and George Chapman’s vivid, realistic
description of natural phenomena –, under Charles II England needed to be “pieced up
together” from the myriad worlds into which it had been split by the war. The lack of a
unified culture mirrored the recent political chaos.

Marvell’s fame rests on a restricted number of poems, all of which were first
published after his death. The most renowned is the Ode upon Cromwell's Return from
Ireland, an imitation, in form and spirit of Horace's Cleopatra ode. The English
Revolution is seen as a turning point in the country's history, as important as Octavian's
victory at Actium, which is Horace's subject. One further analogy is provided by the
young leader, suddenly coming to power, who makes a conquest upon royalty. Horace
depicts a Cleopatra dignified in her defeat, and so is Charles. Although writing in the
encomium tradition, Marvell maintains an objective attitude, making the poem sound
more like a warning than as servile adulation. The king's heroism is to remind people
that the sacrifice should not be wasted. Cromwell should not bid his falcon to go and
make another kill, but see to the restoration of peace at home, take advice from
Parliament and government, and only make war against foreign enemies.

The carpe diem motif (“seize the day”: the exhortation to live and love intensely,
since life is brief) is recreated in a syllogistic form, and in a wild display of metaphysical
conceits. The model is Catullus in one of his fictional dialogues with his lover. Catullus
begins in an abrupt way, urging Lesbia to enjoy life (Vivamus mea Lesbia atque
amemus), exposing afterwards, on a sententious tone, his premises concerning life
which motivate his advice. The lines are often quoted: Nobis cum semel brevis lux/ Nox
est perpetua una dormienda (As soon as our brief life is over, we must sleep an endless
night). In order to lend his exhortation more emphasis, Marvel chooses the passionate
ratiocination of a logical sequence. He starts from the first premise: suppose the lovers
could expand infinitely into time so that their lives might go back to the Flood, or in
space, covering both hemispheres, then would his lover’s reluctance be justified. But –
second premise – that is not possible, their young bodies will soon lie entombed and
know decay which will make her “long preserved virginity” senseless. The conclusion,
therefore, is: let us sport us while we may. The ingenuity of the hyperbole (I would/
Love you ten years before the Flood:/ And you should if you please refuse/ Till the
Conversion of the Jews) consorts with other shocking elements, for instance, the energy
of colloquial speech, as if the couple were engaged in some trivial negotiations: For
Lady, you deserve this State;/ Nor would I love at lower rate. The blazon (description of
the lady from head to foot) pattern is tremendously transformed into an anatomy of the
woman’s body, whose fragments are scattered in the infinite river of time, like Orpheus’s
dismembered body:
 An hundred years should go to praise

Thine Eyes, and on thy Forehead Gaze.

Two hundred to adore each Breast:

But thirty thousand to the rest.

An Age at least to every part,

And the last Age should know thy heart.

The second part of the poem states the grim truth about man’s mortality, through a
close-up technique, or rather by looking through the other end of the telescope,
considering the camera was not available. The scale-shifting device guides the reader’s
gaze from winged Chariot and desarts of vast eternity to the marble vault (...) the
grave’s fine and private place, only sheltering decay.

The Definition of Love shows Marvell’s mind opening up to the new scientific spirit,
which was breaking out in various branches of science, and whose language he
assimilates into that of poetry. Love is defined by Renaissance analogy with the
modern matter of chemistry, astronomy, geometry:

As Lines so Loves oblique may well

Themselves in every Angle greet:

But ours so truly Parallel

Though infinite can never meet.

The metaphysical poets turn away from the disappointing reality, taking refuge into
a world of harmony, as, in it, the relationship between sign and neaning is stable and
full. This can happen in a type of poetry in which the image enacts the sense, like
ancient hieroglyphs and in the spirit of the Hebrew mystique of letters and figures. This
kind of poetry belongs to the emblem tradition. An emblem poem consists of a text, an
image, and a quotation from some authoritative text, all these modes of signification
treating the same theme. This type of poetry engages the new perspective techniques
in the visual arts. Linear perspective is a mirror-like type of reflection. But no other
individual can look at another fellow from the same perspective. That is why, in order to
reach the central viewing position, which belongs to God, the poet provides a triple
perspective on his subject. Science and religion are called upon to produce some of the
best examples of devotional poetry in the language.

Thomas Traherne’s Solitude, treating of the impossibility of enjoying spiritual joy

from the contemplation of things in the world, reminds us of Christ’s body being crucified
in order for the soul to know the true beatific vision of reunion with God. The poem has
the shape of a cross. Devotional poetry often plays upon the patristic trope of the spirit
of Christ locked up in the heart of man (Petrarch had developed herefrom the conceit of
one’s image locked in the lover’s heart). In the metaphysical poems, there is a perfect
reciprocity between God and man. In The Temple or Sion, George Herbert is troping on
the heart as an altar for Christ.

In a poem from Commentaries on Heaven, Thomas Traherne counterpoises

perspective and linear viewing. God’s central vision embraces all things at once,
whereas man can only see one side at a time, before or behind. It is only through faith
that man can assume God’s all-encompassing vision. In this way, God is seen in
perspective as if he were a living tomb, a body and alive. A very daring trope, playing
upon the etymological meaning of sema as sign for a tomb, a buried body. It is the
language of poetry that can reveal God to us.

Francis Quarles appropriates, in his Canticle, the most authoritative model of the
reciprocity between God and believer allegorized as the double address of two lovers in
The Canticle of Canticles, or Solomon’s Song. The epigraph reads: “My beloved is
mine, and I am his; He feedeth among the Lillies”. The poem is addressing God in the
Biblical manner, of esoteric symbolism imposed upon humble images of domesticity:

He is my Altar; I, his Holy Place;

I am his Guest; and he, my living Food

I’m his by Penitence; He, mine by Grace;

I’m his, by Purchase; He is mine, by Blood;

He’s my supporting Elm; and I, his Vine:

Thus I my Best-Beloved’s am; Thus He is mine

A number of poets, mainly loyal royalists, were known under the generic “tribe of
Ben”. Unlike the metaphysicals, focused on inwardness, on individualistic concerns with
love and religion, the model set up by Ben Jonson was that of the poet playing a major
role in the kingdom, emulating in this way Horace, who had acted as an authoritative
legislator during the most flourishing period of Roman culture

As a poet, Ben Jonson was less innovative than in drama, but he effected a
fortunate change in the literary taste and manner, promoting an intellectual and formal
discipline through the handling of codified lyric forms and formulaic imagery,
which tempered the idealizing Elizabethan conceits of the Petrarchan school and the
shallowness of the brief lyrics composed in general for music. Jonson and his “tribe”,
the Caroline Cavalier poets (Robert Herrick, 1591-1674, Thomas Carew, 1594-1640,
John Suckling, 1609-1642, Richard Lovelace, 1618-1656), followed the classical
principles:

a) clarity, cohesion, grace, unity and proportion.

Jonson is still linked to the Elizabethan taste for short lyrics (epigram, epitaph, the
landscape poem, epistle, dirge, the imaginary dialogue with the lover in the
manner of Catullus, ode) and the myth of art’s immortality and superiority over nature.
Although man is not growing like a tree/ In bulk or standing long an Oak, three hundred
years, he stands far above Nature by opposing proportionate forms to its wild shapes
and by creating perfect beauty, based on norms, and measure (Proportion).

In small proportions, we just beautie see:

And in short measures, life may perfect be

b) The artist’s responsibility for ensuring immortal glory for worthy

contemporaries or important events. In An Epistle to Lady Rutland, Jonson praises
not only the lady but also himself and the inestimable service he is rendering her, since
even if aristocratic blood, natural beauty and riches be a good thing, the mothers’
wombs are also tombs for those who have no Muse to make them famous. Poetry
acquires a social dimension, as well as a political one. The cavalier trinity – beauty,
love and loyal honour – show human destiny geared to an ideal higher than the
individual. The poets’ loyalty to the king had an outward correlative in the model
courtier: good looks, witty style, of the sententious kind, several phrases having become
proverbial It is particularly Ben Jonson who dedicates himself to the praise of public
figures in odes, dirge, epitaphs, landscape poems. To Penshurst, the famed country
house of the Sidneys, he dedicates an Ekphrasis (description of art woks, in general),
in which the contemplation of the architectural beauty and setting of the house leads to
reflections on past achievements and to historical associations. To Lucasta going to the
Wars by Richard Lovelace mingles love and politics, placing the martial above the
idealist lover and associating in a striking way the trinity Love/ War/Death. He goes
away from the nunnery of (her) chaste breast, because even love is meaningless,
unless galvanized by some higher social commitment: Wit and paradox are called upon
to build the Cavalier code.

True; a new Mistress now I chase,

The first Foe in the field;

And with a stronger Faith embrace

A Sword, a Horse, a shield.

Yet this Inconstancy is such,

As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee (Dear) so much

Lov’d I not honour more.

To Althea from Prison, by the same poet, develops another Cavalier convention, of
the prison philosopher (after the noble precedent of Boethius) and of the quiet
hermitage of the mind. The reality of the Thames, however, is as present as ever, as
well as the contingency of Majesty and King.

Similar to the Althea poem is the Grasshopper, as it too thematises the frustration
of the loyalist defeated by Puritans. The construction of the cavalier is completed
through the refusal to compromise, like the Compounders – those who gave away their
lands almost for nothing, declaring that they had been wrong and promising never to
wear arms in return for a peaceful life under Cromwell. Like the grasshopper, looking
forward to the coming summer, while freezing in winter, Lovelace recommends
endurance, because only “he who wants himself is poor indeed”. A poem looking
forward to Kipling’s If....
 c) The cult of classical forms, themes and motifs [51].

What a difference they make, however, to the metaphysicals’ handling of them!

See, for instance, the carpe diem motif in Herrick’s To the Virgins, to Make Much of
Time, almost a paraphrase of Ronsard’s Mignon, allons voir si la rose (telle fleur ne
dure que du matin jusques au soir):

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,

Old time is still a-flying

And this same flower that smiles today,

Tomorrow will be dying.

Passion is controlled by sophisticated gallantry, poise and grace, by structured

symmetry, urbanity of tone and smooth variations of rhythm.

Herrick’s priamel (introducing the subject of a literary work) – the Argument of The
Hesperides – goes through such a wide range of themes (from Bridal-cakes to
mythology of ancient Britain and Amber-Greece alike) that it gives an impression of
cleanly-wantonness, unless we are familiar with the classical convention which does
mean thematic survey and coming to a subject of ultimate interest in the end (in his
case, salvation of the soul). What does a Cavalier make of a blazon ? Herrick’s use of
the convention shows something of Van Dyck’s delight in details of fashionable dress.
The Epicurean love of luxury, of women and nature as décor or as lessons in the brevity
of life inscribed in the classical models sounds genuine, yet with few modulations. The
only revolutionary aspect is the objectification of the woman, which goes even further in
the transfer of her moral traits to the sparse fragments of her attire. Her garments
assume a strange animation, which makes the woman’s individuality and personality
vanish altogether:

A lawn about the shoulders thrown

Into a fine distraction,

An erring lace, which here and there

Enthrawls the crimson stomacher,

 A cuff neglectful, and thereby

Ribbands to flow confusedly,

A winning wave (deserving note)

In the tempestuous petticoat,

A careless shoe-string, in whose tie

I see a wild civility....

(Delight in Disorder)

The “Age of Milton” is the age of the English Revolution, stretching from the thirties
to the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The last “squib” of the Elizabethan culture
was also the prophet of a new spirit, whose true greatness was recognized as affined in
the Europe of the French Revolution and of Romanticism. Critical opinion about John
Milton ranges from magniloquence, the deliberate exploitation of the possibilities of
magnificence in language [52] to a status comparable to that of Shakespeare. In an age
of absolutism, ill-balanced by an equally rigid fanaticism, his voice gathered strength
and depth from the mingled strands of a metaphysical quest and political commitment.

The detractors of English empiricism and practical-mindedness see the beginning

of the Civil War as a monotonous argument in Parliament over a nobleman’s obligation
to pay a five-pound tax to the king, comparing it to the French Revolution, where the
combatants were delivering idealistic speeches, thundering on either side of the
barricade and engaging in heroic street action. The truth about the English Revolution is
much more complex. It originated not in a legal but a religious controversy, aggravated
by the King’s absolutist tendencies. The circumstance of Charles being married to a
Catholic – Henrietta Maria of France – was such as to make Puritans suspicious of
attempts, on the part of the Court, to guide the Church of England into a pre-
Reformation direction. Such biases were not completely ungrounded: The King and his
closest adviser, William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, seemed to favour the more
tolerant Arminian minority among the clergy, while spicing Church ceremonial with
ingredients of a Roman flavour: stained glass, candlesticks and organs, as well as the
ingenious rhetoric of Lancelot Andrewes’ sermons – interwoven into the panoply of T.S.
Eliot’s “language of quotations”. “Break of Sabbath” through the bishop’s dispensation
for certain sports to be played after work on Sundays was perceived by Puritans, in their
morose Calvinism, as the Devil’s work. From 1629 until 1640 Charles ruled England
without a Parliament, gathering his taxes as he well pleased. In 1639 he took an army of
2o,ooo men to suppress the Scottish Covenanters, who resisted the forced introduction
of bishops replacing the presbyters or elders (the ministers of a Protestant sect,
founded in 1555 by the Scottish reformer John Knox, that had departed from the Church
of England). After the execution of the king, in 1649, Cromwell’s eleven-year tyranny
Protectorate instituted a reign of political terror. Puritans proceeded to closing down the
theatres, considering them to be places of sin and corruption; fellows suspected of
loyalist leanings were expelled from universities, other royalists lost their properties,
being obliged to sell them by the Parliament’s heavy taxation, fines and sequestration
(or sometimes having them confiscated for no better surrogate reason). The mass of
London merchants, Parliamentarian officials, army officers, or country gentry and well-
off yeomen who afforded to buy that land helped change the balance of power in favour
of the middle class. An output of a body of literature catering for the tastes of the rising
bourgeoisie was composed after the Restoration alongside the aftermath of the Civil
War. The War’s “terminal echo” is heard in idioms as different as John Bunyan’s
reinscription of Everyman (A Pilgrim’s Progress) in a Puritanic spirit and in Samuel
Butler’s aristocratic parody of it. As for John Milton, his is the triumphant logos of the
failed political attempt.

Any birth is difficult, and that of the modern world none the less. The intricate
pattern of the seventeenth century is a proof thereof. The history of English Literature
displays periods of unity, of epistemological and aesthetic coherence, while others
resemble a “mixing pot” of heterogeneous elements. So it happens that Nashe may be
discussed in the context of “Jacobean fiction”, while Bunyan and Butler are sometimes
included in histories of the Restoration. Our reasons in contextualizing them with Milton
are mainly formal. In Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré (Editions du Seuil,
1982), Gerrad Genette distinguishes between various parodic modes, among which: the
deflating treatment of some serious subject – burlesque – and the treatment of banal
events in grand style – satirical pastiche. We find Butler’s Hudibras characteristic of
the baroque burlesque or travesty (see Scarron’s Travestied Virgil) in its reversal of the
values inscribed in the Spenserian courtly epic, whereas the Augustan mock-heroic
(Pope’s Rape of the Lock) is an ironic imitation of grand style. The former degrades
content, engaging the Renaissance disputes on different sets of values, while the latter
takes delight in a formal pastiche, an exercise in style common among neoclassical
writers.
 Born into a well-to-do London family and educated at Cambridge, John Milton was
an accomplished classicist by the time he got his B.A. (1629). His early poems, in Latin
and English, display an evolution from a “conceited” rhetoric towards neoclassical
concentration, rationality, restraint, the bulk of his works drawing together the separate
strands of a literary tradition spanning an entire century. On the Morning of Christ’s
Nativity, occasioned by his twenty-first birthday, brimming full with the exuberance of the
Italianate conceits, encompasses much in little by employing, in an occasional poem,
the revelatory mode of the epic: the juxtaposition of the birth of Christ and two other
supreme events, Creation and the Judgement Day. The next two poems, conceived as
companion pieces, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, are more neoclassical in their formal
pattern of parallel and contrast. The former describes the bucolic joys of life in the
country, while the latter exalts the “hermitage of the mind”: the secluded life devoted to
study and contemplation. The harmonious ring of the rhyming couplets anticipates the
favourite rhythm of the coming Augustan Age. Antoher early work is Comus, a masque,
recalling the idealism of Dante and Petrarch in the defence of the sun-clad power of
personified chastity against the ribaldry of the merry-making God. Lycidas, a pastoral
elegy on the death of Edward King, a Cambridge acquaintance, “drowned on his
passage from Chester to the Irish sea”, possibly suggests a shift from his fancy’s
youthful wanderings in ancient lands towards the engaging issues of the political
confrontation. The classical pattern is maintained close to the end, when, through a
distancing device, engaging both voice (no longer that of the shepherd lamenting the
death of Lycidas in the pastoral mode) and the metrical scheme of the last eight lines, a
change is intimated towards the “fresh Woods and Pastures New” of a present more
challenging than the decorative pastoral. The model is not only Theocritus but also
Virgil’s reflections, in his Fifth Eclogue (the death of Daphnis) on what be the worth of a
good life. Should a man abandon himself to sensuous delight or should he abstain and
give himself to learning and work for the public good ? Lycidas had chosen virtue, yet
what was the good of it now that he was dead ? Divine justice (theodike, theodicy) was
for the first time questioned by Milton. The structural elements of the lament [53] make
up a well-defined design in the mass of strikingly majestic and original metaphoric
visions (the Evening star sloping “the westering wheel” of Heavens).

– the list of mourners is recruited from the pastoral pageantry: nymphs, satyrs,
shepherds, the pagan gods

– the praise of the deceased. Lycidas is transposed into the pastoral world as a
shepherd skilled in song:

Who would not sing for Lycidas ? he well knew

Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.

He must not flote upon his watery bear

Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,

 Without the meed of some melodious tear.

– contrast of past and present: But O the heavy change, now thou art gone.

– the image of the disfigurement, Lycidas being compared to the dismembered

Orpheus:

What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore,

Whom Universal nature did lament,

When by the rout that made the hideous roar,

His goary visage down the stream was sent,

Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore.

– the complaint: What boots it ? What is the good of choosing right if only the
unworthy survive ?

Alas ! What boots it with uncessant care

To tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade,

And strictly meditate the thankless Muse,

Were it not better done as others use,

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Or with the tangles of Neaera’s Hair ?

– the consolatio: those who choose virtue (instead of sporting with the nymphs)
are granted immortality, becoming the good, protecting Genius of the place. Milton
makes a Christian transposition, by showing Lycidas both as Genius of the place and as
a soul entertained after death by the company of saints, locked into the pattern of
Christ’s death and resurrection:

So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,

 Through the deer might of him that walk’d the waves;

Like some virtuous Lycidas, Milton dedicates most of the next twenty years to the
public weal and the defence of liberty on many fronts, resting content with occasional
sonnets on public men and events. The revolution engaged all his resources as a
pamphleteer and public orator in the reform of church and society. In 1640 he returned
from a fifteen-month continental tour spent mainly in Italy, where he had met Galileo,
who, in Milton’s own words, had grown old a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in
astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. In 1641-42
Milton wrote five pamphlets against episcopacy, blaming bishops for persecuting the
Protestants no slacker than the Pope would have done. Within four years episcopacy
was abolished in England, an event upon which Milton made the following comment
eight years later: When the bishops, at whom every man aimed his arrow, had at length
fallen, and we were now at leisure, as far as they were concerned, I began to turn my
thoughts to other subjects; to consider in what way I could contribute to the progress of
real and substantial liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within, and is
to be obtained principally not by fighting, but by the just regulation and by the proper
conduct of life (1654).

The need for internal reformation took care of itself after the Restoration, as the
message of Paradise Lost, the greatest epic in the language. The forties and fifties were
a time for effective involvement in the martial field of politics. In 1644, the year of the
first decisive battle of the war, when Cromwell defeated the royalist troops at Marston
moor, Milton published one of his most famous pamphlets. Areopagitica (Areios-pagos:
the judicial court on Mars’s hill) attacks a parliamentary decision of the previous year to
restrict the freedom of the press, which Milton compares to the arbitrary and often
criminal rule of the Inquisition: That freedom of writing should be restricted by a
discipline imitated from the Prelates, and learnt by them from the Inquisition to shut us
up all again into the breast of a licenser, must needs give cause of doubt and
discouragement to all learned and religious men. He who kills a man, he goes on, kills a
reasonable creature, but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, the lifeblood of
a master spirit, an immortality rather than a life.

Four pamphlets advocating the liberalization of the divorce laws were published in
1643 and 1645. In 1649, two weeks before the King’s execution, he justified it in The
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, claiming that Charles had betrayed the trust put in him
by the people. Shortly after the proclamation of the Commonwealth in 1649, Milton was
appointed Secretary of Foreign Tongues to the Council of State (corresponding today to
the Foreign Affairs Secretary), a diplomatic post which he held for over ten years, even
though by 1652 he had probably become totally blind because of a tumour of the
pituitary gland. The disunity of the radicals, the ambition of the generals ruined Milton’s
illusions which had made him an ally of the revolutionary forces. By 1657 Cromwell had
become king in anything but name, even in appointing his son as his heir to the head of
the State. He did not turn up to be much good, and in 1660 the lawful royal heir exiled to
France returned in the midst of public acclaim to London. Milton was opposed to rule by
any single person, be that a “King” or a “Lord Protector”, and his views on the subject
were expounded in his last major pamphlet published on the eve of the Restoration in
1660. He had shared the Puritans’ belief in the English being the chosen nation,
because it had been an Englishman, John Wycliffe (l320-84), who had begun the
Reformation in England, wherefrom it had spread to Europe – an opinion expressed in
his 1644 address to Parliament. But the English had not proved worthy to answer the
call of Providence. They had failed in their attempt at setting up a free commonwealth,
they had rushed back to the captivity from whence (God) freed us. The pessimistic view
of the “election” fiction, titled The Readie and Easie Way to Estrablish a free
Commonwealth, earned him one month’s imprisonment by order of the new Parliament,
at the end of which he was released instead of being hanged as it was expected. A
relative apparently intervened in his favour, but the explanation may also have been the
King’s tact in sparing a great public figure. In any event, Charles had not come to
England hoisting the banner of a bloody vendetta. He showed himself diplomatic and
tolerant, allowing for the country’s wounds to heal. The outcome of this political decision
was the birth of a world classic, as Milton could continue work on Paradise Lost, the
greatest epic in the language, which came out in 1667.

The poem raises the question of theodicy: if God is omnipotent, why did He not
prevent the fall ? Is He the origin of evil as well? Milton does God justice by recourse to
the ancient Christian doctrine of the Fortunate Fall, which claims that the loss of
Paradise was in certain respects a good thing for the human race: it enabled man to
know good by the emergence of evil, and, in the Augustinian-Armenian version, to
exercise his free will. Here is Milton himself in Areopagitica: It was from out the rind of
an apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil as two twins cleaving together
leapt forth into the world. And perhaps this is the doom which Adam fell into of knowing
good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of man now
is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the
knowledge of evil ? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and
seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is
truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered
virtue, unexercised and unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary (...)
that which purifies us in trial is by what is contrary.

An epic poem mirrors a society’s ideal of meaningful human action, embodied in

the hero. All poets who came after Homer opposed their own ideas of heroism,
summing up their contemporaries’ set of values. Virgil, in his Aeneid, contrasts the old-
type hero, Turnus, whose love of battle and personal glory proves destructive, with his
new hero, Aeneas, more dedicated to social values, characteristic of the more
developed societies: devotion to his father, obeyance to gods, sacrifice of personal
desire for the good of his people. Milton, making archangel Michael his spokesman,
criticizes Homeric heroism as a primitive quest of physical force („might”), proposing a
new type of hero, who wins a battle against his own passionate and irrational heart,
showing a better fortitude/ Of Patience and heroic martyrdom. However, even if not
deliberately, he has implanted a certain sort of heroism also in his Satan, the ambitious
and individualistic Turnus of Paradise Lost, in whom the Romantics of the age of
revolutions and wars of independence did not fail to recognize their idea of a hero. The
two plots construct the fall – of Satan from heaven and of Adam from Eden – in two
different narrative structures. The former is cast in the pagan tradition of dangerous
journeys, personal combat, description of marvellous buildings, speeches before the
army: Satan, who is also a Faustian tragic hero, defeated by God because His “might “,
the thunder, was greater, as well as a villain-hero and a malcontent of Websterian
extract, delivers an inflaming speech before his army of fallen angels, plans with them
the construction of Pandemonium, plots with them to make it even with his Enemy by
destroying his creation – the Edenic couple God was so proud of – in a parody of the
revenge tragedy, undertakes a long and dangerous journey to Earth, returns like a mock
Odysseus, Aeneas, or Beowulf to Hell, where he sets free Sin and Death (a parody of
Jesus harrowing hell and defeating Sin and Death).

The heroic mode – the epic of wrath and strife – is replaced, in the Adam and Eve
plot, by the pastoral and the tragic literary modes. The pastoral tells the story of the
Edenic couple before the fall. Adam’s aubade, asking his fairest, latest found espoused
to awake, describes an idyllic nature, not immobile and “trimmed”, like a neoclassical
landscape, but vital, stirring with life in the early morning, in blessed communion with
man: the fresh fields call us, let’s go and see how spring tends our plants, how blows
the citron grove, how drops the myrrh, and what the balmy reed..., etc. To Adam it was
given to name the animals (a natural, not a conventional language, as by naming he
also understood their nature), and to Eve, the flowers. Ophelia and Perdita, naming
flowers and explaining their meanings ought to have been part of a fiction understood
by everybody. If nature is alive with will and intent, in greater degree will Adam’s
creation be not just a question of ’clay’ and ’breath’, but one of awakening
consciousness. The self-reflexive inquiry into man’s origins and ’raison d’ętre’
would become a commonplace among the Romantics:

My self I then perused, and limb by limb surveyed...

But who I was, or how, or from what cause

Knew not.

The sight of the animals paired two by two works a Platonic awakening to the need
for companionship, which would have given him no satisfaction if it had been lust, not
“rational delight”, spiritual companionship. The tragical pattern encompasses the fall:
the error of judgement induced by Satan, that, as the apple tree was created by God,
it has to be good, like all his other works; the fall (hybris, breach of law), the
anagnorisis, the recognition of truth. They understand why they have been mistaken
and repent. Eve, like Sidney’s magnanimous heroes, takes all the sin upon herself,
praying that Adam be forgiven and she alone punished. Raphael pits “heavenly love”
(uniting with a fit soul) against “carnal pleasure”, leading to mere reproduction, of the
kind stirring in beasts. However it is not the flesh that is guilty, the fall occurs within the
mind. The peaceful minds of Adam and Eve are seized with “high passions, anger, hate,
mistrust, suspicion”. Passions have conquered reason. The way to redemption is
revealed by Michael as the discovery of a “paradise within”, earned through faith, virtue,
patience, temperance, and love:

.... then will thou not be loath

To leave this Paradise, but shall possess

A paradise within, happier far.

Satan’s fall from heaven is also more devastating in the mind than in the cosmic
dive into the abyss. He calls it “darkness visible”, that is the mind’s self -realization of
being evil. The oxymoronic phrase, of exceptionally condensed meaning, was used by
the Nobel Award winner William Golding as the title of one of his novels.

The boxing-in- device builds an overall mythic frame: Adam’s fall locked in Satan’s
fall, Satan’s fall projected against the entire sacred history. The twelve books tell the
story from Satan’s departure to earth, to destroy God’s Eden, up to the fall and the
couple’s remorses, while Raphael refers us to events before the main action (the war in
heaven and the creation of the universe, Book V-VIII), and Michael, who comes after
the fall, reveals to Adam events to come afterwards, from Cain’s murder of Abel to the
Last Judgement: Books XI-XII.

The prophecy of the future course of history was known from the Aeneid, but the
use of blank verse instead of rhyme follows Howard’s bold innovation. Milton created a
flexible metre, the number of stresses varying from four to six or more, the caesural
pauses shifting constantly. The opening is an invocation to the Muse, which is here the
Holy Spirit of God that inspired Moses, the first Shepherd-poet. Apparently whatever
seventeenth-century poets touched turned into pastoral. The image of Creation is
repeatedly laid in the abyss, in a baroque play of mirrors: the creation of the poem,
Moses telling the story of the creation of the world to the “chosen seed”, God creating
the world through the Holy Ghost, Dove-like... brooding on the vast Abyss, the
restoration of creation in Christ. The opening keeps close to the model not only in the
invocation, but also in the outline of the action, set against a background of maximum
expansion, in space and time, also of appeal to the Romantics, in the extended
comparisons and similes:

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

Brought death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one great Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,

Sing, heavenly muse, that, on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed

In the beginning how the heavens and earth

Rose out of Chaos;

But Milton does not speak only one language (of magniloquence) but several.
Satan’s rebellion against God’s coronation of his son sounds very close to the topical
oratory of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates [54]:

Will ye submit your necks, and choose to bend

 The supple knee ? Ye will not, if I trust

To know ye right, or if ye know your selves

Natives and sons of heaven possessed before

By none, and if not equal all, yet free

It appears that something of Milton passed into Satan, whose ambiguous figure –
fallen yet not completely robbed of his former angelic splendour, punished yet no
humiliated, broken yet not defeated – fascinated the Romantics. The doctrine of “free-
will”, on which his contemporaries were greatly divided, is rendered into a paradoxical,
conceited language, coming from God in Book III:

They trespass, authors to themsleves in all

Both what they judge and what they choose; for so

I formed them free, and free they must remain,

Till they enthrall themselves: I else must change

Their nature, and revoke the high degree

Unchangeable, eternal, which ordained

Their freedom, they themselves ordained their fall.

As for the issue of “election” and “predestination”, more palatable to the Puritans,
Samson Agonistes thematizes them in the language of a lyrical drama (1671) whose
hero, after failing his historical mission, allowing himself, like Adam, to be tempted, rises
again, finally bringing destruction upon his people’s foes.

Humming with the voices of a century’s mixed traditions, Milton’s linguistic genius
let forth the inner workings of a great spirit.

John Bunyan knew only the missionary ardour, not also the feel of effective power
in the great religious and political divide of the century, being even imprisoned several
times between 1660-1666 and only for unlicensed preaching. He speaks a plain,
sincere language, figuring a medieval allegory, in a Puritanic version, with emphasis
upon the individual consciousness of the believer. The cautionary allegory is doubled
by a spiritual biography, understandable in the light of the Calvinist emphasis upon
man’s personal relation to God. The author also takes stock of a woman’s position in
the religious community. Christian’s journey from the City of Destruction to salvation and
Heaven in the Pilgrim’s Progress has a corollary in another archetypal allegory: man’s
life as a war between good and evil (The Holy War)

Samuel Butler ‘s Hudibras is another dialogical piece of literature, which cannot

be understood without glancing back to The Faerie Queene [55]. This is Ian Jack’s
complete comment on the genesis of Bultler’s mock-heroic: Butler (1612-80) took the
name of his hero from Spenser, (...) The Faerie Queene. In Book II, which is concerned
with Temperaunce, Sir Guyon reaches a castle inhabited by three sisters. The youngest
loves pleasure, the second moderation, while the third is a sour hater of all delights. Sir
Hudibras, who is contrasted with Sans-loy, the wooer of the younger sister, makes his
suit to the eldest. In a stanza which throws a great deal of light on Hudibras (1662-77),
he is described as “an hard man”.

Yet not so good of deeds, as great of name,

Since errant armes to sew he first began;

More huge in strength, then wise in workes he was,

And reason with fool hardize over ran;

Sterne melancholy did his courage pas,

And was for terrour more, armd in shyning bras.

Butler’s Hudibras resembles Spenser’s in being more famous than he deserves, in

having more strength than wisdom, and in being inspired less by courage than by
“melancholy” (in this context, madness).

He also resembles Spenser’s in the contrast between his outward varnish of a

medieval warrior and the truth of his cowardly nature, which he deliberately tries to
conceal, an inequality between inwardness and outwardness which justifies the
schizophrenic language of the poem. In the manner of Spenser, this is a moral allegory
and the hero embodies a certain trait of character. This is not one of the twelve Cardinal
Virtues but one of the cardinal vices: hypocrisy. The satirical portrait of the Puritanic
spirit delighted the aristocracy of the Restoration, but Butler’s satire is broader, various
other social orders, and the Royal Society itself being presented as afflicted with
pedantry. All the elements of the poem fall into pattern, Butler’s reputation being
constantly increasing in our literary-minded age. The opening is a piece of virtuosity in
the richness of its allusiveness:

Sir Hudibras his passing worth,

The manner how he sally’s forth;

His Arms and Equipage are shown;

His Horse’s Vertues, and his own.

„Passing worth” is ambiguous. It may mean shallow, perishable, unsubstantial, or

have a concrete reference: moving forth, riding forth. The allegorical manner is thus
implicitly defined (concrete and symbolical level), as well as the degradation of “worth”,
value, into “manner”. The third line, with its Virgilian ring (the arms and the man, in the
English version hendiadys), displaces the fits of bravery on a heroic journey by a
modish pastime (taking a drive in a fashionable carriage), while the fourth discloses the
model framing the action of the poem: not The Aeneid but Don Quixote. The reader has
the feeling of walking over a familiarly patterned floor, with some tiles in place and
others hiding empty slots, or flying an airplane which takes unexpected and precipitous
nosedives. The rhetorical strategy of deflation is bathos or anticlimax, to which Butler
adds a deep-cutting irony, playing about the character from the beginning to the end of
the poem. By asserting one thing and meaning another (satirical understatement and
literal encomium), the poet points to the only acceptable (honest) form of hypocrisy:
rhetoric.

References:

[48] William Righter, The Myth of Theory, Cambridge University Press. p. 98

[49] Ibidem, p. 95
[50] T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets”, in Selected Prose, edited by John Hayward, Penguin with
Faber & Faber, 1958. p. 117.

[51] See Wiliam H. Race, Classical Genres and English Poetry, Croom Helm, 1988.

[52] T. S. Eliot, Andrew Marvell, in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode, Faber &
Faber, 1975, p. 162.

[53] The Rhetoric of Lament in William H. Race, Op. cit. pp 86 et passim.

[54] Christophe Hil, in Milton and the English Renaissance (Faber & Faber, 1977, p. 367) sees in Satan
the embodiment of the corruption of the Old Just Cause among Cromwell’s generals, which was
responsible for the failure of the Commonwealth, namely the rebellion for the wrong cause:
jealousy, ambition.

[55] Ian Jack, Samuel Butler and Hudibras, in The Pelican Guide, Op. cit. p. 332

THE NEOCLASSIC AGE

(1660–1780)

England at the time of the emergence of modern institutions. The

Restoration: an age of transition. The Age of Dryden, or the making of the
Augustan ideal. The Age of Pope, or the Augustan ideal under stress.
Neoclassic poetic arts. The socially-oriented literary kinds. Genesis,
poetic, and structural devices of the English novel. The movement away
from neoclassic orthodoxy. The rise of supernaturalism and
sentimentalism in response to oppressive Augustan rationalism.

By analogy with the reign of Augustus Caesar (27 B.C. – 14 A.D.), which was the
golden age of Roman literature, an “Augustan age” means a period of peace,
prosperity, and artistic refinement. In England, its most characteristic traits can be
identified in a period stretching from 1714 to the mid-eighteenth century, known as the
age of Pope and Addison, but it may be extended to a broader neoclassical frame to
include the Restoration and a transition period from an age of reason to one of
sensibility between 1750-1780.
 The Restoration of the Stuarts was a culture of passage, in which two codes were
still competing: of the Court and of the City, mirroring the final stage of a confrontation
which ended in 1689, with the Whig replacement of the Stuart monarchy by William of
Orange, of the Nassau dynasty (married to Mary, the daughter of James II). Queene
Anne (1702-1714), James II's daughter, left no inheritor to the British throne, all her
children dying in infancy or early childhood. The ascension to the throne of George I in
1714 meant the beginning of the Hanoverian dynasty, which went down to Queen
Victoria and her descendants (renamed “Saxe-Goburg and Gotha” under Edward VII,
and afterwards “Windsor” – the present royal family). Engineered through the Act of
Settlement (1701), the Hanoverian parliamentary monarchy (the king as merely an
instrument of the Parliament) meant the victory of the Whig party, the onset of an age of
political stability, and a rapprochement with France.

Towards the end of the eighth decade, Dryden abandoned drama in the
Restoration heroic and heroic-comic tradition, moving more decidedly into a
neoclassical direction, enforced by poetic principles programmatically expounded.
Whereas Dryden draws on René Le Bossu and René Rapin in The Grounds of Criticism
in Tragedy (1679), (after the compromise in the comparative evaluation of the merits of
the neoclassical French and of the highly irregular English drama in his Essay of
Dramatic Poesy, 1668), Alexander Pope's model is the fully canonical expression of
neoclassical poetic: Boileau, walking in the footsteps of Horace. Maybe that is why
Pope succeeded where Shakespeare and Milton had failed: he was the first English
poet to enjoy reputation across the Channel, seeing many of his works translated into
French, praised and imitated. From the second half of the eighteenth century there were
accumulating signs of a transition to a new mode of understanding and sensibility,
which triumphed in Wiliam Blake, the visionary prophet of the Romantic school. The
English Augustans consciously imitated and compared themselves to the authors
in Caesar Augustus's Rome (Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Livy, as well as Juvenal, of the first
century), the neoclassic drift being now Roman rather than Hellenic. The shift is
important for the greater emphasis upon the links between a flourishing material
civilization and the arts, between politics and artistic Maecenate, between artistic
creation and a hedonistic, refined life-style. Writers were known for their elegance, in
attire as well as manners or speech, for the social enjoyment of ideas in the coffee-
house coterie, rather than for a strenuous and scholarly intellectual effort. We may add
a philosophical and religious eclecticism, yielding a motley reinscription of various
systems. Samuel Johnson dismissed Pope's Essay on Man, the most ambitious
philosophical poem of the time, as a metaphysical wreck, but that was precisely the
point: As the picture of the universe was being challenged and shattered by new
scientific discoveries, the thinkers of the time felt free to discourse more tentatively and
leisurely on such issues, to “tame” the language of the Royal Society “virtuosi” into the
common talk of a cultivated society. Joseph Addison, the new voice that could be heard
from journalism in a cultural democracy, proposed to bring Philosophy out of Closets
and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Table,
and in Cofee-Houses (The Spectator, No. 10, 12 March 1711).
 Although we do not subscribe to Eugenius's (Gr. eugenes: well-born) opinion in
Dryden's version of the Platonic dialogue – An Essay of Dramatic Poesy – that the
progress of science automatically brings poesy and other arts (...) nearer to perfection,
we admit that the importance of the social-political and epistemological background in
an approach to Augustan literature is paramount. In this age literature moves from
language to society, from history to the contingent, from the memory of the
antiquity towards literary models geared to living reality. Man descends from his
central position in the universe, allowing himself to be governed by social rules and
necessities, confining his Faustian ambitions to the infinitely more modest requirements
of a practical humanism. From aspiration towards universality, the artist turns to the
painting of morals, from lyricism, to an impersonal kind of literature and eloquence, from
esoteric exploits, to observation of nature, from erudition to modish topics, from idealism
to sentimentality, from a metanarrative (a central story) to individual facts. Theology
tended to be replaced by political economy (Robinson Crusoe). It was from the picture
of England's flourishing industry and commerce, about 1610, that Antoine de
Montcrestien (1575-1621), the author of the first treatise of political economy
(L'economie politique, 1615), derived his notions about the dignity of capitalist
enterprise and peaceful trade. Common man, engaged in his daily practical
activities, became a moral norm and a hero in literature for the first time.

Warfare was not entirely absent over this timespan, but it usually led to a more
advantageous settlement for the British nation. The Exclusion Crisis provoked by Lord
Shaftesbury's proposition in Parliament that the Collateral line represented by James,
the younger brother of Charles, should be excluded from succession to the throne, in
favour of the Duke of Monmouth, Charles' illegitimate son, fell in Parliament and led to
Shaftesbury’s imprisonment, as well as to an armed action led by Monmouth himself,
which was suppressed. As a result of James' deposition three years later (1688), a new
political government could be settled under William III: a social contract between King
and Parliament, which radically restricted the former's prerogatives, while ensuring the
predominance of the Commons, religious tolerance with no more suspicions, more or
less grounded, about “Popish plots” (the last, of Titus Oates, had had its share in the
Succession Crisis). The rise to power of the middle class, whose upper strata had
absorbed a large part of the aristocracy, through the titles sold by the Stuarts to the
moneyed landowners and as a result of Cromwell's confiscations from the royalists, was
completed by the end of the Whig Prime Minister Robert Walpole's long and peaceful
political rule (1721-41), the interests of the two dominant classes having by then
completely merged together. Initially ascribed to those who had opposed the exclusion
of James, Duke of York, and to those who had supported it, attempting a subordination
of the king to Parliament after the 1688 Glorious Revolution, the names of “Tory” and
“Whig', respectively, were in time replaced by “Conservative” and “Liberal”. The
antagonism between them diminished during the Augustan Age, with active support
from those who could sway public opinion in favour of a peaceful cohabitation of all
social classes.

The values and taste of the middle class replaced the aristocratic values, gentility,
as a summation of virtue, religious faith, decorum, mental and physical energy ousted
the ideal of the courtier's refined appearance, manners, and wit. Essayists and writers
of the age undertook to educate the bourgeoisie in respect to manners, urbanity and
propriety of address (letter-writing, conversation). John Pomfret's poem, The Choice
(1700), defines the ideal way of life as that of a leisurley, civilized golden mean, while
Robinson's father's advice to his son (Robinson Crusoe) displays a similar appreciation
of the ideal middle class way of life. Even the third Earl of Shaftesbury's code of
Augustan refinement in art and morals – Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (neoclassic in its import), does not make Gentlemanliness a privilege of caste,
but an attribute of a civilized man living in a stable and just society.

The Great War of the Spanish Succession, which ended with the Peace of Utrecht
(1713) gave Britain control over Gibraltar, Minorca, North America, as well as the
exclusive right to export slaves to the West Indies. The provisions of the treaties
concluded between England, France, Holland, and Spain, Savoy, Prussia, and Portugal
increased England's participation in the largest slave trade in history, when at least six
million human beings were captured and transported across the ocean.

The changes in science and philosophy were deep enough to breed an awareness
of a fundamental discontinuity in history. The “Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns”,
that is between the advocates of the values and spirit of the Antiquity, which had
prevailed during the Renaissance, and those evincing a modern consciousness, arising
from a scientific-experimental attitude to the world, spread from France to England with
the return of the exiled royalists and with the arrival of a French exile, Saint-Evremond.
Dryden, who was an acquaintance of Saint-Evremond's, echoes the dispute in his
Essay of Dramatic Poesy. Important public figures joined the controversy. Sir William
Temple supported the Ancients, while William Wotton sided with the moderns. As Sir
Temple's secretary, Jonathan Swift gave his own opinion in his usual recourse to irony
in A Tale of A Tub and in The Battle of Books. In the former, the moderns are defined in
the manner of the twelfth-century monk, Bernard de Chartre, and of the contemporary
Bernard de Fontanelle as the present “pigmies” on the shoulders of the ancient giants,
whose fundamental works had germinated into a sprawl of petty lexicons. Conservative
attitudes are characteristic among the writers of the age, who support stability, the
establishment – as classicists will always do. However, the substance of their work –
realistic and satirical – is the very outcome of the scientific and social revolutions. The
writers' true political leanings may have remained secret, considering their dependence
upon patronage. The story of Daniel Defoe being a Whig mole on the staff of a Torry
paper is symptomatic [1]. Samuel Johnson's 1755 letter to Lord Chesterfield meant the
declaration of the writer's independence of patronage, but it succeeded a long tradition
of flattering and humiliating dedications from authors whose ambition to make a living
from writing turned them into trimmers.

If literature displays fundamentally new traits, even less entitled would one be to
regard the scientific and philosophical exploits of the age as mere footnotes to classical
works. With all his emphasis upon the importance of science and experiment, Bacon
had however remained ignorant of a number of important scientific discoveries and
advances, which philosophers could no longer fail to take into account: Kepler's
astronomical discoveries, Napierian logarithms, the progress of mechanics in Galileo
and his theory of the acceleration of falling bodies, the theory of the lever, and of the
precession of the eqionoxes, etc.[2].

Following Isaac Newton's publication of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia

Mathematica (1687), the universe ceased to be regarded as organic and teleological.
The long-cherished Ptolemy-Galen-Pliny-Paracelsus model was discarded altogether,
yielding to a decentered, mechanistic picture of bodies moving in space and time,
according to mechanical and matter-based principles. The book of the universe,
according to Galileo, was written in mathematical language. After the Restoration the
group of Cambridge Platonists, who had preoccupied themselves with the philosophical
impact of Hobbes's empiricism on religion, incorporated the Royal Society “for the
Improving of Natural Knowledge”, patronized by Charles II. Its members meant to
promote not only the New and Real Philosophy, but also a new language capable to
word it: of mathematical plainness, freed from empty scholastic, syllogistic ratiocination
(having a “why for every wherefore”, like Butler's Hudibras), of “fruit-bearing” empirical
relevance, of use to the artisan, the countryman, the merchant (Thomas Sprat, The
History of the Royal Society, 1667). The cognitive turn (from ontology to gnoseology,
from inquiry into being to inquiry into the possibilities and circumstances of
cognition, announced by Montaigne and Bacon and effected by Descartes, Hobbes,
Locke, was the one which actually worked the change from the ancients to the
moderns, whereas the hermeneutic turn (from “what do I know?” to “how do I interpret
a world which is in its essence unknowable, how do I represent or constitute it?”),
originating in David Hume and Immanuel Kant, with bearings upon the Romantics and
the Victorians, was absolutized by the modernists. The deconstructive turn (the
deconstruction of the logocentric paradigm of primary and derivative terms, like speech
and writing, cause and effect, good and evil, straight and crooked, right and left etc into
differences without positive terms), originating in Nietzsche and receiving fresh
impetus from Heidegger, Gadamer and Derrida, shaped the epistemological matrix of
postmodernism.

Religion was going from a doctrinary (inner) towards a cognitive (contextual) crisis.
John Locke, a member of the Royal Society, who returned from his French exile (he had
been Earl of Shaftesbury's physician) with William III in 1689, inquired into The
Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), while G.F. Leibnitz searched in a manner
(logical-mathematical) different from Milton's (the theological doctrine of the happy fall)
to “justify the ways of God to Man”, in the best of all possible worlds (Theodicy). The
philosophers of the age were shrewd in mathematics: Hobbes, who was Charles II’s
mathematician, entered into controversies with Descartes, whereas Leibnitz discovered
differential calculus independently from Newton. The Dutch Baruch Spinoza constructed
his Ethics by the Geometrical Method. Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), quantified the
morality of social action in a way which anticipated the Victorian utilitarianism of Jeremy
Bentham in An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725): that
Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers; and
that, worst, which, in like manner, occasions Misery (3, VIII). He even finds analytical
propositions and mathematical formulations for moral actions in his System of Moral
Philosophy, posthumously published in 1755: The moral Importance of any Agent, or
the Quality of publick Good produc'd by him, is in a compound Ratio of his Benevolence
and Ability: or (by substituting the initial Letters for the Words, as M = Moment of Good,
and m = Moment of Evil, M = B x A). Half a century later, when vehemently exposing
the outrage of making God “a mathematical diagram”, Romantic poet William Blake
might well have been thinking of David Hartley (1705-1757), who used a similar quasi-
mathematical formulation to represent man's relationship with God in Observations on
Man (1749).

The authority of mathematical principles spread quickly to the arts. They could
ensure the neoclassical principles of harmony, proportion, symmetry. John Wood the
Elder and his son of the same name were two neo-Palladian architects who
reconstructed Bath according to “figures and numbers”, with no more Gothic or
medieval reminiscences. From buildings of monumental classicism to the “model
villages”, they remained faithful to Palladian proportions, symmetries and rhythms,
integrating individual buildings into the general design with a remarkable sense of the
social organization of space [3]. The individual is conceived of only in relation to the
community. Everything is merged into everything else, with an effect of wholeness,
integrity. Art is made dependent on reason, truth, craft, elaboration, obeying the
commandments of mathematical constructs: The square in geometry, the Unison or
Circle in Musick, and the Cube in Building have all an inseparable Proportion: the Parts
being equal, and the sides and Angles etc. give the Eye and Ear an agreable Pleasure;
from hence may likewise be deduced the cube and a harf, the double cube, the
Diapason, and Diapante being founded on the same principle in Musick [4].

The scientific critical rationalism of the first phase of English Neoclassicism stands
under the sign of Thomas Hobbes's (1588-1679) mechanistic and deterministic
materialism. The royal way to truth leaves behind authorities, theoretical systems
(Nulius in verba), being restricted to inductive and mathematical methods. Leviathan
(165l) examines the content of the mind, reducing it to sense data, to various
impressions worked upon the senses by contact with the exterior world: there is no
conception in a man's mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten
upon the organs of senses. The rest are derived from that original (Leviathan Part I,
Chapter I). Innate ideas are also denied by John Locke (1632-1704), yet he defines the
human being in the same way as Descartes, as being conscious to himself that he
thinks (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690, Book II, Chap. I) and
dissociates between sensations and ideas, the latter transcending the object of the
senses: Whence has it (the mind) all the materials of reason and knowledge ? To this I
answer in one word: from experience; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from
that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either about external sensible
objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by
ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking.
These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can
naturally do spring. Such dichotomies as sensation and idea, simple and compound
ideas (derived from the first, through the mind's observation of its own operations),
perception and reflection do allow of a form of transcendentalism, at a remove from
Hobbes's purely empirical psychology. The mechanistic-empiricist representation of the
mind was later ridiculed by Laurence Sterne in his Tristram Shandy (although it is Locke
he mentions): when his own father impresses him in so many different ways, can the
content of the mind be reduced to a mechanical effect of unique sense impressions (the
same for any subject as long as the object of perception remains the same), like the
material print of a maid's thimble on wax? (Book II, Chap. II) At the other end of the
Augustan Age, Imagination struck Tristram as something quite different from Memory of
the sense impression when the object is removed, being inferior to actual perception of
the object: From whence it follows that the longer the time is, after the sight or sense of
any object, the weaker is the imagination. For the continual change of man's body
destroys in time the parts which in sense were moved; so that distance of time, and of
place, hath one and the same effect in us. (Leviathan Part I, Chap. II, Of Imagination).
The fascination of remoteness in time and space was already relished by some of
Sterne’s contemporaries (Edward Young), precisely for the freedom it granted the mind
to invent something of larger import than any contingent reality. And what is Uncle Toby
(Tristram Shandy), at his heart, if not an obsession with something which has never
happened – his invented, rather than memorized “heroic” past? Sterne’s criticism was
preceded by the philosophers'. There is nothing in the intellect that has not previously
been in the senses, Leibnitz (1646-1716) replies in his New Essays on Human
Understanding, except the intellect itself. For the soul includes being, substance, the
one, the same, cause, perception, ratiocination, and many other notions which the
senses are not capable to originate (Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain, II, I,
2). The monism constructed by Leibniz in his Monadology (each monad has its own
soul, whereas God, as the largest monad, comprises them all) was the other extreme
from atheistic empiricism and different (although equally optimistic in its view of the best
of all possible worlds) from Deism, which only derived the idea of God from the
contemplation of the universe as a perfect machinery, presupposing the existence of a
master-mechanic. Miracles are precluded, God no longer intervenes in his creation, as
a personified agent. Spinoza's ontological monism apparently offered a solution to
Descartes' dualism (being split into substance-body and substance-soul). In Spinoza,
the physical and the metaphysical are merged together, God being the common
substance (Deus, sive substantia, God, that is substance). Everything is individualized
but also merged into its horizon: modes of being included in attributes, attributes, in
substance. Whereas the mechanistic sense theory of Hobbes informs Dryden's view of
feelings and states of mind induced by the way musical instruments work upon the
senses (the odes composed for St. Cecilia's Day), we think it was the philosophy of
Spinoza that provided the arguments of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man. In the Design
preceding the four verse epistles – a form of didactic literature (a classical favourite)
employed for the exploration of some philosophical, moral etc. idea – Pope thanks Lord
Henry Bolingbroke for having been his “guide, philosopher, and friend”. Samuel
Johnson thought it had been the other way round: Pope had been the one whose ideas
had sprouted in Bolingbroke's posthumous papers. The poem has often been accused
of doctrinary incoherence, eclecticism, and inconsistency: Colin Manlove, in an essay,
Parts and Wholes: Pope and Poetic Structure [5] reproduces some of them, pointed out
by previous commentators, which meet with his approval: Pope tells men they are fools
to try to inquire into the nature of the universe, but then has to do the same himself in
order to tell them why they should not: the poet who tells his reader that the proper
study of mankind is man spends much of the first epistle among the constellations and
well above or beneath the sphere of human existence on the great chain of being. Then
there is difficulty with Pope's conception of the governing spring of human conduct – the
“Ruling Passion”, a force conferred by the deity working through nature: where is there
to be human choice in such a deterministic arrangement? Considered in the light of
Spinoza's philosophy, and of the analogical method inspired to his contemporary,
Samuel Clarke (later resumed by Bishop Joseph Butler in his Analogy of Religion,
1736), in A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1705-6), by Newton's
universal laws of nature, Pope's doctrinaire frame appears less incoherent. If inferior
modes of being and powers of perception are included in man, he can obviously know
them, and, through a study of the general laws at his level, he can speculate on larger
“gradations” of the universal “chain of being” or “extent”, or “range”. It is odd that Colin
Manlove does not mention Spinoza, although the following commentary on Pope is
perfectly valid with respect to the Dutch philosopher's advance in a rationalist direction,
away from both Descartes and Leibniz: A significant change in the poem is from a
vertical to a horizontal conception of being. The prepositions “above” and “below”
become fewer, and we deal with a passion that pervades, a social impulse that
spreads. This is already happening in that beautiful passage on the activity of God at
the end of Epistle I – He is an immanent force that “spreads” through all being and
“extends thro' all extent”; His presence in all things removes hierarchic distinctions,
levelling all created things in equal importance: “To him no high, no low, no great, no
small; He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all.” The ladder of being in which
mankind is reduced to a mere point in space, is later in the poem transformed to the
surface of a lake over which like a dropped pebble the loving action of one man ripples
out to embrace all being; just as the vertical has shifted to the horizontal, so has
shrinkage to expansion. (Op. cit., p. 147). Here is Gheorghe Vlăduţescu on Spinoza: În
deosebire de Descartes şi, totodată, cu un grad sporit de autenticitate şi adevăr,
Spinoza nu mai aşază cele două mari ’trepte ’ într-o scară a lumii, pe ’vertical㠒,
ci pe ’orizontală’. În acelaşi plan, adică, şi, parcă, ŕ tiroirs, mai-cuprinzătorul
incluzând orizontul subiacent, substanţa, atributele şi modurile sunt, deopotrivă, în
identitate şi în non-identitate. Venind ’de sus’ dinspre substanţă, totul este în toate,
dar venind din ’jos’, pentru că moduri şi atribute sunt cuprinse (modurile în atribute,
atributele în substanţă), identitatea presupune şi deosbirea [6].

The term “chain of being” is misleading, Pope proceeding to a systematic

deconstruction of the Renaissance overall image of existence. The hierarchy of
separate and multilayered individualities, (the level of nature, of humanity, and of God)
yields to a more egalitarian picture of Being: one stupendous Whole, one Body, one
Soul. He maps the Renaissance onto a philosophical concept which is completely
different. Pope's contention in the Design, that he is steering betwixt the extremes of
doctrines seemingly opposite, probably means avoiding both the Scylla of Descartes
(dualism body/soul) and the Charybdis of Deism (dualism God/creation). The
homogeneous element of water is a monistic trope – a universal substantia – further
qualified by attributes of “range”, “extent”, “powers” (possibilities of perception
individualized for each mode of being, from the lowest, which is the mole's blindness, to
man's perception of ideas – in whose description Pope draws on Locke). Pope does not
ridicule human capacities in general, but only the Renaissance picture of man in his
glory, as the coronation of Creation. His world picture is Newtonian, inferable from a
number of general laws, empirically testable. The Renaissance had emphasized
ontological split (outside and within man); Pope emphasizes connectedness, at equal
distance from Hobbes’s bleak view of man’s instinctive selfishness (Leviathan) and
Shaftesbury’s confidence in man’s inborn moral sense and love for his fellow men (An
Inquiry Concerning Virtue, 1699):

The great directing Mind of all ordains,

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,

Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;

All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;

All Discord, Harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal Good:

And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite,

The truth is clear: WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.

(Epistle I)

Parts relate to whole;

One all-extending, all-preserving Soul

Connects each being, greatest with the least

(Epistle III)

Remember, Man, the Universal Cause,

Acts not by partial, but by general laws.

 And makes what Happiness we justly call

Subsist not in the good of one, but all.

That true Self-Love and Social are the same:

(Epistle IV).

Of the attributes of God or Nature, man only knows range and thought (Reason).
Coming from above, from substance, everything is identical to everything else, yet
coming from below, from different attributes and modes, everything is confined to a
certain “gradation” of the “chain of being”:

Far as Creation's ample range extends,

The scale of sensual, mental powers ascends:

Mark how it mounts, to Man's imperial race,

From the green myriads in the peopled grass;

What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme,

The mole's dim curtain, and the lynx's beam (I, 207-212):

The Renaissance world picture is subject to a sardonic attack.

a) The humanistic fiction of man as the yardstick of the universe, possessed of the
spirit divine (Pope: Eternal Wisdom):

Superior beings, when of late they saw

A mortal Man unfold all Nature's law,

Admired such wisdom in an earthly shape,

And showed a NEWTON as we show an Ape. (II, 3l-34)

b) The capacity to know the entire chain of being. Confined to his “gradation” of the
“ample range”, man is advised to drop all Titanic aspirations and Faustian ambitions, to
learn submission (to universal order), acknowledge his own “point” in space and time,
and limits (blindness, weakness).
 c) The existence of an organic universe, whose general design and purpose (telos)
is known to man. Pope draws the picture of the universe as a machine, as aggregates
of atoms held together by the general laws discovered by Galilei and Newton, as an
anonymous circuit of matter, with creatures feeding upon one another:

See plastic Nature working to this end,

The single atoms each to other tend,

Attract, attracted to the next in place

Formed and impelled its neighbour to embrace.

See Matter next, with various life endued,

Press to one centre still, the general Good.

See dying vegetables life sustain,

See life dissolving vegetate again:

Ill forms that perish other forms supply. (III, 9-17)

d) The pastoral meliorist project: the pride of aiming at more knowledge, and
pretending to more Perfection, is the cause of Man's error and misery. (I/IV)

e) Knowledge received from transcendental experience: the a priori ideas of

operations of the intellect, mysterious communication with the divinity, through dreams,
visions, miracles, inspiration, divination etc. In purely Lockean fashion, Pope reduces
the content of the mind to what comes through a “gradation” of sense, instinct, thought,
reflection. A mole's mode of being and attribute (the “powers”) are included in those
ranging above, and so on, whereas man's Reason is all these powers (sense,
remembrance, reflection, thought) in one (I, 212-232). Also in Spinozian fashion, man is
supposed to suppress his passions and exercise his rational powers, which enable him
to acquiesce in the existing order, which would be ruined if only one element were
removed from its place.

From the centre of creation, man suddenly sees himself under the interdiction even
to think of the Centre, to soar with Plato to th'empyrial sphere, unless he means to drop
into himself and be a fool (II, 19-34). From inquiry into the essence of the world, he
starts wondering: What world is this after all? What “gradation” in the Great World? Yet
he does not, because Alexander Pope will not allow him to look beyond, and nothing
can be defined but by its relation to something else, to everything else. The only
knowledge that is still available is not without but within: all our knowledge is
OURSELVES TO KNOW (IV, 398). The eighteenth-century view of the universe as a
perfect machinery is made to serve Socrates' precept, “Know thyself”. Such a
perspective also justifies social order, the status quo: the division into the monadic
existences of Beast, Man, or Angel, Servant, Lord or King (III), as well as the
inextricable ties between them. Man is made aware of different ranges of knowledge, of
different points of view. The images of the New World are not only those of the
treasures that could be seized but also of other peoples' modes of understanding (see
Friday in Robinson Crusoe, praying to Robinson's gun like to a god, because he does
not understand its mechanism). The natives are confined within the gnoseological
horizon made possible by their particular experience (see the mutual revelation of
colonizers and colonized in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko). Jonathan Swift's work is mainly
based upon a manipulation of various points of view. A cultivated man is no longer one
who dedicates himself to reading but also one who travels, a citizen of the world,
familiar with as many aspects of the human show as possible. A Latitudinarian, if not
downright relativistic attitude is characteristic of the Age of the Luminaries, ready for
new discoveries, new theories, new experiences of otherness. Fanaticism, dogmatism
were buried in the historical past. Robinson Crusoe is capable to see his situation from
opposite points of view, which are both true. There is no ending to Swift's and Pope's
exploration of paradox. In fact, Locke's Epistola to Tolerantia, 1689, the first published
on his return to England (1689), heralded the spirit of the coming age. About the same
time, Bernard de Fontenelle was entertaining wild fantasies about possible other worlds:
lost civilizations in the cosmic space, which the micro-organisms contained in the big
meteorites that had hit the earth made one suspect, populated far-off gallaxies.
Fontenelle is as severe as Pope in his indictment of man's 'pride” and heresy of trying to
know and judge everything: Nous voulons juger de tout et nous sommes toujours dans
un movais point de vue. (Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes – conversations with a
marquise, 1686). In order to see right, one needs to be outside, a spectator, not the
inhabitant of some particular world. Gulliver, the traveller from one imaginary world to
another, is trading in biases and monocular modes of vision with the inhabitants of each
visited land. In a fragment left out in the final version of Tristram Shandy, first published
by Paul Stapfer in 187o, after meditating on the infinite relativity of time and space, the
author-narrator falls asleep, dreaming that he has become the inhabitant of a plum on a
tree in his orchard. Awakening from an apocalyptic experience, he notices that several
plums have fallen from the tree, shaken off by a gust of wind. No, it had not been a
world, but only a bubble that had burst, as Pope says (Who sees with equal eyes, as
God of all,/ A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,/ Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,/ And
now a bubble burst, and now a world – I) If Laurence Sterne had preserved the
fragment, it would have served as an appropriate allegory for his characters, each
imprisoned in his “hobby horse” (personal obsession). But having journeyed from
observation to imagination, from physical sensation and mechanical psychological
response to private obsession, from Social Self to Individual Self, we have trespassed
the Romantic frontier, so we need to return to the Augustans.

Having outgrown the Protestant emphasis upon individual consciousness, as well

as aristocratic egotism, Augustan literature mirrors the relationship between private and
social self, and often develops a discourse akin to that of political economy, law,
philosophy. The policy of a good government no longer looks up towards the ideal
“governor” but down, to the masses of individuals and the way in which they are to
integrate themselves in the social order, to harmonize their private interests with those
of the community. To Hobbes' s absolutism in Leviathan, Locke opposes a
characteristically Augustan balance between the constitutional power and the subjects'
rights. A practical morality replaces the idealism and absolute standards of the
Renaissance man, who had lived by models: If man in the state of nature be so free, as
has been said; if he be absolute lord of his own person and possessions equal to the
greatest, and subject to nobody, why will he part with his freedom? Why will he give up
this empire, and subject himself to the dominion and control of any other power? To
which 'tis obvious to answer, that though in the state of nature he hath such a right, yet
the enjoyment of it is very uncertain, and constantly imposed to the invasion of others.
For all being kings as much as he, every man his equal, and the greater part no strict
observers of equity and justice, the enjoyment of the property he has in this state is very
unsafe, very unsecure. This makes him willing to quit a condition, which, however free,
is full of fears and continual dangers; and 'tis not without reason that he seeks out and
is willing to join in society with others, who are already united, or have a mind to unite,
for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the
general name, property. (John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, 1690,
Chapter II).

Consequently, Augustan literature is to a large degree public, occasional,

mundane. Generally speaking, this is a literature predominantly of social record:
comedy of manners, pamphlet, satire, the addresses of philosophers, divines,
journalists, authors, essays, periodicals. It serves to popularize philosophical ideas, to
educate artistic tastes, to prevent social turbulence, to help polishing manners, and
breed civility, and to assist man in any other way in his effort to depart from the “state of
nature” and advance towards civilization. Writers are now addressing an extended
readership, aiming at a general rather than individual reception. In the mid-seventeenth
century, Comenius, who had been invited to Britain to help promoting the New
Education, was impressed by the amount of books that were being published. In 1709 a
Copyright Act granted writers certain royalties, and the large sales signalled the
existence of a wide popular market. Circulation increased, and periodicals such as “The
Taltler” and “The Spectator”, founded by Richard Steele and Joseph Addison,
disseminating the new ideas in every walk of life, benefited from wide circles of readers.
Pope's translations of the Illiad (175l-2o) and Odyssey (1725-26) sold remarkably well.
The taste for reading and the ability to read increased with the spreading of charitable
foundations, sunday schools, academies, circulating libraries. Contemporary travellers
testified to the existence of a cultivated reading public, and to knowledge of literature
circulating in common talk.

The desire for stability in politics and society bred the need for stability in language.
Science demanded precision, direct, unelaborate expression, as we have seen, and so
did the literary discourse. Florid, conceited style, the uneasy marriage of wit and the
puzzling paradoxes had become gratuitous exhibitionism, being replaced by a record of
actual experience, perceived in the broadlight of reason, apprehended with the unfailing
tools of judgement, and rendered discursively according to precise rules. As women
increased the numbers of the reading public, authors avoided the use of “hard words”.
The ideal idiom, refined in the conversation schools of the literary clubs and coffee
houses of Dryden's and Addison's days, was a variety of well-bred speech, free from
affectation, pedantry, rusticity, and crudeness. The efforts of a committee set up by the
Royal Society, of which Dryden was a member, to “improve the English language”,
particularly as an instrument of precise denotation in an empirically minded community
of speakers, were continued in the next century in the direction of stabilization. The
English language had been changing at an alarming rate, so that Geoffrey Chaucer's,
for instance, had become obscure within two centuries after his death. Language could
only be stabilized through dictionaries, deciding on correct meaning, laying down rules
of spelling, pronunciation. Nathaniel Bailey contributed the first lexicographical work
including all English words: Universal Etymological Dictionary (1721). In 1755, the
authoritative, critically and scholarly-minded Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary,
illustrating the meanings of words by quotations from literary works, ranging from Philip
Sidney's onwards.
 Characteristic of the age was the periodical essay, a literary kind invented by
Richard Steele in April 1709, when his “Tatler” was first issued. It was followed by other
periodicals, whose titles mirror the spirit of the Enlightenment: “The Spectator”, “The
Connoisseur”, “The Citizen of the World”. The primacy of knowledge, the
cosmopolitanism of the age meant an opening to the world, a search for models of
civilization, an interest in the new developments in the academies of France, in the
revolutionary trends in science and philosophy which emerged on the Continent.
Everybody shared Edmund Burke's view: We are afraid to put man to live and trade
each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each
man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general
bank and capital of nations and ages. Images drawn from the new, powerful world of
commerce and finances display a new notion of knowledge, not as the trophy of the
closeted scientist, or of the philosopher's “hermitage of the mind”, but as that which is
common acquisition, coming from minds working together and being shared with the
rest of the community. Ideas are no longer privately enjoyed in the intellect's ivory tower,
but disseminated like light all around. The Spectator – one of the imaginary personages
gathered in Steele's and Addison's literary clubs, with a complete fictional biography,
engages in a mutual exchange of ideas with his readers, invited to write back. A
hypothetic explanation of the emergence of a persona, of an objectified self in
eighteenth-century fiction, of a narrator different from the author (which was a symptom
of the general tendency towards impersonality, towards the dissolution of the private
into the social self) is Locke's theory of the mind examining its own workings. Be it as it
may, the Augustan theory of the imagination expounded in the 44th issue of “The
Spectator” (1712) is an aesthetic by-product of Locke's description of psychological
processes, which was thus popularized in a big run: It is this sense (i.e. sight) which
furnishes the imagination with its ideas; so that by the pleasures of the imagination, or
fancy (...) I here mean such as arise from visible objects, either when we have them
actually in our view, or when we call up their ideas into our minds by paintings, statues,
descriptions, or any the like occasion. We cannot, indeed, have a single image in the
fancy that did not make its first entrance through the sight; but we have the power of
retaining, altering, and compounding those images, which we have once received, into
all the varieties of picture and vision that are most agreeable to the imagination; for by
this faculty a man in a dungeon is capable of entertaining himself with scenes and
landscapes more beautiful than any that can be found in the whole compass of nature.

Addison and Steele were not only disseminating ideas but also constructing the
Augustan world of peace, tolerance, and social concord. They were helping bridge the
gap between town and country, present and past, smooth over differences between the
Tories and the Whigs, the hereditary aristocracy and the champions of industry,
between Cavalier and Puritan.

The Spectator, as the owner of a hereditary estate which has been in the family
since William the Conqueror, suggests the need for continuity in a people's history. Sir
Roger de Coverlay is a softened, sentimentalized version of the landed aristocracy. Like
Chaucer's “Knight”, he is still the first of his society, yet not as an awe-inspiring figure
but in a demystified travesty, with whom the rest of the company, lower in “estate”,
could feel at home. The details of his biography are picturesque and amusing: his great
grandfather invented an inoffensive country-dance, which is called after him, Sir Roger
was crossed in love by a perverse beautiful widow, and on some occasion he kicked
Bully Dawson in a public coffeehouse, for being called youngster. The most important
element in the “invention” of the Tory figure, however, is the mutual understanding
between himself and his tenants, their prosperity and love for him.

The champion of industry is Sir Andrew Freeport, a merchant of great eminence in

the city of London. The upper middle class figure is constructed in a similar idyllic light.
New elements have enriched the Augustan code of values: indefatigable industry,
strong reason, and great experience. Such qualities, as Robinson and his father are
well aware, had earned England a prominent place among the nations of the world. The
prosperous merchant figure too is softened and sentimentalized. Even if public opinion
suspects such people of some sly way of jesting, yet his ideas of trade are as noble and
generous as those inscribed in the Cavalier code. The model of the age goes beyond
social distinctions. The human ideal is an image, a construct, not a given. There is a
scaling down of man, removed from the centre of the universe into the entertaining
society of a “Chocolate-house”. Good-breeding replaces Charity at the top of the
hierarchy: the height of good breeding is shown rather in never giving offence, than in
doing obliging things. Thus, he that never shocks you, though he is seldom entertaining,
is more likely to keep your favour, than he who often entertains, and sometimes
displeases you. The most necessary talent therefore is a Man of Conversation, which is
what we ordinarily intend by a Fine Gentleman, is a good Judgement. He that has this
in Perfection, is master of his companion, without letting him see it; and has the same
advantage over man of any other qualifications whatsoever, as one that can see would
have over a blind man of ten times his strength. („The Tatler”, May 26, 1709).

The introduction of imaginary readers – persons of different humours and

characters – offered the possibility of varying the point of view on different subjects.
Conversation, discussion had proved more profitable than the blows of the Civil War. It
was the age of the public debate, the Parliament itself, possessed of new powers, was
called the “talking shop”. Negotiating ideas rather than killing in their name. Tolerance
was the pass-word in a century of talk and talkers. Political news and comment were
almost absent in the two periodicals, only interested in improving manners, morals,
artistic taste. “The Spectator” No 125 was teaching the lesson of recent history: There
cannot a greater judgement befall a country than such a dreadful spirit of division as
rends a government into two distinct peoples and makes them greater strangers and
more averse to one another than if they were actually two different nations (...) This
influence is very fatal both to men's moral and their understanding; it sinks the virtue of
a nation (...) and destroys even common sense.... And what could be worse in the “age
of reason and common sense”?...

The Romantics were the first literary “school” – a group of writers sharing a
common aesthetic program. The Augustan poetic arts are, from this point of view,
more divided, in their support of one or other trend of thought, intersecting and playing
against each other in the “grey beginning” of the modern age. The Cartesian division of
matter and spirit had wedged the critical spirit to the point of a breakdown. The very
medium of art, language, was subject to an unprecedented critical examination, words
and figures being utterly mistrusted in certain circles (The Royal Society, for instance)
as to their capacity to express the true essence of things. The medieval dispute
between nominalism and realism had mounted higher than ever. Swift pitches it to an
absurd height, in Gulliver's travel to Laputa (standing for the Royal Academy), where the
remedy suggested for the words' emptiness and conventionalism is that it would be
more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to
express the particular business they are to discourse on.

Thomas Hobbes advises the poet to carry about him the whole known world,
when he means to add to his better “Judgment” some mean “ornament”, be it an epithet
or a metaphor. The materialist-empirical version of aesthetics is provided by his Answer
to Sir Will. D'Avenant's Preface Before Gondibert. (a preface written in defence of the
heroic poem). His syllogistic progression sounds as dogmatic as medieval
scholasticism: Time and education beget experience; experience begets memory;
memory begets judgment and fancy; judgment begets the strength and structure and
fancy begets the ornaments of a poem. The ancients therefore fabled not absurdly in
making memory the Mother of Muses. For memory is the world (though not reality, yet
so as in a looking glass) in which the judgement, the severer sister, busieth herself in a
grave and rigid examination of all parts of Nature, and in registering by letters their
order, causes, uses, differences, and resemblances; whereby the fancy, when any work
of art is to be performed, finds her materials at hand and prepared for use, and needs
no more than a swift motion over them...

In conclusion, if some metaphysical wit runs into such fits of fancy as to associate
God with a pulley, it only happens because he has not “scanned” his memory seriously
enough to remember that he has never seen a pulley in such venerable company.

At the other pole, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (167l-
1713), advises the poet to forget about the whole damned world, and to turn to art in
order to find true beauty, and to meditate upon the supreme order of beauty, which is
the form-giving form. Natural beauty does not count, since it is transitory, it vanishes
with the recess or withdrawing of the beautifying power (Characteristics of Men,
Manners, Opinions, Times, Part III, Section II). One of Locke'e disciples, Shaftesbury
ended by rejecting his master, turning to Deism and to Platonism. Beauty cannot be
separated from moral goodness (beauty and good are one and the same:
kalokagathon), therefore it cannot rest in Nature. What will a classicist abhor?
Obviously, the shades, the rustic, the dissonancies, that wild beauty and high
irregularities in unspoiled nature, which the Romantics would relish. Taste requires
study, science, and learning (Characteristics, Ibidem). But even more regular
“lineaments” and proportions in the world of matter are inferior to those fashioned by the
hand of man as an effect of the forming power of the mind. Highest in rank is a sort of
Platonic Nous, or the “living forms” of the archetypes: that which fashions even minds
themselves, contains in itself all the beauties fashioned by their minds, and is
consequently the principle, source, and fountain of all beauty. The text itself is a
Platonic dialogue with Philocles as a Socrates figure.

John Dryden and Alexander Pope are the only ones who seem to stick to the
golden mean, and to talk in the neoclassical language. Dryden's Socrates in his Essay
of Dramatic Poesy is Neander, one of a company of four gentlemen who are sailing
down the Thames in a barge, trying to escape a siege of the Dutch fleet on June 3,
1645. The others are Crites, a severe critic (Gr. krinein: to dissociate, but also chrisis,
the personage giving an impression of sharp judgement and – a false one – of ill nature)
of the Moderns in comparison to the Ancients' greatness (while acknowledging the
Moderns' advances in optics, medicine, anatomy, astronomy, to the point at which
almost a new nature has been revealed to us); Lisideius, who defends the Moderns'
(Cavalier and later Augustan) code of aesthetic values, which also leads him to an
encomium of French drama, for observing the rules of the Ancients (Des trois unités, La
liaison des scénes) : even, sweet and flowing, majestic, correct, elevated, full of spirit,
lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, for the delight
and instruction of mankind. Eugenius, with his Hobbist expectations of a mechanical link
between the development of sciences (a knowledge of natural causes) and the
improvement of the arts. Neander shows the broadest understanding of “Nature”, whose
irregularities English drama could not help reflecting, and of the huge “Difformities” in
the human soul itself, which Shakespeare's more comprehending genius could not
ignore. He approves of “tragicomedy”, for is not life itself a mixture of occasions for
sorrow and for mirth, a sequence of pleasing and disturbing events? Today his attitude
would be termed “realistic” rather than “neoclassical”. The argument around the
comparative merits of English (particularly Shakespeare) and French dramatists was a
long on-going affair, which culminated in Samuel Johnson calling Voltaire a “petit
esprit”, for his misunderstanding of Shakespeare's genius, and Voltaire calling Johnson
a “practical joker and a drunk” for talking such nonsense.

Alexander Pope is the only one who produced a “neoclassical Bible” in his Essay
on Criticism. The poet is to follow Nature but Nature methodized, that is the dramatic
representation of the world in the ancients' discourse: fable, subject, purpose, the way
they mirrored the social, religious etc, context, the spirit of the age. The best poet is the
best student of the ancients, their best imitator. The English should forget their pride in
refusing to follow “foreign laws”, which resulted in their being “less civilized”, and
observe the rules and laws of artistic representation (design, language, versification), as
they had been laid down by Boileau, who “still in right of Horace sways”. John Dryden
had created the first body of professional criticism in England, and had launched the
idea of “literary age”. In his Preface to Don Sebastian (1690), he says that Materia
Poetica is “as common to all Writers as the Materia Medica to all Physicians”. The body
of nature, the flesh of the world are not subject to historical inflexions. What gives one
right of property over the assets of literature is “the contrivance, the new turn” – i.e. the
historically specific encodings of the literary discourse. It was Pope's turn to discover the
international character of the literary codes at some time or other. With him, the search
for common stylistic features, for a rhetorical paradigm as valid in England as on the
Continent, replaced the more primitive recourse to alien stuff as random sources of
inspiration. It was no longer a matter of adapting, imitating or even stealing...; it was an
awareness of the existence of some normative poetics bespeaking the spirit of an age.
The individual genius of a Hamlet, who would not play someone else's tune, the
originality sought by Sidney, the “Liberty of Wit” which had prompted the wild troping of
the metaphysicals were denounced as primitive and counterproductive in an age of
cosmopolitan and collective values, European tours, and universalizing spirit. The
Britons (the use of the Roman appellative is significant) should follow the example of
French intellectual and aesthetic discipline. The illuminizing code of reason and
progress found in neoclassicist formality its ally as a formative element:

But Critic Learning flourished most in France

The Rules, a Nation born to serve, obeys,

And Boileau still in right of Horace sways

But we, have Britons, Foreign Laws despised,

And kept unconquered and uncivilized.

Fierce for the Liberty of Wit and bold

We still defy the Romans as of old.

Nevertheless, Pope also mentions the opposite tradition, of inspired art and the
sublime, whose definition had been provided by Longinus in his Peri Hypsous (1st
century). It is true that Nicolas Boileau had translated it into French in 1674, yet his
subsequent L'Art Poétique had opted for Horace. Pope prefers to straddle the two
positions, praising with a vengeance the “offending Wit” capable of snatching a grace
“beyond the reach of Art”, the Lucky Licence which Critics “dare not mend”, and the
original Example which becomes the Law. Apparently, Dryden and Pope had problems
imposing the strict normative usage of the neoclassicalists, as they had to cope with
“offending” Shakespeare's genius...

A refined civilization is the joint work of many artisans. Enlightenment poetics is

oriented to a practical finality, that of refining manners and of enlarging the minds of
men (Thomas Hayward, The British Muse, 1738, and Isaac Watts, The Improvement of
the Mind, 1741). In his “Life of Addison” (Lives of the English Poets), Samuel Johnson,
the great legislator of the republic of letters in mid century, expresses his appreciation of
the more recent literature which, even if, contrary to Locke's prescriptions, is no longer
ashamed of pleasing as well, had managed however to breed new standards and
values into the society, even among the idle rich, emulating not only graceful manners
but also intellectual elegance. Being stylish, classy, had a more serious purport than the
shallow fashionableness of the Restoration aristocrats. One also needed a knowledge
of Greek and Latin models, of grammar, and a range of experience which betrayed a
“citizen of the world”.
 The recourse to set forms and generic conventions, even if accompanied by small
inventions, show the Augustans' penchant for formality. Witty phrasing and
expressiveness are not an end in themselves: accurate representation (Pope: “Truth
convinced at Sight we find”) and the force of the shaping intellect („That gives us back
the Image of our Mind”) are expected to deepen the effect of the aesthetic (sensory)
enjoyment of art. The Augustan concept of “correctness”, referring to the metrical
structure, was illustrated by Pope in the high regularity of the couplet. Pope condemns
the variations in line-length (for instance, the Spenserian use of a final, longer
alexandrine), although he highly praises the music of Dryden's poetry, which relies
precisely on a very flexible, changing metric scheme. “Neoclassical” also means anti-
medieval, Pope placing Boileau at the top of a gallery of enlightened minds, which had
put an end to the “barbarous age” and had driven the “holy Vandals” off the stage of
history.

The Restoration of the Stuarts (1860-1889) is an age of social refinement and

self-complacency. All anxiety has been hushed, and an easily reachable ideal has
replaced the baroque impasse with the insoluble incongruities of the human condition.
Dryden congratulates his contemporaries on having outgrown the “less polished” and
“unskilled” age of Jonson, the faults and errors of that art, while linking, in a
symptomatically neoclassic manner, the present artistic refinement with that of the
society in its entirety:

„tis not the poet, but the age is praised.

Wit's now arrived to a more high degree;

Our native language more refined and free,

Our ladies and our men now speak more wit

In conversation, than those poets writ.

(Epilogue to The Conquest of Granada, II)

Obviously, polish of manners, wit in conversation, and refinement in language are

not heroic ideals. For all that, the protagonists of an unheroic age cling to a pseudo-
courtly ideal, defending heroic literary kinds, heroic plots, which most often than not
amount to mere extravagance of events and sentiments. Consequently, Restoration art
displays a hybrid character, mingling conventions which neither come together nor
serve a meaningful antithesis. They simply turn on their own axes, annulling each
other’s effects.

The loyalists who had followed exiled royalty to France had brought back with them
a rich display of gallantry and conversational cunning, to which witty and polished verse
could be added for the mere necessity of amorous conquests. The hedonistic court of
Charles II resumed its patronage of the theatre world, rebuilding it in its image. In the
eyes of the respectable middle-class, it was a place of vice and corruption. Nor were
Restoration playwrights gravitating around the Court more interested in winning the
esteem of the Town. The middle-class code of values (virtue, marriage, honesty,
hospitality) is ridiculed, the respectable squires and merchants being shown as the
target of the Court gallants' cunning games and tricks. When it is not class-drama, the
play thematizes the battle between the sexes as an encounter between prudence (a
fallen version of virtue) and cunning masculine sexual siege (a fallen version of love).
The rich scenery catered for the contemporary concern with a more accurate
representation of space, while the introduction of women actresses contributed more
relish to the preoccupations with love, primary physical appetite.

The display of cunning in action and of a quick repartee in speech well matches
the attitude of cynical detachment. Less fortunate is the combination of love
entanglements, with seducers testing a woman's leaning to prudence or surrender, and
a heroic plot, with characters torn between conflicting loyalties in the Corneille fashion
(The Comical Revenge by George Etherege, 1634-1691). William Wycherley (1640-
1716) plays on the misanthrope theme in The Plain-Dealer, and on the contrast
between public pretence of virtue and private reality of lust in The Country Wife, with a
typical tandem of profligate and cuckolded husband in Mr. Horner and Mr. Pinchwife.
Even Dryden yields to the fashion, combining comic action and heroic subplot in
Marriage ŕ la Mode. From vices, brilliantly satirized by Butler, hypocrisy and cynicism
have turned into such tyrannical fashion ( „ way of the world”) that characters are
ashamed of their more humane emotions, doing their best to conceal them behind
words and gestures (William Congreve, The Way of the World).

While almost forgotten as a Restoration dramatist, drawing on the Spanish farcical

comedy, or yielding to the literary taste of the time for heroic tragedy in Abdelazar,
Aphra Behn has been recently rediscovered, particularly by feminist criticism, as a poet
and fictionist, with particular merits in the birth of the modern novel. Her novella
Oroonoko: Or the Royal Slave, written and published in 1688, may also be said to
combine a heroic plot with a realistic story of early colonial venture. The novella
received an early recognition as a seminal work in the tradition of antislavery writings,
and its staging by Thomas Southerne in 1696 increased its public appeal.

Oroonoko is an early stance of the self-conscious female narrator, pondering on

her capacities to handle a literary convention which till then had been the province of
“the more sublime wit” of male narrators. The spirit of a new age, more realistically and
practically-minded, can be inferred from her emphatic profession of truth in narrating
events she actually experienced, not imagined.

Oroonoko is a noble African prince, taken into slavery to the West Indies. Reunited
to his beloved, Imoinda, in Suriname, a British colony in Guiana, he leads a slave
rebellion which leads to the heroes' deaths: Imoinda at the hands of her lover,
Oroonoko, executed by the colonists.

Oroonoko's exploits follow closely the pattern of the hero from the origins to the
present: Homer's hero, invincible in battle, doing single-handedly such things as will not
be believed that human strength can perform, Virgil's good conduct, Renaissance
Humanity and Learning, reigning well and governing as wisely, Augustan ease in Wit
more quick and a conversation most sweet and diverting. In everything he does, he is
guided by the conventional aristocratic code of love and honour, typical of the
Restoration heroic convention. Even killing a tiger proves child's play, and is not
considered too high a price for love and gallantry. At the same time, the novella is an
example of the reductive strategy through which the alien figure of the native is
assimilated by the metropolitan observer. Natives and Europeans are forcibly brought
into contact, and the colonialist-economic relationships engage new psychological
realities: both parties confront outsider perspectives, unfamiliar Others. One hypostasis
of this cross-cultural relationship is identification. As we have seen, the African native
is naturalized within a European's cultural paradigm. Except for his black complexion,
his physical appearance can be barely distinguished from the classical beauty of the
English princes: he is most admirably turned from head to foot, his nose is rising and
Roman instead of African, his lips are not those great turned lips which are so natural to
the rest of the Negroes. Oroonoko entertains a neoclassical admiration for the Roman
world, behaving like someone educated in some European court. The native is made to
assimilate the imperialist's standards, his insider norms.

The forcible cultural assimilation has an economic correlate. The listing of all sorts
of goods, beginning with the feathers which they order in all shapes and which adorn
the dress of the Indian Queen, infinitely admired by persons of quality, skins of
prodigious snakes, baskets, weapons, fish, venison, buffalo's skin..., the evocation of
the brilliant colours of a paradise of birds and beasts betray all the fascination the New
World of colonial commerce and luxury was exerting on the colonizers' imagination,
including the aristocracy.
 The colonial paradigm is enacted by – the least expected – Restoration poetry.
The description of the Thames in Cooper's Hill by John Denham applies the classical
ekphrasis to an encomium of the economic realities made possible by the river, the
order of art and that of nature being brought together in the neoclassical golden mean:

Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,

Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full.

The descriptive details of this landscape poem amount in fact to a meditation on

the way in which it affects the life of the community, from the mowers and plowmans on
the banks to the great navigators and colonizers. There is no sparkling imagery of the
watery body (as in the Anglo-Saxon Durham) but only a dry report on the various profits
of the river. Mythological framing (The Thames as a river god, the most lov'd of all the
Oceans sons) and lyricism dissolve into the language of economy and empire-building,
which is curiously inverted, from outward venture into home-coming and abolition of
Otherness:

When he to boast, or to disperse his stores

Full of the tribute of his grateful shores,

Visits the world, and in his flying towers

Brings home to us, and makes both Indies ours;

Finds wealth where 'tis, bestows it where it wants

Cities in deserts, woods in Cities plants.

So that to us no thing, no place is strange…

At the beginning of John Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Lisideius drops a

“conceit” about those poets capable to write a panegyric upon a victory and at the same
time a funeral elegy upon the vanquished, whose courage deserved a better destiny.
With “neoclassical ease”, Dryden passed from the “funeral dirge” of the Heroic Stanzas
on the Death of Oliver Cromwell (1659), to a poem in heroic couplets welcoming
Charles back one year later: Astraea Redux. At that restless end of the century a poet's
destiny actually seemed to depend a lot upon political commitment. Dryden's genius
was even more apparent in 1889, and yet the Poet Laureateship went from him to his
dull rival Shadwell on William III's accession. Dryden's conversion to Catholicism, apart
from his open support of the Stuarts, had its share in his fall from favour. The poet faced
it all with the courage and detachment that is always to be expected from a great
personality.

The balanced structure of the decasyllabic couplet, with the crisp effect of the
end-stopped rhyme, which Dryden developed, provided the formally tight and
harmonious stylistic matrix of an entire age. The classical bent is also apparent in the
public themes of his occasional elegies (On the Death of Lord Hastings), odes (To the
Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady, Mrs. Anne Killigrew), satires (The
Medal, against Shaftesbury and the Whigs, which meant “against sedition”). The
support of the establishment, of the status quo takes two forms: either that of praise,
the panegyric of the existing order as the only legitimate, or of satire against those who
subverted rules and conventions considered to be normative.

Of the greatest satirical poem in the language, Absalom and Achitophel, probably
written at the request of Charles II, to turn opinion against the supporters of the
Exclusion Bill, it may be said that it does both. That is why it is difficult to classify it: the
satire against Shaftesbury, the Duke of Buckingham, Monmouth and the rest of the
rebel party, is doubled by the legitimating story of Charles and his brother, cast as a
mythical allegory (Absalom rebelling against his father, King David) with several
passages sounding like a heroic poem. It does not mean that the poem is formally
loose, its various threads being woven into a perfectly calculated and harmonious
design. The “impure” aspect is the result of an original development of the English
seventeenth-century satire from the Elizabethan Complaint: Before the changeover
from Complaint to satire fully can be grasped, a brief description (...) of the two forms is
necessary. While both types protest current policy and urge the reform, or at least the
altering of present conduct in some way, notable contrasts in style and tone, in the use
of persona, and in the ultimate objective of the remonstrance divide Complaint and
satire. In general, Complaint speaks abstractly, often allegorically (...) By contrast, satire
tends to fasten upon the here and now – the temporal rather than the spiritual. Knavery
and folly are given a local habitation and a name; satirists draw a hard-edged portrait of
the contemporary setting. Named individuals and groups, rather than general types, are
depicted engaged in earthly wrongdoing [7]. Dryden expounds his views on the nature
and particularly formal aspects of this literary kind in his Discourse Concerning the
Original and Progress of Satire, prefaced to verse translations from Juvenal. Its late
seventeenth-century form has to be in keeping with the general need of decorum,
urbanity and elegant wit prevailing among contemporaries, so it will not clash with the
panegyric element: Yet still the nicest and most delicate touches of satire consist in fine
raillery... How easy it is to call rogue and villain, and that wittily! But how hard to make a
man appear a fool, a blockhead or a knave, without using any of these opprobrious
terms!... Neither is it true that the fineness of raillery is offensive, a witty man is tickled
while he is hurt in this manner, and a fool feels it not... I avoided the mention of great
crimes, and applied myself to the representing of blind sides and little extravagances.

One of the characters who must have felt “tickled”, although the praise is
ambiguous, was the King himself. For whereas in David's time polygamy was legitimate,
in Dryden's Christian world it was considered a sin, and it had not been “priestcraft” that
had declared it so. The issue was important in an argument over legitimacy; for
Monmouth was thus reminded of his illegitimacy, but this circumstance also detracted
from the king's justness. Dryden's allusion to Charles having a bastard son after David's
example is therefore a two-edged strategy: defence or irony? As a consequence, the
poem starts both in a majestically panegyric and ambiguously subversive way, which
diminishes the heroic aspect, smoothing the transition to the satirical. The comparison
between God creating man in his image and the procreative potential of David/Charles
has rather a mock-heroic effect.

In pious times ere priestcraft did begin,

Before polygamy was made a sin;

When man on many multiplied his kind,

Ere one to one was cursedly confined,...

Then Israel's monarch after Heaven's own heart

The vigorous warmth did variously impart

To wives and slaves; and, wide as his command,

Scatter'd his Maker's image through the land (I, 1-10).

The portraits of Achitophel/Shaftesbury and of Zimri/Buckingham are both topical

and timeless, in pure neoclassical fashion, which means description of human nature
and character having general validity. Buckingham's verse serving his amoral
sensualism and stylized hedonism is easily recognizable, but at the same time the
individual is made into a type: the reckless shifty, Protean philanderer, no more
consistent in his opinions than in his gallant games:

In the first rank of these did Zimri stand;

 A man so various, that he seem'd to be

Not one, but all mankind's epitome:

Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,

Was every thing by starts, and nothing long;

But, in the course of one revolving moon,

Was chymist, fidler, statesman, and buffoon;

Ten all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,

Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking (I, 544-552).

Achitophel/Shafetsbury's portrait is a sketchy, stereotyped character progress (a

predictable career, from birth to maturity), the human type (the first in a certain order,
the arche-type or original model), which is that of the scheming politician, being
individualized only through the physical details of a shapeless body as the proper
embodiment of social anarchy. The poetic language has something of a metaphysical
quality in the fusion of abstract and concrete images: a shapeless son for an offspring,
and a ruined social order as a result of irresponsible political action:

Of these the false Achitophel was first,

A name to all succeeding ages cursed:

Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit,

Restless, unfix'd in principles and place,

In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace:

A fiery soul, which, working out its way,

Fretted the pigmy-body to decay,

And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay.

 A daring pilot in extremity;...

Else why should he, with wealth and honour blest,

Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?

Punish a body which he could not please,

Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?

And all to leave what with his toil he won,

To that unfeather'd two-legg'd thing, a son,

Got, while his soul did huddled notions try,

And born a shapeless lump, like anarchy (I, 150-159, 165-172).

The ethical interrogation is never pitched too high by the classic's moderate and
commonsensical appreciation of a good life, including wealth, honour, security, rather
than loyalty as an absolute and fight to the death, characteristic of heroic times. In fact
there is no absolute centre of power, but only some anonymous law, governing God
himself, and some particular good, to which the king is bound in a way more appropriate
to the power relations in a commonwealth.

And public good, that universal call,

To which even Heaven submitted, answered all. ((I, 421-22)

Kings are the public pillars of the state,

Born to sustain and prop the nation's weight (I, 953-54)

For all that, Dryden's choice expressed in Religio Laici is revealed religion, with the
incarnated God, the poem being a refutation of the Deist conception about the universe
as a mechanical system, free from God's intervention, and whose law can be
completely realized in the finite mind. In a beast fable published five years later (1687),
The Hind and the Panther, Dryden is obviously in favour of the Catholic Church, the
unspotted hind of Rome. Such vacillations are characteristic of this age of transition to
the modern, desacralized world. Dryden's conscious attempt to speak a traditional
language is continually subverted by elements of the new world picture coalescing from
the new science and philosophy, which steal into his poems.

The neoclassic mock-heroic is a sort of Menippean satire, featuring an upside-

down world, carnival-like, excentric (off-centred, decentered), effecting a temporary
suspension of coherence. The baroque love of opposites urges Butler to redeploy a
structure of meaning on a low level, or in low style. Hudibras has not managed to
corrupt the fixed stars of his world, which are still shining: Montaigne, Tycho Brahe,
Jacob Behmen, the refined science of logic, the gift of “Study, Industry, or Brains”; it is
only that he makes such a poor work of them. Dryden's mock-heroic instates a realm of
total non-signification, a sinister absence of meaning. One gets the feeling that the
negation of cultural order has gone so far as to make no more value possible any
longer. This cosmic picture is a sign of a desacralized world, generating a literature of
logocentric subversion. Mac Flecknoe, Prince of Dullness, appoints a bad poet,
Shadwell, as his true successor. The temporary negation of all order is meant, just like
in a carnival, to reestablish the Augustan positive side of the coin, with judgement as the
supreme aesthetic value.

All human things are subject to decay,

And when fate summons, monarchs must obey,

This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young

In prose and verse, was own'd, without dispute,

Through all the realms of Nonsense, absolute.

Dryden's reinscription of Dante's Beatrice (a dead lady of exceptional

accomplishments, admitted to heaven and mediating there for mortals) in Mrs. Killigrew
is a transfer from a Theology-figure to a neoclassic artist-figure combining, according to
Horace's precept, the gifts of the sister-arts of poetry and music (ut pictura poesis). The
lady's portrait focuses the classic trinity of grace, well-proportioned shape, and beautiful
lineaments, while her skill enacts the same aesthetic ideal: truthfulness, visualizing
potential, perfect shape, face, lineament (To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished
Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew, Excellent in the Two Sister-Arts of Poesie and
Painting, 1693).

As for music, that of Dryden's verse is unique in English poetry. The changing
rhythms, geared to the sense unit of a complete thought, like a musical phrase, the
echoing sounds, the vowel variations of his two odes commissioned for St. Cecilia's Day
go far beyond neoclassical regularity and uniformity, snatching “graces” beyond the
reach of prosodic norms. The series of annual celebrations in honour of St. Cecilia's
Day (November 22), the patroness of music, mounted on a regular basis from 1683 to
1703, benefited by the contributions of Dryden, Pope, Henry Purcell. The Odes were
performed by the combined quires of several churches, accompanied by an
instrumental ensemble and the theatre orchestras. It was a grand affair, and Dryden's
efforts to exploit all the possibilities of the conditions of performance are obvious.
Dryden recovers the Pindaric principle of ring composition in the overall design.
Pindar's structure of strophe and antistrophe (the latter ending with the first line of the
strophe, which gives a sense of closure) still left out something supplementary: the
epode (sung after), serving as a sort of fixed point (Ben Jonson calls it “stand”). Dryden
rounds up the whole structure, the end coinciding with the beginning: from the tuning of
the universe to its apocalyptic untuning in A Song for St. Cecilia's Day. Circularity or
closure are also the effect of the allegorical mediation between planes of being: the
power of pagan music to transcend matter (the immaterial sounds of the instrument)
and the power of Christian music (vocal music) to enact a sort of incarnation, that of
sounds into words, articulated by the human voice. Yet Dryden preserves several
elements of the ancient Greek tradition, when armies used to sing as they went into
battle: the power of music to arouse the timorous, to calm down the warring spirit, to
sooth and comfort over loss, etc.

Although availing himself of traditional mythopoetic material (the Platonic idea of

the creation of the universe from music, or the theory of the four elements), Dryden
instils elements from a Newtonic cosmic picture into his “hymn of creation” (for ... atoms
and Diapason), which opens his Ode to St. Cecilia's Day. The world is not created out of
nothing, but through a cosmic arrangement of the original confusion of “jarring atoms”:

From Harmony, from Heav'nly Harmony

This universal frame began,

When Nature underneath a heap

Of jarring Atoms lay,

And cou'd not heave her Head,

The tuneful voice was heard from high,

Arise ye more than dead.

Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry,

In order to their station leap,

 And MUSICK's Pow'r obey.

From Harmony, from Heav'nly Harmony

This Universal Frame began

From Harmony to Harmony

Through all the compass of the Notes it ran,

The Diapason closing full in Man.

The poet establishes a sort of Hobbist, mechanistic link between the kinds of
musical sounds playing upon our ears and the kinds of affections they arouse: the
trumpets stirring the listener to arms, the flute accompanying the “woes of hopeless
lovers”, the violin inflicting “jealous pangs”.

Nor is the end of the Ode an orthodox apocalypse, leading to revelation of a a

higher spiritual order. On the contrary, on the moment that the harsh sound of the
trumpet is heard, the music and the orderly progression of the spheres will cease, the
musical design will disappear. The celebration had a religious significance, church
music being defended in a special sermon. Yet Dryden makes the end of his Ode sound
very ambiguous in its terrifying picture of the death of life and the triumph of death, in
the dissolution of heaven itself, in the absence of any hint at resurrection. Art, music, the
tuned structure of the universe become an end in themselves, ruling out the religious,
doctrinary aspect:

So when the last and dreadful hour

This crumbling Pageant shall devour,

The TRUMPET shall be heard on high,

The dead shall live, the Living die,

And MUSICK shall untune the sky!

The power of music is the subject of the other St. Cecilia Ode, Alexander's Feast.
The refrain, None but the Brave deserves the Fair, obviously pits art against valour,
triumph in battle, with the former rising higher on the scales of values. It is not music
celebrating martial power but martial power competing for the Fair trophy. The great
Alexander is completely in Timotheus's power, who can control his martial drive, his
state of mind, his visions by simply playing his instrument. The glory of the pagan
performer is celebrated almost to the end of the poem, when St. Cecilia is finally
brought onto the stage, unable, over the few remaining lines, to conquer Timotheus in a
sort of Pythian contest:

Let old Timotheus yield the prize,

Or both divide the Crown;

He raised a mortal to the skies;

She drew an angel down.

References:

[1] P. N. Furbank, W.R. Owens, The Myth of Defoe as Applebee's Man, “The Review of
English Studies”, May, 1997.

[2] Theodore Redpath, Bacon and the Advancement of Learning in The New Pelican
Guide to English Literature, 3. From Donne to Marvell, edited by Boris Ford, Penguin
Books, p. 145

[3] Simon Varey, Space and the 18th c. Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

[4] Robert Morris, An Essay in Defence of Ancient Architecture, 1728.

[5] Alexander Pope. Essays for the Tercentenary, edited by Colin Nicholson, Aberdeen
University Press, 1988.

[6] Gheorghe Vladutescu, O istorie a ideilor filosofice, Editura Ştiinţifică, 1990, p. 289.

[7] Kirk Combe, The New Voice of Political Dissent. The Transition from Complaint to
Satire in Theorizing Satire, edied by Brian A. Connery and Kirk Combe, Macmillan,
1995, pp. 76-77.
 Alexander Pope takes the crown of poetic excellence from Dryden in his own
words: a cleverly contrived “re-make”:

Of Orpheus now no more let poets tell,

To bright Cecilia greater power is given;

His numbers raised a shade from hell,

Hers lift the soul to heaven.

Almost all Pope's poems may be said to be imitations. What exactly is the
meaning of this concept in Pope's case, to which we tend to ascribe a pejorative
sense? What elements has Pope substituted, for instance, in this quote from his own
Ode for Music on St. Cecilia's Day, published in 1713, but written in 1708, at the
very start of the poet's career? Dryden had inserted an allegory of the supremacy of
Beauty. Timotheus's music urges Alexander to battle, inflames him with the desire
to march forth and destroy another Troy, not like Achilles, through military valour,
not like Ulysses, through cunning, but like Helen, through her beauty. Pope
introduces the archetypal artist, Orpheus, and the archetypal shift from a pagan
to a Christian world, by reversing Dryden's “directions”: an attempt at
transcendence of that reality which Orpheus lost in looking straight in the face, to
press, as Pope says in his Essay on Man, on higher powers. The object of Pope's art
is neither the real Eurydice – individual and empirical experience – nor the
embodiment of imagined, Platonic “shadows” drawn from the mind's underworld,
but “Nature methodized”: the human show in the intersubjective approach which is
possible thought embodied paradigms, the previous works of art. The typical
Augustan writer is self-conscious in the extreme, observing generic identity. Literary
conventions are structuring devices which mediate in multiple ways the writer's
experience of the world. Pope reaches that healthy condition of art, in which a
meaningful pattern can be discerned, without diminishing the impact of a vividly
realized experience. The observation of the recurrence of literary ideas, and of the
reinscription strategy in great masters of the world accompanied Pope's first
awakening to a critical apprehension of the nature of poetry. In reading several
passages of the Prophet Isaiah, which foretell the coming of Christ and the felicities
attending it, I could not but observe a remarkable parity between many of the
thoughts, and those in the Pollio of Virgil. This will not seem surprising, when we
reflect, that the Eclogue was taken from a Sibilline prophecy on the same subject.
One may judge that Virgil did not copy it line by line, but selected such idea as best
agreed with the nature of pastoral poetry, and disposed them in that manner which
served most to beautify his piece. I have endeavoured the same in this imitation of
him... (Advertisement to Messiah. A Sacred Eclogue. In Imitation of Virgil's Pollio).
Apart from the study of canonical aspects (the nature of pastoral poetry), another
favourite neoclassic principle is the “parity” between form and content (such idea
as best agreed with the nature of pastoral poetry). Or, as the poet recommends in
his Essay on Criticism:
 When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,

The line too labours, and the words move slow (37o-37l)

Whether in a contemporary scene laid in the fashionable world of the artists

(the garrulous poetasters in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot), in a reconstruction of
medieval pageantry (Eloisa to Abelard), or in an imaginary scene, filled with sylphs
and Rosicrucian Angellic Intelligences (The Rape of the Lock), the same universal
human passions are embodied in lively characters, brought to our minds with the
vivacity of a heard and seen experience. In what way have they been
“methodized”? Pope's view not only of human character but also of the possibility to
understand and render it truthfully is rendered in that double movement of his
Moral Essays (and of his other “essays” as well): discursive and self-reflexive. Is
human nature to be studied in books or through actual experience? The four
epistles going under the title of Moral Essays provide an answer whose complexity
bespeaks Pope's mature vision, as well as his surprisingly modern view of the
individual inserted into structures of intersubjectivity. The reliability of actual
experience is doubtful, he points out in the first Epistle: a) because there is no such
thing in nature as a pure human type, like the Manichean Virtues and Vices of
medieval allegories, or a stable human self:

But these plain Characters we rarely find;

Though strong the bent, yet quick the turns of mind:

Or puzzling contraries confound the whole;

Or affectations quite reverse the soul.

The Dull, flat falsehood serves, for policy;

And in the Cunning, truth itself's a lie;

Unthought-of Frailties cheat us in the Wise;

The Fool lies hid in inconsistencies.

See the same man, in vigour, in the gout;

Alone, in company; in place, or out;

Early at Business, and at Hazard late;

Mad at a Fox Chase, wise at a debate;

Drunk at a Borough, civil at a Ball;

Friendly at Hackney, faithless at Whitehall (I, 63-75)

 The descent from paradigm – Characters – to ever more particular details
until the type is immersed in topographical details is characteristic of Pope. Actual
experience is also unreliable because b) our apprehension of the object is filtered
through our own subjectivity, colourer by our individual point of view:

Yet more; the difference is as great between

The optics seeing, as the object seen.

All Manners take a tincture from our own;

Or come discoloured through our Passions shown.

Or fancy's beam enlarges, multiplies,

Contracts, inverts, and gives ten thousand dyes (I, 31-36).

Pope also refutes the ancients' illusion that man can be known through his
actions (we cannot, unless we know their inner motivation), as well as the medieval
association between social rank and a set of moral qualities:

'Tis from high Life high Characters are drawn;

A Saint in Crape is twice a saint in Lawn;

A Judge is just, a Chancellor juster still

A Gowman, learned; a Bishop, what you will;

Wise, if a Minister; but, if a King,

More wise, more learned, more just, more everything (I, 135-140)

Why should wretchedness be past speaking only in a king? Pope seems to

be questioning Shakespeare. Human character does not depend upon the outward
circumstances of birth. Nor is Pope inclined to believe in the over-optimistic fiction
of the luminaries, that education can modify character:

'Tis education forms the common mind,

Just as the Twig is bent, the Tree's inclined (I, 149-15o).

 If in the previous quote the poet's irony is most effective in the play of
sobriety and colloquial jest, in the last, his skill can be seen in the most efficacious
choice of imagery: one can see the tree bending, under the taboos imposed by
social institutions on the social ego, and yet never ceasing to be like a tree, a twig,
a natural outgrowth, that which one is by nature.

What Pope seems to suggest through the final example of a man proved, in
his last breath, to be different from the one people had known a lifetime, is that it is
only in discourse, where the empirical has been abolished (allegorically, at the end
of life) that a character can be known in a complete and permanent form. That
general human nature appealing to the classic can only be constructed in the
intersubjective order of the text, and not within the horizon of the empirical
subjectivity. That is why a study of brag, for instance, may prove more profitable in
Plautus than either at Hackney or Whitehall. A vivid image of avarice comes out of
only a few lines, as persuasively as that which collects in Moličre's celebrated play,
out of a host of circumstantial details:

The Courtier smooth, who forty years had shined

An humble servant to all human kind,

Just brought out this, when scarce his tongue could stir,

“If – where I’m going – I could serve you, Sir?”

“I give and I devise (old Euclio said,

And sighed) “my lands and tenements to Ned.”

“Your money, Sir;” “My money, Sir, what all?”

Why, – if I must – (then wept) I give it Paul.”

“The Manor, Sir?” – “The Manor! hold” he cried,

“Not that, – A cannot part with that” – and died. (I, 252-26o)

From his earliest discourses on pastoral poetry to the rhetoric lore preceding
The Dunciad, and to the Imitations of Horace, Pope shows himself concerned to the
utmost degree with the conditions and strategies of reinscription: what use did
Virgil make of Theocritus, why did he modernize the language of pastoral instead of
sticking to obsolete forms, how can a literary convention be updated, in form and
spirit, how can Pope comment on Augustan England by analogy with Horace's
commentary on Augustan Rome, how can a heroic convention be naturalized in an
unheroic age like the present? The self-possessed, detached tone, the urbane,
polished language belong to a strong personality, drawing on classical precedent
with the confident ease of a master builder seizing on his bricks rather than with the
awed admiration of an apprentice.

Pope's exercise in the topographical poem as a kind of descriptive and

reflective poetry was occasioned by the Peace of Utrecht. There is something in the
shot pheasant episode amounting to a sort of heraldic gloss which tells of proud
empires coming and going on the great stage of history. The formal beauty of the
shot bird and the colour symbolism is deliberately artificial, suggesting a “cease of
majesty” rather than the death of a bird, however rare:

See! from the brake the whirring Pheasant springs,

And mounts exulting on triumphant wings;

Short is his joy; he feels the fiery wound,

Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground.

Ah! what avail his glossy, varying dyes,

His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes,

The vivid green his shining plumes unfold,

His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold?

Eloisa to Abelard is an imitation of the Ovidian heroic epistle on the theme of

frustrated passion. Conflicting loyalties had been a favourite theme since the
Restoration, but Pope enlarges it to an ideological conflict engaging the whole
medieval society. The twelfth-century heroine, confined to a monastery after an
impossible love for Abelard, a learned theologian, communicates her feelings of
frustration in a passionate discourse, vacillating between remorse and defiant
acknowledgement of sensual desire, complaint and envy of the other nuns for
whom cloistered life comes naturally as the free choice of their ascetic leanings and
devotion, between repentance and an openly erotic carpe diem, summing up the
crux of the medieval feeling about sexuality:

Come, Abelard! for what hast thou to dread ?

The torch of Venus burns not for the dead.

Nature stands checked; Religion disapproves;

 Even thou art cold – yet Eloisa loves.

Ah hopeless, lasting flames! like those that burn

To light the dead, and warm th' unfruitful urn. (257-26o).

Eloisa's letter, as a response to one of Abelard's to a friend, which had

awakened her passion for him (as the reader is informed in the Argument to the
poem), is in fact a locus copiae (Yet write, oh, write me all, that I may griefs to thy
griefs, and echo sighs to thine – 4l /42). Not only a copia of the Ovidian convention
(love letter). The heroine is inscribed in Abelard's discourse, her language
echoing the ideas of “conceptualism”, Abelard's intermediary doctrine in the
medieval dispute between the extremes of nominalism and realism. If Eloisa does
not word her thought of Abelard – the Idea, or concept – which is mixed with God's
in her mind or in her heart, does it mean that she no longer entertains it? Where do
reality, presence reside? In the mind that thinks, in the heart that feels or in the
words that can no more suppress them than the iron fetters of Religion? Pope's
view of the negotiations between language, society and ideology (the way in which
man relates himself to the conditions of his existence) brings him very close to us.
The closed circuit of the “letter” (graphical sign and discourse), with its autonomous
causality, and implacable necessity shows that the reality constructed through
discourse is equally capable to “awaken” states of consciousness as real events:

Yet, yet I love! – From Abelard it came,

And Eloisa must kiss the name.

Dear fatal name! rest ever unrevealed,

Nor pass these lips in holy silence sealed;

Hide it, my heart, within that close disguise,

Where mixed with God's, his loved Idea lies:

O write it not my hand – the name appears

Already written – wash it out, my tears!

In vain lost Eloisa weeps and prays,

Her heart still dictates, and her hand obeys (7-16).

Satire, however, was the Augustans' favourite, for how else were they to
castigate mores and to construct their paragon of civilization? As Pope never
abandoned his obsession with imitation, he looked back to classical precedent and
gave a negative reinscription of the heroic poem as mock-heroic. The battle of the
sexes, another Restoration theme, is broadened into a tableau vivant of the
fashionable world. The shallow drawing-room society with its petty pursuits is
ridiculed in the grand manner of heroic poetry. The story of an adventurous Baron
who manages by fraud to possess himself of fair Belinda's lock of hair is cast in
Homeric mould: an invocation to the Muse, the ritual of Belinda's (late) morning
toilet, assisted by outworldy sylphs, going busy about the fair lady's cosmetic
powers, the Baron's ritual of sacrifice to the gods of love, whose assistance in
securing the lock is secured by the incense arising from the twelve vast French
romances, the three garters, a pair of gloves, billet-doux and other trophies of
former loves which the Baron burns on the altar of his fireplace, supernatural
agency (sylphs, gnomes, demons, the fates) engaging on either side of the battle,
which is a game of cards ending with the Baron's revenge in cutting the long-
coveted lock. The satirical onslaught on the trivial concerns and passions of the
fashionable society depends for its humorous relish on the contrast provided by the
framing esoteric doctrines: Platonic, Rosicrucian, alchemical. The drawing-room
types are distilled into their eternal essences: If Plato be right about the soul's
passions surviving after death, then a woman's posthumous yield will be the love of
“Ombre” and other trifling delights. The description of the real characters
themselves looking like animated cards is the climax of Pope's reductive game with
his society. Antithetical rhetorical frames are brought into collision, the zeugma
(yoking) figure replacing a logic of parallel by one of explosive contrast, of
paradoxical antithesis. If, in the Essay on Man, it serves to suggest that everything
in the world is relative to everything else, because it can either be seen from below
as something superior, or from above as something of trifling importance – And now
a bubble burst, and now a world –, in The Rape of the Lock the rhetorical meaning is
the total collapse of values in a world which no longer differentiates between piety
and luxury, prudence and virtue, devotion and entertainment, emotional and
economic loss etc.

Whether the nymph shall break Diana's law,

Or some frail china-jar receive a flaw;

Or stain her honour or her new brocade;

Forget her prayers, or miss a masquerade

Or lose her heart, or necklace, at a ball; (Canto II, 105-109)

The deconstruction of the traditional code of values, which at that time was
another symptom of an incipient metaphysical crisis, is completed in The Dunciad.
Pope's models range from Homer to Dryden's MacFlecknoe (in which the author
acknowledged a debt to Hudibras), in that specifically English poise between the
foreign and the native literary tradition, between tradition and innovation, between
past and present. The mock-heroic reinscription is carried one step further by
providing the fictional world of the text with all the para-texts accompanying its
publication: two Advertisements, an address from the publisher, a letter to the
publisher, critical comment, revision of the text. The critical views of Pope's mask,
Matinus Scriblerus, are here a feeble echo of his long pedantic mock-treatise on the
basic mock-heroic strategy, Peri Bathous, where this deflating strategy is given a
literal translation – “the art of sinking in poetry” – and a “dignified” status as the
modern correlate of the sublime. Scriblerus invokes the ancients' authority in order
to legitimise the new literary convention. As Aristotle mentions a treatise on
comedy apart from the celebrated one on tragedy, which was never found,
Scriblerus infers that he ought to have thought of The Dunciad. We wonder whether
Umberto Eco, who makes a similar speculation in his novel, The Name of the Rose,
was familiar with the Dunciad case.

The Goddess of the Empire of Dulness dreams to restore her former glory, to
which purpose she chooses the dull poet Bays (probably Theobald or Gibber), whom
she coronates in the Temple of Fame. The analogy with the epic canon imposed by
Homer and Virgil provides a humorous anticlimax: The King being proclaimed, the
solemnity is graced with public games, and sports of various kinds; not instituted by
the Hero, as by Aeneas in Virgil, but for greater honour by the Goddess in person (in
like manner as the games Pythia, Isthmia, etc. were anciently said to be ordained
by the Gods, and as Thetis herself appearing, according to Homer Odyssey XXIV,
proposed the prizes in honour of her son Achilles) – Argument to Book the Second.
Another parallel, that between the funeral games of the Aeneid and the contests of
the “bards of these degenerate days”, accompanied by critics and booksellers,
carries a powerful intimation of the death of literature in the machinery of book
publication, advertising and commercialization in the modern world. Literature was
no longer written for a restricted elite, it had been subjected to middle-class
standards and to the pressure of the market-place. Another bathetic association is
that between The Aeneid VI, with the Sibyl's famous prophecy of the future Roman
Empire, and the visions of the past, present, and future reign of Dulness in Dunciad
III. Scriptural echoes steal into the last part, with the theme of election and that of
revelation of the divinity to her chosen one (Dulness revealing herself to Bays).
Communication with the divine, however, is no longer the work of Grace but the
catching disease of the “Yawn of Gods”...The triumph of the Empire of Dulness is in
fact Pope's triumph in writing it: The Dunciad, that is the Illiad and the Aeneid of the
eighteenth century. An exorcistic rite of an age setting the highest prize on Reason.
The overwhelming show of the extinction of civilization is an implicit encomium of
its arts: philosophy, metaphysics, mathematics, morality, all are brought down to
the dead level of existence. Pope laments the corruption of science into casuistry, of
philosophy into empiricism, of metaphysics into mathematical constructs. The
negation of cultural order is the very reversal of Genesis, a return to the “uncreating
word” of Night Primeval, and of Chaos old:

Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS ! is restored;

Light dies before thy uncreating word:

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;

And universal Darkness buries All.

In the preface to the second edition of Winter (1726), James Thomson urged his
contemporaries to turn towards “great and serious subjects”. It is particularly in The
Dunciad that Alexander Pope shows the negative rhetoric of satire as being the
royal road to them.

The eighteenth century saw not only the birth of the English novel but also a
diversity of narrative strategies which entitles us to consider the general picture as
a microscopic image of the entire subsequent development of English fiction.

The English word for the new literary genre stresses its “novelty” and not its
origin in romance. In fact, it develops out of non-fictional material: diary,
letters, biography, travel accounts, journalism [8] The great contributors, of
which Elizabethan romance remained a minor source, were the straightforward
narrative style of A Pilgrim's Progress, the periodical essays of Steele and Addison,
with their anecdotes illustrative of character, fictional biographies, and attempted
psychological characterization, the factual style of Defoe's journalistic work, Aphra
Behn's incipient realism in placing heroic actions and character in contemporary
society. With their characteristic awareness of generic identity, the English writers –
Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Charlotte Lennox – identified their model in
Cervantes. Here is Tobias Smollett: representing familiar scenes in an uncommon
and amusing point of view, Cervantes, by an inimitable piece of ridicule reformed
the taste of mankind, representing chivalry in the right point of view (Preface to
Roderick Random). Realism, familiar scenes, point of view, that is artistic
representation not as a mirror but as a narrative perspective on the
action, allowing of the structuring of story into plot, as well as the break
with pre-modern mentalities – this is a splendid characterization, in no way
inferior to Samuel Johnson’s, who was the century's uncontested arbiter of taste:
The works of fiction with which the present generation seems more particularly
delighted are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that
daily happen in the world and influenced by passions and qualities which are really
to be found in conversing with mankind. Its province is to bring about natural
events by easy means and to keep up curiosity without the help of wonder. It is
therefore precluded from the machines and expedients of the heroic romance and
can neither employ giants to snatch away a lady from the nuptial rites, nor knights
to bring her back from captivity („The Rambler”, No 4). Charlotte Lennox
undertakes in The Female Quixote (1752) to awaken the representatives of the fair
sex from their dreamy worlds constructed by French romances of the previous
centuries. Inflamed with their stories of the ladies' abduction by profligate knights,
Arabella sees in every male acquaintance a possible threat, to her commonsensical
cousin's embarrassment (Mr. Glanville). The new form of fictional narrative tells the
modern story of humanity's disenchantment with the medieval world: a call for
realism, an acknowledgement of facts, a break-up of the feudal immobility of status.
The picaro (Spanish: a rogue) travels through a variety of low life settings, where
the humours and passions are undisguised by affectation, ceremony or education
(Smollett, Ibidem). There is an explosive broadening of the human spectre
and social range represented in a narrative, as the high road and the inn provide
a suitable scene for the testing of character, and for the reunion of the most diverse
social types. The novel is associated with the town, where large numbers of
people mingle their inner, individual lives into the inextricable webs of social
intercourse. Characters are no longer atemporal types but social types, rooted in
historical codes, and realized as highly idiosyncretic individuals, each with
his private emotions and personal qualities. In the age of mounting capitalist
individualism, the inner self, subjective experience become as important as social
determinism, while, in a static feudal community, human destiny is shaped by the
circumstances of birth. Alexander Pope launches his attack on the mechanical
association of character and status, and on the wooden types of class comedy in his
first Moral Essay (150-157):

Boastful and rough, your first Son is a Squire;

The next a Tradesman, meek, and much a liar;

Tom struts a Soldier, open, bold, and brave;

Will sneaks a Scrivener, an exceeding knave:

 Is he a Churchman? then he's fond of power;

A Quaker? sly: A Presbyterian ? sour:

A smart freethinker? all things in an hour.

Not only the enormous social displacements but also habits of psychological
observation and satirical comment on manners and morals in view of improving
them – Hominem pagina nostra sapit – have made possible a more realistic
representation of human character: We are very curious to observe the behaviour
of great men and their clients; but the same passions and interests move men in
lower spheres: and I (that have nothing else to do but make observations) see in
every parish, street, lane, and alley, of this populous city, a little potentate that has
his court and his flatterers, who lay snares for his affection and favour by the same
arts that are practised upon men in higher stations (The Spectator, 49, 1711).
Richard Steele says here as much as John Gay in The Beggar's Opera, 1728. It is a
collection of lyrics set to popular airs mocking the fashionable Italian opera, whose
artificiality is also ridiculed by Pope in The Dunciad, and by Addison. The subversion
of a discourse of power – an artistic convention hospitable to a feudal mode of
vision – is doubled by the subversion of the social power system: the parallels
between Gay's plot and the social-political realities of the time show persons in high
positions no better than the treacherous highwaymen, and manners in high and low
life as strikingly similar. Linked with the habits of mind and artistic tastes of the
rising middle-class, the novel tends towards a plain, yet educated language,
towards an expository narrative, with a colloquial ring, yet betraying the ease and
correctness of the coffee-house conversation. Augustan diction – balanced,
assured in tone, of homely directness and natural ease – smoothes over the
rich variety of the languages absorbed into the force field of fictional narration:
Swift's Rebelaisean erudition employed in an extravaganza of plain nonsense,
Defoe's fascination with the language of the market-place made to serve the
empire-builders, the waste of rhetorical subtlety and the misapplications of the
learned wit drawing on the latest philosophical and scientific theories in the
members of the Scriblerus Club, who meant to amend “all the false tastes in
learning” (founded in 1713 by Pope, Gay, and Parnell), the homeliness of serious
aesthetic reflection and the decorum of the low characters' speech.

The “knowledge of the world” mediated by Defoe's Review, running in thrice-

weekly issues from 1704 to 1713, is also disseminating the language of business
and politics. The language of the Church is no longer supposed to be that of
inspiration and of devotion, but a recital of the professionals’ sermons available in
print, and developed into a continued system of practical divinity. (The Spectator,
106, 1711). Even the language of Swift's satirical prose, reminding of the
metaphysicals' genius for metaphorical wit, with explosive puns and compact welds
of the erudite and the grotesquely concrete, assumes the natural tone of the
matter-of-fact. The enormity of the farcical imagination and the playfulness of the
imagistic games lend a fantastic dimension to the usual topicalness of non-fiction. In
order to match the philosophers' wild leaps between empiricism and idealism,
dualism and monism, the chameleonic discourse ebbs from the medieval scholastic
argument (Chap. VIII of A Tale of a Tub, 1704, on the Aeolists) to the dry scientific
report on the experimental observation. The most absurd syllogistic ratiocinations
are conducted on the most confident and natural tone, the Hobbist theory on the
dialectic of sensation/memory of the thing as mental perception is rendered through
a trivial object whose name marks the shift from present to past visual perception:
They (the preachers working on the minds of the congregation) violently strain their
Eye balls inward, half closing the Lids; Then, as they sit, they are in a perpetual
Motion and Sea-saw... (The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, 1704). Swift is
comically reversing all the basic assumptions of the age, whether in matters of
politics, science or social organization. The extravagant exploitation of learned
materials achieves sort of mock-heroic effects in his exploratory pamphlets. The
mock-heroic separation of narrator and characters (dramatically presented by the
former) is paralleled here by the writer's adoption of a mask. As a persona, he dares
to advance the most shocking arguments, submitting the reader's logic and
common sense to unprecedented violence. In A Modest Proposal for Preventing the
Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to their Parents or Country,
and for Making them Beneficial to the Public, 1729, the horrifying suggestion that
the children of the Irish poor should be sold as food for the tables of the English rich
may, through detachment, be advanced in someone else's person in all its shocking
details, with the most audacious intimations: I believe no Gentleman would repine
to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good, fat Child.

It was William Hogarth (1697-1754) that mainly influenced the eighteenth-

century taste for distortion and caricature. His engravings, drawings, paintings
reveal, with a satirical force comparable with that of Swift and Pope, the hypocrisy
and cruelty of the fashionable society of his day. His conversation pieces are a
graphical illustration of Steele’s and Addison's periodical essay: little paintings of
figures in characteristic attitudes and groupings, conversing indoors or in the open.
Hogarth's realistic-moralizing bent – painting and engraving moral subjects, a field
not broken up in any country of any age – influenced the early eighteenth-century
novel to a considerable extent. The visual arts were made to narrate a story, just as
poetry was expected to have a great visualizing potential. His ’conversation
pieces ’ tell a dramatic story of the kind Defoe or Fielding are casting into words: A
Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress, Marriage ŕ la Mode, The Four Stages of Cruelty.
The cautionary tale of his character progress – Tom Nero starting by torturing
dogs and horses, advancing to rape and murder, and ending on the gallows, his
corpse being subsequently dissected at Surgeons' Hall – was another favourite
among contemporaries. In his Preface to Joseph Andrews (a burlesque of
Richardson's Pamela), Fielding defends Hogarth against the charge of Caricature in
painting, which he sees as the analogue of burlesque in literature: even if his
characters do not seem to breathe, like humans in flesh and blood, yet they seem to
think!

A cautionary story is Daniel Defoe's first novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719-

1720). Yet it is much more than that. Whereas Mary Shelley's Frankenstein can be
traced back to the Faust figure, Robinson Crusoe is a modern myth entirely
contributed by the young bourgeois civilization of which England was the chief
representative in eighteenth-century Europe.

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robisnon Crusoe is not a quest
of honour, happiness or redemption but a factual travel narrative, a story of the
struggle for survival and physical comfort. Robinson is not the daring hero of
romance but the prudential protagonist of a non-heroic age. He is not devoid,
however, of his peculiar, new sort of grandeur, which makes him a hero of
eighteenth-century Western Europe: he is the Empire-builder, who carries the
benefits of civilization to savage lands, where he imposes his rule. He is the
economic man, who recapitulates on his island the basic processes of production
and consumption. We also agree with Ian Watt [9], that Robinson is not relying on
Providence but rather on a secularized version of Puritanism – the capitalist
individualistic doctrine of self-help, “unwearied diligence and application”. We shall
go one step further, and say that Defoe conscientiously develops a story of
disenchantment with Providence, this being the first assertion of the modern,
empirically-minded homo faber. Robinson Crusoe is a modern myth also because it
is not centred in the origin. The hero himself was colonized before becoming himself
a colonist. He repeats a story, he does not create an archetype. His father had come
to England from Bremen, had adopted his wife's English name, and even his son's
name – Kreutznaer – had been changed to “Crusoe” by the usual corruption of
words in English.

The age is full of Horatian (sixth Satire from the Second Book) predicaments on
the good life. According to Pomfret or Sir Roger Coverlay, it consists in a leisurely
gentlemanly life, preferably in the country, spent in the reading of books and
enjoyment of good company. Robinson's father's point of view is middle-class
complacency, or rather willing self-delusion, betraying both the satisfaction of being
above those in need, and the resentful dismissal of the abused aristocracy's
enjoyment of luxury and pride of caste: He bid me observe it (...) that calamities of
life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle
station had the fewest disasters, and was not expos'd to so many vicissitudes as
the higher or lower part of mankind; nay they were not subjected to so many
distempers and uneasiness, either of body or mind as those were who, by vicious
living, luxury and extravagances on one hand or by hard labour, want of
necessaries, and mean or insufficient diet on the other, bring distempers upon
themselves (...) that the middle station of life was calculated for all kinds of vertues
and all kinds of enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the hand-maids of a middle
fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable
diversions, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessings attending the middle
station of life. In Crusoe there burns the spirit of the new rising bourgeoisie, which
was challenging and reaching up to the supreme power in the state, or in the world.
As noticed by Hogarth, the alliance between the aristocracy and the commercial
magnates was the keystone of the Augustan social and political system. Crusoe will
rise above the “middle station” of his plantation and trade in “Brasils”, he dreams of
becoming very rich, even by engaging in the slave trade, for which special licence
was needed in the 166os from Spain and Portugal – the most powerful colonizers.
He teaches savages the language of master and slave, Friday and Master, enacting
the paradigm of capitalist exploitation and imperialist colonialization with the
imposition of the European's values, religion, language. It would have made a stoick
smile to have seen me and my little family sit down to dinner; there was my
majesty the prince and lord of the whole island; I had the lives of all my subjects at
my absolute command; I could hang, draw, give liberty, and take it away, and no
rebels among all my subjects. Then to see how like a king I din'd too, all alone,
attended by my servants. Poll, as if he had been my favourite, was the only person
permitted to talk to me. My dog, who was now grown very old and crazy, and had
found no species to multiply his kind upon, sat always at my right hand, and two
cats, one on one side of the table, and one on the other, expecting now and then a
bit from my hand, as a mark of special favour. Crusoe does not love cats, for he has
shot some of them, nor parrots, as his first lesson to Friday is not on naming “the
bigger and the lesser light”, like Prospero's to Caliban, but on shooting a parrot. Yet
he enjoys a show of what looks like absolutist feudal power. Although completely
merged into the middle-class economy of the production and commercialization of
goods, of getting rich and working his way up into the world, Robinson cannot help
admiring and envying the aristocratic ceremonial, or being fascinated with status.
The language of affections as well as the moral sense are completely missing (see
Robinson selling Xury, the moorish boy who had helped his escape from the pirates'
captivity in Guiana), having been replaced by practical morality (do not do unto
cannibals what you would not like them to do unto you), and by the discourse of
utility and economic efficiency. The enumeration of the goods he has rescued from
the wrecked ship, the detailed description of the material conditions of his existence
– building and working, and extending into “the country” residence etc. – help to
construct the faber figure which has replaced that of Faustus in a desacralized
world.

In matters of devotion, there is an evolution in Robinson from blind belief in

Providence towards an empiricism which has extinguished even the last traces of
practical or business-like religion. There are several scenes of obviously
programmatic demystification: Robinson thanking God for the unexpected harvest
of barley, and his disappointment at discovering the natural cause of the supposed
miracle: the grains of corn he had carelessly scattered on a piece of fertile ground
on emptying out a purse he had found on the ship. He hears some secret voice
calling out to him in his dream, and, on waking up in terror, he discovers it to be
coming from his parrot, whom he had taught a few words. He has a dream
prophesying his meeting Friday, but not all details coincide with the actual events,
nor does he rely on his dream in order to secure himself company. On being asked
by Crusoe who he is, the Spaniard he saves from the cannibals' feast, coming from
Old Europe, answers in Bunyan's language, which in the state of nature sounds
rather obsolete and inefficient: “Christianus”. He is very weak and faint, that he
could scarce stand or speak. Robinson urges him, like Shakespeare's Stephano, to
“kiss the book”, that is to drink some rum from his bottle, and to accept some
weapons. The effect is miraculous: as if they had put new vigour into him, he flew
upon his murderers like a fury, and had cut two of them in pieces in an instant. By
releasing the captain of the mutinous crew, Robinson and Friday are taken for gods,
like Stephano and Trinculo – a fiction the “master” discourages with the
commonsensical argument that the angels would have been better clothed, while
suggesting that, under the circumstances, he makes the more efficient god: “All
help is from heaven, sir”, said I. “But can you put a stranger in the way how to help
you, for you seem to me to be in some great distress”.

The humanity Defoe set out to represent required narrative realism in which
his life as a journalist had long trained him. The I-narrator (narrative in the first
person), also dramatized as the hero of the action (intradiegetic narrator), is a
guarantor of truthfulness, reinforced by the author's prefatory statement that he
merely chanced upon the manuscript, which seems to be a just history of fact, with
no fiction in it. The powerful impression of verisimility is indeed ensured by Defoe's
perusal of the actual accounts of Alexander Selkirk and other castaways. The lucid
prose, economic, straight to the point, resembles that of “debtor and creditor”, as
the narrator himself confesses about his first “balance sheet” of good and evil in his
wreck. The narrative structure is programmatically chosen to match, in Augustan
fashion, the factual content of the plot. All narrators and observers, whether first or
third person, can relay their tales to us primarily as scene (...), primarily as
summary or what Lubbock called “picture” (Addison's almost completely non-scenic
tales in The Spectator), or, most commonly, as a combination of the two[10].
Robinson illustrates both, the diary being a sort of quantifier (measuring out in
dates, figures, brief summaries) of the actual experience. Inner and outer reality are
interconnected, the representation of the world follows the realist convention of
(natural) cause-and-effect in constructing the plot, and displays a belief in the
knowable and “writerly” quality of experience. The scenic (quote A) yields to the
summary (quote B), in Addison's manner, because a selection is necessary of the
significant elements from among the chaotic mass of facts, as well as their
qualification, that is the expression of the narrator's attitude to the situation. The
journal is an objectified and “methodized” version of the real self, Robinson
referring to himself as if to an otherness. Like in Lacan's mirror-stage [11], the hero
contemplates his own image in his text, constructed for intersubjective others. The
self-reflexive narrator lays bare his stylistic choices in writing The Journal. The
reader is thus inculpated with the production of the text, noticing, for instance, how
the uncurtailed description, the picturesque and the sentimental, tedious details,
the real life redundancies have been ruled out.

(Quote A) I ran about the shore, wringing my hands, and beating my head and
face, exclaiming at my misery and crying out, I was undone, undone, till tyr'd and
faint I was forc'd to lie down on the ground to repose, but durst not sleep for fear of
being devourd.

(Quote B) The Journal. September 30, 1659. I, poor miserable Robinson Crusoe,
being shipwreck'd during a dreadful storm, in the offing, came on shore of this
dismal unfortunate island, which I call'd the Island of Despair, all the rest of the
ship's company being drown'd and myself almost dead.

The impression of impersonality in a first-person narrative becomes possible

through the variation of perspectives in a consciousness which doubles back upon
itself, making an effort to present the action from different perspectives (an
optimistic pitied against a pessimistic view).

Encouraged by the huge public success of the novel, which shows how much
affined it was to the contemporary mode of vision and sensibility, Defoe wrote two
continuations: The Further Adventures, and The Serious Reflections of Robinson
Crusoe. The habit of reflection has complexified the empirical self. A critique of
vulgar empiricism coming from Descartes, Leibnitz or even Locke, who nevertheless
allows of autonomous workings of the intellect, may be spotted in Robinson's
intimation of the mind escaping the slavery of sense impressions. As his brother's
son, whom he has provided for, as if he had been his own child, expresses his own
secret desire of revisiting the island on which he had spent some thirty years of his
life, Robinson launches on the following speculation, redeeming the former purely
factual account. Nothing can be a greater demonstration of a future state, and of
the existence of the invisible world, than the concurrence of second causes with the
ideas of things, which we form in our minds, perfectly reserv'd, and not
communicated to any in the world. (introductory chapter to Further Adventures...).
In The Serious Reflections, Defoe makes a hint that the story is an allegory of his
own life. In the opening chapter, Of Solitude, he converts Crusoe's experience on
the island into a metaphor of man's loneliness as an inescapable predicament: ... it
seems to me that life in general is, or ought to be, but one universal act of solitude.
Everything revolves in our minds by innumerable circular motions, all centering in
ourselves... we love, we hate, we covet, we enjoy, all in privacy and solitude. The
quote is symptomatic of the unexpected consequence of Locke's empirical theory of
sensations and ideas: the scepticism of the intellect locked up in its private dream
of the world, informing the Romantic cult of the idiosyncretic individual self.
Robinson's conclusion is also symptomatic of the feeling of alienation which the
individualistic capitalist enterprise brought along with it.

His next works of fiction bear titles relating us again to individuals, but the
characters are now closer to the picaro pattern: criminals, whores, pirates. In The
Fortunate Mistress (1724), also known as Roxana, the heroine's life of prostitution
brings, according to the sombre Puritanic view, a terrible punishment upon her
head. Unlike it, Moll Flanders (1722), also a first-person narrative, shows the happy
reunion of a reformed prostitute to her Lancashire husband, after years of perdition.
The economic motivation – she was forced to leave her home in order to make a
living – is carried into an amoral picture of a society in which outdated notions like
chastity or virtue have been ascribed a certain monetary value. Yielding under the
sway of the generalized social market-place, Moll sells her own body because she
has nothing else to sell.

The shrewd manipulation of the point of view takes us to the other extremity of
the 18th-century narrative range: Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift, which
draws on the fantastic of medieval romance. It is a novel of pattern, not a novel
of life [12], since it is not the illusion of the texture of life, in its reality and normal
chronology, that collects at the end of this splendid fictional satire, but a certain
symbolical design: the characters stand for different aspects of the human race. We
may say, therefore, that this is a thesis novel, or a novel with a key. Gulliver's
Travels is also a satirical novel, a naive narrator travelling among strange peoples
– not believable characters and situations – on whom he comments from an
incompatible perspective. A double structure of meaning is thus being encoded:
surface and underlying, literal and of rhetorical deviation (irony). It is also a pioneer
work of science fiction (travel in space and other dimensions), or of utopian
fiction, with a pastoral element in the satirical comment on a society by
comparison with another.

No wonder the idea of a book of travels should have suggested itself at a time
when daring colonialist ventures and exploratory voyages had made them very
popular, but Gulliver's Travels is in a higher degree illustrative of the innovating
spirit which was galvanizing the ambitious mid-century English artists. Hogarth was
not alone in attempting a formal break-through; Samuel Richardson too boasted
having hit upon a new species of writing – the novel in letters, Pamela –, Henry
Fielding himself took pride in his comic epic in prose, or prose burlesque, a kind
of writing which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our
language (Joseph Andrews). Laurence Sterne, who in his audacious Tristram
Shandy (Book V, Ch. 1) ridicules the technique of emptying old books into new, or
walking the trodden path, exercised himself in a completely new manner of writing.
In fact, Henry Fielding concludes in the first chapter of his Tom Jones, it is novelty of
form rather than of subject that bespeaks a writer's “excellence”. Or, in the terms of
his delicious gastronomic metaphor, the reader's mental entertainment will benefit
less from the sort of subject the author is cooking than from its being well dressed-
up. If the piquancy of English eighteenth-century novels has earned them a
worldwide readership down to our days, their formal relevance has made them an
apt illustrative material for theoreticians of fiction, as different as M. Bakhtin, René
Wellek and Austin Warren, Wayne C. Booth.

In Jonathan Swift the experimenting demon works such wonders that the
Gulliver narrative looks like a prose transposition of Pope's Essay on Man: the same
relativistic worldoutlook motivated by the speculation on the existence not only of
different modes of being but also of different modes of perception (in Spinoza, they
are the same totality, Hegel says, regarded from either point of view: as range or as
thought). The doctrinary stringency of Pope's didactic essay is missing altogether,
the author delighting in the upside-down world of Menippean satire (Gulliver finds
himself admiring horses, for instance, and feeling inferior). The broad comedy, with
grotesque overtones, of the prejudices and partialities of all creatures' ego-centrism
(„centering on ourselves”, as Defoe says) has never ceased to be of topical interest,
particularly today when attempts are being made at a reconstruction of world
literature canons, freed from the biases of Europocentrism. The function of the
picaro, fool and buffo, according to Bakhtin [13], is that of disengaging the modern
worldview from the feudal episteme. The individual is pleading for freedom from all
conventional forms of existence, taking the liberty to challenge the establishment,
to remove masks, and tell the truth obliquely by miming the stranger's lack of
comprehension. Don Quixote, the model of the age, is a characteristic blend of the
“strange miraculous world” of the courtly romance “chronotope” and the highway of
a familiar world, characteristic of the picaresque novel. The passion for travel takes
Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships, to remote
nations of the world, where scales and values keep shifting: giants or dwarfs,
reasoning horses or human beings without the gift of reason. And yet, from another
point of view, he never leaves home. Wherever he goes he takes with him the day's
political disputes, the philosophical arguments, the realignment of values, the
inquiry into the comparative merits of empiricism and transcendentalism, reason
and the senses, pragmatism and idealism. The love of paradox Swift shares with
Pope sets reality in an ever new and surprising perspective, overthrowing habits of
thought and long-cherished values, forcing a fresh response from the bewildered
consciousness. The setting is no longer realistic in novels of pattern, but
conventional, symbolic. Diminutive dimensions symbolize petty pursuits and
narrow-mindedness. The inhabitants of Lilliput have been waging endless civil wars
caused by a ridiculous argument over the advisability of breaking the bigger or the
smaller end of their eggs, of wearing low heels or high heels etc. The feeling of a
fatal confinement of understanding within the physical horizon of one's existence
contributes an underground tragical vein to the comical plot. A limited creature will
always measure everything by a yardstick which is in fact his own measure. The
Lilliputians trace everything down to their own dimensions. They have placed
themselves at the centre of the universe, and their understanding of anything in it
is reductive, “Lilliputianocentric”. Here is the report on their “pick-pocketing” the
“Mountain Man” (Gulliver has also proved remarkably clever, yet it is only physical
prodigiousness that impresses them): we observed a girdle about his waste made of
the hide of some prodigious animal; from which, on the left side, hung a sword of
the length of five men; and on the right, a bag or pouch divided into two cells; each
cell capable of holding three of your Majesty's subjects. In one of these cells were
several globes of balls of a most ponderous metal, about the bigness of our heads,
and required a strong hand to lift them; the other cell contained a heap of certain
black grains, but of no great bulk or weight, for we could hold about fifty of them in
the palms of our hands. If we agree with the classical narrative of the
Enlightenment, as a progress from the optimistic belief in the light of reason and
the justness of a rational universe imprinting its harmonious design on society as
well, towards a less-confident and even satirical view, leading to a bleak recognition
of the dark side of life and, consequently, offering up love-kindness, generosity of
feeling, sentimentality and the like as solutions, then Swift is located in the middle
stream. Universalizing perspectives and ideas yield to a historicist awareness of the
cognitive structures mediating, for each people, its knowledge of the world.
Gulliver's watch looks totally unfamiliar to the Lilliputians, and, ironically, they take
Gulliver for the uncouth primitive man, praying to idols... Advanced machinery is
interpreted as a drawback, a recourse to magic. Dissatisfaction with the
establishment transpires in Gulliver's actual contact with such practices on the
island of sorcerers and magicians. The personages of the past they conjure up –
Brutus, Socrates, Cato, Thomas More – share the same attempt of resisting the
power structures. From acquiescence and promotion of peace and stability, the age
is drifting towards contention. The Rabelaisian mix of imaginary voyage and political
satire qualifies Swift's novel for the prestigious tradition of conte philosophique or
philosophical fable, testing philosophical hypotheses and comparative values. Is
man a rational animal? Is universal knowledge possible? Does touring around the
world enlighten one's mind? The Augustan ideal is seriously threatened. Actual
experience is derealized as some kind of troping, for instance, anthropomorphic
gigantism. The land of the giants, Brobdingnag, is that of broad-mindedness as well.
From a higher, enlightened perspective, the Torry/Whig confrontation appears as
ridiculous as that between Lilliput and Blefuscu. In the light of common sense and
reason, intestine strife is absurd. Why have secrets of state when there is no threat
from a foreign enemy? Why have a government which should turn half the people
against the other half? The comments of the uncomprehending Gulliver complaining
about the Brobdingnag King's lack of comprehension are an oblique attack upon
Gulliver's world, which he naively defends while decrying the intolerable
confinement of the art of government within the “narrow” bounds of common sense
and reason, justice and toleration, or of research to applied science, which can
improve living conditions, with no regard for “ideas, entities, abstractions and
transcendental categories” – the scholastic “chronotope”.

Swift's world is that which had been revealed by the magnifying glass and by the
telescope. They ought to have had the same effect as the invention of the camera, utilizing
long-range and close-up lens. By observing the object at a distance or taking a close look at
it one reaches different conclusions. The self and the world are destabilized, threatening to
vanish into a game of perspectives or a clash of points of view. The modern relativist spirit
has been born, an anxiety can be sensed in the inquiry about the world – not as to being the
best, but as to being at all. Is there anything stable at the core, as its essence? Is it merely a
shifting representation, disclosing more about the observer than about the observed? Are the
supreme Augustan values – reason and judgement – any good? Another symbolical space: a
flying island symbolizing a humanity taken up with its own fantasies, losing all grounding in
 reality and common sense. In the country of the most passionate cult of science and the arts,
one cannot find a single straight wall or a single right angle. The land yields little, people are
starving. Science is divorced from the practical ends of a material civilization. The members
of the academy of Lagado (a satirical portrait of the Royal Academy) are employing their
imagination in gratuitous, absurd inventions. Finally there are the reasoning horses. Swift is
an Augustan, yet, like Pope, he responds in a fuller sense to experience, in its entire
complexity: sense and judgement, reason and feeling, abstract concept and sensuous grasp.
The cult of reason as an end in itself may pervert it into something unnatural, inhuman,
stifling affections and crippling the complete human personality. These rational creatures do
not experience the all too human fear of death as the very end of consciousness; they do not
experience love, only coupling for the pragmatic purpose of multiplying the race; their poetry
is didactic, offering instruction but no emotional enjoyment. No wonder the most rational
creature reaches a point where humanity ceases, going back to beastly mechanical
adaptation or fitness of means to ends. Journeying through the world of the mind, Gulliver
discovers its triumph in the death of the heart. There is a seed here out of which the Orwell
world would germinate. Gulliver's explorative journey into human possibilities has come full
circle, and the best of all possible worlds has not been found. Man is locked in contradictions,
life is such an insoluble lump!

The epistemological impasse is communicated through structural and stylistic

devices: irony, paradoxes, tricks of logic, outrageous conclusions to false premises.
Gulliver is un unreliable narrator, an unstable self, who changes from one journey to
another, who is shaped by the discontinuities of experience, rather than remaining
in (rational) control of reality. Not even in control of his own discourse. He
understands less than the reader is given to understand. He aims at one thing, and
gets the opposite. He means to prove the superiority of the human race, but the
enumeration of the means of destruction perfected by man only yields an
apocalyptic show of grim humour: I assured him that I had seen them blow up a
hundred enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship, and beheld the dead
bodies come down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of the
spectators. The implied author remains at a distance from the dramatized
narrator (intradiagetic, who is also a character in the story), manipulating him as
he would a puppet in the public square shows of the time, while building, through
the subverting play of rhetoric, a bridge over to the reader's understanding of the
truth of the situation No reader will fail to retrieve the true rhetorical meaning of
Gulliver's literal upholding of the wrong point of view.

The programme of formal experimentation is a sign of the shift to modern

aesthetics. Ancient ideal beauty is no longer the universal yardstick. Another sign
thereof is the divorce between cultural and social norms. Hobbes's Answer to
Davenant outlines a kind of “class poetic”, making literary kinds dependent upon
social estates and the town/country divide. The heroic poem and tragedy are
suitable for the Court, the burlesque – satire and comedy – is the proper medium for
the City, whereas pastoral poetry is meant for village life. The Augustan Age is
reputed for letter-writing. But it was not only Lady Mary Wortley Montague or Lord
John Byrom who were exercising themselves in the restrained manner and balanced
syntax of the Augustan best. William Shenstone too was calling upon the attention
of country clergy or gentry, sharing his personal experience of landscape gardening,
reading, his delight in a Horatian “enjoyment of country air, and retirement”.
Finally, letter writing appeared to be a legitimate occupation for humble people, in
the proper art of which, employed on different occasions, they needed to be
instructed. In 1638 Samuel Richardson was thus instructing “A Father to a Daughter
in Service”. That was how Pamela was born two years later. Richardson's first long
epistolary novel emerges as a body of letters from Pamela, a modest girl in
service, to her parents, “writing to the moment” on her master's attempting her
virtue. For the sake of veridicity, the author reserves for himself the modest role of
editor who arranged for print, annoted and indexed the documents. This new
narrative technique has certain disadvantages – the imposition to keep characters
apart, for why else should they be writing letters? But it also opens new possibilities
for the exploration of the mind, of feelings, of states of consciousness. It was an
alternative to the picaro convention, with its unchanging, outwardly described
character, moving through a sequence of events, and from one place to another.
The new internal perspective opens to the reader the characters' states of mind,
laying bare their motives for outward action, their reactions. From here the
tradition leads to the fiction of centres of consciousness (stream of consciousness,
interior monologue). The author is no longer an omniscient god-figure but a
privileged observer, claiming no more access to the characters' minds than the
readers themselves. The characters are dramatized as individuals distinct from the
narrator, possessed of a “mind-style” which matches a certain mental self. The
choice of a certain range of vocabulary, rhetoric, mentality dramatically restricts the
author's previous liberties. We can see Pamela opposing Mr. B., a profligate
aristocrat, in the name of the middle-class principles of prudential virtue, modesty,
sobriety. We understand her decision of changing the rich clothes she has received
from her late mistress and master by her previous virginal attire consisting in home-
spun cloth and hand-embroidered necklace, suggestive of that diligence and
industry and self-reliance which made the middle class the true repository of
respectability. The folk theme (low-born maid and high-born lord) absorbs a modern
ethos: birth no longer determines character. In spite of her base parentage, Pamela
displays “born dignity, born discretion”. The interface of love romance and the
pattern of precise social relationships fuses two opposite chronotopoi. Chastity has
become a question of prudence in view of securing a social position. The moral
confrontation engages no absolutes, but only aspects of a social and financial
arrangement. Mr. B locks Pamela in his castle, like the abducting knight of a
medieval romance, placing her under the supervision of his ogre-like servants, Mrs.
Jewkes and Monsieur Colbrand. The express aim of the story is Augustan
didacticism, however – to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds
of the youth of both sexes, whereas, in the demystifying light of Fielding's burlesque
of Pamela (Joseph Andrews), the story amounts to a set of instructions to servant-
maids to look out for their masters as sharp as they can... In any event, the heroes'
transformations – from mistrust and fear to love in Pamela, from guilty desire to
moral reformation in Mr. B., brought about by Pamela's behaviour but also by her
diary, which he chances to read – are vividly and progressively realized.

Whereas in Pamela Virtue is finally rewarded, as announced by the title

(Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded), the less prudential heroine of Richardsons's next
novel, Clarissa finds her death after a long run of misfortunes originating in her
elopement with Lovelace – the immoral gallant of Restoration comedy – in order to
escape a marriage contracted by her parents with the hateful Solmes. Clarissa is
another epistolary novel, the heroine addressing her letters to a lady “of virtue
and honour”, Miss Howe. Although the primitive or elementary form out of which it
develops – the letter – presupposes a narrative of events in their time-sequence, it
also quickens an awareness of a distinction between chronological time and
narrative time. The emergence of a literature of sentiment, as an alternative to
the rational satirical bent of the Augustans – the inward sentimental journey of
Sterne versus the picaresque journey through a multitude of worldly shows – may
be explained in the light of Wilhelm Dilthey's theory of Die drei Grundformen der
Systeme in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Gesammelte Schriften, Leipzig
1925 (vol. IV, pp. 528-554). Dilthey associates modes of thinking with general
psychological attitudes. Empiricism, from Democritus to Hobbes, is associated with
reason, the primacy of the intellect; objective idealism, from Heraclitus to
Leibniz and Spinoza, with the primacy of feeling; sentiment, and dualist idealism
(the autonomy of the spirit in relation to reality), from Plato to Kant, with the
primacy of will. Richardson's emotional outbursts and Laurence Sterne's inward
turn, making public private life in its most intimate aspects, as well as the workings
of the mind, point towards the shift in sensibility towards romanticism at the end of
the century.
 The reaction from the neoclassic critical mind came promptly. Henry Fielding
turned from dramatic burlesque of Dryden's heroic tragedy in Restoration manner
(Tom Thumb the Great, 173o) towards a burlesque of Richardson's Pamela in the
first comic epic in prose: The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, 1742.
The change in the protagonist's sex is very effective in securing the humorous
effects of burlesquing Pamela “in the manner of Cervantes”: a virtuous young man,
following the excellent pattern of his sister's (Pamela's) virtue, is doing his best to
preserve his chastity unimpaired from the sexual assault of Lady Booby, a
shameless seductress. A mise-en-abyme of the Pamela plot – its reinscription as a
figure – can be found in Tom Jones, Book XVI, Chapter VII, where Mrs. Western is
reading a letter on prudence, and matrimonial politics, for the benefit of Sophia, her
niece. Virtue is degraded as a strategy of pragmatic calculation. A further
innovation in Joseph Andrews is the narrator developing an overt relationship with
the reader, commenting on the relationship between reality and its imaginary
reflection in a story, openly acknowledging the fictional ontology of actions and
protagonists.

The bathetic effect of the male character construction as entirely ignorant of

the ways of the world (Parson Adams), threatened or guided by female characters
(Joseph Andrews) is exploited in Henry Fielding's next attempt on the mock-heroic
in prose, Jonathan Wild, 1743. Muzzled by the Licensing Act of 1737, Fielding
travestied his open attacks on Robert Walpole into an indirect satire of political
corruption. The deflating treatment of the biography of illustrious men on the
Plutarchian model in form of Hogarthian rogue biography keeps close to the
stylistic pattern of the burlesqued genre: genealogies, accounts of omens at the
hero's birth etc. The outrageous treatment of famous heroic models of the past is
possible through a Swiftian manipulation of the point of view, revealing the
dramatic shift in the idea of heroism from ancient times to the Enlightenment: In
the histories of Alexander and Caesar, we are frequently and impertinently
reminded of their benevolence and generosity, of their clemency and kindness.
When the former had with fire and sword overrun a vast empire, had destroyed the
lives of an immense number of innocent wretches, had scattered ruin and
desolation like a whirlwind we are told as an example of his clemency that he did
not cut the throat of an old woman and ravish her daughters, but was content with
undoing them. The Augustan ideal is going through a crisis which foretells
exhaustion [14]. Fielding senses the demise of a traditional cultural and moral order,
constantly playing the heroic against a shabby modern reality. Jonathan Wild is not
even an impressive villain hero of the Miltonic school. He finds himself tricked and
robbed by a harlot, humiliated by the woman he loves. Villainy covers a wide range,
yet its extremes are annihilating each other. Jonathan is the Machiavellian schemer,
capable, like Webster's Brachiano, to frame a man who trusts him, but also a
common thief, who just cannot keep his hands out of a friend's pockets, or who
steals a worthless object on the gallows, when nothing could be of any avail to him
any more. The show of villainy turned into automatism symbolizes the moral vacuity
of a society exposed with the subverting force of the popular farce and puppet
show.

It is particularly in Tom Jones (1749) that the I-narrator claims to be the real
author, omniscient and omnipotent, a puppet-master, pulling the strings of
his characters, passing judgement on them, and developing, in an essayistic and
argumentative style, an open relationship with the reader, whom he instructs
how to read the book. In Daniel Defoe, we could see the narrator reflecting on
himself, duplicating himself as narrator and character. If Robinson is going to
rebuild civilization, then he himself will be recreated as a medium for detached
reflection and self-knowledge. Apart from projecting an image of himself as
narrator, Fielding is foregrounding the process of the reader's making sense of
the text. Assisted by Addison's programmatic effort to dissipate literary knowledge
outside the traditional elite, Fielding's style displays a similar imaginative and non-
conventionl handling of literary concepts. The prefaces to the eighteen books of
Tom Jones are meant to instruct the reader on various aspects of fictional narrative
(on style – Book I, on prologues – Book XVI, on the relationship between tradition
and original creation – Book XII, between art and reality – Book VII, on the nature of
the Gothic hyperbole – I/3, or of the marvellous – Book VIII etc.), yet this is done in
such a playful style and with such tropic ingeniousness that the rhetorical continuity
with the rest of the narrative is never impaired. As we said earlier, the habit of self-
reflection, the sense of a separate, observing self may have been induced by the
guiding epistemological concept of the age, which was Locke's divided mind: one
part operating on signals from without and the other observing these operations.
Self-awareness in following models is also encouraged by the neoclassic poetic.
Finally, one needs to remember the hybrid nature of the novel, the heterogeneous
character of the elementary forms which generated it. The “foundling” is a folk
theme, working all its subversive potential on the image of Mr. Allworthy's
gentlemanly household. The parallels between high and low life, trivial adventure
inflated to epic proportions bring two worlds into collision. The name of the hero
(Tom Jones) is meant to show him as a common man, with nothing extraordinary
about himself. The Manichean separation of the Gothic romance between absolutes
of honour, goodness or of villainy has been ruled out. As the name suggests, Mr.
Allworthy is “all-worthy”, therefore, in order to depict him, the narrator needs to
take the reader, in “Gothic style”, to the top of a hill, subsequently not knowing how
to get the reader down without breaking his neck. The literallization of the abstract
notion of greatness explodes any such romantic notion. Jones is generous, honest,
grateful, yet neither a hero nor a saint. The author makes sure his readers will
approve of common man as the new moral standard, by intruding into the
narrative with the resolution of a pointed finger: But whatever detestation Mr.
Allworthy had to this or to any other vice, he was not so blinded by it but that he
could discern any virtue in the guilty person, as clearly indeed as if there had been
no mixture of vice in the same character. While he was angry therefore with the
incontinence of Jones, he was no less pleased with the honour and honesty of his
self-accusation. He began now to form in his mind the same opinion of this young
fellow, which, we hope, our readers may have conceived. And in balancing his faults
with his perfections, the latter seemed rather to preponderate (Book IV, Ch. ll)

As the illegitimate offspring of blue blood, whom Miss Bridget Allworthy has
dumped at her brother's door, Tom Jones offers an ideal link between high and low,
squirarchy and the highway man, fashionable London and the motley highroad inn,
gentry manners and conversation, and the gaming table. Good and evil may spring
from the same root. How different Tom is from his legitimate brother, Blifil, the
egotistic scoundrel who keeps to himself the secret about Tom's identity, who goes
so far as to promise a huge reward to a woman for prosecuting his brother for
murder. The good child and the bad child is another fairy-tale motif, exploited for
the sake of romantic contrast, yet the substance of real life incorporated by Fielding
into such conventional frame does credit to a realist's sense of significant detail in
human character and behaviour. The insight into the motifs of human action makes
possible not only the delightful human comedy, with picturesque and odd
characters, highly individualized, but also general psychological verities, which build
individuals into types. Miss Allworthy's exaggerated abuse of the impudent women
who walk the line of moral decorum, causing such misery as the birth and
abandonment of an innocent, helpless infant, makes the reader suspect her from
the beginning. The tendency in servants or persons lacking personality to model
their opinions on those of their masters or betters is stressed to the point of a
Hogarthian caricature: When her master was departed, Mrs. Deborah stood silent,
expecting her cue from Miss Bridget; for as to what had past before her master, the
prudent housekeeper by no means relied upon it, as she had often known the
sentiments of the lady in her brother's absence to differ greatly from those which
she had expressed in his presence. Miss Bridget did not, however, suffer her to
continue long in this doubtful situation; for having looked some time earnestly at
the child, as it lay asleep in the lap of Mrs. Deborah, the good lady could not forbear
giving it a hearty kiss, at the same time declaring herself wonderfully pleased with
its beauty and innocence. Mrs. Deborah no sooner observed this than she fell to
squeezing and kissing, with as great raptures as sometimes inspire the sage dame
of forty and five towards a youthful and vigorous bridegroom, crying out, in a shrill
voice, “O, the dear little creature ! – The dear, sweet, pretty creature ! Well, I vow it
is as fine a boy as ever was seen ! (I/V)

To Fielding the novel too is a hybrid species, born of the most heterogeneous
parentage, from the drains of the worldly show to the gilded volumes of classical
lore, base-born and high-born, absorbing, like Noah's Ark, humanity's multifarious
show and Babel's many-tongued discourse. When the author has gone about two
thirds of the novel, he remembers he has not said his prayer to the Muse, so he
opens Book XIII with an invocation in Miltonic fashion. The portrait of the novel as an
emerging literary form is exquisitely done, with an unfailing sense of its generic
identity and in a rich, Rabelaisian language of enormous lexical and figurative
resourcefulness. Fielding goes beyond Samuel Johnson's Augustan paradigm of
the novel in the above-quoted Rambler No. 4: learning from books, accurate
observation, just copies of human manners, serving as lectures of conduct
and introductions into life. Fielding drops the didactic aim altogether, brings
“learning” down into the street of common experience, and makes it subservient to
the realistic aim of offering truthful images of humanity throughout history: to
which the recluse pedant, however great his parts or extensive his learning may be,
hath ever been a stranger. Art is that which bridges past and present in the memory
of the race: his image of his dead wife will live for future times in his character,
Sophia, while the actuality of his textualized self for future generations is the true
miracle of the “heroic lyre”. To this “lean shadow” of transcendence, he adds the
“substance” of contemporary reality, of which no part is left out as vile, as unworthy
to be imitated by art. The contemporary world of writing (Pope's Grub-Street society
of poetasters satirized in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot), literary clubs, printing, serial
publication, literary market-place had made the novel possible by appealing to the
tastes of an enormously enlarged readership, of large masses of people
participating in literacy, had lent preeminence to the material circumstances of the
production, dissemination, and reception of the work of art. As a new product, in
need of commercial success, the novel resorts to self-defence and self-advertising.
The chronodiegesis (the level of the plot, as a sequence of events) is doubled up
by a metafictional layer, consisting of acts of language and self-reflexive
statements. Unlike the loose concatanation of episodes of the picaresque plot,
whose narrative time is proportionate to the chronological time events would be
taking if they occurred in real life, or the sequence of discrete narrative units
(letters) in the epistolary novel, the self-reflexive narration holds well together
and performs a set of easily identifiable narrative functions. Written in the first
person and the present tense, the narratorial plot serves as a guide for the
readers, assisting their effort of interpretation and sometimes even deploying a
plot of imaginary reception. Jeffrey Williams [15] also mentions a narratorial plot
(characterising the narrator), a gnomic plot of aphoristic observations and
generics (comments on universal human nature or conduct etc.), a level of
intertextuality, tapping, through literary and mythological allusions, the cultural
code of a community, and the narrative action of spinning out metaphors for the
narrative itself. Although the narrator never masses up with the characters in the
main plot, he creates a role for himself on this metafictional level, alluding to his
beloved wife, to his choices of characters, to his authorial intentions. He compares
the novel to a journey and himself to the host of an inn entertaining his guests
(readers), spicing his meals (figurative speech), behaving now as an arbitrary
monarch who lays down rules for the reader with respect to the genre he has
invented, then as a liberal entertainer catering for his client's tastes. Poised at an
equal distance from gothic supernaturalism and the dangerous heights of sublimity
on the one hand and, on the other, from the reductive, sketchy presentation of a
character's life – the so-called character progress – inspired by the neoclassical
philosophy of character as determined by some ruling passion, Fielding is heading
for the golden mean of realist art. The Genius he claims for himself is that of
Aristophanes, Lucian, Cervantes, Rabelais, Moličre, Shakespeare, Swift, Marivaux.
Here is language worthy of any of them, communicating both the drabness and the
vital glory of modern fiction in comparison to the traditional ’classy’ Muse : And
thou, much plumper dame, whom no airy forms nor phantoms of imagination
clothe; whom the well-seasoned beef, and pudding richly stained with plums,
delight: thee I call; of whom in a terck-schuyte, in some Dutch canal, the fat ufrow
gelt, impregnated by a jolly merchant of Amsterdam, was delivered; in Grub-street
school didst thou suck in the elements of thy erudition. here hast thou, in thy
maturer age, taught poetry to tickle not the fancy, but the pride of the patron.
Comedy from thee learns a grave and solemn air; while tragedy storms aloud, and
rends th' affrighted theatres with its thunders. To soothe thy wearied limbs in
slumber, Alderman History tells his tedious tale; and, again, to awaken thee,
Monsieur Romance performs his surprising tricks of dexterity. Nor less thy well-fed
bookseller obeys thy influence. By thy advice the heavy, unread, folio lump, which
long had dozed on the dusty shelf, piece-mealed into numbers, runs nimbly through
the nation. Instructed by thee, some books, like quacks, impose on the world by
promising wonders; while others turn beaux, and trust all their merits to a gilded
outside. Come, thou jolly substance, with thy shining face, keep back thy
inspiration, but hold forth thy tempting rewards; thy shining chinking heap; thy
quickly convertible bank-bill, big with unseen riches; thy often varying stock; the
warm, the comfortable house; and, lastly, a fair portion of that bounteous mother,
whose flowing breasts yield redundant sustenance for all her numerous offspring,
did not some too greedily and wantonly drive their brethren from the tea (Book XIII,
Ch. l).

The Augustan ideal – Experience long conversant with the wise, the good, the
learned, and the polite – is enlarged to cover the entire social range: from the
minister at his levee, to the bailiff in his sponging house; from the duchess at her
drum, to the landlady behind her bar.

God's plenty but less art is to be derived from the reading of the typical picaro
novel, drawing on Cervantes and Le Sage (Gil Blas) published by Tobias George
Smollett at about the same time (1748): Roderick Random. The hero is born to an
aristocratic and legitimate couple, yet poor. His father is promptly disinherited, his
mother dies of a broken heart. After a sequence of extraordinary adventures at sea
and on land, with the never missing highroad inn society and imprisonment story,
the hero is finally reunited with his father whom he had thought dead. He is now
restored to a fortune and capable to marry the woman he loves. The structure is
episodic, the sequence of events is simply chronological. Characters – whether the
noble yet imprudent main hero, or the brutal captain Whiffle, the kind doctor
Morgan, the downright sea-dog Lieutenant Tom Bowling – remain unchanged, in the
absence of any pattern of action. There is no plot, no causality, the order of the
episodes is irrelevant, things just come about in a world ruled by sheer hazard. The
novel depends for its effectiveness on sensational turns of fortune, unexpected
overthrowals of the situation, rapid change of scenes, excentricities of character,
taste for the grotesque, the picturesque wayside scenes, the raw descriptions of the
eighteenth-century social and domestic life. Last but not least there is Smollett's
linguistic realism, referring the reader to the coarse language spoken in social
environments which were new to literary diction. The author warns the reader
against making use of his book in the family or in the classroom, which was a high
price for a writer to pay in Augustan England. Nevertheless, Smollett yields to the
more powerful drive towards a realistic rendering of the contemporary world, from
the language of those blazoned with ermines to the coarsest possible, as one more
element in the uncleanliness of the cockpick. The narrator is not a reflector but a
dispassionate “camera eye”, revolving with alacrity for a more faithful recording of
the hero's progress in the world of picaresque adventures. In Humphry Clinker,
published in 177l, there are several such centres of consciousness, from which the
same events are narrated, yielding incompatible accounts. The letters written by
various characters lend thus a feeling of the individual's isolation from social others,
in an act of contemplation rather than one of mutual social intercourse.

The dramatized narrator, exploring and laying bare the workings of his mind is
the most daring device of a great innovator: Laurence Sterne. Literary awareness
reaches a climactic point in eighteenth-century fiction with The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the first two volumes of which came out in 1760.
Whereas Pope and Swift associate and reciprocally define modes of being and
modes of thinking, Sterne divorces the life of the mind from that of actual
experience, with which it may not have the remotest resemblance. The self creates
his own world, the mind is its true essence. Tristram's autobiography since his
conception to the present is not a social but a spiritual record. His opinions and
those of the other main characters – his father and uncle Toby – count more than
what has actually happened to them, the novel appearing like a series of essays
fictionally connected. That is why, whereas in Fielding commentary is merely
ornamental, in Sterne's novel, it is integrated with dramatic structure. The
author has the revelation of two worlds, often at war, in his characters: the one in
which they move, and that which moves inside their minds. How is the author to
get access to his characters' minds? The question rises several times, occasioning
ironic hints to Locke's empirical and mechanistic description, or to Pope's
“gradations” of the chain of being: one cannot cut a window into someone's breast
and contemplate his heart, although things may be different on the planet Mercury
(Book I, Chapter 23); it is not possible to evaluate the traces of the sense
perceptions on the mind in the manner in which one examines the imprint on wax of
a maid's thimble (II/2); he could not effectively describe the soul with the help of
wind instruments, as no mechanical device can account for the vanishing, shallow
impressions in our minds – let alone the confusion and delusions induced by words
(which, as a matter of fact, matches Locke's own critique of language). Uncle Toby
keeps telling a story which, in its minutest details, has been put into his mind by
readings of famous battles, descriptions of war machinery, maps, reports on famous
military campaigns etc. He believes in the reality of these fictions, like another Don
Quixote, maddened by the knightly heroic romance. The theological echo of “homo
fuge” (o, uncle, run away from all this) shows the delusion wrought by books as the
most dangerous demon of the modern world. Words can poison the mind, can
create an autonomous reality. They impress the mind as powerfully and lastingly, or
more so, than actual events. The reality of uncle Toby's mind, therefore, is not the
memory of his sense perceptions but his “hobby horse”, a private obsession having
nothing to do with his actual experience of life. Books have made a Hotspur out of a
Falstaff. The reality of the mind is its own chronotope.

The intradiagetic narrator has few and banal incidents to report on, and,
moreover, they do not belong to a chronological time sequence but to a distinct
pattern of time: the time of the narrative, of the characters, of the reader, of the
author. Mr. Shandy, the pedant who wants to do everything by the book and is
hampered in building the best of all possible worlds by hazard or by some unruly
machinery, senses the difference between the time measured by the clock and
psychological time: It is two hours and ten minutes – and no more... since Dr.
Slop and Obadiah arrived... but to my imagination it seems almost an age. Uncle
Toby provides a Lockean explanation ('tis owing entirely to the succession of our
ideas) for the subjective impression of duration lengthening out with the
expectation of an important event.

The emancipation from the Augustan chronotope is also effected through the
figure of Yorick, doubling Tristram as a narrator. The sentimental jester, the
uncomprehending fool performs a subversive function (M. Bakhtin, Ibidem) in his
fresh, unconventional response to the inhibited consciousness, nourished by books,
false cultural idols, personal delusions, systems, and theories.

The freedom of the mind implies the faithful record of its chance associations,
without any external intervention in structuring its content or ordering it into a
logical pattern. Consequently the book is highly digressive, following the narrator's
whimsical train of thought. His attention to outward events is from time to time
inwardly redirected, focusing processes of the mind: … the machinery of my work
is of a species by itself; two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled,
which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a word my book is
digressive, and it is progressive too – and at the same time. (I/2). The revolt from
the mechanistic philosophy of the age, including the representation of man as a
machine, anticipates Blake's gloomy picture of the “Satanic mills” set working by
the rationalists and the materialist empiricists: Though in one sense, our family was
certainly a simple machine, as it consisted of a few wheels, yet there was thus
much to be said for it, that those wheels were set in motion by so many different
springs, and acted one upon the other from such a variety of strange principles and
impulses, – that though it was a simple machine, it had all the honour and
advantages of a complex one, – and a number of as odd movements within it, as
ever were beheld in the inside of a Dutch silk-mill.

Sterne's innovations reach even further than the great Romantic prophet. The
ontology of the graphical space – blank pages to mark the time between the
characters leaving one room and entering another, the score of a song whistled by
uncle Toby, unfinished chapters – anticipates Mallarmé. The inculpation of the
reader with the fictional reality (asking a reader to go back to a chapter, and
proceeding to a digression, while she is reading it), the ontological instability (shift
from memory to the present, from reality to narrative time and space), the overt
exposition of the principles of composition, the deconstructive drive in the comical
deflating of events, characteristic of a chronotope of transition bring Laurence
Sterne in the proximity of the twentieth-century epistemology.

In his Introduction to a collection of essays entitled Introducing Criticism at the

21st Century [16], Julian Wolfreys singles out Laurence's novel as an anticipation of
contemporary theories of chaos and complexity. Newtonian physics had
disseminated a belief in the order of the natural world, which prompts Tristram to
seek out his own place in the universal scheme of things. Yet, from the very
moment of his conception, despite his father's attempts to rule our chances and
accidents, he can only discover disorder and mischance. The “butterfly effect”
theorized by contemporary physicists seems to work underground, ruining, like
some undaunted mole, his family's life. Small inputs into his life have catastrophic
effects. An inconsiderate question on some untimely occasion, the use of forceps,
the alterations of a name conspire to undo his father's plan concerning his son's
prosperous progress through life. Failed schemes, maiming, blighted hopes,
abortive propositions, early deaths, frustrating the illuminizing ambition of writing
treatises for the edification of mankind, of averting the danger of sedition, of
redeeming the congregation, etc., weave a plot of family rundown which throws the
characters back on sentiment as the only solution.

Trismegistus, the name of the god mediating between humans and divines,
imparting messages from beyond, goes through small alterations until it is
degraded into Tristram. The heroic is redeployed as romance. Associationist
psychology was fostering scepticism and relativism with respect to the unity of the
self. Arbitrary associations of ideas, the whims of memory, which is selective, and
unpredictable, destroy all hope of reaching stability and reliability of knowledge –
the archetypal quest of the Enlightenment. Tristram is left with opinions, the bulky
body of real experience vanishes into the mist of swarming partial views, emotions,
feelings. His father's Tristapaedia and his novel construct him in different ways.

And yet, if it is true that there is both chance and determinism in the novel,
they do not belong to the same sphere of life, as in contemporary science. Life may
well be a blighted journey: why, his father wonders, do we put out the light when we
are going to plant a new human being? The black page serving as a funeral slab for
Yorick symbolizes the night at the other end of life. The blank page following Toby's
abortive marriage proposition to widow Wadman (his singing Lilibulero, a song
invented by a profligate aristocrat, was one more unlucky association) is a textual –
graphical comment on frustrated desires. The marbled or motley page is Sterne's
metaphor for the printed page, in whose mingled light and darkness there emerges
a new creation. There is chance in the shuttling plot of the chronodiegesis,
moving at random, forward and backward in time. But there is orderliness and
continuity in the narrative time spent by Tristram at his writing desk. His contract
with the reader, unlike his parents' marital contract, will not fail him.

References:

[8] René Wellek & A. Warren, Teoria literaturii, Editura pentru literatură universală,
1967, p. 286.

[9] In The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, 3. From Donne to Marvell, Op. cit.

[10] Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago, 196l, p. 154.

[11] Jacques Lacan, Écrits, Editions du Seuil, 197l, I, p. 170.

[12] David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing, Edward Arnold, 1979

[13] M. Bakhtin, Funcţiile picaroului, ale măscăriciului şi ale prostului în roman, în

Probleme de literatură şi estetică, Editura Univers 1982, pp. 380 – 388.

[14] C.J. Rawson, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress, 1972.

[15] Jeffrey Williams, Theory and the Novel. Narrative Reflexivity in the British
Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

[16] Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century. Edited by Julian Wolfreys, Edinburgh
University Press, 2002.
 THE ROMANTICS
(1780 – 1830)

The historical context. Epistemological grounds. Romantic poetics and

mode of vision. The romantic smith at his hammers and anvils: William
Blake. The first (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge) and the
second (Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, George Gordon Byron)
generations of romantic poets. The progress of romantic drama from the
history of feelings to the feel of history: Joanna Baillie and George Gordon
Byron. Versions of romantic fiction: the Gothic school, (Horace Walpole,
William Beckford, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Matthew Gregory Lewis,
James Hogg, Mary Shelley), the historical novel (Walter Scott), the novel of
manners and sentiment (Jane Austen).

The landmarks defining the Romantic age are still a debatable issue among literary
historians. The “authorized voices” to be heard from Cambridge in a collection of essays
entitled British Romanticism (editor: Stuart Curran), with editions running from 1993 to
1996, spans a more restricted interval (from 1785 to 1825) than the earlier Cambridge
History of English Literature. The reasons are expounded by Marshall Brown in his
essay, Romanticism and Enlightenment: “Pre-Romanticism”, though widely diffused,
turns out to be an unwitting and accidental by-product of other impulses, and hence
radically different from the consciously worked out aims of the various Romantic writers,
richly elaborated in a coherent body of works [1]

Our dissatisfaction with this latest periodization comes from its neglect of the native
roots, of the intellectual ferment which gave birth to a radically new poetic movement,
and whose traces can be identified throughout the second half of the seventeenth
century. Why absolutize (as Peter Thorslev does in German Romantic Idealism) the role
of Novalis or of Immanuel Kant, when Edward Young, George Berkeley, and David
Hume had preceded them in the emergent worldview we now construe as “Romantic”?
Had not the term itself cropped up much earlier than these recently proposed limits?
The “consciously worked-out” and worded aesthetic programme always comes after a
good deal of discursive practice, whose defining design has finally become apparent.
Aristotle did not spell out how Greek drama was to be written, he simply derived norms
from its already-existing forms. Boileau laid down poetic principles derived from the
revived literary forms of the antiquity during the French Renaissance. Wordsworth's
Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (18oo) came after a half-century
movement towards a mode of sensibility different from whatever had been before. If we
compare the works of Blake and Wordsworth, Burke's aesthetic of the sublime
(fascination with what is dark, confused and terrible) and Wordsworth's prescription of
writing as “recollection in tranquility”, the positive connotations of fear and
sensationalism in the Gothic novel and the framed historical romances of Walter Scott,
we may even infer that the late eighteenth-century sensibility is romantic in excess,
while the “canonical” 1800-183o period is a more tamed version thereof. A mixture of
various features (the dark side of the Enlightenment and the conservative aspects of
Romanticism) is only natural, and so is the overlapping for a while of mutually exclusive
paradigms in the modern world, which no longer relies on a shared context of religious
and philosophical values. Writers do not, as a rule, go about with neatly-drawn literary
manifestoes in hand, nor do they look up the date in calendars, to decide on the perfect
timing for the shift towards a new poetic. Mihai Eminescu was well-aware of his elective
affinities when he looked for models not only in Novalis but also in Edward Young, not
only in Gautier but also in Rousseau.

The history of reception runs smoothly from Northrop Frye's label of “mythopoetic
age” to M.H. Abrams's celebrated “Construing and Deconstructing” and The Mirror and
the Lamp. It is a classical study, introducing valuable distinctions, such as that between
mimetic, expressive, and pragmatic art, which would allow one to construct a
pragmastylistic picture of classicalist, romantic and Avantgarde art. The romantic lamp
of genius succeeds cyclically to the mirror of classical and realist art. The trajectory of
Romanticism, from the projected return to Eden through revolutionary violence to the
imaginative transformation of the self, through Coleridge's clerisy or Shelley's Poets-
Prophets and Legislators, so as to see in a new, redeeming light, the world which could
not be changed, is rooted in a wealth of empirical material. It is only with the “Yale
School” (deconstruction and pragmatism) that revaluation took an unexpected twist.
Paul de Man („The Rhetoric of Temporality”, Allegories of Reading, Blindness and
Insight) deconstructs myth as figure: there are no epiphanies of a transcendental world,
but only acts of language and of consciousness.

The object of desire is always lost within a separate ontological sphere, and poetry is
the allegory of this loss and distancing through troping. The meaning structure is
unstable, pluralistic, so the poem allegorizes its own unreadability. Geoffrey Hartman's
work on Wordsworth lays bare the threads of tradition, literary conventions and generic
markers under the delusive mask of spontaneity and simplicity of idiom.

Brian McHale[2] conceives of two possibilities to construct literary history, either in

narrative form (as a list of canonical or countercanonical texts, which is what we have
been doing so far) or as spatialized form. The latter is organized in the form of parallel
lists of contrasting or opposing features: in the left-hand column, the defining features of
period A; in the right-hand column, the contrastive features that define period B. As
Romanticism means a significant break with the entire past, we think that such a picture
of Enlightenment and Romanticism defined through binary oppositions will prove most
instructive. Marshall Brown himself produces such a contrastive picture of their central
concepts and generic forms [3]. Those ascribed to Romanticism are listed in the right-
hand column:

empiricism supernatural sensationalism

cosmopolitanism nationalism and indigenous myths

satire, heroic couplets, moral and blank verse meditative lyrics,

didactic poems, local poems mythological or metaphysical poems

first-person epics

picaresque or epistolary novels social, historical or Gothic fictions

Setting out from these epistemological and generic distinctions, we have settled on
the following chronology: a period of transition when neoclassic and emerging romantic
elements coexist (1750 – 1780); the outbreak of Romanticism (1780 – 1800); the
progress of Romanticism from generic self-awareness to its own parody (1800 – 1830).

The shift of population towards the factories of the North and the Midlands caused
by the Industrial Revolution had awakened people to a sense of loss and nostalgic
memories of the time when man had lived in harmony with nature. Even to those who
had been left behind, the countryside offered now a different picture: the old open-field
system with landowners who cultivated their strips of land and had access to large
areas of the common ground for pasture had been replaced by private enclosed farms,
which had swallowed the commonly shared meadows, woodlands, and waste. In 1817
Wordsworth bemoaned the dissolution of the principal ties which kept the different
classes of society in a vital and harmonious dependence upon each other. The
communion with nature or the assertion of a sense of fellowship with the other human
beings found an anguished expression in the Romantics, as they had become
problematical. Unlike the pastoralists, who serenely take such communion for granted,
the Romantics apprehended it as something missing and desired in the alienating city-
world.

In politics, this was an age of social upheaval; all standards were subject to
individual testing, the traditional scale of values was radically modified. The War of
Independence which freed the American colonies from the rule of the Hanoverian kings
seriously diminished the power of the Crown, while the fall of the Bastille (1789) was
greeted as the symbolical end of tyranny and feudal absolutism. While the neoclassic
writers had generally supported the status-quo, the Romantic poets decidedly espoused
the ideals of liberty and equality. Even Edmund Burke, who declared himself against the
supporters of the French Revolution (Reflections on the French Revolution, 1790), only
did so out of a sentimental commitment to tradition and chivalry. Blake welcomed both
the French and the American rebellions, dedicating to them frenzied lyrical projections,
mythically coloured and of epic proportions. Wordsworth saw France on the top of
golden hours, Byron got involved in wars of independence on the continent. Romantic
literature was a literature of subversion, which questioned the system into which it was
born. William Godwin blamed unjust social organization for the evil surfacing in man.
Napoleon's betrayal of the republican ideal deeply affected the second generation of
Romantics who took various opportunities of depicting tyranny in the gloomiest colours
(Shelley, Byron). The shifting relations of power between creator and creature
(Frankenstein), the appearance of monsters turning against their creators [4], breaking
social taboos and challenging social norms and laws, were outward symptoms of a
mentality which set a price upon individual judgement and the power of the individual
mind to create its own world, through imaginative vision.

The agnostic and sceptical turn in philosophy was in a way a natural outcome
of Locke's empiricism. The argument that all knowledge comes from experience, and is
transferred through the senses to become our ideas, easily led to the conclusion that
apart from what goes on in our minds there is nothing of which we have any positive
knowledge. George Berkeley [5] radicalized the idea carrying it onto the ontological
level: bodies are only ideas that do not exist independently of the spirit that has
perceived them: esse est percepi (to be is to be perceived). The individual souls are
spiritual substances – active and invisible – contained in the largest monad which is
God. For David Hume too the constantly-recurring mental complexes are our only
guarantee of objective reality. This is the foundation upon which, according to Peter
Thorslev [6], Kant constructed “a marvel of German intellectual engineering”. In his first
great Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant conceded Hume's major
antimetaphysical thesis. We cannot attribute the extension of time and space, or the
relations of cause and effect (to take only the most ready-to-mind of Kant's “categories”)
to the objects of perception, to the things-in-themselves, as Hume had demonstrated,
for if we do, we become inevitably involved in confusion and contradiction (Kant's famed
“antinomies”). On the other hand, it seemed perhaps to Kant's Prussian mind too
dismissive, too flippant, to attribute these categories to mere “lazy” habits of perception.
The categories, Kant maintained, are inevitable, built into the mind; they are also the a
priori conditions of all intelligibility. In this... assertion consists the Copernican
Revolution in epistemology that inaugurated the Romantic Age. Concepts without
percepts are empty, Kant conceded, but percepts without concepts are blind. From
thenceforth, the phenomenal universe became a something that, in Wordsworth's
memorable phrase, we half-create, and half-perceive”. [7]
 A doubling up of human biography accompanies the shaping of the self. In a
letter to George and Georgiana Keats, John Keats defines the world as a “Vale of Soul
Making”, to which the school and the hornbook have their decisive contribution. In
Frankenstein, the biological facts around the creature's coming into being are an
altogether massy affair, but his cultural integration into the semiological orders of the
community (through reading) is a sine-qua-non condition for his being able to
communicate and take part in social life It is only through conceptual frames that reality
becomes intelligible to him. The Bildungsgeschichte in The Prelude spans “childhood
and school-time” as inseparable aspects of the process of growing up. Self-
development cannot be conceived of as mere biology; the hero's progress in the real
world – disparagingly dismissed as “vulgar works of Man” – is cast into epistemological
frames. The “Spirit of the universe” sees to it that the facts of life be “intertwined” with
the passions, the movements of the “human Soul” (spelt with capital letter, like the
affined all-pervading World Spirit). The progress of life is no longer viewed as a
sequence of actions, states and events, but as a psychic evolution, described from
inside the mind. At the same time, the soul is no more a destitute exile on earth (like the
medieval Christian pilgrim). The dynamic and integrative mode of vision, fusing
opposites, so characteristic of the Romantics, roots the sprit in the earth. Human
existence is defined as “being-in-the world” (Nature lodges the soul, the Imagination of
the whole) through tropes which assimilate the soul to nature's vegetative life. The same
vital sap wells up in man and in the world, the World Soul descends into history with
each individual birth:

Fair seed time had my soul, and I grew up

Foster'd alike by beauty and by fear;

Much favour'd in my birthplace, and no less

In that beloved vale to which, erelong,

I was transplanted.

The naturalization of Hegel's leading concepts in The Phenomenology of the Spirit

(„Wisdom and Spirit of the universe” for “Vernunft”, “Weltgeist”) could not escape
detection by an authority in Romanticism like M.H. Abrams, who undertakes a brilliant
reading of the Prelude in relation to The Phenomenology in his Natural
Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, Norton, 197l.
 The Romantic preference for symbols is grounded in this same particular
worldview: It is a finite image expressing infinite suggestibility. An iconographic
expression of a concept, a perfect union between image, sound and idea, intellect and
the senses. Imagination interacts with external reality, contributing its own shaping
vision to representations thereof: An auxiliar light/ Came from my mind on which the
setting sun/ Bestows new splendour (Wordsworth: The Prelude). Coleridge (The
Statesman's Manual) sees the Bible as archetypal imaginative history, as it
communicates truth through symbols. Instead of a collection of dead things on the one
hand and of their qualities on the other, it exploits the mediatory power of the
imagination, incorporating reason in images.

Thorslev too enlarges on the next generation of Postkantian Transcendental

Idealists, singling out Hegel from among them as “the Grand Synthesis, the Ring Cycle
of Romantic philosophy”: The moral and the creative will become one: the Absolute, the
World Spirit, for which he appropriates the name of Reason – having nothing whatever
to do with the “reason” of enlightenment philosophy, the mere “analytical
understanding” as Coleridge also so dismissively names it. (...). The World Spirit
realizes itself in and determines all history; it uses (Hegelian) heroes, world-historical
individuals (weltgeschichtliche Menschen), but these heroes, like Carlyle's, know not
what they do. The World Spirit becomes conscious of itself, but only in retrospect[8].

History is a gradual revelation of the “absolute Idea” (pattern, process, meaning). If

it is not apparent to those acting in history but only to philosophers looking back on past
events – could we not say that this is a Romantic reinforcement of Augstine's
idealization of contemplative minds? It surely explains Wordsworth's definition of poetic
creation as “recollection in tranquility”. It also justifies the new literary kinds which
Romanticism develops as counterpoints to the picaresque of the Enlightenment, based
upon the presupposition of a common, unchanging human nature. The grand Romantic
myth of the developmental self threads texts as different as Blake's Songs of
Innocence and Experience, Wordsworth's Prelude to the Growth of A Poet’s Mind, the
revisit poems contrasting present and past selves, the Bildungsroman inscribed in
Frankenstein. The retrospective narrator is also a cognitive hero of an
epistemological quest: He tries to interpret his past life, and it is only now that the
incoherence of actual experiences finally falls into an ordered pattern.

This process finally reaches out to what Shelley calls “Epipsychidion”: the soul
around the soul, God's Oversoul. Georges Poulet, in Timelessness and Romanticism
(Journal of the History of Ideas, 15, 1954) stresses the essentially religious character of
human centrality with the Romantics, who took hold of the idea of eternity... and
removed it from its empyrian world into their own (...) between the divine source and the
individual source there is identity of origin and identity of growth. For Coleridge, the
highest form of creativity is a repetition of the infinite Mind in the finite mind of the poet
(Biographia Literaria). Man's god-like capacity of boundless dilation (to see a world in a
grain of sand) is a leading motif in Blake. The consequence is an arrogant valorization
of the subject, who, although a willing social exile, becomes the centre of his all-
inclusive, imaginative projection. Individualism, subjectivity, self-determination,
imagination are the new key-concepts.

One more consequence of the Hegelian dialectical view of the “concrete universal”
is organicist historicism, nationalism. The Idea is revealed in organic (having inscribed
a certain teleological pattern of development) and time-specific forms. “... Die seltenste
Form bewahrt im Geheimen das Urbild, says Goethe in Metamorphose der Tiere. These
embodied paradigms (Urbild: archetype) are organic, teleological: Ganz harmonisch
zum Sinne des Tiers und seinem Bedürfnis. William Blake, who sees in God the Great
Designer of the universe, sounds even closer to the Hegelian model (from Idea to its
reflection in embodied forms, and from here to recovery of intelligible pattern in the
imagination): There exist in the external world the permanent realities of every thing
which we see reflected in their eternal forms in the divine body of the SAVIOUR, the
true vine of eternity, the human imagination (Vision of the Last Judgement, 18).

Revaluations are undoubtedly a condition of each generation coming to terms with

the vision, sensibility and discursive practices of those remote in time, yet
sometimes they may falsify the spirit and scope inscribed in them. Little did we expect to
see the British tradition of gothic fiction, which makes one's hairs stand on end,
domesticated into a version of Enlightenment renovation: Gothic romance also aims to
demystify the sublime obscurity by which, according to Enlightenment sociology, court
culture overawes the whole of society, thereby maintaining the power of court
government. In order to do this gothic romances often describe historical and social
settings in terms of Enlightenment philosophical history and use of novelistic devices
and figures to constitute a critical sociology of power operating in several ways: through
institutions founded in the past and now outmoded (in ruins), but nevertheless difficult
or dangerous for the outsider to understand, penetrate, or master (secret entrances,
passages, labyrinths, pitfalls); through social conventions (conspiracies, secret orders)
unrecognized or not understood by their victims; through application of hidden laws and
instruments of force (the Inquisition); through an unsuspected, inward-working
transformation (by philtres, magic) of the victim's perceptions, values, ideology, or
being; and through alien, not truly English values and practices (Mediterranean,
Oriental, Catholic) [9]

The ruins frowning in the Pre-Romantic poems and romances are not ascribable to
a certain historical or political moment. On the contrary, they have lost any contingent
connotations, taking the reader into a fabled past. From actual objects out there in the
world, they have been abstracted to signs of former presences – that dialectic of
presence/absence which allows the imagination to contribute its own share of fictional
embroidery. In most cases, mystery is not rationalized and explained away as somatic
disturbances; the marvellous is an end in itself. Finally, whenever the British meant to
demonize un-Englishness, they went no farther than the French, who had really become
their bęte noire in the period stretching from the Restoration (when the king had brought
home rather objectionable tastes) to the Napoleonic wars. The Oriental setting of many
stories of the age, just like the ruins, is only one form of constructing infinites of time
and space. For a more genuine recovery of the plastic spirit of the age, one need
borrow its own voices, which are addressing a readership in quest of wonder and
sensationalism. The refuge into the past is an effective form of escapism.

Historically, “Gothic” had meant anything wild and barbarous, and destructive of
classical civilization. Later it became associated with the pointed arch in ecclesiastical
architecture between the twelfth and the fourteenth century. To the Romantics, it meant
the age of medieval romance, opposed to the classical culture. Initially, the Gothic was
a renovated instrument of subverting it. Later it turned into mannerism: the antique
setting of a gothic castle, with secret corridors and labyrinthine passages, haunted by
demonic characters, villains who had pledged themselves to the devil, ghosts.

Why not allow a contemporary to explain to us the riddle of this medieval revival,
and how it was being experienced at that particular time? Charles Lamb, the subtle
romantic essayist, did not even consider it to be a return to a past mode of vision, but
rather the revelation of something deep and permanent within the human being, which
the Augustans had programmatically suppressed: Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras
– dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies – may reproduce themselves in the brain of
superstition, but they are in us and eternal (Witches and Other Night Fears)

The need for the liberation of pent up emotion after the dry and rigidly prescriptive
and unimaginative neoclassical age found a release in the previous world of medieval
romances. The near past is erased and a palimpsest reconstruction gets started.

The word “Romantic” too changed from a historical (narrative in a Romance

language) to a typological concept (the falsehood of romance as against the truth of
nature). From the general meaning “like the old romances”, the word came in time to be
used in reference to old castles, horrid mountains and gloomy forests, waste and
solitary places. But the essential shift in the perception of nature is not just that from the
orderly, man-trimmed, domesticated neoclassical landscape to the imaginatively
stimulative and wild sights of the later eighteenth century. The difference is described in
a very influential book: The Romantic Agony by Mario Praz: the term assumes a
subjective character, bearing not so much upon the property of objects as upon their
effects on an impressionable onlooker [10]. The setting undergoes a twofold
displacement: a spatial one – from the actual topical dimensions into the realm of
subjectivity, i.e. a psychological translation – and a temporal one – from the present
into the past or into the future:

The saint or moralist should tread

This moss-grown alley, musing slow;

They seek, like me, the secret shade,

But not, like me, to nourish woe.

My fruitful scenes and prospects waste

Alike admonish not to roam;

These tell me of enjoyments past,

And those of sorrows yet to come.

Setting out to produce a landscape poem – The Shrubbery –, William Cowper is

aware of a generic change pointing to an age of revived sensibility. The poem is not due
to an outward event; it emerges out of a state of mind, as the subtitle reads: Written in a
time of affliction. Whereas the Augustans had imposed didactic schemes on poetry
(moral or religious), the new poets were aiming at self-reflexivity. What they sought in
nature was not physical harmony but a match for the inward states, a consensus
between the onlooker's feelings and a responsive natural background. If this
intersubjective harmony could not be reached,

How ill the scene that offers rest.

And heart that cannot rest, agree!,

the natural scene was to be replaced by visionary sights, in-built in the

contemplating mind, sharing in its substance, like any organic outgrowth (my fruitful
scenes). In other words, the onlooker's mind half-perceives and half-creates. Nature is
not contemplated directly but through a mist of associated ideas and literary memories.
The sunset in a churchyard builds into a metaphor for the transience of human life
(Thomas Grey, An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard). The piteous sight of an
unfortunate outcast swept away into the ocean, while the crew makes haste to save the
ship caught by the storm is made into a metaphor of human solitude during the voyage
of life (William Cowper, The Castaway). Maybe that is why, although the word is used
as early as 1654 by John Evelyn to denote “a very Romantic country-seat”... on the side
of a “horrid Alp near Bristol”, Praz picks up on a different early occurrence: romantique,
in Rousseau, meant to define the elusive and indistinct things which he would express
by “je ne sais quoi”. As soon as things lose their precise outline, they can turn into grit
for the grinding-mill of the infinitely expanding soul. The relationship between
understanding and imagination as conceptualized by Locke or Hobbes is being
reversed: a marvellous light, unenjoy'd of old, is pour'd on us by revelation, with larger
prospects extending our understanding, with brighter objects enriching our imagination,
with an inestimable prise setting our passions on fire, thus strengthening every power
that enables a composition to shine... (Edward Young, Conjectures on Original
Composition, 1758) It is also Young who supplants the neoclassical concept of the artist
as imitator by that of an original creator, who enriches the province of letters, instead of
merely duplicating it. Genius can dispense with rules and achieve “unexampled
excellence”. The vitalist view of art as something organic, natural, dynamic (read:
counter to imitated, consciously elaborated, static) anticipates German teleological
speculations. An original writer may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises
spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made. Likewise, his
Complaint or Night-Thoughts set the fashion for the graveyard school of rhetorical
melancholy, as well as the tradition of romantic night musings (Novalis: Hymnen an die
Nacht).

Freedom of mind consorts with freedom of expression. The break with the
neoclassical tradition can be felt in the taste for the genuine pathos and simplicity of folk
poetry. The three-volumed Reliques of Ancient English Poetry published by Thomas
Percy in 1765 enjoyed wide audience, despite occasional charges of “irregular poetry”.
The public taste had gone so extravagant as to invite hoaxes, as those played upon
their readers by James Macpherson (who passed his own Fingal, an Ancient Epic
Poem in Six Books for a collection of poems by Fingal's son, Ossian, translated from
Gaelic), and by Thomas Chatterton, who pretended to have discovered a fifteenth-
century monk's manuscripts. The latter, an enormously talented poet, died young
(suicide), as did most of the Romantic poets (i.e. those who were not afflicted with
psychic depression or madness for a change), consumed with the flames of their
passionate hearts.
 A passionate thought content will break with any rhetorical decorum, finding
expression in deliberate exaggeration. Edmund Burke (Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1756) calls this deliberate process
“amplification”. The “sublime” is precisely an inherent tension between finite and
infinite, the limits only offering themselves in order to be surpassed. The unresolved
tension between opposites means a denial of confinement to only one possibility. The
immobile statuesque is abandoned in favour of the picturesque (expressive rather
than beautiful, intellectual rather than visual, unstable, irregular); classical claritas is
supplanted by the “mysterious ambiguity” of the coincidentia oppositorum. Mario Praz
speaks about “an aesthetic theory of the Horrid and the Terrible”, which developed
during the eighteenth century, with the bulk of examples provided, in this comparative
book on European Romanticism, by English stock (Collins, Walpole, Shelley) William
Collins writes an ode on... fear, Thomas Grey, on the Pleasure arising from Vicisitude;
Shelley is fascinated by the tempestuous loveliness of terror, Wordsworth grows up
foster'd alike by beauty and by fear. In order to define such wild looms of Romantic
rhetoric, one needs to step into the acategorial realm of myth.

The dumping of neoclassical aesthetic norms is still a prerequisite of those

advancing new aesthetic ideas (Young, or Edmund Burke) in the second half of the
century. By the end of it, when the new sensibility had settled in, Wordsworth would be
able to spell out the Gospel of Romanticism without polemical bitterness.

The Romantic smith at his hammers and anvils: William Blake

T.S, Eliot's contention, that William Blake was an uneducated visionary who owed
nothing to tradition, would probably have elicited a smile from the prophet of
Romanticism. For the Romantic rebels did not believe in institutionalized forms,
including those of education. Blake, the son of a London hosier, chose the intuitive art
lessons provided by Gothic ecclesiastical architecture or by books on mythology and
ancient art which he was called upon to provide engravings for. Besides, his extensive
knowledge of esoteric lore emerged reshaped as a personal mythology, for the poet
well knew that, unless he created a new system, he was in danger of being ensnared by
another's (Jerusalem). An attempt to pin it down to its sources was made by Kathleen
Raine in a seminal book: Blake and Antiquity, Routledge 1963. In order to interpret
Blake's symbolic language, one needs to translate it into the familiar mythosophic
foundation of western civilization.

Blake's artistic initiation started at an early age. He was only fourteen when he was
apprenticed to James Basire, the engraver, who sent him to make drawings of
monuments in Westminster Abbey and other ancient churches. Being in a position to
judge the differences between two forms of art, medieval Gothic and classical Roman
and Greek, the young apprentice, whose visionary designs, illuminations and
engravings earned him lasting fame in the history of visual arts, decided in favour of the
former, justifying his option in terms characteristic of the shift from the mechanical view
of the Enlightenment to the vital-organicist spirit of the new age: Mathematic form is
eternal in the reasoning memory; living form is eternal existence. Grecian is mathematic
form. Gothic is living form. His acquaintance with Hellenistic thought and Eleusinian
mythology, which helped shape his own mythopoetic vision, was probably derived from
Jacob Bryant's Analysis of Ancient Mythology and Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden,
which were published with engravings by Blake. Whereas most Augustans had thought
Plato was nonsense, the new age eagerly absorbed Platonic and Neoplatonic
transcendentalism. Thomas Taylor was the first translator of Plato and Plotinus into
English (1758). The same century saw the translation of Hermetica, whose cosmogony
is subtly echoed in Blake's Vala, or The Four Zoas (Night the First).

The esoteric mixing pot which gave birth to Blake's intriguing and emblematic
figures (Los, Vala, Thel, Tharmas, Ahania, Albion, Tirzah etc.), whose meanings have
not been exhausted by subsequent interpretations, had mainly absorbed elements of
Hellenistic culture – that impressive synthesis of ancient esoteric thought (Platonic
philosophy, Hermetic doctrines, alchemy etc.). Some of its assumptions can well serve
as analogues for Blake' visionary flights of imagination. Our account is partly based
upon information provided by Raine's book, quoted above. According to the
Neoplatonists (see Porphyry: De Antro Nympharum – Cave of the Nymphs), the souls
come into generation attracting to themselves a watery envelope. The nymphs on the
watery cave enact the perpetual cycle of descent through the moon (the northern gate,
the Cancer) and ascent through the sun (the Capricorn, the southern gate of return).
The nymphs at their looms weave the garments of generation (the moist cloud is a
symbol of the body). In the Cabbala, the original pure source is diluted through its
successive emanations (sephiroth) until they reach the earth, gross matter. The return
to the original purity is possible through purging fire. In the Hermetic cosmogony,
likewise, Anthropocosmos gets a glimpse of his own image reflected in water, from the
lowest heavenly body, the moon, falls in love with it and dives into the sea. Out of his
union with nature, seven children are born, who inherit their father's spirit and their
mother's body [11]. The Uranian spirit, the divine principle is thus imprisoned in matter,
and its release is the great work of the Alchemists.

Blake's Urizen is the God of the Old Testament or the fallen Demiurge of the
gnostics, who created the earth in imitation of the divine Intellect's emanation into the
heavenly bodies. He is a figure of authority, tyranny, of reasoning faculties (the patron of
the mechanically-minded philosophers and mathematicians of the Enlightenment), a
defender of an immobile status quo and a giver of the Ten Commandments. His
antagonist, Orc („orcus” is the word for “hell” in Virgil and Milton), whom Urizen has
chained down with chain of Jealousy (The Book of Los) is the archetypal rebel, a hater
of dignities, the spirit of revolt which swells up in revolutionary moments of history (the
French Revolution or America's War of Independence). Los (probably “sol”: sun), the
time-spirit, balances the opposite movements of descent into matter and ascent to the
immortals. He is a smith but also a potter, who takes the furnaces Urizen had used in
creating the world and “builds them anew”. But the creation of Los is no longer one of
matter but an imaginative architecture. The “terrible race of Los and Enitharmon”
(Harmony) produce laws, religions, philosophy.

On the famous Barberini vase described by Erasmus Darwin in his book, the
Eleusian scene of the descent of the soul to Hades and immortality is engraved by
Blake with the additional element of a sleeping sun. The idea behind this strange image
is that the two opposite worlds, of mortality and immortality are contrary to each other in
point of time as well: when one is awake, the other is asleep. Albion, which is Blake's
emblem for Britain, is now dead to eternity, as its imaginary vision has been
extinguished by empiricist science and philosophy. The people of England, in the age of
Newton and Locke, entertained the false belief that the phenomena of nature have an
existence apart from that of the mind (analogous to Hegel's World Spirit or to Fichte's
non-Ego, unable to recognize the phenomenal world as their own creation). Jerusalem
is that blessed state of the Spirit's self-awareness: in your own Bosom you bear your
own heaven/ And Earth ... though it appears without, it is within/ In your imagination, of
which this world of mortality is but a shadow. Sacred history intersects the England of
mortality. In ancient time the Lamb of God was believed to have walked “the pleasant
pastures”, but now is the time of the industrial revolution, of material progress and
mechanistic science. The prophetic tone (Bring me my Bow of burning gold...) mounts
an apotheotic vision of the New Jerusalem built in England's green & pleasant Land.
The successive moments of spiritual blindness or enlightenment yields a cyclic pattern
of history which Blake describes in The Mental Traveller, a poem cast in the swiftly-
falling cadences of the folk ballad form. The poem tells the story of an infant boy
sacrificed by a woman Old. But then “The Babe” is born again, he grows old and the Old
Woman grows young, until he is able to get the upper hand and nail her down. Then the
story repeats itself. The pattern of consistent binary oppositions (abstract and concrete,
visual and suggestive, vital and sapless, cruel and mild, cunning and innocent etc.) is
uncommonly fanciful, the imagery, extraordinarily rich. She grows old, feeding upon his
shrieks & cries, he grows young nourished by the honey of her infant lips/ the Bread &
wine of her sweet smile. This troping strategy is meant to render the metamorphic vision
of the mind, which can project its own world, irrespective of the data furnished by the
senses:

The Guests are scatter's thro' the land,

For the Eye altering alters all;

The senses roll themselves in fear

And the flatt Earth becomes a Ball.

The human spirit vacillates between sensuous delight in the world and murdering
Reason, which reduces the rich variety of the earthly show to the barren, geometrical
representations of Newton's spheres rolling through the void. Blake's pattern of
conflicting historical cycles might have been inspired by a passage in Plato's Politicus,
which was published in English at the time when Blake wrote this poem. Plato sees
history as a movement between two poles; sometimes God is in control of the universe,
and at that time man grows from age to youth, and sometimes God abandons mankind,
those being retrograde cycles, when man grows from youth to age. Plato uses the
simile of a spring wound up in a purposeful direction, and then left by God to unwind
itself. In Milton, one of Blake's prophetic books, the two cycles are called “vortexes”:
heaven is a vortex passed already and the earth a vortex not yet passed. The present
moment would thus be that of the God-forsaken man.

Huge symmetries organize Blake's prophetic books, as well as his Songs of

Innocence and Experience, as they tell again and again his original version of a
traditional myth: the saga of the fall and redemption (descent and ascent) of The
Universal Man, or The Eternal Great Humanity. The poet has abandoned the
Augustans' petty concerns with present social events, taking a view of mankind from the
highest standing, as Shakespeare or Milton had previously done.

Whereas the Songs of Innocence move from dawn to dark, telling of man's Edenic
state (in a metaphorical, not in a topical sense), in the pastoral mode of a Shepherd-
Christ figure, the Songs of Experience coming from a Bard (Blake's mask) pour forth
from dark to daybreak, exorcising, by naming, the evil in the lapsed world.

The universal gospel of love communicated in the Songs of Innocence, with the
artless rhetoric reminiscent of nursery rhymes (one piece is entitled Nurse's Song),
makes one think of Dürer's Adam and Eve in Eden, looking pure yet a bit dull. Man's
Edenic condition is a metaphor for a set of values universally cherished: kindness,
peace, blissful communion. In this prelapserian world, free from death, pain or cruelty,
all anatagonisms have been abolished: a little girl who gets lost is safely lulled to sleep
in a cave by animals of prey – wolves, tygers and lions, which shed “ruby tears” of
compassion. “And the lion will lie with the lamb”, as John's Revelation prophesizes. For
in the world which is still with God, Logos becomes true, reified (identical in physics and
metaphysics –[12]) The poems do not refer to a reality outside them, they narcisistically
mirror their textual nature, the fact that they are a reinscription of the nursery or pastoral
convention. In the manner of Milton, in Lycidas, Blake mixes up elements of the pagan
and of the Christian pastoral: the shepherd's pipe, the hollow reed, the tradition that
Jesus is the Good Shepherd and Christians are his flock, or that Jesus is the Lamb of
God, sacrificed for the redemption of the sinning man. The colour symbolism (black and
white reconciled) would point to a moment before Genesis (light creating a world
separate from God), one of Unity: The black boy has a white heart, the Chimney-
Sweeper is guarded by a white angel, the orphaned child finds in God a father, the lost
girl is protected by beasts etc. The Christ figure is also troped as a child, as the
incarnated God. The Word is its own World.

The world of the Songs of Experience is a postlapserian one, with topical allusions
and unresolved conflicts. We recognize names of places, social institutions, the power
relations governing Blake's real world. Whereas the world of innocence is equal unto
itself, a state of perpetuity („echoing green”), the world of experience exists in a time
fragmented into “„Present, Past, & Future”, disputed by the “lapsed Soul” and the
redemptive voice of the Bard. The figure of the Incarnation is replaced by that of the
Holy Word of the Old-Testamental Genesis, Jesus by Jehovah, the artlessness of the
pastoral by a variety of rhythms and rhymes, most of them breathing the pathos of a
psalmic invocation:

Hear the voice of the Bard!

Who Present, Past, & Future sees

Whose ears have heard

The Holy Word

That walk'd among the ancient trees.

Calling the lapsed Soul,

And weping in the evening dew;

That night controll

the starry pole,

And fallen, fallen light renew!

Once again, the poet combines heterogeneous elements, in his version of the Fall
(a Hellenistic mannerism): the myth of captivation (Hermetic), the descent through the
watery cave (Porphyry), and the cruel, “jealous” (of the true Divine source), fallen
Demiurge of the gnostics. After all, as reads an early prose fragment, he did believe that
“All Religions are One”:

„Prison'd on wat'ry shore,

Starry jealousy does keep my den...”

Education does not seem to be much good (The Schoolboy), churches and priests
are exposed as forms of obscurantism and repression (A Little Boy Lost), man's vital
energies are suppressed by social and religious taboos (The Garden of Love). The
insistence upon the word “chartered” (“charter'd streets” of London, the “charter'd
Thames”) suggests a doubling of the bodily prison of the flesh by a metaphorical prison
of institutionalized forms, pseudo-scientific assumptions, falsifying theoretical systems,
which are constantly imposed upon man. Evil lies outside man, in the victimizing social
institutions: the monarchy sending people to war, the Church denying natural
inclinations and desires, deadening the profusion of the worldly show („blackening” as
opposed to the creative white light):

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry

Every black'ning Church appalls

And the hapless Soldier's sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls.

(London)

While the pastoral allows of the reconciliation of opposites, all the elements of the
postlapserian world are mutually destructive. The world is divided against itself:
Innocence is corrupted by Vice, birth and wedding already contain the germs of death
(the oxymoronic phrase is in imitation of Blake himself):

But most thro' midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlot's curse

Blasts the new born Infant's tear,

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

 The indefinite article is a grammatical index of the present dissolution and fall from
unity: The Divine Image in the first book of songs becomes A Divine Image in the
second;

Mercy, Pitty, Peace and Love are supplanted by Cruelty, Jealousy, Terror and
Secrecy. If Tirzah is the female generative principle of the mortal body, imprisoned in
the senses, who will help the ascent from “generation” to “regeneration”? The most
often quoted poem in the collection seems to provide the answer. And in order to
answer the disquieting question – Did God who created the meek lamb also create the
destructive tiger? –, one needs to remember the allegorical significance of the tiger in
the Anglo-Saxon allegory, as both destroyer and redeemer of a fallen world. The
Redeemer figure, according to Kathleen Raine, is not only Jesus here but also the artist
who imaginatively recreates the world of matter, as the type of interrogation reminds of
the one in the fifth book of Hermetica, the passage about the Workman, the Creator-
Artist. Let us compare them:

And what shoulder, and what art, Who circumscribed and

marked out

Could twist the sinews of thy heart? his eyes? Who bored his nostrils and

And when thy heart began to beat, ears? Who opened his mouth, who

What dread hand? and what dread stretched out and tied together his

feet? sinews?

The shift from past tense to the subjunctive might suggest that the De-miurge who
created the tiger in the world illo tempore might be different from the present “workman”,
who intends to produce the Tyger poem on the page, in twin likeness to the real one:

Tyger! Tyger! burning brigh

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell might well serve for an introduction to the
prophetic books of archrebels. The unprecedented attack on all forms of social and
doctrinary tyranny, the overthrowal of the basic assumptions of aesthetics, religion, and
ethics find an appropriate language of shocking paradoxes, whose turns are still on
everybody's lips, even when the author is not remembered: The road of excess leads to
the palace of wisdom; The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction;
Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion; Improvement makes
straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius etc.

The gnomic phrasing, the grand design of a sage discourse, the epic sweep of the
symbolic cast, the sophisticated versification reveal unexpected resources of a poet
who had earlier exercised himself in the folk ballad and the pastoral. The French
Revolution, in almost regular fourteeners, mounts a vision of history, while the
succeeding America is cast into short-numbered paragraphs, like the verses in the
Bible. It opens with a Preludium, which provides the mythological context for the events
occurring from the early 1770s to the British defeat in 178l. The “red Orc”, arisen from
hell, where he had been confined, opposes the authority of Urizen's iron laws; he
stamps the Ten Commandments to dust and scatter(s) religion abroad. In response to
his speech, Albion's Angel calls on the thirteen angels of the American colonies to
suppress the spirit of rebellion. The thirteen angels hold a meeting and, after some
debating, tear off their robes and throw down their sceptres (a recurrent image in Blake,
suggesting repenting authority). They descend, taking sides with Washington, Paine,
and Warren. In their turn, the thirteen colonies turn from loyalty to Britain to loyalty to
each other. The battle between America and Albion is mainly a contest of visions, of
values.

Blake has long been apprehended as a poet of wild and uncontrolled visions, yet,
as Northrop Frye emphasizes [13], his manner is not allegorical but mythopoetic;
meaning is not oblique but communicated through the total simultaneous shape of the
poem. The looms of his visionary flights are well-tempered by a heightened sense of
form. The tightness of an archetypal script is not annulled by the variety of names or
accidents it applies to. The structuring principle is provided by the Smaragdine Table of
Hermes Trismegistus, poetically explored in Plate 71 of Jerusalem (“for that which is
above is like that which is beneath”). Divine Vision is also Living Form, not an
abstraction. It received an actual shape in the body of the Saviour (Milton). Human
Imagination is its time- and erath-bound correlative. Urizen's Tent, confined to the facts
of the earth, stands for the failed envious imitation of the former. Vala is the soul that
makes the descent, accompanied by Luvah, the divine lover who, in the world of
mortality, becomes the serpent. Thel is also a soul who descends through the four
elements, yet being able, through visionary projection, to escape the prison of “the Clod
of Clay”. Her name suggests “Thalia”, art being a form of escape, of transcendence.
Orc, as the timeless Spirit, Imagination, finds in Los an earthly counterpart. Albion is
opposed to Jerusalem, the daughters of Albion, at their looms of generation, bind the
eternals into mortal bodies, while Enitharmon's looms produce the superstructure of
human systems of belief (In Milton, humans fall into three categories: the Elect, who live
by the Will of God, the Reprobate, who break the Ten Commandments, believing in the
imagination, and the Redeemed, who “live in doubts and fear”). The mode of vision is
defining for a human typology: you are that you believe in. Immortality is always
achieved through union with the heavenly emanation, or the earthly counterpart: Urizen
and Ahania (Earth), Orc and a daughter of Urthona (possibly, “earth-owner”), Milton and
Ololon, Tharmas and Enion. A “marriage of heaven and hell”, for, as we read in the
homonymous piece, without contraries is no progression. Vision is the true demiurge, it
transforms the objects it touches: The microscope knows not of this nor the telescope:
they alter/ the ratio of the spectator's organ, but leave objects untouched./ for every
space larger than a red globule of man's blood/ Is visionary, and is created by the
hammer of Los. It is not the self that is changed by the world, it is for the self to impose
its own world. That is why the process of an artist's growth is only a matter of access to
a higher, enlightened vision: Milton, the national poet, is finally able to escape
individualism, to discard the empirical rationalism of Bacon, Locke and Newton, to free
himself from the “Greek and Latin slaves of the sword”, to cast aside from poetry all that
is not inspiration. Augustan servile imitations (hirelings) are making room for the
visionary spaces of the “new age”.

Traditional myths too undergo assimilation to the new sensibility. The Hermetic
cosmogony in Vala, or the Four Zoas sets in polarity the vision of the Spirit who makes
the descent (Tharmas), diving into the sea, and that of his earthly counterpart, Enion,
who weaves the garments of his mortality. Their visions are mutually destructive. She is
heavenly beautiful to draw me to destruction, yet his soul is to her incomprehensible,
and that is even more horrifying than the loss of immortality. While she hides from his
“searching eyes”, Tharmas, as the broader consciousness, is able to see his soul with
her dim sight, as a collection of dry fibres, set under the microscopic lens, the severed,
sapless vegetation, strongly suggestive of Dionysus being torn to pieces by the Titans:

“Why wilt thou Examine every little fibre of my soul,

Spreading them cut before the sun like stalks of flax to dry?

The infant joy is beautiful, but its anatomy

Horrible, Ghast & Deadly; nought shalt thou find in it.

The Alchemical myth of captivation by a mirror or reflection in water is made into

a myth of the captive artist of Romantic tradition, locked away from the thoroughfare of
the trivial, everyday world. Whereas Jakob Boheme had derived, from the Alchemical
tradition, an idea of “the glasss of the Abyss”, in which the source contemplates itself,
Blake obviously transfers it to the textual nature of his poetry. The “Crystal Cabinet”,
form'd of gold, the golden cage in which Apollo has shut him up to hear him sing (Song)
are mises-en-abyme of the figure of the artist. Gold as lapis, or opus alchemicum, is
cast into a structure, a shape („golden cage”, “silken net”, “Crystal cabinet”), which is at
the same time a fresh perspective on the world: Another England there I saw,/
Another London with its tower etc. The poet can contemplate himself in his objectified
image: the self-sufficient work of art.

References

[1] British Romanticism, edited by Stuart Curran, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 29.

[2] Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism, Routledge, 1992.

[3] British Romanticism, Op. cit., p. 27.

[4] Fred Botting, Frankenstein and the Language of Monstrosity in Reviewing Romanticism, edited by
Philip W. Martin & Robin Jarvis, Macmillan, 1992, p. 5l.

[5] George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge (17l0), Theory of Vision, (1733), Siris (1744).

[6] British Romanticism, Op. cit., pp. 74–94.

[7] Ibidem, p. 76.

[8] Ibidem, p. 79.

[9] Gary Kelley, Romantic Fiction, in British Romanticism, Op. cit., pp. 202-203.

[10] Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, Oxford University Press.

[11] A.J. Festugičre, Hermétisme et mystique paienne, Editions Aubier-Mont-aigne, Paris, 1967, p. 56.

[12] Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie, Editions de Minuit, 1972, p. 27.

[13] Northrop Frye, The Stubborn Sructure, Essays on Culture and Society, Cornell University Press,
1970.
 The Romantic Legislators

No period in the history of English literature has lately known more radical
revisions than Romanticism. In the Introduction to a bookcase on the age, first
published in 1992 [14], we can read the following statement: The dominant force in
American Romantic criticism in the 197os and early 1980s was clearly Paul de Man. His
influence – exerted through such essays as “The rhetoric of temporality” and “The
intentional structure of the Romantic image” – was instrumental in making the
Romantics one of the prime sites of applied deconstruction. No longer could critics write
innocently or confidently about such supposed dualisms of Romantic thought and
practice as nature and supernature, subject and object, and, most particularly, symbol
and allegory. Gone were the unified verbal icons of the New Criticism and the
systematic myth-making of Bloom and Abrams.

According to Paul de Man (Allegories of Reading, Yale University Press, 1979),

Romantic texts are based not upon symbols, as traditionally assumed, but on allegorical
structures, which imply a disjunction between the origin and the meaning of a sign. In
other words, allegory stands on two legs: its own sign value and the sign value of the
object it stands for, whereas a symbol stands on one leg, has a fixed meaning. The
figurative language which Coleridge himself confesses, in The Statesman's Manual
(1816) to have deliberately chosen is that of the Bible, communicating truth through
symbol: The mediatory power of the imagination, incorporating the Reason in images of
the senses giving birth to a system of symbols, consubstantial with the truths, of which
they are the conductors (instead of a collection of things and quantities, hollow
abstractions like the present age) (...) Ezekiel and his vision of the chariot in which the
spirit of the living creature was in the wheels as well. The student is now faced with the
painful choice of deciding whether a philosopher or a poet is more capable of telling a
symbol from an allegory... In this case he may confidently seek advice in a literary
theoretician, like Angus Fletcher, who, in his celebrated book, Allegory, the Theory of a
Symbolic Mode, provides an epistemological grounding of the two: allegory relies on a
shared context, both religious and scientific, while the lack of such a shared world
breeds private symbolic vision. The Romantic symbol points to a crisis in the
interpretative capabilities of the mind, to the limits of understanding. The shared world of
a common Christian transcendentalism had given birth to the Phoenix, Piers Plowman,
Fairie Queene, The Pilgrim's Progress. In all of them there is a deferral in meaning –
from literal to figurative – yet both planes are interpreted in the same way by an ideally
constructed reader. No such easy decoding work is expected by those who read The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Kubla Khan. In the sceptical postmetaphysical and post-
Kantian age, the poet is trying to make his own sense of the world, in his own
language, often prompted by the whimsical free associations of dreams and private
visions. Besides, the language of Romantic poets, who no longer rely on pre-existing
fixed forms, is not a unified one. While there is plenty of allegory in the didactic and
discursive Wordsworth, the Coleridge poems speak a different tongue, reflecting back
upon itself, and not referring to a semiological structure preceding it. Any sign (and any
trope) is based upon differance (a disjunctive temporal structure): it is itself and other.
Yet the relationship between origin and meaning in a symbol and in allegory is perfectly
distinct. An allegory contains its own interpretation: this is how you are going to read the
preceding signs. For instance, Wordsworth, resorting to the familiar medieval dream
allegory in The Prelude. He falls asleep, and has a vision of an Arab carrying a stone
which he takes for Euclid's “Elements” and a shell which he entrusts with the power of
the trumpet sounding the apocalypse. The scene is afterwards amply commented as an
illustration of the Quixotic nature of books. If Coleridge doubles up a sign system, the
symbolical structure (meaning inseparable from sign) is preserved. The effect is one of
duplicating an enigma, a mirror-like effect, not a hermeneutic disclosure of a riddle. The
Abyssinian maid, singing of Mount Abora in Kubla Khan, ecoes the woman wailing for
her demon lover in the first part of the poem; the sunny domes, the caves of eyes are
spoken about after having been contemplated, yet they remain as mysterious and
untranslatable into a paraphrase. This repetition of the same (semper idem) has, on
the contrary, the effect of doing away with the temporality inscribed in the sign, making it
meaningless, as nothing new ever shows up. It is the repetition of the origin (or a return
to it), not a movement away from it (corruption) into a derivative semiological structure.

Another rhetorical structure attributed by De Man to Romantic texts is the

deconstructive effect of rhetoric: the disjunction between sign and meaning, irony, the
divorce between the semantic and the figurative meaning of words. An illustration is his
essay, Time and History in Wordsworth [15] on the preeminence of language over
nature and history in The Prelude, and the strategy by which what is asserted on the
semantic plane (an analogy between the growth of his mind and River Duddon) is
denied through “some aspects of the language”, as, for instance, the important part
played by the word “backward” in the following lines from the Conclusion.

For, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes,

I see what was, and is, and will abide

which invalidates the analogy: This backward motion does not exist in nature but is the
privilege of the faculty of mind that Wordsworth calls the Imagination [16]. As
Wordsworth sees in Imagination a spark of the Universal Spirit, the distinction between
present, past and future is here meaningless. The river is an incremental trope
(repeated throughout the poem) for the mind, and it is hard to interpret just one adverb
as possibly undoing this metaphor. Deconstruction is inherent in the rhetorical strategy
of some modernist and all canonical postmodernist texts (the écart between the
semantic level and the rhetorical meaning in Eliot, for instance, is enormous, while the
Prevert poems sound absurd on the first, only functioning as rhetorical games).
However, applying it to the constructive Romantic stylistic matrix is a rather risky affair.
If a text by Coleridge did not differ formally from one by contemporary poets, there
would be no reason for literary periodization. Besides, speaking in general about
“romantic rhetoric” is apt to level down important differences. More recent approaches,
like those of A.W. Price and Keith Cunliffe, included in a collection of essays titled
Platonism and the English Imagination (edited by Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton,
Cambridge 1994), would indicate that the “sound and the fury” of deconstruction
misapplied have cooled down.

The fact is Coleridge and Wordsworth differ widely in their aesthetic views and
discourses, and they themselves changed a lot in time. Tintern Abbey, the poem which
Wordsworth added at the last moment to the bulk of Lyrical Ballads, seems to belong to
a different poet. In his turn, Colerdige made an early escape from the influence of
Wordsworth's nature philosophy into Neoplatonic and Kantian visions of the autonomy
of Self and art. The corner-stone of his Logosophia – a projected prose epic, meant to
reconcile religion and philosophy – is the idea that man's life begins in detachment from
nature and ends in union with God. Both Wordsworth and Colerdige abandoned in due
time the Jacobin revolt and Unitarian radicalism (disappointed at the collapse of French
revolutionary ideas during the Reign of Terror and later under the policy of conquest),
Wordsworth placing himself in the service of a Torry MP, and Colerdige supporting the
established Church in the form of “clerisy” (Church and State), meant to cultivate people
and to mediate between governmental institutions and the civil society. Wordsworth's
address to Coleridge is often apologetic, while Coleridge is straightforwardly polemic.
We can trace, of course, common, canonical features. For one thing, they do not write
collections of unconnected pieces. Their organic theory inspires them with an idea of
unique and unitary projects, of the One Book, like the Bible (Wordsworth's Recluse,
Coleridge's Logosophia or Biographia Literaria). Their writing has an autobiographical
character, focusing not events but inner growth: having for its principal subject the
sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement (Wordsworth: Advertisement to the
Prelude; Coleridge: Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life
and Opinions). They both fight the mechanistic thinking of the eighteenth century,
Newton's atomistic picture of the universe, the narrow empiricism of Locke, the
simplifying associationism of David Hartley, while supporting the absolute oneness of
being – whether through a return to Neoplatonism (men as parts and proportions of one
whole) or by embracing some form of pantheism (Aristotle's energeia, revived as the
Spirit of the Universe)
 Colerdige and Wordsworth met in 1795, and in 1978 they were hastily preparing
for print a collection of Lyrical Ballads.The collection went into a new edition in 18oo,
this time preceded by a Preface by Wordsworth, which was soon embraced as the
aesthetic programme of a group of young poets. Whereas the Middle Ages had
imposed a palpable didactic (religious, and moral) design upon art, and the
Renaissance and the Enlightenment had drawn heavily upon the poetic of the Greek
and Roman antiquity, Romantic aesthetics is the first to match a modern sensibility and
worldview. The stress on the perceiving mind (I think, therefore I am, to be is to be
perceived, I cannot get any knowledge of reality in itself, I can only control my
representations of it), the valorization of selfhood at the expense of the material, social
circumstances of the individual's personality, originating in the philosophical discourses
from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century (Descartes, Berkeley, Hume,
Kant, Fichte, Hegel) had important bearings upon literature. First of all, it grows
autonomous from either mimetic or formal impositions. The poet is no longer
expected to “hold up the mirror to nature”. Physics is sublimated into its representations.
A poet has a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they
were present; and an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far
from being the same as those produced by real events. The stuff of poetry is not
provided by things or by a direct contact with them but by emotions – by the individual's
subjective response to the world, when it is not present to his consciousness (emotion
recollected in tranquillity). It is no longer controlled by judgement (the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings) or by formal norms (simple and unelaborate expressions
(...) no essential difference between the language of prose and that of metrical
compositions). The scene of aesthetic emotion is transposed from the outer into the
inner world. Man and nature are essentially adapted to each other, but this consensus
of experience has an epistemological rather than an ontological basis: the mind of
man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature.

In discussing Wordsworth's poetic, critics have lately resorted to The Prelude

rather than to the celebrated Preface, as the former knew several revisions, from the
late nineties, when Wordsworth began his work on it to the last edition of 185o. Its
textual history mirrors Wordsworth's life-long hesitations in establishing the
preeminence of the two factors, Nature and Education, in shaping a self which, in the
light of German idealist philosophy had become progressively aware of its separate
existence in the world.

In 1798 Wordsworth launched upon the vast poem The Recluse, which was to
record the Growth of an Individual (later, A Poet’s) Mind, a Bildungsgeschichte out of
which he only produced The Prelude and The Excursion (1805-1814).

Cathy Caruth, in her essay Past Recognition: Narrative Origins in Wordsworth and
Freud [17] locates the origin of the poetic spirit in the baby at the breast” (...) in an
empirically situated event, the physical relation of the mother and the nursing baby,
which produces two stories: an affectionate relationship with an empirically situated
mother and a propping activity (affection derived from the contact with the mother's
body which survives the mother's death, displacement). The respective scene comes
only in the second book, and it is not for nothing that Wordsworth also wrote Book First.
It is here that we are to seek the origin of his spiritual development, whether we are
lucky to stumble into Freud or not. And we do not. The first book is an account of
childhood, and the pivotal experience (there are such moments in each book,
anticipating Joyce's epiphanies, i.e. moments of intense awareness, of spiritual
enlightenment) is one in which the child looks up into the sky, and perceives a huge
peak, black and huge,/ As if with voluntary power instinct/ Upreared its head (...) with
purpose of its own/ And measured motion like a living thing/ Strode after me. The child's
frightened mind (suggested by the repetition of “huge”) lends life to the banal “summit of
a cragged ridge”. Paul de Man, in Time and History... is right in emphasizing the
importance of such reversals of perspectives in Wordsworth, from earth to the sky,
sometimes rendered through the verb “hang”. They are emblems of the reflecting
consciousness, of the subjective representation of actual experience. Nature is seen
from a vitalist perspective, as teleological form (having its own will and purpose,
energeia). The child becomes suspicious of “unknown modes of being”, of a world
beyond that of actual experience. The effect on the mind is one of sublimation
(Aufhebung in Hegel): the real shapes are supplanted in the mind by emptied Forms,
(see Plato, Phaedo, and his theory of our recollections of ideal Forms, from
contemplating their shadows in the things of the world). The eclipse of the real world is
sort of an apocalyptic end (the figure of the apocalypse is reiterated with each new
visionary experience):

o'er my thoughts

There hung a darkness, call it solitude

Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes

Remained, no pleasant images of trees,

Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;

But huge and mighty forms, that do not live

Like living men, moved slowly through the mind

By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

The natural background is erased and supplanted by a subjective representation.

And this process is the work of the plastic Spirit of the universe that gives to forms and
images a breath/ and everlasting motion. A spirit which works through man as it does
through nature.
 As the poet deliberately sets out to recover his past experiences at the end of the
first book, he also shifts from abstract invocations to a precise address. The poem is
produced for the benefit of his Friend (Coleridge), not for some indefinite readership.
Consciousness is being dramatized, lyric self-reflexivity makes room for a histrionic
performance. Wordsworth's self in relation to the world becomes the object of his
recollections, and the narrative of this retrieved selfhood is in its turn the object of his
friend's reading and examination.

In the second book, the poet feels there was a split within his mind as he went to
school. That it had grown divided. It is for the first time that the river metaphor is
employed: This portion of the river of my mind/ Came from what fountain? If the shapes
of things impressing his mind in childhood and the forms imprinted by the plastic spirit of
the universe had been in unity, science which welcomes him to school appears to him
only as a prop/ To our infirmity.

For the question is: do we come to know the world through perception or do we
impose our own representations on it (things we perceive or we have made). Here
comes the scene with the “blessed baby”, which is an allegory for the coming, explicit
answer to the above question. The baby sucking his mother's breast also drinks in the
feelings of his Mother's eye. Physical nourishment is opposed, in the customory
antithetic Romantic manner, to the non-empirical emotional relationship (love between
mother and child). Yet after his mother dies, and that particular “prop” of his affection is
removed, the building stood, as if sustained/ By its own spirit. His emotional inbuilt
drives are still there, because it had not been his mother that had originated them. His
mind had acted as agent of the one great Mind, both creator and receiver, working in
alliance with that which it beholds. In the Phaedo fashion, as the infant beholds his
mother, or a beautiful flower etc., he recognizes their beauty or goodness. There is a
process of the soul recollecting the antenatal existence, before corruption or birth:
Remembering how she (the soul) felt:

let this

Be not forgotten, that I still retained

My first creative sensibility;

That by the regular action of the world

My soul was unsubdued. A plastic power

Abode with me; a forming hand (...)

An auxiliar light

Came from my mind, which on the setting sun

 Bestowed new splendour;

The “residence at Cambridge” in the third book suggests a new birth: the college
labours, of the Lecturer's room, which is a painful one for it means the severance of the
self from the natural habitat, and the suppression of the instinctively emotional life by
Reason (spake perpetual logic to my soul [...] Did bind my feelings even as in a chain)
through acquisition of the purely human language. The river could flow with ampler
range, yet Learning is troped as the Christian warrior of medieval allegories, errant in
the quest (erring?) for culture means again the apocalypse of the real world, and the
creation of a world/ Within a world, a midway residence of human business;

Fit reverence for the glorious Dead, the sight

Of those long vistas, sacred catacombs,

Where mighty minds lie visibly entombed

Have often stirred the heart of youth…

Yet such emotions do not touch the poet who feels driven out of that first
Paradise of communion with natural forms. It is in the hawthorn shade that he hears
Chaucer, while birds... tell his tales/ Of amorous Passion. Of school competitions,
Wordsworth prefers not to say anything, for, as he warns us, his theme has been/ What
passed within me. Not of outward things.

After the summer vacation of the fourth book we are brought to the topic of books
in the fifth. The dream allegory with the Arab (the Arabs are credited with spreading the
love of science over Western Europe), with the stone and the shell, which to him are
Euclid and the Apocalypse, reinscribes the Don Quixote figure of the book addict. The
reified order of culture does not impress the poet. The imagery connected with them is
apocalyptic, inert or mechanical: earthly casket of immortal verse, the Arab of the
desert, the men that framed them, drop of wisdom as it falls/ Into the dimpling cistern of
the heart. The poet prefers to think of their vital origin: That sure foundation in the heart
of man, which recognizes the wiser spirit at work in unreasoning nature (the World
Spirit). The famous “Winander boy” episode (the mature man revists the cliffs of
Winander, remembering what he felt when he contemplated the landscape as a boy) is
one more allegory of man being exposed to the school of nature and to the school of
books (made to act on infant minds as surely as the sun/ Deals with a flower). The
fragment is typical of the romantic “consensus of experience”, of the perfect
object/subject fusion in the relationship between self and world. The former boy
remembers the places, and they are said to have known him well. The boy used to blow
mimic hootings to the silent owls,/ That they might answer him. However, the next lines
engage the attention of De Man, being brought up as evidence of an irreducible
opposition between nature and the boy's self-knowledge (as a reflection) and capacity
to transcend the hic et nunc and anticipate his own death (the “uncertain heaven” as
preknowledge of his mortality):
 Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung

Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise

Has carried far into his heart the voice

Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene

Would enter unawares into the mind,

With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received

Into the bosom of the steady lake.

This Boy was taken from his mates, and died

In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old

(...) the grassy churchyard hangs

Upon a slope above the village school.

If we are to gloss the imagery of these lines, a comparison with a previous

fragment may be of help. In the fourth book, there is the passage from line 247 to 263,
in which the poet's experience of contemplating his image o'er the surface of past times
is likened to the contemplation of his face as reflected in the river. Falting memory
prevents perfect reconstruction of the past, just as motions that are sent he knows not
whence prevent the steadiness of his image in water. The uncertain heaven is the
unsteady image in the lake which ought to be steady yet is motioned by the Universal
Spirit – the same which impresses the observer's otherwise passive mind (the images
enter unawares). “Uncertain heaven” does not signify “preknowledge of death”, since
one can only anticipate actual events. As Wordsworth was still very much alive, the
meaning in the second group of lines ought to be metaphorical. The boy had been
separated from his nature-mates (owls, torrents and other partners of conversation) and
taken to the “village-school”. It had been that self, in a Hegelian natural state (spirit unto
itself, immersed in nature) that had died; school had bred in him an awareness of man
having an existence separate from nature (spirit opposed to itself): the language of
human business.

The poet will speak a different language from now on, the sixth book introducing
that first poetic faculty – the Imagination. The journey to the Alps is the background of a
recognition scene: of the poet in himself. The sight of Mont Blanc brings
disappointment, as a soulless image replaces a living thought: The actual sight is less
than that Mont Blanc which the mind had imaged to itself. Imagination rises from the
mind's abyss/ Like an unfathered vapour. The self, now displaced from the order of
nature, recognizes it as its true home and destiny. Similarly to its origin, which has
nothing empirical about it, imagination is teleologically defined, in Kantian terms, as its
own purpose, seeking no trophies, no spoils, no gains from the outside world.

The seventh book takes the poet to London, in whose description the poet seems
to have followed Cowper's view of the city world as a mutilated structure, soon to fall.
Those tempted by historicist or feminist approaches may find grist to grind in
Wordsworth's presentation of foreigners and prostitutes as adding to the other evils of
the labyrinthine city, of vulgar people and trivial events. We find it impossible, however,
to read it as “literature of the sublime”. Neil Hertz does, in his essay The Notion of
Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime [18]. The sublime is defined, according to
Kant, as the mind's exultation in its own rational faculties, in its ability to think a totality
that cannot be taken in through the senses. London supposedly functions in
Wordsworth's text as a blocking agent, an object of dismay. “Blocking” in what sense?
The sublime, in Burke or Kant, refers to something so grand that it cannot be
comprehended by man's finite mind or properly rendered through words. The mind
takes pride in having conceived something which surpasses its condition (the infinite).
Wordsworth's City can be taken in only through the senses, as there is no rational
structure in it to appeal to reason (block it or do whatever else): no law, no meaning,
and no end. It is below, not above understanding. A minimal world, not an infinitely
expanding one. Its discourses (its reified self-consciousness) are the blazoned names
of the shops or the inscriptions upon fronts of houses, or the informative note on a
beggar's chest, telling the story of his life. The labyrinth-world and the blind beggar’s
face become emblems of an epistemological crisis: This emblem seemed of the utmost
we can know,/ Both of ourselves and of the universe. Man's infinity, which he intimates
in his states of inwardness, cannot possibly be reduced to such minimal “texts”. The
poet turns away from aught external to the living mind, as it had proved
incomprehensible. Still he admits to nature having been a guide to his understanding of
man's superior being, which is his imaginative power. Once awakened, however, the
Imagination “burnishes” Nature (the usual apocalyptic imagery):

From touch of this new power

Nothing was safe; the elder tree that grew

Beside the well-known charnel-house had then

A dismal look; the yew-tree had its ghost ... (Book Eighth)

The following three books tell of the events of France, from the promising
revolutionary dawns (France stood on golden hours) to the restoration of tyranny. The
twelfth book on Imagination, how Impaired and Restored resumes the panorama of his
inner growth as a sequence of living moments (visiting of imaginative power) when The
mind is lord and master – outward sense/ The obedient servant of her will. The mind
finds its supreme delight not in what is, not in the language of what has been (an
inscription on a monument about a murder committed there used to frighten him as if
the scene had been real), but in moments of visionary dreariness, when words are
wonted to express their “radiance”. The sight of a woman forcing her way across the
blowing wind – that visible effect of an invisible force – is a scene of recognition, or of
recollection of the universal heart. People in the City worship false idols – a Narcissistic
reflection of their limited experience in a fragmented, busy and chaotic world. The
history of the soul reaches back to prenatal intimation, rises from man's natural history
to his social life and culture, and looks forward, in expectation of a life beyond:

we have traced the stream

From the blind cavern whence is faintly heard

Its natal murmur; followed it to light

And open day; accompanied its course

Among the ways of Nature, for a time

Lost sight of it bewildered and engulfed:

Then given it greeting as it rose once more

 In strength, reflecting from its placid breast

The works of man and face of human life;

And lastly from its progress have we drawn

Faith in life endless, the sustaining thought

Of human Being, Eternity, and God.

The mind is like a blind cave previously to its conscious states. The nature-world is
a contiguous one (its course/ Among the ways of Nature) while the human world (of
social institutions, culture, history) is transcendent (sublimated in reflected images, self-
consciousness). The spirit recognizes in it its own image (reflects ... the ... face of
human life). The break between them is a sort of death (the buried Boy): death to
Nature, rebirth in spirit. The manifestations of non-empirical agencies are the “props” of
man's intimations of the World Spirit and of his own immortality. As prenatal
recollections are kindled in communion with the actual things in the world (Phaedo), the
without and the within, subject and object (object seen, and eye that sees) are ONE.
The poem possesses the speculative charm of a Platonic dialogue, while presenting the
formal tightness and rich imagery of a literary composition. The symmetries,
parallelisms, repetitions (the moments of visionary enlightenment associated with the
figure of the Apocalypse, and intensified through allegory, emblems, metalepsis) testify
to an unjustly underrated capacity of rendering meaning through the very structuring of
the discourse.

Cowper's conviction that God made the country, and man made the town (Town &
Country) had mapped out opposite emotional and moral spaces. Wordsworth sets them
in polarity in his phenomenology of the spirit, and tropes them in two distinct tongues. It
is only in poems of the countryside (as a social community, not in the broad sense of
“natural background”) that his style becomes deliberately homely, lacking literary
artifice. However, it is precisely his choice of an adequate discourse that betrays a
heightened literary awareness.

His meditative poems are cast in a different language – the canonical sonnet, the
epic sweep of blank verse, the disciplined music of the couplet. The folk ballad form,
which had been previously revived in Germany, undergoes a Romantic mutation,
changing from an epic genre to a “lyric” form, more propitious to the outpouring of
feelings than to the narration of extraordinary events. His broadest theme could be
defined as a quest, like that in the medieval romance, or like a test-case, common in
fairy-tales. It is the mind that is all the time put to the test in its confrontation with the
world and with itself. And the Grail it finally reaches is its own image.

The poems of the countryside are laments upon the disappearance of a pastoral
way of life, under the impact of the Industrial Revolution, which also meant the loss of a
set of values and modes of vision. Those who leave the village to seek work in the
country fall into dissolute ways, become deracinated, bring disgrace upon themselves
and family. The unfinished sheepfold in Michael (a Pastoral Poem) symbolizes the
impossibility of rebuilding a culture in ruins. The Female Vagrant, dispossessed by a
landowner, is forced to leave for America, and her subsequent life is a failure. Those
who stay behind find support in a kindred space, with which the spirit of these artless
people can freely commune. As death is felt as an integration into the anonymous circuit
of nature, of which man is a part, it breeds no anxiety. A child may freely take its meal to
the churchyard, where her brothers and sisters are buried, and still count herself as one
of them (We are Seven). As a good heart is the touchstone of man's character, even the
dim-witted can enjoy their parents' entire love, which does not expect any reward, being
an absolute (The Idiot Boy). A religious spirit can endure with fortitude life's hardships,
while the city drives even the most refined minds to madness and suicide (Resolution
and Independence – which could be paraphrased as “the autonomy of the moral Will”).
The realities of the village-world, as we can see, are permanently filtered through
emotional response and moral behaviour.

The trajectory of the poet's spiritual biography in his poetry has already been
traced in our discussion of the Prelude. All experience is a mode of vision

The mind vacillates between passive states and moments of imaginative flights,
when it lends the world its own transfiguring powers (To a Skylark). Persons or things
may be viewed in the “bodily eye” or in the “eye of the mind”. His lover's death may be
perceived either as return to an impersonal and inert earth (no motion has she now, no
force ... rolled round ... with rocks, and stones, and trees), as in “A slumber did my spirit
steel”, or as integration into the all-impelling, plastic spirit of the universe, whereby the
mind personifies nature, giving it a voice and a soul, as in “Three years she grew in sun
and shower”:

The floating clouds their state shall lend

To her; for her the willow bend;

Not shall she fail to see

Even in the motions of the Storm,

Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form

By silent sympathy

The mind that had perceived nature as a voice and a force distinct from its own
plastic vision and logos finally closes in upon itself. The lover who had been left behind
can still recover Lucy from his memories of her: although the physical prop has been
removed, his feelings feed upon themselves, so that he loves England “more and more”
precisely because its sights are charged with recollections of Lucy („I travelled among
unknown men”). The rainbow symbolizes this final realization that man's soul must be
rooted in a realm beyond that of the empirical universe, which can thus be “bracketed”;
and as the child is closer to the divine source, it is decreed father of the Man („My heart
leaps up when I behold”). A poem of the same year (1807) enlarges upon this idea
enunciated in the first line, bringing evidence in support of a Platonic theory about
recollection of prenatal existence, which lends a child's visions a heightened emotional
colouring: Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.
Although the poet has dropped the traditional formal aspects, the poem is an “ode”
through its thought-content (a “song of praise”). The “landscape poem”, a favourite
genre of the eighteenth century, is made into a “revisit poem” in Lines composed a Few
Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. The
poet's attention shifts from nature to the individual, from the outside to the inside, the
“revisit” being a modality of contrasting past and present selves. The mind has
disengaged itself from “animal” identification with nature, progressing towards vision
(the remoter charm,/ By thought supplied) and an autonomous space of a priori
representations (unborrowed from the eye). Experience is sublimated into
recollection (flashes on the inward eye – “I wondered lonely as a cloud”, The Solitary
Reaper). In the general metamorphosis of forms, the Romantic epic (The Excursion)
introduces the Soul-Odysseus, whose mind, with all its autonomous insights, is still to
the external world/ ...fitted, as it is only through experience of the world that the Ithaca of
the mind can be recollected.

The child, the river, and the wanderer figure tell a different story in Coleridge, and
in a different language too.

To us, Samuel Taylor Coleridge is that difference from Wordsworth which results
in the basic binary opposition of the Romantic code. Stephen Bygrave, in his essay
Land of the Giants [19]discusses the philosophical background of Biographia Literaria
also from Coleridge's perspective on the poetic of his literary associate: The revision of
Wordsworth's preface which occupies most of the second volume (of Biographia
Literaria) asserts the poetic symbol, broadly defined, against literalist interpretations of
the programme for “the language really used by men”. Coleridge stresses as a contrary
“truth” a poetic “genius” which is beyond the language community, a thing per se which
stands alone. The symbol is therefore claimed as a kind of self-sufficient metaphor. In
wishing to distinguish an expressive from a discursive function of language, then,
Coleridge tends to posit a language without contingency, like the logic of geometry. This
is prefigured by the claim Kant makes for the normative function of geometry and
physics in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason,
recommending that metaphysics imitate the revolution they have undergone.

The poet's love of pure constructs of the intellect was manifest as early as 179l,
when he sent to his brother an ode in which he had inscribed “A Mathematical Problem”
(the construction of an equilateral triangle):

On a given finite line

Which must no way incline;

To describe an equi -

– lateral Tri -

– A N, G, L, E.

Now let A.B.

Be the given line

Which must no way incline.... etc.

The poet meant thereby (as he confesses in the letter accompanying the poem) to
assist Reason by the stimulus of Imagination and to have drawn the nymph Mathesis
from the visionary caves of abstracted idea, and caused her to unite with Harmony.
Whereas Wordsworth refused the assistance of reason (he could not divide his organic
soul into geometrical figures, as he says in Book II of the Prelude), Colerdige forges his
symbolic language by incorporating the Reason in images (The Statesman's Manual) –
a “phantasmatic” sort of speech, of ideas made apparent in sensuous images. In Ch.
XIV of Biographia he recalls the plan for the Lyrical Ballads as hinging precisely on this
dichotomy: he was to compose poems whose incidents and agents were supernatural,
and which were to engage the reader through “the dramatic truth” which would
accompany them supposing them real (willing suspension of disbelief), while
Wordsworth was to choose subjects from ordinary life, and subject them to a
defamiliarization treatment, giving “ a charm of novelty” to things of which custom had
bedimmed all the lustre. It is easy to ascribe to the former his conception of “primary
Imagination” (Ch. XIII) as repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the
infinite I AM, his discourse being based upon repetitions of symbolic (incarnationalist)
structures, and, to the latter, his concept of the secondary imagination, which transforms
what it touches but out of pre-existing empirical material. In a way, Coleridige appears
to have found a solution to that baffling effect of the sublime experienced by Burke in
obscurity, infinites of space and time, huge dimensions, abundance etc. He introduces,
through geometrical figures, limits by which to reduce the infinite to something known:
the idea of the Supreme Being appeared to me to be as necessarily implied in all
particular modes of being as the idea of infinite space in all the geometrical figures by
which space was limited (Biographia, I). Burke's threatening obscurity and ambiguity
(keeping the mind in suspense) is resolved into unity by the secondary imagination
which dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.... and unify, and which
(lecture on Shakespeare) hovers between images, reconciling opposites.

Despite the poet's recognition of Kant's giant grasp on him, he did not gladly
assimilate all there was to his philosophy. He was reluctant, for instance, to prop and
test his epistemological constructs on things of the world. His mind is not at all “fitted to
nature”. In Neoplatonic fashion [20], he pursuits intellectual beauty (intelligible forms) in
a circuitous movement of the mind that feeds upon itself. As the initial plan for
Biographia shows, he identifies the origin of the self in its objectified version as text
(„reception of the Author's first publication”), in the semiological order of culture (the
books that shaped his personality, which Wordsworth feels as insufficient, previous
literary and philosophical discourses, from Descartes and Spinoza to Kant and Fichte).
The range of his formal exercises is impressive: anthem, hymn, ode, sonnet, complaint,
invocation, epitaph, ballad, carol... He repeatedly tries his hand at ancient and modern
metrical forms, sometimes imitating (from Homer, Ovid, Catullus and Casimir, to
Lessing and Ossian), sometimes adapting (both Ben Jonson and John Donne, or some
anonymous old play), or translating (even brief inscriptions on churchyard monuments)
from Latin or German, stooping to produce a brief metrical “impromptue” For a Market-
Clock, in the sententious diction of the baroque cautionary verse. There is no “anxiety of
influence”, only an exillarated dive into an element which the mind feels to be affined.
Newly-coined words, subtly echoing Latin etymologies, give delight under their
mysterious garb, never worn before by any words of the tribe (the Lampads seven,/
That watch the throne of Heaven, in Ne plus ultra, meaning the seven planets which for
the ancients – from Aristotle to the hermetics – were the only visible world of
uncorruptible substance, produced by Nous (the Divine Intellect). Rare and difficult
metres (the paeon), often of his own invention, or in new combinations are a source of
perpetual admiration for all those who believe that poetry should be first and foremost
the daughter of Eurhythmia. But to Colerdige books mean infinitely more than a source
of delight; they engage his philosophy of the dialectic of human subjectvity in relation to
the outside world. To Wordsworth, words seem insufficient in comparison to the
emotional experience of the “living soul”. To Coleridge, they are the medium through
which emotions reach understanding and Being becomes self-conscious In The
Improvisatore, a prose dialogue by Coleridge, Eliza, one of the participants in the
Platonic banquet of the intellect, tells the Socrates-Friend: There is something here
(pointing to her heart) that seems to understand you, but wants the word to understand
itself while the Friend himself praises a ballad for best leading to an understanding of
the feeling of love through utterancy: the outward and visible signs of the sacrament
within. The title of the ballad is John Anderson, My Jo, John. As an object for
consciousness, John may be either indifferent or appropriated by the lover, “possessed”
in a relationship of self-identification which makes him a part of her own expanded
being. The problem of “identity” engages both subject and object. Whereas Wordsworth
relies on recollection, Coleridge dismisses F.H. Jacobi's “strange assertion” that the
essence of identity lies in recollecting consciousness as a reductive nonsense: 'twere
scarcely less ridiculous to affirm that the 8 miles from Stoney to Bridgewater consist in
the mile stones [21]. He is not interested in recollections of inbred prenatal Ideas but in
the manifestation of his own self – “phaenomen”, made apparent – through projection in
an otherness. A “phaenomenon” of self – Anthony John Harding remarks – which is no
more than a shadow of the real, substantial self (...) this can only be known through a
relationship with what is outside one and the desire for this knowledge is love; love is
“Being seeking to be self-conscious” [22]. He supports his statement quoting a rather
incoherent note by Coleridge himself, which also throws light on the personal and self-
reflexive aspects which a symbol presented to the poet: All our Toughts all that we
abstract from our consciousness and so form the Phenomenon Self is a Shadow, its
whole Substance is the dim yet powerful sense that it is but a Shadow and ought to
belong to Substance/ but this Substance can have no marks, no discriminating
characters, no hic est,/ ille non est/ it is simply substance (...) Love a sense of
Substance/ Being seeking to be self-conscious, l. of itself in a symbol 2. of the Symbol
as not being itself 3. of the Symbol as being nothing in relation to itself – and
necessitating a return to the first state, Scientia absoluta

Love is recognition of the self in an otherness which means nothing in itself but
only in relation to the subject. As the Friend says, the heart, feeling the insufficiency of
the self to itself, seeks completion in the total being of another, yet does not rest there
but finding, again seeks on. The mirror image seeks to return to the source in a ring
movement, for absolute knowledge can only be reached in the fusion of subject
(seeker) and object (mirror-image in the Substance of an otherness), that is the
disappearance of any alienation. Freud, in his Lectures on Sexuality, describes the
sexual drive in an analogous way [23]. He considers Ichlibido or narzissistische Libido
as the general and primitive state which only later led to Objektlibido which endlich ins
Ich zurückgeholt wird, so dass sie wieder zur Ichlibido geworden ist (love of object
which finally leads to the I, so that it becomes self-love once more). Freud illustrates the
two forms of love in Goethe's Westöstlicher Divan (Narcissism in Suleika and Love in
Hatem, who says that he only loves what Suleika loves in him), which proves that the
theme was circulated at the time. In Notebook 47, Coleridge confesses both his need to
pass out of myself, and his determination not to suffer any one form to pass into me and
to become a usurping Self. In her splendid essay, Literary Gentlemen and Lovely
Ladies [24], Karen Swann quotes the following notebook entry “from the Christabel
period”: Ghost of a mountain – the forms seizing my Body as I passed & became
realities – I, a Ghost, till I had reconquered my Substance. The “phaenomenon” self
finds substance in the appealing forms of the mountains – which seem to be emptying
his self of its Body – but as soon as it has become attached to the other, his self
reverses the libido drive, and recovers its original Substance. As Freud says, Die
Objektfindung ist eigentlich eine Wiederfindung (The finding of an object is, in fact, a
rediscovery). The self realizes that what it likes in the other is its own drive, its appetite.
Subject and object become one Substance, no longer distinguished as hic and ille.
Things are displaced, the world is, as Swann so aptly puts it, “colonized by the senses”.
Her conclusion is, however, debatable: representations which disrupt the very idea of
category by exposing the arbitrariness of the fundamental categories of “inside” and
“outside”, “self” and “world” (...) the spectator apprehends that the physical shell of the
body is no guarantee of the subject's autonomy and difference; and that representations
– scenes, images, and ideas, including, perhaps, the “ideas” of body, substance, reality
– are in some sense material and primary, constitutive of subjects and objects. The
statement may be true with respect to postmodern writers: representation becomes
problematical, because l. the self is no longer at the centre, but thrown (to use a
Heideggerian term, entworfen) into a multiplicity of selves with their own
representations, subjectivity becomes a question of intersubjectivity, and 2. the self
itself is destabilized, it has got no more inner coherence, it often becomes double,
multiple, unable to control its own representations. Contrariwise, the Romantic self-
worshipper, while being at the centre, will also seek expansion, acting the colonizing
agent, whose final discovery is self-recognition. The quest is self-directed. The world
is emptied out and chartered as the subject's emotional map; otherwise it remains alien
(cypher).

for I had found

That outward forms, the loftiest, still receive

That finer influence from the Life within; -

Fair cyphers else: fair, but of import vague

Or unconcerning, where the heart not finds

History or prophecy of friend, or child,

Or gentle maid, our first and early love.

Or father, or the venerable name

Of our adored country!

(Lines Written in the Album at Elbingerode, in the Hartz Forest)

The love-drive is constitutive of personality and its representations. And the

representations are all the poet's world. For his loves are not real and present out there
but fantasies of the mind (their “history of prophecy”). Obviously, friend, child, love,
father mean nothing in themselves. Dislocated from reality into prophecy or memory,
they have become symbols in which the poet recognizes himself as friend, child, lover,
father. The poet's world is of his own fashioning. For love, it should be remembered,
means self-recognition. Coleridge's poetry swarms with Lesbian and Narcissus figures:
Geraldine's interest in Christabel, Christabel seeking the image of her betrothed and
running into Geraldine; Sapho rejecting Alcaeus, the “Lesbian” woman who carries her
own picture with her and remains insensitive to the poet's wooing (The Picture). They
are tropes, and a charge of obscenity (of which they have not been free) is utterly
misplaced. What the lover seeks in love is to see himself loving. Narcissistic love is a
symbol of self-consciousness:

Then grant one smile, tho' it should mean

A thing of doubtful birth;

That I may say these eyes have seen

The fairest face on earth!

In the symbolical language of the poem, the smile is “of doubtful birth”, because it
is the poet that calls it forth. He asks for it and anticipates the effect of his own desire: it
is going to be the fairest smile. Whereas Wordsworth reaches Oneness through infinite
expansion and communion, with the all-impelling Spirit of the universe, Coleridge rules
out multiplicity and heterogeneity through Narcissistic reduction. Sara is reduced to...
Coleridge as his “wife”, as the mother of his child, as his poem. The Day-Dream is an
inscription of Sara's incarnation before his eyes as their child – a symbol of the
incarnation mystery which resides both in birth and in the embodiment of the poetic idea
into the language of the poem. The final stanza coalesces out of the words and images
of those preceding it in which the poet day-dreams of Sara dreaming of their child, who
actually shows up, awaking him. Fictions acquire the actuality of solid facts. The child is
that sort of figure floating unattached between a ghost of his father (A floating presence
of its darling father) and its own dear baby self, a double nature later troped as “elfish”.
The poem is its own history as a male childbirth fantasy (like Frankenstein and his
Creature): eyes idly bright... sweet and playful tenderness...touching my heart as with
an infant's finger...I saw our quiet room...something more than babe did seem... I
seemed to see a woman's form...

And now, when I seemed sure thy face to see,

Thy own dear self in our own quiet home;

There came an elfish laugh, and wakened me:

„Twas Frederic, who behind my chair had clomb,

And with his bright eyes at my face was peeping'

I blessed him, tried to laugh, and fell a-weeping!

 The smiles of Paradise have turned, through sexual love, into self-awareness
(wakening) and weeping. “Sadder and wiser”, the parent figure is however redeemed,
reminding rather of the Divine Father incarnated in his Son through the immaculate
conception of the dream than of the fallen Adam.

The twofold aspects of love (or of woman as Madonna or whore) are present in
several poems. In The Dark Lady the night/day polarity symbolizes the opposition
between chaste, socially acknowledged marriage ceremony and elopement, illicit sexual
love, which makes woman an outcast. The poet's pride in Christabel – which the
moralist Wordsworth struck out from the Lyrical Ballads was justified, the language of
the poem mediating meaning through a very complex organization. The reader who is
not told that it is unfinished, may find the last sentence a master stroke. Altough an early
poem, the imagery is consistently and meaningfully structured. The innocent maiden
Christabel walks out of her father's house into the neighbouring wood to pray for her
betrothed of whom she has been dreaming for several nights. She finds a lady under
the oak tree who says she has been abducted by five men, and appeals to Christabel
for help. Taking her into her father's castle, the innocent girl discovers a secret about
the lady's (Geraldine's) body, but a spell is cast on her, preventing her from disclosing it
to anybody. When her father meets the lady, he is impressed by her beauty, and finding
himself some pretext in an early acquaintance with her father, offers her hospitality.
Christabel notices her father's infatuation with increasing alarm, and finally asks him to
drive her out. Baron Leoline thinks his daughter is acting under the spur of undignified
envy, so he makes his choice:

And turning from his own sweet maid.

The aged knight, Sir Leoline,

Led forth the lady Geraldine!

The poem might be interpreted as a fantasy of repressed sexuality. Why does

Christabel go under a tree (of Eden?) to pray, when she normally prays in her room to
Virgin Mary? The way back into the castle is narrated in the symbolic language of a
nuptial ceremony (Christabel carrying Geraldine in her arms across the threshold, the
sexual connotations of furniture etc.). In seeking love, Christabel seems to trigger an
archetypal pattern of Innocence leading to Experience, Sexuality leading to Birth and
Death. Her mother who had died giving birth to her is now watching over, but it is only
Geraldine who realizes her ghostly presence, entering upon a competition with her.
Driving away the “wandering mother”, she sleeps with Christabel in her arms, like a
mother with her baby. Would the mysterious deformity of her body (aspects of sexuality
which cannot be told because they are tabooed by social decorum) suggest another
“wandering mother“? She also displaces the chaste ghost-mother in her husband's
affections, who drives away from him her incarnated image in Christabel. A story of
displacement (surrogate lover and mother for Christabel, surrogate daughter for the old
Leontine) and ghostliness, which is repeated in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and
The Wanderings of Cain. Initially projected in verse, as a joint work with Wordsworth, it
finally came out in prose and as Coleridge's alone. Both Cain who killed Abel and the
Mariner who killed an albatross („Abel”?) sent by God to save his ship, find themselves
rejected, exiled. They belong nowhere, they inhabit a paraxial realm, and experience a
form of Life-in-Death. The living Cain meets the ghostly Abel, as the living individual
would his Platonic Demon, or archetypal double. The Limbo state, described in a poem
thus titled, is one of objectified subjectivity: He seems to gaze at that which seems to
gaze on him! The Mariner has changed into his own story, which he forces upon all
those he meets, as if seized with agony. Like the “elfish” (spirits of the elements) water-
snakes (probably the snake Uroboros eating its own tale in the alchemical bowl, as the
reader is referred to Hellenistic thought in the marginal notes), the visionary Mariner
with his bright eyes feeds on the fiction that has displaced the real events. All these
“characters” symbolize the self-being-in-otherness of the text. In one of his Letters,
Coleridge makes a distinction between Religion and sacred or devotional writing
(Luther, the Scriptures), which also holds true for that between the subject/object
relationship in Wordsworth and himself: Revealed Religion (and I know of no religion
not revealed) is in its highest contemplation the unity, that is the identity or coinherence,
of Subjective and Objective. It is in itself, and irrelatively, at once inward Life and Truth
and outward Fact and Luminary. But as all Power manifests itself in the harmony of
correspondent Opposites, each supposing and supporting the other – so has Religion
its objective, or historic and ecclesiastical pole, and its subjective or spiritual and
individual pole. In the miracles and miraculous parts of religion – both in the first
communication of divine truths thus communicated – we have the union of the two, that
is, the subjective and supernatural displayed objectively – outwardly and phenomenally
(...)The insubstantial, insulated Self passes away as a stream; but these are shadows
and reflections of the Rock of Ages, and the Tree of Life that starts forth from its side.
(...) While Scriptures bear witness with our spirit, we have received the spirit of adoption
[25]. The power of the Word is manifest in the Believer. As the Tree of Life on the banks
of a river designates that part of heavenly Jerusalem into which immortal men are
received, writing is the poet's myth of immortality, metaphorically speaking, of divinities
and “adopted” mortals coming together. The above quote may also serve as an
excellent gloss on the river image in his best-known poem, Kubla-Khan – the
Coleridgean counterpart to Wordsworth's Duddon River of individual consciousness.
Induced by a dream and nourished by extensive readings of travel books and history,
the poem still entices the reader's imagination with its enigmatic symbolism.

The name of the river, Alph, has probably been abridged from Alphaeus, the
Peloponesian river-god, who in classical mythology pursues Arethusa, a wood nymph,
running under the sea and emerging in Sicily as a fountain, Coleridge's common symbol
of the Imagination. The name also suggests the first letter of the Greek alphabet, and,
as the river flows down to a lifeless ocean, its course resembles the alpha and omega of
the Godhead – the infinite, of which earth and life or human consciousness are only a
portion. The caverns of ice – frozen and immutable geometry – are probably what he
calls visionary caves of abstracted idea, in the letter introducing a Mathematical
Problem. The river sinks in tumult into a lifeless ocean (because the self-sufficient,
insubstantial, insulated Divine Spirit is larger than life), where is heard the “ancestral
voice” of God himself, like a sound of many waters or, according to other versions of
The Revelation, God's voice sounded like a waterfall. Midway on the waves abstract
Idea unites with Harmony: the caves of ice are reflected beside the palace of Kubla,
whose Imagination has managed to fuse the divine and the human “measure”
(harmony). The name of Kubla Khan, as well as that of the land (Xanadu) present a
symmetry of the initial letters, a doubling resulting in Indifference. This is a word used
by Coleridge to designate [26] reciprocation of the Spirit as subjective and objective.
Kubla, the Godhead in history, is also an artisan (a miracle of rare device). The
assimilation of a mortal to the divines (like John mingling the measure of his voice with
that of God) is symbolized by the woman wailing for her demon lover and worked out
through a series of oxymoronic “reconciliation of opposites”. What sort of “apocalypse”
is thus enacted as one more repetition in the finite mind, in the second part of the poem,
prophesied in the first? The second part is the moment of awakening from the
marvellous dream through some banal incident (a man on business). The poet seeks a
similar mediator between mortals and divines in an Abyssinian maid he had once heard
playing a dulcimer and singing of Mount Abora. If he could remember her song, he
could also recover the vision. The displacement strategy works a consistently
elaborated symmetry to the first part of the poem, as if it were its imprint, or trace on the
page. The Abyssinian with the dulcimer echoes the woman wailing for the demon lover.
In manuscript versions, “Mount Abora” appears as “Mount Amara” [27] – a false
paradise in the fourth book of Paradise Lost. The name of this surrogate paradise
yields, in being read aloud, something analogous to “Mount Tabor “- the one on which
Christ communed with God. The Abyssinian maiden singing of Mount Tabor could be
the tanned lady in Solomon's Song, who has been interpreted by Jews as symbolizing
the link between God and his people and by Christians as that between Christ and his
bride, the Church. If we piece all this together, the first part of the poem appears as a
symbolical reinscription of the Genesis (creative act, without any exterior agency, as the
impersonal passive forms and the abstracted masons suggest), the second, of its
reversal, the apocalypse, and the third, the repeated “Revelation” or return to Logos
with each new work of art. The poet, the Kubla Khan foil, entertains a Paradise fantasy
(shift from indicative to subjunctive): the possibility to recapture the vision, in which case
he would be tabooed as one of the “adopted” to the Paradise of the imagination:

Weave a circle round him thrice.

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Bernard Beatty, in The Sea and the Book [28]identifies in the Romantic
transcendentalists two figural matrices: infinites of temporal and spatial extent and
infinites of circularity, repetition, equilibrium, brought about by equal and opposing
forces. This is a 1992 description of the Romantic “tension between finite and the
infinite” which revises and reconceptualizes a similar dichotomy proposed in the
seventies by Northrop Frye (The Stubborn Structure), Brian John (Supreme Fictions),
and J.H. Hillis Miller (Poets of Reality): the Platonic running athwart the vitalist tradition
of Heraclitus (Logos) and Aristotle (Entelechia). In his book, published in 1974 by
Mc.Gill-Queen's University Press, Brian John explains the vitalist shift of most
Romantics (Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley) as following a similar one in science: from the
cosmic and mathematical constructions of Newtonian physics to the chemistry of things,
the biological, botanical and zoological, organically mutating. Force is both creative and
destructive (Blake: the Prolific and the Devourer), self-originating and self-impelling,
without beginning or end (imaged as a river or a fountain). There is a general tendency
towards a naturalization of the supernatural, and humanization of the divine – precisely
what the Lyrical Ballads were meant to effect. The unifying vision of the vitalists finds
expression, according to Miller, in figures of the double articulation of the world: the
tree, the Sphinx, the Centaur, the resonant landscape (echoing green). The unity of
man, nature and the supernatural engages wavering, meditative, organic rhythms. This
is a world where anything might flow and change, and become any other thing. Love of
nature leads to love of man (Wordsworth, The Prelude) and, in a natural kinship, further
on to the divine, the spiritual source which the child still remembers. Nothing has clear-
cut boundaries, being always partly one thing, partly another. The Platonic tradition,
Frye says, identifies the soul of man with the forms and ideas of the world, accessible
through music, mathematics and poetry. At rare intervals a breech of the barrier to the
other world is made, and the poet identifies himself with the pure essence of the Divine
Intellect (is “adopted”). Colours and forms are only natural symbols of the divine. The
poet either knows by intuition these correspondences or comes accidentally upon a
form which has the power to elicit a precise energy from the supernatural. The world is
God's signature or coded message: so that thou see and hear/ The lovely shapes and
sounds intelligible/ Of that eternal language, which thy God utters (Coleridge: Midnight
Frost). The child is no longer “Father to the Man” or “Mighty Prophet”. It is God alone
who teaches himself in the text of the world. The soul of man does not rely on memory
but on a hermeneutic attempt to join, through the synapsis of the imagination (and not
through ontological contiguity), the life of the Spirit feeding upon itself (symbolized by
the Phoenix, the unicorn, the Mariner drinking his own blood). The vitalists will prefer
the contiguity of the synecdoches, metonymies, allegory, and, particularly,
prosopopoeia, which unite various levels of representation, while allowing of their
independent significance as well. In The Prelude, the image in the river is so real, that it
records the uncertain movements of the element as if it were materially engulfed
therein, while, at the same time, being an allegory of faltering memory. The Platonists
are associative rather than descriptive, choosing the symbolic type of discourse,
which does not represent but connects, where words depend on contexts for meaning,
not on sequences of meaning. The temporality of the linguistic sign is tentatively
annulled through reinscription of the figure. In Kubla Khan, the river and the image have
one symbolical meaning, only valid within that particular context (Kubla Khan). The two
rival traditions oppose Wordsworth to Coleridge, together yielding the pattern of the
Romantic discourse, which continues with Shelley and Keats posed in a similar polarity,
and the schizophrenic Byronic discourse of both its reinscription and refutation.

Whether we go in for Frye's “mythopoetic tradition” of Harold Bloom's “romantic

ideology”, it is obvious that the communality of mental styles is accountable for through
participation in a selective and homogeneous cultural code. The feminist school of
criticism has been very active of late in editing and advertising the women poets' voices
which the male Western canon had previously left out. The differences in subject
matter, style and tone are immense. Elizabeth Hands, for instance, takes a non-
sentimental, disenchanted view of family life, in her poem “On an Unsociable Family”,
which is miles away from Wordsworth's sentimental and idealized sketches of domestic
love-kindness and solidarity, particularly among common rustics. Unaware of romantic
biases, or choosing to ignore them, Hands employs the neoclassical couplet for a
sonnet, whose monotonous rhyme well consorts with the indistinctiveness of the family
members gathered round the table at dinner, having nothing to communicate to one
other, except for a number of routine exchanges. Mary Robinson draws a sketch of the
city in a sequence of short lines consisting of nouns and participles with missing links:
Arts and sciences bewailing/Commerce dropping/ credit falling – a sort of short hand or
headlines for an impressionistic view of the city on one particular day: January 1795.
Anna Barbauld gives free rein to a woman's exasperation at the display of erudition in
men, living in the shadow of universities or private tutoring. A poem addressed to
Coleridge – To Mr (ST) C(oleridge), voices her wish to clip the wings of the poet's
“mystic visions” experienced on the “hill of science with steep and rugged paths”, which
are a woman's confusion („the grove of tangled mazes”), so that he would turn to the
more practical duties of social reform: fair exertion for friends and country.

To us, this late emphasis on gender appears irrelevant. The fact that these
informal poems, recording common observations of everyday life, bear no historical
blueprint – they might as well have been written the other day –, has something to do
with the cultural background, which is probably responsible for the existence of period
styles in general. The writers engaging in various negotiations with contemporary
discourses will automatically produce texts informed of similar semantic and ideological
energies. Elizabeth Hands was a servant in Rugby and Mary Robinson an actress and
the Prince Regent's mistress. Only those who were familiar with the romantic manifesto
and emerging body of literature also felt constrained by the “unthought” (Derrida), or
what is unthinkable, unsayable, and unwritable at some time in history.

At the other end of the Romantic Age, Felicia Hemans produced not only culturally
dense poems but also an innovative type of poetry, which favoured impersonation over
self-expressionism. In this way she was, in fact, the inventor of the dramatic
monologue, even if the credit for this graft of the dramatic upon the lyric went to two
Victorian men-poets: Tennyson and Browning.

References
[14] Introduction to Beyond Romanticism, New Approaches to Texts and Contexts. 1780-1832.
Edited by Stephen Copley and John Whale, Longman, 1992, p. 3.

[15] Paul de Man, Time and History in Wordsworth, in Romanticism, Edited and introduced by
Cynthia Chase, Longman, 1993, pp. 55-77.

[16] Paul de Man, Ibidem, pp. 68–69.

[17] Romanticism, Op., cit., pp. 98–l12.

[18] Romanticism, Op. cit., pp. 79 and the following.

[19] Stephen Bygrave, Land of the Giants: Gaps, Limits and Audiences in Colerdige's Biographia
Literaria, in Beyond Romanticism, Op. cit., p. 44.

[20] See Plotinus, The Six Enneads, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952, and C.G. Jung, Psychologie et
alchimie, Editions Buchet/Chastel, Paris, 1970.

[21] S.T. Coleridge, Notebook 3026 apud Anthony John Harding, Coleridge and the Idea of Love.
Aspects of Relationships in Coleridge's Thought and Writing, Cambridge University Press, 1974, p.
120.

[22] A. J. Harding, Op. cit. pp. l19–120.

[23] Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Schriften. Fünfter Band. Internationaler Psychoanalytische Verlag,
1924, pp. 92–97.

[24] Karen Swann, Literary Gentlemen and Lovely Ladies: The Debate on the Character of Christabel, in
Romanticism, Op. cit., pp. 152–153.

[25] T.S. Coleridge, Letter VII in Confessions of an Imaginary Spirit, edited by H. St. J. Hart, Starford
University Press, 1956, p. 79.

[26]Ibidem.

[27] Norman Fruman, Colerdige, the Damaged Archangel, Georg Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1972. p. 344.

[28] In Reviewing Romanticism, Op. cit., pp. 32-34.

Romantic Drama
 Typically romantic, although written by a woman, are A Series of Plays: In Which it
is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind, published anonymously in
1798.

Joanna Baillie was a Scottish gentlewoman, the daughter of a Presbyterian divine

and sister of an eminent doctor. Her family moved to London, where their home became
the rallying point of a distinguished literary coterie. With the assistance of the “Scottish
connection” (Byron and Scott) and the Lake poets, Wordsworth and Southey, Baillie
managed to see her plays performed. Her “Introductory Discourse” to the volume
reveals a cultivated mind and an inborn theoretician, with a special feel for dramatic
structure and effect. She was entitled to boast pioneer work in her design of a series of
plays treating passions in pairs, a tragedy coupled with a comedy on the same subject.
Her characters too were complex personalities, no longer under the sway of some ruling
passion. “A decided wicked character can never be interesting”, she explains. “In the
breast of a bad man, passion has comparatively little to combat, how then can it show
its strength?”. De Monfort, a member of an old yet declining aristocratic family, is said
by Manuel, his servant, to have become of late silent, haughty, difficult, capricious and
distrustful, and yet still capable of “such bursts of natural goodness from his heart” and
moments of generosity that he cannot decide to leave him. De Monfort anticipates the
Byronic character, contradictory and unpredictable. The play was staged three decades
in advance of Hugo's manifesto of romantic drama in his Preface to Cromwell, which
launched the Romantic/Classic polarity. His Cromwell too is a complex, heterogeneous
nature, pulled in opposite directions by generosity and meanness, fanaticism and
hypocrisy, etc. De Monfort is a kind of Usher, the descendant of a doomed old family,
ambiguously attached to his sister. Orphening, barenness are the symptoms of a family
line soon to become extinct. His hatred of Rezenvelt, his sister's suitor, may be aroused
by jealousy, but it can also be a reflex response to the opposite figure of the newly rich.

Baillie's literary lore and intuition enable her to deploy an interesting project of
dramatic composition. She is interested in the anatomy of passion, in its birth and
growth, which owe little to “outward circumstances and events”. This is a proleptic
psychoanalytic approach, trying to plumb the depths of the soul, beneath the routinized
second nature imprinted by habit, until the stage of boyhood is reached, the moment a
certain passion (here, hatred) first flares up. As Freud would later say, the “primary
scene”. The growth of passions or of the mind was a common romantic pursuit. Its
bearings upon dramatic structure were simplicity of plot and the stress on the soliloquy,
allowing the spectator to access the character's mind through the “overflowings of the
perturbed soul”. Passion is something liminal, autonomous, overpowering the rational
self. It is the “enemy”, the subconscious other.

If good judgement and witty conversation were the Augustan distinguishing marks
of a person of quality, Baillie divides the humanity of her psychodrama into the
“powerful, great and interesting” party, experiencing strong passions which mount to
obssession, and the “inferior persons”, who are “represented in a calm unagitated
state”. A romantic dramatist will not attempt either a reflection of life or an intervention in
society; Baille is only interested in “representation”, a poetic similar to that which
prompted Shakespeare to associate verse with kings and prose with servants. Baillie
does not, however, consider differences of social or economic status: “it is the passion
and not the man which is held up to our execration”. Freed from the anchorage of
material existence or social and historical bodies, the chimeras haunting the restless
modern soul take off to a heaven of hellish self-torment. The phrase “perturbed soul”,
Hamlet's address to his father's ghost, seems to suggest Baillie's deliberate location
within the other of the abysmal psyche.

The later Romantics

Classical themes and forms, a return to the neoclassic discipline and satirical bent
(Byron), the shift from the lyric mode to the dramatic (Byron, Shelley) or narrative
(Keats) reveal the later Romantics at a considerable distance from Blake's assault on
Enlightenment ideology and poetics.

Despite his aristocratic heritage and ample means, Percy Bysshe Shelley
launched upon his poetic career with a Godwinian attack on all social taboos in one of
the most nakedly didactic poems ever written, Queen Mab (1813). In this pamphlet in
verse, with epigraphs from Voltaire, Lucretius and Archimedes, the poet declares
himself against monarchy, Christianity, sexual restraint. This Jacobin attitude will be
preserved to the end of his life, and Wordsworth's failure to do the same was the only
apple of discord between the two poets, structurally affined. When Wordsworth defected
to the other side, serving the aristocratic William Lowther, buying land and selling it to
Tory supporters, or writing a pamphlet against Brougham, the Whig antagonist, Shelley
compared him to Simonides, the flatterer of the Sicilian tyrants and also the tenderest of
lyrical poets. He also produced a poem, entitled Wordsworth, in less sharp terms yet to
the same effect, as what we can read between the lines is something like: now we can
see that those heart-rending laments about vanity and the world's mutability were but
sheer hypocrisy:

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know

That things depart which never may return:

Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow,

Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.

These common woes I feel. One loss is mine

Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore.

Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine

On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar:

Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood

Above the blind and battling multitude:

In honoured poverty thy voice did weave

Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, -

Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve.

Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

This may not have been just vain reprobating talk, as Shelley's vision, if not his
style, changed substantially in the late years of his brief life. In the beginning though, he
sounds Wordsworthian, communicating the same vitalist worldview which accompanies
the meditation on social, moral and historical issues of Queen Mab:

The Fairy pointed to the earth.

 The Spirit's intellectual eye

Its kindred beings recognized.

The thronging thousands, to a passing view,

Seemed like an ant-hill's citizens.

How wonderful! that even

The passions, prejudices, interests,

That sway the meanest being, the weak touch

That moves the finest nerve,

And in one human brain

Causes the faintest thought, becomes a link

In the great chain of Nature.

Sometimes he seems to be paraphrasing Wotrdsworth's give-and-take philosophy

in Tintern Abbey about the mind's relation to the outside world, as in Mont Blanc. Lines
Written on the Vale of Chamouni: Now renders and receives fast influencings...

The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

Now dark – now glittering – now reflecting gloom -

Now lending splendour, where from secret springs

The source of human thought its tribute brings

Of waters, – with a sound but half its own.

In Wordsworthian fashion, he revives medieval forms, modulating his meditative

discourse into allegory, bestiary or dream vision. For instance, the battle between an
Eagle, representing evil, and a Serpent, representing good, in the first canto of The
Revolt of Islam (dated 1919 with the title; Laon and Cynthia; or, The Revolution of the
Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century), induced by his state of mind when
The last hope of trampled France had failed. The appetite for the avatars of the
historicized Spirit remains, however, an inward drive as well. The story of the reforming
couple, finally burnt on a great pyre by the reactionary forces, is described by the author
himself in the Preface in terms so Wordsworthian as to make the attempt sound
revisionist, for we do not quite see how the growth and progress of individual mind can
well consort with the awakening of an immense nation from their slavery and
degradation to a true sense of moral dignity and freedom; the bloodless dethronement
of their oppressors, and the unveiling of the religious frames by which they had been
deluded into submission, unless as an example of the “excellence” poetry can reach
when breaking out of its circle of selfhood into a socially committed ideal. Shelley does
handle irony in a very cunning way, for instance in his Defense of Poetry, when he
parrots a poem by Colerdige (The Aeolian Harp) on the inflated tone of a patriarch
spelling out the laws of the tribe, only to overthrow the statement in the next sentence

In revising Aeschylus's hero, in Prometheus Unbound (182o), Shelley makes a

more definite – and defining for the second generation of romantics - shift from nature to
the semiological order of humanity. It is not fire that distinguishes man from beast but
language and thought: Prometheus, like the divine Logos, is what his name designates:
prophecy. Man's transcendence of the here and now is only possible through thought,
speech, the arts, civilization:

He gave man speech, and speech created thought,

Which is the measure of the universe;

And Science struck the thrones of Earth and Heaven

Which shook but fell not; and the harmonious mind

Poured itself forth in all-prophetic thought.

Prometheus being bound is not only a state of fact but also a state of mind: he
cannot remember his curse on Jupiter and his prophecy of the downfall of tyranny of
every kind. Loss of words means loss of power: the failed promise inscribed in his own
name as knowing and naming that which is to come. But the coming together, of word
and living action, means, as The Earth tells him, the coalescence of the two worlds of
life and death, of things and their shadows. The Platonic doubling of living self and
demon, thing and archetype is a language commonly spoken by Shelley, Goethe or
Emerson:

The Earth: ...For know there are two worlds of life and death:
 One that which thou beholdest, but the other

Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit

The shadows of all forms that think and live...

And every fair and every good

Known in part, or known impure,

To men below

In their archetypes endure.

(Emerson, The Over-Soul)

Aeschylus's drama is transposed into an epistemological inquiry around the origin

of the spoken word and thought, with Prometheus experiencing the primary Platonic
cave scene: For the cave, on the other hand, the inremitting interchange with the
outside world, signifies the surrender of any illusory claim to a poetic enterprise that
might evade all relation to the natural (...) For no sooner are we assured of the
difference sweet and harmonies divine that arise from within that Prometheus turns to
the other sounds that come to the cave from without: “the echoes of the human world”.
Unlike the natural sounds, what enters from the human world comes by way of
“mediators”. All shapes and sounds come forth as 'echoes', 'murmurs', 'apparitions',
'phantoms', 'shadows' (...) It is not a question here of simply counterbalancing two
realms of absolutes outside the cave, the one of the here-and-now of natural
substance, the other the space of pure representation. It is not that Prometheus' naming
of the human implies the displacement of reality by image and art. The human world
performs, in the structure of an echo, the menace to the natural realm[29]. We are not
sure whether Shelley had come so close to the “apocalyptic” Coleridge towards the end
of his life – after all “phantoms” still wait for the gathered rays which are reality (III, 3,
49-53) to be cast on them – but he had certainly changed a lot. D. W. Harding's study
on Shelley's Poetry undertakes to free the poet from R.A. Leaves' charges of “modish
topic of incest, influences of Sadism, the fascination of physical decay” (Revaluation,
1936), placing him within the proper context of the Wordsworthian idealized soul
enlarged to universality (...) and sense of oneness with the movements of vast natural
forces, representing the vaster features of the universe. The response to natural events
may be different, but they usually provide symbols or analogues for human experience.
While The Skylark, spurner of the ground, symbolizes the human yearning for the
absent and the unattainable, echoing Hamlet's definition of man as being capable of
transcendence (We look before and after,' And pine for what is not:' Our sincerest
laughter/ With some pain is fraught;/ Our sweetest songs are those of saddest thought),
the Ode to the West Wind voices a Dionysian urge to melt into the natural element, held
in rapt, ecstatic contemplation (Drive my dead thought over the universe/ Like withered
leaves to quicken a new birth !) The “infinite of equilibrium brought about by equal and
opposing forces” (Bernard Beatty, Op. cit.) hurls exquisitely dynamic images into an
oxymoronic shower: the impressive architecture of the Tree of Life and autumnal
dissolution, death and fruition, solid mould and substantial breath:

O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low...

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangles boughs of Heaven and Ocean...

Vaulted with all the congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere...

Transience and the impermanence of things do not spare works of art, either.
The colossal statue of Ozymandias, “king of kings”, lies shattered in the desert; a wreck
is now the work of the sculptor, who well those passions read / Which yet survive. The
rhetorical deftness of subversive effects makes the poem ambiguous. Is it supporting
the conclusion to Adonais, An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (182l) that what the
poet thought and felt is all that remains out of the wreck of life and history or is it
supporting a vitalist gospel about the preeminence of the soul over techne? The first
ironic reversal is the sculptor's intention: he has deliberately produced a gigantic image
of the king, whose conquests have come to nothing, and placed it in the desert in order
to ridicule his vanity:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

And then the second shocking paradox: the work of the hand that mocked is only
outlived by the ironic inscription which now refers to the... sculptor's colossus, while the
passions of the king (the heart that fed) are still being experienced by what in the
preface to the Revolt of Islam he calls human passion in its most universal character.

It is easier to mark out the distance separating The Demon of the World, a
refurbishing of Queen Mab from 1816, and The Triumph of Life (1822) or Alastor (1815)
from Epipsychidion (1822).

The Demon of the World is only another name for Wordsworth's Spirit of the
Universe, descending upon a mortal fair in a chariot like that in Ezekiel's vision, and
inducing recollections of antenatal life (in Adonais still that state of bliss which death will
reinstate):

Maiden, the world's supremest spirit

Beneath the shadow of her wings

Folds all thy memory doth inherit

From ruin of divinest things.

The Triumph of Life, Shelley's last and unfinished work, written in terza rima, with
the obvious purpose of imitating Dante's verse-form in his human comedy, opens with a
vision of a multitude of people hastening along a dusty road, whose existential
questions need to be answered by themselves, as participants in history: yet none
seemed to know/ Whither he went, or whence he came, or why/ He made one of the
multitude... Such questions which substitute historical praxis and planned action for
Platonic recollection show those who point to Mary Shelley as the modest scribe of
her husband's words that the reverse would rather be the case, because they echo the
words of Frankenstein's creature, and both texts quote Milton’s Adam. The poem
opposes Life (that all-impelling world spirit imaged by Ezekiel) to Love (the human
soul's separate life of feelings):

At the centre of the storm, I saw what looked like four living creatures in human
form, but each of them had four faces and four wings...and the wheels did exactly what
the creatures did... (Ezekiel, I: 4-15)

So came a chariot on the silent storm....

The music of their ever-moving wings.

 All the four faces of that Charioteer

Had their eyes banded....

In The Daemon of the World, the visiting spirit is replaced beside the maiden's bed
by his earthly counterpart and her lover; The Triumph of Life reads that all things are
transfigured except Love. The title is ironic. It is only the passions of the heart that
survive Life's tears, infamy and tomb.

In an essay published in The Review of English Studies, Nov. 1996, [30], Patsy
Stoneman speaks about the Romantic poets representing themselves as exiles from
society by a quest for ideal mirrors of themselves in the form of mythological or divine
women, spirits of beauty or truth, sometimes conceived as sisters. Emerson's Over-Soul
or Shelley's Epipsychidion (which means the soul outside the soul) reestablish the
circularity of the spirit (the soul knows only the soul – Emerson) departing from the
pantheistic spirit of the universe into a Narcissistic quest (The Daemons are self-
seeking – The Over-Soul). The nameless hero of Alastor leaves his home and travels
across the world in search of “the thrilling secrets of the birth of time”. He is a perfect
example of Romantic self-absorption, the ideal woman being in fact a projection of
himself: He dreamed a veiled maid/ Sate near him, talking in lowsome tones,/ Her voice
was like the voice of his own soul/ Heard in the calm of thought... So must have been
that of God, talking to himself, before the birth of time...

Epipsychidion plays on the twin-soul theme, inspired by his real affection for Emilia
Viviani, and written after her confinement in a monastery. The mirror-like Romantic love
whose consummation presupposes the elision of the separating bodies to commune
through the Soul outside the soul, is thus free of adulterous implications. There are
elements in this poem which anticipate aspects of Victorian sensibility, and several
conspicuous Victorian writers found in Shelley an affined spirit (Emily Bronte Browning).
For instance, Matthew Arnold's distinction between human values and amoral nature
(Mind from its object differs most in this:/ Evil from good; misery from happiness; / The
baser from the nobler....), and addition of derived objects of culture (antique verse, and
high romance...) to the natural order of rain and passing cloud...The language has lost
both its meditative discursiveness and the violent oxymoronic juxtapositions, weaving a
symbolic texture with rich connotative undertones:

This song shall be thy rose; its petals pale

 Are dead, indeed, my adored Nightingale!

But soft and fragrant is the faded blossom,

And it has no thorn to wound thy bosom.

Two contradictory readings of the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
by John Keats published relatively recently show that the poet may be as
misunderstood today as he was at the time when Wordsworth deplored his “poeticisms”
and stylish paganism, while Byron dismissed the fastidious “finery” of his language as
middle class showing off. A psychoanalytical motivation – the desire for elegance in a
social upstart – will not explain away the sensuousness of Keats' s consummate
language, which cannot be reduced to an infatuation with dazzling surfaces. Just like
Coleridge, Keats started his brief career (he died when he was only twenty six) with
exercises of admiration, imitating the atmosphere, vocabulary and metres of literary
masters, and appropriating some of the most difficult verse forms in the language: the
Miltonic blank verse in the Hyperion poems, the ottava rima (eight-line stanzas of
pentameters rhyming abababcc) in Isabella, the Spenserian stanza of nine lines (two
pentameter quatrains rounded off with a hexameter) in The Eve of St. Agnes. Yet his
attitude to past or remote forms of culture betrays the same revisionist attitude as
Shelley's, while marking out a decisive departure from Romantic self-worshipping and
transcendentalism. The Chapman sonnet is a key text in this respect:

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

 Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific – and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise -

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Sonnet XI. On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.

According to Bernard Beatty, the poem is typically Romantic in its use of the finite
symbol to express infinite suggestibility: the measured as a sign of the immeasurable.
Set in polarity, infinity and text, Pacific and Homer, sea and Book – are read off in terms
of each other. What seems to be a travel account is really reading. Reading Homer is
like the awed discovery by the explorer Cortez of the Pacific, while standing on “a peak
in Darien”. The infinity of the sea can only be measured off against a finite landmark: the
peak. Keats, like Cortez, is only a discoverer, never a traveller, on a par with the peak
he surveys. The main objection that can be brought up against this reading is,
obviously, that Keats is not reading Homer, actually, but an English translation:
Chapman's version. Marjorie Levinson in her 1988 book, Keats's Life of Allegory, a
fragment of which is reproduced in Romanticism, Op. cit., is concerned with this
particular aspect: The experience takes place, significantly, in the breach between the
two movements of the sonnet. Rather than imitate Chapman, Keats reproduces
Chapman's necessarily parodic (that is Elizabethan) inscription of Homer. The
queerness of Chapman's “mighty line, loud-and-bold” version is rewritten in Keats's own
Elizabethanism, and, through the queerness of the Cortes/Balboa image. (...) Keats's
sonnet breaks free of Homer and Chapman by misgiving both (...) The instance of the
poem would suggest that Keats's relation to the Tradition is better conceived as dialogic
(Bakhtin) rather than dialectic (Bloom) [31]. The author is contradicting herself. In
Bakhtin, dialogics is neither parody nor something one can escape. Dialogue is the very
language of Being, and the I-Thou relationship, the realm of ontology. Anyway, the
poet is here, as elsewhere, a Kantian disciple, dwelling on epistemology. The sonnet
hinges on recurrent motifs in Keats: the preeminence of vision, in the imagery of the eye
(often an eagle's, all-surveying eye), and the appropriation of the object as a provisional
epistemologic construct – one of the several which are possible. The poet is convinced
that access to the essence of objects is problematical:

Oh never will the prize,

 High reason, and the lore of good and ill

Be my award. Things cannot to the will

Be settled, but they tease us out of thought

Epistle to J.H. Reynolds

The impasse experienced by the mind in confronting the things in the world, which
remain incomprehensible (tease us out of thought), is caused by its incapacity to make
them conform to its constructs: any standard law/ Of neither earth or heaven. That is,
they remain independent of the human will and consciousness, cannot be appropriated,
possessed. The mind can only build its own world, and all works of art are forms of
ownership, forms of possession. Such outlook explains the paradox that the poet may
feel less at home in “artless” England than in a realm of vision and art (glance and
singing) which implies a specifically human ontology. The eye and the voice create a
float-ing world independent of experience, or, to quote the poet himself, they “world”
and the act is “worldling” (In Heidegger: es weltet). The poet is furious for having
allowed himself to be tempted by journeys at home and abroad when, in fact, man's
proper world is a priori:

Happy is England! I could be content

To see no other verdure than its own;

To feel no other breeze than are blown

Through its tall woods with high romances blent:

Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment

For skies Italian, and an inward groan

To sit upon an Alp as on a throne.

And half forget what world or worldling meant.

Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters;

Enough their simple loveliness for me,

 Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging;

Yet do I often warmly burn to see

Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their singing,

And float with them about the summer waters.

(Sonnet XVII)

The poem is lifting the reader from the heavy, clinging and silent earth, which does
not come out of itself, into a transcendent, visionary world collecting from the sights and
sounds intentionally produced and perceived (to see what has been glanced, to hear
what is manifesting itself in song). That is being with others and about, not in the world.

In sonnet XI, there is Homer's possession of a “wide expanse” in Apollo's “realm

of gold”, which is not a given, like any common land, but a colony of the creative spirit.
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne And there is also the issue of
epistemological appropriation (Chapman's Homer, looking into Chapman, looking at the
sky, watching the sky, staring at the Pacific) which, in a formalized universe, unlike in
the real one, becomes possible. It is only that it is never final or complete. Chapman's
Homer is like one planet among others, like a peak in an immense territory. Coleridge's
favourite scene of the subject being seen (and subjectivity understood in its reflection) is
here enacted with Keats seeing what Chapman has seen. The Romantic Narcissistic
self-reflexivity has yielded to an epistemological inquiry into communication,
intersubjectivity. “Ken” is a key word, for the concrete instrument scientists use to
explore the sky has been replaced by an abstract word meaning “range of sight or
knowledge, esp. in out of, beyond one's ken (The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1964),
while the verb means to “recognize at sight, know”. For it is Chapman's translation – still
recognized as the most forcible one – which makes Homer reach Keats's
understanding. Homer is not modified through translation but allowed to appear, to be
present in Keats's consciousness (swim into his ken). Whereas Wordsworth is looking
at things in the world to remember the ideal forms, Keats feeds on the formalized
universe of art to the same effect. Homer has been there all the time but it is only now
that Keats has discovered him. Being and recognition or knowing have become
distinct acts, and they involve the mutually shared meanings of culture. In man's world,
cognition is always re-cognition, that is knowledge with others, a shared structure of
meanings. Keats is reading Homer with Chapman, just as Cortez was discovering the
Pacific with his men. Keats could not have known of Homer's greatness unless his
education and former readings (Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold) had moulded
his tastes. Even discovery implies, for the self inscribed in a semiological order,
recognition, that is a capacity for integrating or chartering or mapping the new element
into that self-same order: one more book, one more planet, one more ocean. The
“surmise” of Cortez's men suggests that they can introduce the Pacific into a preexisting
epistemological structure, which has made its discovery predictable. An astronomer can
only know that a planet is a new one, provided he knows all the others that have already
been discovered. The poem is in fact an allegory of the mind meeting in the world its
own, culturally inbred, expectations. The aesthetic appropriation of the object is
defended as the only legitimate one, and counterpoised to the material proprietorial
relationship to it. Knowing is distinct not only from being but also from having (see his
approval of Haydon's informed comment of the Elgin marbles, even if his response to
them is less self-assured, more tentative and subjective, as well as his disgust at the
fraudulent manner of their being “seized” and brought to England). This early
awareness of cultural difference will be fully explored by most Victorians.

About one thing is Marjorie Levinson not mistaken – in her Marxist-psychoanalytic

reading of Keats's failure to discover the social code (grammar) inscribed in the poet's
cultural fetishes (and this is, she thinks, “just what Keats was after”) – namely that he
put the entire poem and all its authorial anguish in aesthetic space: museum space, to
be precise [32]. But the “alienating closure of Keats's poetry” – formally expressed by
framing devices – is precisely a programmatic alienation from any other codes (social,
political, moral, religious) apart from the aesthetic. “I stood tip-toe upon a hill “, one of
his early poems (1817) shows that he launched himself upon writing with a full-grown
aesthetic consciousness, that he did not just fumble along, like any beginner, until he
developed it. Moreover, that he did not mean to write inside the already-existing
Romantic tradition. The simple transformational grammar of bodily response to the
world (delight/ Of this fair world), that is an appreciation of natural beauty, leading to
aesthetic creativity (to tell delightful stories) has no cognitive or religious connotations.
There is nothing in the real world to feed the imagination. Whoever looks for Pan and
the nymphs will only experience the disappointment of stark reality:

how he did weep to find,

Nought but a lovely sighing of the wind

Along the reedy stream:

 Therefore he will not waste his time re-visiting old and remote places in England
and in Europe (being also less amply provided than his aristocratic or well-to-do rival
poets); instead he will sit himself down (sit me down: his uncommon verbal expression
for the objectified selfhood) and read. If Wordsworth and Shelley are recovering their
past selves from actual places and experiences, Keats will handle the theme (re-visit
poem) through a figure: metalepsis or the troping of a former trope, for the book he is
reading is Ovid's story of Narcissus, the first of his Metamorphoses. The modish device
of contrasting modes of vision is substituted by antithetical discourses: the figurative
(Caducean charm) language of art (Apollo) which causes ideas to appear in sensuous
form (materialize into a beautiful mortal) versus the apocalyptic, abstracting language of
science or philosophy (see the knowing gaze and truth language of Lycius, the
philosopher, who, by naming Lamia's essence, causes her to disappear.) The
philosopher is left with neither the essence nor the appearance of the true Lamia, as her
essential serpent nature cannot become apparent (phenomenal). On the contrary, the
language of art is creation, increase. A new word is created to illustrate the effect of
Apollo's “lythe Caducean charm”: The word lythe is probably a “portmanteau word”, a
telescoped form of Gr. lysis meaning “dissolution” and Gr. lethe meaning
“forgetfulness”. “Caduceus” designates the wand of Hermes, the god who runs
messages from gods to mortals, while the adjective also means “perishable”. The whole
phrase may be paraphrased as the word that links the present otherworldly form of
Lamia to her future state of mortality, which will be enacted as a form-dissolving proces
(melted and disappear'd). This is but one example of the extraordinarily compact poetic
idiom which makes Keats, when properly understood, one of the most complex and
difficult poets. Each word has its precise function and often an entire history behind it,
which would require its own glossing.

In the manner of Coleridge, Keats writes verse-letters to express his aesthetic

views. Sometimes his choice of an imaginative life divorced from that of nature is
motivated through a proleptic Darwinian picture of destructive beasts praying upon one
another in a fierce struggle for survival:

Still do I that most fierce destruction see, -

The Shark at savage prey, – the Hawk at pounce,

The gentle robin, like a Pard or Ounce,

Ravening a worm, -
 (Epistle to J.H. Reynolds)

The Eve of St. Agnes is a masterpiece of revisionist reinscription. The poem tells of
a maiden's initiation on the night when, according to tradition, young girls are supposed
to dream of their lovers (Christabel), consummated between the cell of the Beadsman
telling his rosary and the guests in the banquet hall of the medieval castle, whose
merry-making and music can be heard, for many a door was wide. The reader is in the
position of the wedding-guest in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, requested to choose
between the Mariner's village chapel and the wedding banquet, whose music is coming
through the open door. The poem ends up with an Wordsworthian closure which
distances the world of the heroes from that of the reader – the inscribed beneficiary of
the story – through a shift from present to past tense, and from dramatized to narrated
events. Coleridge's polarization of woman into virgin and whore is rejected by Keats, by
virtue of his belief in the inevitable course of events in the real world, which is one of
necessity. Madeline, who earlier had been praying beneath the Virgin's picture while
rose-bloom fell on her hands (the Virgin Mary is, in the Catholic tradition, the mystic
rose), wakes up and sees Porphyry (a name suggesting the red colour of passion), who
has stolen into his enemies' castle for love of her. As fiery erotic passion is making
“purple-riot” in his bosom, his devastated face looks quite different from its ideal and
dispassionate vision in her dream-world of mystic inspiration:

“ ...those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:

“How changed thou art! how pallid, chill and drear !

“Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,

“Those looks immortal...

But that is not possible (As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again), for life
pursues an irreversible course, towards the full-blown rose of erotic initiation, decay and
death. The Virgin dreaming under the St. Agnes legend will awake warm in the virgin
morn, no weeping Magdalen. Madeline will not spend the rest of her life in ascetic
expiation, like the famous Mary Magdalen, the reformed prostitute, she will follow her
lover out of the castle. After their elopement, the Baron and his warrior-guests are
nightmared with demons, witches and coffin-worms, which intimates that the lovers
died. They leave the orderly castle world (secure, unchanging) of music, beautifully
carved furniture, dainty meals (this is Keats at his best in his sensuous describing
language), going out into the chaotic nature, ravished by the storm. Keats works a
displacement in his literary model: the terms set in polarity are not innocence and
experience, but art and nature. Inside the castle, opposites have been reconciled,
conflicts have been appeased (Anglo-Saxons and Normans, Hildebrand and Maurice
are feasting together), innocence is not bereft of sensuous delight in embodied beautiful
forms, and Madeline has her own protecting Angela. Outside there is a world of
divisiveness (asceticism or sexual indulgement, life or death), confusion and death.

The Hyperion poems, cast in Miltonic blank-verse, show an analogous technique:

reinscription of the model and afterwards its deconstruction and re-construction in
Keatsian key. Not even gods are spared the effects of time and decay. The Titans led
by Saturn are deposed by the Olympian gods led by Jupiter. In Miltonic fashion, the fall
is within the mind. They have committed “actions of rage and passion” whereby they
have decayed in dignity to the level of “the mortal world beneath”. The reprobating
speech by Coelus, the Heavenly Father, is strongly reminiscent of God explaining away
the “justice” of the fall in Paradise Lost (for I created them free and free they must
remain):

For I have seen my sons most unlike gods,

Divine ye were created, and divine

In sad demeanour, solemn, undisturb'd

Unruffled, like high Gods, ye liv'd and ruled;

Now I behold in you fear, hope, and wrath;

Hyperion's fall (last of all Titans) is his own choice on recognizing the difference
between his state of mind and the “bright, patient stars”. With Keats, redemption is no
longer religious bur aesthetic. Oceanus, one of the deposed Titans, is aware that their
fall was not caused by the Father's thunder (Milton's Satan refers in his opening speech
to God, Whom thunder hath made greater) but by Nature's course, which permanently
brings up a fresh perfection. Is there no escape from Nature's law? Clymene has heard
Apollo's “romanticized” song of joy and grief at once, and knows he is the better god.
She certainly acts as a ventriloquist on Keat's behalf when she spells out the new
gospel of beauty:

'tis the eternal law

 That first in beauty should be first in might;

It is through knowledge enormous and the gift of music from Mnemosyne that
Apollo becomes immortal, no longer subject to Nature's displacements and mutability
law. Art and memory are man's Edenic condition. And if there is to be an analogue for
the Kubla-Khan poet “adopted” by the Divine Imagination, that is Endymion loved by the
moon goddess, that is the immortality of mortal beauty made into a myth.

Ode on a Grecian Urn is the most typical Keats, not only with its opposition of love
decaying yet consummated in the real world, while arrested but eternal in the engraving
on the famous Barberini vase (a poetic allegory of the Kantian principle of aesthetic
appreciation as disinterested, free of any practical purpose, expressed in The Critique
of Judgement) but also in the generic awareness of the closure. As the poet is glossing
on an art object of the Attic world, he has selected the literary mode of the “Cold
Pastoral”. The mind cannot survive in the body, yet it can conjecture something of the
nature of eternity by contemplating an art object that will endure when old age shall this
generation waste.

Major writers are those who gear literature towards new modes of sensibility and
expression, and this may be counted as one of Keats's great achievements. With all
recent revaluation work, his true greatness remains to be fully grasped, which is only
possible by enlarging the frame of reference to later nineteenth-century developments,
when the Kantian shift from being to episteme, from Nature to “knowledge enormous”
engendered a new aesthetic awareness and response.

With Lord George Gordon Byron, the Romantic state of mind invades the
everyday. The prodigal aristocrat is given to role-playing (building the mask of the
contradictory Fatal Man), scandalous behaviour, which would send him on exile, heroic
enterprise (swimming the Hellespont, like Leander), and premature death on a romantic
quest (while away to Greece, fighting for her independence from the Turks). His poetry
is more of a narrative and dramatic quality, while his dissatisfaction with the solipsistic
chaos of the unfocused romantic “outpouring of feeling” took the form of a belated,
critical Augustan pose, at odds with the first generation of Romantics (the “Lake District”
school); Southey, who had relegated Byron to the “Satanic School of Poetry”, is found
boring, Wordsworth, pedestrian, and Coleridge, obscure in a satire in verse, English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The poet makes much use of irony (Yet still obscurity's a
welcome guest), but plain reprobation is not missing either, articulated with that scoffing
disdain and hauteur which a hereditary peer (the sixth Lord Byron) sucks in with his
milk.

His refutation of Romantic modes of writing took three forms.

1. The early verse (Hours of Idleness) displays the neoclassic preference for satire,
Greek and Roman models, dedications and literary correspondence, for occasional
poetry, on trivial events, specified with wealth of detail in long titles, as in this racy piece
of gallantry: Lines addressed to a Young Lady, who was alarmed at the sound of a
bullet hissing near her.

2. Romantic topoi are reinscribed and subverted. Hand in hand with a professed
partiality for “the talents of action” and a rejection of the “plaintive mood” goes a rather
mechanical recitation of Romantic commonplaces: the Wordsworthian comparison of
the past self and the “altered eye” of a more philosophical perception in adulthood
(Epistle to Augusta); the theme of the Romantic self-exiled wanderer, who spurns the
city world, seeking refuge in nature (Child Harold's Pilgrimage, a long poem recording
his wandering about Europe and as far as Greece); the interaction between the
individual 's consciousness and the outside world, as reciprocal giving and receiving:

Are not the mountains, waves and skies, a part

Of me and of my soul, as I of them?

(Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. III/72)

Byron anticipated the Victorian double or democratic poem [33], which allows of
two contradictory structures of meaning or interpretations. The play upon personal
pronouns, the I / thou relationship of direct communication, as well as upon tenses, past
and present, achieves in the Epistle to Augusta a syntactic ambiguity which
deconstructs the Wordsworthian myth of the growth of the mind. The poem is, in fact, a
reflection upon the nature of writing, which transposes temporal distance into
grammatical oppositions and textual as well as mental co-presence:

For thee – my own sweet Sister – in thy heart

I know myself secure – as thou in mine

We were and are – I am – even as thou art -

 Beings – who ne'er each other can resign

It is the same together or apart -

From life's commencement to its slow decline -

We are entwined – let death come slow or fast

The tie which bound the first endures the last.

The unity of the Romantic self is broken in Childe Harold, split as it is into narrator
and persona (Byron calls attention to a distinction between the author and the pilgrim in
a letter prefacing the fourth Canto), and so is the unity between word and world, the
temporal and the eternal, which Coleridge sought in the use of symbol. No longer a
seeker of the neoplatonic Oneness with the Universe, but of the One Word which could
render “soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings”, i. e. the immediacy and truth of
experience, the poet becomes aware of the separate nature of language (I have found
them not (...) Words which are things), of the deferral poetry (Harmodia II: harmony of
song, not of the world) effects on life:

Oh, as full thought comes rushing o'er the mind,

Of all we saw before – to leave behind -

Of all – but words / what are they? can they give

A trace of breath to thoughts while yet they live?

No...

Safe on the shore the Artist first must stand -

And then the pencil trembles in his hand.

The Prisoner of Chillon sets out from the Romantic thesis of the solipsistic, self-
absorbed mind, which is sufficient unto itself, but eventually reaches its antithesis,
through allusion and ironic implication. Imprisoned Bonnivard, enjoying the company of
rats and stray birds, resembles Defoe's Robinson, severed from civilization and swaying
as a parody of an absolutist monarch over a party of... cats and a parrot. The prisoner's
final confession of feeling at one with his chains and the society of mice and spiders, as
the natural outgrowth of his environment, plays ironically around the dithyrambic
invocation of the Eternal spirit of the chainless mind!/ Brightest in dungeons in the
“Sonnet on Chillon” preceding it. The contrast is enhanced by the shift from the heroic
beat of the decasyllabic iamb in the Sonnet to the former freedom fighter's combination
of two iambs and a paeon (two unstressed syllables in between two beats) – the
characteristic rhythm not of celebratory and confident odes but of hymns and prayers.
The sense of freedom has been inverted, as the regime's victim has internalized its
most oppressive practices – privation of liberty and the monarch's right of life and death
over his subjects –, to the point where he can only deny in the same language what he
had previously been taking pains to end:

With spiders I had friendship made,

And watch'd them in their sullen trade,

Had seen the mice by moonlight play,

And why should I feel less than they?

We were all inmates of one place,

And I, the monarch of each race,

Had power to kill – yet, strange to tell!

In quiet we had learn'd to dwell,

Nor slew I of my subjects one,

What Sovereign hath so little done?

My very chains and I grew friends,

So much a long communion tends

To make us what we are: even I

Regain'd my freedom with a sigh.

(The Prisoner of Chillon)

Drummond Bone [34]is sensitive to the deconstructionist rhetoric of Byron's mature

lyrics, reading “She Walks in Beauty”, the best known of his Hebrew Melodies (a
musical volume, written for the Jewish composer Isaac Nathan), against the background
of a changed reader response:
 This is a “Romantic” poem under deconstruction – the necessities of indefiniteness
(escaping the rational and moral light of defining reason and limiting moral code) are
superseded by the unambiguous expression of moral certainty. Most readers in the
post-Romantic period, which is to say, most readers, have instinctively read it in
reverse.

Byron's portrait gallery of contradictory Fatal Men (Manfred, Lara, The Corsair,
The Giaour) has found a proper description in Mario Praz' Romantic Agony: mysterious
origin, melancholy habits, traces of a former fatal passion, the suspicion of some ghastly
secret, pale face, bright eyes. Lara, for instance, inspires both fear and fascination: In
him inexplicably mix'd appear'd/ Much to be loved and hated, sought and feared. The
characteristic Romantic hero, experiencing a radical split between his twin sides –
gentle and destructive -, is constantly driven by contradictory impulses, such as the
liberal aristocrat's generous defence of the wretched of the earth (see Byron's maiden
speech in Parliament on behalf of the Luddites, the frame-breakers), while still clinging
to the status of a hero, set above the rest (to do what none or few would do), swayed by
benevolent and by criminal instincts alike.

There was a laughing devil in his sneer,

That raised emotions both of rage and fear;

And where his frown of hatred darkly fell,

Hope withering fled, and Mercy sigh'd farewell!

(The Corsair)

Nor was Byron's creation of his fascinating demons a thoroughly original act.
Angus Calder identifies [35] two new discourses of subversion which Byron put together
to give birth to Conrad, Manfred and their company: the new man of feeling
(Mackenzie and Byron's Werther) and the Gothic (Harold leaves Albion pursuing the
Virgilian shadow of Beckford's Vathek, while Juan's startling “Virgin face” is lighted in
the final scene through some Gothic window etc.).

Marie Roberts [36] traces the prototype among the brothers of the esoteric order of
the Rosy Cross, who had attempted the overthrow of the established order in the name
of a meliorist ideal. Their alchemical search for the philosopher's stone had lamentably
failed, they had travelled from dream to disenchantment, from elixir vitae to taedium
vitae. A sense of guilt and satanic loneliness accompanied their social heresy and
revolutionary fall.

Psychoanalytic interpretations add up to such cultural explanatory narratives.

Some obscure drive in the poet (traced by Drummond Bone back to the primary scene
of his early life – his being born lame, which, according to his Scottish mother's Calvinist
belief, was the mark of Cain, his possibly incestuous relationship with his sister,
Augusta), to which we could add his mature associations both with the Italian mob – La
Turba, or the Carboneria (the freedom fighters) – and the aristocratic Gamba family,
whom he joined in their exile for revolutionary activities, or with some robbers/rulers of
the Levant, may have been responsible for the symptoms of guilt accompanying the
extraordinary abilities of his heroes, while, in the context of the Regency's moral
relativism and shallowness, it did not take a calculated cynic to make a mysanthropic
“modern Timon” (Childe Harold), or a Satanic rebel against a rotten society (the
Conrad/Lara pirate). A degenerate age doomed the earnest moral reflector to an
outsider's position, to heresy:

Doomed by his very virtues for a dupe,

He cursed those virtues as the cause of ill

......…………………………………….......

He knew himslef a villain – but he deemed

The rest no better than the thing he seemed;

....……………………………………….....

Lone, wild, and strange...

(The Corsair)

As he had outgrown the Romantic temper, the Satanic posture takes a form of
studied malaise, or of a revisit portrait, such as the following Miltonic re-mix from his
Manfred – a piece of what he called “mental theatre”: the late romantic version of the
earlier anatomy of passions:

The mind which is immortal makes itself

 Requital for its good or evil thoughts -

Is its own origin of ill and end -

And its own place and time – its innate sense,

When stripp'd of this mortality, derives

No colour from the fleeting things without,

But is absorb'd in sufferance or in joy,

Born from the knowledge of its own desert.

(Manfred, III/4)

Manfred cannot be tempted by the conjured devils with a promise of control over
the elements, like his Faustian predecessors; he only demands forgetfulness, peace
from his own mind, and he finally disobeys the Spirit's command to follow him to hell,
proclaiming himself both self-creator and self-destroyer. The hyperbolic Romantic ego
is, however, set in a perspective which challenges his claim to self-sufficiency and
diminishes his status: the background of the Gothic gallery in his castle frames Manfred
as a sort of medieval ghost, and it is not Manfred but the Abbot of St. Maurice who has
the last word: the simple statement of Manfred's disappearance, emphatically and
repeatedly stated, reclassifies the metaphysical drama, through the bracketing of the
hero's afterlife, as human and finite:

Abbot: He's gone – his soul hath ta'en its earthless flight;

Whither? I dread to think – but he is gone.

(Ibidem)

3. The third type of detour on Romantic modes of vision is the scaling down of
history and the historicization of the past. In his Preface to Marino Faliero, Doge of
Venice, a historical tragedy, Byron provides a list of trivial incidents which had led to
huge historical convulsions, in order to prove that history is a collection of “slight
causes” taking “a great effect”, and, thereby, defend his own choice of an apparently
insignificant subject for the grand design of mankind's progress.

Deconstructive is also his argument that there is little connection between the past
as it really was and textuality, the fiction which a society sends down in history. He
brings in arguments to defend Childe Harold's Pilgrimage against a charge of
anachronisms and historical inaccuracy, more precisely, that the “vagrant Childe”,
meaning a knight in training, suggested to Byron by “Lord Maxwell's Good Night”, in the
Border Minstrelsy edited by Scott, “is very unknightly, as the times of the Knights were
times of Love, Honour, and so forth”. By recourse to documents, other than the amour
courtois tradition of the troubadours, the author makes his point, that their time was “the
most profligate of all possible centuries”. The gap between words and world justifies his
creation of an entirely fictitious character, a literary device, handled in picaresque
fashion as the link between the loose episodes of a travelogue providing a meditation
on historical events, manners and the arts, as Harold, the protagonist sated with
pleasure and ennui, proceeds from Portugal to Constantinople, from youth to age, from
ancient Greek splendour and civilization to its bondage, as the emblem of modern
Europe. It is a historical, not a mental progress, as in The Prelude, a sequence of
mental vignettes and as many occasions for discoursing on change, from ancient belief
to institutionalized religions and metaphysical crisis:

Son of the morning, rise! approach you here!

Come – but molest not yon defenceless urn:

Look on this spot – a nation's sepulchre!

Abode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn,

Even gods must yield – religions take their turn:

'Twas Jove's – 'tis Mahomet's – and other creeds

Will rise with other years, till man shall learn

Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds

Poor child of Doubt and Death, whose hope is built on reeds.

(Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, II, 3)

The vision of revolutionary achievement as wreck of old opinions – things which

grew,/ Breathed from the breath of time, is marked out for a new, relativist filtering of
outwardness through opinion. The mind is textualized, the self and discourse are
historicized, myth and history are reinvented in the light of modern ideas and
discoveries. As he turned away from self-expressionism to drama in his later career,
Byron developed a sense of constraining literary conventions and of the provisional
character of epistemological assumptions. For instance, his Cain, A Mystery is by
himself generically defined in the Preface as belonging with the medieval Mysteries or
Moralities tradition, while putting on a new garb, lent by Byron's textual sources and by
his knowledge of modern science. Lucifer's seductive speeches gather new strength of
argument (the pre-Adamite world was also peopled by “rational beings”) from the
contemporary catastrophist theory: Cuvier’s (and Lyell's) idea that “the world has been
destroyed several times before the creation of man”. Lucifer's prophecy to Cain,
substituting for Michael's to Adam in Milton's Paradise Lost, is less modelled on sacred
history than on the new genesis of natural sciences, including the onset of the ice age
(Cain: Snows? What are they?).

Byron's political views are interpreted by contemporary critics in different ways, as

the method, as well as in quantum physics, seems to determine the results of the
research. Whereas Jerome Christiansen’s historicist and psychoanalytic reading (Lord
Byron's Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society, John Hopkins University
Press, 1992) places Byron within the context of the emerging consumer society and
contemporary philosophy of history, Bone's deconstructionist method minimalizes the
import of his politics:

The politics are angry, but they are the politics of the outsider who has no
purchase on power – they are the politics of the outsider who has no purchase on
power – they are the politics of the tourist observer, angry but without responsibility.
The politics of loss in short serve the creation of the texture of the poem rather than
informing a political philosophy. Nevertheless, they were sufficiently real to upset the
party of government, who perhaps understandably but certainly exaggeratedly) read the
ennobling of ennui as political, rahter than critical politics as aiding the ennoblement of
ennui. (Op. cit., p. 14).

Even in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which is Bone's subject under consideration

here, Byon's politics of opposition amounts to infinitely more than a moody youth's
discontent with the world. It is characteristically Romantic in its anti-imperial stance and
its promotion of national values and traditions. The fighter for the nations' freedom, who
financially supported the Greek troups, a field hospital and a propaganda publication of
the Greek Committee for independence, must have felt deeply for the Gladiator dying in
the Roman “bloody Circus” for “imperial pleasure” (Canto IV, 140/1), in the acclaimed
show whose futile wastefulness of human life and energy ran counter the principles of
the Republic of Fraternity in France and of their Jacobin supporters in England: As man
was slaughtered by his fellow-men. The symbolic code works through binary
oppositions: Empire versus colony, the Colosseum versus the Dacian hut, the values of
Rome versus the pieties of home, the here of alienation and the there of psychic
homeliness, the father of the nation versus the tribal pater familias:

I see before me the Gladiator lie:

He leans upon his hand – his manly brow

Consents to death, but conquers agony,

And his droop'd head sinks gradually low -

And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow

From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one,

Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now

The arena swims around him – he is gone,

Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hail'd the wretch who won.

He heard it, but he heeded not – his eyes

Were with his heart, and that was far away:

He reck'd not of the life he lost nor prize,

But where his rude hut by the Danube lay,

There were his young barbarians all at play,

There was their Dacian mother – he, their sire,

Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday...

It was a modern version of “the knight in shining armour”, taking the risk of
rescuing an adulterous woman in Greece, who was on the point of being drowned by
soldiers, and putting down the following observations of a woman's fate in
Mohammedan society (Canto II, 61):
 Here woman's voice is never heard: apart,

And scarce permitted, guarded, veil'd, to move,

She yields to one her person and her heart,

Tamed to her cage...

What Byron does deconstruct is the myth of the absolutist Oriental ruler, or tyrant,
and, by extension, of the agent in history, in his historical play, Sardanapalus, dedicated
to Goethe as an act of homage from a “literary vassal to his liege lord”. The historical
source is Diodorus Siculus, but a discussion of Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus is
relevant in this context, as well as for the late Romantics’ shift from the temporality of
music (Coleridge and his musical backgrounds and agencies, Wordsworth and his
Prelude) towards the spatiality of the visual arts. It was a sign of respect for form, what
Byron calls, in the Preface, “the more regular formation of a structure”. The “law of
literature”, that is Byron's decision to observe the Aristotelian unities is set above the
commandments of a truthful historical reconstruction: the long war of history is replaced
by a conspiracy exploding and succeeding in one day, for the sake of “dramatic
regularity”. It is no longer the Romantic organic form, emerging simultaneouly with the
content of the work of art (Coleridge's “essemplastic” or form-giving faculty), but the
appropriation of pre-existing, generic conventions.

Christiansen is reading the play in the context of England's shift to liberalism,

whose political philosophy is summed up in Benjamin Constant's 1813 book, The Spirit
of Conquest and Usurpation and Their Relation to European Civilization. Napoleon's
wars, as an expression of the vain desire for conquest and glory, were seen as an
expression of Oriental despotism and as an anachronism, the usurpation of civil society
by the state as the instrument of a single man. Peaceful commercial exchanges were
infinitely more profitable than martial activities, which could only be justified in light of
motives compatible with the present state of civilization. The Sardanapalus plot stands
in relation to Constant's theory as a photographic negative to the positive snapshot. The
protagonist of this Oriental drama, a sort of Haroldian addict of sexual pleasure and
luxury, is made, by his mistress and ministers into a martial figure, in the image of the
ruthless Nimrod and Semiramis, the founders of the Assyrian Empire. Sardanapalus is
aroused to sway by an idealizing image of himself [37], held up to him by the object of
his consumption, his Greek mistress, Myrrha.

References
[29]Carol Jacobs: Unbinding Words: Prometheus Unbound, in Romanticism, Op. cit., pp. 26l-262.

[30] Patsy Stoneman: Catherine Earnshaw's Journey to Her Home among the Dead. Fresh Thoughts on
“Wuthering Heights” and “Epipsychidion”, “The Review of English Studies”, Nov. 1996.

[31] Romanticism, Op. cit., p. 205.

[32]. Ibidem, p. 2l0.

[33] Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry. Poetics and Politics, Routledge, 1993, pp. 13-17.

[34] Byron, Northcote House in association with the British Council, 2000, p. 23.

[35] Angus Calder, Byron, Open University Press, Philadelphia, 1987, p. 21.

[36] Marie Roberts, Gothic Immortals. The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, Routledge,
1990.

[37] Christiansen quotes Lacan on the role in the psyche's development of identification with a mirror
image. The ego is constituted as an alterego, as an imaginary nature. This reading distorts Lacan's
theory, according to which the specular I (of the child identifying himself with his image in the mirror
which gives him an illusion of autonomy and wholeness) is superseded by the social I after entry into
language, or the symbolical order of society, governed by the Law of the Father, social taboo and
convention. The social I is metonymically or only partially manifest, as what is not approved by ’le
nom du pčre” ” social constraints ” is repressed and sinks into the unconscious. Sardanapalus
represses his personal inclinations and desires in order to meet his subjects' expectations. When he
asks for a mirror, it is not his real self that he beholds in it but the distorted one, which is not kown but
“recognized” by his soldiers, mistress and ministers, i.e. it complies with the ideal image of the
Oriental ruler pre-existing in their minds. He talks and acts not as he would like to but according to
some alienating prototype, mediating his desire for him, in the same way in which Don Quixote allows
Amadis of Gaul to choose his own objects of desire, communicated to him through the symbolic order
of society (language). See Jacques Lacan's essays, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function
of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” and “The Symbolic Order”, in The Function and
Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis).
 As the master of historical painting on grand, heroic design, Delacroix portrayed
the Assyrian king as a spiritualized, pale-faced and self-possessed Oriental ruler,
reclining with perfect composure on his sofa, surrounded by his harem of women
fawning on and dying for him by the swords of rude, barbarous and dark-looking
soldiers.

Byron is re-writing an episode in world history as unheroic, absurd, purporting

much more than the Bible of English liberalism. He is concerned with ego-formation and
identity construction, located now within the realm of intersubjectivity (as against
Romantic self-generation and self-absorption). Salemenes, the king's brother-in-law,
experiences the split between personal feelings and the subject positions available for
Sardanapalus and for himself along the paradigm of royalty (I/1):

Salemenes (solus). He hath wrong'd his queen, but still he is her lord;

He hath wrong'd my sister, still he is my brother;

He hath wrong'd his people, still he is their sovereign,

And I must be his friend as well as subject…

It is by conformity to social roles that he is as such recognized by Myrrha's recital

of his virtues, similar to Ophelia's portrait of the Renaissance polymath prince, i.e., by
constructing him as a sign whose meaning resides in his relation to others: a soldier's
trust, a subject's reverence,/ A king's esteem – the whole world's admiration!

The issue at stake is not a wrong choice of values ending up with the conversion of
the sinner, as in Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra, where the protagonists finally
embrace the superior values of Rome versus Egypt. In Sardanapalus, there is a battle
of values for which a solid case can be made on either side of the tracks. The Attic,
Greek ideal of repressing personal desires for the sake of public duty and image is
experienced by Myrrha as a painful obstacle against her spontaneous love for the king:
she would not have him as a debased monarch, unworthy of her country's ethos. The
king would like to remove the third, alienating element in what René Girard calls
“triangular desire” (Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 1965):

There comes

For ever something between us and what

We deem our happiness; let me remove

 The barrier...

(Sardanapalus, I/2)

He worships another God, another Greece, to be later discovered by Nietzsche:

God Dyonisos, the cult of the uninhibited consummation of desire, who had conquered
more lands than the king's “man-queen” of a grandmother. But for this apparent return
to the golden age of pastoral content – “a king of feats, and flowers, and wine, and
revel” instead of a “king of glory” –, there is no present grammar. Sardanapalus can only
defend his policy in negative terms, as what he had not done in order to fall in with the
others' image of Assyria's king, according to the “annals”:

I made no wars, I added no new imposts

I interfered not with their civic lives...

If they rebel, 'tis because I oppress not...

(Ibidem)

Myrrha, the “eloquent Ionian”, engages in a crazy talk about civic love as self-love,
a sort of proleptically Freudian ego mediating between the id of the libidinal self and the
social super ego demanding its suppression; the desire to be admired is the expression
of the primitive, self-loving, narcissistic ego. She gets herself trapped in a tangle of
contradictions, lying at the heart of king worship:

I speak of civic popular love, self-love,

Which means that men are kept in awe and law,

Yet not oppressed – at least they must not think so,

Or if they think so, deem it necessary.

(Ibidem)

Sardanapalus is invited to seek in the annals models for his conduct, to model
himself on the empire's founders. It is out of love that he concedes to the effacement of
his personality, as suggested by the tropes of giving away his signet, showing up before
his troupes, not as active leader but as an image apt to give them courage, putting on
his armour, asking for a glass. It is in his dream that the repressed ego returns and its
symbolic language that bestows meaning upon his transformation and spiritual miming.
It is his father's ghost (and Law) that looses upon him his two ancestors, the founders of
Assyria, not heroes but a “bloody-handed, ghastly, ghostly thing” each. The scene
symbolizes the spectralization of an individual who allows himself to be possessed by
some imagined other. The king invaded by his ancestors' personality inhabits a limbo,
an in-between realm:

Till I grew stone, as they seem'd half to be,

Yet breathing stone, for I felt life in them,

And life in me: there was a horrid kind of sympathy between us, as if they

Had lost a part of death to come to me,

And I the half of life to sit by them.

We were in an existence all apart

From heaven and earth. And rather let me see

Death all than such a being!

(IV/1)

Identity is generated within the in-between of dialogue, the living conversation

which is always oriented toward the other. Not only does his wife, Zarina, confess to
have been living for years on his image, but he himself undergoes in her presence a
transformation, becoming indeed what she fantazises about him and speaking the
words she wants to hear:

Had I never loved

But thee, I should have been an unopposed

Monarch of honouring nations. To what gulfs

A single deviation from the track

Of human duties leads even those who claim

the homage of mankind as their born due,

And find it, till they forfeit it themselves!.

 (Ibidem)

To Salemenes, he declares that he had married for reasons of state, while to

Myrrha, who comes in as Zarina walks out, he promises “I shall be myself again”, but it
is only the self that is conjured in her presence. As the logical conclusion to the
unfolding of the plot, the king and his mistress choose to perish in flames, so that no
monument would grace their bodies. The king would not be mixed up by his subjects for
their ox-god Apis. King or kine – this is the ironic final revelation of the emptiness of
popular beliefs and myths. Sardanapalus, the effeminate king worrying about his
armour's heaviness, had been burdened with idols for which there was no original
heroism and greatness.

While Beppo sketches a world where commercial goods and fashion have
vaporised old values into a Carnival of present, opaque signs, Don Juan is the passive
modern picaro in a world which has rendered heroism impossible, while the media
fabricate overnight surrogate myths of passing public acclaim, dished out to a morally
relaxed readership, craving for exotic adventures as an antidote for boredom. Unlike
Milton's time of earnest political commitment and steadfastness, Byron's
contemporaries only offered examples of compromise, chameleonism and, like Southy,
radical shifting of sides. The ambiguity of “want” obscures the author's intention: I
desire, or I lack a hero?

I WANT a hero: an uncommon want,

When every year and month sends forth a new one,

Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,

The age discovers he is not the true one...

Byron's Don Juan is not, however, the “ancient” antagonist of social taboos,
Shelley's Promethean opponent of authority, or Mozart's tormented hero confronting the
Commendatore but a new type of hero, effeminate, lost in disguise among the women
of a harem, being seduced or resisting female seduction, trying to deal with woman's
“mobility”, role-playing and change of heart.

A picaresque novel in verse, launching the hero upon six adventures in 17 cantos,
by an author who has given up on grand epic design or the inner consistency of organic
form in order to adopt the much more modest role of Improvisatore. Don Juan is often
a crafty display of mock-heroic cultural critique, as in the Haydee episode, where his
love idyll is interrupted by her father's, pirate Lombroso's return. Byron produces a
lovely parody of Locke's mechanistic psychology and of aristocratic mannerisms (the
absurd duel ceremony) in the high-flown romantic rhetoric. The narrator does not keep
company with the “Intellectual Giants” of philosophy, from Pythagoras to Locke, he
ranks himself among the day's “little people”, amoral and eternal “Children”, himself in
want of a precise and stable identity: So that I almost think that the same skin/ For one
without – has two or three within.

Travelling between East and West, Byron acquired a voyeuristic sense of the world
as a theatre of depthless shows and floating signs, unattached to historical and national
roots, of the schizophrenia produced by globalization. In Beppo, the wife surprised at a
carnival ball with her lover by her husband returning from the East in a Turk's guise,
only fears his “queer dress” could cause a scandal... She starts prattling about his new
look as well as hers, as if she hereself had travelled to the Orient, ou tout est pris ŕ la
legčre... As Byron got the story in Italy, from his lover's (Marianna Segati) husband,
while visiting a mistress of his own, it is not difficult to guess the experiential source of
this exclusive concern with manners, food and luxury in an age of surfaces:

„And are you really, truly, now a Turk?

With any other woman did you wive?

Is't true they use their fingers for a fork?

Well, that's the prettiest shawl – as I'm alive!

You'll give it me? They say you eat no pork....”

In a society taken up with carnival, masques, mime, fashion, Ketchup, Soy, Chili-
vinegar and Harvey sauce, Beppo will settle in as just one more, even “true Turkey”,
merchant “with goods of various manners”. The individual is no longer deciding his
destiny in a history of displaced civilizations, of palimpsestic cultural erasures, similar to
the disconnected layers of fossils in the earth's crust. Cast away “about where Troy
stood once”, Beppo's destiny is shaped by the place's present society (Significantly,
cultural law replaces the ahistorical genius loci of the Romantics). Fate and Providence
are only names for the iron law of conquest and cultural substitution. Where he could
have been a citizen with a voice in the public forum, he becomes, under the Mussulman
rule, a slave. However, in a mobile world of capital and trade, and, consequently, of
unstable social identities, he will soon make a fortune.
 Back to Venice, he discovers the international workings of capital and the
boundless circulation of its consumer goods and exchange values. He will sit down with
Laura and her Count in his own house, helping himself to some coffee – a beverage for
Turks and Christians both/Although the way they make it's not the same –, and to the
same way of making love...

The author makes room for his own representation in the story, as a broken,
wandering dandy, experiencing permanent displacement on account of external
pressures and circumstances. He only chooses verse because it is “more in fashion”,
and sells well in a commercial and consumer society, he ends his story not because he
has brought it round to some conclusive end but because he has reached the end of the
page, he is no longer in control of writing: the story slips through his fingers, the norms
of poetic form rule his choice: just as the stanza like to make it... This form of verse
began, I can't well break it... The characters themselves are parodic surrogates of
literary prototypes: the present Laura is a mock version of Petrarch's unattainable lover
– Fresh as the Angel o'er a new inn door –, and a new Desdemona, no longer either
pure or ending in tragedy on account of her husband's jealousy, as Beppo will put up
with his share in love as the third shareholder... Byron's protest against commercialism
and mass culture was a proleptic assertion of the aesthete's revolt against the
bourgeois society. A good number of years in advance of Baudelaire, he saw the dandy
as the only hero of modern life, the last lamp holder of aristocratic refinement in a
philistine, indistinctless, classless, mass society:

For a “mix'd company” implies that, save

Yourself and friends, and half a hundred more,

Whom you may bow to without looking grave,

The rest are but a vulgar set...

This is the case in England; at least was

During the dynasty of Dandies, now

Perchance succeeded by some other class

Of imitated imitators...
 In a letter to his publisher dating from April 1819, Byron disclaims his ability to
answer his demand for some “great work”, “some such pyramid”, or “divine poem”. He
deconstructs history, human agency, authorship and modifies literary forms accordingly.
For instance, his epic Childe Harold, drawing on Renaissance models, also takes up the
famous Spenserian stanza, but gives it a new turn by the use of rhyme. He introduces
two couplets, at lines 4 and 5, and at the end of the nine-line stanza; the former usually
creates a sort of semantic gap, as in the Petrarchan sonnet (for instance, between past
valour and present dissolution), while the latter emphasizes repetition. The poem
emerges thus through similarity with and difference from the model.

Childe Harold was he hight: – but whence his name

And lineage long, it suits me not to say;

Suffice it, that perchance they were of fame,

And had been glorious in another day:

But one sad losel soils a name for aye,

However mighty in the olden time;

Nor all that heralds rake from coffin'd clay,

Nor florid prose, nor honeyed lies of rhyme,

Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime.

(Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, I/3)

There is in Byron a keen sense of the cultural or semiologic order as the only
marker of human worth. Napoleon had been vanquished by the frost, the elements.
Sciences, religion, manners and the arts make up the grammar of civilization (Our
Christian usage of the parts of speech), while the inferior body of nature, for instance
the publicly advertised beauty, is evacuated from language:

Laura, when dress'd, was (as I sang before)

A pretty woman as was ever seen,

Fresh as the Angel o'er a new inn door,

Or frontispiece of a new Magazine,

With all the fashions which the last month wore,

 Colour'd, and silver paper leaved between

That and the title page, for fear the press

Should soil with parts of speech the parts of dress.

In mid nineteenth century, Wordsworth published the last form of his Prelude, a
Romantic poem still, proving a remarkable stability of poetic structure among changing
literary ideas and forms. But if Byron had outlived his tumultuous youth, he would
probably have become a foil to Browning. As such, he is another instance of the black
comedy ending a cultural phase.

Romantic Fiction

Whereas cultural anthropology makes an attempt to meet historical

epistemological paradigms on their own terms, the New Historicism school of criticism is
often an act of aggressive valorization of texts in terms of social determinism, or power
relations. The deliberate attempt to put them into a Procrustean theoretic frame often
yields inconsistent readings. This is the case of Gary Kelly, who makes the following
contradictory statements about English Gothic:

Gothic romance also aims to demistify the sublime obscurity by which, according
to Englightenment sociology, court culture overawes the whole of society, thereby
maintaining the power of court government...

The gothic novel was and is known for its effects of terror, supposedly operating
vicariously in the mind of the reader through the representation of terror in the mind of
the protagonist. But the important point is that this representation foregrounds the mind
(reason and emotion) at the expense of physical action and social conduct.
Furthermore, terror is depicted less often than perplexity or being of two minds...[38]

How can one enforce a social programme while being “in two minds”? What
narrative mode can both “demistify” and exercise the art of freezing the blood? What
Enlightenment sociology may be said to inform a wandering spirit, incarnated through
several ages? How can one pin ghosts down to social ties and determinism? And yet,
E. J. Clary, in his essay on The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 179os [39]goes to
the ultimate consequences, concluding that, as the heroine gives her property over to
her husband, Valancourt, the gothic castle (is) a metaphor for woman's
dematerialization before the law. What about those gothic castles which are in the
hands of male protagonists from the start, or the gothic heroines without a castle to give
away? Such statements may rule out any generic definition and make all theoretical
distinctions ineffectual.
 Except for the Gothic, Gary Kelly's picture of Romantic fiction is a persuasive one,
and original in the revaluation of Jane Austen as centrally a novelist of her time. He
divides the writing of the age into the following trends:

The Jacobin novel: English Jacobin novelists develop an Enlightenment

sociology of knowledge to argue that individual and social groups are constructed by
the political and cultural system under which they live. Accordingly, the English Jacobin
rhetoric requires detailed representation of social conventions, institutions, and
structures of power and a new particularity and authenticity in representing human
psychology (...). Although several Jacobin novelists adapted the picaresque form, they
give it and other appropriated forms a rigorous connection between character, plot, and
setting in order to show how the individual is first constructed by social conditions and
then necessarily responds to these conditions by ethical action of certain kinds
[40]Included here are Thomas Holcroft's Anna St. Ives, William Godwin's Things as
They are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of
Woman; or, Maria.

The anti-Jacobin novel: Anti-Jacobin novelists came from the same social
background as their literary foes and shared their criticism of court politics and plebeian
unreason and insubordination, but they were more inclined towards a coalition with the
dominant classes. Accordingly, they draw on more genteel and learned, less
“democratic” literary traditions than their rivals and rely on parody and burlesque. (...)
They often use bathos to show the comic consequences of theory in practice (...). They
adapt the novel of education to show how a protagonist infatuated with “philosophy” or
seduced by a “new philosopher” is either ruined or reeducated to social “reality” [41].
Like a prerevolutionary novelist of manners, sentiment, and emulation, (Jane Austen)
uses the courtship story, settings in genteel and social life, and the plot of romantic
comedy to show the interaction of landed gentry and their professional middle-class
dependents and allies, as they negotiate through temptations of courtliness,
contamination by vulgarity, or socially destructive independence. More important,
Austen also uses a metaphor of reading-as-cognition to show both the priority of the
moral-intellectual self and the necessity of integrating that self into landed society and
culture. Here she merges the prerevolutionary conduct-book ideology of domestic
women with the revolutionary feminist protest that women deprived of intellectual
development would be unable to exercise free will correctly in personal and family life
and thus would fail to sustain the major ideological and cultural role in state formation
that was expected of them in the revolutionary aftermath. [42]

The distinction between “representation of excessive selfhood” and the

representation of the social in historical novels so as to “redefine the nation in terms of
the values held by readers of such fiction” is, we think, important enough to list Walter
Scott's novels of national origins, history and culture into a third trend. There is also
a formal distinction to justify the division: the free indirect discourse in Austen, versus
the transhistorical consciousness and the authoritative narrative voice in Scott.

Is book-reading a form of cognition or of delusion in Northanger Abbey? Is not

Mary Bennett's pedantry (explained away as a desperate need of compensation for her
plainness) a figure of fun? Is not the scholarly-minded Mr. Bennet himself, keeping aloof
in his library from all domestic trouble, so egotistic and ineffectual, so impotent in
allowing himself to turn to his daughter Elizabeth for advice and help? Do not Elizabeth,
Jane, and Lydia make their own - sometimes disastrous – decisions in the absence of
proper parental assistance? The Romantics are suspicious of ready-made assumptions,
of dominant ideological views reified in texts. They would rather choose enlightenment
through personal experience. The myth of the “culture heroine” comes later, with the
Victorian novelists. Jane Austen is here much closer to the Don Quixote pattern, but
that holds true for all anti-Jacobin attacks on the supposedly false consciousness of
social reformers, promptly corrected by social practice.

However much these writers might appear to differ from one another, yet common traits
may be identified in a circuitous discursive energy informing all of them. They weigh
heavenly in one direction or other, yet they could not escape the centripetal forces of
what we call the “Romantic paradigm”.

The description of social comedy in Jane Austen, her engaging scenes of

unheroic domesticity, the focus on the social world (manners, idiolects, mentalities,
economic determinism, and whatever else is meant by it), is inseparable from the
epistemological issue each of her novel poses: can one see straight? Her hero's
adventures in the world, which is a limited one, that of the countryside gentry, are
backed up by a cognitive enlightenment, an awkening to a a finer sense of reality,
which he is finally prepared to meet on its terms: the final overcoming of self-division, a
recognition of what both self and world really are and in what relation they stand to each
other.

Scott's novels, harking back on the romance of remote events, are not completely
lacking in an awareness of social responsibility and the pragmatic demands of social
action. His protagonists are not merely pilgrims in historical time; the perspective is
often intradiagetic, revealing a self-developmental process. Ivnahoe allows himself to be
corrected in his feudal worship of the heroine in the amour courtois tradition (Rowena)
by thinking more often than his wife would have liked him to of the temperate, modest
and kind-hearted Rebecca. Edward Waverly progresses from infatuation with the
reckless devotees to Romantic absolutes to a much domesticated love relationship in
choosing to marry a considerate and realistically-minded woman.

Finally, the gothic romances, with all their escapism, are not at all devoid of an
awareness of the way social machinery works A lot of Godwin's Rousseauian interest
in the savage and Jacobin reforming speculations is incorporated into Mary Shelley's
horror story about the demon-bearing Frankenstein. Before the monster is rejected by
the humans he approaches with most benevolent intentions, before he is awakened by
reading to an awareness of an outcast's condition (Werther) and the possibility to turn
against his Creator and break all laws and taboos (Paradise Lost) and of other wild
ideas which are built into his mind by readings, he has time enough to prove his innate
goodness, despite the uncommon circumstances of his birth.

If we leave aside occasional exaggerations of one-factor analysis, Clary's reading

of The Mysteries of Udolpho against the Jacobin tradition of the individual opposing
authority is not completely devoid of interest. There certainly is an “economic structure
and cultural law” inscribed in the novel. The discrimination between males and females
in point of social acceptance (it is enough for men to behave decently, whereas women
also depend upon the tyrannical and often blind public opinion), economic
dispossession and despotic treatment does link this novel to Wollstonecraft's Mary.
Moreover, the confrontation between heroine and usurper, assisted by Emily's aunt in
that monstrous coalition of aristocratic mature villains in view of seducing an innocent
soul, which De Laclos denounces in Dangerous Connections, engages financial and
legal aspects which go much beyond the timeless and vague scenes of gothic romance.
The narrative convention – the explained supernatural – would also point sooner to a
tendency to translate sensationalist fantasy into a Romantic trope of the subjective
vision informing all percepts. Whereas the early gothic fiction displays the Preromantic
interest in pre-Enlightenment realms of wonder, the later Romantic works evince a
heightened awareness of form and convention. Jane Austen becomes progressively
aware of the formal imposition to introduce no character into her stories, unless they are
connected with it. Scott sets out deliberately to write in a certain convention: he will try
his hand at romantic composition, with all the formal characteristics inscribed in it:
pledging the author to some special mode of laying the scene, drawing the characters
and managing the adventures (General Preface to Waverley).

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has often been interpreted as some sort of imitation,
a telling portrayal of a masculine fantasy... a deliberate miming and framing of a
narcissistic masculine discourse [43] This is what Margaret Homans actually says, in
her essay Bearing Demons: Frankenstein and the Circumvention of Maternity:

Now that we have assembled the parts of Shelley's introductory account of the
novel's genesis, we can see that she equates child-bearing with the bearing of men's
words (...) The conversation between Byron and Shelley probably represents Shelley's
and Byron's poetry, the words, for example, of Alastor that she literalizes in her novel.
[44]

It is only that Mary Shelley does not reproduce only the “germinating words” she
had heard in the conversation with Byron and Shelley before she went to sleep, or from
their works alone. Quotations are much more numerous and diverse, and they have a
very important structuring function. In Frankenstein the Romantic fusion of subject and
object is as complete as the divorce between creature and creator. Frankenstein reports
on the monster and the monster reads his diary; they both judge each other and are in
their turn seen and judged. Frankenstein is terrified at the prospect of Walton hearing
the monster's account of the events and of himself. He warns Walton not to allow
himself to be persuaded by the monster's eloquent speech. Would not that imply that
Frankenstein knows the creature's contentions are not only eloquent but also just? What
can we make of the mise-en-abyme provided by the “canon” of the monster's readings?
Plutarch's Lives are exemplary biographies, illustrious examples of the ancient world.
What self-developmental fictions, Bildungsgeschichte, biographical novels did the
modern world provide? Plutarch's heroes had been statesmen, conquerors. From the
stories Mary Shelley had lately heard and read, she could gather that man was now
attempting to conquer not himself but the elements, to double up, in a futile and
illegitimate attempt, God's work, while ignoring his true position in the universal
hierarchy, the need of compassion for and solidarity with the rest of nature (which the
Ancient Mariner is “wiser” for learning). The story is replete with quotes from other
Romantic writings apart from Alastor (several from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
which serves as a sort of parallel, Tintern Abbey, Jacobin political slogans, Goethe, a
leading figure of the Sturm und Drang). In the Plutarch manner, Mary Shelley sets out to
write the exemplary or merely typical biography of the Romantic age. She internalizes
and inscribes the discourse of Romanticism, and not just a set of values. The man of
the Romantic age can see himself in a mirror, which is an abyss of textual reinscription.
Could Shelley be contrasting the German spirit embodied in the Faust figure (changing
nature's law) and in the Werther figure (the individual destroyed by social division and
prejudices) with the English Romantic outlook: adding to nature the colours of the
imagination rather than actively and destructively intervening into it, challenging social
arrogance and fighting for republican ideals of equality and social harmony? Anyway,
Frankenstein, as a late, self-reflexive form of Romantic fiction appears to us more as a
refutation than as a servile imitation of Romantic thought and rhetoric.

The beginnings are, on the contrary, tentative to the point of self-denial.

Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto), and William Beckford (Vathek) pass
their fanciful romances for a medieval manuscript found by chance or disguised as a
translation from the Arabic. There is nothing genuine about such worlds remote in time
and space, they are sought precisely for their exotic appeal, they are sensational and
fascinating, catering from the wakening sense of wonder in the more extensive
readership of the post-Augustan age.

Terry Castle's reading of The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, a writer who
has enjoyed renewed attention since the seventies, sets out to demonstrate in a new
approach the otherwise traditional view of the Romantics favouring projections of
memory, fantasy, love, and desire at the expense of the shabby everyday reality. The
book, which belongs to a “canonical” phase of Romanticism, presents the symptoms of
the denatured state of our awareness: our antipathy towards the body and its
contingencies, our rejection of the present, our fixation on the past (or yearnings for an
idealized future) our longings for simulacra and nostalgic fantasy. We are in love with
what isn's there [45] .The novel is a piece of Romantic displacement, which is a form of
expressing discontent with the status quo in any walk of life. Somehow in the manner in
which, according to Coleridge (Biographia Literaria), the “lyrical ballads” were to be
accomplished, Radcliffe makes a similar attempt at “the rationalizing of the bizarre by
fancy, and the imaginative enriching of the ordinary”. A purely rhetorical deconstructive
exercise which Paul de Man considers to be constitutive of Romantic poetry. The
supernaturalization of everyday life, through distorting sensory experience, absorption in
illusion, goes hand in hand with the opposite strategy of the supernatural being all the
time explained, demystified. Rational explanations are provided for the mysterious
musical sounds, the groans emanating from the walls, the apparent deaths and walking
spectres of the castle lost in the Apennines. A trail of blood leads to nothing more than a
pile of old clothes, a corpse coming back to life proves to be a pirate who had hidden in
the castle of Montoni, a hero villain of the most genuine Romantic concoction. The other
world of the novel is that of the ordinary, domestic, familiar St. Aubert estate (La Valle),
which, gradually, acquires the hues of an enchanted place. Old-fashioned ghosts have
disappeared from the fictional world, but a new kind of apparition has taken their place.
To be a Radcliffean hero or heroine in one sense means just this: to be “haunted”, to
find oneself obsessed by spectral images of those one loves. One sees in the mind's
eye those who are absent; one is befriended and consoled by phantoms of the beloved.
Radcliffe makes it clear how such phantasmata arise, they are the products of refined
sentiment, the characteristic projection of a feeling heart [46]. Thoughts shape reality,
magical reunion is possible (Emily St. Aubert thinks of her lover, Valancourt, who
presently materializes before her, characters fancy they can perceive the phantoms of
the dead walking the scenes before them). The ghostliness of other people is an effect
of their being reduced to a thought content, an unchanging spiritual essence which is
preferred by the imaginative individual to their bodily presence.

The third phase of gothic writing shows a mannerist handling of stock scenes
(mysterious crimes, exaggerated violence), and characters (the Fatal Man, the Fatal
Woman), who owe their ambiguous nature – both demonic and fascinating – to the
Coleridgean principle of reconciliation of opposites and discordant qualities. Such are
the leads of The Monk, a masterpiece of the Horror School, contributed by Matthew
Gregory Lewis: Ambrosio, a man in holy orders, who pledges himself to the devil, and
Matilda, a woman exceedingly beautiful who turns out to be Satan's instrument. Her
sensuous charms blind the monk of blameless reputation, enforcing upon him her skills
in the magical arts. Miraculous events spiced with blood-letting scenes and everything
besides add to the calculated gothic effects of the terror school.

A mixture of Jacobin reforming ideology and gothic story went into the making of
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in a late Romantic version. “Making” is a proper word to
use, as by that time the Pre-Romantic enthusiasm for the “unexampled excellence” of
the creative genius had subsided. Mary Shelley voices that anxiety of influence which is
the sign of exhaustion. Instead of producing new substance (the absolute originality
demanded by Colerdige), the epigone consciousness is satisfied to take up and
refurbish – however imaginatively – pre-existing stuff. Here is the authoress herself in
her Introduction: Every thing must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and
that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindus give the world
an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise. Invention
does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first
place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into
being the substance itself (the story of Columbus and his egg). Invention consists in the
capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and
fashioning ideas suggested to it.

„Moulding and fashioning” would rather suggest a deliberate effort of elaboration,

and it is only by contradicting Shelley's express confession that one can impose upon
her story a psychoanalytical grid. This is what Jeffrey Berman is doing in one of his
essays collected in Narcissism and the Novel [47]In this respect and others, he walks
into the footsteps of Ellen Moer (Female Gothic, an essay published in New York
Review of Books, 1974), who reads Shelley's novel as a “phantasmagoria of the
nursery”, an elaborate fantasy of birth trauma evoking a woman's deepest fears of
conception and child-birth. Shelley is supposed to have been traumatized by her
mother's death (Mary Wollstonecraft's) as a consequence of giving birth to her, by her
own childbirths and by the circumstance of seeing two of her children dying in infancy.
This is not how Shelley remembers her state of mind years later: I have an affection for
it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which
found no true echo into my heart (Introduction to the novel). Yet Jeffrey Berman insists
on the psychological motivation of her novel-writing as a magical defense against the
fear of death. The hideous phantom is made into a novel which is no longer an enemy
but an ally, capable of delighting as well as terrifying readers, so she bids her mind's
offspring go forth and prosper. Fankenstein's animation of lifeless matter is interpreted
as a wish to participate in the mystery of sexuality and usurp the mother's role, to
displace God and woman from the acts of conception and birth. Quite interesting is
Berman's identification of a Lacanian “mirror-stage”: the Creature's self-alienation on
beholding his reflection in the pool of water. It is actually on the moment he becomes
aware of his image for others that his personality actually merges with it, becoming
monstrous.

In other respects, Frankenstein is much more a matter of word-ing death and

grief, of reinscribing the archetypal rebel figure of the Romantic school: Milton's Satan,
Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen, Werther, Faust, Prometheus, Schiller's Räuber,
Coleridge's Mariner, Byron's Fatal Man, Shelley's escapist, Alastor-haunted poet, etc.
The monster reading Plutarch and Werther in his hut resembles Schiller secretly
reading Plutarch, and Goethe's Götz and Werther at the time he was unwillingly
studying medicine at the Military Academy near Stuttgart, by order of the Duke, which
inspired him with ideas for his own works “in tirannos”. The monster stealing fire and
discovering both its beneficent (warmth) as well as its harmful (burning) effect is a
downscaled Prometheus figure. Frankenstein, Walton, or Mr. Waldman, who aspire to
benefit mankind, even at the cost of self-sacrifice, embody that modern Prometheus
stance of the scientist stealing the secrets of the universe in science-fiction, a literary
kind whose founding stone was laid by Mary Shelley.

Written in epistolary form, just like Werther, the novel progresses through
embedded narratives. Robert Walton's letters to his sister, Mrs. Saville, England,
provide the broadest frame, into which is cast Frankenstein's narrative, which frames up
the monster's account, including the latter's report on his Creator's diary. The beginning
is also framed through intertextuality, as it recalls the fearful encounter, at the beginning
of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, between the ghostly story-teller and the wedding
guest. Walton, an explorer who voyages north to the farthest inhabited spot of the earth
(Archangel: a hint to Milton's Satan?), entertains Faust's thirst for knowledge which is
stronger than love of life: One's man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the
acquirement of the knowledge which I sought, for the dominion I should acquire and
transmit over the elemental foes of our race. As he means to kill no albatross (that is, a
quest of knowledge which does not run counter God's or nature's law), he does not fear
God's punishment: that he should go back to his sister, worn and woeful as the “ancient
Mariner”. The power of books, of culture to shape vision, to mould personalities is now
part of self-Bildung: I have often attributed... my passionate enthusiasm for the
dangerous mysteries of ocean to that production of the most imaginative of modern
poets... a love for the marvellous... which hurries me out of the common pathways of
men. As if by some magical effect, it is such a “worn and woeful” Ancient Mariner, in
striking resemblance to the hero in the poem, who will have him hear out his story, that
he chances upon amidst the icy waters of the North: his lustrous eyes dwell on me with
all their melancholy sweetness: I see his thin hand raised in animation, while the
lineaments of his face are irradiated by the soul within. Strange and harrowing must be
his story. But Frankenstein is not a common trespasser of the Romantic Gospel of
natural religion: he merges with Faust (it was the secrets of heaven and earth that I
desired to learn) in the guise of a scientist absorbed in the latest research-work in
galvanism. In going from alchemy to modern physics and chemistry, Frankenstein
seems to be telling the charade of a human archetype which knows various avatars in
history. The question is: does Mary Shelly share Walton's enthusiasm for the Colerdige
poem? The subversive, deconstructive rhetoric Paul de Man attributes to the Romantic
discourse makes Walton an unreliable narrator. The reader is left to make his own
inferences. Frankenstein's procedure in his horrid experiment follows the Coleridgean
definition of imagination as “reconciliation of opposite and discordant qualities”: To
examine the causes of life we must first have recourse to death... I must also observe
the natural decay and corruption of the human body... all the minutiae of causation, as
exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life... Everything sounds
absurd, of course, and Mary Shelley, educated at the Jacobin school of Mary
Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, is here pointing to the muddled moral notions that
may derive from such poetic art. Man is no longer an agent of firm moral choices;
everything becomes double, out of focus. Berman explores the textual traces of
Frankenstein's identification with the monster: the fact that Walton mixes them up, the
circumstance that the monster kills Frankenstein's bride, denying him a wife as he is
denied a female companion, the use of the Doppelgänger technique, with Frankenstein
and the Creature pursuing each other etc. There is even more textual evidence to
support this theory. In her consistent inscription of Frankenstein as the Ancient Mariner,
Shelley has him pursued by the Creature in a manner Frankenstein describes through a
quote from the Coleridge poem: like one that on a lonesome road... Because he
knows, a frightful fiend/ Doth close behind him tread. This is the moment when the
spectres of the Mariners' former mates, who had died as a consequence of his killing
the albatross, appear before him, offering a show for a charnel-dungeon fitter. The
spectre Frankenstein feels behind him is his own creation and victim. As the Creature
progresses to a sense of self-awareness, he starts to put himself the fundamental
questions which man alone among all creatures is able to ask: (Milton's archetypal
Adam in Paradise Lost): Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my
destination? Frankenstein's quest is to preserve life, to create an immortal race of men,
invulnerable to sickness and death. His purpose is not so much Promethean (to benefit
mankind) as Satanic (let them worship me as they worship God). The Creature's quest
is an epistemological one: what is the meaning of my being in the world? Shelley
seems to be correcting Coleridge: no, man is not just one indifferent link in that
celebrated chain of being: Both man and bird and beast. Your creature will inquire into
the unlawful way of its coming into being, will seek a destination different from mere
vegetative existence. Frankenstein sees in Elizabeth a form of possession: mine to
protect, love, and cherish. I looked upon Elizabeth as mine. The happy race of people
will make him more of a parent than anybody else, for he will be mother and father in
one, his creatures owing their “natures” to him alone. What the Creature expects from
some other being is companionship – again a feature defining only man as “social
animal”. Frankenstein expects awed gratitude from his future creatures; the Creature
asks for love. Frankenstein is not even able to give his Creature a name (this being the
sign of man's capacity to appropriate the nature of that which he names), while the latter
is able to interpret his existence, to project it into a paradigm: the forsaken Adam, the
fallen angel. However surprising it may sound, the Creature is more human than his
creator. His crimes may also be read as Frankenstein's deserved punishment, an ordeal
he has to go through like the Ancient Mariner, by way of expiation. As J. Berman
remarks, “the Creature's eloquence renders Walton speechless” and “awed”. In this
reinscription of a paradigmatic work by a Romantic poet of the first generation, Mary
Shelley seems to be denying not only the validity of their philosophy, their excessive
and potentially dangerous individualism and self-worshipping, but also their obsessions
with darkness, death, charnel-houses. Frankenstein's dream, preceding the Creature's
animation, is a prophetic one. Not life but only death will yield from death, by virtue of
natural causation. His mother's corpse is nightmarishly associated with Elizabeth, one
of his Creature's future victims. Frankenstein's friend, Clerval, who does not feel the
need of a remoter charm by thought supplied (a quote from Wordsworth's Tintern
Abbey), never comes to entertain Frankenstein's wild plans, never loses the sense of
responsibility to his fellow human beings.

The failure of the French Revolution had split the two generations of Romantics
apart. Frankenstein is an example of failed good intentions. He is aware of a Creator's
responsibility to his creation, and yet he leaves him to his own devices. He has had in
mind many happy excellent natures, yet he procedes to collecting bodies from charnel-
houses, producing a gigantic eight-foot high creature, with yellow skin, shrivelled
complexion, straight black lips, dull, watery eyes... He promises to create a female
companion for him, and then changes his mind, which leads to more deaths.
Frankenstein might well be the emblem of the abortive French Revolution. It had
sought, to quote Elizabeth, republican institutions and social manners so refined as to
allow ignorance and lack of dignity not even in servants. And it had ended up in a
monstrous hybrid: a restoration of tyranny, without at least a varnish of hereditary
legitimacy.
 With all its formal incongruities and occasional breach of verisimilitude, Mary
Shelley's novel is an important landmark in the history of literary ideas, and an exquisite
piece of deconstructive rhetoric.

Even more radical in his experimentation with stylistic registers, narrative voice and
structure was a low-born Scottish novelist and poet, admitted later into the best literary
society (the Shelleys, among others). With the disrespect for status which is to be
expected from someone who transgresses social bounderies, Hogg started his career
with parodies, of Wordsworth and Southey, who had acquired an institutional role, in
The Poetic Mirror, and even of Daniel in pseudo-biblical prose. Generic conventions
were treated with a similar lack of deference. He contributed to a generic mix, the
Noctes Ambrosianae dialogues, published by the Edinburgh Magazine, and wrote a
long narrative poem, The Queen's Wake (Queen Mary of Scoytland's wake at
Holyrood), in which he assumes the masks of seven bards, entertaining the Queen with
their verse epics in different styles and moods.

One more generic concoction (Dramatic Tales) led him to a daring multigeneric
structure, which G. Kelly labelled “quasi-novel”: The Private Memoirs and Confessions
of a Justified Sinner. The novel was discovered, recommended to public acclaim and
imitated by André Gide, whose Palude (meaning parasite or amphibian, i.e. straddling
several genres) led to the postmodernist metafictional novel. The roles of author,
narrator and character are destabilized, Gide also accommodating a virtual reader.

In the Confessions, the narrator's story, focalized through the eyes of one of the
characters – George Colwan –, encloses another character's version of the same
events: Robert Wringhim's confessions. The narrator recovers Robert's diary from his
tomb, to which he is prompted to go by a letter to “Blackwood's Magazine” sent by...
James Hogg, a wool-stappler, who had witnessed Robert's suicide. James Hogg had
been a shepherd in his childhood and youth and had actually published the letter in
“Blackwood's Magazine”... The real author and life are incorporated as character and
fiction within the plot. Hogg, who had seen Robert while still alive, refuses to accompany
the narrator to the grave out of which the manuscript (the novel) is extracted, as if to
allegorize the mutual exclusiveness of life and sign. The narrator proceeds from signs
(letter) and digs up signs: humans revolve within a sphere of signifying practices.

The novel is a variation on the Doppelgänger motif, a current one in Romantic

fiction (Schiller, Hoffmann, Chamisso, Poe...). The Romantic project had sought the
reformation and melioration of society and had ended in the darkness of the Reign of
Terror, despotism and international warfare. It was in the name of the loftiest ideals,
degraded into inhuman abstractions and fanaticism, that horrible crimes had been
committed. The Romantic rebel felt like a fallen angel, doomed for his heresy against
legitimate authority.

The Confessions belongs to the Gothic tradition, a metamorphic genre, exploited

by Hoggs in its rich potential. George's sense of being persecuted and the victim of a
conspiracy against him orchestrated by his half-brother (unsupported by material
evidence) qualifies the novel as an instance of paranoid gothic. The intersubjective
dimension – Robert is a victim of institutional fanaticism – is complemented by the
intrasubjective: Robert internalizes the superego, taking the form of religious
dogmatism, and becomes a massochistic ego, denying himself all joys, repressing his
body and tormenting his conscience. The Gothic body, in excessive pain, inflicted by
religious tyranny, will eventually hang from a tree in a parody of the Crucifixion. His
whole life had been nothing else: “Fairwell to the world which has no comforts and
enjoyments”, he concludes in the end. He had despised and shunned women, and had
hated man.

Were the two brothers really haunted, or were they the victims of some psychic
disturbance? The novel is steeped in ambiguities. Gide even saw the story as a figment,
the exteriorized development of an individual's desires or pride.

The narrator himself wonders whether this not be some allegory or religious
parable. The author of the Confessions might have been some maniac who was writing
about a deluded creature “till he believed himself the object he was describing”. The
narrator playing editor no longer guarantees the veridicity of the story. He opens it up to
a variety of interpretations.

George, Lord of Colwan, marries the daughter of a Glasgow merchant, who also
happens to be a religious fanatic. After the birth of their son, Lady Colwan separates
from him to live with her confessor, with whom she shares a belief in the Calvinist
doctrines of predestination and election. According to extreme Calvinists, a justified
person (whose name is written from birth by the Lamb in the book of life) is incapable of
sinning. No transgression in the future could alter that decree – his election for salvation
–, everything is permitted, including crimes. Self-righteousness is antisocial: the society
of the just made perfect demonizes the religious or political (Jacobite Order of the
Episcopelians versus the Calvinist Whigs) Others. The French Revolution had offered a
similar example.

The psychological explanation remains open as well, and this is what distinguishes
crude supernaturalism from the fantasy tradition of the modern scientific age. George is
obsessed with his brother's pursuit and persecution. He is always in his neighbourhood,
hurting or even trying to kill him. The coincidences, as if Robert had been endowed with
prescience and ubiquity, are suspect. It is particularly one of his encounters with his
brother that intimates the possibility of his being deluded. During a walk in the
mountains, he suddenly sees “delineated in the cloud the shoulders arms and features
of a human being of the most dreadful aspect... the face of his brother dilated to twenty
times the natural size”. What George is describing seems to be the well known Brocken
spectre, whose discovery had caused as much excitement among the romantics as
Newton' revelation of colours as an effect of light.

In his turn, Robert feels pursued and persecuted by his brother's image which is
ever at his elbow in the person of Gil-Martin. This “fiend of malignant aspect”, who
materializes the moment his father informs him that he is one of the elect, turns Robert
into a murderer. The individual's alienation into unnatural and inhuman abstractions
takes the form of absolute evil.

Walter Scott follows the symptomatic trajectory of Romantic biography: from early
infatuation with revolutionary attitudes (a translation of Götz von Berlichingen) to a
recognition of the eternal values of prudence and Real-politik in his Waverly novels;
from an absorbing interest in ballads and ancient folk poetry towards the depiction of an
anti-romantic heroine in The Heart of Mid-Lothian. His numerous novels fall into three
divisions: those dealing with Scottish history Waverly, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary,
Fair Maid of Perth a.o.), or private life in historical times (Heart of Mid-Lothian, Bride of
Lamermoor, Rob Roy); those dealing with English history (Ivanhoe, Talisman,
Kenilworth, Fortunes of Nigel, Woodstock etc.), and with Continental history (Quentin
Durward, Anne of Geierstein, Count Robert of Paris). Although, as it can be seen form
his Introduction to Ivanhoe, his focus shifted from an antequarian interest in Scottish
manners, dialect, and character, towards “more exotic medieval romance”, Scott
displays that anxiety of influence and literary self-awareness which characterizes the
second generation of Romantics. He deliberately makes an attempt at what we might
call a re-invention of Scotland, out of previous texts. Therein he follows the example of
Maria Edgeworth, of whose Irish characters he says in his prefatory notes to the
Waverley novels to have done more towards completing the Union, than perhaps all the
legislative enactments. Setting himself in opposition to the Gothic tradition of spacious
miracles of fiction, Scott proposes that tamed form of romantic composition, which
combines fantasy and reality, wrapping up a historical core into veils of imaginary
projections. The bare reality of Scotland is mediated through its written tradition of
legends, romances, “tales of other times”, myths, beliefs, customs. Scott finds himself in
the position of the hero in the unfinished romance of Queen Hoo-Hall, who has to
choose between the sword and the horn. It is not the history enacted through the sword
but the voices of past times coming to us through narratives about the times that he
brings out in his many-framed fictions (the text of Waverly, presented as the
continuation of an extant manuscript, is preceded by an Advertisement, a General
Preface, an Appendix to General Preface and an Introduction...)

The other tradition he openly rejects is the Enlightenment novel of manners, which
is time-specific. His interest in “those passions common to all men in all stages of
society” prevails over the realist's interest in the colourful social show of the here and
now. His peculiar “description of men than manners” carries the weight of
characterization from the outward circumstances of social position, mannerisms of
speech and behaviour, into the hero's inner world, which is a mobile one. In
counterdistinction to the neoclassical characters, Edward Waverley changes before the
reader's eyes, from an idealistic, day-dreaming and castle-building youth, to a mature
man chastened by the harsh realities of war. [48]

Waverley, Scott's first novel, is set in the time of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745,
which attempted to put the House of Stuart on the British throne in place of the House of
Hanover. Edward, a young noble Englishman, is sent on a diplomatic mission to the
rebellious Highlanders, a journey which turns out to be a test of the hero's character, an
initiation quest. He is confronted with two opposite points of view, upheld by the owners
of two powerful Scottish settlements: the Tully-Veolan manor-house of Baron
Bradwardine, and the conservative Glennaquoich of the royalists, Fergus and Flora
Mac-Ivor. In fact, what the author does, in a free indirect discourse rendering Edward's
own evaluation, is to oppose the spirit of the age of reason embodied by Baron
Bradwardine, the owner of the well-run Tully-Veolan household, to that of an age of
sensibility and imagination, whose pulse the hero recognizes in himself and in the
passionate Mac-Ivors: the Baron only cumbered his memory with matters of fact; the
solid, dry outlines which history delineates. Edward, on the contrary, loved to fill up and
round the sketch with the colouring of a warm and vivid imagination which gives life and
light to the actors and speakers in the drama of past ages. The social frescos of the
picaresque novels, teeming with representatives of all social classes, are gone. Social
differences are small, but the internal distances are great. To Rose Bradwardine, a
gentle and commonsensical girl of seventeen, the time when her father's residence had
been a place of fierce encounters between her father and the highlanders has nothing
romantic about it, while to Edward, it is a story which bore so much resemblance to one
of his own day-dreams. In a purely Wordsworthian fashion, Edward communicates to
his percepts a tincture of its (of his intellect) own romantic tone and colouring. He is
permanently casting the spell of his artistic associations upon common characters and
events. Fergus and Flora are transposed from their Scottish background into figures of
romance (Viola and Sebastian). At the beginning, Flora has a greater pull over his
imagination than Rose, because of the picturesque background of her residence. The
primitive, wild vicinity of the massive or spiry rocks, the ancient ruined tower, frowning
from a promontory over the river makes her an enchantress of Boiardo or Ariosto. The
codes and traditions of Highland society and culture lend it the heroic status of a
community worthy of the ancient epics. When Waverley arrives at Glennaquoich and is
admitted into the “banqueting hall”, which calls to our minds realities as old as those of
Beowulf, he finds himself attended as the heroic travellers of Odyssey, being offered
the patriarchal refreshment of a bath for the feet. The family bhairdh (bard) with his
recital of Celtic verse (Chapter 20) revives the themes and manner of the old tribal
poetry: He seemed to Edward, who attended him with much interest, to recite many
proper names, to lament the dead, to apostrophise the absent, to exhort, and entreat,
and animate those who were present (...). The ardour of the poet appeared to
communicate itself to the audience. Their wild and sunburnt countenances assumed a
fiercer and more animated expression; all bent forward towards the reciter, many
sprang up and waved their arms in ecstasy, and some laid their hands on their swords.
When the song ceased, there was a deep pause, while the aroused feelings of the poet
and of the hearers gradually subsided into their usual channel.

The author's point of view does not coincide with that of the character's. Edward is
gradually brought round to a proper apprehension of reality and history. The attempted
return to the medieval past through the royalists' military and romantic adventure yields
up the fruit of destruction. Edward can see them all around: the devastated crops, the
broken carriages, dead horses, unroofed cottages, trees felled for palisades, and
bridges destroyed. His final choice lies with the realistically-minded Bradwardines. Rose
will make a better lady for Waverley-Honour. The demystifying technique is a proof that
the author himself did not believe in the validity of a nostalgic cult of the past. Fergus,
the hero who is mostly committed to the Stuart cause, and to a narrow cult of ethnic
specificity, is cast by the author into a literary type which he had theoretically
condemned in his Preface: the hero-villain of Gothic-Byronic extract. Fergus, who is
haunted by the Bodach Glas phantom of a man killed by an ancestor in a quarrel about
division of booty, remains loyal to the king until the moment of his brave death, yet he is
not himself free of an undignified quest of “booty” in encouraging his sister's affection for
Edward, in whom he envisages a political and financial catch.

The greatest of the Waverley series, The Heart of Mid-Lothian develops the
realistic side of Scott's narrative art. If Edward chooses Rosa, a commonsensical
instead of a heroic attitude to war, the case is still sorted out as one of “romantic
enlightenment”: the hero is waken up to a sense of reality, a realization of war as
danger and misfortune. Edward Waverley is a reinscription of the Ancient Mariner: a
sadder and a wiser man. In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, the romantic quest is set aside,
and with it the unusual hero. Jeanie Deans is the representative of a humble social
class, who differs radically from the conventional heroine of romance: Her personal
attractions were of no uncommon description. She was short, and rather stoutly made
for her size, had grey eyes, light-coloured hair, a round good-humoured face, much
tanned with the sun, and her peculiar charm was an air of inexpressible serenity, which
a good conscience, kind feelings, and her regular discharge of all her duties, spread
over her features. The story, which is that of a conflict of loyalties in a person with a
good conscience, is not, however, exempt from gothic sensationalism.

Jeanie's integrity, loyalty and common sense, associated with the un-romantic
average looks make her one of a pair with Jane Austen's heroines of domestic
experience. That does not imply that Austen's social sweep is a marginal one or of
minor importance. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was the upper and
lower gentry that bore the germs of social change rather than the aristocracy or the
proletariat. Scott's great world of history, of poverty or royalty, is narrowed down to a
country estate and its neighbourhood, and the romantic quest of absolutes (loyalty,
courtly love, freedom, heroism, tradition) is reduced to an exploration of the values of
domesticity. Whereas Mary Shelley and Walter Scott, with their techniques of
reinscription might appear as a summation – often a critical one – of the Romantic
programme, Jane Austen debunks both Enlightenment and Romantic conventions,
opening up new vistas which lead directly to the great Victorian classics. She vacillates
between light, ironic social comedy (Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Northanger Abbey)
and satirical realism (Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Persuassion), broadening
the scope and range of the narrative voice. In a way, the narrative technique of
multiple voices rendered through free indirect discourse anticipates Henry James's
focalization (no character is introduced unless directly connected with the story, and the
events are narrated from a character's point of view). The anti-romantic heroine, with
common looks, and a good judgement, who tames male arrogance and self-sufficiency,
looks forward to the Brontës. The female Quixote, cured of romantic delusions through
actual experience, women's emotional and sexual self-awareness, the view of the
individual as a mere cog in the machinery of social determinism (financial resources,
social status, public opinion), pave the way for the mid-century novels of George Eliot
and Elizabeth Gaskell. It is not a bookish but a gender and social consciousness that
are inscribed in Austen's fiction.

First redacted under the title Elinor and Marianne about 1792, the novel which in its
final form was published only in 18ll as Sense and Sensibility bears traces of the
onsetting Romantic age. One of them is the technique of contrasting modes of vision:
the rational, self-possessed and altruistic Elinor versus the impetuous, emotional and
self-indulgent Marianne; Edward Ferras opposing his neoclassical taste for tall, straight
and flourishing tress to the picturesque crooked, twisted, blasted ones, or a troop of
tidy, happy villagers to the finest banditti in the world. The main theme is also Romantic:
the gradual maturation of the heroine, who travels through illusion to a recognition
(anagnorisis) of reality. If the author picks up on a domestic subject – marriage – it is
because that was the time in a woman's life when she was allowed to make a choice
and thereby prove the strength of her personality, or, on the contrary, let herself be
carried away in a passionate involvement with an unworthy object or risk her security by
unwisely pursuing the injunctions of an undisciplined heart. Austen's more realistic
temper advises her not to equate the final end with marriage bells with perfect
happiness. The way of the world is sooner one leading to disillusionment, which is
greater in proportion to the character's previous expectations. Instead of a Prince
Charming, whom the unrealistic Marianne had envisaged in the reckless and
untrustworthy Willoughby, she is going to marry a man who had loved before, who is a
bit too oldish for marriage, and is in the habit of wearing a flannel waistcoat in winter...
Yet there is no Romantic ache in this wakening on the cold heel side (Keats, La Belle
Dame Sans Mercy), nor can we read the end as a reassertion of the Augustan ideal of
rationality at the expense of imaginative minds, in excess of the world.

Austen is waging war not only with the romantic self-worshipper but also with the
eighteenth-century institutionalized role of the male moral guide. If Emma fails in her
attempt to play God at Hartfield, as she feels persuaded by an exalted view of herself
(handsome, clever) and of her position (rich), so do most of the infatuated upper-class
males who start a love affair by acting the Virgilian guide. The heroine's suitor
undoubtedly helps her to correct her passions, prejudices or illusions which prove a
disintegrating force to selfhood, yet he too emerges out of this double initiation
transformed. His pride has been thwarted (Darcy learns that individual merit is not
wanting outside aristocratic homes, nor unfailing within them), his social armour has
been scarred (Henry Tilney discovers that Englishness and aristocratic status are not
immune to barbaric behaviour or cruelty), his patronizing tone has melted into a penitent
confession (George Knightley).

By the time Northanger Abbey was published (1818), Jane Austen had become
aware of the shaping force lurking in the discourses of the age. A displaced response to
reality is associated with a precise literary convention: the Gothic novel. As she
proceeds to her description of Catherine Morland, she pits her portrait against Gothic
mannerisms, also producing a mise-en-abyme, by making her heroine a Gothic addict,
given to readings from The Mysteries of Udolpho and other “horrid” books. Catherine's
mind is “not unpropitious for heroism”, but everything else is against her: her ordinary,
awkward look, sallow skin, dark hair, as well as family background: No one who had
ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a
heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person
and disposition were equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being
neglected or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard – and he
had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence, besides two good
livings – and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters.

The same ironic tone is employed in the demystification of other Gothic cliches: the
hero-villain (John Thorpe), the calumniated maid (Catherine prevented from joining
Henry Tilney, in whom she took a serious interest, by the scheming Thorpe), the
distressed heroine (in the mock-heroic treatment of Catherine's distress at finding
herself sitting alone, as Thorpe, with whom she had been engaged to dance, does not
show up), the mysterious interior and furniture of Northanger Abbey, which induces
Catherine to believe that General Tilney, her host, had locked up and killed his wife, the
narrative strategy of the” explained supernatural” (a roll of written papers hidden in a
mysterious chest with a folded counterpane turns out to be a ... laundry list). The lesson
Jane Austen sets out to teach the belated Romantics is that reality may prove as
sensational as the offshoots of imagination. On hearing the General's motives of
tempestuously driving her out of his home (the General had found out out that she was
less rich than he had been told), Catherine feels that in suspecting General Tilney of
either murdering or shutting up his wife she had scarcely sinned against his character,
or magnified his cruelty.

Jane Austen is not satisfied with what she demolishes; she means to put
something in its place. The Romantic self-worshipper makes room for the Kantian hero
who becomes the moral yardstick for the whole action (Mansfield Park). The individual
is now seen as a knot in a subjective network of social interaction. The facts of social
organization are doubled up by the superstructure of opinions, beliefs, ideological
assumptions, by a certain ethos. Individual consciousness can no longer be conceived
of as something independent of the collective consciousness of the family circle, of the
village, of the neighbourhood: …three miles to Uppercross and a total change of
conversation, opinion, idea. She needed to clothe her imagination, memory and all
ideas in as much of Uppercross as possible (Persuasion). The wheel has come full
circle: the Pre-Romantics had made an inner-directed move, discovering the values of
subjectivity in comparison to the material aspects of man's existence. Jane Austen looks
both ways, exploring the material as well as the subjective negotiations between
individual and society, between self and social mind.

References
[38] Gary Kelly, Romantic Fiction, Ibidem, pp. 202-203.

[39] E. J. Clary, The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s, in Reviewing Romanticism, Op. cit., pp.
69-86.

[40] Gary Kelly, Op. cit., p. 204.

[41] Ibidem, p. 205.

[42] Ibidem, p. 2l0.

[43] In Romanticism, Op. cit., pp. 162, 163.

[44] Ibidem, p. 178.

[45] Terry Castle, in The New Eighteenth Century, edited by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, p. 250.

[46] Terry Castle, Op. cit., p. 234.

[47] Jeffrey Berman, Narcissism and the Novel, Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis, 1990

[48] Robin Mayhead, Walter Scott, Cambridge University Press, 1973.

INDEX OF AUTHORS*

Addison, Joseph (1672-1719). Periodical essayist, Whig M.P. Contributed essays to Richard
Steele's Tatler (1709-1711) and Guardian (1714), and together they produced the
Spectator (1711-1712). Cato, a tragedy, 1713.
Arbuthnot, John (1667-1735). Physician to Queen Ann. The History of John Bull, 1712 (the
typical Englishman).
Austen, Jane (1775-1817). Novelist. Daughter of the rector of Steventon in Hampshire.
Sense and Sensibility, 1811; Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Mansfield Park, 1814; Emma, 1816;
Northanger Abbey; Persuasion, 1818.
Bacon, Francis (1561-1626). Philosopher, essayist, lawyer, statesman. Son of Sir Nicholas
Bacon. Entered Parliament 1584. Knighted 1603. Lord Chancellor (1617-18) Essays (1597,
1612, 1625.) The Advancement of Learning, 1605; (in Latin and augmented, 1623) Novum
Organum, 1620; The History of the Reign of King Henry VII, 1622; Apophthegms, 1624;
New Atlantis, 1626.
Baillie, Joanna (1762-1851) Scottish dramatist and poet. Daughter of a Presbyterian divine and
sister of a famous doctor. Moved from Scotland to London and thence to Hampstead
(1791), where she became the "model Gentlewoman" and hostess of a literary society.The
first performance of her play, De Monfort, on a romantic scale, with Gothic scenery and
thirty singers, on 29 April 1800, had the significance of a dramatic companion to
Wordsworth''s poetic manifesto, published as "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads the same year.
The protagonists' parts were performed by a sibling pair of actors (John Kemble and Sarah
Siddons) and the play was enthusiastically reviewed by William Hazlitt. The romantic non-
conformist party, from Elizabeth Inchbald to Lord Byron, joined in the acclaim. The play
was soon after successfully performed in New York, Edinburgh and Philadelphia. A Series
of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind , 1798;
The Family Legend, 1810; Miscellaneous Plays, 1836; Fugitive Verses, 1790; Metrical
Legends, 1821.

Beaumont, Francis (1584-1616). Playwright. Born in Leicestershire. Jointly with John Fletcher
he produced: The Knight of the Burning Pestle 1609; A King and no King, 16ll; The Maid's
Tragedy, 1611; Philaster, 16ll; The Scornful Lady, 1616.
Behn, Aphra (1640-1689). The first professionist woman writer (plays, poems, fiction). Lived
as a child in Guiana. The Forced Marriage, or the Jealous Bridegroom, 167l; The Amorous
Prince, or the Curious Husband, 1671; Abdelazar, or the Moor's Revenge, 1677; The
Debauchee: or, the Credulous Cuckold, 1677; The Rover; or the Banish'd Cavaliers, 1677
Poems upon Several Occasions, with a Voyage to the the Island of Love, 1684; A Pindaric
on the Death of Our Late Sovereign, 1685; A Pindaric Poem on Happy Coronation of His
Sacred Majesty James II, and His Illustrious Consort Queen Mary, 1685. To the Memory
of George Duke of Buckingham, 1687; Two Congratulatory Poems to their Majesties,
1688. Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, 1684. Three Histories. I.
Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave. II. The Fair Jilt; or, Tarquin and Miranda. III. Agnes de
Castro: or, The Force of Generous Love, 1688.
Berkeley, George (1685-1753). Philosopher, born in Ireland. Dean of Derry, 1724. Travelled to
America (1728-31). Bishop of Cloyne. An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, 1709; A
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710; Three Dialogues between
Hylas and Philonous, 1713; A Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches in Our
Foreign Plantations, and for Converting the Savage Americans to Christianity, 1725;
Alciphon (seven dialogues), 1732. The Theory of Vision, 1733; Siris, 1744.
Blake, William (1757-1827) Poet, artist, engraver. Poetical Sketches, 1783; Songs of Innocence,
1789; The Book of Thel, 1789; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and A Song of Liberty,
1793, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 1793; America, a Prophecy, 1793; Songs of
Experience, 1794; Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Showing the two Contrary States
of the Human Soul, 1794; The Song of Los, 1795, Milton, 1804; Jerusalem. The
Emancipation of the Giant Albion, 1804.
Bodley, Thomas (1544-16ll). Scholar and diplomatist. Reformed and endowed Oxford
University Library. The Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, 1926.
Bolingbroke, Henry St. John (1678-1715).Tory statesman and political philosopher. Letters on
the Spirit of Patriotism, 1749; Reflections Concerning Innate Moral Principles, (in French
and English); 1752 The Works of Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 1754.
Browne, Thomas (1605-1682). Physician and writer. Hydriotaphia,Urn-burial, or, a Discourse
of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk, together with the Garden of Cyrus, 1658.
Buckingham, George Villiers (2nd Duke of Buckingham) (1628-1687). Lived a life of
extravagance and political intrigue. Plays: The Rehearsal, 1672, The Chances, 1682.
Burns, Robert (1759-1796). Scottish poet, farm labourer. Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect,
1786.
Byron, George Gordon Noel (6th Baron Byron). Poetry. Prose. Born in London, died at
Missolonghi fighting for Greek independence. Fugitive Pieces, 1806. Poems on Various
Occasions, 1807; English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 1809; Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage, Cantos I – IV, 1812-1818.The Curse of Minerva, 1812; The Giaour, 1813; The
Corsair, 1814; Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, 1814; Lara, a tale, 1814; Hebrew Melodies,
1815; The Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems, 1816; Sardanapalus, a tragedy, the two
Foscari, a tragedy. Cain, a mystery, 182l.
Carew, Thomas (1598-1639). Poet of the Cavalier school, and courtier. Employed at court of
Charles I. Coelum Britannicum. A masque at Whitehall, 1634; Poems, 1640.
Chapman, George (1559-1634). Poet, dramatist, translator. Bussy D'Ambois, 1607; The
Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, 1613 (plays). The Whole Works of Homer, 1616.
Chatterton, Thomas (1752-1770). Poet. Son of a Bristol schoolmaster. Came to London in
1770, where, driven by poverty and frustrated literary ambitions, poisoned himself at the
age of 17. Supposed author of the poems and verses he claimed to have discovered in the
church of St. Mary Redcliffe, and attributed to Thomas Rowley, a 15th century monk.
Chaucer, Geoffrey (1340-1400). Poet, writing for a court audience, translator. Son of a London
vintner. Captured at Retters, during a military expedition to France and ransomed (1360).
Went aboroad on diplomatic missions. Held administrative appointments under Edward III,
Richard II, and Henry IV. Book of the Duchess, 1369; The House of Fame, Anelida and
Arcite (1372-1380); Parliament of Fowles, Troilus and Criseyde, Legend of Good Women
(1380-1386); The Canterbury Tales (1387-1390). Translated Boethius, De Consolatione
Philosophiae (1380-86), and a considerable fragment of Roman de la rose, in octosyllabic
couplets.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834). Poet, critic, philosopher (introduced German
philosophy to the English public). Tour with Wordsworth in Germany, 1798. The Fall of
Robespierre. An historic drama, jointly with Southey, 1794; Poems of Various Subjects,
1796. Wallenstein, a drama in two parts, 1800; Lyrical Ballads, 1798, jointly with
Wordsworth; Christabel (written 1797, 1800); Kubla Khan, a vision; the Pains of Sleep,
1816; Sibylline Leaves, 1817.). Biographia Literaria, 1817; Aids to Reflection in the
Formation of a Manly Character, 1825. Essays and Lectures; Works, 1828, 1834.
Collins, William (1721-1759). Poet. Son of a Chichester hatter. Suffered from acute melancholy
and occasional fits of insanity.Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Poems, 1747.
Congreve, William (1670-1729). Dramatist, poet. Born in an ancient Yorkshore family. The
Double-Dealer, 1694; Love for Love, 1695; The Way of the World, 17oo; The Judgement of
Paris, 170l. Lyrics, masques, operas.
Cooper, Anthony Ashley (see under Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of)
Cowley, Abraham (1618-1667). Poet and essayist; cipher secretary to Queen Henrietta Maria
(1647). Poetical Blossoms, 1633. A Satire, the Puritan and the Papist, by a Scholar in
Oxford, 1643; The Mistress: or, Several Copies of Love-Verses, 1647; Ode, upon the
 Blessed Restoration and Return of His Sacred Majesty, Charles the Second, 166o; Verses
Lately Written upon Several Occasions, 1663; A Poem on the Late Civil War
(fragment), 1679. A Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy, 166l.
Cowper, William (173l-18oo). Poet, letter-writer, translator. Unable to continue his promising
career as a Parliament official on account of a mental breakdown, which forces him to
retire to the country. Olney Hymns (among them, God Moves in a Mysterious Way), 1779;
The Task, 1785; Translations of Horace and Homer.
Crabbe, George (1754-1832). Poet. After a failed career as physician, took Holy Orders. Rector
of Trowbridge. Admitted into Edmund Johnson's circles. The Village, 1783; The Parish
Register, 1807; The Borough, 18lo.
Crashaw, Richard (1612-1649). Caroline metaphysical poet. Fellow of Peter House. Steps to
the Temple. Sacred poems with other delights of the Muses, 1646.
Darwin, Erasmus (173l-1802). Physician, writer and inventor. Formed a botanical garden near
Lichfield (1778). Expounded the laws of organic life on evolutionary principles. The
Botanic Garden; a poem in two parts, 1789. Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, 1794-
1796.
Defoe, Daniel (1660-173l). Journalist, novelist, poet and pamphleteer. Son of a London butcher.
Supported Monmouth and William III in 1688. Fined and pilloried for The Shortest Way
with the Dissenters (1703). Prosecuted and imprisoned for Anti-Jacobite pamphlets (1712-
1713). Robinson Crusoe, 1719-1720; Captain Singleton, 1720; Moll Flanders, Journal of
the Plague, 1722; The Fortunate Mistress (Roxana), 1724.
Dekker, Thomas (1570-1632). Dramatist and pamphleteer. The Pleasant Comedy of Old
Fortunatus, 16oo; The Shoemaker's Holiday, 16oo
Deloney, Thomas (1543-1601). Ballad-writer, pamphleteer, and novelist. By trade a silk-
weaver. A Joyful New Ballad, declaring the happy obtaining of the great Galleazo, 1588.
Thomas of Reading. Or, the Six Worthy Yeomen of the West, 4th ed. 1612; The Pleasant
History of John Winchcomb, 8th ed. 1619.
Denham, John (1615-1669). Courtier, poet. Followed Prince Charles and Henrietta Maria to
France (1648). Cooper Hill, 1642. Cato Major, 1669.
De Quincey, Thomas (1785-1859). Essayist. Scholar of Greek, Latin, Hebrew and German.
Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1822
Drummond of Hawthornden, William (1585-1649). Scots poet, historian. A Royalist and an
Episcopalian. Author of sonnets and songs dedicated to a girl who died on the eve of their
wedding. Entertained Ben Jonson on his visit to Hawthornden in 1619. The History of
Scotland, 1655; Conversations of Ben Jonson with William Drummond of Hawthornden,
1842.
Dryden, John (163l-17oo). Poet, dramatist, translator and prose writer. Poet Laureate (1668).
Converted to Catholicism (1686). Astraea Redux, 166o; Annus Mirabilis, 1666; Absalom
and Achitophel, 168l; The Medall, 1682; Mac Flecknoe, 1682; To the Pious Memory of the
Accomplished Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew; The Hind and the Panther, 1687; A Song
for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687; Alexander's Feast, 1697. The Indian Queen, 1665; The Indian
Emperor, 1667; The Conquest of Granada, 1672; Marriage-ŕ-la-mode, 1673; Aureng-Zebe,
1676; All for Love, 1678
Edgeworth, Maria (1767-1849). Novelist. Daughter of an Irish landlord and M.P. Founded the
tradition of the regional novel. Scott followed her example in attempting a fictional
 monograph of Scotland, as she had done for Ireland. Early Lessons, 1803; Tales of
Fashionable Life, 1809, 1812; Harrington; Ormond, 1817.
Elyot, Thomas (1499-1546). Diplomatist and writer. Ambassador to Charles V. Translations
from Classics. The Book Named the Governor, 1531; Of the Knowledge Which Makes a
Wise Man, 1533; The Doctrinal of Princes, 1534; The Education or Bringing up of
Children, 1535; The Dictionary of Sir Thomas Elyot, 1538; The Defence of Good Women,
1545.
Etherege/Etheredge, George (1634-169l). Diplomatist under the Restoration Stuart kings,
dramatist. The Comical Revenge; or, Love in a Tub, 1664; She Wou'd if She Cou'd, 1668;
The Man of Mode, 1676.
Fielding, Henry (1707-1754). Novelist, satirist, magistrate. As Westminster magistrate (1748)
expounded the social causes of and managed to reduce the crime rate in London. Translated
Moliere's Miser. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His friend Mr.
Abraham Adams. Written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, 1742; The Life of
Jonathan Wild the Great, 1743; The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, 1749; Amelia,
1752.
Fletcher, John (1579-1625). Dramatist. Nephew of Giles Fletcher the elder – ambassador and
poet, and cousin of Giles and Phineas – poets of the Miltonic school. The Faithful
Shepheardesse, 1609; The Two Noble Kinsmen (with Shakespeare); Rule a Wife and Have
a Wife, 1640. For the plays by Beaumont and Fletcher jointly see Beaumont, Francis.
Florio, John (1553-1625). Translator. Son of an Italian Protestant refugee; Italin-English
Dictionary, 1598. The Essays of Moral, Politics, and Military Discourses of Lord Michaell
de Montaigne, 1603.
Gay, John (1685-1732). Poet and dramatist. An extravagant figure and a popular author. Poems
on several Occasions, 172o; Trivia, or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London, 1716; The
Beggar's Opera, 1728; Acis and Galatea: an English Pastoral Opera (music by Handel),
1732.
Godwin, William (1756-1836). Political philosopher, upholding a Rousseauian view of the
innate goodness of man, spoilt by a corrupt society. A theorist of social reforms, exerting a
powerful influence on the Romantic movement. Novelist, dramatist. Presbyterian minister
who turned atheist, being later converted to theism by Coleridge. His second wife was
Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley. An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of
Political Justice, and Its influence on General Virtue and Happiness, 1793; Memoirs of the
Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1798; Thoughts on Man, His Nature,
Productions and Discourses, 183l. Things as They Are: or, the Adventures of Caleb
Williams, 1794; Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling, 1805.
Goldsmith, Oliver (1730-1774). Irish poet, novelist, playwright, essayist. Studied medicine at
Edinburgh and Leyden. After a two years' journey to Europe, settled in London, making a
living as a professional writer, and from various expedients, including schoolteaching.
Reputed for his generosity and for his spending habits. Befriended Samuel Johnson, who
more than once assisted him financially. His “prospect of society” is that of a “traveller”:
the cosmopiltan comment on a culture from the point of view of another, characteristic of
the broader understanding of the Enlightenment for social difference and cultural others.
The Citizen of the World: or Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to
His Friends in the East (modelled on Montesquieu's Lettres persanes), 1762. The
 Taveller, or A Prospect of Society, 1765. Poems for Young Ladies, 1767. The Good Natur'd
Man, A comedy, 1768; She Stoops to Conquer, A comedy The Vicar of Wakefield, A tale,
1766; The Deserted Village, 1770.
Gower, John (1330-1408). Writer in French, Latin, and English. Of good Kentish family stock
and easy circumstances. His friend Chaucer called him “Moral Gower”, as his works never
failed to point to some moral. Speculum meditantis or Mirour de l'omme in French; Vox
clamantis, in Latin; Confessio Amantis in English (octosyllabic couplets)
Gray, Thomas (1716-1771). Poet, classical scholar, linguist and student of science. Toured
Europe in the company of Horace Walpole (1739-41), England and Scotland. A Fellow of
Peterhouse and, later, Pembroke. Professor of History and Modern Languages (1768). Ode
on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, 1747; An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,
1751; The Bard, 1757. Letters.
Greene, Robert (1558-1592). Poet, playwright, novelist and pamphleteer. Travelled in Italy,
Spain, France, Denmark and Polland. After spending his wife;'s money, went to London
where he established himself as a professional writer. Orlando Furioso, 1594; Friar Bacon
and Friar Bungay, 1594; James IV, 1598; Alphonsus King of Aragon, 1599 (plays).
Mamillia. A Mirror of Looking-Glass for the Ladies of England, 1583; Pandosto. The
Triumph of Time, 1588
Hazlitt, William (1778-183o). Essayist and critic. Through lecturing and journalism he bridged
the eighteenth and the noneteenth centuries, striking a balance between Enlightenment and
the Romantic mode of sensibility. His criticism created a new species of literary character,
in which the subject is neither the author as an individual, altough the writer's appearance is
often described with a painter's eye for significant or piucturesque detail, nor his work
regarded in itself, but the figure of the author in his work, as the embodiment of a certain
Zeitgeist (spirit of the time). Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, 1817-1818; Lectures on
the English Poets, 1818-1819; On the English Comic Writers, 1819; Table-Talk, 182l-
1822; The Spirit of the Age; or Contemporary Portraits, 1825.
Herbert, George (1593-1633). Poet and divine. Public Orator at Cambridge, then rector of
Bemerton. The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, 1633.
Herrick, Robert (159l-1674). Poet and clergyman. Educated at Cambridge. After some years
spent in the company of Jonson and the court wits, took Holy Orders, and became vicar of
Dean Prior in 1629. In his poetry, he sought to renconcile his state of mind, divided
between a hedonistic drive and religious piety, securing a more complex effect than the
other Caroline Cavaliers. Hesperides: or, The Works both Humane and Divine of Robert
Herrick Esq. 1648.
Heywood, Thomas (1575-164l). Poet, dramatist and prose pamphleteer. Translated Sallust and
other Latins. A Woman Killed with Kindness (a play), 1607. The Life and Death of Queen
Elizabeth. Written in heroical verse, 1639. Mayoral pageants for the City of London.
Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679). Philosopher, translator and prose writer. Tutor to the Cavendish
family and other distinguished persons, mathematical teacher to Charles II, secretary to
Bacon. Took refuge in Paris during the Commonwealth period. His mathematical studies
brought him into controversy with Descartes. Translated Homer. Leviathan or the Matter,
Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, 165l; Mr. Hobbes
Considered in His Loyalty, Religion, Reputation and Manners, 1662. The History of the
Civil Wars of England, 1679.
Hogg, James (1770-1835). Scottish poet, journalist, and novelist. A self-taught member of the
Scottish literary circles, who had risen from the humble condition of shepherd, which he
abandoned after repeated failure in trade. In 1816 Countess of Dalkeith, his patroness, died
leaving him her manor of Eltrive Lake, where he lived to the end of his life. Edited The Spy
(1810), a weekly periodical. Contributed (signing as the "Eltrick Shepherd") to the "Noctes
Ambrosianae" dialogues, a literary medley published by Edinburgh Magazine (1822-35).
Re-directed romantic self-expressive lyricism towards narrative (The Queen's Wake) and
drama (Dramatic Tales). The Poetic Mirror; or, the Living Bards of Great Britain
(parodies), 1816; Some of his best lyric poetry came out in The Jacobite Relics of Scotland,
1819. The Three Perils of Man, 1822; The Three Perils of Women, 1823. The Private
Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 1824.
Hume, David (17ll-1776). Scottish philosopher and historian. Studied Law, and completed his
education in France (1734-7). Judge-Advocate to General St. Clair, 1747; Keeper of the
Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, 1752. Went to Paris in 1765, and retired to Edinburgh in
1748. A Treatise of Human Nature, being an attempt to introduce the experimental method
of reasoning into moral subjects, 1739; Essays Moral and Political,174l; Philosophical
Essays Concerning Human Understanding, 1748; An Enquiry Concerning Principles of
Morals, 1751; Political Discourses, 1752; History of England, 1754-61; Natural History of
Religion, 1757; Essays and Treatises, 1770; My Own Life, 1777; Natural Religion, 1779.
Jonson, Ben (1572-1637). Of Scottish descent, born at Westminster. Served as a bricklayer and
soldier before settling in London as a professional dramatist (1597). Temporary
imprisonment for killing a fellow-actor in a duel (1598). Tried for murder, escaped by
benefit of clergy. Converted to Catholicism, which he abjured twelve years later. Wrote
masques for the Court, staged by Inigo Jones, with whom he finally quarrelled. Granted a
court pension as poet laureate, although he did not have the title. Received honorary
degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge universities. Established the manner for a whole
school of poetry the Caroline Cavaliers. Every Man in His Humour, 1598; Every Man out
of His Humour, 1599; Cynthia's Revels, 1600; The Poetaster, 1601; Sejanus His Fall, 1605;
Volpone or the Fox, 1607; Catilene, 1611; The Alchemist, 16lo; Bartholomew Fair, 1614;
Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, 1620 (plays). King James's Royal Entertainment – a
masque on the coronation of James I, 1604; Hymenaei, 1606; The Masque of Blackness;
The Masque of Beauty (court masques). Under-woods: consisting of diverse poems (in
Works), 1640.
Keats, John (1795-182l). Poet. Gave up his practice as a surgeon to dedicate himself entirely to
writing. Went to Rome, seeking a relief from his sickness, and died there with
consumption. Poems, 1817; Endymion, 1818; Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and
other poems, 182o.
Lake Poets, or Lake School. Colerdige, Wordsworth and Southey, who lived in the Lake
District of Westmorland and Cumberland. So called for the first time in the Edinburgh
Review of 1817.
Lamb, Charles (1775-1834). Essayist, critic, and poet. Educated at Christ's Hospital, with
Coleridge. A clerk in the East India Office for thirty-three years. Nervous depression and
fits of insanity obliged him to a secluded life later, in the companionship of his devoted
sister. His frequent refuge into the past was was not merely a quest of happier days but a
romantic preferment for what, being remote in time, can be more advantageously coloured
by the imagination. He was not running away from the oppressive prison of his mind but
 also from the emerging world of railroad, factory and political economists. Hiding behind a
mask, a persona, he talks about the small, reassuring aspects of life in a sophisticated
idiom, involving paraphrases, archaisms, puns, ellipsis – a literary, elaborate style behind
which Montaigne can be deivined. The first writer to describe himself as “introspective”.
Tales from Shakespeare, 1807; Specimens from the Dramatic Poets, 1808; Essays of Elia
and Last Essays of Elia, 1822-1833.
Langland, William (1330-1400). Poet. Born in the Midlands, educated at the monastery of
Great Malvern. Probably of poor extraction. Went to London, Cornhill, as a chantry priest,
where he wrote The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, which has come
down to us in three copies. One of them contains a fragment, Richard the Redeless, a poem
remonstrating Richard II, also attributed to him. The rebel peasants of 1831 recognized
their ow grievances in his attacks on churchmen and lawyers.
Lennox, Charlotte (1720-1804). Novelist and poet, born in New York, as daughter of the
lieutenant governor. A member of Johnson's litearry club. Translated from the French. The
Female Quixote; or, the Adventures of Arabella, 1752; The History of Sir George
Warrington; or the Political Quixote, 1797.
Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818). Novelist, dramatist, and translator from the German and
French. Diplomat. Died at sea on his return from the West Indies.The Monk, A romance,
1796. Journal of a West India Proprietor, kept during a residence in the Island of
Jamaica, 1834.
Locke, John (1632-1704). Philosopher, Greek lecturer, lecturer in rhetoric, and censor of moral
philosophy at Oxford. Fellow of the Royal Society. Physician to the Earl of Shaftesbury.
Fled to Holland in 1684 and returned with William III in 1689. Rejected the teachings of
Renaissance Humanism from a standpoint which combined the empiricism of Newtonian
methodology with the systematic structuralism of the Cambridge Platonists' theoloogy.
Reformed religious and political thought, educational theory and practice. His application
of the physiology of sensation to ethics and politics opened the way to the eighteenth-
century “sciences of men”. Whereas Bacon had claimed that all knowledge was his
province, the more sceptical John Locke set out to inquire into the origin, range and
validity of human knowledge. Epistola de Tolerantia, (against the abstract universals, and
empty words enslaving human minds) 1689; Second and third Letters Concerning
Toleration, 1690, 1692; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690. Divided into
four books I. Of Innate Notions II. Of Ideas;III. Of Words, and IV. Of Knowledge and
Opinion. Two Treatises of Government, 1690; The Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695;
The Whole History of Navigation, 1704.
Lovelace, Richard (1618-1658). Cavalier poet, courtier, scholar, musician, translator of
Catullus. Imprisoned in 1642 and 1648. His prison poems, To Althea (his bethrothed) and
To Lucasta are the best expresssion of the Cavalier union of love and loyalty. Lucasta:
epodes, odes, sonnets, songs, to which is added Amarantha, a pastoral, 1649.
Lydgate, John (1370-1450). Poet, priest. Received lands and money from his patron, Duke of
Gloucester. Later retired to Bury St. Edmunds as a monk. Learned versification from
Chaucer. Danse macabre, 1554.
Lyly, John (1370-1450). Novelist, poet and dramatist. “A noted wit:” at St. Magdalen, Oxford.
M.P. (1589-1601). The creator of an elaborate, artificial style. Euphues. The Anatomy of
Wit, 1578; Euphues and His England, 1580. Alexander, Campaspe, and Diogenes, 1584;
 Endimion (the man in the moon), 159l; Gallathea, 1592; The Woman in the Moon, 1597
(plays).
Marlowe, Christopher (1564-1593). Dramatist and poet. B.A. from Cambridge One of the
scholarly and versatile dramatists known as the “university wits”. Enormously talented,
which can be seen in the impressive rhetoric, skilled versification, convincing
characterization of powerful human personalities, he was also reputed for many things
which cannot be verified: being a member of a secret society of free-thinkers, being a spy
or an agent of the secret police. Credited with a warrant of arrest on his name, issued by the
time of his death. Died under obscure circumstances in a drunken brawl. Tamburlaine the
Great, 1590; The Jew of Malta; Edward II, 1594; Dido, The Massacre of Paris. Narrative
verse: Hero and Leander, 1598.
Massinger, Philip (1583-1640). Dramatist. Collaborated with John Fletcher, Dekker and others.
The Emperor of the East. A tragicomedy, 1632.
Middleton, Thomas (1570-1627). Dramatist. Son of a London bricklayer. City chronologer
(1620). A Game at Chess, 1625; The Changeling, 1653. Courtly masques and pageants.
Milton, John (1608-1674). Poet, historian, pamphleteer. Son of a Protestant (disinherited on
embracing his creed), who successfully combined prosperous business and a taste of
learning and literature. Milton's Latin scholarship made him renowned at Cambridge as
well as on the Continent, where he travelled between 1637-39, being introduced to J. P.
Manso, Dati, Deodati and other men of letters. In time he abandoned his Presbyterian
leanings, moving towards an independent and heretical position, which he expounded in
De Doctrina Christiana, first published in 1825. Appointed Cromwell's Latin secretary in
1649 (Secretary in Foreign Tongues to the Council of State), a position which he held to
the end of the Protectorate, although by 1652 he had probably gone completely blind
because of a tumour of the pitulary gland. In 1642 he contracted an unfortunate marriage,
which made him support a more lenient legislation on divorce. After the Restoration he
spent his life dictating verse to his third wife On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, 1629;
L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, 1632; Comus, 1634; Lycidas, 1637; Poems, 1644; Paradise
Lost, 1667; Paradise Regained, 1671, Samson Agonistes, 1671. Of Prelatical Episcopacy,
1641; The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 1643. Of Education, 1644; Areopagitica,
1644; The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649; The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a
Free Commonwealth, 1660; The History of Britain, 1670; De Doctrina Christiana, 1825.
More, Henry (1614-1687). Philosopher and poet, member of the circle of Cambridge Platonists.
Platonica, 1642; Democritus Platonissans, or an essay upon the infinity of worlds out of
Platonic principles (in verse), 1646; An Antodote against Atheism, or, An appeal to the
natural faculties of the mind of man, whether there be not a God, 1652.
More (Morus), Thomas (1478-1535). Humanist, a friend of Erasmus, translator,
controversialist. Abandoning Oxford University for Lincoln's Inn in order to become a
lawyer. Speaker of the Commons, 1523. Lord Chancellor (1529). A typical New
Humanism and Renaissance man, who set a prize on individual worth: studied discourse,
fine manners, graceful behaviour whether to peers, family or domestics. Executed for
opposing Henry VIII's divorce and for denying the King's headship of the Church. A
Fruitful and Pleasant Work of the New Isle called Utopia, 1516 in Latin – a fine example
of utopian fiction (the description of an ideal commonwealth), ranked by Vives next to the
dialogues of Cicero. The English version of Raphe Robynson (155l) is unable to render
More's subtle irony in a work urging the reader to reflection rather than to taking immediate
 practical action. History of King Richard III (unfinished), whose dramatic power in laying
the scene and characterization was exploited by Shakespeare. A Dialogue of Comfort
against Tribulation, 1534 – a prison work, seeking the “comfort” or consolation of
philosophy against the “tribulation” of tyranny. Controversial writings against Tyndale as
translator and commentator of the New Testament, More himself being engaged in the
translation of the Bible.
Nashe, Thomas (1567-1601). Pamphleteer, novelist and playwright. One of the “University
Wits” (B.A. from Cambridge). Anti-Puritanic attitude, bohemian life and sarcastic manner
which earned him many enemies. Imprisoned for his Isle of Dogs, 1597. Author of a play,
Dido, Queen of Carthage, jointly with Christopher Marlowe. Author of the first picaresque
novel in English: The Unfortunate Traveller or the Life of Jack Wilton, 1594.
Newton, Isaac (1642-1679). Scientist. Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (1669). President
of the Royal Society (1703-1728). I Invented the telescope (1668). Promulgated his theory
of the law of the attraction of gravity existing between all bodies and varying directly as
their masses, inversely as the square of their distance apart (1687.) Knighted (1705). The
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687. Opticks: or a treatise on the
reflexions, refractions, inflexions and colours of light, also two treatises of the species of
magnitude of curvilinear figures, 1704.
North, Thomas (1535-16ol). Translator. Studied at Lincoln's Inn. Knighted (159l); M.P. for
Cambridge (1592). Pensioned by Queen Elizabeth (1601). Translated Plutarch's Lives of
the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579) from Amyot's French version, a very influential
book among the Elizabethans, who lived by models.
Norton, Thomas (1532-1584). Poet. Lawyer, M.P. Author of the Senecan tragedy of Gorboduc,
jointly with Thomas Sackville.
Otway, Thomas (1652-1658). Dramatist, poet, prose-writer. Highly successful among his
contemporaries, becoming, in the next century, the object of a cult which reached the
inflated proportions of a comparison with Shakespeare. Alcibiades, 1675; Don Carlos,
Prince of Spain, 1676; Venice Preserv'd, or A Plot Discover'd, 1682 (plays). Love-Letters,
1697
Parnell, Thomas (1679-1718). Irish poet, essayist and divine. A member of the Scriblerus Club.
Contributed the essay on Homer to Pope's version of the Iliad. An Essay on Different Styles
of Poetry, 1713. Poems on Several Occasions, published posthumously (1722) by Pope.
Parquhar, George (1678-1707). Dramatist. His Beaux's Stratagem is a canonical comedy of the
Restoration satirical wit, thematizing marriage and class adversities.
Peacock, Thomas Love (1785--1866). Novelist, poet, and critic, a close friend of the Romantics.
The Genius of the Thames. A lyrical poem in two parts, 18lo; The Philosophy of
Melancholy, 1812; Sir Hornbook; or Childe Launcelot's Expedition. A Grammatico-
Allegorical Ballad, 1814; Rhododaphne: of the Thessalian Spell, 1818. Nightmare Abbey
(a novel), 1818.
Peele, George (1558-1597). Dramatist, poet. Ordered out of his father's house on account of his
life of dissipation, he supported himself as a playright and as enetertainer of the Polish
Prince Palatine.The Old Wives' Tale – a comedy, 1595. Pageants
Percy, Thomas (1729-18ll). Men of letters, a pioneer anthropologist. Bishop of Dromore.
Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese, 1762; Five Pieces of Runic Poetry
translated from the Islandic languages, 1763; The Song of Solomon, newly translated from
 the original Hebrew, 1764; Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765; Northern
Antiquities, or a description of the manners, customs, religion, and laws of the ancient
Danes. With a translation of the Edda and other pieces from the ancient Islandic tongue,
1770; Ancient Songs, chiefly on Moorish subjects, translated from the Spanish, 1932.
Pickering, John (fl. 154o). Dramatist of passage from the medieval moralities to the popular
Elizabethan tragedy: A New Interlude of Vice Containing the History of Horestes with the
Cruel Revenge of His Father's Death upon His One Natural Mother, 1567.
Pope, Alexander (1688-1744). Poet, translator. Son of a Roman-Catholic linen-draper. Short
and crippled, Pope spent his childhood in the country, being privately educated. Introduced
by Wycherley into Addison's circle. A member of the Scriblerus Club. The peak of the
Augustan movement in a varied range of discourses, from poetics to politics, from
economics to ethics, from form to fashion. His cross-discursive practices bring into
conjunction various strands of thought: science and philosophy, culture and society,
literature and politics His description of the Augustan “soft refinement” and neoclssical
taming of the baroque wit is associated, maybe deliberately, with military conquest over
France in the Second Epistle of the Imitation of Horace: Wit grew polite, and Numbers
learn'd to flow (266). Enjoyed the reputation of the greatest contemporary poet in Europe.
His translations of the Iliad and Odyssey sold remarkably well, ensuring him a leisurely
existence in the last years of his life, corresponding with his friends and cultivating his
garden at Twickenham. Windsor Forest, 1704; An Essay on Criticism, 17ll; The Rape of
the Lock, 1714; Eloisa to Abelard, 1717; The Dunciad, 1728; An Essay on Man, 1733-
1734; Moral Essays, 1732-5; An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 1735.
Price, Uvedale (1747-1829). Essayist, theoretician of the picturesque. Illustrated his theories of
natural beauty and landscape gardening in the outlay of his estate at Foxley. An Essay on
the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (1794-8).
Puttenham, George (1529-159o). Critic. The Art of English Poesie, 1589. Also attributed to his
brother Richard (152o-16ol).
Quarles, Francis (1592-1644). Writer of verse, prose and emblems. Cup-bearer to Princess
Elizabeth (1613). Emblems, 1635; Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man, 1638 (verse).
Ralegh/Raleigh, Walter (1552-1618). Poet, historian, explorer, politician. The type of
Elizabethan courtier. Established the first British colony in America, Virginia. Executed by
order of James I on a charge of complicity to a plot and for disobeying his instructions on a
gold-hunt voyage to Guiana. The Discovery of Guiana, 1596; The History of the World,
1614. A Discourse of the Original Cause of Natural War with the Misery of Invasive War,
1650. The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, 1813.
Richardson, Samuel (1689-176l). Novelist. Made a living in the printing trade, which he
entered at the age of seventeen. Earned a reputation on the Continent as well, where he was
admired by Rousseau, Lessing, Goldoni a.o. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, 174o; Clarissa.
Or, the History of a Young Lady, 1748; The History of Sir Charles Grandison, 1754.
Sackville, Thomas, lst Earl of Dorset and Baron Buckhurst (1536-1608). Poet, man of letters,
statesman, barrister. Chancellor of Oxford University. The Tragedy of Gorboduc, the first
English blank verse tragedy, 1565 (three acts by Thomas Norton, and the two last by
Thomas Sackville). The Induction and Complaint of the Duke of Buckingham in A Mirour
for Magistrates, completed by William Baldwin and George Ferrers, 1563, augmented in
the following editions of 157l, 1574, 1610.
Scott, Walter (177l-1832). Novelist, poet, historian, translator. Called to the Scottish Bar
(1729). Journeys into the Lowlands in search of authentic oral versions of the ballads in
Percy's Relics, which he used to recite as a child. Promoted the foundation of the Tory
Quarterly Review (1809). Created baronet (1819). The success of his works was immediate
and immense, not only in England but also on the Continent, where translations of his
novels would sometimes appear on the same day as the originals. His translations of
Ballads from the German (1796) and of Geothe's Gotz von Berlichingen had important
bearings upon the English Romantics. After the crash of the Constable and Ballantyne's
printing business, of which he was a partner, he had to work hard to the end of his life to
pay off his debts. His “inroads” into Scottish, English and Continental history yield vivid
reconstructions, down to the minutest details of costume and environment, teeming with a
live and diverse humanity, pasted on a rich emotional canvas. Lay of the Last Minstrel,
1805; Ballads and Lyrical Pieces, 1806. Waverley, 1814; Guy Mannering or The
Astrologer, 1815; The Antiquary, 1816; Rob Roy, 1818; Ivanhoe, 1819; Kenilworth, 1821;
The Fortunes of Nigel, 1822; Quentin Durward, 1823, Anne of Geierstein, 1829 The Life of
Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the French, 9 vols. 1827. Tales of a Grandfather. Being
stories taken from Scotish history, 1828, Tales of a Grandfather. Being stories taken from
the history of France, 1831.
Shadwell, Thomas (1642-1692). Dramatist and poet. Open controversies with John Dryden.
Never missed an opportunity to dedicate “a congratulatory poem” or “ode” to William of
Orange and his wife, Mary: on His coming into England, upon Her arrival in England,
1689, on the King's birthday, 1690, 1692, on the King's return from Ireland. He even
published one in... Dryden's name: The Address of John Dryden, Laureate to His Highness
the Prince of Orange, 1689. It was a banter “with a key”, the Laureateship going from
Dryden to Shadwell in 1688. The Miser, 1672; The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island,
1674; The History of Timon of Athens, the Man-Hater, 1678; The Lancashire Witches,
1682 (plays).
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury (167l-1713). Philosopher
whose opinions were, alongside those of Locke and Newton, one of the main shaping
influences on the eighteenth-century mind. M.P. A Deist influenced by the Cambridge
Platonists. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 1711; Several Letters,
Written by a Noble Lord to A Young Man at the University, 1716; Second
Characteristicks; or, The Language of Forms, 1914.
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616). Dramatist, poet, actor. A myth growing in time: identified
as “the national poet”, the soul of England, expressing in his works “the desire for world-
order which fabricated the League of Nations” (G. Wilson Knight), even spoken of in
religious terms:” If ever a new Messiah is to come, he will come in the name of
Shakespeare” (Herman Melville). Little is known about his life, the information which can
be deemed from the 1623 first Folio coming from or being confirmed by Ben Jonson. Out
of the 37 plays currently attributed to Shakespeare only 16 were anthumously published
(quatro editions), the others coming down to us in manuscripts copied by actors, stage
directors, full of errors and interpolations. The sixteen years which lapsed from 1644, when
the Puritans closed down the theatres to 166o, when they were reopened by Charles II are
wrapped in a cloud of oblivion. Only one authoritative image of Shakespeare was
available: the copper engraving first printed on the title page of the 1623 first folio. It
seems that 147 lines from Sir Thomas Moore were written by his hand –a play to which
 several dramatists contributed. The parish Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon
records his baptism on 26 April 1564. Tradition assigns his birth-date to the twenty-third,
as the inscription on the dramatist's tomb reads that he died on 23 April 1616 in his fifty-
third year. John Shakespeare, his father, was a tradesman. William attended a free school
for some time, which, however, was a superior institution of its kind, the masters holding
bachelor's and master's degrees from Oxford University. On 28 November 1582 William
Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway of Stratford and on 26 May his first child, Susanna,
was born. Between the birth of the twins (Hannet and Judith) and the first reference to
Shakespeare in London (1592) the documentary record is virtually blank. He might have
joined one of the touring companies – Leicester's, Warwick's or the Queen's – that played at
Stratford in the eighties. By 1592 he had established himself in the London theatre world as
actor and playwright, successful and envied by fellow-dramatists, as it can be inferred from
Robert Greene's venomous attack. In 1598, when the Lord Chamberlain's Men pulled down
the regular playhouse, The Theatre (the first playhouse built in 1576, with James Burbage
as leader of the company), and used the timber to erect The Globe, Shakespeare entered a
form of proprietorship which entitled him to a tenth percentage of the profit. In the royal
patent by which the Lord Chamberlain's Men (Earl of Leicester) became, in 1603, The
King's Men, Shakespeare's name appeares near the head of the list. He made a nice income
which enabled him to buy the Great House of New Place, the second largest in Stratford.
By 1613 he had retired to Stratford, living there as if Shakespeare had never existed. I, II,
III Henry VI (1589-91); Richard III, 1592-3; The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the
Shrew, 1593-4; The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Love's Labour's Lost, 1594-5; Romeo and
Juliet, Richard II, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595-96); King John; The Merchant of
Venice, 1596-97; I,II Henry IV, 1597-8; Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V; The Merry
Wives of Windsor, 1598-9; Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, 1599-16oo; All's
Well that Ends Well; Othello, 1602-3; Measure for Measure, 1603-4; Timon of Athens,
1604-5; King Lear, Macbeth, 1605-6; Antony and Cleopatra, 1606-7; Coriolanus, 1607-8;
Pericles, 1608-9; Cymbeline, 1609-10; The Winter's Tale, 1610-l; The Tempest, 1611-2.
Henry VIII, 1612-3. Shakespeare may, however, have contributed to it, as well to a number
of other plays: Cardenio, Two Noble Kinsmen, Sir Thomas More.Three pages in the
manuscript of this last play have been claimed to be in Shakespeare's hand, and so have
half a dozen signatures. There are doubts about Shakespeare's authorship of certain parts of
Pericles and Titus Andronicus, and of Henry VIII, which is not included in all editions of
Shakespeare's complete works. Poems: Venus and Adonis, 1592-3; The Rape of Lucrece,
1593-4; The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599; The Phoenix and the Turtle, 16ol.; Shakespeare's
Sonnets, 1609.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797-185l). Novelist. Daughter of William Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft and Shelley's second wife. Dedicated herself to editing his works after his
death. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, 1818; Valperga, 1823; The Lst Man,
1826; The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, 183o; Falkner, 1837; Tales and Stories, 189l.
Travel notes, letters, a poem on Shelley's death (The Choice).
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822). Expelled from Oxford for his pamphlet The Necessity of
Atheism (18ll). In the same year eloped with Harriet Westbrook. In 1815 left England with
Mary Godwin. Drowned in Italy. Queen Mab, 1813; Alastor, 1816; Revolt of Islam, 1818;
Lines Written among the Euganaean Hiils, 1818; Cenci, 1819; Prometheus Unbound,
182o; Adonais, 182l; Hellas, 1822; Julian and Maddalo, Witch of Atlas, 1824.
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (175l-1816). Irish dramatist. M.P. and Under-Secretary of State,
Privy Councillor and Treasurer of the Navy. The School for Scandal, 1780.
Sidney, Philip (1554-1586). Diplomat, courtier poet, novelist and critic. Son of a Lord Deputy
of Ireland who became Lord President of Wales, nephew of the Earl of Leicester. Mortally
wounded at Zutphen, and died at Arnhem. His works were written between 1580 and 1585,
but published posthumously: Arcadia, 159o; Astrophil and Stella, 1591; Apologie for
Poetrie, 1595.
Smollett, Tobias George (172l-177l). Scottish novelist. Ship's surgeon, present at the battle of
Catagena, 174l. Worked in London as doctor, journalist and novelist. The Adventures of
Roderick Random, 1748; The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, 1751; The Adventures of Sir
Launcelot Greaves, 1762; The History and Adventures of an Atom, 1769; The Expedition of
Humphry Clinker, 1771.
Southey, Robert (1774-1843). Poet and prose-writer. Converted to Unitarianism and
Pantisocracy (the project of an ideal Commonwealth) by Coleridge. Supported himself as
translator and journalist at Keswick. Poet Laureate (1813). The Fall of Robespierre. An
historic drama (jointly with Coleridge). Joan of Arc, en epic poem, 1796; Madoc, 1805;
Wat Tyler. A dramatic poem, 1817; Robin Hood (a fragment) 1847.
Steele, Richard (1672-1729). Irish essayist and politician. Knighted for political services (1715).
Founded the Tatler (1709). From 17ll edited the Spectator with Addison.
Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768). Novelist. Son of a subaltern stationed in Ireland, of very good
stock (his grandfather had been the Archbishop of York), but forced to embrace a military
career, as the family estate always went to the first born. A parson at Sutton and Coxwold.
The Life and Opinions of Tristran Shandy, Gentleman, 1759-67; Sermons of Yorick, 1760;
Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, 1768. Letters from Yorick to Eliza, 1773;
Sterne's Letters to His Friends on Various Occasions, 1775.
Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547). Poet. Earl Marshal at Anne Boleyn's trial
(1536). Translated The Aeneid (Books II and III) in blank verse (unrhymed enjambed
pentameters), the first in English. Modified Wyatt's form of the sonnet, creating the sonnet
form later used by Shakespeare (three quatrains rhyming abab and a final couplet). Songs
and Sonnets by Lord Henry Howard and others, 1557.
Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745). Irish novelist, pot and pamphleteer. Dryden's cousin. Secretary to
Sir William Temple who, as ambassador to the Hague, had brought about the marriage of
William of Orange and Mary. Dean of St Patrick's Dublin, 1713. Battle of the Books, A
Tale of a Tub, 1704; Bickerstaff Papers, 1708-9; Meditation upon a Broomstick, 1710;
Drapier Letters, 1724-5; Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. By Lemuel
Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships, 1726. Poetical Works, 1736.
Journal to Stella, 1710-1713.
Tourneur, Cyril (1575-1626). Poet and dramatist, The Revenger's Tragedy, 1607.
Tyndale, William (1484-1536). Translator of the Bible. Took Holy Orders. Contacted Luther in
Wittenberg. (1534). Translated the New Testament from Greek and the Pentateuch and the
Book of Jonah from the Hebrew. The King James Bible (The Authorized Version of 1611)
is largely based upon Morus and Tyndale.
Traherne, Thomas (1637-1674). Metaphysical poems and prose writings on religious topics.
Udall, Nicholas (1505-1556). Dramatist, scholar and headmaster of Eton and Westminster.
Fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford. Ralph Roister Doister, 1553
Vaughan, Henry (1622-1695). Anglo-Welsh metaphysical poet, interested in hermetic,
alchemical and other esoteric doctrines. Known as the Silurist poet, because
Brecknockshire, the place of his birth, was formerly inhabited by the Silures. Studied law
and medicine. Silex Scintillans, 1650.
Walpole, Horace, 4th earl of Oxford (1717-1797). Novelist, letter-writer, editor, printer. M.P.
Son of Sir Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister. Bought Strawberry Hill (1747), which
he outfitted in Gothic style. Founded the Gothic horror school with his Castle of Otranto,
1765. Miscellaneous work in verse and prose.
Whetstone, George (1544-1587). Author of prose romances, poems, plays, morallizing
discourses. A soldier to the Low Countries (1574). A member of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's
expedition to Newfoundland (1578-9). George Gascoigne, Esq., 1578; Promos and
Cassandra, 1578; Sir Nicholas Bacon, 1579. A Mirror for Magistrates of Cities, 1584; The
Honourable Reputation of a Soldier, 1585; The English Mirror, 1586.
Wollstonecraft, Mary (Godwin) (1759-1797). Irish prose-writer, vindicating women's rights.
Kept a school with her sister. Married William Godwin and died giving birth to their
daughter, Mary (Shelley's future wife). Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 1787; A
Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1794; An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and
Progress of the French Revolution, 1794. The Wrongs of Women, or Maria (unfinished
novel), 1798.
Wordsworth, William (1770-1850). Poet, born in the Lake District. French tour (179l-2). In
love with the French Revolution and with a Parisian woman by whom he had an
illegitimate daughter, whom he recognized. Disappointed with the Revolution after the
“Reign of Terror”, ended up a Tory supporter. Moved to Alfoxden to be near Colerdige
(1797) with whom he planned the Lyrical Ballads but lived at Grasmere for the greatest
part of his life. Succeeded Southey as Poet Laureate (1843). Lyrical Ballads (with
Colerdige), 1798 (with Preface, 1800); Poems, 1807, 1815,1845; The Excursion, 1814;
Peter Bell; The Wagoner, 1819; Sonnets on the River Duddon, 182o; The Prelude (written
1799-1805), 185o.
Wyatt, Thomas (1503-1542). Poet, diplomat. Got in touch with the European Renaissance
during his embassies in Italy, France and Spain. Borrowed and adapted the Petrarchan
sonnet. Together with Surrey he created the Elizabethan sonnet (five rhymes and a
concluding couplet). Translations of Plutarch and David's psalms. His songs and sonnets
got into print in Tottel's Miscellany in 1557.
Young, Edward (1683-1765). Poet, essayist and divine. Fellow of All Souls.The Complaint: or
Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, 1747. Conjectures on Original
Composition in a letter to the author of Sir Charles Grandison, 1759.
 PARTEA A II-A

CONTENTS:

THE VICTORIAN AGE (1830- 1900)

THE FRONTIERS OF MODERNISM (1900-1940)

THE PRESENT

INDEX OF AUTHORS
 THE VICTORIAN AGE
(1830- 1900)

The “matter of England” in the postindustrial and postmetaphysical age.

The movement away from the romantic tradition. Poetry as intellectual,
public discourse. From self-expressionism to dramatic impersonation:
Alfred Tennyson. Traditional narrative forms (Bildungsroman, the
picaresque novel, Gothic romance) and their earlier Victorian
transformations: Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, The
Brontë Sisters. Victorian phenomenology. Victorian Gothic and the
Grotesque. Robert Browning and the historicization of the human
personality. The mid-century multiplot novel and the omniscient narrator:
George Eliot. The other side of the coin: fantasy and Manippean
subversion of Victorian orthodoxy. Lewis Carroll. The prophecies of art
religion: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Charles
Algernon Swinburne. William Morris. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Late
Victorian literature. The fall from totality and unity: split personalities,
paraxial realms, dystopias. The degeneration plot: Thomas Hardy.
Aestheticism and Decadence. The nineties or modernism in the making

The amount of revaluations that have brought the Victorians up the wheel of
fashion in the last thirty years or so are not only the expression of a generalized interest
in a long-neglected range of textuality, apparently outdated against the background of
modernist experimentation, but also a recognition of their present relevance in the new
contextual frames within which modernism is being reconstructed. If a literary trend is
no longer understood as only an expressive but simultaneously as an epistemological
model, the deconstruction of knowledge which is a defining feature of modernism is a
process whose roots go back to the nineteenth century. The revolving kaleidoscope of
the texts produced during the long reign of Queen Victoria (1837-l901) displays, in its
multiple hues, a variety unprecedented in literary history. Practically, no single or unitary
definition is possible any longer. The Victorian mind is divided against itself, casting
about for and failing to find fixed and universal categories of thought in order to bridge
the radical Kantian divide: between the empire of nature and the empire of humanity (of
meaningful, purposeful action), between art and technology, pure understanding and
the demands of practical action etc. The brief summary heading this chapter is telling in
this respect: realistic novels of manners coexist with Gothic romances; Victorian
decorum fails to repress the id-centred approach to sexual drives; the logic of dreams,
jokes and Freudian slips complexifies the exercises in mathematical logic. Victorian
industrialists, bankers, landowners, politicians, with their language mannerisms, clothes,
postures, exerting the overwhelming appeal of a tableau vivant, march into the
unmistakeable London streets side by side with ghosts, doubles, vampires, animals
enjoying their newly-licensed (by Charles Darwin) familiarity with humans Novels and
poems giving a voice to the race and to the anxieties of the historical moment join in a
chorus with haughty proclamations of the artist's independence in his ivory tower.

The “Re-reading of Victorian Poetry” – one of the essays published in Joanne

Shatock's collection Dickens and Other Victorians [1] - is undertaken by Isobel
Armstrong from precisely this vantage point. The political upheaval and the fundamental
changes in the structure of the English society in the nineteenth century necessitate a
redefinition of its nature. The ancient teleological world splits up into a fragmented
history, metaphysics yields to the history of philosophy and culture, the fixed categories
of thought and language ordained by God are replaced by belief systems and unstable
series of representations. Universal truths make room for provisional conceptual frames,
differing from one age to another, as from one geographical area to another. Art itself
stands at a remove from practical experience, performing a mediating function,
interpreting rather than representing life (Matthew Arnold: a criticism of life).

Is this a recent re-reading of the true spirit of Victorianism or were the Victorians
themselves aware of their antinomic world frame of mind, which posterity reduced to a
series of simplified representations: gross materialistic spirit, complacency, prudery,
shallow notions of decorum, respectability, domestic pieties, imposed by the
domineering spirit of the middle class ? John Stuart Mill, the supporter of the new ideas
that brought about the 1848 revolutions in Europe, is unfailing in his diagnosis of the
contemporary philosophical mind, torn between two opposite tendencies: the Kantian
Coleridge and the “subverter” Bentham, who roots all categorical and a priori
imperatives into the concrete ground of actual institutions and historical facts. Bentham
had thereby worked a Copernican revolution in the philosophy of the society,
comparable to that by which Darwin, at the climactic point of an argument concerning
evolutionary theory, would place man in his proper place in the zoological series,
offering up unrefutable proofs of the fact that Man still bears in his bodily frame the
indelible stamp of his lowly origin (The Descent of Man, Part III, Ch. XXI). In this
postmetaphysical world, Bentham had created a new language for philosophy,
substituting notions of interests and instincts for the traditional ones of will, intellect
and virtue: We do not mean that his writings caused the Reform Bill, or that the
Appropriation Clause owns him as its parent; the changes which have been made, and
the greater changes which will be made, in our institutions, are not the work of
philosophers, but of the interests and instincts of large portions of society recently
grown into strength. But Bentham gave a voice to those interests and instincts (J.S. Mill,
Bentham). As a social reformer, Mill is not primarily interested in Bentham's reversal of
Kant's metaphysic of morals in his doctrine of utility, but in the Benthamite acceptance
and, respectively, in the Coleridgean rejection of postindustrial England – that was the
great crux in argumentation throughout the Victorian Age: Take for instance the
question how far mankind have gained by civilization. One observer is forcibly struck by
the multiplication of physical comforts; the advancement and diffusion of knowledge; the
decay of superstition; the facilities of mutual intercourse; the softening of manners; the
decline of war and personal conflict; the progressive limitation of the tyranny of the
strong over the week; the great works accomplished throughout the globe by the
cooperation of multitudes; and he becomes that very common character, the
worshipper of our enlightened age. Another fixes his attention, not upon the value of
these advantages, but upon the high price which is paid for them: the relaxation of
individual energy and courage; the loss of proud and self-relying independence; the
slavery of so large a portion of mankind to artificial wants; their effeminate shrinking
from even the shadow of pain; the dull unexciting monotony of their lives, and the
passionless insipidity, the absence of any marked individuality in their characters; the
contrast between the narrow mechanical understanding, produced by a life spent in
executing by fixed rules a fixed task... (Colerdige).

The urban sprawl of the Victorian city, with its black chimneys daring the sky, with
its massive buildings and unshapely suburbs of slate and red brick houses for the
working class, was the architectural mirror of a decentred humanity, fumbling their way
in an ideological maze. In her enlightening book, Church, City and Labyrinth in Brontë,
Dickens, Hardy and Butor, [2], Marilyn Thomas Faulkenburg compares the amorphous,
smokestack-cluttered city of nineteenth-century England to the shapely, steeple-
dominated medieval town (at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, three fourths of the
population lived in large cities, as opposed to one fifth of the population at the turn of the
nineteenth century): Concomitant with the growth of the cities was the simultaneous
impact on the place and authority of the church. Formerly at the centre of city cultural
life, if not topographically as well, the church now faced the challenge of expanding with
the city or stagnating at its displaced centre. By the time of the Industrial Revolution,
cities no longer crystallized around their central religious edifices as they had in the
Middle Ages. Then the church was the centre of city life not only topographically, but
morally as well. It was the church that made and enforced the laws by which city life
was ordered. By the nineteenth century, however, a heritage of Renaissance
humanism, seventeenth century empiricism, and eighteenth century rationalism
exploded in an industrialism that changed the face and manner of city life. The medieval
town still preserved, still aimed at an imitation of cosmic order, or celestial archetype
which the temenos of the ancient cities displayed. Geometrically, the square or circle
was the preferred shape. The centre, or axis mundi, was considered a sacred space,
forming the point of intersection for imaginary lines extending in the four directions of
the compass. From this holy of holies the rest of the city received its orientation. It was
considered holy because here communication was established between heaven and
earth and the underworld of the dead.

To Blaise Pascal (Preface pour du vid), the entire history of humanity along the
centuries appeared as un męme homme qui subsiste toujours, et qui apprend
continuellement. When we descend into the nineteenth century, we are confronted with
the myriad avatars of this Pascalian universal man. There is no longer one but several
Victorian worlds, each walled in itself and conflicting with the others. There is not a
creed which is not shaken, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve
(Matthew Arnold, The Study of Poetry, II Essays in Criticism)... we hear already the
doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust (Arnold, Preface of the
first edition of Poems).

Neither from an epistemological, nor from an economic perspective is the Victorian

Age that homogeneous map drawn by its former detractors. Three distinct phases mark
out the ascent and descent of Britain's imperial power. The 1832-185l period is one of
tremendous changes and social upheavals, of important shifts in the power relations,
starting with the 1832 Reform Bill which enfranchised the middle class and ending with
the Great Exhibition which displayed the bourgeois triumph in Free Trade and
manufacturing industry. The Age of Equipoise which followed, apart from the material
prosperity ensured by the policy of laissez-faire (the manufacturer's pursuit
unhampered) and by England's industrial supremacy, also knew a widely shared code
of middle class moral values: work, piety, self-help, diligence, domestic fidelity. The
Great Depression of the mid-seventies and the challenge to England's supremacy
coming particularly from Germany put an end to an age of cultural consensus and
general self-satisfaction. Social conflicts emerge to the surface of fictional works, doubts
and anxiety undermine the previous lengthy depiction of a bourgeois leisurely existence.
In 1880 Edwin Ray Lankester, Darwin's disciple, published a book entitled
Degeneration, in which evolutionism is no longer synonymous with progress. The best
adapted forms in nature are not always also the highest. Lankester gives examples of
parasites outliving the host organism, which are inferior in structure. The ideas of
regression, atavism and decline, which scientists had first drawn attention to, spread to
biologized social theories, breeding political pessimism about the decay of the Empire.
They are also underwriting the fictional works of Hardy, Gissing, Samuel Butler, Bram
Stoker, H.G. Wells. Social pessimism may have contributed alongside inner factors of
aesthetic consciousness towards a literature of evasion, of fantasy, and programmatic
divorce from the everyday towards the end of the century.

The Victorian age is an age of concern – social, political, educational, scientific –

mostly aroused by the rapid progress made in science and technological equipment, by
the changes occurring in the democratic frame of representation and by the alarming
demographic growth. The empire expanded geographically and economically, the
government encouraging personal enterprise as well as corporate capitalist venture.
Between 1875 and 1900 the total area of the British Empire was increased by
something around 5,000, 000 square miles, containing a population of at least
90,000,000 people. Within only twenty-five years Great Britain became forty times as
large.

The political events and the economic processes leading to the creation of the
Welfare State had a cumulative effect, shifting the centre of political power and making
it possible for enormous masses of people to engage in the national venture of Victorian
energetic action and success. The main steps along this process were the
construction of the first railway in Britain (183o), the bills which granted women the
right of association (1824-25), religious tolerance to Catholics (1829), vote to the
middle class (1832), and to the working class (1867), the Trade Union Act (187l),
acknowledging the unions as part of the political system. Enclosures and confiscation of
land accompanied the improvement in communication through the railway system; the
dislocation of huge masses of people and the repugnant sights of crowded suburbs,
where people built at random and cheaply for the sake of a higher return in rents, were
the effect of the urbanization of the countryside. The code of social responsibility
associated with traditional landownership was being replaced by the amoral
relationships based on money. The establishment believed in the value of self-help and
thrift and shift in high or low estate among the doers of the age was not uncommon. The
response to such Victorian tragedies or comedies, brought up by the Wheel of laissez-
faire, was divided. The moral conscience of the age that usually works its way into the
media promptly condemned the immoral system, which made it possible for an
unscrupled upstart to rise to wealth and importance (see the Illustrated London News,
1849, portraying George Hudson, the former railway King). However, the defence of the
more business-like ethics of the moneyed bourgeoisie could be heard with equal
intensity, coming, for instance, from a reputed essayist like Samuel Smiles: National
progress is the sum of individual industry, energy and uprightness, as national decay is
of individual idleness, selfishness and vice. (...) Schools, academies and colleges, give
but the merest beginnings of culture (...) Far more influential is the life-education daily
given in our homes, in the streets, behind counters, in workshops, at the loom and the
plough, in counting-houses and manufactories, and in the busy haunts of man (Self-
Help). As becomes an advocate of homo faber, Smiles gives several examples of such
self-raised men who had worked their way into the British House of Commons. The
biography of Mr. William Jackson is one apt to comfort our contemporaries who deplore
the debasement of knowledge into TV games and competitions: William, when under
twelve years old, was taken from school, and put to hard work at a ship's side from six
in the morning to nine at night. His master falling ill, the boy was taken into the
counting-house, where he had more leisure. This gave him an opportunity of reading,
and having obtained access to a set of the “Encyclopaedia Britanica”, he read the
volumes through from A to Z (...) He afterwards put himself to a trade, was diligent, and
succeeded in it. Now he has ships sailing on almost every sea, and holds commercial
relations with nearly every country on the globe (Ibidem).

Such language – which will have aroused the roaring laughter of John Henry
Newman, with his sophisticated idea of a university promoting the Kantian principle of
knowledge as its own end, as well as Thomas Carlyle who saw the man of letters as the
hero of his time – abandons, in the mouths of the economists, any trace of idealism.
Cold-blooded theories reify and quantify the mechanisms by which human society
assumes the laws of the jungle, proclaiming the survival of the fittest. Thomas Robert
Malthus, in his Essays on the Principles of Population (1798) argues that the population
tends to increase by geometrical progression but supplies of food only by arithmetical
progression. Wars and pestilences, therefore, are justified in that they prevent universal
famine through an efficient natural control. David Ricardo develops Malthus's law into a
similar iron law of the wages: In the natural advance of society, the wages of labour will
have a tendency to fall as far as they are regulated by supply and demand; for the
supply of labourers will continue to increase at the same rate, whilst the demand for
them will continue to decrease at the same rate... Like all other contracts, wages should
be left to the fair and free competition of the market, and should never be controlled by
the interference of the legislature.” (The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation,
1817).

While taking note that each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical
ratio, Darwin feels reassured that the vigorous, the healthy and the happy survive and
multiply. The foundation of the moral self is identified in social instincts, primarily gained
through natural selection (Ibidem). With Jeremy Bentham, a jurist and philosopher who
published his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation in l789, these
social instincts are only two in number: pain and pleasure. Society is an aggregate of
selfish individuals, pursuing their own happiness and avoiding pain. A legislation
founded upon the “principle of utility” will weigh the quantities of pleasure for the
majority against the quantity of pain for the minority and favour the former irrespective of
such old-fashioned moral concepts as altruism, piety, or the sacred worth of each
individual soul. Raging against the irresponsible tendency to leave human affairs at the
mercy of folly and accident (thrusting at the “let alone” policy), Carlyle, just like
Tennyson and the other Cambridge Apostles, cherishes an idea of the enlightened, true
leader, the Goethean Noble Practical Man, guiding and teaching people in the kingdom
of human ends (Ch. VI, Laissez-faire, of Chartism).

The Chartist Movement, claiming rights for the emerging working class, rose into
its full tide in the thirties or forties, a period of deep economic and political crisis, when,
according to the Scottish geologist and journalist Hugh Miller (First Impressions of
England and Its People, 1847) every tenth citizen of England was a pauper. Politicians
(McCulloch's inquiry for the House of Commons into the emigration of English workers
to escape the appalling poverty at home), as well as writers (Elizabeth Gaskell's novels,
Mary Barton, North and South, Charles Dickens's Hard Times) offered their hearty
support to the “least-fitted”. The idealist John Ruskin and the sentimental Dickens
sensed the real danger threatening the labour faction even to a larger extent than the
lack of bread: alienation in the work process, as the factory style turned them into
animated machinery. Instead of creativity, it was fragmentary work and detailed
concentration on mechanical execution that stifled their imaginative resources, reducing
them to cogwheels and compasses (see Ruskin's essays, The Stones of Venice, Ch. VI
and The Crown of Wild Olive).

If utilitarianism was the philosophy of the rising middle class, the counter,
conservatist movement of the Tory tradition, rooted in Burke, Colerdige and Scott,
revived in the works of Benjamin Disraeli (novelist and statesman), of Thomas Carlyle
(esayist, historian and philosopher), and Matthew Arnold (poet, critic, and Inspector of
schools). Adherence to past historical realities were, with them, not so much a romantic
drawback as a natural need for stability in a world which witnessed the death of old
values without the prospect of new ones in view. The Repeal of the Test Acts (taking
vows of loyalty to the monarch and the Anglican Church by any person in office)
acquired, in the public imagination, apocalyptic proportions: The King has virtually
abdicated; the Church is a widow, without jointure; public principle is gone... (Carlyle,
Signs of the Times). The passage from an age of status to one of social contracts had
similarly traumatic consequences: two great existences have been blotted out of the
history of England – the Monarch and the Multitude; as the power of the Crown has
diminished, the privileges of the People have disappeared: till at length the sceptre has
become a pageant, and its subject has degenerated again into a self... (Disraely, Sybil).
Summing up the Characteristics of an age in which loyalty had become a phrase, and
faith, a delusion (Disraeli), Carlyle sounds even more impressive for the highly tropical
sermonistic discourse, only rivalled by Ruskin's. He employs ingenious metaphors and
symbols, for instance, the clothing figure of speech in Sartor Resartus (the spiritual
biography of Herr Teufelsdröckh, the author of a treatise on clothes), to render the
sense of simulacrum, of the lack of substance, which Victorian orthodoxy could not
escape, with all its formal orthodoxies. Andrew Elfenbein's recent case studies in the
Victorian reinscription of Byronism points to Teufelsdröckh as an example of savage
animalism in an intellectual dandy, expecting to be honoured, nourished, soft-bedded
and lovingly cared for according to his merit by birth rather than by the professional,
intellectual earnestness which was required in the new age of criticism and vocation.
Like Byron's absent-minded and extravagant wanderers, Professor Teufelsdröckh gives
public orations (no formal lectures) on things in general at the university of Weisnichtwo
(Don'tknowwhereto)[3]. Although Carlyle's bęte noire is Lord Byron's solipsism and
spiritual malaise, while his declared idol is Goethe's programme of enlightened, active
engagement with purposeful social action, we can catch, particularly in Signs of the
Times, verbal echoes of another philosophical polarity: utilitarianism versus
Kantianism. Man is said to have lost faith in individual endeavour for internal perfection
(Kant: he... prefers to indulge in pleasure rather than to take pains in enlarging and
improving his happy natural capacities [4]), in necessity and free will (Kant: reason's
true destination must be to produce a will, not merely as a means to something else,
but good in itself, for which reason was absolutely necessary [5]), hoping and struggling
but for external combinations and arrangements. The picture of men as mechanisms,
who construct or borrow machinery, looks quite familiar if compared to the individuals
caged in the twentieth-century social routine of “mechanic furtherances”, Bible-
Societies, public dinners, Academies of everything, committees and prospectuses…
Even John Suart Mill, who saluted in Bentham the recognition of his empirical principle
that there is no knowledge a priori, could not help feeling the danger lurking even in
democratic societies, under the new circumstances of extending the franchise, of seeing
the individual crushed under the power of the majority: If all mankind minus one were of
one opinion, and only one person were of a contrary opinion, mankind would be no
more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be
justified in silencing mankind (On Liberty). Discussion, public debate, the opportunity of
exchanging error for truth are suggested as more humane alternatives to the reductive
arithmetic of utilitarianism.

The attempts to give substance to the cherished spiritual institutions of the time
materialized, among others, in marrying the “widowed” Anglican Church to the pre-
Catholic Greek Church, by incorporating into services translations of Greek Christian
prayers and hymns. The Oxford Movement, represented by Matthew Arnold and John
Henry Newman (cardinal and essayist), was meant to dig up roots in an ancient layer of
tradition for a centre of Christianity isolated from the old European churches, and
experiencing – like all Victorians – a crisis of identity. The experiment was as short-lived
as Faust's Euphorion – the symbol of the failed attempt to unite the gloomy rationalistic
spirit of the North to Mediterranean imaginative exuberance.

The Earlier Victorian

Age

The first third of the Victorian age is partly one of subversive reinscription of the
Romantic tradition. Nostalgia and deference mingle with a deliberate refutation and
departure from romantic literary modes. Social problems – gender discriminations,
women's education, the metaphysical crisis, the need for an enlightened government,
the impact of the scientific revolution – penetrate even the texture of Tennyson's poetry,
reputed for its musical structure, melodiousness and atmospheric imagery. Lyric
expression is reorganised as drama (the dramatic monologue) and framed
narrative, allowing of a particularization and objectification of subjectivity. The subject is
an illocutionary source as well as an object of analysis, not an universal self but a
provisional construct of consciousness.

The novel is still indebted to tradition: Gothic scenes and characters, the
picaresque tradition, melodrama, the Bildungsroman (of the romantic developmental
self), the I-figure claiming to be the real author – omniscient and omnipotent, a puppet-
master, handling his characters with the charming ease of the eighteenth-century
humorists, and finding himself in an overt relationship with the reader. However, the
interaction between literature and society reveals the “condition of England” against a
much wider social canvas (W.M. Thackeray), and in an increasingly complex narrative
discourse. The novelist is less intent upon mirroring a world than on making sense of it.
Orphanated children are left on their own in a society that invites interpretation, while
providing them with no guide to do it. A more realistic novelist than the Brontës, whose
“culture heroines” shape the world to their hearts’ desire, Dickens shows his Pip
abandoning his childhood “great expectations”, while unconsciously adopting the
prejudices ingrained in the power discourse shaping the individual.

On the threshold to the Victorian Age stand the two complementary figures of
Alfred Tennyson (Poet Laureate from 185o) and Robert Browning. Although the former
passes for a Romantic disciple, whose emergence upon the literary scene of 1830 with
Poems. Chiefly Lyrical produced no disruptive effect, we would be grossly mistaken to
label the age he inaugurated as Romanticism not only derivative but popularized and
conventionalized [6].
 Where J.S. Mill (London Review, 1835) saw beautifully typical... upholding,
purifying imagery, assimilating to itself the grosser and the ruder, there was polemical
intent. Whereas Wordsworth had modulated the narrative discourse of the ballad into
lyric in order to talk about the world and himself (self-expressionism), Tennyson draws
the reader's attention to some previously constituted language, to pre-existing orderings
of reality, whose new, possible forms he explores by redirecting chiefly lyrical
expression towards reinscription and drama. By cultivating traditional conventions and
literary forms, retrospective motifs, medieval textuality, or by successively revising his
own works, Tennyson finds himself perpetually immersed into a world of signs rather
than in a direct relationship to the actual world. Marianna, Oenone, Ulysses, Arthur,
Lancelot are not individuals in the real world, like Wordsworth's picturesque humanity of
the Lyrical Ballads, but characters already endowed with meaning, figures in a network
of cultural codes. They are inserted into symbolic systems which are collective, that is
shared by everybody: When one takes as object of study not physical phenomena but
artefacts or events with meaning the defining qualities of the phenomena become the
features which distinguish them from one another and enable them to bear meaning
within the symbolic system from which they derive. The object is itself structured and is
defined by its place in the structure of the system... [7]. The romantics' worship of the
individual as empirical subject, yields to the Kantian transcendental subjectivity
(interpersonal cultural systems) and the outpouring of spontaneous feeling
(Wordsworth), to reinscription in an image repertoire. The discourse of culture, Jonathan
Culler emphasizes (Ibidem) sets limits to the self.

l. In counterdistinction to the romantics, Tennyson is less interested in the internal

condition of consciousness (which is the object of psychology) than in the
representations of inwardness, in the construction of the self, whereby consciousness
is related to the external forms of culture (phenomenology). Isobel Armstrong (Op. cit.)
identifies two concurrent poems in Mariana, and a doubleness of language which is
not possible in a subject-centred discourse: the undivided condition of unified selfhood
has dissolved into a framed soliloquy, a combination of narrative and dramatic
expression which renders both the subject's utterance and the subject as an object of
analysis. The framing provided by the motto from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure
(Mariana in the mooted grange) urges the reader to construct the meaning of the
character by exploring similitudes and differences in comparison with some previous
text. In Shakespeare's play, Mariana stands in sharp contrast to the frigid, morally
upright and pious Isabela, who is on the point of becoming a novice. Mariana does not
refrain from the proposed bed-trick in order to trap her unfaithful lover into marriage.
Tennyson takes up the theme of the woman as a victim of man's neglect, experiencing
psychological and sexual frustration, making a Victorian reinscription thereof. Although
the starting point is a figure against a background of textuality, Tennyson allows it to
come to life in a portrait tinged with specifically Victorian hues. Marion Shaw's feminist
approach to Tennyson is an attempt to tie the poet's range of early nineteenth-century
female types down to the Victorian realities. Here is the description of a typical
nineteenth-century family life: a harsh father, a kindly but ineffectual mother
(educationally, inferior, legally and financially of no consequence), ten brothers and
sisters, assorted servants, cramped living conditions and an emotional claustrophobia
resulting from geographical isolation, and the self-sufficiency that characterizes large
families [8]. In an age of hypocritical prudery, when even the legs of the chairs were
covered with affected propriety, sexuality could only find release in what Michel
Foucault calls (The History of Sexuality) “the talking cure”, which started simultaneously
with the repression of sexuality by the middle-class spirit of thrifting diligence („Business
is preferred always to love with the wise”, spells out Wycherley in The Country Wife).
The language of the poem constructs Mariana as a prisoner in a solipsistic world, in
which all natural objects are held in a stasis mimetic of her erotic dependence on a
male-lover [9]. The mood of desolation is communicated through an atmospheric
imagery of loss and decay. The deserted maiden, wasting her life in a meaningless
existence, away from an active busy world, is apparently entombed beneath the
weeded thatch, among the broken sheds, the empty flower-plots, whose general spirit
seems to be embodied by the sun-flower hanging heavily, as if the skyward aspiration
towards light and life had been replaced by a death drive. The unlifted latch suggests
the absence of visitors, of any outward contacts, the repetition of the word “old' – steps
and voices – reinforcing the feeling of a stale household. Victorian sexuality
communicates itself not discursively but through processes of projection (unconscious
wishes expelled from the self and attributed to another object) and introjection (qualities
of external objects absorbed by the self). Elizabeth Wright (Psychoanalytic Criticism.
Theory and Practice, Routledge, l984) mentions the subconscious identification of the
male body with upright objects, of the mother's body, with enclosures. Mariana, a
prisoner within the decaying mooted grange, symbolical of her body, experiences life
through her senses: she is besieged by the shrieks of the birds during the night, the
shadow of the poplar falling on her bed, the stir of the mouse in the wainscot. The
mediations of the body materialize in a language apt to disturb the alphabet of culture,
that dictated by the Victorian tabooing super-ego.

One step further towards the phenomenological constitution or the objectification of

consciousness is the dramatic monologue. It is an imaginary utterance by some
person other than the author in the presence of an implied listener or interlocutor. We
would not presume to attribute to Tennyson a deliberate semiological awareness,
unless we were able to provide textual evidence for the linguistic ontology of his
imaginary characters. Does the poet construct his famous Ulysses as a character in a
life-like situation (even if previously imagined by Homer) or as a text ? The monologue,
in blank verse, begins with Ulysses' return to Ithaca, departing in several respects from
the Homeric original: Ulysses finds himself matched not with a fatal woman, who does
not know how to rid herself of her numerous suitors, but with an aged wife. Ulysses is
singled out, like a true hero, and severed from all connections with the empire of nature.
He cannot possibly commune with his subjects, who hoard, and sleep, and feed, and
know not me. There is no Eumaeus left among them, to recognize him even in disguise.
His subjects fail to recognize him in the sense that they do not share the same spiritual
needs, the knowledge transcending bodily needs. Like Du Bellay's Ulysses in “Heureux
qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage”, Tennyson's hero has come back spiritually
enriched (plein d'usage et raison), the voyage without having nourished the voyage
within. At the same time, he has gone through a Lacanian “mirror stage” [10], thanks to
which he not only knows but is known by others, in that fusion of objectivity and
subjectivity which conditions inscription in the semiological order. The recognition
scene (identity defined not as one's self-consciousness but as one's image for others)
occurs not in the real Ithaca but in that of “names”, in the linguistic texture of the
Homeric epic:

I have become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known: cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honoured of them all (...)

I am a part of all that I have met;

Nor does Ulysses commune with his own son, who makes a great leader of men,
improving on their ruggedness as an enlightened Victorian prince was expected to; yet
he is centred in the sphere/ Of common duties, whereas Ulysses is inseparable from the
saga or narrative of spiritual quest. He urges his mariners to set sail again and advance
towards a newer world beyond the sunset. Ulysses's mariners had died by the time he
came back to Ithaca, and the voyage under the western star can only be a metaphor of
death. The “new world” is the new heaven and earth of the postapocalyptic Jerusalem,
spirit, logos. Veracity or verosimility are only the impositions of the mimetic arts,
representing the actual world, whereas Tennyson's metatext is meant to make one
aware of new possible forms which the Homeric story may assume. What they reach is
an immortality, nevertheless, the pagan paradise of the Happy Isles, where Ulysses
joins the other Homeric hero, Achilles. While his physical strength and anger are
capable to “move earth and heaven”, the wise Ulysses embodies the paradigm of
spiritual strength: weak by time and fate, but strong in will/ To strive, to seek, to find,
and not to yield. Tennyson seems to be correcting Homer in the light of an age
worshipping culture and the moral will. If the hero is identified with infinite thirst for
knowledge and adventure, the inner coherence of the action requires that he should not
be abandoned to domesticity and a down-to-earth existence everafter. Tennyson
provides his story not with a comical but with a heroic resolution, which greatly appealed
to the Victorian energetic spirit (the last line was engaved on the tomb of the famous
explorer Robert Falcon Scott).

2. Tennyson's poetic art in two obvious cases is a refutation of Byronic solipsism.

There is a striking similarity in versification between the enchanting Lady of Shalott

and Byron's Prisoner of Chillon:

She left the web, she left the loom, I saw the white-walled distant town
 She made three paces thro' the And whither sails go skimming down;
room
And then there was a little isle
She saw the water-lily bloom,
Which in my very face did smile
She saw the helmet and the plume
The only one in view.
She look'd down to Camelot.

Contemplating the “distant town”, Byron's Bonnivard feels alienated, choosing to

remain a prisoner of his cell, symbolical of the mind, in which everything is familiar and
bears the mark of his personality. The Lady of Shalott is another prisoner of the mind,
who finds herself at two removes from reality. The first of the four parts of Tennyson's
poem introduces the two ontologically distinct realms, divided by the river (reflection,
cognition). The one is Camelot, of the Arthurian saga, yet conventionally assumed, like
Telemachus's everyday, to be the transitory natural world (reality itself is constructed in
Tennyson, it is the “effect” of “reality”...), with pastoral scenes of peasants going about
their daily work, sowing and reaping their crops. The other is the island inhabited by the
Lady of Shalott, who never shows up at the casement to take a look at the boisterous
life unfolding below, in the valley. Neither is she directly contemplated by the people of
Camelot, who only divine her presence from her songs, reaching down to them from her
high recess. The lady knows of their existence from the reflections they send from the
river into her mirror. The symbolism of the scene becomes transparent, if we read the
codes carefully. In Plato, music represents metaphysical power, while the shadows
impressing the cave of the mind come from the real world. The lady belongs to a
transcendent spiritual reality, whereas Camelot is nature moving from one fertility cycle
to another (images of life and death, the archetypal moments in life: a funeral, two
lovers lately wed). If only the man in Plato's cave could go out and gaze directly on the
world in the bright sunlight, instead of the shadows cast on the walls by the fickle fire
within! If only the Lady could look straight at Camelot, without the mediating river and
mirror, for she is so sick of shadows! But just like Orpheus, who is forbidden to gaze on
Eurydice before he has taken her out of the underworld, she is cursed to remain a
prisoner of an ontologically distinct realm. Reality and the mind cannot meet on mutual
terms, but only through the mediation of the subject's objectified otherness: God and his
creation, the artist and his work. The lady at her loom (Blake's looms of generation) is
weaving a web which is twice removed from reality: the shadowy texture of the shadows
of the world, the free play of the artist's imagination. Cannot they assume materiality?
The third part of the poem introduces such a miracle of ideal yet substantial existence:
Lancelot, the hero of the Arthurian romance. Tennyson's embroidery of medieval
heraldry in all its splendour is a tour de force. The intoxicating rhythms, the alliteration,
the interplay of sounds and colours actually give the impression of the tremulous effect
of light reflected from a mirror. The reader cannot but feel hypnotized, like the lady, by
the rich material texture of the pageant changing colours and sounds, at the same time
freezing in the armorial bearings, as if the live flux of life itself were being arrested in
perfectly wrought immortal patterns. Lancelot's emblematic shield presents us with an
image strongly reminiscent of Keats's myth of immortality in Ode on a Grecian Urn:

A red-cross knight for ever kneel'd

To a lady in his shield,

Although never reaching consummation, their love is perfect – for ever he will love
her, for ever she will be fair –, for art is not touched by the devastating effects of time,
by the transitoriness of life with its succession of weddings and funerals. The red-cross
knight, in Spencer's Faerie Queene, is an allegory of holiness. Art is paradisal for being
pure (of spiritual origin) and eternal, and yet realized into a palpable aesthetic object. It
is to this living immortality and to Lancelot's song that the Lady proves responsive. As
she looks down, the mirror cracks, for imagination and sense perception are mutually
exclusive. The fourth part takes the lady in a boat down to Camelot. On entering the
mortal world, her blood freezes, her eyes darken. Yet people can identify her in the
words she has written about the prow of her boat: “The Lady of Shalott”. Logos
incarnated (the spoken or written word, which is here the very title of the poem) is the
vehicle that realizes the closure subjectivity/objectivity, spirit/reality. The lady, a
phantom of the mind, materializes into the poem about herself: it is only now that she
becomes an object of cognition for her previous object of contemplation. Tennyson well
knew, as he put down in his diary, that to get the workmanship as nearly perfect as
possible is the best chance of going down the stream of time. A small vessel on fine
lines is likely to float further than a great raft [11].

That aloofness is a deadly sin of art reads between the lines of Tennyson's
allegorical Palace of Art. Art personified builds herself a castle on a huge crag-platform
where she might live apart from the rest of mankind: My soul would live alone unto
herself/ In her high palace there. But solitude, so much cherished by the Romantic
poets, has ceased to fascinate the Victorian spirit, only seduced by positive values. Art's
ivory tower is symbolical of the fragmented, heterogeneous and blasphemous culture of
Tennyson's time. The Luciferic ambition of rivalling God's creation (probably inspired by
contemporary scientific challenges to traditional assumptions about the creation of the
world) is ridiculed by the analogy with the evolution of the embryo as well as by mythical
allusions (Prometheus, the gnostic pseudo-Demiurge mimicking heaven”, and Satan:
Back on herself her serpent pride had curl'd). The pagan-Christian admixture, the
kaleidoscope of Biblical, Greek, Islamite, Indian, Celtic myths and legends point to
something worse than scepticism: the decay of a central sophia, of a central body of
belief. In the spirit of early Victorianism, Tennyson seeks a reconciliation between
science and the humanities. Art's mytho-poetic Pantheon absorbs recent theories
developed by psychology about abysmal deeps of Personality. The metaphor is grimly
literalised, as isolation causes art's... schizophrenia (divided quite/ the kingdom of her
thought). The end of the poem displays the Victorian relish for moral castigation: art
undertakes to expiate her guilt descending into the valley of common people and
afterwards ushering them into her palace. In a culture collectively constituted, the
response to a work of art has become as important as its creation, or rather, part of its
creation.

3. Towards the middle of the century, when the shadows of the great romantics
have shrunk into oblivion, the genuine sound of Victorianism is heard in poems
widening into social, ethical, religious and political concern. The voices of anxiety are
breeding a sense of psychic homelessness in the minds that wake up to a stark reality,
with no new values to replace the traditional ones, now emptied out of any substantial
support. The mind experiences the anguish of having outlived the heart. More than a
modish topos, exile becomes an allegory of a fundamental crisis within a cynical and
sceptical culture. The exhaustion of Tithonus or the homelessness of the Lotus-Eaters
are symptomatic of a limbo psychology: the sense of being imprisoned in a paraxial
realm, in a gap between two civilizations: one dead, the other powerless to be born
(Matthew Arnold, Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse).

The feel of the age collecting from spiritual blockage is channelled by Tennyson in
one of the few long poems of the age – actually a sequence of l3l elegies framed by a
Prologue and an Epilogue –, composed during a long time span, and finally published in
185o. The title, In Memoriam, defines it as an occasional poem, meant to commemorate
the death of his Cambridge friend, Arthur Hallam, who suffered a premature death in
Vienna in 1833, just before the time fixed for his marriage to Tennyson's sister, Emily.
The pain caused by his personal loss is sublimated into a generalised picture of
confused humanity, striving to find a way out of the contemporary epistemological
maze: It is not always the author speaking of himself, the author warns his readers in an
account of his composition published by his son, Arthur Hallam, but the voice of the
human race speaking through him. The lyrics figure a kind of Divina commedia, a
spiritual quest representing the Way of the Soul. It starts with the funeral of Hallam and
ends up with marriage bells, announcing the wedding of Tennyson's younger sister,
Cecilia. Life has resumed its course; a Victorian poet will not anchor in the sea of
melancholy to the end of time. The first 27 elegies voice the initial despair over Hallam's
death; the next (XXVII-LXXVII) show the poet steeped in philosophic doubt,
progressively yielding to hope (LXXVII-CIII) and the confident belief in salvation (CIV-
CXXXI): the far-off divine event of mankind returning to unified spirituality (one God,
one law, one element). Is Tennyson's background, in this most topical of his poems,
historically and psychologically, or rather discursively constituted ? Once more the
bricks of his discourse are provided by already structured elements: the topos of
theodicy, with forced conclusions to fallacious syllogisms (Thou madest man, he knows
not why,/ He thinks he was not made to die;/ And thou hast made him: thou art just), the
pathetic language of psalms (Be near me when my light is low...), contemporary
anthropological views of history (Our little systems have their day; / They have their day
and cease to be), evolutionary theories about nature red in tooth and claw, catastrophist
theories (Lyell's Principles of Geology) dispelling even hope in the survival of the fittest:

So careful of the type, but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone

 She cries, “A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.”

Unlike the romantic consensus of experience the relationship between man and
nature proves now equally destructive: man disfiguring nature in his building frenzy,
nature annihilating entire civilizations. Lyell's discovery that the fossil population of one
geological stratum is not related to the next had generated doubt about there having
been only one, unique Creation of the world. The belief in a teleological universe (Who
trusted God was love indeed/ And love creation's final law) was gone. The collapse of
the prospect of justice in a life beyond the tomb had removed the central ground of all
values (the true, the just) and had rendered death, in its finality, unbearable. And yet,
with Tennyson, it is not the absence of the original creative light but rather the
inarticulate infant's inability to word his grief that causes the ultimate tragedy:

............... but what am I ?

An infant crying in the night;

An infant crying for the light;

And with no language but a cry (LVI)

The “promised event” is of a linguistic nature, the Incarnated Word, Hallam's

letters through which he is resurrected: So word by word, and line by line, / The dead
man touched me from the past,/ And all at once it seemed at last/ The living soul was
flashed on mine – XCV). The story about how an individual self is acquired through
language (Elaine Jordon [12]) from XLV to XLVII is also Tennyson's Victorian
transformation of Wordsworth's famous scene of the baby at the breast in the Prelude.
Tennyson's baby, pressing his palm against the circle of the breast, thinks, “this is I”:

But as he grows he gathers much

and learns the use of I and me

And finds I am not what I see

And other than the things I touch

So rounds he to a separate mind

From whence a clear memory may begin

And through the frame that binds him in

His isolation grows defined.

 This is not just a Hegelian separation of the self from the empire of nature (other
than the things I touch) but a Lacanian acquisition of ego identity through language
(Elaine Jordon, Ibidem). Nature is a world in itself (a circle), wheareas the human being
is inserted into constitutive frames of culture. The language of this excerpt is
exceptionally condensed and profound. The difference between the pronoun as a
grammatical tool (“I”) and the full pronominal value of “me” is meant to suggest absence
or recognition of identity. The interplay of the third and first person (And finds I am not
what I see, referring to the same individual) expresses the objectification process of the
recognition or mirror stage, when the subject begins to see itself as an image for others.
Finally, the paradoxical association of the binding and isolation notions expresses the
dialectic of identity, which is only possible through differentiation from all the others
inscribed in the same semiological order.

4. I use gender to mean cultural assumptions about masculinity and feminity,

rather than biological differences of sex, confesses the “poet of woman”, as Gladstone
called Alfred Tennyson. The issue of feminism concerned Tennyson as early as 1832.
In a manuscript fragment of A Dream of Fair Women, the poet muses idly on the
possibility of the gentler mind assuming rule among mankind. When The Princess came
out in 1847, it was part of a movement for women's emancipation, swelling even in
aristocratic circles (e.g. the tournament staged at the Scottish baronial castle of Eglinton
in 1839). Women claimed, among other things, changes in their legal status, the right to
divorce their husbands and to maintain goods in their possession after marriage.
Tennyson's modern social comedy cast in the guise of medieval romance is concerned
with women's education rights. One source of the story is Shakespeare's Love's
Labour's Lost, where the King of Navarre retires with his “bookmen” into the hermitage
of studies, taking vows, with his retainers, to abstain from any female company and
avoid any entertainment and distraction. In a comical reversal, Princess Ida sets up a
college for women, on the border of her father's kingdom, barring men from entry. In
typically Victorian fashion, Ida's intellectual arrogance is finally broken down by the
more humane demands of love and a practical life. This comes only after Ida's defence
of women, battered like slaves or pampered like dolls, culminating in the century's
supreme moral value, Kant's Good Will:

Would this same mock-love, and this

Mock-Hymen were laid up like winter bats,

Till all men grew to rate us at our worth,

Not vassals to be beat, nor pretty babes

To be dandled, no, but living wills, and sphered

Whole in ourselves and owed to none. (IV, l25-3o)

 The poem reflects the spirit of the time in looking backwards and forwards, in
combining the language of myth and the scientific record of geological expeditions and
explorations, in fusing romance and concerns about scientific experiment and science
deontology (the counter-utilitarian and anti-Darwinist urge of the feminist campaign that
no one, including the lowest orders of nature, should be hurt). The attempted synthesis
between science and the humanities was doomed to failure in the modern world, but
Tennyson's other attempts at innovation – textual self-reflexivity and multiplicity of
perspectives – were destined for a brilliant career. The poet was addressing a
community divided on issues of public interest, therefore he chose the narrative device
of telling the story from one speaker to another instead of a single-voice argument. The
narrators are seven undergraduates gathered together during “one Christmas vacation
at college”, the conclusion being voiced by a speaker – the author – who undertakes to
turn the story into a poem. The poem reflects back on its genesis, being itself and the
story of its own creation.

The encroaching social and economic concerns modify Tennyson’s early theme of
the woman waiting for a lover to deliver her from patriarchal tyranny and captivity within
family. In Maud (1855), a psychic monodrama, the love story is controlled by the values
of moneyed power and economic success, which had replaced the more archaic ideals
about chivalrous love and heroic defiance. The speaker fails to get Maud for his wife,
because his noble father had lost the competition in a ruthless materialistic society, and
because Maud's brother would rather buy for her “a lord, a captain, a padded shape”.

5. By the time Idylls of the King came out (the first, in 1859), the Victorian scene
was saturated with the decorative medievalism practiced by the “Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood”. The tendency to work primitive scenes and feelings into sophisticated art
was in fact the result of a Continental influence, ranging from the German Nazarenes to
the French Impressionists. In Manet's famous Dejeuner sur l'herbe, the nineteenth
century is intruding into the ancient scene populated by classical nudes through the
muslin dress, the hat abandoned on the grass, and the gentlemen fully dressed
according to the latest fashion. The painting takes the (Baudelairean) test of modern
reality being fit for artistic representation. It is for different reasons that Tennyson joins
the artists who diligently decorated with Arthurian themes the Houses of Parliament,
public schools or Oxford University. The Prince Consort Albert was painted in armour, to
symbolize his chivalry as a modern gentleman, and it is as the paragon of the
enlightened leader that Tennyson reinscribes the figure of the fabled prince who would
come again to rescue his people from the Victorian wasteland. No antiquarian interest
to revive the past, as that which had prompted the romantics or which was spurring the
medievalizing Pre-Raphaelites, lurks behind Tennyson's reinvention of the Arthurian
romance. The literary mode itself – the Hellenistic idylls of Alexandria in the third
century B.C. – is an acutely self-conscious medley. “Idyll” is the Greek word for “little
picture” (eidos): a shape, form, figure. The twelve books of the Idylls are a deliberate
reinscription of a figure. It is Hallam's reading of Malory's romance (which knew several
editions in the nineteenth century), a linguistic event, that induces the epiphany of
Arthur in the poet's imagination like a modern gentleman. The poet watching Arthur's
bark from the shore in the midst of a multitude is the allegory of a type of consensus of
experience different from that of the romantics of the Wordsworthian school
(consensus between the self and the natural world): this is Arthur, a sign, a figure sailing
down the river of textuality, shared by all of us through knowledge of culture's
narratives. The Victorian reinscription of the medieval ethos means its transformation
into a fine poise between the need to castigate a materialist culture through fantasy
worlds and the equally justified duty to answer the demands of historical praxis.

Where yet in sleep I seem'd

To sail with Arthur under looming shores,

Point after point: till on to dawn, when dreams

Begin to feel the truth and stir of day,

To me, methought, who waited with a crowd,

There came a bark that, blowing forward, bore

King Arthur, like a modern gentleman

Of stateliest port: and all the people cried,

„Arthur is come again: he cannot die.”

Then those that stood upon the hill behind,

Repeated – “Come again, and thrice as fair”;

And, further inland, voices echo'd – “Come

With all good things, and war shall be no more.”

At this a hundred bells began to peal,

That with the sound I woke, and heard indeed

 The clear church-bells ring in the Christmas-morn.

Heterogeneity of narrative modes and the polemical dialogue with tradition

characterize the novelists who launched on their careers between the thirties and the
middle of the century

The main strand of what is now known as “the golden age of the novel” is
professed realism, foregrounding social rather than human types. “The Art of Novels”,
according to Thackeray, is to represent Nature: to convey as strongly as possible the
sentiment of reality.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) was born at Calcutta, India, where

his father was in the service of East India Company. While Jane Austen had contented
herself with a mildly humorous view of romantically inefficient characters, Thackeray
extricates himself completely from romantic modes of vision and narrative conventions,
while furtively looking back to earlier fictional modes of the eighteenth century. He starts
on his career by burlesquing popular contemporary novelists for Fraser's Magazine. In
Rebecca and Rowena, his parodic continuation of Scott's Ivanhoe, Thackeray shows
the hero unhappily married to the frigid Rowena, and Robin Hood a tamed conservative.
Sharing in the cynical view of the age, Thackeray has the destructive flow of time put an
ironical end to any kind of human illusion. Life is understood in terms of change and
development, the momentous patterns of history dissolving into a meaningless
sequence and progressive decrepitude. As well as Stendhal, in La Chartreuse de
Parme, Thackeray brings heroic history round to a dead end in Vanity Fair. The novel,
with its Waterloo episode, is actually subtitled “a novel without a hero”.

Although not an innovation, the author developing an overt relationship with the
reader brings Vanity Fair closer to our century. At the beginning of the novel, the
intruding narrator who identifies himself with the author draws attention to the various
narrative modes in which he could develop his subject: as a sentimental romance, a
heroic romance, or a rogue story. What is going on has obviously become less
important for the novelist (who was also a reputed critic) than how the events are
narrated. The obvious conclusion is that form prevails over story, rhetoric and the
structuring of events practically changing the entire meaning. In fact, there is no stable
meaning embedded in a text, but only the provisional effect of a rhetorical play. The
novel contains its own figure, mise-en-abyme: the fair with its circus is the emblem of
the entire society as merely a delusive show of disguised intentions, and at the same
time a mirror of its making. In the Prologue, the narrator refers to himself as the
manager of the Performance, and to the characters as puppets of varying flexibility and
liveliness. The dehumanised early Victorian society comes to life through the cynical
vehicle of Thackeray's puppeteering. His humanity is one of types, not of individuals, so
that, at the end of the novel, the narrator may conclude: Let us shut up the puppets, for
our play is played out. The iron network of social relationships traps the individual,
leaving him no option, no choice. What can a young yet clever orphan do in a society
where money and rank prevail over individual achievement? I think I could have been a
good woman, if I had 5,000 a year, confesses Becky Sharp, the energetic opportunist
so characteristic of the nineteenth-century novel. Becky is not a wolf among innocent
sheep but the very product of the ruthless capitalist mechanism. As an orphan, she is
deprived of any honest means of acceding to an honourable social position. Her defiant
gesture of throwing away Samuel Johnson's Dictionary on leaving school is symbolical
of the demise of the Enlightenment humanistic and moral rationality. The new social
grammar was such as to render the Dictionary useless: it could spell out no rules for
social success. What follows is anything but Johnsonian learning, decorum and
propriety. From Miss Pinkerton's School for girls, Becky accompanies her rich friend,
Amelia Sedley, to her home at Vauxhall, where she meets her brother Jos. After an
unsuccessful attempt to seduce him, she takes a position as a governess to two young
girls in the household of Sir Pitt Crawley. She manages to see herself married to
Rawdon Crawley, who is consequently disinherited by his jealous father. Even if
dishonestly earned, their money (Rawdon's from gambling, Becky's from flirting with old
aristocrats) allow them to live on a grand scale. Her scandalous behaviour makes
Rawdon leave her in the end, and Becky finally manages to get hold of Jos Sedley. A
few months after their reunion his family learns that he died at Aix-la-Chapele under
obscure circumstances. Thanks to his insurance, Becky comes into a large sum of
money, and the author does not rule out the sinister possibility that she might have
poisoned him.

And yet Becky has something fascinating about her, in her revolutionary
endeavour to change the rules of social games, arbitered by class and wealth. She
does not passively accept her lot, manifesting herself as a disruptive social force in a
society that had recently experienced the end of the age of reason and classical rigour
and a progressive decay – material and moral – of the aristocracy.

The plot of narratorial action, doubling up the third person chronodiegesis in an

authorial novel (with the author entering as narrator) in Vanity Fair is a nineteenth-
century clone of Fielding's fictional strategy, which in the eighteenth century looked like
a textual analogue of the Deists' God as original creator, but subsequently allowing the
machinery of the universe to work according to its own objective laws. Similarly,
Thackeray displays demiurgic omniscience and comments upon his creation, as it has a
separate existence from its creator's, evolving according to the generic rules inscribed
within romance, rogue story, etc. They are not arbitrarily invented by each individual
writer but commonly shared with the readership.

The ontological uncertainty generated by the metaphysical crisis steals gradually

in, also bearing upon narrative, which undergoes multiple mediations: removed in time,
framed, perspectivised. In the novels written in the later half of the century, J. Hillis
Miller (Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch, 1975) notices a passage from objectivism to
perspectivism: the limited vision of a single person is destabilised. In The History of
Henry Esmond (1852), not only is the protagonist's third-person narrative framed as
“memoirs” by his daughter, Rachel Esmond Warrington, and by a first-person ironic
statement on the “Tragic Muse”, providing the wising up perspective of old age, but the
narrator himself alters his mode of vision. This is not an authorial (omniscient) but a
figural novel (focalized through one of the characters). There is also a bid for realism in
the shift from historical to ethical (See Terry Eagleton, From Criticism to Ideology, 1976)
and in the characters' disenchantment with heroes and romantic feelings. The narrator
sizes up history like Winslow Homer, the American painter who turned his back on
David and Delacroix in his homely representations of historical action and characters.
Esmond remembers having seen King Louis XIV – the Sun King, “the type and model of
kinghood” – in his old age, as a “little wrinkled man, pock-marked, and with a great
periwig and red heels to make him look tall”. However, Thackeray departs from Hogarth
and Fielding, acknowledged as masters, in his sketch of the near past. It is a Whig
version of the attempt to reinstate the Stuarts on the throne in the person of James III.
The “Old Pretender” is a ridiculous personage, a narrative device serving Thackeray's
political agenda of debunking the pretences and the unreasonable claims of the
absolutist monarchy and of the bloods and dandies brought into his train. James passes
a night writing a madrigal for a typically “Cruelle Belle” of the eighteenth century, a
pastime whereby he loses both the girl and the cause, vainly fought by his old-fashioned
loyalists.

Social satire broadens into a bitter realisation of the narrow ken of life's resources
in fulfilling an idealist's cravings. The protagonist's disillusionment in love, religion and
politics works as a “realist operator” (Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language), i.e.
effecting an impression of realism through the representation of common characters
and unheroic actions. Rachel, the wife of the fourth Viscount of Castlewood, is forced to
admit that her Francis is no Jove or other “supreme ruler”, but a coward, a sensualist,
and, occasionally, a blundering drunk. She forsakes (initially, in her heart) the “god of
the honeymoon”, and falls for Esmond, the much younger “tutor” of her daughter.
Esmond himself, educated as an ardent catholic, lives out the disappointing experience
of discovering in Holt, who had intoxicated his childhood with stories of martyrdom, a
scheming Jesuit priests, more interested in politics than in religion. He is a master of
disguises (also in a literal sense, as an “expert practitioner”, ready to exchange a
military coat and cloak with a farmer's smock).

Consequently, the hero turns from faith to... trade, assuming the cassock and
bands in the mind of someone who “mounts a merchant's desk, for a livelihood”.

Disappointed by the beautiful but heartless and shallow Beatrix, Esmond settles
down in a marriage with her mother, Rachel, the dutiful wife emulating the Biblical
model, and yet with a Dulcinea figure lurking behind her in the dark hues of the
canvas...

It is the chiaroscuro of a new genesis: the realist tradition in fiction.

In the heaven of lately resurrected Victorians, Charles John Huffam Dickens

(1812-1870) is the brightest Nova. Gabriel Iosipovici included studies in Dickens in a
collection entitled The Modern English Novel, and critics approach his works in the light
of such postmodern concepts as “the decomposing self” or “dialogic fiction”. What
strikes critics today in his mature novels, when Dickens has outgrown his taste for
picturesque characters and the loose concatenation of events in the picaro tradition, is
no longer the wide social canvases, the galleries of vivid characters, individualized by
comical eccentricities, phrases or mannerisms, so that readers could remember them
over the long span of their serialization before publication in the bulky three-deckers. It
is his concern for architectonics that is of more appeal to the contributors of academic
case studies: the carefully wrough parallelisms, the presence of what Barthes (S/Z) calls
the 'symbolic code”: basic dyadic pairs, repeated contrasts, binary polarities, contrasts
or pairings with thematic and archetypal resonance.

What Walter Bagehot could notice as early as 1858 in his essay on Clough's
Poems was the disappearance of the Voltairean self and view of reality. The arrogant,
universal, rational Voltairean ego had been replaced by a multitude of individual selves
constituting reality in a particular, incomplete linguistic frame: We frame to ourselves
some image which we know to be incomplete. Bagehot's contemporaries could no
longer write Voltaire's sentences (Mr. Clough's Poems), as the finite beings living in the
world can only construe imperfect, halting, changing images of the universal, divine
subjectivity. Writing on Dickens, he also notices that his perception of city life takes
stock of its being fragmented, disconnected, the enlarged multiplied and grotesquely
animated attributes of his characters being the phenomenological effect of the distorted
growth of industrial mass production, with its uncanny blending of multiplicity and
repetition. It is not the novelist's realistic, objective view that identifies mannerisms but a
vivification of separate attributes as the result of a priori “petrification”, lethal
reductiveness of life. Dickens's characterization is not of a mimetic but of a hermeneutic,
interpretational nature. In l953 Dorothy Van Ghent resumed Bagehot's criticism into a
more markedly historical (i.e. construing the individual as the product of the
environment) approach: The English Novel: Form and Function. She comments on
Dickens's strange process of interchange in which objects in the material world acquire
a malicious and unnatural vitality, while human beings are reduced to the condition of
inert objects or endlessly repeated mechanical processes. Dickens's art is viewed as a
direct response to the processes of nineteenth-century reification, or the reduction of
processes to things: People were becoming things (the things that money can buy or
that are the means for making money, or for exalting prestige in the abstract…were
becoming deanimated, robbed of their souls, and things were usurping the prerogatives
of animated creatures [13]. The thwarted and distorting patterns of life bear on the
patterns of fictional characterization. Dickens's are no longer rounded characters but
abstracted and enlarged incidental characteristics. The cultural critique demanded by
Arnold materializes into the structural artifice requested later by Henry James: an
aesthetic isomorphism.

In our opinion, what really changes in Dickens is a new phenomenology of

perception. The romantic consensus of experience between self and world brings the
two realms together ensuring their communication, while allowing them to keep their
separate identities – idem, selfhood. With Dickens, this selfhood dissolves. In his
mature novels, we witness a process of what Merleau-Ponty calls “the becoming-nature
of man... the becoming-man of nature” [14]. It is not a nineteenth-century industrial
reality that modifies the idea of selfhood but a new outlook on the interpretational nature
of the human body. Dickens's character is a decentred subjectivity, an embodied
interpreter. Things have become correlative to his body, perceived with his body.
The perceptual world is “laid-out” by an encoding body schema. Things are no longer a
meaning for the understanding but a structure to be perceived by the body. Victorian
society is mapped as a prison, school, as a taming game, the need for evasion, as an
illusionary circus.

References:

[1] Dickens and Other Victorians, Essays in Honour of Philip Collins, Edited by Joanne Shatock,
Macmillan, 1988

[2] Marilyn Thomas Faulkenburg, Church, City and Labyrinth in Brontë, Dickens, Hardy, and Butor,
Peter Lang, 1993.

[3] Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians, Cambridge University Press, 1995

[4] Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Great Books of the Western World, Encyclopaedia
Britannica, Inc., The University of Chicago, 1952, p. 269.

[5] I. Kant, Op. cit., p. 257

[6] G.D. Klingopulos, in The Pelican Guide to English Literature, 6. From Dickens to Hardy, Penguin
Books, 1982, p. 62

[7] Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, Linguistics and the Study of Literature, Cornell University
Press, 1975.

[8] Marion Shaw, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988, p. 16.

[9] Ibidem.

[10] Jacques Lacan, Écrits, I, Editions du Seuil, 1971, pp. 125-135.

[11] Christopher Ricks, Alfred Tennyson, Second Edition, Macmillan 1989.

[12] Elaine Jordan, Alfred Tennyson, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

[13] Dorothy Van Ghent apud Steven Connor (editor), Charles Dickens, Longman Critical Readers, 1996.

[14] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Physiology of Perception, VI..

 When Dickens published his Dombey and Son (1846-8), he had already come to
an understanding of character not as one who wanders through the world but one who
perceives the world from a certain, limited perspective, and develops a language
capable to render it.

Dombey can only look at the world – whether it be his family or the entire cosmos
– though the perspective of his prosperous economic enterprise. This is his sole
constitutive frame. He needs a son to carry it on; a daughter is simply useless in a man-
made world. The discourse in which he is inscribed is obviously not that of an objective
narrator but a form of free indirect speech. It is Dombey's discourse in the third person:
“He will be christened Paul, my – Mrs. Dombey – of course. Dom-bey and son”. Those
three words (i.e. for son, father and grandfather) conveyed the idea of Mr. Dombey's
life. The earth was made for Dombey and son to trade in, the sun and moon were made
to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their enterprise; stars and
planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the
centre. Common abbreviations took new meanings in his eyes, and sole reference to
them. A.D. had no concern with anno domini, but stood for anno Dombey and Son. He
had risen, as his father had done before him, in the course of life and death, from Son
to Dombey, and for nearly twenty years had been sole representative of the firm. In this
world, Florence, his neglected daughter, is a victim, yet her perceptual frame is provided
by the pair of glasses a bourgeois education has superimposed upon her natural sight:
the blue coat and stiff white cravat, which, with a pair of creaking boots and a very loud
ticking watch, embodied her idea of a father. Dombey's firm is to him all time and space.
It is centred on the “son” like the planets revolving round the “sun”; it is measured by the
“loud ticking” of his watch which, in the silence of his sick son's room seemed to be
running a race. That race is going to be lost. Dombey has invested in chronological
time: in the biological chain leading from grandfather to father and to son. Doomed be
such misplaced trust! For his Paul will turn out to be the missing link that makes the
whole enterprise pointless. There is another constitutive frame for time in the novel: time
measured by the offspring not of the flesh but of the mind, i.e. the marine chronometers
of Solomon (suggestively abbreviated to “Sol”, “sun”) Gills, which will never fail their
creator (it is on Gills money that Florence rebuilds the firm): The stock in trade of Sol
Gills comprised chronometers, barometers, telescopes, compasses, charts, maps,
sextants, quadrants and specimens of every kind of instrument used in the working of a
ship's course, or the keeping of a ship's reckoning, or the prosecuting of a ship's
discoveries... the shop itself seemed almost to become a snug, sea-going, ship-shape
concern, wanting only good sea-rooms, in the event of an unexpected launch, to work
its way securely to any desert island in the world. Dombey envies the course of nature
so much that he wants to displace the mother in the breeding of Paul: my Paul, Mrs.
Dombey. Sol Gills's “snug” of artefacts is meant to “shape”, chart and steer man's
course into the empire of nature, to lay it out, to cut intelligible “sea-rooms” into the
oceanic Leviathan of life. Time is vanquished by being spatialized: from devouring
Chronos, it is made into an enduring empire of civilization. Nature is turned to desert
and man takes over, colonizing it, building himself a shelter within it.
 Recent approaches to David Copperfield (1849-5o) undertake to show the way in
which Dickens transforms the romantic convention of the Bildungsroman. In fact, what
Simon Edwards does in David Copperfield: The Decomposing Self [15] is to explore,
from a new historicist perspective, Cwendolyn B. Needham's conclusion in an l954
article [16] that the novel is the story of the disciplining of David's undisciplined heart. In
tracing the development of the hero from childhood into adulthood, through a troubled
quest of identity, Edwards identifies the shift from the self-constructed individualism
associated with romanticism to Victorian discipline and restraint. The old selfhood is
decomposed and a new self is constructed, a new species of bourgeois individual for a
new society. If we read the novel carefully, all we can say is that Dickens does not
depart from the Kantian ethos, which seems to have had such a powerful hold on the
Victorian intelligentsia. The boy's education, from the moment he is dressed up in adult
clothes, is meant to bring him up in such a way as to become a fine fellow, with a will of
his own and with a strength of character that is not influenced, except on good reason,
by anybody or anything. In his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant says just as much:
summum bonum is the autonomous will recognizing its duties as a universal
legislation, not as sanctions, that is to say arbitrary ordinances of a foreign will and
contingent in themselves, but as essential laws of every free will in itself [17]. If
psychoanalysts set out from the loss a child feels on its separation from the mother's
body, which is indeed the primary scene of David's autobiography, Dickens points to the
more genuine break in the formation of his protagonist as that between his manly,
mature will and his mother's weak will and submissive self, with disastrous effects upon
the child. The first person narrative allows the reader to watch from the inside the
orphaned hero-narrator's progress from the trustworthy child to the disillusioned
adolescent who has learned what cruelty and villainy under unsuspected masks may
accomplish, and from here to the mature man who passes from false friends and false
love to the mutually shared spiritual bond of affined minds in marriage and abiding
friendship. He settles down to begin his career as a professional writer (see Mary
Poovey, The Man-of-Letters Hero: David Copperfied and the Professional Writer in John
Peck (editor) New Casebooks. David Copperfield and Hard Times, Op. cit.), finding in
his second wife, Agnes Wickfield, that spiritual guide pointing upward, to the stars that
bear witness to Kant's categorical imperative. It is this self-possession and self-
governance that can show the way out of the Victorian prison-world. It had been his
weak temper, inherited from his mother and from his ineffectual dead father, that had
yielded to his stepfather's tyranny, or which had allowed himself to be thwarted by Jane
Murdstone's harshness, or by the cruel taming strategies at school, pressing on him the
conviction that he is a dog that bites; it had been his weakness again that had
responded to the bullying arrogant James Steerforth, the spoiled wealthy youth, whose
temper is forever imprinted in his worshipping victim's scar. And now it is Agnes's finger
pointing upwards that urges him to transpose the actual events of his life into the
immortal heaven of the text.

Organic images of natural growth – Sowing, Reaping, Garnering – organize

Dickens's criticism of the inhuman, mechanical system of education in Victorian
England, as chapters of a book he most appropriately dedicated to Thomas Carlyle, the
fiercest antagonist of man grown mechanical in mind: Hard Times, 1854.
 The historical reality behind the grotesque picture of Victorian schooling, which
forced the plastic human being into an iron mould is reconstructed by David Craig in his
Introduction to the Penguin edition of Hard Times: At the Manchester Lancasterian
School, a thousand children were taught in one huge room controlled by a kind of
military drill with monitors and a monitor-general and by methods derived from the
catechism, squashing the children's urge to find out or understand anything by
themselves. Groups of facts were mechanically classified. Lancaster worked out an
elaborate code of rewards and punishments among which was the log – a piece of
wood fixed to the neck of the child, handcuffs, pillory, stocks, the cage (a sack or basket
in which offenders were suspended from the ceiling). The school practically embodied
the industrial image of the society as a whole: that of machinery that runs itself.

In Hard Times, children are denied any imaginative gratification, play, the circus,
the reading of fiction, being stuffed with knowledge of stark facts. Gradgrind teaches his
doctrine of Utilitarianism at school and applies it at home. Both school and house are
correlative to his body: the former are anthropomorphised, the latter is unnaturally
petrified, externalised into a building structure:

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the
speaker's forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with
a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square
wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found
commodious cellarage in two dark caves overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was
helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was
helped by the speaker's hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation
of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of
a plum tree, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored
inside.

..........................

A great square house, with a heavy portico darkening the principal windows, as its
master's heavy brows over-shadowed his eyes... A lawn and garden and an infant
avenue, all ruled straight like a botanical account-book.

Gradgrind's “infants”, Louisa and Tom, whom their father gratifies with the fondling
labels of “pets” and “reasoning animals”, drawing on Darwin's Theory of Species, have
been taught never to “wonder”, to lay aside Defoe and Goldsmith for the sake of Euclid
and Cocker, and to choose a fiancée on the demographic-economic principles laid
down by Adam Smith and Malthus. The grains “garnered” by Gradgrind are a delinquent
son and a daughter wasting her life in a loveless marriage, both of them completely
alienated from their father.

But there is more at stake in Dickens's critique of Utilitarianism than a cautionary

story about mid-Victorian industrial society dominated by materialism, acquisitiveness
and ruthless competitive capitalist economics[18]. The author is concerned with the all-
time relevance of art: the construction of man's “home” in the midst of nature, what Rilke
calls, in his Duineser Elegien, “a world of our own”, speaking to man. Louisa complains
that she cannot make her brother feel at home as she has not been trained in any art,
nor has she read amusing books: I can't reconcile you to home – can't talk to you so as
to lighten your mind, play to you or sing to you... Feelings harden and freeze in an
accountant-book of facts. Here is the reified courtship of the elderly banker Bounderby
to the tender Louisa: Love was made on such occasions in the form of bracelets; and
on all occasions during the period of betrothal, took a manufacturing aspect. Dresses
were made, jewellery was made, cakes and gloves were made, settlements were
made, and an excessive assortment of facts did appropriate honour to the contract. The
business was all fact from first to last.

Carrying the stamp of evil – the serpents of smoke never getting uncoiled, which
are trailing out of the black chimneys in a town of machinery – Coketown condemns its
citizens to long and monotonous work. The repetition of symbolic images (incoate
symbols) throughout the text is compared by the author to a musical device (striking the
key-note). In fact, the imagery is structured into binary oppositions: facts and
imagination, positivist education and the circus, nature and machinery, science and the
humanities etc., even clashing social roles (parent and child, teacher and pupil,
husband and wife). The same object of observation, a horse, is constituted as a living
pet by Cecilia Jupe and as quadruped graminivorous by a pupil stuffed with Gradgrind's
“facts”. Even the stylistic register is not the same throughout. Roger Fowler, in
Monologic and Polyphonic of Dialogic Fiction [19] applies on Hard Times the Bakhtian
grid Roger D. Sell uses for Dombey and Son („Dickens and the New Historicism: The
Polyvocal Audience and Discourse of Dombey and Son”, in The Twentieth Century
British Novel, edited by Jeremy Hawthorn, Edward Arnold, l986). In the manner of
Raymond Williams, he identifies on the one hand voices and points of view of the
establishment and, on the other, those which challenge their validity. Gradgrind is an
utilitarianist, Slackbridge talks like a union demagogue, while Sleary's incoherent
discourse is that of a comic drunk, living outside the restraints of society, as the circus
master, and consequently lacking some precise social identity. Let us add the language
of juveniles and lyrics for children („Twinkle, twinkle, little star”), which form a dyadic pair
with the grown-ups language of economy and finances.

What more is there in a name, according to Dickens? In his late novels, the
discourses of a culture are the very shaping force of human personality. As Pip (Great
Expectations, 1860-1) is crouching over his parents' tomb in the cemetery, reading their
names and trying to infer what they might have looked like from the shapes of the
letters, he is assaulted by the escaped convict, and symbolically introduced into a
prison-world. His “great expectations” are fictions which reality keeps frustrating and
contradicting. Unawaringly, he is assimilated by the dominant ideology, internalising
society's language of repression. He cannot feel affection for the man who worked hard
in Australia so that he could study and become a gentleman. He too frustrates the
convict's “great expectation”, that he should feel a bit grateful for his success in that
same society which had hunted Magwitch down. Unable to recognize in Magwitch a
victim like himself, he assumes the general view of the convict as a monster, comparing
himself to a Frankenstein who is paradoxically created by his own creature. He feels
ashamed of having such a benefactor and regards his former acquaintance as a “taint”.
Magwitch has foolishly wasted his money, for it is as a consequence of the
institutionalized education he has made accessible to Pip that his “adopted” son rejects
him. Society reinforces its ideological codes through education, creating in Pip a second
nature, which suppresses that humane inclination of the child who fed his friend in need.
Brought up in the fiction of Miss Havisham's frustrated wedding, in hate of males and
seclusion from mankind, Estella does not survive emotionally the gratification of the old
lady's “great expectations” of revenge. The characters see themselves caught up in a
network of relationships governed not by biological ties (which are obliterated) but by a
cultural alphabet. They are the products of fictions, hierarchies of values, prejudices,
ideologies, and, not least, by other characters' narratives of their own lives. The “I
narrative” no longer communicates the only “truth” about the character. The reader
understands more about Pip than he is conscious of. If the name of the father tells
nothing about his physical body, the discourses of power can father the consciousness
replicating it. The individual is an ideological clone.

Why should the Brontë sisters be blamed for their reliance upon the old
convention of the heroic romance, occasionally spiced with ingredients of the gothic
school, when even the titles that ran in print by the end of the sixties betray the taste for
sensationalism still associated with the idea of woomanhood: “Women of Beauty and
Heroism” (1859), “Women of Worth” (1859), “Heroines of our Time” (1860)? The only
susbstantial change was the liberalization of the empire of “worth and heroism” by
allowing the female representatives of the middle class to walk in. The whole sham talk
of the work idyll and the conventional, outward bourgeois pieties is heard in The
Eclectic Review of 1857, which sketches the biography of Charlotte Brontë/ Jane Eyre,
in the manner of the Hudson self-made man: Everything was against her through life –
plainness of person, poverty, a solitude and sensitiveness of soul that no one could
appreciate... Yet she nobly struggled on – her watchword DUTY, and her reliance
HEAVEN.

Harriet Martineau, in the Westminster Review, 68, 1879, sees the authoress as the
modern version of the saints and martyrs of the Middle Ages, who earned herself a
better title than many a St. Catherine and St. Bridges for the moral battle of life fought
outward and nobly one. A contemporary critic, Robert B. Heilman, ascribes her novels,
charged with irregularities and lack of verisimilitude, a motivation at the other end from
such Victorian moralizing assumptions: the function of Gothic (is) to open horizons
beyond social patterns, rational decisions, and institutionally approved emotions; in a
word to enlarge the sense of reality and its impact on the human being. It
acknowledged the nonrational; – in the world of things and events, occasionally in the
realm of the transcendental, ultimately and most persistently in the depth of the human
being [20].

The two facets to Charlotte Brontë's personality (1816-1855) did not, in fact,
escape detection by her contemporaries, either, who vacillated between the rejection of
her novel, The Professor (1847) as an immoral, unchristen book, not to be given to the
young, and her “canonization” ten years later. Had mentalities changed, or is her work
an admixture at the same time enforcing and subverting the ideology of her time? She
was obviously aware of thinking differently in a world where discourse making was a
male affair, and yet that she had to create a personal medium of literary expression if
she was to remain true to herself. Although the conviction that authoresses are likely to
be looked on with prejudice (Preface to Wuthering Heights) determined the three sisters
to publish their books under pseudonyms, she decided to remain “on her ground”,
dealing with the woman problem, even if, consequently, there was going to be a want of
distinctness and impressiveness in her heroes (as she confesses in a letter).

Catherine Malone, in The Critical Reception of Brontë's “Professor” [21], draws a

very interesting parallel between two gender-conscious characters: Lucy Snowe in
Villete, and Crimsworth, in The Professor. Crimsworth shows the confident ease of
being a man in a man's world, experiencing a sense of exhilaration on his first day on
the Continent. He is a free independent traveller, possessed not only of male but also
imperial confidence, enjoying for instance the fact that a gentleman approaches him at
breakfast, addressing him in very good English. The male Englishman felt home
wherever he went. Unlike Crimsworth, Lucy is the one supposed to obey the rules
dictated by the other half of mankind, and, therefore, wherever she goes, she carries
with her a schoolgirl’s anxiety about doing the right thing, and the inescapable feeling of
remaining an outsider: On entering the coffee-room, I trembled somewhat; felt
uncertain, solitary, wretched. Wished to heaven I knew whether I was doing right or
wrong, Could see the people breakfasting at the tables – they were all men.

Malone's insightful approach anatomises Crimsworth's inconsistent ego, the

manifestations of a contradictory personality, which is probably a reflex of the divided
mind of the age. There was talk about women's emancipation at the time, but deeply
inbred were age-old prejudices about women's inferiority and subservient role in
marriage. Before marriage, Crimsworth entertains fine ideas about a woman's worth: he
is not to marry a doll or a fool, no matter how beautiful, a woman lacking a will of her
own, a lump of wax and wood... a half idiot clasped in his arms. After marriage he finds
it difficult to reconcile himself to the idea of his wife having a professional life of her own.
He would rather see her reduced to one of those sources of refreshment and comfort to
the sanctuary of home, with himself nothing less than Providence or God: there is
something flattering to man's strength, something consonant to his honourable pride in
the idea of becoming the Providence of what he loves – feeding and clothing it, as God
does the lilies of the field. Or, at the very least, be that powerful influencer controlling
her entire emotional life: kindle bliss, infuse awe, stir delight, rouse sparkling spirit, and
sometimes waken pleasurable dread. God had not done less for Adam, the lump of
clay....

A question which has never been asked, yet is suggested by the new interest in
the symbolical patterning of the Victorian novel imagery, concerns the function of the
Gothic in relation to the theme of the novels. Gothic elements, we notice, are not there
for real, but rather in the way of mocking make-believe; they are associated with
Rochester rather than with Jane Eyre, with the older generation of Wuthering Heights,
not with the man from the city, who divides the inhabitants of the Heights into
misanthropists and clowns. The Brontës seem to produce a Gothic spectre of imagery
for the old medieval “pasha” mentality of males with regard to their female companions.
Rather than a drawback, the Gothic would prove a structural device, contributing to the
overall meaning of the novels.

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë has cast the sex battle into a cultural conflict of two
typecast heroes: the Byronic hero with a past and the Victorian culture heroine with a
“vision”. Modern vision eventually conquers the patriarchal past. Unlike romantic
heroines, Jane lacks charm, beauty and grace, while excelling in intelligence, resolution,
firmness of character, courage to challenge social prejudices and barriers. The
bildungsstory is not so much one of spiritual growth and maturation, or an identity quest,
but a test case. A sequence of trials in which the heroine baffles male authority –
beginning with the spoilt little John, who knocks her to the door, continuing with Mr.
Brocklehurst’s taming school, and with the authoritarian lord of Thornfield, and ending
with St. John Rivers, the typical Victorian religious man, pursuing a missionary career in
a rationalistic way – lays bare a woman's plight in society and family life from childhood
to maturity. Jane refuses each time to submit, fighting back as a child, resisting
Rochester's prerogatives of sex and rank in his proposition of marriage, and imposing
her vision as a married woman. If we do not come to see Copperfield engaging with the
practical issues of a “professional writer's” career, we see Jane training for a profession
and practicing it, making a living as an well-educated governess and a skilled mistress
in a school. Jane chooses intellectual refinement for a target in life, and rather than
scale the social hierarchy, like Becky Sharp, she endeavours to correct the existing
hierarchy of values, the presumptuous assumptions of the Ingram-Ashton party about
the superiority of rank and wealth, as well as the womanish inclinations towards luxury
and coquetry (the French heritage!...) in her pupil, Adele. Her dissent, therefore, is not a
disguised form of compliance, but an earnest challenge to the Victorian patriarchal
ideas. She chooses to be herself part of the social mechanism rather than a shadowy
assistance to a forefronting male figure. Mr. Rochester proposes to Jane at a time when
she has found out about his mad wife locked up in the attic, and is surprised to see her
reject an unlawful bond with a determination uncommon in a woman of inferior social
position. Jane's flight from Thornfield takes her to the household of another domineering
male character, Reverend St. John Rivers. If Rochester is medieval in locking up wives
and in his readiness to possess them irrespective of their consent, Rivers is as medieval
in his craving for some all-absorbing missionary work, demanding of him the sacrifice of
a loveless marriage. He does not love Jane, but he finds her morally qualified for his
religious mission. Jane, however, will not allow herself to be carried off to some distant
land for the salvation of pagan souls, being of a more earthly mould and motivation.
What she aims at and finally achieves is by far more ambitious than Becky ever got
through her murderous schemes. She is ahead of her time in wishing to become her
husband’s vision – not only in the literal sense that she assists Rochester who has gone
almost completely blind as a consequence of the fire set by his first wife, but also in a
metaphorical sense: the triumph of a woman's mode of vision and world outlook over
the male point of view.
 The Gothic elements are crowding around Rochester: the presence of the
mysterious woman locked up in the attic, the fortune-telling scene, Rochester's disguise
as a mysterious and ominous gipsy, prophetic dreams, the storm and the fire that purge
the Thornfield castle of hidden guilt, coincidences (the arrival of Bertha's brother in time
to prevent the marriage), divinations (Rochester's call reaching Jane a long way off).
Rochester's mind, like that of a misogynist patriarch, demonising woman, is breeding a
whole medieval pageant. He sees in the self-possessed and positivistic Jane an “elf”, a
“changeling”, a “witch”. Lacking Dickens's genius for structural imagery, Charlotte
Brontë has a taste (and gift) for imagery which is symbolic of a state of mind – a feature
she shares with other Victorian novelists: Emily Brontë, Stevenson or Meredith. The
image of a summer landscape invaded by an icy winter is Jane's objective correlative
for her shattered marriage plans. In his essay, Fire and Eyre: Charlotte Brontë's War of
Earthly Elements (Op. cit.), David Lodge makes an interesting remark about a sort of
“movable” symbols in Jane Eyre. Fire, for instance, may symbolize domestic comfort,
shelter, socializing (see the image of the hearth drawing together the Rivers,
contemplated through the window by the exhausted Jane, who has run away from
Thornfield), but it may also suggest the consuming fires of hell (the conflagration at
Thornfield caused by Bertha). Such ambiguous, conflicting, rather than polarized
imagery offers one more textual support to Richard Chase's reading of the novel in The
Brontës or Myth Domesticated[22]. Jane is a nineteenth-century “culture heroine”, who
enforces an orderly and democratic way of life after the spirit of the masculine universe
is controlled and extinguished (...) The purpose of the Brontë culture heroine is to
transform primeval society into a humane and nobler order of civilization (...) Our Brontë
culture heroine then is the human protagonist of the cosmic drama. Rochester and
Heathcliff are portrayed as being at once godlike and satanic. In them the universal
enemies may be set at war by a culture heroine. Then, if the devil is overcome, a higher
state of society will have been achieved.

However, the conflict in Jane Eyre, as well as in Wuthering Heights, to which we

are going next, seems to us significantly different from the cosmic drama, characteristic
of the pre-modern age. The clash triggering the plot in the two novels is one between
cultural frames, and was characteristic of mid-Victorian England. Rochester, who is
merely comic in his spookish disguises and talk, makes no demon but merely a
patriarch tamed by a feminist of the Brontëan school.

The conflict between nature and civilization organizes the structure of a novel
unique in English literature: Wuthering Heights published by Emily Brontë (1818-1848)
in 1847 under the pseudonym “Ellis Bell”. It is one of those enigmatic works which
entice and baffle interpretation, its fundamental ambiguity being a result of a narrative
convention that was an innovation. The unreliable narrator is a profoundly sceptical
device, bespeaking the very spirit of the age.

The story is told by a placid visitor from the civilized world, Mr. Lockwood, who is
vainly trying to figure out for himself the strange humanity he encounters in the bleak
countryside of Wuthering Heights. Bullied around by everybody, besieged by
nightmares and hunted by dogs, he would like to carry one of those “misanthropists and
clowns” into the stirring atmosphere of the town: the beautiful and young Catherine. In
this he could not be more mistaken than in his poor guess-work about her legal status in
the house, for the city world could not have satisfied the lady's longing for the Fairy
Cave and the Goblin-Hunter... Embedded in his narrative is the story of the
housekeeper, Nelly Dean, referring him to the events preceding his coming as a tenant
to Thrushcross Grange, owned now by the same Heathcliff, the master of Wuthering
Heights. How much can Nelly be trusted? At some time in the story, she admits to
having held back the information about old Catherine's sickness, on an impression that
she was acting, which proves wrong. Her fatal mistake is symptomatic of her narrow-
mindedness and false opinions. As a result, the reader is left to make his own
inferences about the extraordinary characters whose violent wills clash from the
beginning to the end of the story.

Forced by a storm to stay overnight in the house of his gloomy and savage
landlord, Lockwood has a strange dream, probably induced by his reading the diary of a
certain Catherine before falling asleep. It seems his fingers feel the touch of an ice-cold
hand and he hears the voice of a child saying she is Catherine Linton. Her hand is
forcing its way through the casement, but Mr Lockwood rubs it savagely against the
broken glass. Why should a civilized man from the city, who has come to pay a formal
call upon his landlord, be capable of such cruelty? Thrushcross Grange, as the seat of
good breeding, fine manners, and social enjoyment of the arts, and Wuthering Heights,
as the windy seat inviting the upsurge („heathcliff”) of untamed, pagan, demonic nature,
are set in polarity from the very beginning. Spiritus loci is so strong that, by merely
crossing from one place to another, the visitor seems to be transformed accordingly.

The Earnshaw household at Wuthering Heights had been a prosperous and

peaceful household, owned by an old family, before Heathcliff came in. Mr. Earnshaw
had brought this foundling after a trip to Liverpool, but the story went that he had found
the little gipsy lost in the moorland, maybe by the devil himself. The little boy is bullied
by Mr. Earnshaw's son, Hindley, whose haughty and cruel behaviour breeds in
Heathcliff a desire for revenge. Hindley's sister, Catherine, takes to him, and they
become inseparable, wandering in their own world of moorlands, haunted by popular
superstitions. One day they reach the neighbouring Thrushcross Grange, peering, like
two wild gipsies, through the windows at the classy parlour, flooded by light and filled
with music. The Linton children are having a party, and envious Catherine gets by
accident an opportunity to spend a time in their household. The primitive Heathcliff is
immune to the spell of the Grange, but Catherine is torn between conflicting drives: the
crude sensitivity, unsophisticated affections, and imaginative nature of Heathcliff, on the
one hand, the polished manners, established order and social eminence of the Lintons
on the other. Is she not a complete human being, at the same time nature and culture,
body and soul ? Back to the Heights, she confesses to Nelly, without knowing that
Heathcliff is eavesdropping on their conversation, that marrying Heathcliff would
degrade her. She chooses the enclosure of civilization: nature is here suppressed
(„thrushcross”), domesticated (trees are trimmed, dogs are tamed). Heathcliff runs away
and returns as a rich man, only to find Catherine married off to Linton. Catherine
rediscovers she owns too much in common with Heathcliff to be completely assimilated
by the Linton world. In her final agony, she complains of her prison-life, asking Nelly to
open the window for her, so that she might see the light up at the Heights.

She no longer recognizes her face in the mirror, her alienation being complete.
The significant and odd detail that she haunts Lockwood as a child while giving her
name as a married woman, is symbolical of her fatal frustration on leaving the Heights:
the child in her had never gone to the Grange. She had suppressed a side of her
personality which had afterwards caused the great psychic disturbances leading to her
untimely death.

In her essay, The Shattered Prison: Versions of Eden in “Wuthering Heights”,

Marjorie Burns [23] mythifies the polarity of the two sites of the action, lost in a sort of
“Nowhere”: Although Thrushcross Grange, with its walled park and cultivated fruit trees
(most probably the apple tree traditionally associated with the fall) is an easy parallel to
Eden, the rough and pandemonic Heights also has its Edenic side. Only here can the
bonding of Catherine and Heathcliff flourish, a bonding which is destroyed when the
Grange and its mannered society come in touch with their energetic and idiosyncretic
world. This does not mean, however, that we should read Wuthering Heights as a
simple reversal, as a variation on Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with its
idealized devils and its dissatisfying angels. Though there is clearly something of an
inversion in Emily Brontë's depiction of these two households (the violent has its loyalty
and innocence, the peaceful, its imperfections and falsity), the entrance of Edgar into
the Heights is no less disruptive than Heathclif's entrance into the Grange). Both men
serve as tempters in each other's realms. Edgar, with an offer of order and civility that
has no place in the restless world of Wuthering Heights, and Heathcliff (more clearly a
serpent figure) with unhampered energy and vengeful intent, scaling the walls of the
Linton Park.
 One of the latest readings of the novel is that published by Patsy Stoneman in The
Review of English Studies, Nov. l996: Catherine Earnshaw's Journey to Her Home
Among the Dead: Fresh Thoughts on “Wuthering Heights” and “Epipsychidion”. The
writer traces the influence of Shelley's concept of love as a union of “twinn’d souls” upon
Emily Brontë's representation of the Catherine-Heathcliff love relationship. She also
quotes two other works that might throw light upon the subject. Juliet Mitchell, in
Women: The Longest Revolution, distinguishes between two forms of love: that which
does not have a sexual object that is ultimately different from itself, leading to the
triumph of death over life, and legitimate or married love, which is the triumph of
sexuality over death, of the species over the individual. Heathcliff declares he cannot
live without Catherine who is his soul, while Catherine confesses to a similar sense of
complete identification with Heathcliff: I am Heathcliff. But this is an ontologic
impossibility: one cannot, in the empirical world, be both oneself and other. The elision
of their bodies ensures their reunion after death as ghosts, in that undifferentiated
empire of Shelley's Epipsychidion ( the word meaning “Over Soul” or “soul outside the
soul”, the romantics' universal spirit). The other book, by Denis de Rougemont, Love in
the Western World, mentions another European myth – that of Tristan and Isolde, of
adultery, of adversarial assumptions, providing codes of conduct and interpretation for
triangular love-relationships. The ethic of revenge in this latter cultural archetype
(opposed to the romantic myth of “mirror-consciousness”) would account for Heathcliff's
behaviour after his return as a rich upstart. Catherine finds, like Shelley, in love with his
wife and Emilia Viviani, that “to divide is not to take away”. She can be Edgar Linton's
wife, which ensures her social standing at the top in the neighbourly society, and enjoy
Heathcliff's company, in her need for an affined spiritual companionship. Linton,
following the “proprietorial logic of either or” (De Rougemont, Op. cit.) finds she has no
moral sense, while Heathcliff elopes with his sister, Isabella, possessing himself of what
is Linton's in order to make it even on him...

Although tantalising, these interpretations leave out an essential aspect of the

novel: its distancing devices and structural parallelism. There is not just one but two
love stories, reflecting upon each other. Heathcliff avenges himself on Hindley, by
robbing him of all his possessions. But his real triumph, as he confesses, is the
transformation of Hindley's son, Hareton, into a more primitive creature than Heathcliff
had ever been. Hareton is denied access to education; he is illiterate and rude, since
Heathcliff has taught him to scorn everything extra-animal as silly and weak. Catherine's
daughter is faced with the same choice as her mother. She is forced by Heathcliff into
marrying his sickly boy by Isabella, who has received an education but lacks humane
feelings and imagination. It is young Linton rather than Hareton who makes the better
Caliban. Books have not instilled in this pampered boy any higher ideal than to lie from
morning till evening on a bank of heath, the bees humming dreamily about among the
bloom. Hareton, like Heathcliff before him, opens to young Cathy the world her mother
had cherished: Peniston Crag, the Fairy Cave, the Goblin-Hunter... He also protects her
against Heathcliff's rough temper and vengeful hate, risking his own position in the
house. The widowed Catherine will not repeat her mother's mistake. She responds to
Hareton's natural goodness, opening a world of culture to him: teaching him how to
read. First of all, the name of his family on the front of the house, wakening him up to
his former dignity, to a memory of his family and an awareness of his identity, which are
only possible through language. If the “mirror-consciousness” of Epiypsychidion is a
satisfactory background for the Heathcliff love story, its correlative and happy resolution
would rather, we think, find a more proper point of reference in another work by Shelley,
The Witch of Atlas. In it, a Witch with yellow curls makes for herself a companion,
Hermaphroditus, with whom she opposes all despotic institutions, monarchies, and
religion. Young Cathy is often called “accursed witch” by Heathcliff, who is only
prevented by Hareton from pulling at her golden locks. His irrational hate is occasionally
suppressed by the sight of their faces that look so much alike, both resembling old
Catherine’s. They build together a Hermaphrodites figure, Cathy finding in him an ally
against Heathcliff's tyranny, and “creating” him as a socialized human being. She even
defies Heathcliff, threatening with turning Hareton against him. After three days of
deliberate starvation, with the intent of being reunited with Catherine, Heathcliff passes
serenely into the world of shadows. Reports are heard of the two ghosts haunting the
wilderness they had shared in childhood. Romantic Narcissistic love (love of other in
oneself) ends up in physical annihilation. Young Cathy has no more reasons of feeling
ashamed and degraded by Hareton. Nor does he reject her world of learning and
improvement. Reading, as Nelly perceives on watching them, had brightened his
features, and added spirit and nobility to their aspect. As they are sitting side by side,
Nelly can see two radiant countenances bent over the page of the accepted book (...)
the treaty had been ratified on both sides: and the enemies were henceforth sworn
allies. It is culture that appeases conflicts and builds bridges, that ratifies a common
space, where nature is reconciled to the spirit, where the spirit beholds and loves
itself in an otherness. More than a happy solution to an old story, Emily Brontë's novel
is a hypothesis on the phenomenology of culture.

Nineteenth-Century Phenomenology
 The economic crisis affecting England in the mid-seventies had its spiritual
correlative. The mirror of Victorian consciousness had cracked from side to side: no
unifying sophia or central narrative was any longer allowed to coalesce at the
crossroads of centripetal and centrifugal tendencies manifesting themselves on the
intellectual battlefield. The myriad arguments about the self, the world and their
relationships could be summed up as the confrontation between Hegel's Monists and
the pragmatist Pluralists, between all-inclusive systems and various empiricisms.
However, the construction of a constitutive frame for any historical situation cannot
afford a similar heterogeneity. Our approach of the later half of the nineteenth century is
an attempt to trace the Victorian worlds, floating each on its separate island, back to an
epistemological continent. It proves legitimate, as the interrelationships between
literature and society, which have been absolutized by traditional Victorian criticism,
have lately been revealed as only of an importance ranking second to the writers'
dialogue with the other discourses of the time: philosophical, religious, aesthetic,
scientific.

To Graham Hough, the expert anatomist of The Last Romantics [24], it seems that
the new ideas about the arts and their relations to religion and the social order (...)
seem to originate somewhere in the dense jungle of Ruskin's works. But this is as much
as to say that some of the mid-Victorians had already developed an awareness of living
in a post-Kantian world, concerned with the status of the experiencing subject, with
problems of representation (the way in which the self builds constitutive frames of the
world and of himself – the Einbildungskraft), of fiction and language.

The decay of belief under the siege of scientific discoveries had led to a redirecting
of the dialogue man had conducted with God towards “the dialogue of the mind with
itself“ (Schlegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Arnold: Preface of the 1853 edition of
Poems, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, Ch. 1 of Essays in Criticism,
First Series). Identity was no longer an issue of God making man but of man's self-
fashioning (Kant: wie Mensch macht sich selbst – Anthropologie, 1800). In mid-century,
George Eliot undertook to translate two fundamental works in this process of Victorian
re-fashioning. One of them was David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus, which
challenged the metaphysical relevance of the Gospels, scaling down the figure of Jesus
from the incarnated God to a hypothetical historical personage, leading an exemplary
moral life. The other book was Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, which
replaces metaphysical thinking by anthropology. Miracles had merely been
historical expressions of man's desires, mentally conceived possibilities, which passed
for a reality at some particular time. Universal truths and metaphysical beliefs dissolve
into provisional belief systems, unstable series of representations. Facts are defined as
wishes that project themselves as reality. The conceptual frameworks of culture change
in time, because they have no permanent, inherent ground in outward reality, but they
are also shared by the entire community, because man's perspectives are conditioned
and constituted by hermeneutical and social backgrounds: Man is himself at once I and
Thou, for he can put himself in the place of another, for this reason that to him his
species, his essential nature and not merely his individuality is an object of thought. This
opinion of Feuerbach's is quoted by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth in her essay, The
Observed of all Observers: George Eliot's Narrator and Shakespeare's Audience [25],
as an epistemological explanation for the emergence of the omniscient, objective,
extradiegetic narrator, representing collective consciousness, intersubjectivity. The
historical representation of temporality – no longer cyclic or monumental time, with a
millennial or anagogic end – implies a continuous process of negotiations between self
and society. The narrator, lacking individual identity, provides hermeneutic,
interpretational frames for characters, performing a zigzag between locale and
generalizations, between particular and meaning. Individual characters are cast into
typological contexts, the tensions are revealed establishing between the private
leanings of the empirical self (Kant's “moralisches egoist” in the Anthropologie, welche
alle Zwecke auf sich selbst einschränkt, i.e. who lives in the narrow sphere of his
personal leanings and purposes), and the impositions of the social self or collective
consciousness (the others' perspectives, exceeding that of the self, of which one
becomes aware through social intercourse). The mind advances from “phenomenalism”,
that is from perceptions of different phenomena, when it feels lost among things, as if
wrecked on an uninhabited island, towards phenomenology, that is the perception of
order, of “laws”, which are in fact its own creation, its constitutive frames through which
the world is appropriated as familiar, as homely. Here is a mid-century discourse, with
an unmistakeably Kantian ring to it: To me there is something in the simply
phenomenalist spirit, so far as one has a tendency to sink (as I should say) into it,
inexpressibly depressing and desolate. We are supposed to wake into a world (for even
a world or universe is something for the imagination to lay hold of, a unity, a something
added to which we wake into from ourselves) but into circumstances to which we
ourselves are accidental, and our knowing which or knowing anything as to which, is
quite an accident in regard to them: as if we were thrown on an uninhabited island
where everything, in a manner which to our actual human experience is impossible,
was strange and out of relation to us. And as we go on in our island, in this view, the
state of things does not alter. Without the links to bind them together which our mind
must supply, one thing is as strange to another as each thing is to us – though here I
am using wrong language, as it is impossible to avoid doing, for unless our mind
proceeded otherwise than phenomenally at first there would not be even things to us;
we would separate and distinguish nothing (...) I am aware that it will be said that...
what we do is mount up from particular facts to general laws... But what do we mean by
“laws” ? Why do we thus take pleasure, and find our minds exalted, in the seeing in the
universe these uniformities, and recurrences, and order ? It is because we recognize a
likeness to what we should do ourselves, and do, that is, we trace mind, and here we
are going quite beyond the phenomena. When we view things in this way, knowledge is
not accidental in the universe, or to fact, but so far as either is to be postponed to the
other, the universe is accidental to knowledge, we are brought into relation with the
knowledge of which it is a result and an example. This is what I meant by our feeling
ourselves, as to knowledge, at home in the universe. And this is something quite beside
phenomenalism. (John Grote, Exploratio Philosophica, Part I, Cambridge, 1865, p. 15,
quoted by Hilary Fraser and Daniel Brown in English Prose of the Nineteenth Century,
Longman, 1996)
 As the individual is always hermeneutically situated, making his own sense of
the world, the lyric expression of universal emotions yields to dramatic
representations of characters and situations, empirically and historically posited
(“dramatic monologue”). The romantic notion of “self” is replaced by that of “role”. Roger
Sharrock, in Browning and History [26] speaks of the historicization of personality, the
historical self-consciousness of Browning's characters. The act of culture is conceived in
its full anthropological sense, as interaction with the non-human world, with other
humans, and with oneself. In an essay on Shelley (1852), Browning defines his poetic
art by a series of oppositions to the romantic outlook:

l). Poetry is not soliloquising but intersubjectivity, not reification of inwardness,

but the poet's drive towards the mediating of meaning to and from his fellow human
beings: The objective poet – one whose endeavour has been to reproduce things
external (whether the phenomena of the scenic universe, or the manifested action of
the human heart and brain) with an immediate reference to the common eye and
apprehension of his fellow man, assumed capable of receiving and profiting by this
reproduction.

2) Timeless notions about the nature of humanity are broken up into parts of
independent value. Humanity in action produces independent historical periods,
different from one another, objectified in various art and life-styles. The romantics had
dwelt in hypotheses, in impalpable Quixotic fictions, in impossibilities: Not what man
sees, but what God sees – the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the
Divine Hand – it is towards these that he struggles. Not with the combination of
humanity in action, but with the primal elements of humanity he has to do; and he digs
where he stands, preferring to seek them in his own soul as the nearest reflex of that
absolute Mind, according to the intuition of which he desires to perceive and speak...

3) Browning defines the aesthetic value, in Kantian manner[27] as an object, a

fabrication (work, opus): He does not paint pictures and hang them on the walls, but
rather carries them on the retina of his own eyes: we must look deep into his human
eyes, to see those pictures in them. He is rather a seer, accordingly than a fashioner,
and what he produces will be less a work than an effluence.

4) The fourth opposition is not stated in an anti-romantic polemical argument but

as a confession in a letter to Ruskin (December 25, 1867). This is the decentred
subjectivity, the artist's impersonality:...poetry always dramatic in principle, and so many
utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine.

Matthew Arnold's urge for the exertion of a great critical effort, and the imposition
of knowing life and the world may be misleading. Not for one moment does he conceive
of art as fulfilling the instrumental demands of practical experience. At the same time,
neither are the constructs of consciousness, as Kant himself emphasizes, divorced from
the object of empirical observation, which serves as their validating ground (providing
the touch of truth). Criticism (The Function of criticism at the Present Time, Op. cit.)
means interpretation of the object as in itself it really is, that is irrespective of empirical
particularizations or instrumental energies. Isobel Armstrong (Re-reading Victorian
Poetry, Op. cit.) calls it criticism at a remove from what it represents. Here is Arnold,
criticising narrow empirical pragmatism and empiricism, while keeping very close to his
Kőnigsberg master: The rule may be summed up in one word, – disinterestedness. And
how is criticism to show disinterestedness? By keeping aloof from what is called “the
practical view of things”; by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be
a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches. By steadily refusing to lend itself
to any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas, which plenty of
people will be sure to attach to them, which perhaps ought often to be attached to them,
which, in this country at any rate are certain to be attached to them quite sufficiently, but
which criticism has really nothing to do with. Its business is, as I have said, simply to
know the best that is known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. The failure to
leave alone all questions of practical consequence and applications (which Kant sets as
a prerequisite of both the moral Free Will and of aesthetic judgement) was responsible
for the biased character of the English media of the time, supporting the practical ends
of sects and parties (the political dissenters, the well-to-do Englishmen, the Irish
Catholics etc.). The critical self is opposed to the empirical “egoist”, doing as he likes,
according to his material interests; Arnold's criticism follows a priori principles of
universal legislation. It is this pure, non-empirical ego that can establish that synthesis
of horizons or of conceptual frames, which is current at a certain time. Being
interpretational, it is historically contained, but it also transcends the empirical ego
towards an intersubjective otherness. For the creation of a master-work of literature,
two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the
man is not enough without the moment (Ibidem).

The great majority of Victorian thinkers couch their ideas into historical conceptual
frames, integrating their object into various “life-styles”. Henry Thomas Buckle (History
of Civilization in England, Ch. VII) manages to put up with the present spirit of inquiry, of
doubt and even of insubordination, because it appears to him not as a fatal universal
condition of his people but only as a transitory crisis of scepticism and mental distress.
Walter Bagehot (Physics and Politics, The Age of Discussion) distinguishes between
societies in which life is regulated by social usage and modern societies, like England,
where there is a government by discussion. Matthew Arnold's cultural typologies
cover an impressive range. In Essays in Criticism, First Series, 1865, he distinguished
between epochs in which art is sustained by some central system of belief, enforced by
a vigorous intellectual life (English Renaissance), and decentred epochs of
provincialism, eccentricity, violence, extravagance (English Romanticism); between
epochs of expansion, when the ideas of Europe steal gradually and amicably in and
mingle with native notions, and epochs of concentration, of cultural isolation. Between
pagan and medieval religious sentiment, that is, between focus on the life of the
senses and of understanding and medieval interest in inwardness, in the imagination. In
Culture and Anarchy (1869) he moves from literary to social criticism, distinguishing
between Hebraism (emphasis on conduct and obedience to law, to commandments)
and Hellenism (encouraging spontaneity of consciousness), and between various
social classes in terms of social behaviour. Although representing different categories –
aristocracy, middle-class, workers and paupers – the Barbarians, Philistines and
Populace are reduced to the same moral type, that is they are various examples of the
Kantian “egoist”, relying on individual logic, judgement or interest. The aristocrats are
interested in the outward show of greatness for its own sake – graces, looks, manners,
accomplishment, and prowess. The industrialists seek triumph over the aristocracy,
through machinery and material achievement, while neglecting their inner selves. The
final stage is the degradation of the working class, the “populace”, where private will is
no longer galvanised by any recognizable conscious purpose: marching where it likes,
meeting where it likes etc. Arnold's nostalgic eye turns to the Continent, where the
nation, in its corporate character, was controlling private wills, channelling them towards
collective purposes, above the individual

According to the essayist John Morley (On Compromise), some ages are marked
as sentimental; others stand out conspicuously as rational, while the Victorians
seemed to be a “compromise” between the two.

The constructs of consciousness shape not only the reality immediately inspected
by the senses, but also other historical, constitutive frames, that is an object which is
already perceptually structured. A distancing strategy is apparent in such cases of
reinscription.

John Ruskin's construction of the Italian Renaissance in The Stones of Venice (in
three parts: The Foundations, The Sea-Stories and The Fall) probably worked as a
powerful shaping agent in an age of uncommon interest in Italy among poets, essayists
and novelists alike. The distancing attitude is there all the same. As Addington
Symonds remarks (Essays), the English Renaissance of the sixteenth century became
renascent in the nineteenth, but modified by elements of world fatigue, an awareness of
the decay of faith and the devastating effects of a materialistic culture. Ruskin remarks
the deterioration of Venice between his earlier visit in 1836 and his return some fifteen
years later, when he saw how the modern work had set its plague spot everywhere. The
defacement of Venice by the building of railway, the introduction of gaslight, the
demolitions of ancient buildings or their reconstruction were the late avatars of the
spiritual fall that had occurred during the Renaissance. Venice had been corrupted by
the pagan and rational spirit of the Classicalists; faith was gone. Hope, one of the
Virtues decorating the ninth capital of the ducal palace, is praying to the sun. The hand
of God is gone. What is there left of the medieval religious sentiment? Gods without
power, nymphs without innocence, satyrs without rusticity. Ruskin speaks of several
versions of Venice: His Venice he says, is different from Byron's, from Shakespeare's
or from that of the Venetian dodges, who would have been shocked to see the
subsequent transformations of the city. At the same time, his own construction of
Venice is displaced into what J. V. Bullen calls “Ruskin's construction of the nature of
feminity” (Ruskin, Venice, and the Construction of Feminity – [28]). Bullen identifies a
pattern of several antiphonic discourses: Cultural history is modulated into a peculiar
version of moral drama, typological historical epic, dialectic between outer and inner,
empirical history and subjective historiography. Walking in the footsteps of T. Tanner
(Venice Desired, l992), Bullen draws a parallel between Ruskin's apprehension of
Venice and his construction of the virtues and defects of the female character. He
feminizes and eroticizes Venice, speaking of medieval Venice as virgin and
Renaissance Venice as whore (the author further psychoanalyses Ruskin, discovering
in the story of his marriage grounds for such an unusual process of psychological
displacement). Venice had risen as a vestal from the sea, but after being seduced by
the Renaissance – corrupted, sensuous and given to pleasure, enjoying its material
triumphs – she had become drunk with the wine of her fornications.

The literary works published during the Age of Equipoise often thematize a clash
of constitutional frames: Browning's impersonated dyads (Renaissance and medieval
aesthetics, ethos, natural and revealed religion, innocence and corruption, madness
and reasonableness), George Eliot's and Elizabeth Browning's contradictory frames for
constructing feminity, Arthur Hugh Clough's versions of Venice, as Byronic idealist
projection and Victorian nineteenth-century tourist guide, conflicting to the point where
the self becomes dipsychic (Dipsychus), etc. Even the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,
reputed for their spiritualising tendencies in an age of social and material concern, play
upon a highly conventional construction of medieval, Pre-Raphaelite Italian poetry.

Two more aspects of Ruskin's aesthetics may justify Graham Hough's

contention that he offered the starting point for the fin-de-sičcle aestheticism.

I. The conception of art as autonomous, different both from the natural

beautiful and the instrumental technological fabrication. In Ch. VI of Stones of
Venice, Ruskin dissociates between a work of art which reaches after perfection,
confessing desire of change, some human purpose, and the nest of a bird, which needs
not express anything like this, is perfect and unchanging (Kant: art always presupposes
an end in the cause, a concept of what the thing is intended to be...and as the
agreement of the manifold in a thing with an inner character belonging to it as its end...
constitutes the perfection of the thing, it follows that in estimating beauty of art the
perfection of the thing must be also taken into account – a matter which an estimating a
beauty of nature, as beautiful, is quite irrelevant [29]). In opposition to medieval gothic,
which had allowed of the free creativity of the aesthetic object as its own end, modern
technologies compel the worker to execute parts of pre-existing designs. The worker is
alienated, because the end of the artefact lies outside his activity. He is turned into the
“cog-wheels” of modern industrial manufacturing, with exclusive instrumental purposes.

II. The dissociation between objective reality and the self's subjective perception of
it. The representations of consciousness may sometimes owe nothing to a power
existing in the object but only to the observer's disturbed state of mind, imagination or
emotion, strong enough to vanquish the intellect. Kant speaks of Vorstellungen durch
Assoziation, representations through associations, which have nothing to do with
Understanding (Verstand) [30]. In Modern Painters, Part IV, Ch. XII, Ruskin calls it
Pathetic Fallacy.

What Kant and Ruskin conceive of as “fallacy” – “physiological or pragmatic”

anthropology – came to be absolutized as the true reality about the workings of the
human brain in the theories of the Pluralists and Pragmatists (opposing the neo-
Hegelian Monists, F.H. Bradley at Oxford, and J.E. Taggart at Cambridge) towards the
end of the century. In Hardy’s Tess, the world is a psychological phenomenon. Drawing
on the physiological psychology of H. N. Martin and G.T. Ladd, on works by Charles
Sanders Peirce, William James studied in his laboratory at Harvard the relationship
between physiology and psychology, and produced already in the eighties papers in
which everything about “cognition” is brought down to the level of sensation. His
theories were probably popularised in England by his brother, Henry James, who was
himself influenced by pragmatism. The publication of William James's books – The
Principles of Psychology, in 189l, and Pragmatism, 1907 –, merely gave a more definite
form to ideas that had long been circulated. They belong to a radical empiricism, the self
is a “concrete particular”, constituted by his sensory response to the world, and
consciousness is built up of individual sensations and emotions, real or ideal. They have
no relevance either to objective reality or to a pure, transcendental ego. James
imagines a situation in which two persons find themselves in the same room: the things
in it exist-to-themselves, the thoughts of each person are completely independent, each
thinking to himself, in a stream of consciousness based upon previous associations of
their separate empirical experiences. Walter Horatio Pater, in the Conclusion to his
Studies in the History of the Renaissance, describes this self in perpetual flux
(influenced, perhaps, by the atomism of contemporary physics), as the passage and
dissolution of impressions, images, sensations (,,,) ringed round for each one of us by
that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to
us. The individual lives imprisoned in his own dream of the world, in the narrow
chamber of the individual mind. The consequence is that images are tied down to
things, to sounds, colours, smells, that works of art become impressionistic vignettes.
W.B. Yeats, in analysing “The Symbolism of Poetry”, sums up the developments in
France as emotion finding expression in colour, sound, form, becoming perceptible.

Personality is, according to W. James, nothing stable but just a “stream of thought”
(Pater's perpetual weaving and unswerving of ourselves, Ibidem): thought goes on, one
could say, “it thinks” as one says “it rains” (Ch. IX of Principles of Psychology). Selfhood
is at the same time a vector of several constituents (Ch. X, The Consciousness of Self),
which may be at variance with each other: l) The natural body at the bottom. 2) The
social body or a man's social self, the recognition one gets from his mates. This is an
occasion for unstabilizing plurality: a man has as many social selves as there are
individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in the mind. Browning
dramatizes Pompilia's social selves (The Ring and the Book) as various voices at the
trial, but Wilde and Stevenson probably wrote with an awareness of pragmatist theories
in mind. Dorian or Jekyll have not only different but violently contradictory social selves,
of which they are perfectly conscious. 3) The spiritual, pure self at the top. This is not
the Kantian a priori, transcendental subject but the phenomenologists' “synthesis of
horizons”. That is “sameness among phenomena” of consciousness, the sense that I
am the same as yesterday. At the same time, there are extracorporeal selves. A man
may be possessed of different selves, but physical nature restricts our choice to but one
of many represented goods. A man may want to make a million a year and be a saint,
but as the millionaire work would run counter to the saint, one “potential” self would
have to be discarded, while the other may be actualised. In The Jolly Corner, Henry
James constructs Brydon as a split personality: the actual self returning from the old,
conservative Europe with his double (unachieved, “extracorporeal”, that is, ghostly)
haunting him: the potential active builder of modern American civilization, that which he
would have become if he had stayed home (see Richard A. Hocks, Henry James and
Pragmatist Thought, The University of North Carolina Press, l974). Stevenson finds a
“scientific solution” for his character, Dr. Jekyll. In early youth, he had discovered that
his self is not one but a polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.
He undertakes to study medicine and produces a drug capable to transform the body
according to the conflicting desires of his polypsychic self. The socially secure and
respected Dr. Jekyll can thus release the latent libidinal potential of his social ego in the
physically deformed person of Mr. Hyde. Arnold's intimations of a split personality, of a
hidden self buried beneath the conventional social mask (The Future, The Buried Life,
Dover Beach), or Clough's improvisations on the theme of split personality may have
had something to do with the power strategies of Victorian repression, but W. H. Pater,
Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde are consciously thematizing contemporary
pragmatist interrogations of human consciousness. Arthur Symons, in Stéphane
Mallarmé (The Symbolist Movement in Literature), while making the interesting remark
that symbolism is not a question of merely writing differently, but of thinking differently,
lists the following aspects of the new art, which we associate now with modernism: pure
beauty (autonomy of the aesthetic value, as its own end, advocated by Pater and Oscar
Wilde), fascination with Roman decadence (Peter's Marius the Epicurean being the
English correspondent of L'Aprčs-midi d'un faun), the elocutionary disappearance of the
poet, who yields place to the words...(which) take light from mutual reflection (the need
for impersonality, the importance of the mask in Wilde and Yeats).

The criterion for the evaluation of art is truth of representation, art being
superior to nature in the beautiful descriptions it gives to things that in nature would be
ugly or displeasing (Kant, The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, Op. cit. pp.527- 528).
Henry James (The Art of Fiction) and Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) seize on
the idea, defending well-written books even if they present “somewhat morbid realities”.
Partiality and faulty representation are the only immorality in art. It constructs a world of
its own, free from any religious, moral, ethical etc. impositions, and is its own end. The
rapport between art and reality is reversed. According to Kant, man lives in a world of
his own constructs. It is art, according to Wilde, that shapes reality (Intentions: The
Decay of Lying).

It seems to us that the most enduring part of Victorian writing is an attempt to build
expressive models into epistemological models simultaneously. The main drives
charting the later half of the nineteenth century have taken us beyond the paradigms of
Victorianism, but an awareness of their interplay can help trace the history of literary
ideas and modes that led from romantic self-expressionism towards modernist
fictionalism.

Victorian Gothic and the Grotesque

 Isobel Armstrong's Victorian Poetry published by Routledge in 1990 worked an
important revision of her earlier approach to Victorianism. It is not at odds with the
earlier emphasis upon phenomenology, it only calls attention to a tradition of writing
which is more in favour with present theories of the relationships between textuality,
politics and modes of representation. This time she focuses on the grotesque
hermeneutics, launched by Ruskin (The Stones of Venice) and evolved by Pre-
Raphaelite aesthetics. The Grotesque is a form of the diseased or ungoverned
imagination, a form of play. It takes a fanciful or distorted form, and represents a form of
cultural critique. It is the form given to oppression and negation (assuming extreme
aspects of vulgarity and scatology among the working class). The individual conscience
reacts to authority in a society of brute materialism and cynical competitiveness. The
grotesque type is the teleological type in crisis. With the fundamentals of religion
gone, there was no ground for the stable entity, whose nature and teleology had been
decreed by the divine intellect. With the Pre-Raphaelites, it is especially women's
sexuality that stands for the deviating and distorting element. Symbolic meanings are
incarnated, the new ideology is written on the woman's body, for the mystical or
symbolic can only be known through the physical.

The interpretation of cultural models is usually a more complex enterprise, as, in

general, there are overlapping epistemic and textual patterns.

Ruskin’s essays on Gothic were so influential as to call forth a massive interest in

the revival of medieval architecture; Ruskin saw even his country residence surrounded
by the Gothic fakes, which his contemporaries chose to plague the country with. It was
not what he had meant at all. He could see the imaginative freedom of hybrid forms,
exceeding categorical boundaries of Gothic art, assuming a distorted, displaced or
grotesque form. Ruskin sensed the eerie effect of technology in the modern world,
creating psychological discomfort, anxiety and uncertainty. Natural or technological?
Living or inert? Playing in earnest or miming? Surface or depth? Symbol or unreadable
sign? One could no longer be certain. Ruskin read those signs in what passed for the
greatest achievement of a materialist civilization: the Crystal Palace, housing the Great
Exhibition:

In my old studies of architecture I always used to have great regard to the apse of
a cathedral, and whatever else failed, looked always to the close of the great aisled
vista as the principle joy of one's heart... So one has a natural tendency to look also to
the apse of this cathedral of modern faith to see the symbol of it, as one used to look to
see the conchs of the Cathedral of Pisa for the face of Christ, or to the apse of Torcellor
for the figure of the Madonna. Well, do you recollect what occupied the place of these –
in the apse of the Crystal Palace? The head of a Pantomime clown, some twelve feet
broad, with a mouth opening from ear to ear, opening and shutting by machinery, its
eyes squinting alternately, and collapsing by machinery, its humour in general provided
for by machinery – nobody laughed at it. (Modern Art, par. 25)

A sense of insecurity about the significance of anything looms above the century's
tradition of dramatic monologues, with speakers caught in painful efforts of
interpretation, in a universe which has become unintelligible.

The new rhetoric of grotesque displacement focuses on the female other, sexually
transgressive. The Defence of Guenevere, by William Morris, is the Arthurian heroine's
speech before Gawain and the court, less in self-defence than in self-comprehension,
as she was trying to sort out the true meaning of love, while working with the opposite
values of faithfulness, purity, loyalty on the one hand, and passionate, mutually shared
love on the other. Her bodily manifestations are as meaningful as her words. At the
beginning, Gawain's accusation (dismissed from the text) causes a blush in her cheek
and a convulsion of her body, as if in pain from an inflicted wound. Gradually her body
resumes its upright posture, and her voice grows firm, as she becomes confirmed,
through her own argumentation, in her choice of Lancelot over the frigid Arthur, who had
married her for dynastic considerations. Her parable of the dying man being invited by
some divine agency to choose between the red and the blue thread with salvation or
damnation at stake is meant to illustrate the conventional, arbitrary character of all
social norms and values. As Christians associate red with passion and sin, the man
chooses blue – the liturgical colour of the Madonna –, and yet, he is doomed. She also
reveals the unnatural crimes of her accusers, including matricide, in the name of rigid
social conventions, while fondly recalling the heavenly happiness she had known with
Lancelot.

In Eden Bower, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, centred on another female rebel, Lilith
(Adam's first wife in the Jewish tradition), there is a vision of bodily displacement, setting
the scene for the palimpsestic bodies – grafted, repressed, multiplied, written over with
the signs of the beast or of past crimes and sins – of late Victorian fiction (The Island of
Doctor Moreau, by H. G. Wells, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert
Louis Stevenson, The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde.) Lilith is asking the
serpent to lend her his form, so that she could avenge herself on Adam, who had
repudiated her for refusing to submit to his authority. A typical product of the “fleshly
school of poetry”, the poem abounds in images of sexuality, uncommon at the time:

In thy sweet folds bind me and bend me,

And let me feel the shape thou shalt lend me (...)

Wreathe thy neck with my hair's bright tether,

And wear my gold and thy gold together !

 We have travelled a long way from The Angel in the House, by Coventry Patmore,
a close acquaintance of the Pre-Raphaelites. He remained, however, at the surface
level of their medievalism, drawing on schemata borrowed from romances, the courtly
love tradition and Dante. The lover confesses that his beloved brings out the best in
him, and that the comforts she offers him under their domestic roof are the solace of his
struggles in the public world of action. Marriage does not lead immediately to
consummation; she continues to inspire him with the reverence supposed to be felt by
someone kissing the queen's hand. A highly allusive scene in May, in the midst of
mating, sensuous nature, lets the reader understand that the lover has known perfect
happiness. As soon as his wife has dutifully accomplished her social mission, of giving
him a son, she is conveniently put out of the way. There is a heartbreaking scene of the
father punishing the child who had disobeyed his ten times repeated command (pater
familias is as stern as the God of the Ten Commandments...), and who, afterwards,
filled with compassion for the orphaned creature, goes to the nursery to find his son
asleep, suppressing tears under his eyelashes and surrounded by the objects which he
had gathered around to assuage his grief and which already betray an artist's and
collectors' interest: sea shells, two French coins... The new Beatrice has fulfilled her
mission; the father feels that he is admitted to God's company of earthly children. On
the contrary, Guenevere and Lilith are the chryssales of the full-grown Sadean women
in Swinburne and Wilde.

The publishing conditions in mid century – the circulating libraries, the railway
bookstalls, the cheap copies and serial publication – commercialised literature, making
it dependent on ever-greater numbers of readers. Popular taste also implied a craving
for sensationalism, to make up for the boredom of everyday routine and an uneventful
life. The rise of sensation literature was condemned by a voice of the establishment –
Henry Mansel, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford University, a high
churchman and high Tory –, as “the demand of a diseased appetite”. The reason of the
attack („Sensation Novels”, 1863) was the anxiety of the hegemonic classes about the
“undermining of traditional and religious values”. The dark plots of violent villainy, selling
like “goods made to order”, were instances of “morbid anatomy”, offering the pleasure of
nervous shock. The Woman in White, written by Wilkie Collins, one of the “rising
romance writers in England”, amounts to much more than that. His spectralized female
protagonist may be seen as the typical Victorian woman, while Laura, forced by Fosco,
who plays the modern Rembrandt, to take her place, to become a stand-in for Anne
Catherick, could be interpreted as the deferred presence of artistic representation,
considering the author's heightened literary awareness.

The Pre-Raphaelites' interest in the body paralleled (was inspired by ?) the

biologizing of social theories. Ernst Haeckel’s Morphology of General Organisms had
advanced the theory of ontogeny repeating phylogeny. One could imagine the
possibility of the embryo's evolution being arrested at some previous state of
development. Forms of atavism rather than evolutionism were now an obsessive
concern. The individual became aware of the presence of libidinal desires within
himself, which escaped rational control. The split personalities of Jekyll, Dorian, and
Jude fit into narratives of degeneration (Ray Lankester Degeneration, Max Nordau:
Entartung), regression and entropy (Hermann von Helmholtz and Rudolf Clausius on
The Second Law of Thermodynamics), as the century was approaching its end. From
Benjamin Disraeli’s utopia of silver fork societies coming to terms with the other England
of poverty (Vivian Grey), we reach the apocalyptic visions of end-of-the-century
dystopias: After London, by Richard Jefferies, Erewhon, by Samuel Butler, The
Island of Doctor Moreau, by H. G. Wells. Science and technology have been overcome
by nature's jungle, are feared and confined to museums, or inspire horrible experiments
in vivisection, grafts and mutating biological forms. The collective subconscious of the
visitors to the Crystal Palace were releasing their fears of the placeholders of humanity.

Anxieties about the nation's degeneration caused by the heavy losses in the war
with the Boers were at the back of the incipient tradition of colonial gothic. Doctor
Moreau, modelled on a French scientist who considered that the overexcitation of the
brain in a scientist's research work leads to the atrophy of the moral sense, is trying to
create a new race of humans through grafts on animals. As his revolting experiments in
vivisection had caused his exile to a deserted island, he is repeating the Robinson
Crusoe experience in imposing his law to the natives trained to treat him as their God.
This time the experience fails, as the beastly in man is no longer separated from the
rational self through a safety valve. The return of the beastly in the men-animals and the
white men (the doctor, his assistant and the narrator shipwrecked on the island)
stooping to beasts (the doctor through cruelty and his obsessive pursuit of a mad
project, his assistant through drink, and the narrator by being forced into the beasts'
company and way of life in order to survive after his companions' death) levels down all
distinctions between the traditionally incompatible classes of bodies and cultural
constructs.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula brings home, literally and figuratively, the threat of non-
western others, consorting with parasites and social dropouts in order to conquer the
rational world of prosperous bourgeois wealth and values. The vampire count's
immemorial dynastic heritage of the blood fits into the narrative of a powerful nation
beginning to feel that in the world and within each individual there were more
mysterious and incomprehensive forces than they could control through discussion,
reform, and technological progress.

One more factor destabilizing identity in late Victorian literature is the growing
resistance to the oppressive ideologies of the Victorian conservative society. Oscar
Wilde blurs the distinction between life and art, enacting his transgressive, decadent
aesthetics as a form of life: “what paradox was to me in the sphere of thought,
perversity became to me in the sphere of passion” (De Profundis). He lives in two
worlds at once, fusing art and life, mixing facts and representations. In this way, he
collapses the “dominating binaries” of the western rational structure of thought, what
Jonathan Dollimore calls “the binaries organizing our culture” (Sexual Dissidence, 199l):
surface/depth, lying/truth, difference/ essence, persona or mask/essential self,
insincerity/sincerity, style/authenticity, narcissism/maturity.

The literary modes employed by the dark side of Victorianism are transgressive
themselves. The instance writing and the reflector are obscured in Dr. Jekyll and Mr
Hyde (as Jekyll dies in Hyde's body, who is writing the last pages of his confession?)
and Wilde's Portrait of Mr. W.H. The swamping of the rational subject causes a
corresponding shipwreck of narrative voice. A character is no longer a full presence, but
“a hideous puppet” (Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray) on account of bodily
repression demanded by social taboos, which had rendered inaccessible the ancient
world's harmony of body and soul, their plenary gratification of the complete human
being. A character carries within “strange legacies of thought”, “the memories of the
dead”, being overdetermined by hereditary laws. As the unconscious desires are
stronger than the rational will, characters will move about like the automata (Dorian) of
technology. Wilde, in whom meet the two traditions, of the Kantian/ Schopenhauerian
theories about the autonomy of the aesthetic and about the unbroken circularity of
representations, and the “grotesque hermeneutics” of displaced subjectivity, steals into
his Dorian Gray the double key to its interpretation: the Huysmans school of the
aesthetic decadence and the Gothic long-trailing, strangely animated, uncanny shadows
and arabesques of reverie.

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after
one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of
those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain
sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks
in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one
might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the
malady of reverie.

References:
[15] John Peck (editor), New Casebooks. David Copperfield and Hard Times, Macmillan, 1995, pp. 58
and the following.

[16] C.B. Needham, “The Undisciplined Heart of David Copperfield” apud New Casebooks. David
Copperfield and Hard Times, Op. cit.

[17] I. Kant, Op. cit., p. 347

[18] David Lodge, The Language of Fiction, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.

[19] In Steven Connor (editor), Charles Dickens, Op. cit..

[20] Robert B. Heilman, Charlotte Brontë's “New Gothic” in The nineteenth – Century Novel. A. Reader.
Edited by Stephen Regan, Routledge 2001.

[21] “The Review of English Studies”, May, 1996.

[22] Forms of Modern Fiction, edited by William Van O'Conner, Bloomington, 1959.

[23] The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, edited by Jeremy Hawthorn, Edward Arnold, 1986.

[24] Graham Hough, The Last Romantics, Duckworth, 1979.

[25] The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Op. cit.

[26] In Robert Browning, edited by Isobel Armstrong, G. Bell, 1974.

[27] I. Kant, Of Aesthetic Judgement, Op. cit., p. 523.

[28] “The Review of English Studies”, November, 1995.

[29] I. Kant, Op. cit., p. 527.

[30] I. Kant, Anthropologie, Verlag von L. Heimann, 1869, p. 12

The Age of Equipoise

The “grey beginning” of Victorian literature clears up in mid-century, its course

taking a decisive turn towards what Isobel Armstrong calls “a hermeneutic of culture”.
[31]
 The mid-century characters are constituted by and constitutive of the cultural
frames they inhabit. Browning's “men and women” are born of a particular historical time
and their selfhood is to a large degree social and time-bound; at the same time their
selfhood is objectified into historicized cultural artefacts: music, paintings, religious
systems, or scientific theories, even... tombs.

Poetry grows meditative, philosophical, providing historical framings for the

major intellectual issues of the time. The intrusive authorial narrator sketches, in his
commentaries or paratexts (introductions, epigraphs), moral, religious or social types for
the unfolding, multiple-plotted narratives. The writer is also a thinker, more given to
analysing than... creating (Anthony Trollope about George Eliot in his Autobiography).

The intellectual drive is accompanied by a tendency towards discursive difficulty

and complexity (which often earned them a charge of obscurity). Coming after
Tennyson's spellbinding numbers and atmospheric troping, Browning shocked his
complacent readers with a sense of novelty compared to that produced by Baudelaire in
France. It was in the critically earnest Athenaeum of 1850 that W.M. Rossetti greeted
Browning's deliberate unity of purpose, the self-conscious artist's production of an
aesthetic object instead of the romantic outburst of feeling, a defence in which George
Eliot joined six years later in the Westminster Review:

.... these poems have a majestic obscurity which repels not only the ignorant but
the idle. To read poems is often a substitute for thought: fine-sounding conventional
phrases and the sing-song of verse demand no cooperation in the reader; they glide
over his mind with the agreeable unmeaningness of the “compliments of the season” or
a speaker's exordium on “feelings too deep for expression”. But let him expect no such
drowsy passivity in reading Browning. Here he will find nonconventionality, no
melodious commonplace, but freshness, originality, sometimes eccentricity of
expression; no didactic laying-out of a subject, but dramatic indication, which requires
the reader to trace by his own mental activity the underground stream of thought that
jets out in elliptical and pithy verse. To read Browning he must exert himself, but he will
exert himself to some purpose. If he finds the meaning difficult of access, it is always
worth his effort – if he has to dive deep, “he rises with the pearl”. Though eminently a
thinker he is not prosaic but concrete, artistic and dramatic.

One of the few general characteristics which Michael Wheeler identifies in the
“high-Victorian fiction” is “a split between highbrow and middle-brow readership”
[32], but it had been Browning, before Eliot and Meredith, who had raised the
“intellectual standards” by which literature could be judged.

When we come to the social attitude, we notice an opposite tendency towards a

mutual accommodation of the classes with each other, an attempt to smooth over
the dramatic class clashes of the earlier novelists. Benjamin Disraeli makes fictional
arrangements for the marriage or at least a coming to terms between the “two nations”,
the rich and the poor, the aristocracy and the nouveaux riches or even Chartists (Sybil;
or The two Nations, 1845), moving on to the escapist solution of silver-fork novels and
romances. Even Elizabeth Gaskell, the merciless exposer of the workers' plight,
entertains a belief in the possibility of a mutual love between master and worker (Ruth,
1853). Focusing on moral choices, the novels of George Meredith and George Eliot
avoid social conflicts, distancing characters and actions in time and place (as far back
as the Italian Renaissance in Eliot’s Romola), confining their heroes to claustrophobic
provincial environments (Middlemarch), and expressing an unmistakeable distrust of
revolutions (Felix Holt). The catastrophist theories that had inspired Tennyson were
superseded by the Darwinian picture of a very slow evolution. Eliot was a gradualist
who believed that what has grown up historically can only die out historically, by the
gradual operation of necessary laws (The Natural History of German Life). England
found herself at the end of the process of industrialization and urbanization. The Age of
Equipoise, with its enheartening display of industrial triumph and material welfare, filled
everybody with a feeling of genial torpor, like dozing off to the monotonous sound of the
bees humming in a summer afternoon.

To the more discerning minds, however, the technological achievements of the

Great Exhibition had also revealed the spiritual wasteland and the metaphysical
crisis of the Victorian materialist civilization. The response to the religious problem is
profounder and much more complex. Up to mid-century, religion had been a problem of
institutional allegiances and ritualistic choices. Stories of conversion are often
autobiographical records, or “Tractarian” commitments to current religious
controversies, which never question the validity of religion itself. E.g. J. H. Newman
telling the story of Charles Reding's conversion to Catholicism in Loss and Gain (1848),
in response to Elizabeth Harris's negative version of the same conversion in From
Oxford to Rome (1847). The apology of the favourite institutionalised form of religion
goes together with moving stories of women's martyrdom (Charles Kingsley's Hypatia,
1853 or Newman's Calista, 1856). The other half century views religion from a critical or
satirical perspective: the decay of faith into mechanical ritualistic exercise (Matthew
Arnold, Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse), ontological crisis (Arnold, In utrumque
paratus), farcical observance of outward form, pragmatically motivated (H.A. Clough,
Dipsychus, The Latest Decalogue), deconstruction of faith into provisional belief
systems (Browning, Christmas-Eve, Easter-Day, Clough, Epi-Strauss-ium), into the
secular history of man's mythical representations (Eliot, Middlemarch). There is a
paralysing awareness of the incompatibility between the spirit of the age and the old
stories of martyrdom (Middlemarch) But there is also the Pre-Raphaelites' rhetoric of
religion “ornating” the love-relationship as an absolute, anticipating the displacement of
religion by art towards the end of the century..

A discussion of individual works in the context of the mid-century epistemological

change will have to begin with ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889), the poet whose
early formal experimentation earned him a nomination for “the mad poet of the Batch”
from Fraser's Magazine in December 1833, on the publication of his first poem, Pauline.
From this debut, which paid a tribute to Shelley, Browning departed gradually in a
direction that continually and more decidedly revised traditional habits of mind and
sensibility. By 1852, when he published his Essay on Shelley, the transformation had
been completed. By that time he had outgrown the Shelleyan dilemma of choosing
between modes of vision (between science and poetry, knowledge or love in
Paracelsus, 1835*). The society he inhabited had fallen from a unified culture, and did
not value the possibility of making the two traditional streams of thought flow into the
same bed. Now Browning rests contented to accomplish what Tennyson had shunned,
i.e. the provisional and the fragmented: getting at new substance by breaking up the
assumed wholes into parts of independent and unclassed value, careless of the
unknown laws for recombining them. Rabbi Ben Ezra (1864) finds himself on the
threshold between his life of action and the expected wisdom of age in a teleological
universe, in which everything occurs according to a divine plan. But his expectations are
baffled, for, instead of a unified body of human knowledge and wisdom, he is confronted
with individual and conflicting opinions:

Now, who shall arbitrate ?

Ten men love what I hate,

Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;

Ten, who in ears and eyes

Match me: we all surmise,

 They this thing and I that: whom shall my soul believe ?

The formal consequence of this exploded worldview is the deconstruction of the

romantic unified selfhood. Browning chooses poetry always dramatic in principle, and
so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine (letter to Ruskin,
December 10, 1855). The awareness of competing views leads not only to the
substitution of a persona for the romantic self-expressionism but also to the creation of
a special type of dramatic form: not the soliloquy, in which the speaker merely
verbalizes his own thoughts, but the dramatic monologue in which the speaker is
addressing an implied interlocutor. With Browning, the poetic form engages an I-thou
relationship, either as the poet constructing his strategies with a reader in mind or as a
fine balance between self-revelation and rhetorical manipulation in a speaker
addressing his audience: The objective poet (is) one whose endeavour has been to
reproduce things external (whether the phenomena of the scenic universe, or the
manifested action of the human heart and brain) with an immediate reference to the
common eye and apprehension of his fellow men, assumed capable of receiving and
profiting by his reproduction (Essay on Shelley). The poet is no longer the romantic
prophet-priest but an objectified subjectivity, the originator of an aesthetic object. Bells
and Pomegranates, the title of a collection of works published between 1842-1846,
shows the poet in the position of the Old-Testamental priest, the description of whose
garments takes several passages of Exodus, 39, with its emphasis upon objects of cult
and ritual. The garments are the outward tokens in the construction of the self for a role,
the mask of the priest appearing before the congregation. These imaginary utterances
by a persona (in ancient Greek drama, an actor speaking through the mask), by some
person other than the poet, are distinguished from Tennyson's in that they betray
rather than articulate aspects of states of mind [33]. They are imitations of
character (Ibidem), not revelations of subjectivity but deft and ingenious constructs.
Distortion and caricature serve as distancing devices, and also as the projection of
human character into a typological and historical frame. In Pictor Ignotus, the old and
failed painter realizes that the difference between himself and a younger and more
successful artist, whose works he is enviously contemplating, is not emotional range or
truth of actual experience but the capability to give them an objective realization,
spatially and temporarily “bound”. Browning's “soul tragedies” are plumbing the deepest
recessions of human psychology (which was the object of a vivid scientific interest at
the time), but it is not only the individual but the entire historical epoch shaping him that
are brought into focus. The multivoicedness of these texts is the result of combined
dramatization and narrative framings: we get characters dramatizing voices of others, or
the author framing their speeches through prologues and epilogues. John Wolford and
Daniel Karlin [34] identify the following formal parameters in Browning's ’p ure dramatic
monologues ’:

ˇ the presence of an implied listener or interlocutor

ˇ a dramatic situation which is inferred from what the speaker says but not
stated directly

ˇ the poem beginning in the middle of the action

ˇ the reader picking up clues as to what is going on (and, we should add,

reconstructing the truth of the situation which usually is broader than the speaker's self-
awareness).

The ’dramatic shift’ in Browning's career is, in fact, programmatically exposed

by the poet himself in his narrative framing of Sordello, a poem published in 184o:
instead of bodying forth a story, he will keep out of view, making the very man speak
and the readers say the rest for him. By going back in time to eleventh-century Verona,
the past is hurled in twain: what happened then and Browning's reconstruction of it.
Sordello, the poet attempting to forge a new idiom in an Italian dialect, to try the stuff/
That held the imaged thing, stands for Browning himself, shifting from the Romantic cult
of the imagination to a proleptic obsession with “image” – the objective correlative
capable to evoke, by its own structure, a state of mind, an idea, a mood. Somehow
anticipating the conflict between the reforming Pre-Raphaelites and the Academy,
Browning is searching for enlarged poetic possibilities, in the same way in which
Charlotte Brontë is exploring unpatterned feeling in Shirley, and Dickens, the fits of
David's undisciplined heart. As the herald of a more literary-conscious age, Browning
doubles his scientific interest in the workings of the mind by formal innovations, which
are part of an aesthetic programme rather than a deliberate intention of épater le
bougeois. They were apprehended as such, though, at the time, and an anonymous
reviewer in the Dublin Review (1840) thought it necessary to give him a warning
Sordello contained with regard to bourgeois complacency and conventionality:

Change no old standards of perfection; vex

With no strange forms created to perplex.

The emblematic image of the trapping of the human mind in its own framings of
self and situations, like the patterned hem framing the head of the Old-Testamental
priest (Bells and Pomegranates), is Madhouse Cells. (Dramatic Lyrics, 1842). Browning
is fascinated by self-righteous characters, shut-up in their haunting obsessions, which
are sometimes presented argumentatively, so as to acquire an appearance of
reasonableness: Johannes Agricola (later, Johannes Agricola in Meditation), a
sixteenth-century theologian, entertaining a fixed idea about being one of God's elect, is
planning his ascent to heaven, while Porphyria's Lover is making a detailed case on the
necessity to kill a perfectly beautiful, pure and devoted maiden, lest she should be
corrupted some day. Psychopathic cruelty in The Laboratory (a girl glutting at the
perspective of seeing her rival killed by the poison a chemist is preparing for her) blends
with egomania in My Last Duchess, a study in the paradoxical blend of mercantilism,
hidden murderous schemes and art connoisseurship associated with the Italian
Renaissance aristocracy (both poems are included in the Dramatic Romances and
Lyrics of 1845). The Duke (apparently, the third Duke of Ferrara) is addressing a silent
interlocutor, the messenger of his future father-in-law, telling him a cautionary story
about his former wife, whose assassination he had ordered out of psychopathic
jealousy. The paranoid suspicion collecting out of harmless incidents and irrelevant
observations is gradually realized by the reader, while the murderous act is indirectly
revealed by the duke himself, through deliberate slips and cunning allusions woven into
the expert commentary on the late duchess's portrait or on other art objects, which are
lying or hanging about as tokens of the Duke's status and magnificence. The fluency of
the decasyllabic couplet is counterbalanced by the speaker's suspensions and
resolutions, imitative of natural thought processes and colloquial informality. The last
lines contain an ingenious mise-en-abyme of the whole poem: the statue to which the
speaker is drawing his visitor's attention represents masculinity in a godly posture and in
a taming act (Neptune taming a sea-horse). It had been commissioned by the Duke
himself (Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!), the final positioning, for the sake of
emphasis, of the first-person pronoun being suggestive of Renaissance obsession with
self-fashioning and the creation of social roles.

Whereas Dickens's evolution is mainly formal, Browning's poetry mutates more

decidedly towards a modern representation of characters and situations and a more
literary-conscious interplay of literary conventions. This is more obviously true in his
framings of love relationships.

In two early companion pieces, Meeting at Night and Parting at Morning,

masculinity is traditionally constructed as man's world of knowledge and action,
diverted by occasional delight in female company. The representation, however, is
anti-romantic. The natural background is “scenic”, that is a semiotic transcription of the
sexual act, the eye travels with the motion of a camera, long-tracking the male partner's
advance from the sea to the shore, with a final close-up on the cottage and the lovers'
embrace. The effect of objectivity in the “filming action” is enhanced by the
impersonal recording of sounds, like in a movie sound-track without dialogue:

The grey sea and the long black land;

And the yellow half-moon large and low;

 And the startled little waves that leap

In fiery ringlets from their sleep,

As I gain the cove with pushing prow,

And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears;

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match,

And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,

Than the two hearts beating each to each !

(Meeting at Night)

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,

And the sun looked over the mountain's rim:

And straight was a path of gold for him,

And the need of a world of men for me.

(Parting at Morning)

In Pipa Passes (1841), Browning had already revised the medieval aubade into the
modern stuff of a naturalistic description of the lovers waking up in the morning, of
Sebald's clumsy attempts to open the dusty shutters and finally ruining them, of the
couple's conversation which adds to the scene the sinister hues of a murder story:
Ottima had been an accomplice to her lover's murder of Luca, her old husband whom
she had married for money. The prostitutes on the cathedral steps, the beggars, the
girls from the Silk-mills, the garrulous students and officers in the streets of Asolo have
something of the paradoxical appeal of sordid modern realities in Baudelaire's Parisian
Scapes. The Sebald/Ottima story of fallen love and murder is the first counterpoint to
innocent Pippa's morning song of the golden age, when God is in his heaven and all is
right with the world. Back to her chamber, after a day's gliding along in this lapserian
world of prostitution and material squalor, Pippa herself gives up praying and lends her
hymns a completely changed voice, of Victorian doubt about divine justice, and despair
at God's unfulfilled morning “promise”:

All service ranks the same with God –

With God, whose puppets, best and worst,

Are we: there is no last, no first.

Browning's Men and Women of 1855 are increasingly aware of their material,
cultural or historical background. Landscapes and locations are no longer atmospheric,
expressive of moods or states of minds, as with Tennyson, but a form of cultural
determinism. The painter Filippo Lippi “spatializes” and reifies his moral and artistic
convictions, relating them to the material conditioning of his existence: the strictly
normative life of a monk, but also the licences he can afford through his acquaintance
with a powerful Maecena of the arts (Cosimo Medici). The door left ajar by sportive
ladies and the monk's attire, the proximity of the medieval cloister to the Renaissance
seat of worldly power and art connoisseurship are the objective and paradoxical
elements of Lippo's life, symptomatic of a conflicting culture and ideology, and inducing
aesthetic dilemmas. When shifting to the present, Browning seems to be asking himself
the same question as Baudelaire: is modern life fit for artistic representation? The lovers
move within real-life interiors, the mistress imprinting her presence everywhere (on the
couches, curtains, sun blinds), negligently dropping a fan or a pair of gloves (Love in a
Life):

Room after room,

I hunt the house through

We inhabit together.

Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her –

Next time, herself ! – not the trouble behind her

Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume !

 As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew:

Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather.

The critical habit of mind (here is Clough in his long poem, composed in Italy in
1849, Amours de Voyage, 18: I can be nothing at all, if it is not critical wholly) yields an
aesthetic object perfectly coherent and holistic in the concurrence of all its elements:
character, situation, and literary convention. By “critical wholly”, Clough means
analytical forms, constructs of the mind, which no longer depend for their validity on
outward reality (like “coxcomb” Adam’s Cratyllic speech): as he names things, they are
completely transposed into linguistic entities:

Here in the garden I walk, can freely concede to the Maker

That the works of his hand are all very good: his creatures,

Beast of the field and fowl, he brings them before me; I name them;

That which I name them, they are, – the bird, the beast, and cattle

To Fra Lippo Lippi, things are not only different, when painted, but also better.
There is no advantage in trying to reproduce nature, which is even impossible. The
attitude to the world is realistic (the world's too big to pass for a dream) and the
approach, hermeneutic: its transcription as a “forest of symbols “ (it means intensely
and it means good). Things no longer exist out there but as constituted by an active
subjectivity, a meaning being. To the Kantian subject, this is their only form of existence:
they are better, painted – better to me/ which is the same thing.

Writing becomes conscious inscription in a literary convention (pastoral for

love against a natural background in Two in the Campagna). A very interesting case is
Love Among the Ruins, where the pastoral mode is inscribed (the lovers take refuge in
nature, in an a historical world, away from the vanity of worldly power, from the wars of
the mighty, bringing civilization down into ruins), and at the same time subverted, by the
simplicity and straightforwardness of the modern idiom. Each longer line, with its
evocative music, alliteration and idyllic tropism, is deflated by the next, which is
ridiculously short and business-like in comparison:

Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,

Miles and miles

On the solitary pastures where our sheep

Half-asleep,
 Tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop,

As they crop –

Was the site of a city great and gay,

(So they say)

Of our country's very capital, its prince

Ages since

Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far

Peace or war.

A more obvious example of doubleness of language matching a split

personality is The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church, included in the
1845 volume of Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, and later in Men and Women. The
Bishop's speech on his future tomb while lying on his death-bed is an incongruous
mixture of moralizing quotes from the Bible – the discourse of the Church – and a
sensualist's hints to pagan and hedonistic realities, which only now reveal the
submerged iceberg of his hidden life: love affairs, illegitimate children, luxurious life.
Poetry grows more problematical, becoming the dumping ground of aesthetic, moral or
philosophical issues, while the texture of consciousness is realized not as a confession
but as a “formula”: emotion expressed thorough objective correlatives, a set of objects.
It is true that Browning’s Bishop received a most commendatory comment from John
Ruskin in the fourth volume of his Modern Painters: I know no other piece of modern
English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the
Renaissance spirit – its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of self,
love of art, of luxury and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I said of the central
Renaissance in thirty pages of the Stones of Venice put into as many lines, Browning's
being also the antecedent work. At the same time, however, Browning does not “say”
anything any more. The paradoxical character of the Bishop, his mental and moral
chaos are constructed through language: the juxtaposition of ceremonious variations on
Chrisostomos’s vanity and of colloquial address; of Christian and pagan elements; of
Christ's sermon on the mount and Moses’ tables; the emphasis upon “contrast” and the
image of the “bas-relief”:

Swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years:

Man goeth to the grave, and where is he ?

Did I say basalt for my slab, sons ? Black –

'Twas ever antique-black I meant ! How else

 Shall ye contrast my friese to come beneath ?

The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,

Those Pans and Nymphs, ye wot of, and perchance

Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,

The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,

St Praxed in a glory, and one Pan

Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off,

And Moses with the tables...

It is not only in Browning that the typically mid-Victorian struggle between realism,
idealism and social conscience, sometimes within the same individual, receives a
stylistic correlative: a schizophrenic discourse, in which several voices can be
simultaneously heard. In Clough's Dipsychus, for instance, the romantic reverie and
metaphoric raptures of the main speaker, modulated into elegiac scepticism (as the
character himself is divided between moral idealism and intellectual realism), are held in
check by the Mephistophelian Spirit's crisp couplets, colloquial tone, and grasp of the
palpable word – the language of bourgeois worldly compromise. As Ruskin had recently
pointed to the Renaissance as the “original sin” of the modern divided mind, the most
conspicuous writers of the period define their characters in a confrontation with Italian
culture and art. Whereas Clough or George Eliot are more interested in individual
responses (Claude, in Amours de Voyage, vacillating between Love, Faith and
Knowledge, or Dorothea in Middlemarch, in whom the fragmentary collection of dead
cultural artefacts works as a powerful reminder of the values of a passionate active life),
Browning is constructing his characters as products of the first cultural movement which
recognized the beauty of the senses in the post-classical age. Putting the infinite into
the finite (letter to Ruskin, on December lo, 1855) does not signify the Romantics'
momentous empathic identification of the individual soul with the spiritual energies at
work in the universe, but the construction of the self as a semiological marker inserted
in a type of culture. Seated in the window of his studio, speaking persuasively yet vainly
to his faithless wife, Lucrezia, Andrea del Sarto comes forward in a vivid picture to
which Vasari's Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, one of
Browning's early favourites, had contributed the conceptual framing of a mannerist
artist. The faultless painter emerges as a type, a figure in a lyric essay in late
Renaissance art, with its conventionality, lack of personality, dependence upon the
moneyed patrons, search of technically perfect forms, but emptied of inner drama (this
low-pulsed, forthright craftsman's hand of mine), mechanical stereotype (I could count
twenty such), Narcissistic vacuity (I paint from myself and to myself), interested,
materialistic ends (I could earn more, give you more).
 To the actual report on Filippo Lippi's liberal life and acquaintance with the Medicis,
Browning has contributed the image of the revolutionary artist who, like himself, is
substituting a mundane trinity for the holy one: reality, artist, aesthetic object. The world
represented in art is constituted by the artist (endowed with meaning), whether as a
product of actual experience or of the imagination. The artist's sharp gaze is dislocating
the guard in the street from his actual posture – elbowing on his comrade... with the
pike and lantern – projecting him into a figure: the slave that holds/ John Baptist's head
a-dangle by the hair.

The painting alluded to at the end of the poem is, we think, the Coronation of the
Virgin, housed by the Ufizzi. The canvas is invaded by the common humanity in the
artist's neighbourhood, taken into possession, appropriated by the artist in a certain
mental picture (the men of Uz – and Us without the z –, i.e. we, ourselves, those of us),
while the self-portrait of the painter in the right-hand corner, with a scroll in his hand
reading “Iste perfecit opus”, is the figure of the artist in his work. He is a Christ-figure
(I'm the man ! – ecce homo), as he himself has worked the “incarnational” miracle of a
mental picture descending into its concrete realization. Job’s Uz (an area whose exact
location is unknown) is given “a local habitation and a name”.

Lippo is speaking of himself in the first, as well as in the third person, seeing and
being seen, as art effects the closure of inwardness and outwardness, the objectified
interiority. The irresolution, pauses, interjections, repetitions, questions, passionate
protestations create an overwhelming impression of a mind wrestling with itself, and,
like Job, with God/ Authority, and trying to make a new sense of the world in the “grey
beginning” of the modern age.

The German critique of the Gospels had nourished divided minds, expressing
themselves in interior dialogues between the voices of belief and scepticism (Clough's
Dipsychus, scene V, Epi-Strauss-ium, Browning's Christmas Eve and Easter-Day,
1850).

From 1855 Browning becomes more interested in the phenomenology of the mind
than in earnestly problematizing religious and philosophical issues. His dramatic
monologues reach towards the self-validating truth of analytical statements. How will an
empirically minded Arab physician (An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical
Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician) conceive of Christ's miraculous
resurrection of Lazarus? Obviously, as physiology: recovery from a long epilepsy
trance... How will Cleon, the poet of the decadent Hellenic world think of the inspired St.
Paul? As one who writes well, but without depth or grounding in truth.

Caliban, in the Dramatis Personae of 1864, is an example of metalepsis (the

troping of a figure). How will Shakespeare's Caliban represent God to himself ? In his
own image, as natural theology, a maker, a commander of the elements, possessed of
physical force, envious of higher powers, cruel and vengeful. While Prospero and
Miranda are sleeping, the time is come to mock at form (II, Henry IV), the time of
Caliban creating monsters...
 The interrogation of Victorian commonplaces leads to the final realization of the
age being unfit for poetry of the romantic sort. Utilitarianism only judged of actions by
results. Browning writes Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873) to stress the importance
of human motifs behind action, of the moral impulse. The trivial idealization of utility had
extorted an ironic, playful equation of beauty and the work idyll from Clough in his 1848
Bothie, where Philip, the member of an Oxford reading party to the Highlands, chooses
his wife from among the nineteenth-century “Graces”: Lady Maria, Katie, a rustic
farmer's daughter, and Elspie, also a farmer's daughter but endowed with a kind of
natural gentility. Philip's final choice of Elspie, as the one representing Primal Nature
and Beauty, in opposition to Victorian industrialist squalor (unfinished houses, lots for
sale, and railway outworks), but also as an alternative to the Lady's leisurely and
useless existence, occasions his friend Hobbes's ironical comment:

She that is handy is handsome, good dairy-maids must be good-looking,

If but the butter be nice, the tournor of the elbow is shapely,

If the cream-cheeses be white, far whiter the hands that made them,

If – but alas, is it true ?

We last find Browning engaging in an exploration of the relationship between

idealism and realism as part of an aesthetic inquiry. His last work, Asolando, subtitled
Fancies and Facts, raises the question of the artist's role in an unimaginative age:

And now a flower is just a flower:

Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird man –

In 1889, the issue was still haunting the poet, whose profession had been to seek
“the soul's world”, the truth of fiction, although his long poem, The Ring and the Book
(1868-1869) had in a way answered the dilemma. The “embossed ring” which had been
a gift to his departed wife, was the product of smithcraft applied to pure gold, cast into
shape. It is analogous to the poet's imagination, acting like acid on the crude facts of the
Yellow Book – the record of the trial of an l698 Roman murder case – which he had
found on a stall in the Piazza San Lorenzo, in Florence. But the book itself, as the
record of a trial, and not of the actual facts, suggests the impossibility of ever getting to
the naked truth of experience. Reality is always filtered through consciousness, it only
provides the starting point of various and contradictory stories, perspectives on events,
like the conflicting testimonies the jury are confronted with in court. The distancing
material (the framing of the trial story by the writing of the book, the oblique effect of the
multiple points of view) conveys the sense of partial access to truth in a culture of
various commitments, but it also shows a tendency towards the modernist concept of
impersonality (elaborate construct instead of self-expression):
 Art may tell a truth

Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,

Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.

The nine (out of the twelve planned) books of this long poem give a voice not only
to the characters involved in the case but also to a human community so divided upon
the subject as to be unable to arbitrate more efficiently than Pope Innocent XII himself,
to whom the case is deferred. An old nobleman of Arezzo, Guido Franceschini, marries
Pompilia, a twelve-year-old child-bride. Pompilia manages to escape her husband's
persecution and cruelty with the help of a young priest, Giuseppe Caponsacchi. The
couple are arrested and tried for adultery, Pompilia being sent to a nunnery. Being
found out with child, Pompilia is sent to her parents. In his extreme rage, Guido has
Pietro and Violante Comparini killed, and the girl is so severely injured that she dies a
few days later. Guido is condemned to death. The disparities between the characters'
speeches and the tendentious comments of fallible interpreters breathe forth the
pessimism of the late Victorians concerning man's alienation among his
uncomprehending fellow-beings. Half-Rome (Book II) urges Guido to take the old way
trod when men were men, which contrasts ironically with the character's cowardice and
abjection. Guido's trial leads to the complete dissolution of his personality, to that abyss
of moral abasement when he bursts into irrational appeals (even to the victims of his
cruelty) to be spared:

Life is all !

I was just stark mad, – let the madman live

Pressed by as many chains as you please pile !

Don't open ! Hold me from them ! I am yours,

I am the Granduke's – no, I am the Pope's !

Abate, – Cardinal, – Christ, – Maria, – God,...

Pompilia, will you let them murder me ?

The unfailing scales of the patriarchal world, with its Manichean divisions between
right and wrong, between the supposedly dark temptations of the female Half and the
broad daylight of man's intellectual Other-Half has been left behind; it has yielded to a
more complex representation of the human being in the interplay of public opinion and
social determinism. Pompilia looks forward to Tess of the Durbervilles. Nor did
Browning's critics or readership by that time reject the evil against which the pure and
the beautiful might sometimes be cast for a more truthful representation of human
character. Even Athenaeum, his life-long adversary, found the book the most precious
and profound spiritual treasure that England has produced since the days of
Shakespeare.

Lord David Cecil's estimation in Early Victorian Novelists that there is one sort of
novel before George Eliot and another after her finds support in at least three aspects of
the mid-Victorian novelist's art of fiction: a shift of focus from class to gender and
from biology to vocation, Feuerbachised characters (versions of the self as the
outcome of the reciprocal workings of self-regard and social opinion) and patterned
action (structural contrasts and parallels, anticipations etc.), pointing not to mirrors
but to possible orderings of reality.

George Eliot (18l9-1880), by her real name, Mary Ann Evans, was an
emancipated woman of her time, a brilliant intellect and a courageous personality, who
defied social conventions not only in writing but in her personal life as well. At the age of
seventeen she already had an excellent background of education when her mother's
death forced her to return home and look after the house for her father – a carpenter,
builder, and agent. She continued her studies with lessons in Greek, Latin, Italian, and
German. At the age of twenty-one she moved with her father from Arbury Farm,
Warickshire, to Coventry. Here she made the acquaintance of two writers, Charles Bray
and Charles Hannell. The latter was the author of An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of
Christianity, which denied the historical validity of the gospels. Mary Ann came under
this liberal influence, which caused her to refuse to attend church and to question the
evangelical belief she had been brought up in. She even took to translating David
Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus, which had been the source of Hannell's book.
Between 1850-1853, she worked as assistant editor of the Westminster Review,
surrounded by a circle of distinguished friends, among whom, John Stuart Mill, Thomas
Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, and George Henry Lewes, editor of The Leader, to whom she
became strongly attached. Lewes could not bring himself to getting a divorce from his
mentally-ill wife, but Evans was an emancipated woman, who did not feel ashamed of a
personal bond justified by spiritual affinity and mutual affection, even if it lacked legal
sanction and scandalized people. Her own brother refused to see her, and it was only in
the last years of her life that they became reconciled. The Mill on the Floss (1860) is
less the idyllic picture of the Victorian prelapserian brother and sister relationship than
the psychological release of the writer's anguished relationship with her brother. There
are more reasons, in fact, for an identification of the writer with Maggie Tulliver, whose
talents and aspirations cannot bare fruit in the provincial, male-dominated community on
the banks of the river Floss. As this heroine of deep sensitivity, intellectual capacity, and
spiritual longings tries to break social conventions and have her own way, she finds
herself ostracised by a morally strict and conventional society. The anxiety of choice
and freedom, first cropping up in a post-traditional society, defines her no longer
through class and status (a type of social determinism which is still at work in Adam
Bede, 1859 – the story of a peasant girl seduced and deserted by her landlord), but
through the capacity or failure to shape her life according to a vocational ethos. Maggie
is more promising in her studies than her brother, Tom, yet the Victorian society will not
give her the same opportunity to advance in education, even if, unlike the typical
Victorian girl, Maggie fights for her place in the world. There are also recesses of
feminity which are being more openly explored than in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley.
Maggie struggles between the call of duty and the spur of her own sexual highly-strung,
hungry nature. She sees herself trapped in a network of emotions which are conflicting
with the requirements of family and social bonds. The young man she first befriends,
Philip Wakem, is the son of her father's mortal foe, to whom also her brother, according
to a patriarchal code, has sworn life-long enmity, while the second man she falls in love
with is the finance of her cousin, Lucy. Society is the realm of divisiveness, of conflicting
aims, as the ground of the free manifestations of each individual will. It is only nature
that draws all the threads of creation back to itself. The flood that ravages St. Ogg's
carries with it the brother and sister, not divided anymore, towards the common womb
of nature from which they had proceeded into the world.

In a study of Felix Holt (1866), published in the autumn 1995 issue of Studies in
English Literature, Rita Bode points to the pre-eminence of the feminist issue over that
of the hero's radical revolutionary commitment. Successive framings of feminity –
Felix's, Harold's, Esther's – yield a Feaurbachan typology, positioning it within that I-
thou relationship which is the new perspective on the interaction of public and private
within one character. We are informed about Jane Eyre's personal moral dilemma, but
Esther Lyon is aware of larger, transpersonal patterns of the general social stream
engulfing individual life. She is considering not the traditional issue of marriage but a
woman's opportunities in pursuing some vocation; not acquisition of status and income
but practical efficacy of knowledge in serving man [35]: A woman – Esther complains to
Felix – can hardly ever choose in that way (i.e. between a life of difficult blessedness or
one of moral mediocrity) ; she is dependent on what happens to her. She must take
meaner things because only meaner things are within her reach. On the merely
assertive level, Esther appears to acquiesce to the commonplaces in point of man's
superiority: My husband must be greater and nobler than I am. But it is her eloquence
and marvellous use of words that finally create a noble-hearted Felix. He stands
reprieved because she has persuaded the court into it, being herself a moral standard:
He is a good-fellow if she thinks so. In an oblique way, her speech denies the power
discourse about man being always greater and nobler. As Rita Bode pinpoints, Esther is
inscribed as a sage figure, who is in the habit of shaping life into intelligible patterns.
With her, life is no longer biology but meaningful design. Life is to her a book which she
secured herself to be constructing, some personage strikes her as misgeneric identity
(You are in another genre; a lover rather than a tragic hero), ideas are like books on
shelves etc. To what use does the male-dominated society put her plentiful fire and
pride and wit? While acknowledging her accomplishments, Mrs. Transome is
simultaneously evaluating her as a good catch from the wrong point of view: Men like
such captives, as they like horses that champ the bit and paw the ground; they feel their
triumph in their mastery. Feminity is also crosslit from the men's points of view. To
Harold Transome, women are like inert portraits in a gallery: pleasing and decorative
possessions, occupying him in the interval of business. Felix is the revolutionary
idealist, who is dreaming of a woman sharing all the great aims of his life. But he too
errs on the side of a despotic positivism. At the other end from Victorian shallowness in
the shaping of woman as a charming doll trained in etiquette and propriety of speech –
what he calls the spun-glass affair –, Felix will not have any artifice added to crude
nature's gift. The revolutionary's language is in no way less biased than the patriarchal
disdain of the haughty aristocrat: I want you to change (...) I should like to come and
scold her every day, and make her cry, and cut her fine hair off. The Victorian battle of
the sexes, with “the male element extinguished and subdued”, is transposed into a
discursive contest. Esther, with her embroidery, stitches and netting, is a temptress
figure, of course, but she is also the source of the redeeming word, while Felix, who had
carefully avoided becoming a woman's sleek dog, sees himself reduced to a raven
croaking failure. The power of words is greater than any practical revolutionary venture.

If one wishes to measure the epistemologic distance separating Middlemarch

(1872) from Adam Bede, let one compare two definitions of determinism encapsulated
in the two novels. In Adam Bede, we read that our deeds determine us, as much as we
determine our deeds. In Middlemarch, there is no straightforward pronouncement on the
matter but only a problematical framing of the story through an argument contained in
an epigraph:

1st Gentleman: „Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves”.

2nd Gentleman: „Ay truly: but I think it is the world/

That brings the iron”.

The interplay of perspectives on characters and events, what characters think or is

thought about them have replaced monological claims to truth. At the same time social
determinism has become as important as individual action. David Daiches [36] explores
the imagery of entanglement, of bonds, yokes, fetters, bridles establishing modes of
connection in the novel, while F.R. Leavis, in his famous Great Tradition, remarks that
there is no public life which has not been determined by a wider public life. Arnold Kettle
[37] even presents Lydgate and Dorothea – the protagonists of originally separate
stories and subsequently interwoven – as the vehicles for the main theme of the
compromise between aspirations and the life the conditions permit. In fact, the centre of
attention is being shifted from characters to the background. The subject is the old
provincial society. The subtitle of Middlemarch – published in eight books from
December 1871 to December 1872 – is indeed “A Study of Provincial Life”, but it is so
only to the extent that it offers versions of characters, and shapes human destiny.
Although stifling, it is not that province of the European tradition (Flaubert, Turgenev)
where nothing ever happens. The world of Middlemarch is historically distanced yet
neither stale nor irrelevant to the writer's time. The detachment historicization always
presupposes is sooner the guarantee of an objective construct of actual events. The
time preceding the Reform Bill of 1832 is one of important economic and political
changes. The novelist researched the material for the novel scrupulously, making pert
references to the state of medical knowledge, dress habits and speech. But such details
are not there for decor; they do not betray Balzac's interest in realistic descriptions of
the bare facts amassed for the sake of a “realistic”, well-documented narration. Such
details are functional, highly selective and often symbolical. The hints to the newly
introduced stethoscope and post-mortems are there to differentiate Lydgate, the
modern general practitioner, from his old-fashioned colleagues. The references to
contemporary debates on the cell, ethnographic material about African tribal
theophanies, or to the German critique of theology serve to justify the characters' failure.
Casaubon is wrong in trying to find a key to all mythologies as much as Lydgate in
searching for the “primary tissue”. In an age of fragmented, positivistic research,
mythography was being replaced by ethnography and linguistic study, and so was the
Goethean monistic myth (the Urpflanze), by the atomistic observation of the cell. The
railway, advancing into the countryside and sweeping off individual destinies,
symbolizes the great divide between the more traditional England that had existed
before the Reform Bill and its post-industrial outcome. Caleb Garth, the land surveyor
dedicated to honest work and good practical achievements, well understands its utility,
while the conservative Mr. Brooke, with his ill-housed tenets and ill-paid labourers, fails
to get a seat in the future, reforming Parliament. As a matter of fact, even
“Middlemarch”, an imaginary provincial town, has a symbolical not a topical significance.
It is provincial, because it is bereft of the glamour of heroic adventure and passionate
dedication to high ideals; and this not because the characters are no longer capable of
dedication, but because the time for uncommon fits is forever gone. Those who still
crave for them look quixotically ridiculous and helpless. Provincial, because intellectual
enterprise no longer leads to momentous scientific systems and discoveries but only to
provisional results and diminutive steps in collectively undertaken projects. If the
Dorothea and the Lydgate plots unfold as twin studies in defeated aspirations [38], it is
not because they lack natural endowments or noble cravings, but because bourgeois
existence was so monotonous and science so empirically mediocre. There was no more
opportunity for either religious or speculative quests in the post-industrial and post-
metaphysical age. A modest sort of happiness is still possible, according to Eliot,
Swinburne (Songs before Sunrise), Meredith or Hardy, through a careful avoidance of
romantic idealism, egotistic self-absorption. The Garth family, providing the moral centre
of the novel, are prudentially steering a middle course between idealistic aspirations and
the disenchanted realism nourished by an age of material prosperity. There is
something enduring and substantial in the things they value or accomplish. Whereas the
ladies of the time are instructed in the graceful way of getting into and out of a carriage
and in the rank flavour of speech (tone of voice, accent, use of particular phrases),
emulating manners before morals [39], Mrs. Garth instructs her children in English
grammar or Roman history. She finds such accompaniment to her cooking in the
kitchen as proper as having taught before marriage. With them, the absolutes are
tamed, and the religious notions recast in human terms. Caleb knows values well, the
value of practical achievement, his idea of the devil being a slack workman, but also
some higher notion about a sort of Kantian self-legislating will. Even if God winked at
Bulstrode's evil past, he would not work for him any more.

As for the writers of the time, their bęte noire seems to have been the Kantian
’moral or practical egoist’, who reduces everything to his own ends (Anthropologie,
Op. cit.). The name of ’Willoughby Pattern’ in The Egoist by George Meredith may
suggest indeed the willow pattern on china, as fragile as the protagonist's claim that
people or life in the house conform to his pattern, but we find the linguistic sequence
significant in itself: the will to be of a kind, the portrait (pattern) of the egoist, enclosed
and fortified in his “bower”. Rosamond, sacrificing Lydgate's aspirations, happiness and
dignity to gratify her capricious and trivial appetites, or Casaubon, marrying Dorothea for
her capability of devotedness, and whose selfish will reaches beyond death, are perfect
egoists. Nor is the pathetic Dorothea free from selfish motives. In fact she chooses to
marry Casaubon, not only because her culture has bred in her the conviction that the
husband should be a sort of father (who) could teach you even Hebrew if he wished it,
but also because she is thrilled at the perspective of playing the lamp-holder to some
great work, of being able to see the world by the same light as great men have seen it.
The circumstance that she misconstrues the old failed scholar as “a living Bossuet” or
as “Pascal looking like Locke” is the real source of her misery. This is a case of
epistemologic error rather than genuine Don-Quixotism (the hero of idealistic romance).
Nineteenth-century culture no longer made it possible to reconcile complete knowledge
with devoted piety, i.e. the fusion of mysticism and empiricism, any more than monistic
constructs of world mythologies or the identification of an original tissue. Dorothea is
herself role-playing in some measure, feeling, for instance, disappointed, because
Lowick does not have a larger share of the world's misery, so that she might have had
actual duties before her. The sense of shame generated by the realization of her selfish
interest in the world's misery shows Dorothea as the much more self-conscious idealist
in a critical age than the selfless St. Theresa or the perfectly naive Don Quixote, who
never considers himself mistaking wind-mills for dragons. Mary Garth is the only
character who finds a straight path to happiness, precisely because she does not
unrealistically expect the world to conform to her expectations: Things were not likely to
be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction. Her honest and kind nature, scrupulously
avoiding the mean or treasonous part wins her the affection of the mayor's son.

Characters are, in fact, defined against a background of shifting values. Mrs. Vincy
finds working for bread embarrassing, while her daughter, the beautiful but shallow
Rosamond, mainly values her husband's capital of aristocratic and moneyed relatives.
Contrariwise, Lydgate, the new figure of the professional, conceives of success as the
fulfilment of some vocation: conducting research, founding a hospital along modern
lines. Eliot attacks all extreme opinions, trying to reach a commonsensical and realistic
compromise. The Victorian female ideal seems to be polarized between Casaubon
extolling Dorothea's elevation of thought and capability of devotedness (St. John Rivers'
missionary fantasy of Jane Eyre) and Mr. Chicherly's paradise of charming dolls fit for
male pastime: There should be a little filigree about a woman – something of the
coquette... And I like them blond, with a certain gait, and a swan neck. We would be
mistaken, however, if we ascribed to George Eliot a middle-class ethos of the good life.
All she says is that the sense of belatedness – these later-born Theresas – bred by the
epistemological crisis defined in the Prelude (no coherent social faith and order which
could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul) makes cultural
creation problematical. In the absence of a commonly accepted structure of knowledge,
and of some long-recognizable deed (reified order of culture), “spiritual grandeur” is
wasted in senseless and sterile agony. Will Ladislaw, with his intellectual background,
artistic taste and political insight, is the only character whose aspirations find an outlet in
socially-significant action, whose worth is “recognizable”: speaking for people, painting
for an audience, communing physically and spiritually with his wife.

References:

[31] Isobel Armstrong, Poetry, Poetics and Politics, Routledge, 1993.

[32] Michael Wheeler, English Fiction of the Victorian Period, 1830-1890, Longman, 1985, p. 90.

[33] Michael Mason in Robert Browning, edited by Isobel Armstrong, Op. cit. p.1974.

[34] John Wolford & Daniel Karlin, Robert Browning.Ch. 2 Genre and Style, Longman, 1996, pp. 38 and
the following.

[35] Alan Mintz, George Eliot: The Novel of Vocation, Harvard, 1978, p. 17.

[36] David Daiches, in Middlemarch. A. Casebook Edited by Patrick Swinden, Macmillan 1972.

[37] Arnold Kettle, Ibidem.

[38] W. J. Harvey, Ibidem.

[39] Lynda Mugglestone:” Grammatical Fair Ones”, The Review of English Studies, February, 1995.

The interplay of public opinion and self-regard projects characters at the focus
of collective consciousness. Public opinion swamps Bulstrode more effectively than
Raffles's report on his past. The romantic analogies between physical appearance and
moral character (natural symbolism, as the result of the workings of a universal spirit)
are one more discarded myth. Back from Rome, Dorothea is looking at her face in the
mirror, expecting to find traces of her inner agony, but all she can see is an expression
of perfect health. The individual himself is building his mask for others, sometimes
mistaking his social image for inwardness, or no longer being able to distinguish
between them: Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the
consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that
entered into her physique; she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did
not know it to be precisely her own. On another level, the most dramatic case of bad
faith is, of course, Casaubon – the Victorian parody of the Renaissance scholar. His
dried preparation, lifeless embalment of knowledge, always reproducing someone else's
opinions, never committing himself to any values, is the abortive product of the age of
the accumulation of empirical facts, of multiplying technologies, concomitantly with the
decay of humanistic values. The conviction of humanity having reached a dead end,
having experienced “all modes of thought and life” (Pater) is breeding a sense
of world fatigue, which gives Dorothea's fresh mind a mental shiver. What had been
religious fervour is now a history of “inconstant modes of fashion” (Pater). Spiritual
exhaustion becomes manifest as paralysed moral will, non-commitment to a set of
values, as self-alienation, depersonalisation. Casaubon looks back to Ibsen's Peer Gynt
(he is “invented” by Dorothea's moral energy, as Peer Gynt exists more
genuinely in Solweig's imagination) and ahead to Kipling's Tomlinson (never galvanized
by his personal motives but only swayed about aimlessly by current readings)

The interconnected lives of the Brookes, representing the country gentry, of the
Vincy group (city bourgeoisie) and the Garth household (country middle-class) are cast
into a masterfully controlled multi-plot structure, not only as a requirement of serialized
publication (the readers could not be allowed to forget a neglected character), but also
as the narrative correlative of an idea about the interrelatedness of our social lives.
Occasional parties are a good occasion for gossip, which works as a connecting agent.
Characters move from one group to another in their capacities as professionals, needed
irrespectively of barriers of birth, rank, status (which had collapsed anyway). They are
the family doctor, the banker, the land-surveyor, and the clergyman of various
commitments (varieties of Anglicanism). The structural frames of the “Prelude” and
epigraphs show the narrator not only as omniscient but also as an obtruding,
interpreting observer. The chapter proper is often a reinscription of a figure in the
epigraph. For instance, the double possible visions of Don Quixote as either a cavalier
on a dapple-grey steed, wearing a golden helmet, or as a man on a grey ass, carrying
something shiny on his head, work a closure of subjectivity (the protagonist's idea of
himself) and objectivity (the onlooker's empirical observation). The same reality is both
empirically perceived and subjectively constituted. Dorothea may very well see for
herself how very ugly Mr. Casaubon is, but what she rejects in the chapter thus framed
is Celia's mode of looking upon human beings as if they were merely animals with a
toilette. If Don Quixote is maddened by medieval romance, Dorothea deliberately rejects
the shallows of ladies-school literature (of the grammatical beaux [40]), reaching after
intellectual conditions that had preceded the Industrial Revolution, bred into her by
Swiss Protestantism.

The Industrial Revolution and the metaphysical crisis were also responsible for the
emergence of a kind of fantasy that is paradoxically aligned to the triumph of the
scientific idea about the existence of a rational and necessary order of phenomena [41].
Roger Caillois or Tzvetan Todorov dissociate between the marvellous (supernatural,
located in an ontologically distinct realm) and the fantastic (a breech in the rational,
logical order of the real world, the irruption of something which contradicts its laws). In a
natural or secular economy, otherness is not located elsewhere; it is read as a
projection of merely human fears and desires transforming the world through subjective
perception [42]. Science and psychology offered the ground for a new form of fantasy,
which reconciles the need for imaginative projection to the rational need for verosimility
in a scientific age. The modern avatar of the ancient myths, folklore, fairy tales appears
as a reaction of the imaginative spirit against the oppressive rationalism of a
materialistic culture but also as an internalisation of the dialogue that used to be
conducted with God. The representations of otherness, which can no longer be
attached to metaphysical realities, are posited within the self: dreams, nervous
disturbances, and polypsychic personalities. Rosemary Jackson, in Fantasy. The
Literature of Subversion (Op. cit.) historicizes and psychoanalyses Todorov's theory of
The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973). This special kind of
fantasy is interpreted as a literature of desire, seeking that which exists outside the
dominant law or value system. In Jackson's opinion, fantasy is a form of Manippean
satire, figuring a carnival world, in which there are only eccentric, multiple identities
that have ceased to coincide with themselves. Victorian fantasy is a form of
subversion, deliberately undermining the contemporary complacence and belief in the
stability of the Bank of England and the everlastingness of the British Empire. From a
structural point of view, realistic forms are described as closed, monological, while the
fantastic mode is realized in open, dialogical forms. They do indeed allow of a double
interpretation – realistic and supernatural, literal and figurative etc.

The beginning of the... end of unity and totality as the sign of desire's dominance
[43] is to be identified, in our opinion, in the last third of Victorianism and around the turn
of the century, when scientific theories encouraged moral and epistemological
pessimism. The wild fantasies of Charles Brockden Marturin, Sheridan Le Fanu, Arthur
Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker or Arthur Machen are merely forms of evasion and
sensationalism. In major writers – such as Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells – they are most often psychological
explorations of character or parables of human destiny.

The fantasy books published in the sixties and early seventies do not fall into the
category of the fantastic as defined above. They do point in its direction, however, in
that they combine fantasy with an interest in natural history (Charles Kingsley, The
Water-Babies), or in H. L. Mansel’s recent theory of language (verbal structures without
meaningful referent, proving the autonomy of language in its relation to the world)
(Lewis Carroll's Alice books).

Lewis Carroll (the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson – 1832-1898), a

mathematical lecturer at Oxford, geometrician and logician, writes fantasy as an
innovation of his scholarly interest in logic and mathematics, or in games playing with
their notions and rules (chess, cards, croquet). There is a pastoral element in his
description of a fantasy world as a satirical attack upon the Victorian, post-Darwinian
culture – an aspect commented by William Empson in his Versions of Pastoral. Whilst
seeking for new narrative forms of representation, he appears to be aware of several
modes of constituting reality (like all his contemporaries, whether poets or novelists),
rather than of ontic disruptions. In the Preface to his Sylvie and Bruno (1893), he does
not mention three orders of reality but three kinds of mental states: ordinary, when man
sees a real world, eerie, when he perceives a transitional world, which strikes one as
uncanny and trance-like. This last – the imaginary world – is the one perceived in a
state of trance, or dream, which does not violate the rules of the waking everyday.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is presented as a juvenile

“commissioned” by three charming little girls in whose company he happened to sail in a
boat on some lovely holiday. The three sisters, qualified as “cruel”, are a modern
version of the ancients' grim Fatal Sisters, meeting the Victorians in form of a... request
for nonsense... (They ask him to tell a story off hand, in which there be plenty of
“nonsense”). The narrator sets it in a dream (no ontic disruption is thereby produced).
Alice falls asleep while making a daisy chain – a possible symbol of the chain of being –
and dozes off. She falls through a rabbit hole, being symbolically re-born into the animal
under-world. Her identity becomes problematical. Does man indeed belong with the
other animals, as the climactic point of biological evolution? Carroll's brilliant book has
occasioned a host of interpretations, most of them ranking it with the author's manuals
on the more serious or more playful logical applications of the intellect. We see it as an
anti-Darwinian parable, an attempt to restore humanity to the only Eden still possible
in the post-metaphysical age, that of cultural signifieds. Plunging among Darwinian
extinct and extant species, Alice finds herself in a realm of total insignification, which
she can finally control as a meaning being, ordering and qualifying it as an invention of
the human brain (a “pack of cards”).

In the rabbit’s world, man's constructs are denied or annulled. The Newtonian
intellect finds itself baffled by the absence of physical laws: as Alice falls down through
the hole, she can rest to pick up bottles or jars, read the labels, taste their content and
put them back. Her body suffers shrinking or elongation, but her identity is not
threatened by such bodily metamorphoses. When she needs to remember who she is,
she begins to check what she knows. She tries to recover her command of language,
knowledge of grammar, geography, or nursery rhymes. Carroll builds a hierarchy of
knowledge – from stark figures quantifying facts, like the multiplication table –, to words
which “signify”, i.e. conventional meanings produced through man's historical action and
social cohabitation. In the rabbit’s world, good manners, like curtseying, notions like
“latitude” or “longitude”, or pragmatist speech (saying nice grand words, not to
communicate something, but only to impress people) have lost all meaning. With the
instruments and yardsticks of civilization lost, Alice has no possibility to measure or
check her condition against any objective landmark: she is vainly holding her hand on
her hand to feel the way she is growing. Alice would like to get to a splendid garden with
roses and fountains, but she cannot reach the golden key to it, which is lying on a glass
table. She starts crying, and there she is, swimming in the salted water flowing forth
from her eyes, together with a lot of animals, among which, the extinct Dodo bird. The
mythopoetic imagery seems to suggest the Eden of the Spirit (glass symbolizing
consciousness, reflection), which man lost when he accepted to frame himself not as
Hamlet's “large discourse of reason” but as the product of obscure biological processes,
going on in nature's prodigious body. William Empson interprets the bath of tears in the
underground chamber as the amniotic fluid or as the sea from which life arose (a parody
of individual ontogeny repeating phylogeny, the history of the species).

Drawin's Copernican revolution had turned the world upside down, allowing of the
human and the animal to coalesce. On the surface or literal level, the theory seems to
work: Alice is mistaken for the rabbit’s servant, while the rabbit has possessed himself
of a male suit, gloves and a watch. The girl is being ordered about by birds and animals,
or going messages for the rabbit, in a parody of democracy, in which the highest among
all is their servant. The extended franchise, the demagogic talk in Parliament and in the
newspapers, and other developments towards the rapprochement of classes were
probably being experienced as great a threat as Darwin's deposition of man from the
throne of creation. On a deeper level, through a subversive rhetoric, such notions are
dismissed as absurd. The Caucus-race, in which everybody joins when one choses and
leaves off when one pleases, with everybody winning in the end, is a parody of
egalitarianism and a recognition of man's superiority in constructing rules and stepping
beyond bare necessity: humans will engage in such competitions to prove their
superiority, not in order to get dry. The great divide between humans and animals is the
capacity of transcendence, of standing at a remove from things. Alice's comfits are
either too big or too small for animals, she cannot adjust herself to their needs, while the
present defining her human nature is a thimble – the instrument of her work, which
creates a secondary order of reality. The incapacity to transcend the here and the now
is seen in the confusion between literal and figurative meaning, or between meaning
and sound (the dry tail of the mouse and the dry tale he is telling), between full lexical
words and grammatical empty markers (see the duck's puzzled questioning about the
meaning of “it” in The Archbishop of Canterbury found it advisable). The absurdity of the
animal world is not just a matter of dream-like incoherence and random associations,
but also the effect of a deliberate deconstruction of the cultural order, which is made to
reflect upon itself. In it, any hierarchy – of values, notions, status etc. – has collapsed.
The cook is terrorizing the Duchess, a fragmented body assumes control of personality
or identity, and everything is relativized. Alice imagines herself sending massages to her
feet; a cat is reduced to a grin, with Alice waiting for the ears to show up, so that she
might address their possessor. The Duchess's baby would have made a very ugly child,
but it makes a rather handsome pig, and Alice is ransacking her memory to see which
of the children she knows could go through a similar improvement. The shallow
Victorian education for girls is probably the butt of the biting irony on schools teaching
laughing and Greek, French music and washing extra. And yet Alice does get a chance
to possess herself of the golden key. The meeting with the Caterpillar deserves all
attention, for it splits Alice's adventure into two quite distinct halves. The Caterpillar is
undoubtedly a serpent figure, introducing Alice to the Eden of knowledge and wisdom.
Whatever is is logical or not at all. The caterpillar teaches Alice to bite from a mushroom
which helps one grow either small or tall. As Alice does not know which half is which,
she extends her arms around its circumference (they are its perfect measure),
snatching a bit from each. The fallacy of her “solution” is obvious. She cannot possibly
know whether she has got her bits from different “hemispheres” or from the same.
“Differences”, like “tall” and “small”, “left”, “right” etc. are established on a relativist
ground. They are not out there, as a datum in nature, but relative to the evaluating
subject; they are generated within the sphere of humanity.

The incongruities have so far qualified the ontic level: bodily transformations,
displacements in the evolution of species or simply confusion between things and the
linguistic order of the world (What did the Archbishop find? I find a thing, a frog or a
worm...).

The golden key ushers Alice into a bidimensional, cultural order, from which the
principle of reality – of cause and effect, of empirical adjustment to facts, of efficiency
etc. – has been excluded (in a mad world nobody asks for reasons), and which,
however, she can finally govern. Nature is here absorbed into signifieds: hedgehogs
serve as croquet balls, and flamingos, as mallets. The conventional time measured by
the clock has abolished the reality of actual time. If the clock has stopped at tea time,
the March Hare, the Hatter and the Dormouse are having an endless Mad Tea-Party,
moving around the table for a clean cup, as there is no time to wash them. Confusions
and errors are internal to language (between nouns and pronouns, caused by the
homophony of “mine”) and so are the self-validating truths, needing no empirical testing
(The more there is of yours the less there is of mine). The Knave of Hearts is being
prosecuted for stealing some tarts, which are not missing, but what else can one do
about someone who is by name a “Knave”? ... Mathematical computations take no
heed of the things thus computed (as two members of the jury cannot agree upon the
date, they reach a compromise adding the years and reducing the answers to shillings
and pence). Whilst the democracy of biology would have man debased to a low status
among animals better fitted for survival, the errors of judgement and bad faith can more
effectively behead man than the Queen's executioner. Alice, who had dismissed the
reality of the mushroom, displacing it into a signifier (I decree that this half stands for
“tall”, and this, for “small”), is now discovering the normal relationship between signifieds
and the world referentia. Her new company, deliberately refusing signification of objects
constructed by intuition (If there is some meaning in the poem intended to prove the
Knave’s guilt, the judges will not bother to find any) is dismissed as the bidimensional
reality of a pack of cards. Carroll's book is a figure of the production of meaning through
a tripartite linguistic sign: signifier, signified, referent. Man is not an indifferent link but
the great breach in the order of nature, because it is through him that self and world
come together in the transcendent forms of culture.

Bernard Richards [44], in anatomising the English Poetry of the Victorian Period,
traces the amalgamating (of) different arts to produce a unified impression back to the
Pre-Raphaelites, who emerged as a self-conscious art school in the 185os. Robert
Browning himself joined the practice of writing commentaries on paintings or of
producing paintings to poems, but not as part of an aesthetic programme. Anyway, his
eternalization of the fleeting moment in Eurydice to Orpheus, an eight-line comment
accompanying Frederic Leighton's painting exhibited in London in 1864, seeks other
poetic ends than Dante Gabriel Rossetti's definition of the sonnet as “a moment's
monument”. Browning is after a condensed picture exploding with the manifold
significance of the character or situation, while Rossetti's is a neo-Platonic search
for immortal patterns, despite his also being intensely aware, as well as Charles
Baudelaire in his seminal essay, The Painter of Modern Life (1859-60), that the neo-
classical ideal of unique, unchanging and absolute beauty no longer appealed to the
modern world: Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art,
the other being the eternal and immutable. The whole story of Eurydice is exquisitely
poised on the threshold between being and non-being, all past and all future,
simultaneous presence and dissolution in a fragmented, freezing anatomy:

But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow !

Let them once more absorb me ! One look now

Will lap me round for ever, not to pass

Out of its light, though darkness lie beyond:

Hold me but safe again within the bond

Of one immortal look ! All woe that was,

Forgotten, and all terror that may be

Defied, – no past is mine, nu future: look at me !

The meaning of the poem is complete and independent of the accompanying

painting, which is Leighton's re-interpretation of the Orpheus myth, with Eurydice, who is
unaware of the gods' imposition that he should not look back, entreating a gaze from
him. In his sonnet sequence, The House of Life, Rossetti, who was also a painter,
recovers the enigma tradition of the Renaissance emblem, in which text and image are
reflecting upon and completing each other, in a revived dialogue of the arts. Here is the
famous “Introductory Sonnet”:

A sonnet is a moment's monument, -

Memorial from the Soul's eternity

To one deathless hour. Look that it be,

Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,

Of its ardous fulness reverent:

 Carve it in ivory or in ebony,

As Day or night may rule; and let Time see

Its flowering crest impearled and orient.

A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals

The soul, – its converse, to what Power 'tis due: -

Whether for tribute to the august appeals

Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,

It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath,

In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.

The accompanying emblems – the Soul hovering over the “sonnet monument”, a
common churchyard sight, a butterfly and a serpent biting its tale – are familiar from the
alchemical tradition. The butterfly symbolizes transience – that misapplication of the
soul to fleeting and worthless pursuits, which end in a toll to Death. The serpent is
reminiscent of Uroboros in the alchemical bowl, biting its tail, symbolical of the Spirit that
feeds upon itself. Should the Soul remain sphered unto itself, dedicated to intellectual
beauty (Life's august appeals, that is superior forms of Love, Afrodita Urania, or love of
super-sensuous beauty), she will crystallize into an oriental pearl (a splendid hendiadys:
impearled and orient), like some coral island in the chaotic Leviathan. Yet neither can
be achieved in the absence of the other – form and formlessness, the fleeting, the
contingent, and the still vital “flowering” pearl – they are merely the two sides of the
same coin; the new aesthetics is born by their tension made permanent. Rossetti is
weary of vague Platonic paradigms, founding his “fleshly school” as an alternative to
what Baudelaire calls that intangible dream floating on the ceilings and academies.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848 as a society of artists

(Holman Hunt, J.E. Millais, Dante Gabriel and William Rossetti) with strong literary
interests. Christina Rossetti shared the new school doctrine, Gerard Manley
Hopkins, who published no volume in his life-time, was Rossetti's disciple, while
William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne, who emerged from under the cloak
of Pre-Raphaelitism, were the spearhead of the poetic climate in the final third of the
century. Literariness, and a consciousness of artifice are forms of spiritual feedback, in
art's ivory tower, severed from the interests of common life. The Germ, a magazine first
issued in 185o, promoted the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic. Summing up [45], it means a
practice of decorative “neo-medievalism” as a reaction to the ugliness of the
industrial urban environment, particularity of sensory detail, archaising and
medievalizing tendencies, a taste in decoration, the cultivation of morbid states
and habits of feeling (decay, dissolution, death), the use of religious language for
evocative purposes, a care for finish of style and polish of phrasing at the
expense of a clear definition of meaning.

In his discussion of the Pre-Raphaelites [46], Graham Hough is framing them as

part of the great post-romantic movement which dawned upon the positivist nineteenth
century, causing the radical turn from realism towards modernism. The refuge to
imaginary realms, the excursions into the religio-romantic dream-worlds is seen as
essentially different from that of the romantics. It is caused by a general melancholy
agreement that art and the sense of beauty have a rougher time in the modern world.
They are visiting the past not as spectators, like the romantics, but as exiles from a lost
paradise. Their revolt against academic “grand style”, artificiality, rules and conventions
often consorted with utopian ideas about a republican reformation of society. In fact it
had been Overback who had introduced Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) in Rome
to the German Nazarenes, who combined primitivism in design with the ethos of living in
a semi-religious community. Following Ruskin's pointed finger, Hunt and the Rossettis
identified in Raphael the “original sin” of typecast attitudinising, sensuality, and vacuous
mannerism. Consequently they sought their inspiration in Raphael's predecessors,
whom they found less consummate but more sincere, unstereotyped and
unconventional. The spiritualised, remote and delicately stylised faces covering the Art
Gallery in Liverpool are D.G. Rossetti's mural transposition of the Vita Nuova mythology,
while the murals of Oxford Union are the fruit of his flight into the medieval Arthurian
romance. The new religion of beauty was heralded by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Hand
and Soul, published in the first number of “The Germ”, where the mistress of Chiaro dell'
Erma (an imaginary Tuscan painter) is no longer a figure of theology, as in Dante, but
an allegory of the “gracious and holy Italian art”. Rossetti's translation of early Italian
poets (Guido Cavalcanti, Guittone d'Arezzo, Guido Guinicelli) represented a similar
attempt to reach beyond the Italian Renaissance which had only exploited the animal
side of man. Ideal love – Love's high retinue – only exists in a world of its own, as an
absolute, being incompatible with marriage and consummation in the day-to-day world.
The continuing relation to a dead love, inspired by Dante's Vita Nuova, however,
engages imagery drawn from religion in order to ornate a mistress who is still material,
in a heaven which is more like a medieval fortified castle. In Bernard Richards' words, it
is a medieval heaven so stylised and consciously archaic as to be almost a fake
(Ibidem). With the generic awareness of mid-Victorian writers, D.G. Rossetti couches
his medieval worlds into medieval literary forms: the ballad or the sonnet. The Blessed
Damozel is now a chorister in heaven, but her body can still warm the bar she is leaning
on, while her wishes modulated in ballad form are that she and her lover might live as
once on earth only for ever now. Her stylised portrait is elevated through mystical
numbers, emptied of any religious content.

The blessed damozel leaned out

From the golden bar of Heaven;

Her eyes were deeper than the depth

Of waters stilled at even;

She had three lilies in her hand,

And the stars in her hair were seven.

The religious imagery is only there as décor or as a symbol of the new religion of
Art (Love is Plotinus's Intellectual Beauty, immortal pattern). A more interesting
comment comes from Walter Horatio Pater, who, in the last phase of Victorianism, is
reading Rossetti's sonnet sequence as a conscious attempt to sublimate external
landscapes into phenomenological constructs: the bodily schemata, the way they
establish a sort of Baudelairean “correspondences” between sensations and the
external stimuli, charting a landscape of the mind, as the more genuine house of being.
The real dwelling place is never properly one's own at all, but only to the extent that one
can fashion (it) to oneself, through “associations”: (...) the whole of Rossetti's work
might count as a House of Life, of which he is but the “Interpreter”... This Dream-land
(...) with its “phantoms of the body” deftly coming and going on love's service, is to him,
in no mere fancy of figure of speech, a real country, a veritable expansion of, or addition
to, our waking life (Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Appreciations).

Pater is here assimilating Rossetti completely to the fin-de-sičcle epistemology,

where the medievalizing tendencies are replaced by an enthusiastic appraisal of the
Renaissance resurrection of the flesh. In reality, the definiteness of his (i.e. Rossetti's)
sensible imagery is most often symbolical, his dream-land collecting as a result of the
intersecting vectors of sensuous experience („phantoms of the body”) and a Platonizing
reduction of thing to pattern. In The Woodspurge, for instance, the images are carefully
selected and associated. The narrow range of the poet's sight (the run/ of some ten
weeds), while lying in the grass, as if merged with nature's anonymous circuit, suggests
the spiritual poverty or consolation it can lend (there need not be/ Wisdom or even
memory). The body – fragmented into knees, lips, hair, ears – is at the mercy of the
elements, having no will of its own:

The wind flapped loose, the wind was still,

Shaken our dead from tree and hill:

I had walked on at the wind's will,

 I sat now, for the wind was still.

It is only the spirit that imposes on things its intelligible, meaningful patterns, even
if unable to understand the workings of the universe:

One thing then learnt remains to me, –

The woodspurge has a cup of three.

Simplicity and directness of language distinguish Christina Rossetti's (1830-

1894) poetry from that of her brother's, yet we cannot agree with C.H. Sisson[47] that
she is an “idle singer” of human emotions (that) persist through all the changes of
circumstance and ideology. The yearnings of a frustrated heart, charged with Pre-
Raphaelite absorption in desolate, passion-wasted moods (an elegiac appeal to be
remembered by her lover after death, the elegiac vision of a lover morning a dying
mistress, a nun passing The Covenant Threshold, the realization of vain hope in A
Pause of Thought) are making a persuasive contribution to the Victorian story of
repression. Neither does the sense of alienation from nature fill an empty slot in the
Victorian ideological frame. The comparison of the physical, unintelligible maze to the
multiple hues of the rainbow and the need to restore them to the unity of the original
source (The Thread of Life) or the opposition between the variegated and passing
worldly show and the eternal patterns of wisdom's looking-glass, proving there is
nothing new under the sun (Passing and Glassing), show a characteristically
Pre-Raphaelite reductionist strategy from phenomena to pattern.

William Morris (1834-1896) joined the Brotherhood later, bringing in new

emphasis. His prose romance of 1990, News from Nowhere – a revolutionary socialist’s
utopia among characteristically fin-de-sičcle dystopias – could not be understood
outside the Pre-Raphaelite medievalism and cult of pastoral. Morris takes, however, a
step forward towards modernism in the conception of art as autonomous and free from
any requirements of practical efficiency. In the Apology of the Earthly Paradise, the poet
defines himself as “the idle singer of an empty day”. In addition to Arnold’s realization of
what Hölderlin had called “dürftige Zeit” – the spiritual wasteland of a materialist
civilization – Morris is also pointing to a way out which the modernists would explode
from a sketch into a full-blown fiction. Unlike Hamlet, Morris will not set the crooked
straight. The Renaissance meliorist dream has been abandoned. The poet no longer
seeks to reform the world, to engage in metaphysical inquiries, to offer moral
consolation. The epic of the modern world begins with an anti-priamel: not the lengthy
exposition of the theme in grand style, but a listing of what the poet will not “sing”:

Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing,

I cannot ease the burden of your fears,

Or make quick-coming death a little thing,

 Or bring again the pleasure of past years,

Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears,

Or hope again for ought that I can say,

The idle singer of an empty day:

Why sing of arms and the man to an unheroic age, more in need of having its
fears appeased than its spirit mounted to brave deeds? The steely sea of the age of
machinery had debased the human quest into the trivial yet none the less bewildering
care of living and earning one's daily bread. Anticipating Rilke's Raum of cultural
signifieds (Duineser Elegien), Morris builds his shadowy isle, which is still troped as a
traditional, mythological (i.e. acategorical) reconciliation of opposites (coincidence of
summer and winter, sound and silence etc.) but also constructed as a semiological
space: art within its ivory gates, the murmuring rhyme of humanity's stories. The
framed stories present a group of Norse wanderers who reach a western island
inhabited by the descendants of an ancient Greek colony. A Swabian student of
alchemy is in search of the Elixir of Life, of the earthly paradise of eternal youth (the
myth of eternal youth and everlasting life in Ispirescu's fairy tale can indeed be found in
the Norse folklore as well). A Goethean blend of Northern medieval and classical
legends – the living chronicle of forgotten lands and ages – are the only form of
immortality: the tale-teller's paradise. The myth of England as Troy novat (founded by
the mythical Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas) may be deemed behind the whole story,
while the “paradise” seems to be the immortal English literature, with Chaucer (to whom
the Envoy is addressed) as the founding father. Chaucer is invited to tell his stories
again, and he indeed seems to be resurrected in all subsequent poets.

News from Nowhere is a Pre-Raphaelite response to a Utopian writing by the New

England Edward Bellamy, whose Looking Backward (1888) was enormously influential
(it was translated in Romania, in the “Biblioteca Românul” collection soon after its
publication in America). Julian West is resuscitated in the technological paradise of the
year 2ooo in Boston (Bellamy's imagination has already been surpassed, of course),
which Morris finds trivial, a “cockney-paradise”. Morris's time-traveller wakes up in the
twenty-first century but only to rejoice at the breakdown of the machine age and the
return of the pastoral English rural life. The Pre-Raphaelite tableaux achieve a sort of
renovation of the Middle Ages.

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) passes for the most Frenchified

Victorian poet. In Ave atque Vale, written In Memory of Charles Baudelaire, he hails
Baudelaire as his brother, yet he mistakes Baudelaire's grasp on modern realities for a
Gothicised version of half-faded fiery blossoms and lovely leaf-buds poisonous. In a
Sonnet, benefiting from the Virgilian guide of Théophile Gautier (With a copy of
Mademoiselle de Maupin), Swinburne proves to have internalized Gautier's
sensationalism in the creation of the Vampire Cleopatra figure (Love making the soul
burn as an altar-fire) to a more satisfying degree than his mentor's concerns with the
“art for art's sake” doctrine (Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless) in the preface
to the novel. There are not isolated cases of aesthetic violence, for the decadent
literature of this period, in France and in England, is nourished on the legacy of the
Marquis de Sade, whose work was appearing in new editions during the 1880s (...) the
relentless misogyny of these texts – a misogyny ill concealed by fantasies of female
dominance and lesbian freedoms – was closely bound up with an anguished
repudiation of the body and erotic desire. Everywhere in the literature and visual art of
the period there is the association of women with death, and of erotic desire with
murderous instincts. Art becomes a form of morbid machination, mesmerised by the
idea of a “pure” intelligence freed from the bondage of bodily desire. In Gabriele
D'Annunzio's The Triumph of Death (1894), for example, the hero Giorgio is obsessed
with the possibility of “detaching the individual will which confined him within the narrow
prison of his personality, and kept him in perpetual subjection to the base elements of
his fleshly substance” (...) Yet the protracted act of cruelty can never really “abolish” the
body, and the hypertrophy of style in Swinburne's work – especially notable in the way
sound habitually supervenes on meaning – finally makes the writing, like the body
castigated by the rod, a dehumanised thing. (...) However structured, the sadistic
fantasies of the decadents almost always embodied a strong misogynist drive, so there
was a curious logic to the association of the dehumanised body of the female victim
with the excessively material nature of a “feminine” language. (...) Where masculine
language is exploratory, governed by the logic of concepts and syntax, women's
language is tied to the repetitive and conservative rhythms of the oral tradition [48]. As
early as 1867-1868, we get the masculine variety of sadism's conceptual frame in
Pater's comment on Da Vinci's Mona Lisa (Studies in the History of the Renaissance),
which links the feel of the age to the condition of modern philosophy [49]): All the
thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which
they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of
Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and
imaginative loves, the return of the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older
than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times,
and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps
their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and,
as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary (...)
The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old
one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by,
and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand
as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

Swinburne's “idea” and morbid vision of victimizing love comes from the Marquis
de Sade, who is hailed as greater than Byron (Atalanta in Calydon). Byronic “malaise” is
absolutized as universal doom: crime and destruction are universal laws of nature, for
how could nature create afresh if not by destruction of things old? (De Sade, Justine
and Juliette).
 Josephin Péladan or Théophile Gautier anthropomorphise nature bifrons, creative
and destructive, and employ the fatal woman – a romantic inheritance (See Keats, La
Belle Dame sans Mercy) as the new Muse “dépravante de l'esthétique du mal”.
Gauthier's heroine in Une Nuit de Cléopâtre proclaims Egypt le coeur et le noyau de
toute chose, as it doubles the show of life by the monstrous architecture of funeral
monuments. To the queen, who slays her lovers so that she may get others, the stately
show of l’éternité palpable is but a sarcastic comment on the brevity of life. Swinburne's
gallery of fatal women – Venus, Proserpine, Faustine, Cleopatra – deploys in fact the
Victorian paradigm of divided and divisive place and time, of perpetual strife between
contraries, yearning after the dematerialised limbo or paraxial realms haunted by the
vampires and doubles of the end of the century. Swinburne's poems (particularly in the
three series of Poems and Ballads of 1866, 1867) are rejecting Christian morality in
favour of that pagan aestheticism, which the writers of the nineties assume as an
aesthetic axiom or norm. Ross C. Murfin's comment on The Garden of Proserpine [50]
applies to the great majority of his neurotic, morbid pictures of decomposition, in which
he seems to take a decadent delight: faith and doubt, beauty and ugliness, tears and
laughter, hopes and despondencies, romantic faith and Victorian heresy, all dissolve in
a place “where the world is quiet”, a place called into being by the poet's desire for
nothingness. In Hymn to Proserpine, Swinburne, who urges Ruskin in a letter to Ruskin
to leave hope and faith to infants, reverses the myth of the fall, locating it in... the birth of
Christ. The beautiful pagan gods had been dethroned by a bitter God who denied the
worth of earthly existence:

Thou hast conquered, o pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;

We have drunk of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

The lover in Laus Veneris refuses to follow Christ's new faith (although one of
Christ's choosing), turning to kiss the dying goddess of beauty and love, even if love
mean a bitter thing and dead delight. The art of living, or the art of love yield to the art
of death, as the promised end of the corrupted flesh. The interest in Villon (the sad bad
glad mad brother – A Ballad of François Villon) and medieval ballads is Pre-Raphaelite
with a decadent tinge, but Faustine is the unmistakeable Muse of the aesthetic of evil:

Wine and rank poison, milk and blood,

Being mixed therein

Since first the devil threw dice with God

For you, Faustine.

The imagery of Cleopatra flows and ebbs between emblems of eternity (serpent,
scarab, sign) and visions of corpses or of life's ephemeral show of anonymous
creatures.
 She possesses not only the histories of all time but also the face of things to be,
the final stanza providing an unorthodox yet not less mythical Eucharist of death:

The laughing red sweet mouth of wine

At ending of life's festival;

The spices of cerecloth, and the fine

White bitter dust funeral

Sprinkled on all things for a sign.

There is nothing mythological about Oscar Wilde's inscription of the Cleopatra

“figure” as his cat in The Sphinx. It is merely a playful, parodic transposition of Pater's
“modern idea” about the reiteration of cultural paradigms. His feline Sphinx is gazing on
versions of the archetypal sacrificed hero (Osiris, Adonis, Antony, Christ):

And you have talked with Basilisks, and you have looked on Hippogriffs.

O tell me, were you standing by when Isis to Osiris knelt ?

And did you watch the Egyptian melt her union for Antony ?...

And did you mark the Cyprian kiss white Adon on his catafalque ?

... Sing to me all your memories !

Sing to me of the Jewish maid who wandered with the holy child.

The revulsion from universal decomposition breeds a paradoxical drive towards

annihilation so complete as to make further decay impossible. Swinburne has remained
unrivalled to this day in the verbal “painting” of nothingness. A Forsaken Garden shows
the poet at his best in the intensification technique whereby all the elements in the poem
contribute to the theme: negation on the lexical, grammatical, stylistic levels. Here is the
final stanza of Swinburne's “triumph of death”, with its subtle changes in rhythm and line
length, hypnotic repetitions, alliteration, caesura, vowel variations and stress at the
verse-end for the sake of emphasis:

Till the slow sea rise and the star cliff crumble,

Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,

Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble

 The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,

Here now in his triumph where all things falter,

Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,

As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,

Death lies dead.

As an incarnationalist and a disciple of the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus,

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1489) – the great discovery and influencer of the l92os
– seems to resist modernist “slotting”. Rainer Emig's criterion in his substantially
theorized study (Modernism in Poetry, 1995) is not the particular circumstance of the
1918 first publication of Hopkins's poems by his friend, Robert Bridges, but one affined
to our own approach: the changing concept of the sign (...). The poem charts its
signifying territory through careful differentiation, a well-organised imaginary map. A
language, implying variety within the traditional shape of the poem (internal rhyme,
alliteration, assonance) is created for the personal appropriation and apprehension of
reality. The poem is no longer “representation of an external reality already constituted
but constituting it (inscape)”. “Inscape', however, is not only poetic construct, in Hopkins,
but also an individual and essential design that exists out there, in the things lying
outside consciousness, waiting to be grasped by the alert observer. It is not posited
exclusively inside the subject, as with the modernists proper. The “inscape” of the
poem is only the mirror catching the flashes of the incarnated pattern imprinted on
things by the divine mind. On the other hand, Hopkins is the most radical innovator in
English literature, evolving from an empathic experience aiming at the tying up of the
human and the divine (Hurrahing in the Harvest), towards a more deliberate
construction of constitutive (autonomous) rather than expressive forms (particularly in
his late Sonnets). He shifts from “apprehension” to “constitution” of reality.

The shaping factors also included Rossetti's painting study of precise physical
detail, Newman's religious fervour which characterizes all converts (in their cases, to
Catholicism), Christina Rossetti's ponderings on worldly commitment and religious
withdrawal, on the conflicting demands of the spiritual and the mundane, the expert
criticism of Robert Bridges, the Jesuit scholarly tradition, which developed a fine sense
of linguistic structure (James Joyce is one more example). As well as Jesuit labour on
language, Hopkins was given to habits of detailed observation of nature and
impressionistic recording of the effects of light. At the other end from Swinburne,
Hopkins is the poet of being and, particularly, of coming into being, that is into the
subject's consciousness. Here is one of his notes on Parmenides, a monist
philosopher: I have often felt when I have been in this mood and felt the depth of an
instress or how fast the inscape holds a thing that nothing is so pregnant and
straightforward to the truth as simple yes and is. Thou could never either know or say
what was not, there would be no coming at it. There would be no bridge, no stem or
stress between us and things to bear us out and carry the mind over... Poetry is this
“coming at” things, the bridging of self and world, not through romantic emotional
identification but through a mystique of sensations, an impressionistic technique of
charging surfaces with depth, epidermic experience with profundity. The idiosyncratic
form of the poem is geared to the world's landscapes. The world can be taken into
possession because its substance has been transferred to its accidents: colours,
shapes, and sounds. Their oppositions build an intelligible pattern of strongly marked
individual entities, held together by a divine force which constantly regenerates itself. It
is “pattern” or “inscape” (a word coined by the poet) that prevents a thing from
changing into something else, the essence that gives its special and particular identity.
Hopkins follows therein Duns Scotus, a thirteenth-century philosopher, who emphasizes
the distinctiveness of individual things, their determination in a specific form which he
calls haecceitas or “thisness”; for instance, elm-ness in opposition to oak-ness.
“Inscape” is not just outward shape („scape”) but “within scape”, inner shape, selfhood,
the thing itself, in its special nature. The subject can perceive the “inscape” of the
observed thing, only if it is made manifest through the instress (another coinage) i.e.
copula, relating instance to type (universals). The idea of nature as a code (forest of
symbols”) naturally creates a necessity for encoding in poetry (establishing
“correspondences”, sensory patterns), and for a lengthening out of the process of its
understanding. The difference from Baudelaire’s phenomenological commerce with the
world is the instability of the ego and of the objects of perception within the poem, they
engaging in mutual transformations, in an open-ended dialogue. Moreover, the idea of
“God as Grammarian” [51] links up with Mansel’s grammatical ontology. Consciousness
makes the world appear through signs and their relationships. The poetic form is thus
drawing attention upon itself. In a letter to Bridges, Hopkins speaks of two kinds of
clearness: whether the meaning to be felt without effort as fast as one reads, or else, if
dark at first reading, when once made out to explode. Another letter is an apology for
the extraordinary difficulty of his poetry: … as air, melody is what strikes me most of all
in music and design in painting, so design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling
“inscape” is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern or
inscape to be distinctive, and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice
I cannot have escaped.

The versification is a complex example of encoding, presenting patterns of unity

and repetition. The variations in pitch, stress, and rhythmic emphasis produce the
verbal equivalent of a musical score, and it is this shift from pictorial to musical form that
marks the transition to the aesthetic eighties and nineties. He chooses accentual versus
quantitative lines, scanning by accents alone without any account of the number of
syllables, producing what he calls “sprung rhythm”. In this way his rhythm is closer to
the native and natural rhythms of speech. Two adjoining syllables carrying heavy
stresses (counterpoint rhythm) are apt to interrupt the fluid monotony of more orthodox
metres, tapped out in regular foot. The exceptional intricacy of his verse (charged with
alliterations, assonance, repetitions, internal rhymes, inversions, chiasmus or
antimetabole) is an attempt to record the subjective response to the multifariousness of
the visible world.

The archaising tendencies look ahead to the next century. From the very
beginning, Hopkins is trying to recapture the primitive vitality of Anglo-Saxon poetry in
its use of alliteration and kenning (extensive attributes). The tragical event of the wreck
of a ship transporting five Franciscan nuns from Bremen to the New World triggers a
quest of the divine, whose nature is appropriated through the tentative, periphrastic
mode of the Anglo-Saxon antonomasia. The conjunction of the human and the divine
(the poet “being with” one of the nuns in her mystical identification with Christ) is
expressed by the alliteration on “f” (feel/finger/find), and the traditionally spiritual
revelation is replaced by an epidermic contact, a bodily experience of a fragmented and
objectified God:

Thou mastering me

God ! giver of breath and bread;

World's strand, sway of the sea;

Lord of living and dead;

Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flash,

And after it almost unmade, what with dread,

Thy doing; and dost thou touch me afresh ?

Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

(The Wreck of the Deutschland)

The poet celebrates the Pied Beauty with its gradations of light and colour, which
makes the world intelligible, and deplores injured landscapes (the felled Binsey Poplars)
which “unselve” (one of the many coined or portmanteau words), that is deprive things
of the outward pattern giving them identity, making them “special”. The object made
manifest, in its physical immediacy, whether spiritual, human or natural, is the persistent
theme of his early poems. In The Windhover, it is assimilated to an alchemical process.
The form of the sonnet – Petrarchan in intent – is transformed beyond all recognition.
The title is a kenning for “falcon” (that which hovers in the air), while the subtitle explains
the poem in terms of an ecstatic greeting of God: “To Christ our Lord”. The octave is an
imaginary recreation of the bird, drawn or pictured against the early morning. The bird
seems to be in command of the elements, as the manifestation of a spiritual force
momentously revealed in the impressive flight:
 I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-
dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy ! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend, the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing !

The alliteration shows the bird as a dauphin and as the favourite of morning and of
life, that is, a king's son, with the graceful connotations of French chivalry, and a prince
of light (the king of the heavenly kingdom). The compound attributes – “dapple-dawn-
drawn Falcon”, which may mean drawn by, towards or against the dapple dawns –
create an effect of extraordinary concentration and compactness, destabilizing the act of
interpretation. What the poet records is not an object of but the very dynamic of the act
of perception, the bird in its flight. The bird has changed its position from the beginning
to the end of the sentence: the air rolling at the beginning has become steady by the
end, because a kestrel rolls sideways, levels out and comes to a hovering standstill [52].
Hopkins picks up images of precise physical movements, of sights and objects new to
poetry (the sweeping of a skate). The charming flight of the bird is at the same time one
of “brute beauty”, that is very powerful but also original, unadulterated. Paddy Kitchen
[53] identifies here a “metaphor for sexual suppression”: the observer is urging himself
to crush the sensations aroused by the brute beauty and valour and be ready to receive
Christ. But the bird is an objective correlative for Christ, and, besides, the “brute beauty”
obviously has positive and spiritual connotations: the elements are subdued; the rolling
air becomes smooth under the falcon. It is the force within the bird that makes itself felt
in the observer, whose heart comes out of its hiding in order to meet the bird.

The sestet describes the moment of “instress”, the coming together of subject and
thing. The connective “AND” is spelt in capital letters, and the word “buckle” suggests
the moment of fusion, of communion. The quote from Virgil, sulco attritus splendescere
vomer (Georgic I, 46) – sheer plod makes plough down sillion/ Shine – seems to
encourage Paddy Kitchen's pastoral reading of the end: the poet's model is Theocritus
experiencing emotional joy in physical beauty of all kinds. It seems to us, though, that
Hopkins is here – as elsewhere – compressing several ideas tightly into place. The
unmistakeably alchemical colour progression from sheer plod and blue-bleak embers to
gold vermillion (from nigredo to rubedo in alchemy) – considering also that Christ is
lapis, the philosopher's stone in medieval alchemy – would rather point to a negation of
pastoral delight in physical beauty by the spirit. That would also be more in keeping with
the spiritualising tendencies of the time.
 Hopkins seems to be more self-conscious as a poet writing in a tradition. Spelt
from Sibyl's Leaves (1884) is his version of the Sibylline Oracles of the second and third
century. The fourteen books, attributed to the Cumae Sibyls and composed by Jewish
and Christian writers, are encoded prophecies of the apocalypse. Hopkins's poem is
also a prophecy of the apocalypse, deploring the reduction of the world's rich show –
skeined, stained, veined variety – to the colour poverty of the black-and-white. The
souls of the dead would be divided into two flocks (goat and sheep, mentioned in
Matthew 25.31 – 33): black, white; right, wrong. We do not hear the believer's joy at the
victory of the Spirit, but a lament on the beauty of the world, and we remember
Swinburne's apostrophe to the “pale” Galilean, from whose breath the world had grown
grey.

While the last, despairing sonnets („No worst, there is none”, “To seem the
stranger lies my lot”, “Patience, hard thing”, “No, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair”) are
pointing, if not to a decay of faith, at least to the passionate wrestling with God of a soul
besieged by doubts, there are also signs of a progress from organic, expressive,
towards autonomous forms.

A sonnet composed in 1889 (Thou art indeed just, Lord) is almost an exercise in
deconstruction. The Latin quote from Jeremiah 12:1 provides a Biblical framing which
Hopkins subsequently subverts. Jeremiah questions the Lord, expressing his doubts
about wicked men being prosperous and dishonest men, successful. The Lord's answer
settles the question in an edfying manner: the hardships of life are only there in order to
strengthen the spirit. The speaker in the sonnet, who experiences a sense of failure in
all he attempts, is entering a plea of unfair, developing the time-honoured theodicy
theme in the language of court trials. The official and restrained voice of the pleader is
doubled by the anguished voice of the discontented believer knowing in his heart that
such interrogation is blasphemy. Jeremiah's “questioning” the Lord has become
“contention” with God. The syntax is broken or elliptical, like the sobs of a claimant
facing some awesome authority, and therefore not daring to give free rein to all his
thoughts. Language is still intensely varied and difficult, but also deliberately
constructed to suggest more than what it actually asserts. The pleader is like a licensed
writer slipping in truth through rhetorical play. The Old-Testamental prophet begins with
a dogmatic assertion of God's justice: if I argued my case with you,/ you would prove to
be right. Yet I must proceed with my questioning nevertheless. Hopkins changes it to
something like “you are indeed just if you allow me to contend with you, since what I
plead is just”. The straightforward accusation – you are my enemy for thwarting me so –
is prudentially counterbalanced by the conventional address (“O thou my friend”), and
by a psalmist prayer in the end (send my roots rain). There is no definite meaning
structure, but only a counterpointed and dialogic score. An overwhelming picture of
physical decay and sterility blocks the final enlightenment in Jeremiah, characteristic of
the sage discourse, as objective correlatives of spiritual impotence:

See, banks and brakes

Now, leaved how thick ! laced they are again

 With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes

Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,

Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes

Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

As well as Morris and Swinburne, Hopkins is standing on the threshold to

modernism, looking both ways.

References:

[40] Ibidem.

[41] Roger Caillois, Eseu despre imaginatie, Univers, 1975, p. 146.

[42] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy, The Literature of Subversion, Routledge, 1988,

p.1984.

[43] Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax, apud Rosemary Jackson, Op. cit.

[44] Bernard Richards, English Poetry of the Victorian Period, Longman 2001.

[45] W.W. Robson, Pre-Raphaelite Poetry in The Pelican Guide to English Literature. 6.
From Dickens to Hardy, 1982, pp. 353-370

[46] Graham Hough, The Last Romantics, Op. cit.

[47] C. H. Sisson, Christina Rossetti, Selected Poems, Carcanet, 1984.

[48] Peter Nicholls, Modernism. A Literary Guide, Macmillan 1995, pp. 53-54 and 61-62.

[49] According to Schopenhauer (The World as Will or Idea), art reproduces eternal
Ideas, therefore representations from various ages may he said to coexist.
Nietzsche (Second Untimely Meditation) speaks of “the omnipresence of
imperishable types”. As aesthetic representation, Mona Lisa is both Idea and a
paradigm of historical embodiments.

[50] Ross C. Murfin, Swinburne, Hardy, Lawrence, and the Burden of Belief.

[51] Isobel Armstrong, Poetry, Poetics and Politics, Op. cit.

[52] Guy Cook, Discourse and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 246.
[53] Paddy Kitchen, Gerard Manley Hopkins. A Life, Carcanet, 1989, p. 178.

Late Victorian Literature

The fall from the “Age of Equipoise” into the Great Depression of the mid-7os
struck contemporaries as a secular loss of the Eden of machinery and Empire. The
former became the butt of dystopic writing, while the latter grew “recessive” even in the
eye of an enthusiastic imperialist like Rudyard Kipling. The challenges to industrial
supremacy coming from Germany and America added to scientific work pointing to
counter-evolutionary, degenerative processes in nature in shaping a gloomy picture of
the state of the nation. Whilst the mid-century had seemed to have reached an
agreement upon a widely shared moral code of work, piety, and domestic sanctity, the
late Victorians launched upon an individual quest of values in a rapidly changing world,
slipping away from socially integrated framings of personality towards various forms of
personal Crusoism. In his enlightening study The Transformation of the English Novel,
1890-1930 [54], Daniel R. Schwarz traces modernism back to the social change and
aesthetic innovation of the last third of Victorianism: The search for innovation in form
and technique is inseparable from the search for values in a world where the British
Empire had lost its sense of invulnerability, the political leadership had suffered a crisis
of confidence, and industrialization had created worker unrest. The breach in the
ongoing materialist venture, which had ensured England's supremacy in world
commerce, was echoed by the split culture generated in response to one and the same
reality. The Victorians had yielded to the temptations of the Champions of Industry, but
the fruit of knowledge and material success had tasted bitter: “The Great Exhibition of
the Works of Industry of all Nations 1851” has been described as “one of the most
outstanding success stories of the nineteenth century”; its results are incalculable. What
was shown there led to the development of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and to a
more general awareness of the deadness and tastelessness of machine-produced
objects. It made fertile the field within which John Ruskin (another imperialist) would
soon begin to preach his gospel of anti-commercialism, and that within which William
Morris would work [55].

The literature of the late Victorians, as well as that of the first decade of the next
century (the Edwardians), suffering from the loss of community values, is sharply
divided between a realistic (of a naturalistic variety) and an imaginative (with
suggestions from science and psychology) trend.

Whilst the show of the rise and fall of empires, from the Roman to the British,
makes Thomas Hardy travel out of history, into an alien universe, without any intelligent
plan, in which moral choices become irrelevant, Rudyard Kipling, the Poet Laureate of
the noon of the British Empire, keeps celebrating the British as God's chosen nation,
destined to govern the “lesser breeds”. His Recessional, composed for the Queen's
Diamond Jubilee, is meant to arouse the vigilance of his countrymen, who, drunk with
the sight of power are in danger of seeing the Empire diminish : losing / Wild tongues,
praying to another God. The use of the synecdoche is symptomatic of the arrogant
treatment of the colonized nations, anatomised and fragmented: “wild tongue”, “heathen
heart”. They are “less” than human, just separate limbs appended to the Empire. On the
contrary, the status of England is elevated by being associated with ancient seats of
civilization and power, like Nineveh and Tyre. The poet's tone is exceedingly
overbearing, considering he is writing in the hymnic tradition: he does not pray to God
for more but only for the vivid memory of the past conquests. The British are apt not
only to govern inferior nations but also to oblige God by choosing Him from other gods.
Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901) or Arthur Machen's The
Great God Pan (1894) are bitterly satirizing such complacency in dystopian versions of
the Victorian world, sinking back into primitive forms of life or even animality. From
teleological movement, the plot takes a deadly twist towards apocalyptic visions of
England. After London (1884) by Richard Jefferies is medieval with a vengeance, as it
imagines a relapse into Barbarism, a return not to a graceful pastoral but to the dark
Middle Ages, from which the nineteenth-century conquests of learning and the arts have
been blotted out. Unlike “after Byzantium”, with its final consummate but devitalised
artistic refinement, “after London” means a return to “wild England” a millennium after
London had perished in some disaster that nobody remembers any more. Felix, the
futuristic Gilgamesh in search of happiness, does not fear death as final bodily
extinction, but life as a form of spiritual death, that nasty, brutish and short thing it turns
into when man is restored to the wilderness of the woods or of a prehistoric lake. His
knowledge of the lost arts and sciences at a time of beastly oblivion enables him to
oppose the cultural apocalypse in a story that anticipates Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit
451.

Whilst Thomas Hardy is singing a dirge on the loss of the rhythms and continuity of
rural culture, as a result of the urbanization which had dislocated huge masses of
farmers, driving them into the alienating city-world, Kipling is celebrating the self-made
Victorian capitalist, the power of machinery, the success of courageous, risk-taking
venture. As well as in Browning's Bishop, the dying speech of Sir Anthony, a self-made
magnate, reveals his disappointment in his son for not showing signs of carrying on his
trading enterprise. Unlike the Bishop, he speaks in a straightforward and coarse
manner, transferring human relationships into rude aspects of work and machinery
(Mary Gloster).

Whilst Robert Louis Stevenson admits to having been influenced by books as

much as by real people, whilst Pater, Wilde and Yeats have their characters shaped by
the reading of exquisite books, Rudyard Kipling sends his Tomlinson wandering into the
Naked Space between heaven and hell, for having merely read or thought but never
done anything to deserve judgment after death. Like Peer Gynt, he is but the guise of a
man, unrecorded in Kipling's files of British success: the fighting soldier, the engineer,
the tycoon ship-owner, the Empire's missionary to India etc. Human character is reified,
and metaphor is literalized. The reader can visualize the judgment of Tomlinson as a
farmer's heaven, with Tomlinson sieving his proper wort (...) twixt star and star...
 Kipling relishes the naturalistic details of an execution in his ballad Danny Deever,
and so does George Moore in his exploration, in the manner of Zola, of his characters'
sexual drives and physical needs (A Modern Lover, 1883, A Mummer's Wife, 1885).
John Gissing follows the French writer's naturalistic principle in the objective description,
without authorial commentary, of the workers' infernal living conditions (Workers in the
Dawn, 1880, The Nether World, 1889).

In counterdistinction to this realistic and naturalistic matrix, Oscar Wilde's Trooper

of the Royal Horse Guards in his Ballad of Reading Goal is constructed as inwardness..
The sterile and sordid operations of human justice, as David Lodge remarks in his
reading of the text in The Modes of Modern Writing, are surpassed by the absorbing
interest in the workings of divine grace upon the guilty heart. Is-ness (the quality and
intensity of the soul and heart) replaces does-ness (the effect of behaviour) as norms
for character (Daniel Schwarz, Op. cit. p. 22). The shifted focus, from “the worth of the
body” (Tomlinson) and its deeds towards the haunts of consciousness produces a
similar shift from discursive (what Lodge calls discourse derived from reality, from
the structure and order of the events) to constituted form (discourse derived from
language, patterned through figures of repetition, symmetry, analogy and
contrast). The colour symbolism in Wilde's Ballad is in itself meaningful, running in a
consistent parallel to the Passion.

England becomes an aesthetic battlefield; the literary scene is a site of contention,

with the American Henry James as the most effective ferment. In reply to him, R.L.
Stevenson distinguishes between the very type of the deliberate artist – Henry Jame –
and merely good nature in Walter Besant (A Humble Remonstrance). In his notebooks,
Thomas Hardy engages in the ongoing quarrel between Aesthetes and Naturalists: Art
is a changing of the actual proportions and order of things, so as to bring out more
forcibly than might otherwise be done that feature in them which appeals more strongly
to the idiosyncrasy of the artist (...) Art is a disproportioning – (i.e. distorting, throwing
out of proportion) – of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those
realities, which, if merely copied or reported inventorially, might possibly be observed,
but would more probably be overlooked. Hence “realism” is not Art. [56].

Similar polarities would be suggested, with various allegiances, by H.G. Wells,

Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, a.o. around the turn of the century and after, until the
final victory of a prevailing paradigm – Georgian modernism.

The allegations of Martin Seymour Smith concerning Kipling's multi-selved inner

life (Op. cit. p. XV), his disingenous nature, consisting of many disparate selves may
find support in the writer's biography but are not textually defensible. Kipling's
Authoritarian thinking, the idea that the course of life is determined by forces wholly
indifferent to the individual's desires, helps his Kantian construction of the moral will, in
opposition to Hardy's bleak vision of the Willer masked and dumb – the
Schopenhauerian blind force ruling the universe. The human being is consequently lost
in a moral labyrinth. Tess is entirely dependent upon male versions of herself, and
destroyed by male selfishness or misunderstanding. Kipling's spokesman in If is an
autonomous Will, which is never influenced by current opinions, remaining steadfast in
the face of all adversities:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too....

The Law often invocated is a categorical imperative, whose validity is universally

recognized in opposition to doing as one likes, which is its negative, the “Law of the
Jungle”. In a chapter-heading to The Naulahka, there is another misrepresentation of
the Law as the speaker adopts his lover's law, although its objective, universal necessity
which frees the Moral will from empirical, circumstantial appetite, is not apparent to him:

Yet such am I, yet such am I -

Sore bond and freest free -

The Law that sways my lady’s ways

Is mystery to me.

From Hardy's deracinated characters, or experiencing the “modern ache of

unrest”, to the latitudinarian Marius (Walter Horatio Pater) and Robert Elsmere (Mary
Humphry Ward), to split selves (Stevenson and Wilde), and the ghostly inhabitants of an
interstitial condition (Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells), there are important degrees in the
transformation of the unified human personality, galvanized by an autonomous moral
will, into partial or polypsychic selves, pulled into different directions by instinctual drives
or by the tension between themselves and social taboos. Social theory is biologized. In
The Evolutionary Self [57], Roger Ebbatson contributes a Darwinian background to a
discussion of the new types of conflicts inside characters: between individual and
society, socialization and individuation, recast in terms of heredity versus milieu, innate
versus acquired, nature versus nurture. Suggestions from William James's pragmatist
psychology will have shaped Stevenson's idea of characters whose conduct is directed
by an unconscious, atavistic and suppressed self. In his confession to Hastie Lanyon,
Dr. Jekyll (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886) mentions both the
different selves of which he is possessed and the different orders of his self regard (W.
James, The Principles of Psychology, Ch. X, Potential and Actual Selves). He had early
discovered that man is a polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens.
A part of him was fond of the respect of the wise and the good, while the other felt
libidinal impulses that would have lost him the company of either. The scientific
experiment with the potion which separates the two sides of his personality into a
metamorphic body, changing from a deformed dwarf into a handsome gentleman, is a
“gnomic Gothic” [58] version of James's physiological experiments in human
psychology.

Kipling's fatalism is nourished by a sense of man's impotence when confronted

with ruthless nature:

Ah ! What avails the classic bent

And what the cultured word,

Against the undoctored incident

That actually occurred ?

And what is Art whereto we press

Through paint and prose and rhyme –

When Nature in her nakedness

Defeats us every time ?

(The Benefactors)

Kipling sounds as if he expected Art to prevent an earthquake, or stabilize the

Stock Exchange. Art is made dependent upon practical efficiency and immediate
realization, like the reality-bound language in the first part of Alice in Wonderland, where
“drink me” or “eat me” are immediately obeyed, without the least hesitation about the
advisability of such actions.

R. L. Stevenson's Humble Remonstrance asserts the analytic, autonomous and

linguistic nature of literature: The whole secret is that no art does compete with life,
Man's one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut his eyes against the
dazzle and confusion of reality. The arts, like arithmetic and geometry, turn away their
eyes from the gross, coloured and mobile nature at our feet, and regard instead a
certain figmentary abstraction (...). So far as it imitates at all, it imitates not life but
speech (....) Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art in
comparison is neat, finite, self-contained, rational. Long reputed for its entertaining
character, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has more recently been appreciated as a writing of
pattern, of a self-conscious and complex structure. Andrew Jefford's commentary on
Vladimir Nabokov's reading of the text (Ibidem) extends the famous novelist's study of
the image repertoire into a diagram of the “ineluctable opposites” structuring the
powerful image system within the narrative: the red wine and the blue potion are the
arteries and veins of the text, constantly coursing the narrative, omnipresent, yet only
occasionally marked. The symbolism of the “chameleon liquor” in opposition to genial
wine is certainly broader in scope than Jefford's listing of binary pairs:

wine Jekyll's Potion

speech ............................................... impossibility of speech

well-lit interiors.................................. foggy exteriors

warm fires ......................................... wintry cold

hearthside company .......................... deserted streets

evenings............................................. late nights and small hours

Wine is associated with “epiphany”, the manifestation of one and the same
essence – of the divine essence in Father and Son – that traditional unitary self or
rational, Voltairean ego. The chameleon potion suggests metamorphic nature, alienated
from the origin, endlessly other. Jekyll's house itself is “chameleon-like”, with its clean
and gay facade, with freshly painted shutters, and well-polished brasses, broken by the
entry of a court, which bears every feature of sordid negligence. The remotest,
dissection room, where Jekyll's atavistic self is hiding, is separated from the classy front
room by an amphitheatre. The structure of the house suggests the progress of the
libidinal self, capable of murder and debauchery, towards the social ego, known by the
civilized society, through the acquisition of a mask.

The apocalyptic visions of the late nineteenth-century may appear as heightened

versions of the economic depression, but literature is usually shaped to a larger extent
by cultural factors. George Eliot had drawn on Ludwig Feuerbach for her construction of
the interconditionings establishing between society and the individual, with emphasis on
science, social determinism, class confrontation and sexual warfare. The action of her
narratives is teleological, reinforcing the general values of the society, and the character
is expressed as action.

The violent change undergone by Hardy's world outlook from the seventies
pastoral to the eighties plots of melancholico-pessimismo-naturalism [59] is a symptom
of the age. One of the great influencers was Arthur Schopenhauer (of the anti-Hegelian
and post-Kantian school), who had become very popular in Germany after the
publication of his essays, Parerga and Parilopmena (1851) and in France during the
1870s. The years of depression in England were finally hospitable to his ideas, which
had first been made public in his 1819 treatise, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (“The
World as Will or Idea”). The universe appears to be lacking in any teleological structure
or intelligible design, to be ruled by some blind Will, which man can in no way control.
However, if the substratum of phenomena remains inaccessible (the world as “will”, or
fate, a total enigma to man), man is free to create himself in his ideas, or
“representations” of the world. As well as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard (The Concept
of Anxiety) conceives of God as self-willed and inaccessible to the human mind, and of
man as isolated, experiencing existential anxiety in a world completely devoid of any
moral landmarks and support.

Writing at a time of crisis, when things seemed to be falling apart, Thomas Hardy
(1840-1928), felt naturally inclined to such modes of vision. Instead of teleological
narratives, his later novels display a ring composition, a circularity symbolical of the
vacuity of existence. The end is a return to the beginning, or the fulfilment of its
prophecy, inbreeding a sense of doom. Character is fate, Hardy says, because the
appetites of an atavistic self, lurking within man, reflect the bountless egotism
(Schopenhauer, Parerga) of the willer masked and dumb (Hardy’s poem, Agnosto
theo). Social determinism is thus replaced by blind fate (man becomes the site where
the blind universal Will is manifest) and biology (inherited biological drives or appetites,
as destructive as the ancients' Fate). The lives of Tess or Jude are determined from
their very births, they fulfilling their family's destinies, as gloomy as those of doomed
families in Zola.

As far as poetry is concerned, to which Hardy turns after 1995, it grows anti-
romantic but also anti-narrative and anti-discursive. Hardy's focus is not on man's actual
conditions of existence but on individual (yet not personal) representations or framings
of the world, like Browning's, but tinged with existential anxiety. In The Mother Mourns,
one of the poet's dramatic or impersonative pieces, Nature complains about the
romantic insight in Earthland, mindsight, or appraisements which had idealized her
above her scope, causing subsequent relapses into more commonsensical but also
disappointed versions of her:

Man's mountings of mindsight I checked not,

Till range of his vision

Now tops my intent, and finds blemish

 Throughout my domain.

The formal reflex of the aesthetics of “representation” is the construction of the

poem as an impressionistic vignette: mere impressions of the moment, and not
convictions or arguments. Neutral Tones contains, in its last stanza, a mise-en-abyme
of its own production as the subjective constitution of a landscape of the mind. The
phenomena described in an “objective” tone in the first stanza are qualified in the last as
subjectively transformed by the poet's personal experience of disappointment in love
and human nature:

We stood by a pond that winter day,

And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,

And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,

– They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

.......................................................................

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,

And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me

Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,

And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

The speaker in The Bedridden Peasant, living in the post-Christian age (some
disaster cleft thy scheme/ And tore us wide apart), admits to be praying to a god who is
his hypothetical construct:

But, seeing how much Thy creatures bear –

Lame, starved, or maimed, or blind –

Wouldst heal the ills with quickest care

Of me and all my kind.

Then, since Thou mak'st not these things be,

 But these things dost not know,

I'll praise Thee as were shown to me

The mercies Thou wouldst show !

Caught in the grip of accelerated changes and fragmentation, Hardy's characters

can derive no support or consolation from a hiding or humanly revised God. In his world
of universal chaos and indifferent or impotent gods (see his parody of the Last
Judgement in Channel Firing), there is no longer room for Eliot's spacious
representations of Anglicanism: the Tory variety Cadwallader, the Evangelical zest in
Mr. Tyke, and the good shepherd figure in Farebrother, who, in the secularized society
of Middlemarch, can still convert religious conviction into comforting and efficient moral
guidance. As David Gervais remarks in Literary Englands. Versions of “Englishness” in
Modern Writing [60], whereas George Eliot's novels invariably include some clergyman
as a focal point of village life, his either omit the clergy or minimise their role. This was
no doubt partly a comment on their dwindling importance and partly a reflection of his
own religious views but it was also a way of removing an essential moral and social
cement from rural life, a way of destabilising it.

Hardy's “destabilising” of pastoral England was progressive, from the demise of

the traditional yeomanry, whose pastoral work and moral code is embodied in Giles
Winterborne (The Woodlanders, 1887) to the most dispairing misanthropist curse and
wish for existential nothingness that was ever heard in literature (Jude the Obscure,
1895). The bleak new knowledge that the cosmos is without intelligent plan or divine
direction [61] informs his poetry and fiction alike. Voices from things Growing in a
Country Church-Yard or Transformations comment with Kierkegaardian irony on the
absurdity of death, which drowns the infinite capacities and aspirations of the soul in the
anonymous circuit of nature. The antilogy of the flowers declaring whose dead bodies
they incorporate, or of the plants endowed with “nerves and veins”, like the dead human
bodies they have absorbed into their recycling energies, is a sort of Easter mass – with
the priests playing the guards of the empty tomb replying to the priests inquiring after
Christ's body: He is not underground; he is risen – in a Darwinian transcript. Religious
drama lapses into the buffoonery of an improvised nature scientist.

So, they are not underground,

But as nerves and veins abound

In the growths of upper air,

And they feel the sun and rain,

And the energy again

That made them what they were !

 Hardy's “Wessex” poems and novels construct an imaginary space, even if
geographical locales and the “signs of the times” can be read into it. His narratives slip
away from the actual social background, experimenting with new forms of inner
understanding, elevation of character over plot, psychological exploration, and
patterned structure. The high Victorians had often felt inclined to set their actions and
characters in another historical period, because in that way they could perceive and
convey the idea of unity and stability under the glossy surfaces of their amber lockets.
Their historical preserves could be labelled, judged, classified, “criticized” in Arnold's
sense of the word. In a stable or slowly changing world, the writer can enjoy the leisure
of taking snap-shots of “monotonous homely existence”. The “faithful pictures” worthy of
a Dutch painting, which Eliot extols in the seventh chapter of Adam Bede, draw on a
patriarchal countryside, whose “Fortuna” emblem is the spinning wheel of the traditional
mode of production. Eliot herself felt that world belonged to the past: an old woman
bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light... just
touches the rim of her spinning wheel. The character is physical appearance, posture,
gesture, and action. Food and work provide the umbilical chord of a human community
mainly observed in its material self-reproduction by an omniscient and ubiquitous
narrator

In Hardy' s novels, the only stability life can be stuck into is that of the formal
pattern imposed upon contemporary rural England – a world dramatically changing from
the traditional structure of landlord, tenant and labourer towards the new matrix of
capitalist farmer and dispossessed or pauperised life-holders (entitled to the tenure of
their cottages for three generations). Although details of the contemporary processes of
the dislocations of rural population, of different modes of production, of linguistic
accuracy (dialect or Standard English) help to construct a time-bound England, the logic
of metaphor, symbol or structural parallelism is freezing the naturalistic flow into
ahistorical patterns of vacuous recurrence. Daniel R. Schwarz (Op. cit., p. 47) defines
beginnings and endings in Hardy's major fiction as patterns of a timeless world,
invulnerable to essential change. Each novel has its own Genesis and Apocalypse. The
prophetic openings, foreshadowing major themes, are confirmed by the conclusions,
which creates a sense of inevitability. Character is fate, Hardy's famous definition in The
Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), has nothing in common with the ancient Weird Sisters.
Determinism is now posited within the individual, in his psychological response to the
world. Dominated by the biological necessity of a libidinal self, or alienated by mental
processes quickened by education and breeding the “modern ache” of unrest, Hardy's
characters enact the donné of their hereditary or acquired nature. According to Daniel
Schwarz, the iterative structures – returns, re-marriages – mime man's inability to
improve himself morally or spiritually (Ibidem).

Hardy's scope seems to be broader, however, as the pattern contained in nuce in

the opening and carried through in the end is transpersonal. The ring composition of
his best novels is sooner the programmatic deconstruction of the traditional idea about a
teleological universe, and the complimentary construction of form. If the world is amoral
and chaotic, art builds its own, coherent order. The action is a sum of variations on the
theme; the narrator strikes their keynote in the opening. In The Woodlanders, Giles
begins by planting a tree and dies of consumption in the woods, which is the proper
paradigm for a character called “Winterborne” in a novel titled “The Woodlanders”.
Imagery is neither naturalistic not atmospheric but constitutive. Giles is inscribed in the
“silva” tradition of the pastoral from the perspective of the deracinated, half-cultured
Grace Melbury; it is an implicit commentary on the genre as literary framing of “Nature
unadorned”: He looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to
wheat-colour, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit
stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and
everywhere about him that atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has
such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the
orchards. Her heart rose from its late sadness like a released bough; her senses
revelled in the sudden lapse back to Nature unadorned. The narrator's and the
character's perspectives are fused, with frequent lapses into free indirect discourse: The
look of his face – what had there been about his face which seemed different from its
appearance of yore ? Was it not thinner, less rich in hue, less like that of ripe Autumn's
brother to whom she had formerly compared him ? And his voice; she had distinctly
noticed a change in tone. And his gait; surely it had been feebler, stiffer, more like the
gait of a weary man. Daniel Schwarz remarks occasional shifts from the third to the
second person in Jude the Obscure, conflating Jude's and the narrator's voices and
implicitly, their views of life. The separation between narrative discourse and direct
discourse becomes blurred. Narrative omniscience yields to point of view and imitation
of interior monologue.

Jack Durbeyfield, a small itinerant trader, curious to know why the clergyman he
meets on his return to Marlott keeps calling him “sir John”, finds out that he is the
descendant of a very old family, whose ancestor had come from Normandy with William
the Conqueror (Tess of the d'Urbervilles). The theme of decay and death – his
ancestors are all sleeping under their slabs in the ancient cemetery of Greenhill –
organizes the unfolding story in the book. Overwhelmed by his family history, “John”
Durbeyfield refuses to work, contributing to the final ruin of his home. His daughter Tess
is raped, marked out for a fallen woman, forced to accept her seducer's sexual siege in
order to save here family, thereby ruining her chances to be finally reunited to the man
she loves. She falls victim to “men's boundless egotism” : Alec staining her purity, Angel
condemning her in the name of his male, narrow and biased concept of “purity”.

The novel ends with her execution and the casual mention of her ancestors
sleeping in the churchyard, ignorant of the whole tragedy.

The very first sentence plays upon the homophony of “Blakemore” and
“Blackmoor” – a conventional signifier, and one of natural signification, describing some
locale – as the keynote to the subsequent tensions between heredity and education,
nature and nurture. With all his physical (natural) resemblance to his ancestors,
Durbeyfield is as far from them in the encodings of social life as his corrupted name
suggests. It is the social upstart and usurper of the family name who enjoys social
prestige. There is no natural signification or providential plan in the universe; life is just a
matter of chance. Even social glamour and meaningful human action end up in
churchyard self-oblivion and organic recycling. The emblem of Hardy's world is the altar
of an ancient Temple of the Sun: nature emancipated to a cult object and the spirit's
extinction on the altar of “swift-footed Time”. This is not a historical picture of humanity –
Savonarola's Italy in Eliot's Romola, let us say – but an all-time emblem, valid since the
time of man's magical beginnings.

Thomas Hardy's fiction is a bridge between Victorian and modernist from one
more point of view: The novel is a flexible form and realism and pastoral can be made
to serve each other in it, though they seem to be opposites, the whole conception of
Wessex, for instance, depends on us recognizing that Shaston, Casterbridge and the
rest are fictions on the one hand and based on real places on the other [62]. The
modernists' narrative fictions drop most of the real-life loess from their soles, but the
Victorian dilemmas are still sticking to Hardy's countries of the mind: the philistine
biases of caste, urban deracination, alienation through education or social dislocation,
the decay of the village traditions and cultural changes.

However, his geographical pointer – Egdon Heath in Wessex – is fictionally

transformed into a mythical space, like Faulkner's Yoknapathawpha. It may have been
born as a fantasy of his childhood, steeped in the atmosphere of remoteness and
desolation inspired by the remains of vanished races and fallen civilizations. The
neighbouring Rainbarrows presented to his view a group of three Celtic tumuli on a hill
overlooking a track of the Roman road running north from Dorchester to Salisbury. Just
outside Dorchester (Casterbridge) was Mambury Rings, the ruins of a Roman
amphitheatre and two miles southwest of the ancient town lay the vast earthworks
called Maiden Castle, whose last garrison had fallen into the hands of the Romans.
Such places will have been a theme for nostalgic speculation upon a cosmic rundown,
pictured as a sun of destruction filtering its rays through the impassibly cold stones of an
all-time sacrificial altar. The local anti-Catholicism and Calvinist spirit, with its emphasis
upon man's depravity and final doom, reinforced the pagan, pessimistic folk belief in
blind destiny, preparing a propitious ground for the seeds Schopenhauer and
Kierkegaard had sown earlier in the century.

Thomas Hardy divided his novels into three categories: Novels of Ingenuity (such
as Desperate Remedies); Romances and Fantasies (A Pair of Blue Eyes, 1873); and
Novels of Character and Environment (Far from the Madding Crowd, 1874, The
Return of the Native, 1876, The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886, The Woodlanders, 1887,
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 1891, Jude the Obscure, 1896).

The trajectory followed by Hardy’s fiction, from the pastoral work and love idyll in
Far from the Madding Crowd to the epitaph on pastoral England in The Woodlanders
and finally to the picture of social disharmony and religious decline reversing the
pastoral convention in Jude the Obscure remains consistent throughout under two
important aspects: the reduction of the social to the personal and the production of
meaning through structural contexts. In his celebrated S/Z, Roland Barthes
distinguishes five narrative codes: proairetic, indicative of action (characteristic of the
picaresque), hermeneutic (posing questions and enigmas), cultural (recycling common
knowledge), semic (connotative, linked to theme) and symbolic, also linked to theme,
but which consists of contrasts and pairings related to the most binary polarities: male
and female, good and evil, night and day, life and art etc. The last is characteristic of a
phenomenological perspective on the world, the structures of contrastive elements
being fundamental to the human way of perceiving and organizing reality. The recurrent
patterns and motifs are constituting rather than naming reality, that is, designating
something which is already there.

While tailoring the action and characters to the needs of his early pastoral from the
traditional depositaries of the village traditions, obliterated from the rest of an
industrialized England, Hardy is undermining the realistic illusion through conscious
handling of conventional, literary material, structuring his narratives according to a set of
underlying fundamental dyads. The title and setting of Far from the Madding Crowd
already introduce us to a world of signs rather than to a naturalistic background. The
space is the isolated, self-sufficient rural background, far from the corruption of the
metropolitan civilization, and time is ahistorical, attuned to natural cycles
(„Weatherbury”). The realistic elements are not missing either, recognizable in the
coexistence of the traditional farming mode, with Batsheba, the landowner, personally
supervising work, and with Boldwood, the capitalist farmer, paying Gabriel to do it for
him, or with Batsheba's self-conscious feminist interrogation of a language created by
men to express their feelings to the exclusion of women's. The pastoral elements are
however prevailing: forms of man/nature continuity in a community centred on the
symbolic presence of The Great Barn, Gabriel Oak playing the flute as the shepherd
figure, implicitly critical of the unworthy upper classes and offering a moral standard of
combined art and work. The dyad of traditional farmer versus capitalist employer
(Batsheba and Boldwood) polarizes human relationships based upon affectionate
commitments (Batsheba and Oak) and those regulated by money (Boldwood hiring
Oak). Another binary opposition establishes between Boldwood's capitalist wealth and
power and aristocratic decline in Captain Troy. Troy is the hero of romance with a past
(a Gothic story of seduction, child bearing and death), looking upon property as merely
a source of funds for the gratification of his expensive appetites, and upon women as
the passive worshippers of his reckless military bravado and handsome looks. In a post-
romantic and postmetaphysical world (the church is a reminder of a worn-out religious
creed), there is a need for human deeds divine (A Broken Appointment). Failed idealism
seeks solace in a more realistic and modest search for bonds of love and society
making up for the lost absolutes: lovingkindness, mutual help, and divided work.

The dyads of Tess of the d'Urbervilles are subsumed under the fundamental
breach in the sensibility of the age. Angel is aware of the modern ache in a cultural
pause between loss of belief and a new ideological structure, to which a refined
sensibility might attach its need for stable meaning. But the ideas of the time no longer
hold any claim to universal validity; they are simply the latest fashion in definition. Angel
experiences the anxiety of the romantic idealist lost in a relativistic age, himself causing
disaster through his idealising visions of people in flesh and blood. Angel is one of the
fin-de-sičcle theosophists, who had given up on Christianity and doctrinary rationalism
(like Swinburne, Angel finds that the necessity of taking thought had made the heavens
grey), returning to the beautiful gods of humanity's joyous pagan past. In the landscape
of his mind, Tess is transfigured from a milkmaid into a visionary essence of a woman, a
nature goddess, Artemis or Demeter. In reality, she is the embodiment of healthy
womanhood, often compared to graceful creatures and beautiful things in nature, failing
to understand the constraints of society. In opposition to her need for sensuous
gratification, the Biblical texts inscribed on walls by itinerant painters strike her as
horrible, crushing, killing. Hardy's version of the “fallen woman” transfers the issue from
social behaviour to the character's inner understanding. Although facts and
circumstances are against her, Tess is “pure” because in the beginning she is unaware
of evil, subsequently she is motivated by family affection and gratitude in living with a
man she does not love, and finally she is redeemed through the realization of her guilt.
By choosing to die like a fallen woman, Tess has become her own judge, crossing the
threshold from nature towards the realm of the moral will. Thomas Hardy is not only
aware of the split between phenomena and the subject's phenomenological constitution
of reality, but also deliberately foregrounding it in discourse. There is no narrator to pass
a final judgement on Tess, or tell us what a “pure woman” is, in the same manner in
which the narrator is repeatedly framing Dorothea as the failed idealist in Middlemarch.
Instead, the reader is granted access to her thoughts, to the way she is wording them,
and to the other characters' conflicting mental framings replacing the living Tess. To
Angel, she is the fresh and virginal daughter of nature, a goddess he treats with
deference; to Alec, she is the object of his sexual hunger. No less godlike does Angel
appear to Tess, while the reader is made aware not only of his all too human prejudices
but also of his own doubts and unrealistic, idyllic choices against a world drawn to a
larger pattern: the capitalist mechanization of agriculture at Flintcomb-Ash. David Lodge
[63] discovers a distinction between the language articulating the character's thoughts
and their “language of presentation”, between their interiority and self-dramatization or
conscious insertion in the I-thou relationship of conversation:

Of course, in the strict sense, the distinction between Tess's consciousness

and the author's articulation of it is a real one. Consider, for example, the account of
her disappointment at the appearance of Alec D'Urberville:

„She had dreamed of an aged and dignified face, the sublimation of all the
D'Urberville lineaments, furrowed with incarnate memories representing in
hieroglyphic the centuries of her family's and England’s history. But she screwed
herself up to the work in hand, since she could not get out of it, and answered:

„I came to see your mother, sir “ (Ch. V)

The first sentence is a consciously literary paraphrase of Tess's vague,

romantic expectations; whereas the second sentence is tough, simple and idiomatic,
precisely rendering the verbal quality of Tess's consciousness.

Jude the Obscure shows a novelist increasingly aware of both timeless, biological
factors at work within the individual and of social dilemmas besieging a culture of
passage.
 The novel proceeds through patterns of oppositions and recurrence: Marygreen as
a fallen version of idyllic Merry England and Christminster as spiritual Alma Mater, the
seat of knowledge and of historical memories; Arabella dominated by biological
necessity, and deracinated Sue, in whom mental processes have displaced the laws of
gravity and germination, etc.

The keynote in the beginning of the novel is struck by Jude's observation of the
flaw in the terrestrial scheme, the fact that being good to one set of creatures results in
being cruel to another. He cannot reconcile the avaricious gardener who has appointed
him to scare birds off to the hungry little creatures feeding on his corn, which sickens
his sense of harmony. Jude is thereby proclaiming the end of the conventional
pastoral and the onset of the Darwinian age of ruthless competition. The
“catastrophe” is the fulfilment of the initial prophesy: Jude's son by Arabella, symbolizing
the devastating effects of “Father Time”, kills his brothers and himself, as this is his idea
about being good to Jude and Sue. He finds a Malthusian justification for his horrible
deed, qualifying it in the letter he leaves behind as a “generous impulse”: there were too
many of us, there was not enough food for the whole family.

As well as Dorothea, Jude finds his dreams gigantic and his surrounding small.
What had been understated in Middlemarch is now openly acknowledged in a more
consciously phenomenological perspective on the world. Jude's “dreaming” does not
concern only social success – a career as scholar or priest – but also the imposition of
mental constructs upon reality. Jude's second visit to the scene of the kiss is charged
with mythological associations, while Arabella passes unheeding it. The embroidery of
imagination upon the stuff of nature produces a transcendent reality: the chartered
landscape of the mind. Consistent in his dyadic structuring of symbolical and archetypal
relevance, Hardy inserts Arabella into a similar pattern of displacement, this time not in
a figurative but in a literal sense. Everything about her is false: the lie about her
pregnancy, which only serves to trap Jude, her hair, her dimples, the adulterated beer.
Whilst Jude is possessed of the Christminster sentiment, distilling the actual town into
an ecclesiastical romance in stone, the struggling men and women who are the reality
of Chistminster know little of Christ and Minster. The permanent interplay between the
topical and the tropical is the narrative enactment of the theme of failed idealism. The
symbolical “tree of knowledge” growing in Christminster finds an objective correlative in
the physical presence, charged with sexual connotations, of the tree with a limb
branching off and a wrangling caterpillar, bearing witness to Jude's instinctual response
to Arabella's sensuality. The return to Marygreen and the re-marriage pattern reiterate
the entrapment figure of Jude's relationship to Arabella. Jude's “fall” to Arabella's
temptation, reminiscent of the scene in the garden, parallels England's fall from the
pastoral condition. Instead of the former common and harvest festivals, the fresh
harrow lines, lending a new utilitarian air deprive Marygreen of all history. Instead of a
traditional community working in continuity with nature, there is the greedy landowner
against the sensitive employee and against the hungry birds, accumulating wealth and
applying the capitalist moral summed up by A.H. Clough as “the devil take the
hindmost” (In the Great Metropolis). The human being is crushed under the burden of
anxieties collecting from society and biology alike.
 The circumstance that Hardy is less bent on producing independent stories and
more intent upon recycling a set of obsessions which give coherence and unity to his
entire work accounts for the existence of iterative patterns of character. Like Angel,
Jude feels the modern vice of unrest, accepting stone-masonry as a provisional
occupation, while flowing unattached to other possibilities of self-realization. He too
wraps up Sue in the drapery of a goddess from another world, failing to acknowledge
the biological determinism at work in Sue, her heritage of masochistic drives, conflicting
with her acquired nature, as the product of civilization.

In the preface to a later edition, Hardy associates Sue with the suffragette
movement storming England at the time. The heroine does indeed combine a
Swinburnian critique of Christianity (rejected as sickness and horror, while celebrating
Greek joyousness) with open political and feminist dissent. In revolt from Victorian
class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, she defends her private worth against
society's mean exclusiveness with respect to gender. Darwinism had provided a
biological justification of patriarchal gender discriminations, pointing to sexual
differentiation as natural and necessary [64]. Yet Sue well knows that she is not
intellectually inferior to many of her male acquaintances. Contradicting such empirical
evidence, the discourse of the church and state were framing women as passive
subjects to male authority:... the bridegroom chooses me of his own will and pleasure;
but I don't choose him. Somebody gives me to him, like a she-ass, or she-goat, or any
domestic animal. Was there any use trying to break society's chain of authority? If Sue
refuses to go through the bureaucracy of marriage, which takes stock of the material
conditions of the parties united through a social contract while ignoring their feelings,
Sue and Jude see themselves ostracized. The Artisans’ Mural Improvement Society
does not accept Jude, as their free love is an outrage to common standards of conduct.
Hardy is giving a voice to the marginalized and dissenting social categories, yet does he
approve of them ? The qualification of Sue's nonconformism as “cock-sureness” and her
tragical failure provide no easy answer. The novelist seems to be still pointing to
societal determinism as decisive, rendering individual revolt inefficient. The romantics
had meant to change the world; the bourgeois Victorians, to get ahead in it. Hardy
narrows dramatically his utopian social scheme, confining it within the basic units of
loving couple or family. The solution is “lovingkindness”, sympathy and mutual
understanding. In Jude's opinion, Sue ought to blame the conditions which enslave men
too, whose strands reach beyond man's control. The rest is existentialist despair in an
agnostic and agonizing age.

Fin-de-sičcle Aestheticism
 The last two decades of the nineteenth century appear to be not only an aesthetic
particularization of Victorian phenomenology, but also the beginning of a mode of
sensibility and cultural matrix divorced from anything that had preceded it. In The
Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, Lord Henry commends the ancient Greeks'
belief in the harmony of soul and body in opposition to his Manichean contemporaries,
who have separated them and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is
void. The idea crops up in different places, not only with Wilde but with Pater, Hardy,
Swinburne as well, all of them in search of a golden mean between the two, which Pater
calls “imaginative reason”, and Wilde, “aesthetic criticism”. It is the motive behind
Pater's engagement with the Italian Renaissance: in the works of its masters, the
material and the spiritual are fused and blended, there is a perfect identification of
matter and form, with the subordination of subject to design.

The subject matter at the disposal of creation, Gilbert (O. Wilde, The Critic as
Artist) remarks, becomes every day more limited. Up to that moment, the artist had
either given us entirely new background, like Kipling, opening vistas in exotic lands, or
had dived inwards, in order to reveal to us the soul of man and its innermost workings.
The example thereof is Browning, who concentrates neither on incident or event, but on
the subtle mechanism of the mind.

Was there a third mode of steering between either the abstract waters of Pre-
Raphaelitism, the hazy dream-worlds and paraxial realms of ghosts and doubles, or the
steep crags of contingency (the naturalism of Gissing and Moore, the imperial
“Englishness” of Kipling in fiction or of Alfred Noyes, Henry Newbolt and William Watson
in poetry)? Leaving behind the Enlightenment cult of reason, the romantic’s
dematerialised haunts of the imagination, the Victorian realistic comment on the social
scheme, what new ground was being broken by creative energies reaching for a
closure of subjectivity and objectivity ? How can the mind go out into the world and
at the same time reflect back upon itself? That was the question. By answering it, Peter
Nicholls [65] establishes typological differences between Walter Horatio Pater and the
paradigmatic Decadents, between Decadence and Modernism. The decadent denies
the worth of life (Villiers de l'Isle Adam's “as for living, the servants will do it for us” was
often quoted), allowing himself to be completely absorbed in Narcissistic inwardness,
seeking aesthetic enjoyment within finely decorated interiors (in Rosa alchemica, by
Yeats, the room is hermetically sealed from any outside intrusion), ” an obsession
whose origin Nicholls is inclined to attribute to E.A. Poe's Philosophy of Furniture (Yeats
does identify the source of the fin-de-sičcle sentiment in Poe in his Rosa alchemica). In
counter-distinction, the rediscovery of an ’outside” to the febrile interior of the
decadent imagination would be fundamental to the various forms of modernism
(Ibidem). As far as Pater is concerned, he stands apart from the death-driven art of the
decadents, preaching an outwardly focused aesthetic of hedonism:

Strongly influenced by modern science and its relativistic accounts of experience,

Pater looked to past works of art to provide the “finite images” (...) which expressed a
desired balance of idealist and empiricist elements. Much of his interest in remote
periods, and especially in Greek antiquity, derived from Pater's sense of the growing
abstractness of modern thought, which he saw as “committed to a train of reflection
which must end in defiance of form, of all that is outward, in an exaggerated idealism”
(...) Pater's conception of style had much in common with that of the decadents, and he,
too, conjured with images of sadistic Medusas and the “fascination of corruption”, but at
the same time his work was animated, often nervously, by a desire to burst the limits of
the self, to escape the “narrow chamber of the individual mind “(...) which would
become the decadents' sole domain (Ibidem).

Verlaine's anguished confession – I am the Empire in its decadence – (Apathy, in

Of Old and Late, 1884) ought to have strongly appealed to the British in the late
eighties, caught between degeneration talk in the scientific discourse and imperial
anxieties. Anyway, the godfathers of the new movement were French: Maurice Barrčs
(1883) and Anatole Baju, the editor of Le Décadent (1886). Peter Nicholls is quoting
from the magazine's manifesto:

Society is disintegrating under the corrosive action of a decaying civilization (...)

Modern man is blasé about it (...) Refinement of appetites, sensations, taste, luxury;
pleasures; neurosis, hysteria, hypnotism, morphine addiction, scientific quackery,
excessive Schopenhauerism, these are the symptoms of social evolution [66].

Baudelaire had undertaken to test the aesthetic “feasibility” of modern life, and the
next generation's response to it was nausea. Turning his back on the ugly bourgeois
civilization, on the stereotypical multiplication of consumerism, the decadent shuts
himself up in a fictitious world, trying to get rid of the dead weight of his material body.
The need for pleasurable aesthetic enjoyment grows excessive, unnatural, and the
decadent recognizes his doom as the inhabitant of a civilization that has reached the
end of its evolution: declining Rome, Byzantium. Of one more ironic inconsistency, the
decadents do not seem to have been aware: the circulation of a fixed number of motifs,
situations, and doctrinaire attitudes in their works, somehow mirroring the copiae of the
artificially induced craving for material satisfaction in the consumption society. Among
these: the closeted, aestheticized interior (Huysmans’s Ŕ Rebours, Wilde's Picture of
Dorian Gray, Yeats ’s Rosa alchemica), consciousness shaped not by contact with the
world but by artificial objects created by aesthetes with an insider's consciousness:
Marius studying the Roman rhetoricians, Des Esseintes reading Mallarmé in Ŕ
Rebours, Dorian and the narrator reading Ŕ Rebours in Dorian Gray and The
Alchemical Rose (maybe for the symbolism of its title: ’Against Nature’). Whereas
Pater's character is stil vacillating between two worlds, the decadents' is usually a split
personality, as the I-thou relationship has been internalised: not the communication with
others in the world but inner conflict. Baudelaire sees himself always double, action and
intention, dream and reality, always one hindering the other [67]. Dorian is harassed by
his double in his “picture”, Yeats’s narrator in Rosa Alchemica feels within himself the
split between the idealist's raptures and the mournful look of another self, realizing the
impossibility of the vision coming true. Paradoxically, the decadents’ self-fabrication
yields artificial postures, standardised attitudes, masks. Pater's difference from them,
we think is his attempt to ground the new aestheticism within a changing paradigm. That
is why he is closer to the modernists (concerned with the dynamic of perception, with
consciousness making sense of the world).

A different interpretation from Nicholls's comes from Gary Day [68], who does not
separate the Decadence from the epistemological inquiry following the collapse of
traditional values and beliefs:

Experience is pursued, not for itself but for the fruits it yields and there is a desire
to charge bodily experience with profundity. Chiefly there is a consciousness of
corruption which is both desired and reviled, “waters of bitterness, how sweet” [69]. The
sense of decadence and corruption is important because it compensates for the
absence of meaning in experience by the intensity of experience. Subjectivity is
reduced to sensation, which is private and perhaps incommunicable but certainly is the
one genuine experience open to the self.

Identity becomes a matter of artifice, as Clive Scott remarks of the decadents:

“Make up, the music hall milieu with its garish lights, costumes, and other forms of
ostentation are at once the art of being oneself and the way that, for others, knowledge
of a self becomes a series of sensory delights. In this essentially baroque world of fluid
roles, identity depends on the particular stimulus one transmits at a given time”. [70].

Decadence and Symbolism are the two trends Day singles out from the mixture
of the pastoral, the romantic, and the patriotic, whose threads lead on towards
modernism in the dynamic picture of literary history. The difference he suggests is
phenomenological. The Decadents' concern with experience comes from a charge of
sensuous surfaces with meaning, while the symbolist's belief that reality lies behind the
surfaces of things results in the use of the symbol as a focus, a way of organizing and
making sense of disparate phenomena (Ibidem). The English aesthetes of the nineties
(decadents or symbolists) are a Frenchified section, more concerned with technique
and consciously imitating the formal developments in France than their predecessors of
the eighties, who sometimes even define themselves in opposition to the French. The
difference, according to R.L. Stevenson, is the English writers' serious engagement with
such issues as the self, the finality of art, and the rapport between art and reality,
whereas the French write mostly for entertainment. (The Morality of the Profession of
Letters, 1881). Such inquiries we shall now explore.

1. Pater is probably the first to replace the centrality of metaphysics in the

logocentric paradigm, suggesting that mixture of art and poetry, philosophy and the
religious life, enjoying equal status, which today we call “mytho-poetic tradition”. His
definition of the contemporary age is epistemological: Modern thought is distinguished
from ancient by its cultivation of the “relative” spirit in place of the “absolute”
(Appreciations). The search for universals has given way to a succession of changing
paradigms or epistemes: to regard all things as inconstant modes of fashion has
become the tendency of modern thought (Conclusion to Studies in the History of the
Renaissance).
 2. The acknowledgement of the true limits of man's capacities (Marius the
Epicurean, Ch. IX) in ever attaining stable knowledge about things (which are “in
perpetual motion”), or in reaching beyond empirical experience of the world
(metaphysical speculation) is counterbalanced by the positive assertion of the
powers of emotion and sense”. Heightened perception of the world – the immediate
sense of the object contemplated – becomes an end in itself. The intensity of the
sensuous experience of the world is the new criterion, not of the truth of experience
but of the “value” attached to it. With reality placed within brackets, the new set of
values is no longer likely to be affected by any subsequent scientific discovery: as it
would be unaffected by any discovery of an Empedocles (improving on the old story of
Prometheus) as to what had really been the origin, and source of development, of
man's actually attained faculties... It is not that the sense of corruption or negative
emotions are the focus of a morbid interest, as with the decadents, who declare war on
the body and on the world, but they are no longer excluded from the range of the
subjective experience of a world in perpetual flux: Not pleasure but fullness of life, and
“insight” as conducing to that fullness – energy, variety, and choice of experience,
including noble pain and sorrow even, loves such as those in the exquisite old story of
Apuleius, sincere and strenuous forms of the moral life, such as Seneca and Epictetus
– whatever form of human life, in short, might be heroic, impassioned, ideal; from these
the “new Cyrenaicism” of Marius took its criterion of value. The “outward focus” of
Marius's aesthetic is on an otherness, which is not however empiricist: the texts of the
world. Thereby the new Cyrenaicism emancipates old hedonism in the ideal of the
“cultivated agnostic”. “Carpe diem”, enjoy the “hic et nunc” yields to be (ing) perfect in
regard to what is here and now.

3. The dissolution of the stable and rational Voltairean ego, the reduction of
personality to the contents of consciousness, that is a body of sensations, engage a
new ontology of a perceptual and fluid self. In the midst of contemporary enthusiasm
with physiology, William James's pragmatist psychology (Op. cit. p. 19) defines
consciousness as built of individual sensations and emotions, selected out of multiple
elements, sensory and not notions, according to whether they lead to the desired.
Physiological psychology conceives of consciousness as a “stream” of sensations, the
perceptual self changing continually: no state once gone can recur and be identical with
what it was before (p. 149). Pater's Conclusion to Studies in the History of the
Renaissance (1868) is remarkably proleptic: Experience is reduced to a group of
impressions, which are in perpetual flight, gone while we try to apprehend them: It is
with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images,
sensations, that analysis leaves off – that continual vanishing away, that strange,
perpetual weaving and unweaving of oursvelves.

The focus on the progressive refinement of sensory experience weakens the role
and importance of memory: We teach people how to remember, we never teach them
how to grow. (Gilbert in The Critic as Artist). The aesthetes develop an impressionistic
novel of sensibility rather than one of action. Marius the Epicurean or The Picture of
Dorian Gray are novels without a plot, whose theme is the growth, education and
development of a youth. The “imaginary portrait” is “the story of a soul”. Since identity
is reduced to perception, the self can only impress others by building a certain mask.
The details of costume and extravagances of behaviour are the subjectively constructed
outward form meant to elicit a subjective response in an outward observer. The
sensuous forms are in fact a search for identity, The Truth of Masks, Wilde says in his
famous essay published together with The Decay of Lying, Pen, Pencil Poison, and The
Critic as Artist under the title Intentions, is superior to living but formless beings and
things, actually existing in the world. Perception of forms already constituted is
consequently more formative and refining than perception of natural beauty. It is
through works of art, books or pictures, that the portrayed youth is more effectively
moulded and enabled to discover himself.

4. In this way perception acquires an ontological dimension. It is no longer an

aspect of reflection, of cognition but constitutive of a new order of phenomena: Pater
distinguishes between mimetic (constituted) and constitutive artistic forms or
aesthetic objects: But poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal,
it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common things (....) or it may actually
add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative
creation of things that are ideal from their very birth. Rossetti did something, something
excellent, of the former kind, but his characteristic, his really revealing work, lay in the
adding to poetry of fresh poetic material, of a new order of phenomena, in the creation
of a new ideal. This is the poetic principle informing Fauvism, Cubism, Imagism and
Vorticism, and later, Expressionism, Vorticism, Dada and Surrealism, i.e. Modernism
proper. Perception is not mechanical sensuous response but interpretation,
appreciation, phenomenology: an expression no longer of fact but of his sense of it, his
peculiar intuition of a world, prospective, or discerned below the faulty conditions of the
present, in either case changed somewhat from the actual world (...) the transcript of his
sense of fact rather than the fact (Style, in Appreciations). Formal coherence (the unity
of the linguistic structure, of the whole composition with the subject and with itself) is not
a technical but a hermeneutic act: All depends upon the original unity, the vital
wholeness and identity, of the initiatory apprehension or view. Giorgione's paintings are
glimpses of life, Marc Aurelius and the other rhetoricians of Roman Decadence are not
only eloquent but also effective interpreters etc. With Wilde, artistic creation is a form of
criticism. The necessity of imposing form upon chaos is realized as new attitudes of the
mind and new points of view. How comes it that perception is not simply a matter of
automatic physiological response but, in a remarkable anticipation of Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, primarily of an interpretational nature? It is because the body schema encodes
and decodes the world as a meaning structure (Rossetti's phantoms of the body as the
more genuine house of life in Pater's essay), or because man is moulded as a meaning
being by contact with already constituted interpretational frames. They are, Oscar Wilde
repeatedly emphasizes, the contexts conditioning man's perception of reality. It is not art
that imitates life but the other way round. Here is his definition of the hermeneutic
circle: Nature (...) is our creation. Things are because we see them, and what we see,
and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is
very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.
Then, and then only, does it come into existence. At present people see fogs, not
because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the
mysterious loveliness of such effects, There may have been fogs for centuries in
London. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did
not exist till Art had invented them. (The Decay of Lying). What the Londoners saw at
that moment were the white quivering sunlight... the strange blotches of mauve.... the
restless violet shadows, painted by the.. French Impressionists.

W.H. Pater's (1839-1894) relativistic attitude, as a solution to the nineteenth-

century epistemological impasse, explains a lot about his work both as a novelist and as
an essayist. His fundamental attitude is Latitudinarianism, that is, liberality of
interpretation. The conversion of Marius, a student of rhetoric in Rome in the time of
Marcus Aurelius (an emperor doubled by the public lecturer and essayist), from the
practical religion of Roman household gods to Christianity is not complete. Marius is the
embodiment of the mind in suspense, with no strong belief ever getting the upper
hand. He is attracted not so much by the Christians' mysticism as by their noble
feelings, and, particularly, by the aesthetic aspects of the cult: the music as an
expression of the joyful soul, the peaceful light and shade. Aestheticism, love of fine
words and eloquence are the only salvation at a time of vulgar material prosperity to
which that of the late Victorians was strongly affined. Not only in this “Imaginary
Portrait”, but also in the philosophy of Plato does Pater seek confirmation of his option
for tentative thinking and suspended judgement. Plato and Platonism is a very
personal interpretation of the Greek philosopher, as one who gave up upon the ambition
of an “ontological science” or “doctrine of Being”. He is wrong, of course, as Plato
ascribes Ideas that real existence which is denied to physics.

Relativism also characterizes Pater's choice of an impressionistic form of

criticism, expressing his personal emotional response, and of the essay, for its
“tentative and dubious” nature. The definition of beauty is Kantian – beauty is that which
produces immediate sensuous delight (Preface of The Renaissance) –, but, unlike Kant,
he does not distinguish between natural beauty and art. In fact, Pater hates theory and
objective aesthetic judgement; he will not try to define the aesthetic value – some
universal formula of beauty – confining himself to subjective evaluations
(“appreciations”) of its particular manifestations.

By reproducing Pater's Conclusion to The Renaissance at the end of The Picture

of Dorian Gray, and by counterpointing it with his own Preface, Oscar Wilde (1856-
1900) has made more obvious both his indebtedness to and difference from Pater. The
Oxford don himself had expelled those pages from the second edition, for fear their
overt hedonism would corrupt innocent young people. This is what Dorian must discard
in his quest of immortality: the pleasures of the body, the aesthetic novice's waste in
exploits of the outer world.

Wilde's emphasis upon the constructed aesthetic object, self-fashioning, mask

(From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type), provides the link with
W.B.Yeats in the chain of English modernism. Paterian and Jamesian (originally
Kantian) is the affirmation of art's autonomy (There is no such thing as a moral or
immoral book, only well-written or badly written), but the idea of impersonality (To
reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim) leads on to T.S. Eliot, while that of
intersubjectivity (It is the spectator and not life that art really mirrors) is a postmodern
prophecy.

The opening scene, introducing the Decadent Lord Henry, is an impressionistic

vignette. The novelist does not describe objects but the character's sensuous
response to them. Objects are disembodied and transferred into colours, scents,
fleeting synaesthetic impressions, the accumulation of adjectives being a Decadent
favourite: the heavy scent of the lilac or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering
thorn, (the) divan of Persian saddlebags, the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-
coloured blossoms of the laburnum, the fantastic shadows of birds on the tussore silk
curtains, a Japanese effect, conveying swiftness and motion, the opium-tainted
cigarette... Through perception, Lord Henry is already immersed in meaning (qualifying
the elements as “heavy”, “delicate”, “honey-sweet”, “fantastic” etc.). Shut up in his
mind's “dream of the world” (Conclusion), induced by opium or contact with Japanese
painting, he is giving us, in the spirit of Pater, images of his, under which he groups the
simpler and more elementary forces of nature. It is the interpretational nature of
perception that allows of art being at once surface and symbol (Wilde's Preface)
Language is, according to Lord Henry, the realm of ontology: If one does not talk about
a thing it has never happened. Unlike Pater, however, Wilde thinks that the individual
can break through the thick wall of personality (Conclusion) towards intersubjectivity, by
building a mask – communal meanings constructed by culture. Sibyl and Lord Henry are
the poles of an utter incompatibility in the understanding of the nature of reality and art,
between which Dorian keeps vacillating until his tragical end. Sick with shadows, like
Tennyson's Lady of Shalott, Sibyl decides to abandon the theatre world (the masks) and
live a life of domestic felicity with Dorian. As her name suggests, she is a prophetess in
calling Dorian “Prince of Life”, as the hero's hedonistic frenzy would later confirm. For
the time being she is mistaken about his interest in her. Her art is supposed to mirror
her spectator's interest in the parts the actress is performing and in the texts she is
enacting, not in the living Sibyl. Her error turns her into an Orpheus figure: the moment
she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, Lord Henry explains. The
artist's condition is that of giving shape and substance to the shadows of art. Ophelia or
Cornelia are more real than the real Sibyl, because they are inscribed in meaning
structures.

The novel thematizes the condition of the artist throughout. All the characters who
break one of the commandments listed in the “decalogue” of Wilde's Preface are
doomed. Sibyl trespasses the ontological and intersubjective principles; Basil Halward,
that of impersonality. He has put too much of himself – of his personal infatuation with
Dorian – into his picture. He confesses his mistake of not having painted him in the
costume of dead ages. Flesh and blood have not been reduced to “costume”, to type;
have not been entombed („dead”) into conventional sign (sema, tomb). His “realism of
matter” presents the object directly, “without mist or veil”. His painting has remained
faithful to the principle of reality, and therefore becomes vulnerable to change and
aging. Life mars the painting and it mars Basil, who falls victim to the living object of his
too personal desire. On the other hand, art creates a new Dorian. His image for Basil
becomes his own image of himself; Basil's worship, his Narcissistic self-love. His
mistake is that of making art dependent upon “moral life”. He lives a double life. The
aesthetic one is shaped by the book Lord Henry sends him. By reading it and living in its
spirit, Dorian identifies himself with an image other than his physical likeness in the
mirror. Des Esseintes, the hero of Ŕ Rebours, written in the jewelled style of the French
symbolists, gives a record of his refined taste and habits, divorced from any practical
purpose or aspect of ordinary existence. Laying it in the abyss of his own life, Dorian
gives similar attention to interior decorations – old brocades, green bronzes, lacquer-
work, luxury, pomp, readings of Gautier etc. – and he remains as young as his
prototype. But he also embarks on alienating nightly adventures (paradoxically causing
confusion about his identity, although he does not change physically), since he looked
on evil as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful. The
aging portrait, marred by this mixture with an extra-aesthetic principle of morality, is also
a record of his crimes. Turning his back on the amoral world of an aesthetic existence,
Dorian starts contemplating the abyss of evil in his own soul, feeling horrified. The
Dorian who listens to the preacher, intimating that nothing profits a man if he gain the
whole world and lose his soul, weighing the comparative values of hedonism and
Christian morality, is the perfect double of the painting recording his moral life. Dorin
leaves the Des Esseintes world, joining the preacher and the people in the street. But in
the physical world, perfect doubles are an ontic impossibility. The homo duplex ends in
death. In stabbing himself, Dorian also kills the “real”, aged Dorian in the painting. Being
released from its earthly burden, inherent both in the act of creation (Basil's) and
reception (Dorian’s, who transfers to it the circumstances of his actual life), the portrait
now partakes of the immortality of art. It is only Lord Henry, the spokesman of Wilde's
aestheticism throughout, with a perfect understanding of the complete separation
between art and reality, who survives. A fairy-tale motif – wish fulfilling –, and the
modern myth of the covenant with the devil are transformed into a parable of the
condition of art and the artist.

Victorian drama is weaving, like poetry, a double thread: problem plays or

poetic and symbolic drama. Ibsen’s influence can be traced in playwrights as different
as Arthur Pinero, Oscar Wilde and the early George Bernard Shaw. The technique of
deflating the spectators' expectations, by challenging their conventional notions and
prejudices through thought-provoking questionings, were a proleptic form of critical
philosophy (emerging a few decades later from Frankfurt) in dramatic form.

Arthur Pinero is exploding the current clichés of domestic drama as a debased

form of the new realism by revealing the tragical consequences of the passive
acceptance of inhumanly rigid social norms. The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893) stages
a foil to Tess, as the heroine, a woman with a past, is led to suicide by her husband's
strict notion of "purity". The "fallen woman" is looked upon as a source of disease or
contagion, putting her children's lives in jeopardy.
 Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan of the previous year is a comic counterpart
not only in point of genre. The bad mother who had deserted her baby running away
with a lover comes back to blackmail her son-in-law, threatening to reveal her identity
and ruin the couple's reputation. Lady Windermere is induced to believe that the sums
of money her husband is paying to some unknown beneficiary are a proof of his
infidelity. She plans to make it even on him by running away with another man, but her
mother, in whom the maternal instinct is finally alive, claims for herself the fan her
daughter had left behind in her prospective lover's flat. Her lies and manipulative moves
manage to redress everybody's faces in the end, but by that time all Victorian pieties of
marriage and domesticity have been exposed as fraudulent fabrications. Wilde's women
are not Patmore’s angels in the house or Ibsen’s dolls, crushed by anxiety and
prohibitions. They are figures of subversion, getting back at a discriminating society
through moral transgression and brilliant verbal fencing. They seem to be instinct with
the impish conviction that "conscience is either killed or... lives to give rebellion its
fascination and disobedience its charm. For all sins... are sins of disobedience" (The
Picture of Dorian Gray).

Doubleness of character and the hints to moral perversion (The Importance of

Being Earnest, 1895) are articulated through the paradoxical, epigrammatic, witty or
aphoristic quality of Wilde's stage language. The dissatisfaction with ideological
oppression and social hypocrisy takes an inverted form. Wilde confesses in De
Profundis: "what paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me
in the sphere of passion".

Ontological evacuation is the correlate of the revelation of art in his Salome, a play
which mostly contributed to the end-of-the-century myth of the Fatal Woman.

The Biblical myth is rewritten to serve the Bible of aestheticism. The universal
appeal of the play is enhanced through the conflation of several historical Herods into
the play's Tetrarch. John the Baptist (Jokanaan), beheaded on Salome's request, as a
reward for dancing before Herod, is displaced from the centre of the stage, which is now
held by the dancer as the embodiment of the higher aesthetic value. Her dance is an
unmaking of the world of flesh (she removes her seven veils), an anti-Genesis, leading
to the revelation (apocalyptein) of her body not in the flesh but covered in jewels, like
the gems of heavenly Jerusalem. If Dorian's discovery of the soul seems to chastise
Pater's hedonism in the Conclusion, Salome is the spiritualised counterpart of Gustave
Moreau's famous painting, Salomé Dancing Before Herod, of 1876. Moreau's Salomé
stands for the bestial, the unredeemed and destructive carnal desire – a Medusa figure.
Wilde's Salome is an earthly double of the moon (like Diana), reviling sexuality and the
flesh, from the heights of her heavenly abode. Salome anthropomorphises her as a
virgin, with silver feet, who is cold and chaste, and has never defiled herself. She herself
appears to the Page like a resurrected spirit, "a woman rising from the tomb".
Jokanaan, the recluse emerging from his cistern, makes a strong impression on
Salome, because his spiritual vision annihilates phenomena into immaterial reflections,
aesthetic objects or fictions: They [his eyes] are like black holes burned by torches in a
tapestry of Tyre. They are like the black caverns of Egypt in which the dragons make
their lairs. They are like black lakes troubled by fantastic moons. The redness of his
mouth, resembling the pomegranate (the fruit of the underworld) flowers, makes him her
foil of otherworldliness. Apparently Wilde is transposing Rimbaud's colour symbolism
into a dramatic version of the Genesis through the Word. Jokanaan's beheading
symbolizes the separation of the spirit (“an image of silver”, argentum vitae or lapis in
alchemy) from the worthless body, releasing the "moonbeam" in him. Her praise of his
whiteness assumes the hymnic modulations of the Song of Solomon. Unlike
conventional tropes, symbolic language evacuates the order of the flesh: “You must not
find symbols in everything’, Herod warns his wife... 'It makes life impossible. It were
better to say that stains of blood are as lovely as rose petals” Both Jokanaan and Herod
realise the danger of looking at Salome, but this time she is the Eurydice figure, the
shadowy presence that cannot be directly grasped, through the senses, as are the
material things in the world. Art's derealizing effect is suggested by the antimetabole or
epanodos (repetition of words in reversed order):

HEROD: ... One should not look at anything. Neither at things nor at people should
one look.

For reality there is none. It is an empty sign, filled with different meanings by
each observer. There are several versions of the moon, or of any other referent
vanishing under representation. To Herod, in frenzied fear of castration (whose
symptom is the convulsive, obsessively repetitive speech), the moon is the opposite of
how Salome conceives of her:

The moon has a strange look tonight. Has she not s a strange look? She is like a
mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers. She is naked too. She is quite
naked. She shows herself naked in the sky. She reels through the clouds like a drunken
woman... I am sure she is looking for lovers. Does she not reel like a drunken woman?
She is like a mad woman.
 The misogynist writers of modernism looked back to Salome as the female other of
male rationality and idealism, yet they were misreading Wilde. Salome is the feminine
figure of Art, baffling and confusing not only the bourgeois, but the whole patriarchal
paradigm of King-Prophet-Sage.

References :

[54] Daniel R. Schwarz, The Transformation of the English Novel, 1890-1930, Macmillan Press, 1989.

[55] Martin Seymour Smith, Rudyard Kipling, Papermac, 1989, p. 3

[56] Michael Wheeler, English Fiction of the Victorian Period, Longman, pp. 171-180.

[57] Roger Ebbatson, The Evolutionary Self. Hardy, Foster, Lawrence, Harvester, 1982.

[58] Andrew Jefford, “Dr. Jekyll and Professor Nabokov: Reading a Reading”, in Robert Louis Stevenson,
edited by Andrew Noble. Critical Studies Series, Vision and Barnes and Barnes & Noble, 1983, p. 54.

[59] Anatole Baju, Le Décadent, April 1886.

[60] David Gervais, Literary Englands, Versions of “Englishness” in Modern Writing, Cambridge
University Press, 1996 (first published 1993), p. 18.

[61] Ross C. Murfin, Swinburne, Hardy, Lawrence and the Burden of Belief.

[62] David Gervais, Op. cit., p. 11.

[63] David Lodge, The Language of Fiction, Second Edition, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984,

[64] Roger Ebbatson, The Evolutionary Self, Op. cit.

[65] Peter Nicholls, Modernism, A Literary Guide, Op. cit., pp. 68-69.

[66] Ibidem, p. 47.

[67]Ibidem, p. 16.

[68] Literature and Culture in Modern Britain. Volume One: 1900-1929, Edited by Clive Bloom, Longman,
1993, pp. 31-32.

[69] Lionel Johnson, The Dark Angel

[70] Clive Scott, “Symbolism, Decadence and Impressionism”, in Malcolm Bradbury and James
McFarlane, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930, Harmondsworth, 1991, p. 218.

THE FRONTIERS OF MODERNISM

(1900-1940)
Modernist epistemology. Literature prior to 1911. Factual and fictional
narratives: H. G. Wells. The bourgeois saga: John Galsworthy. Empire as
the experience of otherness: E. M. Forster and Joseph Conrad. Into the
psyche: D. H. Lawrence. G. B. Shaw and Ibsen's heritage: the drama of
ideas. W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and poetic drama. The discourse of high
modernism. The building blocks of modernist lyric: image, objective
correlative, collage. W. B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, or western civilization
and its discontents. Narrative structure: focalization, stream of
consciousness, and interior monologue. The linguistic ontology of the
self: Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. The anti-modernist and pro-realist
shift in the thirties: Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, W. H.
Auden, Dylan Thomas.

The paradigmatic features we are going to list below apply to a period

extending from 1911 to 1930; however, the broad tendencies leading to their
canonical expression can also be identified in the last decade of Queen Victoria's
reign (the 1890's) and in the Edwardian period (Edward VII, 1901-1910). Despite
changing historical circumstances and aesthetic views, the background radiation of
modernism lasted well into the thirties and forties. Being an international literary
phenomenon, the history of English modernism cannot be separated from its
Continental roots, although we tend to agree with Malcolm Bradbury and James
McFarlane [1] that the wealth of Parisian lore about Aestheticism and Decadence,
Impressionism and Symbolism was “grafted onto an ongoing native tradition”. The
1890s climate of the “Yellow Book” aestheticism is “incomprehensible without
reference to Huysmans, Mallarmé and Valéry – but is equally incomprehensible
without reference to Pater, Blake and the Irish folk tradition”.
 In the Bradbury McFarlane version, modernism appears as a reaction against
Naturalism and Parnassianism, occurring first in France, with Charles Baudelaire as
its prophet. It was a “movement of movements”, a succession of phases, theories,
social groupings, spanning the period from the seventies up to the thirties of our
century: SYMBOLISM, IMPRESSIONISM, and DECADENCE around the turn of the
century; FAUVISM, CUBISM, POSTIMPRESSIONISM, FUTURISM, CONSTRUCTIVISM,
IMAGISM and VORTICISM in the period up to and over World War I; and
EXPRESSIONISM, DADA and SURREALISM during and after the war.

Our criterion in dissociating between the first grouping of “isms”, which we

would rather define as a post-romantic aftermath, and modernism proper (the last
two) is provided by the different articulation of textuality at the level of signifier and
signified. With the former, we can speak of new attitudes to art, the self, of a shift
from burgher epic to representation of inward states of consciousness or of artistic
consciousness, etc. But new subjects do not automatically imply new ways of
treating them. The textualizing of character through focalization, stream of
consciousness and interior monologue reaches incomparably farther than Pater's
and Wilde's “imaginary portraits” or Henry James's “point of view”. With the trends
cropping up around the war, the narratological purposive models of traditional
writing are replaced by grammatical organization, autonomous constructs,
reflecting back upon themselves, behind which one can detect the epistemological
shift worked by the revolution in sciences and philosophy at the beginning of the
century. Whereas Baudelaire or Rimbaud seek to establish “correspondences”
between phenomena, abstracted to colours, sounds, tastes, on the one hand, and
erotic, moral, aesthetic meanings on the other, the modernists, in one of the most
enlightening definitions, that of Lucian Blaga [2] build “cosmoids” of a completely
fictional nature, devoid of any natural signification. Reality no longer serves as art's
“forest of symbols”. A work of art does not point outside itself; its parts are
subordinated to the grammar of the totality of form. Even space and time are
structured in a different way in life and in narrative. One can think of the formal gap
between Monet and Cézanne or Picasso when reading the following in Blaga: An
imagined world possesses, just like the real world, some horizontal frames: the
spatial and the temporal frame. The “para-correspondences” consist in that they
are differently structured in the imagined and in the sensible world. For instance,
the spatial horizon of the sensible world is always extensive, intuitive yet of a non-
determined form, always merging with and being one with the landscape, while the
spatial frame of the imagined world is a doublet of this sensible horizon, yet of a
more determined structure.

As far as the constructed, “determined” aspect of the modernist text is

concerned, we find Jeremy Tambling considering the same aspects (signifier and
signified) in his refusal to canonize Forster or Lawrence as “modernists”: Though A
Passage to India is sometimes discussed as modernist, it is no more so than D.H.
Lawrence's novels, which remain largely realist and antagonistic to modernism's
experimentation and interest in language at the level of the signifier rather than at
that of the signified. If forced to find analogies between Lawrence, who himself has
very interesting points of comparison with Forster, and modernism, they might be
located in a certain homoeroticism and a proto-fascism, as well as in an attitude to
character which sees it as something in process rather than fixed, but clearly
Lawrence rejected most of the tenets of modernism and Forster did the same by
the virtual silence as a novelist after “A Passage to India” [3]. The space and time of
the “brave new world” of modernism –, as it actually meant an apocalyptic end and
a completely new beginning – as well as its “tenets”, among which a sense of
catastrophism or radical break with the past, cannot be separated from the new
developments in society, and in the history of science and philosophy.

The tensions between the individual and society, which are present at
the level of the signified in the Aesthetic Decadence, as a reaction against industrial
squalor and bourgeois Philistinism, know a new impetus in the twentieth century.
The fin-de-sičcle artists grouped in aesthetic coteries, centring on cafes (like the
Rhymers' Club, founded by W .B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys), and around vanguard
reviews (The “Yellow Book”, “New Age”, “New Review”), had displayed contempt of
outside values, and a programmatic tendency to shock bourgeois complacency, not
only in their art but also in their outrageous social behaviour. At the beginning of
the century, the programmatic slogan “épater le bourgeois” grew into gloomier
attitudes, as self-exile was replaced by overt dissent in response to forms of social
pressure on the individual. Clive Bloom, in his Introduction to Literature and Culture
in Modern Britain. Volume I: 1900-1929 [4] defines the social spirit of the age in
terms of the appearance of a collective perspective and a homogenized voice
(which) ran through trade unionism, Hollywood films, public broadcasting,
suburbanism, scientific management, behavioural science, summer holidays and
domestic purchasing. Summing up, it was the cultural birth of the controlled
collective and mass produced experience. The state and its slowly growing
bureaucratic machinery would attempt to demolish ancient privileges of a new type
of individuality the state sought to protect. Thus the state and its nameless,
faceless bureaucracy was a symptom of the growth of the mass and the
subordination of individuals and their freedom to the demands and pressures of the
aggregate. Having finally assumed complete control, the bourgeoisie changed
strategies. Bourgeois individualism, the same Clive Bloom writes in another book,
Spy Thrillers: from Buchan to Le Carré (1991, pp. 1-2), was accompanied by an
equally bourgeois need for public control of all private functions At this moment the
bourgeois state came into being, armed with the legislative and cultural power to
regulate all forms of expression (including dissent), either through governmental
interference (bureaucratised secret police forces at one end) or through cultural
control of the mass circulation of printed material (novels, newspapers and
journals). Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, V. Woolf and the whole Bloomsbury Group
reacted in a negative way to collectivity, manifest in the form of uniform, urban
sprawl, the dominance of mass opinion created through national dailies and radio,
chains of shops like Woolworth's with their cheap and standardized goods, and in
the presence of universal form-filling at the labour exchange and elsewhere
(Ibidem). The dominant mood of the period was an aesthetic variety of
individualism, figuring the latest, diminutive, “form-filling” version of the imperialist
economic venture as a sort of contemporary hell (see the female clerks knitting
black wool and barring the entry to the Company, like Lachesis and Clotho guarding
the door of darkness, in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness ).
 In an article published in the August issue, 1996 of “The Review of English
Studies”[5] David Bradshaw qualifies the effect of New Physics impact on literature
as revived idealism. The theories of Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg
encouraged the contemporary mind to take a leap from actuality into
possibility. J.W.N. Sullivan welcomed the liberation from the Newtonian world
picture, explaining the universe in terms of little billiard balls and the law of the
inverse square and the shift to one in which even mystics, to say nothing of poets
and philosophers, have a right to exist, in an article entitled “The Sense of
Possibilities”. In physics there was a transition from causal to probability laws. There
are limits of predictability in quantum physics, instead of strict causality, Werner
Heisenberg admits in his Principle of Indeterminacy. The results of Planck’s
researches in quantum mechanics depend for validity on method not on empirical
“truth”. There was an end to Euclidean geometry and conventional logic. Albert
Einstein's Theory of Relativity (1905 and 1916) completely changed the picture of
the universe. From homogeneous and of a spherical symmetry, it had become
dynamic and incomplete. To Kraus's objection that his definition of simultaneity
violates the logical law of non-contradiction, Einstein replied that simultaneity (at
different places, not at the same place) is a relative concept, like right and left, and
thus no principle of logic is violated. People were invited to consider theories as
autonomous and self-validating constructs of the mind, which are logically true,
while stating nothing about reality. Did modernism mean a denial of outward
social presence, an aesthetic fanaticism, a return to an anti-humanist classicism
with emphasis on form, order, law, which finally led to fascism, rejectionism,
suicide, religious conversion, racialist propaganda, disillusion and a depressing
English snobbery (Clive Bloom, Op. cit., p. 25)? We think not. A new scientific
philosophy and new literary modes arose from the results of the scientific research
mentioned above. Analytical Philosophy, Fictionalism, Neo-Kantianism,
Conventionalism give up on either empirical observation or metaphysical
speculation, concentrating on the logical analysis of the hypotheses, observations
and conventions that enter into the constructions of a scientific theory. Reality is
unpredictable and for the most part illogical. Man's apprehension of reality follows
not its laws but those of his inner understanding. As Hans Vaihinger says in Die
Philosophie des als ob, 1918 [6], reality, das Wirkliche, is “unbegreiflich”. It can only
be thought by analogy with man's subjective relationships (nach Analogie
menschlicher subjecktiver Verhältnisse – Op. cit., p. 42). All knowledge, apart from
factual succession and coexistence, is analogical (Alle Erkenntnis kann, wenn sie
nicht tatsächliche Succession und Koexistenz feststellt, nur analogisch sein).
Cognition is Apperzipieren durch ein Anderes (Ibidem), that is, through fictions
(Fictionen). Unlike traditional scientific hypotheses, supposed to be empirically
verifiable and validated, Vaihinger's mental structures do not directly correspond to
reality. Neither do art's symbolical or tropical fictions (pp. 30-40) reproduce
reality directly, but only in a mediated way, through analogy or similarity (ein
ähnliches Verhältnis). Dies ist auch zugleich der formale Ursprung der Poesie,
Vaihinger says (p. 39), establishing an unprecedented isomorphism between the
lyric and the philosophic discourses. Art's fictions (what Blaga calls “simili-lumi”) are
meant to impose order upon reality's multifarious show. This is done by Joyce, in
Eliot's opinion, by manipulating an analogy between contemporaneity and antiquity,
that is between reality and a pre-existing patterned discourse:
 It is here that Mr. Joyce's parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance.
It has the importance of a scientific discovery (...) In using the myth, in
manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr.
Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be
imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of Einstein in
pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of
controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method
already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats to
have been the first contemporary to be conscious. It is a method for which the
horoscope is auspicious. Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be
comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bow, have concurred to make
possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method,
we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step towards
making the modern world possible for art... („Ulysses”: Order and Myth).

Eliot's own language of quotations builds his texts as precedented

discourse, mirroring a contemporary drift towards analytic forms.

There was one more reason for writers dropping the teleological purposive
movement in favour of narrative grammar or encoded structures as forms of inner
understanding. As Hans Reichenbach records in his Modern Philosophy of Science
[7], Darwinism too had received a serious blow from recent scientific discoveries.
They had demonstrated that organic evolution produces not only useful but also
useless forms, that not teleological but only chance causal connection can be
established. By the end of the nineteenth century, the degeneration plot, with
stress on regression, atavism and decline, had replaced the previous evolutionary
optimism in progress. Besides, teleological narratives are only possible with a
rational agent, within a continuous range of individuality, whereas what the fiction-
maker Eliot seems to be alluding to in the above quote is an unstable self, split
between the conscious and the subconscious according to post-Freudian
psychology, or between the personal and the collective subconscious, according to
Jung and the anthropology of James Frazer's Golden Bough.

In a book published in 1963 – The Struggle of the Modern –, Stephen Spender

distinguished between a chronological and a typological map of the literature
published in the first half of the century. “Modern” is the label of self-conscious
writers, or “recognizers”, who deliberately set out to invent a new literature as the
result of their feeling that their age was in many respects unprecedented, and
outside all the conventions of past art. The merely “contemporary” writers are the
“non-recognizers”, who either did not acknowledge the existence of a modern
situation, or refused to regard it as a problem special to art. The representation of
subjectivity is central to the “modern situation”. The Voltairean I – characterised by
rationalism, progressive politics etc. – of Shaw, Wells and the other
“contemporaries” – is said to work upon events, whereas the “modern I”, through
receptiveness, suffering, passivity, transforms the world to which it is exposed (p.
72). Modernist subjectivity is not just “pathetic fallacy” (J. Ruskin) but a fantasy of
the subconscious, subverting the representations of the rational ego or social
superego through processes of “condensation”, “displacement”, “revision” etc. The
syntax of dreams is based upon chance associations whose “symbolism” needs to
be decoded, not upon logical sequences. Association depends on likeness and
contiguity. One thing which is the cause of another may appear in a close temporal
sequence, without the overt expression of the relationship of causality. The
juxtaposition technique in Ezra Pound or the “aggregation method” in T. S. Eliot,
with images added to one another, without the imposition of a structure,
without logical or narrative continuity are the formal correlatives of Freud's
principles in The Interpretation of Dreams. In a way similar to non-representational
techniques in the visual arts and atonality in music (thematised by Thomas Mann as
the devilish exploit of modernist Faust), the text tends towards non-narrative forms,
beginning with a cluster of images just coming into focus, whose meaning is
progressively constructed by analogy with other sets of images, juxtaposed through
a collage technique. Tancred de Visan, in Lattitude du lyrisme contemporaine
(1911), had pointed to Bergson as the philosopher of symbolism. According to
Bergson, the perception and presentation of things (des vues pris sur la réalité
changeante – L'Evolution créatrice) is the essential function of the artist. The
imaged thing, wrapped up in a halo of evocative associations and allusions, is a
mere instrument, a symbol (of the soul, the infinite, the transcendental). The
modernists' juxtaposition technique yields spatial forms, counter to Bergson's
intuition of duration. Ezra Pound's image, which he defines in an interview with Flint,
published in the March 1913 issue of “Poetry” (the Imagist manifesto) is an
equation for an emotion, an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of
time. T.S. Eliot keeps close to his American influencer in his own opinion that the
only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective
correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which
shall be the formula of that particular emnotion, such that when the external facts
which must terminate in sensory experience are given, the emotion is immediately
evoked. (essay on Hamlet, The Sacred Wood, 1920)). The meaning of an image is
contextual: the visual chord formed of two images may suggest another that is
different from both. Unlike symbols, which, like numbers in arithmetic have a fixed
value, images are like letters in algebra, having a variable, contextual meaning.
Nature's alphabet is disturbed by the body's alphabet. The “objective correlatives''
as equations for emotion are not part of a universal mytho-poetic thesaurus but the
result of a subconscious process of transference (a mode of investing persons and
objects with positive and negative qualities, according to the individual's early
memories of significant experience or “primary scene”). The relationship between
object and emotion is not that of symbolic fusion but one of personal association or
analogy. All this may sound pretty abstract, so let us illustrate Wilde's use of symbol
against Eliot's objective correlative. Here is a fragment from The Ballad of Reading
Goal, where the traditional colour symbolism is playing off the execution of the
Trooper against the Christian story of sin and redemption:

Out of his mouth a red, red rose !

Out of his heart a white !

For who can say by what strange way,

 Christ brings His will to light,

Since the barren staff the pilgrim bore

Bloomed in the great Pope's sight ?

But neither milk-white rose nor red

May bloom in prison-air;

The shard, the pebble, and the flint,

Are what they give us there:

For flowers have been known to heal

A common man's despair.

So never will wine-red rose or white,

Petal by petal, fall

On that stretch of mud and sand that lies

By the hideous prison-wall,

To tell men who tramp the yard

That God's Son died for all.

Red is the colour of spilt blood but it is also charged with the symbolism of
passion (he had killed his mistress out of jealousy), and of the redemptive power of
Christ's blood, as the convict had repented. The flower is the symbol of the
renascent soul blooming forth through Grace, through divine forgiveness, which
remains unknown to the mechanical way of man's doing justice. The pebble and the
mud are symbols of aridity, as execution, unlike forgiveness, is a brutal, violent act,
failing to lead to or recognize the value of repentance, of moral reformation. The
last allusion to the Crucifixion reinforces the symbolism of the whole passage.
Contrariwise, in T. S. Eliot's Whispers of Immortality, the traditional symbolism of
the images clustering round the figure of Grishkin, a contemporary Russian dancer,
is not enforced but deconstructed:

Grishkin is nice; her Russian eye

 Is underlined for emphasis:

Uncorseted, her friendly bust

Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

The imagistic potential becomes unfixed, variable. It is only through

contextualization, through the sophisticated grammar of the entire poem that the
images acquire meanings. In fact, the traditional meanings are inverted. The “eye”
used to be associated with true spiritual vision. Here, it is the “make-up”, the faked
physical outline that is emphasized. Grishkin does not see, like an active cognitive
agent, she is seen – the inert object of someone else's “vision”. “Pneumatic”,
etymologically associated with the “soul” (“pneuma”), transfers the object of “bliss”
– a poetical word for “happiness” – from spiritual to sensuous delight in the dancer's
breasts. The shocking epithet – as they are not literally inflated like some pneumatic
tyres – suggests the shallowness of the speaker's interest in the dancer to the
exclusion of Wordsworth's interrogation of the soul's divinity in the famous
Immortality Ode.

A certain disorder of the mind due to subconscious impulses stronger than the
forces of conscious individuality is common to the autonomous dictates of the
dadaists, the arbitrary associations of the surrealists, the obsessed characters of
D.H. Lawrence or to the freely associative discourse of James's Ulysses – which
otherwise cannot be reduced to a common stylistic denominator. The thought
process is a Jamesian “stream of consciousness” (William James speaks of “The
Stream of Thought” in his Principles of Psychology, 1891), knowing of no logical
restraints or chronological succession, moving freely from one image to another,
back into the past or forwards into the future. This is the genuine life of the mind,
Virginia Woolf urges in her essay Modern Fiction, and it is precisely on account of
the unaltered recording of its hazy disorder that she praises James Joyce for a
“realist”. The formal correlative of such an idea of subjectivity is the confinement of
the narrative discourse to centres of consciousness. According to the analytical
philosophers, from Bertrand Russel to Rudolph Carnap, knowledge is deconstructed
into the solipsist subject's point of view. The autopsychological point of view (I
have the same representation of the world and of whatever there is in it as all the
other human subjects), which underwrites the omniscient narrative, is replaced by a
heteropsychological point of view. In Virginia Woolf's Waves there are as many
versions of the same events as there are characters.

And yet the modernist narratives claim universal validity. Anthropology,

folklore, comparative religion, Jung's archetypal psychology contributed to the
construction of a transhistorical subjectivity. The roots of modern man were
discovered in early, primitive worlds (see John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of the
Golden Bow, Princeton University Press, 1973). In Jung, the subconscious takes two
forms: at a more superficial level, there lurks the “personal subconscious”, feeding
on personal experience; the other, the “collective subconscious”, is not a personal
acquisition but inborn, forming the deeper layer of the psyche. Jung considers the
latter to be identical in all men, thus constituting a common psychic substratum of a
superpersonal nature. While the “personal subconscious” consists chiefly of the
“feeling-toned complexes”, the latter is the repository of hereditary “archetypes”
[8]. Jung links his “archetypes” to Plato's “eidos” (ideal form or archetype), Philo's
“archetype” or “God-image in man” and the anthropologist L'evy-Bruhl's
“representation collective”. i.e. the “symbolic figures in the primitive view of the
world”. In his Autobiography (1938), W.B. Yeats fashions himself as the founder of a
new religion, almost unfallible church of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories, and
of personages and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression passed on
from generation to generation by poets and painters with some help from
philosophers and theologians. His own definition of the archetype is “archaic or
primordial types” or “universal images that have existed since the remotest times”.
Naturally, from “God-image in man” to the symbolic representation of “ancestral
desires, joys and sorrows”, the term covers too wide a conceptual frame to be
useful at all. With the vanguard Georgians (George V, 1910-1936), it tips our
thought in the direction of recurrent motifs and narratives in the mytho-poetic
tradition, passed on from generation to generation.

Literature Prior to 1911

With more space, the present course would have included two Americans who
spent a significant number of years in England, exerting a powerful influence on the
native writers: Henry James and, particularly, Ezra Pound. We wonder, nevertheless,
whether being physically in England is synonymous with partaking of its literary
tradition. In a lecture delivered in 1905, Henry James, whose preferences went to
Flaubert and Turgenev, finds Anglo-Saxon literary production uncontrolled,
untouched by criticism, unguided, unlighted, uninstructed, unashamed, on a scale
that is really a new thing in the world. His cosmopolitan world is for its greatest part
a comment on a New Englander's intellectual and emotional experience of the
ancient European traditions. Ezra Pound played an important role in the
reorientation of Yeats from his early Pre-Raphaelite and symbolist beginnings
towards imagism, but he cannot compare with T.S. Eliot, whose contribution to
English literature did more than any official application in the way of his
“naturalization” as an incontestable citizen of the British Republic of Letters.
Although coming from America, T. S. Eliot experienced England as a homecoming, a
return to his ancestors' land. He wrote from within the English tradition, as if the
spirit of Thomas Elyot, the model-fashioner of the Renaissance, had flashed on him
from the dead. The stuff of his work is English history, literature, life. It was through
Eliot that so much of the past literary works came into focus, was revived and made
part of a living tradition. And it was thanks to him that Elizabethan drama
brightened with new lustre in the public consciousness, which elevated it to a
national myth during World War II.

Henry James does offer, however, a profitable starting point for the discussion
of late Victorian and Edwardian fiction, as one pole in the argument around the
comparative values of the “journalistic” and the “aesthetic” parties. From the very
outset it is important to emphasize that the awareness of form, of the constructed
nature of a work of art, which the Aesthetic Decadence had recently contributed, is
missing in neither party. H. G. Wells joined the former no longer as the naive realist
but out of a deliberate commitment to the relevance of his personal response to
actual experience and moral concern. Here is George Ponderevo, the narrator-
protagonist of Tono-Bungay:

I want to trace my social trajectory (and my uncle's) as the main line of my

story, but as this is my first novel and almost certainly my last, I want to get into all
sorts of things that struck me, things that amused me and impressions I got – even
though they do not minister directly to my narrative at all.

As an unsuccessful shopkeeper's son, H. G. Wells might have experienced the

same low middle-class aversion towards the poet-priest-and-legislator pose as
towards social aristocracy. His attack on Henry James's cosmopolitanism and elitism
in his Autobiography betrays something of the social malcontent's hatred of the
insider policy and exclusivism of the fin-de-sičcle Art for Arters, who had turned
from a subversive guerrilla into the new aesthetic establishment:

He had no possible use of the novel as a help to conduct. His mind was
turned away from any such idea. From his point of view there were not so much
novels as The Novel, and it was a very high and important achievement. He thought
of it as an Art Form and of novelists as artists of a very special and exalted type. He
was concerned with their greatness and repute. He saw us all as Masters or would-
be Masters, little Masters and great Masters, and he was plainly sorry that “Cher
Maître” was not an English expression. (...). I was by nature and education
unsympathetic with this mental disposition. But I was disposed to regard a novel as
about as much as an art form as a market place or a boulevard. It had not even
necessarily to get anywhere. You went by it on your various occasions.

The split between art and market-place does seem to have concerned other
Edwardian novelists as well. Two Engalnds had been created by the end of the
century. One was the product of the champions of industry and imperialism, those
who had turned the country into the banker and workshop of the world. The other
England was the subtler emanation of Arnold and Ruskin's cultural critique of the
former. The issue, with the Edwardians, was an interrogation of the worth and
inheritance of either, while the next generation, the Georgians, turned away from
both, in order to “look within” the mind (V. Woolf), beneath the surface of the
socially patterned ego.

Of H.G. Wells (1866-1946), one can say that he showed the way in both
respects. Tono-Bungay (1909), describing the rise and fall of a business racketeer,
is one of a pair with Kipling's Mary Gloster, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or
Orson Welles's Citizen Kane – modern versions of biographies of great men as big-
business tycoons. If one thinks of the prestigious tradition whose modern avatars
they are – Plutarch's biographies of exceptional statesmen, or the histories of the
rise and fall of empires – one feels simultaneously disappointed at their anti-heroism
and impressed by the impact of internationalized bourgeois enterprise, almost
assuming the guise of Fate or Destiny.
 Wells's scientific romances, which ensured both his early reputation and
income (The Time Machine, 1895, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 1896, The War of
the Worlds, 1898, When the Sleeper Awakes, 1899, The First Men in the Moon,
1901) draw together separate threads in the history of English fiction: the pastoral
(taken over by science-fiction) characteristic strategy of commenting on a real
society under the pretext of describing an imaginary one (Swift's Gulliver), the
colonialist venture, from Crusoism to Empire, the modern Prometheus or Satan
figure of the scientist rivalling God's creation (Frankenstein). The novelist's moral
insight is even gloomier, beset by the Darwinian tenets about the biological
proximity between man and beast. The Island of Doctor Moreau combines the Defoe
story of the castaway on an island with un updated version of Frankenstein creating
monsters, not through an experiment in galvanism but through the contemporary
experiments in vivisection, and likewise getting killed by one of his own failed
creatures. Is Dr. Moreau less inhuman than the monsters he has created, in whom
“one animal trait, then another creeps to the surface”, staring at him? Whilst Mary
Shelley keeps the inhuman at bay, constructing even Frankenstein's creature as a
fallen Adam, with characteristic human needs for love and company, undergoing a
socialization process through language and reading, Wells portrays a narrow-
minded and reckless scientist assisted by a disciple half-animalised by alcoholism.
The human and the inhuman are no longer kept safely apart. The safety valve has
been raised, allowing Joseph Conrad to peep within. The view on man and society,
coloured by contemporary dystopias, remains essentially unchanged by the
dazzling perspectives of technological progress, which cannot of itself reform
human nature.

The lack of meaningful purpose, the search for values in imaginary worlds
meets with the same failure in the comical transcription of everyday experience,
richly enriched by autobiographical elements, in Wells's late fiction: Tono Bungay
(1909) or The History of Mr Polly (1910). One senses in such novels, from a
mongrel-like position, the same crisis of confidence that political leadership and
social institutions suffer in Woolf's classy society in the years of the Empire's
decline. With all the comical “impressions” Alfred Polly may record in his pilgrimage
through the world, his story of an alienated individual, manipulated by mean and
calculated fellow-beings, attending rites conducted by weary priests and habits
from which life has departed, mounts with pathetic effects towards the end.

„Middle-brow” literature, prospering with the new spirit of collectivity and

bourgeois control even of forms of dissent, has in John Galsworthy (1867-1933) a
typical representative. The Forsyte Saga (1906-1922) thematizes a conflict central
to the age: that between liberal humanism and bourgeois acquisitiveness. The
artists – whether professional, like Bosinney, or amateurish, like young Jolyon, or
sympathising with them, like Irene – rebel against society's worship of property and
mercantilism, yet, as already noted [9], is not their anti-social behaviour mere
pretence? If Soames's sense of property reaches so far as to conceive of his own
wife as the proudest acquisition, does not Irene agree to the bargain? Is not
Bosinney ready to make money by exploiting Soames's fantasy of gentlemanliness
in addition to a Victorian taste for solid and useful architecture? Or does not Soames
take a more earnest interest in his art collection than the vulgar desire to show off?
Characters get blurred and sentimentalised, and the moral drama is lost.

The slow yet fluent progress of Galsworthy's yards of writing in The Forsyte
Saga and A Modern Comedy (1929) fail to yield the modern epic he had intended,
but he cannot be said to miss completely his contemporaries' mutated sense of
form. The omniscient narrator tells not only what is inside his characters' minds
(apart from their precisely delineated physical lineaments), but also what should
have been:

In the centre of the room, under the chandelier, as became a host, stood the
head of the family, old Jolyon himself. Eighty years of age, with his fine, white hair,
his dome-like forehead, his little, dark grey eyes, and an immense white
moustache, which drooped and spread below the level of his strong jaw, he had a
patriarchal look, and in spite of lean cheeks and hollows at his temples, seemed
master of perennial youth. He held himself extremely upright, and his shrewd,
steady eyes had lost none of their clear shining. Thus he gave an impression of
superiority to the doubts and dislikes of smaller men., Having had his own way for
innumerable years, he had earned a prescriptive right to it. It would never have
occurred to old Jolyon that it was necessary to wear a look of doubt or of defiance.

The physical portrait is not a gratuitous naturalistic exercise but extended to

include the character's social selves emanating from him: what he feels towards
those with whom he comes in touch and what others feel about him (see W. James,
Op. cit., Ch. X, The Consciousness of Self). The strategy whereby the characters are
reduced to their possessions – Old Jolyon's study full of green velvet and heavily
carved mahogany, or Swithin's elaborate group of statuary in Italian marble,
deliberately placed upon a lofty stand – is in accordance with their framing as social
animals. What is the character of any Forsyte abstracted from his furniture and his
saddle of mutton? Arnold Kettle asks in his Introduction to the English Novel [10]
with his own reply at the ready: It is Galsworthy's strength, not his weakness, that
he should so continuously insist in his presentation of the Forsytes on the crude
material basis of their lives. It is nonsense to assume that behind Timothy or
Swithin Forsyte there is some mysterious, disembodied “character” waiting to be
expressed by some sensitive artist like Virginia Woolf or Ivy Compton-Burnett.

The imperial theme as well as the conflicting demands of liberal humanism and
piled up wealth well up in an Edwardian with a more serious concern for the
construction of cultural identity and otherness, the economic basis of society,
gender and sexuality: E.M. Forster (1879-1970). Rickie Elliot, a graduate from
Cambridge, contemplates The Longest Journey (1907) in modern England's
experience: from the pastoral greenwood to the bourgeois mode of living on
dividends. From the perspective of his liberal education, the active Sawson may
appear vulgar yet efficient. The real life outside the walls of the university, in
Wiltshire, throws Rickie into doubts about the Cambridge dons who dealt with so
much and they had experienced so little. Could the spirit of his mother be revived
from the dead or was there no possibility of re-establishing connections with the
past?

Howards End (1910) entertains no more illusions about the end of liberalism in
England as well as in the novelist's heart, as he later confessed in Two Cheers for
Democracy (1951): I belong to the fag-end of Victorian liberalism (...) (I am) an
individualist and a liberal who has found liberalism crumbling beneath him and at
first felt ashamed. Then, looking around, he decided there was no reason for
shame, since other people, whatever they felt, were equally insecure.(...) I am
actually what my age and my upbringing have made me – a bourgeois who adheres
to the British constitution... And so does Helen Schlegel, the liberal intellectual, who
marries the Wilcoxes new money not out of necessity or to maintain the property
she has symbolically inherited, but even approving of their go-ahead business, in
the absence of which civilization is unconceivable: there would be no trains, no
ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields even, just savagery. The novelist
has by now accepted the Marxist thesis voiced by Margaret Schlegel, that the very
soul of the world is economic, and the lowest abyss is not the absence of love but
the absence of coin, with the difference that he gives his blessing where Marx
criticises. It will have seemed a bit confusing for a Marxist critic like Raymond
Williams, whom Edward Said [11] faults for his inability to read the English cultural
tradition for its overt imperialism (the treatment and defence offered of the
Wilcoxes).

The representation of characters is, as with almost all Edwardians, class-

bound, in terms of social and economic determinism, with plenty of
authorial comment: The narrator himself can never stop introducing and glossing
and paraphrasing what they say as if he were really composing one of Charles
Lamb's essays. Some of the characters, particularly the ones Forster is less sure of,
look more like debating topics than flesh and blood. This can even be true of his
“symbols”, like the Marabar Caves in “A Passage to India”, which can become
overcast with discussion [12].

Even if “racism” is an exaggeration, Forster cannot escape the charge of

“Europocentrism” in his invention of India: A Passage to India, 1924. The ex-British
colony is constructed as completely other, and it is interesting to notice that Forster
had by then been contaminated by the modernists' obsession with form and
contents of consciousness. The problem with India is the incapacity of the English
mind to take hold of such a country. The “enlightened Englishman's tradition” is
less the inheritance of rationalistic thinking than the form-building capacity, which
relates England to the rest of Europe. India is the Leviathan world – the teeming,
sprawling, mutating life of the Ganges, periodically flooding and modifying the
insecure architectural design of the banks. It is only biological life, in its
indestructible, fecund mutability that is eternal. India's vastness, secret creeds and
history fall outside European comprehensiveness, and, particularly,
representability. Adela may experience sexual menace, and Fielding, the
temptation and failure of friendship, but more important is the natives' inability to
share with them common codes of culture. While writing his postcards representing
Venice he intends to send to India, Fielding has a sense of futility: They would see
the sumptuousness of Venice not its shape, and though Venice was not Europe, it
was part of the human norm. The “norm” is what draws people together,
irrespective of geographical boundaries. The Mediterranean is the human norm,
whereas the Orient means the monstrous and the extraordinary. Fielding feels
home in Venice and alienated in the Oriental British territory, because here he
cannot share the “joy of form”. It was not that the geographical Empire had become
invulnerable, but that the cultural common language had always been impossible.
Contiguity in space is meaningless unless cemented by the values of a common
culture constructed in time. As Adela says, in space things touch, in time they part.
Forster thinks of Oriental versus West-European cultures in the same way in which
Constantin Noica dissociates between temporal and spatial civilizations.

A Passage to India came out in the years of triumphant modernism. The

recognition of the importance of consciousness and its constructs is textualized by
E.M. Forster, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, in occasional shifts of the
narratorial voice into characters' subject positions.

With his preoccupation with the relativity of truth and the possibilities of
representation, the naturalized Polish immigrant filled the first blank on the map
of modernism. The fact strikes one as the more puzzling as, by contrast with other
Edwardians, Conrad wrote from experience. It was however a biography of the
restless, anxious modern mind, obsessed with political unrest, cultural and
individual identity, and imperialist conquest. Besides, it seems that the more one
experiences the less sure one gets about the possibility to get to the core of things,
or to communicate the whole complexity or truth of one's exploits: It is impossible
to convey the life sensation of any given epoch of one's existence – that which
makes its truth, its meaning – its subtle and penetrating essence... We live, as we
dream, alone (Heart of Darkness).

Joseph Conrad Nalecz Korzeniowski (1857-1924) was born into the Polish
landed gentry, his father being also a talented poet and translator of French and
English literature. After his father's death (1869) the orphaned Joseph was adopted
by a wealthy uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, who sent him to Geneva with a tutor, after
his school years in Krakow. The young student did not seem to be moulded for the
conventional forms of education. The biography of a deracinated personality, living
outside a fixed value system (unlike Forster, falling back on the “English
Enlightenment”), naturally favoured a dubitative, restless cast of mind. Conrad
joined the French merchant navy, and spent the four next years sailing to the West
Indies and Venezuela, losing a small fortune in love, getting involved in a political
venture (the Carlists' plot to seize the throne of Spain for Carlos de Bourbon), and
finally attempting suicide. Several of his novels, from Almayer's Folly (1895) to The
Rescue (1920) are based upon his East and West Indies ventures. As French
immigration authorities prevented him from continuing as a sailor on merchant
marine vessels, he went to Britain (1878), spending the next fifteen years on British
ships.

One particular book out of many echoing Conrad's voyages seems to be

connected with a primary scene in his childhood. Heart of Darkness, a novella
published in 1902 (after a serial publication in 1889), explores colonial otherness
from a perspective different from Forster's and through the distancing device of the
unreliable narrator. The biographical elements that went into its making reach
further back than his actual trip to King Leopold's Congo in 1890 on the steamer
“Roi de Belges”. In Some Reminiscences, he mentions a childhood fantasy: It was in
1868, when I was nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of
Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space then representing the
unresolved mystery of the continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance and
amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now: “When I grow up, I shall
go there”. By the time he came of age – he continues the account in a late essay,
Geography and Some Explorers – the “biggest, the most blank, so to speak (spot)
that I had a hankering after had got filled (...) with rivers and lakes and names. It
had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to
dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one
river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an
immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over
a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land.

Forster's India is the construct of the rational civilized colonizer, the inheritor of
the European Enlightenment. Conrad's story is one that mirrors his own “passage”
from innocent childhood to mature initiation: a story of disenchantment, even of the
fall. Africa had been innocent, virginal, but the colonists had polluted, blackened
her, coming from the sea and sailing inwards along that Congo River, uncoiling like
a snake. Forster is presumptuously overlaying European patterns and narratives
upon India's formlessness. From the “romantic” myth of discovery, or total
revelation, Conrad sees himself reduced to the more modest prospect of reading
the signs of an already chartered territory. Hence his scepticism: he may interpret
them inadequately. Forster dismisses his subject as incomprehensible, while
reserving for Europe the privilege of rational understanding. Conrad admits to a
partial understanding of Africa, by introducing a narrator who himself acknowledges
his partiality. Marlow (Conrad's mask whereby he distances himself from his
narrative also in Lord Jim and Chance) warns the reader that his access to the story
of Kurtz, the colonist representing the “European enlightened mind”, is mediated by
his own version of it: You know Kurtz because you know me. But Marlow himself is
trying hard to make sense of the various stories of Kurtz supplied by the manager of
the Central Station, the Russian Harlequin, the Company representative on his
return, the cousin and the Intended. Telling his story while sitting cross-legged like
Buddha in European clothes, he subverts his own position as the voice of wisdom.
He is a false idol [13] or he may be intimating that his African meta-narrative cannot
escape an European's falsifying framing of it, a cultural travesty. And yet, unlike
Fielding, Marlow manages to articulate, if not the truth about Africa, at least his
sense of it. Maybe he has not discovered its heart, but he has worded it. Fielding is
defending himself against the Oriental labyrinth by stepping behind the barricade of
reified European forms. Marlow has a voice to defend himself against the sexual
threat, the unspeakable rites, and the horror of the wilderness, to which the libidinal
self of the dipsychic Kurz falls prey. Apparently he is not a psychologically full but a
linguistic self (constructed in language), sharing a discursive “symposium” with the
Director of Companies, the Accountant, and the Lawyer, tolerant of each other's
yarns. To J. Hillis Miller [14], these characters, whose names denote social functions,
not private individuals, are just disembodied voices, fragments of discourse:

I have suggested that there are two ironies in what Marlow says when he
breaks his narration to address his auditors directly. The first irony is the fact that
the auditors see more than Marlow did because they see Marlow whom they know;
the second is that we readers of the novel see no living witness. By Marlow's own
account that is not enough. Seeing only happens by direct experience, and no act of
reading is direct experience (...) But there is, in fact, a third irony in this relay of
ironies in that Marlow's auditors of course do not see Marlow either. (...) They hear
only his disembodied voice. “It had become so pitch dark”, says the narrator, “that
we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time already he, sitting apart,
had become no more to us than a voice.” Marlow's narrative does not seem to be
spoken by a living incarnate witness, there, before his auditors in the flesh. It is a
“narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of
the river.” This voice can be linked to no individual speaker or writer as the ultimate
source of its messages, not to Marlow, not to Kurtz, nor to the first narrator, nor
even to Conrad himself. The voices spoken by no one to no one. It always comes
from another, from the other of any identifiable speaker or writer. It traverses all
these voices as what speaks through them. It gives them authority and at the same
time disposes them, deprives them of authority, since they only speak with the
delegated authority of another. As Marlow says of the voice of Kurtz and of all the
other voices, they are what remains as a dying unanimous and anonymous drone or
clang that exceeds any single identifiable voice and in the end is spoken by no one:
“A voice. He was very little more than a voice. And I heard – him – it – this voice –
other voices – all of them were so little more than voices – and the memory of that
time itself lingers around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense
jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of sense.
Voices, voices…

Is Heart of Darkness really a deconstruction of individual consciousness into a

semiological web of universal, anonymous textuality or discoursiveness, a post-
modern prophecy? Or is it rather a modernist assertion of the fiction-maker's
triumph over the unknown, lurking beyond the level of the conscious self or out
there in the world?
 The two narrators embody the two poles of the speech act: the one making
discourse and the listener. Kurtz can neither articulate his experience of Africa,
summed up in the elliptical and reductive “the horror, the horror”, nor communicate
it. Marlow's experience cannot be logically articulated, for the story of Kurtz gets
lost in the impenetrable darkness of Africa and its libidinal calls, but he can build a
fiction analogous to it: one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or
simply mean, without any kind of sense. Whilst Kurz extorts the greatest amount of
ivory from Congo, Marlow colonizes it, appropriates it in language. The “box of
dominoes” with its interplay of black and white, light and darkness, may suggest a
new genesis, the graphic aspect of the text or a metaphor: the heart of darkness
reaching the light of consciousness.

In 1876 King Leopold II of Belgium organized a meeting in Brussels to discuss a

plan “to open to civilization the only part of our globe where Christianity has not yet
penetrated and to pierce the darkness which envelops the entire population”.
Leopold's white speech was hiding dark purposes. He had divided the country into
sixteen districts, each governed by a commissioner who built personal fortunes by
collecting taxes from the natives, and as the native could only give their labour, the
Belgian officials were in fact camouflaged slave-owners. The atrocities described in
Conrad's narrative were all too common and they inverted the moral rapport
between the savage white colonists and the helpless victims of their idea of
progress.

Marlow, the intradiegetic narrator, tells of his childhood passion for maps, and
wish to reach the black heart of Africa, which had been fulfilled when he had signed
up for a Congo command, thanks to the intervention of an influential aunt. Marlow
begins his account of the voyage by subverting the Europeans' narrative of
colonialism: the gigantic tale of acts of nobility and renown (Anthony Fothergill, Op.
cit.), the joint story of brave conquests and gifts of the “enlightened mind” (bearers
of the sword and torch of knowledge). In anticipation of his African adventure,
Marlow is trying to imagine what the Romans might have felt while advancing
through Britain's threatening wilderness. What he encounters in his voyage towards
the Central Station, Kinshassa Inner Station, Stanley Falls, is the savage...
colonizers' world. First, the outward show of the blacks starved to death, the rusting
machinery, useless and misplaced in an environment of natural vital energies, like
the crew of natives suddenly brought into his view.

The metonymic and metaphoric language, fragmenting the bodies of the

Negroes exhausted by hard labour and assimilating them to trees and bushes
suggests to Anthony Fothergill (Op. cit.) “the depersonalizing forces of colonialism”:
Black shapes crouched, lay, set between the trees, leaning against the trunks,
clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the
attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despairs. But is not the Accountant as readily
turned into a hairdresser's dummy? In the vicinity of rotting corpses, the agent with
starched collar and got-up shirtfronts, snowy trousers and varnished boots was
lying flushed and insensible. Marlow's journey through the hell of colonialism is
constantly bridging the gap between the native fashioned as savage and the
coloniser fashioned as the inheritor of the Enlightenment. The native with the gun,
commanding his fellows as ruthlessly as his masters, has been completely
assimilated and is now enacting the imperialistic paradigm, for colonialism not only
depersonalises man, it also alienates him from his fellow beings. Kurtz, the most
efficient European agent, is alienated from himself: he has extorted the most
impressive amount of ivory from the natives, while making exalted speeches about
the missionary civilizing role of the white colonist: Each station should be like a
beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade, of course, but also for
humanising, improving, instructing. What has become of the “enlightened mind”
making the most eloquent speeches about the noble mission of civilizing the African
tribes by... exterminating all brutes? The figure of Kurtz, lost in a muddle of
incongruities and paradoxes, becomes emblematic of the hypocritical, unnatural
and contradictory character of imperialism. The small sketch in oil Kurtz has
painted, representing a woman draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch, is
the very symbol of his own spiritual blindness, his gross misunderstanding about
himself and the world in which he lives. The Chief of the Inner Station, the emissary
of pity, and science, and progress, and the devil knows what else finally recognizes,
in that moment of enlightened insight into one's whole life which is believed to flash
on a dying man, the horror in his heart. The truth about his assimilation by the
jungle world, by the gorgeous apparition of the savage woman, by the unspeakable
rites, by the mute spell of the wilderness... The rational is subsided; the “Intended”
(his fiancée abandoned in Europe, but also his lofty project) is betrayed. The
libidinal self has conquered all. Kurtz crawls away from the steamer sent to take
him back to Europe, as he can no longer perceive differences on which values are
built: Marlow could not appeal to him in the name of anything high or low. The
civilized Europe of social forms and institutions is no test of character, according to
Conrad. It is easy to suppress man's beastly instincts when one lives with a
policeman at one corner of the street and a butcher at the other; with no fear of
getting killed, and not having to kill. The true test is the confrontation with one's
own irrationality. Civilization has not laid the beast in man. But the moment he can
recognize and name it for what it is he is free of its horror, he becomes man
enough. The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the
shackled form of a conquered monster, but there – there you could look at a thing
monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were – No, they were not
inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it – this suspicion of their not being
inhuman. It could come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and
made horrible faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity –
like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.
Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough: but if you were man enough you would admit to
yourself that there was in you the faintest trace of a response to the terrible
frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you –
you so remote from the night of first ages – could comprehend. Marlow is indeed
abstracted from an individual in flesh and blood into a discourse-maker. By contrast
with Kurtz's last speech, repetitive and minimalist, Marlow, himself aware of the
terrors and horrors of existence, shields himself from the jungle world through his
“voice”. He sees and is seen, he is told several “yarns” about Kurtz, acts in the
Kurtz story and produces his own versions of Kurtz, depending on the audience he is
addressing (for instance, he keeps back from the Intended the things which might
have disturbed her, romanticizing the account). But he is also a self reaching not
only self-recognition but also some general idea about the human situation. The
man who returns to civilization with the steamer and the one who yields to the
wilderness provide an Apollonian-Dionysian polarity. The antithesis on which
Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, (1870-71) [15],
is built was a much debated topic at the time. Kurtz, the Superman, undergoes a
debasing experience of un-selving, being finally mesmerised by “the demonic chant
of the multitude”, by “the maternal womb of being”. According to Nietzsche, the
image created by a sculptor or epical poet is a shield from their characters. The
poet becomes his images; his images are objectified versions of himself. The “I” is
not that of the actual waking man but the “I” dwelling truly and eternally in the
ground of being, for only as an aesthetic product can the world be justified to all
eternity [16].

How is the jury to deal with the protagonist of Lord Jim (1857-1924), an
exceptional character yet tried for the most despicable cowardice: jumping into a
life-boat from the sinking sheep he had in command. Does it matter he had thought
there were not enough boats anyway? That he had acted as if in a trance? Are we,
readers, always in rational control of our actions? Marlow, the narrator, is there to
codify the irrational impulses in man, to reconcile facts and justice.

The transition from the Victorian discourse of perception to perception of

discourse is partial in the plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and
complete in the intimist theatre of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).

The Christopher Innes narrative history of Modern British Drama (Cambridge

University Press, 1992) takes 1890 for its signpost, because that was the year of
Shaw's famous lecture, The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Shaw is allowed to weigh
heavily in the progress of British drama over the last hundred years, whose course
he set in the 1890s. A statement to the contrary can be read in Michael Woolf's
fourth chapter, Theatre: Roots of the New, of the Longman Literature and Culture in
Modern Britain (Op. cit. p. 102):

The modern impact of modernity in the British theatre does not really come
until the 1950s. In the novel or in poetry (in Joyce and T.S. Eliot, for example) there
exist major technical innovations self-consciously and determinedly creating the
new by signalling separation from the forms of the past. In the theatre, there is no
comparable figure. George Bernard Shaw's work marked a transition from
Victorians to modern theatre, but it is expressed in terms of the material and the
ideas contained within it, not in any formal innovations or radical departure from
traditional techniques.

Although Shaw approves of Ibsenism, in reality he drapes it in much of his

personal poetic, departing significantly from it in his own drama of ideas. Ibsen's
discrediting of socially-conditioned reflexes, that is of the social norms and
codes at the time, materializes with Shaw in a more literary-conscious strategy of
building the audience's expectations in the opposite direction – that reversal of
expectations and baffling of the audience later practised by the epic theatre of
Bertolt Brecht. More audacious in his re-inventing of traditional myths, famous texts
and even history, Shaw foregrounds the importance of the point of view in
putting traditional material to an entirely new use. The Galatea theme is easily
recognizable, but instead of wishing his statue to take life, Higgins-Pygmalion is
freezing a lively human being into some speech mould. Shaw, a music and drama
critic, displays a fine sense of language structure as well. The simple rearrangement
and change of focus in a common saying – Too true to be good – enlarges the
negative perspective on one particular case into a generalized pessimistic view of
existence. The ladder in Jacob's dream, traditionally symbolizing communication
with God, the divine promise of man's kingdom on earth, is pointing downwards in
Back to Methuselah, making the descent from heaven to an earthly hell.

With his historical background for several of his characters (Morell in Candida,
1897, based upon James Mavor Morell, a Scottish theologian, the Oxford phonetician
Henry Sweet appearing as Professor Higgins in Pygmalion, 1914, T.E. Lawrence as
Private Meek in Too True to Be Good, 1932) or events (Caesar and Cleopatra, 1906,
reflecting on British Imperialism in Africa, St. Joan, 1924, echoing Ireland's struggle
for independence as well as the canonization of Joan d’Arc) Shaw still preserves a
semblance to the realistic, documented dramatist. The real personages are however
transformed beyond recognition, the result being an augmentation of the
importance of discourse. “Too true to be good” is not synonymous with “Too good
to be true”, although the empirical facts they refer to remain the same.

1. Shaw's perspective on history is updated, by his shutting Shakespeare's

Plutarch and opening the German historian Mommsen. The result is the deflationary
treatment of the hero and the superman, and the interplay of ambiguities blocking
any illusions about the worth of the imperialistic conquest. Unhooked from heroic
motivations, the protagonists are left with a limited choice of opportunities. The
down-to-earth Caesar has but one alternative: a man will have either to conquer the
world as I have, or be crucified by it. Dick Dudgeon in The Devil's Disciple (1897) is
left with none: he will be executed by the British anyway, whether for being himself
or Judith's husband. Ceasing to be a drama of grand actions and inflated emotions,
it falls back for its powerful appeal on the vividness of the repartee: My plays do not
consist of occasional remarks to illustrate pictures, but of verbal fencing, matches
between protagonists and antagonists. (Malvern Festival Book, 1931). Exercising
himself like Conrad in deconstruction, Shaw exposes the imperialist ethos of
progress, science, moral, religion for fictitious glory on robbery, starvation, disease,
crime, drink, war... The most daring subversion is probably that of male dominance
in Back to Methuselah (1922), where Eve, the first mother, becomes the She-
Ancient, the tribe's voice of wisdom and authority. In Shakespeare, anachronisms
serve to emphasize the universal pattern of the story. By slipping in allusions to
contemporary events and situations, Shaw anticipated Pound's “renovation
method” in Homage to Sextus Propertius and Joyce's “mythical method”, in
exploiting the present relevance of historical stuff.

2. Shaw's characterisation is a tour de force. He is unique in that, on the one

hand, his characters are trans-subjective, trans-historical essences, and, on the
other, time-bound. The audience is told that men twenty centuries ago were already
just such as themselves (prologue of Caesar and Cleopatra, 1912), and that should
Joan of Arc be brought back to life, she would be burnt again within six months
(Saint Joan, 1924). At the same time, people and events are historically framed.
What Shaw dislikes about Shakespeare's drama is that his kings are no statesmen;
his cardinals have no religion (Preface of Saint Joan), whereas the world is governed
by forces expressing themselves in religions and laws. Joan is one of those
exceptional individuals (like Socrates or Napoleon, Shaw thereby completing the
heroic paradigm as thinker/social reformer/saint figures), an embodiment of
Bergson's élan vital (vital surge), making progress possible, at the cost of poverty,
infamy, exile, and death. At the same time, however, such personalities are often
disruptive of social order. At that time Joan represented a threat to the Roman Holy
Empire, a germ of heresy and mass insubordination. Shaw adopts a relativist
position, showing himself to be fully aware of possible framings of events according
to the changing paradigms (fashions and family habits in belief) of one age or
another. His plays are usually framed by prefaces, sometimes as long as the texts
themselves, and the action proper is superseded by discussion. In the Preface of
Saint Joan, Shaw draws attention to himself as un unreliable commentator on the
respective historical situation: my fashion being Victorian and my family habit
Protestant, I find myself unable to attach any such objective validity to the form of
Joan's visions. A more relativist view of human nature helps to dismiss the black-
and-white polarity into saint and villain, complexifying the human situation to the
degree where no conclusion is finally reached. It is not that Shaw grows
progressively into an insular cynic; he is only exploring the multiple and often
contradictory points of view from which events are commonly crosslit. His dialectic
genius can make the audience agree with both Saint Joan and the Inquisitor.
Frequent conversions show the self as a mask or role to be exchanged at will. Shaw
is not interested in history but in phenomenology: not in objective truth but in
points of view. How did the Inquisition judge of Joan from their point of view? How
would Joan or the saint be constructed by contemporaries? The historical overlap
produces broad comical effects: Joan would no longer be burnt at stake but put on a
diet of typhoid extract, adrenaline thymin, pituitrin, and insulin... Which is worse?
the dramatist wonders....His phenomenological relativism produces the same
fluidity of roles as the later existentialism. Eliza's father, in Pygmalion, changes from
an imaginative tramp figure into a boring lecturer on ethics, as if the character
lacked any interiority. An exchange of clothes is enough to turn the rebel into a
conforming preacher in The Devil's Disciple.

3. The setting is more selective than that of naturalistic drama, often serving
as an objective correlative to the characters on the stage. In the 1897 Candida,
Titian's Assumption of the Madonna hanging above the heroine at the climactic
point of the action is symbolic of her Christian renunciation of personal delight in
eloping with an idealist poet of romantic appeal, out of sympathy for the
conventional yet vulnerable husband, who offers her a loveless marriage. She
manages to suppress the temptation of the adulterous love triangle of the Western
civilization, modelled on the Tristan-and-Isolde romance (Denis de Rougemont, Love
in the Western World), opting for the Madonna figure: joined in marriage to her
clergyman husband, the practical reformer and the man of domestic duties,
although she finds in the rival poet the holy spirit of man – the god within him, the
most “godlike”. The life-size image of half a human head, showing in section the
vocal organs exhibited in Dr. Higgins's laboratory is a mise-en-abyme of the
inverted theme of Pygmalion: Professor Higgins is trying to freeze the natural flow
of life, of thoughts and emotions, into a sound statue, a wooden variety of speech,
mechanical, emptied of personal emotional involvement, only marked for social
class, like the meaningless sound sequences Eliza is expected to repeat. The flower
girl’s passionate, youthful nature, personal thoughts or feelings are stifled into a
duchess's correct pronunciation and intonation. In a paradoxical way, her insight
into the situation is broader than her professor's. She realizes the automatic vacuity
of his handling of human personality, as proved by her question whether she needs
to return her clothes for her successor. In refusing to be “stuffed” or “serialized” as
one of his fabricated humans, Eliza slips from type back into life's sprawl of free and
unique individualities. Where the modern Pygmalion's “art” succeeds, the result is
the wooden Doolitle.

4. From demystification of social codes (Pinero, Wilde), Shaw passes to the

deconstruction or playful treatment of previous models. We have already mentioned
Caesar and Cleopatra, where the whimsical child queen rolling out of a carpet under
Caesar's eyes, scratching like the “armorial” cat of her dynasty, baffles the
audience's expectations of a love romance. Shaw's realism prevents him from
breaking through class distinctions with the unproblematic readiness of sentimental
bourgeois comedy. Apart from the ancient sculptor and Galatea figure, Pygmalion
refurbishes and denies the unrealistically happy end of Boucicault's Grimaldi: or The
Life of an Actress, where a Covent Garden flower girl, trained as an actress, gets
adopted by her professor, who turns out to be a duke.

What “technical innovations” do we find in Samuel Becket that were not

anticipated by the poetic drama of William Butler Yeats ? He too is blurring the
distinctions between genres, building a minimalist dramatic discourse, with a few
symbolical images substituted for action, with the tramp-figures of The Purgatory in
the attempt to portray generic humanity, with the simplified, internalised scenery,
thematic abstraction, severed heads to suggest a “theatre of the mind”, uprooted
from the soil of socio-historical reality, defining human condition in the most
abstract and universal way? There is an important difference, but, unlike Micael
Woolf (Op. cit.), we consider it to be one in terms of vision rather than of form.
Becket's heaven is empty; God is the personal fantasy which never comes true of
characters reduced to speech. If there are two characters on the stage, there are
two names, in English and German, underwriting an endlessly deferred divine
project: God + Got (Waiting for Godot).

W.B. Yeats is a poet and playwright brought up among the fin-de-sičcle

Theosophists, whose lore he handles, according to T.S. Eliot, in a Dublin lecture on
Yeats, in two distinct ways. Eliot distinguishes between external and internal ways
of handling myths. In his early works, characters are treated with the respect that
we pay to legends, as creatures of a different world from ours, while, in his later
works, the characters, though still mythical, are at the same time some universal
men and women. In the latter case, myth is not present for its own sake, but as a
vehicle for a situation of universal meaning [17]. It was about the same time that
Blaga made a similar distinction between “mythological” and “mythical”, and so
does Mircea Eliade in his record of Structure and Changes in the History of Religion.
In our opinion, it does not apply to Yeats at any stage of his career. The Irish writer's
use of Celtic “myth and legend” is either a structural device or a characteristically
modernist concern with impersonality.

Yeats's personal construction of French Symbolism (The Symbolism of Poetry

and The Autumn of the Body) is that of the work of art as full of patterns and
symbols and music, lured to the threshold of sleep. That is, based upon the
archetypes or patterns of the collective subconscious. Symbols do not belong to a
world different from ours, they are produced by the transformational rules of our
own subconscious in dreams – a mundane event.. Following a Nietzschean
Dionysian drive of mystical un-selving, Yeats reaches towards progressive
otherness: the self-portrait as a many-faceted self, the text as the collective portrait
not only of himself but also of his friends (Maud Gonne, Olivia Shakespeare, John
Synge and Augusta Gregory in The Municipal Gallery Revisited) and, by joining in
the collective dream of the noble and beggar man, a portrait of contemporary
Ireland as well. The self and anti-self, the will and the mask, complete each other
rebuilding the archetype. In reinventing the Ireland of mythical heroes, Yeats
produces a modern country's mask, what is mostly unlike it [18].Whereas myths
are acategorical (that is, they step beyond opposites), Yeats builds binary
polarities: self and collective imagination, Ireland, past and present, the Ireland of
O'Connell's rhetoric or of Parnell's revolutionary action etc. If nations, races and
individual men are united by an image or a bundle of images (Autobiography), they
are not forms of belief but symbolical or evocative of states of mind. In A People's
Theatre, he urges the return of drama to its original source, thereby giving a voice
to the multitude's deeps of the mind, articulating values and views which would
otherwise have remained unexpressed. While resorting to archetypes of the
imagination, in a deconstructive medley of Irish myth, Buddhist cosmology, Oriental
theosophy, etc., Yeats turns his back on the “people”, producing “chamber plays”
for a small and elitist group, capable to read the patterned dramatic language of
the patterned collective subconscious: stylised elements of ritual, minimal and
symbolical scenery, a formalized stage language, resulting from a blend of words,
dance, music, exploring the symbolist “correspondences” between sense and
“sound, colour, form”. The Dublin Hermetic Society, founded on June 16, 1885,
Madame Blavatski's Lodge of the Theosophical Society, The Golden Dawn, a society
dedicated to the study of the Jewish Cabbala, the Rosicrucian or Rosy Cross Order,
which Yeats joined in 1990 initiated him into occult doctrines exploring not so much
a transcendental rapport but the transmutation of all things into some divine and
imperishable substance: and this enabled me to make my little book of fanciful
reverie over the transmutation of life into art, and a cry of measureless desire for a
world made wholly of essences. (Rosa Alchemica). As well as the various letter and
number relationships through which the Sephiroths (emanations from the original,
pure substance) can be combined into infinite series of designs in the Cabbala,
Yeats's symbols are merely the primary patterns through which everything can be
apprehended. His early plays – The Countess Cathleen, 1902, On Baile's Strand,
1904, The Golden Helmet, 1908 – along with his collections of “fantastic stories “ –
The Secret Rose and the Tables of the Law, 1897 – help build a mythico-symbolic
system inspired by his esoteric pursuits, whose unified subject is, according to Yeats
himself, the anti-romantic and essentially modernist war of spiritual with natural
order. The world is disputed between the demands of the real world of material
interests and economic profit and the call of the Old Woman looking young – the
vagrant muse of immortality This old/young singer of Countess Cathleen is modelled
on the Rosicrucians' mystic rose on the rood of time, opening at the trysting place
of mortal and immortal, time and eternity. On Baile's Strand pits King Conchubar,
representing the need for order and rationality, and the self-assertive irrational
spirit in the hero Cuchulain against each other. The Golden Helmet plays on
Nietzsche's polarity of weak man versus Superman.

In time Yeats moved to one-act plays, for the sake of intensity of focus:
Calvary, 1920, Purgatory, 1938. The allusions to topical British realities in the latter
may be misleading. In reality, the minimal scenery reduced to a ruined house and a
tree is Cabbalistic: the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life united into one
image, paralleling the archetypal Adam (intellectual, moral man, and the material
world). The only characters are a Boy and an Old Man, returning to the primal scene
of the fall. The Old Man's mother had married a stable groom, who had brought
destruction upon the old aristocratic house. The individual house is inflated to the
proportions of the country's history, and further on to the broad scene of the British
Empire, and, through a final generalization, to universal man's destiny, who grows
up, marries, dies:

Old Man: Great people lived and died in this house;

Magistrates, colonels, members of Parliament,

Captains and Governors, and long ago

Men that had fought at Aughrim and the Boyne.

Some that had gone on Government work

To London and to India came home to die,

Or came from London every spring

To look at the may-blossom in the park.

They had loved the trees that he cut down

To pay what he had lost at cards

Or spent on horses, drink and women;

The Old Man had killed his father, and had repeated his mother's mistake of
marrying beneath her in begetting his illegitimate son, who now threatens to kill
him for money. The Old Man stabs him on that same spot, on that same day of the
year, with the same knife. Thereby he thinks his mother's soul has finally found rest,
as all that consequence of her original sin has been washed away. The bare tree in
the background is now standing in white light, like a purified soul. Death is the only
possibility to put an end to the heritage of sin and crime. Life's massy incongruities
cannot be made to “rhyme” with the noble order of art. The Old Man cannot find
rhyme between his mother's real life and the idyllic story in the lullaby:

„Hush-a-baby, thy father's a knight,

Thy mother a lady, lovely and bright,”

No, that is something that I read in a book,

And if I sing it must be to my mother,

And I lack rhyme.

Childhood and experience, present and past, private and national, present and
historical, old man and young man, father and son, noble birth and descent (social,
moral, mythical) are dyads which carry over into Yeats's late work the symbolical
structuring he had practised from the very first. The emphasis on formalization,
stylisation (masked figures, ritualised action through costume, motion, verse and
music), borrowed from the Japanese Noh plays (Four Plays for Dancers) merely
diversify original formal drives, while A Full Moon in March (1934) and The Death of
Cuchulain (1949) bring new emphasis to the myth of art theme. The severed head
of the hero (A Full Moon in March), which starts singing and the responsive dance of
the Queen stage the same aesthetic parable of a universal spirit incarnated in
temporal, embodied paradigms.

The early work of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is wrapped in the

mists of symbolist “evocation” and “suggestion”. In fact Yeats is the centre on
which hinges the entire English poetry from Pre-Raphaelitism to modernism. It is not
often that one can study the metamorphosis of literary ideas and forms within the
same writer's work.

Pre-Raphaelite is his early rejection of the city world and cult of the medieval
Irish pastoral. Ornate and flourishing in style, of a Paterian, essayistic bent, the
early fiction of William Butler Yeats serves, as well as the major work of the
aesthetic movement of the time, as a vehicle for ideas. The two pieces published in
1891, the realistic novel John Sherman and the fanciful story of an Irish giant,
Dhoya, could raise objections of indecision and a suspicion of the absence of an
organic talent, but they serve perfectly well the author's dialectic view of the war of
spiritual with natural order as the motive power in history.

John Sherman is an “imaginary portrait” in the negative, that is, it shares with
The Picture of Dorian Gray and Marius the Epicurean the scarcity of plot and action,
the emphasis upon character, created more by analysis than by incidents [19].
Unlike Dorian and Marius, however, Sherman is not the aesthete but a down-to-
earth type, enjoying the “sleepy old society” of Ballah (West of Ireland), dreamily
planning to marry money some day, rather than get it himself. His failed experience
in London, where he joins his uncle's prosperous firm, Sherman and Saunders, Ship
Brokers, his distaste of London's industrious show, with the towering factory
chimneys on the Thames and his return to the peaceful Irish provincial life to join
the modest-looking yet earnest and profound Mary Carton, the schoolteacher, show
that the natural inclination to live with mere facts does not necessarily associate
with “mercenary schemes”. Eve Pattern, in her Afterword to an edition of John
Sherman and Dhoya, describes the novel as a rejection of the great bourgeois
dream of getting ahead in the world. John Sherman is an inversion of the traditional
nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, a story in which the hero learns to resist rather
than to exploit the various educational strategies proffered, to reject the world of
toil and ambition....[20]. The “aesthete paradigm” is present, however, in the other
couple of this short novel: Howard, the curate of some Anglican order, and Margaret
Leland, Sherman's fiancée in London, whom he “generously” passes off to Howard,
correctly appreciating him as the more proper match.

While still in Ballah, the curate takes pride in his Wildean capacity to perceive
reality through the shaping mould of previous aesthetic experiences (According to
Oscar Wilde's Critic as Artist, the actual sights and events are filtered through
interpretational frames provided by what art has touched):

How pleasantly conscious of his own identity it made him, when he thought
how he, and not those whose birthright it was, felt most the beauty of the shadows
and this river? To him who had read much, seen operas and plays, known religious
experiences and written verse to a waterfall in Switzerland and not to those who
dwelt on its borders for their whole lives did this river raise a tumult of images and
wonders. What meaning it had for them, he could not imagine. (The evening gnats)
made his mind stray to the devil's song against the little spirits in Boito's
Mefistofele.

Margaret Leland, the woman who puts belladonna in her eyes, also inhabits a
world whose “birthright” is artifice. She lives surrounded by bronzes, china vases,
heavy curtains, rich Italian and medieval draperies of the Pre-Raphaelites, artificial
flowers and stuffed birds – the well-known aestheticized décor of the Huysmans
school. The mildly satirical hint at stuffed creatures, Margaret's insistence on
neckties, and refined behaviour, her infatuation with new books would rather point
to an early resistance in Yeats towards the aesthetic decadence, which he would
have joined wholeheartedly in London by the end of the eighties The transformation
can already be seen in the new edition of the two prose pieces alongside others in
The Secret Rose. Rosa Alchemica, The Tables of the Law, The Adoration of the Magi,
1897 – the author's aesthetic manifesto. The aesthetes' arrogance breathes forth
from the very epigraph, borrowed from Villiers de l'Isle Adam: As for living our
servants will do that for us. The introductory poem is a vision of the apocalypse:

When shall the stars be blown about the sky

Thy hour has come most secret and inviolable Rose.

 As well as with the Pre-Raphaelites, the religious meaning is displaced by
aesthetic symbolism. According to A. N. Jeffares (A New Commentary of the Poems
of W.B. Yeats), the rose is the symbol of spiritual beauty. Within the tradition of
Rosicrucian symbolism, a conjunction of the rose and the cross (four leaves), forms
a fifth element, the rose possessing feminine sexual elements, the cross masculine,
united in the alchemical wedding. The cross both engenders and crucifies beauty by
letting it into and out of time.

The stories drawing on Irish myth, legends, history, in that theosophical

heterogeneity characteristic of the fin-de-sičcle, progress from pagan Ireland, with
its visionary heroes and bards to the fallen Ireland of materialism and utilitarianism.
The outcast gleeman, the last of his breed, Costello the Proud, a remnant of the
native, disinterested aristocracy, the Knight of Palestine, Hanrahan the Red live in
the cult of the Rose, of the immortal beauty in a world beyond.

The final triptych is set in contemporary Ireland, completing the displacing of

the Christian orthodoxy by an aesthetic heterodoxy.

Rosa Alchemica compares the artist to the alchemist in his attempt at the
universal transmutation of all things into some divine and imperishable substance...
the transmutation of life into art, and a cry of measureless desire for a world made
wholly of essences. Now it is the narrator-character and not some secondary-rate
personage who lives like Des Esseintes (the hero of Ŕ Rebours, by Joris Karl
Huysmans), surrounded by a collection of aesthetic objects, which shut out reality.
The aesthete is a sceptic, removed from the world of actual experience, professing
a form of pagan aestheticism, which Swinburne had borrowed from the French: I
had gathered about me all gods, because I believed in none, and experienced every
pleasure, because I gave myself to none. Art is valuable precisely because it
sublimates action and actual emotions. A net of colours mediates between reality
and meaning (the relevance of colours to aesthetic moods was one more suggestion
coming from Huysmans, and the French symbolists). The passions of the real
Shakespeare, Dante and Milton have been abstracted to the symbolical language of
the coloured book covers: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory of the world,
Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue grey of his formal calm.

The author's friends appear in these stories disguised as personae: Mac Gregor
Mathers, an occultist friend, as Magus Robartes, and Lionel Johnson, a poet, as
Aherne. Robartes ranks with Baudelaire's homo duplex and other decadent doubles:
something between a debauchee, a saint and a peasant – all of them melting into
the occultist visionary. Following the propositions in Expositio in Apocalypsein, by
Joachim of Flora, Aherne announces the end of the two historical cycles – that of the
Father and that of the Son – and the advent of the Spiritual Cycle. This spirituality,
however, is not of a religious but of an aesthetic order. Aherne transmutes God's
metaphysical presence into sensuous surfaces in The Tables of the Law: the hidden
substance of God is colour and music and softness and a sweet odour. The new
“Law” is a paraphrase of Mallarmé: the world only exists to be a tale in the ears of
the coming generations. Whereas the “Tables” prescribe the nature of the new
language of art as symbolical, The Adoration of the Magi is the “Annunciation” of
the new art for arter. The new magi hear the Immortals speaking to them through
a dying prostitute in Paris. But her words are in fact borrowed from Virgil's fourth
Eclogue (the “Messianic”), about another Achilles, another Troy. Art is the only
immortality; art feeds back upon itself, for here is Yeats writing consciously within a
pre-existing convention. He is remarkably aware not only of the aesthetic climate of
the moment but also of its genealogy: this is the mood Edgar Poe found in a wine-
cup, which passed into France and took possession of Baudelaire and from
Baudelaire passed to England and the Pre-Raphaelites, giving birth to a new, great
religion.

As his essay The Autumn of the Body openly states, Yeats found the English
poets deficient in comparison to the latest developments in France. Like Swinburne,
another Frenchified aesthete, Yeats seeks in-between worlds in his poetry –
dreamy and visionary shores, lakes, islands, twilight and dawn – avoiding hard
outlines, precise locales and the picturesque writing that had handled them in the
realist tradition of externalities of all kinds. Yeats's diagnosis of the contemporary
French state of mind is exploration of inwardness.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree (from The Rose, 1893) features a departure for a
rural seat, which is an allegory of the deep heart's core – the freedom of the inner
space, wherefrom spring the transforming hues changing midnight into a glimmer
and noon into a purple glow. In true Pre-Raphaelite fashion, the lover is a mystique
of the soul not a woman in flesh and blood. The morbid He wishes his beloved were
dead or The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart (The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899)
construe the mistress as an abstraction, a rose, the symbol of eternal beauty, which
is permanently fading from the world. Reality is a labyrinth of things uncomely and
broken, all things worn out and old, a collection of unshapely things. In the manner
of Rossetti's “moment's monument”, the poet counterbalances the descriptio in the
first part by a fashioning act. Sitting on a green knoll apart – on the other side of
nature and against it –, the speaker is seized with reconstructive zest: to build the
wasted life anew. The alchemical imagery – the earth's wintry mould changed into
gold – serves the poet's redemptive recreation of the world through illusion, through
the enduring “monument” of the poem:

I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,

With the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold

For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my

heart.

References:
[1] Modernism. 1890-1930. edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Penguin
Books, 1978, pp. 175-176.

[2] Lucian Blaga, Trilogia culturii, E.L.U., 1969, p. 349.

[3] Jeremy Tambling, Introduction to New Casebooks: F.M. Forster. Contemporary Critical
Essays. Edited by Jeremy Tambling, Macmillan, 1995, p. 2.

[4] Literature and Culture in Modern Britain. Volume One: 1900-1929. Edited by Clive
Bloom, Longman, 1993, pp. 5 and the following.

[5] David Bradshaw, The Best of Companions: J.W.N. Sullivan, Aldous Huxley and the New
Physics, “The Review of English Studies”, August 1996, p. 352.

[6] Hans Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des als ob, Verlag von Felix Meiner, 1918.

[7] Hans Reichenbach, Modern Philosophy of Science, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959, p.
86.

[8] N. Takei da Silva, Modernism and Virginia Woolf, Windsor Publications, 1990.

[9] D.H. Lawrence, Pheonix, 1936, p. 547.

[10] Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel 2, Hutchinson, 1985, p. 88.

[11] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, London, 1992, pp. 241-242, apud Introduction to
New Casebokks: E.M. Forster, Op. cit., p. 8.

[12] David Gervais, Literary Englands, Cambridge 1996, p. 71.

[13] Anthony Fothergill, Heart of Darkness, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989.

[14] J. Hillis Miller in Conrad Revisited, University of Alabama Press, 1985.

[15] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, Doulbleday & Co
1956.

[16] John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of the Golden Bow, Princeton University Press,
1973.
[17] Paul Murray, T. Eliot & Mysticism. The Secret History of the “Four Quartets”, Macmillan
Press, 1991.

[18] John Unterecker, A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats, Thames and Hudson, 1959.

[19] G. J. Walson Introduction to W. B. Yeats: Short Fiction Penguin Books, 1996.

[20]Ibidem.

Another influence came from Whistler, the American artist who had made his
apprenticeship in France and come to England in 1859, as the herald of Impressionism,
Art for Art's Sake and Symbolism – Monet, Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. Whistler
engaged in a resounding argument with Ruskin over his disparaging remarks on
Nocturne in Black and Gold, in his magazine, Fors Clavigera. Voicing the time's
conservative intolerance to non-representational art techniques, Rossetti found that
Whistler was simply flinging a pot of paint in the public's face. The Pre-Raphaelite taste
for the decorative arts, for the painterly, even for an assimilation of literature to the
pictorial arts was still prevailing. Art was now making a new attempt to unify the
multifariousness of existence through synaesthetic impressions. The symbolists were
working at it. The new trends emphasized the importance of the materiality of the
medium, the perceptional qualites of sounds, colours, forms, as an end in themselves.
As Arthur Symons (1865-1945), the author of the 1899 Symbolist Movement in
Literature, remarks in his essay on Mallarmé, the true novelty was the elocutionary
disappearance of the poet and the isolation of speech: growing autonomous, with words
taking light from mutual reflection.

An example of what Pound would later blame as symbols having a fixed value
(Gaudier Brzeska) is The Rose of the World, a poem Yeats included in The Rose, 1893.
The first stanza is mounting a funeral symbolism in ever wider circles of reference. The
colouring suggests the first stage – nigredo, putrefactio – of the alchemical process. The
mournful pride playing about the Shakespearean “red lips” detracts from youthful
confidence, while lending individual mortality a heroic status, for that means to share in
the heroic tragedy of the decaying glory of the world – the mythical Troy:

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream ?

For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,

Mournful that no new wonder may betide,

Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,

And Usna's children died.

 The second stanza unites, in Hermetic fashion (Hermes's Smaragdine Table), that
which is above to that which is below. The colour symbolism changes from black to
white – albedo. The rites of passage, suggesting the purgatorial dance of the departed
souls, polarize an imagery of fleeting and insubstantial surfaces, appearances,
phenomena:

We and the labouring world are passing by:

Amid men's souls, that waver and give place

Like the pale waters in their wintry race,

Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,

Lives on this lonely face.

The third stanza completes the ascension upwards to the Creator, ending with the
grassy road and the Rose. The colour symbolism in this alchemical poem (Yeats's Rosa
alchemica) is brought to the last two stages, green, preceding the revelation of lapis
(according to C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy), which is red (rubedo). Beauty as
the teleology of the world, its cause and finality, with the divine agencies subordinated
to it are part of the Art for Arter's discourse. In Gautier’s Preface of Emaux et Camée,
one can read that even gods die, art alone survives. Such an “exchange of the divine
guards” occurs in Buchers et Tombeaux, with Jupiter passing the world to the Nazarene
– a frequent metalepsis (troping of a former trope) in Swinburne. The Rose of the World
is an embodied Platonic paradigm, archetypal Beauty, incarnated in the transitory
phenomena. In Plato's Timaios, we read that God, unable to make the world eternal,
gave it Time as a wandering mirror of eternity. As a matter of fact, in his dedication To
Ireland in the Coming Times, the Rose is a woman whose dance is time.

Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode,

Before you were, or any hearts to beat,

Weary and kind one lingered by His seat:

He made the world to be a grassy road

Before her wondering feet.

The works of the mighty tumble down; it is only beauty that survives. The golden
world has decayed into one of mutability; words alone are certain good (The Song of
the Happy Shepherd). The Irish countryside reminds Yeats of the original state of man,
when gods were believed to tread on the earth (The Autumn of the Body). Like Goethe's
child riding in his father's arms (The Fairies' King), the sleeping child in The Hosting of
the Sidhe is tempted by malevolent spirits of the other world. If the romantics had
thought the child to be closer to supernatural agencies, Yeats obviously attributes such
visitations to the subconscious active in dreams.

From the 1899 London Impressionists Exhibition at Goupil Gallery, organized by

Walter Sickert to the Post-Impressionists' Exhibition some ten years later the aesthetic
principles changed greatly, and so did Yeats, under the additional influence of Ezra
Pound and Wyndham Lewis.

The transition to Imagism and Vorticism (and, in Europe, to Futurism, Cubism,

Expressionism) was a revolutionary one, as impressionistic perceptual form yielded
to metamorphic form, in which no isomorphism can be established between artistic
and natural forms.

THE DISCOURSE OF MODERNISM

(1911-1930)

The Japanese inspiration of the impressionistic vignettes delighting Lord Henry at

the beginning of The Picture of Dorian Gray was not only Wilde's concern at the time.
Manet, the spearhead of Impressionism, had carefully studied Japanese etchings
before attempting forms of representation, which contradicted the laws of
perspective dominating art ever since the Renaissance. The flat volumes, the
transference of depth to contours, to an epidermic landscape of patterns, the
juxtaposition of light and dark colours, without transitional hues render the natural
landscape simultaneously with the artist's emotional response to it. The modernist
reaction against Impressionism is based on a morphological disanalogy or
paracorrespondence between natural and artistic form. Cezanne's geometrical interplay
of curves, triangles, and pyramids is meant to impose order upon the chaotic
movements in nature.

The language of similarity and contrast among tints only reflects back upon the
inner space of the aesthetic object. Art is not only arrogantly aloof, as with Wilde, but it
does violence to the natural space in various ways: the subject is no longer unified but
broken into energy-filled tints (as with the Neo-Impressionist Seurat), or spatially
disconnected through the juxtaposition of two separate scenes (Seurat, Woman
Walking a Monkey), or of different facets of an object, which cannot be contemplated by
the eye simultaneously (as with Cubists, Braque or Picasso).

In Husserlian fashion, the present act of perception is made to depend on previous

views of the object (I can only perceive one side now, but my representation is complete
thanks to previous experiences of the object's other sides). Landscapes and human
figures are decomposed and recreated into a new order of reality, with help from two
antagonistic sources, although somehow similar in their reductive handling of the
subject: Cezanne's geometrical form, and Gauguin's and Douanier Rousseau's use of
primitive art. The tension between living form and artistic form informs the painting of
the Fauvist Raoul Dufy, where the colour brush strokes and the lines or contours remain
independent of one another, as if the flux of life were incessantly trying to escape the
ordering grasp of pattern.

The years Yeats spent with Pound in a common cottage in Sussex towards the
end of the first decade of the century worked a substantial change in him. It was also
Pound who revived the 1909 “Eiffel Tower” circle of English Imagists, headed by T.E.
Hulme, in 1912-1914, who explored the literary relevance of Wyndham Lewis's
Vorticism, and who founded with T.S. Eliot another literary workshop, in which important
alterations were made in the work of the leading English modernist poet. Eliot's
“mythical method” of establishing parallelisms between present realities and past
designs was anticipated by Pound's “renovation method” in Homage to Sextus
Propertius (1917), where he handles Virgil's device of legitimising Rome by establishing
a continuity with Homer's heroes. The principle of impersonality and the use of
intertextuality (Eliot's language of quotations) – that is, the poet seeking models in the
literary tradition, and emerging from this intersubjective experience as a mask – can be
traced back to Pound's Personae (1909). The anti-heroic view of the contemporary
Western civilization – Eliot's spiritual Wasteland – is already articulated in The Return, a
poem included in the 1912 Ripostes. The collage technique, or architectonic of
concatenations without logical connections, described by Eliot in his Introduction to St.
John Perse's Anabase and best known from his Wasteland, had been assimilated by
Pound from his contacts with Vorticism and with the Fenellosa manuscripts. Ernest
Fenellosa, a philosopher from Massachusetts, had translated in prose Chinese poetry in
Japanese ideographs. Every word therein is an image or a juxtaposition of images,
imitating nature which itself is without grammar. The temporal succession of images is
replaced by spatial relationships of images in dynamic interplay. Pound's Cathay (1919)
is the fruit of this experience.

Pound's shift from Imagism to Vorticism does not involve any significant break, as
it is commonly apprehended. We may compare the two phases as the casting of
building blocks and the actual building. Unlike the symbol, an image is not a word but a
thing, an objective correlative for an idea or an emotion. Under the influence of
Wyndham Lewis and Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound revised his theory of image not as “idea”
but as focus, not as static image but dynamic vortex. The manifesto of the movement
was Lewis's The Great English Vortex, published in the “Blast” (1913-4). The artist who
was indebted to French Cubists and the naive painting of Douanier Rousseau, as well
as to contacts with the primitive, non-European cultures of Egypt, Africa, Polynesia,
combined a taste for geometrical-abstract art with an interest in the intrinsic qualities of
the material and the dynamic relationships of lines, planes, images („planes in relation”).
The image, Pound says in his book on Gaudier-Brzeska, is not an idea but a radiant
node or cluster, a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which ideas are
constantly rushing. In other words, the construction of a work of art depends on the
subordination of its elements to one governing image, only revealed in the end, when
the chaotic heaping of apparently unconnected images allows all of them to fall into
place.

In A Vision, the exposition of his mythopoetic system in 305 pages, Yeats

confesses that all along he had been trying to construct a metaphor for the correlation of
all things: stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawings
of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi. They have helped me
to hold in a single thought reality and justice. We cannot be too emphatic about the
stylistic and not the mythological character of the poet's symbolic language. It is true
that he frequented occult societies, including the circle of Mrs. Blavatski, a Russian
medium. But this joint venture with his wife, Georgie Hyde Lees, taking automatic
dictation, was no more a supernatural event than the experiments in automatic writing of
the contemporary Futurists, very influential in England. In his Replies to the Objections
to his Manifesto (1912), Marinetti justifies his innovations – random juxtaposition of
nouns, interspersed with numbers and musical notes, substitution of analogy for logic,
verbs only used in the infinitive etc. – as automatic writing: The hand that writes seems
to detach itself from the body and reaches out independently far away from the brain....

Yeats was enthusiastic over the unexpected patterning of the fantasies of the
subconscious, which confirmed the psychologists' theories about the transformational
rules of dreams. The Yeatsland in A Vision is geometrical; just old fancies about life in
the “new expression” of signs, shapes, abstractions (The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid). The
basic binary opposition is between an imaginary monadic entity and the interpenetrating
gyres of constant strife, responsible for the existence of historical cycles. The sphere is
described in the little poem entitled There as the hypothetical or virtual reconciliation of
opposites, whose strife alone allows of the existence of the real world:

There all the barrel-hoops are knit,

There all the serpent tails are bit,

There all the gyres converge in one,

There all the planets drop in the sun.

The pictogram of the two interpenetrating cones or gyres, rotating in opposite

directions, the apex of each at the centre of the other's widest ark, accounts for the
antithetical elements that go into the cyclic pattern of history. The cones reverse their
motion every two thousand years, humanity moving from one type of culture and mode
of sensibility to another (for instance, from Leda's aesthetic cycle to the moral reversal
of Christianity). The poet displaces the origin by a repetitive process, thereby ruling out
the mythological aspect which, in its broadest definition, means return to the origin:
 Primary gyre Antithetical gyre

space time

moral aesthetic

objective subjective

As one cone is widening, the other is narrowing, but elements from both are
simultaneously present, even if in varying degree. The times of most turbulence are
those when the gyres reverse their motions, which happens every two thousand years.
What Yeats builds on Blake's cyclic pattern of history in The Mental Traveller is an
updated world picture with time as the fourth dimension, with the post-Kantian
moral/aesthetic dichotomy, and a “stylistic arrangement” of existence.

Christ's first coming inverted the fall, through the Crucifixion, while His second
coming marks the end of the world.

In Yeats, The Second Coming is just one more reversal of the cones. The origin is
not mythical but Homeric. The first cycle was inaugurated by Leda's conception of
beautiful Helen, who brought war and destruction: The broken wall, the burning roof and
tower/ And Agamemnon dead were all engendered in Leda's rape by Jupiter changed
into a swan (Leda and the Swan). The counterpointed pentameter (the metrical norm
continually subverted by the colloquial rhythms of speech) and the antithetical
patterning of imagery – the weak, emotionally aroused Leda and the divine, indifferent
Intellect, incarnated in the sublunary world – strike home the sense of the violent impact
of the divine on the natural world in pagan cosmologies. The opposite cycle begins with
another bird, this time the Holy Spirit descending like a dove. As god made man, Christ
smoothes over differences, brings peace and preaches love. Unlike Homer's heroic
individualism and beautiful but amoral heroes, Christ urges escape from personality,
dissolution in otherness, in mystic communion with one's neighbours and with God. In
The Second Coming, we see the cycle of Christianity coming to an end: bonds broken,
the centre dislocated, moral values inverted, scepticism and violence enthroned:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

 Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The simple repetitiveness following the impressive prophetic discourse sounds as

if the speaker were casting a spell or making an invocation. What follows is the only
fulfilled prophecy in a desecrated world: the image aroused by words:

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand,

The Second Coming ! Hardly are these words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs...

As the new Sphinx, with the head of a man and the body of a lion is slouching
towards Bethleem to be born, the Nativity too gets shifted from its mythical unicity,
becoming a figure.

An updated Typal Man whirls inside the cones, moving from one incarnation to the
next, until a twenty-six cycle is completed. The twenty-eight phases of the Great Wheel
or complete Moon Cycle show a similar vacillation between objectivity (pure body) and
subjectivity (pure soul) At phases one and fifteen – dark and full moon –, standing for
either, human life cannot exist. In The Phases of the Moon, the movement is summed
up as the soul seeking itself Before the full/ (...) and afterwards the world. It is
interesting to notice that the types recorded in the twelfth phase, very close to the full of
pure imagination, is the hero, but not some humans in flesh and blood. They are the
Homeric antagonists, Achilles and Hector, and... Nietzsche. The unexpected
association can be explained as a doubling of hero-textuality (literary characters) by
metatextuality: Nietzsche theorizing the Superman, and the slave and master
relationship. The next remove from actuality, or disembodiment through the cat-o'-nine-
tails of the mind, that is the mind eating its tail, feeding upon itself, is the pure soul
which would die in its own labyrinth were it not to seek some objectified “image” of
itself.. The perfect union of that body and that soul can only be the subject of a song, as
it has an ideal nature, never to be born into the visible world. In the second cycle, the
soul becomes the world's servant. There is an analogous polarity of the narrators.
Robartes, the idealist, the “man within” in a topical as well as tropical sense, reading by
the light of the candle and writing with his laborious pen, can sing the song which
carries the story to subjective fullness. Aherne, another fantastic character in the early
hermetic fiction of Yeats, has never written a book, and therefore only oblivion and
mortality lie ahead of him (forgotten, half out of life). He belongs with the men of
practical ends and domestic values, in their progress towards the crescent and the dark:
reformer, merchant, statesmen, learned men,/ Dutiful husband, honest wife. The last
crescents are allotted to the mentally or bodily deformed: Hunchback, Saint and Fool.
Dressed in the Connemara cloth, Michael Robartes and Robert Aherne are in fact
descended from the Welsh Mabinogion (Crane Skin Bag) book of poetry. Like Gauguin,
Douanier Rousseau or Brancusi, Yeats seeks the roots of archetypal imagination
among primitive people.

Nor does, in our opinion, the poet's symbol of anti-self or demon suggest a
supernatural agency: the daimon is a kind of anti-self or mask elevated, so to speak, to
a plane beyond the human. The human being is partial in comparison with the daimonic
fullness [21]. In The Saint and the Hunchback, we read that a Caesar may be hiding in a
hump. Overwhelmed by his dead heroic past contained in it, the deformed character
may serve as an intuitive lesson about the deformity of military conquest and the decay
of worldly power, in counterdistinction to the heroes of the deathless texts. In Ego
Dominus Tuus, another poem in dialogue form, the characters are given Latin pronouns
for names. As usual, they make an antagonistic pair or a binary opposition. Hic is the
rational, empirical Augustan self, trusting in love of the world and imitation of great
masters. Ille is the introverted type, the writer, building a theory of creation as the
embodiment of an anti-self. If Dante was a lecherous type in everyday life, his work is a
mask, an anti-self's love of an idealized and inaccessible mistress. The only opposition
is between Dante the living individual and Dante's mask he fashions in his work. In
defining his image as a call to his opposite all/ That I have handled least, least looked
upon, Ille is simply spacing out the life of action and the rooms of the imagination. In his
quest of identity, he does not stop at books, which are self-centred, seeking his own
image in his own creation. The poem is in fact an artist's self-portrait:

Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush,

We are but critics, or but half create,

Timid, entangled, empty and abashed,

Lacking the countenance of our friends....

Because I seek an image, not a book

 These men that in their writings are most wise

Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.

I call to the mysterious one who yet

Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream

And look most like me, being indeed my double,

And prove of all imaginable things

The most unlike, being my anti-self,

And, standing by these characters, disclose

All that I seek; and whisper it as though

He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud

Their momentary cries before it is dawn,

Would carry it away to blasphemous men.

To this “thou”, created from within the self in matrices of otherness, the Ego is
God.

The norm-drive leads to various “stylistic arrangements of experience”: life in an

old Norman tower ar Bellylee, which he purchased in 1916 and made into a symbol in a
volume of poems published in 1928 (The Tower). It stands for a Jungian repository of
images in the great memory stored, (...) which have ceased to be a property of any
personality or spirit. A Prayer on Going into my House is a curse on those who in the
future might disturb the patterned geometry of the place, the careful mixture of
household objects and antiquities, stored by ancestors along centuries and acting as a
“norm”. As well as Pound who identifies in the Italy of Guido Cavalcanti an age
propitious for art, as it shared a common outlook and mode of sensibility, Yeats points
to the refined Byzantine society not as one of decadent aestheticism with the artist
locking himself up in his ivory tower but as a spiritually unified community:

... religious, aesthetic and practical life were one... architects and artificers...
spoke to the multitude and the few alike. The painter, the mosaic worker, the worker in
gold or silver, the illuminator of sacred books were almost impersonal, almost perhaps
without the consciousness of individual design, absorbed in their subject-matter and the
vision of the whole people. (A Vision).

In Sailing to Byzantium, the poet advances through antithetical sets of images:

those relating to modern, “paltry”, time-bound Ireland, and her anti-mask – the
Byzantine “monuments of unaging intellect”. The “bodily form” may be the “natural
thing”, but the poet will prefer “such a form as Grecian Goldsmiths make” – the
formalized universe of art as his materia prima.

A similar counterpointed scheme is followed in Among School Children, the

starting point of which was a senatorial visit to a Montessori school in February 1926.
One month later the poet noted in his diary: school children and the thought that life will
waste them, perhaps that no possible life can fulfil their own dreams or even their
teacher’s hope. Bring in the old thought that life prepares for what never happens. This
was the diffident beginning of a poet's triumph. The opening scene of a common class,
taught in the best modern way, with the famous “public man” and children scrutinizing
one another, is successively cast into remoter frames. The woman he loves comes to
his mind with a wretched childhood memory. This is the first attempt to bridge the gap
between self and others, for, just as in Plato’s Symposium, the loving couple are like the
yolk and white of the one shell – an originally androgynous unity split into two halves by
God's wrath. The woman is now in her sixties. Her beauty is past, and yet is not the
child standing in front of him another embodiment of the same ideal beauty Leda
possessed and bequeathed to the successive generations? Is a living child, as the fruit
of love, a solution to age and mutability? Certainly not, the deformed, aged body, with
sixty or more winters on its head, would offer a meagre recompense for a mother's
pangs at his birth, if only she could see her son so old and decayed. Would the contrary
drive towards the Platonic ghostly paradigm of things be a more rewarding one?
Disembodied abstractions, whether Plato's Ideas, Aristotelian abstract logic or
Pythagoras’s theory of heaven being a musical scale are like old clothes upon old sticks
to scare a bird. It is the poet's favourite image, the dancer, the embodied paradigm that
finally works the desired fusion between the flesh and the soul, between nature and
eidos:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

 Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole ?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can you know the dancer from the dance ?

With Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), we pass to a new principle of

composition, a new variety of modernist discourse. The two poets have a lot in
common, first of all the emphatically constructed character of the text, springing from a
deliberate attempt to offer it up as a new order of reality. But they also differ in some
essential aspects. If we were to borrow a distinction between two kinds of magic made
by John B. Vickery in The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough (Op. cit.), we could say
that the imagery of Yeats is “homeopathic” (operating by similarity) while Eliot's is:
“contagious” (operating by contiguity, in contact with the thing or person). In Sailing to
Byzantium, for instance, the theme of mortality in the first stanza is conveyed through a
consistent amplification, in baroque fashion, of the protean oceanic life: salmon-falls,
mackerel-crowded seas, fish, flesh, or foul (the images are related, sometimes also
phonetically). They are different things with a likeness (symbols). The artifice of
eternity in early Byzantium engages another set of distinct objects sharing in some
essential quality: form... of hammered gold, gold enamelling and even golden bough.
Gold, as the metal which does not rust, has come to be associated, in a long-standing
tradition with eternity, and, in alchemy, with the spirit. Being interested, like Jung, in
archetypal psychology, Yeats is reducing the multiplicity of physical perceptions to
schemes of representations.

T.S. Eliot was the disciple of Bergson, who, just like William James, represents the
contents of consciousness as an assembly of heterogeneous material. Bergson's
famous definition of the self, in Introduction ŕ la Methaphysique, as a continuous flow...
a succession of states... all extending into each other (...), a continual rolling up like that
of a thread or a ball, comes close to James's stream of thought in Ch. IX of his
Principles of Psychology. Consciousness is memory (Bergson: Matičre et Mémoire), a
succession of perceptions or of states of which none is identical to what preceded it
(William James, Op. cit.). T. S. Eliot, who had received his M.A. in philosophy from
Harvard in 1906, went to Paris to study the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1911-13),
which developed in him an awareness of the distinction between various orders of
experience. In Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), Bergson
speaks of a double self, the everyday self experiencing common reality, and a deeper
self, attuned to deeper truths yet subjugated to the superficial self. There is no
revelation coming from beyond actual perception. However, the chance succession of
perceptions ultimately yields a meaningful design. Consequently, Eliot does not resort to
symbols, which rely on coded images of the collective consciousness, but to random
and opaque images of concrete objects, events or persons that do not automatically
point to some transcendent order. They are just “objective correlatives” (para-
correspondent to the subject's life of emotions), contiguous in space (or in memory), but
belonging to different orders of meaning. In the following example from Mr. Eliot's
Sunday Morning Service, generation in nature (with fertilization helped by the bees) and
the mythical genesis of the world (through the Word, Logos) are the same thing with a
(huge) difference:

Polyphiloprogenitive

The sapient sutlers of the Lord

Drift across the window-pane

In the beginning was the Word.

Unlike Yeats, Eliot does choose his bodily form from any natural thing. As B. C.
Southam remarks in his excellent Student's Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot,
Eliot's images are consciously concrete, linked to something actually seen or
remembered.

Secondly, the unity of his imagery is not archetypal, as with Yeats, but one of
underlying tension, characteristic of modernism. Todd Gitlin, in Postmodernism. Roots
and Politics [22], defines Premodernism, Modernism and Postmodernism starting
from Raymond Williams's concept of “structure of feeling”, that is the ways of
apprehending and experiencing the world and our place in it, replacing the traditional
notion of “style”. Premodernism is said to aspire to a unity of vision, cherishing
continuity, speaking with a single narrative voice or addressing a single visual centre.
Modernism aspires to unity but this unity has been constructed, assembled from
fragments or shocks, or juxtaposition of difference. It shifts abruptly among a multiplicity
of voices, perspectives, materials.. As for Postmodernism, it abandons the search for
unity altogether, cultivating surfaces, endlessly referring to, ricocheting from,
reverberating into other surfaces. (...) Instead of a single centre, there is pastiche,
cultural recombination (Ibidem).

The business of the poet, Eliot says in his essay What Dante Means to Me (1950)
is to make poetry out of the unexplored resources of the unpoetical, to assemble the
most disparate and unlikely material. How is it “assembled”? According to Bergson, W.
James, H. Pater, sensations come at random. As with the contemporary Cubists or
Futurists, the compositional principle in Eliot's poetry is a juxtaposition of heterogeneous
images, of different times, places, points of view, voices, even ontological orders
(empirical reality, art, mythology). Variegated impressions are recorded in memory
successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment: so that, at
the end, a total effect is produced. (Introduction to St. John Perse's Anabase). Eliot is
not, of course, a hard-nosed empiricist. The impressions are not necessarily of actually
experienced events, they may be imaginary as well. The reader's gaze is directed
towards an actual spring landscape, immediately shifted to the childhood memory of
some historical personage, without the least logical connection, and then to a Biblical
text, to a Wagner opera score, to a mundane scene in the home of a London medium,
etc. (The Waste Land), as if the poet were impatiently zapping around the remote
control from one T.V. channel to another.

One principle Eliot shares with Yeats is that of impersonality. But whereas Yeats
conceives of impersonality as a given, because the mind is automatically rooted in the
collective subconscious, with its ancestral codes of archetypal representations, Eliot's
impersonality is consciously constructed and borrowed. First of all, he borrows words
from the common stock which are charged with the connotations of their uses in
precedented language: Whatever words a writer employs, he benefits by knowing as
much as possible of the history of the words, of the uses to which they have already
been applied... The essential of tradition is this: in getting as much as possible of the
whole weight of the history of the language behind his word. (The Three Provincialities,
1922). As the next philosophic influencer in Eliot's life was the Hegelian monist F.H.
Bradley, something like the individual as the concrete universal is the concept informing
his framing of impersonality. In reading about the poet who, in writing himself writes his
time (Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919), we also remember Stéphane
Mallarmé’s letter to Henri Casales in which he defines himself as a depersonalised
medium through which the spirit of the universe has come to self-realization. With Eliot,
the “spirit of the universe” is no longer a form of objective idealism, which makes
possible a universal system of symbolization, as with the symbolists. It has been
replaced by textuality, by the reified order of the world's texts. Shakespeare and Dante
impress him precisely because they managed to transmute personal and private
agonies into something universal and impersonal. The author is not an agent but a
discourse-making catalyst, whose personal obsessions do not get into the final alloy.
Eliot's idea of “historical sense” is paradoxical because, unlike the Victorians, he no
longer sees history as a succession of distinct phases in the linear flow of time. With
Eliot, there is no stable historical identity. The world's texts make up a dynamic
atemporal order. The present is influenced by the past – the keenest anxiety of
influence experienced in literature so far –, and the past is modified by the present:

.... the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation
in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer
and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence
and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the
timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. (...) No poet,
no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation
is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him
alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as
a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical criticism. (...) The existing monuments form
an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new / the
really new / work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new
work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing
order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of
each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the
old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of
English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the
present as much as the present is directed by the past (Ibidem).

It is only lately that comparative literature has driven a revisionary wedge into
canon theory, suggesting significant alterations from a contemporary perspective. The
critical approach to the texts of the past displays, in most cases, a tendency to evaluate
them in terms of their relevance to present concerns about the construction of identity,
class, gender, sexuality, the degree of self-reflexivity, etc. Eliot also proves proleptic in
his intertextual practices. His notion of tradition does not include only a “sense” of
history but also of pre-existing discourse. In studying his “language of quotations” (B.C.
Southam), one may enter upon an edgy debate around the meaning and worth of
originality, individuality etc., even of a necessity for new aesthetic criteria. How is
meaning produced in an intertextual discourse? Is the meaning of such discourse a sum
total of the separate meanings embedded in the collated texts, or are these meanings
distorted and fused into something completely new ? Eliot must have asked himself the
same question, for here is his opinion and aesthetic criterion: Immature poets imitate,
mature poets steal, bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into
something better (Review-essay on Philip Massinger, 1920). Anyway, in approaching
Eliot, one faces a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, one finds his poems more
difficult, because they demand of the reader extensive reading and even a philological
background. On the other hand, one feels on safer ground for being expected to break
precise codes rather than to interpret open meaning structures. Nobody is sure about
the precise meaning of Hamlet after four centuries of diligent criticism, while the range
of possible interpretations in the case of a poem like A Cooking Egg is limited and
controlled by the textual indices guiding reading towards an almost exhaustive
hermeneutic act. It is true that, even after identifying all the allusions, quotes, hints, and
after reconstructing the framework of mythology and philosophy in the much more
complex Waste Land, this twentieth-century epic continues to meet us with the blank
stare of a modern Sphinx. Another paradox is that, in spite of the extreme heterogeneity
of imagery – Eliot following Baudelaire in the exploration of the poetical relevance of
unpoetical material and of contemporary scenes – we can trace a limited set of binary
oppositions running through most of his works. Whereas the introspective romantics
had compared different phases in the development of the self, the impersonal Eliot
keeps contrasting, in a bathetic style, a spiritualised past and an unheroic, barren,
profane present, the meaningful order of art and meaningless reality, contingent
experience and textuality. Let us see how Eliot does make something new of his
borrowed stuff. Here is A Cooking Egg, whose allusions are scrupulously spotted by
B.C. Southam in his Guide:

En l'an trentičme de mon age

Que toutes mes hontes j'ay beues.

Pipit sate upright in her chair

Some distance from where I was sitting;

Views of the Oxford Colleges

Lay on the table, with the knitting.

Daguerreotypes and silhouettes,

Her grandfather and great great aunts,

Supported on the mantelpiece

An Invitation to the Dance.

.................................................……..

I shall not want Honour in Heaven

For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney

And have talk with Coriolanus

And other heroes of that kidney.

I shall not want Capital in Heaven

For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond,

We two shall lie together, lapt

In a five per cent Exchequer Bond.

I shall not want Society in Heaven,

Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;

 Her anecdotes will be more amusing

Than Pipit's experiences could provide.

I shall not want Pipit in Heaven

Madame Blavatsky will instruct me

In the Seven Sacred Trances;

Piccarda de Donati will conduct me.

.....................................................…………

But where is the penny world I bought

To eat with Pipit behind the screen ?

The red-eyed scavengers are creeping

From Kentish Town and Gilder's Green;

Where are the eagles and the trumpets ?

Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps.

Over bottered scones and crumpets

Weeping, weeping multitudes

Droop in a hundred A.B.C.s.

The poem assimilates some principles of musical composition in the “accords”

between various images throughout the poem, the parallelisms, oppositions or
counterpoints organizing the structure of the text, and in the pleasure deriving from the
recognition of cultural allusions. The epigraph is from François Villon's Le Grand
Testament, introducing a Villonesque motif: the poet is aware of his life of dissipation,
but also of his craftsmanship. There are multiple variations upon the “Testament”
theme, which is in fact an interrogation of what be the worth of life and immortality. The
poem is divided by suspension dots into three sections. They usually separate past and
present, as, for instance, the Renaissance and contemporary London in Whispers of
Immortality, or New-Testamental parable and its grotesque literalisation in Mr. Eliot's
Sunday Morning Service. The first part of A Cooking Egg, that is a stale egg, only good
for cooking, not for eating, resumes the opposition in the epigraph between Villon's life
of shame and the immortal poetic “Testament” he has left behind. There is a crafty
interplay of the abstract and the concrete in the polarity of the speaker's physical sight
and a painter's or a writer's “sights” reified in art; the seats of learning and the domestic
knitting; the “testamental” post-mortem avatars of common people in form of
daguerreotypes and silhouettes and Weber's musical “testament” – his celebrated waltz,
Invitation to the Dance. This last is, in fact, a pun, the words referring both to the
musical composition and to a private, written invitation to a ball lying on the
mantelpiece.

The second section contrasts the past, with its strong faith and notions of honour,
with drab contemporary realities, which had replaced God by a financial Mammon and
saints by mediums and esoteric crooks. The Renaissance, when people used to live by
models, had fashioned the hero as the courtier: a brave warrior but also a learned man;
of noble birth, but also skilled in the arts, which alone can earn one immortality; of
refined speech, manners, costume and graceful private living, but also committed to
ideals higher than the self. The prototype is Sir Philip Sidney, of noble birth, residing at
Penshurst (the lofty subject of Ben Jonson's well-known ekphrasis), enjoying the
company of the mighty as well as of the learned and esoteric Rosicrucians, a great
writer, and a warrior who died on the battlefield, as a consequence of an act of gallantry.
What do Eliot's contemporaries worship? What do they find “capital”? The world of
finance, of money, attracting to its magnetic field people of both high and low descent,
the champions of industry, who are knighted by the crowned heads. Alfred Mond, the
lead in the chemical industry, is as much of a “sir” as... Philip Sidney. The ironic choice
of the poetically obsolete “lapt” for “rapt”, in reference to the trivial financial bonds
issued by the government at a tempting interest, parallels the similar use above of the
obsolete “sate” with respect to Pipit, a common girl. What is “left remarkable” about the
Italian Renaissance, which had fascinated Romantics and Victorians alike? It is only the
need for sensational anecdotes in a society weary of its uneventful life. Could the banal
anecdotes within Pipit's reach compare with the formidable crimes and entanglements
in the life of Lucretia Borgia, in whose home state policy was intersecting private
destiny? Man no longer turns to religion for spiritual guidance, preferring the surrogate
Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky, a London medium. The surrogate Beatrice
conducting the new Dante is Piccarda de Donati, the nun compelled to break her vows,
being consequently confined to the Lowest Level of Heaven (see B.C. Southam, Op.
cit.).

The order of reality and that of metaphysics yield in the third part of the poem to
that of art. It is a reinscription of the “ubi sunt” motif, which bloomed into one of its rarest
blossoms in Villon's Ballad of the ladies “du temps jadis”. It is not Chaucer's “good
women” that the speaker in the poem is mourning, but again, the baseness of the
present in comparison to the greatness of the past. The heart has been vanquished by
the belly. There was a time when the multitudes would sacrifice themselves for their
country. It was for the glory (trumpet) of the Roman Empire (metonymically suggested
by its emblem, the eagle), that Roman armies crossed the Alps; they were defeated, but
the snows burying their bodies have not melted, as in Villon's ballad. They are still there,
to tell of the Roman world and its posthumous glory. What has Eliot's speaker lost ?
Also a “world”, more precisely, a penny world, that is of cakes and sweets, which he
used to share with Pipit when they were children (B.C. Southam informs us that children
used to eat apart, behind a screen). Can the present buttered scones and crumpets
compare with that penny world? And when one comes to think of the indiscriminating
multitudes one sees nowadays, weeping and weeping for them, drooping in a hundred
tea shops of the Aerated Bread Company, like the ancient Romans for the “Capital” of
their Empire and of the world (orbis et urbis) !... Social entropy finds a correlative in
language. Signifiers slip away from signifieds, lost in fatal ambiguities. Within the
complex tissue of the poem everything is linked to everything else. “Mond”, the French
for “world”, standing for moneyed power, is echoed by “penny world” – with “penny”
comically deflating Mond's “capital” and offering a bathetic comment on the speaker's
childhood Eden of cookies. “Capital” is in turn the centre of Heaven (the throne of God
to which Beatrice guides Dante), a superlative, a financial term, the centre of the world.
“Pipit”, as B.C. Southam specifies, is a Greek pet name, a mistranslation of the Hebrew
Yahweh (meaning nothing less than “God”), written on a hard-boiled egg, which is
believed to open the heart to wisdom. That egg had certainly got stale in Eliot's time...
The present sinking from excellence is suggested by the sugary infant world, whose
loss is lamented in mock-heroic fashion, as a variation upon sic transit gloria mundi. The
shrinking of the complex world of the grown-ups behind the screen, in the baby-world, is
paralleled by a similar deconstruction of Villon's poetic discourse (also a European
literary motif – But where is...) into the reductive gibber of the alphabet. The
unintelligible modern abbreviations (“A.B.C.s” for “Aerated Bread Companies”) usually
cover equally unintelligible enterprises.

Using the bricks of quotes and topical or textual allusions, Eliot has produced a
poem absolutely remarkable for the originality of theme and outlook.

A similar rhetoric proves very effective in Gerontion (composed in 1919 and

included in the 1920 volume of Poems). The title is a diminutive of the Greek “Geron”,
which means “elderly person”. The “little old man”, who has lost the vigour of youth
while failing to attain the wisdom of age, is turned into an emblem of the impotent
Western civilization. The subversive strategy works a literalization of tropes. The Duke
in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, which provides the epigraph of the poem, is
speaking in parables to the young Claudio, condemned for having proved too
passionate a lover for his own good, while Gerontion, an old man in a dry month, /
Being read to by a boy, reduced to a dreamer's dry brain in a dry season, matches the
prototype like a live man his passport picture. With him, the Duke's trope is literally true:
Thou has neither youth nor age/ But as it were an after dinner sleep/ Dreaming of both.
Gerontion has wasted his life in inaction, his memories being rendered through negative
words: I was neither at the hot gates (the literal translation of “Thermopiles”)/ Nor fought
in the warm rain/ Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, etc. The rented decayed house is the
objective correlative of his physical degeneration, spiritual impotence, and lack of
identity, which applies, by extension, to the entire contemporary civilization. Gerontion's
record of contemporary history is one of non-being. The quotes have the effect of a
leitmotif amplification – for instance, those from Middleton's Changeling, suggesting a
deracinated culture, without any identity, as it had lost its humanitarian values –, or one
of deconstruction. As Southam remarks, the poem sounds like a parody of Newman's
Dream of Gerontius, containing the dramatic reverie of an old man, approaching death,
whose spiritual struggles are crowned with salvation (Ibidem). More complex is the
metalepsis, the troping of one of Christ's parables in Matthew, 12: 38. Gerontion's
contemporaries, in preferring empty signs to actual wonders (signs are taken for
wonders), are worse than the Pharisees and teachers of the Law who demanded a
miracle from Christ, instead of seeking his wisdom, and the fulness of his prophetic
speech. Christ is here defending the superiority of the Logos or of the sage discourse,
with himself appearing as a Jonnah and Solomon figure, over the supernatural being
turned into a mundane event: On Judgement Day the people of Nineveh will stand up
and accuse you, because they turned from their sins when they heard Jonah preach;
and I tell you that there is something here greater than Jonah ! On Judgement Day the
Queen of Sheba will stand up and accuse you, because she travelled all the way from
her country to listen to King Solomon's wise teaching; and I assure you that there is
something here greater than Solomon ! (...) The only miracle you will be given is the
miracle of the prophet Jonah. In the same way that Jonah spent three days and nights
in the big fish, so will the Son of Man spend three days and nights in the depths of the
earth. The figure of the Son of Man in his tomb is looming behind Gerontion imprisoned
in the rented house and of contemporary Man inhabiting a dehumanised civilization.

The alienation is caused by the demise of all values. People have lost their
metaphysical sense. Gerontion, literalizing Newman's trope in Apologia pro Vita Sua
(God give us sight, hearing... taste, touch of the world to come) can only think of a
physical contact with God, mediated by sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch, whose
use he has almost lost, now that he is old. With God out of the way, moral energy is
released both ways:

Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices

Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues

Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes...

With the Victorians, values had been historicized, declared to be provisional, but
valid for the people living at a certain time. Eliot completes the deconstruction of
meaningful historical action by alluding to The Education of Henry Adams, a book
asserting that at the beginning of the century the historian entered a vaster universe,
where the old roads ran in every direction, that led nowhere [23]. Gerontion literalizes
his metaphor, associating it with the cunning passages, contrived corridors, which no
longer led in a precise direction. The Polish Corridor, the strip of land taken from
Germany under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), was no longer a one-way
road in geopolitics.
 The allusions to autobiographies of great men, with emphasis upon spiritual
enlightenment (the “education” of Henry Adams, or Newman's record and defence of his
spiritual conversion), qualify Gerontion's monologue for the same genre, handled, of
course, with Pope's “art of sinking in poetry”...

Eliot's version of contemporary England is one of hell, peopled by hollow men and
stuffed men, like the effigy filled with straw and old rags representing Guy Fawkes, the
head of the conspirators involved in the Gunpowder Treason Plot against James I
(1605). In The Hollow Men, a poem published in 1925, two choruses are heard. The
chorus of the hollow men is a confession, of devastating self-awareness, which collects
verbal echoes from texts playing upon the theme of death and spiritual emptiness: the
murderous and hollow Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, pulled by and pulling the strings of
colonialist policy, controlled by the inhuman jungle, which is lying without as much as
within; the equally animalised clown, disguised in rat's coat and crowskin, which
appears in a ritualistic dance in Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance. Next come
the spirits blown by the wind in Dante's Inferno and the spirits of the dead clinging to the
jaw bone (here, the broken jaw of our lost kingdom) in Judges, 15:19. The hollow men
are like a multiplication of Kurtz, whose newly got mind sight leads him to a realization
of his whole death-in-life existence at the time of his final physical agony. They know
that the “promised” kingdom is not the multifoliate rose – Dante's symbol of Heaven in
Paradiso XXXII –, but death's twilight kingdom. The other chorus joins the voices of
children, who, like clowns, are traditionally associated with truth telling. As well as
Andersen's child exposing the emperor's nakedness, it is a boy who reports, in his
broken English, the death of Kurtz, who had broken his vows to his fiancée and to
mankind's dream of expanding civilization: Mistah Kurtz – he dead.

In I, Chronicles, 24: 11 and 15, the kingdom belongs with God, while the days on
earth are said to be “shadows”. What is ungodly about man's modern life on earth?
What is the key to the hollow men's complaint ?

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion and the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom.

A drab reality has ceased to come up to the mind's idealistic dream of it; motion is
inefficient, a senseless “agere”, which comes to nothing. Alienated from each other are,
in the post-logocentric world, conception and creation, emotion and response, essence
and descent from it. The children make no sage discourse. Their wisdom is artless slip
of tongue. The truth is not openly stated but suggested. The loss of faith, of the meaning
of existence and of redemption is suggested by the blocked predication and the
reduction of a full lexical unit to an empty article:

For thine is

Life is

For thine is the

The spiritual crisis is paralleled by a crisis in language. The dead end humanity
has reached is imitated by the futile movement of the children in a circle. The
teleological view of existence, progressing from Genesis to the Last Judgement, is
gone. The perspective of the Last Judgement is no longer awesome to a spiritually
crippled humanity, in whom it can only call forth a pitiful “whimper”.

Conrad's Heart of Darkness had obsessed Eliot for some time before he found a
place for its “whispering” jungle in the image repertoire of The Hollow Men. “The horror,
the horror”, the last words of Kurtz, were to have served as a motto to The Waste Land,
a poem published in The Criterion, London, in October 1922, and in The Dial, New
York, in November of the same year. The “notes” to the text were appended when the
poem appeared as a book in 1922, from the New York publishers, Boni and Livewright.

The five-part poem, whose theme is death and redemption, was conceived as a
contemporary version of the Divine Comedy, with its descent ad inferos (The Burial of
the Dead) and ascent to the voice in the thunder, the voice of the Vedic God, incarnated
in the Upanishads. Can a moribund civilization find resources for spiritual rebirth? By
selecting the two epigraphs provided by Petronius's Satyricon, and The Divine Comedy,
Eliot opted for a generic as well as a thematic framing of his poem. It is a Menippean
satire, in the manner of Satyricon, a literary form of subversion, and a modern epic, with
Eliot as a Dante figure, and Ezra Pound as a Virgilian guide. Like all great poets, Eliot
felt compelled to produce some up-dated kind of epic, which in all epochs sums up the
time's most general world picture and the idea of a hero. All post-Homeric variations
upon the hero-motif are revisionary work. Virgil revises Achilles as Aeneas, that is as a
hero of moral rather than physical strength. Allowing himself to be guided by Virgil,
Dante replaces one kind of legitimacy – the mythical descent of Rome from Troy –, by
another: the Homeric epic. Dante's “I am not Aeneas” (because I do not mean to found
an earthly kingdom but to seek a heavenly one) is the first apologetic diminution in a
long and famous tradition. By disclaiming the type of ancient heroism conceived of as
physical strength and courage – I am not Heracles –, Hamlet is still a hero, as
Fortinbras qualifies him, but one who has won an inward struggle against the evil in
himself, not in an outwardly projected Inferno. The next apologetic diminutions come
from Laforgue and T.S. Eliot. I am not Hamlet, Eliot's anti-hero confesses in his first
published poem: The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock (a dramatic monologue of 1911).
But, unlike his predecessors, he is nothing else in exchange…
 The poem is not exactly a mock-heroic but a more complex mixture of levity and
seriousness, absurd irony, free association and bathetic reversals in the manner of
Jules Laforgue. The critique of the contemporary life of surfaces and pretence, not only
uncreative but also incomprehensive of past values, goes too deep for unproblematic
mirth. Unlike Fielding's and Pope's puppets, Pruffrock is painfully aware of the
meaningless of his existence in a society lost in mean pursuits. He has not heard the
mermaids sing like Ulysses, he has never disturbed the universe with Hamlet's
unsettling questions about the time out of joint, and he lacks the words expressing
exactly what he feels, like Horatio's story capable to redress a wounded name. He has
measured out his life with tea spoons, he has only considered the adequacy of his hair-
style or the opportuneness of wearing flannel trousers... No ! I am not Prince Hamlet,
nor was meant to be, he finally has to admit. Eliot does not merely reinscribe a
convention (Dante, Shakespeare, Laforgue). The true novelty about his hero is the way
in which he constructs himself as an image for others.

...... there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.

The new phenomenology of the self rules out Donquixotism. Awareness of social
others prevents Prufrock from making a fool of himself. It is not that a man in the early
twentieth century was mentally incapable of lingering in the chambers of the sea, of
sea-girls song reveries; it is only that human voices wake us and we drown. Self-
fashioning is socially-conditioned. The self is moulded and controlled by external
cultural factors.

By 1922 Eliot had dropped the anti-hero, the contemporary panorama of futility
being an impersonal Waste Land. The formal innovation is radicalised: (there is) no
traditional form or structure, those provided by a single speaking voice representing a
point of view consistently developed through the poem, or a series of events arranged
in temporal or logical sequence and pointing to a foreseen conclusion. Instead, there is
a set of “broken”, disconnected images, resembling a musical conception of poetic
exposition, repetition and development of the parts of a unified creation [24].

The two epigraphs introduce the themes of decay, death, creation and
reinscription. The Sibyl of Cumae, whom Aeneas meets in the underworld (Aeneid, VI),
hearing from her the prophecy of the Roman Empire, is willing to die in Petronius's
version of the episode in his Satyricon. The second epigraph substitutes Pound for the
Provençal poet Daniel Arnaut in Canto XXVI of the Purgatorio, presented as “il miglior
fabbro”, the better craftsman. God had created the world, which in Eliot's time was an
image of hell. Aeneas had created the Roman Empire, which had crumbled down.
Arnaut and Dante, Pound and Eliot, partaking of Art's Purgatorio, are the better
craftsmen, as their works endure forever. The literary tradition, the successive
reinscriptions of the world's Text, are the only forms of transcendence and immortality in
the modern wasteland, in which the voices of prophesy are dead. This seems to be the
parable threading the three motifs into the texture of the poem. In an old, decadent
civilization, of temporary suspension of coherence, like the one that shaped Petronius
(2nd and 3rd century A.D.), only subversive art forms are possible. In chameleon-like
fashion, art mirrors an eccentric carnival world, in which identities have ceased to
coincide with themselves. The Waste Land is a chorus of selfless voices, of fluid
identities merging into one another. Like Trimalchio making his mock-Virgil contribution
to the erudite symposium in the Satyricon, in which the Cyclop is reported to have done
nothing more than twist the fingers of Ulysses with a pair of tongues, and in which
Virgil's prophetess appears in a decrepit condition, hanging in a cage and mocked by
children, Eliot subjects authoritative texts to a double treatment: deconstructive and
reconstructive. The mythical framework includes an alchemical progression from the
putrefactio of the Burial of the Dead service in the Book of Common Prayer, through an
ablutio (passage to white) of a redeeming death by water to the rubedo (passage to red)
of the torchlight red in What the Thunder Said.

The first section is a variation upon the themes of death and resurrection,
contained in the funeral service.

Spring has come again, but to an old man it looks cruel, as in him it cannot work
the same revival as in the dull roots stirred with rain. The complaint of the neurasthenic
speaker, awakened from the comfortable forgetfulness and death-in-life of winter, is
followed, in collage manner, by a conversation in a coffee house in Central Europe. One
of the voices in this polyphonic score is obsessed with genuine birth, true identity – a
recurrent motif in the poem. The ensuing childhood memory seems to have been
borrowed by Eliot from My Past, a volume of recollections published in 1913 by
Countess Marie Larisch, a kinswoman of King Ludwig, who had drowned in
Starnbergersee Lake, near Munich, trying to escape from imprisonment. The mad and
sick Ludwig is resurrected not only in the Countess's account but also as Wagner's
Amfortas, the sick king whom Parsifal heals with the Holy Spear. Several new motifs
have thus been introduced: biological birth, actual death by water, the sickly king whose
impotence is responsible for the sterility of his entire land, the Parsifal artist saving a
moribund civilization through his art. Agnosticism and spiritual alienation are contributed
by an Old Testamental Prophet (Ezekiel, 2:1 and 6:6) and by the exiled Sailor's song in
Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

The next fragment introduces the symbol of resurrection – the hyacinth into which
the youth loved by Apollo and killed by the jealousy of Zephyrus was metamorphosized.
A mortal's admission into the company of the divines is fatal. And even if access to a
transcendent world were possible, its mystery could not be communicated in the
materiality of speech. The heart of light lies beyond words: Looking into the heart of
light, the silence. As well as in his play, Murder in the Cathedral, myths are associated
with speech out of time and with the unsayable.

The failure to render metaphysical experience into words links up with the refusal
of the shepherd to report on the arrival of Isolde, whom the sick Tristan, like another
Amfortas, has summoned to heal him. On hearing the false report, that the see is empty
and deserted, the hero dies.
 Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed' und leer das Meer.

As we can see, motifs already recur, lending the text a musical rather than a
narrative aspect. Eliot's “characters” are not full and stable individualities but
semiological facsimiles. Madame Sosostris, a clairevoyante, resembles the Sibyl in the
Satyricon, in that she is displaced from the vates position through physical
enfeeblement: she has a bad cold. She also resembles her model in being borrowed
from a previous text: the fake fortune-teller in Aldous Huxley's novel, Crome Yellow
(1921). She uses the Tarot pack of cards, said to be of Egyptian origin, but which figure
in fertility rites as ancient as the Rig Veda (see Ch. III of Weston's From Ritual to
Romance). Their mystical symbolism is corrupted by Sosostris, who speaks of them in
existential sentences: Here is the man with three staves, etc. She annuls their esoteric
and universal symbolism by applying them to banal horoscopes of common individuals.
Their magical meaning, that is of subsequent acts of identification, up to a universal
spirit, is the effect of a counter, reconstructive movement of the text. A. C. Partridge
identifies the man with the three staves and the Hanged Man as figures in the Tarot
pack[25], the latter being a king through whose death the fertility of the land is restored.
Eliot himself associates him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to
Emmaus in Part V, that is with Christ, through whose sacrifice mankind was redeemed.

Stephen Coote gives us the history and a description of the Tarot Cards in his T.S.
Eliot. The Waste Land, 1985. He enlarges upon the way in which the cards speak the
language of symbols, of the subconscious, opening doors into the hidden reaches of
the soul. The cards were known in Europe by the late fourteenth century, but their origin
is unknown. Fifty-six out of the seventy-eight pack make up the Lesser Arcana, which
was the source of the present playing cards. The remaining twenty-two cards are the
Greater Arcana, each depicting a symbolic picture or scene. They are mainly fertility
symbols, combining elements of Christian, Celtic, Norse, Islamic imagery. This group
includes the Wheel of Fortune and the Hanged Man, who symbolizes the reversal of
aims and values that should accompany the second half of life. As a matter of fact,
Norse mythology is full of mortals who sacrificed their lives to acquire wisdom or the gift
of prophecy. The god Odin himself hung with his head downwards in order to become
prophet. The reversal is also central to the symbolism of the cards: when actually being
used, the cards may come out upside down from their previous shuffling. If they are
reversed, instead of presenting symbols of the quest for enlightenment, they tell of the
dangers and difficulties that the querent may experience (Ibidem). Adonis, the god of a
fertility cult, was worshipped at Cyprus and Byblus, the holy city of the Phoenicians. It is
the rites at this latter temple that we are reminded of when Eliot talks of Phlebas the
Phoenician (Ibidem). Not only of these rites are we reminded in section IV, but also of
the “Bibliopolis” motif, running like a red thread through the whole poem: “Gentile or
Jew” is, in our opinion, a hint to Shakespeare's antithesis between Shylock and Jessica
(„Gentile”, meaning “Christian” at the time) in The Merchant of Venice. Although “echt
Jew”, Jessica reverses the data of her birth by opting for the Christian world.

Some of the cards are of Eliot's own invention, but whatever he adds is by analogy
with the Tarot symbolical scheme. Phlebas is warned of danger: fear death by water, a
prophecy which is fulfilled. Shakespeare fills in the “Bilbiopolis” parenthesis, which is a
quote from Ariel's song to Ferdinand: Those are pearls that were his eyes. Phlebas's
double is Ferdinand, who goes on the “quest of enlightenment”, from the “eye” to the
“pearl”, from the vision of the traitor father (himself transformed) to the wondered father,
Prospero. Belladonna is probably Fortune, turning her wheel of “situations”. The “Wheel
of Fortune” inspires the fortune-teller’s vision of crowds of people walking round in a
ring, as if resembling a dance of death, with people as prisoners of the mortality
situation. It triggers the “Bibliopolis” counterpoint… What follows is a funeral recital
patched up from various texts: Baudelaire's imagery of the “fourmillante cité”, the
impressive numbers of Death's victims in the Inferno III, the corpse of the wolf in
Webster's White Devil, whose dead body cannot be resurrected.

With the second part, A Game of Chess, the text splits between high life and low
life, between actual speech and interior monologue. The title apparently refers to a
scene in Middleton's Women Beware Women, in which the Duke's procuress plays
chess with a girl's mother while the Duke is seducing the girl upstairs. The hypothesis is
supported by Eliot's note that All the women are one woman. The neurotic lady in the
fashionable boudoir and the cockney girl in the pub house display a similar limited range
of sensibility, experience the same monotonous routine of an uneventful life, suggested
by the vacuous repetitiveness of gestures and words:

The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

The mechanical repetition of good night in the pub scene secures the same effect.
It may also tip our minds in the direction of Ophelia's last speech, fallen in her madness,
like the fine neurotic lady yielding to her cockney variety.

The gentleman is silent, in spite of the lady's exasperated attempts to extort an

answer from him, as silent as Philomel, whose metamorphosis is represented in a
picture hanging from the wall. Deprived of the possibility to tell her story as her tongue
had been cut off, Philomel communicates it through art (weaving a tapestry or singing).
The gentleman's inner monologue is one of literary allusions, as if he had been carried
by the Shakespearean rag of textuality to Art's miraculous metamorphoses of reality. In
a variant of the poem, his answer to her question, do you remember nothing?, is: I
remember the hyacinth garden, which relates the gentleman's silence to the dumbness
induced by the contact with a different ontological order in the hyacinth garden of the
first part. This time, it is not myth but art versus reality. The nerve scene of the modern
alienated couple deconstructs the Renaissance emblem of the game of chess as a
game of love (Ferdinand and Miranda play it in Prospero's brave new world), with its
crafty repartee. The quote from Ariel's song, Those are pearls that were his eyes,
resuscitating the drowned Phoenician Sailor in Sosostris's speech, is the textual index
of the main theme. Ariel is trying to comfort Ferdinand over his father's death, telling him
that the drowned man's sockets are now filled with precious gems of the sea
(symbolizing metaphysical power). If we go to section IV, which is the fulfilment of
Sosostris's warning, fear death by water, we think we can identify an allusion to
Shakespeare's Henry VI… The Duke of Suffolk is warned to avoid death by water. He is
finally killed by a character called “Walter”, and thereby the prophecy is said to have
come true. Truth is validated within language, not in an empirical situation. As well as in
some of his plays, where there are stages disposed on two levels, presenting an overt
and an underlying design of the plot, Eliot is here constructing two orders of reality. The
prophecy of Sosostris is literally fulfilled, the sailor's death in Chapter IV occasioning a
sad memento mori (Remember Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you...),
while, in Shakespeare's play, the prophecy is figuratively fulfilled.

Going back to section III, The Fire Sermon preached by Buddha against the fires
of lust, a third order emerges, that of myth, faith, religion. In Spenser's Prothalamion, the
bridegroom's pray (Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song) celebrates the poet's
noble wedding. The world has decayed ever since, and the river is now a place of litter
and loveless seduction. A similar erosive treatment is applied to the well-known Psalm
137 (By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, there we wept...), the scene being
transposed through a pun to the banks of Lake Geneva, Leman, which also means
“mistress”: By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept..

The quest of Parsifal (O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole, in Verlaine's
sonnet Parsifal) merges with Philomela's onomatopoeic story of Teseus's criminal
violence. Images are welded by some common element (here, the song of innocence)
and simultaneously polarized into sharp contrast (innocence violated).

Eugenides, the one-eyed merchant, possibly a suggestion of spiritual blindness,

enjoys good living, being well-situated in the world of affairs.. He echoes the motif of
“good birth”, legitimized by his name like some documents at sight (eugenics, as a
remedy for the nation's degeneration, was a new and fashionable science at the time).
“Eugenides” means “well-born”: well-born in language (according to the very structure of
the signifier), not in the real world, like echt Deutsch, gentile, Jew (according to some
referent). The counterpointal figure is Tiresias, the seer and prophet. The ancient
prophet is physically blind, as Jupiter has taken his view, but he has acquired spiritual
insight.

Augustine and Buddha are brought together into a joint plea for asceticism, for
people turning away from worldly indulgement (money and sexuality) towards faith.

The last part is saturated with mythical allusion, yet we may say that they are
drawn towards two main force fields. In the Christian mythological structure, the
individual soul is absorbed in an external Saviour, and made dependent upon grace
from above. The disciples on the way to Emmaus do not recognize the resurrected
Christ before He Himself wants them to, allowing their hearts to warm up to him. In the
Vedic mythology, the deity is perceived in the self. Eliot gives it a modern philosophical
correlative: Bradley's philosophy of “centres of consciousness”.

The wasteland imagery is resumed: the barrenness of stony places, the downfall
of the great seats of civilization: Falling towers/ Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria/ Vienna,
London. The Sanskrit ethos of the Upanishads finds no propitious ground in the
alienated and empirical modern world. The meaning of the Thunder fable is found in the
Brihadanariaka Upanishad, Book V, 2. In it, gods, demons and men ask the Creator to
speak to them. He replies “DA”; each group translates it into their private language, and
all of them are reassured of the validity of their interpretation. The meaning of the fable
is either that God does not speak to man in an intelligible language, or, more probably,
that the complete meaning of the divine logos is the sum total of the possible
interpretations in centres of consciousness along time. The texts of the world speak to
all men in all times, incorporating collective meanings (matrices of intersubjectivity)
even if in different languages.

„Datta”, meaning “give”, opens a meditation on a man's bequest The fullness of his
life cannot be recovered in the “obituaries”, “memories” of him, or goods sealed by the
solicitor. “Dayadhvam”, which means to “sympathize”, examines the rapport to other
selves. The compelling picture of modern man's alienation from his fellow beings, each
locked up in the prison of his mind, like modern embodiments of Shakespeare's self-
exiled Coriolanus, wrenches a most pathetic ring from one of the usually dispassionate
voices in the poem:

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

The thick of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.

Only at nightfall, ethereal rumours

 Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus.

Eliot’s English for „Damyata” is “control”. In the above-mentioned Upanishad,

Prajapati or Brahma is defined as the Heart, rendered by three syllables (Hr-da-yam),
the knowledge of which wins one the affectionate response of family, strangers, and
divines. The boat responding gaily to the hand expert with sail and oar in Eliot's poem
(the adverb underlines through its very impropriety the inanimate and inhuman
character of the object) is contrasted with the heart of man responding gaily, when
invited, beating obedient/ To controlling hands. Christianity too turns consciousness into
a passive object of grace: Christ willing his disciples into recognizing him, controlling
them, seeing his disciples “obedient” to his will. The poet's active imagination,
transfiguring the actual world through a tropical discourse, is also in control of the
reader's response, on whom he imposes his own vision.

References:

[21] Richard Ellman, The Identity of Yeats, Faber,1964, pp. 159-160.

[22] Cultural Politics in Contemporary America. Edited by Ian Angus and Sut Jholly, Routledge, 1988, p.
349.

[23] B.C. Southam, A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, Faber & Faber, 1994.

[24] Derek Traversi, T.S. Eliot: The Longer Poems.

[25] A.C. Partridge, The Language of Modern Poetry, Andre Deutsch, 1976, p. 167.

What “control” is given to Christ's apostle, fishing with the arid plane of a
dying civilization behind him? The mythical Amfortas, Tristan, the Fisher King, lying sick
and waiting for the Grail, bear no relation to this active subject, fishing, like Christ's
apostles, for men, attempting to hook their minds. What salvation is still possible, amidst
the crumbling fragments of contemporary civilization? If London Bridge is falling down,
what other bridges can still bring humanity together? What lands of one's own can be
shored up against universal entropy? Following the Lord's advice in Isaiah, 38:1 – Thus
saith the Lord, Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die and not live, the “fisherman”
preaches his new Gospel, which is a collection of quotes, making up a
discontinuous and yet meaningful text, which we shall try to “translate”.

Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli afina (Purgatorio, XXVI, 148)
 The speaker turns towards Arnaut Daniel, Dante's miglior fabbro, better than the
one who created the “arid plane”, producing something more enduring out of the
“affined” demiurgic fire.

Quando fiam uti chelidon – O swallow, swallow

„When shall I be like the swallow?”, reads Pervigilium Veneris, (Vigil of Venus), an
anonymous late Latin poem about Venus and the spring. In some versions of the
legend, Philomel is metamorphosed into a swallow. The Philomel figure is re-echoed
into an inquiry about the possibility of rejuvenescence or rebirth into the beauty of song,
as ransom for life's violence.

Le Prince d'Aquitaine ŕ la tour abolie

This is a literary analogue for London Bridge is falling, provided by Nerval's El

Desdichado, which also plays upon death and recurrence, revival. The speaker is
disinherited, uprooted from the traditions of civilization, but, as well as in Nerval’s
sonnet, he has “twice crossed the Acheron”: into death and back to the life of poetry
(like the literary heroes “twice born and twice buried” in The Phases of the Moon by
Yeats). Disinherited of the real world and reborn to Nerval’s “soleil noir”, the “black sun”
of the imagination. Chronological time is redeemed as recurrent pattern: La
treisieme revienne, c'est encore la premičre.

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad again.

It is these texts, confirming the redeeming force of art, that I mean to hold up
against decay and death, like the believer driving the devil away by holding up the
cross: Hoc signo vincis. Why, then Ile fit you, another voice is heard. You are like
Hieronymo in Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, who makes real the stage of dramatic
performance. You are as mad as he is to exchange reality for its “sacred name”
(Hieronomen). Why not, since this is the fulfilment of a better prophecy than that of
Sosostris which has ended in death. And being well-born in language (Eugenides) is
superior to and endures infinitely longer than the biology of being echt Deutsch. It is
only through language that the origin is known (Brhadanaryaka Upanishad, IV, 1).The
demands of

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata

have been answered. The works of art embody what is highest and most intense in the
individual; it is through them that the seal of the mind is broken and the key to one's
locked room is found, so that others may walk in. The reader will respond more fully to
the fullness of the spirit in a work of art than to an obituary. And this is immortality.

Shantih shantih shantih

 „The peace which passes understanding”, for understanding means subject taking
a passive object into possession, while Brahma is reciprocal communion between the
private and the transcendental subject. As well as the traveller who, setting out for a
long journey, takes a cart or a ship, so do you, Emperor, possess these Upanishads in
your soul – Brhadanaryaka Upanishad, IV, 2 It is only through voice that the origin is
known (Ibidem, IV, 1). The words ending The Waste Land are the formal ending of the
Upanishads – poetic dialogues commenting on the Hindu scriptures of the Vedas.
Eliot's poem is not so much meant to be a picture of contemporary civilization as a
Bildungsstory of the writer growing into a “centre of consciousness” (a seat of the
transcendental subjectivity informing all the texts of the world).

Alchemical symbolism and musical structure are defining for Eliot's next major
poetic achievement. In 1935 he published a poem meditating on time and eternity,
Burnt Norton, to which he added in time three more sequences: East Coker (194o), The
Dry Salvages and Little Gidding (1941). What has thus come to be known as The Four
Quartets does indeed display, through structural parallelisms, the regularity and
discipline of a classical musical score [26]. The Waste Land itself, in its contrapuntal
arrangements and use of leitmotifs, comes close to the experimenting Wagner. As one
can also infer from his 1957 essay On Poetry and Poets, which includes his 1942
lecture on The Music of Poetry, Eliot found music akin to his idea of poetry as a matter
of structure and development of themes rather than of words and sounds.

Each of the four poems, whose imagery scales up an alchemical progression from
the nigredo of Burnt Norton to the rubedo of the Pentecostal Fire in Little Gidding,
stands under the sign of one of the four elements: air, earth, water, and fire. The two
quotes from Heraclitus seem to be pointing towards a possibility to perceive the
fragmentary experience of life as whole and simultaneous:

1. Though the law of reason is universal, the common herd live as though they
possessed a wisdom of their own.

2. The way upward and downward are one and the same.

The flow of private life into the common stream of universal history is the main
theme, all the titles of the four poems being historical places or locales of some
personal interest to the poet. Burnt Norton, with its funeral connotation, was a manor
house near Chipping Campden, which Eliot visited in 1934. He entered the rose garden
of the deserted place, where the sundial, attuned to the eternity of the cosmos, urged
him to redeem the time, the chronological time measured by the clock. In a language
reminding one of Aquinas’s scholastic argument in his Confessions or in The City of
God, Eliot communicates a mystic's intimations of immortality. Man is initially urged to
give up on the sensuous or natural beauty of the rose garden, either by following up the
stairs to the light of revelation (the path of the saint) or downward into St. John's Dark
Night of the soul: the penitent who discards the dross of temporal life. The counter
movement of the disembodied mind (the organizing element is air, the Intellect in
alchemy) takes its revenge upon the abolished earth. It is only art, the perfect order of
speech, that goes beyond the body and soul dichotomy, bridging the real and the ideal,
being and un-being.

It is through discourse that the spiritual origin can be retrieved. East Cocker is the
village in which Eliot's supposed ancestors had lived since the fifteenth century, one of
them being the author of a book on Renaissance self-fashioning: Sir Thomas Elyot's
The Book Named the Governor (1531). Such books did not mirror but create reality. The
models for Hamlet aspiring to live beyond death in Horatio's story were living people,
walking in flesh and blood on the broad stage of history. Eliot quotes Mary Stuart's last
words, En ma fin est mon commencement (In my end is my beginning), revealing the
Renaissance man’s obsession with reputation and with the art of dying, as the scenario
of a mortal being changed into a legend.

The Dry Salvages – the rocks off the Cape Ann, Massachusetts – is one more
attempt to place the individual and family into the pattern of change and immanence.
The third poem is a nostalgic reminiscence of the American scene of the poet's youth.
The strong brown god reaches through Eliot's three ontic orders: the actual river
Mississippi, mythic god and a figure in discourse: the river of Heraclitus, his trope for the
ceaseless flow of time. Once more the fifth part works a reversal of the premises. In
memory, life becomes an orderly, simultaneous, that is spatial pattern. It seems, as one
becomes older,/ That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be mere sequence.

Burnt Norton is a compendium of all possible attitudes to experience, a typology

of humanity, the sensualist, the mystic, the homo faber, the artist, who creates a new
order of reality. East Coker is a vision of space, The Dry Salvages, one of time, whereas
Little Gidding handles the transcendental situation.

“Little Gidding” was the name of a village in Huntingdonshire where Nicholas

Ferar had established an Anglican community consisting of his mother and his brother's
and brother-in-law's families. The chapel in which Charles I is said to have prayed, was
burnt down by Cromwell's troops. From hic et nunc (now and in England), the poem is
pitched to the endless time of regeneration.

... A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light falls

On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

How are the “dying generations” to know what is incarnated in time kairos if not
through the patterned record of history? Mary and Charles Stuart are historically dead
and textually alive. Discourse is a form of incarnation. The Pentecostal fire, that is the
Holy Ghost descended upon Christ's Apostles, dominates the entire sequence. It
purges, it releases one from intimate attachment to the world and makes possible
communication in time between the living and the dead, through the pattern of history,
i.e. through textuality.

In one of the essays included in The Sacred Wood (1920), Eliot inquires into The
Possibility of a Poetic Drama, while acknowledging the necessity for grounding drama in
the life of society: drama is said to be capable of greater variation and of expressing
more varied types of society than any other poetic form. Unlike Shaw, however,
historical framings cannot be set apart from discourse patterning. The nineteenth-
century, he says, had a good many fresh impressions, but it had no form in which to
contain them. Artistic forms are generic, time-bound and collectively produced: The
Elizabethan Age was able to absorb a great quantity of new thoughts and new images,
almost dispensing with tradition, because it had this great form of its own (i.e. the blank
verse) which imposed itself on everything that came to it. (...) No man can invent a
form, create a taste for it and perfect it too (...) To create a form is not merely to invent a
shape, a rhyme, a rhythm, but also a precise way of thinking and feeling (the
appropriate content of this rhyme and rhythm), the temper of the age, a preparedness,
a habit on the part of the public to respond to particular stimuli. Eliot rejects the “hybrid”
sort of drama which sets out to embody some philosophy or social theory (like Bernard
Shaw), opting for a dramatic structure which is simultaneously a precise statement of
life and a point of view, a world which the author's mind has subjected to a complete
process of simplification. In writing a play about Becket (Murder in the Cathedral, 1935)
Eliot retrieves the basic statement of the Church being founded on sacrifice (Christ's
Crucifixion), the point of view (transcendental, in Becket, mundane in the knights) and
the generic form (medieval liturgy). The plot is replaced by ritual and symbolic
patterning.

Eliot's plays assume the philosophical-devotional tone of poetry, which

accompanied the poet's conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927. The language of
repentance in Ash Wednesday (1930), the holy day of the Church at the beginning of
Lent, echoes many phrases in the Bible and the Prayer Book, as well as the lofty and
yet tropical, inspired language of Lancelot Andrewes's sermons. In fact, two of his plays
were commissioned by the Church: The Rock (1933), a pageant play to be performed in
aid of a fund to build forty-five new churches in the growing London suburbs, and
Murder in the Cathedral, written for the Canterbury Cathedral Festival of June 1935,
commemorating the twelfth-century martyred Archbishop Thomas ŕ Becket. They are
related thematically, in that the former muses on the possibilities of founding a church
and keeping up the flame of belief in a secular age, while the latter explores the eternal
rivalry between the servants of God and the servants of kings. Eliot handles a form of
“poetic drama”, in which the ancient Greek, the Elizabethan and the modern-
philosophical varieties are included, to the exclusion of the comedy of “ideas” (from
Shaw to Galsworthy). His use of a chorus, controlling the audience's response,
mediating between stage and audience, is more complex than its ancient precedents.
The chorus is not unchanging and omniscient. In Murder in the Cathedral, for instance,
it shows the progress of common people's consciousness from a state of torpor to
enlightenment. Or it may comment not on what is going on but on the very language of
the play (metalingual function). Here is the Chorus in The Rock:

Out of the sea of sound like music

Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet, and hail of verbal
imprecisions....

There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.

In Murder in the Cathedral, the chant of the priests in Part II is a form of

consciousness superior to that of the chorus of ordinary people, who are Nietzschean
weak men, unable to understand the godly strength of the Superman, even fearing the
approach of revelation, which places them in contact with unbearable spiritual energies.
Were it not for exceptional heroes, the world would never progress. It would remain
what we have always taken it to be. The highest form of consciousness is Thomas ŕ
Becket, swayed to the supreme sacrifice by ideals transcending the mundane order.
Stirred by a hypocritical accusation, Thomas doubts himself for a moment, wondering
whether he is indeed motivated by vanity, by a desire to place himself above common
mortals. He is quickly reassured that he is doing the right thing, not for the wrong but for
the right reason. It is not his personal will but the will of God that has made him its
instrument. The difference between himself and the King’s Knights who murder him is
that he is aware of the divine plan in his martyrdom, while his opponents are, like Judas,
just blind instruments in the hands of God, unconscious shuttles of the eternal design.
The grotesque attempt at self-justification by weighing their deed in terms of material
recompense sinks them beneath the conscious agency of any transcendental scheme.
The Knights and the Tempters remain confined in the order of nature unredeemed.

Eliot's play follows Shakespeare's “recipe” in stressing motivation as much as

behaviour. Likewise, in The Family Reunion (1939), it is not an actual crime that is
played back but a mind's self-introspection, among incomprehensive, conventional
relatives (with the exception of Agatha), leading to the realization that it is not itself that
is diseased, but the world. Eliot's dramatic stage extends, as usual, into three levels of
perception. Unlike the magical countryside of The Countess Kathleen, where demons
disguised as merchants tempt artless and poverty-stricken peasants into selling their
souls, the banal scene of the country house drawing room, with its narrow, empirically-
minded stock figures, roots Eliot's drama in a domestic reality as persuasive as Ibsen's.
However, the plumbing of psychological depths, of liminal states, the mixture of
colloquial and heightened speech in the intense exchanges between Harry and Agatha,
the mythological patterning and superimpositions on action and characters (the
Oresteia in Harry's relationship to his mother, Amy, the Eumenides haunting his
oppressed subconscious) take Eliot's drama one step ahead in the history of twentieth-
century experimentation and innovation.
 THE DISCOURSE OF MODERNIST FICTION

As we proceed to modernist fiction, we can no longer speak of renewal but of

revolutionary experimentation. The formal elements become meaningful in themselves,
structuring not only the discourse but also modes of experience. A new view of history,
of reality, of the self, and of their interrelationshis can be deemed behind the new
narrative modes. Traditional fiction is based upon an unfolding narrative, following a
linear logic of story, told by an omniscient narrator, engaging social-political realities,
and forwarding a teleological design of historical events. The modernist fictional
discourse substitutes spatial form for linear narrative, that is aesthetic ordering
instead of temporal or logical sequence: repetition and variation of motifs, images,
symbols, troping, moments of heightened experience, outside time, coexisting in the
continuum of consciousness. The almost exclusive interest in the phenomenology of the
mind may have been fostered by two contextual factors. On the one hand, there was a
feeling of living in a rapidly changing world, which baffled the mind in its attempt to
make sense of it. The sense of a crisis described by Virginia Woolf in her essay Mr.
Bennet and Mrs. Brown, as having occurred around a date whose precision gives an
impression of catastrophic break with the past (on or around December 10, 1910), was
associated with loss of confidence in the political institutions, in social bonds, in the
social forms which had codified man's behaviour and cultural intercourse. On the other
hand, the more obscure mechanism of politics, whose ropes were being pulled behing
the scenes of overt political action, the unprecedented destructive consequences of
generalized warfare were apt to produce an alienation of the individual from society.

Although coming from the opposite direction of cultural superstructure, the new
framings of subjectivity in the psychological writings of Jung and Freud favoured an
ahistorical perspective with their stress on the subconscious. Archetypal psychology,
tracing the present back to primitive worlds, suggests that true novelty is ultimately
impossible, while Freud's explorations of the subconscious rely mainly on the dream as
an asoziales seelisches Produkt [27]. The emblematic figure of the suppressed social
ego, enrolled in the routine of institutionalised forms, is the soldier, subconsciously
identified with the dehumanising machinery of the war sweeping Europe at the
beginning of the century. At the other end from G. Eliot's Feuerbachised characters,
inscribed in social frames, in an I-thou relationship, we find D. H. Lawrence's
Nietzschean “free moral” or “human moral” counterpoised to the “slave moral” and
“social moral” (John Galsworthy). Ursula Brangwen is fighting back the social other in
her lover, Anton Skrebensky, an officer in the Royal Engineers:

“... I hate soldiers, they are stiff and wooden. What do you fight for, really ?”
 “I would fight for the nation.”

“For all that, you aren't the nation. What would you do for yourself ?”

“I belong to the nation and must do my duty by the nation.

“But when it didn't need your services in particular – when there is no fighting ?
What would you do then ?”

He was irritated.

“I would do what everybody else does.”

“What ?”

“Nothing. I would be in readiness for when I was needed.”

The answer came in exasperation.

“It seems to me”, she answered, “as if you weren't anybody – as if there weren't
anybody there, where you are. Are you anybody, really ? You seem like
nothing to me.”

Peter Walsh, the restless hero of an identity quest, even more than of the ideal
woman (Mrs. Dalloway), records the mechanical movements and vacant looks of the
depersonalised soldiers marching into Hyde Park as the most depressive episode in his
parable of the more genuine, yet repressed, subconscious drives, reaching towards
conscious realization like fishes in the sea, coming up for air. Instead of humanizing
things – in Art and the Individual, Lawrence ascribes art the mission of bringing us into
sympathy with things and phenomena – man sees himself reified, inscribed into an
order of things. Life's vital sap is dried up and stuffed into “social cans” – a theme
threading both fiction and poetic drama (see the complaint of the chorus in The Rock,
by T.S. Eliot, that Life is lost in living, wisdom in knowledge, knowledge in information).
Lawrence's individual is not the realist's social type. What he opposes is social
depersonalisation not impersonality, in the sense of a Nietzschean un-selving. The
relationship of the self to an otherness is oriented towards Jungian archetypes: anima,
the image of the ideal woman buried in the subconscious, the mother-son relationship,
the archetypal moments in life – birth, wedding, death, etc. The artist defines himself as
the “enemy” of society (Wyndham Lewis), living in withdrawal from it, thereby trying to
defend his inwardness as a more genuine mode of experience. This inwardness,
however, is rooted not in the rational representations of private consciousness but in the
archetypes of the collective subconscious, manifested in the symbolical language of
dreams, in psychosexual behaviour, in the fixed, static, ahistorical structure of myths.
The Victorians had dislocated world and self from the logocentric frame, rooting them in
history. The modernists dehistoricize the individual, seeking the fundamental facts of
human existence (birth, growing up, love, death, the struggle between children and
parents, fraternal rivalry) and archetypal personality types: the rebel, the self-made
man, the hunted man, the siren, the witch and femme fatale, the traitor, the snob, the
guilt-ridden figure in search of expiation, the person more sinned against than sinning.
We see Stephen Dedalus in search of a father, painfully trying to expiate the guilt of
having denied his mother's last wish, vacillating between aesthetic snobbery and
genuine artistic calling, rebelling against all biological and social ties. We see Bloom in
search of the lost son, listening to the alternating calls of Molly-Circe and Gerty-
Nausicaa, and we hear Woolf's characters in The Waves progressing from the dawn to
the twilight of their lives. Archetypal figures, like snake, rose, paradisal garden,
innocence or pre-Fall, as well as archetypal themes – quest or search, descent into the
underworld, home-coming, overcoming of difficult tasks, symbolic fertility rites and
redemptive rituals link the otherwise disjunctive narratives of Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce.
D.H. Lawrence, the professed hater of social taboos, undertakes a critique of the
individual's surrender to the alienating institutionalised form of his personality even in a
novel which might be vaguely termed 'historical”, considering it deals with the lives of
three generations. In The Rainbow (1915), Ursula Brangwen tries to resist the tyranny
of social stereotypes, like jingoism, class fixities, family expectations, “disentangling”
herself progressively from social framings of selfhood – father, mother, urban milieu,
England – no less effectively than Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, in order to reach a vital,
Nietzschean identification with the maternal womb of being. His essay on John
Galsworthy goes so far as to identify a lapserian script in the collapse from the
psychology of the free human individual into the psychology of the social being, just as
the fatal change in the past was a collapse from the freeman's psyche to the psyche of
the slave. To the fragmentation into the myriad social stereotypes, Lawrence, whose
knowledge of Nietzsche had been mediated by his wife, Frieda von Richthofen,
opposes a mystical experience of unselving and Dionysian Oneness within the
relatedness of all things, flows and changes and trembles like a stream (Surgery for the
Novel – or a Bomb). The business of art, he writes in Morality and the Novel, is to
reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe at the living moment...
The writer will seize on moments of crisis, not in the character's social existence but in
his understanding, emotion, passion, rendering, through repetitions and merging
images, the to-and-fro workings of the mind reaching up towards self-realization.
Lawrence drops “object and story”, proposing the “exhaustive method” whereby vivid
scenes are created of objects in the light of emotion and in the language of feeling. The
narrator tells the story from the point of view of some character or other, finding
objective correlatives for his or her emotional response to scenes and events: the
peacock, the rainbow or the plumed serpent for the colour spectrum of free
individualities as against the stark white light of social uniformity; the serpent as the
continuum of the collective subconscious, wrangling back to primitive, mythical worlds;
the queuing people like a serpent, echoing the ancient Dionysian chant of the multitude
in Sea and Sardinia; the immense and ruddy moon, suddenly shooting forth from the
rim of the sand hills, waking Paul to an awareness of his desire for the frigid, religious
Miriam in Sons and Lovers etc.

The self is seen as fragmented, either split between subconscious drives and
conscious realization, or as only one hue in the spectrum of the complete human
personality. As well as in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, the self is no longer the old
stable ego (letter to Edward Garnett, June 1914), but a fluid, empirical reality, a
perpetual unfolding in time, space and causality, going through what Lawrence calls
“allotropic states”. If one removes the social mask, one can trace the multiple faces of
personality back to the same radically unchanged element. His novels are based on
antithetic pairings, repeated motifs and contrasts, on symbolic codes, so that characters
fill in a complete paradigm of human types. In Sons and Lovers, Paul's experiences
reveal to him a complete range of female typology: an intellectual and religious woman,
a passionate sensualist, an authoritative mother. In Women and Love, the individual is
embedded in an affined “circumambient” society: the mining world of Gerald Crich, Lady
Hermione Roddice's intellectual banquet in her country house, the artists' Cafe
Pompadour in London. Another binary pair, male/female, is brought in support of
marriage as a fundamental human event, fulfilling the individual's aspiration towards
completion. Tom Brangwen's “hymn” to marriage as the fulfilment of the human
personality in a heterosexual Angel-figure is not less serious for being uttered through
the vapours of the brandy served at his stepdaughter's wedding ceremony (The
Rainbow).

Wyndham Lewis's pseudo-couple, Hanp and Arghol, are a version of the

archetypal opposition between servant and master in early modernist guise [28], with
many literary antecedents (Faust and Mephistopheles, Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza). Echoing predicaments contained in Lewis's 1925 essay, The Physics of the
Non-Self, Arghol defines art as a manifestation of the non-self, of the anti-Cartesian and
anti-romantic self-worshipper, illustrating his idea with a favourite figure of the time: the
shells and carapaces in antithesis to life's messy guts, vital organs (Ibidem). Bloom's
Rabelaisean amplification on the “vital organs” topic in his kitchen (Ulysses) is a
symptom of his reality-oriented mind whereas Stephen's “playing” with insubstantial
surfaces – a visionary rose, the dappled dawns, the mirror flashing back his face for
social others – are the “objective correlatives” of his escapism and pose as priest of the
imagination. Peter Walsh and Clarissa Dalloway are “allotropic states” of the same
basic element, considering that they communicate perfectly at some deep, intuitive
level, while their conversations are verbal wars, sharp exchanges, which, on the social
level, distort their genuine feelings and thoughts beyond recognition. Christopher Gillie's
comment on the scene in which Mrs. Morel, turned out of doors by her drunken
husband (Sons and Lovers), is restored to her high spirits by the genial atmosphere in
the garden, ends with the following conclusion: What we see happening to her in the
garden is more subtle than a process of surface healing; it is reconstitution, from a
deeper level of the self, by means of an experience which is more powerful in its
positive action than the destructive experience which she has suffered. This ability to
use environment, especially natural life, to show the workings of that part of the psyche
which lies beyond the rational mind gives Lawrence an unprecedented power to present
the deeper experience of inarticulate characters [29].

The modes of structuring the experience of the self between 1910-1930 as

moments of heightened awareness are remarkably similar, testifying to the existence of
a unitary mode of vision, but the formal realization is substantially different. Such
moments of aesthetic apprehension, of the realization of the meaning or what-ness of
outside objects and events, are called “moments of being” by Virginia Woolf, spots of
time or “epiphanies” by James Joyce, “living moments”, by Lawrence. The epiphanies
are accompanied by authorial indications of the character's subjective perceptions. The
epiphanies in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce, are subjective
records of impressions consistently realized through a certain rhetorical scheme, which
is meaningful in itself: epanodos or antimetabole, that is repetition of words in converse
order, suggesting the psychological drive in the character, from outwardness towards
inwardness.

With D.H. Lawrence, we can speak of a multiplicity of perspectives on events or

points of view. James Joyce expands enormously the narrative techniques in the
exploration of consciousness. Katie Wales [30] finds an original point of development in
Joyce's Dubliners, a collection of stories, leading to his later Portrait, which she calls
focalization. The narrator is building his characters in language, keeping close to their
points of view but also characteristic language. A certain life-style is forced into a
specific literary style. The “deliberate meanness” Joyce mentions in a letter to his
publisher, Grant Richards, the impoverishment of expression, the monotonous
sequences of short main clauses, the obsessive repetitions, juxtapositions are justified
by the drabness of the Dublin world, by the characters' irresolution, incapacity to break
with the paralysing environment of a frustrated and degraded community. Joyce's
evolution towards stream of consciousness and interior monologue appears to be
an original development – a combination of focalization and free indirect discourse, or
reported interior monologue, followed by a shift from third-person to first-person
narrative – rather than a tribute to Edouard Dujardin and Proust. Joyce's uncommon
experimental imagination carries him, in fact, beyond the modernist model, into the
writing of Finnegans Wake, appreciated by Brian McHale as proleptically postmodern
[31]. McHale defines the two phases of twentieth-century literature as a shift from
epistemology (How can I interpret this world of which I am a part ? And what am I in it?
) to the post-cognitive question: What world is this ? What is to be done in it? Which of
my selves is to do it? The epistemological quest engages a retrospective narrator,
who is trying to make sense of his own experience, as it comes back to him from
moments of intense awareness or “epiphanies”, falling into an intelligible pattern.
Postmodernism is agnostic, playing on ontic discontinuities, on the end of all history,
repeatedly troping on the apocalypse. Actual history is framed as a timeless reservoir of
events and personalities, cyclically generated from a basic set of configurations: And so
with its polyphony of recycled voices, none privileged over the other, it rewrites “its
wrunes for ever”[32]. There is no pattern of character, no structure of themes, only
anonymous, non-agentive, protean morphology. The “carbon” element of personality is
now the “celves”, that is the selves as a non-hierarchical set of cells, as empty matrices
seeding in time. Characters are no longer cast within typological frames but mapped
onto bits of selfhood. The legendary Finn McCool, believed, like Arthur, to be a
wondering figure in time, is resurrected as the New York Irishman, Tim Finnegan,
revived at his own funeral. “Wake” means “vigil” but also “course” – the cyclic pattern of
history. Speech reaches backwards to a time before Babel, to a unique, universal
language. A polyglot idiom, combining words from different languages, syllables,
telescoped forms, quotes. Polymorphous, anti-narrative, ludic, language grows
monstrous, enjoying the perfect freedom of the eternal act of speech: the dream in
which all the languages are present, as infinite differences without positive terms,
replacing the symbolic codes of the collective subconscious – humanity's mythic
repository of the archetypal imagination.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) epitomizes modernism in its purest expression, both

as artistic manifesto and life-style: a reaction against the establishment, group cohesion
and mannerism, elitist aloofness from the world of politics, aesthetic guerilla. The
“Bloomsbury Group”, which she founded with her husband in Gordon Square, flourished
in the first two decades of the century, and decayed in the thirties, under the serious
attacks from writers who were seeking anchorage in the pressing social realities of the
time. At the end of this anti-modernist decade, Virginia Woolf ended her life in the River
Ouse, feeling no one can “live with one's nose pressed against a door”, that is, with no
vision of the future or the necessary resources to give it shape.

Virginia Woolf grew up among celebrities. Her parents' spacious countryside

residence, Talland House at St. Ives in Cornwall, was visited by George Meredith,
Henry James, and Thomas Hardy, among others. At the age of twenty-two, she
changed her London residence, moving from 22 Hyde Park Gate to Bloomsbury, the
future seat of the vanguard intelligentsia. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, in whom
she found an ideal companion and professional guide. Their residence became the
meeting place of a circle of artists and thinkers, among whom, the philosopher G.E.
Moore, the economist Maynard Keynes, the art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell, the
painters Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. In opposition to the establishment, which
supported Kipling, Bennet, Galsworthy or John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, The
Bloomsbury Group cultivated a sceptical, socially non-committed and rather amoral
aestheticism. They created their own world, an intense, exclusive world, where they
flourished like hothouse plants. Here they acquired their characteristic delicacy, subtlety
and independent boldness, but also the somewhat artificial qualities and the limitations
to which any sect is liable. Perhaps they had no conscious intention of cutting
themselves off from the rest of the world; but chance had surrounded them with so
many treasures and had so amply satisfied their taste for excellence that they were
unconsciously led to neglect any broader, more diffuse sort of experience [33].

The liberal financial resources and the absence of children allowed Virginia Woolf
to dedicate herself entirely to hatching fictional worlds in the rather dispassionate
chambers of her mind. “Consciously elaborating” would probably be a more appropriate
term, since, unlike the great majority of writers, who articulate an aesthetic theory at the
end of their careers, Woolf began by writing criticism. As early as 1903 she was a
contributor to “Times Literary Supplement”, the bulk of her essayistic writing coming out
in six volumes: The Common Reader (in two volumes, 1925 and 1932), The Death of
the Moss and Other Essays (1942), The Moment (1947), The Captain's Deathbed
(1950), Granite and Rainbow (1958).
 Matthew Arnold and W.B. Yeats had defined aesthetic oppositions in psychological
terms – outward drive or inwardness –, without giving them a philosophical grounding. It
was Virginia Woolf's new ideas of reality and the self that prompted her distinction
between the Edwardian materialists (Bennet, Galsworthy, Wells), concerned with the
external details or the material aspects of life, and the Georgian spiritualists (Joyce,
Eliot, Lytton Strachey, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster) in Modern Fiction (1919) and Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924), who were exploring the mind's mitigations with reality,
irrespective of the traditional laws of “probability, or coherence”. From objective
existence, reality is transferred to an object of consciousness, while the rational and
stable ego is exploded into a synthesis of perceptual horizons.

Woolf's narrative technique is commonly called “stream of consciousness” and

associated with William James's pragmatist thought. Maybe the characterization
requires some qualifications. It is obvious, from Woolf's famous intimation in A Room of
One's Own, a sociological essay of 1929, that she has in mind a Husserlian retentional
consciousness rather than a Jamesian “stream” of empirical sensations, a thread of
sensations strung out in a straight line. Consciousness is based upon interpretational
perceptions rather than on mechanical physiological responses. Our grasp on reality is
based upon a perspective, on something originally structured, not on mere sensations.
There are moments (Eliot's or Joyce's “epiphanies”) when the production of meaning
transforms everything which had gone before. Unlike James's fluid consciousness,
moving from one sensation to another, in the total absence of any structure of
continuity, Woolf's representation of the mind is an interweave of pasts and presents. It
is not the thing that comes under our senses but our perspectival perception of it that
stabilizes it into some permanent structure of consciousness:

What is meant by “reality”? It would seem to be something very erratic, very

undependable – now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the
street, now a daffodil in the sun... But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes
permanent, that is, what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the
hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I
think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality.

(A Room of One's Own)

It is the permanent transcendence and modification of the empirical present

through past horizons that accounts for the contradictory aspect of the perceptual self:
superficially random yet “patterned” on a deeper level of consciousness:

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall,
let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which
each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.

(Modern Fiction)
 From a physiological point of view, an aeroplane or a limousine produces similar
impressions. In Mrs. Dalloway, the object of perception is never the naked thing but an
object hermeneutically situated. It is interpreted in a different way by different subjects,
the present perception is determined by individual past experiences, the past itself is
modified by present states of mind – yet all these perspectival frames can be
understood because, as Merleau-Ponty says in The Prose of the World, we are
moments of the same syntax... we belong to the same Being – the conceptual
frameworks of culture. Whereas we agree with Kate Flint[34] that Woolf's representation
of consciousness is not a “continuous flow”, “stream” being an improper term, we do not
agree with the “cyclical and repetitive” pattern either. There is always a deflection, a
distance from the past as it was one day, which is never completely nullified. The past
moment does not “recur” as identical, it only serves as a perceptual background for new
experience. Woolf's subject is always hermeneutically situated. The five characters
standing for as many perspectives on reality in The Waves (1931) evolve between the
reality-bound Percival and Bernard, the chameleonic artist as the embodied interpreter,
who invades the boundaries of their personalities, making them intelligible in discourse.
The narrative voice is permanently mediating meaning, between depth psychology and
the character's self-awareness, between the individual centre of consciousness and the
other characters, or the reader. It is chameleonic, seeking to represent consciousness
in two types of discourse: One is interior monologue, in which the grammatical subject
of the discourse is an “I” and we, as it were, overhear the character verbalizing his or
her thoughts as they occur. (...) The other method, called free indirect style, goes back
at least as far as Jane Austen, but was employed with ever-increasing scope and
virtuosity by modern novelists. It renders thought as reported speech in the third
person, past tense, but keeps to the kind of vocabulary that is appropriate to the
character and deletes some of the tags (like “she thought”...) that a more formal
narrative type would require. This gives the illusion of intimate access to a character's
mind, but without totally surrendering authorial participation in the discourse. These
definitions by David Lodge (The Art of Fiction, Penguin Books, 1992) focus formal
elements, while smoothing over epistemological distinctions. There certainly is a great
difference between the I-narrator in David Copperfield or even Tristram Shandy and
Molly's “monologue” in Ulysses, between Austen's realism, making a demand of
accurately reproducing mannerisms of speech, and Woolf's exploration of
consciousness. The formal effects thereof in the modernist novels are the
fragmentation of syntax, the unexpected transitions and juxtapositions, instead of logical
development, the shifts from present to past tense etc., in imitation of the random
associations and capricious workings of the mind. We are not going to speak of “free
indirect style” with Woolf or Joyce, but of “stream of consciousness” in a perceptual and
linguistic self.

Perception and discourse making are merged into one another in Woolf's nine
novels, stories and sketches. As the vague “sign”, the ineffable void marker of
semiology, in The Mark on the Wall, an early story, evolves metamorphically in the
observer's mind, gradually encompassing all forms of existence, material and ideal,
towards the spiralling of the finally identifiable snail, the reader has a feeling of the
enormous power of language to render the deepest recesses of subjectivity. Starting
from the surface impressions of a mark noticed on the wall, the narrator goes back in
time to some point of origin – an object, a circumstance, an action – which could serve
as possible signifieds. Unlike Bennett's Mrs. Brown, Wolf's subject journeys within the
mind, trying to retrieve the world from a semiological system. The mark is related to the
actual things it might stand for – a nail, a rose leaf, a crack in the wood –, showing that
real things fall outside ourselves, unintelligible and dead. It is the semiological utopia
that engages our imagination and makes possible a holistic approach to reality. Only the
“lighthouse” of memory and art can retrieve, in Proustian fashion, the actual experience
of people and events. In To the Lighthouse (1927), as well as in The Waves, light is the
symbol of human consciousness flashing upon the chaotic and meaningless leviathan-
world.

The light-darkness polarity is Woolf's favourite imagistic correlative for life and
death, consciousness and the subconscious, sanity and insanity: I want to give life and
death, sanity and insanity, she jotted down in her diary as the project of her 1925 novel,
Mrs. Dalloway. Within a time span of twenty-four hours in London, the two sets of
characters centred on Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith evolve
alternately, coinciding momentarily at different points in space and time made concrete
by objects, people and scenes which flash across their consciousness. Clarissa, the
“perfect hostess” of the Westminster high-life residence, emerges as a bit of a snob in
the airy attic of her Apollonian ego. Her individualistic and independent frame of mind
and a tendency to gratify the taste of the social ego for luxury and aristocratic eminence
had urged her to crush her possibilities for passionate fulfilment, choosing to marry the
mediocre but politically influential Richard Dalloway. At the other end of the spectrum,
Septimus, the social destitute, represents the dark side of the spirit, immured in visions
of horror. He cannot escape his memories of the war, the death of his closest friend, the
feeling of life's absurdity, which finally leads him to suicide. And yet, at the climactic
point of the story, when the Dalloways residence is honoured by the presence of the
Prime Minister in the flesh, Clarissa herself, moved by the news of his death, can only
feel envious of his courage which had put an end to life's loneliness, and it is only with
difficulty that she manages to return to her glamorous guests instead of following his
example. The superficial crust of social appearances splits up, revealing the unexpected
spiritual affinities between the two protagonists. Clarissa has been unable to establish
any bridges, any true emotional links between herself and the others. Her husband has
his own independent life, insensitive to the possibility of Clarissa feeling hurt by his visits
to a woman who deliberately shuts her out. Her daughter is equally estranged from her,
seeking the company of Mss Killman, an old maid and a hypocrite, who lessons her in
piety and morality. Her present loveless and conventional life is the sad counterpoint of
to her youth, when she had known genuine love and friendship, in the company of Sally
and Peter Walsh, with his dreams of social renewal, even if they had been filtered
through vague readings of the French Revolution legacy: Shelley, Morris.

The action is anything but spectacular. Clarissa goes out in the fresh morning to
buy flowers for her party, while her mind's incursions into the past exceed by far her
limited actual movements in space. Peter Walsh, the man she once rejected and who is
still in love with her, is back from India, to see about the divorce formalities necessary
for his second marriage to the wife of a Major in the Indian army. Although a failure in
point of social success – sent down from Oxford, failed socialist reformer, failed lover,
failed marriage – Peter Walsh is the moral centre of the novel, who can see through
Clarissa – the frustrated woman, confined to her room with a single bed as if to a
nunnery –, and into the shallowness and corruption of the high political circles, the
ineffectual social institutions, the collapse of values in a decaying Empire. He has been
working his way through life with a zest for passionate involvement and is now ready to
derive from aging itself the advantage of the enlightenment which comes with looking
back upon one's experience: the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence –
the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light. However it
is through image rather than statement that Woolf approaches the imperial theme. The
political aspect is superseded by the universally human question. Peter Walsh brings
back with him the vivid memory of his last love affair, the woman with her two children,
who pale under the impact of his new meeting with Clarissa. The rest of India is to him
just a matter of plains, mountains, epidemics of cholera. The Empire feeling, as Kipling
had worded it, was gone. This is Peter's perception of the young soldiers marching up
Whitehall to pay their homage to the empty tomb and the exalted statues, Nelson,
Gordon, Havelosk:

A patter like the patter of leaves in a wood came from behind, and with it a
rustling, regular thudding sound, which as it overtook him drummed his thoughts, strict
in step, up Whitehall, without his doing. Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with
their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression
like the letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude,
fidelity, love of England.

Walsh knows that the show deserves respect, but also that such noble ideas have
been emptied of any meaning by the worthless politicians and shallow high-life society
of the day. The mere association of high imperial politics and mundane gossip has a
strong deconstructive effect; the pun on “acting” is very suggestive:

He would go to Clarissa's party, because he wanted to ask Richard what they

were doing in India – the conservative duffers. And what's being acted ? And music...
Oh yes, and mere gossip.

With Woolf, reality dissolves into subjective framings of it. The record of the
conflicting reactions to the progress of a limousine with its blinds drawn, carrying some
high personage to a mysterious destination, seems to interrogate not only the present
lack but also the very possibility for the existence of community values. To Clarissa, the
pageant of royalty is a cause for emulation: she too is going to give a party that evening,
standing at the top of the stairs, among candelabra, glittering stars, and the gentlemen
of England, like those in Buckingham Palace. The people she disparagingly calls
“middle class” are crowding round the car, to take a closer look, blocking the street. The
policemen salute, raising their arms and jerking their heads, a loyal Irish-woman is
prevented by the constable's stern look from tossing a bunch of roses into the street.
The way in which her familiar language appropriates royalty is the very counterpoint to
Clarissa's class-conscious revolt at seeing her majesty blocked by the “mob”:

Shawled Moll Pratt with her flowers on the pavement wished the deer boy (it was
the Prince of Wales for certain) and would have tossed the price of a pot of beer – a
bunch of roses – into St. James's Street out of sheer light-heartedness and contempt of
poverty had she not seen the constable's eye upon her, discouraging an old Irish-
woman's loyalty.

The hyperbolic style obliquely mocks the rigid imperial consciousness of the
British: the passing car sends vibrations into the glove shops and tailor's shops which
not even instruments capable of transmitting shocks in China can register; people think
of the dead; of the flag; of the Empire... A Colonial responds in an unorthodox way,
insulting the House of Windsor, which causes a brawl. An aeroplane racing and
swooping aimlessly in the sky delights a child, baffles people who expect a secret
message from its smoke looping, while to Mr. Bentley it appears as a “symbol of the
human soul”, of man's determination and capacity to rise above the here and now
through speculation, like the contemporary scientists who had revolutionized physics
and biology – Einstein and Mendel. The shrewd manipulation of language and point of
view is permanently shifting the emphasis from reality to the mind's constitution of it.
And this constitutive self is permanently changing, modified by and modifying its past
history, unable to rationalize its subconscious drives. According to Walsh, nothing exists
outside us except a state of mind, the self is but the cry of the occasion. He had thought
his love of Clarissa was dead and yet how easily does his affectionate representation of
Daisy get swamped at the sight of his London hostess.

The future certainly belongs to young people like those soldiers, who believe in
abstractions, as Peter Walsh had believed in his early socialist ideas, but Walsh is also
ready to acknowledge the complexities of life. The “marble stare” of defeated
temptations is not easy to achieve against the “troubles of the flesh”, nor can the gods
who hurt and thwart human lives be put out by the sceptical Clarissa by merely
behaving “like a lady”. Peter's representation of subjectivity is obviously inspired by
recent developments in depth psychology:

For this is the truth about our souls, he thought, our self, who fish-like inhabits
deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant
weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable;
suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has
a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.

The truth about characters lies beneath the discursive, often also beneath the
conscious level. Peter and Sally understand each other without the help of letters, Peter
understands Clarissa in spite of her words. As the Bradshaws tell the story of the
suicide, Clarissa feels how her shield of marital happiness and prosperity, of freedom
and achievement melts away, releasing the previously unacknowledged anxieties eating
at her heart even when she feels most secure, in the vicinity of power and greatness,
among Peter's typical Englishmen: dressing up in gold and doing homage. At the top of
the social hierarchy, which her rational will has prompted her to scale, Clarissa suddenly
feels the irresistible need of a Dionysian identification with the whole Being:

Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the
impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them. Closeness drew
apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

Virginia Woolf's tragic death, as well as the occasional remarks in her diary about
the futility or even crime of having children encourage us to think that some of her
deepest anxieties went into the making of Septimus – the man shocked and emotionally
crippled by the horrifying experience of the war. Major writers, nevertheless, are aware
of the necessity to ensure their artistic universe a coherence which may be missing in
the real world. The labyrinth is provided with Ariadne's thread, the jungle, with a golden
bough (which shows the way). Even an absurd destiny is given an individual not a
universal justification. Clarissa had given up on opportunities for sympathetic
communication, choosing a self-sufficient husband, only interested in sports and horses.
The oppressive outward show of hypocritical masks in the midst of which she spends
her life breeds in her an irresistible need for genuine spiritual identification.
Metaphorically speaking, she spends her whole life musing among the vegetables, as
Peter used to mock her, in their youth, while he prefers real men to caulliflowers. Peter
may be a failure but the possibility of his being in love makes her painfully envious.

Characters evolve in a hermeneutic circle. Interpretations of events are

conditioned by contexts constituted out of the flux of previous perspectives. Septimus's
framings of the world are conditioned by his memories of war:

For the truth is (...) that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity
beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs. Their
packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness. They desert the
fallen. They are plastered over with grimaces.

Traumatic experiences had accustomed him to the show of death, taking off the
edge of pain. If he could feel nothing any longer when Evans got killed, he infers that it
might be possible that the world itself is without meaning. The war had transformed him
into an animal glad to survive, hastily marrying an Italian girl only because she seemed
to be of the most joyous disposition, and therefore capable to make him forget the past.
His constitutional frames are as biased and onesided when they are applied to an
originally structured object. He seeks arguments for his misanthropy in his readings of
Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Dante's Inferno. But Shakespeare's play is
also one about moral redemption and heroic triumph, while Dante's “Inferno” is followed
by “Paradiso”. The essence of the Woolfian character is its interpretational nature. To
Septimus, even inanimate objects seem to prey upon him, and even the ancient and
Renaissance humanists speak a madman's massages:
 How Shakespeare loathed humanity – the putting on of clothes, the getting of
children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! (...) Dante, the same. Aeschylus
(translated) the same (...) Love between man and woman was repulsive to
Shakespeare. The business of copulation was filth to him before the end. But, Rezia
said, she must have children. They had been married five years (...) One cannot bring
children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of
these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities,
eddying them now this way, now that.

The course of the narrative is not like that of a river but planned and assembled
from bits of experience that round off a meaningful perspective on characters and
events. This is how Virginia Woolf herself defines her narrative method in her Diary: my
tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it. The sort
of selection the author makes in the lives of the characters shows an interest in major,
archetypal moments which shape a destiny and a kind of relationship with the world
(loves, marriages, death). The associative thought process (in the opening paragraph,
the present fresh morning calls to mind another, an order to remove some doors from
their hinges reminds of a squeak of the hinges overheard a long time ago, etc.) is
rendered through a blend of narrative and figural discourse, of the authorial voice and
the character's colloquialisms, qualifications and the hesitations of a faulting memory:

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut
out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were
coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to
children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little
squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French
windows and plunged at Burton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this
of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave;
chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she
did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was going to happen;
looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising,
falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?” –
was that it ? – “I prefer men to cauliflowers” – was that it?

Woolf's shift from stream of consciousness to interior monologue in The

Waves contributes an impression of the interconnectedness of all Being, of all empirical
selves in the transcendental intersubjectivity of story-telling. One's self-fashioning does
not conflict with one's image for others – for identity is built in structures of
intersubjectivity – but the sense perceptions of the same events are intensely private.
The novel is a sequence of six “dramatic soliloquies”, as the author calls them,
interspersed with interludes produced by an impersonal voice, which describes shifting
patterns of light and water, passing from dawn to dusk, building a symbolic cosmic
background for the aging characters, gradually approaching death. The sea trope had
been used by Virginia Woolf before. In the 1915 novel titled A Voyage Out, Rachel
Vinrace, a ship-owner's daughter, motherless, living withdrawn in the narrow circle of
her family, is sailing on one of her father's boats, the “Euphrosyne”. On this boat, which
is an emblem of the loneliness of human life, the characters escape from the setting of
space and time within which we usually inscribe our lives, and become mere centres of
feeling, consciousness, reduced to what is purely inward. The port of Santa Marina has
the same out-of-this-world character – a lost island, connected by ships and letters to a
world dimly perceived in consciousness. The outside world is bedimmed, while the mind
of the character becomes the real centre, articulating a pilgrimage in a subjective time
and place. A malignant fever ends Rachel's uneventful life, shaped by reading more
than by actual experiences.

The lifespan of the six characters in The Waves is similarly uneventful, the stress
falling again on the movements of their thoughts and emotions. The anthropomorphic
dawns, making one suspect the presence of a woman behind the sea line, lying
horizontally and holding up a burning taper, is the symbol of the children's awakening to
self-consciousness and awareness of the world around them, while the final wave
breaking on the shore accompanies the extinction of Bernard's consciousness, the
broadest in the novel. The polyphonous texture of the six interrelated discourses strings
out internalized impressions of the world, representing the record of the tide of reality
reaching consciousness.

The earliest sense impressions of the characters (I see... I hear...) are selective,
prefiguring their typological patterning as grown-ups. Susan is the domestic sensualist,
enjoying life in its earthly, vital aspects, seeking fulfilment in the biological continuity
leading from father to children. Virginia Woolf has a realist's eye for the scenes of
domestic rural life, with its characteristic groupings (Susan's father, a priest, in a
pastoral communion with the farmers), with its work in the field or in the kitchen, down to
the minutest and picturesque details of winter preserves. Jinny takes an absorbing
interest in her body, luxury, and hedonistic enjoyment of life. Moving from one intense
experience to another, she maintains herself on an epidermic level of reality, seeking
acclaim, dazzling superficial impressions, and the assurance of her beauty flashing
back from windows and looking-glasses. Neville, the decadent aesthete, remains
intensely private. Louis is the homo faber, the successful commercialist who believes in
the enterprising spirit that builds civilizations, making history. A Brisbane banker's son,
mortified by his Australian accent, he is repeatedly baffled by the divination of an
unwritten set of values and an underground current of sensibility running in all ancient
cultures, which escape the power of money. It is his outsider condition that favours his
love relationship with Rhoda – the orphaned and unadapted hypersensitive nymph,
floating unattached in a world in which things and people alike seem to be jumping at
her all the time. The sense of cosmic terror and the inability to appropriate the cultural
codes whereby man assumes control of the physical world finally lead her to suicide.

Woolf's range of narrative styles, from realistic detail to expressionistic prose in the
“construction” of Rhoda is absolutely remarkable. The ironic portrait of Percival, patched
up from the characters' allusions to him, shows reality as the wrong object of the quest
for values (the character's name recalls the medieval seeker of the Grail or the elixir of
life). The young hero of the sportsground, who despises anything that is counterfeited –
or, the whole of culture is built in divorce from nature and above it – goes to India as the
administrator of the British Empire, ingloriously dying by falling off his horse. The
philosophy of Bernard, the archetypal story-teller, mirrors the intersecting trends of
thought at the beginning of the century, whose joint effect was what Ronald E. Martin
(American Literature and the Deconstruction of Knowledge) calls the “deconstruction of
knowledge”. Phenomenology, the analytical philosophies, or fictionalism deny the
existence of general truths, because man's perceptions are his own. There are
differences between the individuals' perceptions, there are nuances and differences in
what people experience when they witness the same phenomena, and, besides, there
is an inescapable element of self-projection in whatever the subject sees or knows.
Meaning is only possible in language, in an artificial construct. Man is a meaning being
and the nature of meaning is worth exploring more than the meaning of nature. As
Woolf jotted down in her Diary (November 28, 1928), the novel does away with exact
place and time. Experience is distilled into meaningful, epiphanic moments: what I want
now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, and
superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a
combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from
the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business
of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.
Bernard feels that it is only by telling stories about things, that the sense of incoherence
is replaced by that of a hidden connection, binding all things together. His words and
phrases have an autonomous existence. They come into his mind independently of
actual experiences, and they are recorded for future use, serving therefore not for
communicative or pragmatic but purely expressive (aesthetic or constitutive) purposes.
Bernard lives in the world which he creates in language: stories about his friends he has
known for a life time, but also about the people he runs into in trains, in public places,
while trying to imagine what their lives may be like. “Unvanquished and unyielding”, he
is the true Percival who exorcizes Death the Enemy by naming him.

JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941) spins the narrative teetotum of the last century. The
concluding remarks on Joyce in Christopher Gillie's survey of the Movements in English
Literature. 1900-1940 are as categorical and memorably worded as they are
disconcerting: No one can doubt the originality of Joyce's genius. Yet a reader mat still
doubt whether his whole enterprise was not based on a false premise: that a work of art
is absolute, superseding our reality by including it, instead of serving our reality by
extending it. The great works of art, back to Homer, have all been fertile of later art:
Joyce's last two works seem to stand aloof, monuments of language in a desert, of
citadels of words defying the cities of life [35]. The “two works” alluded to are Ulysses
(1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), and what one can safely predicate about them is
that they achieve more in the way of fertilizing the future than culminating the past.
What T.S. Eliot saw in the immediate impact of Ulysses was the way in which the
Homeric pattern could be employed in order to redeem the “trivia” of the everyday in the
life of a common contemporary Dubliner. What we see today, at a remove from the time
of the novel's publication, is the deconstructive strategy whereby the figures of the
Homeric hero and of the “wandering Jew” are demythologised in the person of an
advertising canvasser, while the artist, the modern Daedalus, builds not a physical but a
moral labyrinth without a guide (Ariadne's thread) or escape (wings).

In the third chapter of Ulysses (Proteus), Stephan Dedalus begins by playing upon
two German words, “nacheinander” and “nebeneinander”, and by conflating space and
time in an Einsteinian continuum of consciousness (passing through very brief space-
times). The two words crop up in a famous passage of Nietzsche's Jenseits von Gut
und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil), which may be considered the cornerstone for the
subsequent development of philosophical thought in the direction of poststructuralist
deconstruction. Nietzsche denies the existence of the logocentric issues, that is, of the
fixed categories of thought and language ordained by God which govern relationships.
The centrality of the logos, as an ontological principle, generates precise rules of order
and succession („after one another”, “next to each other”) in metaphysics as well as in
the real world. Nietzsche, in his proleptic deconstructive manifesto, exposes such
logocentric hierarchies as mere fictions of the imagination. There is no Divine Maker of
the world we live in, only makers of discourse about the world, whereby the actual
“Protean” world is assimilated to the order of the spirit: Wir sind es, die allein die
Ursachen, das Nacheinander, das Füreinander, die Relativität, den Zwang, die Zahl,
das Gesets, die Freiheit, den Grund, den Zweck erdichtet haben [36]. We are those who
have created all these fictions about the original causes, fundamental grounds of
existence, law, freedom, purpose, number or succession etc. In A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man, Stephen discusses Aquinas's theory of beauty as that which meets
the three requirements of integritas, consonantia, and claritas (wholeness, harmony and
radiance). We would be wrong to conclude that Stephen appropriates it as his own – a
common mistake among Joyce's commentators. Stephen undertakes a critique of the
medieval scholastic aesthetics from a phenomenologist point of view. He no longer
believes in divine teleology, in the objectively given essence of a thing but in the
aesthetic image as first conceived in the artist's imagination. The logocentric
aesthetics (the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or
a force of generalization which would make the aesthetic image a universal one) is to
him merely “literary talk”. Nietzsche was as confident about his philosophy as the
“Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft” as Joyce, who followed in his footsteps. The
one laid the foundation; the other inaugurated the fictional discourse of postmodernist
deconstruction. In Proteus, Joyce reproduces a dialogue between Mary and Joseph in
Leo Taxil's blasphemous Vie de Jesus. If David Strauss, in the previous century, had
denied the metaphysical relevance of the scriptures while still presenting them as valid
moral parables, Taxil demythologizes the central New-Testamental myth of the
Immaculate Conception. Joseph inquires into the circumstances of Mary's pregnancy,
which she explains away as the work of the “pigeon” (Holy Ghost):

Qui vous a mise dans cette fichue position ?

 – Ce le pigeon, Joseph.

Stephen is obsessed with the idea of “origin”, the juxtaposition of the myth of Eve
without a navel (the absolute origin, as she is not born of a woman) and of “alpha”, the
first letter of the alphabet, deconstructing the divine and unique origin into the ontology
of language – a system of differences without positive terms. In Proteus, there is no
logocentric hierarchy based upon a dialectic of origin and derivation, primary and
secondary etc., only a logic of associations. Reality is protean, shape-shifting; the
thought-process reduces it to an ideal pattern. So many different things, crossing
Stephen's mind, can be reduced to one single idea, that of origin: the birth of children,
midwife, Stephen's parents, the history of the race (of the Irish people), the myth of the
immaculate conception in the New Testament and of God creating Eve in the Old
Testament, Joseph's anxiety about the purity of his bride and an anecdote about a
political leader escaping from prison disguised as a bride, the Holy Ghost as a pigeon
and the actual Sandymount Pigeon-house Stephen passes, reminding him of the pigeon
passage in Taxil's book, etc. In Nietzschean manner, Joyce reduces the protean
realities of Ireland to the “already known”: a human construct, a fable, the Homeric
epos.

Another reductive process concerns the representation of the self – no longer as

the stable, rational will, but as a fluid associative process, potentially in dissolution. The
psychologists Freud and Jung had shown the conscious ego as depending upon
subconscious processes. The type of personality Bloom embodies in Ulysses during his
one-day wanderings through Dublin is not essentially different from the one projected by
H. C. Earwicker's one-night dreams in Finnegans Wake. It is in the subconscious
energies released by dreams that the permanent, atavistic self of the race is once more
“awake”.

The postmodern feeling of the absence of origin and of the end of history, the
belief that true novelty is ultimately impossible is inscribed in the very linguistic pattern
of Finnegans Wake, with its last sentence to be continued by the first, which begins
midway. Reality only produces perfect clones, endless copies. Earwicker, in Finnegans
Wake, falls into a pattern of repetitiveness, the typical masculine rivalry being
reproduced in his relationship to his sons, Kevin and Jerry, while the Jungian search for
a specific type of woman – anima – transfers the focus of his love from wife to an
incestuous infatuation with his daughter Isobel, Anna's biological copia. Bloom, the
modern Ulysses, is the more affected by his son's death, – a symbolically lost continuity
from father to son –, as he realizes that his daughter replicates his unsatisfactory wife,
Molly (the same thing watered down).

The Victorians themselves had replaced a humanistic and historical perspective

on the past – that is, a set of values held to be valid for all ages, with identity stabilized
by a feeling of continuity, of the individual as being the son of his father, who is the son
of his father [37] – by a historicist point of view. The past is a succession of life-styles,
provisional values, reconstructed in the present as conventions. Modernism continues
the deconstructive process, breaking the ties between generations, abstracting the
individual from the social, absolutizing movement and change, with Joyce taking one
step farther in framing the self as self-referential discursive sequence. The form of
catechism developed in Ulysses, in the Ithaca episode, or in Finnegans Wake shows
knowledge about one's own perceptions as the only valid and accessible form of
knowledge. In an essay entitled Habermas and the Competition of “The Project of
Modernity” [38], David Ashley speaks of the “swamping of the subject” in modernism:
the rational, self-contained individual merges with amorphous nature, regressive
Dionysian impulses. Habermas defines the very Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
[39] as one focusing the body-centred experience of a decentred subjectivity that
functions as the other of reason. The repressed subjective nature of the individual is
retrieved from the vital forces of dreams, fantasies, and madness. Consciousness is
shaped by disconnected, epiphanic moments when, as in Freud's primary scene, outer
objects are transfigured by the perceptual self and inscribed in its bodily scheme as
correlatives for inner states or feelings. This is how Joyce describes the process in the
first draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, entitled Stephen Hero:

We recognise that it is that which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the
vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is
so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.

Open responsiveness to the flux of experience, psychic processes of transference,

from the inner self to outward objects, replace traditional qualities of rationality and will.
And yet there is a also a reconstructive, form-giving process in the generation of the self
as not only perceptual but also linguistic subject. In a letter, Joyce confesses that
he has written Ithaca in the form of a mathematical catechism. The systematized play of
language in the orderly succession of questions and answers, the self-validating,
analytic truths about Stephen and Bloom, as they have been constructed by the text,
provide the other, self-enclosed, intrinsically valid counterpoint to reality (social, political,
religious) about which the two characters can reach no agreement. From totalising
perspectives on reality (traditionally construed as stable, coherent) the subject has
moved towards partial standpoints. In a teleological world, values are commonly shared
and action is purposive, whereas, in the modernist maze of private inner worlds, the
subject is making his own sense of the world. Max Weber, in The Methodology of the
Social Sciences, speaks of Zweckrationalität (purpose-rationality), which draws the
individuals towards communal ends in the traditional societies, and Wertrationalität
(value-rationality), constituting the individual as a free valuing subject in the post-
logocentric age, which is no longer based upon some central narrative of history and
culture. The portrait of Stephen Dedalus is only one of the several possible (a portrait),
perspectively limited (as a young man), realized as partial and temporal (young
man), perceptual (his consciousness grows through epiphanic moments) and
linguistic (his psychic development is accompanied by a growth in linguistic
competence, from infant speech to figurative discourse.). The phases of biological
growth are associated with phases of consciousness and types of textuality. Stephen's
growth from infancy to maturity is paralleled by a process of language acquisition (from
infant speech to the tropic language of art). As a child, he is familiar with the formulaic
language of fairy tales; as a sentimental teenager, with the romantic fiction of Dumas;
as a Jesuit student, with the aesthetics of Aquinas; as an accomplished artist, with the
contemporary aesthetic ideas of Yeats. It is this common genesis of discourse and self-
awareness, or the construction of the subject in discourse that Roger Moss most aptly
describes [40] as what differentiates Joyce from Woolf and opens the way to the
postmodernist discourse:

The justification of the difficulty of Ulysses by this point is that the two difficult
things – language and perception – justify each other and so make for a way of reading
(not a “reading” of) the book which coheres around a distinctive perception of language
as well as a distinctive language of perception.

Joyce's impressive linguistic awareness, culminating in the verbal web of the

almost unintelligible Finnegans Wake, originated in his Catholic schooling. The Jesuit
tradition, advocated in Grace – one of the stories included in Joyce's first book (The
Dubliners, published in 1914 but completed as early as 1904) – as the only abiding
spiritual relic in a decaying civilization, had stimulated in him a remarkable hermeneutic
competence [41].

Joyce's narrative style evolved from an early, Jamesian focalisation (telling the
stories from the point of view and in the characteristic language of the characters)
towards stream-of-consciousness in A Portrait and Ulysses (which also includes the
interior monologue), ending up in a complex exercise in dream phantasmagoria and
intertextuality in Finnegans Wake.

The “scrupulous meanness” characterizing the style of The Dubliners is justified by

the writer himself in a letter to the publisher:

My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose
Dublin for the scene because the city seemed to me the centre of the paralysis. I have
tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood,
adolescence, maturity and public life.

The degraded and frustrated humanity, moving against a meagre social

background, in a Dublin transferred from history into a timeless moral labyrinth, comes
forward in a language which imitates the monotony and mediocrity of existence. The
style is often flat, ordinary, suggesting intellectual poverty in the sequences of
juxtaposed main clauses, in the absence of tropes, connectives, of a wide range of
vocabulary. The progress from a child's perception of the world and the people around
towards the shaping of the self as an image for others, the transition from the subjective
order (one's own construction of one's own identity) towards the semiological order
(identity constructed in linguistic intercourse with others in the “public life”) does indeed
justify Garry M. Leonard's approach in the light of postmodern psychoanalysis: Reading
Dubliners Again. A Lacanian Perspective (Syracuse University Press, 1993). What can
a boy make of the object of his experience when faced with conflicting framings of it?
(The Sisters). The senile Father Flynn, who had introduced the boy to the mysteries of
the Church, which had seemed to him only “mere facts” until then, is sanctimoniously
heightened by his sisters' worship of him and subverted by the Old Cotter's relish of the
old priest’s mental paralysis. Is there any truth in the sisters' superstitious fiction about
the priest breaking the chalice as the cause of his subsequent decay? The “vessels”
which had contained the vital sap of belief had probably been broken by the enfeebled
Irish Catholic Church itself, which had ceased to act the spiritual Mother, or to carry
conviction. The priest's young “pupil's” refusal to eat the crackers, symbolical of a denial
of the Eucharist, foreshadows the absence of spiritual communal values throughout the
stories. The “indifferent public”, the Irish people had grown irresponsive to the call of
ideals higher than the individual: national independence, art, heroes, the Church.

A young girl's failure to leave home, where she is a victim of her father's
patriarchal authority and cruelty (Eveline), becomes an allegory of her limited intellectual
capacities. The adolescent mind is disputed between the memory of the dead mother,
whose urge that Eveline should seek freedom and a new life elsewhere seems to be
reaching her subconscious from beyond this world, and the paralysis caused by the
repressive, authoritative will of the father.

References:

[26] H. Howarth, Notes on Some Figues Behind T.S. Eliot, 1965.

[27] Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke. IX Band Der Witz und seine Einziehung zum
Unberwusstem. Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. 1924-28.

[28] Bernard Bergonzi, The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature, St. Martin's Press,
1986.

[29] Christopher Gillie, Movements in English Literature. 1900-1940, Cambridge University Press,
1975, p. 54.

[30] Katie Wales, The Language of James Joyce, Macmillan, 1992.

[31] Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism, Routledge, 1992, p. 146.

[32] Katie Wales, Op. cit., p. 143.

[33] John Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her Works, The Hogarth Press 1965, p. 63

[34] Kate Flint, Introduction to “The Waves”, Penguin Books, 1992.

[35] Cristopher Gillie, Op. cit., p. 101.

[36] Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Werke in drei Bänden, Vol, II, Carl Hansen, 1955,
p. 585.

[37] Scott Lash: Postmodernism as Humanism? Urban Space and Social Theory, in Theories of
Modernity and Postmodernity, edited by Bryan S. Turner.

[38] Ibidem.

[39] Ibidem.

[40] Roger Moss, Difficult Language: the Justification of Joyce's Syntax, in Gabriel Josipovici, The
Modern English Novel, Op. cit. p. 135.

[41] See Katie Wales, Op. cit.

Mature men are completely alienated by the others' versions of themselves:

beyond the Lacanain “mirror stage”, their “id” is absorbed into public images.
Gabriel Conroy, in The Dead, is a humanist who can well control the universe of
discourse in which he moves, both as a fellow lecturer and as a reviewer of books. It is
books he can understand and interpret, for himself and for others – a mode of
understanding within the cultural order, which is spiritually more rewarding than
the financial gains he derives from writing. In the real world, however, moving among
people in flesh and blood, he falls victim to painful misunderstandings: he is not
confirmed in his ideal versions of others, nor does he recognize himself in the other's
versions of himself. Oxymoronic speech is the expression of displaced identities, which
no longer coincide with themselves. “She's not the girl she was at all”, he muses
in connection with Lily, whom he meets at the yearly party thrown by his aunts, Kate
and Julia Morkan. Having discovered that she has outgrown school time, or nursing rag
dolls, Gabriel makes a second wrong conjecture about the girl planning to meet her
Prince Charming, a fairy tale fantasy she dismisses with a cold, disenchanted comment
on decaying masculinity: The men that is now is only palaver and what they can get out
of you. Nor does Molly Ivors, his Lancers' partner confirm his expectations of her. The
elaborate rules of the Lancers dance, in which various patterns are formed, are much
more intelligible to him than the woman who did not wear a low cut bodice, like the one
in his anima fantasy, and with whom he enters into political arguments. The most tragic
misrecognition is occasioned by his own wife, whom he perceives standing near the top
of the first flight of stairs, in the shadow, listening to distant music. What is she a symbol
of, Gabriel asks himself, and he figures himself to be the object of her desire. Once
more he is wrong, because Mr. D’Arcy's song had reminded Gretta of a man whom
she had loved and who had died young. Gabriel manages to extort his name and story
from her, finally realizing that the dead man's image in her heart is more powerful than
her actual perception of himself. Fantasy worlds have grown autonomous; the fairy tale,
the dance, the song fail to match the reality of facts, while memory can colonize
someone's personality more forcibly than reality. Gabriel is still mastered by his
mother's taste and distastes, Gretta is still moved by the presence of the dead. The
dinner ceremony builds the broadest pattern, which is continually exploded by the
unruly, unpredictable factual or psychological reality:

Both the Morkans' party and Gabriel's after-dinner speech emphasize tradition,
continuity, stability, clarity, and a comprehendible universe. Within the setting, individual
attempts to rule over their personal worlds of identity confusion, shifting modes of
subjectivity, and unpredictable suspensions of conscious thought, the price of all this
superficial order is that the Morkan sisters and their guests, in attempting to rule
everything that is present, are ruled by everything that is absent. They are ruled by the
dead as well as by absent thoughts that they cannot afford to remember. Much of what
they say to one another in conversation is compulsively banal precisely because what it
is they wish to say is so alarming. What they have forgotten is what remembers them.
Conversation is dangerous, Gabriel learns, because it is always an attempted seduction
of the Other, and one's sense of self may be subverted as easily as it may be confirmed
[42].

The characteristically modernist awareness of the gaps separating natural,

psychological and linguistic order informs the process of ego-formation in A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man, a novel which began to be serialized in “The Egoist” in 1914,
and was published as a book in 1922. What the play of definite/indefinite article in the
title suggests is that it is only in the artist that the process of individualization is
completed, as it reaches the ultimate stage in which the self is constructed in the
analytical, self-validating and incorruptible form of a work of art.

The natural need for revisionist criticism and canonization has lately yielded a
spectacular re-reading of the novel as an example of “antimodernism”: The
Antimodernism of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by Weldon Thornton,
Syracuse University Press, 1994. The approach is a fallacious one from several points
of view, betraying a shallow knowledge of philosophy and narrative structure. Freud,
Frazer, William James, amalgamated by Thornton into the same mixing pot (p. 68), are
very different from one another, and even more distinct from Rousseau, Wordsworth
and Goethe in the representations of the self. Even more shocking than this mixture of
pragmatist philosophy, intuitionism, French and romantic idealist philosophy is
Thornton's classification of the Portrait alongside Lawrence's Sons and Lovers,
Maugham's Of Human Bondage, and Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel as
examples of the “Bildungsroman”, which does not emerge full blown until the twentieth
century, especially the period from 1910-1930 (p. 69). Generalizing from marginal
cases, while ignoring the classical examples, Thornton concludes that the unreflective
picaresque is almost always presented in first person point of view, while the more
interior Bildungsroman is typically in third person (p. 71), at the same time conflating
The Rainbow and the Portrait into the same type of narrative discourse as presentation
in third person. If we agree that the Bildungsroman involves an entelechy, an underlying
developmental movement (p. 73), we cannot see Paul Morrel fitting into this pattern, as
he is dominated by his mother's personality throughout, with a dim perspective of
freeing himself from maternal bondage after her death, but which the reader never sees
accomplished. No continuity, as implied by the concept of “entelechy”, can be traced in
the American Wolfe's nostalgic realization of self-alienation from the past, either. While
disagreeing with those who would see language as Joyce's sole theme or subject, or
who would argue that language comprises the source and substance of his character's
problems and failures (p. 117), the author brings forward an argument likely to strike his
antagonists dumb: That Joyce did not identify language and reality is made clear by a
number of his statements at varous times during his career (Ibidem). Joyce certainly did
not, but it is the very autonomy of language in which he builds his characters that
separates him from the rest of the company which Thornton has chosen for him.
Thornton's book should warn us against the relaxation of the theoretical strain after the
excesses, in this respect, of structuralism and poststructuralism.

There is a great difference between the Bildungsroman, originating in Goethe's

Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre, focusing on what Wordsworth calls “the growth of an
individual mind”, the imaginary portrait, in which the aesthetic decadents portray the
growth of aesthetic consciousness built in cultural matrices, and the modernist artist's
portrait (Künstlerroman) as growth of discursive competence.

To begin with, the Bildungsroman and the picaresque are not “cognate forms”
(Thornton, Ibidem, P. 66). The latter takes the protagonist through a series of
adventures in the world of empirical facts, presenting him in an extradiegetic
perspective (from the outside). The perspective is intradiagetic in the Bildungsroman,
with focus upon the “bon voyage”, as Du Bellay would say, within the character's
consciousness. Whereas the “picaro” hero is not far from a delinquent of a minor sort,
the hero of a Bildungsnarrative is the embodiment of the time's ideal self-fashioning.
Wilhelm Meister is progressively sphered in a different set of values from those of his
family, appropriated in separation from it (since the Bildungsroman is not “a search for
the father”, as Thornton assumes – Ibidem, p. 70). Dickens makes sure his protagonists'
personalities are “built” in separation from the father figure, by making them orphans.
Wilhelm Meister says “good-bye” to the feudal world, Copperfield embodies the
Victorian ideal of the professional intellectual, capable to discipline and check a
romantic disposition. The separation from the family is symbolical of the demise of an
old set of values and the assertion of the spirit of a new age.

The “imaginary portrait” by Huysmans, Pater or Wilde situate the protagonist within
an axiological context, divorced from the sphere of everyday concerns. The hero is
faced with the necessity of choosing among values, with the result that the aesthetic
value is in Kantian fashion autonomised and absolutized at the expense of all the
others. Whereas the Bildungsroman takes the form of what Gérard Genette calls, in
Introduction ŕ l'architexte, (Editions du Seuil, 1979) a factual narrative, in which the
author is identical with the narrator (A=N), and the events assumed to be real, the
“imaginary portrait” emerges as deliberately “counterfactual” (fictional narrative),
illustrating an aesthetic thesis, laying in the abyss its own nature as a fiction bracketing
reality and opposing it.
 With Joyce, language is no longer expressive but constitutive; the protagonist is
built in language, and the linear narrative is replaced by a spatial form. The arbitrary
sequence of flashbacks, anticipations, repetitions or dislocations of the
chronological time-sequence are meant to point towards a different order built outside
time, of epiphanic moments (moments of being aesthetically apprehended), existing
simultaneously in the continuum of consciousness. The structure of events yields to
structurality of discourse: leitmotifs, images, symbols, contrasts, repetitions and basic
oppositions. Developing from infant language to figurative speech as the very
construction of the main character, the discourse of A Portrait is very far from the
omniscient narrator's “third person presentation”, which displays the same degree of
linguistic competence from the beginning to the end. Joyce's Stephen is a linguistic
construct, almost emptied of psychological inwardness, like Wallace Stevens's Crispin
as the letter “C”, voyaging in the sea of the text [43].

The five divisions of the novel correspond to major phases in a process of

progressive disengagement from the world of experience and emancipation of the mind,
which creates out of its own substance a semiological utopia: I. Stephan's boarding-
school days; II. His education at Belvedere in Dublin; III. The retreat and penitence after
his erotic initiation, and the attempt to mortify his senses; IV. His entry to University and
the clarification of his aesthetic doctrine, according to which art is life purified in and
reprojected from the human imagination, by an artist who creates like the God of
creation; V. His decision to leave Ireland to pursue his artistic vocation and,
correspondingly, the ability to control the metaphorical level of language: bird and rose
as symbols of the work of art, the one “spurning the ground”, as Shelley would say, the
other, as Rilke's favourite image of pure “Innerlichkeit” (inwardness), self-identity or
Dante’s symbol of divine self-identity, since the petals hide no kernel, no solid lump of
reality.

Unlike Marius's mind in suspense, built in the isolation of James's pragmatist

thought, recording the permanently changing flow of empirical sensations, Stephen is
seeking a pattern of order, which Bergson's deeper self can add, in the pattern of
memory, to the fluid empirical self, immersed in the “données immédiates de la
connaissance”. In L’Évolution créatrice [44], Bérgson does not deny the existence of
patterns or forms, it is only that they are empechées par la matičre qu'elle porte en elles
(embodied, fused with the matter they contain), and at the same time ready to assume
their ideal nature (les formes sensibles... toujours pretes ŕ ressaisir leur idealité). As a
child, whose language is barely articulated, and whose imagination is shaped by tales
(the novel actually opens with “once upon a time...”), Stephen is striving to make sense
of the chaotic sequence of incidents, of the atomistic shower of sensations, to reach an
understanding of the world and of his place in it. The child starts with existential
statements, the Verb bringing the objects of his consciousness into existence: The
Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. The substances
are afterwards qualified by attributes: His mother had a nicer smell than his father..
When you wet the bed, first it is warm, then it gets cold (...) The progressive
schematisation of thought, produced by the insertion within a pre-existing cultural order,
can be seen in the attempt to order experience through systems of hierarchy which
place the subject at the centre of the universe:

Stephan Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College

Sallius

County Kildare

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe

“World” and “universe” are meant to differentiate the ecumenical („inhabited”,

socialized) from the cosmic order of existence. “Physis” is what has not been
appropriated or constituted by man, Stephan finding himself at the beginning of this
potentially infinite phenomenological process of transferring things into meanings.
“Names” are not just words but bridges between self and world. They establish identity,
differences between “I” and “thou”, “mine” and “yours”. Stephen sees his self as “woven”
within a social texture. Physical geography is itself “mapped” by sets of values: nation,
family, religion:

Stephan Dedalus is my name,

Ireland is my nation,

Clongowes is my dwellingplace

And heaven my expectation.

Stephen's “home” is not a place of harmony and togetherness. Parnell's disgrace

and adultery drive a wedge between the two certainties of Stephen's early life: Irish
nationalism and Irish Catholicism. The overt conflict over dinner caused by Mr. Casey's
diatribe against the “princes of the church” and Dante, his aunt, who passionately
defends them, brings tears into his father's eyes, while breeding in the child-witness an
early sense of the incapacity of politics and religion to answer the fundamental question
“What is right?” Another question engages a graceful order of conduct: he may feel
prompted, but is it right or proper to kiss his mother, and what is the meaning of a kiss,
anyway?

School proves as impotent as family environment in gratifying his sense of justice:

Stephen is unjustly punished for not doing his homework on account of his broken
glasses, the prefect of studies beating him across his hand in the famous pandybat
scene. The family order is again disrupted by a forced move to Cork, Ireland: These
changes in what he had deemed unchangeable were so many slight shocks to his
boyish conception of the world. Stephen makes a frantic attempt at reestablishing the
ties with his family. He uses the money he gets as a prize for writing an essay to
improve his family's condition, to make them graceful gifts: He had tried to build a
breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to damn
up, by rules of conduct and active interests and new filial relations. But his bank account
soon comes to an end, and the whole enterprise proves useless anyway.

Adolescent love assumes the garb of romantic literature, which sends him
wandering from garden to garden in search of Mercedes (the heroine of Dumas's Count
of Monte-Cristo)

The Jungian search for “anima” (a man's subconscious ideal of a woman) is

conceived of as a mystic experience, whereby he might be “transfigured”, but the world
of flesh and blood does not work such miracles. The erotic drive ends in moral disaster,
with Stephen stranded in a prostitute's home. The religious language augments the
irony of failed intentions, substituting intimations of the sexual orgies on the pagan altars
of Greece for the “Transfiguration” scene in the New Testament. He cannot possibly
recognize his “Mercedes” in the fallen woman, as people recognized the divinity of the
“transfigured Christ”, wrapped up in the light flashing from above: He was in another
world, with yellow gasflashes... burning as if before an altar, with people arrayed as for
some rites (...). Her room was warm and lightsome. A huge doll sat with her legs apart
in the copious easychair beside the bed. Stephen's sexual initiation makes him feel his
soul tainted, grown as bestial as his body: fattening and congealing into a gross grease,
plunging ever deeper in its dull fear into a sombre threatening dusk. A need for
penitence and redemption makes him withdraw for a while from the cares of this
workaday world, in order to examine the state of (his) conscience, to reflect on the
mystery of holy religion and to understand better why we are here in this world.

During his “retreat”, Stephen seeks painful nervous irritation, exposing himself to
bad odours, noises, fasting, etc. The aggression on his senses cuts him off from the
workaday world, lighting his inner vision. However, the vague acts of priesthood, their
semblance of reality are very remote from his idea of complete self-fulfilment. The
church has a business-like face – acts of piety adding up in a great cash-register – and
a histrionic one: love and hate pronounced solemnly on stage and in the pulpit. It lacks
substance; it denies passion.

The next “temptation”, which, given Stephen's childhood experience, is easier to

resist, comes from politics. His college-mate, McCann, passes a very severe judgement
on his aloofness, nourished by the aesthetics of Pater, Wilde and other decadents:
Dedalus, you are an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself. I'm not. I'm a democrat
and I'll work and act for social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the
United States of the Europe of the future.

Engaging in the most rewarding quest – writing –, Stephen heads towards a full
realization of his aestheticist view of art, purged of everything alien to it, even of its
moral dimension. Stephen echoes James's and Flaubert's view of literature as primarily
a question of form, of language, a language which has been purified of the market-value
lent by its millenary use by the “tribe”: “One difficulty”, said Stephen,”in aesthetic
discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the tradition of the
marketplace. I remember a sentence of Newman's, in which he says of the Blessed
Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in
the marketplace is quite different. I hope I am not detaining you”. Carlyle, Arnold,
Ruskin, Newman, Pater, Wilde are as many steps on the way to the modernist gospel of
the man-of-letter's emancipation from the gospel of realism and pragmatism. Lending a
purer sense to the words of the tribe (Mallarmé), the artist works language into an
opaque, intransitive medium, reflecting back upon itself. He is not a prophet, possessed
of the original, Joanic Word, attempting an imitatio dei (the repetition in the finite mind of
the eternal act of creation), but an architect, a Daedalus figure, trapping the reader in a
labyrinth of words, in a linguistic structure deliberately constructed to bar the way back
to the reality of things. One can only escape it by flying, soaring above the unredeemed
clay of the “workaday”. Stephen discards his biological and national heritage, being
ritualistically reborn as an artist, in the long line descending from Daedalus, at the end
of chapter four. He is capable now to create a new linguistic order of the universe,
independent from physics:

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:

A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words.
Was it their colours ? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold,
the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey-fringed fleece of
clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself.
Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of
legend and colour ? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he
drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the
prism of a language many-coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of
an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic
prose?

At the name of the fabulous artificer, it seems to him that he beholds a winged
form flying above the waves, the wings of the soaring Icarus who has made his escape
from the labyrinthine reality. The image of ascent is traditionally associated with
conversion. Discovering his true self, Stephen adheres to a new Church, of artists, and
to a new order of existence – the impersonal language of the work of art, speaking
messages from the spirit of (its) age. Rather than original and visionary, modernist art is
an exercise in reinscription, a conscious insertion in an artificial order. By creating the
Villanelle, Stephen acquires generic identity. The prostitute of the “workaday”, or the
“Mercedes” of romantic love are replaced by the female Muse. The girl on the beach is
a woman-inspiration-soul, acting like Beatrice for Dante: It seemed that the first
thoughts he had ever known were given him as at first from her eyes, and he knew her
hair to be the golden veil through which he beheld his dream. Several images and
verbal echoes would point to W.B. Yeats as the model behind Stephen Dedalus (maybe
Joyce's own youthful stance, influenced by the early Yeats). In 1901 Yeats had made
the following confession: Nobody can write well, as I think, unless his thought, or some
like thought, moving in other minds than his, for nobody can do more than speak
messages from the spirit of his time. In Rosa Alchemica, Yeats confesses to having felt
attracted to alchemy by analogy with the artist's attempt at transforming reality into
imperishable, immutable essences. Here is Stephen's “alchemical” poetic at the end of
chapter four: a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish
matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being. Finally, Stephen's
analogues for art are the bird-girl, his angel of mortal beauty, and the rose. However,
the rose is no longer Yeats's Rosicrucian symbol of the unity of time and eternity, but
the emblem of the a priori nature of poetic language. It seems to stream forth from the
heart of the rose which is impalpable, immaterial, absorbing reality into its apocalyptic
vortex of words: the roselike glow sent forth its rays of rhymes: ways, days, blaze,
praise, raise. Its rays turned up the world, consumed the heart of men and angels: the
rays from the rose that was her wilful heart.

The Yeatsian alchemical reversal from reality to art is enacted rhetorically by the
epanodos (or antimetabole, the repetition of words in reverse grammatical order; here,
the repetition of “heart”), which accompanies each epiphany [45] or milestone on the
road to self-realization. The first antimetabole shows Stephen as a would-be
Prometheus, ready to snatch the creative power from gods (in Shelley's version of the
myth), disobeying authority in his childish manner:

Pull out his eyes

Apologize

Apologize

Pull out his eyes...

In the pandybat scene, we can read: But it was unfair and cruel. The prefect of
studies was a priest but that was cruel and unfair. The encounter with the prostitute is
rhetorically enforced by an emphasis upon the body: “lips... eyes.... lips”. The retreat (an
organized contemplation of the four last things: death, judgement, hell and heaven)
occasions the following epanodos: radiant his eyes and wild his breath... wild and
radiant his windswept limbs”.
 In Ulysses (1922), Joyce employs the two kinds of “aphasic disturbances”
identified by Roman Jakobson (Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic
Disturbances) in the modernist discourse: metaphor (based on similarity) and metonymy
(based on substitution). The “mythical method”, as T.S. Eliot calls it (Order and Myth in
Ulysses) is less of an analogy than a consistent substitution of chapters in Homer's
Odyssey by a twentieth-century transcription of them, with the basic motif proliferating in
endless imagistic deferments. The associative process produces a modern equivalent
of the baroque amplification (sequences of related images).

The novel presents the events of a momentous day (June 16, 1904) focused
through the eyes of Leopold Bloom, an Irish-Jewish advertising canvasser, who, like
Ulysses, leaves his wife, Molly, in the morning and returns to her in the evening,
together with Stephen Dedalus, a Telemachus who makes a substitute for Bloom's dead
son as a possible spiritual heir.

The novel is divided into three main parts and eighteen chapters [46].

TELEMACHIA

1) Telemachus (Odyssey I). The first chapter of Ulysses is not the story of the
bereaved son but the construction of a figure. Stephen Dedalus, the artist who makes a
living by teaching history in a school, shares a sort of fortress or decayed tower on the
outer fringes of Dublin with an Irish student in medicine, Buck Mulligan, and an English
student, Haines. Stephen is in mourning after his mother's death, eliciting from his
companions comparisons with Japhet in search of a father or with Christ aspiring to
unite himself with the Father in heaven. Stephen is painfully trying to disengage himself
from the natural parent state. He remembers having refused to kneel and pray when his
dying mother had asked him to, a memory which fills him with remorse. His mother had
interpreted his refusal as a proof of his hard temper, but Stephen had only meant to run
away from the national church, which was claiming the role of a spiritual godmother.
The milkwoman, symbolizing the alma (nourishing) Ireland, appears to him as lost, self-
alienated from the ancient spiritual roots. Stephen denies the existence of any meaning
in the phenomena of the world, his own face in the mirror being alien to him:

Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a
crooked crack, hair on end. As he (i.e. Buck) and others see me. Who chose this
face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin.

His image for Mulligan is cleft, cracked, partial, betraying nothing of the truth about
himself, which lies within. Stephen will seek a different sort of nourishment. His
prototype is not the Son descending in the flesh, but Hamlet, Shakespeare's fictional
creation, making the better son, free from death (unlike Shakespeare's Hamnet, the
biological offspring) and corruption. Stephen's love of fine-sounding words is a
desperate attempt to recreate himself in an immortal shape, to “rid of vermin”.
“Chrysostomos”, the word which obsesses Dedalus merely for its expressive and
esoteric sound shape, means “golden mouth (cut)”, a metonymy for speech. In it he
discovers a more truthful image of himself for others than the actual, physical reflection
in a mirror. Summing up, the related images polarize parenthood as natural process or
as artistic creation.

2) Nestor (Odyssey III). The figure of the wise old counsellor presiding over the
inquiry into the course of history in the second chapter prepares the reader for a sage
discourse. Is the study of history any good in man's pathetic endeavour to accumulate a
thesaurus of worldly wisdom? Such fiction is systematically subverted. In teaching
history, Stephen realizes that the course of events is purely accidental. There is no way
of prophesying the outcome of any action, nor can one discover precise laws of
causality, accounting for the materialization of only one out of the many potential
events. What would have happened if Caesar had not been assassinated, for instance?
We shall never know. Mr. Deasy's discourse is full of inconsistencies, a mixture of the
Ulster Protestant Unionist's opportunism with fierce anti-Semitism, of pragmatic cunning
(he preaches Iago's “put but money in thy purse”) and rhetorical millenarism (All human
history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God). As there are no laws
or necessary relationships in history, there is no truth in its record. Historical writing is a
subjective construct, a fiction. Stephen feels he might just as well tell children a “winter's
tale”, that is, a tale with sprites and goblins. In abandoning the course of actual events
and in engaging in the realm of possibility or fiction, Stephen unconsciously reaches
towards some private truth. The story he tells – of the fox burying his grandma behind a
bush –, can be interpreted as the release of a pent up obsession: the fox may have
murdered her, as Stephen, in disobeying his mother's last wish, might have contributed
to her death. Whilst history fails to discover any form of inner legislation, fiction-making
is apt to reveal some hidden truth about one's personal history. Stephen proclaims
history a nightmare, because it is irrational, while the symbolical projections of the
subconscious are the waking state of self-realization. As a matter of fact, later on, in the
ninth chapter, in a reply to John Eglinton, Stephen quotes Maeterlinck (Wisdom and
Destiny), who maintains that nothing ever happens to us that is not cognate with what
lies within us. If Socrates opens his door, he will find Socrates sitting on the threshold
and he will become wise. If Judas goes out, his steps will carry him to Judas and he will
be given the opportunity to betray. Joyce only ascribes this self-identity and all-
inclusiveness (all in all) to inner space and fictional constructs. It is only within a text,
which relies upon a self-validating inner legislation, not upon hazard that a character will
always find in the world outside what he has conceived of as possible within himself,
because a text is a fiction, a possibility, with no empirical frame of reference that might
contradict it. Stephen cannot account for the murder of Julius Caesar, but he can
interpret to himself his own obsessions.

3) Proteus (Odyssey IV). The prophetic sea-god sought out by Menelaus in

Homer is an emblem of the Bergsonian self, both fluid in its permanent shift from actual
perception to memory or fantasy, and following a deeper law of associative processes.
Although shape-shifting, Proteus does not change his true identity, as a sea-god in the
service of Poseidon. Even his gift of prophecy suggests the existence of a divine pattern
in the world. Stephen's thoughts ramble from Irish history and politics to memories of his
family, from an anticipation of his meeting Mulligan in a pub to his readings of Leo Taxil,
but following a certain principle of association. The various images floating freely in his
mind are consistently associated according to the basic oppositions of origin and
departure from it, true identity and disguise: hoist standing for Christ, naval leading back
to Eve, Sytephen's departure from the family nest, a bride's disguise saving a political
leader, Mary's pregnancy, the Holy Ghost, Taxil's demystification of the immaculate
conception through the pigeon and the actual Sandymount Pigeonhouse Stephen
passes etc.

ODYSSEY

4. Calypso (Odyssey V). The chapter introduces Leopold Bloom, the very
opposite of Stephen. He is mundane, realistic, business and empirically-minded,
committed to physical desire, rooted in the present, endowed with a keen sense of the
history of his race and profoundly marked by his family tragedy. Bloom's separation
from his wife since the death of their son Rudy functions as the surrogate of Odysseus’s
separation from Penelope. Their sexual estrangement has turned his wife Molly from a
Penelope into a Circe figure, with extramarital love affairs, keeping secret her love-
letters to Blazes Boylan like another Zerlina seduced by the “blazing” Don Giovanni.

5.The Lotus-Eaters being lulled to sleep by the drug they taste against Ulysses's
warning is the traditional emblem of escapism. Bloom tries to forget the problems of his
marriage, seeking refuge in an exchange of letters with Martha Clifford, in the bodily
relief of his bath, in the momentary relaxation from his busy trading life. Joyce's
amplification technique enhances the leitmotif by building ever larger frames of non-
commitment and depersonalisation: the soldiers automatically following orders in the
drill-yard, abandoning their own judgement, the opiating comforts provided by religion,
the Oriental inclination to languishing repose.

6. Hades (Odyssey XI). The presence of three characters from Grace in the sixth
chapter of Ulysses, saturated with death, is extraordinarily rich in the suggestive
potential of the reinscribed figure – a characteristic postmodernist device, discussed by
J.F. Lyotard in Discours, figure (Klincksieck, 1974). The contemporary images of death
paralleling the Homeric hero's descent into the underworld are the Galsnevin cemetery
in Dublin, the statues of dead historical personages, the funeral of Paddy Dignam,
whose heavy drinking had been like a sort of death-in-life, or loss of consciousness,
Bloom's playful project of advertising a fat corpse as ensuring the fertility of a fruit
garden, the gramophone preserving the voices of the dead, memories of dead relatives,
etc. The presence of Kernan, Cunningham, M'Coy and Power from The Dubliners,
mingling with the characters of Ulysses would point to semiotic constructs as another
form of death (sema” tomb”, thing replaced by or entombed into name). Joyce is
“digging up” (Dignam) names from a previous text, the new one feeding on a
semiological deposit. Signification is self-referential, the language of the chapter
becomes meta-discourse, endless reinscription.

In Grace, Kernan is depressed because of his failed commercial enterprise, which

is the same as Bloom's: a commercial traveller. Heavy drinking in a bar causes him to
fall down the stair leading to the lavatory. This moral descent will be reversed through
the “power” of words, of logos. The constable summoned beside the man whose clothes
were smeared with the filth and ooze of the floor on which he had lain, asks him his
name and address. Kernan is unwilling to reveal his identity, which makes things even
more difficult for him. He is saved by his friend, Mr. Power, who unexpectedly shows up,
and calls him by his first name, assuring the constable, who straightens up and salutes
him, that he will see the sick man safely home. It is his friends' discourse about values –
like the culture preserved through time by the Jesuit order that never “falls away”, unlike
the changing fortunes of trading –, that Kernan is restored towards a realization of the
importance of his lost human dignity. Speech is restorative. The fall from dignity through
drinking is echoed by Paddy Dignam's story, who had died of too much Barleycorn, by
Mrs. Cunningham's drinking habits, and later by Stephen Dedalus himself, who is
rescued from a brothel, in an inebriated condition, and taken home by Bloom. The two
sinful men recover their identity through discourse, in the Catechism scene. This is the
chapter in which Bloom meets Stephen. The common man misses his son, as the
offspring of his loins. Stephen, the artist, thinks of his father as the man with my voice
and my eyes. To him identity is something defined in terms of vision and language. He
has given up on his biological father, seeking a spiritual affiliation to the universal race
of artists, beginning with Daedalus. Bloom can only think of revival within the
anonymous circuit of matter (the fat corpse, nourishing fruit-tress). And yet, just as
Bernard needs Percival to provide the earthly touchstone for his imaginary flights, so
does Stephen, the artist, benefit from his encounter with Bloom, the common man. It is
life that offers the artist the material he will work into something permanent – the
semiological order of the text, enduring from Homer to Joyce, from The Dubliners to
Ulysses.

7. Aeolus (Odyssey X). Speech is breath, but Joyce does not live in the
logocentric age, proclaiming, like Shakespeare (see our discussion of his sonnets), the
superiority of voice over graphia. Undoubtedly, it is not God's spoken Word that makes
discourse in this chapter but speech that departs from its performative or creative
function, seeking pragmatic ends: to impress, to persuade, to deal justice etc. In Joyce
speech is reported in writing and exposed as shallow and reductionist: journalistic
headlines, picture-captions, the speeches of Dan Dawson, Seymour Bushe and John F.
Taylor.

8. The Lestrygonians eating Ulysses's companions suggest the victory of

beastliness and monstrosity over humanity. Beginning with chapter eight, Joyce seems
to be engaged in a tropic mapping of the human body, presenting a universal man,
Anthropos, as dismembered and incorporated in one component or other of the
fragmented modern world. Here the focus is on the belly and its needs. Bloom's
musings over his sandwich at the Davy Byrne bar reveal it as a “moral” pub, because it
does not occasion the Pantagruelic meals in the fashionable restaurants. The
associations of filth, rottenness, dirt, savagery accompanying man's search for food in
all of nature's realms, under the ruling image of the licking warm blood, with man turned
into a brutal carnivorous beast praying upon helpless creatures with instruments of
torture, concur in the construal of one of the most repugnant images of man in world
literature.

9. Scylla and Charybdis (Odyssey XII). The informing idea of this chapter is the
difficulty of steering a course between the contradictory demands of realism and
idealism. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister is quoted in the opening, as an example of the
wrestling spirit in search of values. Stephen's Bildungsstory takes him into the straights
framed by the Scylla of the hard-boiled realism displayed by his acquaintances engaged
in studying medical sciences – the sciences of the body – and the Charybdis of the
Theosophy and Platonism of the Irish Literary Society. Stephen's exchanges with John
Eglinton, the literary pseudonym of an influential contemporary essayist, W.K. Magee,
apparently lead towards a solution, the artist of the decadent school and the custodian
of Ireland's National Library discovering a closure between subjectivity and objectivity,
as pointed out by Maeterlinck, in the ontology of the literary character. The “recognition
scene” from A Portrait is repeated, with Stephen as a flying, Icarus figure, as the artist
who has no earthly love, because his fertility is realised as the immaculate conception of
art: Bous Stephanoumenos, the noumenal (spiritual) crowning of existence (the ox of
the sun is a symbol of fertility in Greek mythology). The fertilizing energy originates in
the perceptional self, that visionary “Bull's eye” Lynch makes light of in A Portrait, from
which the “aesthetic image” of the things in the world issues forth.

10. The Wandering Rocks. Following Circe's advice, Homer's Ulysses prefers the
Scylla and Charybdis to the threatening, wandering rocks, floating on the filthy surface
of the sea. The characters wandering about in the brief episodes of this chapter,
juxtaposed as a sequence of close-ups in a film, are not rooted in some stable belief or
set of values. The idea underlying their dissipation seems to be that an encounter with
firm and known adversities is to be preferred to spiritual waste or faltering. Father John
Commes, Stephen's learned instructor in A Portrait, takes a leisurely walk, musing on
the inconsistencies of great men: Archbishop Wolsey serving the King more
undauntedly than God, and being met but with a poor recompense, or Pilate, the
trimmer, disgraced in history. Blazes Boylan, the woomanizer, is making one more and
gratuitous conquest on his way to Molly Bloom, as if by force of habit.

Stephen Dedalus is engaged in a light conversation in Italian with a former master

who urges him to resume his singing lessons. The exchange sounds particularly casual
and shallow in comparison to the serious engagement with philosophical and aesthetic
issues in the previous chapter. The usually grave Bloom, obsessed with history, racial
and family traditions, spiritual inheritance, etc. can be seen flipping over the pages of a
licentious book, savouring an unfaithful woman's encounter with her lover and buying
the cheep novel under the approving gaze of the old man selling it. Soldiers die for the
wrong cause, a crippled man is begging for the wrong reason („for England”) etc.
 11. The Sirens (Odyssey XII) The fugal arrangement of the chapter is a structural
mise-en-abyme of the compositional principle of the whole novel, based upon theme
and variations, similarity and counterpointal figures and motifs. Singing and talking of
music, the characters themselves sound like voices in a concert touching on the theme
of love, of fame, of war, of courtship, of bachelorship, love conquest etc. The sound
effects of the richly onomatopoeic language, mainly made up of brief ejaculations, or
non-finite clauses, provide the proper sound-track for the topics of conversation, mainly
musical (voices, styles, arrangements), in a bar: The leading “siren” is Bloom's wife, a
singer, who is probably rehearsing home, while Bolyan, who yields to her amorous call,
cuts a dazzling figure as a seducer at the bar. Bloom, the modern Ulysses, is still deaf
to her call.

12. The Cyclops (Odyssey IX). The symbolism of the chapter is best interpreted
by David Fuller [46] as “fanatic Polyphemus”, someone who is one-eyed, or mentally
monocular. The nationalism and xenophobia of the people engaging in a controversy in
a bar are such signs of spiritual blindness and intolerance, reaching a climactic point
where Polyphemus, who knows nothing of the laws of hospitality and feeds on the
human kind, becomes a proper analogue. In this chapter Joyce employs a new
narrative form (apart from Molly's interior monologue and the stream of consciousness,
blending the character's and the authorial voices): a first-person narrative, whose
elementary diction and rude, cynical tone are particularly appropriate.

13. Nausicaa (Odyssey VI). Gerty Macdowell is a heroine of cheap romance, but
her blooming youth and innocence offer Bloom a brief alternative to the sexual
promiscuity of his marriage. The Nausicaa-Gerty helps him escape from the Circe world
into a brief fantasy of guiltless flirtation. Joyce couples his bodily map with a typology of
humanity: the virgin and the whore, the artist and the common man, the fallen and the
resurrected self.

14. Oxen of the Sun (Odyssey XII). Despite Ulysses’s interdiction, his men eat
the sacred Oxen of the Sun. We see this chapter as the counterpoint to The
Lestrygonians: whereas homophagy or cannibalism yield a pitiful triumph of a visceral
self, man's ontophagy (feeding on reality) is realized as discourse-making (transfer of
reality into signs). The chapter is a history of literary styles in English fiction, an
evolutionary process like the organic development of the foetus (which serves as a
mise-en-abyme).

15. Circe (Odyssey X). The episode enacts a fall and a redemption. Stephen, the
tipsy guest of a brothel, is helped to get up and collect his hat and staff (a symbolical
gesture of resumed dignity, familiar from Grace) by Leopold Bloom. The mature hero
has just had a vision of his lost son, the spiritualized portrait of an Eton boy, with an
impeccable suit and a book in his hand. Paternity as spiritual guide replaces Bloom's
concerns with sexuality (tempted by Gerty-Nausicaa, cheated by Molly-Circe, humiliated
by Boylan, the successful rival, visiting a brothel). He decides to take Stephen to his
place.
 NOSTOS

The “home-coming” is realized in three chapters.

16. Eumaeus (Odyssey XIV-XVI). The figure of the old herdsman meeting the
returning Ulysses in disguise informs a chapter which develops further the
“recognition'„ theme. Talking of politics, of the present condition of Ireland, Bloom and
Stephen cannot reach any agreement, sometimes Bloom missing not only Stephen's
meaning but also his words. The one is tolerant, the other, contemptuous. Stephen
decides that whatever they might think, there is no efficient action in changing Ireland
anyway. And yet the artist will always need the common man's touch with the reality of
things, with the feel of history in his bones.

17. Ithaca (Odyssey XVII-XXII). Is there a common country for all men to come
back to from their historical of contingent disagreements? Is there a mirror that flashes
back an image for others which the spirit recognizes as his own? In resuming the issue
of identity launched in the opening of the book, Bloom, who has been exposed to the
influence of Stephen, the “teacher”, distinguishes between two images of himself:
ipsorelativ (self-relying, the type) and aliorelative or the movable type. The former is the
mirror stage achieved through analytical structures, where truth is interior to language:
his father and his grandfather's son are one and the same. The latter is self-alienation in
the otherness of his biological self: physically resembling his “procreative” mother or
father. What Bloom contemplates in the mirror now is no longer the accidental look of
his individual face but the books in his library. The “procreative” order is there replaced
by the orderly design, the self-validating truth of art. It is time Bloom changed into a
narrative about himself, which he tells Molly.

The chapter is built in the form of a “mathematical catechism”, as Joyce confesses

in a letter, with identity between the one who asks questions about the action and
characters in the novel and the one who provides the answers. The author knows
nothing certain about the world out there. He can only control his own constructs, whose
meanings are shared by all the speakers of his language. A text addresses
consciousness as a self-enclosed system.

18. Penelope (Odyssey XXIII). Whereas Stephen and Bloom, emancipated into
an ideal spiritual relationship, like the consubstantiality between God and his Son („they
have become heavenly bodies”, Joyce says in the same letter), the female element is
isolated as the visceral, maternal womb, realized in a long interior monologue, pretty
incoherent, without any punctuation. Molly Bloom remembers her love affairs in a
language often verging on pornography, obsessively hinging on the sexual element.
Joyce has split his Anthropos into two selves: Bloom and Stephen have been rescued
from their “eye”, “ear” or “tongue” heresies, and sphered within consciousness, to which
Molly has no access. This is Joyce's own description of his heroine in the above-
mentioned letter: It turns like the huge earth ball slowly surely and evenly round and
round spinning, its four cardinal points being the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt
expressed by the words because bottom woman yes. Joyce was not probably a sexist,
his representation of feminity in this instance being a psychological and cultural frame
(the domain of the “id”). Let us remember that the same “broken syntax” is employed for
the human “Cyclops” and for the tipsy humanity singing “areas” in The Sirens. Joyce's
consistent association of music with superficiality, the Italian opera buffa, comical love
entanglements, cuckoldry, intellectual limitation is very intriguing, and it would deserve
more attention. It may have something to do with his fixation on the written word.

The book closes with Molly's memory of saying “yes” to Bloom, with the
reassertion of the vital, procreative energies of life, among which texts float as worlds
apart.

The symmetries structuring Ulysses through the pairing of Stephen and Bloom
somehow resemble the doubling scheme in Shakespeare's Henriad, with Falstaff
miming in low key the actions of the prince and king in the heroic plot, with the
difference that Hal’s self-fashioning is replaced in Joyce's novel by the construction of
identity as presence within public discourse, where, given the pre-existing and
autonomous order of language, the individual is both speaking and spoken. Ulysses
differs much not only from other modernist novels, narrated through individual centres of
consciousness, but also from A Portrait of the Artist, where identity is the cumulative,
spatial continuum of epiphanic moments. Anticipating Merleau-Ponty (The Prose of the
World), Stephen becomes aware of the non-coincidence of his past moments of being
with themselves. Now his selfhood strikes him not only as perceptual and linguistic but
also as temporal: what is given in the present of his consciousness is not the naked
past itself but an alteration of it, the past modified by all the visions he can have of it, a
distancing which questions the validity of memory and imagination themselves: So in
the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection
from that which then I shall be. The Stephen of Ulysses is therefore in search of
authority structures as guarantors of identity, which he identifies in the semiological
space of textuality. His actions are repeated attempts at inserting the objects of his
consciousness into a self-sufficient symbolical chain. Stephen is not only an artist but
also a teacher (the idea itself would have horrified the aesthetes of the fin de sičcle),
correcting the empirical attitude and situations in which his interlocutors are immersed.
He is constructed largely in conversation (the highest and normative form of which is
catechism), in an event of mutual understanding and transcendence towards a
community of meaning, the only monologue being reserved for the id-centred Molly. In
dialogue, le locuteur y comporte un allocutaire, autrement dit que le locuteur c’y
constitue comme intersubjectivité. (J.Lacan Écrits, 1971, p. 135). The character's
identity emerges as his image for others: What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal
form, were Bloom's thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom and Bloom's
thoughts about Stephen's thoughts about Bloom ? This image may be accidental or of a
more permanent and constructed nature. Stephen refuses to accept the reflection of his
face in the mirror as a genuine image of himself for Mulligan, because it only means
what Paul Ricoeur (Soi-męme comme un autre, Editions du Seuil, 1988) calls
’l’identité au sens d’idem’, that is permanence in time as different from changing,
variable. But his ’dogsbody’ cannot escape the plight of vermin. He will therefore
seek the ipseité du soi męme, which can only be realised in an otherness: un soi-
męme en tant que autre. When he comes to objectify himself in a narrative, the artist is
born. Summing up, the individual can be the idem of his physical presence in the here
and the now; ali-ity (self-alienation in physical resemblance to one's parents, for
instance); and ipse-ity – the overcoming of alienation in an image which is not oneself
but oneself in an otherness of one's own creation, a deliberate (not accidental),
constructed (not natural), objectified version. For instance, Shakespeare's texts, which
are other than Shakespeare and yet another version of himself, his image for all the
coming generations. But the source of this second image is not in himself (like Hamnet,
his son, his flesh and blood) but beyond himself, in the linguistic system into which he
was born.

This is Stephen to John Eglinton: His (Shakespeare's) own image to a man with
that queer thing genius is the standard of all experience, material and moral. (...) The
images of other males of his blood will repel him. He will see in them grotesque
attempts of nature to foretell or repeat himself. That is, the realm of the idem. On the
contrary, Stephen notices that Shakespeare's characters foreground the linguistic
system itself: Marina, Stephen says, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita, that
which was lost. Eglinton misses the point sliding into the order of nature and talking
about the “art of being a grandfather”. In Scylla and Charibdis, the same Eglinton, who
seems obsessed with the biological chain, mentions Dumas pčre et fils, whereas
Stephen carries the topic over to the Shakespearean text again: unlike Hamlet father
and son who are buried by the gravediggers, Prospero offers the better epilogue with
poetic justice done ” a world not already in existence but constituted by Prospero as
prosperous, as closure of subjectivity and objectivity: finding in the world without as
actual what lies within himself as possible. Not reality but epilogos, or "logos outside the
logos". Here is Lacan again: l'insistance de la chaine signifiante - comme correlative de
l’ex-sistence (de la place excentrique). Who has chosen this face for Stephen? It comes
from his biological father, de la place excentrique. Stephen replaces it by the signifier,
which is not his own creation but a pre-existing linguistic order, constructing him in a
subject position.

Le signifiant materialise l'instance de la mort. Chrysostomos, the word fascinating

Stephen, means "golden mouth": the imperishable order of speech or signs: sema
(tomb). The displacement worked by Hamlet as Shakespeare's figural son (a stand-in
for his lost Hamnet) is one more token of this incremental symbol.

Leopold Bloom himself is in his modest and more modern way another producer of
a discoursal space whose signifying battery lies beyond his own individual subjectivity.
As Norman Fairclough remarks in Language and Power (Longman 1989, p. 203), the
advertisement (...) is public discourse in the sense that it has a mass and
indeterminable audience (...) And it is one-way discourse in the sense that the producer
and interpreter roles do not alternate - the advertiser is the producer and the audience
are interpreters. The language-sensitive Joyce linguistically recorded England's
contemporary passage from a society of production towards one of consumption.
Advertisements are the discourse of consumerism. If Stephen has broken all historical
ties with family, class, nation, so does advertising. Capitalism, Fairclough argues (p.
200), has fractured traditional cultural ties associated with the extended family, the local
or regional or ethnic community, religion and so forth. (...) The cutting off of people
from cultural communities which could provide them with a sense of identity, values,
purposes is what underlies the growth of broadly therapeutic practice and discourse.
(...) advertising is of course the most visible practice and discourse of consumerism.
Ersatz communities are offered as alternatives to real ones. They build images,
construct subject positions for people as members of “consumption communities". If
Stephen's girl on the beach is a bird girl, a woman-inspiration soul, Bloom's Nausicaa,
Gerty, is the product of consumerist ideology: Time was when those brows were not so
silkily seductive. It was Madame Vera Verity, directress of the Woman Beautiful page of
the princess novelette, who had first advised her eyebrowline, which gave that haunting
expression to the eyes, so becoming in leaders of fashion, and she had never regretted
it. Then there was blushing scientifically cured and how to be tall increase your height
and you have a beautiful face but your nose? The character emerges through quotes
from the ads - the language of spurring and creating desire. "Vera verity" is an ironical
comment on the world of the ads, which is one of simulacra, of identical, depthless
copies.

Everything Bloom's imagination touches turns into the language of commercials.

The economy of the brief, non-finite clauses, freezing in the materiality of the nominals
arrests attention. Like this grotesque phantasmagoria advertising love in a modern
cemetery designed for telephone and gramophone facilities, spiced with echoes from
Browning and Shakespeare: Love among the tombstones. Romeo Spice of pleasure. In
the midst of death we are in life. Both ends meet.

This primitive stage of commercially-oriented action, however, will be redeemed in

the catechism scene, which returns being to the Ithaca of language. Under Stephen’s
influence, Bloom himself starts on the way to subjectivization through the signifier. The
first specular scene relates images to outside objects – the ex-sistence. In the next,
Bloom takes one more step towards self-recognition in an otherness. His image in the
mirror impresses him as that of a solitary (ipsorelative), mutable (aliorelative) man. All
along Stephen had been constructing the ipsorelative identity of self-validating analytical
language, of which we are now offered an example: “that man's father was his
grandfather's son”. The mutability of Bloom is given by the idem of his physical
resemblance: From infancy to maturity he had resembled his maternal procreatrix. From
maturity to senility he would increasingly resemble his paternal creator. Bloom also
catches the optical reflection of "several inverted volumes”, the specular perspective
reversing the real world order: He travels from resemblance to an otherness to self-
reflexivity. First, what Lacan calls “the mirror stage” of constructing his image for others,
allegorised by the Narcissus figure. It is not his own face in the mirror, this time, but an
object belonging to the autonomous order of artefacts: The candour, nudity, pose,
tranquility, youth, grace, sex, counsel of a statue erect in the centre of the table, an
image of Narcissus, purchased by auction from P.A. Wren, 9 Bachelor's Walk. We can
catch the faint echo of Stephen's theory of bachelorship as the ideal condition of the
artist. What follows is the first example of discourse analysis: the construction of an
advertisement according to schemes or stereotyped versions fed into Bloom's memory
by his knowledge of the "modern art of advertisement", with due attention paid to the
readers' making sense of it: triliteral monoideal symbols, vertically of maximum visibility
(divined), horizontally of maximum legibility (deciphered) and of magnetising efficacy to
arrest involuntary attention, to interest, to convince to decide. Like Stephen, he dreams
of “the independent discovery of a goldseam of inexhaustible ore”. His "golden tomb" is
going to be a "narrative about himself". As he tells his story to Molly, he leaves out the
events which might have annoyed or embarrassed her, serving it up not as a genuine
record but as a verbal repast, fit for the consumption of the two "consummated females
(listener and issue)”.

The end of the novel is its own nostos or homecoming: its framing as a merchant's
adventure story. Bloom is not the sage, the Ulysses figure, his language being one of
technology and tradism, not one of discovery or speculation. He is only streetwise, a
modern version of Sindbad the Sailor. Words no longer produce meaning or outside
reference (ex-sistence), seeking instead a sort of phonetic insistance: Sindbad the
Sailor and Tinbad the tailor and Jinbad the jailor and whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad
the Nailor etc. The last question of the catechisms, "Where?", is left unanswered,
because the world has evaporated into a semiological utopia. La subjectivité ŕ l'origine
n'est d'aucun rapport au réel, mais d'une syntaxe qu'y engendre la marque signifiante
(Lacan: Le seminaire sur “La Lettre volée”). Its property is nullibieté, being the symbol of
an absence – the golden tomb. Liberated from the constraints of its signified and
referent, the signifier is now a pure phonetic shape: Darkinbad the Brightdaylor is left to
contemplate its ipse-ity in the mirror of the text from which all ali-ity (mutability) has
been removed.

THE THIRTIES
 Christopher Gillie, in Movements in English Literature, l9oo-l94o, defines the
thirties as the “critical decade” [47]. It was critical both in the sense of social and political
unrest and in that of literature going back to a criticism of life. The first chapter of
contemporary English literature is written in between two world crises. The one in trade
around the turn of the fourth decade substantially contributed to the outbreak of World
War II on the threshold to the fifth. The Wall Street stock market collapsed in l929, and
the pound was devalued. Unemployment, hunger marches, overt conflict between
politics of right and left thread the whole period, being enhanced by an apprehension of
a world run-down, fed into Britain by the grim realities in the dictatorships (the
totalitarian regimes in Soviet Russia, Germany, Italy, and the Civil War in Spain).

It had been much easier for the modernist aesthetes to put reality into brackets,
out of a commonly shared belief that the sense of the world must be sought outside it
(...) as in it there is no value [48], than for those who shared a sense of living in a
“leaning tower”, on the point of an imminent collapse. Even H.G. Wells, the
“journalistically”-minded Edwardian, had completely abandoned the quest for scientific
progress and economic improvement towards the end of his life, owing up to a “mind at
the end of the tether” (the title of his last work) in trying to make sense of the bundle of
accidents which were constantly heaping up in a massy world. It was for the writers of
the thirties to drop the tone of apologetic diffidence, engaging on either side of the
barricade – left or right, Communist or Catholic – or in a curious combination of both (for
example Graham Greene, drawn towards the left, while being a Catholic convert). It was
not that the young generation felt differently about the meaningless and threatening
realities in the world without, but that they undertook to articulate their condition of
modern Jonahs. In his 1940 essay “Inside the Whale”,
George Orwell took to task the modernists for engaging solely in gratuitous
manipulations of words, while paying no attention to the urgent problems of the
moment. In reply to the frequent attacks on the modernists' aestheticism, Virginia Woolf
made an edgy comment on the young “communists, anti-fascists “living in The Leaning
Tower. While admitting to the existence of public causes much more pressing than
philosophy... aesthetic emotions and personal relations, she also saw these writers as
the product of traditional education and bourgeois leisurely means, which made their
commitment to Labour problematic. Graham Greene himself, a headmaster's son, had
blamed the “Old School” for a stultified sort of education, harking back on a liberal
humanism which had lost touch with reality. As a schoolboy, he had inhabited half of a
building whose other half was the public school. Despite his father's mild disposition, he
must have felt like a spy among his colleagues, and it was such ambiguous situations,
or what, with a phrase borrowed from Browning, he called “the dangerous edge of
things”, that became signposts of Greeneland. The writer himself was sort of a spy in a
society whose political drama was plotted behind the scenes.

Graham Greene (b. 1904) started, however, in a more conventional way, with
historical romances, and with an idealistic focus on the loner in dangerous situations:
The Man Within (1929) could still be constructed from fictional materials. Greene
himself confesses that at that time he chose the past as he found it more accessible for
being contained in books. When his character decided to look without, he first saw
England as a site of warfare: It's a Battlefield (1938). Cotton workers, railway men, the
match-box factory build a realist background for the protagonist, Jim Drove, a bus driver
who kills a policeman at a political rally held in Hyde Park, when he thinks he is going to
hit his wife.

Another “primary scene” in Greene's life, the circumstance that he belonged to the
intellectual Greenes, while his uncle's family, the rich Greenes, inhabited the Hall, the
most expensive building in Berkhamsted, probably offered the binary model for
character-patterning in his novels: communist Drove's brother, Conrad, works for the
police. Commitments are always precarious; social cohesion, even among those who
have no other support in society, proves precarious. The Party will not intercede to save
Drove, whose death penalty is finally commuted to life-long imprisonment. A new kind
of narrative structure and diction are created for a sort of fiction that cuts to the quick
of life. The documented event (the novel is based upon an actual rally which was held
in Hyde Park in 1932), the immediacy of the popular songs and the newspaper
headlines remind of Dickens's reconstruction of the 1854 Preston strike in a newspaper
article, published in “Household Words”. “Journalistic” realism, which progressively
contaminates fiction (the most famous example is the American Dos Passos), the
cliches of colloquial diction, pointed conversation consort with a cinematic
montage technique of cutting from scene to scene, which gives Greene's novels the
aspect of shooting scripts. His novels, as a matter of fact, have often got on to the
screen.

Greene's journeys abroad concomitantly enriched his map of humanity.

Irrespective of the changing fashions in the after-war literary scene, Greene continued
to explore the unpredictable “human factor”, its contradictions and paradoxes, which
lead lovers to betray, the uninvolved to die for causes, the loyalists to change
allegiances.

At first, the heart of humanity looked black. The Heart of the Matter (1948) is set in
a West African colony, on that continent shaped like man's heart, as Greene intimates in
one of his travel books. Colonizers and Syrians alike compete for a prize in a contest of
“injustices, cruelties, meannesses”, which cannot leave even Major Scobie, the man
decided to see justice done, untouched. The heart's “end of the tether” is reached by
Wilson who, on going down the passage to a brothel, thinks he has got rid of every
racial, social and individual trait, and has reduced himself to human nature. The “human
nature” beyond racial, social and ethical considerations is “horror”.

In a mass-controlled prison-world not even the acceptance of one's positioning in

the socially nested boxes described by way of a cautionary tale by Daintry, the man
policing an agency of espionage in The Human Factor (1976), secures a possibility of
salvation. The uninvolved Davies dies for being wrongly suspected of a leak of
information, while the politically uncommitted Castle, who had never meant to become a
communist, ends up in Soviet Russia. Is it only because, as the epigraph of Conrad's
Victory reads, “any man in love is an anarchist carrying a time bomb”, or is it because
the woman to whom Castle is attracted to the point of sacrificial generosity is a black
from Pretoria, for whose escape he has contracted political debts and beside whom he
still has to fight racial prejudices?

In Monsignor Quixote (1982), the mechanism of institutionalized authority, whether

political or religious, has seriously slackened, allowing the two protagonists, a
communist and a Catholic priest, to share in the blessed community of the white human
heart. The modest father Quixote, who entertains a fiction about his descent from
Cervantes's fabled hero, is appointed “Monsignor” by an Italian bishop, to whom he has
offered hospitality in El Toboso. Quixote's bishop, who thinks him an old dodderer, gives
him leave until he can properly retire. Zancas, whom Quixote has baptized “Sancho”, is
to accompany him in his old Seat („Rosinante”) to Salamanca, to secure a bishop's
violet socks and “parashah”. Zancas is the communist ex-mayor, who has lost the
elections, the “dismissals” of the two protagonists being symbolical of the failure
awaiting those who play down the rigid expectations of dogmatic social institutions. The
dreamy and tolerant priest finds himself involved in a crusade to recover the purity of
faith from a clergyman's money hunt, and the same doubting priest ends up in the
supreme act of faith, which is a mass performed without the material presence of
chalice and hoist. Man of various commitments can be brought into spiritual communion
and mutual tolerance; it is society that sets men against one another, in unnatural,
absurd confrontations. The influence of postmodernist recycling of semantic energies
can be felt in the framing of the protagonists as “figures” – Cervantes's pseudo-couple in
contemporary guise. The “battlefield”, however, is as topical as in Greene's early novels,
the “human factor” trying to assert itself against the force field of conflicting ideologies.

The other Catholic convert of the thirties, Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), sought
anchorage in the political right. His conservatism did not prevent him from launching a
satirical attack upon the decayed aristocracy, through whom the traditional pastoral
England had been lost. It was only in the thirties that the horror of mass slaughter in
World War I was fully realized, and the fiction of a pre-war rural England of stable
values acted as a sort of counterpoise to the meretricious and violent present. That
cultural narrative, developed by the Edwardians as a compensation for a diminishing
sense of Imperial grandeur, had now come down to A Handful of Dust (1934), and the
only defender of traditional values is symbolically named “Tony Last”. Waugh detracts
from his worth as the guardian of the ordered, pre-capitalist society, through
suggestions of artificial attitudinising and of an effeminated character. He simply waters
down the sarcasm lavishly bestowed on the other characters, treating Last with the mild
humour reserved for Donquixotic figures. Tony is deeply attached to his country
residence, Hetton Abbey, which he has medievalised, naming its rooms after characters
in Mallory's Arthurian romance. Ironically enough, his room is called “Morgan Le Faye”
(Arthur's sexless half sister from beyond this word), and that of his wife, “Guinevere”
(Arthur's unfaithful wife). He is an antiquated gentleman, posing as an upright God-
fearing gentleman of the old school, ceremoniously attending church on Sundays and
solemnly treating himself to a glass of sherry in the library in the evening. His frivolous
wife, who suffers from great ennui in one of those big houses which are now a “thing of
the past”, disturbs the peace of his shelter with the newspaper echoes of London petty
events: a new political speech, a little girl strangled in a church-yard, the unusual
circumstances of the birth of a pair of twins etc. This is the prelude to the two Englands
colliding in the thirties: one dead, the other meaningless. Brenda's visit to London
occasions a love-affair with the good-for-nothing son of a modern decorator. John
Beaver is, from one point of view, a victim of the circumstances. Since he left Oxford,
the economic depression has prevented him from finding a job, with the exception of a
brief time spent in an advertising agency. He has possessed himself of a good store of
amusing anecdotes, which are his pay for the meals in the homes where he manages to
get himself invited. The picture of London social life is depressing, with its conventional
round of calls, petty conversations, gossip, immorality, cynicism. Brenda's son, John
Andrew, gets killed in a hunting accident, while she is enjoying herself in the London
society, where her adulterous affair is regarded as matter-of-factedness. On hearing the
report of John being dead, she first thinks of her lover, and it is with relief that she
realizes that it had “only” been... her son.

The process of atrophy of feelings and dehumanisation is carried to even lower

depths in Point Counter Point (1928), a novel by Aldous Huxley, whose cool, scientific
anatomising of human perversities lacks the vivid realism of his peers.

Brenda's ignonimous behaviour does not kill the chivalrous impulses in Tony. He
produces faked evidence against himself in the ensuing divorce trial, Hetton Abbey
passing to his rich cousin, Richard Last, who puts an end to all nonsense about “old
associations”, seeing to it that he derives good profit from his property. Thinking of the
good returns he is going to earn, he turns the stable into a silver fox farm, while Tony's
dream of “cream and dappled unicorns” takes him to South America in search of the
fabled Eldorado: It was Gothic in character, all vanes and pinnacles, battlements,
pavilions and terraces, a transfigured Hetton... luminous and translucent, a coral citadel
crowning a hill- top, sown with heraldic and fabulous animals....

Waugh reacts powerfully to a new type of society, still in the making: the society of
consumption, which had replaced the one of production, in which traditional values and
aesthetic habits are replaced by arbitrary fashions imposed by the mass industry of
designers, decorators and advertisers. Tony's ’bęte-noire’, as he goes down with
fever in the Amazon jungle, are not the people who had actually destroyed his life, but
Mrs. Beaver, who, in his delirium, has covered his Eldorado in white chromium plating
and converted it into flats. He seems to see her hand everywhere, warning Mr. Todd (a
maniac who saves him from the mere) to guard his house, built entirely out of
indigenous materials, lest Mrs. Beaver should cover it in chromium plating. Mr. Todd
lives in a sort of No Man's Land, as the depopulated area in which he is only known to a
couple of families is disputed by both Brazil and the Dutch Guyana. Tony finds himself
stranded as it were out of space, out of time, spending the rest of his life as Mr. Todd's
prisoner, jealously hidden from the eyes of occasional visitors, reading to him from the
early novels of Charles Dickens...
 The nostalgic dream of an idealised past Britain underpins the action of Coming
up for Air (1939), a novel George Orwell (1903-1950) published after an attack on
Imperialism in the mixture of fiction and documentary of Burmese Days (1934).
Oppressed by his tedious life in London, George Bowling feels the impulse to come up
for air, that is, to return to the patriarchal pre-war life in Lower Binfield. The Home
Secretary, Scotland Yard, the Bank of England, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, the Pope, seem
to be tracking him back to the Eden of his childhood, which, as he reaches it, turns out
to be a fallen one, corrupted by urbanisation like any other place in inter-war England.
The racy colloquialism, the topicality of political allusions, the realism of everyday details
betray, like all thirties fiction, the influence of the American realists of the twenties and
the thirties.

The death of the individual, the triumph of totalitarianism reach a climactic point in
Orwell's dystopia, Nineteen Eighty Four, published in 1949. Orwell's master
achievement is not the recital of horrors, which the Gulag literature has meanwhile
turned into clichés, but the transference of the confrontation with evil within the human
heart. Physical torture counts less than human perversion, generalised warfare, less
than participation in the hate world. Language itself goes through a crisis, the social run
down replicating itself in a minimalist, illogical, abridged, impoverished, meaningless
slogan world. Yet even on this stage of apocalyptic visions, of terror and imprisonment,
man can still protect his heart from the evil encroaching outside. The archetypal script of
the hero put to the test pits Julia, who cannot be made to join the hate world, against
her lover, Winston Smith, who yields to the perverted will of the demonic O'Brien. Apart
from judgement, there is also the only possible form of retribution in a dictatorship:
people avoid Winston, depriving him of that secretive mutual sympathy, which dares not
materialize in gestures and words. Orwell had meant to entitle his novel “The Last Man
in Europe”. Unless there is one single man left in the world, there is no judgement, no
law, and only beastly non-differentiation. Orwell was as aware of that as Eugen Ionesco
in his Rhinoceros.

The focus on large public themes brings the poetry of the, “critical decade” into
unprecedented intimacy with the fiction of the age. The modernists' exploration of
personal states of consciousness takes the form of a “technical” inquiry into
psychosomatic illness, like those of the extraordinarily intelligent and skilful W.H. Auden
(1907-1973), while the need for experimentation subsides in the refurbishing of
traditional forms to which a new colloquial vigour is imparted:... his contemporary
knowingness, his skill with references, with slang, with the time's immediate worries
went into the production of a kind of social, occasional verse, mostly traditional in form,
but highly up-to-date in idiom [49]. In The Orators, Auden programmatically opposes the
natural flavour of the language of the tribe to the modernist abstract aestheticism, as the
more suitable idiom at a time of crisis.

His Poems of 1927-1932 tap the large public themes of the age, with their mutated
values. Echoes of the General Strike and political repression steal into Let History Be
My Judge and 1929. Contemporary enthusiasm over improved communications at a
distance is shown their dehumanising, alienating effect. No Change of Place may mean
more expediency but, in communicating through letters or telephone, the concrete
human personality becomes remote, abstracted to a voice or a dead graphical picture.

Situations are crosslit from opposite viewpoints, sometimes problematized in an

ambiguous language. There is undoubtedly heroic majesty in the images of the
hovering kestrels, of the curlew's call, subtly echoing The Seafarer, a sense of
metaphysical determinism in the hint to the leader's “doomed companions”, who had
died in the war, an almost mythical suggestion in the “happy valley” in which the dead
heroes sleep like ancient heroes on the Happy Isles. The worth of the enterprise is
however lost in the final realization that they had been fighters for no one's sake. The
surviving leader receives week-end guests in the house turned into a museum. The
domesticity of the lights and wine set for supper, the social rite of going on week-ends
are taking the reader back to the unheroic everyday. And yet, the call of a pastoral
countryside, in opposition to the monotonous life in the capital, the search for wonder,
for heroes in the neighbouring woods emancipate the present from beastly satisfaction
of physical survival. The refusal to join the army for obscure reasons can still be seen as
a justified act of rebellion against irrational political authority:

And bravery is now

Not in the dying breath

But resisting the temptations

For skyline operations.

Is military operation any worth, when it does not also mean a defense of values ?
The “missing” (dead soldiers) are also being “missed” (nostalgically remembered), the
poem intimating, through its ambiguities, that facts are not important in themselves but
through their echoes in consciousness.

The Poems of 1933-1938 are even deeper involved in exploring relationships

between reality and representation in the arts, social appearances and the sublimation
of subliminal states, modes of vision and modes of language. It is interesting to
compare Leda and the Swan, by Yeats, where the violence of the mythical encounter
between mortal and divinity marks the beginning of terrible disasters in human history
(the siege of Troy, the deaths of heroes) and the shabby modern look of the seeds of
disaster in contemporary history, where politics is no longer transparent or confrontation
overt, heroic or chivalrous. In Gare du Midi, a character completely lacking in the
glamour of a an official person or even of some mysterious spy, looking like an
inoffensive, shabby bureaucrat, may just have infested Brussels with the hidden designs
of Nazi diplomacy, while his footprints are covered by the innocent and indifferent snow:

A nondescript express in from the south,

Crowds round the ticket barrier, a face

 To welcome which the mayor has not contrived

Bugles or braid: something about the mouth

Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity.

Snow is falling. Clutching a little case,

He walks out briskly to infect a city

Whose terrible future may have just arrived.

Consider is a symptomatic title for Auden's particular phenomenological strategy,

which has received little attention so far. The three parts of the poem separate three
perspectives on humanity. The first is a cinematic, panoramic vision, a God-like view
from above, like that of a pilot or of an omniscient narrator, objectively recording people
and things in a winter sports hotel, international tourists gathering for the first garden
party of the year, alongside rural pictures of farmers and their dogs. The second part
abandons the outside landscape, plunging into the depth of the subconscious,
wherefrom the “neurotic dread” gushes forth. This is Satan's world, of self-awareness
and repression of inner drives by the social ego. The third part suggests the art form
which can best render the poet's own view of humanity, which is not outwardly
voyeuristic but psychologically explorative. The split personalities, with “alternate
ascendancies” (one self or other becoming alternately dominant) are best rendered by
the musical arrangement of fugues. The poem is thus commenting upon its own
structure. Miss Gee and Victor are supplementary studies in distorting sexual
repressions and psychological processes of transference.

The rhetorically divided structure of the Petrarchan sonnet supports a similar

division between a poet's reductionist generalizations of experience and The Novelist's
generous view of the multifarious aspects of humanity. The poet's partiality for realism
inspires his praise of the realist school of Flemish painting. The Old Masters never
smooth over life's incongruities, drawing all the threads of its complex texture to one
single, unified impression thereof. The scene of martyrdom runs into a corner, while life
goes on undisturbed about it, with children skating, someone is eating or opening a
window, the dogs go on with their doggy life (Musée des Beaux Arts). The natural, the
animal, the human and the divine are all brought into communion, the world is no longer
Hardy's “psychological phenomenon”, but a house of many apartments, with life going
calmly on in each of them, unaware of the others.

The gap however could no longer be completely bridged. Auden's art cannot jump
over its own, modern shadow, back to the unproblematic realism of the “Old Masters”.
This is not “first-hand” realism but art criticism, an aesthetic statement about the
necessary union of thought content and form in art. The Commentary on Shakespeare's
“The Tempest” carries forth Joyce's innovation of character created in language by
adding to this strategy an awareness of genre. Common people, like Stephano and
Trinculo, use the popular ballad form. Ferdinand, the romantic lover, writes a sonnet,
Miranda communicates her vision of the pastoral brave new world, in perfect harmony,
in a villanelle, Alonso sends a letter of sage advice to his son, Ferdinand, in the
Basilicon Doron tradition. Caliban understandably resorts to prose, Auden availing
himself of the opportunity to get back at the modernists. Caliban preaches to the
Audience on the role of art in the style of...Henry James. Auden is a typical example of
the failed attempt to wind back the clock of art history. The deliberate, conscious
reaction against modernist attitudes and styles had its limits. Writers could no longer go
back to the pre-modernist discursive freedom.

The “Counter-Reformation” did not take long. Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), the
Welsh Bohemian poet and journalist, rejected Auden's intellectualism, while
rehabilitating rhetoric.

Thomas's main but, however, is high modernism. One of his prose volumes is
entitled Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (194o), the polemical exchange with Joyce
having started two years earlier, when he had written a poem beginning “Once it was
the colour of saying...” Unlike Stephen Dedalus, who produces his artistic language out
of a Narcissistic absorption in the self, taking delight not in the colours of the natural
landscape but in the rhetorical effects of the poetic idiom, with the actual sea
evaporated into “sea-borne clouds”, Dylan Thomas undertakes a process of
depersonalization (Now my saying shall be my undoing) while displaying a passionate
interest in outside people and things. The figures of the fishing-reel or of the stone
unwinding like a reel he throws at the lovers in a park are emblematic of his attempt to
practise a harder, disenchanted form of realism. Whereas Stephen's emblem of art is an
impalpable, soaring figure (Icarus), Thomas is harking back to the fusion of subjectivity
and objectivity, realized through a new kind of poetry. He feels he must destroy the
Joycean idiom, into which reality is drowned, annihilated, resurrecting it into forms felt
once more to be palpable and alive: The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo? Till all
the chrarmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill.

World and self re-emerge as twin-born in the seductive, rhetorical obscurity of the
forties, maybe emotionally enhanced by the war raving around. The body's alphabet
disturbs the language of modernist narratives. His poems are descriptive pieces,
deliberately merging, through anthropomorphic imagery, the human and the natural
world. A letter dating back to 1933 makes his poetic quite explicit: All thoughts and
actions emanate from the body. Therefore the description of a thought or action... can
be beaten home by bringing it onto a physical level. Every idea, intuitive or intellectual,
can be imaged and translated in terms of the body, its flesh, blood, sinews, veins,
glands, organs, cells, or senses... All I write is inseparable from the island... I employ
the scenery of the island to describe the scenery of my thoughts, the earthquakes of the
body to describe the earthquakes of the heart.

One such poem, in which the human body is projected on a cosmic scale, is A
Process in the Weather of the Heart. The rhetoric at work in it is much more complex
than a depersonalizing of the human body while personalizing the body of the world...
bringing the two into intimate, mysterious connection [50]. The union is a tense one, of
unresolved opposites, which is characteristic of the modernist discourse in general. The
connotation of “weather” is change, something reputedly whimsical and unaccountable
for, whereas “process” implies a sequence of changes, whose inner law the human
mind has discovered and defined. Wittgenstein says that language is an unstable
ground. If you look at it from one direction, everything sounds coherent, if you look at it
from another, you find yourself in a maze, in a labyrinth. With Dylan Thomas we do find
ourselves on such unstable ground. The weather of the eye, a forest of the loins do
indeed point simultaneously outwardly to nature's activity and inwardly to events in the
poet's own body (Ibidem), but in doing so they are pointing rather to irreconcilable
oppositions. That eye capable to see both the quick and the ghosts of the eye has no
correspondent in the reflecting surfaces of nature. The heart “yielding” its dead, out of
cherished memories or imagination is essentially different from a field yielding a harvest.
This seems to be in Thomas the function of poetic language: to unify what nature and
the discriminating intellect have set apart. The utopia of a mythical oneness sends him
on a quest of prenatal (I Dreamed My Genesis) or post-mortem (The Tombstone Told
When She Died) states. A comparison between Milton's On the Day of His Nativity and
Thomas's Poem on His Birthday would prove most rewarding in a historical approach to
changing literary paradigms. Milton forces a private event (his birthday) onto a mythical
scheme (from Christ's Nativity to the Revelation), whereas Thomas deals in a
phenomenology of consciousness in a complex, ambiguous way, which prevents the
construction of a coherent cultural narrative or a definite conclusion. The labour of the
self upon the world produces the genesis of consciousness (man alone can transcend
nature, divine the existence of God and realize the meaning of death), and a new type
of apocalyptic “exultation”: through death, man is restored to the continuum of nature, is
reunited with the rest of being. It is consciousness that condemns man to solitude in the
universe, whereas the body is the link with it (four elements and five/Senses). A
rhetorical subversion of this confident and literal pronouncement is however still at work,
in the separation of “elements” and “senses” into different lines, in the improper
matching of natural elements and human emotions: the sea... exults, the whole world...
With more triumphant faith, etc. Dylan Thomas is the prophet of a new poetic, according
to which the text becomes the space of unstable meanings and open-ended readings.

References:

[42] Garry M. Leonard, Reading “Dubliners” Again. A Lacanian Perspective. Syracuse University Press,
1993, p. 291.

[43] Maria-Ana Tupan, Limbaje si scenarii poetice, Editura Minerva, 1989, pp. 81 and the following.

[44] Henri Bergson, L'evolution creatrice, Librairie Felix Alcan, 1924, p. 345

[45] Katie Wales, Op. cit., pp. 51-4

[46] David Fuller, James Joyce's “Ulysses”, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.

[47] Christopher Gillie, Op. cit., p. 122.

[48] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Tractatus. (6.41), 1921.

[49] A. Alvarez, Introduction to The New Poetry, Penguin Books, 1970, p. 22.

[50] Walford Davies, Dylan Thomas. Open University Press, 1986, p. 47.

THE PRESENT

Post-war historical contexts. From modernist subjectivity and

aestheticism to positivism and behaviourism. The anti-
cosmopolitan social fiction of the “angry young men”. The
existentialist breakthrough in drama: Samuel Beckett and Harold
Pinter. The Movement, or Empsonian craftsmanship and Leavisite
feedback on the “great tradition”. Philip Larkin, emerging out of
the Movement's cloak. Ted Hughes, or the surrealist path from New
Criticism to postmodernist deconstruction. Moral psychology:
William Golding and Iris Murdoch. Fabulators and Metafiction: John
Fowles and Doris Lessing. Postmodernist Gothic, Magic Realism
and Cyberpunk. Postcolonial Fiction, or the Empire moving in.
Parody, Camp and Postmodernism: Tom Stoppard. Towards a new
constructivism?

British literature since 1945 is a chapter defined by a chronological

landmark – the end of World War II – rather than by coherent canonical features.
The critical appraisals vary widely, sometimes in the case of one and the same
author. Even Ted Hughes, the Poet Laureate, that “institution” commonly
considered to designate the writer “speaking messages from the spirit of the time”,
has attracted labels as different as “empirical imagination”, “living consciousness of
the physical world” (Terry Whalen, Philip Larkin & English Poetry, Macmillan, 1986),
“surrealistic modes”, “Shamanism” and “Disney cartoon movies” (The Achievement
of Ted Hughes, edited by Keith Sagar, Keith Sagar, 1983). Harold Pinter's plays are
framed as “drama of the mind” but also as “kitchen-sink” realism (George Watson,
British Literature since 1945, Macmillan, 1991); Samuel Becket's drama, as
“absurdist” but also as a “theatre about theatre”. Given the diversity of points of
view on a subject which is still exposed to radical shifts and revaluations, the lack of
consensus upon the possible mapping of a territory produced by a recent and
unfinished genetic process, our own approach will be of a more tentative nature, an
introduction, suggesting a possible ordering rather than an established canon.

The socio-economic and political condition of Britain in the fifties somehow

accounts for its non-paradigmatic cultural picture. These are the years of the
disintegration of the empire, of England's withdrawal from Europe, and reliance on
internal resources. The debacle of Suez in 1956 and the retreat from Cyprus in the
late nineteen fifties figure as major crises. It was only later in the sixties, when
England had been accepted into the West European Common Market, that the ties
with Continental culture, resumed in the late fifties, were multiplied and
consolidated.

David Lodge, in Modes of Modern Writing, divides the period into

“postmodernist” (the 1940s and the 1950s), characterised by a breaking away
from Joyce and Proust, and new postmodernist (from the sixties to the present) –
the age of “paper-thin fictional worlds”.

Few literary works published in Britain over this time span can be classified as
“postmodernist”, as the term has been constructed in its American and French
variants. Apart from this “Frenchified” party which started to emerge towards the
end of the fifties (including Samuel Becket, Lawrence Durrell, John Fowles,
Doris Lessing, among others), two other distinct groups crop up in the fifties and
in the sixties. One is known as the “angry young men” – the social realists whose
attack on the dissatisfying state of affairs in England bespeaks the spirit of the
revived positivism in philosophy and of behaviourism in psychology: The
phrase “Angry Young Men” carries multiple overtones, which might be listed as
irreverence, stridency, impatience with tradition, vigour, vulgarity, sulky
resentment against the cultivated [1]. The “phrase” had first occurred as the title of
a novel about the interwar working class by Leslie Paul (1951), but it was only after
the performance of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) that it became
current. The thirties and the forties had not completely rid themselves of Edwardian
stuff: the cultural narratives of pastoral and rural Britain, in opposition to the
postindustrial present, journalistic realism with a marked tendency towards
“paysage moralisé”, an inclination to formally tight narratives and symbolisation, as
in Waugh or Huxley, a taste for dystopias like Huxley's Brave New World or Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty Four. No need for elaborate construction is felt in the crude realism,
both social and linguistic, of the “angry” fifties. The young novelists react against
the Bloomsbury intelligentsia, the chandelier-drawing-room literati – a tradition still
continued by Cyril Connoly and his magazine, Horizon. New areas of experience are
now being opened up for literature. The typical situation in these novels of a loose,
picaresque structure is a hero climbing up or down the social ladder, the upstarts
being engaged, like Balzac's Rastignac, in running a race against society. They
begin as malcontents, breaking into mutinous rage, but they often adopt the point
of view of the moneyed classes, the bougeois values, ending up with a well-paid job
and moral surrender: Lucky Jim (1954), by Kingsley Amis, Hurry on Down (1953)
by John Wain, Room at the Top (1957) by John Braine. It is only Alan Sillitoe
who goes deeper into an exploration of working-class culture and life-styles, taking
a consistent, principled and class-conscious stand against the establishment in
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and The Loneliness of the Long
Distance Runner (1959). John Osborne's radical dissent, assuming imprecatory
tones (Damn You, England), can be heard both in fiction and in the “kitchen-sink
realism” of his plays (Look Back in Anger, 1956).

While this anti-cosmopolitan trend was being established in England,

existentialism and absurdism were raving on the Continent. It was through Samuel
Becket's Waiting for Godot, 1952, performed in England in 1955, that they finally
managed a breakthrough in England as well. Jean Paul Sartre's works – Nausea,
1938, L'Ętre et le Néant, 1943, L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946 ” set out
from subjectivity, but of a very special sort. The first principle is that existence
precedes essence. Man is born into a godless world, which offers him no pre-
existing laws, guide for behaviour, inherent values and norms. Man is free but
overwhelmed by the enormous responsibility of choosing, creating and asserting
values himself, through his individual acts. Life has no a priori sense; man only
exists to the extent to which he fulfils his personal project. In L'Existentialisme...
Sartre gives a persuasive example: whereas Maggie Tulliver (G. Eliot's The Mill on
the Floss) gives up on the man she loves out of consideration for the insignificant
woman to whom he had already committed himself, Sanseverina in The Monastery
of Parma, by Stendhal, finds that a passionate love relationship is a value superior
to that of fidelity in a lukewarm marital relationship, and who should say that she is
wrong? Man constructs himself through his acts. Racine, for instance, is the totality
of the tragedies he has written. Save for his achieved projects, the individual is only
a bundle of unfulfilled promises and vain expectations. There is no such thing as the
determining influence of heredity, society, and psychology, much exploited by the
naturalistic school of Zola. Man constructs himself in frames of intersubjectivity, in a
discourse with others, for man is what the others acknowledge him to be. The
bearings of existentialism on the literary discourse can be identified in the neglect
of the historical background, of the characters' social status, and in the
corresponding emphasis upon the characters' ontology in language, in conversation.
There is no stable ground for identity any longer (status, family, profession etc.). It
is the intersubjective communication that determines what man is and what the
others are. The memory of past selves is often a lacunary one, the individual
progressing through chameleonic identities as he engages in various relationships.
Reality is erased by succeeding versions of it. In The Erasers (Les Gommes, 1953),
Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the leads in the French “nouveau-roman” (a fictional
offshoot of existentialism), builds several conflicting versions of the same events.
The way in which characters construct reality in language becomes more important
than the truth of the events. Lawrence Durrell goes so far as to question the
existence of objective reality: What is reality? (in reply to Do you think that reality is
an illusion? in a radio interview). In his Alexandria Quartet (Justine, 1957, Balthazar,
1958, Mountolive, 1958, Clea, 1960), he provides several accounts of the same
events, the tetralogy giving the impression of a kaleidoscope turning on its own
axis. The luxurious sensuousness of the language, mimetically reproducing the
atmosphere of an Oriental, lascivious city, even suggests that the characters are
the projections of Alexandria, that they might have assumed different identities in
another place. From the realist multiplot novel, we have moved into a fictional
tissue woven out of multiple points of view, whereby reality is deconstructed and
identity destabilized. The choice of genre – the Alexandria is spy fiction, Robbe-
Grillet writes detective novels – is symptomatic of the Sartrian view (also upheld by
Robbe-Grillet in Towards a New Novel, 1956) that reality is beyond human
comprehension, alien, meaningless. Fluidity of identity characterizes the English
fictional transcripts of French existentialism: Colin Wilson's The Outsider (1956), and
Nigel Dennis's Cards of Identity (1955).

The most innovating field is drama, with its ongoing experiments in the London
Fringe theatres, of a non-conventional structure and locale (over a pub, in a
basement or train-shed etc.).The paired trampish figures are maybe a replica to the
clowns of the silent screen [2] in this age when the boundary between high and
popular art become blurred, yet the fable sustaining them is that of the
existentialist bracketing of the social-historical background. The tramps of Becket or
of Harold Pinter live outside society (in Pinter's The Caretaker, 1960, the tramp even
lacks documents to identify himself), being created in conversation, like
disembodied voices. In Becket's Play (1963) the three characters enacting the
archetypal scheme of adultery are three heads protruding from funeral urns. In
Happy Days (1961), by the same author, Winnie is buried to the neck in a sand-pile,
yet as long as she is being looked at (by the audience, just like the tramp-like figure
in Film, 1965), she may be said to exist. Someone being aware of your existence or
of your own playing someone else (Vladimir and Estragon “doing Pozzo and Lucky”)
establishes yourself in the frame of intersubjectivity which is the true source of
identity, more genuine than possession of land, title, home etc. The pseudo-couples
engage in conversation to prove that they exist: Cumulatively, these almost-
persons and near-characters go on “making words” together as, in a different kind
of play, a couple might make love [3]. According to Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes,
Michel Riffaterre, and their disciples (including the British John Fowles), there is
nothing outside the text, and texts signify by reference from words to words not to
things. A literature of language acts is being born, foregrounding its own self-
generative processes.

A third group, which we choose to call the “Leavisites”, as their traditionalism

and formal discipline are a feed back upon what Frank Raymond Leavis (1895-
1978) called “the great tradition” in English literature, includes such “new
syntheses of old conflicts” [4] as the novels of Angus Wilson, William Golding,
Iris Murdock, and the poets of the Movement in the fifties.

It is only now that the reaction to high modernism assumes the form of a
poetic manifesto and materializes in a distinctive code, even if the vaguely termed
“Movement” is mainly retrospective. Modernist experimentation struck them as an
American invention, the poets of the present reaching back to Hulme, Lawrence,
and Hardy. The climate of opinion had probably been shaped by the constant efforts
of F.R. Leavis as editor of “The Scrutiny” (1932-1953) and in his book, The Great
Tradition (1948) to reassess the moral, humanistic and national main stream in
literature (Jane Austen, Alexander Pope, George Eliot) against Flaubert's heritage of
formal innovations. As the director of English Studies, he used the educational
system to disseminate literary knowledge and appreciation, which were meant to
develop the individual's moral sensibilities. Leavisism stood at the origin of the
cultural studies which appeared in England in the fifties and have recently received
a new impetus. Even Doris Lessing is found to speak the language of Leavis in her
combination of experimentation and social commitment: Once a writer has a feeling
of responsibility, as a human being, for the other human beings he influences, it
seems to me he must become a humanist, and must feel himself as an instrument
of change for good or for bad... he must see himself, to use the socialist phrase, as
an architect of the soul... But if one is going to be an architect, one must have a
vision to build towards, and that vision must spring from the nature of the world we
live in [5].

The “Movement” was more precise about the point of departure than about
what it was heading to. When its members (D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Robert
Conquest, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, John Wain,
Thom Gunn) got into an anthology (New Lines, Macmillan 1967), they were
introduced by Robert Conquest as offsprings of the positivist and behaviourist
refusal of abstractions: I believe the most important general point would be that it
submits to no great systems of theoretical constructs nor agglomerations of
unconscious commands. It is free from both mystical and logical compulsions and –
like modern philosophy – is empirical in its attitude to all that comes. The anthology
with its diffident rather than blasting manifesto, resorting mainly to negative self-
definitions, had been preceded by an anonymous article entitled “In the Movement”
published in the Spectator on 1 October 1954, in which the authoritative figures of
Dr. Leavis and Professor Empson were called upon to assist the birth of an anti-wet,
sceptical, robust, ironic. Movement. Emulating the Augustans' empiricism as well as
their metrical norms, these poets impress Alvarez [6] as a group of doctrine-saddled
writers forming a definite school complete with programme and rules. Most of them
were university teachers, producing academic-administrative verse, polite,
knowledgeable, efficient, polished, and, in its quiet way, even intelligent. Keeping a
balance between Charles Thomlinson's contemptuous rejection of the Movement as
“middle-cum-lowbrainism” and Alvarez' “cum laude” academism, it was Blake
Morrison [7] who gave up on a comfortably unified scheme, pointing to the group's
basic inconsistencies:

The critic of the Movement is faced, then, with a series of divisions. On the one
hand, the Movement enjoys and exploits the sense of belonging to an academic
elite; on the other hand, it disapproves of writing aimed at such an elite. On the one
hand, it asserts the importance of university teachers and critics; on the other, it
questions and satirizes their function. One the one hand, it declares that to write for
a larger audience is damaging; on the other, it declares that it is valuable and
necessary. On the one hand, its work is dense, allusive, intimate with fellow
intellectuals; on the other, its work is simple, “accessible”, intimate with an
imagined Common Reader. Previous critics of the Movement have tended to
emphasize one side or the other, accusing it of “academism” or of “philistinism”;
the truth is that the work of the Movement is characterized by a tension between
the two.

In the absence of an orthodox literary school's symptomatology (salon,

manifesto, magazines, mutual influence and collaboration), the Movement poets did
display a common impatience with modernism. This is Philip Larkin in an interview
with Ian Hamilton („Four Conversations”):
 What I do feel a bit rebellious about is that poetry seems to have got into the
hands of a critical industry, which is concerned with culture in the abstract, and this
I do rather lay at the door of Eliot and Pound... I think a lot of the “myth-kitty”
business has grown out of that, because first of all you have to be terribly educated,
you have to read everything to know these things, and secondly you've got
somehow to work them in... But to me... the whole of classical and biblical
mythology means very little, and I think that using them today not only fills poems
full of dead spots but dodges the writer's duty to be original.

The range of the everyday that falls under the detailed observation of this mid-
fifty school of poetry is, just like that of the Augustans, a carefully selected one. As
far as the oppressive feeling of the age following the holocausts is concerned,
Donald Davie prefers to be “dumb”. It had been all right for Donne to be daring,
because he had lived in a humanistic age, he had never experienced the “loss of
nerve” produced by broadcasted war news, like this “radio-active fall-out” (a
splendid pun):

„Alas, alas, who's injured by my love ?”

And recent history answers: Half Japan !

Not love, but hate ? Well, both are versions of

The feeling that you dare me to. Be dumb !

Appear concerned only to make it scan !

How dare we now be anything but dumb ?

(„Rejoinder to a Critic”)

John Holloway gives a similar Warning to a Guest: let him not lure his host out
for a romantic walk on the shore at night, or for an exploration of the fabulous
things/ Of the moon's dark side. The “new-line” poet can only give him a classicist's
idea of the good life: wine and conversation, colour and light.

However, in “Modes of Control”, Yale Review, 53, 1964, Thomas Gunn shows a
more complex awareness of the poet's post-modernist condition, which no longer
allowed of an “immaculate” new start:
 The only assumption shared by the poets who have emerged in the last ten
or fifteen years is that they do not want to continue the revolution inaugurated by
Pound and finally made respectable by learned commentaries on “The four
Quartets”. Yet nobody has pretended that, once the revolution was abandoned, it
was possible simply to take up where Hardy left off, as if the experiments of Pound
and Eliot had never taken place. Clearly we must, without embodying the
revolution, to understand its causes and to study its mistakes.

One gets a pretty good understanding of what it means to deny a revolution in

whose aftermath one is unwillingly contained by reading the poem “Beowulf” by
Kingsley Amis. The “Eliotian” reinscription of the famous Anglo-Saxon poem is
realized in two registers: parodic, expressing a modern impatience with the
fabulous and the heroic, and metalinguistic, that is, a commentary on the poem's
structure, with a final mise-en-abyme of the Kingsley poem as “Old English harking-
back”.

So, bored with dragons, he lay down to sleep,

Locking for good his massive hoard of words

(Discuss and illustrate), forgetting now

The hope of heathens, muddled thoughts on fate.

Councils would have to go along without him:

The peerless prince had taken his last bribe

(Lif is laene) useless now the byrnie

Hard and hand-locked, fit for a baseball catcher.

Only with Grendel was he man-to-man;

Grendel's dam his only sort of woman

(Weak conjugation). After they were gone

How could he stand the bench-din, the yelp-word ?

 Someone has told me this man was a hero.

Must we then reproduce his paradigms,

Trace out his rambling recess to his forbears

(An instance of Old-English harking-back)?

Philip Larkin's destiny was somehow the most typical for the fifties. His first
volume, The North Ship (1945), is seized with the “Celtic fever” with which Vernon
Watkins, an admirer of W.B. Yeats, had infested him at the “English Club” in Oxford
in 1943. He soon outgrows his infatuation with Yeats, the disenchantment being
expressed in the very title of his third volume of poems, The Less Deceived, 1955.
In going back to another spokesman of romantic disenchantment, Thomas Hardy,
Larkin, however, does not lose the visual sensitiveness of the Imagists, which he
exploits in an empirically-oriented poetry of the natural, elemental, familiar aspects
of the everyday. As well as Thom Gunn, Larkin was well-aware of the impossibility to
escape the consequences of the modernist experiment, even if the present
generation chose to borrow only the Imagists' “exact delineation of the external
world” (Gunn, Ibidem). One of the poems included by Larkin in his second volume –
XX Poems (1951), and reproduced in the 1966 reprint of The North Ship as a “coda”,
as it “shows the “Celtic fever abated and the patient sleeping soundly”, heaps up
images of the immediate, drab background (and even absence of quotations marks)
as “objective correlatives” of his feeling of boredom in the morning of an uneventful
day:

Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair,

I looked down at the empty hotel yard

Once meant for coaches. Cobblestones were wet,

But sent no light back to the loaded sky,

Sunk as it was with mist down to the roofs.

Drainpipes and fire-escape, climbed up

Past rooms still burning their electric light.

I thought: Featureless morning, featureless night.

In the second stanza, the chameleonic voice of the poem moves into modes of
desire and romantic excitement. It is as if a frozen image were animated through
the agency of prosopopoeia and other tropical transformations:
 Misjudgement: for the stones slept, and the mist

Wandered absolvingly past all it touched,

Yet hung like a stayed breath....

Can one think of a more imaginative rendering of the levelling effect of the
mist, like the absolution granted by a priest which can wash away sins as if they
had never existed? And yet the third stanza effects a new twist (But...) rejecting the
tender visiting. The price exacted for the recovery of this “Celtic fever” seems too
high. The poet would have to give up on the warm woman in flesh and blood,
brushing her hair next to him, and turn part invalid, part baby and part saint – the
Pre-Raphaelite sexless male worshipping a dead love, or one sublimated to an ideal
presence in his heart.

Terry Whalen's 1986 study in Larkin repeatedly emphasizes the importance of

the alertness of mind, the “explorative vision” which accompanies the poet's
meticulous observation of reality, and which links him to the modernists’ selectivity
of “epiphanic” moments. Parallel readings of The Trees and of Lawrence's Solar, of
The Whitsun Weddings (from the homonymous volume, published in 1964) and
Lawrence's Tommies in the Train are meant to disclose Larkin's “poetry of reality”
as visionary rather than as mere “transcription”: I think that it is with Lawrence's
immediacy of wonder that Larkin gives internal coherence to his moment of living
relationships. Both writers participate in the innocent chaos and beauty of the
festivities [8]. Larkin's refurbishing of precedented discourse is, in our opinion, a
distancing rather than an identifying strategy. Lawrence's ontic inquiry in the
Tommies – What are we ? – is changed into a phenomenological one in the Larkin
poem, where the travellers no longer fall apart from the real sights hurling behind
the train but grow with the meanings they have made of them: loaded with the sum
of all they saw. Alongside existentialism, phenomenology was another shaping
influence at the time, and Larkin is close here not to Lawrence but to his
contemporary, anti-Movement Charles Tomlinson, the author of Four Kantian Lyrics
(1963), to whom poetry means a permanent negotiation between subject and
object, self and world, and whose “ave atque vale” to the reader is: I leave you to
your meaning (Poem). Here is a fragment from Tomlinson's Winter Encounters:

House and hollow; village and valley-side:

The ceaseless pairings; the interchange

In which properties are constant...

In Solar, the sun is seen as a self-sufficient “origin” (maternal womb of being”)

on which man depends for his needs hourly whereas The Trees by Larkin is
characterized by a doubleness of language. Words marked [+human] emphasize
man's difference from, not his link to nature: coming to leaf is only figuratively
associated with something... being said; the greenness of the leaves is improperly a
kind of grief; trees cannot deliberately play a trick of looking new. To nature, last
year is dead, each spring is an indifferent repetition: afresh, afresh, afresh, whereas
man has memories of the past. The poem is practically a permanent intimation of
man's incompatibility with nature, which lacks speech, emotions, will, memory.

In Wedding Wind, the imagery of violence is common to the wind raging

outside and to a bride's wedding night, but the girl also experiences joy, happiness.
The poem is built by analogy between the natural and the human element, and the
last two lines in which the girl ascribes nature her own feelings (delighted lakes, all-
generous waters) is a comment on the poet's rhetorical strategy.

Any reader of So Through that Unripe Day You Bore Your Head is struck by its
similarity to Hardy's Neutral Tones. The reason why Larkin appreciated Hardy was
mainly („Wanted Good Hardy Critic”, 1964) his being well equipped to perceive the
melancholy, the misfortune, the frustrating, the failing elements of life. Sadness is
both true to life and an inner incentive to spiritual growth. In Hardy, it is experience
of the world that induces a sort of pathetic fallacy in the way in which the past is
permanently reshaped in the memory. Unhappy love relationships have projected a
negative natural landscape as the background of a past love meeting. In Larkin,
there is a progressive degradation and hardening in sense perception (plucked and
tasted become cut, gummed), the self's meaning-making being independent of the
physical landscape. The memory held in the static past contrasts the cold, rough
weather and the flamboyant severed image of the mistress. Contrariwise, in the
present, the lovers are safe indoors, but her live charm, like that of everything else
in the “provincial winter”, is gone.

Church Going is a remake after Arnold's Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse,
the innovation being a dramatic form of poetry, a doubleness of voice, suggesting
several personae or centres of consciousness. Terry Whalen is keenly sensitive to its
dialogism: It creates a modulation of tone and interplay between two basic
personality traits in the poet's work as a whole” the one comic or clever, the other
more open and sensitive (...) Where one voice is sceptical and often turns to the
caustic, the other is more sensitive and struggles towards praise. Each voice, in
fact, represents one of the major impulses in Larkin's poetry: the ironic and the
wondrous [9]. The modern sceptic walks incredulously into the church, impassibly
observing and making remarks in casual tones about the objects lying around,
which to him are emptied of any religious meaning. Faith is deconstructed through
disparaging words (some brass and stuff), ambiguous words (dubious women:
suspect, indistinct, doubting?), household words for common hobbies (Christmas-
addict). The speaker cannot account for his presence inside the Church, but
gradually feels drawn to it, as if to a force field (gravitating... to this ground),
because man is a meaning being, and the church, even if not visited by the divines,
has been traditionally constituted as a place for seriousness, for wise musings on
life reduced to its essentials – marriage, birth and death. The language itself grows
ceremonious, spelt out in solemn rhythms and formal, fine-sounding diction
(uninformed, equably, it pleases me). Larkin's interest in social events, festivities,
the rites of modern life – going on week-end, to the sea in summer, weddings – is an
expression not of Lawrence's anthropological concern with the “chant of the
multitude”, or of Nietzsche's obsession with archaic codes, but of his idea of
meaning as collectively produced, in matrices of intersubjectivity.

The next volumes, Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974), show
the poet even “less deceived” about the material world of commercial values, of the
advertising industry scrupulously exploiting and enhancing the trivial consumptions
hungers of his contemporaries. If the “Celtic fever” has subsided, infinitely more
horrifying feels the “shopping fever” in The Large Cool Store. The Pre-Raphaelite
dream of the separate and unearthly love, our young unreal wishes assume the
grotesque shapes of synthetic natureless (...) Bri-Nylon, Baby-Dolls and Shorties as
Modes for Night. The vacuous repetition in the title (Going, Going) suggests the
dead end humanity has reached in its new worship of commercial, profit-making,
selling and spending mythology. The traditional values of the rural countryside,
nourished by the communion between the individual and his environment, cannot
be carried into the postindustrial town, where man and nature are hygienically
sealed apart from each other by tyres and concrete.

TED HUGHES (1930-1998) was somehow speaking pro domo when he

defended the escapist aloofness of the Movement poets. It was natural, he declared
in an interview, that they should try to forget the horrors of the holocaust and death
camps. He, however, chose a different way, the violence and terror of his poetry,
teeming with birds and beasts of prey, being the more energetic and therapeutic
response to the long shadow cast over people's minds by the recent world
cataclysm.

The rhetoric of his early poetry is in keeping with the spirit of the time,
displaying a New Critical obsession with language, without the need for a feedback
on traditional forms. The poem is an aesthetic object, a new specimen of the life
outside your own (a radio talk on writing in the early sixties), which reflects back
upon its own making. Capturing animals in the cage of the printed text is, as well as
with all formalists and structuralists, a process of defamiliarization, of suggesting
how much more vivid is the algebraic replacement of things by symbols, by
conventions and modes of signification than the “lifelessness” of the real world. The
shift from the romantic subject, which is anterior to the process of writing, to the
modern subject which is contemporary to the writing, and only exists in writing
(Roland Barthes, To Write, an Intransitive Verb ?) can be seen from the very first
volume, The Hawk in the Rain, 1957. The Thought-Fox is progressively constructing
the animal within the text, through the ing-forms lengthening out the act of
perception, the “whispering, clicking, exploding” consonants, the music of the
vowels [10], the compact, monosyllabic words suggesting the immediate impact of a
physical presence. The framing of the animal's progress displaces it from reality,
inserting it into the space of the blank page which gets finally printed and into the
dark hole of the head – the black hole of the semiological space absorbing within its
vortex and disintegrating the material world. The use of the present indefinite
instead of the continuous shows the writing scene as a timeless one, of general
significance. The Poetics of Veronica Forrest-Thomson provides a perfectly adequate
method for the poet's early phase, as the elements in the poem engage in complex
and meaningful relationships, cohering at all levels: from that of the empirical
complex and voice to that of theme. The poem progresses from the darkness of the
midnight forest to that inside the skull, from the blank page to the printed page,
from the reality out there to the interiority of textuality:

I imagine the midnight's moment's forest:

Something else is alive

Beside the clock's loneliness

And the blank page where my fingers move...

................................................................

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

The title of the book is emblematic of the release of horror and violence, the
visions of charnel-houses, massacred armies, vampires, babies born with nails
suggestive of claws, the decayed corpses of war casualties, dove breeders changed
by frustration into hawk-hunters. The rain reminds of the deluge, with the exception
that it is mankind's heritage of carnage that is once more loosed onto the world,
epitomized by the perching hawk, presiding over the cosmic dissolution. The poems
are structures of contrasted pairs, which are much more effective than the
mechanical heaping up of connotative images. This long Soliloquy of a Misanthrope
explores with morbid curiosity the mechanism whereby destructive energies gush
forth from beneath the orderly, polished surface of civilization. Who can explain the
mystery at the heart of that man who, after having spilled a fellow man's brains,
bursts into the police station exacting that “justice be done” ? Can mankind take
pride in its laws and legality when they only serve to deal a mechanical sort of
justice that fails to waken man's consciousness up to the very roots and essence of
evil (Law in the Country of the Cats) ? The graceful imagery of the ceremonious
medieval hunting (And there rides by/ The great lord from hunting. His
embroidered/ Cloak floats, the tail of his horse pours...) is matched with the greed
and beastliness of two wolves, competing for supremacy in the wilderness of the
woods and only coming to terms with each other when being mutually engaged in
preying upon the “great lord”. Post-war man had recently experienced his
identification not with civilization but with the wolf world:

There is no better way to know us

Than as two wolves....

 In his destructive project, man has descended from worst to worst: from unjust
treaties and truces, to mass massacre (Two Wise Generals), from vanity of glory
and individual heroism to cowardly holocausts (The Ancient Heroes and the Bomber
Pilot). Hughes does not state anything; he merely suggests through the crafty
handling of imagery. Here is, for instance, the primitive quality of warfare, rendered
by the emphasis on “raw”, by the association between war propaganda (patriotism,
jingoism) and the eerily animated and blindly crushing force of the arsenal which is
ironically ascribed human attributes („sweating”, “smacking”), while the soldier's
chest turns into a destructive volcano, and his arm withers away into the inhuman
weapon he is carrying:

Suddenly he awoke and was running – raw

In raw-seamed hot khaki...hearing

Bullets smacking the belly out of the air –

He lugged a rifle numb as a smashed arm:

The patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye

Sweating like molten iron from the center of his chest, –

The poet deconstructs the myth of the hero: the soldier is merely an
instrument, a cogwheel in an inhuman machinery of cosmic destruction. And yet, it
is in blind commitment to some hidden purpose he cannot comprehend that he is
turned into a statue of heroism:

In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations

Was he the hand pointing that second ? He was running

Like a man who has jumped up in the dark and runs

Listening between his footfalls for the reason

Of his still running, and his foot hung like

Statuary in mid-stride.

The addition of “etcetera” after the slogan-words of jingoism show the

dissolution of true patriotic values under the grim reality of slaughter, while the last
line fuses the two opposite drives meeting in the fighting soldier: terror channelled
into destructive impulse, and the transfer of wrath to the inanimate “dynamite”,
suggesting his dehumanization. The soldier's personality has merged into his
instruments of destruction:
 King, honour, human dignity, etcetera

Dropped like luxuries in a yelling alarm

To get out of that blue crackling air

His terror's touchy dynamite.

The deconstruction of a human world is carried forth in the next, 1960 volume,
entitled Lupercal, as a hint to the Roman festivities in honour of the God of fauna.
Hawk-Roosting is justly celebrated for the economical structure of an animal poem
which persuasively communicates the arbitrary force of destructive nature: un-
scrupulous, un-mannered, un-reasoning, un-imaginative, un-changing. The poem
has been pertinently read off as an anti-genesis and, more topically, as a ban on
fascism.

Meeting Sylvia Plath, the glamorous American poetess, whom he married in

1959, changed the poet's absorbing preoccupations with craftsmanship (forcible
imagery, a special feel for structure, sound, rhythm) into a spiritualising direction.
He began to take an interest in dreams, occult symbolism, exercises in meditation
and invocation. The mythical narrative of Robert Graves's The White Goddess
(1948) provided him with an alternative to the male-centred mythology of the West,
being the story of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the Spirit of the Year, son
and lover of the Threefold Goddess. In 1992 Hughes was still drawing on Celtic
mythology, projecting it on Shakespeare: Shakespeare and the Goddess of
Complete Being, Faber and Faber. The Threefold Goddess, which supposedly
provided a rich primer for the genetic tributaries that enrich the bloodstream of
Shakespeare's Goddess and hero (p. 458) can be seen as the creative womb of the
inchoate waters, gradually refining herself into human form (p. 6). Nature acceding
to Spirit, assuming anthropomorphic form and relapsing into the amorphous,
creative womb is a familiar myth which we can read between the lines of Song (with
the memorable The difficult stars swam for eyes in your face). After his wife's
suicide, in 1963, Ted Hughes departed into surrealist modes, seeking promises of
the spirit's resurrection in a blend of myths reaching out of the Indo-European
matrix (for instance, North-American). Hughes identifies two negative narratives
which are responsible for the present alienation of Western man. One of them is the
desecration of woman originating in the Calvinist witch-hunt misogyny, which he
tries to resist through the revival of the Celtic pre-Christian cult of a Mother
Goddess but also through the more personal narrative of the desecrated woman's
salvation by an equally disintegrated male (The Wound and Eat Crow, the latter
being a dramatic fragment, an attempt at rewriting the Rosicrucian theme of sposus
and sposa in the Alchemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, by the seventeenth-
century Johann Valentin Andreae). Alchemy (progressing from putrefactio to
revelation of lapis) is played off against another mythical body – the shamanistic
descent into disintegration as a premise of rebirth. The other negative Western
narrative is the story of the mind exiled from nature. Can man discard the alienating
rational systems of Western culture and seek a new identification with the cosmic
creative energies? In the 29th issue of The Listener (1964), Hughes reviews Mircea
Eliade's Shamanism, which forcibly engages his imaginative energies. In
shamanism, the aspirant goes through solitary ordeals of fasting and self-mutilation,
until a spirit, usually some animal, arrives and becomes henceforth his liaison with
the spirit world. His animals of prey receive new connotations, as deposits of cosmic
spiritual energy. The self has three possibilities [11]: to reject the energy and live a
sort of life in death, to accept it and be destroyed by it or to receive it and turn it to
good: the controlled energy of rituals, religion, art. The Second Glance at a Jaguar
changes the perspective from the previous poem in Hawk in the Rain (The Jaguar):
not the New Critical assumption that reality and our visionary experience of it are
discontinuous with each other (consequently the textual version of the jaguar is a
new ontology, with its own earth and heaven, and not an ancillary, mimetic portrait,
like the indifferent, inoffensive pictures of caged animals in a zoo, worth adorning
children's bedrooms) but a jaguar as a shamanistic figure of embodied energy,
muttering some mantrah, and going through a ritualistic shedding of the old skin.
Wodwo (1967) is the most powerful critique of Western culture with its alienating
effects on the individual. Later in the volume, in Wings, Hughes argues that even
the advancements of twentieth-century philosophy, literature and science attest to
contemporary man's complete alienation from any form of ancestral wisdom, for
each man is now hopelessly isolated in his own existential agony (Sartre in section
I) in a universe the teleology of which man is incapable of understanding (Kafka in
section II) but whose scientific advancements have blasted him to star vapour
(Einstein in section III) [12]. In the final portrait, Wodwo refuses to place himself at
the centre and become the core of some new unifying spiritual belief, preferring to
go on alienating himself in the otherness of the mundane show (looking at rather
than being looked at).

A poem published in “Times Literary Supplement” (1970) provides a

convenient connection between Wodwo – the emblem of the enslaving mythologies
and cultural fortifications of the rational Western self – and Crow (1970), embodying
the transforming role of a universal Trickster, drawing on ancient traditions from the
Old and New Worlds. It is obvious from this uncollected poem that the origin of Crow
was Beelzebub, lord of the flies, the antagonist of God, the usurper of or interfering
with God's creation:

Fighting for Jerusalem

The man who seems to be dead

With Buddha in his smile

With Jesus in his stretched out arms

With Mahomet in his humbled forehead

With his feet in hell

With his hands in heaven

With his back to the earth

Is escorted

To his eternal reward

By singing legions

Of what seems to be flies.

Jarold Ramsey in Crow, or the Trickster Transformed (The Achievement of Ted

Hughes, Op. cit.) defines Crow (alias Jesus or Coyote with North-American tribes) as
Jung's primitive, utterly undifferentiated state of consciousness, that society
transcends, mischievous, greedy, selfish, of Protean diversity. He is what Levi-
Strauss calls “bricoleur”, the handyman, who, finding God asleep, starts giving
shape and order to existing materials. This is a world he pieces together, with no
idea of some grand design. But is not the bricoleur the emblem of the
postmodernist artist and the apocalypse his favourite trope ?

References:

[1] Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade. A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen-
Fifties, Peter Owen, 1958, p. 10

[2] Charles Innes, Modern British Drama, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 432

[3] Andrew K. Kennedy, Samuel Becket, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 37.

[4] Randall Stevenson, The British Novel since the Thirties, Institutul European Iasi, 1993.

[5] Apud Jeanette King, Doris Lessing, Edward Arnold, 1989, p. 2.

[6] A, Alvarez, Introduction to The New Poetry, Penguin Books, 1962, p. 23.

[7] Blake Morrison, English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s. The Movement, Methuen, 1986,
pp. 134-135.

[8] Terry Whalen, Philip Larkin and English Poetry, Macmillan 1986, p. 84.

[9] Ibidem, pp. 14, 15.

[10] Martin Dodsworth, “Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill” in The Pelican Guide to English
Literature. The Present, Penguin Books, 1983.

[11] See Michael Sweeting, “Hughes and Shamanism” in The Achievement of Ted Hiughes,
Edited by Keith Sagar, Manchester University Press, 1983

[12] Leonard M. Scigaj, “Oriental Mythology in Wodwo”, in The Achievement of Ted Hughes,
Op. cit.

Postmodernism. Theory and Practice.

 The move towards poststructuralism and postmodernism occurred within the
Tel Quel group in Paris, by way of a departure from the original claims of immanent
analysis of texts (explication de texte), capable to delineate all codes and exhaustively
capture a text's meaning, towards work on difference and dissemination (Jacques
Derrida) and the recovery of the Russian Formalists’ critique of univocal meaning and
monologic discourse (Julia Kristeva). Textual analysis was destabilized by the
poststructuralist deconstruction of the sign (there is no transcendental signifier), of
meaning (there is no stable signification) and of the self (the self is an empty signifier,
constructed differently through different discourses). Semiotics was revised as
pragmatism (the way language produces meaning in a context of usage). The
hermeneutics of suspicion inaugurated by Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger, took the
radical form of utter indeterminacy. Signs and texts were now understood as referring
to something other than themselves. No longer confined within their structural
boundaries,
texts were suddenly revealed as overflowing their margins, changed to an intersection
of textual surfaces or intertexts. Deconstruction spread rapidly to
the States, making Yale University famous through Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man,
Harold Bloom, and others. In the 80s a renewed interest in history and the social
background, mediated, however, through systems of representations, restored the
contextualized approach in criticism in the form of identity – class, gender, race –
studies.

The notion of “postmodernism”, spotted by Wolfgang Welsch (Unsere

postmoderne Moderne, Weinheim 1987) and occasionally used by Sir Nikolaus
Pevsner, Philip Johnson, and Robert Stern in the 1960s, came to be officially accepted
by the intellectual community of the world as a period term for the contemporary after its
being used by Charles Jencks in his article, “The rise of Post-Modern architecture”,
published in 1975, later extended into a book: The Language of Post-Modern
Architecture. Postmodernist theory developed offshoots throughout the world, as a
genuine outbreak of... cultural epidemiology. Gerard Delanty (Modernity and
Postmodernity, Sage Publications 2000) uses two different terms for the two phases of
the cultural movement taking us from the late sixties to the present: deconstruction
(dissolution of the self) and constructivism: new selves are created through interest
group affiliation (women, blacks, the marginalized or diasporic, hybrid identities in the
postcolonial world, etc.)

If we accept Paul de Man's definition of episteme in The Resistance to Theory

(„Theory and History of Literature”, vol. 33, University of Minnesota Press, 1986) as
“intentional model applied to an object”, postmodernism may be characterized by their
proliferation. J. F. Lyotard sees the “postmodern condition” as the end of authoritative
metanarratives. Contemporary culture is polycentric, pluralistic. According to Thomas
Kuhn (Structure of Scientific Revolutions), revolutions in science are usually initiated by
young researchers, who have not yet internalized the official and institutionalized theory
laid down in textbooks. The non-normative discourses of postmodernist science with its
fuzzy boundaries have nothing to do with the scientist's position on the edge of the
discipline. Research seems to be enlarging the realm of the unknown, it lays bare
irregularities, chance and unpredictability in the universe.

According to Nobel Prize winner Philip Anderson, in the world there are several
layers of organization and each is independent of the other. Quantum physics, theories
of chaos, of the fractal have radically displaced the worldview based on stability and
continuity.

Opposed states (random plus determined, creative and destructive, material and
immaterial, temporal and instantaneous) coexist within systems. Randomness and
determinism are simultaneously present. James Gleick's theory of chaoplexity points to
disorder and unpredictability – the famous “butterfly effect” (fluttering its wings in the
west and causing a monsoon in the east) – while Benoit Mandelbrot, a theoretician of
the fractal, declares, on the other hand, that there are forces in nature governing
apparently chaotic and complex systems. René Tom, an adept of catastrophe theory,
takes pain to explain, through purely mathematical calculations, discontinuous
behaviour, ranging from the change of a caterpillar into a butterfly to the collapse of
civilizations. Natural systems appear to be controlled by mysterious forces, some
“strange attractors”, which render them simultaneously random and determined. Such
theories bear upon the “epistemological foci in the humanities” (Julian Wolfreys,
Introduction to Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century, Edinburgh University Press,
2002), for one more feature of the contemporary is the “interdisciplinary nature of
critical and cultural studies” (Ibidem). The work of reading, freed from its traditional
confines, opens towards scientific, philosophical and psychoanalytic discourses.

Technology plays an even greater part in the creation of illusionary communities,

in which people are connected by an impersonal network of mass-disseminated TV
images and representations. Desire generated by the advertising and consumer
industry produces lifestyles, passions, fantasies, modes of speech and action. Cell
phones, fax machines, portable physiotherapy units, grafts, personal stereos etc.
generate a posthuman body, which is half machine and haff a media-projected
concoction. Liberal technology yielded to autonomous technology in the 60s and the
70s, while the 90s perfected the body's subjugation to aesthetic and stylistic addictions,
in an apocalyptic megalopolis (D. Cavallaro, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture, The Athlone
Press 2000). The computer-generated movies, the reader's choices of narrative
trajectories and endings in virtual space have radically modified the status of writing and
reading. There is machine control at both poles of the author-reader communication,
reconfiguring the generic parameters of the so-called “participant novel” or
“interactive fiction”. There is no longer a pre-constituted space, like that projected by
dimensional mechanics, characterized by entity, unity and symmetry.

Geometric dimensions dissolve to fractionary dimensions. Infography,

holography, informatics, supersonics and quantum mechanics have converted
notions of surface, limit and separation into interface, commutation and interruption
(Andrew Gibson, Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative, Edinburgh University
Press l966).
 The end of doctrine has meant the birth of discourse (Steven Connor,
Postmodernist Culture. An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary). Disembedded
from its relation to some signified, split within through trace of the other and difference
from itself, the signifier relates to other signifiers, in an endless spiral of dissemination or
slippage of meaning. The syntagmatic relationships within a text destabilize the
paradigm of non-contextual meanings, instituting an endless play of signification, for the
Saussurean difference is now conceived as also meaning deferral, temporalization
(Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”,
1966, Of Grammatology, 1967). Meaning (what is signified) no longer depends on its
relationship to some signifier but on the signifier's slippage under other signifiers along
the syntagmatic axis. Saussure's binary model of the sign (a set of letters or sounds
related to an image) had dismissed reference and reality from the theory of signification.
Deconstruction takes one step further disjoining the signifier from the signified. We are
left with a free play of signifiers, generated by difference from other signifiers (think, for
instance, how “wretched” fixes the limits of “sad”), while texts connect laterally with
other texts (Roland Barthes: the text is a tissue of quotations from the world's
innumerable centres of culture – “The Death of the Author”). Degraded to bricoleur
(Derrida, Lévi-Strauss) or scriptor (Barthes), the formerly agentive and autonomous
author is now born with the text (no longer a self-contained “work”). The boundary
between chronodiegesis (the level of the plot, supposed to refer to the world) and
metanarratives (self-referential language acts) is blurred into distinct layers of fictionality
(Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative. The Metafictional Paradox, Methuen, 1984.)
The text's figurative play signals its status as illusion, fiction, as the allegory of its
unreadability due to the impossibility of choosing between competitive meaning
structures (Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism, Minnesota, 1983).

Whereas in his earlier “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” (Image

- Music - Text, Fontana, 1977) Roland Barthes is undertaking a systematic description
or a “structural analysis” of the “levels of meaning” within a text, in the later “Textual
analysis: Poe's Valdemar, included in Untying the Text: A Post-structuralist Reader
(Routledge, 1981), he focuses on the “processes of meaning”, which “explodes and
disperses”, on the text not as “a closed product”, but as a “production in progress,
plugged in to other texts, other codes (this is the intertextual levels of meaning) and
thereby articulated with society and history in ways which are not determinist but
“citational”. Postmodernist texts cannibalise other texts, parody, quote them, rewrite
them in order to inscribe a different ideology (Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; William
Golding, Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors; Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton; David Dabydeen,
The Intended; Jeanette Winterson, Boating for Beginners; Angela Carter, American
Ghosts and Old World Wonders; Emma Tennant, Two Women of London. The Strange
Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde; Sue Roe, Estella. Her Expectations; Brian Aldis,
Frankenstein Unbound, and many others.)

In S/Z, Barthes identifies five codes (systems of differences) which texts tap in
their process of self-constitution. The juxtaposition of heterogeneous texts renders
irrelevant such issues as subject, story, representation, truth discourse or realistic
justice. Realist texts are merely generated by realist operators, by a set of generic
conventions (David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing, 1977, Roland Barthes, The
Rustle of Language, 1987). The play with generic conventions bears upon the plot,
which may provide closure (if generated by the referential code of realism) or remain
open-ended, if the novel sets out from the assumptions of existentialist freedom from all
preestablished norms (Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman).

Knowledge, identity, subjectivity are understood to be discoursively produced.

Modernism had asserted the autonomy of the self, the creative power of perception.
Deconstructionists argue that there is no language-free standpoint, and language
expresses more than the speaker's/writer's intentional meaning. Writers are no longer in
control of their medium. Postmodernists complete the deconstruction of history
(abolition of subject, agentive action, causal links, evolution, the possibility of new
action, monumental acts, documented reconstruction, etc.), which Carlyle had
originated in his essay, “On History”, where the subject is defined as “alphabetic letters
in need of interpretation”. Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations had revised history as a
succession of chance events, lacking order, meaning and purpose. Although man is the
only animal that lives historically, that is, aware of the past, true awareness is to come
to the point where one realizes that the past and the present are one, “a motionless
structure of a value that cannot alter and a significance that is always the same”. Moral
values (The Genealogy of Morals) are not factual, humanity is surrounded by a system
of signs to which a contingent significance is ascribed. Morality, values, in general,
depend on interpretation.

With postmodernists, there is no distinction between past and present history is

always in the process of being written. It is discourse, bound up with other discourses
(Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, University of California Press,
1988). In the age of pluralism, time is the glass of passing fashions. Humanity has
reached the end of history, where one direction is as good as another (Arthur Danto,
“The End of Art”). The postmodernist man lives posthistorically. The truth discourse of
history is replaced by historicist negotiations of personal and communal, present and
past narratives that invent rather than discover the past as it really was. History-writing
is a form of narrative, communicating knowledge (Gr. gnarrus) of the past through
rhetorical emplotment (Hayden White, Metahistory). Real events are essentially
irretrievable in their original significance, as, in writing, they emerge from a partial and
provisional perspective. Postmodernists may choose to rewrite the history of the nation
as the story of their family (Graham Swift, Waterland), or tinged with the imaginative
hues of popular traditions, a counter-culture opposed to the official, institutionalised
version of history, mingling facts and fantasy (magic realism, as illustrated by Salman
Rushdie, or Jim Crace).

Identity is played down to a set of “positions” (Benveniste, Derrida) in language.

The self dissolves into a criss-cross of narratives, an interface of the lived and the
discoursively produced body – sexed, classed and raced through cultural stereotypes.
In the post-colonial spaces of migration and cultural transitivity, identity too
becomes hybrid, nomadic (See Rosi Braidotti's Nomadic Subjects, deploying a
paradigm of decolonised subjectivity as nomad, exile and migrant). Postmodernity has
developed forms of postnational or deterritorialized forms of citizenship (Gerard
Delanty, Op. cit.) Communitarian discourses (shared by virtual communities, by the
European Union, New Age travellers, international professional societies, etc.) have
given rise to non-geographic communities, cutting across national boundaries. Jacques
Lacan's psychoanalytic theories had their share in the conceptual dissolution of unified
and stable identity. The specular I of the child (the “mirror phase”) identifying with its
image of integrity and autonomy in the mirror, is later suppressed by entry into the
symbolic order of language. The self will only be metonymically present, repressing
what is non-normative, “gathering the signs of approval and acceptance” (Homi K.
Bhabha, “Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation” in The
Narrative Reader, edited by Martin Mcquillan, Routledge, 2000). The individual's identity
is called into question, brought to trial, shaped by the others' representations. As Gerard
Delanty remarks (Op. cit.), postmodernity has marked a shift in the priority of the Self
over the Other, assumed by modernism. The self is now defined in relation to the
other, seen through the eyes of the other. The Other is placed behind his Desire, inbred
into him through institutionalized discourses, through the media, etc. The Other is
internalized, present within the self. The subject as well as the nation are not historically
constituted but permanently written into being. Historical identities ascribed through
birth, lineage, family and national background have dissolved into local narratives,
articulating cultural differences into the surrogate identities of sex, class, race or
professional affiliation. This is the agenda behind feminist writing (Jeanette
Winterson), class and race-conscious poetry (Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney) or
postcolonial fiction. V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, David Dabydeen, Kazuo Ishiguro
a.o. are trying to overcome the outsiders' subalternity through subversive strategies of
signification, re-building their disseminated ethnic selfhood (mainly effected through
geographical displacement, but also through the modernists' discourses of racial
differences) into a new identity structured round new values (a patriotism of the
constitution, dedication to common civil values, etc.)

Fragmented environments, the commodification of technology (cosmetic surgery,

genetic engineering, prosthetics) procuring health and beauty, the computer-generated
spaces have further subverted identity in the sense of essential, stable human essence,
producing the mutating and transgressive bodies of gothic fiction (Angela Carter)
and cyberpunk (William Gibson). Deviant, transgressive, mutating, technological
bodies cross the boundaries between biology and technology, humanity and machinery,
reality and fiction. Apocalyptic visions inspiring a set of novels and stories which
Steven Connor, in his survey of The English Novel in History. 1950-95, is instancing as
“Endings and Living on”, are not only the product of science fiction (Brian Aldis) but also
the allegorical representations of morally transgressive spaces and of physical and
mental disarray (Martin Amis, London Fields). Their bearing on narrative materializes in
what Mark Currie (Postmodern Narrative Theory, St. Martin's Press, 1998) calls the
“abyss of subjectivity” (uncertainty as to the source of narration)
 The history of the literary discourses of postmodernity goes back to the seventies,
and its twists and turns are probably the effects of a mutual feedback between theory
and practice.

The “roots and politics of Postmodernism” [13] are identified by Todd Gitlin, as well
as Frederic Jameson [14] in the cultural climate of late multinational capitalism, in which
capital has abolished particularity. The authentic use value is overcome by the
universality of exchange value. The computer, the characteristic machine of the period,
enthrones the “bit”, placing a premium on process and reproduction. Television,
advertising create a class-less decontextualized culture of what Donald Barthelme
(apud Gitlin, Op. cit.) calls a forest of images, mass-produced and endlessly, alluringly
empty. The discourse of postmodernism is characterized by:

- pastiche, cultural recombination;

- a premium on copies;

- blankness;

- sense of exhaustion;

- relish for copies and repetitions;

- rejection of history;

- mixture of levels, forms, styles;

- bricolage fashion;

- the implied subject is fragmented, unstable, even decomposed, a

crosshatch of discourses.

The “spatialized” literary history of Brian McHale (Constructing Postmodernism,

Routledge, 1922) enters the following contrasting features of modernism (left-hand
column) and postmodernism (right-hand column):

Hierarchy Anarchy

Presence Absence

Genital Polymorphous

Narrative Anti-narrative

Metaphysics Irony
 Determinacy Indeterminacy.

The postmodernist spirit subverts the logocentric hierarchy of fixed categories of

thought ordained by the divine mind, defining language systems as differences without
any positive terms, traces without any origin or centre (Derrida, De la grammatologie),
annuls the myth of unity, creates a tension between deconstruction and reconstruction
(Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus), blurs the boundary between play and
reality, between high and popular culture (Leslie Fiedler, Cross the Border, Close the
Gap), undoes all meta-fictions (J.F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition),
deconstructing experience as discourse (J.F.Lyotard: Discours, figure), proclaims the
end of history (G. Vatimo: The End of Modernity). The postmodernist subject is self-
destructive, demonic, nihilist (Rolf Günter Renner, Die Postmoderne Konstellation) – the
Beelzebub, coyote figure, the trickster [15] of the Disney cartoons, endlessly killed and
coming back alive (David Lodge, “Crow and the Cartoons”, Critical Quarterly, Spring
197l), since that which has no real existence cannot be destroyed.

In our opinion, Ted Hughes turns, like the majority of British postmodernists,
towards a French source. His deconstructive attempts on the contemporary exhausted
Western civilization are not channelled in the direction of reinscription, intertextuality etc.
but in the radical return at fontem – to the primitive imagination of endlessly recycled
transforming energies which Lévy-Strauss discovers in The Savage Mind (1966). The
bricoleur addresses himself to a collection of elements left over from human
endeavours (p. 19). Floyd Merrell [16] finds in the bricoleur figure the very essence of
postmodernist deconstruction: The engineer works within the sanitary confines of a red
brick building, or, if in the field, at a certain distance, while the bircoleur's job is the junk
yard, where he sorts and classifies, dirtying his hands in the process. The engineer
mathematizes the world, the bricoleur taxonomizes it. The engineer is a subject who
supposedly would be the absolute origin of his own discourse and supposedly would
construct it “out of nothing”, “out of whole cloth”, would be the creator of the verb, the
verb itself. The bricoleur's universe is closed and the rules of his game are always to
make do with “whatever is at hand”, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which
is always finite and is also heterogeneous, because what it contains bears no relation to
the current project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to
renew and enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions
or deconstructions. Like Wodwo, Crow, the bricoleur is not at the centre. He just picks a
provisional centre, knowing that it is not full presence, the origin, nor absolute and
deconstructs the system in order to demonstrate that there is no centre (Ibidem).

Crow, like the cosmogonic counsellor of God in some Romanian folk tales, is not
the Great Designer but only the belated transformer. Crow is a subverter of any
metaphysical or teleological plan. In Crow's Playmates, the creation of gods out of
mountains and rivers (man's primitive natural religion) leaves Crow alone in the midst of
nature. The Protean Crow (Truth Kills Everybody) finds metamorphosis to be a way out
of extinction. He is of the primary substance of creation, and therefore he cannot be
destroyed, only refurbished, like the literary tradition of library space in the hands of the
postmodernist handymen. He is the devourer not the Redeemer, the reinscription of the
Bible script, deconstructed and reconstructed, the actor of a perpetual apocalypse:

When God Hammered Crow

He made gold

When God roasted Crow in the sun

He made diamond

When God crushed Crow under weights

He made alcohol

When God tore Crow to pieces

He made money

When God blew Crow up

He made day

When God hung Crow on a tree

He made fruit

When God buried Crow in the earth

He made man

When God tried to chop Crow in two

He made woman

When God said: You win, Crow

He made the Redeemer.

When God went off in despair

Crow stopped his beak and started in on the two thieves.

 Crow is back in the central panel of the Crucifixion. When he has possessed
himself both of Christ’s pounding heart and the earth shrunk to the size of an earth
grenade, he is blown to nothing by an apocalyptic “Bang !” Postmodernist buildings,
Brian McHale argues, are allegories of “cognitive mapping”. Library space is an attempt
to draw a cognitive map of the world. What aspect does it map: its imminent end. A
figurative displacing, a troping on apocalypse.

Ted Hughes bemoans the loss of origin in the postmodern world through a
therapeutic discourse on the deconstruction of origin.

Moral Psychology

This phrase picked up by Iris Murdoch to defend herself from those who assigned
her novels a label of “fictionalized philosophy”, substituting symposiasts at a disputation
for characters, may serve as an adequate heading for a number of novelists who
flourished in the fifties as equally remote both from the social satirists of the “angry
division” and from the “French connection” (as Randall Stevenson calls them) of
“fabulators” and language gamesters.

It is true that Angus Wilson, for instance, sounds quite reassuring in his Leavisite
apology for the nineteenth-century literary forms and in his commitment to the cultural
and social order:

Most of the English novelists (perhaps all) who have arrived since the war have
reflected the predominant, politically detached, social concerns of the community. This
has led to a revival of traditional, nineteenth-century forms. It has told against
experiments in technique and against exploration of personal sensitivity. I belong to this
reaction myself [17].

The social vistas, however do not carry us far and wide, Angus Wilson's Anglo-
Saxon Attitudes (1956) being centred upon an inside coterie of professional historians
and archaeologists, Late Call (1964) breaking free into fable and fantasy, while the
sophisticated No Laughing Matter (1967) feeds back into a central court of relatives, in a
liberal mixture of interior monologues, dramatic monologue and narrative.

The more traditional Anglo-Saxon Attitudes does indeed rely on the construction
not of a paper-thin self but of a solid Victorian biography, yet one which has also fed off
Freud in the attempt to explore the unaccountable in the psyche – that something which
withstands rationalization. The novel engages in epistemological issues concerning the
relationship between reality and language, history and document, historical truth and
fraud. Several palimpsestic accounts of the Anglo-Saxon Saint Eorpwald mix up things
in a manner which prevents access to some unique truth about him. Gilbert Stokesay,
the young and ambitious medievalist who had lied about his sensational discovery of a
pagan fertility idol in the bishop's tomb, was no more to blame than the successive
historians who in time had defaced the saint's biography. Is Carroll Lewis's Anglo-Saxon
messenger, mentioned in the epigraph, dead in modern man? Bishop Eorpwald had
christened King Albert's people, had condemned unlawful deeds and unmarital sex, yet,
according to a late mediaeval document, he had been a victim of people's bad faith,
being accused of black magic, and whatever else. Subsequent biographers had taken
the original slight for truth. Rewriting is
re-inventing the past, defacing it beyond recognition. Or is it that a truthful account of
man will just have to acknowledge the saintly as well as the instinctual ? Can Gerald
Middleton, the aging historian who struggles hard to reestablish the truth, at the dear
cost of breaking human ties and demolishing reputations, forget his affectionate and
sensuous need of Dollie Stokesay, while repressing it by hard work and unfailing
attendance of family duties? Can Inge's domestic pieties and exalted sentimentality
make up for her frigidity and grotesque conventionalism? Had not Middleton all along
experienced the gap fixed between the mind and the body? Had it been Lionel
Stokesay's son or the self-conscious spirit of a post-Freudian age that had dug up the
pagan deposits in man's subconscious? Wilson addresses essentially psychological and
epistemological, not social issues, while remaining fully aware of the constructed nature
of man's world. History is not a record of actual events but a palimpsest of discourses
about them, each making up its own version, according to its own obsessions (like
those of the late medieval church about witchcraft and magic).

The term “magical realism” used in connection with Iris Murdoch (b. 1919) by
Peter J. Conradi in his 1986 full-length study [18] requires qualifications. Hers is not the
South American parabolic fantasy but a sort of surrealist mixture of fantasy and
“meticulous naturalistic rendering of detail” (Conradi, p. 6). She has also been seen as
progressing from existentialism to religion, from the artist to the saint. In reality Murdoch
has been much more consistent with herself, proceeding from a well-tempered
existentialism towards a more positive quest of holy fools, descending from
Dostoevsky's Alyosha (Brothers Karamazov), whose quest, however, is still grounded in
language. With Murdoch, the Christ figure is primarily A Word Child (1975).

Being of Anglo-Irish stock, transplanted in London in her early childhood, Iris

Murdock felt naturally allied to the cultureless refugees and deracinated outsiders whom
she portrays in several of her novels: Under the Net, The Flight from the Enchanter,
The Italian Girl, A Severed Head, A Fairly Honourable Defeat. The experience of the
war added to her personal background, justifying an approach to existentialism, which
she encountered as early as 1945 in Brussels. She said “yes” to Sartre, because
existentialism engages with issues of value and morality, not as abstractions but as the
personal responsibility of a solipsistic, exalted individual. It means a return to
subjectivity, which at the time offered a remedy “against dryness” (the title of one of her
essays), an alternative to the stark positivism and behaviourism of the age. The need
for an informing philosophical idea was bred into Murdock by the language philosophy
(originating in Bertrand Russell) and the phenomenology of the time. The title of her
fictional debut, Under the Net (1954) refers us to a passage (6.341) in the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. In it, Russell's pupil establishes a
discontinuity between reality and the net of conventional symbols whereby the
heterogeneous world picture can be reduced to a unitary and coherent image. Various
nets correspond to various ways of describing the world (in covering some irregular
surface with a net of regular geometrical forms in order to render it intelligible, the
scientist can choose triangles or squares or other). As man is consequently defined as
the creature that builds images of things and then reassembles the pictures within nets
(Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”), it is not the historical reality but some sort of
philosophy that will give an idea of “the consciousness of the age” („The Sublime and
the Beautiful Revisited”). What Murdock disliked about existentialism was the
annihilation of the cultural past, the “tabula rasa” posited as the starting point for each
individual's valorization of experience. Such excesses may lead to demonic solipsism,
and Murdoch took their edge off by establishing limits or what the French mystic Simone
Weil calls Degrees of Freedom. The “freedom” Murdoch affords is the dialectic of binary
structuring, of dyadic pairs whose inner struggles provide the form of her fiction. One of
these dyads is the very opposition between empirical or formless, journalistic fiction,
and crystalline, or symbolist, in which a net of values or transcendent realities is
superimposed in order to make meaningful the empirical world („Against Dryness”).
Another opposition establishes between open and closed fictional forms (interview
published in Bookman, Nov. 1958):

The open novel contains a lot of characters who rush about independently, each
one eccentric and self-centred; the plot to some extent situates them in a pattern but
does not integrate them into a single system. The closed novel has few characters and
tends to draw them, as it were, toward a single point (...) The advantage of the open
novel is that it is bright and airy and the characters move about freely; it is more like life
as it is normally lived. Its disadvantage is that it may become loose in texture and it is
more difficult to make the structure evident. A closed novel is more intensely integrated
but may be more claustrophobic in atmosphere and the characters may lose their sense
of freedom. Ideally, and if one were a great writer, one could, I think, combine both
these things in a single work and not have to oscillate between them.

Under the Net, The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea, The Flight from the
Enchanter, The Severed Head, The Unicorn, with their artist or enchanter figures, naive
fools or solipsistic demons fall within the first category, whereas The Bell, The Red and
the Green, the Nice and the Good, The Sacred and the Profane Love Machine, Henry
and Cato, Nuns and Soldiers, The Philosopher's Pupil picture “free, separate”
characters, and yet, as the titles suggest, integrated within a pattern.

Maybe a more adequate typology of Murdochian characters would revolve round

an axes whose poles are moral types: the existentialist hero, the voluntarist, cheerfully
godless because he has substituted himself for God, trying to impose or assert himself,
and the mystic: a new version of the man of faith, believing in goodness without
religious guarantees, guilty, muddled, yet not without hope. This image consoles us by
showing us man as frail, godless, and yet possessed of genuine intuitions of an
authoritative good (Existentialists and Mystics). What Murdoch presumably implies by
this half-way dissociation from Sartre would be that, while both types are uprooted from
tradition, from pre-constituted values of morality, the former is joyously (in the
Nietzschean sense) founding a new, set of values, whereas the latter is trying to
discover them intuitively or to divine them. The world is not altogether absurd but
mysterious, with the good lurking in its unfathomable depths.

Under the Net shows Murdoch combining formalist existentialism, language

philosophy and the Platonic idea of art as copy in a structural pattern which is a fictional
transcript of her studies of Sartre and Plato. Jake Donaghue, the Bohemian Irishman
brought up in London, who passes in a symbolical way from translation work to original
writing, resembles Hugh, the son of a rich bourgeois family of German refugees, in his
condition of existentialist outsider through social or national displacement. The aesthetic
patterned against the bourgeois reality-bound outlook initially echoes Mann's Doctor
Faustus, but Murdoch's characters are not static, going through the well-known
existentialist change of roles. Hugo is a Platonist in his distrust of art as making of
falsehoods, of language as that alienating instrument which touches up, defaces the
truth of experience. Jake, the formalist voluntarist, is also persuaded of the disanalogy
between language and reality, and yet he offers up discourse as our very means of
understanding ourselves and making life endurable. As far as human relationships in
the real world are concerned, Jake is completely mistaken, but his transcription of his
conversation with Hugo in a Platonic dialogue (The Silencer), as a response to Hugo's
challenge that he could never be able to represent their conversation as it really was, is
a more truthful version thereof for being “weighted with theory”. The two protagonists
are now constructed in the language of Wittgenstein, one as his disciple (Tamarus), the
other as his antagonist (Annandine). Annadine defends the “situation itself”, the
“unutterably particular”, which cannot be grasped however much one crawled under the
Wittgensteinian “net”. Truth can only be attained outside language, “in silence”. Jake's
Wittgensteinian apology for human constructs which double up upon experience making
it intelligible shows him to be the master in control of a world of discourse as Hugo is in
control of the moneyed power. Discourse is all there is, if only that, had Jake applied
Hugo's principle of “silence”, we would have had no access to Plato's symposium of
ideas... Jake moves away from theory to find in novel-writing a reconciliation of fact and
fiction. Progressively, Hugo too disentangles himself from too close attachments to
things and people.

It seems odd to us that Peter J. Conradi should present John Robert Rozanov, in
The Philosopher's Pupil (1983), as the innocent victim who dies of his perfectionism and
Puritanism, and his pupil, George McCaffrey as the Satanic, demonic character whose
loss of self-respect has accompanied his moral decline (pp. 42 and 269). The return of
the aging philosopher, Rozanov, to the Ennnistone spa is disruptive, leading to personal
disasters and breeding moral confusion. It is significant that the reader should first
encounter the demonic nihilist taking a bath in the Ennistone baptistery, where all the
people come and gossip in the all-enveloping vapours, like the misted moral
consciousness of the age. Rozanov certainly reaps what he has sown, both Hattie and
George being the victims of his “teaching”. He had filled the former with love and the
latter with grand philosophical ideas, and now he rejects the validity of either. He
protests he cannot love Hattie, because he lives in an existentialist proximity of suffering
and death. His more personal and sadistic selfishness however is openly revealed in
the remark that he would rather kill Hattie than see her lose her present purity and
innocence.

Rozanov does not take the trouble to hide from George the reality of his being a
failure, which is greatly due to his pupil being crushed under the awed admiration of his
professor's personality. He rudely admits to having left behind all the inspiring ideas
which are still cherished by George as fundamental truths. The conversation between
the priest Bernard and Rozanov is so subtle that commentators have failed to discover
its incorporated humour or even sarcasm in the implicit comment on the demise of
contemporary religious and philosophical thinking. The protagonists are letting each
other down, in a mutual service of baffled expectations. Rozanov is surprised to
discover that the priest

- has given up on any prospective revelation, living in expectation

- is satisfied with “images, rituals, words” as surrogates of faith, worth saving

from the collapse of religion

- is waiting not for some revelation but for people to call on him to get up and
direct some ritual or other

- has substituted material vibrations (possibly of a sexual nature as we keep

running into sexuality wherever we turn...) for revelation.

The priest is equally surprised to learn that the philosopher

- finds love of people nonsensical, for who could love such villains and
assassins ?

- has deconstructed human essence (as rational or Christ nature) into love of
the concrete individual (in this case, of Rozanov, whose own love of others is
but the mask of his love for himself)

- defines art as the devil's work, the magic that joins good and evil together.

- is only interested in reality to the extent that it provides some contrast to art,
which is falsehood

- sees reality as junk, devoid of any deeper structure

- is incapable to utter the truth because it is sui generis and unutterable

 - denies the existence of values, because man is a dirty pig whose emotions
and ideas have no foundation in the absence of the pure divine source. It is as
if man were writing letters to himself.

And yet Ennistone is not just a network of pipes channelling water from some
unknown source, but also a “ring”, an intelligible pattern, which could be perceived,
would they but walk beyond the labyrinth. Tom McCaffrey, the good brother, like
Dostoevsky's Aliosha, embarks on a quest which however is no longer religious but
heuristic: he tries to discover the source of the water flowing down the fallen
“baptistery”, which no longer links man to God, like the Jordan, but merely takes care of
the body. Tom may fail, but the quest is worth all the same, because it defines the true
human nature as the quester. To man the messy disordered reality is Sartrean nausea.
“Ennistone” echoes, in our opinion, the Latin for “being” (ens, entis) and the alchemical
“philosopher's stone”. Man will not be satisfied to live within the labyrinth; he will seek
the pattern of being, the self-sufficient “ring” of an epistemological assault on reality.
The Philosopher's Pupil is the eighties version of Murdoch's fictional world of the fifties,
placed under the sign of Raymond Queneau, to whom her first novel is dedicated, of
Becket and Sartre: a blend of existentialist formalism reinforcing Queneau's view of
language as free from things, arbitrary, playful. We can identify a shift of emphasis from
aesthetic freedom towards a spiritual quest.

Reinscriptions and/or Revisions

The rewriting of previous texts is not necessarily rewriting them wrong, as Steven
Connor would seem to imply by choosing Origins and Reversions as the umbrella term
for a great number of literary works cast into a very productive model invented by the
modernists.

Joyce's Ulysses and, let us say, E. Tennant's Two Women of London relate,
however, in very different ways to some precedented text, and, therefore, they call for
quite distinct readings. The assumptions made by Joyce in his allusion to Homer's
Odyssey were part of a climate which could well be defined by Freud's title of one of his
works: the discontents of modern civilization, and, hence a reverential attitude towards
the ancient epic. Postmodernists treat the world's library as a free for all, engaging in
textual operations whereby the model is appropriated, tracked down to its less
transparent intentions, disfigured, parodied, reversed in its basic views, or, on the
contrary, reinforced, reconfirmed. Whereas Tennant set upon a rewriting of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde, with a view to achieving a breakthrough in the Victorian male novelists'
closeted world of masculine professionalism and marginalized or muted women, in
Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton, each character's story is a new spin on the basic
assumption that “everybody copies”, for which the unfortunate romantic poet who died
at an early age is making a very solid case. Chatterton pretended to have discovered an
antiquated manuscript, in order to cater for the readers' thirst for sensationalism and
medievalism after a century of oppressive rationalism. He had defamiliarized his idiom,
by copying the spelling of medieval manuscripts, and had invented himself as a monk of
the fifteenth century, launching a perfect fake into the market. Posterity’s uncertainty
about the conditions of his death – was it accidental death or suicide? –, or even about
his identity take, in Ackroyd's novel, an allegorical form: Chatterton's palimpsestic
portrait, which, unlike Dorian Gray's aesthetic double living times on end, crumbles to
pieces. The emphasis upon the clots of colour dropping onto the floor suggest that
Chatterton is just some empty, self-effacing (instead of self-composing) signifier, to
which multiple identifications can be ascribed in the way in which the eye lends colour to
the objects within its ken. Living in an age of simulacra – copies for which there is no
original –, Ackroyd was naturally attracted to the Chatterton experiment in mystification.
He may be said to mature in others, for instance, in Meredith's “egoist” who would like
reality to conform to his vision, or, going back in time, in Don Quixote astride Rosinante,
yet living in the image of the fictional Amadis, or in the postmodernists recycling past
writing.

The thematic features of the original are also confirmed in The Intended, David
Dabydeen's reinscription of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, including a defence of the
Polish immigrant's defence of pluralism through colour symbolism: the totality of the
spectrum is opposed to the black-and-white, reductionist view of racism and
colonialism. The Intended, the fiancée left behind by Kurtz on departing for the jungle
world that will absorb him completely, is recast as the protagonist's fiancée, Janet, once
more enclosed within the frame of a male fantasy about the fragrant, innocent virgin, the
other of the fallen woman (Monica), whom he can bed without moral scruples or social
obligations. The crude separation of ideal love and sexuality shows the narrator-
character himself to be prejudiced, a moral flaw the world around him acts out with a
vengeance. As an immigrant to England, he is alert to forms of racial, religious and
class discriminations. There is no need to go to Africa any more, as the Empire has
moved in. While working for some theme park with its funhouse delights, he can read
the racist scribbling of tourists on the walls of their imaginary voyage to exotic lands.
Black Joseph, the social derelict whom society puts in a charitable home, feels that his
identity is constructed from without, that he is forced into a stereotyped portrait with no
support in his individual conduct or character: They look at me and see ape, trouble, fist.
Ironically, he fails later in his job, because he is trying to aestheticize the crude art of
pornographic film industry, whose financial success is an implicit comment on the
morally dubious audience in a metropolitan centre of the world. As an orphan entrusted
to social care, he is trying to provide some objective correlative for his identity. In the
absence of historical, national and family roots, he turns to a set of objects, establishing
some order in his room, as an image of his personality. It never lasts, for the warden
comes in, and, as he always suspects the inmates of planning trouble, goes through
Joseph's things and turns the room upside down.

The majority rewritings, however, incorporate a different ideological agenda, often

by focalizing the story through some character excluded from discourse or from power
in the original (for instance, Jean Rhys, rewriting Jane Eyre from Bertha Mason's
perspective. She is Rochester's mad wife, shut up in the attic, presented as the racial
irrational other, with madness running in her family, whom the protagonist had married
out of a sense of duty to the Empire, according to an aristocrat's role in the narrative of
earning the nation the riches of the colonies.)

In Jeanette Winterson, revisionary work assumes the garb of parody in her Boating
for Beginners, a very fanciful and amusing revisit of the Noah episode in the Bible. The
writer is mainly known for her contribution to feminism and Queer fiction and theory. In
response to the genderized controversy which often amounts to turning the tables in
women's favour, that is some other form of monocular, biased, vision, being Queer
surmounts the crude divide between the sexes. It indicates ambiguity of gender and
sexual behaviour. Noah is a... travestite, and God calls him “Mother”, as the relationship
between Creator and creature have been inverted. Winterson goes through all extents
to liberate the individual from the straitjacket of essentialist stereotypes – of class, race,
gender –, by attacking its supreme representation in myth. The deconstruction of origin
goes all the way back to the absolute transcendental signifier, God. The deconstructive
treatment reveals inconsistencies within the holy script themselves: the emanations of
the Cabbala and the New Testamental Trinity displace God from origin and self-identity:

Noah turned pale. What if YAHWEH were spontaneously reproducing ? He

examined the column with his magnifying glass. Yes, he could see a character forming
inside, not a full or rounded character but certainly something that might prove difficult.
“It's your emanation,” he said finally. “It's part of you but it's also separate and it won't
go away.”

If the original name given by Noah to this emanation, “Holy Wisp” changes,
through negotiations with God, into “Holy Spirit” it is because God is as fastidious as a
movie star, and won't put up with anything less “grand and puzzling”...
 The Flood is a new creation of the world, this time by cooperation with human
agency (Noah), therefore it does not take a scientific catastrophic theory to undermine
the Biblical fiction of unique origin and creation. The myth is sometimes ingeniously
literalised, as in this passage where God's utter otherness and inaccessibility to humans
(the “unpronounceable”) are put down to some peculiar characteristic of the Hebrew
alphabet, which makes meaning dependent upon a text's creative reading and
interpretation (or, translation):

“But YHWH is unpronounceable unless you put some fake vowels in there,’ Noah
pointed out. ‘It's not my fault that we have to do this in Hebrew, It's just how it is.”

„Yes,’ insisted God, ‘but it isn't always going to be Hebrew, is it ? It's going to be
French and Norwegian and African and lots of others. You told me was going to be
worldwide. Not everyone speaks Hebrew. I have my popular appeal to think of. Why
don't we just settle for something translatable like “Almighty’ ”?

In Boating for Beginners, Noah is only saving the feeding animal of contemporary
society and flooding the world in the melting Icecream-God... The whole issue comes
down to choosing proper kinds of food, proper kinds of cooking, freezers, congealed or
fresh food, the proper diet, as well as the consumption of... romances written for mass
entertainment by Bunny Mix. Another inverted Eucharist, like the scene of Caliban and
the clowns mixing up wine and Prospero's Book in The Tempest. With prescience, Noah
is preparing to embark upon the Wakefield Tour (the famous medieval cycle of miracle
plays), but, at the end of culture, he will only resurrect the animal-man, living in the
body.

In another novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – a plead for religious and
sexual tolerance –, Winterson lays in the abyss a scene of... re-reading. The heroine's
religiously fanatic mother changes the ending of Jane Eyre in reading it to her child, by
having Jane marry the dutiful and impassionate (in fact, emotionally repressed) St John
instead of the less orthodox Mr. Rochester.

One more novelist out of key with contemporary positivism, engaged in the
exploration of the evil within the human heart is the Nobel-Award winner William
Golding (1911-1995).

The narrative form whereby he sets out to make moral Darkness Visible (the title
of his 1979 study of two psychopathic twins, borrowed from Milton's Paradise Lost) is a
sort of intellectual fable which inverts some previous myth: in Pincher Martin (1956), that
of the castaway as Robinsonian Empire colonizer, the wreck being transposed into the
protagonist's consciousness; in Lord of the Flies (1954), that of the idealized British
boys defending the Victorian values of order, material progress, and moral responsibility
in some far-off tropical wilderness. By establishing a network of similarities (topical) and
dissimilarities (tropical) with previous writings on the wreck and jungle theme, Lord of
the Flies creates a sort of inner space, the novel referring in dialogic fashion back to
precedented language, instead of things or actual experience. The characters in the
book – children abandoned on a deserted island at the time of some future war – are
exhilarated at the prospect of going not through an original experience but one whose
stereotypes are looming at the back of their minds:

“It's like in a book.”

At once there was a clamour.

“Treasure Island –”

“Swallows and Amazons –”

“Coral Island –”

The idyllic paradise of juveniles is deconstructed by Golding as Beelzebub's

(meaning “Lord of the Flies”) hell of evil, in a twentieth century replica to Rousseau's
theory of the child being born good and spoilt by society. Abandoned through a tube by
an aircraft in flames the children know a second birth, into the natural world,
progressively disengaging themselves from the order of civilization in which they had
been brought up. Yet even the refutation of R.M. Ballantyne's 1858 Coral Island is
undertaken by Golding in the epistemological climate nourished by the twentieth-century
psychology, ethnography and anthropology (Freud, Frazer, Jung, Neil McEwan even
adding theories developed since it was published, like Marthe Robert's 1972 Roman
des origines et origines du roman, and her discussion of l'identification classique du
sauvage et du l'enfant [19]. Ballantyne's characters, although acknowledging at times
that the pirates or cannibals are appealing to something deep and irrepressible within
their souls, manage to maintain the rational control of their ego, which grows sick at the
sight of this bloody battle. Golding's characters set out from the same thesis, in-bred by
the jingoistic propaganda of such juveniles:

We-ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we-re not savages. We-re
English; and the best at everything. So we-ve got to do the right things.
 It is precisely Jack who leads the way back into savagery, which amounts to an
implicit ironical comment on the worth of such simplifying slogans. In the absence of
their parents' authority and societal control, the majority of the children turn into
barbarians who go hunting, take delight in killing animals, intoxicating chants, painted
faces, and do not even refrain from murdering their own mates. Golding makes
extensive use of symbols: the classical association between physical debility and
reasoning power, which, in the course of evolution, was the distinguishing feature of
man in comparison to the better fitted and adapted animals, the broken shell and
glasses, symbolical of the collapse of social order and the extinction of consciousness,
the snake shape of the pilot's fly-blown decayed body, swept by the parachute above
the trees, mitigating the “ancient, inescapable recognition” of the evil in fallen man, the
streak of phosphorescence, the fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itelf a silver shape
beneath the steadfast constellation which surrounds murdered Simon's head like a
saint's aura, the black garments of the choir boys, who pass so easily from religious
hymns to savage chants urging to kill the pig and spill the blood, as if they had been
carrying all along a heritage of slaughter, etc. Dyadic pairs structure the narrative:
Ralph, the leader of the civilized group, the diminishing one, and Jack, the champion of
the jungle, represent two continents of experience and feeling, unable to communicate.
The one, guided and assisted by Piggy, the raisoneur, urges children to establish rules,
to build shelters, to keep up a fire as a signal to occasional ships which might restore
them to civilization. Jack teaches them how to paint their faces, the masks behind which
their conscience may hide and feel no more shame, how to kill. The first successful
hunting scene is symbolically associated with neglect of the fire, which goes out, the
passing ship being consequently missed. We could've gone home, Ralph bitterly
remarks over Jack's parade of bravery; but Jack had chosen the jungle instead of man's
genuine home, which here is a trope and not just a concrete referent. At the beginning,
the taboos of civilization still work. Roger is aiming his stones at Henry but only to miss,
since there was a space round Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he
dared not throw. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the
squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law.
Roger's arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.
The original evil is the corruption of civilization itself, the battle fought at ten miles
height, wherefrom the dead pilot had dropped, still hanging to his parachute, and
troubling the dreams of the “littleuns” with nightmares of “the beast”, until they discover
it within themselves. Later in the novel Roger is able to hurl the rock that kills the
reason-talking Piggy. Ralph's narrow escape from the stick sharpened at both ends,
meant by Jack for his severed head – the symbolical end of civilization, of humanity – is
made possible by the arrival of the naval officer. What Ralph first perceives is not a
human being in flesh and blood but insignia, elements of heraldry. He is restored to the
world of signs, of meanings (kingdom, loyalty, rank, professional calling etc.):

He staggered to his feet, tensed for more terrors, and looked up at a huge peaked
cap. It was a white-topped cap, and above the green shade of the peak was a crown,
an anchor, gold foliage. He saw white drill, epaulettes, a revolver, a row of gilt buttons
down the front of a uniform.
 The officer's ironical remark, that the jolly good show is like the Coral Island,
reestablishes the circuit of semantic energies which make communication possible
within frames larger than the individual. Ralph well knows what the officer means by
that. He weeps for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall
through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy. The asthmatic and short-sighted
Piggy had through education conquered the beast in himself, his nickname being so
improperly assigned to him by mocking, shallow children – unless as a subconsciously
sarcastic comment on their own cannibalism By hunting him down, as they hunted
actual pigs, the children had known a second fall of man. Golding is not only interested
in the mythical pattern; there is a parallel fall in the order of culture. The end of
innocence also means the end of the “Coral Island” fiction.

Fabulators and Metafiction

In a paradoxical way, the greatest experimentators and “fabulators” (Robert

Sholes, 1967) in contemporary British fiction – John Robert Fowles and Doris
Lessing – draw lavishly upon personal experience. It is only that they no longer
distinguish, in fact, between fiction and reality, moving freely between the one and the
other, making the actual act of writing part of the subject, mixing genres (stories, letters,
diaries, speeches, debates) into some carnivalized sort of textuality. However, the
awareness that all civilization is based on agreed codes (Malcolm Bradbury, Eating
People Is Wrong, 1959) does not rule out the necessity for ordinary man and woman to
resist an asphyxiating smog of opinions fostered on them by society (John Fowles,
Aristos, 1964). An institutional critique of culture is undertaken by Fowles in Aristos –
the novelist's intellectual portrait and apology, a collection of numbered pensées in
imitation of the fragments of Heraclitus. The “aristos” is “the good man” who, according
to Heraclitus, shows independence of judgement and the pursuit of inner wisdom.
Unlike Iris Murdoch, Fowles feels no need for existential mystery (demystified in Magus,
his first written and second published novel, as surrogate God-playing, love-making
machinery and awe-inspiring “stage direction”), following Sartre in the denudation of the
universe of all intervening gods, of any grounds for existential truths. Picking up on such
popular forms as the detective story or the thriller, advocating freedom of attitude and
fictional playfulness, Fowles walks into the footsteps of his acknowledged masters,
Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes. His remarkably innovating fiction also justifies
references to Kristeva's semiologic critique of structuralism, Derrida's deconstruction of
logocentric hierarchies and the psychoanalysts' disintegration of the Cartesian self.

The binary oppositions structuring the novels of Golding or Murdoch are replaced
in The Collector – the fictional debut of John Fowels – by a double-voiced discourse,
anticipating Julia Kristeva's Stabat Mater (from Tales of Love, 1976). In it, Kristeva
develops the concept of the Virgin Mary in two completely distinct discourses, arranged
in separate columns on the page. One of them is an incursion into the historical
construction of Virgin Mary in Western culture, resulting in a deconstruction of the myth
into historicized cultural frames. The other explores an almost pre-linguistic experience
of motherhood in the natural language of the body. The metaphors of non-speech
foreground the possibility of the semiotic representation of a personal as well as of
collective experience (motherhood as biology of “primary narcissism”) other than the
articulation in language, at the level of cultural institutions, which follows ego formation.

The Collector takes a similar dialogical form: the discourse of Clegg, narrating the
events from a natural, personal, tangible and immediate perspective, in a thick,
ambiguous, illiterate language, lacking punctuation, and Miranda's dramatized version
of the same events, projected within an intelligible pattern, into multiple cultural
framings.

Clegg's natural articulation of the horrifying claustrophobic story of his

imprisoning and indirectly murdering Miranda pays enormous attention to concrete,
physical, bodily details. His language is unintelligible, hardly articulate: My father was
killed driving. I was too (...) It finally ten days later happened as it sometimes does with
butterflies... The details of Miranda's seizure, of her vomiting after his “gag and scarf”
treat, of his catering for her bodily needs, of the decomposition process in her corpse
etc. are sickening. The pseudo-Ferdinand seems to be bereft of memory, living in a sort
of beastly oblivion: I can't really say what intention I had. What you do blurs over what
you did before. He avoids companionship, deceiving himself about his feeling a genuine
contempt for such a “crude animal thing”, when, in fact, he is merely trying to hide his
physical and emotional impotence. He treats people as if they were animals only worth
living if physically fit (the crippled Mabel would better be put out painlessly), as if they
were things, worth completing his collector's items, and preferably dealt with in
photographs, because pictures do not answer back... If culture is built upon differences,
Frederic, who is ready to replace Miranda the artist by an ordinary shop girl – “another
M” –, delights in the deconstruction of all values, all meanings. He anticipates Derrida
(„Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, 1966, Of
Grammatology, 1967) in exploding the original relationship of “superior” and “inferior”
which makes possible the hierarchy of values. With the centre removed (God, logos as
the centre structuring all networks of meaning), there is no criteria of choosing between
alternatives; language is just a free play which mitigates no truth, no origin, no stable
meaning. It only offers up mutually exclusive differences, without positive terms:

Because what it is it's luck. It's like the pools – worse, there aren't even good
teams and bad teams and likely draws. You can't ever tell how it will turn out. Just A
versus B, C versus D, and nowbody knows what A and B and C and D are. That's never
why I never believe in God. I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and
that's the lot. There's no mercy in things. There's not even a Great Beyond, there's
nothing.

Clegg cannot catch cultural meanings (bookish allusions), or understand figurative

speech and language games; he has no religion and no opinion on a work of art. Let
Miranda do it for him, he will take her word for it. He is, like animals, incapable of
transcendence. When he does read a book, it is either for immediate pragmatic
purposes (to derive some ideas from the Gestapo books concerning the means of
isolating prisoners and breaking their will), or for the narcissistic pleasure of seeing his
face in a mirror (reading The Catcher in the Rye, with its rebellious hero).

Miranda's discourse is in Standard English and in dramatic form, as she is

capable of objectifying herself, of seeing herself as another, of putting herself in
another's place – that form of projective behaviour which is defining for humans. She
lives in the imagination as much as in the real world: I didn't say all these things – but
I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did (...) The only thing that
matters is feeling and living what you believe. Unlike Clegg's, her basic exercises are
re-construction and reinscription of figures or insertion of people and events into a
cultural image-repertoire. She has no trouble identifying in Clegg the class and sex
neurosis of the characters in the “angry young men's”' novels: Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning, Room at the Top.

It is this claustrophobic England, steeped into provincial positivism, detailed

naturalism, embittered by and resenting the show of social differences, of wealth, class
differences and refinement, of manners or of intellectual taste, immune to Continental
experiments that Miranda, the novelist's mask, condemns as Caliban's England (...) the
apathy in England, the great dead weight of the Calibanity of England: England stifles
and smothers and crushes like a steamroller over everything fresh and green and
original. Like Clegg, England is a “tortoise” (Prospero’s trope for Caliban), that which will
not come out of itself and meet the world on its own terms. Miranda voices the need for
the subjectivity which petit bourgeois squareness, narrow social realism, galvanized by
the class war, had suppressed:

Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing
in life is actually what you call “nasty” or has been caused by feelings that you call
“nasty” ? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Nasty ? Nasty nice proper right.
Except cups of weak tea in a stuffy old room... The whole business of my being here is
nasty, nasty, nasty... I might be talking Greek.

Miranda is permanently casting an intelligible net over the incidents of life, trying to
understand them in terms of similar versions available in previous cultural constructions.
Clegg is maybe a man looking for the mother, a typical Alan Sillitoe mock-humble,
Shakespeare's Caliban, to whom the football pools (by winning the pools, he had
received an important cheque which had allowed him to carry through his plan ) had
been like Stephano and Trinculo in Shakespeare's Tempest (that is, the false idol he
worships). She is a new Miranda, spiritually transformed by her professor, George
Paston, framed as Professor Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion (the play itself being an
inversion of the ancient myth). Clegg, collecting butterflies or herself, resembles, she
thinks, one of those critics who classify artists, putting them in drawers labelled with
various “isms”, unable to understand their individuality. The model is sometimes
reversed: Clegg's is not the brave but the sick new world, governed by money. Clegg is
not finally won over to the side of the redeemed, as Caliban is in The Tempest. Unlike
him, Miranda is capable of spiritual progress. Before this crucifying experience, she had
rejected the common prospect for a woman in a man's world: the baby world, and
cooking world, and shopping world. Or, for that matter, the necessity to do illustrating
and commercial art to keep the home going. She wants to learn geometry and
mathematics, to improve spiritually, like Shakespeare's heroine. Her present suffering,
instead of hardening her, helps her to “think and understand things better”, to feel sorry
for not having shown more sympathy to her lame mother. When she feels, in existential
fashion, abandoned by God, she breaks the existing norms, proposing new values, of
her own. She will not use his weapons: Not selfishness and brutality but generosity (I
give myself), gentleness (I kiss the beast) and no-shame (out of my free will) and
forgiveness (he can't help himself). But she cannot communicate at this level of
intelligibility with Clegg. Her naked body, the otherness to understanding and discourse,
is all her inhuman partner can perceive – something he knows to be denied to him, the
sense of frustration, however, being subconsciously translated into presumed
puritanical scruples. Otherwise, he had not refrained from taking photos she did not
want to be published...

Miranda voices the anxieties of the intellectual and social elite in a mass culture,
feeling their privacy threatened by the invasion of the “New People”, who had got
access to education under governmental dispensation, and were now seeking a new
moral and social centre. The disintegration of the society based on status, the levelling
out processes in the late capitalist, classless society of consumption are insightfully
associated by Fowles with the deconstruction of philosophical hierarchies into an order
of empty signs (even abbreviations...). It was only seven years later, in 1967, that
Jacques Derrida was theorizing the process in his Grammatologie: There is nothing at
the centre or origin any more except “la trace” – pure difference („A versus B”...). Sings
and being are now disjunctive and in free play instead of being united by a link of a
priori necessity: thing as res created from its eidos or meaning conceived by God's
infinite understanding. Consequently there are no more hierarchies of meanings
established by the basic oppositions of wordly/other-worldly, inner and outer, ideal/non-
ideal, universal/non-universal... (Or “good and bad teams”...).

The psychoanalytic deconstruction of the substantial subjectivity into a position

within a larger system of discourse can be traced in The French Lieutenant's Woman, a
novel set in a decor familiar to the author, as he was actually living at Lyme Regis, the
Dorset coastal resort. Fowles is initially playing with the narrative conventions of the
Victorian novel. Charles Smithson enters into the familiar triangular relationship:
engaged to Ernestina, representing the “earnest” Victorian dream of getting
simultaneously into one's bride's bed and bank, and in love with Sarah, an almost fallen
woman ” the Victorian bęte noire. Charles knows the costs of the obedience to social
etiquette, as well as those involved in the pleasure principle of doing as one likes: You
stay in prison, what your time calls duty, honour, self-respect, and you are comfortably
safe. Or you are free and crucified. The signs of ontological transgression steal into the
very beginning of the novel, through hints to Henry Moore, the nineteenth and the
twentieth century communicating freely in the temporally odd fictional frame. In the
thirteenth chapter, the breach is completed by the author's intrusion into fictional space,
exposing it as a construct. Fowles has no personal identity, he writes from within a
system of literary conventions which delimit possibilities of experience, apprehension,
narration. He shifts from one position within the text (a typical Victorian novel) as
omniscient narrator to that of nouveau novelist, developing a democratic relationship
with his characters, constituted in a cultural manifold:

This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I created never

existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters'
minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed
some of the vocabulary and “voice” of) a convention universally accepted at the time of
my story; that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to
pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if
this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word (...).

The ego does not engage in a direct experience of the world but through the
mediation of sign systems. The novelist gives up on “authority” and adopts the
“freedom” principle, because his own origin is lost: the omniscient God presiding over a
teleological universe. Left on his own, the new novelist simply does not know of any
rules of behaviour for his characters, of any structure of necessity seeing characters
through the beginning, middle and end of a rounded-off, linear, and purposive narrative.
To him the world is a matter of hazard (therefore he spins coins in order to decide upon
possible endings), no longer heading towards some precise destination (therefore he
will simply reverse the action, go back in time, turn back the watch and re-run scenes).
This is not at all the world outlook of a Victorian novelist, or even his parody; neither is
the author's mask brooding over Charles in a railway carriage in Chapter 55 an
“omniscient creator” [20]. The narrator is simply casting himself in various roles – as
Victorian novelist, as successful impressario, as author-character – disintegrating
himself through cycling subject positions. In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”, Freud
gives a narrative account of the semiotic construction of the subject precisely as visual
experience. From its own position, the subject engages in a relation with its object,
undergoing “partial-object” identification. The single act of looking creates three
positions in a subject: subject, subject/object, and object for the scopic drive. The
novelist's look is not a “divine look”, like that of a unified subject, which would have
decided on a single, typically Victorian ending, with Charles married off to the wealthy
Ernestina, but “mean and dubious”, resulting in the multiplication of his character in two
more alternate endings (Charles is happily reunited with Sarah or rejected by Sarah).
Instead of a rational consciousness, fully responsible and aware of its intentions and
motives, we get the whole paradigm of relationships between author/narrator and
character, constituted as functions, not as entities. By failing to select one world to the
exclusion of others, Fowles problematizes the notion of plot and the distinction between
actual and fictional in narrative.

One more example of how language constructs the subject in various subject
positions is The Golden Notebook (1962) by Doris Lessing, where a traditional type of
novel, entitled Free Women, is divided into five sections, separated by notebooks in
which various types of texts – newspaper articles, literary criticism, fictional fragments,
political discourse – frame the heroine as woman with personal affections and failures
(Blue Book), socialist activist (Red Book), colonial (Black Book), writer (Golden Book).

References:

[13] Todd Gitlin, “Postmodernism. Roots and Politics” in Cultural Politics in

Contemporary America, Edited by Ian Angus and Sut Jholly, Routledge and London,
1988, pp. 347 and the following.

[14] Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” in

“New Left Review”, 1984.

[15] Jarold Ramsey, “Crow or the Trickster Transformed”, in The Achievement of Ted
Hughes, Op. cit.

[16] Floyd Merrell, Deconstruction, 1985, pp. 139 et passim.

[17] Angus Wilson, “Mood of the Month” – II, “London Magazine”, 1958.

[18] Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch, The Saint and the Artist, Macmillan, 1986.

[19] Neil McEwan, The Survival of the Novel. British Fiction in the Later Tewntieth
Century, Macmillan, 1981, p. 159.

[20] Neil McEwan, The Survival of the Novel, Op. cit., p. 27.

Postmodernist Gothic

In her Handbook to Gothic Literature, Marie Mulbrey-Roberts points to the mutating

nature of the Gothic, a cultural phenomenon which continues to break its boundaries.
Angela Carter confesses to have turned to Gothic precisely in order to “write into being
new ways of living and relating beyond those naturalized and institutionalized”
(Afterword to Fireworks). She did contribute to the ever-expanding borders of Gothic
fiction some characteristically postmodernist features of characters and narrative
spaces.

Transgression, a subgenre of romance, is the generic frame of The Infernal

Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter. Murder, rape, acts of sado-
masochism are, in fact, symptoms of cultural dissent. The world of the novel is disputed
between the Minister of Determination, the representative of patriarchal authority, taking
pride in the intellect and rigidly inflicting the Law, and Doctor Hoffman, the subverter of
rationalism, of the superego policing the desires of the subconscious. Desiderio, the
protagonist, is initially the Minster's secretary, but he will overcome psychic repression,
ending up with Hoffman, master of the machinery of Desire, in the latter's mysterious
castle. Location is significant: the New Age “Erotic Traveller”, the pilgrim prompted on
his quest by his libidinal body, moves out of institutional confines following the call of the
dark recesses of Gothic architecture, of ancestral and untameable cravings. This
psychoanalytic reinscription of the conflict between Blake's Urizen and Orc, with
Desiderio as a sort of Faust disputed between the enlightened ego and the dark,
Luciferic id, instances the postmodernist view of self-constitution in relation to one's
Desire, to the Other of Law and reason. As Gothic forms are never contained, the novel
is also an example of popular horror and sensation fiction, which delights in mystery,
crime and horror as antidotes of the uninspiring, rationalist society of consumerism.
The acts of Sadomasochism are acted out on bodies on which is written the opposition
between phallic and castrated, masculine and feminine, while allusively linking up with
previous texts (The Island of Doctor Moreau), and grafting the tortured Gothic body on
the hybrid nature, both human and machine, of cyberpunk.

There were, perhaps, a dozen girls in the cages in the reception room and, posed
inside, the girls towered above us like the goddesses of some forgotten theogeny
locked up because they were too holy to be touched. Each was as circumscribed as a
figure in rhetoric and you could not imagine they had names, for they had been reduced
by the rigorous discipline of their vocation to the undifferentiated essence of the idea of
the female. This ideational femaleness took amazingly different shapes though its
nature was not that of Woman; when I examined them more closely, I saw that none of
them were any longer, or might never have been, woman. All, without exception,
passed beyond or did not enter the realm of simple humanity. They were sinister,
abominable, inverted mutations, part clockwork, part vegetable and part brute.

Their hides were streaked, blotched and marbled and some trembled on the point
of reverting to the beast. If beasts of prey had become furnishings, some of the sexual
appliances of the establishment were about to become their victims. Perhaps that was
why they kept them in cages. The dazed, soft-eyed head of a giraffe swayed on two
feet of dappled neck above the furred, golden shoulders of one girl and another had the
stripped face of a zebra and a cropped, stiff, black mane bristling down her spine. But, if
some were antlered like stags, others had the branches of trees sprouting out of their
bland foreheads and showed us the clusters of roses growing in their armpits when they
held out their hands to us. One leafy girl was grown all over with mistletoe but, where
the bark was stripped away from her ribcage, you could see how the internal wheels
articulating her went round. Another girl had many faces hinged one on top of the other
so that her head opened out like a book, page by page, and on each page was printed
a fresh expression of allure. All the figures presented a dream-like fusion of diverse
states of being, blind, speechless beings from a nocturnal forest where trees had eyes
and dragons rolled about on wheels. And one girl must have come straight from the
whipping parlour for her back was a ravelled palimpsest of wound upon wound – she
was neither animal nor vegetable not technological; this torn and bleeding she was the
most dramatic revelation of the nature of meat that I have ever seen.

This nightmarish reading by a male, crazed with fear of castration, of the female
body – subject to imprisonment, sexual exploitation, violence, denied its fundamental
humanity through successive mappings onto animals, plants and machines – is a gothic
version of the feminist protest against patriarchy. The stereotyping male perspective
constructs woman as a body displayed for sexual consumption, a piece of “meat”, and
yet feared as a potentially ruthless and dangerous seductress. Reduced to the
senseless workings of biology, to nature (Kristeva: the semiotic, as absence of
meaning, irrationality, chaos, darkness, non-being, the inarticulate, and opposed to
man's symbolic order of culture), woman is born through “theogeny”: the god of genes,
the genetic code, echoing the Greek gyne, meaning “woman” as reproductive organ.
Woman's effacement in the world of power relationships or of the public sphere is
allegorized as the woman's passive body laid out for inspection by the male gaze.
Woman is divested of her true nature, reduced to a masculine cliche of “ideational
femaleness”, to a depthless “figure”, an empty sign, the surrogate identity of a pronoun
(a “she”), “blind, speechless”, no longer the marker of full presence. Such examples of
complex narrative and figural interlacing are persuasive proofs that the well-selling
Gothic genre is not incompatible with high art.

Carter also tried her hand at genuine cyberpunk, in The Passion of New Eve, a
post-catastrophe fanatsy. Setting out from inside the technological heart of
postmodernism, from historical facts, such as illicit operations in the internet and the
electronic trade of body parts (William Gibson, Neuromancer), from anxieties raised by
totalitarian attempts of controlling the human mind, Pat Cadigan (Mindplayers) and W.J.
Williams (Hardwired) imagine the existence of companies which can modify personality
or sell... artificial identities.

Magic realism, a phrase coined by Franz Roh with reference to post-expressionist

painting, partakes of the nature of Gothic – formless, transgressive, Protean –, through
its characteristic mixture of realism and fantasy. Peter Widdowson (Literature, “The
New Critical Idiom”, Routledge, 1999) defines it in negative terms: a counter-culture of
the imagination, subverting the rational and institutional discourses of the dominant
culture. Writing against the grain, Isabel Alende (The House of the Spirits), Gabriel
Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) or Salman Rushdie (Midnight
Children, Shame) articulate the inter-dicta, what is censored by official discourses and
school textbooks.

Miguel Angel Asturias qualified this blend of realism and fantasy as the original
mentality of the Indians. There is indeed a great number of books written in this manner
in the former colonies and third worlds, but Jim Crace, who scored immediate success
with his Continent, published in 1986, in metropolitan London, is a notable exception.
The seven stories, whose action is set on an imaginary Continent, provide an anti-
theology, or anti-creation, for each thematizes the blotting out of contemporary
civilization through loss of historical and national identity, the commercialisation of the
arts, and their conversion into simulacra – the faked exotica for the tourist industry,
mass produced by Third World traders and bought off mannerist artists, who conspire to
make money by exploiting the desire of the Western rich for what is still authentic,
original and unadulterated –, the hypocrisy, the double think and the fraudulent
reputation of scientists, pitting impassionate nature against depraved civilization, while
stooping to amoral treatment of primitive people and promiscuity, the futility of
technological experiments, the alienation from the values of home and family, the
extinction of the values of citizenry through totalitarian practices. The stories are
remarkably written, with information withheld for the sake of suspense, but also because
the narrator has a limited awareness, forcing the readers to fall upon their resources of
analogous characters and situations in order to make decisions about meaning and
appropriate interpretation. Crace seems to have responded to the boom of hermenutics
in the 70s and the 80s.

Salman Rushdie resorts to magical realism as an appropriate medium for his

vision of aberrant history and of a nation in disarray. In Imaginary Homelands, where he
denies the existence of a so-called “Commonwealth literature”, he affirms, nevertheless,
a literary mode, magical realism, whose frontiers are neither political nor linguistic, but
imaginative. It is a literature of “the powerless” – mainly Latin Americans and Indian-
language writers –, blooming forth as a trans-national and cross-lingual “process of
pollination”. As an aesthetic mode, it transgresses boundaries which realist conventions
set between history and fiction, reality and imagination, natural and supernatural, real
space and textual space.

The story of the Shakil family's displacement and extinction in his novel Shame is
closely intertwined with the history of Pakistan. The interstices of the social, the
economic and the psychological are interweaving the web of fate and determinism. Loss
of fortune leads to loss of reputation, and the ensuing sense of shame (sharam), which
is the sense of inadequacy in a religiously oppressed, guilt-ridden disintegrating race,
creates “centaurs of psychology” and leads from inhuman isolation from the world to
revenge on the world, to crime. The three sisters who conspire to cover the sin of one of
them who gives birth to an illegitimate child lose their identity into copies of the others,
hybrid personalities: the youngest assumes the majestic air of the eldest, the eldest
mimes the hesitating, uncertain demure of the middle one and the latter apes the
histrionic frailty of the youngest. The temporal displacement through the adoption of the
Hegira calendric time symbolizes the medievalism of this world lost in superstitions,
taboos, swayed by military dictators, corrupted judges and fundamentalist priests. It is
precisely the threat of political retaliation in a totalitarian regime that forces the narrator
to adopt a non-realist mode of presentation. His fictive world is said to exist obliquely
towards reality, two countries, the real and the fictional one, occupying the same place
at the same time, like radiations pervading bodies. This decentred approach, the
narrator explains, is also necessary, because he is not writing only about Pakistan. He
is trying to remove from the present palimpsestic body of a nation the false images
created by colonial discourses. Kipling's Mowgli, son of the jungle, cannot possibly fit
into a space where a world turned upside down can only create inconsistent, self-
contradictory, irrational etc. individuals. The narrator identifies himself with the
immigrants who founded Pakistan leaving behind India, as he himself is “an emigrant
from one country (India) and a newcomer in two (England, where I live, and Pakistan, to
which my family moved against my will)”. The history of Pakistan is made into a tailored
autobiography and the circumstance of the author taking a death warrant with him in
exile may have something to do with his nightmarish visions of bloodshed and
monstrosity. History, in the traditional sense, used to imply continuity, sovereignty,
legitimacy, and agency: “brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging”. The
mohajirs, the immigrants who had been told to “pack up double quick and be off”, had
conquered the law of gravity, but they had also lost belonging, the organic rootedness of
history. It had been turned to memory, “a few meaning-drained mementoes”, they had
become unstuck both in time and in space. The novel is a study in the dismantling of
identity: national, historical, individual. The phenomenal past and history are split apart.
Truths are fictions imposed by the power system:

To build Pakistan it was necessary to cover up Indian history, to deny that Indian
centuries lay beneath the surface of Pakistani Standard Time. The past was rewritten;
there was nothing else to be done.

Instead of continuity, there is secession, instead of full presence, there is the

emptiness of alphabetic letters, of self-referencing signifiers, instead of truth discourse,
there is rewriting, fiction, erasure of the origin with endless confusion and warring
contradictions as their place-holder:

It is well known that the term “Pakistan”, an acronym, was originally thought up in
England by a group of Muslim intellectuals. P for Punjabis, A for Afghans, K for
Kashmirs, S for Sind and the “tan”, they say, for Baluchistan. (No mention of the East
Wing, you notice; Bangladesh never got its name in the title, and so, eventually, it took
the hint and seceded from the secessionists. Imagine what double secession does to a
people ! (....) Pakistan, the peeling, fragmenting palimpsest, increasingly at war with
itself, may be described as a failure of the dreaming mind. Perhaps the pigments used
were the wrong ones, impermanent, like Leonardo's; or perhaps the palace was just
insufficiently imagined, a picture full of irreconcilable elements, mid-riffbaring immigrant
saris versus demure, indigenous Sindhi shalwar-kurtas, Urdu versus punjabi, now
versus then: a miracle that went wrong.

The geographical space is further derealized by being mapped onto mythical,

symbolic, mental and textual versions. Unlike the Biblical myth of the fall from pure
origin, Pakistan comes into being through... the fall. Punning on its name, the narrator
traces the country back to Peccavistan: I have sinned. The Hyder family is the image in
little of ethnic tragedy. The condition of migration is symbolized as being swept away by
the wind (Bilkis Hyder is obsessed with being blown away by the wind) and vanishing
away (Raza has an impression of the void closing in on him, as he sees his wife
gradually disappearing under her veils – a trope on the Islamic woman's ghostly
presence in society). Their daughter, Sufya Zinobia, periodically metamorphoses into a
beast that tears men and children to pieces. Bred in repression, abused, beaten and
rejected by parents for frustrating their expectations of a male heir, later neglected by
her husband who sleeps with her nurse, as he fears sexuality might aggravate her
illness, Sufya is overcome by what psychoanalysts call the return of the repressed. She
murders children, maybe because social conventions ascribe a woman's life the only
purpose of birthing, and tears to pieces four men, the number of wives a Muslim can
entertain under his roof. She is split between love for her husband, whom she struggles
to protect from her own devilish transformations, and resentment for his betrayal, which
brings forth within her the irrational and vengeful aggressivity. A sublimation of violent
protest as art is seen in the Philomela-like story of Rani Harappa's eighteen
embroidered shawls, which display no crimes. What intrigues Raza is the fact that his
daughter had been brought up in the midst of a respectable society, not among
dragons. Being in a position of power, he can afford to keep the horrible secret hidden,
out of “reasons of state” rather than out of parental love: her expulsion would have
revealed what must not at all costs come out, the impossible truth that barbarity can
crop up on cultivated land.

As the offspring of an inverted order and of sin, the protagonist, Omar Khayyam
Shakil, is an anti-hero, “a creature of the edge, a peripheral man”, further displaced
through marriage, as his father-in-law was responsible for his brother's death, and
through the narrator's doing and undoing him, as he builds him into the plot, or exposes
his fictional status.

The distinctions between fact, history and story are blurred in the narrator's plot as
the narrator obliges the reader with lots of details about his choices of plot and
character construction, and with apologetic diminutions for his falty memory, which turns
the story into a figment of its capricious workings – not a mirror on the world:

Although I have known Pakistan for a long time, I have never lived there for longer
than six months at a stretch (...) I have learned Pakistan in slices (...) I think what I'm
confessing is that, however I choose to write about over-there, I am forced to reflect that
world in fragments of broken mirrors.

With Rushdie, magic realism is the textual emplotment of a form of politics which
derealizes the world. There is no Purity Land, as Maulana Dawood, the Islamic divine
claims for Pakistan. Neither sexuality, nor politics or morality qualifies for such
“Standard”. Nor is the metropolitan mind safe from ideological biases. There is no clear-
cut division, as in the list of western binaries, between epicureans and puritans, Danton
and Robespierres, Virtue and Vice, God versus Satan. We are all Robestons and
Danpierres...

If a great writer is the one who enlarges our awareness of the nature of humanity,
Rushdie can claim the trophy. His Shame is The Scarlet Letter of the East.
 Postcolonial Fiction

There are important differences between the colonial gothic published at the time
of the Empire's greatest extension and the literature of the decolonised, i.e. of the
authors writing in English in the Commonwealth. Far from appealing to the gothic
enclaves of irrationality and supernaturalism, post-colonial writing sets out from some
precise political agenda, which often develops into theory. For instance, Anderson's
concept of "imagined communities", or that of "transnational imaginary" (See Rob
Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, editors of Global/Local: The Cultural Production and
the Transnational Imaginary, Duke University Press, 1996), are probably indebted to
Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands. Theoretically derivative is also, Homi Bhabha’s „Of,
Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”, 1984, which most certainly
owes its Vergilian allusiveness („arms and the man”) and speculative substance to V.S,
Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967). Vergil was a representative of the Augustan Age, and
his Aeneid substantiated the megalomaniac myth of the Roman Empire, looking back to
its mythic foundation. In Naipaul’s novel, the Caribbean Indian going to England is
alienated from his selfhood into a babble of discourses which are the metropolis's
paradigm of the colonial subject. Neither can he establish meaningful connections
between his present life and his past memories. London is a revolving teetotum of
random sights, a theatre of signs on display for the tourist and the voyeur. Disembodied,
reduced to "a cell of perception that might be altered by any encounter", incapable of
recovering the feel of home on his return, he pronounces a verdict upon his own
alienation in Latin - the language of a former Empire, which England had long been
trying to emulate: Quantum mutatus ab illo !...

Nevertheless, the perspective is no longer that of the Empire man, translating into
gothic horrors his fears of the primitive people in the colonies, whether in going to some
exotic place of the world (The Island of Doctor Moreau) or in experiencing the reverse
colonisation of spectral invaders from remote places (Dracula). The stories are focused
through some member of the Commonwealth, who might even have settled in England
and earned a secure position in the world of letters.

In his Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie is speaking of the "Empire within",

the immigrants who, to some extent, have altered the very essence of "Englishness", as
a cultural construct, referring to their intrusion in a paraphrase of a poem by another
famous writer who had moved in from the periphery of his Irishness, W. B. Yeats: when
we rough beasts actually slouch into Bethlehem. In which case, it's true to admit that
the centre cannot hold. The poem is entitled The Second Coming, and it announces the
beginning of a new two-thousand-year cycle in the history of humanity, with an anti-
Christ figure taking over. It is the world's new history of heroes, art and imagination,
putting paid to the tamed, unimaginative democracy of the Christian era. Will
postcolonial culture turn the world on its hinges towards something substantially new?
At least so appear to think some of its outstanding makers (Naipaul won the Nobel
Award at the turn of the third millennium...)

The relationship between the former Empire and colony, no longer one of political
subjection, is redefined in cultural terms. The Empire writes back in an idiom which is
distinct from the language of the master, although part of a common tradition: the world
language possesses now a world literature (S. Rushdie, Ibidem). H. L. Gates even finds
the type of troping and emplotment in his colonial background to be more affined to the
characteristic signifying practices of postmodernism ("The Signifying Monkey").

Naipaul's Mimic Men reveals a brilliant mind, capable of overthrowing the negative
image of the non-European, of the colonial Other, generated by the former discourses
of the western world through subjective evaluations presented as facts (Edward Said:
Orientalism) and of forcing his subject into a new paradigm, subsequently taken up by
philosophers and theoreticians. Ralph Singh, the narrator-character, leaves the Third
World disorder of his imaginary island, Isabella, and comes to England in order to put
down roots and find order. He will only have the revelation of emptiness and uncertainty
about his own identity. In order to be accepted, he allows himself to be forced into the
convenient fiction of the rich colonial. His insertion into the symbolic order suppresses
his true and autonomous self: He becomes what he sees of himself in the eyes of
others. He imitates images of power (Mr Shylock, a lawyer, businessman and politician),
marries a plain girl for the wrong reason: because he is seduced by "the glamour of her
race". Back home, he joins a mock society "linked less by their background and
professional standing than by their expatriate and fantastic cosmopolitan wives or girl
friends". The Roman house he builds never feels like home to him, because there is no
collection of books (a community insufficiently imagined, as Rushdie would say), no
household gods, "no sympathy between man and the earth he walks on". He ends up
disappointed, reviewing his life as a set of social positions and activities, leading to
withdrawal (student, house holder, man of affairs, recluse), not as the record of a
unified, developmental self.
 In the same way, Stephen, the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the
Day, finally realises that his attempt to insert himself into a cultural order by playing one
of the cards of "Englishness", the perfect butler, had not only deprived him of a family
(he loses the woman he loves and gets so involved in his daily routine, that he has no
time to close his dead father's eyes...) but had also deprived his life of any meaning. For
what might be the essential depth of a national stereotype? Neither his former master's
investment in secrecy (not as the free choice of a classy lifestyle, but out of necessity: in
order to hide some past misplacement of political allegiances) nor the new master's
shallow bantering can provide some solid, substantial ground for his idealistic
dedication. The immigrant butler is left with the remains of a day he ought to have
seized, of a life he might have fully lived. He fails not only because he cannot get
himself accepted, like some frustrated dropout of the Werther sort, but also because the
enterprise had been wrong from the start. There is no genuine Englishness that he
might appropriate. Well in advance of Homi Bhabha, Naipaul was aware of the colonial
paradox: the imperialists are driven by the desire of eviction and succession. But the
order to which the colonial politician succeeds is not his order. It is something he is
compelled to destroy.

Characters are permanently destabilised through colonial displacement. Singh's

wife, Sandra, experiences on the island of Isabella the humiliation he had known in
England: she is no match for the wealthy and classy Deschampsneufs. Therefore, she
abuses them in the jargon of the... white-hating blacks: "Whitey-pokey". There are no
stable hierarchies, however. Apparently, an ancestress of the Deschampsneufs had
had a love affair with Stendhal and had interrupted any communication with him on
receiving a copy of Le Rouge et le Noir, where is mentioned “une des femmes de la
maison”, speaking Creole French... In advance of Said, Naipaul identifies the biased
view that reduces human worth to a number of stereotypes: Negro idleness, Indian
thrift, South-American short vision (living in a state of nature) set over and against the
self-complacent myth of European superiority: the doers, the builders of civilisation. As
any truly great writer, Naipaul sets the world in a new perspective and writes a new
mode of life into being: the long-visioned, imaginatively resourceful British Indian...

Parody, Camp and Postmodernism

 The fragmented individualism of laissez-faire capitalism has found a correlative in
the complete deconstruction of the Mallarméan concept of the “book” into that of writing
(Derrida: écriture). Culture is now conceived semiotically as textuality. From
constitutive, the literary discourse has become transformational, recycling precedented
discourse, toying with it or resituating it within ever-changing cultural contexts. A new
text is in no way original speech but a form of “travesty”, a transposition, a free play with
structures of authority.

The irreverent, iconoclastic tone of Tom Stoppard's plays, having the appearance
of a cultural protest [21], is found by Roger Sales to be in accordance with sixties
mythologies: parody, Camp and Postmodernism. If Malcolm Bradbury had reasons for
dissatisfaction with the sluggishness and provincialism of British fiction around the turn
of the sixties (Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel, 1973), the theatrical
experiments of the Fringe and other playhouses became soon known all over Europe.
Tom Stoppard, himself an expatriate, reintroduces the historical context, bringing to the
theatre recent events going on beyond the Iron Curtain: the world of dissenters,
psychiatric prisons, prisons of consciousness, the Helsinki Agreement on Human
Rights. However, what he is doing is not, as the early Pinter said about himself, realism.
In playful, vanguard fashion, he reconstructs the atmosphere of the Dadaist Cabaret
Voltaire in Zurich, 1917, when a form of radical iconoclasm in the arts had accompanied
historical changes on the political map of Europe (Travesties, 1974), as if to prove that
aesthetic innovation does not run counter to political commitment. The play is about an
actor's staging of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, with Joyce and Tzara cast
as parts, mixing multilingual wordplay and Dadaist collage with Lenin's speech on
Imperialism.

Stoppard's reputation relies mainly on his exercises in deconstruction: the

transposition of cultural auctoritates into popular or contemporary contexts (Dogg's
Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, where “Dogg” is a school jargon and Cahoot, a Czech
dissenter).

Roger Sales considers that, in leaving out the ghost, Stoppard has brought Hamlet
(Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead, 1966) down to earth. We wonder, however,
whether the ghost is such an impressive metaphysical presence in Shakespeare. In his
famous monologue (To be or not to be...) delivered after the encounter with his father's
ghost, Hamlet complains that he is prevented from taking his own life by his fear of the
unknown, of the “undiscovered country”, wherefrom no traveller has ever returned. It is
obvious that he is not at all convinced of the ghost's reality. Something else is lost in the
Rosencrantz play, togeher with the ghost: what Lacan [22] calls the nom-du-pčre:
Hamlet's semiotic acceptance of words in place of the absent father. The paternal origin
of language means that it is an iterable operation of identical functions, a play of
recognition and difference in a subject, emanating from some substantial origin: I,
Hamlet the Dane, the son cries out, descending into a tomb, being himself replaced, as
a substantial thing, by the “sema” (tomb). Contrariwise, the letter is a facsimile, a
simulacrum, absolutizing Derridean difference, instability, and allowing of no
recognition, no functional origin. Hamlet proceeds to a free substitution of names,
reversing the message completely: it is the Kings' messengers, not himself that are to
be put to death. There is no symbolical necessity (hic et ubique, topos noetos, which
makes the ghost's words a hundred pounds worth) but merely symbolical alternative,
difference, trace.

Stoppard's play relies heavily upon intertextuality, the play itself offering a site of
recognition and difference. In the opening scene, Guildenstern, the more philosophical
and patronizing of the two, and Rosencrantz, the dull, childish pole of the pseudo
couple, are flipping over coins which all come down heads. The scene is rich in
connotations. Firstly, that reality is chaotic, unpredictable, that within it laws (of
probability, of averages, of diminishing returns) do not apply. There is also a hint of the
bloody history of Shakespeare's time, when heads kept rolling down on the scaffold,
sometimes for obscure or flimsy reasons. Finally, there is the “coin” image itself,
suggesting the market value of words, and marking the onset of a long series of
analogies between the acting space and the audience (for instance, that patronage and
performance are two sides of the same coin, which was literally true at the time of the
Renaissance, when great lords afforded to maintain touring troops in their houses,
mingling freely with the actors and being the object of contemplation almost to the same
degree). Roger Sales records the phrase as an allusion to the round of heads the actors
could see from the stage, carefully picking up evidence throughout the play for its
metatextual character (theatre about theatre).

Stoppard works an important number of significant reversals: the “indifferent”

Rosencrantz and Guildernstern become the protagonists, displacing Hamlet, who hangs
about, mocking courtiers, Ophelia and Polonius. He enters backwards, in imitation of
Polonius walking “like a crab”, a posture which also allegorizes the degradation of the
protagonist, cast as a mischievous loafer.

What escapes deconstruction in Stoppard's play? Almost nothing. The classical

tragedies are matri-fratri-surori-murder stories. The action of the much admired
Renaissance plays amounts to “accidental judgements, casual slaughter, deaths,
cunning”; the function of the dumb-show is to make up for lack in style; Hamlet is so
distracted because Claudius has robbed him of the crown. Language, as well as
ceremonies, are said to be based on deceit. The incestuous couple are the only
persons who adopt the voice of ceremonious discourse, while the other characters use
a blend of serious and colloquial speech. Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are not the
traitors and spies Hamlet abhors but two innocent victims of the king, who summons
them to a script of which they have no previous knowledge or understanding. When
they do discover Hamlet's sombre predicament in the letter, they simply apply the rules,
of almost religious import, laid down by the official discourse of the time: not to interfere
with the designs of fate or even of kings. In taking Hamlet's place in death, they
somehow fulfil their own prophecy of the time when they were playing Hamlet in order to
understand what he meant. There can be no truth in performance, as there is no more
consensus at the level of community values in the world outside the theatre. The Spirit
of unity is not completely missing however. Guildernstern thinks he can hear the
Unicorn, but what finally shows up is a company of actors. Metaphysics is replaced by
performance, empty representation, leading up to the disembodied Beckettian voices
piercing the dark in the final scene. History may be a record of bloodsheds, but all this
the immortal Actor can truly deliver. Stoppard's deliverance of Hamlet is the play's
rebirth, its “deliverance” to the sixties Britain. In Shakespeare's play, the word is used by
Hamlet himself, but also by Osric, a mock-courtier figure. The dialogism of one text
reading another, the carnivalesque reinscription reestablish links with the decentring
popular culture of suburban, class-less micro-units, of the jazz, the pop, the rock, of the
fragmented professional or age jargons, recycling semantic energies between the
authoritative classics and their postmodernist travesties.

Towards a new constructivism ?

We have reached the (provisionally) final station in our flee-back museum of

British literature, with the exit door ready to close up behind us. The Ariadne thread in
our hands is not a single but an entwined thread, for each historical age is some sort of
Janus with one conspicuous and one hidden face. Even cultural historians and
philosophers, using biological metaphors in their naturalistic approaches (see Dan
Sperber, Explaining Culture. A Naturalistic Approach, Blackwell Publishers, 1996, p.
84), no longer look at their object as something organic, holistic:

Though “organicism” has disappeared from the anthropological scene, the

organicist view of culture as a well-integrated whole still lingers. The epidemiological
approach departs from such cultural holism; it depicts individual cultures as wide open,
rather than almost closed, systems and as approximating an ecological equilibrium
among strains of representations, rather than as exhibiting an organic kind of
integration. It is then of interest to find out which strains of representations benefit one
another, and which, on the contrary, compete.

Affined strains of representations concur to create the dominant paradigm, while

the counter movements effect transformations which lead to the onset of a new one.
Dan Sperber's genetic analogy fits well into an explanatory narrative of literary periods:
 Suppose, however, that we investigate the manner in which items in this
population actually beget descendents, and discover that an offspring is never of the
same type as its parent ! Rather, the offspring is always of one of the eight types
adjacent in the matrix to that of its parent (...) A parent is more likely to beget a
transform that differs from it in a given direction. (...) Transformation and replication can
combine.

We have seen how the wild paganism of the heroic age was disciplined and
filtered through the orderly patterns of early European Christian models. The austere
Middle Ages also knew the counterpoint of the satirical Latin poetry produced by
wandering scholars, educated in universities (Goliath was apparently an English
creation), the unrestrained, irreverent mirth of village festivals (Christmas Festival of
Fools, Lord Misrule of rural carnivals), the buffoonery of the Church (the comic
interludes of mystery plays, staging scenes of sacred history), etc.

The Renaissance, obsessing with Prince Reason in command of subdued

passions, also knew the dark searches of esoteric thought. The revolutionary spirit of
Romanticism was born out of the Enlightenment project, like Minerva out of Jove's
head. The Kantian critique of pure reason fostered the Victorian age of phenomenology
(with the added value of Comtian positivism), yet Arnold himself, the champion of the
disinterested exercise of “criticism” and of the power of judgement, was aware of he
“buried life” of currents flowing underneath (gothic, sensationalism, decadent
aestheticism) which gushed to the surface during the closing decades.

In the earlier half of the last century we can see the modernists' ivory tower of the
canonical twenties leaning towards the more socially-oriented concerns of their
Edwardian and Georgian peers: the condition-of-England novel (Bennet, Wells,
Galsworthy, D. H. Lawrence, Waugh, Rebecca West), the issue of Empire (Forster,
Greene), the woman question (Wells, in Ann Veronica, Dorothy Richardson, G. B.
Stern), the impact of the movies, mass culture, and pulp journalism (Greene, Orwell),
etc.

What postmodernist mainstream culture seems to have driven underground keeps

coming up. If deconstruction is the gate entry to canonization, successful constructivist
attempts are not missing either. In fact, they have been multiplying over the past two
decades, working as the strong attractors of a new paradigm.

The modern spirit, twin-born with the Industrial Revolution, has known, through the
cultural pastiche and linguistic games of postmodernity, the longest distance from pre-
modern natural perspectives. The pastoral mode would, therefore, signal something like
the return of the prodigal. However, as no one can ever return to exactly the same point
in the past, we no longer find the stylised picture of a world in stasis, outside time, like
the one usually associated with the pastoral tradition. The “literary Englands” of much
contemporary poetry reach out of Bibliopolis towards nature, nation and history. In fact,
on discussing the poetry of R.S. Thomas (d. 2000), who ministered as an Anglican
priest in Wales, Terry Gifford (Green Voices. Understanding contemporary nature
poetry, Manchester University Press, 1995, pp 46-50) defines the poet's “bleak
construction of melancholy” and representation of Welsh landscape as “a reluctant
pastoral”. Nevertheless he does include a chapter on a substantial and valuable body of
poetry containing the elements of pastoral, according to Roger Sales's definition
(Pastoral, Methuen, 1971): refuge, reflection, rescue, requiem and reconstruction.

In his attempt to do on behalf of Wales something like the Irish Revival or the
Scottish Renaissance, Ronald Stuart Thomas was not the Phoenix of the national
spirit, reborn out of the deconstructionist pyre that had reduced the self (national or
individual) to a wandering “cell of perception” (Naipaul), altering as it alteration finds. His
“Anglo-Welsh” identity as a poet was a deliberate construction. He undertook to learn
Welsh, which only 19 per cent of the population still speak, and stole under the cloak of
Patrick Kavanagh (of The Great Hunger, 1942) in his fabrication of “Welshness”: typical
Welsh landscape and a human prototype, Iago Prytherch, an anti-hero, rather like his
Irish master's Monaghan farmer, Maguire. The hero's name should warn us against our
natural inclination to ascribe his hero a full, unambiguous identity, and so should the title
of his autobiography in Welsh, Neb, meaning “No-one”. Is this an allusion to Ulysses's
denial of his own identity on being confronted with the Cyclop - the monocular leviathan
(Thomas Hobbes) of an oppressive political power? Or the suggestion that cultural
identity is not some kind of individual subjectivity, but an impersonal, writing subject,
making public an experience of the world which is given in common to a a people,
because it is shaped in a language which sets it apart from others and may be traced
back to an original point in history?

As Gifford remarks, this Welsh farmer is an anti-Romantic figure, the object of

nostalgic reflection: a figure at odds with his urban-minded contemporaries, at one with
nature, but at the same time “half-witted”, “vacant”-looking, and so completely merged
with the desolate landscape of a backward way of life, as to resemble “an animal living
among the elements”. (p. 46). The rural hero who could rescue his traditional culture
from imminent death is less the object of satire (like Joyce's Dubliners) than an unstable
portrait poised between reality and imagination. The Gap in the Hedge is an absolutely
remarkable poem, as the poet's vision swings between absence and full presence in the
order of nature or of culture (framed in the gap), literal and figurative meaning (hazel:
fruit and colour of the eyes), nomadic life and sacred revelation, primitivism (torn cap)
and hope of redemption (bird's flight), protection and isolation (is the hedge pawning
Prytherch off on nature or on civilization?), solid substance and the airy pictures of
verbal painting (framed, drew, pencilling):

That man, Prytherch, with the torn cap,

I saw him often, framed in the gap

Between two hazels with his sharp eyes,

Bright as thorns, watching the sunrise

 Filling the valley with its pale yellow

Light, where the sheep and the lambs went haloed

With grey mist lifting from the dew.

Or was it a likeness that the twigs drew

With bold pencilling upon that bare

Piece of the sky? For he's still there

At early morning, when the light is right

And I look up suddenly at a bird's flight.

The deconstructionist notion of absence is positively reloaded, as the poet handles

the Heraclitean (and, later, Fichtean) negative exercise of deducing an object from its
absence. God, as transcendental subject, is felt to inhabit the interstices of the material
world, which is known through the senses. Via Negativa opens in the abrupt, colloquial
and energetic style of G.M. Hopkins, another non-conformist bard, ministering in a
paradoxical way to God's greater glory:

Why no ! I never thought other than

That God is that great absence

In our lives, the empty silence

Within, the place where we go

Seeking, not in hope to

Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices

In our knowledge, the darkness

Between stars. His are the echoes

We follow, the footprints he has just

Left. We put our hands in

His side hoping to find

It warm. We look at people

 And places as though he had looked

At them, too; but miss the reflection.

Unlike traditional poets pouring forth professions of the true faith, Thomas
vacillates between changing moods, for, as we have seen, he no longer believes, like
Fichte, in man's possibility to assume God's fixed and central vision. He is in turn
disappointed at the insensitivity of nature (for instance, the snow feeling no pity for the
wounded belly of a fox, in January), “the neutrality of its answers” (That), and
overwhelmed by nature, elevating it to the status of a shrine (such as the memories of
The Moon in Lleyn, to which people who had fled to the promise-failing cities return in
spirit like medieval pilgrims, or his native Moorland, resembling a cathedral). Wales
becomes the true promised land, “the kingdom” (heavenly Jerusalem), “Heaven on
earth”, “blissful Paradise, guarded against the modern desecrating Satans of genetic
engineering and radiation in a language reminiscent of Blake’s Garden of Love:

Only

Satan beams down,

poisoning with fertilisers

the place where the child

lay.

Similarly, the search for God, along successive collections of poems, progresses
from the unexpected revelations to the senses within nature (Pieta), through the
modernising idiom borrowed from the laboratories of science (Frequencies), and
reaching a sort of Wordsworthian resolution in the battle between the senses and the
mind, nature and concept/form (Laboratories of the Spirit):

Emerging

from the adolescence of nature

into the adult geometry

of the mind. I begin to recognise

you anew, God of form and number.

Fleur Adcock ascribes the free-floating emigrant's self a critical and clear vision,
an outsider's privileged detachment, which differs widely from the almost consensual
sense of hybrid identities to be found in colonial writing. The geographical and temporal
remoteness of her New Zealand background and the cultural long distance from the
classics (Catullus and Propertius) were filled up with an “unfocused nostalgia”, which
became permanent as she settled down in London in 1963. Physical remoteness makes
one aware of the nature of signs and disembodied forms, which Adcock enforced as “a
straitjacket around the mad, wailing, hysterical self inside”.

It was not only the irrepressive, irrational self inside that Adcock was trying to
chastise, but also an entire tradition of poetic nightmares, inspired by psychoanalysis,
demonic history or esoteric mythology. The heritage of beasts, from Muir's to Hughes's
horses, the apocalyptic “hot-blooded... panting, people-sized animals”, loosed out by the
sense of the impending end of a suicidal civilization is puffed off with an ironic approval,
communicating in fact the sense of boredom and of mannerist exhaustion:

There have been all those tigers, of course,

and a leopard, and a six-legged giraffe....

The Swiftian device of changing scales serves her purpose of deflating

pretensions and exaggerations in order to land safely on the ground of our shared
experience:

Hedgehogs or perhaps tortoises would do,

but I think the pangolin would suit me best:

a vegetable animal, who goes

disguised as an artichoke or asparagus-tip

.........

the scaly anteater.

That does not mean that Adcock's imagination is free from the temptation of long
rides to the outer space (The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers), backward in time and
forward, as far as... Doomsday, usually with an ironic agenda in mind. Unlike
deconstructionists of history, she looks at the past as a deterministic force, spectralizing
and trapping the present in its Swings and Roundabouts. The heritage of abuses and
crimes (the Industrial Revolution, the Enclosures, the Civil War, the War of the Roses...)
is carrying contemporaries to their doom, the ancestors advancing upon them as they
retreat to childhood, in a crazy reversal of gyres:

they'll meet me riding my bike with Lizzie Wood

when I was twelve; they'll rush right through me

and blow the lot of us back to Domesday.

 It was a knowledge of the Classics that displaced Tony Harrison from his
working-class background in Leeds, relocating him with the arts-degreed generation
that benefited by the 1947 Education Act. His poetic career has followed a predictable
paradigm: from the early conflict between the language of subversion and that of
authority to a taste for what is classy, accomplished, rendered yet uneasy by a sense of
inadequacy, as if he were repeating the experience of middle-class Keats, writing in a
jewelled style yet having to deal with a verdict of snobbishness and the aristocratic
disdain dished out to him by Lord Byron and his company.

THEM & (UZ), the title of an early poem in which class and cultural distinctions are
translated into the linguistic war between Standard English and non-standard forms of
northern dialects, may be implicitly hinting to famous figures in the gallery of artists or
scribes opposing divine or worldly authority, assuming a like status (Job, a man of Uz,
Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi, portraying the people of UZ against the canons of the
church).

Institutionalized art (King's English is the language fit for poetry, while low-born
Harrison is only allowed to read prose and play... the drunken porter in Macbeth)
positions the individual according to preestablished roles and hierarchies. His individual
protest is inefficient, as public discourse is defacing his embodied self, yet it is only this
consumable, discoursive self that gets through into the forum of negotiated identities:

My first mention in the Times

automatically made Tony Anthony!

Long Distance, The School of Eloquence and Other Poems thematize this
dilemma of identity, because schooling has estranged him from his parents and he
himself is committing an act of betrayal in discoursing about them in the language of the
upper classes.

His parents' death apparently removed the prop for such misgivings, the poet
assuming a more conservative posture, with occasional lapses of propriety which
caused controversies in the press at the time. Such was his poem V (l987), made into a
television broadcast, which openly attacked underground culture (or, rather, anti-
culture), the graffiti of skin heads and obscene language, venturing however to quote
from it. The poem reverses the premises of Thomas Gray's famous Elegy Written in a
Country Church-Yard. The eighteenth-century poet was speaking on behalf of the
unlettered muse, of the wretched of the earth buried underground. Harrison is defending
the “bits of Latin” and the hymnal fragments carved on the tombstones of notabilities (a
banker, a Mayor) from the crude pornographic and xenophobic words graffited over
them. The graveyard situated above an old pit is the collocation of the crude ore of
man's low instincts and the precious mineral of the language of art and religion. Unable
to pray for his parents buried therein, the poet changes the requiem into an
admonishing address to the skins and “a call to Britons and to all nations/ made in the
name of love for peace's sake”.
 Harrison's more positive creative bent came to fruition in his poem A Kumquat for
John Keats, which, unlike postmodernist rewriting wrong, is a pretty faithful
reconstruction of the romantic poet's consummate language of sensuous celebration of
beauty, even if it is cast in the Augustan couplets Keats detested (Sleep and Poetry).

The offending prosodic form is nevertheless enclosing the genuine spirit of the
master's poetic, diction and troping. The negative capability which prompted Keats to
select plurivalent images, like the sour-sweet grapes, in order to render his idea of
“Melancholy dwell(ing) inside Delight” lies within Harrison's poetic reach. His choice of
the “kumquat” is a master stroke, due to its rich connotations. It is, as COD tells us, an
orange-like fruit, with sweet rind and acid pulp, used in preserves. It is meant to prolong
delight in the present and fight back the melancholy of its perishable and fleeting nature.
The name is a pun on its Chinese etymology: kin ku, meaning golden orange. Having
acquired an enviable command of an aesthete's golden diction, Harrison can look for
his “kin” among the best poets in the language. And yet, despite his familiar address to
“John”, he seems to be writing with Pope's advice concerning the classics in his mind:
to copy nature is to copy them. The kumquat is

best fruit, and metaphor, to fit the soul

of one in Florida at 42 with Keats

the flesh, the juice, the pith, the pips, the peel,

that this is how a full life ought to feel,

its perishable relish prick the tongue,

when the man who savours life's no longer young,

the fruits that were his futures far behind.

Then it's the kumquat fruit expresses best

how days have darkness round them like a rind,

life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.

..........…………

I thought of moon-juice juleps when I saw,

as if I'd never seen the moon before,

the planet glow among the fruit, and its pale light
 make each citrus on the tree its satellite.

The anxiety of aging, the impossibility to talk to the dead, the horrors of the history
humanity has known since the death of Keats, the adumbration of death in the shrill
sounds of the farmers' saws, mingling with sweet memories of fulfilled love in paradisal
Florida are pitted against his predecessors' sources of melancholic thought: being ill,
leaving his beloved on his departure for Italy, contemplating the beauty of art and of
nature with an awareness of impending death. And yet the conversation with the dead
yields no falsifying fictions, as historicists would have us believe, but the affined
language of an embodied aesthetic object.

Deeply rooted in the Northern Irish “troubles” which began in 1969, and yet
pleading for reconciliation and the peace of art that passes the misunderstandings of
history, the poetry of Seamus Heaney could launch a more effective call to the world
after l995, when the author won the Nobel Prize. An Anglo-Irish poet's predicament is
even more subject to cultural and political divisiveness than that of an Anglo-Welsh
poet, yet Heaney's commitment to his Irish Catholic background will not stay in the way
of his stronger commitment to poetry, as he confesses in his prose book, The
Government of the Tongue (1988).

Heaney's wide appeal could be accounted for in terms of “mental spaces”

competing for “cultural spaces”, if we subscribe to David Sperber's epidemiological
explanatory model (Op. cit., p. 73):

The most evocative representations are those which, on the one hand, are closely
related to the subject's other mental representations, and, on the other hand, can never
be given a final interpretation. It is these relevant mysteries, as they could be described,
which are culturally successful.

Heaney felt attracted to the art of “revelation and danger”, linking back with Edwin
Muir's mythic visions of dreams, and horizontally with Richard Long's combination of
Concept Art and Land Art. Long's patterned (usually, circles) display of objects removed
from their natural environment during his excursions is an interesting experiment
whereby art dispenses with the rules of representation mediating between nature and
artistic illusion since the Renaissance (rules of perspective, of interpretation, of
phenomenological constitution...). Art recovers the ingenuity of Humanity's prime, its
archetypal geometries, moving in circles.

In Heaney's early poetry (Death of a Naturalist, 1966), the domestic and field work
on his parents' farm is forced into significant geometries (the dancing butter spades in
Churning Day, the inside/outside patterning of his father's Digging outdoors and his
writing indoors, using his pen as his father uses his spade) and effective sound effects
to match his detailed landscape poems, reminiscent of Hopkins. Present art is building
upon the child's vision and emotional experiences, which become the sun towards
which gravitate his later thoughts and impressions. This is no longer a metonymic and
repressed selfhood, but an autonomous, self-centred identity (Personal Helicon), with
the only difference that now it is writing, not the fountain, that is holding up a mirror in
which the poet can contemplate an image echoing the “darkness” of his abysmal self.

Identity if further stabilized through his fitting into an ancestral line of descent. He
is The Follower, the one who takes his father's place: the former gibbering child
standing in the way of his deft father, who was charting the furrow with his eyes, is
taking over, feeling compassionately for his doddering old man.

The reconstruction of the Irish traditional countryside continued in Station Island, a

book concerned with the growth of a poet's mind. It is an inner journey, back into the
world which formed him and forward into the Irish “sea of troubles”. Traditional trades
are on the wane, yet the blacksmith, the thatcher still subdue the elements at their
“Midas touch”.

Poems figuring domestic scenes with his children and inroads into the mythic past
to revive Sweeney, king of Ulster, bind together family and nation into a mythic whole.

The Troubles poetry, indicting the atrocities committed by Protestant paramilitaries

in the 1920s as well as the cruel punishments dealt to young Irish women who date
English soldiers, is set within larger frames, gathering poetic strength from historical and
mythological contexts. Bogland initiated a series of poems (mainly collected in North)
based on the Iron Age excavations effected by Danish archaeologist P. V. Glob in
Danish peat bogs. He brought up bodies of people who had been the victims of justice
(In Punishment, the “tribal retribution” for adultery fills the poet with a sense of guilt fort
not being able to defend his contemporaries, similarly victimized for their connections
with the English) or of sacrificial rituals. The poem is based on a disanalogy between
Europe and the New World. The Old World pioneers do not move out and on to
receding horizons over prairies, they do not dig up coal to start at a new, prosperous
civilization. The bogs of Denmark reveal Hamlet's prison, of “encroaching horizons”,
they do not yield useful ores but skeletons from the bottomless nightmare of European
history.

The Haw Lantern (1987) is an exercise in the Richard Long art of staging the
mythical past and dressing up nature for multimedia museum space, eventually failing
because of the intercession of the media which stultify all lived out experience into the
archives of TV documentaries.

The poet returns to the original texts of the race, telling of marvellous occurrences,
in Dantesque terza rima, and takes a test of the negative capability which Keats used to
admire in Shakespeare: he declares them true and proves them wrong... Readers will
surely be converted, by this high priest of poetry, to the.... truth of the parable:

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

 A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain.

„This man can't bear our life here and will drown,”

The abbot said, “unless we help him. “ So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climed back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

(from Lightenings)

References:

[21] Roger Sales, Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead, Penguin Critical Studies,
Penguin Books, 1988.

[22] See Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, Criticism & Culture, Longman 1991, pp. 104 et passim.

INDEX OF AUTHORS*

Ackroyd, Peter (b. 1949). Award-winning novelist and biographer, poet and book reviewer (on
the staff of the Spectator and The Times). The philological lore he acquired at Cambridge and
Yale, also assisted by his Catholic upbringing, developed in him a sense of linguistic
 structure that places him on a par with other Catholic converts: Hopkins, Eliot and Joyce. As
well as Eliot, he engaged in cultural criticism : Notes for a New Culture (1976), an essay on
Modernism, completed by a characteristically postmodern concern: Dressing Up, a study in
transvestism (1979). His Lives (of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Charles Dickens, William Blake,
Sir T. More) display an unusual capacity of getting under an affined writer's skin. His
stylistic chameleonism takes two more forms: imitative reinscriptions of past texts and
biographies (The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, 1983, Hawksmoor, a pastiche of the 18th-
cent. style, 1985, and Chatterton, 1987) or fictional narratives about historical personages
(Milton in America, 1996).

Adcock, Fleur (b. 1934). Poet and translator, born in New Zealand and educated at Victoria
University, Wellington. In 1963 she settled in London. A complex personality, whose wide-
ranging interests materialised in translations and original verse (The Eye of the Hurricane,
1964, High Tide in the Garden, 1971, The Inner Harbour, 1979, Selected Poems, 1983,
reissued 1991, Poems 1960-2000, 2000), betraying, in the ironic or restrained treatment of
agonies and frustrations the influence of her Classical studies. Translations of medieval Latin
poems (including two Goliardic poets, Hugh Primas and the Arch Poet, 1994). A friend of
Romania, who wrote about the fall of communism.

Amis, Kingsley (1922-1995). Novelist beginning as one of the “angry young men” and poet
associated with the Movement. Novels: Lucky Jim (1954; filmed 1957), That Uncertain
Feeling (1955), I Like It Here (1958), The Egyptologists (1965), I Want It Now (1968), The
Old Devils (1986), Girl, 20 (1971), Difficulties with Girls (1988). Moving into popular and
enjoyable genres with The Riverside Villas Murder (1973 – a detective story), The Anti-
Death League (1966 – a spy story), The Green Man (1969 – a ghost story). Poetry: Bright
November (1947), A Frame of Mind (1953), The Evans Country (1962).

Arnold Matthew (1822-1888). Poet, critic and educationalist. The son of Dr. Thomas Arnold,
headmaster of Rugby, whom A.P. Stanley praises in his Life for having established an ideal
relationship between the discipline and the studies of a school and the claims of citizenship,
of work, of the family and the social organism. Educated at Rugby and Balliol College,
Oxford. Inspector of schools (1851-1883) and Oxford Professor of Poetry (1857-1867).
 Travels abroad in the late '4os, when he met the Swiss girl Marguerite, to whom he dedicated
a number of reflective rather than erotic poems. The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems
(1849); Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems (1852), New Poems (1867). His poems are a
sort of phenomenological propositions, reflecting from some high standing on the meaning of
personal experiences. Poetry is a form of criticism, not a record of immediate emotional
responses to reality. Arnold's poetry is an example of Victorian public discourse on major
issues of the day (the decay of faith, the conflicting demands of reason and the senses, of
culture and nature, of action and meditative withdrawal), yet the elegiac and nostalgic
manner contributes a lyrical strain to the major philosophical bent, materialised in narrative,
dramatic and lyrical modes. Essays in Criticism (First Series, 1865, Second Series, 1888)
support a Kantian view of a disinterested intellectual discourse, the necessity for maintaining
European standards in culture and an informing central body of thought in art, while working
up relevant cultural typologies (the Renaissance and the medieval spirit). The essays
collected in the 1869 Culture and Anarchy display the upper classes anxiety about the nation
living in a state of anarchy after the 1867 Reform Bill, which had enfranchised the working
class, but also an apprehensive view of middle-class laissez faire. Hebraism and Hellenism,
Barbarians, Philistines, Populace are concerned with the right balance between obedience
and self-assertiveness in history as well as in the contemporary symptomatic behaviour of
social classes. Whereas the distinction between the Hellenic and the Jewish spirit seems to
have influenced the contemporary American Harold Bloom, Literature and Dogma (1873) is
proleptically Heideggerian in its search of the philosophical vision incorporated in the
original, etymological meanings of words and in its defence of the literary, flexible,
metaphoric style in opposition to the rigid, fixed, scientific discourse.

Auden, Wystan Hugh (1907-1973). Poet and dramatist, born in York, of middle-class,
intellectual background. While at Oxford, he became the lead of a group of left-wing
intellectuals, among whom Stephen Spender, and edited two issues of Oxford Poetry.
Married Erika Mann, Thomas Mann's daughter. Influenced by Freud and other
psychoanalysts, by the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard and by the German-American
theologian Niebuhr. Taught in English and American universities. Emigrated to the U.S. in
1939, and got converted to Anglo-Catholicism after 1940. Poems (1930), The Orators
(1932), The Dance of Death (1933), Look, Stranger ! (1936), Another Time (1940). Plays,
often jointly with Isherwood: The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935). The Ascent of F6, On the
Frontier (1938).
Barnes, Julian (b 1946). Lexicographer and journalist. Playful and parodic fiction. Flaubert's
Parrot (1984), Staring at the Sun (1986). Crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh.

Beckett, Samuel (1906-1989). Dramatist and novelist. Born in Dublin, of Jewish parents. Went
to Paris as a lecturer in English and French. A central figure in the minimalist theatre and
absurdist literature. Novels: Murphy (1938), Molloy (1951), Malone Meurt (1952),
L'Innomable (1953), Mercier et Camier (1974). Plays: En Attendant Godot (1952), Fin de
partie (1957), Happy Days (1961), Play (1963), Not I (1973), Ohio Impromptu (1981).

Bennett, (Enoch) Arnold (1867-1931). Novelist, short-story writer, playwright and journalist.
Born at Hanley in the Potteries. Began his career as a solicitor but he quit his father's firm
when he was 21. Assistant editor of Woman magazine (1893-1900). Moved to Paris in 1903
where he lived until 1908. Married a French woman, Marguerite Soulie, whom he divorced
1921. Had a daughter by Dorothy Cheston, the companion of his later years. Influenced by
Maupassant. Zola and Flaubert. Produced a three-volume Journal (1932-1933) in imitation
of the Goncourt Brothers. Classified by Virginia Woolf as an Edwardian realist, Bennet was
the voice of the literary establishment, being associated with influential persons of the day,
whom he popularized in the “Books and Persons” series for The Evening Standard (1926-
1931). His novels draw on his memories of the powerful characters and picturesque language
of the people in the Potteries (Anna of the Five Towns, 1902), Bennett resembling
Galsworthy in his studies of the overwhelming influence of money upon human relationships
and of family sagas (Clayhanger, 1910, followed by Hilda Lessways, 1911, These Twain,
1916 and The Roll Call, 1918).

Bowen, Elizabeth (1899-1973). Novelist and short-story writer. Born in Dublin. Worked for the
Ministry of Information in London during World War II. Novels of atmosphere and
inwardness, symbolical landscape and stylistic flourish, often with focus on youthful
consciousness traumatized by the adults' brutal invasion of their privacy: The Death of the
Heart (1938). The emotionally sweeping effects of the second world cataclysm are recorded
in the novel titled The Heat of the Day (1949).
Braine, John (1922-1986). Novelist. Displaying the mixture of sedition and compromising
conservatism characteristic of the “angry young men”. Room at the Top (1957; filmed 1958),
Life at the Top (1962; filmed 1965), Stay with Me till Morning (1970), The Two of Us (1984),
These Golden Days (1985).

Bridges, Robert Seymour (1844-1930). Poet and dramatist, trained in medicine. Poet Laureate
from 1913 to 1930. The chief correspondent and literary executor of Gerard Manley
Hopkins. Best remembered for the philosophical Testament of Beauty (1927-29).

Brontë, Anne (1820-1849). The sister of Charlotte and Emily Brontë. Agnes Grey, first signed
“Acton Bell”, tells the story of on an unhappy governess, probably modelled on Anne's own
experience as a governess with the Robinson family at Thorp Green Hall (1840-1845). The
Tenant of Widefell Hall (1848) a minor romance, with mystery and unexpected turns of
situations, develops the theme of narcissistic attachment between brother and sister of
romantic extract. The idealized relationship between Helen Graham and her brother
Lawrence suggests a wish-fulfilling fantasy, considering that Anne's brother, Branwell, died
of alcoholism, an affliction she attributes to Huntington, Helen's husband in the novel. The
imagery of the novel, playing about purity and corruption, may suggest a subconscious
release from biographical frustration.

Brontë, Charlotte (1816-1855). Novelist and poet. The daughter of the Reverend Patrick
Brontë, born in Northern Ireland, and of Maria Branwell, a Cornishwoman. Born in
Thornton, Yorkshire, wherefrom the family moved to Haworth, a moorish village a few miles
off, in 1820. Worked as governess, and spent two years in Brussels at the pensionnat run by
M. Constantin Heger, to whom she felt progressively attached, and his wife. Taught English
and learned French and German. Southey's patronizing comment on her poems did not
prevent her from publishing Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (the literary pseudonyms
of Charlotte and of her sisters, Emily and Anne) in 1846. Her first novel, The Professor,
drawing on her experiences in Brussels, was rejected as immoral. Jane Eyre, 1847, was
received with public acclaim, and soon became a Victorian standard of womanhood, of the
Victorian heroine, replacing beauty by work, endurance and spiritual fortitude. Elizabeth
Gaskell's biography, presenting her as a Jane Eyre in flesh and blood, contributed much,
 alongside the shifting mid-century moods, to her moral rehabilitation, so that The Professor,
a novel challenging patriarchal male views of women, was accepted for print in 1857. Other
novels: Shirley (1849), Villette (1853). In 1854 she married her father's curate, the Reverend
Arthur Bell Nicholls. Died one year later.

Brontë, Emily Jane (1818-1848). Novelist and poetess. The sister of Charlotte Brontë. Died of
tuberculosis. Wuthering Heights, 1847, whose second edition was prefaced by Charlotte
Brontë's revelation of the sisters' true identity and by an apology for her sister's lack of
experience, which, however, is profusely compensated by her intensity of feeling. The
change of fashions has made such excuses superfluous, the enigmatic novel having long been
considered a unique book in English literature. Charlotte's comment only reveals the tyranny
of the realistic moods at the time.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861). Poet, born into a patriarchal Victorian family.
Eloped with Browning, defying authority on various levels: family, class, political
domination. Competed with Tennyson for the Poet-Laureateship. The title went to Tennyson,
but the nominalization of a woman-writer for such dignity in the Victorian age was in itself a
remarkable fact. Defended in writing the woman's rights to a professional career and upheld
reforming social activities in the long poem Aurora Leigh. Supported Italian independence in
Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Poems Before Congress (1860). The Sonnets from the
Portuguese (1850) display the Victorian poets need of a persona to mediate between
themselves and some public authority.

Browning, Robert (1812- 1889). Poet. Born at Camberwell in South London into the family of a
clerk of the Bank of England, whose scholarly interests had secured an extensive library in
the house. Mainly educated at home and, for a brief period, at London University. Eloped
with Elizabeth Barrett in 1846, with whom he lived at Pisa, Florence and Rome (1846-1861).
Returned to London after his wife's death with their son, watching over his career as a
painter. Published his first book, Pauline (1833), with financial help from his aunt, Mrs.
Silverthrone. Browning's originality and novelty of diction elicited contradictory comments
from critics. William Mangin (Frazer's Magazine) labelling him as “the mad poet of the
 batch”, while W.J. Fox (Monthly Repository) ranked him with Tennyson, pointing to his
power of laying hold of the reader as the unmistakeable mark of genius. Charged with
obscurity, he was defended by the authoritative voices of J.S. Mill, George Eliot, W. M.
Rossetti, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, who felt which way the wind of change was blowing:
towards an impersonal, dramatized form of subjectivity, increased difficulty. Whereas
Paracelsus (1835) still betrays the influence of Shelley, Browning's 1852 essay on the poet
marks his programmatic break with romantic aesthetics. It had already been apparent in his
184o Sordello, Dante's contemporary serving as a mask for Browning's own ideas concerning
the artist and his subversive attitudes to the artistic establishment and bourgeois
complacency. From 1841 to 1846 he published under the general title of Bells and
Pomegranates a series of poems of a dramatic kind, s: Pipa Passes (1841), Dramatic Lyrics
(1842), Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), Luria and A Soul's Tragedy (1846) and the
plays King Victor and King Charles (1842), The Return of the Druses (1843), A Blot on the
Scutcheon (1843) and Colombe's Birthday (1844).Echoes of the German criticism of the
Bible steal into Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850). Men and Women (1855). Dramatis
Personae (1864). The Ring and the Book (1869). Elected an honorary fellow of Balliol
college, Oxford (1867). The Browning Society was founded in 1881, proving that the poet
had broken the circle of an initiated elite towards public recognition.

Burgess Anthony (1917-1994). Novelist and critic, born into a Roman Catholic Lancashire
family. Placing himself at the other pole from positivism and behaviourism, which he
attacked as brain-washing in A Clockwork Orange (1962; filmed in 1971). Polyglot
playfulness, diversified by his contacts with Malay, Arabic, Chinese, and language games in
the manner of Joyce, but also the use of jargon, underworld slang. The Piano Player (1986).

Byatt, A.S. (Antonia Susan) (b 1936). Novelist and critic. Influenced by Iris Murdoch, on
whom she has published two books, in the mixture of realism, symbolism and mythosophy:
The Shadow of a Sun (1964), The Game (1967). A postmodernist narrative tissue of
intertextuality and self-reflexivity characterizes the first two novels out of a projected
tetralogy set in the England of Elizabeth II: The Virgin in the Garden (1979) and Still Life
(1985).
Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881). Historian, essayist and critic. Born at Ecclefechan,
Dumfriesshire, as the son of a stonemason. Studied for the ministry and afterwards law at the
University of Edinburgh, but abandoned both for literary work. His interest in German
literature resulted in essays on Goethe, Jean Paul and other German writers, a Life of Schiller
and the translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, which provided the
bildungsstory model for his own Sartor Resartus (1833-1834). In 1834 he moved to Cheyne
Row in Chelsea and began work on his History of the French Revolution, which got into
print in 1837. The book shows the influence of the beginning of hermeneutics, Carlyle
defining history as narrative, a Prophetic Manuscript, which can be fully interpreted by no
man alone. The French Revolution is but so many Alphabetic Letters, which historians use to
build into provisional discourses. The cultural pessimism engendered by the French
Revolution bore upon his distaste of Victorian materialism and utilitarianism, his diagnosis
being that of a “mechanical age” (Signs of the Times, 1829). Carlyle's conservative views in
an age of extended franchise culminated in his proposition of an authoritative leadership by a
strong man of genius: Past and Present (1843).

His emphasis on the cultural elite, inward, moral reformation and individualism ran counter
populist propaganda, and the bourgeois dream of material progress and getting ahead in the
world (On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, 1841). Lord Rector of
Edinburgh University (1866). One of the letters in support of Germany in her war against
France, published in The Times won him the Order of Merit of Prussia from Bismarck, yet
Carlyle rejected the offer of an honorary position in England coming from Disraeli,
Bismarck's political ally.

Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832-1898). Mathematician and writer of

children's literature and nonsense verse. Born at Daresbury in Cheshire as a country parson's
son. Lecturer in mathematics, Christ Church, Oxford. Ordained priest in 1861.Published
books on mathematics and logic. Revolutionized the juveniles through his fanciful,
nonsensical and highly entertaining books, free from moral or didactic purposes. Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869), Through the
Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), The Hunting of the Snark (1876), The
Game of Logic (1886), Dreamland (1882), Sylvie and Bruno (1889)
Carter, Angela (1940-1992). Novelist and short-story writer. Fiction of surrealist and Gothic
fantasy, psychoanalytic studies of sexuality and violence, an uneasy mixture of horror and
comedy with lapses into caricature: The Magic Toyshop (1967), Several Perceptions (1968),
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977).

Celtic Twilight, The. The title of a book of short stories by W.B. Yeats, published in 1893,
which became the label of an entire movement that opposed the poetic vision of a mystical
Irish past to the pragmatic contemporary Anglo-Saxons in England and in Southern Scotland,
attempting a national revival.

Churchill, Caryl (b. 1938). Playwright. Graduated from Oxford University. Her own definition
of her themes is “power, powerlessness and exploitation: people's longings, obsessions and
dreams”. Her political theatre has been staged by small-scale theatre companies of students
or other vanguard groups, delighting in experimentation. Churchill combines realistic,
documented details with caricature and grotesque symbolization. She focuses the tensions
between the individual and society, particularly at times of radical changes, developing
drama collectively. Vinegar Tom (1976) is based on the trials of the Lancashire witches in
1612. Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) deals with the Levellers at the time of the
English Revolution (1647), while Mad Forest (1990) provides a very personal view of the
events in Romania around 1989, with a wealth of facts but lacking in historical or political
insight. Top Girls (1982) is concerned with issues of female equality of opportunities.
Serious Money (1987) is set in the financial City of London.

Clough, Arthur Hugh (1819-1861). Poet. Born in Liverpool, the son of a cotton merchant who
emigrated to South Carolina. In 1828 he came on a family visit to England. Studied at
Rugby, under the headship of Thomas Arrnold and befriended his son, Matthew. Attended
and after graduation became Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and Principal of a student
hostel at University Hall, London (1849-1851). Shortly after he departed for Cambridge,
Massachusetts, where he worked as a tutor, becoming acquainted with Ralph Waldo
Emerson. In 1853 he returned to England, working as Examiner in the Education Office until
his death in Florence from a cerebral attack. The Bothie of Taberna-Vaolich (1848), a verse-
novel in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) is one of the few long poems of the century.
 Dipsychus, left unfinished, came out in 1865. Recent studies in the Victorian repressed and
split personalities have brought Clough to the fore, as an intelligent, cunning and resourceful
recorder of this spirit, also reflected in the doubleness of language. Arnold's poem Thyrsis
commemorates his death.

Conrad, Joseph (Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) (1857-1924). Novelist. Born in Podolia
(now part of the Ukraine), into an aristocratic Polish family. His father's participation in an
anti-Tsarist conspiracy resulted in exile to Volgoda, north-west of Moscow, where Joseph's
mother died. His father died of tuberculosis shortly after his return to Poland. Joseph was
sent by his uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, to Geneva to continue his systematic studies, but the
youth prepared himself for a life of adventures. He went to sea at the age of twenty joining
the French merchant navy. In 1884 he became a master in the British Merchant Service and a
naturalised British subject. In 1894 he gave up on his career as a seaman, dedicating himself
entirely to writing. Almayer's Folly. A Story of the Eastern River (1895), The Nigger of the
“Narcissus”. A Tale of the Sea (1897), Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo. A Tale of the Seabord
(1904), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), Chance (1914), Victory
(1915), The Rescue (1920), The Rover (1924). Short Stories: Tales of Unrest (1898), Youth
(together with Heart of Darkness), 1902, Typhoon and Other Stories (1903).

Crace, Jim (b. 1946). Novelist, television producer and freelance journalist. His first book,
Continent (1986), mapped the imaginary space of his fiction as one disputed between "trade
and superstition". In subsequent novels (The Gift of Stones, 1988, Signals of Distress,1994,
Quarantine, 1997) this amounts to material deprivations (historical backwardness,
shipwreck, life in the desert or in the age of bronze) as the correlative of spiritual
impoverishment in the consumer society of market values. A medallist of literary
competitions, widely read and reviewed in a commendatory language: "Only William
Golding has made a similar brilliantly intuitive leap of the imagination" (John Fowles).

Dabydeen, David (b. 1956). Poet and novelist born in Guyana, whose subsequent studies at
Cambridge and at University College London were grafted on the primary scene of rural
Creole culture. Cross-cultural relationships and post-colonial issues engage his early literary
exploits. Slave Song (1984) rewrites the site of colonial antagonisms as the quarrel of
 Guyanese Creole and Standard English. His later poetry and fiction leave behind the crudities
of indigenous speech, as the natural self makes room for the cultural second nature of the
university don at Warwick. He plays with changing perspectives - colonial versus
metropolitan -, in his rewriting of scenes from Hogarth (A Harlot's Progress, 1999, a novel)
and Turner (1994, a poem). His rewriting of The Heart of Darkness in his first novel, The
Intended (1991) is an act of homage rather than a polemical departure from Conrad.

Dickens, Charles (John Huffam) (1812-1870). Born at Portsmouth, the son of a thriftless clerk
in the Navy Office. His father's imprisonment for debt in the Marshalsea forced Dickens to
work in a blacking warehouse, a humiliating experience which he was unable to mention for
years. After two years schooling in Wellington House, Dickens became a lawyer's clerk
(1827), learned shorthand, and saw himself promoted to the position of reporter for the Sun
in The House of Commons. That was the time when sociologists, politicians and journalists
were beginning to take an interest in the otherness of the East End London, for which they
often employed the language of colonialism. The conditions of the labouring populations,
with starving children, suffering women, overworked men, horrifying sights of disease and
filth were presented as if they had been another country. Dickens contributed reports on
political meetings, and sketches on the incidents occurring in the squares, courts, markets and
alleys of London to various magazines: The Mirror of Parliament, The Morning Chronicle,
The True Sun, The Monthly Magazine (the last edited by his friend George Hogarth, whose
eldest daughter he married in 1836. His lore of London life at the other pole from
metropolitan middle-class culture was used in his first book, Sketches by Boz. Illustrative of
Every-Day Life, and Every-Day People (1836). In 1846 he edited 17 numbers of the newly
founded Daily News, and in 1850 he founded his own magazine, Household Words, which
often reported on social and industrial conditions in the Northern manufacturing towns.
Visits to America in 1842 and 1867. Lived for brief periods in Italy (1844-1845), in
Switzerland and Paris (1846). His restless nature urged him to attempt theatrical management
and acting. Lecturing tours in 1858.

The Pickwick Papers (whose serialization began in March 1836), Oliver Twist (1837-9),
Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1), Barnaby Rudge (1841),
Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4), Dombey and Son (1846-8), David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak
House (1852-3), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (18575-7), A Tale of Two Cities (1859),
Great Expectations (1860-1), Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), The Mystery of Edwin Wood
(unfinished).
Disraeli, Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield (1804-1881). Novelist and politician. Born in
London, the eldest son of Isaac d'Israeli, miscellaneous writer, descendent of an Italian
Jewish family. From 17 to 2o years of age worked with a firm of solicitors. Silver-spoon
novels with a key (introducing society figures under thin disguises): Vivian Grey (1826), The
Young Duke (1831). Two more novels, Henrietta Temple (1837) and Venetia (1837),
fictionalize the biographies of Shelley and Byron. It was only when Queen Victoria ascended
the throne that he succeeded in winning a Conservative MP seat for Maidstone (1837). Twice
Prime Minister, in 1868 and in 1874-80. Urged Queen Victoria to take title of “Empress of
India”. Took the title Earl of Beaconsfield (1876) from a character in his first novel. Joined
the reforming Tories, in an attempt to bridge the gap between what he called “the two
nations”: the poor working class and the aristocracy of wealth and power – an intention he
carried from politics into novel-writing (see his trilogy, Coningsby, 1844, Sybil, 1845,
Tancred, 1847).

Drabble, Margaret (b 1939). Novelist and short-story writer. Began as a social novelist, under
the influence of Arnold Bennett, on whom she published a book in 1974. Her novels open up
to a wide range of issues, from feminism to the condition of Britain in the mid 1970s. The
Needle's Eye (1972), The Ice Age (1977). A more complex structure, with shifts in the points
of view and narrative voice, is brought to The Realms of Gold (1975).

Durrell, Lawrence (George) (1912-1990). Novelist and poet born in India, the son of a civil
engineer. Taught English in Athens during the war. Appointed to the Foreign Office in Cairo,
Athens and Belgrade. Settled in Cyprus in 1953. Piped Piper of Lovers (1937), The
Alexandria Quartet (Justine, 1957, Balthazar, 1958, Mountolive, 1958, Clea, 1960), Tunc
(1968), Nunquam (1970), Monsieur (1974). Collected Poems (1960).

Eliot, George (Mary Anne Evans) (1819-1880). Novelist, critic, poet, translator. Born at South
Farrm, Arbury, Warwickshire, the daughter of a builder, carpenter and estate agent. Educated
at various schools, among which Misses Franklins' school in Coventry, where she learned the
piano and French, yet her private education surpassed the conventional Victorian education
for young women. Forced by her mother's death to return home and run her father's
 household, she continued her studies in Italian, German, Greek and Latin, and read
voraciously in theology, the Romantic poets and German literature. At the age of twenty-one
she moved with her father to Foleshill, near Coventry. She made the acquaintance of two
writers, Charles Bray and Charles Hennell, who drew her towards freethinking. Translated
The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined by Dr. David Strauss (1846) and Feuerbach's Essence
of Christianity (1853). Continental travel with the Brays (1849). Assistant Editor of
Westminster Review (1851). Lived with George Henry Lewes, whom she had met in 1853
until his death in 1878. Married the much younger J.W. Cross, a banker, in 1880. Scenes of
Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede, 1859, The Mill on the Floss, 1860, Silas Marner (1861),
Romola (1863), Felix Holt (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72), Daniel Deronda (1876)

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965). Poet, critic and dramatist. Born in St Louis, Missouri.
Educated at Harvard, in Germany, at the Sorbonne and at Merton College, Oxford. Having
settled in London in 1915, Eliot began by teaching at Highgate School, and from 1917
worked for Lloyds Bank. Assistant editor of The Egoist, editor of The Criterion from 1922
until it ceased publication, in 1939, and director of its publisher, Faber and Faber. Joined the
Church of England in 1927. Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1919), printed
by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their Hogarth Press, The Waste Land (first issue of The
Criterion, 1922, Collected Poems (1909-35), including Ash Wednesday (1930), which
records his religious conversion, Four Quartets (Burnt Norton, 1935, East Coker, 1940, The
Dry Salvages, 1941 and Little Gidding, 1942), 1943. The Sacred Wood (1920), a collection
of essays, in which he develops his concepts of “objective correlative”, impersonality in art,
the relationship between tradition and innovation in art. Homage to John Dryden (1924),
including his revaluation of the metaphysical poets, as examples of unified sensibility,
capable to devour any sort of experience, in opposition to the latter's writers' dissociation of
sensibility (the intellect or the senses). For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order
(1928), in which he defines himself as “classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-
Catholic in religion. His attempt at reviving the tradition of the poetic drama materialized in
an essay and in his verse plays Sweeney Agonistes: An Aristophanic Fragment (1932), The
Rock (1934) and Murder in the Cathedral (1935). Ancient plays provide models for his next
dramatic exploits: Aeschylus' Oresteia for The Family Reunion (1939), Euripides' Alcestis
and Ion for The Cocktail Party (1950) and The Confidential Clerk (1954) and Sophocles'
Oedipus at Colonnus for The Elder Statesman (1959). Noble Prize winner. Awarded the
Order of Merit.
Enright, D.J. (b 1920). Poet, novelist and literary critic, a central figure in the anti-romantic
Movement of the fifties. Verse: The Laughing Hyena (1953), Bread Rather Than Blossoms
(1956).

Forster, E(dward) M(organ) (1879-1970). Novelist and essayist. Born in London and educated
at Cambridge. Associated with the Cambridge “Apostles” and the classy Bloomsbury Group.
In 1912 he visited India and returned to it as secretary and companion to the Maharajah of
the native state of Dewas Senior in 1921-2. Honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge
(1945). The Order of Merit. Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey
(1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924). His
Clark lectures were published as Aspects of the Novel (1927).

Fowles, John (b 1926). Born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. B.A. – Honours – degree from Oxford in
1950. Lecteur for English at the University of Poitiers, France, English master at the
Anargyrios School on the Greek island of Spetsai, north of Crete, English lecturer at Colleges
in London. In 1968 he made Lyme Regis (Dorset) his permanent residence. Influenced by
existentialism in his studies of freedom, manipulation and control of the individual. Fiction
of narrative experimentation of the nouveau-roman school. Antiquarian interest in prehistoric
sites. Co-authored The Enigma of Stonehenge with Bary Brukoff (1980). Novels: The
Collector (1963), The Magus (1965), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969 – all of them
filmed). Other novels: Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), A Maggot (1985).

Frazer, Sir James George (1854-1941). Scottish anthropologist. Fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge. Professor of Social Anthropology at Liverpool (1907-22). Totemism (1887), The
Golden Bough; A Study in Comparative Religion, 2 vols. 1900.

Galsworthy, John (1867-1933). Novelist, poet and dramatist. Born at Coombe, Surrey. Called
to the Bar in 1890, he practiced but briefly. Publisher. Lectured in America. Honorary Fellow
of New College, Oxford. Awarded the Order of Merit (1929) and the Nobel Prize for
Literature (1932). Plays concerned with social problems: injustice, strikes, social privilege
and snobbery. Plays: The Silver Box, Joy, Sytrife (1909), Vol. II: The Eldest Son, The Little
 Dream, Justice (1912), Vol. III: The Fugitive, The Pigeon, The Mob (1914). Whereas half of
his plays are one-acters, his novels show a preference for connected narratives presenting
extensive family sagas. The Balzacian realism of detail and portraiture exasperated the anti-
Edwardians, but catered for the reading public's need to identify with characters and their
plight as if they were people in flesh and blood. Television adaptations have increased his
popularity. The Forsyte Saga (1922) includes The Man of Property, 1906, In Chancery,
1920, To Let, 1921, with two connecting interludes: “The Indian Summer of a Forsyte”, 1918
and “Awakening”, 1920. Its sequel, A Modern Comedy (1929) includes The White Monkey,
1924, The Silver Spoon, 1926, Swan Song, 1928, and two interludes: “A Silent Wooing” and
“Passers By”. Another trilogy, End of the Chapter (Maid in Waiting, 1931, Flowering
Wilderness, 1932, Over the River, 1933, published together in 1934), shifts focus to the
Charwells, relatives of the Forsytes. The Collected Poems (1934).

Gaskell, Elizabeth (Cleghorn) (1810-65). Novelist and biographer. Born in Chelsea, London,
the daughter of a civil servant, but brought up in Knutsford, Cheshire by an aunt. Married a
Unitarian parson, William Gaskell, Professor of English History and Literature at Manchester
New College, with whom she shared her humanitarian schemes. Organised sewing-rooms
during the cotton fame of 1850, and popularized the living conditions of the Manchester poor
(Mary Barton. A Tale of Manchester Life, 1848). Her contemporaries were sometimes
shocked at her unwomanly audacity in revealing crude aspects of life, like social unrest
(North and South, 1855), illegitimacy and the rehabilitation of a fallen woman (Ruth, 1853).
A friend of Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, whose Life she published in 1857.

Gissing George (Robert) (1857-1903). Novelist. Trained as a classical scholar but sent down
from Owen's College, Manchester on account of some love affair. After a year's wanderings
in America, he settled in London, living poorly on private couching. Recently raised out of
temporary obscurity by critics of social contexts. Naturalistic pictures of the working class
urban hell in Workers in the Dawn (1880), following his masters, Dickens, on whom he
wrote two books, and, especially, Zola. The Unclassed (1884). The Nether World (1889). The
theme of the new woman informs The Emancipated (1890). The Odd Women (1893).
Golding, William (1911-1993). Novelist. A schoolmaster, like his father, blaming the war
(„Fable”) for his pessimistic view of human nature as essentially evil. Fiction of
displacement and reinscription, based on symbolical structures. Reverses well-established
meta-narratives, like Rousseauistic optimism about the in-born goodness of children and
people living in the midst of nature (The Lord of the Flies, 1954, filmed), assumptions about
man's superiority over beasts, producing an original myth of the fall, with rapacious Homo
Sapiens replacing the innocent Neanderthal Man (The Inheritors, 1955), and transmutes
Robinsonianism into fantasy (Pincher Martin, 1956). Other novels: Free Fall (1959),
Darkness Visible (1979), Rites of Passage (1980), The Paper Men (1984).

Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904-1991). Novelist. Born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, in the

intellectual branch of a family (his father was headmaster of Berkhamsted School), whose
other wealthy branch inhabited Berkhamsted Hall. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford.
Worked as a journalist (The Times, The Spectator, Night and Day), reporting on events and
reviewing films, realism and the cinematic montage becoming the distinctive feature of his
fiction, which programmatically drifted away from modernist aesthetic Narcissism. Worked
for the Foreign Office, mainly in Sierra Leone during World War II, and travelled widely.
Conversion to Roman Catholicism (1926). Companion of Honour (1966), Chevalier de la
Legion d'honneur (1969) The Man Within (1929), Stamboul Train (1932), It's a Battlefield
(1934), England Made Me (1935), A Gun for Sale (1936), The Confidential Agent (1939),
Loser Takes All (1955), Our Man in Havana (1958), The Power and the Glory (1940), The
Heart of the Matter (1948), The End of the Affair (1951), The Quiet American (1955), A
Burnt-Out Case (1961), The Comedians (1966), The Honorary Consul (1973), The Human
Factor (1978), Monsignor Quixote (1982)

Graves, Robert (1895-1985). Poet, critic, novelist, author of verse for children. Descendant of
the German historian Von Ranke. Professor of English literature in Egypt (1926). Clark
lecturer, Trinity College, Cambridge (1954). Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1961).
Anthropological research, resulting in works on primitive religion: The White Goddess, 1948.
Setting out as an advocate of modernism (A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 1927) but later
adopting a more lyrical strain, of anti-convention and experimentation yet skilled, polished
verse, probably felt to be a therapeutic humanistic form of escape from the horrors of World
War I, in which he fought as an officer. Historical fiction: I, Claudius, Claudius the God and
His Wife Messalina and Claudius the God (1934).
Gunn, Thom (b 1929). Poet drifting away from the Movement's precision of style towards the
American beat, rock and motorbikes. Fighting Terms (1954), The Sense of Movement (1957),
Moly (1971), Jack Straw's Castle (1976), The Passage of Joy (1982).

Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928). Novelist and poet. Born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, a master
mason's son. Familiarized since early years with the village life, in whose festivities he took
part with his father as a violinist of the band. Hardy's youthful perceptions of a locale turned
into a mythical space in his Wessex novels were coloured by his mother's gloomy Calvinistic
belief in man's corruption and doom, by folk superstitions, as well as by the disenheartening
show of the fall of civilizations presented to his inspection by the Roman and Celtic ruins
scattered all around. His apprenticeship to John Hicks, a local architect, was followed by
five-year work in London (1862-7) at the architectural offices of Arthur Blomfield, winning
architectural prizes. His publication of “How I Built Myself a House” (1865) betrays a self-
made man's pride in his progress from a builder's son to a professional writer's career. He
lived mainly in Max Gate, on the edge of Dorcester, with yearly visits to London. After 1895
turned to poetry. Awarded the Order of Merit. Desperate Remedies (1871), A Pair of Blue
Eyes (1873), Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The
Mayor of Casterbridge: the Life and Death of a Man of Character (1886), The Woodlanders
(1887), Tess of the D'Urbervilles: a Pure Woman Faithfully Presented (1891), Jude the
Obscure (1896). Wessex Poems (1898).

Harrison, Tony (b. 1937). Poet and translator. Born into a working-class family in Leeds. His
upward mobility and earnest engagement with literary culture (occasionally demonizing the
cultural establishment) started with his studies of the Classics at Leeds University. His
thematization of class and politics goes hand in hand with an express desire to top his
contemporaries' facility in rhyme and in "all forms of articulation". The School of Eloquence
is a sonnet sequence (in 16-line Meredithian sonnets), "A Kumquat for John Keats" is in
couplets, etc. Other volumes include V (1985, written during the miners strike of the
previous year and broadcast on television two years later) , The Blasphemers' Banquet
(1989). The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992) won the Whitbread Award for poetry.
Heaney, Seamus (b. 1939). Poet of Irish extract. Born at Mossbawn, Co. Derry, into a farmer
and cattle-dealer's family. Studied at Queen's University, Belfast, where he got a lectureship.
In 1972 he withdrew to rural Wicklow and then moved to Dublin. In 1984 got a
professorship at Harvard. In 1989 became Professor of Poetry at Oxford (until 1994). In 1995
won the Nobel Prize. His poetry evolved from a preoccupation with the natural environment
to a broadened frame of historical and political interrogations: Eleven Poems (1965), Death
of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969) North (1975), Station Island (1984)
Sweeney's Flight (1992). His reflections on poetry are haunted by the shadows of Irish
medieval bards, Hopkins, Chatterton and Joyce. Collected Poems 1966-96 (1999). A
translation of Beowulf published in 1999 was met with unanimous acclaim.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-1889). Poet. Born in Stratford, Essex. Early trained in drawing
and music, and later encouraged in close aesthetic observation of nature by his friendship
with the Rossettis. Taught by Jowett and Walter Pater at Oxford, where he read classics and
got a First. He fell increasingly under the influence of the Oxford Movement, and in 1866
was converted to the Roman Catholic Church. Ordained for the Church in 1877, ministering
to parishes in Chesterfield, London, Oxford, Liverpool and Glasgow. Taught Greek and Latin
in Stonyhurst (1882-84), and spent his last years as Professor of Classics at University
College, Dublin. A disciplined Jesuit, he destroyed much of his early poetry, considering it to
be a frivolous occupation in comparison to his new religious vocation. In 1875, however, he
wrote “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (in memory of the five Franciscan nuns who had
recently drowned when the ship so baptized had sunk in the Thames), following the
injunction of the rector at St Beunos’s, where Hopkins was a novice of the Society of Jesus.
The ode appeared in The Month, a Jesuit periodical. The poem displays Hopkins's
characteristic technique – an absolute novelty at the time – of establishing an open-ended
dialogue between form and substance, matter and metaphysic, description and perception.
The episodes of the wreck are taking shape under the active gaze of the beholder, the poet's
making sense of them being inseparable from the crude facts. The phenomenology of
perception and the fascination with the properties of the material force Hopkins to create a
new terminology for his highly idiosyncratic art, emerging out of the tensions of surface and
depth: “instress” (empathic energy, within whose force fields the act of perception becomes
possible), “inscape” (characteristic pattern, distinctive form of the object of perception),
“sprung rhythm” (pro-stress and anti-foot, that is scanning by stresses irrespective of the
number of syllables). The poet moves simultaneously outwards and inwards, becoming un
unstable ego in an impressionist relationship to the environment. The poet's confidence
wanes towards the end of his life, his vision darkens, giving birth to the last “despairing
 sonnets” which problematize his relationship to God. His poems were circulated mainly in
letters to his friend, Robert Bridges, who published them in 1918, long after the author's
death. The time was ripe for a fully comprehensive response to Hopkins's innovating genius.

Hughes Ted (1930-1998). Poet, dramatist and critic. Married the American poet Sylvia Plath in
1956. Poet Laureate, 1984. Interest in anthropology, in Welsh romance and its influence on
Shakespeare (Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, 1992), in ancient mythology
reaching out of the Indo-European matrix. The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Lupercal (1960),
Wodwo (1967), Crow (1970), Poems, Eat Crow (1971), Prometheus on His Crag (1973),
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter (1974), Cavebirds (1975), Gaudete (1977), Remains of
Elmet, Moortown (1979), River (1983), Season Song (1985), Flowers and Insects (1986).

Huxley, Aldous (Leonard) (1894-1963). Novelist and short-story writer. Born in Godalming,
Surrey, in a distinguished family which included T.H. Huxley, a scientist famous for his
defence of Darwin against Bishop Wilberforce at Oxford in 1860, Mrs Humphrey Ward,
another subverter of religious orthodoxy in her latitudinarian novel Robert Elsmere, and
Leonard Huxley, his father, an editor of The Cornhill Magazine. Educated at Eton and read
English at Balliol College, Oxford. Worked on The Athenaeum and contributed drama
criticism to the Westminster Gazette (1920-1). Spent much time in France, Italy and ended
his life in California. Prevented by an eye disease from reading biology, Huxley applied his
critical gaze to contemporary people and events. He often murders to dissect, even if his
diagnosis of inertia and emotional atrophy applies not to a cross-section of English society
but mainly to the upper class and literary coterie. An essayistic sort of fiction, his characters
being mainly engaged in conversation, writing and listening to music. Crome Yellow (1921),
Antique Hay (1923), Point Counter Point (1928). His satirical wit subsides into bleak
dystopic writing in Brave New World (1932), with a title borrowed from Shakespeare's
Tempest, and sarcastically inverted, and Brave New World Revisited (1958), both of which
comment ironically on people's manipulation through scientific cunning.

Ishiguro, Kazuo (b. 1954). Born in Nagasaki wherefrom he went to England in l960 to study at
the universities of Kent and East Anglia. His novels are postmodernist (post-colonial
narratives about spiritual migrants or hybrids) versions of the Proustian search for the past
 with belated understanding making up for the sense of loss, waste or frustration. A Pale View
of Hills (1982), The Remains of the Day (1989, also filmed) and The Unconsoled (1995) are
studies of spatial displacement or defeated aspirations. The Booker Prize for The Remains of
the Day.

Joyce, James (Augustine Aloysius) (1882-1941). Irish novelist, short-story writer and poet.
Born in Dublin and educated at Jesuit schools, where he acquired a fine sense of language
structure (Clongowes, Wood college, Kildare, Belvedere College, Dublin). Read modern
languages at University College, Dublin, wherefrom he graduated in 1902. Nourished dream
of Irish revival with Yeats, Synge and George Russel, but felt the need to breathe more freely
in an extended cultural space. Left Ireland in 1902, spending a year in Paris, where his
contact with the writings of Edouard Dujardin, a precursor of the “stream of consciousness”,
proved decisive in shaping his own narrative technique. In 1904, one year after his mother's
death which had brought him back to Dublin, he left for Zurich, in the company of Nora
Barnacle (whom he married in 1931), seeking work in Zurich. His failed attempt took him to
Trieste where he got employed at Berlitz school (1905). Left Trieste during World War I and
was able to move back to Zurich thanks to two grants received through the intercession of
Yeats and Pound. Settled in Paris in 192o, but the outbreak of World War II forced him to
return to Switzerland, where he died. Chamber Music (1907), a volume of poetry published
in London, was followed by a collection of stories, The Dubliners, rejected by Irish
publishers, and finally printed in London and reviewed enthusiastically by Ezra Pound – that
consummate conductor of the experimental, cliquish British modernism. Recent revaluations
(Reading “Dubliners” Again. A Lacanian Perspective by Garry M. Leonard, 1993) have
revealed the modernity and complexity of a narrative structure which had been previously
regarded as the early, more conventional, traditional and tamed Joyce. The early
autobiographical Stephen Hero was reworked as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and
published din 1916. Ulysses, a paradigmatic text of modernism, came out in Paris on
February 2, 1922, while the baffling and wildly innovating Finnegans Wake was published as
Work in Progress (a fine definition, as well !...) in 12 parts between 1928 and 1937. It was
first published in its complete form in 1939.

Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936). Poet, novelist and short-story writer. Born in Bombay, where
his father taught at a school of art and later became Director of the Lahore Museum. A
reporter for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette, where he later published poems and
 stories drawing on his knowledge of the Anglo-Indian community. Left India for Japan and
U.S. (1889), settling soon in London. Married Caroline Balestier, spending the years 1892-6
near her family in Vermont, USA, wherefrom he retuned to England. Visited South Africa
during the Boer War. Refused Poet Laureateship (1895). Was the first English writer to
receive the Nobel Prize (1907). The Light that Failed (1891), The Naulahka (1892, in
collaboration with Wolcott Balestier, his future brother-in-law), The Jungle Book (1894), The
Second Jungle Book (1895), Captain Courageous (1897), Kim (1901), Just So Stories (1902).
Recessional and Other Poems (1899).

Larkin, Philip (1922-1985). Poet, novelist, essayist. The most conspicuous among the “New
Lines” (the title of Robert Conquest's 1956 anthology) or the Movement poets. Drifting away
from the influence of W.B. Yeats towards a more sincere realism and engagement with the
pathos of everyday characters and events. Drawing on tradition (Hardy and Lawrence) and
admiring Jazz, writing poems in a doubleness of voice: praise and satirical comedy, tropism
and colloquialism. Verse: The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun
Weddings (1964), High Windows (1974).

Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (Richards) (1885-1930). Novelist, short-story writer, poet,

playwright and essayist. Born at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the son of a coal miner and of a
more genteel mother, who spoke Standard English, discussed religion and philosophy with
the minister and read books from the local library. Lawrence confessed to his friend, Ford
Madox-Ford, of The English Review, that he considered himself “the product of a martyred
lady-saint and a savage lower class father”. Worked as a pupil-teacher at Eastwood and then
at Ilkeston until he saved money for his training at University College, Nottingham. Taught
at Davidson Road School in Croydon. Unlike the decadent and modernist “imaginary
portraits” or Künstlerromans, showing the development of a youth's consciousness,
Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913) is an autobiographical Bildungsroman, tracing his
displacement from the working class milieu, and incorporating labour in the story of his
becoming a professional writer. In 1812 he met Frieda Weckley (nee von Richthofen),
daughter of a German baron and wife of a professor at Nottingham, whom he married after
her divorce. It was Frieda who enlarged his knowledge of German philosophy, particularly,
Nietzsche. During the War, the couple lived in England and then in Cornwall, wherefrom
they were officially expelled on a charge of spying for the Germans in 1917. Censorship,
libel suits and accusations of obscenity dogged Lawrence throughout his life. The Lost Girl
 (1920) won him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Aaron's Road (1922) sufficient
money to travel. Spent the rest of his life in Italy, Ceylon, Australia, Mexico, and the United
States. Died at Venice in France, having long been afflicted with tuberculosis. Other novels:
The White Peacock (1911), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), The Plumed
Serpent, 1926, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). Travel Books: Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea
and Sardinia (1921). Essays showing his interest in the new developments in psychology
(Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, 1921 Fantasia of the Unconscious, 1922). The Letters
of D. H. Lawrence (1932) .

Lessing, Doris (b 1919). Novelist and short-story writer. Born in Iran and brought up in Sudden
Rhodesia. Settled in London in 1949. Her fiction exhibits a fortunate mixture of vivid
response to the urgent social and political issues of the time, coming out of a sense of a
writer's responsibility to his contemporaries, and postmodernist experimentation with
multiple narrative structures, meant to explore the interrelationships between writing and
reality. Her engagement with issues of colonialism, age, class, gender, social justice,
terrorism, moral improvement give an impression of dealing with life completely. The Grass
is Singing (1950), the Children of Violence series (1952-1969), The Diary of Jane Somers
(1984), The Good Terrorist (1985), The Fifth Child (1988). The Golden Notebook (1962) is a
carnivalesque mixture of literary genres. Started to write science fiction in the eighties,
defending the genre as a promising field for furthering a melioration project of humanity (her
series Canopus in Argus: Archives).

Lodge, David (b 1935). Novelist and critic, Professor of Modern English Literature at the
University of Birmingham since 1976. Evolving from a realistic portrayal of contemporary
England (The Picturegoers, 1960) towards language-based fiction. In The British Museum is
Falling Down (1965), a character's framing and discourse of personal experience come to
him shaped by the language of the modern writers he is studying. Changing Places (1975)
and Small World (1984) are a banquet of literary expertise, anecdotes and linguistic games.
One of the most authoritative literary theorists and critics of the present time.

Meredith, George (1828-1909). Novelist and poet. Born in Portsmouth, the son of a naval
outfitter. Educated in Germany at the Moravian School at Neuwied. His portrait of the
 “egoist” may have been inspired by Kant's Anthropology. Articled to a solicitor but in 1860
took up journalism (weekly contributions to the Ipswich Journal) and publisher's reading for
Chapman and Hall. In 1864 he moved to Box Hill, Surrey, where he remained for the rest of
his life. In his last twenty years, money from sales and literary honours enabled him to
dedicate himself entirely to writing. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), Evan Harrington,
an autobiographical novel (1861), Rhoda Fleming (1865), Vittoria (1867), The Adventures of
Harry Richmond (1879), Beauchamp's Career (1876), The Egoist (1879), The Tragic
Comedians (1880), Diana of the Crossways (1885). Poems (1851), Modern Love, and Poems
of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads, 1862.

Mill, John Stuart (1806-1873). Philosopher, political economist. Born in Pentonville, London,
the eldest son of the Scottish Utilitarian philosopher James Mill, a friend of Jeremy Bentham
and David Ricardo, who helped found the Benthamite organ, The Westminster Review.
Trained as a philosophical radical in the main stream of Victorian Utilitarianism and
Positivism, a pupil of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. In an age in which education was the
subject of more study than at any former period of English History, as Mill remarks in his
Autobiography (1873), he received a formidable education, starting Greek at three and at
eight, Latin, history, geometry, logic, mathematics and political economy. Worked for the
East India Company (1832-58). Contributed to The Westminster Review and joined the
Utilitarian Society (1823-6) and the London Debating Society. By 1830 his philosophical and
political thinking betrayed new influences coming from St. Simon and Auguste Comte, the
radical and positivistic main drive becoming progressively tempered so as to allow of a more
latitudinarian view. His essays on Bentham ((1838) and Colerdige (1840) define the spirit of
the age as divided between the two, between positivism and idealism, and advocating the
need for diversity at a time when the intelligentsia had given up on absolute truths and
universal systems of thought. He also identifies a radical break with the past in Bentham, a
body of ideas different from whatever had been before, while admitting to the provisional
validity of any system of thought. After his wife's death at Avignon in 1858 he bought a
house there and made it his permanent residence until his death. By 1865 he had become
sufficiently popular in order to win a seat in Parliament without any campaign or financial
expenses. He served as an independent MP for Westminster until 1868, supporting Irish land
reform and women's suffrage. Rector of St. Andrew's University (1866). A System of Logic,
Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843), Principles of Political Economy (1848). On Liberty
(1859), Utilitarianism (1861), Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), On the Subjection of
Women (1869)
Morris, William (1834-1896). Poet, artisan, printer and a Socialist.Born at Wlthamstow in
Essex, where his father made a fortune trading shares. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford,
joining a circle which in 1854 fell under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite school. Dropped
his plans for an ecclesiastical career, turning to art. Articled to the Oxford architect G.E.
Street after taking his B.A. In august 1857 worked with Rossetti and Burne-Jones on frescoes
at the Oxford Union Society, with subjects borrowed from Malory's Arthurian romance.
Founded a firm (Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co.) which revolutionized English taste in
the decorative arts. His pattern designing for wallpapers, damasks, embroideries, tapestries
and carpets, the hand-manufactured stained glass and stencilled mural decorations helping
revive the Gothic architecture, the painted tiles and furniture created a cultural alternative to
the ugly Victorian landscape, lending existence an aesthetic charm unknown since the
Renaissance. One of the founders of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, he meant to carry
forth the aesthetic pursuits of the Pre-Raphaelite Germ. Founded the Society for the
Protection of Ancient Buildings. Visited Iceland and Norway, and translated the Sagas with
the Icelandic scholar Eirikr Magnusson, nostalgically entertaining the fantasy of an England
which, in the absence of the Roman conquest, might have developed as “a splendid branch of
the Germanic people. The Bulgarian atrocities of 1876 stirred him to enter politics, on the
Socialist side. Joined the Social Democratic Federation (1883), which he abandoned one year
later in order to set up The Socialist League and the Hammersmith Socialist Society in 1890.
Art for Art's sake no longer appealed to him by 1892. Morris is responsible for offering up
one more alternative in the ideological climate of literature in the nineties: not an aesthete's
absorption in the inner movements of his consciousness but “man's delight in his labour”.
David Trotter, in The English Novel in History, 1895-1920 (1993), pays attention to this less
studied aspect of the turn of the century literature, in which identity is formed not so much by
the development of consciousness as by reciprocal alteration of man and world (p. 35),
counting Hardy and Lawrence among the main representatives. The Defence of Guenevere
and Other Poems (1858), The Life and Death of Jason (1867), The Earthly Paradise (1868-
70). News from Nowhere, or an Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters from a Utopian
Romance (1891), The Well at the World's End (1896).

Murdoch, Iris (1919-1999). Novelist, playwright and philosopher. Born in Dublin and educated
at Oxford and Cambridge. Lecturer in philosophy. Books on Sartre and Plato. Novels of
ideas, displaying a tight symbolical structure, addressing philosophical, moral and religious
issues in a highly seductive blend of detailed realism and intruding supernatural or grotesque
 elements. Under the Net (1954); Flight from the Enchanter (1955), The Bell (1958), Bruno's
Dream (1960), A Severed Head (1961; dramatized 1963); The Unicorn (1963); The Italian
Girl (1964; dramatized 1967), A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), The Black Prince (1973),
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), A Word Child (1975), Henry and Cato
(19976), The Sea, the Sea (1978), Nuns and Soldiers (1980), The Philosopher's Pupil (1983),
The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987).

Naipaul, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad (b. 1932). Novelist. Born to a journalist in a Brahman
family of Trinidad. Studied at Oxford and settled down to a literary journalist's career in
England. Naipaul's early novel A House for Mr Biswas (1961) may be considered an emblem
of his life-long quest of cultural identity, played off against a growing sense of the loosening
of ethnic and religious bonds and identities (with progressive encroaching of political and
sexual violence on four continents): The Mimic Men (1967), In a Free State (1971, Booker
Prize), Guerrillas (1975), A Bend in the River (1979), An Area of Darkness (1964), The
Return of Eva Peron (1980). Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) and A Turn in
the South (1989) explore civilizations in the mirror (Islamic and Christian). The semi-
autobiographical Enigma of Arrival (1987) showcases him as another Strether, journeying
from Trinidad to England only to run into a rural landscape that his previous aesthetic
experiences had already shaped to his imagination. As Strether's full name is echoing that of
one of Balzac's characters in a philosophical novel (Louis Lambert), Naipaul himself seems
to place himself within this subspecies of fiction, while distancing himself from Henry James
as the latter had distanced himself from Balzac. Knighted in 1990. Won the Nobel Prize in
2000.

Orwell, George. Pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950). Novelist, essayist and
journalist. Born in Bengal and educated at St. Cyprian's and Eton, England. Spent five years
(1922-27) in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, which bred in him anti-imperialistic
convictions. Resigned and took up ill-paid jobs in Paris, then London. Worked as a book-
seller, ran a farm, and kept a pub. A documentary account of unemployment in the north of
England, commissioned by the Left Book Club resulted in a classic of journalism: The Road
to Wigan Pier (1937). Democratic socialist attitudes took him to Spain during the Civil War,
where he volunteered for the Republican army. Worked in the Indian Service of the B.B.C.
during World War II. Literary editor of Tribune. Died of tuberculosis. Burmese Days (1934),
 A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Coming up for Air (1939), Animal Farm (1945), Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949)

Osborne, John (Jarres) (1929-1994). Playwright, prose-writer. Born in London and educated at
a public school in Devon. Began writing while working as an actor. One of the “angry young
men” of the fifties, who attacked the traditional values of the Establishment, trying to provide
a new social and moral centre. Opposing “kitchen-sink realism” to the chandelier and rentier
tradition in the theatre. Look Back in Anger (1956), The Entertainer 91957), Under Plain
Cover (1962), A Patriot for Me (1965), West of Suez, A Sense of Detachment, A Place
Calling Itself Detachment ( (1972), Watch It Come Down, The End of Me Old Cigar (1975),
A Better Class of Person (1985 – for television).

Pater, Walter (Horatio) (1839-1894). Essayist and critic. Born in London. Taught by Jowett at
Oxford. Fellow of Brasenose, Oxford (1864), where he lived in bachelor retirement
surrounded by an aesthetic coterie. Associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, particularly
Swinburne (1869) he gave their aesthetic attitudes a more definite shape, which became
known as the “aesthetic Movement” of the eighties. Having native roots in the anti-Utilitarian
aestheticism originating in Ruskin and enriched with elements from the French Art-for-
Arters, the eighties aesthetic decadence denied the relevance of morality to art, cultivated
melancholic and pessimistic moods, sought exotic art forms, intensity of sensuous
perceptions, displayed anti-bourgeois and escapist obsessions. The impressionist,
latitudinarian critic par excellence. Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Marius
the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (1885), Imaginary Portraits (1887), Appreciations.
With an Essay on Style (1889), Plato and Platonism: a Series of Lectures (1893), An
Imaginary Portrait (1894)

Pinero, Sir Arthur Wing (1855-1934). Dramatist. His father had intended him for a solicitor's
career, but he abandoned his office in order to become an actor, and then dedicated himself to
writing. Working within the Victorian norms and social codes of the time, Pinero made the
first steps towards the modernization of English drama. His farces discredit the cliches of
Victorian domestic drama, while his “problem plays” show an influence of Ibsen.
Dramatizing such themes as the conflict between love and moral responsibility, personal
 inclinations and social norms etc. The Magistrate (1885), The Schoolmistress (1886), The
Profligate (1889), The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893), The Benefit of the Doubt (1895),
Trelawny of the “Wells” (1898).

Pinter, Harold (b 1930). Dramatist. Trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Plays addressing the disintegration of personality, in Pirandello fashion, the frustration of
communication among individuals, social alienation, the end of stability and the unreliability
of memory in fluid personalities, going through various roles and relationships. Compared to
Beckett's minimalist theatre, yet staging a show of fear-provoking obscure threats and
violence, which has much to do with the recent realities of death camps and psychiatric
asylums. More recent advances towards political drama. The Room (1957), The Birthday
Party (1958), The Dumb Waiter (1957), The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1964), No
Man's Land (1975), Mountain Language (1988).

Redgrove, Peter (b 1932). Poet, playwright and novelist. Associated with Sylvia Plath and Ted
Hughes into what is known as “The Group” or the “post-Movement”. The Collector (1960),
The Force (1966), The Man Named East (1985).

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (christened Gabriel Charles Dante) (1828-1882). Poet, painter and
translator. Born in London, son of the Italian poet and scholar Gabriele Rossetti, a political
exile, and brother of William Michael (art critic and man of letters) and Christina (Georgiana,
poet and artist). Educated at King's College School, London, and Cary's Art Academy. With
Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti and others formed The Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848), whose organ, The Germ (1850), was edited by his brother,
William. The butt of the new aesthetic movement was the artistic establishment with its
academic attitudinising and conventionalism, artistic mannerism, whose origins were sought
in Raphael. A revival of artistic purity and simplicity was attempted by going back in time to
Pre-Raphaelite, medieval subjects and modes. Symbolic paintings, inroads into past and
exotic worlds. Type-cast ladies, with golden hair, blue eyes, swan-like necks, remote gazes
populate both his canvases with Dantesque, Testamental or Arthurian subjects of the forties
and fifties and his poems reviving the medieval ballad form and archaic language. Decorated
the Oxford Union with Arthurian murals, assisted by William Morris and Arthur Hughes.
The Early Italian Poets from Ciullo d'Alcamo to Dante Alighieri, 1100-1200-1300 in the
 Original Metres Together with Dante's “Vita Nuova” (1861). Poems (1870), Ballads and
Sonnets (1881), which included The House of Life, a Sonnet-Sequence and The King's
Tragedy.

Rushdie, Salman (b. 1947). Novelist, short story writer, miscellaneously employed. His fiction
displays a fortunate mixture of Oriental fantasy and the western theorised and argumentative
line of thought, which channelled his imaginative resources towards magic realism. He got
the Booker Prize for Midnight's Children (1981) inspired from India's contemporary history
(the major event being the day she got her independence). The originality of his focus on
post-colonial realities is his critique of the decolonized/derealized world, claustrophobically
imprisoned within medieval habits of thought and practices (Shame, 1983). The Satanic
Verses (1988) is a panoramic novel of the contemporary, a sort of New Age picaresque in a
world of simulacra, which brought a death sentence on his head from Muslim
fundamentalists. Imaginary Homelands (essays and interviews, 1991) and East West (a
collection of short stories, 1994) are hinging on the issue of contrasting civilisations which
are beginning to share and to trade in a globalized and rapidly mutating world of migrants.

Ruskin, John (1819-1900). Art critic and social reformer. Born in London, the son of a wealthy
wine-merchant. Travelled widely in England and on the Continent, mostly in the company of
his protective father and domineering mother. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford, where he
won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. A member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His
mother, Margaret, inspired him with an idealised image of the pure woman, with whom none
of his female peers could ever compete. His marriage to Effie Gray, whom he compared in a
letter to “a wrecker on a rocky coast, bringing vessels to their fate”, ended disastrously. One
year after their 1854 divorce, Effie married the painter Millais. A conservative mind, like
Carlyle, with whom he shared the anti-Utilitarian revolt and a sermonistic, hortatory style,
with an Evangelical ring to it (probably under the influence of his mother, who made him
sensitive to the spirit and sound of the Authorized Version of the Bible), Rossetti maintained
patriarchal, patronizing attitudes in his views of social economy. Of a highly tropical quality,
his essays often construct womanhood differently from the Radicals like Mill, as inferior to
man and as a potential source of moral pollution (Medieval Venice as virgin, Renaissance
Venice as whore). He wrote a companion piece to his essay, Of Kings' Treasuries, entitled Of
Queen's Gardens (1865), in which women are only granted the possibility of being taught
into understanding or even assisting their male partners' grand designs. Only then could a
 woman grasp the nothingness of the proportion which that little world in which she lives and
loves bears to the world in which God lives and loves. As far as the class system was
concerned, Rossetti showed much more democratic attitudes, defending the workers' right, in
an industrialized England which had changed them into blind tools, to a kind of work which
could cater for their spiritual and creative propensities. Ruskin put his social schemes to
work, teaching at working men's colleges and founding Ruskin College, Oxford. The
immense fortune he inherited on his father's death was spent in philanthropic projects.
Sometimes loosely classified within the broader frame of Romantic aesthetics, or of
subjective historiography, Ruskin was in reality an odd example in the post-Kantian age a
blend of artistic temperament, imaginative troping and the objective scientific method of the
natural historian or art historian. In his autobiographical Praeterita (1886-89), he takes pride
in the” interwoven temper” of his mind: love of beauty and love of science. Modern
Painters, 5 vols. (1843, 1846, 1856, 1860), The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), The
Stones of Venice, 3 vols. (1851, 1853), Pre-Raphaelitism (1851), Unto This Last. Four
Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy (1862), Sesame and Lilies. l. Of Kings'
Treasuries.2. Of Queens' Gardens (1865, lectures delivered at Manchester). The Crown of
Wild Olive. Three Lectures on War, Traffic and War (1866), Fors Clavigera. Letters to the
Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, 8 vols. (1871-84).

Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950). Playwright, novelist and critic. Born in Dublin. Came
with his mother, a singer, to London in 1876. Tried in turn music criticism (The Star, 1888-
90), drama criticism (The Saturday Review, 1895-8) and book reviewing. Became a socialist
in 1882 and two years later joined the Fabian Society, serving on its Executive Committee
for many years. Assisted William Archer, the Scottish journalist and dramatic critic, in his
attempts to modernize English drama by exampling Ibsen. The Nobel Prize for Literature
(1925). The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) is a sort of pro domo apology for the
Norwegian dramatist. Ibsen's views on drama are further expounded in Our Theatre in the
Nineties (3 vols., 1932), a collection of articles, and the collected Prefaces to his published
plays (1934). Although Shaw's drama of discussion rather than action is a proper reflex of
the Ibsenian problem threatre, he is stylistically closer to Wilde, the dramatist delighting in
shocking reversals of expectations, demystification, parody, and verbal wit. Widowers'
Houses (1893), Plays, among which, Mrs. Warren's Profession, The Philanderer, Arms and
the Man, Candida (1898), Three Plays for Puritans, with The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and
Cleopatra, Captain Brassbound's Conversation, (1901, Man and Superman (1903), John
Bull's Other Island, with How she Lied to her Husband; Major Barbara (1907), Androcles
 and the Lion, with Overruled; Pygmalion (1916), Heartbreak House (1919), Back to
Methuselah (1921).

Sillitoe, Alan (b 1928). Novelist and poet. Born like D. H. Lawrence and Hardy into a worker's
family, in Nottingham, and made his way upward, from a worker to a professional writer. He
shows a more earnest and consistently anarchic social dissent than the other “angry young
men”, refusing to compromise with the welfare state which, while providing improved
material conditions, had failed to cater for the young ordinary people's spiritual needs.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958; filmed), The Loneliness of the Long-Distance
Runner (a novella, 1959; filmed), The General (1960, based on his personal experience of the
war in Malaya), Raw Material (1972), Life Goes On (1985).

Spark, Muriel (Sarah) (b 1918). Poet and novelist. Born in Edinburgh. Spent eight years in
Africa (1936-44). Returned to England and worked in political intelligence at the Foreign
Office. Edited Poetry Review from 1947 to 1949. Although she described her first novel, The
Comforters (1957) as “a novel about writing a novel”, she is generally considered to belong
to the most traditional fiction of her age. There is however a tendency in Spark towards
parabolic fiction, a secondary order of symbolical meaning, which allies her to Golding and
Murdoch. Robinson (1958), Memento mori (1959), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961,
filmed), The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), The Takeover (1976), A Far Cry from Kensington
(1988).

Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-1894). Romance writer, essayist and poet. Born in Edinburgh,
an engineer's son. Read law at Edinburgh University, and was called to the Bar in 1875 but
never practised. Despite ill health, he undertook a canoe tour of France and Belgium, and a
travel to California by emigrant ship and trade. Contributed to The Cornhill Magazine (1876-
82), and Longman's Magazine, where he published “A Humble Remonstrance” (1884), in
reply to Henry James's The Art of Fiction. Left England in 1888, settling in Samoa, where he
died from a cerebral haemorrhage. Polynesian culture impressed him as a natural paradise,
spoilt by the relentless European colonization, which he condemned in The Ebb-Tide (1894).
Long classified as a writer of entertainment and children's literature, Stevenson has been the
object of radical revalution attempts in the last two or three decades, his non-realistic
romances and literary self-consciousness being now considered hallmarks of incipient
 modernism. Treasure Island (1881-83), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886),
Kidnapped (1886). The Black Arrow; a Tale of the Two Roses (1888), The Master of
Ballantrae. A Winter's Tale (1889)

Stoppard, Tom (b 1937). Dramatist, writing for stage and television. A Czech emigrant. An
expert in theatrical effects, being intimately acquainted with the stage, in the long tradition
which opposes the line of actor-director-dramatists, descending from Shakespeare to Pinter,
to the theatre of literary ideas, of Shaw and Eliot. He has also earned a reputation for
intellectual wit and literary subversion. Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead (1966),
Travesties (1974), Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), Professional Fool (1977; for
television), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Indian Ink (1995)

Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837-1909). Poet, playwright, novelist and critic. Born in
London, an admiral's son. Educated in France and at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford,
without getting a degree. Became conversant with both classical culture and the postromantic
experiments in France; came under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, his poetry being
consequently a mixture of metrical virtuosity, playing on and experimenting with old forms,
channelling and controlling an impetuous flood of new ideas – rebellious, decadent, sadistic
moods, shocking Victorian prudery. Ill health forced him to leave London, whose sedate
atmosphere he had enlivened with his brilliant talks, intoxicating metres and drunken brawls,
and retire to Theodore Watts-Dunton's house in Putney, where he died. Poems and Ballads
(1866), Ave Atque Vale (1868), Songs Before Sunrise (1871). Plays: The Queen Mother and
Rosamond (1860), Atalanta in Calydon (1865), Bothwell (1874), Mary Stuart (1881).

Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 1st Baron. (1809-1892). Poet. Born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, the son
of Revd. George Clayton Tennyson. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, which he left
without a degree on account of his father's death. While at Cambridge, Tennyson became a
member of the Apostles, a group of brilliant young men, and won the Chancellor's Gold
Medal for poetry with Timbuctoo. Met and befriended Arthur Henry Hallam, the most
promising intellect of the batch, whose early death inspired Tennyson a long elegiac poem,
In Memoriam, (1834-1850) which, according to the poetic fashion of the first half of the
century, amounts to a public discourse on the most urgent philosophical and religious
 questions of the age. Succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate (1850), his official bardic
posture being magnified by several audiences with Queen Victoria. Accepted a baronetcy
and took his seat in the House of Lords in 1883. Poems by Two Brothers (Alfred and Charles
Tennyson, to which also Frederick contributed four poems) (1827), Poems, Chiefly Lyrical
(1830), Poems, 2 vols, 1842, The Princess (1847), Maud (1855), Idylls of the King (1859,
1869, 1889), Enoch Arden. Idylls of the Hearth (1864), The Holy Grail and Other Poems
(1869), Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), Demeter and Other Poems (containing
Crossing the Bar, 1889), The Death of Oenone (1892).

Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-1863). Novelist. Born in Calcutta of Anglo-Indian

stock. Came to England in 1817, leaving Cambridge after two years, without a degree. Visit
to Paris (1829) and to Germany (1830-1), where he met Goethe. The heavy financial loss in
the Indian Bank failures of 1833 convinced him to turn to painting. Studied art in London
and Paris (1834-7). Back to London in 1837, he made a living from writing. Contributed
reviews, comic sketches, parodies and satires to Frazer's Magazine, Punch and other
periodicals. In 1859 became the founding editor of The Cornhill Magazine. His satirical
portrait of an unheroic, mercantile and snobbish age comes forward in a ludic interplay of
voices and narrative conventions. The paradigmatic God-like author, the omniscient and self-
willed puppeteer, whimsically manipulating the reader's responses and developing an overt
relationship with them. Possessed of a keen awareness of the historicity of literary forms.
The Book of Snobs (1846-7), Vanity Fair, a Novel Without a Hero (1848), The History of
Pendennis. His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemies – a semi-
autobiographical Bildungsroman (1849-50), The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. A Colonel
in the Service of Her Majesty Q. Anne. Written by Himself (1852), The Newcomes. Memoirs
of a Most Respectable Family (1854-5)((1852), The Virginians. A Tale of the Last Century
(1858-9)

Thomas, Dylan (Marlais) (1914-1953). Poet. Born in Swansea, Wales, an English teacher's son.
Left Swansea Grammar School in 1931, working as a reporter for the South Wales Evening
Post. Moved to London three years later. Unfit for military service, worked for the B.B.C.
during the Second World War. Reading tours to the USA where he fascinated large
audiences as much as he had impressed the English readers and critics. Bohemian excesses
contributed alongside his fragile physical condition to an early death. 18 Poems (1934),
Twenty-five Poems (1936), The Map of Love (verse and prose, 1939), New Poems (1943),
 Deaths and Entrances (1946), In Country Sleep (1952). Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
(stories, 1940). Under Milk Wood, a “play for voices” (1952).

Trollope, Anthony (1815-1882). Novelist. Born in London, a Chancery barrister's son. His
mother, Frances Trollope, started on a successful literary career in her fifties. Educated at
Harrow and Winchester. A post-office official until 1867, successfully organizing postal
services and even inventing the pillarbox. In 1841 went to Ireland as a surveyor's clerk,
where he married. Returned to England for good in 1869. Ran for Parliament as a Liberal and
lost (1868). His opponent, the Conservative Biberly, was accused of bribery, and the
constituency was consequently disenfranchised. This episode reinforced Trollope's satirical
view of Parliamentary life. Edited St. Paul's Magazine (1867-70). Realistic portraits of
middle-class domestic life in his “Chronicles of Barsetshire” (Barchester Towers, 1857,
Doctor Thorne, 1858), Framley Parsonage, 1860, The Small House at Allington, 1862-4,
The Last Chronicle of Barset, 1866-7). Unscrupled high Victorian politics, conventional, dry
and mediocre MPs with their ambitious wives fill the fictional space of the Palliser Novels,
serialized for television (Can You Forgive Her ?, 1864-5, The Eustace Diamonds, 1871-3,
Phineas Finn, 1867-9, Phineas Redux 1873-4, The Prime Minister, 1875-6, The Duke's
Children, 1879-80). The Way We Live Now (1874-5) is mentioned in Graham Greene's The
Human Factor as suggestive of a typical Victorian novel, with wide social vistas exposed to
the broad daylight of an omniscient author's inspection, at the very opposite pole from the
contemporary novelist's bafflement when confronted with man's paradoxical and
unrationalizable nature, which remains a mystery even to himself. An Autobiography (1883).

Wain, John (1925-1994). Novelist, poet and critic. Associated with the Movement as a poet and
with the “angry young men” who challenged the social order in post-war Britain. Hurry on
Down (1953), Living in the Present (1955), The Contenders (1958), The Pardoner's Tale
(1978), Young Shoulders (1982).

Waugh, Evelyn (Arthur St John) (1903-1966). Novelist. Born in Hampstead and educated at
Lancing and Hertford College, Oxford. Taught in private schools for a while. In 193o was
received into the Roman-Catholic Church. Served in the Marines, and later in the
Commandos during the Second World War. Travelled widely. Although he departed
significantly from modernistic aestheticism, he showed an earnest interest in its Pre-
 Raphaelite roots, publishing An Essay on The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1847) and a
monograph on Rossetti, His Life and Works (1928). In his novel, A Handful of Dust (1934),
he himself employs medieval Arthurian symbolism as a counterpoint to the unimaginative,
prosaic and corrupted present. Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies, 1930, Black Mischief
(1932), Scoop (1938). Travel books: Remote People (1931, about Africa), Ninety-Two Days
(South America, 1934), Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), Robbery Under Law: The Mexican
Object-Lesson (1939), A Tourist in Africa (1960).

Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (1866-1946). Novelist and SF writer. Born at Bromley in the family
of a failed tradesman. A draper's apprentice, and then a student assistant at Midhurst
Grammar School, A grant allowed him to study at the Normal School of Science, where he
took a first-class honours degree in zoology (1890). Published textbooks of biology and
geography. From 1893 Wells dedicated himself entirely to writing. A member of the Fabian
Society. Famous controversies with Henry James and G.B. Shaw. Divided between realistic
scenes of lower middle-class life and utopian fantasies exploiting the scientific and
technological progress which had appealed to the public imagination since the Great
Exposition. The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible
Man, a Grotesque Romance (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the
Moon (1901), In the Days of the Comet (1906), Tono Bungay (1909), The History of Mr.
Polly (1910), The New Machiavelli (1911), Men Like Gods (1923).

Wilde, Oscar (Fingal O'Flahertie Wills) (1854-1900). Playwright, novelist, essayist, poet.
Born in Dublin, the son of Sir William Wilde, a surgeon and man of letters. Studied at Trinity
College, London, and at Magdalen College, Oxford. Reputed at Oxford as the founder of the
aesthetic cult. A disciple of Pater, courting socialist ideas more as a promise of release from
the pressures of the contingent on the individual than as one of democracy and
egalitarianism. Settled in London in 1879, wherefrom he went on lecturing tours of England
and the States. In 1895 lost a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, Lord Alfred's
father, being subsequently imprisoned for homosexual offences. Wilde's reproachful letter to
Lord Alfred was published in 1905 as De Profundis. In 1897 he went to France, where he hid
under a pseudonym (Sebastian Melmoth, after Charles Maturin's character), and was received
into the Catholic Church. The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), written for his two
sons, The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890), an “imaginary portrait” articulating his aesthetic
ideas. Plays of verbal pyrotechnics, wit, charming paradoxes and moral subversion. All
complacent assumptions about Victorian morality and decorum are ingeniously overturned.
Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband
(1895), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Salome, written in French, was translated
into English by Lord Alfred Douglas (1894). The Ballad of Reading Goal (1898), a powerful
indictment of the carcereal and punitive mentality. Intentions, a collection of essays (The
Decay of Lying, Pen, Pencil Poison, The Critic as Artist, The Truth of Masks, 1891),
 asserting Art's independence from Ethics, opposition to reality and paradoxical validity in the
transgression of the concrete individual contingency towards the universality of the mask, of
the prototype. Develops a physiology of perceptions as moulded by precedented artistic
discourse (The Critic as Artist). Wilde's love of paradox may impress one as ostentatious and
extravagant, but this is nothing more than a proleptical idea about man being thrown
(Heidegger: geworfen) into a network of discourses, matrices of intersubjectivity, into a
semiological order which is constitutive and not constituted by him ab origine. The
individual's outlook on the world is shaped by “what art has touched”.

Winterson, Jeanette (b. 1959). Novelist. As well as with Wilde, her queer identity is the prop of
social and religious rebellion. The straitjacket of her upbringing by sectarian (Pentecostal
evangelist) adoptive parents tipped her allegiances in the opposite direction. She is making
light of religious and sexual taboos in Oranges Are not the Only Fruit (1985), which won the
Whitbread Award for a first novel. Her fiction is transhistorical, violating the dividing line
between reality and fiction, past and present, myth and reality, ritual and entertainment:
Boating for Beginners (1985), Passion (1987), Sexing the Cherry (1989).

Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882-1941). Novelist and essayist. Born in London, daughter of Sir
Leslie Stephen, reputed man of letters. In 1904 Virginia Stephen moved from Hyde Park
Gate to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, which the next year became the meeting place of an
elite of Cambridge intellectuals, writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group (Clive
Bell, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, a.o.). The couple founded
the Hogarth Press, Richmond, where some important books of modernism were printed.
Drowned herself in the River Ouse at Rodmell in Sussex. The Voyage Out (1915), Jacob's
Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves
(1931), Between the Acts (1941). Essays: Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924), The Common
Reader (1925, 1932), A Room of One's Own (1929), The Death of the Moss (1942), The
Moment and Other Essays (1947), A Writer's Diary (1953).

Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939). Irish poet and dramatist. Born in Dublin, the son of a
lawyer turned painter. In 1867 the family moved to London, after spending the summer
holidays in the Irish Sligo – the site of Yeats's first novel, John Sherman (1891). In !881 the
family returned to Dublin, and Yeats matriculated at the Metropolitan School of Art. His
interest in esoteric and occult doctrines led to the foundation of the Dublin Lodge of the
Hermetic Society. At the university (the Contemporary Club) he met William Morris,
through whom he absorbed much Pre-Raphaelite aestheticism. Back in London in 1887,
Yeats formed with Ernest Rhys the Rhymers' Club, one of the coteries associated with the
genesis of modernism. Frequent calls on Mrs. Blavatsky, a Russian medium. Joined her
Theosophical Society, and Mac Gregor Mathers's Rosicrucian society, The Hermetic Order
of the Golden Dawn. Helped to found Irish literary societies in Dublin and London. Through
 Arthur Symons Yeats came to an appreciation of French Symbolism, while Ezra Pound,
whom he meets in 1912, guided him in an imagist direction. It was also Pound who
introduced him to Japanese Noh plays. In 1917 Yeats bought a Norman stone tower at
Ballylee near Coole Park, full of historical associations, which he renovated and used as
summer residence. The same year married Georgie Hyde-Lees, who practised automatic
writing in answer to his questions. This new spiritual experiment materialized in A Vision
(1925), containing the codes of Yeats's symbolism. Becomes an important public figure as
Senator (1922). The Noble Prize for Literature (1923) mounts his literary prestige high
enough to see himself entrusted with the publication of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse
(1936). The Wandering of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), The Wind Among the Reeds
(1899), The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), Responsibilities (1914), The Wild Swans
at Coole (1917), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1922), The Tower (1928). The Winding
Stair (1929), A Full Moon in March, 1935. Plays: The Countess Kathleen (1892), The King's
Threshold and On Baile's Strand (1904), The Golden Helmet (1908), Four Plays for Dancers
(1921), The Player Queen (1922), The Words Upon the Window Pane (1934). Miscellaneous
Prose: John Sherman and Dhoya (1891), The Celtic Twilight (an anthology of Irish
folkloree1893), The Secret Rose (stories, 1897), Per amica silentia lunae (1918), The
Trembling of the Veil (autobiography, with a title borrowed from Mallarmé, 1922),
Autobiographies (1955).

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* Compiled mainly on the basis of: A Dictionary of Literature in the English Language from
Chaucer to 1940. Compiled and edited by Robin Myers, Pergamon Press, 1970, William J.
Entwistle & Eric Gillet, The Literature of England, Longmans, 1962, and The Oxford
Companion to English Literature, Edited by Margaret Drabble, 2000.