ROMANTIC TRANSFORMATION: VISIONS OF DIFFERENCE IN BLAKE AND WORDSWORTH By RONALD BROGLIO A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1999 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Donald Ault for his visionary difference. Also thanks go out to my other committee members including John Leavey for his patience and kind advice, John Murchek for his insightful and exacting readings of my work, and Gayle Zachmann for her generosity in serving on my committee. For many, many hours in our collective construction of Romantic monstrosities, I thank my colleague and collaborator Bill Ruegg. For their friendship along the way, I thank Tom, Steph, and Trish. For all their support through my graduate career, I would like thank to my family. And I would like to thank Theresa for her loving companionship. For his inspirational indifference to my turmoils, I thank Bad Badtz-Maru. 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii LIST OF FIGURES v ABSTRACT vii CHAPTERS 1 THERMODYNAMIC TRANSFORMATION COUTNERING ORGANIC GROWTH 1 Metaphor and the First Law of Thermodynamies 4 The Gothic Church Meets the Second Law of Thermodynamics 16 Transformational Relations and Implications of Entropy 24 Notes 29 2 VECTORS OF READING AND TOPOGRAPHIES OF DEFIANCE IN WORDSWORTH'S LANDSCAPES 33 Reading for Time 34 The Simplon Pass: from the Sublime to the Transformational 37 The Penrith Beacon: The Collapse of an Architecture 53 Other Poems of Transformation 58 Notes 70 3 OTHER PLACES AND OTHER TIMES IN WORDSWORTH'S GUIDE TO THE DISTRICT OF THE LAKES 74 Categories of Objects in the English Countryside 76 Spatialization of Place 84 Temporal Clouds 98 Notes 115 4 BECOMING-ZOA 119 1793 126 111 1797 137 1800 141 Plateaus of Becoming 158 Notes 161 5 BLAKE'S MILTON AND THE UNGROUNDED FIGURE 168 The Body as Pivot Point 170 Milton's Body as Turning Point 175 The Spacing of Space 184 The Ungrounded Figure 192 Notes 193 WORKS CITED 198 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 206 IV LIST OF FIGURES 2- Figure page 3- 2-1 Vector Reading of 6c of William Wordsworth's The Prelude. 6. 624-635 45 2 The view from Penrith Beacon as noted by James Clarke in A Survey ofthe Lakes. London, 1789 54 1 Perception of an Object. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of 3- Psychoanalysis 87 3-24- The Subject as Perceived, the Gaze. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis 87 3-3 John Constable. The Hay-Wain. 1821. Oil on canvas. 51 1/4 X 73. Tate Gallery. London 103 3-4 John Constable. Cloud Study 25 September 1821. Oil on paper laid on panel. 8 3/8x11 1/2. Tate Gallery. London 105 5 John Constable. Hampstead Heath with London in the Distance. 1830. Oil on canvas. 25 5/8 x 38 1/3. Tate Gallery. London 107 1 William Blake. America. Page 14. Copy M. Relief etching finished in watercolor 129 4-2 William Blake. America. Page 15. Copy M. Relief etching finished in watercolor 130 4-3 William Blake. "Divine Image." Songs ofInnocence and Experience. Copy B. Relief etching finished in watercolor 134 4-4 William Blake. The Four Zoas. Page 99. Proof NT: 45: 14E, early state with pencil revisions 142 4-5 William Blake. The Four Zoas. Page 100. Pencil and chalk drawing with chalk shading 143 V 4-4-6 William Blake. The Four Zoas. Page 42 Detail. Pencil and chalk drawing 148 5- 7 William Blake. Nebuchadnezzar. 1795/c.l805 Color print finished in ink and watercolor 150 1 William Blake. Pity, c.1795 Color print finished in ink and watercolor 172 5-2 William Blake. Milton. Title Page. White line etching finished in ink and watercolor 178 VI Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy ROMANTIC TRANSFORMATION: VISIONS OF DIFFERENCE IN BLAKE AND WORSDWORTH By Ronald Broglio August 1999 Chairman: Donald Ault Major Department: English Two tropes of Romantic discourse stubbornly remain in contemporary criticism—organic growth and the Romantic metaphor. The human-nature exchange found in organic growth and the Romantic metaphor derives from the same Naturphilosophie that informs the early 19‘*’ century thermodynamic law of the conservation of energy. But like thermodynamics with its second law of entropy. Romantic exchange must contend with losses and seepages. The second law introduces into physics time's arrow and the non-linear disjunctions of singular points accompanied by heterogeneous space. I use these same elements of temporal flow and spatial disjunction to read against the spatial architecture of Romantic metaphor and organic growth. The first Wordsworth chapter examines the Penrith Beacon section of The Prelude where the economy of the sublime gives way to transformation in which the disoriented poet discovers entropic forces. Such forces fashion strange vii interrelations of man and nature in Wordsworth's poetry, such as the Leech gather as rock and sea-beast and the Cumberland beggar as bird and sun. The second Wordsworth chapter looks at the landscape aesthetics from Gilpin and Gainesborough to Wordsworth and Constable. The former two use abstract and isomorphic geometry to order the landscape. In contrast, Wordsworth finds points of singular intensity that disturb categories of the landscape tradition. In contrast to stationary landscape scenes, Wordsworth and Constable use clouds to reveal temporality. The first Blake chapter looks at how properties from different objects in Blake's visual and verbal texts migrate to and converge upon other objects and how the force of this convergence enacts a change in identity. Transformational relations become increasingly evident in Blake's text of the 1790s and culminate in The Four Zoas. The instability of the Zoas defies and critiques the political, economic, and industrial machinery of publication during the turn of the century. The second Blake chapter examines how Blake manufactures textual spaces self- reflexively to include the role of the author and of the reader. The focused example of in this chapter is the title page of Milton where Milton's renunciation of Eternity disrupts conventional relations in the narrative, in the act of reading and in authorship. viii CHAPTER 1 THERMODYNAMIC TRANSFORMATION COUNTERING ORGANIC GROWTH Civilization is the economy ofpower. —J. von Liebig* The way objects function in time and space constitutes a system. Until the nineteenth century, the operative organizing principle was the mechanical system. In mechanics, a primary set remains fixed and stable while objects in the set undergo movement or variations. Think of a solar system. Here a set of materials is distributed through a pre-defmed space and moves according to Newton's laws. Or consider the mechanics of gear, tackle, and pulleys that follow the rotary motion known for centuries but made definitive by Louis Poinsot.^ A unique characteristic of mechanical systems is that time direction is reversible. The system works the same backwards as forwards. Mechanics represent a small set of all possible means of organizing material, since in most systems time is unidirectional—things decay, change form, and lose or gain energy. The Industrial Revolution begins a new way of organizing physical reality that takes into account time's arrow, the single direction of time. Heat operates as the new organizing principle. Scientific inquiries into light, electricity, friction, meteorology, and steam engines introduce the transformative role of heat transfer and energy loss due to 1 2 The engineer considers only four moving agents which can be applied to machines: animal power, water, wind and fuels. The physicist adds to these natural causes of motion electricity, magnetism, the force of affinity between air and water and that force whose action on the atmosphere manifests itself in variations in the height of the column of mercury in a barometer.^ Heat is not simply another technological tool; it became a new system for organizing objects in time and space. Rather than objects in a mechanical system working by mass, weight, and speed, this new system organizes energy through differences in temperatures and circulations by means of reservoirs. Thermodynamic motive powers introduce transformations of objects. For example, one form of energy, heat, becomes another form, work. And unlike mechanical systems, the structure and functioning of thermodynamic systems includes its own irrecoverable losses of energy. The steam engine serves as the leading representative of the new thermodynamic system of the Industrial Revolution. Not only does the steam engine provide the technological muscle for the revolution, it also gives early physicists in a clear and dramatic, observable and controllable form the capacity of heat to perform work. The prevalence of these fire-engines in the mines of Cornwall and the Midlands makes Britain the leader not only in industry but also in the new field of physics. Some of the best engineers of the early 1800s are in Wales and the best scientists in the study of heat are of the Scottish School.'' Engines bailing water and hauling coal in mines are soon accompanied by steamboats, railways, and steam-engine-enhanced water mills populating the British landscape. If, as Joseph von Liebig says, "Civilization is the economy of power," then following the development of thermodynamics will provide an insight into the organization and entropic disorganization available in the age of the steam engine. 3 From the Savery engine of 1698 with its single chamber to the very first Newcomen machine of 1712 that solved the problem of air filling the cylinder, to the first truly thermodynamic, double chamber engine of Watts in 1765 and his subsequent perfections of the engine well into the 1790s, it is evident that the closed system of the steam engine lost power over time and that a steady supply of external heat was necessary to maintain the machine's functioning.