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Wordsworth's Subliminal Lyric

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Wordsworth's Subliminal Lyric Haunted Metre: Wordsworth’s Subliminal Lyric by Adrian Harding (Université de Provence & American University in Paris) Given Wordsworth’s condemnation, in the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, of the “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse,” exciting the reading public’s “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” (LB 249), it has been customary to approach his relations to the Gothic in terms of readerships, grounded on or eventually grounding a sociology of reception. In this paper I am assuming the transference of the Gothic charge more intimately upon Coleridge, despite the latter’s own disparagement of the seductions of Gothic literature, as in the (perhaps strategic) letter of 27 December 1802 to Mary Robinson: “My head turns giddy, my heart sickens at the very thought of seeing such books in the hands of a child of mine” (Griggs, 94). The terms of Coleridge's condemnation of the Gothic provide a counterpart to Wordsworth's lyric phenomenology: “combinations of the highest sensation, wonder produced by supernatural power, without the means—thus gratifying our instinct of free-will that would fain be emancipated from the thraldom of ordinary nature—& and would indeed annihilate both space & time” (Notebooks 3449). What interests me here are the ways in which Wordsworth works with familiar, not unfamiliar, spirits, in a bringing up of language from what Hegel in The Philosophy of Spirit calls the “night-like mine” or “unconscious pit” (Hegel §453) from which signs emerge, to “the light of things” (“The Tables Turned”), the emancipations and annihilations operating from within “metrical language” to motivate any possible incursion or excursion through “ordinary nature”, any possible space and time of writing, any signs of a presence. In its collaborative genesis , in the reception history of its hybrid title (“What is a ‘lyrical ballad’?”), in Wordsworth’s claim in the 1798 Advertisement for the book's “experimental” status modulating into the common-language refractions of the 1800 Preface, in its unstable positioning between monologic and dialogic modes, in its complexification of the relations between tradition and modernity (both thematized and performed), in its framing and unframing of trauma – the list of antitheses goes on – Lyrical Ballads has been of exceptionally fractured significance, certainly insofar as the poems and their Prefaces have seemed to perform the fractured construction of significance which is one of the identifying marks of Romanticism. Where Coleridge’s “Ancyente Marinere”, originally conceived as a poem by two hands, rises like a ghost at the beginning of the first edition, it is repressed if not quite suppressed in the second, a note appended by Wordsworth decrying its unmotivated, defective strangeness (and this helped destroy STC’s self-confidence), as Coleridge was erased from the writing of the 1800 Preface, whose opening passages were taken from his notes and which owed much to his “whole souled” thinking. Eventually, unsure what poems to include, unable to complete the Gothic “Christabel” on time for the second edition but justifying its omission, in a letter to Humphry Davy, as being “in direct opposition to the very purpose for which the Lyrical Ballads were published” (Letters I, 631) and charged nevertheless with seeing the book through the press, Coleridge assumes the uncanny otherness of the “Friend” addressed in the transferential economies of The Prelude. We can no longer, like contemporary reviewers, talk indifferently of “the author” of the anonymous first edition; by 1800 Wordsworth had effectively rendered Coleridge’s “supernatural” poetic subliminal, in the sense that it is split off for failing to do what his own poems precisely wished to avoid: the Mariner “has no distinct character. as a human being who having long been under the controul of supernatural impressions might be supposed to partake of something supernatural” (Wordsworth's “Note to the Ancient Mariner” from the 1800 edition, LB 277). Yet what then of the anti-supernaturalism of “Peter Bell”? If Coleridge’s poetic, in the words of the collection’s 1963 editors, “faded from [Wordsworth’s] mind” (LB xlii), its practices of ideational dislocation and form, and of conversational distancing as “a father’s tale” seeking the redemption of the child, that “his childhood shall grow up / Familiar with these songs, that with the night / He may associate Joy!” (“The Nightingale”), Harding, Adrian. “Haunted Metre: Wordsworth’s Subliminal Lyric.” EREA 5.2 (automne 2007): 62- 62 79.<www.e-rea.org> merge with liminal and subliminal forms of terror threatening and generating much of Wordsworth’s poetic. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s definitions of style and purpose in the collection, in the Prefaces and in Biographia Literaria, have influenced critical readings towards the epistemological and conceptual discourses predicated upon the poetry, whether generically in relation to theme, structure and diction (supernatural/natural, dramatic/lyric, rustic/urban, common/individual), or ideologically in the conceptual oppositions between historical and imaginary, or materialist and idealist inscription, notoriously in the New Historicist “Romantic ideology” interpretations of “Tintern Abbey” as a retreat from history, following McGann, Levinson, Johnston, most interestingly refuted, as to location “above” the ruins (i. e. upriver), by David Miall, in his essay “Locating Wordsworth: 'Tintern Abbey' and the Community with Nature.” A 1998 essay on Wordsworth’s poetic language which begins in Kristevan “semiotic rhythms” ends up admitting that “When all is said and done, no plausible account of Wordsworth’s poetic language can go very much against the grain of Coleridge’s account of Wordsworth’s stylistic signature” (Hanley 20). Wordsworth’s Advertisement and Prefaces, like the later (1814) “Prospectus” for The Recluse, are richly inconclusive, yet although Coleridge is as acute a reader as one could wish of those objects on which he focuses, his criticism of what he sees as Wordsworth’s failed impersonations of (unrepresentative) characters in the poems and of his reliance upon Hartleian associationism as poetic motive merely point out the lack of a unitary poetic theory, but do not account for the unpredictably shifting qualities that give the book its variously orchestrated, extraordinary powers – including the metonymic “associations” of metre. If Wordsworth’s poems, in Coleridge’s words, “excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom” (Biographia Literaria, Ch. XIV), it is, I would argue, because that “feeling” occurs where awakening and lethargy – the intentions and intensions of ek-stasis – metrically enable and condition both event and horizon of the prosodic sequence, suspending meaning (common knowledge) as an uncertain correlative of the event, the correlation itself being the ostensible motive of the poetry. The bivalent effect of metre asserted in the 1800 Preface is that it will either “temper [. .] and restrain [. .] the passion” or else “impart passion” (LB 264-5). These energies can be seen in two of Lyrical Ballads’ favourite things, epitaphs without stones and stones without epitaphs, whose writing, involving extremes of presencing and absenting, anthropology and ontology, in the metrics of an imperative “pause” addressed to and by a “strange” familiar, provides an ontology of trace as both act and text, speech and writing, a patterning of stasis against which the poetry moves, as if against its own mortality. Where there is personal memory there is the scene of the epitaph, even though only one poem, and a precisely unmemorable one at that, is entitled “A Poet’s Epitaph”; one could say of Wordsworth’s poems what Derrida says of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, reporting Deleuze, that it “was less an exercise of memory than a semiotic activity or experience” (Derrida 124). The ethical function of the epitaph, as noted in the “Essay on Epitaphs”, is, like that of metre, a restraint and an intensification of feeling, to restrain the particular idiolect, on one hand, and the general language, on the other, the double restraint coming from the temporal dislocation of remembrance: the remembering subject is in the present, the remembered object in the past. They cannot therefore maintain their identities if there is to be a representation of common experience (this is the semiotic diagram1 of “a man speaking to men”). The epitaph, whether of self or other, is the poetic form of a correlation that is to counteract the other erasures of mortality. There is no swoon into the aestheticized totalization of an involuntary release of 1 I use the term in Deleuze’s sense (he refers to the painting of Klee and Bacon) of an originary organization of pre- semiotic chaos: “Le diagramme ce serait la catastrophe germe: il y a cette instance très particulière, la catastrophe, … et en sort quelque chose qui est le rythme, la couleur, ce que vous voulez. Et bien cette unité pour faire sentir cette ‘catastrophe germe’, ce ‘chaos germe’, ce serait ça. Ce serait ça le diagramme” Harding, Adrian. “Haunted Metre: Wordsworth’s Subliminal Lyric.” EREA 5.2 (automne 2007): 62- 63 79.<www.e-rea.org> dramatized self-presence. One has only to imagine that what the ballad metre of “The Idiot Boy” “restrains” is cognate with that to which “Tintern Abbey” “imparts passion” to see that the ground of this poetry
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