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Christian La Cassagnère Keats’s Gleaming Melancholy: A Reading of Endymion by Christian La Cassagnère It may seem paradoxical to analyse the nature and the work of melancholy in Keats’s poetic creation without concentrating on the celebrated “Ode on Melancholy”, written in May 1819, in the height of the annus mirabilis. And it may seem somewhat provocative to choose instead Endymion, written two years before, in 1817, a notoriously “long poem”, as critics (taking up Keats’s own phrase) usually say to present it— a hardly engaging epithet to the 20th or 21st century poetry reader who shares Ezra Pound’s opinion that “It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works”. Endymion is thus a poem that Keats’s critics never approach with much happiness and regard, with some condescension, as the product of a juvenile exercise in verse writing: “one of the most diluted poems in a century often given to poetic dilution”, which makes it (in comparison with Keats’s later production, especially that of the odes) “the most atypical of Keats’s major poems”, so that “the admirer of Keats, though prepared to be indulgent to every awkwardness and excess, has never really found the poem as a whole to be as interesting as he secretly thinks he should find it”. I am quoting Walter Jackson Bate who points out as well, in his authoritative book on Keats, the confusing and hardly significant economy of a text in whose making the young, inexperienced poet “kept adding details, snatching at embellishments as mere filler as he dashed forward”, uncertain as to where the composition might lead ( 171-4) . I would like in this paper to challenge that widely accepted view and to offer a thorough revaluation of the poem by showing that Endymion is indeed a myth of melancholy, and that read systematically as such, it emerges as a fully consistent, significant and profound text. It is a text, I mean, that poses and works at solving — through its so called “details” and “embellishments” — a crucial problem of poetics which is that of the so to speak impossible relation between melancholy and writing; and as such, it lays out the field—the problematic field—of Keats’s poetic writing, that very writing which is to produce the masterpieces of the great year. Melancholia To the reader familiar, as Keats was, with Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, there is no doubt that Keats, in his description of Endymion throughout the Ist Book and more particularly in the opening scenes, is projecting an image of the melancholy self. Central to the scene of pagan celebration, as “shepherd prince”, and yet psychologically absent to the scene he is central to, Endymion offers some of the main features of Burton’s symptomatology: the sorrow without a cause but that “goes deep”, to quote a phrase from the Aristotelian description of melancholy in the Problems (Radden 58); the search for solitary places where the self can commune with his affect, as if his own affect was his object for want of a real one; the withdrawal, therefore, from the vital bonds woven by Eros, from inter-subjective connections and the life around him, which makes him “quite dead to every worldly thing” (IV.292), or again, as Keats will later write in “The Eve of Saint Agnes” (in the description of a female variant of the melancholy self) “All amort” to everything except to her (or his) secret longing or secret sorrow. And the insistent signifier in Keats’s text, “dead”, “amort”, points to a further symptom, a symptom mentioned indeed, among many others in most of the traditional discussions of the “black bile” disease, but which grows central in the image of the Keatsian hero who really seems haunted by a death wish, by something very much like the death drive to be discovered by Freud (XXII 103-108), namely that force which tends to destroy the motions and the bonds of Eros, thus dedicating the self it inhabits to Thanatos: a death drive which the Keatsian hero both inscribes in his body by mimetically assuming the stasis of death, as “in the self-same fixed trance he kept...Aye, even as dead-still as a marble man” (I.403-405), and projects in objective correlatives that surround his image like a death halo in the eyes of those who observe him: “But there were some who feelingly would scan / A lurking trouble in his nether lip… then would they sigh, / And think of yellow leaves, of owlet’s cry, / Of logs piled La Cassagnère, Christian. “Keats’s Gleaming Melancholy: A Reading of Endymion.” EREA 4.1 (printemps 2006): 43 43-50. <www.e-rea.org> solemnly” (I.178-83), a sequence of emblematic images which looks, one may already observe, like a first draft of the opening stanza of the “Ode on Melancholy” in its evocation of the deathward attraction. Keats’s poem thus has as its referent a melancholic character. But what is more essential, is that it constitutes itself, as poem, as a text of melancholy by defining itself fundamentally, at the outset, as the field of a tension between two spaces alien to each other, say that of silence and that of speech. It does this by performing the double ritual that generally opens up the poetic narrative in the great tradition (that of the epic, that of medieval romance), namely that of the “proposition” (or statement of theme) coupled with that of the “invocation” (or propitiatory appeal to the Muse). Keats’s romance adopts—or pretends to adopt— the canonical ritual, but splits it up into two separate channels that lead into the two alien spaces. And that textual staging takes us no doubt far beyond Burton’s landscape of symptoms into the deeper problematics of melancholy. “Invocation”: beyond the conventional address to the Muse by the narrator’s discourse (“O kindly Muse! let not my tongue falter / In telling…”, I.128-34), the true invocation comes indeed within the narrative itself, in the reported speech of Pan’s worshippers as they both invoke the god and evoke his mysteries in a gorgeous, already ode-like lyric in five stanzas (I.232-306)—the purple patch, incidentally, which the young Keats was once invited to recite before the lionized Wordsworth and which Wordsworth declared, presumably to the young Keats’s embarrassment, “a very pretty piece of paganism”. More seriously, in this lyric, Keats interprets the figure of Pan as a life-force, a life-god “to whom every faun and satyr flies / For willing service” (I.263-4), so as a permanent movement and interplay of energy within the living, in other words as an allegory of drive-life. But what is most specific to Keats’s vision— and what Wordsworth obviously failed to see—is that the mysterious realm of Pan is not only a locus of instincts or of drives, but somehow a locus of signifiers, since those drives seek after expression, they exist as inscriptions as well as energy-charges, producing “strange overgrowth[s]” (I.241), uttering “undescribed sounds” (I.285). The realm of the Keatsian Pan, therefore, is not symbolic (it is not a place of words and of signification), but it is nonetheless a place of meaning, a field of primary inscriptions, of traces and structuring rhythms—made audible on the supra-segmental level of the text in pulsating alliterations, like that of “the dreary melody of bedded reeds” (I.239). It is thus a place, one might say, which corresponds to that infra or pre-symbolic field which Julia Kristeva has defined as the “semiotic”, namely the psychic marks and imprints wrought by the drives as they displace and condense energy in the psychosomatic world of the emerging self (Revolution in Poetic Language 25). The realm of Pan is thus a locus where it speaks. And what it speaks about is loss, an inconsolable sense of loss, and here lies Keats’s ground-breaking exploration of melancholy. Melancholy is no longer a sadness without a cause, but a sadness with a secret cause, which is the loss of a primordial object, a loss with which the self cannot come to terms: O thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness;... And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken The dreary melody of bedded reeds— In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth; Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx... (I.232-43) In this picture of Pan as a self-absorbed being forever brooding over an object he has lost and yet cannot lose, over a Thing for which there is no possible mourning, Keats offers us, so to speak, his own Melancholia, his own version, I mean, of Dürer’s celebrated engraving, but a version that probes deeper into the essence of melancholy, since it pictures the void at the heart of the brooding figure—of the brooding angel or the brooding god—: the Thing’s absence which is Melancholia’s secret centre. La Cassagnère, Christian. “Keats’s Gleaming Melancholy: A Reading of Endymion.” EREA 4.1 (printemps 2006): 44 43-50. <www.e-rea.org> Keats’s mythological representation of the lost Thing, moreover, as Syrinx (whose story is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses) is fully significant in that Syrinx-the-nymph in her primal state (the love object the god has lost) will be finally transformed into Syrinx-the-instrument (so a metonymy of musical expression), which amounts to say that Pan could enjoy her as transposed, that he could relate to her symbolically, if only he first accepted to lose her as Thing, as the Thing she was in her primal state: a double process of gain through loss which is in fact the destiny of the self as he becomes a subject of language, as he acquires the mastery of signs by losing all immediate relation to a primal love object.
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