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"Severer Interventions": William Wordsworth and the Play of the Line

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“SEVERER INTERVENTIONS”: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH AND THE PLAY OF THE LINE A dissertation presented by Arturo R. Zilleruelo to The Department of English In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of English Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts April, 2013 1 “SEVERER INTERVENTIONS”: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH AND THE PLAY OF THE LINE by Arturo R. Zilleruelo ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University, April, 2013 2 Abstract This dissertation introduces attention to the materiality of William Wordsworth’s verse into a critical discourse that habitually limits itself to considerations of the verse’s ideas and ideologies. Adopting the working premise that all poems must be recognized as physical artifacts crafted from the raw materials of letters and lines, I explore the friction that occasionally arises between the semantic content that poetry contains or transmits and the material structures (letters, lines, and punctuation) that provide a vehicle for that content. This exploration considers the possibility that some of the most dramatically affecting moments in Wordsworth’s verse derive their aesthetic force from the tension generated when the way the poetry feels does not correspond to, or even actively subverts, what it says . By articulating the complex relationships between Paul de Man’s materialist critiques of aesthetic ideology and the sensitive treatment of Wordsworth’s lineation in William Empson, Christopher Ricks, Isobel Armstrong, and others, I extrapolate a general principle of poetic fragmentation that may be used to explore the disruptive operation of several related phenomena in Wordsworth’s verse, phenomena for which I tentatively offer the nomenclature “the play of the line,” or the disarticulation of a poetic argument that occurs when the multiple lines that compose it individually exhibit a material resistance to the semantic content they are conscripted to articulate. I argue that these and similar moments of the verse’s material resistance to the rhetorical function imposed upon it may be a hitherto unacknowledged point of access for sublime feeling to manifest itself in Wordsworth, complicating the poet’s own understanding of the sublime as a temporary, rhetorically manufactured stage in a secular theodicy that redeems the intensely traumatic aesthetic experiences of youth by binding them to beauty in a marriage of the mind to nature, which in turn facilitates a marriage of the solitary self to society. I trace the turbulent effects of 3 these materially instantiated interventions of sublime affect into the semantic plane of Wordsworth’s corpus, illustrating the ways in which his lyrics and epics, long recognized by scholars of Romanticism as spaces within which Wordsworth sought to construct a stable figure of his own subjectivity, may materially deconstruct the identity they manufacture tropologically and figuratively. I also consider the ramifications of the poetry’s traumatic, self-deconstructing materiality upon the catachrestic images of Wordsworth produced by much of the normative critical commentary on his work. I posit Wordsworth as both self-constructed and self- deconstructed, and therefore irreducible to the stable positions or personas often used to render him susceptible to critique. Specifically, I seek to defend Wordsworth against the charges of solipsism leveled against him by certain strains of New Historicism by demonstrating how the tension between what the poetry feels like and what it says facilitates an autogenic aesthetic critique of its own ideologies, in what may be thought of as an exploration of the poetry’s internal politics, which are inextricably connected, but never merely reducible to, the definitive historical and political events of the poet’s lifetime. 4 Acknowledgements Many heartfelt thanks are due to Professors Peterfreund, Rotella, and Dillon, whose insightful and encouraging commentary, commitment to scholarly rigor, inexhaustible generosity with their time, and patience with my methodological idiosyncrasies were instrumental in this project’s completion. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my wife, Erica, who sacrificed much precious time with her family to relocate to Boston with me while I pursued the doctorate. It has been my privilege and my pleasure to know Tabitha Kenlon, Sarah Connell, Lana Cook, James Richie, Bret Keeling, Gregory Cass, Brent Griffin, Genie Giaimo, Michael Dedek, Megan Tarquinio Roche, Tom Akbari, and David Ober. I have been, and shall continue to be, honored and humbled by their friendship. Acknowledgment is also due to the discontinued, whose voices this project seeks to make audible, and to whom this work is dedicated. 5 Table of Contents Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 5 Table of Contents 6 Introduction: A Role for Affect 7 Chapter 1: Apocalyptic Prosody and Affective Counter-Rhetoric in Early Wordsworth 71 Chapter 2: “the set is now broken”: The Play of Material in Wordsworth’s Prelude 130 Chapter 3: “A straggling volume, torn and incomplete”: The Recluse , Wordsworth’s Decline, and the Rhetoric of the Unwritten 184 Chapter 4: Solitary Reapers: Poetry, Prophecy, and Time in Wordsworth and Ginsberg 240 Works Cited 302 6 Introduction: A Role for Affect I. There are truths of intellect, and there are truths of affect. The essential dichotomy between thought and feeling has been historically associated with a series of culturally and disciplinary contingent binary formulations: logos and pathos for the rhetoricians of the Classical period, higher cognition and lower cognition for the Cartesian Rationalist strains of Continental philosophy, studium and punctum for Roland Barthes’ idiosyncratic meditations on photography in Camera Lucida (26-7), hermeneutics and aesthetics for literary critics, information cognized and events registered for students of trauma. Although these and other familiar formulations represent distinct efforts to encapsulate this dichotomy within specific discursive traditions, the fundamental problem of the incommensurability of intellect and affect remains—as it almost certainly must—decidedly unresolved, and continues to serve as a nexus of common frustration among many otherwise unassociated systems of knowledge production. The role of the thought / feeling binary in arranging an attingence between these latter two traditions, literature and trauma, will be one of the primary foci of this investigation, especially as it applies to the aesthetics of the sublime in the poetry of William Wordsworth. A somewhat recent example of this frustration—and its potential to inform critical discourse on literature and trauma—may be observed in Susan L. Feagin’s Reading with Feeling , a volume that, although characterized by Feagin herself as “an exercise in philosophy” rather than “an exercise in literary criticism” (2), illustrates the difficulties faced by both philosophers and literary critics when attempting to negotiate the relationship between the interpretation of a text (offering an account of the semantic content it speaks to our faculties of cognition) and the articulation of how a text feels (offering an account of the emotional content it speaks to our 7 affective faculties, a process Feagin designates “appreciation”). Feagin characterizes her inquiry as one committed to enriching the scholarly understanding of the mechanisms of affective response, stressing that her focus “is not interpretation but appreciation,” but she almost immediately finds herself having to concede that “one cannot appreciate without interpreting,” before finally acknowledging and expressing interest in the “gap” that seems to emerge between the interpretive and appreciative acts that collectively constitute the activity of reading: I suggest thinking about it in the following relatively crude way. Think of theories of interpretation as theories of meaning, and think of meaning as having strictly cognitive content. Whatever justifies or warrants or explains how one reached an interpretive conclusion will be, in itself, insufficient to explain or warrant an affective response . I’m interested in that ‘gap,’ as it were, between cognition and affect. (3) In my capacity as a student of trauma and the sublime, I too am interested in the gap between cognition and affect, though in different ways and for different reasons than Feagin. I wonder to what extent the act of reading, bound up as it is with what Feagin would classify as both the hermeneutic and the appreciative, might be articulated as an intrinsically traumatic phenomenon, one which either severs these two sets of faculties from one another or restages a severance they have already suffered. I also wonder to what extent the apparent vacuum space left in the psychic tissue of what I shall provisionally call “the subject” in the aftermath of this severance may actually be populated with noise, alive with the tentative rhetorics by which an intellect excluded from participation in acutely affecting aesthetic events may retroactively attempt to colonize and revise those events into something it may apprehend and tolerate, and alive also with the counter-rhetorics mobilized by the affective faculties to revise the intellect’s 8 revisions into something approximating the visionary. As an iteration of the old pairing of wound and womb, trauma may be a space out of which language
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