Psychoanalytic Listening from Keats to Freud Kiera Allison Charlottesville
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Scanning for Silence: Psychoanalytic Listening from Keats to Freud Kiera Allison Charlottesville, Virginia B.A., University of Toronto, 2005 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English August 2015 Abstract “Scanning for Silence” is, first and foremost, a study of rhythm in the postromantic Anglo-German canon. More specifically, I’ve tried to show how signal works of nineteenth- century verse and prose deploy the diagnostic metrics then in currency—supplied by the contemporary vanguard of physicians and psychologists—to declare the deeper, inarticulable meanings that all writers, authors and clinicians alike, were attempting to convey within this period. Ultimately, the project looks toward a certain methodological transition in Freud’s Studies on Hysteria (1895), a slight shifting of attention from the verbal contents to the interruptive rhythms of his patients’ oral reports. Be it a slip of the tongue, or a stutter, a gestural spasm or a recurring phrasal trope—or in the more advanced conception of his 1916 Papers on Technique, the subliminal “oscillations” exchanged between the patient and the psychoanalyst— rhythm takes the stress of the unspoken, and very possibly unconscious, truths which language does not fully comprehend in Freud’s analyses. Psychoanalysis thus reinstates a style of reading which goes back to the very beginnings of Freud’s literary century. Keats set the tone with his famous “proofs upon the pulses”; and Wordsworth before him, laying down the universal “laws” of meter against the “arbitrar[iness]” of language. Chiefly the dissertation builds on three major authors at midcentury, who, writing on the very precipice of language’s collapse, help to convey the extra pressures that get routed into rhythm in the decades leading up to Freud. Chapter One investigates the prose-poetic patterns that consistently emerge, in Thomas Carlyle’s history of The French Revolution (1837), just where the author wants to get a gauge on the unscripted (“inarticulate” and “unconscious”) forces at the heart of that event. Chapter Two looks at an epistemic crisis on a smaller scale in Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850); and discovers the finely- 1 calibrated verbal and phonetic recurrences whereby Tennyson registers, and at the same time tries to makes his literal “returns,” upon the tragic loss of Arthur Hallam. Chapter Three revisits the idea of traumatic repetition in the life and works of Charles Dickens: particularly, the “flashback” rhythms he performed throughout his railway writing in the 1850s, leading up to his own near-fatal accident at Staplehurst in 1865. Finally this project verifies, albeit to qualify, what trauma theorists have discerned across the board in Romantic and Victorian writing. Rhythm spells a mental crisis: the neurological replay ad infinitum of some event which Freud would say had bypassed comprehension in the first place. What trauma theory tends to undervalue is the reconstructive, ultimately therapeutic work that is the other half of postromantic rhythm: a potential that reveals itself more fully when the above three authors are read alongside their contemporaries in clinical physiology (cardiologists vis-à-vis Carlyle, neurologists when we come to Tennyson) and the new “associationist” psychology which Dickens captures at a Victorian midpoint between Wordsworth and Freud. Sounding the unconscious through the well-established patterns of the pulse, the brain, and the autonomic nervous system, ultimately these writers—in every reach of postromantic science and letters—provide a glimpse into the longer history of what the dissertation styles as the “hermeneutics of rhythm.” 2 CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………….1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………………..4 INTRODUCTION Before Language: Romantic Prosody, Tractarian Liturgy, Freudian Psychoanalysis.....................6 CHAPTER 1 Carlyle and the Rhythms of Unconsciousness...............................................................................21 CHAPTER 2 Recovery Acts: Tennyson’s Elegiac Premonitions of the Freudian Fort-Da................................74 CHAPTER 3 Theme and Revolution: Dickens and the Postromantic Burden of Victorian Prose Fiction.......128 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................190 3 Acknowledgements I confess, in advance, to having met no finer listener—in this extended project on the history of listening—than the one who was responding from the margins of my drafted work. To my director then, Herbert Tucker, whose inimitable savvy and generosity as a reader, editor, and advisor have been often (but never exhaustively) commended by the dozens who have worked with him to date, I too extend my deepest thanks. He alone made this unlikely project conceivable. To those who made the dissertation even possible—the faculty and administration at the University of Virginia, the University of Toronto, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada—I owe a longer and more complex debt of gratitude than I can well explain in less than another, separate chapter. Suffice it to say, here, that Professor Alan Bewell might fairly take the credit for sending me to grad school in the first place (and assuring me Virginia would be a very good first place, indeed). Professor David Morris— an invaluable mentor once I got there, and an enduring friend to this day—guided my earliest forays into the dark realms of nineteenth-century clinical medicine. There I encountered Keats’s pulse…and the rest, they say, is history. Jerome McGann receives my thanks, and everyone’s, for opening our ears to Keats’s poetry, and poetry’s music—and for impressing into critical awareness the imperative, indeed the fundamentally ethical obligation to read closely, and to listen closer again. To him I owe part of the inspiration that would culminate under the guidance of three others— this dissertation’s eventual readers, Stephen Arata, Bruce Holsinger, and Michael Puri—who will of course deserve a separate paragraph of acknowledgment. Rhythm properly entered my prospectus—and the prospectus was expanded into resonances that had, as yet, just barely caught my ear—when Professor Holsinger joined ranks 4 with the committee. His double grounding in literature and music, his astonishing historical and theoretical latitude in both disciplines, have been a constant boon to graduates across the map (and well beyond his own medievalist home grounds). To him, this project owes its broader intellectual foundations. To Professor Puri, whose scholarship revived my latent musical ideas— whose course on Wagner has provided my most rigorous ear-training, to date, in nineteenth- century rhythm and psychology—the dissertation owes its hopeful future. To Professor Arata… a simple confession. This is the place where I’d assumed for many years I would acknowledge (say) the work that captured my attention as an undergrad, that drew me to this school where (once there) I determinedly attended every class, and every faculty lecture, I could possibly fit myself into alongside all my other cohorts who apparently had the same idea. We’d chased the scholar, and discovered—something much rarer—an educator, a humanist in the deepest sense of the term. Thank you, then, for helping me to see the bigger picture of an education that only begins with what’s been written on the books. Lastly, to my parents, my undying love. I have only begun upon he lessons you instilled in me so long ago. 5 INTRODUCTION BEFORE LANGUAGE Romantic prosody, Tractarian liturgy, Freudian psychoanalysis Keats’s famous proof-upon-the-pulses took an interesting turn in the writings of his friend and fellow critic, Leigh Hunt (1820). “If a passage in King Lear brings the tears into our eyes, it is real as the touch of a sorrowful hand. If the flow of a song of Anacreon’s intoxicates us, it is as true to a pulse within us as the wine he drank” (71-2). The shift from Keats to Hunt is minute, but crucial; and it only registers if we recall that for Keats, “proved upon our pulses” meant proven by our “larger experience” in the world. The Keatsian pulse is extrinsic— referential, empirical—where Hunt’s is intrinsic to the point of tautology. “Whatever is, is,” writes Hunt. “Whatever touches us, whatever moves us, does touch and does move us” (67). We might think forth to Tennyson’s “Ulysses” in 1842 (“that which we are, we are, — / One equal temper of heroic hearts”: 67-8); or backward, following Hunt’s Shakespeare-lead (“To be or not to be...”). Either way you translate, it is the very essence of Hunt’s tautology (tautology in general) that it does translate so neatly into verse. As reason folds into refrain, as predicate verbs rather press than properly predicate the beat of the poem (the force which “does touch and does move us”), Hunt shows us a logic that is frankly more rhythmic than semantic. His “truth” is proving its palpable, prosodic pulses—even though little, arguably nothing, has been proved upon those same pulses. Just where Keats extended an epistemological aid, Hunt 6 grabbed for an epistemic default: the pulse is a substitute, not a mere sponsor, for greater knowledge. It turns out Hunt’s reading was prescient. Just a casual glance through the annals of nineteenth-century verse—the early- and midcentury bestsellers (Keble’s Christian Year in 1827, Tennyson’s In Memoriam in 1850,