Romantic Historicism and the Afterlife Author(s): Ted Underwood Source: PMLA, Vol. 117, No. 2 (Mar., 2002), pp. 237-251 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/823271 . Accessed: 12/08/2013 17:56 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 130.126.32.13 on Mon, 12 Aug 2013 17:56:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 117.2 2 Romantic Historicism and the Afterlife TED UNDERWOOD WIA{IRITING ABOUTWILLIAM WORDSWORTH'S VISION OF the British past on SalisburyPlain, Alan Bewell has remarked that "Wordsworthbelieved he had a special sense that enabled him to 'look into past times as prophetslook / Into futurity'and to hear in the distant winds 'the ghostly language of the ancient earth'" (43). The observationis also applicableto many of Wordsworth'scontempo- raries.Romantic-era representations of history often dependon a special sense that sees or hears historical depth in the inanimateworld. Felicia Hemans's "Voice of the Wind"(1828), for instance, is premised on the conceit that the wind carriesthe sounds of vanished civilizations, which merge into a single hollow note as they echo down "the darkaisles of a thousand years" (487). The history that Hemans and Wordsworthhear on the wind lacks dates and footnotes, to be sure, but it is more than a generalized sense of time. Hemans's poem lists sounds systematically enough to suggest the specific social differences (between conqueror and conquered and between public and privaterealms) that create vari- ous ways of life. Thouart come from cities lighted up for the conquerorpassing by; Thouart wafting from their streets a soundof haughtyrevelry; Therolling of triumphantwheels, the harpingsin thehall, The far-offshout of multitudes,are in thyrise andfall. TEDUNDERWOOD, assistant professor of TEDUNDERWOOD, assistant pr r of At the same time, this list of sounds is randomenough to suggest that it Englishat ColbyCollege, has published alarticles on Romanti poet merely samples a largerfield of historical differences that stretchesbe- and science.This essay is drawnfrom yond the poem's ability to discern them. The wind's voice finally has a a newproject on nineteenth-century haunting remoteness (like a "far-off shout of multitudes") because it historicism. evokes the enormousrange of forms humanexistence can take. ? 2002 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA 2237 This content downloaded from 130.126.32.13 on Mon, 12 Aug 2013 17:56:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 238 RomanticHistoricism and the Afterlife PMLA These poems are hauntedby historical dif- an earthly alternativeto Christianity's increas- ference, but they are also more obviously ingly doubtfulheaven. This connection between hauntedby ghosts. After describing the sounds historicism and immortality was central to the of ancient and recent history that seem audible poems' popularity,as I will show by examining on the wind, Hemans's poem finally addresses their reception.When writers imitated Ossian's the wind as a ghost: "Be still, be still, and haunt evocativeotherworldliness, they were chiefly im- us not with music from the dead!"Wordsworth, itating a way of describing historical difference too, representshistorical difference as a ghostly so thatit seemed to promiseearthly immortality. presence: aside from the reference to ghostly Renaissance texts had already playfully language cited above, one could examine his comparedposthumous fame to immortality."So sonnets on the Cave of Staffa, where historical long as men can breatheor eyes can see / So long consciousness is figuredas the ability to see the lives this, and this gives life to thee" (Shake- cave shadows as ghosts of bardsand chiefs (son- speare 1929). But this sort of immortalityis sim- nets 28 and 30 [Works40-41]). In this essay I ply an extension of the fame enjoyed in life: argue that the pleasure Romantic poems take in what lives on in writing is not consciousness but projecting historical difference onto the inani- reputation.The historicalimmortality envisioned mate worldis relatedto the pleasureof seeing (or by Macpherson'sbards, and by early Romantic imagining that one sees) a ghost. To explain the philosophersof history such as J. G. Herder,is a connection, I begin with a set of earlier works literal continuationof life after death. Implicitly thatare alludedto in all the texts by Hemansand or explicitly, these texts promise that the con- Wordsworthconsidered above: the poems of Os- stituent parts of human consciousness will sur- sian, writtenin the 1760s by JamesMacpherson.1 vive in the physical realm, just as the body's The internationalvogue for Macpherson's constituentpowers and particles live on inside a Ossian poems lasted from 1760 into the 1830s, worm or a leaf. After exploringthe appealof this leaving behind a large numberof literaryimita- promise in Ossian, I examine some of its subse- tions and tributes, as well as a slightly smaller quent transformations.Looking particularlyat numberof Frenchchildren named after Ossianic JohnKeats and Hemans,I arguethat the "histori- heroes (Van Tieghem 28-30). The poems' suc- cal sense" in Romanticpoetry continuesto draw cess is now most often explainedby referenceto its evocative power from the same promise of their fictitious byline, since the rediscovery of a earthlyimmortality we see in Ossian-although third-centuryScottish bardlent supportnot just that promise is transformed,in the first few de- to Scottish nationalists but to culturalnational- cades of the nineteenth century, by changes in ism in general (Trumpener78). Withoutdenying the British system of class distinction. Finally, I the importanceof nationalism,I propose to pay ask whether the pleasures of historicism today attention to an underexploredaspect of the po- may not still derive from a similarly half- ems-the way they imagine history through acknowledgedlonging for life afterdeath. conversations between ancient bards and yet- more-ancient and material) (but earthly ghosts. Historical Difference as Ghostliness Although these conversationspose as a preliter- ate, and thereforeprehistorical, attempt to think James Macpherson may have set out with the abouthistory, they projectand combine two late- idea thathe was reconstructingan enormousepic Enlightenment obsessions. By translatingcon- from fragmentaryremains, but his extrapolative tinuous time into a discrete boundary between zeal was based on such firm preconceptions the dead and the living, they emphasize the oth- about the past that it amounted to invention. erness of the past. At the same time, they hint at Though he had access to some genuine Gaelic This content downloaded from 130.126.32.13 on Mon, 12 Aug 2013 17:56:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 1172I Ted Underwood 239 ballads and drew on them for a few passages and the songs of bards can cross the numinous outlines of plot, his "translations"take place in a boundarythat separatesthe present from "other world entirely their own (Thomson 14). But if times"-a phrase,ceaselessly repeatedin the po- Macphersonwas a bad historian,he became one ems, that can refer to the past or to the future.In through an excess of historicist zeal. His fixed Temora,for instance, one warriorurges another desire to recognize the past as something differ- to free captive bards in these terms: "Cairbar! ent from the present converted the past into an loose the bards:they are the sons of other times. icon of pastnessas such and thus into a model of Their voice shall be heard in other ages, when his historicism. the kings of Temorahave failed" (Macpherson, By describingMacpherson as a historicist,I Poems 155). Unlike the scop in Beowulf "who mean that he sought, not to measure historical could recall many of the stories of the old days" moments against a common standard(civility, (16), these bards represent, not tradition, but say, or conformityto nature),but to describe the radicaldiscontinuity. Sons of the alien past, they way standards change their meanings. Early- also speak to an alien future in which the civi- eighteenth-century historians began to under- lization of Temorawill have ceased to exist. standthese changesas legitimatetransformations Macpherson'sbards, then, are creaturesthat rather than disagreements to be resolved. In live outside the present and belong more to the 1735, for instance, Thomas Blackwell defends dead or the unbornthan to the living. Their self- Homer'sseemingly coarse descriptions of Mene- consciously historical perspective is literalized laos as "loud-voic'd"(3orlv ayaOocv)by arguing in the poems as knowledge about ghosts. These that strong lungs made up a large partof leader- ghosts, J. S. Smarthas commented,were largely ship "before the Invention of Trumpets or inventedby Macpherson;ghosts rarelyappear in Drums"(Blackwell 317).2Appreciation of this the Gaelic ballad tradition, and when they do, sort of difference grows gradually more articu- they lack the auraof mystery and the connection late in the years that separate Blackwell from to "the more terriblephenomena of nature"that Herder and Hegel. When we historicize con- distinguishthem in Macpherson(71, 124). Bards it cepts, we perform an operation learned in this sing, turns out, mainly about ghosts from an period. Even the inevitable first words voiced even more ancientpast and (projectingthe same over the previews for costume dramas-"In a perspective into the future) about a time when Time, when X was a Y" (love was a crime or they will have become ghosts themselves.